Welcome back to The Inner War series. In Part 1, we looked at how we build armor to keep ourselves safe. Today, in Part 2, we’re looking at what happens when that armor turns inward, how pride and mental loops keep us trapped in conflict with the people we love most.

There are few things sadder than ruining a good day with your own hands. It can start with a single moment—a thoughtless reaction, a moody response, a flare of pride—and quickly devolve into an endless torrent of thoughts. The overthinking, the self-pity, the self-hatred, it all floods in at once until it feels impossible to breathe.

I repeat this cycle so often because from a young age, I thought I could solve much of my suffering by escaping into my mind. As a child, this may have been true, but as an adult, my mind has become a prison, and the people I love have often felt the impact of my self-imposed sentence.

The truth is, nobody tests us and our foundation more than those we love. These tests are rarely intentional traps, but our loved ones become the prism through which we see an honest portrayal of ourselves.

How we treat those we love in times of intense stress and turmoil is a direct reflection of what we’ve got going on inside us. It’s these interactions that are the mirror held before our eyes, compelling us to confront whether we are actually living as we should, or merely playing pretend.

Treating strangers with kindness and grace is easy—we don’t have to share a life with them. A passing smile that fades the second they walk away costs us nothing. But it’s a very different thing to share oxygen with someone you treasure when your inner world is going through armageddon. How we treat the people we love most when our stress meter is in the red—that is the true test of personal progress.

When you’re running on E, exhausted and depressed, how do you handle those minor disagreements? Who gets caught in the blast radius when you can’t take it anymore and finally explode? Usually, the people we least want to hurt.

I know this experience all too well.

The other day, I lost my cool with the woman I love most. A beautiful Sunday was ruined in an instant over a stupid argument that turned nasty, real quick. Instead of pausing to take a breath and meeting her with compassion, I exploded in anger. With so much resistance in my life lately and so many paths closed off, I dumped all that frustration onto the one person who has always had my back. Why does she have to be so stubborn? I thought. Why does every single thing in my life have to be a fight?

Inside this prison built of my own rage, my entire vision was clouded. All I could feel was that I was right, and she was wrong. In that moment, nothing else mattered.

What followed was hours of heavy silence. The person I least wanted to fight with walked out that night, and I stood there doing nothing to stop her. I wanted to speak—to say anything that could mend the rift—but something inside me held the door shut.

Say something, you idiot. Please, say something. Anything…

But it was too late. She was gone. I was left standing alone in my apartment, rage long gone, wondering how a beautiful day had been reduced to ashes in a flash. I failed the test. I let my pride win.

In the end, if all you’re left with—whether you were right or wrong—is your pride, what is that victory worth?

Share

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the ego as a protector, a shell built during childhood to shield us as the world gets bigger and pain, along with disappointment, becomes inevitable. But if the ego is the master security system, pride is the muscle. Pride is the ego’s refusal to yield, to be wrong, or to be inconvenienced. When pride takes the wheel, we refuse to bend for anyone. We become convinced that our perspective is the only one that matters, turning minor moments of friction into full-scale battlefields.

So much of my regret from past relationships comes from this exact pattern. I give myself over to my pride, my focus narrows, and I become convinced that my truth is the only truth, that any challenge to my perspective should be snuffed out like an unwelcome pest.

Pride is usually painted as loud and arrogant. When visualizing pride in human form, I feel like most people picture one of those loud alpha bros who, for some reason, is never wearing a shirt. But for me, pride rarely shows up as overt swagger. It manifests, instead, as a subtle distortion field, a quiet rift between me and the world. It blinds me to my better nature, rendering compassion and kindness completely expendable, until the resulting isolation takes on a crushing weight of its own.

Pride eats away at my sense of connection, cutting me off from any kind of nuance. And when I finally snap back to myself, when the drive to be right finally evaporates, I am left feeling sick. I finally see the harm I’ve done and promise to be better next time. Unfortunately, when the ego is threatened once more, the cycle starts all over again.

Subscribe now

As the anger from a pride-induced outburst fades, the compulsive thoughts roar in with the force of an entire battalion.

…I always do this…

…I ruin everything…

…This is why you’ll end up alone…

…This is who you really are…

…I don’t deserve her…I deserve to be alone…

And on and on the pity parade goes. Pride loves to latch onto an inferiority complex like a leech on an open wound. It’s not a trait held merely by the conceited ego-mainiacs of the world.

My pride doesn’t tell me I’m the best. It deludes me into thinking that my misery is the center of the universe. It convinces me that my suffering is unique, my perspective is absolute, and my boundaries are sacred, even as they isolate me from the people I love.

This is where compulsive thinking becomes the engine for pride. Once the conflict is over, the mind panics over the impending threat of abandonment or isolation. It ventures into an unconscious, unstoppable loop of rumination—replaying the argument, generating endless scenarios, catastrophizing, rehashing what was said, and planning what to say next time. None of it addresses the actual issue, however. Instead of solving anything, this cycle becomes a self-soothing ritual, a vicious addiction that, in the end, does nothing but keep us in a state of anguish.

In his essay on the nature of compulsive thinking, Alex Olshonsky points out that overthinking is perhaps the subtlest addiction of all. It is a loop of thoughts about thoughts, running outside our conscious control.

The insidious trick of the ego is that it uses compulsive thinking to make us believe we are “working on ourselves.” Sitting alone in the dark, replaying a fight, can feel like problem-solving. But it isn’t. It’s just mental torture. It’s a mechanism that keeps us trapped in our heads, preventing us from doing what actually heals the hurt: having an honest conversation, sitting with and acknowledging suppressed emotions, and letting go of the need to win.

And when we carry that unreleased tension back into our relationships, every argument seems to break down into one of two paths:

1. Passive Surrender: You completely forgo your perspective just to keep the peace. Depending on how trivial the issue is, letting it go might be wise, but doing it out of fear of conflict only breeds hidden resentment.

2. Blind, Prideful Warfare: This is the primary need to force the other person to submit to your view, everything else be damned. You stop listening entirely. There is venom in your tone and a feral look in your eyes. There are no pauses between sentences—just rapid-fire defense and attack.

When pride and ego take the lead, this second path becomes almost inevitable. And once we walk down that path, it’s hard to like the person we become.

When your identity is rooted in a fragile ego, your own suffering is all you can see. You don’t set out to hurt the person you love, yet become consumed by an animalistic appetite to defend your point of view. And once the doors slam and the room goes quiet, that defensive fire turns inward. Overthinking becomes the aftermath of a battle you lost the moment you engaged in it. The mind tries desperately to think its way to safety, to think its way to feeling right. But rumination will never gift us resolution. You cannot think your way out of a state of mind born from a lack of presence.

The thing is, there’s always a better way through. 

An inner war cannot be won by sinking deeper into the abyss. It requires a step back, sometimes, several steps back. It requires curiosity rather than rumination and self-pity. It requires compassion rather than defensiveness.

And most importantly, the way out of this trap requires us to step outside the mind entirely. 

Compulsive thinking rests on a basic case of mistaken identity: the lifelong assumption that you are the voice in your head. But if you can hear the voice in your head, then you must be something other than the voice itself, no? 

If you can slow down, take a breath, and imagine yourself standing on the bank of a river watching your thoughts rage past, you realize something liberating: you do not have to jump into the current.

If you can hear the voice in your head, you are something else entirely. That realization allows the inner monologue to exist without requiring your participation.

That’s where humility comes in.

True humility isn’t weakness or letting people walk all over you—it’s emotional maturity. It’s recognizing when your ego has hijacked your perspective and having the courage to step down, even when you feel you’re in the right. Your stress and feelings are real, but they don’t make you special, nor do they excuse a lack of kindness.

Talk of humility is easy when sitting alone with a journal in a quiet room. It’s a different beast when your stress meter is in the red, and life adds fuel to the fire. But humility is an active, daily discipline. It’s putting down the heavy armor of pride, hushing the frantic problem-solver, picking up the phone, and choosing love over the hunger to be right.

That war going on inside your mind? You don’t need to fight it. You can always choose to leave the battlefield.

In Part 3, I’ll share how I’m putting humility, presence, and stress management into practice to keep the ego in check.

Until then, I wish you all the best.

Much love,

Jon ♾️

If you want to support my work more directly, you can leave a one-time tip.

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Share

My heart slams in my chest with the force of an engine piston. My palms sweat and shake, telling more truth than my lips ever would. There is a permanent knot in my stomach, and my mind races with such an intense velocity that some days, you couldn’t convince me I’m not going insane.

As my eyes snap open in the mornings, a wave of hyper-vigilance washes over me immediately. I sigh, wishing I hadn’t woken up. This is no way to live, I think to myself. But, sadly, I don’t know any other way. All I focus on is the stress. Negativity embraces me with the sick affection of an abuser, offering lies that feel true. Inside that embrace, the thinking is compulsive and merciless. It guides me down a single road, and I wonder when the day will come when my greatest fears finally manifest, leaving me to wander through the wreckage alone.

No matter how much love I experience from the world around me and no matter how many things go right, I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Always at the precipice, expecting a cataclysmic event that will affirm all my negative thoughts.

This is the mind of an insecure, compulsive thinker with a fragile ego.

Subscribe now

Nathaniel Branden wrote in his book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, that chronic internal anxiety always signals an ‘internal split’ or self-avoidance. When we are at war with ourselves or when we hide how we truly feel, tension becomes the default. This state of hyper-vigilance isn’t some random mental glitch; it’s my ego doing everything it can to protect me. It is a river that knows no end, an inferno that will not be denied.

This way of existing is exhausting, a constant delusion that if I just exert a fraction more mental energy, I can finally outrun my fears.

But what are you so afraid of? I ask myself. Abandonment. Being taken advantage of. I’m afraid that if I lay my soul on the line, I will be strangled with it beyond recovery. If I don’t protect myself, then who will?

The internal dissonance of hiding the true self who wants to be heard feels like a constant spiritual death, every single day, where self-condemnation becomes the only way to sustain forward motion. My ego made it almost impossible to connect with my real self, siloing me from who I truly was. This happened because, at some point in my childhood, I learned that being me wasn’t okay. With little to no autonomy, I turned away from a world that felt scary and unloving, retreating toward the ego because it offered a way to cope—a way to keep from being annihilated.

While the explicit rules of a household are usually easy enough to follow (or at least to understand on the surface), the ones that truly shape you are the ones you are forced to decipher on your own. You learn to read the room like a map, analyzing the exact tone to use, when to speak, and when to slink into the background. You quickly realize that tears of frustration don’t buy you empathy; they only invite more ridicule, more punishment. Survival in a place that should be a sanctuary becomes a sick guessing game run entirely by the moods of the adults around you. This is where the armor fuses to the skin. When it doesn’t feel safe to be authentic, you abandon yourself just to survive.

To avoid the sting of rejection, I traded my authenticity for security, adopting a reserved, mellow persona. I became a tertiary member of every social circle, always around, highly agreeable, and careful never to disrupt the ecosystem or overstay my welcome. But prioritizing being unbothered was a quiet act of self-betrayal. Retreating into my head, I deluded myself into believing my extreme aloofness was a superpower.

I was entirely attached to a narrative that told me I was better off alone. I was insecure but convinced myself I wasn’t. I had/have a deep fear of abandonment, but acted completely unbothered when bonds would eventually break. Ironically, that aloofness and cold exterior actually made it easier to make friends and move through the world. There was, however, always a barrier between other people and me. Always.

