Writing

I was considering how to start this entry, “post” (whatever) and I guess I wanted to acknowledge the trope of confessional writing, when you become the “you”, the “subject”, the “object” of the written word. It is self indulgent. It points towards a culture that is accepting of, that has a vested interest in, low-grade narcissism and largely feeds on the spectacle of interiority. All that being said, it serves some utility insofar as it makes others feel less alone. In our attempt to assert individuality we seem to conjure some kind of acute universality in our suffering, our faltering. If I were to lean into the idea of having a “true calling”, or a soul's path, I think mine is to ameliorate as much loneliness as possible, it is the sole reason I do what I do, it has defined my career path and my interpersonal sensibilities. Because I remember how it feels, a kind of loneliness that isn’t cured, only managed. Like humidity or debt. The condition of our time. I assume you’ve made peace with yours, too.

Change. I don’t know how to manage it. The moment I reach stasis, I start clawing for a fault line. I have always been this way. I have a habit of mistaking safety for stagnation, of perceiving it as a kind of deranged imprisonment. I’m only now realizing I play both roles: the prisoner and the masochistic guard, pacing the same small cell. No one enforces these conditions but me. This realization arrived, predictably, in the debris of my latest self-inflicted lifestyle implosion. The triennial event (I am fundamentally predictable). I finished graduate school, moved across the country, and ended what had felt like the most meaningful relationship of my life. I still don’t understand what compelled me to do any of it (particularly in the destructive manner in which things unfolded), especially in regards to the latter two. I like to tell myself I’m intuitive, guided by some deeper knowing, but I suspect the impulse is fundamentally grounded in a refined addiction to chaos. The deeply juvenile kind that makes reality only feel explicitly Real when everything is on the verge of collapse.

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes with moving somewhere like New York. Particularly when one does not listen to the whole “wherever you go, there you are” thing, which, I do not really have an excuse for. I had the belief, that I often hold, that running would fix everything. When you reach the immaterial finish line, and feel absolutely nothing, it is viscerally horrifying. There is nothing cinematic about this experience, you can not contextualize yourself within the beautiful imaginative world you have created to escape from your own ill conceived nightmare of a material reality. The experience mostly feels like being miscast in your own life. There’s no singular moment of arrival, only a slow unraveling of reference points. The person you were doesn’t quite make it through baggage claim; her tone, her gestures, her small rituals dissolve in the glare of a place that demands constant recalibration. I watch myself, going through the motions, ordering coffee, buying another pack of twenty dollar cigarettes, crossing streets too quickly, as though I’m impersonating someone who used to exist, far away, absolutely not here. Everything feels a few degrees off, like being conscious in a dream where the dialogue keeps looping. I used to think alienation meant not recognizing the world, but, really, I think it’s the eerie intimation of not recognizing the person that is at once witnessing, and existing within it.

Egoic death sounds somewhat nice when you say it out loud, particularly from some kind of immature masochistic perspective, like a spiritual detox or some noble transcendence. But it’s more like the slow amputation of a limb that you can only really observe, and do nothing about. You don’t rise above anything, you just lose the scaffolding that used to hold your reflection in place. Your ego doesn’t really die, it just gets humiliated into silence. It watches as the architecture of identity collapses under the weight of change, and you have to keep living inside the debris. You tell yourself you’re evolving, that this is necessary, but most of it feels like grief: for the person who knew how to be competent, who had reached the well adjusted state, in the old version of Your Life, who had a context, a vocabulary, a mirror. In New York, you can feel yourself dissolving inside a crowd of eight million, and no one notices your small extinction, your own, individual, pleistocene environment, you are just an organism in the biomass. There’s something liberating in that, but you slowly become a ghost who still has to pay rent (bad). Really, time is the only solvent for this kind of rupture, and it moves like wet cement. Every instinct in me wants to hack it, to outsmart the process, to intellectualize the ache into something legible. But there’s no shortcut through the kind of (almost campy?) horror of becoming. You can’t trick time into meaning, and you can only surrender to its pacing. Eventually, the rawness dulls, the shock wears down, and what once felt totally unbearable in its abject misery, becomes tolerable, then, almost imperceptibly, ordinary. That ordinariness is what has seemed to steady me, though it never announces itself. I think healing is mostly the gradual erosion of disbelief, realizing that you are still here, still conscious, still carrying yourself forward through the tedium of adjustment. Normalcy. That your continued survival, as banal as it may be, can be an act of faith, even when devoid of some sort of divine grandeur. Your will to live lies implied in your heart beating.

