In S4 of Rick and Morty, episode 4 (One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty), there’s this scene where Rick is standing in front of a booing crowd. They’re angry because Rick refuses to go along with their mindless "heist" obsession.
Unbothered, Rick simply shrugs and says:
"Your boos mean nothing. I've seen what makes you cheer."
And that line? It’s been echoing in my head ever since.
In the last post, we talked about living wide. About refusing to pick a single lane or specialise neatly, like society desperately wants you to. The thing I have come to realize is that once you step off the path, once you start building your own version of a life, you’ll quickly notice something else:
The reactions are strange. People don’t know how to react.
People like to think they’re rooting for "authenticity." They will clap for things such as self-discovery, creativity, freedom—until they actually see it. There's no need to go too far. Look at what Jesse Pollak started with the idea of tokenizing everything (the fact that this was him being ungovernable occurred to me while writing this). What happened next?
Boos.
What's worse is they squint at you like you’re a suspicious stain on their clean little story of how life (or crypto) is supposed to work.
Rick’s quote hits differently because it’s a truth we don’t talk about enough: The same crowd that boos you for being different is the one that cheers for mediocrity when it feels safe.
If you’re serious about being ungovernable, the lesson you have to learn and learn quickly is that you must not take the boos. The cheers too, actually.
Both are weather. Both are noise. Neither defines who you are.
Society loves a winner, just not the ones who win differently.
This is something we see everywhere. In school, we’re taught to innovate but only within the box.
I remember in high school, my favourite teacher (math) would tell us to "think outside the box" when faced with a difficult math problem. But now that I think about it, the solution you come up with still has to follow set rules.
We are handed awards for "best in class," "most promising student," "rising star". But these are titles that come with an invisible fine print: Congratulations! You're the best at doing exactly what we expected you to do.
I guess this is why I never liked the idea of school.
Step one inch out of line, and suddenly, the applause dries up. The room gets awkward.
Or worse: "Are you okay?" (Translation: You’re making us uncomfortable, and we need you to shrink back to something we recognise.)
Remember the classic movie scene where someone gives a powerful speech, and instead of clapping, the crowd just blinks and whispers awkwardly. Not because the speech was bad, but because it was not familiar.
Real originality short-circuits the applause machine.
Being ungovernable means you stop waiting for a standing ovation before you move.
It means you build the weird project anyway. You write the messy book anyway. You chase the reckless dream anyway. You become who you’re supposed to be, even if everyone watching folds their arms and shifts nervously in their seats.
Imagine if Van Gogh had based his career on public approval. (He sold exactly one painting while he was alive and it was to his brother.)
I think about this often. Imagine if the Wright Brothers, after the first dozen failed experiments, had said, "You know what? Maybe humans just aren’t meant to fly." Imagine if they had packed up their tools, gone home, and settled for building better bicycles instead of dreaming about airplanes. We forget that most revolutionary ideas start off looking like bad jokes. Until they don’t. Until the thing that made everyone roll their eyes suddenly rewrites what’s possible.
That’s the gamble! You build when no one believes. You believe when no one believes yet.
Imagine if every inventor, artist, and rebel stopped the first time someone said, “This doesn’t make sense.”
Here's something to chew on: Governability is the art of making yourself small enough to fit the frame. Ungovernability is knowing you were never meant to fit at all.
One of the biggest lies we’re sold is that success will feel like a finish line you cross. That somewhere, someday, you’ll arrive at a moment where it all just makes sense-wrapped up, approved, untouchable.
I don't believe it will.
Even if the applause comes, it will never be enough to fill the places inside you that require real purpose.
The real win is not the cheer. It's the building itself. The making. The living.
If you live long enough outside the rules, you realise two things:
You stop building for approval.
You start building because it’s what keeps your spirit alive.
At some point in my life, I looked at the crowd, and I realized I don’t owe them a damn thing.
I don’t need them to get it. I don’t need them to clap. I don’t even need them to notice.
I just need to keep going.
They'll call me (us) foolish, arrogant, unrealistic, and stubborn. Wear every word like a badge. That means we're doing something right.
Because in the end, it’s better to be booed for living wide than cheered for living small.
And besides, if you're doing it right, the rules were never written for you anyway.
Image Credit: Cord Allman (Unsplash)
Alexander
