Exiting the Matrix: A VERYRARE Perspective

There’s a kind of prison where every door is open.

You can go anywhere, want anything, become anyone. That’s the pitch, anyway. And somehow the start date of your actual life keeps getting pushed back. When the money comes in. When the work pays off. When the right person notices. When you finally turn into whoever you were apparently supposed to be by now.

Then you’ll relax. Then you’ll feel like you deserve it. Then you’ll be grateful. Then you’ll live.

I keep going back to one scene in The Matrix Reloaded (2003). Not the freeway chase, not Neo fighting a hundred Agent Smiths. A Frenchman at a lunch table, explaining the universe with a slice of chocolate cake. I think it’s the clearest explanation of the Matrix in the whole franchise, and almost by accident it shows you the way out.

Le Vrai ⇄ the real

Quick refresher. Neo, Morpheus and Trinity need the Keymaker, and the Keymaker is held by the Merovingian, an old program who deals in information and has made himself very comfortable inside the machine. Lambert Wilson plays him like a man who has never once paid for dessert. He holds court in a restaurant called Le Vrai, French for “the real”. Subtle, the Wachowskis were not.

He opens by telling the crew they didn’t come by choice: someone sent them, and they obeyed. Then the sermon. One law runs his universe, cause and effect, and the rest is decoration. Morpheus answers that everything begins with choice. The Merovingian, smug as ever:

“Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without.”

Then the demo. Across the room, a woman is eating a slice of chocolate cake he sent her. He wrote it himself, he says, the way you’d write a poem, each line triggering its own effect. A rush, then heat, then her pulse skipping. She has no idea why. The wine? Something else? Pretty soon the why stops mattering and only the feeling is left. That, he explains, is the point: understanding why is the only real power, and the people who only feel are the ones without it.

Then he excuses himself for the bathroom (cause and effect again, by his own account) and leaves. His wife Persephone stays behind. She watched every second of it, and shortly after she offers our heroes the Keymaker. Her price: one kiss from Neo, the way he kisses Trinity.

The cake is the argument

Everyone remembers this as the horny scene. Fair. But what’s scary here is who wrote the desire.

He controls the input and she lives the output. The most efficient part of the whole operation is that the question of where the feeling came from dissolves inside the feeling. The why goes first. The sensation stays, and she’ll walk out of that restaurant calling it hers.

That’s the Matrix, more than the pods and the human batteries ever were: a feeling you didn’t write, lived as if you did.

01poem dessert {02  serve(cake)  // she never ordered it03  rush()  // first bite04  heat(+1)  // must be the wine?05  pulse.skip()  // ...06  why = undefined  // question dissolved07}

The annoying part is that the Merovingian isn’t wrong. Feelings have causes, and somebody can write them. Ask anyone who has ever built an ad. (Hi.)

Now look at Persephone, the most interesting person at that table. She’s married to a man who writes feelings for a living, and she’s starving for one nobody wrote. She sells him out for one kiss that’s real. Put enough engineered sensation in a room and you get a very specific hunger: to feel something nobody designed. That might be the most 2026 thing in a 2003 movie.

If this, then that

Here’s the version most of us are running. When I succeed, I’ll feel worthy. When I have enough, I’ll feel secure. When something wonderful finally happens, I’ll feel grateful.

The event happens, then the feeling follows. That’s cause and effect, and cause and effect is the Matrix. Each of those lines is a little dessert somebody else wrote: a parent’s idea of safe, an industry’s idea of success, an ex’s idea of what you’re worth, an algorithm’s guess at what you’ll want next.

None of this is new. René Girard argued that we mostly want things because we watch other people want them. Guy Debord described a society where life gets lived through images of life. Neither needed a computer simulation to make the point. What changed is the scale. The Merovingian needed a waiter to get one slice to one woman. The feed serves everyone at once, all day, and learns plate by plate which line works on you.

So it comes down to time. How many years can you spend waiting for the event that unlocks the feeling?

Enough keeps moving

And when the event finally shows up, how long does it hold?

In 1978, the psychologists Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman interviewed 22 recent big winners of the Illinois state lottery. They weren’t happier than a comparison group, and they got less pleasure out of everyday things. It’s a small, old study and it gets overstated a lot, but the idea it pointed at has held up in decades of research since. The exceptional turns ordinary, fast. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation.

So the finish line moves with you. The number that once meant freedom becomes the number below which you feel behind. Last year’s impossible becomes this year’s minimum.

I’m not arguing against ambition. I run a brand that makes hoodies out of Caravaggio paintings, so I’m obviously into unreasonable ideas. The problem is putting your right to be alive today up as collateral. You mortgage today for a feeling tomorrow promised you. Tomorrow shows up, collects, and sends a new invoice.

What caused you ⇄ what can you cause

This is where I part ways with the usual red-pill reading.

The Merovingian jumps from everything has a cause to so you can’t choose. That doesn’t follow. Being caused and being powerless are different things. My decisions have a history (upbringing, temperament, fear, habit, money or the lack of it), and they also make history. A cause can be shaped by older causes and still change what comes next.

Spinoza worked this out in his Ethics, published in 1677. Nobody floats outside the chain of causes. For him, freedom means understanding the causes that move you and acting from that understanding, instead of getting shoved around by them. Which is funny, because it’s almost the Merovingian’s own line about the why. He’s right about where the power is. He just points it at other people and never at himself. He admits he’s a slave to causality, bladder included, and still believes he’s the one running the place.

Neo’s real awakening happens quietly, before any bullet-dodging: he stops treating what’s in front of him as the limit of what he can be.

