The Sublimation & Abstraction Of Survival

By Leo Gura - March 17, 2026

As civilization evolves, survival becomes more and more abstracted — or as I call it, sublimated. What does this mean? It means that what used to be obviously survival doesn’t appear that way any more. Crude, material survival like building a campfire, hunting, or farming takes on a highly abstracted form. For example, instead of farming, a hot girl in Miami parties at nightclubs. But she has no idea now that her partying is survival. This is happening all across civilization, with everyone. As civilization advances, technology enables more and more abstracted, complex, and subtle ways of survival. It becomes harder and harder for the mind/self to keep track of this survival. So the mind/self gets lost in survival more and more easily. And many of these abstracted ways of survival are highly artificial, unhealthy, and dysfunctional. But because they are so abstracted, the unhealthiness is harder to see. So this becomes a huge problem across modern society.

Examples of abstracted survival:

  • Teenage girl spending 3 hours scrolling through Instgram, obsessing over how other girls look
  • Wall Street bankers inventing new kinds of derivatives
  • A YouTuber who make a channel criticizing and trolling other channels
  • Girls doing OnlyFans
  • Andrew Tate or Calvicular grifting young men with Red Pill and Black Pill ideology
  • Podcast shows like Joe Rogan
  • Alex Jones peddling conspiracy theories
  • Right wing talk radio
  • Pickup coaches doing bootcamps
  • Twitch streamers getting paid millions just to play video games all day
  • People making money off of culture wars, like Jordan Peterson
  • A chef working in a 5-star gourmet restaurant
  • Crypto
  • Tech bros hyping up AI
  • Going to Burning Man

Here’s a deep example of what I mean:

Piers Morgan on YouTube hosts a news show where he deliberately invites the most controversial and bombastic guests to shout and arguing over each other. What is really happening here? To most viewers and even to Piers Morgan and his guests, this is just an entertaining show about important political and cultural topics. Of course Piers knows this is also his career and business. But none of these people comprehend that this entire spectacle is just a mechanical abstraction of survival. It’s nothing more than that. The crucial insight is that they are not conscious of this. Once you become conscious of it, it’s like spoiling the magic trick. The whole thing starts to look gross, stupid, and silly. It’s like, “Oh… unconscious survival? That’s all this is? Wow! I never saw it that way. That’s so lame.” You see that everyone involved in the activity is just a mechanical zombie. This is eye-opening!

Obviously I am not saying you can’t or shouldn’t survive. But once you start to see how the things you’re doing are nothing more than unconscious survival, the activity loses its charm, allowing you to find healthier and deeper ways of surviving. This is about becoming conscious of the true reasons of why things are happening. There is always the surface appearance and the deeper reality. For example, the surface reason for going to party is to have fun. The deep reason is reproduction. Notice that most people only see and understand the surface level of their activities. Most people going to a party have no idea why they’re actually there! That’s amazing. But I’m saying something much deeper than just that when you go to a party you should know you’re there for reproduction. For example, you might think that pickup artists understand the deeper reason of what they’re doing, since they know they are only at the party for sex. But here’s the mind-fuck: pickup artists do not understand what I’m saying here. They don’t understand that pickup is just mechanical survival. If they understood what I’m saying they would quit pickup. So this goes much deeper than it seems. Consciousness of survival goes deeper than anyone appreciates.

The more you study my work, the more you will see how everyone in society is a survival machine, including yourself. This will explain all their/your behaviors and problems.

Here’s another key insight: the intelligence running all this abstracted mechanical survival is way higher than the intelligence of any individual involved in it. It’s as if the individual humans are just robots running on an intelligence located in the cloud and governing all their movements. The system itself is more intelligent than the humans actors within it. The point of self-actualization is make yourself more intelligent than the intelligence running these mechanical systems of abstracted survival.

Example of what I mean: When a hot girl goes to a nightclub, she is just a robot run by a higher cloud-intelligence that is the clubbing system. She has zero awareness of this. Which is why her life is so miserable and broken. You are just a robot within survival systems of higher intelligence beyond your comprehension. To start to see this is the beginning of your mental liberation.

Another example: ALL of Wall Street is a vast abstracted survival cloud-intelligence of which none of the actors in the system are aware. That’s WHY Wall Street causes so much damage and corruption. It’s just a survival machine! A survival machine cannot have Goodness, Truth, or Love. Civilization is a collection of godless survival machines. That’s why humanity is so godless and broken.

You are an ant in a godless mechanical labyrinth.

Ta-daaaa!

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