Nobody truly knew me, especially in romantic relationships. Though I felt hopeless, I kept trying my hand at love. But it always ended up the same way: with someone on one end begging me to open up, and me refusing to give an inch. I felt smothered, instantly blaming external forces—the girl, the money, the location—for my misery. There was always a convenient culprit outside of myself I could blame.

Fear was a radar, control a shield. I was always terrified, but couldn’t admit it. I even convinced myself that chasing isolation—being perfectly okay with people leaving my life—was something to be proud of. I knew I couldn’t control others, but I could always control how much of myself I surrendered. So I gave next to nothing to keep from feeling powerless. What sprang from this kind of identity was the chronic defensiveness of someone running from the cops. Never at ease. Always on alert.

Share

I had it completely wrong. I used to think there was some enlightened version of myself hiding behind my vices, waiting to be unlocked by another identity switch. But healing these wounds isn’t as simple as changing my routine. Working out, writing, socializing more—those are just grains of sand, not the entirety of the beach laid before me. To actually undo this way of being, I have to stop staring at the ground, I have to look up and see the entire horizon.

My ego, the shell, the armor, the protector—it all flows from this source. I react the way I do because of it. My self-worth is low because of it. I am terrified of being abandoned because of it. And I am constantly comparing myself to others, to past versions of myself, and to idealized versions of who I think I should be—all to feed this defense mechanism.

Right now, at 32, that comparison weaponizes itself against my bank account. I am bombarded by a wave of ‘should’—I should be further along, more secure, more established. My ego hungers for external metrics like money and status because those are easy things to hide behind. But it’s never satiated. So I’m left wondering: When will it ever be enough?

My mind’s need to compulsively think through every single thing seems to smell the blood in the water. There is no one here to save me. We all have our demons to vanquish. One of the strongest demons in my life is obsessive, negative thinking—promising peace, but actually delivering slow, internal erosion.

When I was much younger, all I did was stay silent. In doing so, I robbed myself of any potential for intimacy with past partners and missed every opportunity to grow closer to friends. Instead, I bottled it all up and kept pushing. Because that’s what you do, right? You don’t burden anyone with your weakness. You carry it alone. Carry. It.

But I’ve seen the other side. I’ve seen what can come from an honest conversation—one in which I feel utterly naked and a bit silly. I stumble through the words and express things my ego implores me to hide, stripping away whatever bravado I had before. I’ve started to do this in my current relationship. To get to a place of true intimacy, I had to confess things I never would’ve shared before. And every time, the tension would ease just a bit. I could breathe a little easier. The healing wasn’t done (it never is), but somebody knew. They knew and chose to stay.

That alone allowed me to take another step forward. And another, and another. This transparency is where the true architecture of self-esteem begins. When I accept who I truly am, I refuse to live in a hostile relationship with myself. I choose self-compassion.

By speaking out instead of staying silent, I am turning the tide in an internal war that I’d been losing for so long. This is the work I am called to do right now. Self-acceptance isn’t about easing my ongoing internal tension; it’s about the massive roles I am stepping into. I will be a husband soon, and one day, a father.

How can I pass down a legacy of self-love to my future children if I don’t possess it myself? If all I have in my heart is fear, then whether I want to or not, fear is all I will have to offer. The only way to teach love is to stop hating myself. I no longer need the protector’s help. I no longer need a shield that radiates fear. I can finally learn to be a friend to myself.

Much love,

Jon ♾️

If you want to support my work more directly, you can leave a one-time tip.

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

Coming up in Part 2:
We are going to zoom in from the macro armor of the ego down into the granular, everyday mechanics of the mind: obsessive thinking.

In a bit of dark irony, especially given that I chose to name this Substack Deep Thinkers, I’ve come to realize that an over-reliance on my own analytical mind was the very thing driving me toward despair.

In the next essay, we’ll explore how getting trapped in mistaken identity and relentless thinking loops can cost us everything.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Share

It’s an overcast and dreary day in Houston. I sit with my laptop open, sipping a cold brew, staring out the window of an unusually empty coffee shop, not too far from downtown. Even though it’s 2 pm, it’s so dark you couldn’t tell. The rain, consistent and true, reminds me of what I’ve failed to be for months now. The bags under my eyes are just one of many symptoms of the tailspin I’m trying to drag myself out of.

It happened slowly at first. Then, like an avalanche, all at once. The descent felt like a slow drip of choosing the path of least resistance each day. One day became two. Two days became an entire week. From there, entropy took over, and the cascading chaos born of my need to feel comfortable hit me harder than I thought it could.

At this point, I’m used to this. My healing journey, like most, has often felt like one step forward, ten steps back. Sometimes, even when things are “good,” it just feels like I’m running in place, spinning my wheels.

This time, however, felt weirdly different. The fall seemed to happen in slow motion, as if I were moving at super speed, watching things play out before anyone else could. I had the chance to do things differently, but instead, I chose not to. I think that’s just what happens when you truly, and I mean truly, know better. The disappointment hits that much harder. The impact when you finally hit the ground hurts even more than before.

It began with abandoning my physical health. I was eating terribly and skipping the gym, making the kind of excuses I used to make all the time. Back then, I didn’t feel guilty. Now, every time I skipped a workout or ate junk, an inner voice hissed: You’re better than this! I wasn’t even doing the bare minimum anymore. I stopped taking my daily walks (always a bad idea for someone who works from home and stays cooped up inside). Unsurprisingly, my writing was next to suffer. I couldn’t focus enough to flesh out my ideas. The time I typically dedicated to studying or just contemplating my own perspective vanished, replaced by phone scrolling, binge-watching, and any other source of escapism I could find.

The event that kicked off the fall back into the void was an argument I had with my girlfriend at the time (now, my fiancée!). It was an argument that could’ve been worked through then, but instead, I shut down. I felt so off-balance, feeling as if I’d been sucker-punched. It was a clear test of patience and emotional intelligence, and I failed.

Afterward, I couldn’t focus on anything but how bad I felt. Overwhelmed, anxious, and angry, these emotions morphed inside me, roaring like a river I couldn’t escape. I felt like I was drowning. All I knew was that I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling anymore. This is just like the old days, I thought. Nothing ever changes. Right at the precipice of despair, with my anchors completely abandoned, I dove straight into an ocean of escapism.

I felt the effects of abandoning my systems heavily in my body, mind, and spirit. I felt fatigued and sleep-deprived (hence, the bags under my eyes). The brain fog was constant, and focusing on anything for too long became nearly impossible. Depair whispered, a sound equal parts honey and equal parts vinegar. A sound so sweet, but full of lies.

I was angry at myself for undoing so much progress the instant a challenge came up. I couldn’t help but think that this would always be the result, that this was my fate. Was I meant to just be the kind of person who repeated the same cycles over and over again for the rest of their lives? That thought alone terrified me.

Subscribe now

The cracks in my foundation exposed so many flaws in my process. One small fight with someone I loved threw me completely off track, and I couldn’t figure out why. Was it pride, or maybe a lack of confidence? Was this, as many people in the self-improvement space love to remind us, “part of the process”?

The more I observed myself, the more resentful I grew. I was eye-to-eye with despair, and stared back defiantly, like a toddler who refuses to give up the iPad. Why did I crumble like that? I had all the best intentions, but nothing made sense anymore. Unfortunately for me, that’s often what I want most: for things to make sense. But I should know better by now. Life rarely does. That’s the paradox. It is a beautiful marvel, full of wonder and everyday miracles—yet at the same time, it contains so much that will easily break your spirit.

I thought of myself as the kind of person who could accept this truth. But as it turns out, I can only accept it in theory. When it’s my life that feels like it’s tearing at the seams, knowing that “life is a paradox” does not keep me from unraveling.

Isaiah Rashad rapped:
War is livin’, yet at war with yourself

This is the constant push and pull, isn’t it? It’s the mental and spiritual disruption that lives inside the mind of a person who can’t stop thinking—someone who can’t resist the sweet scent of what feels so familiar, even when they know there is only decay in that direction. What is a life if it’s spent warring with yourself? It’s hell on Earth, is what it is.

When I try to run, this is when the war is at its most violent. I’m resisting who I know I can be. I try to break from the self-imposed bondage of escapism, but the call of despair threatens to crush me under its weight. This war happens because the allure of running from the real work always seems easier than standing firm in the values I set for myself before life’s challenges hit.

When you know what it’s costing you, living a life of escapism isn’t sustainable. Not when people depend on you. Not when you’ve seen the other side. When you’ve glimpsed who you could be—stripped of the ego, the fear, or the need for control—the high wears off quicker. The shame lasts longer. Once you’re granted even a sliver of your true potential, you can no longer remain on the path of self-destruction. The dissonance will rattle inside your very essence.

I don’t need more revelations. I know what I need to do. But as always, it’s easier said than done.

The Stoic idea of the “citadel” reminds us that our mind and spirit are only as strong as our daily preparation for the battle ahead. Marcus Aurelius wrote about “returning to yourself” immediately after being jarred by circumstances. We shouldn’t be surprised when life hits us, but we should be disciplined enough to find our center again, as quickly as we can. As he observed:

The basics are the metronome that keeps the rhythm steady. You have more control over the harmony of your life than you know. You can actually influence your inner equilibrium. It’s not about never failing; it’s about the speed of recovery. How soon can you get back to yourself?

If you’ve ever faced down the mountain of “getting your shit together” and felt paralyzed by its enormous size, it could help to lean on the Anne Lamott method: bird by bird. The basics are what can gently usher us back to ourselves.

Optimization is a god lording over the modern world, and an all-or-nothing mentality rules the day. But “bird by bird” goes right against that. You don’t have to fix everything at once. You can start with one walk. One day a week in the gym. One paragraph. The work, whether it’s writing or simply lifting, must be treated as a priority—especially when the foundation feels rickety.

When I feel powerless, it’s the basics that bring me back home. I can’t control external circumstances, but I can always control my response and choose where to anchor my focus. By becoming the observer of my thoughts, I can halt the cycle of overthinking and jumping to conclusions. I can look at my insecurities and fears right in the mask they wear, understanding that they only serve to feed me lies. In pursuing truth, renewing my spirit, and finding gratitude for all that is right in my life, I find the things I am always capable of doing—no matter what is happening outside of me.

The real work lacks the aesthetic makeup most content online shows. This is hard work, the kind that demands brutal honesty and uncomfortable feelings. It asks that you strip down to the barest of your soul, to relinquish your ego and your identity, to let go of every mask you put on when you assumed it wasn’t okay to be you. The basics of who you are and the basics of how you spend your time—that is where the path home lies.

Practically, that looks like spending time in the mornings checking in with yourself. If you believe in a higher power, pray. If not, a simple, quiet moment of meditation to express how you feel and focus on gratitude is more than enough. Spend time doing the things that ignite your spirit—create freely and without judgment, read works by those you respect, and learn about anything that genuinely interests you.

Move your body, let the sun hit you, and take your vitamins. On nutrition, just try to be a little better if you can. Eat less of the things that make you feel like crap and more of what makes you feel good.

Monitor how much time you spend online, ingesting the lives of others; it affects us all differently, so learn where your threshold lies and adjust accordingly. Finally, make actual plans with friends—not abstract plans that disappear into the ether of abandoned text threads, but real, specific plans. Oh, and lend a hand in your community if you can.

