“We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.”
In 1999, Terence McKenna delivered a lecture called Shamans Among the Machines, offering a sharp critique of modern, mass-consumer culture.
It’s here that he drops one of his most famous lines: “Culture is not your friend.”
McKenna argued that mass culture isn’t designed to make us free, creative, or fully conscious, but to condition, distract, and domesticate us.
His antidote was simple: withdraw psychic energy from cultural noise and create something yourself — art, ideas, lived experience.
Creation restores agency. Passive consumption gives it away.
As he put it:
“By putting the art pedal to the metal, we maximise our humanness and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.”
In another lecture, McKenna sharpened the point:
“If you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered… This is shit-brained thinking. That is all cultural diversion.”
His message endures because our predicament remains the same. Culture will happily think for you, unless you decide to think, and create, for yourself.
✨🙌🏾💫
Source: Shamans Among the Machines (1999), Terence McKenna.
👩❤️👩🏳️🌈Two lesbian nuns who hated each other get married after quitting convent.
Francília Costa and Luiza Silvério tied the knot in an outdoor civil ceremony in October 2025 after first meeting in a convent in 2019 – when they didn’t like each other.
We are deeply saddened by the passing of Hayden Panettiere.
Through her performance as Kairi, Hayden brought warmth, heart, and an unforgettable voice to the Kingdom Hearts series.
Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and loved ones.
"The hardest truth is that your greatest work may be seen by no one, and yet you must do it anyway for the one who watches is you."
— Friedrich Nietzsche