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The world around me is going crazy right now.

The busy restaurants that used to compete for my business struggle to keep their doors open. For the third time in the last week, I found the restaurant door locked tonight when I went to have dinner. When the next two places I tried were also locked, I went home instead.

It felt as though I had no choice.

After some flooding at our office a couple of weeks ago, I needed to install tile in an office where the carpet was damaged. My flooring supplier couldn’t sell me tile. Why? He can get the tile, but he can’t keep a dependable installer. (At any price.) I had to install a cheaper vinyl plank floor instead.

It makes me feel as though the choices I’m accustomed to having have been taken away.

I wasn’t thrilled when gasoline prices rose above $2 a gallon last December, but those prices sound great compared to the $3.199 price at my “cheap” neighborhood station this week. The price of everything I buy seems to be going up. Of course, anyone paying attention to the massive inflation of U.S. currency in circulation over the last 18 months would expect this.

It’s been obvious that politicians and central bankers have been destroying the value of our money — going back to the creation of the Fed in 1913 and the eventual end of the gold standard in 1971 — but it’s more obvious than ever today.

And I have no choice and no control over any of what they’re doing.

I need the world to make sense. I need people around me to be rational and behave in ways that I can understand. But that’s happening right now — and I find it’s affected me in an unexpected way.

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Personal growth can be painful. I don’t recall a single time when I’ve experienced psychological growth from moments of triumph and success. My growth has always come from profound moments of self-understanding — and those have tended to come from painful insights about my mistakes and failures.

I had another one of those uncomfortable moments this morning. I woke up thinking about a dream I had about a woman I once dated. That’s her above. Something disturbing hit me that I’ve been thinking about all day.

I’ve always had impossibly high standards for myself. The fact that I couldn’t be perfect made any slight error I made feel like failure. My imperfections made me feel worthless. I’ve been trying to deal with that perfectionism for a long time.

What I hadn’t realized until today was that I’ve unconsciously applied the same standards to the women I’ve loved. This has warped my view of these women.

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I don’t want to live in Mark Zuckerberg’s “Metaverse.” I’ve already see what Zuckerberg and Co. have to offer. Regardless of their intentions, the results of living in the virtual world they’ve created have been monstrous.

I embraced the online world far earlier than most. I had my first CompuServe account in about 1986. Before long, I was deeply involved in forums, message boards and bulletin boards. I became part of the early culture of “cyberspace.” We saw ourselves as pioneers — and we believed we were part of something great which would change everything.

As those early nerds days evolved into the fashionable world of social media, I came along for the ride. But over time, I became horrified at what I saw. Those of us who thought we were pioneers in something great were wrong.

We were pioneers who laid a foundation for something which would ultimately cause damage in “the real world.” And now that Facebook and other social media platforms have shown us just how dangerous they can be, Zuckerberg is asking us to double-down on trusting him — by joining him in something he calls “the Metaverse.”

If we have a shred of wisdom remaining in our online-addicted brains, we will run screaming from the dystopian future which Zuckerberg is so eager to sell to us.

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