The Merovingian asks what caused you? Neo’s whole arc asks a second question: what can you cause? You need both. The first shows you your programming. The second asks what you’re going to do with the readout.

The opposite of being an effect isn’t being causeless. It’s becoming a deliberate cause.

Sit in the lounge room first

So what does causing the effect look like on a Tuesday?

Think about building a house. Before there’s a foundation, before there’s even a plot, you picture yourself on the couch in the lounge room. The light at five in the afternoon, people around the table, the noise. That room doesn’t exist yet and it’s already doing things. You save differently. You sketch. You call people who’ve built one. You learn what concrete costs. You get up and work.

The imagined experience hasn’t built the house. It has entered the present as a cause.

To be clear, this isn’t “manifest a Ferrari by vibrating at the right frequency”. Feelings don’t override physics, rent, luck, health or a bank balance. The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen has spent years showing that pure positive fantasy can backfire. In a 2011 set of experiments with Heather Barry Kappes, people who indulged in an idealized future had less energy afterwards, as if their body had already collected the reward. What works better is what she calls mental contrasting: picture the wish, look straight at the obstacle, then make a plan. Vision, then friction, then work.

You don’t control every outcome. What you can change is the assumption that your values have to stay in storage until the project ships. Can I feel grateful before the good news arrives? Can I carry myself with some dignity before anyone claps? Can I feel fulfilled while there’s still an absurd amount left to build? You can be brave while scared, and curious while you’re still bad at the thing. That’s causing the effect: living now the qualities you keep assigning to some future version of you.

Even the exit is for sale

The Matrix always has one more layer, so here’s one.

In the first film, Neo keeps his contraband disks inside a hollowed-out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard was not flattered. In a 2003 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, he dismissed the film as something the system itself could have made. Harsh, and kind of right. The system is very happy to sell you its own critique.

Early in The Matrix Resurrections (2021), a character announces that Warner Bros. is making a sequel to The Matrix, with or without its creator. The rebellion got a release schedule. Today “red pill” is a meme, and “escape the matrix” is the headline on trading courses, dropshipping masterclasses and half the guru funnels in your feed. Each one is another dessert, this time labeled exit.

So yes, even wanting out can become another Matrix. You quit the nine-to-five and become a slave to performing entrepreneurship. You trade logos for an equally strict uniform of not caring about logos. Rebellion isn’t automatically authorship. If the crowd still decides your direction, going against it is conformity in reverse.

The actual work is quieter and more private. Why do I want what I want? Which of my wants are borrowed? Which rules were never laws to begin with?

A VERYRARE perspective

Which brings me to the obvious problem with a clothing brand writing all this. No hoodie contains a red pill, and no purchase comes with a personality. If I told you otherwise, I’d be serving you the exact dessert I just spent two thousand words warning you about.

What we’re after is something else. Artwear, for us, means art you can wear: a Caravaggio, a Kuniyoshi print, a Naruto villain, an old folk tale, woven into jacquard and taken out from behind the glass. The garment is the medium. The material is everything those references carry, plus the person who walks around in them.

There’s a painting I keep putting next to that restaurant table: Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew, painted around 1600 and still hanging in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Another table, another room full of men and money. Matthew is a tax collector, mid-count. A beam of light comes in, a hand points his way, and he’s being called to get up and follow, coins still on the table. Art historians still argue about which figure is Matthew: the bearded man pointing at himself like me?, or the kid at the end of the table who won’t look up from the money. Either way, nobody waits for him to finish counting.

Two tables. At one, a man writes your desire for you and serves it on a plate. At the other, the light walks in and asks you to stand up before you’re ready. We put Caravaggio’s Matthew on a pair of pants, which is either the most Catholic or the least Catholic thing a streetwear brand has ever done. And the Matrix has lived in our studio for a while too: [THERE IS NO SPOON] and “Bᵥʳeach in the Matrix” in 2023, and then ‘Main Character’ the year after.

Rarity, the way we mean it, isn’t a number on a tag. Artificial scarcity is easy to manufacture. A singular way of seeing is much harder. VERYRARE has always been for the willful ones, the people building their own mythology in public, taking art seriously without treating the world’s instructions as sacred. The piece should amplify a life, not stand in for one. And not later, after some final transformation. Now, mid-becoming.

No exit sign

I don’t think anyone exits the Matrix once and for all. You wake up from one script and find another one underneath. There’s no certificate at the end, and no final state where ads, fear, desire or the need to belong stop working on you.

The Merovingian was right about one thing: causes are everywhere, and the world will act on you whether you notice or not. That still doesn’t make you a footnote in his sequence.

So start making things before you feel ready. Start caring before there’s a reward. Be grateful before the thing arrives. Because if everything you want is supposed to change how you feel about your life, how long are you willing to put off being alive until you get it?

You’re not here only to feel the effect. You’re here to cause something.

EXIT THE MATRIX. BECOME VERYRARE.

— [ARTWEAR c/o Raf Reyes]

Notes & further reading

• The Matrix Reloaded (2003), written and directed by the Wachowskis: the Le Vrai restaurant scene.
• Jean Baudrillard, interviewed by Aude Lancelin, Le Nouvel Observateur, June 2003. English translation: “The Matrix Decoded”, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, July 2004.
• Philip Brickman, Dan Coates & Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978.
• Heather Barry Kappes & Gabriele Oettingen, “Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011. See also Oettingen, Rethinking Positive Thinking (2014).
• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677), parts IV and V.
• René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961). Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
• Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.
• The Matrix Resurrections (2021), directed by Lana Wachowski.