It’s often easy to be a punk.
There’s something seductive about the sneer, the eyeroll, the posture of righteous contempt. It costs nothing to be cynical. It requires no effort to point out what’s broken. The world is absurd, the systems are rigged, the powerful are corrupt — these are observations so obvious they barely qualify as insights.
In my teen years, “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger was an anthem. That opening riff, that snarling vocal delivery, that chorus about being “not sick but not well” — it captured something essential about adolescent alienation. The song is about being driven mad by a world that doesn’t make sense, about being so exhausted by the noise that you just want to burn it all down and walk away.
I’m not sick but I’m not well
And I’m so hot ’cause I’m in hell
It was permission to be angry, to be frustrated, to reject everything.
But now when I listen to it, it hits different.
The Nihilism Trap
There’s a movie from 2006 called Idiocracy. It’s a comedy about a man who wakes up in a future where society has become spectacularly stupid. People speak in grunts. The president is a professional wrestler. The most popular show is called “Ow! My Balls!”
It’s funny. It’s also, in a certain light, prophetic.
But here’s what no one talks about: Idiocracy is nihilistic. Its central thesis is that humanity is doomed to become dumber and dumber, that intelligence and nuance will inevitably be overwhelmed by spectacle and distraction. It’s a punchline dressed up as social commentary.
The Idiocracy nihilist view is funny with a nugget of truth. Yes, our society has problems. Yes, there are forces that seem determined to make us stupider and more passive. Yes, it can feel like we’re collectively sleepwalking into a future we don’t want.
But that perspective makes it easier to give up. It makes it easier to just watch the rot grow. It makes it easier to become a bystander, a commentator, a spectator in your own life.
The punk posture, the cynical sneer, the nihilistic shrug — these are not acts of rebellion. They are acts of surrender dressed up as defiance.
The Garden
It doesn’t need to be that way.
Control what you can. Cultivate what you can. This is the gardener’s philosophy, and it’s radically different from the gatekeeper’s.
A gatekeeper controls access. They decide who gets in, who gets to know, who gets to be part of the conversation. They build walls. They hoard knowledge. They protect their territory.
A gardener cultivates. They plant seeds. They water. They pull weeds. They create conditions for things to grow. They don’t own the garden — they tend to it.
Be a gardener of ideas, not a gatekeeper of what you know.
This is the antidote to nihilism. If you’re a gatekeeper, the world is a zero-sum game. Resources are scarce. Threats are everywhere. You must protect what you have.
If you’re a gardener, the world is abundant. Ideas multiply when shared. Connections deepen when nurtured. The more you give, the more you receive.
The gardener doesn’t wait for the world to change. They change the patch of earth in front of them.
The Rabbit Hole
But here’s the thing about being a gardener: it’s easy to get lost in your own garden.
Try not to be annoying or too eccentric. Society tends to excommunicate those personalities.
This is hard to hear because it sounds like a surrender. It sounds like telling someone to dim their light, to tone down their passion, to conform to expectations. But that’s not what this is.
This is about discernment.
When you’re deep in a rabbit hole, it’s easy to forget that not everyone is with you there. You can become so consumed by your niche, your passion, your obsession, that you lose the ability to connect with anyone outside of it. You can become so convinced of your own rightness that you alienate the very people you’re trying to reach.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be passionate. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go deep into the rabbit hole. Wonderland is a beautiful place.
Just be careful how deep you get. It’s really easy to get lost. Document what you find, but don’t treat every story as objective fact. We live in a society that encourages everyone to lie to you for money. Whether it’s outright misinformation, a bent truth or a white lie or two. The incentive is there so people gravitate to it. Not all lies are or should be treated the same. There is a great quote form a classic dystopian film V for Vendeta: “Artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.”
The Punk Reconsidered
So what does it mean to be a punk in a world that has co-opted punk?
It means rejecting the easy nihilism of Idiocracy. It means refusing to accept the premise that we’re all doomed. It means choosing to cultivate instead of consume, to build instead of burn.
It means singing “Flagpole Sitta” differently. Not as a surrender, but as a diagnosis. Not as a prayer for the world to end, but as a call to action.
The world is full of problems. They are not going to fix themselves. But they are also not going to be fixed by cynicism. They are going to be fixed by people who refuse to give up, who plant seeds even when the ground is hard, who tend to their gardens even when the weeds seem to be winning.
It’s easy to be a punk. It’s easy to be cynical. It’s easy to shrug and walk away.
It’s harder to cultivate. It’s harder to plant seeds and wait for them to grow. It’s harder to be patient, to be generous, to be hopeful.
But it’s the only thing that works.
The Wonderland We Can Build
Wonderland isn’t just a place to get lost. It’s a place to build.
Alice went down the rabbit hole and found a world of wonders. She met strange characters. She had impossible conversations. She grew and shrank and grew again.
But she also found her way back. She carried something with her. The experience changed her, but it didn’t destroy her.
That’s the goal. To go deep enough to find wonder, but to stay grounded enough to share it. To be eccentric enough to be interesting, but not so eccentric that you become unintelligible. To be passionate enough to inspire, but not so passionate that you alienate.
The world is waiting for your ideas. The garden is waiting for your hands. The rabbit hole is waiting for your curiosity.
But the world is also not going to wait forever. We can’t wait for permission. We can’t wait for the system to change. We can’t wait for someone else to fix it.
We have to be the gardeners.
The Final Verse
Maybe the tension between sickness and wellness, between despair and hope, between cynicism and optimism, is the human condition.
But what we do with that tension is up to us.
We can let it consume us. We can let it become a sneer, a shrug, a surrender.
Or we can let it become a garden. We can plant seeds. We can pull weeds. We can create something beautiful in the patch of earth we’ve been given.
The world is absurd. The systems are broken. The powerful are corrupt. These things are true.
But they are not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that we can cultivate. We can create. We can build castles in the sky and then, somehow, watch them become real.
The whole truth is that we can be the change we want to see.
It’s often easy to be a punk.
It’s harder to be a gardener.
But the garden is worth it.
Originally published on Medium. It lives here now — new essays land in the Journal first.
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