Bureaucracy and Technology are Rust

Imagine that happiness/contentment/fulfillment are Polaris, the north star. A person might set his course by that and follow a very short path there. However, people almost always move tangentially from that course. It actually seems impossible to set that course.

Rather than pursue contentment, people pursue "wealth". That's not even true. People don't know what wealth is. Instead of accumulating things they need, or things that will sustain them, they'll stack piles of paper certificates like stocks or bonds.

People will try to adapt their environment, or will make a "system" to achieve some original, simple goal, but the system itself or building a new environment will replace the simple original goal.

Technology and Bureaucracy are the best examples of this replacement phenomenon. "Tech" is an end in itself, now. Countless lifetimes have been spent typing and staring at a computer screen to expand tech. Meanwhile the products of technology kind of suck and only partly work. Bureaucracy expansion is an even worse phenomenon.

The "beast system" or the Matrix or whatever you want to call it is an illusory world. Life in service of the Beast is not really life. It's really a form of walking death. It looks real. It looks alive, but it's not.