Bobby Epperson's Blog
September 4, 2025
Robert’s Archetypes
A Visual Journey into Creating Order from Chaos
In my base understanding of psychology, an archetype is a universal pattern that beckons to be recognized by the collective unconscious. However, I believe the Digital Age has perverted our archetypes, leading to a milieu of sicknesses, especially in America.
In my blog post titled Robert’s Rorscharchs, I shared visual impressions that I created during a journey of self-healing. Next, after reading Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, I was inspired to turn those linoleum block prints into a version of beauty as defined by Norman: something symmetrical, visceral (thus the bright colors), and functional (I later turned the images below into coffee table tops.).
The end result is something that not only do I hope will be visually appealing and mentally stimulating, but one man’s attempt to right the wrong of a society that has perverted its archetypes. I hope you enjoy the experience below. Thank you.

Amigos del Mar

Bravehearted

Cargo

City of Gold

Fresh Faces

Frida's Ghost

Hail Mary

Industrial Revolution

Jewel of My Heart

Last Stop

Loadbearing

Loco Motive

Los Muertos

Mississippi Crossing

Parting Waters

Peyote Wisdom

Surrender

Caravan
Photo Credit: https://girlinthejitterbugdress.com/d...
Robert’s Rorscharchs
My high school art teacher, Gail Hogue, taught me that we create art to fill a void. I believe we also create art to heal ourselves. Mrs. Hogue also instructed me in the art of crafting linoleum block prints. This blog is an inventory of many (but not all) of my prints that I produced during a journey of self-healing and while I was engaged in a process known as The Artist’s Way, which is a masterful literary course written by Julia Cameron. Most of the work below is copyrighted.