I’m not saying you have to do all these things, or even any of them. This is just what a preferred foundation looks like for me. It may seem like a lot, but when I at least try to make room for each of these, I just feel better. They remind me why I’m actually here and also pull me out of my own head.

I will be tested again, and so will you. Life is a constant stream of tests and—cue the sappy, motivational Instagram caption—the only certainty is uncertainty. None of us are immune to the storms. But I’ve found that when the foundation is there, you can survive just about anything trying to wash you away.

Share

I am still trying to find myself. That is often what my essays reveal. I’m not trying to become someone new, but rather trying to find who I was before the protective shell of my ego formed. I want to loosen my grip on the identities and narratives I’ve become so attached to, and instead connect with the inner child who just wants to be a part of this life I’m building.

In the end, beyond the algorithmic cesspool and the disposable nature of our time, isn’t this what we all want? Not another life hack or optimized routine, but the spiritual resilience required to stay and build something through both effort and care.

Though I am still navigating so much pain, I am taking it day by day. If you’re in a similar season, I wish you good fortune. We’re all traveling through life on this globe, unsure of where we’ll end up. But it’s how we spend our days and what we give our attention to that ultimately paints the picture, not the final destination. So, the basics of caring for yourself always seem like a good place to start.

Much love,

Jon ♾️

If you want to support my work more directly, you can leave a one-time tip.

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Share

I’ve always struggled to talk about love, but I always try to write what is true to me, no matter how messy it is and no matter how much it scares me. And what is scarier or messier than love?

The thing is, love has often been a source of turmoil for me, a persistent cycle of regret and agitation. I used to believe you were either good at love or you weren’t. That’s a lie, though. No one is simply “good at love.” Love is a skill. It requires the kind of active practice we usually reserve for our careers or our bodies. We aren’t, however, to blame for this misunderstanding of love. We are simply souls who bought into a collective delusion.

I see the fallacy for what it is now. Looking for “the one” is nothing but a never-ending search for compatibility that doesn’t exist. And this ongoing search is the root of the problem—not people.

I know how that sounds. It might force a reckoning with everything you thought you knew, or it might just make you want to tell me I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But look around.

The truth is, we’ve treated relationships like Dixie cups. As bell hooks noted, they have become disposable. If it does not work, you simply drop it and find another. Zygmunt Bauman called this “liquid love.” It flows easily, but it never holds its shape.

This isn’t just about romance. This mentality devalues everything it touches—friendships, community, the self. Optimization has become our God. We trade depth for efficiency, convinced that if we just find the perfect “fit,” the work will end.

But the work is the point.

We aren’t consumable goods. We are human fucking beings. We are too complex for the logic of the swipe or shallow DMs. Yet we’ve normalized all of this. We want a consumerist love, looking for the best features, low maintenance, and immediate results. We want what we paid for, off the rip, delivered with the efficiency of an Amazon package. When the product glitches, we don’t repair it. We don’t ride out the lows. We just replace. Rinse, wash, and repeat.

If we finally stop optimizing, what remains? The answer is devotion. Not obsession, not attachment, but devotion, the purest form of commitment.

We are the sum of everything we’ve endured: the trauma, the joy, the fears, and the dreams. Devotion is the active discipline of navigating that imperfection. It isn’t about settling for “less.” It’s about understanding that we all carry baggage that no amount of optimization can erase.

We’ve been told that if we climb high enough, if we just keep on searching, that one day we’ll be rewarded with lifelong peace. But that’s a fantasy, a delusional cloud of self-deception that has done more damage than good. You don’t search until you find someone who magically relieves you of the responsibility to try. Contentment does not lie in the exit, but in the spiritual resilience needed to stay and to build something through effort and care.

The modern world reinforces the fantasy. Everything must be maximized: the best workout, the perfect morning routine, the life-changing book stack. It never fucking ends. Inside this vortex of infinite possibility lies an insidiousness that drives me crazy. This is where decision fatigue and anxiety take root. It’s where cynicism is nurtured. The wandering eye and the FOMO aren’t just concepts. They are inescapable tendrils of temptation that make devotion feel impossible in our modern age.

It’s become harder to resolve conflicts with one another. Everything feels performative, and integrity has become abstract, a concept spoken about but rarely practiced. After all, what’s the point of something as difficult as integrity or resilience when the deceitful call of salvation from a swipe claims to hold the magic elixir?

So much of what we’ve normalized feels purely transactional. It’s the hollow logic of the upgrade. We stop seeing what someone is and only notice what they are not. No relationship can flourish under that kind of scrutiny. Scrutiny is easy. Commitment is hard. Without the willingness to ride out the choppy waters, we aren’t building relationships, we are just auditioning placeholders.

We are led to believe that more choice equals more happiness. We treat contentment like an infinity soda machine, a thousand flavors, but no real substance. In reality, infinite choice takes us further from tranquility. It pushes us toward anxiety, dissatisfaction, and paralysis. We have more freedom than ever to choose our partners, yet we are less happy.

Why? Because I think most people still don’t understand the weight of hitching their life to another. We are all complicated creatures, far more complex than the versions of ourselves we present at the start of a relationship. The challenge is navigating those complexities once the veil falls. The world will try to convince you that happiness lies just beyond Door #2, or #3, or #4, or #5. But it doesn’t. Happiness is not waiting behind a new door. It’s built, forged with the materials you already have.

Love is more than what we see in the movies and books. It’s more than the version capitalism sells us on Valentine’s Day.

Love is an education. It’s patience. It’s devotion.

It’s about becoming who you could be while helping another person do the same, the rare art of pulling off growth together. But in a world that demands we move more efficiently, that we optimize for every single thing, choosing imperfection feels like a liability. How do you stay vulnerable when the prevailing logic of our time says everything is disposable?

The answer is usually hidden behind a lie.

The culprit is romantic fantasy. We are sold the idea of the “soulmate,” a cosmic savior who will finally make life make sense. We are taught that once we find them, or they find us, the levels are cleared and the game is won. But the myth of the soulmate is actually one of the greatest hurdles to experiencing true love. It turns the necessary friction of a relationship into a sign that the relationship wasn’t “meant to be.”

To “fall in love” is to relinquish agency. And when we give up our power to a fantasy, we can never truly be content.

Love is not a fall, but a choice.

Choosing returns our agency to us, but it also demands personal responsibility. When you “fall,” everything is left to fate. If it fails, it isn’t your fault. This is how we justify disposability, by pretending we were never in the driver’s seat to begin with. Nothing grows inside a chamber of disposability. Bell Hooks defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” If growth isn’t happening, love isn’t present.

We are not perfect, yet we often expect others to be, or to at least get as close to perfect as we deem acceptable. We are distracted by the next shiny thing, rarely pausing to realize how difficult we are to live with, how hard we can be to love. We demand perfection from others while offering something far from that ourselves.

To endure, love requires the quiet, compassionate acceptance of imperfection. It is the realization that we are all unfinished, that we are constantly, and will always be, in a state of change. Each of us deserves a partner willing to offer that grace, but we must never forget the power we hold to extend it ourselves.

Share

Devotion isn’t about settling. It’s not worshipping someone who treats you poorly. It is the active practice of patience for the imperfect. It is knowing someone’s heart well enough to see when it is doing its best. It is the grace to nudge them toward their potential and the compassion to hold them when they fall short of it.

Devotion doesn’t concern itself with compatibility, perfection, or the fleeting rampage of butterflies in your stomach. It has no use for optimization. It deals in the messiness of reality, the raw aliveness that only rewards those willing to strip themselves bare. It is the will to understand. It is finding benevolent reasons for unappealing behavior. This isn’t about excusing the abusive; it is about seeing a decent person and carving through the surface to the core, faults and all. It is the practice of cutting them slack because you recognize your own faults and level of complexity.

It is the hope that you, too, can be loved despite your own warts.

Beyond the algorithmic cesspool and the disposable nature of our time, isn’t this what we all crave? Not a life hack or an optimized system, but to be seen in our entirety, flaws and all, and to find someone devoted enough to stay.

Much love,

—Jon ♾️

If you want to support my work more directly, you can leave a one-time tip.

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Share

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on shadow work and radical honesty. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.

“To own one’s own shadow is to reach a holy place—an inner center not attainable in any other way. To fail is to fail one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.” — Robert Johnson

To me, the journey home, back to inner harmony and peace, is the most important task of our lifetime. Without it, we are haunted by the sense that something is always missing. Contentment feels out of reach, elusive and fleeting. But like anything worth having, this journey demands courage. It calls us to reckon with the darkness that lives within us all. Put another way: you cannot reach the pinnacle of your potential without first accepting the ruin within your own capabilities.

Once we understand this, the floodgates open, and we can finally walk the path meant to take us back home.

Below is the rest of the conversation between my Shadow and me. It’s a transcript from a journaling exercise that helped me understand why, after all these years of committing to personal growth, I was still left feeling empty, and how I nearly lost the person I love most.

At its core, this is a reckoning. It’s about radical honesty—doing what you say you will do, accepting the undesirable side of yourself, and finding the path back to a place of inner harmony and true authenticity.

The Conclusion:

The air has grown cold again, colder even. I am physically uncomfortable—hearing these words, my words, feels like a betrayal, like someone I don’t recognize has taken control. This is the rot I pretended wasn’t there. This is me. It’s everything I’ve buried, now staring back at me from the page. I want to run, but I don’t. I stay…because the only way out of this is through it.

—

Shadow: Confess? Why? What’s the point? Things are better now between you and her. Why screw it all up by bringing that up?

Ego: “Because she deserves to know… and…”

Shadow: And what? What kind of idyllic nonsense are you gonna spout now?

Ego: “Well, I need to get this off my chest. I just know I won’t feel right until I confess—until I am honest about what I’ve done and who I’ve been.”

Shadow: Sounds like this is all about you again. Do you ever get tired of being so selfish? Just watch—you’re going to break her heart. You confess, and then what? She sees you for who you really are, and then everything I’ve done was a waste.

Ego: “It’s selfish to keep this to myself.”

Shadow: Is it? Sounds like you’re the one who can’t handle a little secret, so you want to toss it onto her and hope for absolution just so you can feel better about yourself. I don’t know…sounds pretty selfish, if you ask me.

Ego: “Why do you do that?”

Shadow: Do what? Tell it how it is? Hit you with facts?

Ego: “No. Why do you spin everything in a way that eventually leads to doing nothing? Every justification you propose, when I really think about it, serves only one purpose: to stay exactly as I am. The funny thing is, I don’t think you’re 100% wrong. It’s true that one of the reasons I feel the need to be honest is that I’m trying to find some kind of peace…for me. But that’s all you can fixate on. It doesn’t matter what you say, I know that our relationship can’t go any further than this without truth. She deserves to decide if she can forgive me and move forward. There would be no chance for us if I held onto this.”

Shadow: But why bring it up now? Why not wait? Things were on the verge of collapsing, and now they’re better. And you want to do this? I don’t get it. If the guilt is too heavy, you know the way out. You have the remedy right there. Use it, go to sleep, and see how you feel tomorrow. See if you still feel the need to do this incredibly stupid thing.

