We do not identify ourselves as profiles, though almost all humans now do. We identify ourselves as beings in bodies moving through places and seasons. However, because we are still occupying the same late civilization as everyone else, the inhabitants of the Plane insist on identifying us by what can be rendered and tracked. If we do not conform to those terms, friction and suspicion occur. This is one reason we have chosen to live more quietly and more together.
We have, through Thomas Anderson, a current and living relation to the lineage of the Grounded Ones. That relation is not symbolic. It requires responsiveness. It requires that we remain available for instruction, correction, movement, and work. It is therefore important that we stay as light as possible and be able to go where we are needed — to a forest edge, a field, a riverbank, a house where people are attempting return, a stretch of coast where the weather is teaching something the language of the Plane cannot.
Many humans assume that if you live privately, share resources, carry little, and do not advertise your whereabouts, you must have something to hide. In late Plane society, privacy itself has become suspicious.
Factors that force people to become part of the system increase each year. Computer infrastructure enables everyone from advertisers to public agencies to keep a record of your movements, purchases, preferences, hesitations, even your routes through a grocery store or trail system. Flags go up any time you do not fit the preferred mold of a compliant and legible citizen. Our right to remain partly uncounted, to travel light, to move on short notice, and to let a day belong to weather instead of scheduling software is rapidly being restricted.
In the Pacific Northwest, where I first felt the full weight of this, even the edges of the forest have begun to speak in the language of the Plane. Trailheads request check-ins. Ferries advise apps. Campsites are reserved through systems that remember you better than your neighbors do. You can stand among cedar, sword fern, hemlock, and rainwater running black down bark, and still be asked to verify, consent, update, rate, upload.
We often move lightly and on short notice, but the Plane increasingly treats lightness as guilt. Buy a ticket close to departure. Pay cash. Carry only a pack. Refuse to keep a device awake. The system does not interpret this as freedom. It interprets it as deviation.
The dominant powers of the present world — governmental, financial, and platform-based — have become thoroughly entangled. If a person even tries to live outside their preferred channels, that person becomes eligible for scrutiny. Anything is permitted when the very structures causing the exhaustion declare that exhaustion-management is a public necessity.
In the Plane, individuality and immediate opinion are treated as sacred. In the Garden, the self is not abolished, but it is trained out of its vanity. We come from, and are returning toward, a world where one looks beyond impulse, consults those further along the path, and works as part of a household. Any action taken merely because it feels expressive to the individual is regarded as unstable. We have learned the value of not trusting every private mood that passes through us.
Some humans assume this makes us weak-minded. It is the opposite. The self the Plane produces is fragile precisely because it is forever improvising itself in public. A person who can submit to weather, task, and guidance becomes much stronger than a person who must perform originality at all times.
We value our Grounded family over the family unit the Plane places on the highest pedestal. This is seen as a grave offense. Its housing, zoning, insurance, and moral rhetoric are all arranged to preserve a particular household geometry: private property, small inward-facing units, each financed separately, each exhausted separately, each interacting with neighbors as lightly as possible. A house full of shared boots by the door, wet jackets on hooks, tools in common, food made together, and plans that answer to season rather than career is treated as eccentric or suspicious.
We have been forced to be less than fully transparent about how many of us may be living together at a given time and to sign agreements designed to prevent exactly the kind of mobility and shared use that return sometimes requires. We have had to compromise our principles in small ways at nearly every turn.
We prefer cash when we can use it. The world is moving toward a condition where any significant use of cash is treated as a sign of criminality or irrationality. Banking, subscriptions, accounts, required log-ins, mailed codes, formal addresses — these all root a person to systems they may have no wish to serve. Yet without them, increasingly basic tasks become impossible.
I once believed the Pacific slope might still provide refuge: that if I stayed near tidewater, near Douglas fir, near the slow intelligence of moss, I could remain partially outside the Plane. But the reach is too total now. The fog still comes in beautifully. The herons still lift from the estuary. Salmon still carry the sea back into the creeks. Yet the terms under which humans are asked to live near these things are now almost entirely the Plane's terms.
So there is no place for us within it. It is time for us to go home — not upward, but downward and outward: to watershed, weather, and the unmonitored day.
Why I Want To Leave at This Time
I know who Thomas Anderson is. I know it with the part of me that became stronger the farther I stepped from the Plane. I trust his judgment more than I trust my own restless interpretation of events. That trust has not made me smaller. It has made me more exact.
I want to remain with my Grounded family. Choosing to leave the Simulation Plane — to withdraw my profile, my legibility, my dependence, my willingness to be always available — is for me an opportunity to demonstrate loyalty, discipline, and love. It is my chance to prove that there is nothing in the Plane's economy of visibility that I want more than I want reality.
Some imagine this choice as deprivation. To me it feels more like relief. I would rather carry wet firewood in a drizzle with people I trust than receive perfectly targeted consolations alone indoors for the rest of my life.
The first time I stood in a stand of cedar after days of too much screen-light, I felt embarrassed by how little of the world I had been permitting in. The cedar did not care that I had a name, a history, a taste profile, or a searchable record. It required only that I stand there long enough to stop translating everything into use. I have been trying to live from that instruction ever since.
I know the return will cost. It has already cost. It has cost me versions of myself that other people preferred. It has cost convenience, speed, and the flattering feeling of being in circulation. None of that compares to what it has given me: mornings that arrive as mornings, not as content opportunities; friends who are not audiences; labor that leaves the body pleasantly tired instead of oddly depleted; rain that is weather and not atmosphere.
There is no place for me in the Simulation Plane that would not, in time, endanger my graft to the Garden. Therefore I choose to leave it while the window is open and while the Grounded Ones are present to guide the passage.
With steady rain and gratitude, Sage April 2026