A Pit Misunderstood

Alien Portrait

Alligator Wrestling

Bird's Nest

Bridge to Mister Mountain

Day of the Dead

Death by Railroad

Devil's Stairway

Impossible Shadows

Light Headed

Robb & Jenn

Saturnine Bride

Unplug Yourself

Wild Woman
Photo Credit: https://www.the-rampage.org/3336/feat...
July 2, 2025
The Post-Journalism Age
(Originally Written 02/04/2018)
We live in era when major media news outlets are declared “Fake News” by the leader of the free world. We are at a threshold, and, increasingly, people will demand “news” that is based purely on perception and conjecture and appeals to the listener’s own biases. Most of the time, the listener will not have the insight to recognize that the media that he or she is consuming is nothing more than a reflection of who he or she is. Gone will be the days when media is expected to try to change minds. The game of changing minds is over. The game of reinforcing the way that minds already think has begun.
We seem to be on a trajectory of the self who is interested in the good of the whole to the self who is interested in the voyeurism of others’ lives to, finally, the self who is interested in only the self. I see a man in 2030 sitting in his living room. On his tv is an image taken by the video camera hanging behind him on the wall. He is watching himself watching himself, ad infinitum. It is endlessly condensed toward a never-ending spiral of self-gratification. Just what our smartphone habits have been telling us all along.
So get ready, folks, for the age of atomization. We are being broken down into our smallest parts, the part that is you and only you and what you want and what you care about. The political elite love this because no longer will masses of people so easily unite under common causes. We have been scattered, with no bonds to ease our alienation. Finally, it will come to our attention that our technology has made us weak — that our self-interest has made us powerless. Then and only then, if it’s not too late, will begin to rebuild a society that has power to create a world where we all feel some sense of belonging.
Photo Credit: https://www.pexels.com/search/mirror%...
June 28, 2025
Opinion: AI Over-Hyped
Despite the ever-present hype from tech companies, AI will do little to save a collapsing human civilization. Societal collapse demands the mobilization of material goods and resources to serve basic necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing. Equally as important, a sense of shared purpose must organically take root via high-trust interactions between those who occupy shared spaces in the real world. At best, AI can be subjugated to disseminating knowledge and recommending productive courses of action as we all navigate uncharted territory during these increasingly dark times, and AI’s future ubiquity will not be a pressing concern until mid-century.
The new landscape will require a symbiosis with AI that delineates clear boundaries for the practical applications of synthesized intelligence. While our current social media (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like) may facilitate communication as a proxy or shadow of the coming “AI revolution”, those platforms offer little in the way of promoting human flourishing and may be antithetical to that end. (The popularity of such media stems from navel-gazing and the dead-end pursuit of empty dopamine hits.) However, consulting humanity’s collective knowledge to date (AI websearch summaries and YouTube tutorials, anyone?) — as well as re-tooling social media to coordinate the flow of essential resources — would be beneficial amidst a survival scenario.
Because the bonds that hold society together are based on relationships between humans, the dissolving of those bonds can be augmented but not fully restored by our technology. For the same reason that most of us desire to speak to a human representative in lieu of a machine, especially during those calls related to sensitive information, we are wired as highly social creatures that will not readily sacrifice trust for AI expediency. (Alas, tech companies have already made bank by perverting our social hardwiring to exploit our attention spans through the allure of “relationships” with “friends”, targeted advertising, and even, for the most vulnerable, entire worldviews.) Consequently, we are set to see a reversal of the Bowling Alone mentality.
As this crisis period deepens, authentic relationships and new community-organizing efforts will coalesce around places-of-being that are inherently more trustworthy than digital ones, such as neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches. The American social fabric will regenerate from the people, from the ground up, while simultaneously being guided by AI course-charting from the top-down. The intersection of these two forces is the great unknown of the current era. Will we awake from the spiritual slumber that befell America twenty years ago and see civic institutions revived, and will that revival see a hard delineation between man and machine-learning? Our leaders would be wise to respond to popular sentiment, which will increasingly become anti-tech.
The current outlook is grim and will bring out the best and worst of our humanity. AI should be used as a tool to promote social regrowth and to teach us better resourcefulness and governance. As (God willing) society is reconstructed beyond the crisis period, our leaders will be charged with creating the box inside which AI will find its limits. Perhaps a couple decades will pass, and the young people — as young people often do — will question everything and lead us into another awakening. If civilization survives to that point, the awakening will take AI out of the box and explore its ability to explore us and our sentience, but we need not worry about that amid the current cultural moment that will reach a conclusion around 2030.
Photo Credit: https://www.lummi.ai/photo/futuristic...
June 25, 2025
You are Here
Trump’s been in the White House for about five months. Tariffs have been levied on many nations, with China’s being the most severe. I think we have yet to see the full price effects of that. Iran and Israel started trading blows using hypersonic missiles and such. Trump decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites to ostensibly bring peace to the world and prevent the Iranians from destroying America or Israel or who really knows.
I’ve been watching the YouTube lectures of Professor Jiang (let’s call him PJ). He’s a scholar of world history, politics, and the like, and he predicted Trump’s re-election and war with Iran about a year ago. PJ claims that America only wants to assert its military’s dominance to prop up its decaying society. A move born of Trump’s hubris. Combined with the US debt (about $36 trillion right now, but who’s counting?), war with Iran will be a trap, an over-extension that only further causes this country to collapse.
Much can be documented about the times we’re living in right now, but who knows the truth any more? The veil of propaganda is as strong as ever, and people are free to go down rabbit holes on the internet to try to find answers. We can’t get on the same page about anything, maybe unless you’re a Boomer. They still seem to hold solidly to the paradigms of a zeitgeist that has already died. We’re in a new era now, but the pensioners go on living life like nothing has changed. Man, their whole lives have been so easy, so entrenched in the ways of consumerism and self-indulgence. For example, their generation has been in political power as the debt has skyrocketed.
I can only speak to what I experience and what I have read. I’m not a voracious reader, but I hold tight to a few good ones: The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe; Disunited Nations by Peter Zeihan; Technofeudalism and Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, both by Yanis Varoufakis; Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich — these are probably the main contexts for my current thinking. You may be wondering what I’ve synthesized as a result. Nothing groundbreaking to report except that the future looks bleak, dark, and rocky.
Here is where I will make generalizations. Young people don’t want to work any more. They’re chasing TikTok fame or something. But really, who can blame them? The economy is going all “rentier” on us, and the generation coming up is priced out of housing. And that’s just housing. Everything else seems to be getting more expensive too. Admittedly, when I was younger, I hated the 8 to 5 grind knowing that I was just lining the pockets of the people at the top of the ladder, but at least at that time there was a ladder. Upward mobility still existed.
Now that we’re moving into a multipolar world in which America is no longer the unipolar global hegemon, we’re probably going to start seeing more wars abroad. And if this country is ever in a position to institute a draft, good luck getting young men and women to serve for a country that doesn’t give a damn about their well-being. Best case scenario: here in five or ten years, we’ll exit the world stage and retreat to isolationist status as we revert back to the cultural backwater that existed in the first few decades of the 20th century.
But what will be the catalyst the ignited the fire of rapid change? Will it be civil war? Will it be a prolonged conflict with Iran that PJ says we can’t win (for a number of logistical reasons)? That’s why I’m here — to document in real time as America implodes; however, there’s a silver lining in destruction, which is new creation. I believe in the spirit of this country and our collective ability to generate something better out of the ashes. When the next reconstruction period begins, I want to document that too.
This site is not for any type of monetary gain. It’s a creative hobby for me and something I’d like to leave behind for my family and anyone who might stumble upon these words with a desire to know what happened in the world before their time or to remember what they lived through. I am Robert Epperson, these are the Epperson Times, and You are Here.
June 22, 2019
Believable Eccentricities
Some people are real characters, which helps my writing. I’m trying to write fiction for the first time, and my gut instinct is to not make the main character too colorful because he won’t be believable. However, I’m reading a novel right now that is written to be very believable, and it’s terribly boring.
Anyhow, I was at the Barnes & Noble cafe reading a book when I met the aforementioned real character. This white woman was like 65 or whatever and had tits hanging down to her waist. She was sitting at a little table several feet away from me. To my right was a man sitting at his own table, reading a book.