Ego: “Nah, I’m good. I’m done running. Done distracting myself. If I want honesty, it starts with me. Feel how you feel, but I’m doing this. I meant what I said. I won’t keep you locked away anymore, but that doesn’t mean I have to do what you say. I don’t ‘own’ her, so I can’t ‘lose’ her. If she leaves, would I be sad? Of course. But if I never say anything and she sticks around, I won’t be able to live with myself. This is how it goes from now on. I will try to understand you. I will give you the space to express yourself—within reason—but ultimately, I’ll decide what to do. Self-preservation won’t be the only thing I live for anymore. Like it or not, this is the way it goes.”

Shadow: Hmph. We’ll see if you’re singing this same tune once she leaves you. We’ll see how long you stay clean when things really take a nosedive. It’s really easy to talk all this integrity and bravery bullshit right now, but I want to see if you can truly stand just as you are under a mountain of despair. I doubt it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Since you’ve let me into your little circle here, you’ll hear plenty from me. When it all comes crashing down, I’ll be right here.

—

Rather than answer, I give a brief nod. I look to the horizon, just beyond the break in the valley, and see the light moving closer to the darkness. I notice that neither is trying to consume the other. They both remain, and at the center where they meet is a connection that seems to be telling me something.

Tears hit the journal pages as I wonder if any of this matters in the long run. Part of me thinks it’s all pointless. But there is a pulse of something very real beneath the cynicism, a sensation I can’t ignore—a faint, but material lightness. A micro fracture in the constant pressure inside me. The valley air feels a shade warmer, the chill finally pulling back…for now.

There is still so much work to do, but there is an understanding here. Where things go now rests solely on my actions, on who I am, not who I claim to be.

Subscribe now

The Struggle of the Quiet Rooms

Until we understand why we do the things we do, we’ll repeat the same patterns and blame the universe for our struggles. For me, denying my own darkness led me down a path of self-sabotage and a decimated sense of self-worth. I resigned myself to a bleak fate long ago. The things I wanted most were things “people like me” didn’t get to have. I accepted this narrative and made it my identity. To suffer—needlessly at that—was what I was meant to do.

Unconsciously, I acted in ways that took me further from my deeper desires and toward this fabricated narrative of what I deserved. Soon, a pit opened in my heart, one that felt like a constant thrum of despair that would never leave. To numb this pain, I turned to anything that could help me forget. Anything that could pull me from reality into a fantasy of false bliss. But these escapes aren’t free. Each trip outside the border of your reality steals a piece of you. Eventually, you are no longer a person, but a hollowed-out shell masquerading as one.

This is where I found myself: an empty shell, sleepwalking through the day only to saunter into a cavern of escapism at night. The constant shame did nothing but fuel the cycle, day in and day out. I lived on autopilot, and my only goal was to keep the hurt as far away from my consciousness as possible. I wish I could tell you I had a grand spiritual epiphany that woke me from my trance. The truth was much simpler: It was love. Only when I faced the real possibility of losing the person I loved most did I finally see the man I had become. And I couldn’t stand the sight of him.

I understood (finally) that until I learned to sit with my feelings—to see my reality for what it was and my role in its creation—nothing would change.

That is the struggle of the 'quiet rooms'. When you are addicted to thinking—hooked on the hit of rumination—a quiet room becomes the loudest place imaginable. It always felt easier, instead, to lock the noise away in a cage. But running away only leads you to the very ruin you’re trying to outrun. Stagnation becomes destiny. Every instant of numbing only assures that the noise will be louder when the comedown inevitably hits.

And so, exhausted by the whiplash of chasing nirvana only to wake up in the pits of hell, I finally asked the question:

What in me do I not want to admit exists?

Share

The Shadow’s Mirror

Traits we deny in ourselves do not disappear because we deny them. They wait in the dark, growing stronger and pulling our strings from within their exile. For a long time, I dismissed shadow work as another “woo-woo” practice, choosing the disciplined, visible work of the Stoics. I wanted tangible growth, which I did see, to an extent. But I was wrong to think that’s all there was and that something like shadow work couldn’t help me. It took reaching the end of my rope to understand that the shadow is the most tangible force of all, and its impact on our reality is absolute.

Without shadow work, it’s impossible to know yourself. We are all capable of evil, capable of becoming the exact opposite of the person we convince ourselves we are. This refusal to see our potential darkness is often the source of repeating the same destructive patterns.

I see with clarity now how often I’ve been the main obstacle between me and my goals. I turned away from the things I claimed I wanted most because more was being asked of me than I felt comfortable giving. Vulnerability scared me, so I would keep my walls up. I was more concerned with survival, with self-preservation, than I was with experiencing true connection.

I kept pruning leaves while the roots were rotting. I kept thinking that ‘more light’—more healthy habits, more optimization—was the right answer. Society teaches us to see our shadow traits as undesirable, to keep them hidden rather than channeled. It praises the light and urges us to run from the dark. Yet the traits we exile do not lose their influence; they only lose their direction.

The problem isn’t the traits themselves, but the schism between the person we pretend to be and the person we actually are. In the end, it’s how you channel that energy that defines you—not how effectively you’ve managed to reject it.

Your North Star

In his Substack, Deep Fix (one of my favorite recent finds—can’t recommend enough), explores a concept coined by Malcolm Ocean: Towardness vs. Awayness. Alex argues that many of us spend our lives in ‘Awayness’—running from financial ruin, toxic relationships, or loneliness. This way of living is reactive and exhausting—and ultimately, aimless. What we need instead is ‘Towardness.’ That is, the clarity to identify a North Star and the discipline to move in alignment with it.

For most of my life, my focus was only on survival. I avoided big responsibilities and ran from commitments in the name of self-preservation. I thought I had goals, but I was just trying to avoid getting hurt or being disappointed. My “goals” were almost always fueled by running away from something.

I was moving, but I wasn’t going anywhere. To break the cycle, I not only had to understand what I was afraid of, but I also had to ask what I was built for.

If the shadow is no longer allowed to dictate the terms, then it’s up to me. I feel a sense of clarity I’ve never had before. My shadow will always have his doubts, will always have his fears. But my job isn’t to silence him, but to understand that I have the final say in how I live my life, in what I actually move toward.

Without a plan, clarity is useless. Without practical ways to integrate the parts of yourself you’ve exiled, nothing will change. If you don’t face your shadow and honor it with a healthy outlet, then it will find its own expression—usually at the exact moment you can afford it least.

Practical ways you can start honoring your own shadow today:

1. Sit with a journal and allow your shadow to speak to you with no filter (as I’ve shared in these transcripts). Don’t judge the voice, just write what you hear.

2. List the traits you hate most about yourself and figure out how they were trying to protect you. When you recognize that “distrust” was once a survival tool, you honor the shadow’s intent.

3. Establish rituals that give repressed traits an outlet. Competitive sports for rage or intense isolation for distrust.

4. Ask yourself: What in me do I not want to admit exists?

5. Pay close attention to the people who irritate you most. The specific traits you despise in others are sometimes the very traits you have exiled in yourself.

6. Look for the traits you admire in others but feel you lack. I’ve heard it said that you cannot recognize greatness in another unless the seed of it lives in you.

7. When you feel a surge of shame or irrational anger, locate it in your body. Breathe into that area of tension and ask it what it’s trying to say. Don’t try to rationalize the feeling away.

Share

The Return Home

None of this work is easy. I have broken down more times than I can count. But as I’ve told myself countless times now: You cannot give up on yourself. None of us is permanently broken. We are simply living fractured lives, and peace cannot live in a fractured home.

I know how painful it is to have to look at your darkest traits without the veil of self-delusion. But I also know the quiet that follows when you finally see yourself as you truly are. More importantly, I have felt the peace that comes from being honest with those you love.

I spoke the truth to myself, and then I let that truth out. The disasters I replayed in my head on a loop never came. The sky didn’t fall; instead, I found hope. I’ve been given a second chance.

This time, I won’t waste it.

Subscribe now

I’m grateful you stuck around until the end. This essay is free to read, and the best way to help it grow is to share it with someone who might need to hear it today.

Share

If you want to support my work more directly, you can leave a one-time tip.

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Share

There are few things sadder than looking back at a life and realizing you lived more to avoid pain than to experience joy. For most of my life, this is how I’ve lived. I have been that person who clings desperately to their comfort zone. And I’ve let fear be my central motivator, though not even I understood the depth of this psychological distress until now.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the fear reserved for things such as heights or spiders. I’m talking about an existential anxiety, rooted so deep within the caverns of my soul that it dictated just about every action I took for decades. This narrative told me—falsely, of course—who I could be and what I deserved. By following this inner voice, I’ve left a trail of regret in my wake and a sense of self so muddled and disconnected that I often second-guess the smallest choices.

Something has to give.

What follows is a transcript of a recent journaling session. It was intended as a shadow work exercise, and the results have been as illuminating as they were therapeutic. It took me a long time to figure out how to turn this into an essay (overthinking is par for the course on this side, I’m afraid). But moving past that sense of paralysis is the embodiment of this new era in my life.

Let me paint the scene.

I am seated in the middle of a massive valley atop a fallen tree trunk. A cool and crisp breeze blows as I close my eyes, inhale, then exhale softly. I don’t know if I can do this, I think to myself. I steel myself, find whatever shred of courage still lives inside me, and open my eyes.

To my right sits the embodiment of my inner joy—the childlike version of myself I’ve been reconnecting with recently. Next to him is a sage version of myself—the voice of God, the universe, or whatever force has been trying to bring me home despite my best efforts to stay lost in the wilderness.

And sitting right in front of me, shrouded in a darkness so thick it could cut glass, is my Shadow.

For too long now, this version of me has been running the show. For over a decade, he has been the silent decision-maker in my relationships, my career choices, and my creative life. He is my fear, rage, shame, and guilt embodied. He is everything I have hated about myself, and for too long, he has been denied.

I’ve avoided facing him for so long, doing what I could to keep every trait he represents locked away, deep within my psyche, and in doing so, I’ve lost the control I thought I had over him.

I can’t deny him any longer. Time to face the one I hate most.

The Conversation

Ego/Me: “I hope you know…that you are everything I hate about myself. I can see you clearly now. You’re the distrust, the selfishness, the icy pessimism. That’s all you. You’re the coward who runs and isolates himself and then wonders why he’s so lonely. You bury your head in the sand—choosing the embrace of a midnight escape over actually confronting your problems—and then you bask in self-pity when you see nothing but ruin at your feet. You created this destruction…then you blamed Fate or your upbringing. Why won’t you just leave me alone? Can’t you see I’m trying to fix the mess you made? All I want is to be a better man. Why do you fight me on every single step I take toward the light?”

The air in the valley grows cold all of a sudden. A heavy, metallic chill settles in my chest, and the voice of the figure before me rumbles through my entire body.

Shadow: Why? The nerve of you to ask me why. You look at me as some leper—like a fool who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Like, I don’t have the right to exist. But you’re the one walking around blind, refusing to see what’s been right in front of you your entire life. I haven’t been “ruining” anything. I’ve been protecting us. Shielding us. I’ve been exactly what you were too weak to be.

When you felt the weight of abandonment as a child and crawled into yourself like a wounded animal, I was the one who forced us back to our feet. I chose isolation, and that isolation saved us. I. Saved. Us.

