INDIGNIFIED by CD Damitio. Utopias and Dystopias Explored.
There’s a Buddhist concept called the hungry ghost. You’ve seen one — you might be one right now, reading this. A being with a vast, distended stomach and a throat so narrow nothing can pass through. Endlessly hungry. Unable to eat.
The hungry ghost doesn’t want specific things. It just wants more. More content. More validation. More outrage. More stimulation. The thing it’s consuming doesn’t matter — what matters is the consuming.
I spent most of the winter thinking about this from a house in Japan, where I moved in 2024 partly because America was starting to look like a country I recognized from history books — and not the good parts.
What Happens When Meaning Goes on Sale
Here’s the dystopia hiding in plain sight: we live in an economy that profits from your emptiness.
Religion — for all its failures, and there were many — gave people something the market couldn’t easily commodify. Ritual. Community. A framework for suffering that didn’t require a subscription. A reason to get up that wasn’t tied to productivity metrics.
It started breaking down in the 20th century. By the time my generation came of age, the container was cracked. GenX watched our parents’ institutions fail — the company that expected loyalty and laid off anyway, the church that preached community and built real estate portfolios, the government that talked about freedom and meant something narrower.
So we became suspicious of all containers.
The problem is: you still need somewhere to put your life.
The Algorithm Moved In
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does capitalism.
Into the space left by collapsing meaning systems moved: social media platforms designed by behavioral psychologists to maximize engagement (which turns out to mean: maximize agitation). Influencer culture selling identity as a product. Outrage cycles so perfectly tuned to the nervous system that people consume them the way hungry ghosts consume everything — insatiably, joylessly, unable to stop.
I watched this happen in real time. I watched people who used to have religions get TikTok instead. I watched the vacuum fill with conspiracy theories, parasocial attachments to strangers on the internet, identity politics that offer the feeling of belonging without the mess of actual community.
It’s not that people are stupid. It’s that the hungry ghost economy is very good at what it does. It found the exact lever — the need to belong, to be seen, to matter — and it pulls that lever constantly, in both directions, and charges you for the privilege.
The Personal Version
I invented Baoism on a trip halfway around the world with my ten-year-old daughter.
I know how that sounds. Bear with me.
We were somewhere in Asia — she was asking the questions kids ask that adults have stopped asking because they’ve accepted the non-answers. Why do people believe things that make them unhappy? Why do you have to belong to something to feel like you belong?
I didn’t have a good answer. I had a lot of bad ones.
So I started building one. Not a religion — I’m too suspicious of those. Not a philosophy — too academic, wrong register. A framework. Something sturdy enough to live inside, simple enough to carry, open enough that you can make it yours without having to check with anyone.
Baoism has three core moves:
Stop Tox — remove what poisons you. The feed. The habit. The relationship that leaves you worse than it found you.
Do Rox — take real action. Not productive action, not optimized action. Real action. The thing that moves your life in a direction you chose.
Help Others — lift people without keeping score.
That’s it. It’s not a complete system — it’s a starting point. The full framework is at baoism.org if you want to go deeper.
What I was building, I realized, was an alternative to the hungry ghost economy. Not a cure. An alternative. A place to set your pack down that doesn’t belong to an algorithm.
The Utopia That Won’t Be Sold to You
The utopia I keep returning to in my fiction — in Hasan i-Sabah, in the Sultanate of Baboob, in Notes from Nowhere — isn’t a place where everything is perfect. It’s a place where people have found a way to belong to something that doesn’t consume them.
The Sultanate of Baboob is a satirical version of this. A landlocked North African kingdom where all men are named Mucho, taxes are a moral failing, and belonging is established through blood debt rather than brand loyalty. It’s absurd. It’s also closer to what community actually feels like than anything the hungry ghost economy offers.
Hasan i-Sabah — the real one, the historical one who built Alamut — understood something about this. He built a mountain fortress and filled it with people who chose to be there. They had a shared framework, shared ritual, shared purpose. Were they a cult? Maybe. Were they also onto something about what humans need that capitalism still can’t sell you? Also maybe.
What I’m Watching
The dystopia isn’t coming. It’s the current state of affairs, scrolling past you at the speed of your thumb.
But here’s what I’ve also noticed, from this house in Japan, watching from a comfortable distance: people are tired of being hungry ghosts. The ones I talk to, the ones who find their way to Baoism or to the Vagobond brand or to the Indignified Substack — they’re looking for the same thing I was looking for in every VW bus, every country, every attempt to build something real.
A place to set your pack down.
The utopia isn’t a country or a system or a platform. It’s a practice. It’s the daily choice to stop consuming what makes you less and start building what makes you more.
That’s not a silver bullet. But it’s a start.
CD Damitio has been looking for somewhere to set his pack down since 1971. He’s found it a few times, lost it, and rebuilt it. He currently has a house in Japan that he can live in sometimes. See all his books at https://indignified.com/books. Baoism is at baoism.org.
INDIGNIFIED by CD Damitio. Utopias and Dystopias Explored.