The Gary Null Show - 10-14-26

And welcome back, everyone.

I'm Gary Null.

If you're just joining us, this is a part of a five-part series essay that I'm doing on better understanding the human condition, why we make the choices we do, and how we become more self-sufficient.

The article's entitled, it's on Gary Null Substack, How to Become Self-Sufficient Instead of Co-Dependent.

And today, we're going to look at how to bring meaningful purpose back into your life, which I think most people could enjoy.

And we're gonna deal with this constant supervision.

And are you in a supervised relationship? Supervised means that the other person in the relationship is always controlling you.

They ask questions such as, "Where are you going? Where you been? What'd you do? Who were you with?" And these are things that they need to know, supposedly.

The supervised person in the relationship adopt, adopts to that.

Not adopting becomes equated with challenge.

And rather than being challenging with the resultant hassle, drama, the supervised party acquiesces.

Basically, you've got a dominant submissive situation with supervision.

Supervision no longer needs to ask those questions out loud.

A partner can now watch a little blue dot move across a map in real time, see exactly when a text was read and how long it took you to answer, and treat any gap in that data as something to be explained.

The habit of controlling someone through constant monitoring is not new.

The technology has simply made it frictionless, and it can masquerade as caring.

After all, I just wanna know you're safe.

Yeah.

Right.

Right up until it becomes the only way the relationship is held together.

Control through watching has a long history In 1791, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, B-E-N-T-H-A-M, designed a panopticon and, uh, a prison in which a single guard could observe every inmate without the inmates ever knowing whether they were being watched at that moment.

The whole point was that they would end up policing themselves.

And for centuries, English common law held that when a woman married, her legal existence was absorbed into her husband's.

As the jurist William Blackstone put it in 1765, "The husband and wife are one person in law." And that one person was the husband.

It took until 1848 in New York, and in the 1870s and 1880s in England, for married women to win the right to own their own property.