Our Mission & Community

You’ll find the success and happiness you crave once you’ve made it to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – self-actualization, reaching your highest potential. 

But you can’t do it alone. And you can’t do it how you’ve been taught to...

The modern mantra goes something like this: 

Get born, grow up in the suburbs with Mom and Dad + 1.5 siblings, go to school, take AP everything, score 1500+ on you SATs, marry your high-school sweetheart, get a prestigious 9-5 but work in that cubicle (maybe a hospital or school) from 8-8 anyway, start the cycle all over. 

Buy a nice house with a big yard for your dog, have 2.5 kids of your own, and enough retirement money to buy a beach house and travel to the Maldives, Thailand, Hawaii or anywhere else on your bucket list at least twice a year. 

But what happens if you can’t afford college? Your sweetheart dumps you? You never had one in the first place? Your dog dies? You can’t have children? You’re diagnosed with cancer? You don’t get that prestigious job you’ve worked your whole life (and drowned in debt) for?

How the heck are you supposed to get and stay happy, even in the shiniest of scenarios? 

Especially when 44 million Americans have a mental health condition and over 24 million are untreated. Especially when wealth disparity in the U.S. is higher than any other G7 nation – where the gap between America’s richest and poorest more than doubled from 1989 to 2016.

And how does excelling at AP calculus and your SATs prepare you to get a loan, pay off debt, purchase a home, file your taxes, or invest in the stock market anyway (all things you need to check off the aforementioned to-do list). 

And why does everything we “learn” our whole lives barely touch the surface? Of what we REALLY need to know to thrive – heck, just survive – in this competitive, complicated world?

The stuff we talk about everyday here at BRAINWASH. 

Like, how do you: 

• Cope with lifelong illness, sudden loss of a loved one, and other tragedies?

• Make your relationships work?

• Care for a newborn?

• Support elderly parents?

• Actively participate in making the world less shitty?

• Think critically when facing tough decisions or living through unprecedented historical events like a pandemic?

• And what the hell are you supposed to eat/cook 3X a day for the rest of your life?!

Even mundane stuff like how to train your dog, clean an air filter, change your oil, set up a 401k, plant a garden…

And holy hell, why did no one explain taxes, health + life insurance, and how refinancing works somewhere along the way? 

And why does mastering all those mundane things STILL not guarantee success and happiness? 

This is why I started BRAINWASH. Because all our brains need a therapeutic washing. 

It’s time to break the shackles of these “mind-forg'd manacles”, limiting your potential for health, wealth, and happiness. 

Because if you really want to live a happier, healthier, more balanced life, 

You’ve got to figure out what you really want… 

Not what the world has brainwashed you to think you want, or you’ll never find fulfillment. 

And you’re going to have to reinvent your own version of the American Dream.  Because the old one seems to have passed its expiration date. As Americans have never been more depressed, overweight, unstable, and isolated. 

We’re asking Google for everything instead of talking to our spouses, parents/grandparents, friends, and neighbors. We’re reading news that’s constantly dramatizing reality for ratings. 

We exhaust ourselves running this rat-race, motivated by fear of the unknown. 

To quote The National, “we’re half awake in a fake Empire”.

What we need is to re-shape the way we learn about and experience the world. In order to figure out what to do in our own lives, we need to learn lessons from REAL people and real stories.  

We don’t need sugar-coated history lessons painting murderous tyrants, sociopathic explorers, and delusional ego-centric “leaders” as heroes. 

Solving the mysteries of being with science-based research from real experts will give us a healthy foundation.

But we still need to be our own heroes. And we need a community to help us out by encouraging us and holding us accountable as we become the best versions of ourselves. 

In return, we must offer the same support and understanding to others on a similar journey of reinvention and self-actualization. 

And that’s what BRAINWASH is all about. Telling stories. Seeking answers. Sharing humor, poetry, and science to re-learn how to view the world so we can cope with its chaos and celebrate its magic. 

Taking the time to understand the science and psychology of everything before we make blanket assumptions about complex issues. 

“Unlearning” the world around us so we can make better choices. So we can live a better-balanced life. 

So go ahead and save hours of your life sifting through thousands of Google searches, and sign up for a long overdue BRAINWASH instead.