How To Starve The Monsters | 4.12.26

Here’s a bit of uncomfy truth to kick off your Sunday:

You probably don’t know you’re doing it, but you’re feeding your monsters. You’re watering your weeds.

We’re just wrapping up the first season of this new year, just tipping out of Winter and into the second quarter of 2026, and as such we’re probably collectively looking at a mental discard pile of a whole slew of things we promised ourselves we’d do, resolutions we swore we’d keep this time around. It happens, I get it.

Saying that, I think it’s time we had a little check-in, a little revisit, and I thought I’d speak to you by speaking to myself and those I love by mentioning a habit I see repeated over and again. I thought I’d bring up the consequence of that habit, and see if we can’t do something about it.

To put it in simple terms, what I see all around me is people rewarding so many of the destructive behaviors they most wish to stop.

I read an article awhile ago called “Things That Don’t Work” that had a list of 43 things that have been proven to Not work, and most had the proof linked to just how they don’t actually do what they claim to do. Everything from Acupuncture arguing with people to trying to explain the rules to board games, all the way down to my aforementioned Quality over Quantity (see the article I wrote by clicking below) fallacy.

One of the items on the list, however, really struck my interest and made me want to write today. Number 18 said this:

“Subsidizing undesired behavior. Say you’re waiting at a busy intersection and someone walks between the lanes of cars asking for money, putting themselves at risk and blocking traffic for a bit after the light turns green. If you give them money, it’s unlikely this will convince them they should stop doing this.”

I will say, I’ll always give money to people that ask for it in the street, because I’m entirely positively they don’t want to be asking for money in the middle of that metaphorical intersection, but it’s the underlying and overarching point he was making I wanted to address today. Subsidizing undesired behavior. Or, simply, watering our weeds, or, poetically, feeding our monsters. We do this all the time, almost constantly, and then we wonder and fret about how tired we all feel, how burned out, how over it we have collectively become. All these things we claim to hate, we know we want to avoid, somehow seem to persevere or often even multiply. We stand back, we wonder why.

“Where?!” you ask, as you are like me and desire example instead of abstraction. We claim to hate the constancy of negativity bombarding us from the news cycles. We claim to hate the rage bait, the misinformation, the extremism from trolls that seems never-ending. Then we share them, we retweet, quote, repost their hateful videos. Then we argue with them, shout back on online forums or comment threads. Every single interaction is a donation, a drop of water to these weeds, a giant bite for the monster to consume. We are the oxygen to the exact fires we wish to put out.

Politically we speak about wanting integrity and accountability in our elected offices, we want leadership, we want decency and humanity. We watch in horror then send the clips of our administration to our friends and family, “Look how bad THIS is,” we text, and in doing so transform ourselves into the marketing department of our own worst enemies. We want all these things, these traits that should be inherent into our highest positions of power, but instead we reward fanatical performance, cruelty, absolute outrage. We reduce ourselves to the sordid soundbites and the spectacle of it all.

It does not stop here, and never has. We all agree that corporate behemoths like Amazon and Apple are creating monopolies on our consumer culture, we complain about surveillance taking over capitalism as ads for products we mention in the “privacy” of our living rooms or dining room tables somehow find their way onto our social media feeds. We look out windows at a rapidly warming planet and an environment being destroyed and we feel the fear rise in the pits of our stomach. Then what? We buy the product on PRIME DAY DEALS because it was 45% off, we click AGREE on the terms and services without bothering to read, we welcome Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant into our homes because it makes it easier than having to manually turn up the volume or turn off the lights at night.

We know this, but we push it away, we don’t feel like its personal, we don’t feel like it’s really touching us. But it is friends. It is.

What of the “friends” who drain us, and leave us feeling more empty than when we began spending time with them? What of the family member that manipulates every situation to somehow seem like you’re the villain and they’re the victim? What of coworkers that make each room a bit more toxic, but somehow that it’s not their fault? What of all the Yes when what we truly want to shout is a No? What of work emails that come in at 9pm and that creeping obligation to respond, even though we’re at home, even though we shouldn’t?

We keep showing up, we keep answering, we keep allowing, we keep saying “Sure” and then feel miserable inside. We keep accommodating, more than anything else. It’s loyalty, say we, but really, it’s just constant permission given freely to all that holds us back, holds us down, wears us out.

Bottom line, we complain, we recognize the problems, we call them out, but then we fund them daily with our time, our money, our energy, our sense of calm, our lives.

We “good” people are subsidizing the “bad” behaviors of so many because so often we don’t want to be rude, we don’t want to ruffle feathers, hurt feelings. We let people cut in line and stay silent though we might be stewing inside. We let the arrogant and crass command a room, we let ourselves be walked on. By doing this, we’re paying the tax, by being nice, I argue we’re actually being more cruel to the whole, to the collective. We are directly incentivizing the actual breakdown of the system we’re trying so hard to uphold.

We’re feeding the monsters, be they giant and casting shadows unimaginably large over the whole of this country, or parasitically small and infecting the minutiae of our daily lives. We’re watering the weeds then we’re standing in dusty gardens, holding the soil we once knew as loamy and alive as dust, and we’re weeping at what once was. We’re protesting this by marching, by shouting, by posting, by arguing, by throwing our voices into the echo chambers we’re all surrounded by, and then being confused as it feeds the monster, as it satiates their ego, their aggression, their power.

What we need is refusal, what we require is disengagement. We have to stop feeding them, we have to stop participating in and inadvertently aiding their growth.

Mumford and Sons once sang: “In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die, And where you invest your love, you invest your life.” Now is our time to choose where we do that investing, now is the time to refuse to give it away to all that hurts us.

We must choose:

• Where our energy goes, and who deserves it.

• What we amplify with our own voices.

• What we normalize, and let ourselves grow accustomed to.

• What we tolerate.

• What we allow to continue.

Every system runs on consent, some given, some taken, some ignored, even those most broken. We cannot give ours any longer, we cannot abide ours stolen anymore.

In the end, when the dust of our garden settles, the world we live in is the one we pay for with our choices, with the food from within us. It’s the one funded by our money, our attention, our silence, our tolerance.

In the end, what you water grows.

Choose wisely.