SLUDG3 DW3LL3R

Life’s a swamp. Always has been.

But nowadays, it’s slicker, filthier, and smells like overpriced coffee left out in the rain. You wade in, thinking it’s shallow—just a puddle of bad jobs and worse loves—but before you know it, you’re knee-deep in heartbreak, debt, and the kind of loneliness that tastes like metal.

You try to keep moving, but the mud doesn’t just stick to your boots; it seeps in, pulls at your skin, makes a home in your soul. Every step you take, something you love gets swallowed. First, it’s the little things: your favorite band breaks up, the bar down the street raises its prices, your dog gets sick. Then it starts to take the big things.

A woman, maybe. Or a man. Or someone who makes you feel like you’re worth a damn, and just when you think you’ve got something solid to hold onto, the swamp gets hungry. It doesn’t chew—it swallows whole. Their laugh, their smell, their place in your bed—all gone. All that’s left is their ghost, floating just above the muck, waving at you like a cruel joke.

And you think, maybe, if you just stay still, the swamp will let you be. Let you sit in the mire and rot in peace. But it doesn’t work that way. The stillness only makes it worse. The swamp starts whispering: Come down, deeper now, there’s nothing left for you up there.

You fight it for a while. Drink too much, meet too many people you don’t care about, write poems no one will read. But the swamp doesn’t care about your distractions. It’s patient. It waits. One day, you wake up, and it’s already pulled you under. You didn’t even notice the last bit of air slipping out of your lungs.

And the sickest part? You start to love it. The weight, the darkness, the way it wraps around you like an old lover who never stopped hating you. The swamp doesn’t just consume what you love—it makes you believe you belong in it.

And maybe you do.

It’s not just the swamp that’s pulling us under anymore—it’s the people in it.

Nowadays, everyone’s their own sun, orbiting no one but themselves, shining just bright enough to cast a shadow over everyone else. Self-centered, self-serving, self-everything. They tell you they want to connect, but what they mean is they want to consume. They want the story of you to fit neatly into their timeline, a snapshot they can show off before they scroll past it, delete it, forget it.

You see it everywhere. The endless parade of curated lives, polished and filtered to death, no room for anything real. Love is just another commodity, packaged and sold back to us in swipes and likes. Conversations aren’t conversations anymore—they’re competitions. Who’s more interesting? Who’s more broken? Who can make their tragedy sound the most poetic?

And even when someone does reach out, it’s never really about you. It’s about what you can give them. Validation. Entertainment. A distraction from their own empty lives. But the moment you need something back, the moment you crack open your chest and show them the swamp inside, they’re gone. Connection isn’t a two-way street anymore. It’s a toll road, and you’re always the one paying.

So you start to think: maybe loneliness is better. At least the swamp doesn’t lie to you. At least it doesn’t pretend to care before it drags you down. Loneliness is honest. It doesn’t promise you love or understanding or even a hand to hold. It just sits with you in the dark, a quiet companion that doesn’t ask for anything in return.

And yeah, it’s cold, and yeah, it’s heavy, but at least it’s yours. At least it doesn’t demand that you make yourself smaller, shinier, easier to consume. At least it doesn’t ask you to play the game, the endless game of pretending to be something you’re not just to make someone else feel less alone.

Maybe that’s the real tragedy. Not that we’re lonely, but that we’ve made loneliness the safer choice. A swamp might kill you, but at least it won’t betray you. People? They’ll pull you in, promise you the world, and then leave you drowning in the swamp consumed by what you loved—believing you belong in it.

And maybe you do.