The wrong fight, the wrong enemy, the wrong story
What happens when survival becomes the perfect distraction.
The world is burning with conflict — headlines tell us what to fear, protests tell us who to blame.
Left vs. right, migrant vs. local, rich vs. poor.
Survival has become the perfect distraction, leaving us too exhausted to imagine what comes after it. This is not about taking sides, but about seeing the machinery that keeps us locked in the wrong fight, against the wrong enemy, because of the wrong story.
The choice before us is simple, but it won’t be easy.
Part I — The Wrong Fight
The streets are restless. In the UK last month, more than a hundred thousand people marched under the banner of “Unite the Kingdom,” waving flags in protest against asylum seekers housed in hotels. Councils tear flags down, activists raise them back up, while the government pushes forward with its “one in, one out” migration plan. The headlines frame it as culture war — Englishness is under threat, and identity dissolving. But is that what is truly happening?
Across the Atlantic, in the United States, policies written into blueprints like Project 2025 are now playing out in real time. ICE raids sweep through neighborhoods, detention centers overflow, and National Guard troops are being deployed, most without state consent. This is not just policy. It’s suffering written into law.
Meanwhile, in southern Europe, the outcry takes a different form. In places like Barcelona, Lisbon, Venice, and Greek islands, locals fill the streets. This time it is against mass tourism. Rents have exploded as housing is devoured by short-term rentals. Cruise ships dump thousands into neighborhoods that can’t breathe under the weight of an economy that treats people as products and cities as playgrounds. Protests erupt demanding livable wages, protections for workers, and an end to the flooding of their cities.
This isn’t only unfolding in Europe. For years, places like Bali, Machu Picchu in Peru, the beaches of Mexico and Thailand, the souks of Morocco, and the islands of Hawai‘i have grappled with the strain of overtourism. What feels new is the attention, one that dictates who gets heard, who gets ignored, and who profits while communities everywhere struggle under the same pressure.
Overtourism, like mass immigration, is the same story written differently: people moving in numbers that destabilize life.
What ties these stories together isn’t culture or identity, but the machinery beneath them.
Capitalism demands constant expansion — more growth, more consumption, more bodies moving, more markets to exploit. It cannot pause, it cannot rest; it must devour. That same logic drives both mass migration and mass tourism, squeezing every ounce of value out of people and places until they break.
Mass migration, like mass tourism, overwhelms resources, destabilizes communities, and pits neighbor against neighbor. One is driven by hope, opportunity and survival, the other by curiosity, escapism and consumption, but both become tools in the same machine: capitalism’s hunger for endless growth.
How do you feed this machine?
Part II — The Wrong Enemy
For the tourist, the story is about aspiration. Each trip another purchase in the marketplace of identity, a way to prove you’re “living fully,” to check off bucket lists, to capture Instagram-worthy moments. Travel is marketed as therapy for exhaustion — work hard, burn out, and then buy your recovery in the form of a vacation. Some are driven by curiosity; others are hungry for the “authentic,” though what’s consumed is often a staged version of a cultural experience packaged for outsiders to collect as products.
Governments embrace overtourism because outside money props up local economies. Cities are rebranded as products to be consumed, their culture packaged into attractions and locals reduced to service workers in economies designed for the steady influx of visitors.
For the migrant, the story is one of desperation — leaving behind family, land, and identity because war has turned their home into rubble, because famine has emptied the soil, because an economy has collapsed under debt and corruption, often worsened by global powers.
Wars in Gaza, Syria, Ukraine, Sudan. Economic collapse in Venezuela. Famine in Yemen. Climate displacement across Africa and Asia. Millions are uprooted precisely because they don’t have a choice. The same powers who benefit from immigration often create the conditions that force it. Why?
Often when nations face aging populations and low birth rates, the system looks at immigrants as “replacement workers” to keep the machine running. Multinational corporations prefer labor that is vulnerable — migrants who can’t easily organize or demand rights. Undocumented workers become the most profitable, precisely because they can be most exploited.
And who benefits from the chaos?
Arms manufacturers profiting from endless war.
Corporations seizing resources once communities are displaced.
Political elites stirring hatred to secure votes that keep them in power.
One group runs toward survival, the other away from a life numbed by routine and burnout. Both are caught in the same net. Capitalism.
Capitalism, once a framework for trade or enterprise, has morphed into a growth-at-all-costs machine. Economies must expand. Stock prices must rise. Corporations must extract more, sell more, and pay less.
Yet instead of recognizing the system we are all contributing to, we are taught to recognize each other as the threat.
The migrant is framed as the invader.
The tourist as the nuisance.
The neighbor becomes the enemy.