I keep thinking about what it means to feel safe within yourself. Not in the sentimental sense, but in the practical, almost bureaucratic one, a kind of abstract, internal contract. Change has a way of humiliating you into the realization that this sense of deep, internal safety, is essential for beingness. Change strips away the false forms of safety, the external scaffolding, the illusion of stability, the security that allows for the performance of being “well adjusted.” What’s left is whatever you’ve built internally, whatever part of you remains when everything familiar feels extraordinary far awat. I’ve spent years forfeiting agency in subtle ways, handing it over to circumstance, to other people, to whatever narrative seemed most convincing or exciting at the time. When you abandon yourself, you also abandon choice; you become reactive, mechanical, governed by the external. Safety, in its truest form, is the return of authorship, of agential capacity. It’s the potential to move, to act, without performing for some imagined witness. To know that you can rely on your own continuity, even when all external context is gone. When you are safe with yourself, you are never truly alone. You cease negotiating your existence through proximity, through recognition, through sex, through love, through consumption. There is just you, and that is, somehow, enough.

In these moments of profound atomization, I have found myself moved by the kindness and deep intricacies of near strangers, the capacity for connection, and moments where you feel briefly known. I am moved to tears by the way the sun shines relentlessly through the dulled windows of the train. I am struck by how when I turn on to my street, I can feel my cognition signaling “home”, and I feel safe. I am deeply touched by the warmness of both friends and acquaintances' smiles at parties, by recognition. These moments, they arrive without announcement, without any promise of permanence, and still manage to rearrange something deeply felt inside of me. After months of dislocation, of trying to create a semblance of coherence, I find myself startled by how simple it can be to experience that which is just findamentally Human. Not through intensity, but proximity, wholeness. The awareness that even within change, a complete fracturing and reassembly, you can still be met where you are, and for a second, you just are. If there is anything to hold onto, it is this.

The modern future no longer glimmers, it glowers. In its most potent form, the imagination of what is to come now arrives laced with dread. Climate collapse, social unraveling, artificial sentience; these are not simply material crises, they are eschatological whispers echoing through secular mouths. This kind of futurity speaks not in utopias, but in endings, often ambiguous and unlocatable, but (almost) always imminent. It is a fearful orientation, a psychic disposition wherein the unknown is not ripe with potential, but fraught with danger. Our imaginative capacity is hijacked by catastrophe, and yet even this fear functions as a strange kind of devotion, what Schiller might call a “sublime fear,” the horrifying magnitude of something we cannot grasp, but must bear witness to.

In this, we hear the echo of judgment day, not the Christian variant with angels and Holy fire, but the existential moment Kierkegaard describes, where man stands before himself, trembling in the face of his own becoming. The end is not orchestrated by divine decree, but by human hands, trembling and bloodied, reaching toward power and deliverance. This is what makes the modern apocalypse so bitterly intimate, it is not that God condemns the world, it is that man, in full possession of his capacities, might do so himself. Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” is not terminal because it kills the body, it is terminal because it disconnects the self from the eternal, from spirit, from the possibility of a truth that transcends our mortal limits. So what, then, are we afraid of? Not just death, but meaningless death. Not just judgment, but judgment without grace.

This is where a discreet spiritual war takes place, not in churches or political assembly, but in a war of interiority. We live in an age of competing gospels, some transcendent, some seductively, malignantly, immanent. Among them is the so-called redpill, a secular mythos masquerading as revelation. It positions itself as gnosis, promising illumination through unveiled cruelty: the world is what it is, say its prophets, and only those willing to endure the pain of this knowledge will be liberated. Not unlike ancient heretics, the redpillers seek salvation through insight, through a disillusionment so total it becomes a kind of armor. But this, too, is a theological posture, it has faith in its own cosmology of despair.