rollingstone.com
All of a sudden this lady just starts clearing her throat and sounding like she’s going to cough up mucus at regular intervals a few seconds apart. And she doesn’t stop for a couple minutes. Then, out of nowhere, she looks at the man to my right and loudly says, “I heard Madonna had six abortions!” Then she repeats the whole routine again, with the coughing and hacking and snorting, before she stands and walks over to the guy and says, “You know A-Rod, I hear they call him Stray-Rod. He’ll go for anything. And I don’t know about that Jennifer Lopez. She’s been married a few times herself.” And finally, I ran into this woman again at the help desk when she was chastising one of the workers about the Ten Commandments.
If you’re a writer, play up your characters! Give them idiosyncrasies that will bring them to life. Sure, there are plenty of boring, vanilla people in this world, but every now and then you run across some loon who shows you that people can be very “extra” as the kids are saying these days. And, even if fiction sounds unbelievable, I’m not sure that it matters. It is, after all, fiction. Just a story.
Write on. Read on.
June 14, 2019
Are You World-Weary?
I contend that there are two types of people:
those who love this world, and
those who don’t.
Which one are you?
If you’re young, I’ll give you a pass. The world is new and exciting for you. Life feels effortless. New emotions to explore, new experiences to absorb. You seek novelty—in self-expression, in personal growth, in relationships, and in the products marketed to you. But this kind of worldly love seems to lose its grip around the age of 30 or so as you become resigned to the sad state of affairs that is Planet Earth.

thesaurus.plus
I’m not saying you shouldn’t find enjoyment. You absolutely should! Find things you love that bring you joy; however, you may eventually realize that this joy is only temporary, a distraction from a certain kind of world-weariness. I think this will be especially true if you are the type of person (as most of us are) who has experienced a good deal of suffering or empathetically taken upon your shoulders the suffering of others, maybe friends or family. (I do hope that in those situations, others have been there for you and that you have been there for others. To love our fellow man as ourselves is truly all that we have.)
For those of you who don’t love the world (maybe you’re a little older, or maybe you never loved this world): congratulations, this world is not meant to be loved. It is plagued by disease, famine, war, greed, lust, destruction, despair, monotony, and even a sense of being imprisoned by our circumstances, jaded by the 40+ hour workweeks that repeat on end for 40+ years, and that’s if we’re lucky. It’s all contrived. It’s all a racket to make the rich richer, to make sure you (unless you’re not a middle-class salary slave like me) have just enough to keep you going and not much more. Of course, with hard work sometimes comes upward mobility, which I don’t particularly love as I can already afford a sense of security and am not thrilled by the idea of purchasing ever-expensive houses, cars, clothes, and the like. Those things don’t bring me joy.
There’s a wise story in the Bible in a book called Ecclesiastes. It’s the first-hand account of a king who was unimaginably wealthy in his day. He had everything and anything that he could ever want. This king goes on to express that, although he partook in all the pleasures of his day and strove to love the world, there is nothing new under the sun, nothing to do that hasn’t been done. All of life is merely a chasing after the wind, fleeting and meaningless. Get it? Pointless! All we have is to take pride in a hard day’s work and to eat, drink, and be merry. And, I would say, to love our neighbors. Anything beyond that is like building a self-serving house of cards that can easily come to ruin.