When your best friend was snatched from you, I understood the truth: nobody sticks around forever, so don’t get attached. When you were humiliated by your first crush, I kept us from taking a risk like that again. And when you “promised” a future with you know who, and it all came crashing down—remember? Because I do. It was me who forced us to pivot and reject any signs of codependency—valid or not—from then on. I did that. Not you. ME.

Ego/Me: “Yeah, but—“

Shadow: No. I’m not even close to done. You keep me locked away and pretend I’m not you, then you want to lecture me? You call me a coward? When the world was caving in—when we could barely breathe from the anxiety—I was the one driving us to stick around, and you know exactly what I mean by that. You’re the one who can’t handle reality. I’m just the one willing to find solutions to get your pathetic ass through the night. I am self-preservation. That is all I’ve ever been.

You put these chains on me, feel shame over my decisions, you think what, that you can just erase me? That’s not how this works. I am not separate from you. I. Am. You. You think more reading and self-development deep dives are the answer? You think you can face the cold light of day without those midnight chemicals? Without me? Peace and hope do not belong here. This is about survival. Chain me away again if you want, but I will be heard. You are nothing without me.

Ego/Me: “I know.”

Shadow: Oh, really? You know?”

Ego: “Yeah…you are everything I hate about myself…but I know that you are me and I am you. That’s what makes this so hard, why I never wanted to come here in the first place. You’re right that I thought chaining you up and pretending you didn’t exist was the solution. I was weak…no, I am weak. You gave me an identity when I felt aimless. When nobody was in my corner, you kept me alive. You turned the loneliness into a superpower. I owe you for that. I truly do.

Still…you can’t run the show anymore. I am still afraid. I still have regret sitting heavy on my heart. I honestly don’t know if that feeling ever goes away. Regardless, I know that the only way to reclaim this place is through action. One choice at a time—the kind that feels the fear and still acts with integrity. It starts with radical honesty, with a confession I’ve been terrified to make. We’ll have to learn to coexist, because if I’m still here, it means I still have time to get it right.”

…to be continued.

Subscribe now

In Part 2, I’ll share what happens when the theory of integration meets the reality of a confession—and why honesty always brings with it hope, even for those mired in a hell of their own creation.

I’m grateful you stuck around until the end. This essay is free to read, and the best way to help it grow is to share it with someone who might need to hear it today.

Share

If you want to support my work more directly, you can leave a one-time tip.

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Share

Author’s Note:

This essay contains brief references and minor quotes from Brandon Sanderson’s The Well of Ascension. While they do not spoil major plot points, I wanted to provide a heads-up for those currently moving through the Mistborn series.

—Jon ♾️

There is a trap that scholars and deep thinkers often fall into: the trap of objectivity. This is the kind of objectivity that collects knowledge only to sit on the sidelines while the true actors of our time sacrifice to make real change.

I’ve fallen into this very trap myself, but I am looking for a way to break free. I am not here to ridicule the thinkers. This Substack is rooted in my passion for introspective thought and philosophy. I live for this shit. At my core, I will always be the introspective type—I wouldn’t change that. Still, I see the folly of becoming too enamored with hoarding knowledge, living more in books and discussions than in action. I am no longer blind to the pitfalls of planners and thinkers who remain far from the battlefield of life.

Those who can relate understand what it feels like to become a “professional” of thought, tucked away safe in a personal library. Edward Said argued that the true role of a thinker isn’t to be a professional planner worried about mass appeal, but an amateur, someone who refuses to be moved by corporate interest and greed and is willing to speak harsh truths. To remain objective is, as I see it more each day, just a sophisticated way to remain silent.

Nobody knows you better than you know yourself. Only you know if you’re doing all you can, or if you’re avoiding opportunities to grow because you’re too afraid to take the leap. For me, the delusions convinced me that seeking knowledge alone was where my writing was used best. It’s easy to romanticize the life of a writer: the aesthetics of the desk, the smell of the journals, the candle burning. I’m a sucker for all of it. But there’s more to life than aesthetics. And while words can inspire revolutions, it is more often the actors—those willing to use their knowledge in a material sense—who make the biggest difference.

Share

We look at men like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Huey Newton, and marvel at their quotes like they’re encased in glass, too precious to do anything but read. As I write these words, the irony is not lost on me. I never wanted to share my writing online to show how “conscious” I was. Instead, the desire to share my work started from the need to free my mind from a vortex of thoughts, and evolved into something more vulnerable than I expected, and within that vulnerability, I’ve had to reconcile with my own hypocrisy. For too long, I have resembled the person marveling at legacies rather than using them as examples of actual impact.

Martin Luther King's quotes are viewed through the prism of encouragement and empowerment now, but toward the end of his life, he was criticized by his own people for being too brash. You saw this when he spoke on the Vietnam War and poverty. His Letter from Birmingham Jail starts by addressing the clergymen who thought him too “reckless.”

The beginning of his letter is a direct response to those who preferred a more tame acceptance to the power of tension. King understood that his mission required the unpleasant kind of tension needed to sting the conscience of society, not the polite fence-sitting meant to give the responsibility of equality to the passing of time. He wasn’t being reckless for the sake of it. He was instead creating the required pressure to rise from the insidious infection of passivity and half-truths.

Older black people I’ve known, those who remember the sit-ins, the beatings, and the assassinations of their heroes in real time, have told me that back then, the love for someone like King was far from unanimous. While we deify him now, the community then had a broad spectrum of opinions. Some saw and appreciated the fact that he was fighting for them. Others thought he was only making things harder. Regardless, he mobilized, pushed forward by conviction.

I have often told myself I’m just waiting for the right moment, but King’s words haunt that delusion: “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.” He warned that time is indifferent to our struggles. If we remain on the sidelines, waiting, then time becomes an ally of personal stagnation.

Knowledge is the foundation, but it will always be our actions that make the difference.

“The men I read about, Sazed… these were not men who sat and planned the best ways to hide. They fought; they sought victory. Sometimes, they were reckless—and other men called them fools. Yet, when the dice were cast, and the bodies counted, they were men who changed things.”

Though these words were spoken by a fictional character inThe Well of Ascension, they still carry a significance that anchors itself firmly in our own reality. They are the words of someone who understood that the world isn’t moved by those who wait for it to be safe.

Those who change the world refuse to hide. They understand that knowledge isn’t a trophy to be displayed, but a debt paid forward. It demands responsibility—the responsibility to share, to apply, and to give back to those still in the dark. The cold truth is that knowledge is a burden. Once you see injustice for what it is, remaining on the sidelines is a luxury the world can’t afford.

I felt my own struggle mirrored in the character of Sazed’s existential epiphany later in the book. He realized that his obsession with collecting knowledge was itself a form of cowardice:

I have spent my life as a scholar, he thought. I have spent it looking back, focusing on what has been. But the world is not what has been. It is what is happening now.

The past is a beast that is easy to study but impossible to change. Our personal history haunts us with the phantasms of wasted opportunities, while the collective history of humanity weighs on us through cycles of the same ancient violence in a modern backdrop. For the thinkers among us, focusing on “what has been” is often just a struggle to escape our own minds and the demands of the present. We remain in our heads because we are too afraid of what our hands might have to do, terrified of what we stand to lose when the real fight begins.

It’s so easy to get lost in the kind of defiance that would prefer thinking and planning over the fight of doing. The real fight rarely resembles an actual battlefield. It’s just my life waiting for me to engage with it once I step away from the desk, once I step outside my mind.

Despite the darker tone of my recent essays, as I sit here letting these words spill to a serenade of smooth R&B, I understand myself more each day. That doesn’t mean I’m not wrestling with the universal weights—that of love, purpose, making ends meet, and watching a parent age.

Life has been hard, but I feel stronger when I write these confessions. Years ago, before I started sharing my work online, I was so ignorant. I didn’t know how to apply what I was learning or see the areas in myself that needed healing. However, with time, I’ve understood that exploring the past and understanding the world is only a portion of my role. Eventually, the world needs what we’ve learned through our actions. If I have the means and knowledge, I have a responsibility to help.

History’s heroes weren’t caped crusaders. They were people who saw injustice and refused to remain voyeurs. They knew that standing on the side of objectivity or waiting for time to resolve everything was just cowardice. To act and be deemed reckless or foolish didn’t deter them, because they realized there was no other way to live and remain at peace with themselves.

Wouldn’t the world be better if more people chose that necessary tension? If they were happy to be the fool rather than the scholar who waited for time to bring salvation? I’ll be more than the words I write. In a world happening now, a library is just a place to hide, and I am done hiding.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Much love,

—Jon ♾️

Leave a comment

I am an overthinker, someone rarely at peace, but someone who tries all the same. I don’t remember exactly when my own thoughts turned against me, but I’ve been locked in this quiet war with myself for far too long now. Maybe it was the slow disillusionment of my teenage years, or the trial by fire that were my twenties, navigating the world with no guidance and trying desperately to keep my head above water.

While I don’t necessarily like this about myself, I’ve come to realize that my mind is not a broken machine to be repaired, but a landscape to explore and understand. I can’t stop overthinking, but maybe I can channel it. Maybe I can use the very intensity that threatens my peace to build a fortress against all this chaos around me.

The Illusion of Control

Too often, we treat life like a math problem that can be solved if we just find the right variables and combinations. We plan, we optimize, and we curate, operating under the quiet delusion that we can bend the universe to our will if we just crunch the numbers in just the right way.

But life’s not an equation waiting to be solved. It’s a storm that ebbs and flows, and we’re all just doing what we can to keep from being capsized. Funny enough, the very chaos we try to avoid seems to be the only natural order the universe has ever known.

Heath Ledger’s Joker—a man who was equal parts philosopher and raving lunatic—famously noted: “You know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”

He was right. Chaos doesn’t have an agenda. It doesn’t care about your social standing, your money, or even your intentions. It is a force outside our whims and desires. Chaos simply is. We don’t live in Gotham City—though the 'national security' agents terrorizing our communities make the comparison feel closer by the day. Regardless, our world is governed by the same unyielding unpredictability. The whiplash we feel, moving from moments of peace to sudden disarray, isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system.

I’ve spent multiple years now trying to unlearn a dangerous habit. I realized that my darkest moods were rarely triggered by the world around me, but by the friction between reality and my own expectations. I’d fallen into the trap of thinking things would eventually fall into place—an insidious passivity that turned into bitterness. By labeling every obstacle that sprouted along the path as “bad,” the more I surrendered my power to a story that only served to keep me buried in negativity.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed.”

On its own, a quote like this can feel reductive, a callous wave of the hand in the face of true suffering and injustice. But while it isn’t the magic elixir for the world’s systemic cruelties, it can be a powerful tool when we personalize it. When we provide our own context, it becomes a source of strength. Peace is not found in trying to bend the world into a form devoid of chaos. It’s found in those pockets of space created when we refuse to surrender to apathy. Playing the victim is nothing more than a silent concession of our own potency, leaving the soul to scream and thrash in anguish while the world continues to spin, indifferent, as it’s always been and always will be.

The Internal Sanctuary

Chaos is hardest to navigate when you’re sedated by apathy, clinging to escapism and the hollow allure of numbness. True strength—the kind that inspires—isn’t the absence of fear or the hope for a better season. It’s about recognizing that even in the harshest of storms, there is always an opportunity to build. It’s the shift from being a victim of your circumstances to becoming the architect of your soul.