While local communities rage against overcrowding and scarcity, elites quietly collect profits — landlords cash in on short-term rentals, corporations thrive on cheap migrant labor, governments tighten control under the banner of security.
This is the wrong fight, the wrong enemy, the wrong story.
And it works because we are kept unconscious. Caught in feedback loops that ensure we never look up. We consume what is marketed to us, compare ourselves to curated highlight reels, grow complacent in comfort when the system throws us breadcrumbs, and then rage when our toys are taken away.
This unconsciousness is not neutral. It is what fuels the machine.
Every time we fight each other instead of questioning the system, we perpetuate it. Every time we consume mindlessly, compare endlessly, or stay silent, we reinforce the very conditions that keep us bonded.
“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” in Daniel, a Model for Young Men (1854) by Reverend William Anderson Scott (1813-1885)
Part III — The Wrong Story
The rhetoric convinces us that the story is about them.
The migrant who comes for your job.
The tourist who clogs your streets.
The low-income who drains your system.
The neighbor who votes the wrong way.
That is the wrong story.
A story as old as empire: divide the people, distract the people, and extract from the people. Keep them looking sideways while the siphoning flows upward. Bread and circuses.
Entertainment galore, but the bread is no longer free.
The real story isn’t about immigration or tourism, or any of the other convenient forms of othering we’ve been programmed to cling on to — race, politics, religion, gender, class. The real story is about the system we’ve come to accept as normal: one of relentless drive for profit and unsustainable growth. A machine that cannot stop consuming, that must turn every person, every resource, every community into fuel.
It doesn’t matter whether the stage is mass immigration, mass tourism, or the latest culture war. The spectacle keeps us distracted while the extraction continues.
This paradigm survives by making our survival precarious. Planned obsolescence ensures that the phone in your pocket or the washing machine in your home will fail long before they should because another replacement keeps the system turning.
Enshitification is how once-useful tools become degraded: social media that once connected us now buries us under ads, algorithms, and outrage; platforms that once empowered creators now extract their labor and funnel profits to the top of the chain. Even the commons — public space, community life, shared imagination — gets stripped, repackaged, and sold back to us in diluted form.
And sometimes we complain, but without alternatives being presented to us, we often comply, we adapt, we normalize. We buy the new device, we scroll the feeds, we numb ourselves, we accept the scraps. We tell ourselves this is “progress.” Yet every iteration of “new and improved” leaves us more distracted, more dependent, and less resourced.
Meanwhile, survival itself is commodified. Water privatized. Food wasted while millions starve. Housing turned into financial assets instead of homes. The safety to rest stolen in refugee camps or detention centers. The basics of life — air, water, sleep, food, shelter — that are fundamentally inalienable rights for survival are now treated as bargaining chips. And so long as we are scrambling to secure them, we will never have the energy to question why they were made scarce in the first place.
Anytime profit is attached to a problem, energy and intelligence are devoted to keeping that problem alive — and growing. This is what we call an industrial complex. Crime, war, drugs, illness, poverty, racism — each has become its own industry.
Prisons profit off arrests.
Drug companies profit off chronic prescriptions.
Banks profit off debt.
Defense contractors profit off war.
DEI programs profit off injustice.
Homeless nonprofits benefit from more homelessness.
The results speak louder than the intentions of even the most benevolent. Because in the end, the system does not seek resolution — only to perpectuate itself. Problems are not solved; they are managed, repackaged, and monetized.
The machine needs the problem to persist.
Our needs are not just physical, though. They may keep the body alive, but our emotional needs — to be seen, to be heard, to belong — are just as fundamental. They are what make life worth living. Because to say you matter is not sentimental; it is quite literal.
Without belonging, recognition, and voice, we cannot thrive. And when these needs are unmet, identity politics becomes the surrogate, offering belonging through division and illusion.
They are set up as “us vs. them” so that we fixate on who is other, instead of asking why things are structured this way in the first place. We get stuck reacting instead of responding, caught in fear, shame, and rage. Meanwhile, the systems that benefit from division stay hidden: economic inequality, corporate power, media incentives. Identity battles distract and fragment us, keeping us from seeing the deeper truth: the underlying extraction, the scarcity paradigm, and the reality that we are far more connected than the narratives allow.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In reality, immigration is not invasion, and tourism is not crime. The real theft is not jobs or culture. The real theft is our right to live beyond survival, with dignity and joy.
Part IV — The Alternative
It would be easy to stop here and point fingers. To say the problem is them — the corporations, the governments, the billionaires. But even that is only another layer of the wrong story. Because directly or indirectly, we all feed the same machine.
We contribute to corporations when we agree to buy what they sell. We create billionaires when we funnel our attention and money into their platforms. We strengthen governments when we elect officials who do not represent our interests and values, waiting for them to be the saviors that will fix what only our collective responsibility can change.