azquotes.com
The earth is not our true home. That is a comforting statement for me. I can tell you from my profound personal experience that we serve a God who knows us very, very intimately. He is a God that goes all the way out to infinity and all the way down to you and every hair on your head, and smaller. The Kingdom of Heaven will far surpass our temporary afflictions here on earth. Put your hope in that, and like in Ecclesiastes, take pride in the work you do here on earth, and don’t forget to seek out the things that bring your joy: reading a good book; enjoying the company of friends, family, pets; helping those less fortunate; personal growth of any kind; and holding on to a deep sense of hope that what waits for us beyond this world will surpass our wildest dreams.
Here’s hoping for a smooth ride.
May 25, 2019
Season of Sacrifice
I’m not wealthy. Not even close. I would disclose my financial information to you, but that would be in poor taste probably. Let’s just say that I’m middle class. Negative net worth. Drive a 20-year-old Toyota Tacoma. Live in a modest apartment. Have a decent paying job. Paid off all my hospital debt at least.
Are you middle class? Let’s just say you are. I don’t know what you want out of life. Do you? Maybe you watch a lot of HGTV, so you set your aspirations on a big new house, or becoming an expat house-buyer in the Bahamas, or renovating the house you have. Maybe you have a hobby that you’re trying to get better at. It requires ever-expensive equipment as you hone your skills. Or you’ve got kids and you just want to plan for their college educations. Whatever you goal is, let’s just say that it’s going to be pretty pricey.