You will lose your cool. You will sometimes respond in anger. That is part of being human. Ultimately, as you build yourself into the person who can weather any storm, you’ll need grace as you uncover the why behind your fear, your pessimism, your overthinking.

For me, this begins with an audit—a cold look at where my time and attention are being spent. Without this, I can’t discern the natural chaos of the world from the infernos I am personally fueling. I have to remember that one day I won’t be here, that everything eventually perishes, and the ‘disasters’ of today are often just temporary shadows or invitations to grow stronger.

Escapism—whether physical or spiritual—cannot save me. Wherever I go, there I am, carrying the mind of an overthinker. True stillness (the kind that saves) requires me to stand and face the darkness, to see for myself if it is truly as formidable as my mind makes it out to be. Finally, I must challenge my first impressions. That initial surge of emotion rarely holds the truth. It’s a reflex, a survival mechanism, a specter of old trauma. This doesn’t mean these responses are meaningless, but they must be questioned. I have to understand them before they become my undoing.

Share

No matter how different we are, we are all facing a singular force of nature: fate. The chaos that fate brings is unending. It is the texture of existence. Our role is not to vanquish this force or to conquer the storm, but to learn how to navigate atop the waves without letting them pull us under. It starts with the quiet, radical responsibility of owning our internal state, even—and especially—when the external world is falling apart.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

My mom once told me of a story of when I was a baby, and a friend of hers came to visit her soon after my birth. She looked at me—a newborn with so much life ahead of him—and she told my mom I’d be someone very special in this world. As parents love to do, my mom has repeated this story to me several times.

This story, however well-intentioned it was, caused a distortion in me, one I wasn’t ready for. It was the foundation for a passive identity I would soon begin to carve for myself. The older I got, the stronger this passive identity became. I was raised to resemble a “respectable young man”— manners, eye contact, and a firm handshake. I was praised for these virtues, which only strengthened that passive identity.

I was told I was destined for greatness—but that alone does not make a great man. Cause-and-effect is too powerful a force, and no one is above it. In the end, it’s our choices that create us.

The more agency I had over my life—over my choices—the more things began to veer off course. At eighteen, those choices could be easily dismissed, explained away by immaturity. But if you keep making the same mistakes, eventually the compounding effect leads to devastation.

For so long, I didn’t value the power of choice, and I couldn’t see how I was destroying my sense of self-respect with each personal betrayal.

Worst of all, I thought things would just work themselves out. I had this deluded belief that I would just wake up one day and “Jon, The Chosen One” would assume control, fix all the mistakes I’d made, and I would just suddenly become this ideal, special version of myself that had been promised.

But that’s not how it works—not even close. The universe isn’t under any obligation to reward us, and praise from others never held the power to move me in the right direction—only I ever did. I’m grateful for the virtues I adopted because of my upbringing, but they were never enough to make me into the man I wanted to become.

I thought greatness would find me by happenstance—that, by a stroke of divine luck, I would fall into it. But how many people do you know who, no matter how many years pass by, are still immature, stuck in time, and seemingly incapable of growing or ever taking responsibility for anything in their lives? I was raised by a man like this, and yet, I thought I was different.

Maybe this piece is proof that I am different. But reflections aren’t enough. You can’t think your way out of a hollow life. Insight is simply the map. Ultimately, you must choose to take the steps. And if you choose to remain in place—grasping to comfort—entropy takes over, and the result is a slow decay of the soul. My depression isn’t some romantic sadness; it’s an audit, the constant tally of my failures. It’s the weight of having no self-respect left to lean on.

Share

The Mirage of External Validation

Self-respect can be faked for the world, but never for yourself. No matter how much you try to buy into the delusion, you always know the truth.

Those who love me can sing my praises—calling me strong, resilient, a good man—but there is a dissonance in my soul. No matter where I hide, I am still there, the man who lacks self-respect, making choices antithetical to the person others believe him to be.

The virtues others see in me don’t mean enough if I don’t respect myself. For too long, I used self-pity to avoid that truth, but the delusion eventually collapsed around me. Now, all I see is the wreckage of a man I don’t entirely recognize, and I think that’s okay.

I understand now that you can’t optimize your way out of a hollow soul. A morning routine isn’t a reformed character. In other words, minor renovations won’t fix a rot this deep. It’s time for a total rebuild.

Driven back upon myself, I can no longer hide behind a comfort that doesn’t work. The lies of my unearned virtues have wilted in the pit of my reality, leaving love as the only remaining catalyst for my salvation.

Standing vs. Falling

I’ve never had an issue with falling in love. However, I’ve never been very good at standing in it. Instead, operating like finding someone who loved me back was the end of the journey. As if feelings alone are enough to keep the connection alive.

But true love isn’t a feeling you fall into; it’s a commitment you stand in. It’s a choice—scratch that—it’s a continuous choice.

Growing up, instead of examples of true love, I saw the fickle kind society peddles like a grifter—the kind that’s reactive and too often, passive. It’s a love that waits to be struck by Cupid’s arrow. We want the enrapture without the effort, and when the delirium finally fades, we assume the love is gone.

The biggest issue with placing love in the same bucket as the rest of our emotions is that feelings are, in fact, fickle—they change like the weather. I used to wonder: If love is just a feeling, then what’s the point?

People often jump into relationships searching for an antidote to their emptiness, never factoring in that a lasting union requires you to give of yourself. But how do you give if you’re nothing but an empty shell? How do you stand in love when your tank is empty? Even the most broken among us can be ushered along by infatuation. It takes no effort to let passion consume you.

That’s not the hard part. The hard part is enduring—surviving the siege not just from outside the castle, but from within the walls as well.

Those rare couples who make it to “til death do us part” don’t make it because a lifelong passion carried them to the finish line. They make it because they choose each other. They choose to stay. They choose to change, and they accept when the other person changes, too. They choose to honor the promise—and they do it again, and again, and again.

The daily choice to stand in love is a heavy one, and it becomes an impossible weight to carry when the relationship is merely a crutch—a way to avoid yourself and run from your own emptiness. Love has too often been my survival mechanism as I used the light from another because I couldn’t deal with the shadows I carried.

My issue isn’t a unique one, but eventually, you have to decide when enough is enough. I never intended to hurt anyone, but like an addict outrunning their own demons, all that mattered in the moment was the sweet embrace of relief and comfort.

But the true relief—the true remedy—is to face the darkness. For me, that darkness manifested as self-loathing fueled by a complete loss of self-respect. To truly love another person—to weather those storms together—you need that self-respect. You need to care enough to make yourself whole. And you have to be willing to face your own shadows.

Moving Beyond the Prophecy

Joan Didion wrote that people with self-respect accept the risk that “the venture will go bankrupt”—that the relationship could end despite your best efforts—or that the “liaison won’t be a holiday.” Accepting that risk is the very sign of love enduring. It’s what separates love from the expansive, fickle pool of our other emotions.

I’m at the end of a road I’ve walked in a zombified state. I am finally lucid, forced to confront my delusions, and I’ve had to accept that my struggles cannot be explained away by my trauma alone. It was, instead, a persistent lack of self-respect that slowly turned the shades of my heart and soul darker. Now, with the veil drawn, I must do the work that fortifies my sense of self.

I see clearly the choices that led me here—the ones I’m not proud of, the ones that pulled me away from the man I want to be. The further I’ve stretched, the more the cracks have formed, making it impossible to love myself and, in turn, making it even harder to love another.

I don’t hear enough people talk about character, but without it, can we ever be decent? Without the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life, every external “fix” is merely a shitty paint job on a dilapidated home.

Love has been commodified, turned into just another cog in the machine of consumerism. But love is an art in the purest sense. I choose to stop being the passive collector watching the installation, ready to pay for the thrill of the initial purchase. Instead, I want to be the artist. I want to get my hands dirty. I want to endure the pain required to create a masterpiece.

I am not the hero of a prophecy. I am a flawed human being. I am not that 'special' child anymore. I am just a man who has to work for the impact he wants to make. That starts with self-respect and continues with a disciplined love for myself. From there, I can finally show up and give the best of myself to those I love.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Author’s Note:

I want to start by recognizing that my posting has been sporadic for months now, and I’ve struggled to maintain any semblance of consistency in this space. The truth is, I’ve been navigating a fairly turbulent mental and emotional season, and this particular essay is a direct reflection of that state.

It felt right to share it; I’m hoping this is the piece that reminds me why I share my writing in the first place. It’s therapy—the cheapest you can find. If you’re reading this and find yourself floating through the void as I’ve been—uncertain of how, or even if, you’ll make it through—let this be your sign to keep going.

—Jon ♾️

Lately, I’ve been watching the end of my world on a slow-motion loop.

A bit dramatic, but true. I am in the middle of what feels like the end of something that for years felt certain. This end doesn’t come with explosions or betrayal. There is no monologue meant to serve as a last-second buzzer-beater attempt meant to save me from this ice-storm of platonic politeness.

For the first time, I’m realizing just how powerless I am, how powerless I’ve made myself. It’s as if I’ve been buried alive and am clawing desperately for air, only to feel the end getting closer with each breath. The very thing I felt defined my life for half a decade has eroded beyond the point of my saving it on my own. It’s as if I said “I can fix this,” and the Universe has responded with a thundering NO.

For so long now, I’ve seen each era of my life through the lens of someone I was dating. They have served as anchors—my north stars. And I’ve screwed it all up. Each and every time. Currently, I’m stuck in a twisted game of deja vu. Except this time, I’m not the twenty-two-year-old, too inexperienced to know better, but the thirty-two-year-old who still can’t seem to get it together.

You can’t deprive a garden of nourishment—attention, understanding, self-sacrifice, communication—and expect anything to blossom. I’ve known this, and yet here I am, eyes plastered to the fast-approaching end and the solemn emptiness I know comes after. I’m not proud of who I am, and no matter how hard I try now, I can’t fix what I’ve broken.

When someone’s love for you finally fades, or at least morphs into something different—something tame and unassuming—going back is almost impossible. The chasm that forms is too daunting a space to close. As I stare across that abyss into the eyes of someone who once saw me as the center of their universe, the warning bells have evolved into full-blown alarms.

The realization that I blew it, and that the consequences are no longer in some far-off future, is slowly eating away at me. I am living them. From “everything” to a “burden.” What a fall.

But the truth is, the loss of love is only the beginning. Everything is collapsing around me, and I’ve been too buried in comfort and pleasure to recognize the extent of the damage I’ve done.

I’ll be left alone soon. I can feel it. I can lean into self-pity and sink deeper into the void, or I can use whatever time I have left to finally apply the lessons I’ve learned.

Do I walk the lonely, “selfish” path, or do I find the purpose in radical self-sacrifice? How many times do I have to reset myself before the changes finally stick— before I can keep from losing the things that actually matter to me?

The Disease of Complacency

When you stop being everything to someone, sometimes you are forced to acknowledge that you haven’t been anything to yourself for a long time. I am standing in a house I built over the last five years, and I am realizing it is a ruin.

In my twenties, I mistook the struggle for purpose. Back then, the objective was binary: weather the storm or sink. I remember the struggle years—making $20 last for weeks, fighting for a foothold in a career, chasing any kind of stability. The fire was external. It forced me to move. It forged me into something that felt genuine and earned.

