All Posts

Author Mark Brent reads from Idiot Factory in the embedded video . Article goes in-depth on what mindfulness is and what it is not.

The Pursuit of Happiness Is Making Us Miserable Our pursuit of happiness has become a form of psychological torture. Not because happiness is bad. Not because joy is fake. Not because wanting a good life is some kind of moral failure. The problem begins when happiness becomes a requirement. When we decide that every day must feel good, every feeling must be productive, and every uncomfortable moment must mean something is wrong with us. That is where we stop living and sta

This is a stylized audiobook style reading of Chapter 1 of the Idiot Factory. The actual manuscript is used verbatim for the voiceover, so yes, it's like getting an audiobook, but with a little more visual storytelling. Enjoy. https://youtu.be/xDcecvagCiI?is=hG8XEJRo9rj2Ms76

Here is a audiobook reading of Idiot Factory by Mark Brent. Enjoy it while you work around the yard. Listen to it on your drive to work. If you like what you hear … well, the Idiot Factory is now available on Amazon. https://youtu.be/1HE9h4y4Jy4?is=5aGx2ZPAGXbbd95g

Listen to the Idiot Factory by Mark Brent

The world produces suffering and confusion at industrial scale. The Department of Clarity exists to push back against it. Part reader group, part underground signal network, this is where supporters help spread the ideas behind Idiot Factory and Truth Told Sideways.

The Monarch is short magical realism story by Mark Brent. This is the first story I published. It was in a yearly anthology put out by my college. I won an award for the best student short story for it my senior year.

Truth Told Sideways exists because some truths are too direct to survive first contact. Say them plainly and people defend themselves. Wrap them in story, satire, metaphor, contradiction, memory, or a cracked little scene from ordinary life, and something different happens. The truth slips past the guards. It lands somewhere deeper. It waits there. Then, later, it starts making noise. That is the point of this site.

We built lives our bodies cannot understand. Our nervous systems were made for weather, movement, silence, and danger that passed. But modern life keeps us trapped in permanent anticipation. This post is about what happens when stress stops being an event and becomes the atmosphere we live inside. Lowering cortisol is not self-care theater. It is stepping away from the machine long enough for the body to remember something older than urgency.