“You Are Living in Flatland (And You Don’t Even Know It)”
The Death Initiation Version
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Cold Open
There’s a dimension you can’t see.
Not because you’re not smart enough.
Not because you’re not paying attention.
But because you haven’t been initiated yet.
By death.
Not your own death. Not literally.
But close enough.
Close enough to see through the game everyone’s playing.
Close enough to realize that all the things Flatland tells you matter… don’t.
My son died at birth.
I was fired after twenty-six years.
My wife is fighting cancer.
I turned fifty.
These were my initiations.
These were the moments when death—actual death, identity death, the confrontation with mortality—lifted me out of the flat plane of normal life and showed me dimensions I couldn’t perceive before.
And now I’m back.
Back in Flatland.
Where people are still obsessing over job titles and credentials and retirement plans and “being realistic.”
And I can’t relate anymore.
Because I’ve seen the vertical dimension.
This is Flatland.
And this is about what happens when death teaches you to see.
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Act One: Welcome to the Plane
Let me tell you about a book.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.
It was written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott Abbott.
It’s about a two-dimensional world.
Imagine a perfectly flat surface—like a piece of paper.
That’s where everyone lives.
You can move forward and backward.
Left and right.
But there is no up.
There is no down.
Those dimensions don’t exist.
The inhabitants are shapes.
Triangles are the workers and soldiers—the lowest class.
Squares are the professionals, the middle class.
Pentagons, hexagons, octagons—the more sides you have, the higher your status.
And circles—the elite, the priesthood—have so many sides they appear perfectly smooth.
Your worth is determined by your geometry.
Sound familiar?
In our world it’s not sides. It’s:
Your degree—BA, MA, PhD.
Your title—assistant, manager, director, VP, C-suite.
Your salary—the number in your bank account as proof of your value.
Your followers—the algorithm’s measurement of your significance.
The more you accumulate, the more you are.
That’s Flatland thinking.
You’re a shape on a plane, trying to get more sides.
But here’s what the Flatlanders can’t perceive:
There’s a third dimension.
Up.
Down.
Depth.
A whole direction of reality they’ve never experienced.
And if you tried to explain it to them, they’d think you were insane.
The book is narrated by a character called A Square.
A respectable, middle-class shape.
Living a normal life.
Following the rules.
Accepting that the plane is all there is.
Until one day, he’s visited by a Sphere.
A being from the third dimension.
The Sphere tries to explain that there’s more—that Flatland is just a cross-section of something larger.
A Square thinks he’s hallucinating.
So the Sphere does something radical.
He lifts A Square out of the plane.
Up.
And A Square sees his entire world from above.
He can see inside houses.
See inside his neighbors.
See the truth of Flatland that was completely invisible from within it.
He realizes everything he thought was solid… was just a slice.
Then the Sphere drops him back.
And nothing is ever the same.
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Act Two: Death Is the Sphere
Here’s what I’ve learned.
Death is the Sphere.
Death is the thing from another dimension that enters your flat world and changes everything.
When my son died at birth, that was the Sphere appearing.
When I was fired after twenty-six years, that was being lifted out of the plane.
When my wife got cancer, that was seeing from the vertical dimension.
When I turned fifty and realized I no longer fit in the traditional workforce, that was being dropped back into Flatland—changed.
These weren’t just tragedies that happened to me.
They were initiations.
Moments when death lifted me out of the two-dimensional game and showed me what’s real beyond the plane.
And here’s what you see from up there:
All the things Flatland says matter… don’t.
Job titles become meaningless when you’re standing at your son’s grave.
Credentials evaporate when your identity collapses overnight.
Retirement plans feel absurd when someone you love is fighting for their life.
Death shows you what’s actually real.
Love.
Connection.
Presence.
Meaning.
Not what you have—what you are.
Not your status on the plane—your depth beyond it.
That’s the third dimension.
Maybe you’ve been initiated too.
Through loss.
Through diagnosis.
Through near-death.
Through the death of a career, a marriage, an identity.
A moment when death got close enough that all the 2D nonsense fell away—and you saw clearly what actually matters.
If that’s happened to you, you’ve been lifted out of Flatland.
And you can’t unsee it.
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Act Three: Back in the Plane
But here’s the problem.
The Sphere drops you back.
You don’t get to stay in the vertical dimension.
You return to Flatland.
Where people are still networking, optimizing their LinkedIn profiles, saving for retirements they assume they’ll reach, obsessing over titles and credentials and “realistic” goals.
They’re playing the two-dimensional game like it’s all there is.
And from Flatland, you sound crazy.
A Square tried to tell people what he saw.
And they called him insane.
Dangerous.
A threat to society.
They imprisoned him.
I haven’t been imprisoned.
But I’ve learned to edit myself.
Because when you talk about seeing dimensions others can’t perceive, people get uncomfortable.
They tell you to move on.
To stop overthinking.
To be realistic.
Translation: stop talking about the vertical dimension. Get back on the plane.
But once you’ve been initiated by death, you can’t pretend Flatland is all there is.
You can function in it.
But you can’t believe in it anymore.
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Act Four: The Activation
So here’s what I’m going to do in this series.
I’m going to activate your Reticular Activating System—your RAS.
The part of your brain that filters reality and decides what you notice.
Right now, most people’s RAS is tuned to Flatland.
Status.
Money.
Credentials.
Metrics.
After this series, your RAS will start noticing something else.
You’ll see Flatland everywhere.
And you’ll start seeing the third dimension too.
Moments when the veil lifts.
People who’ve been initiated.
Opportunities for dimensional shift hiding in plain sight.
I’m not here to convince you of anything.
I’m here to tune your perception.
And once it’s tuned, you can’t untune it.
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Closing
At the end of Flatland, A Square is still imprisoned.
But he keeps writing.
Still insisting the third dimension is real.
I’m not in prison.
But I am between dimensions.
One foot in Flatland—bills, cancer treatment, survival.
One foot in the vertical—death-knowledge, depth, initiation.
And I’m done pretending I only live on the plane.
This series is for people who’ve been initiated.
People who can’t go back.
Over the next six episodes, we’re going to explore what happens when the Sphere appears, what you see when you’re lifted out, and how to live when you’re dropped back.
This isn’t philosophy.
This is fieldwork.
Your RAS is now activated.
You’re going to start seeing Flatland everywhere.
Welcome to the vertical dimension.
Welcome to the initiation.
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