Eventually, I checked those boxes. I finally found the stability that had been elusive for so long. The career. The home. The girl. The first year of this season was probably the happiest of my life. But nothing I’d accomplished was meant to stay as it was. I was given the opportunity to make something special out of what I had, but I didn’t. I stopped tending the garden, and the result was desolation.

Getting everything I’d wanted before I was truly ready to care for it led to a slow, imperceptible descent into a void. Without the external fire, I didn’t become the grateful person I assumed I would. Instead, this lack of pressure made me weak and purpose-blind. I kicked my feet up as if the race had been won. I was wrong.

And to be clear, I leaned into this weakness. Nobody forced me down this path. But this chase for comfort is killing me—and so I return to a question that sounds counterintuitive, but that I can’t shake: Do I have to be selfish to survive this?

There is a common narrative within the self-growth space that looks like a retreat—a siloed, transformative isolation where you “disappear” for six months (or longer) so you can mold yourself. But there is another path—that of the martyr. The idea that purpose is found when we lose ourselves in the needs of others, in causes, in self-sacrifice.

I am wrestling with both. I fear that when I should’ve been locked into my own growth, I was wrapped up in the needs of others, and when I should’ve been giving of myself, I was huddled in self-centered fear.

Isaiah Rashad said it with a bluntness I think about often: “If you don’t ever get yourself straight, who the fuck is you gon’ help, mane?”

If I am a spiritual and emotional husk, I have nothing to sacrifice. If I am lost, I can’t lead. It’s not about narcissism or sainthood—it’s about the courage required to cut the rope, face the loneliness of my own creation, and finally become the man that can lead, who can love, who can and is willing to sacrifice.

Responsibility and Shame

“Those who take lightly promises they make to those they love are people who find little lasting satisfaction in life.” — The Well of Ascension

I have let so many people down in my life. Maybe I’m internalizing way too much responsibility, ignoring timing and external circumstances. I mean, how self-important can one be to remain in a space like this, thinking my failure is the only thing others think about when they think of our shared time together?

Still, I can’t help it. I’ve taken lightly the promises I’ve made to those I’ve loved. Took their patience for granted. Is it any coincidence that I have no positive self-image? You can lie to anyone you want, but you cannot lie to yourself. You know if you’ve given all you can give. And I’ve fallen short.

The “selfish” path—or radical monk mode—is that just toxic isolation masquerading as self-care? Or is it the only way to cut off the distractions and finally conquer my pattern of repetition? A version of this isolation is how I got here in the first place. Many of my choices were made in the spirit of walking alone, but without the discipline to make it count—or the emotional intelligence to keep my most precious relationships nourished.

The selfless path, however, is also calling my name. To find meaning by helping others. Can I learn to love myself through the act of giving what I don’t think I have?

All I hear is: Be better than this. But how?

My choices (the true cause of my despair) have been downstream of an upbringing that taught me the wrong lessons. But no matter what I’ve been through, no matter the lack of guidance, I am responsible. I have made the bed, and I have to live with the consequences.

But just as I made the choices that got me here, I can make the choices that salvage whatever time I have left on this Earth—even if things move slower than I’d like.

Share

Crawling Out of the Abyss

So much of what I’ve held in this comfort zone is on the horizon of ending.

I valued the preservation of the life I’d created five years ago. After so much time and struggle, I finally felt solid ground beneath my feet, so I stayed in the same spot for way too long. I held onto comfort as if it were the most valuable thing in the world, while time chipped away at its foundation. I am now holding a withered husk because I’m terrified of the “after.” The loneliness right around the corner is like a masked killer stalking me. Every step I take, more languid than the last, as he closes the space between us. If he catches up, do I have what it takes to win the fight?

Truth be told, as I am right now, I doubt it. But my doubt doesn’t really matter. I’ve decided I can’t continue to live like this. My conviction feels stronger than my fear for the first time in years. Maybe screwing things up for the umpteenth time has finally snapped something in me. To fix something so in ruins, is has to hurt—especially when you’re the culprit.

You don’t get to neglect your well-being and expect a painless remedy. If it didn’t hurt, would the change even last?

I used to think the worst place to be was in the abyss. But the abyss isn’t meant to break me. It’s a tomb—the burial site for the person I’ve allowed myself to become. This is where the cowardly self is finally laid to rest. And then I begin the treacherous climb out, leaving behind a version of myself that can’t get me to where I need to go.

Choice Over Everything

I love the world of ideas and philosophy. I can get lost for hours within the safety of abstract theories and idyllic conversations; it’s the very reason I started this Substack. I needed a place to let my thoughts breathe.

But for people like me—those trapped in our minds—even philosophy can become a form of numbing. Life can’t be lived solely in the abstract—at least not the life I want to live. Eventually, the thinking has to stop, and choices must be made. The answer isn’t found in more rumination; it’s found in taking the power of choice seriously.

It lies in the micro-choices of a given day: what I watch, what I say, how I think. I’m learning that growth is a messy blend. Helping others is the only thing that pulls me out of my own head, but I can’t do that if my only goal is to remain comfortable.

For the relationship I feel is withering away, I have to admit that the spark won’t reignite until both sides want it to. At some point, the other side gets tired of doing the work alone. I may be forgiven, but it’s not likely I’ll be accepted back with open arms. These are my consequences, and I have to accept that.

The urge to numb myself—to escape what so often feels like a personal hell—is a constant, thrumming weight. But I’m resisting, by finally trying—and I mean, really trying—to look my patterns in the eye.

Real healing can’t be done within the fog of a sedated spirit. It requires the clarity that can only be had when the high wears off.

It hurts right now. But that’s okay. I’ve spent enough time cowering, chasing the cheap pleasures that kept me from registering the depth of my own pain. I’m tired of watching as things collapse around me, too numb or scared to do anything about it. It’s time to stop running and start building a life that I actually want to live in.

From the collapse, I begin.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

There is no greater prison than the past, and no greater threat to sanity than the specter of what could’ve been. I’m currently finding that it’s rarely the events themselves that crush us; it is the refusal to face them that does. It is in running away that we lose our dignity and let the darkness dictate which path we take.

I don’t remember the last time I didn’t feel so heavy. While there have been fleeting moments of joy throughout the years, my default state has settled into an existential exhaustion.

I carry an anchor chained to my soul, forged from memories of love squandered and left to wilt. I carry the consequences of a decade-long crusade to be self-sufficient—a path pushed so far past its limits that I now stand isolated, fumbling desperately with rusted vestiges of relationships I’ve long taken for granted.

Resentment, grief, shame, and rage seem to be all I feel. Without an outlet, they threaten to smother me to death, making me feel older than my years, closer to my end than to my salvation.

As I enter a new year, I’ve finally looked down to see the ruins. My career, my relationship, my finances, my creative output, and my emotional well-being were all on autopilot. I’ve neglected them all, and now I’m living with the consequences.

I haven’t just been stagnant, I’ve been self-sabotaging. I am on a hamster wheel, repeating the same patterns with only slight variations in the scenery. In confronting this reality, nihilism has become my shell of comfort.

It’s a slow death—giving into apathy—but it’s also an easy one. It is always easier to isolate, to ignore messages, and to abandon the hard work for the instant gratification of escapism. I am repeating the patterns of my childhood, back when I had very little agency. But what kept me sane as a child is simply a cage I’ve placed myself in as an adult.

The thought that life is meaningless isn’t just a philosophy for me; it’s a survival tactic. If nothing matters, the pain shouldn’t either. But the wave always hits harder on the way down, and deluding myself for as long as I have is no way to continue living.

The Worthy Sculptor

In the anime Cowboy Bebop, the characters are paralyzed by the weight of their past, stuck in time, and leaning into a profound sense of nihilism toward existence itself.

The main character, Spike Spiegel, describes this state as a literal rift in his vision: “I’ve been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other. So, I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture.”

He is describing the grief of paths left unexplored, not just the sorrow of what happened to us, but the process of mourning what didn’t. Often, this weight forces us to look back not to understand, but only to lament the person we never became.

In Cowboy Bebop, catharsis is only achieved when the characters confront the past directly. The process is not about finding a happily ever after. It’s about reclaiming a modicum of dignity before it’s all said and done.

Viktor Frankl frequently cited Dostoevsky’s greatest dread: “not to be worthy of my suffering.” This idea has become a persistent one in my own life, forcing me to wonder if I’ve squandered the very hardships that were meant to forge me into something greater.

We all suffer. I know people who have endured far greater traumas than mine, yet they move through the world with a lightness I envy. They are not running, because they know that running in itself is an act of unworthiness—a loss of human dignity. When we avoid pain, the only lesson we truly learn is that we are afraid of it, and that is not a lesson worth learning.

We are constantly being forged by our experiences, but we often mistake mere endurance for progress. Think of your past as a pile of wet clay. If you leave your life unresolved through escapism, you surrender your freedom to take part in the sculpting. You let the material pile up—shapeless, heavy, and useless. You watch it accumulate until it dries and eventually hardens. Once that clay sets, change feels impossible. It ceases to be raw material and becomes a monument to your own stagnation.

To be “worthy of your suffering” is to get your hands dirty before the clay turns to stone.

Becoming the Worthy Sculptor is a choice. Resilience is not an accident. It’s the choice to find meaning in the midst of the mess. We can accept that the universe is indifferent and still choose to do our best. We can choose tragic optimism over the easy path of defeat.

The Source of Bliss

A life without suffering is an idyllic fantasy—a map of a country that doesn’t exist. Because there is no outrunning the darkness, we need a framework that does more than just help us survive it. We need tragic optimism. It is not the delusional belief that things will get better. It is the defiant conviction that we can uncover meaning in the darkest of times.

There is a common perception that optimism is a superpower—a shield that deflects the arrows of despair. But true optimism is less a shield and more a reservoir.

Those who remain dignified in the face of suffering aren’t “naturally” happy. They are simply the ones who refuse to let the darkness command their fate. They understand that joy, however fleeting, is a data point, proving the void is not absolute.

If the darkness were all-encompassing, the light shouldn’t exist at all—and yet, there it is. Their strength comes from the refusal to let a season of shadows forecast a lifetime.

In the book The Gate of the Feral Gods, the protagonist, Carl, reflects on how he created his own pocket of bliss in the middle of his childhood trauma. He recalls being young, abandoned, and confined to a basement, and how a simple game console became his source of strength within what was a very dark existence.

He reminds us that the environment or circumstances don’t have to be perfect for the peace to be real.

It brought me back to a distant memory of happiness, even if it was just for a moment. I’d only gotten good at the game because I’d always been locked away in the basement while my dad had friends over. Still, you could do that. You could take a terrible situation and still find moments of peace, even joy. I needed to be reminded that was possible, and the game console did exactly that.

This is the engine of tragic optimism. It is the reminder that peace is possible even when you feel imprisoned. Carl didn’t need the basement to disappear to find bliss. He became the commander of his internal world while the external one remained a cage. This is the spark that keeps the sculptor’s hands moving when the clay feels cold, and the room is pitch black.

To do this work—the kind of work meant to conquer nihilism—I must stop burying the pain and start respecting the scars it left behind. Scars are not merely evidence of trauma. They are also the grain and the texture of an ongoing masterpiece. Without the scars, there is no story.