Every purchase, every click, every vote, every act of complacency has weight. Each one either oils the gears of the machine or becomes the speck of sand that clogs it. And yet, even with all the money and power the top accumulates, they too are not free.
Their fears are woven into the same system. The wealthy fear revolt, so they build their own prisons with better scenery, thinking isolation will keep them safe. Civil servants fear losing office, so they cling to donors and policies that keep money as the measure of power. Corporations fear boycotts, regulation, and irrelevance, so they double down on profit extraction, no matter the human cost.
Each layer of the hierarchy clutches tighter to its own survival, feeding the very cycle it claims to control.
They hoard as though they are still starving. Accumulating as though more will finally silence the fear of not having, doing or being enough. In their pursuit of freedom, they too reinforce a system where success is measured by hoarding money and defending resources, through control and domination.
This isn’t about condemning individuals. It’s about recognizing how deeply survival mode runs through every level of society. For some, it means not knowing where the next meal will come from. For others, it means not being able to thrive even when surrounded by abundance, because their worth is still bound to numbers and status.
Survival is a spectrum, and all of us are caught somewhere along it.
We’re not just trapped in economic systems. Democracy is a system too, and lately it’s showing its fractures: voting cycles that feel hollow, leaders who promise change but deliver maintenance of the same structures, people who feel unseen, unheard, powerless. This system is not “dying in darkness” — it’s just been depleted by complacency, distraction, and disillusionment. That’s exactly why small, local, participatory experiments matter now more than ever.
We cannot change the system overnight, because it wasn’t built overnight. But it has been eroding while we are consumed with surviving, too distracted by conflict, comparison, and scarcity. It has been stressed gradually, with each generation adding more noise, more blame, more division.
So what is the alternative?
Imagine, just for a moment, that the leaders you protest against actually stopped and asked, “We’re listening. What do you want us to do?”
What tangible changes would you demand?
And how would you know they would be carried out?
The truth is, many of us haven’t even thought about those questions. We’ve spent so much energy reacting to the world we don’t want that we’ve barely stopped to define the one we do. That’s why the deeper work we need to do is not about platitudes of perfect worlds or utopian blueprints.
It’s about asking better questions.
It’s about imagining a world where our most fundamental needs — physical and emotional — are actually met. Where air, water, food, shelter, and rest are secured. Where belonging, recognition, and voice are not bargaining chips but birthrights. They are the foundations on which every human life is built, and the ones we must agree are sacred, non-negotiable, beyond commodification.
To advocate for these is not ideology — it is humanity. Something we all have, need and want.
Any story that goes against these fundamentals is the wrong story. Just another distraction. All the reasons to fight over land, or hoard resources, or turn religions and opinions into weapons? Mere distractions to keep us bonded to the machinery. There is enough for everyone, if only we learn to trust ourselves and each other instead of the systems that profit from our fear.
From there, we build outward. Because ultimately, circumstances don’t matter. What we do with them does. We are the meaning makers. Which means every small, deliberate step — in our homes, our communities, our choices — is not just symbolic.
It is the beginning of the alternative.
Part V — A Small Step
More often than not, the power is in what you can do locally, in your neighborhood, in your home, in your relationships. A meal shared with a neighbor. A community garden that reclaims a patch of soil in a food desert. A conversation that refuses scapegoating and instead asks, “Help me to understand. What do we actually want to create together?”
These are not grand gestures, but they are the seeds of a better world. A world that asks us to notice how we participate in the very system that harms us:
Am I consuming mindlessly, or choosing intentionally?
Am I blaming my neighbor, or questioning the system?
Am I numbing myself with comparison or the latest trend, or am I cultivating enoughness?
Am I living aligned with what is true for me, or am I another cog in someone else’s story?
On the surface, these questions may seem insignificant. But they are cracks in the machinery. Every conscious choice interrupts the feedback loop. Every act of enoughness challenges the lie of scarcity. Every refusal to scapegoat a neighbor exposes the system for what it is.
There’s no greater enemy than our own unconsciousness.
And in this more conscious world no one is coming to save us, and no one needs to. There are no victims to be rescued, no villains to be destroyed, and no bystanders to be excused.
We are all participants, creators, and leaders in our own lives.
I don’t have the right answer for everyone, because each of us must discover it within the contours of our own lives. But I do know this: survival will not be the measure of human existence. There is no fight to be fought, only the challenge to remain awake when the world lulls us back into distraction.
The world may keep burning with conflict, but we are not here to be consumed by the wrong fight, the wrong enemy, the wrong story. We are here to write a new one.
We were born whole, sovereign, and free. To live from that truth again begins with a single choice: to take the next small step toward the world you most long to create.
Whole. Sovereign. Free.