Is Convenience Killing Us?
Why your body, your mind, and your freedom all need the resistance we've been engineered to avoid
Or Is It Just Stripping Us Of Our Humanity?
There’s a tax nobody warned you about.
It doesn’t show up on your 1040. Nobody sends you a bill. But you’re paying it every single day — in money, in time, in freedom, in reach, and in something harder to quantify but just as real: your soul.
I call it the Sovereignty Tax. And the more convenient your life gets, the higher it goes.
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I talked about this at Confluence a few months back, and it hit differently when I laid it out in front of a room full of sovereign entrepreneurs who’d been feeling it without having a name for it.
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
The Money Tax — You use PayPal, Stripe, or Shopify Payments because it’s easy. Then one day your account gets flagged, your funds get frozen, and you realize you never owned any of it. Square processes your payments until the moment they decide your speech is “high risk.” You built your business on someone else’s infrastructure and you’re paying rent you didn’t know you signed up for.
The Time Tax — Google changes an algorithm. Meta throttles your reach. You spend weeks rebuilding what took years to grow. Your content lives on platforms you don’t control, which means you’re always one policy update away from starting over.
The Freedom Tax — You self-censor. Maybe not consciously. But you do it. You soften the post. You don’t say the thing. Because somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re doing the math on what it’ll cost you if you do. That’s not freedom — that’s a cage with really good Wi-Fi.
The Reach Tax — Your email list is rented from Mailchimp until Mailchimp decides it isn’t. Your YouTube channel belongs to Google until it doesn’t. Your Facebook group is yours until Meta shuts it down for a terms violation that didn’t exist when you built it. Every platform owns your relationship with your audience — you just think you do.
The Soul Tax — This one’s the quiet killer. You know something’s wrong. You’ve always known. But the convenience is so good and the friction of doing anything about it is so high that you just... don’t. And slowly, the person who was willing to fight for something worth fighting for becomes someone who refreshes their feed instead.
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Here’s the thing I’ve been thinking about lately: we were never designed for this.
Not spiritually. Not biologically. Not psychologically.
Your body gets stronger under resistance. The terrain learns by getting ‘sick’. Your mind sharpens when it has to solve problems instead of having them solved for you. The struggle isn’t a bug — it’s the mechanism. It’s how living things actually grow.
Modern society’s obsession with convenience has produced a generation of people who are physically softer, mentally more fragile, and spiritually more adrift than any generation before them. Not because they’re weak — but because they’ve been systematically removed from the friction that would have made them strong.
Centralized technology accelerated this in ways most people haven’t fully reckoned with. When you outsource your thinking to algorithms, your discovery to search engines, your community to apps designed to maximize engagement (not connection), you’re trading the workout your mind and spirit need for the illusion of ease.
And the bill comes due. It always does. Usually in anxiety, disconnection, dependency, and a creeping sense that something important has been lost but you can’t quite name it.
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This is why I’ve gone all-in on Qortal.
Not because it’s the easiest option. It’s not — and that’s actually part of the point.
Qortal is a fully decentralized blockchain network built to give back to people what centralized tech took away: true ownership of your data, your identity, your communications, and your commerce. No central server to seize. No corporation to deplatform you. No algorithm deciding what your community sees. No third party holding your funds hostage.
Q-Sites, Q-Chat, Q-Trade, Q-Mail — these aren’t just products. They’re a fundamentally different relationship with technology. One where you are the network. One where the infrastructure can’t be captured because there’s nothing to capture.
It requires a little more of you. That’s the design. And that little bit of friction? That’s your sovereignty muscle getting a workout it desperately needs.
When I talk about exiting technocracy, this is what I mean in practice. Not complaining about the system. Building the alternative. Qortal is a cornerstone of the Sovereign Stack I’ve been building for myself and helping others build through WINNR Digital — and it’s become one of the clearest examples I know of technology that aligns with how humans were meant to live rather than working against it.
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Which brings me to something I’m genuinely excited about.
This weekend I’m appearing as a featured speaker at the Exit & Build Virtual Summit — a free, one-day online event hosted by my friend John Bush over at Live Free Academy.
Saturday, June 13th, 12–5 PM Central. Free to attend. I go on 1:00-1:30 Central Time.
This is Part 1 of 3. The focus this time is mindset — because you can’t build a free life on a colonized mind. The whole series leads up to the in-person Exit & Build 6, November 5–8 at Mollie Engelhart’s Sovereignty Ranch.
The speaker lineup is stacked with people who aren’t just theorizing about sovereign living — they’re doing it. Mollie Engelhart, who left a famous LA vegan restaurant behind to raise cattle on a 200-acre regenerative ranch. River and Imani of Haven Village, who built a functioning private realm community from the ground up. Daniel Mentz and Phil Mederi of Sacred Honor, who walk people through status correction and stepping out of the system’s jurisdiction. Glenn and Eric Meder of Privacy Academy, who help everyday people escape mass surveillance without needing a tech degree.
And me — talking about Qortal, decentralized networks, and what it actually looks like to rebuild your relationship with technology from the ground up.
Every single speaker will also be in person at Exit & Build 6 in November.
Register free for the June 13th summit here!
And if you already know you want to be with us in person in November: Get Your Tickets Here!
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Convenience isn’t neutral. It has a cost. And most people won’t calculate what they’ve spent until the bill arrives.
The good news is there’s a different way. It takes more of you. That’s exactly the point.
See you Saturday.
— Mike
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One thing that the freedom movement is failing to acknowledge is common law trial by jury. People are trying to reinvent the wheel and not understanding that a nation actually governs itself through its justice system because with the power to judge on the justice of the law and sentence comes with it all power. And that power is naturally vested in the people as citizen jurors in accord with the common law of the land. I'm happy to talk to you about this because this is the blind spot of the voluntaryists movements?
...becomes someone who refreshes his feed. His. Not their. Not her. His. His sufficiently covers all of us.
And that has forever been correct.
Grammar has been hijacked and weaponized to achieve lawfare.
This, coming from a former recovering women's studies junior college major who's department head was named Sandra "Emmachild." 🤪