There is something fundamentally Gnostic in this framing. The world is fallen, corrupted. The flesh is weak. Knowledge saves. And yet this knowledge does not elevate, it corrodes, debases. The redpill is a heresy precisely because it reclaims the structure of revelation, but strips it of all metaphysical dignity. It offers no resurrection, no grace, only an endless unveiling of rot. Spinoza might call this a perversion of conatus, the striving for self-preservation that ought to align with joy and reason, but here becomes compulsive, recursive, feeding on despair. The striving persists, but it becomes anti-vital, a drive toward knowing more only to believe less. And yet something about this resonates. We are tempted by these heresies not because they lie, but because they expose partial truths. The world is broken. Systems fail us. There is something poisonous in the water. But the heretic forgets that revelation without compassion is just another form of violence. The true spiritual act is not to expose the world’s failures, but to hold fast to love in their midst. This is the spiritual war: not angels versus demons, but fatalism versus hope. The former is often louder. The latter, more dangerous.

Here the distinction between the philosophy of mortal truth and that of transcendental truth becomes sharp. Mortal truth, grounded in the empirical, the flesh, the historical, seeks what can be touched. It speaks in data, decay, diagnostics. But transcendental truth, as Kierkegaard and Schiller suggest, speaks in longing. It speaks from the wound. It knows that fear is not the enemy of faith, but its prerequisite. The leap into spirit does not ignore the abyss, it jumps directly into it. Maybe that’s where we find ourselves now, standing at the threshold, devoured not by the future, but by our response to it. There is a kind of psychoanalytic return here, a confrontation with the Real in Lacan’s sense, the domain of what resists symbolization, what cannot be known or tamed. The apocalyptic future is the Real par excellence. It terrifies because it cannot be controlled. It strips us back to our most elemental fears; Will I be safe? Will I be loved? Will I be saved?

We were not made for endless unveiling. There is a limit to how much truth the body can bear before it fractures, before knowing becomes an act of violence against the self. The redpill’s error is not in its identification of rot, but in its belief that rot is all there is. It confuses lucidity with liberation. But clarity without care is its own form of blindness. The soul cannot subsist on exposure alone, it requires beauty, mystery, nourishment. Not the anesthetic beauty of curated surfaces, but the kind that disorients, the kind that ruptures time, the kind that demands reverence. Beauty can be an end in itself. And perhaps this is its defiant power in a decaying world: to behold something that does not instrumentalize, that does not dominate, but simply is, and to love it anyway.

Choosing, upon your own volition, not to despair, is a radical act. In a time of cascading predictions, despair masquerades as wisdom. But to hope is not to close one’s eyes, it is to open them differently. Spinoza’s joy, the ethical flowering of understanding, begins with this reorientation. Not the flattening of feeling into naïveté, but the spiritual clarity that sees the necessity of all things and chooses, still, to affirm life. In this sense, joy is not opposed to dread, it is born within it. A joy that knows the dark but does not worship it. The redpill heresy cannot imagine this, it can only desecrate what it cannot control. So we return, recursively, to the site of the wound. To the part of ourselves that still aches for transcendence, even after ideology, even after disillusionment. We carry both mortal truth and the pull of the transcendental, that which is infinite. And it is in this tension, in the impossibility of resolution, that we become most alive, we come into contact with the Real. The future will come. Perhaps it will devour. Until revelation, our bodies, the corporeal form, persist. To feel, to oppose numbness, to find sanctity in that which is alive and trembling. This is not retreat. It is fidelity to what endures. To what cannot be reduced. To what still, impossibly, calls itself Holy.

We are not asked to be gods. We are asked to remain human. Which is to say, to feel, to suffer, to choose, to strive. To believe that spirit is not a fantasy, but a dimension of reality we must keep choosing to see. The war is not won through certainty. It is endured through fidelity, fidelity to the idea that transcendence is still possible, even now. That something sacred remains. That even in rapid decay, the soul, humanness (pure in its imperfect state), endures.