I come from what was originally I would call a lower middle class family. My dad has worked as a machine operator at Campbell’s Soup for something like 40 years. When he started out making $10/hour, it was more than my mom made as a radiologic technologist at around 20 years of age. But my mom did better then her own mom, who retired from Kroger food stores after decades of service. The further you go back in my family, the more you see we were always just working class folks.
Did you watch your parents sacrifice? I’m talking about years and years of doing without, staying stuck in the old pattern of being dedicated to the same job and hoping to put back enough savings to one day buy instead of rent, or even build instead of living in a falling down old house. I definitely watched my parents sacrifice, and one thing that strikes me about that is that one has to have infinite patience and grit to keep the dream alive.
In fact, you almost have to resign yourself to an existence where you believe that you will never have what you want to have and that your dreams will always be just dreams. Well, my friends, the truth is that the more time goes by, the less likely younger middle class folks like me will be able to achieve the same dreams for the same amount of sacrifice as our parents. The question becomes, “Can you ever give up on you dreams, no matter how unlikely you are to reach them?”
The answer is, “NO!” You keep the dream alive to motivate yourself. You can still believe that something is possible at the same time that you detach yourself from its outcome. Giving up the dream is the same as giving up hope, and day-to-day existence becomes a lot harder without that hope.
We hope for a better day to make living easier. Ultimately, my middle class ass would rather be motivated everyday by an ideal and by a dream than to be jaded by having so much money that the future would become inconsequential. (Can you imagine listless days of lounging around, wondering what the hell to do because your hoard of wealth could afford any potential option?)
Living in a season of sacrifice gives structure to our lives. And, by the grace of God, may that season only be temporary. Even if you don’t gain anything materially, you’ll learn not only how to keep the dream alive but how to let the dream keep you alive.
If you’re having a difficult season of sacrifice, my heart goes out to you. Things will get better. And if you’re middle class, work harder like Boxer in Animal Farm. But try to enjoy your time off at least. It may be all you get.
Good luck.
May 18, 2019
ROBZILLA MC
My name is Robert. I’m bipolar.
A manic-depressive mound of mole hair.
Met with the doc in her underground control lair.
She prescribed an antipsychotic,
a dopamine antagonist,
for the brain where all the maggots live,
eating holes in tissue of American static laxative.
“Let me take out my pad and scribble a few lines
so I can bill you $1500 for five minutes of my time.
There’s just one catch,” looks over her glasses,
“You’ll have the vocabulary of the privileged classes.”
Use it to your advantage, but watch those country roots.”
She stands up, grabs a book, and opens halfway through.
“Here’s the diagnosis you’ll give to the future you:
‘You internalize aspirations of the masses,
highly impressionable,
A strong gut without the facts yet,
fighting with time,
lacking patience and peace of mind.
You’ve got to school yourself
before you get your half-baked brain checked.
Be careful with your intent
or you’ll spew verbal evidence—
the rotting excrements—
of maggots eating away
at the decay
of a once-great nation.’”
I stand and grab the book and say,
“I wrote this from the future,
meanwhile quacks like you
bound up human potential
with your psychobabble sutures.”
I pull down my pants,
shit in my hand,
and pile it on her desk.
“That’ll be ten-million dollars
for emotional distress.”
**mic drop**
Go Your Own Way (Responsibly)
Those of you who have been reading my latest blogs might have noticed that I’m a bit preoccupied with the mythical beast that is the human female. Time for a change of subject. Lately, I have realized how much time I have wasted in life as a result of where my mind has been.
After I graduated college, I put myself on the fast-track to making sense of everything. That included politics and the power structure underlying our social malaise. If you have read my book, Robert and the Erupting Brain, you will see that I was a kid who severely lacked patience and healthy coping mechanisms.
In my defense, I felt like I had missed out on something. College, according to greater society, was supposed to be a rite of passage for me, but it wasn’t. Therefore, when I was thrown out into the real world with expectations of running a 40-year marathon toward retirement, I didn’t see much potential for becoming a true adult. (Funny thing about that is that you will run into plenty of people in corporate America who are stunted at a pretty miserable level of existence because, in my opinion, they never got a chance to find themselves.)
So what does it mean to find oneself? Everyone’s path is different, but I think one realization remains the same: you will become comfortable enough with who you are to trust in life. When you truly trust in life, you have the patience to let life unfold as it will, and you know that you will learn the lessons you need to learn when your experiences hand them to you. But there’s a catch: if you’re anxious and have a burning hunger for those experiences to happen as soon as possible, you need to be active in responsibly bringing challenges your way. As there is a season for everything, there will be a season to sprint like mad and a season to settle into your marathon. Let’s look at a snapshot of my life to support that claim.
· Number of jobs (defined as paying income tax) since age 20: thirteen
· Number of cities lived in since age 20: ten
· General feeling from age 20 to age 30: nomadic, unsettled, on-the-run
· General feeling now coming over me at age 31: comfortable, where I belong, ready to settle down, unhurried
So how did the shift occur? The answer is probably far more complex than I am capable of understanding, but from the point-of-view of the sheer number of my experiences, I would have to say that I have understood very deeply the futility of searching, yet the irony is that I know that I would not have reached my current level of inner peace had I not gone through those experiences.
If you’re looking for any life wisdom from me, the best answer to all this I can give you is: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. (Highly recommended read.) I won’t give anything away except to say that The Alchemist is a powerful story about how sometimes you have to go on a long and difficult journey only to one day discover that what you were looking for was back where you started, right under your nose all along. Now that I’m back home in North Texas, I see my old stomping ground with fresh eyes. Without my journey to expose me to different jobs, people, and environments, I might never have enjoyed the deep satisfaction of coming home again. I am no longer a child who is too good for home and needs to run away. I am an adult who realizes that this place made me who I am, and it is as vital to me as the bright moon is to the coyotes I hear calling from the fields.

pixdaus.com
While I regret how much “time I’ve wasted” as a result of being young and impulsive, how much time would I have wasted in life had I not listened to the voice that was telling me to run as life was putting shackles on my feet? Maybe, just maybe, my sprint had to happen so that my subsequent marathon would have clarity and gravity. Maybe if I had just accepted the status quo and tried to find the silver lining in my drab cubicle while marching soullessly toward retirement, I would have wasted far more of life trying to find my place in the world and wondering what would have been if I had simply stepped off the treadmill and let myself get lost in the woods.
Go with your gut, and it is my belief that the universe will lead you to the right place.
Good luck and God bless.