— You’re a Name or a Number

… And nobody will ever let you forget being the latter.

It’s the eternal principle of male existence. No matter what you do or where you go, you will have presence, or you will be a numbered nobody.

Which do you prefer being? If the former and not the latter, what are you going to do to become somebody who can’t easily be ignored?

Are you willing to evade reality by lying to yourself, that you’re a legend? There’s even a saying for it, and when used, everyone always seems to get the he/him pronoun right.

Yet, not all men are built for conflict, for the ceaseless pressure, for the unyielding stress. Not all men are designed to deliver under the spotlight. Most men, in fact, blend into the crowd, unnoticed, until they are scattered across a battlefield.

They are quantified by their numerical count, not their individual identities. They are the bloodied and impaled casualties of superior men.

Your appearance, your words, your demeanor, your conversation. Your ability, wit, charm, and enigma. Your gentlemanliness, belying the bloodthirstiness in your heart. The depth of knowledge you display and the hint of hidden wisdom you subtly suggest.

As a man, the most rewarding aspect of life is crafting an ideal persona in your mind and evolving into that exact individual.

Even amongst the forgotten masses in some strange place, you have the ability to quickly transcend being reduced to a mere digit—despite being surrounded by a crowd of anonymous men.

You can always quickly become recognized and acknowledged as “Mr. Somebody-X.” You’ll manage to retain your identity, your name, even when the path of least resistance for almost everyone is to regard you as just another interchangeable number.

So, I pose this question to you: will you default to the default position…being just a number? Are you content being a faceless cog in the machine, in The Maxtrix?

Or will you strive to etch a unique identity of your own, where within The Matrix, you’re an outlier, and you’ve taken neither pill, no pill at all?

The choice, as always, is yours.