The Clinical Picture
Let’s be honest. The sweetest sound in modern Moscow is not the clinking of glasses at “Dr. Zhivago” or the roar of an AMG on the Garden Ring. It’s the short, delicate ‘ding’ from your bank.
“Salary credited.”
You exhale. Your shoulders drop. The anxiety that has been gnawing at you for the past two weeks dissolves. You feel safe. You are a highly paid slave.
As someone who broke free from managing global logistics and dynamic pricing systems, I must disappoint you. This is not safety. It’s the drug taking effect.
Your salary is an anesthetic. And you are hooked.
The Biology of the Hunter. Why Pain is Useful
Evolution is a cynical but fair mistress. She gave us pain not to make us suffer. But to make us move. Pain is a signal. You are doing something wrong. You are hungry. Your cave is leaking. Pain forces the hunter to get up and kill the mammoth.
In the wild. If you catch nothing, you feel hunger. That is honest.
In the corporate fish tank. If you spend a month filing useless reports and simulating activity, you still get that text message.
The system severs the link between outcome and survival. You sold your time in bulk. Now all you have to do is show up.
Salary deadens the pain of lost time. You can spend years in a role that sucks the soul out of you. But every two weeks, you get an injection of financial Novocain. And you think. Well, it’s not so bad. I can live like this.
The Death of Instinct in the Golden Cage
I see it in the eyes of my clients. Those on a “fixed rate”—even a very high, golden fixed rate. They lose their edge. Their peripheral vision dulls.
They stop scanning the horizon for opportunity. Why risk leaping across a chasm. When the feeding trough is refilled automatically.
This is the comfort trap. The salary makes waiting tolerable. You tolerate boring meetings. You tolerate the tyrannical boss. You tolerate the absence of meaning. The anesthesia works flawlessly. You don’t feel life slipping through your fingers. Because the pain threshold is artificially inflated by money.
In Moscow, a city built by predators and for predators. Being a salaried herbivore is an evolutionary dead end.
If you want to get off the needle. To get a step-by-step plan on how to monetize your brain before the corporate shears cut your wings. You need a reality audit. Start by reading our Escape Plan here.
Time to Wake Up. The Reality Audit
The danger of anesthesia is that you might wake up too late. The moment the dose stops working. Or when the clinic closes. Read. When you are fired. The pain of years spent aimlessly will hit you like an avalanche. Without warning.
I suggest conducting a Truth Audit.
Try mentally “turning off” the next transaction. Imagine that text message never comes. Never.
What do you feel. Panic. Cold.
Excellent. Sensitivity is returning. Your inner hunter is waking up.
Use this phantom pain as fuel. Stop viewing your salary as a guarantee of safety. See it as a temporary resource. One you are stealing from the system to build your own ark.
Get off the needle. Start hunting. Even if you are still in the cage.
The Litmus Test
If your guaranteed income disappeared tomorrow. How many months could you rely on your skills—not your savings, but your actual skills—to hunt a mammoth in the open field.
Write down the number. Be honest.