Still Waters, Silent voices
When Flow Stops: On the Dammed Rivers of Thought, Voice, and Resistance
One of the most beautiful truths in nature is that water always flows to the sea. Rivers don’t need permission or instruction. They’re not led, they’re pulled - by something inevitable, by gravity, by the careless ease of nature.
Unless we build a dam.
My thinking on this came from a passage from the Tao Te Ching:
“The reason the sea can govern a hundred rivers / is because it has mastered being lower” (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 66)
Those simple lines really resonated, leading me to consider what is stopping me from feeling this sense of ease, of flow and ability to create and contribute with a careless ease to the global collective. I've been unable to write for so long. There are barriers - or dams in the way.
In society, in our workplaces and in our minds… there are dams. Invisible ones. Thought-constructed ones. Some personal. Many structural.
And they stop us from flowing, from speaking, from creating. And someone is always profiting from that stagnation.
Dams serve a purpose, they can be a good thing, improving services for local communities but more often than not, they serve to silo power.
They hold water, not for the common good, but to commodify it. To extract value from a public, natural resource that should be freely available to all and then sell it back to the true owners as commodified basic needs goods.
The river no longer nourishes downstream communities. It floods upstream lives. And those who operate the dam? They profit off the blocked, the stuck, the silenced. They buy more silence: through low-paying jobs, political influence, and the occasional morsel thrown to appease dissent.
Our Inner Dams
So what are the dams inside us?
Who built them? And who profits from our silence, our shame, our fear?
Here are some that I've started to observe in my own life:
Silence Dams: Built from being told “you’re too loud,” “don’t speak unless spoken to,” “girls should be seen and not heard.” So now we whisper when we should speak clearly. Or we roar, because we’ve been silent too long. We haven’t learned how to speak our truth AND still hold space for connection and new understanding.
Fear Dams: Constructed by every punishment for trying something new. Every mistake that became a scar, not a lesson. Our fear dams stop us from speaking before we even begin. It is:
the post you didn’t share for fear of backlash
the point you didn’t raise in the meeting
the person you didn’t approach because rejection felt inevitable
the idea you didn't progress incase it failed
Shame Dams: Forged in childhood. Every time we reached for something inconvenient, socially or culturally unacceptable or that was perceived to challenge the authority of our caregivers and were met with a look, a silence, a shaming. So now we hide our best questions, instincts, ambitions—deep underground, locked in an iron box, welded shut with shame.
The commodification of our stuckness
When we’re jammed up… mentally, emotionally, creatively. It’s not just an internal issue, it has become a resource.
The Matrix might have harvested our energy but the algorithms feast on our anxiety. Platforms extract our half-thoughts, our clickbait musings. They don’t want our best. They want our pain - it is our pain that generates more clicks, more data and more eyeballs. They want our constant attention, diverting us from what really matters.
The real tragedy? They profit off our stagnation.
Not from our genius but from our fractured productivity. Our fracked energy.
Because it’s more extractable.
Our dams, coping mechanisms that once kept us safe, have become weapons used against us. A landlord class has emerged that seeks to transform pain into profit:
Financial insecurity pain
Emotional & social pain
Relational pain
Physical pain
The pain of insecure shelter and community
The basics of humanity have been turned into commodities - homes are investments, natural food is more expensive than processed food, mental health - there's an app for that. Childbirth is big business, water is bottled and time is money.
Who's to blame?
So who’s to blame? That’s the hard part. There’s no cartoon villain here. No shadowy figure pulling levers behind a curtain. No singular hand at the wheel.
It’s not even the rent-seekers’ fault… not entirely. Most of them don’t see themselves as exploiters. They see themselves as survivors. As innovators. As value creators.
They believe they’re building systems that reward productivity. But what they’re actually building are mechanisms of endless extraction… of human energy, attention, creativity, labour, and nature itself.
And the real tragedy?
They don’t even see the damage.
Because the boot is not on their necks... yet.
We’ve built a world where survival is transactional.
Where wealth is infinite and worth is relative.
Where safety for some is funded by scarcity for others.
We now live in a world where extraction has become a virtue. Where more is always the goal, and enough is a concept we no longer believe in. Where the life-force of people, land, and imagination is mined with no intention of restoration.
This isn’t just an economic model… it’s a worldview.
And it’s quietly killing us.
So what now?
We can’t just blow up the dams. The surge would drown the very people we seek to liberate. But we can start to name and recognise the dams.
We can notice the stagnant waters in our minds and hearts.
And ask... what would it take to let this flow again?
Not to be louder, more consistent or more right. Just freer.
Not to cause chaos for chaos sake. Just to return... to voice, to creativity, to connection.