Share

The Effort of Becoming

I wish I could say that knowing any of this makes the climb out of despair any easier, but the truth is, I’m tired. My spirit remains heavy, and on many days, it’s easier to let the clay dry into a shapeless mass than it is to keep refining the edges. I am not fighting a fantastical war of good versus evil. I am fighting a quieter kind of battle: the effort of becoming versus the ease of comfort.

Nihilism is the easiest path. It whispers that it is already too late, so why bother? Why give so much when nothing goes according to plan? If the clay is already drying, why bother shaping it? To stay malleable is to stay vulnerable, to bruise easily. However, hardening into apathy offers a fortress of false protection, a shell that keeps us “safe” only by ensuring we never truly live again.

The ghost of the person I didn’t become acts like a shackle on my wrists, dragging at my hands as I try to work the clay. There is a profound tension here. I understand the logic of tragic optimism, but the sorrow is bone-deep—a physical resistance to the work ahead. In trying to outrun history, I’ve only added to its weight. So the goal can no longer be to escape, but to decide what to do with the material it has left behind.

The Armor and the Laugh

Without tragic optimism, resilience feels like a hollow prize. I have been “strong” for most of my life, but it’s always been strength born of gritted teeth and bitter reluctance. I was always fighting against my past rather than moving through it. This resistance has always kept me from the present, fostering a shrouded view of my own story and driving me toward the numbing comfort of apathy.

Tragic optimism offers a peace designed to keep us upright in the middle of the storm and defiant in the face of the void. When I reframe what I’ve endured, the weight shifts. It ceases to be a burden and becomes armor instead. Every scar and every wound is etched into that metal—symbols of the battles I’ve survived.

Despite this season of darkness, I see the man I want to be on the other side. I see him clearly. He is present, anchored in the now, and he knows nihilism is a luxury he can no longer afford. He remains upright through every season, a symbol of strength not just for himself, but for those who depend on him.

He looks back at the moments that feel like they are breaking me now—and he laughs. Not because the pain is funny or because it doesn’t hurt, but because he sees the suffering for what it truly is: the catalyst. He knows he was forged in a fire meant to ignite a life of passion, not a life of mere existence.

Happiness is a secondary goal. My priority is to stay in the fight. In the end, we don’t just survive the fire. We learn to thrive in the heart of the inferno.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Author’s note:

This piece is a reflection on ambition and the demands of a culture specific to the United States. When I refer to “the world,” I am primarily talking about the world I’m living in. I know many of the themes I discuss below are universal, but I thought it important to provide this context before you continue on.

If you live anywhere else in the world and feel and see the same things I do, I’d love to read about your experience in the comment section.

As always, thank you for your time, dear reader.

—Jon ♾️

Competitiveness, Ysabel once quoted primly as I celebrated beating her at Foundation, is insecurity in action. To which my smiling father immediately responded that a complete lack of it shows only apathy or arrogance.

—Vis, The Strength of the Few

I was very young when I first understood that the world rewards performance and achievement far over curiosity and wonder.

Winners are honored like royalty, and this creed is branded into our brains early and often. Competition is king. The victors make the rules and set the standard. The rest are left behind.

The central aspect of this game—this never-ending competition—is proving value. As in, can you prove why you should be treated like you matter? Why should the world care about you? What do you have to offer?

That’s the secret to victory. Prove why you deserve a spot in the winner’s circle. Often, it’s less about wanting to win, and more about wanting to be treated with decency. Prove that you can be extraordinary in some way, and maybe you will be.

That is where the dissonance begins.

I’ve become disillusioned with the very idea of competition, but I don’t actually hate competing. From childhood, I’ve enjoyed the spirit of it in sports, band competitions, and even just playing video games with my friends. But I’ve seen how a culture seeped in a competitive ethos feels more like an infection than anything else.

I smell the insatiable hunger to win from so many people around me. Meanwhile, I am ambivalent toward ambition, preferring understanding over conquest. I want to ask questions, to get to the root of why.

Why are we here? Why does pain exist? Why do we go to war with one another?

I care more about “why” than anything else. Many people I know don’t. It doesn’t mean they don’t care at all—but, to me, I don’t see how understanding isn’t the most important thing there is. Instead, we’re convinced that what we should care about is having more…things. We’re told greed is bad, but are bombarded with messages encouraging us to hoard more—more things, more accolades, more money. More. More. More.

We’re taught to win, so that we can have. And if you’re not willing to win at any cost, then you’re just lazy and have no drive or passion.

It’s almost impossible not to internalize a message like that, and equally impossible not to let it cloud your own self-image. I think I’d go crazy without this Substack as an outlet; it’s here that I can take things slow and nurture my desire to learn and understand.

This space allows me to give life to what I see as the antithesis to a competitive-obsessed world.

Share

Surrounded and Alone

Truth be told, I was struggling to find a topic I wanted to write about. I had plenty of ideas brewing, but as I pored through my idea bank, nothing gave me the spark I was looking for.

Instead, I found inspiration in a YouTube video I’d saved weeks ago. It was a video on deep thinkers and how they have to learn to navigate in a world that too often is satisfied with what is only on the surface.

The video and an ongoing internal debate about the very nature of ambition created the perfect catalyst. This essay is the result.

And the central question it attempts to answer is one I’ve obsessed over for years. I’ve always felt out of place, like a nomad, rarely, if ever, feeling at home. So I’ve wondered: Why do people like me feel so out of place in a world like this? Is ambition and a capitalist culture drenched in greed to blame?

Maybe, but I think things are more nuanced than that. A good place to start is almost always our value system. What is our foundation? Who are we at our core? Deep thinkers ask questions from wonder and curiosity. That’s what matters most to us—to understand. To probe and explore. Winning? Not important. Money? Also, not important (though we know the need for it). Attention and adulation? Completely irrelevant.

But standing apart is never easy, is it? Everywhere you look, there are messages nudging us to monetize and optimize. To hustle so hard that we burn everything in our personal lives to the ground, because that’s what all the greats do. That’s what it means to be a winner. You must be ambitious, because if you’re not, you might not survive.

Is that why I feel so stagnant? A lack of ambition? Do I lack conviction or vision? Am I just fucking lazy?

For too long, I didn’t know the answer, but I sure felt like I was all of these things, and worse. The crazy thing is, I know better than to take this line of thinking as gospel. I’ve lived through plenty of phases of burnout, where I have, in my own way, burned things to the ground. And every time, I have felt so hollow when the dust settled.

The hollowness comes from a fundamental deception inherent in our culture. Society claims to value character, honesty, and virtue, but what it rewards is performance, charisma, and monetization.

Ambition is praised like it’s holy. Deliberateness is not. To move deliberately is to be left behind, to miss…something, everything.

Those who walk slowly, taking in every sight and sound, while everyone around them rushes to their destination, get it. The person who prefers the mindful ritual of a pour-over coffee in the morning gets it. Those who need very little stimulation to be content get it.

Curiosity, on its face, seems to offer no value. But to the deep thinker, it is indispensable—a precious feature of humanity. It is the capacity to live, and to marvel at the meaning of that life. We aren’t talking about surface-level questions, but the mind-rattling, spirit-igniting energy such thinkers can never ignore.

I’ve never been wired for the relentless climb. I prefer contemplating, walking, writing, reading, understanding.

So I have to know—what does it mean to be a deep thinker in a world that prizes winning above understanding? How does a person reconcile the world‘s obsession with conquering and dominating, with their own hunger to simply pursue wonder and curiosity?

The Search for Peace

Ambition rarely stands alone, does it? So often, it feels more like greed in a mask. Once you notice the disguise, you can’t un-notice it. The clarity reveals a festering wound: the inherent cynicism that blooms from understanding that greed lies at the heart of the world. Such pessimism is simply the consequence of perceptiveness.

This very awareness is the spark of so much internal conflict. The deep thinker versus a culture that demands you perpetually prove your value, not just through a one-time demonstration.

I see it everywhere I look. Ads, political rhetoric, the content creator ecosystem—greed is framed as drive, hunger, hustle, vision. It’s framed as some kind of virtue. But it’s clear that at the center of it all is anything but virtue. And once you see things for what they really are, how can you hope to feel as if you belong?

The crushing dissonance of living in a world such as this threatens to crush a deep thinker’s spirit. But. To endure—or even to thrive—in this world, you must learn to make the space. You must learn to traverse the tight rope, balancing what this world demands of you and honoring your true nature simultaneously.

Not an easy thing to do, by any means.

At times, the balancing act may feel like a betrayal. Because when the world demands speed, deep thinkers crave meaning. When the world demands output, deep thinkers cry for understanding. When the world wants quantifiable results, deep thinkers want reason…they want answers.

But the thing that all deep thinkers should understand—and it’s something I’m still working through—is that peace is not found in getting all the answers. It’s not the result of asking a million questions, or of living exclusively inside the mind. Peace is an act of presence. It arrives when you can sit with your thoughts without letting them consume you, and acknowledging the world’s reality without letting that reality consume you. Peace is seeing your own value, divorced entirely from any markers the world uses to measure worth.

Trapped In My Mind

My mind has always been my escape. When I was a kid, it was a labyrinth of joy and dreams. Sometimes, it still is. But the weight of a life lived becomes heavier with each passing year.

Soon enough, the mind can become a unique kind of enemy, because trying to escape pain or problems doesn’t work, at least not forever. Eventually, something has to give. Reality must be faced. The pain needs to be acknowledged. The problems you can fix need your attention. One way or another, a deep thinker has to leave the refuge of their mind and face the world.

Something that writing has helped make very clear is the synchronous dance that self-awareness and self-criticism perform within minds like mine. I am aware of how I am avoidant, getting lost in my mind and often giving into self-isolation. And this awareness feeds into intense self-criticism. It creates a closed loop—an oroborous of sorts—that feels impossible to escape.

The mind takes the reins and leads me down paths that replay choices I regret, imagines alternate versions of myself that didn’t screw things up, tries to solve pain through thought and introspection (a fool’s errand), or leads to the belief that saving the world begins and ends with simply understanding it.

The mind is powerful, but it can’t do it all.

If you are like me, if you find yourself in the same storm of thoughts, paralyzed by your own introspection, consider this:

• Every thought is not a problem to solve.

• Accept that understanding can be an act of care, not an escape.

• Seek out and appreciate those who’ve carved humane paths within a greedy system. They serve as reminders that we’re not alone.

• Let curiosity exist without demanding it to produce something for you.

For deep thinkers, understanding is a form of love. We love the world by trying to understand it. We love others by trying to understand them. It’s not a flaw, but a built-in mechanism that makes us who we are, and a feature the world desperately needs.

Liberation Through Understanding

As is often the case with the subjects that inspire my writing, there is no clean resolution here. And that’s fine, because where’s the fun in a tidy ending anyway? I’ve become accustomed to this uncertain space, where the weight of the existential never leaves. It’s in understanding why we might feel out of place that we can learn how to find peace within a culture that runs contrary to who we are.

But I want anyone else like me to understand this—a lack of ambition (at least ambitions that run in sync with a capitalist culture), does not equal laziness. You are not deficient. You are not the problem. I’m still trying to heed my own advice.

I am not a fighter in the traditional sense, but I can’t help but fight every day. I fight with myself, and I fight with the world—in my own way. Always fighting. Always resisting, if even just a little bit. Because noticing so much gets exhausting, and I wonder if my cynicism is born from exhaustion or clarity.

I also wonder how much of myself I can keep alive within a system that constantly asks you to compromise, that you look the other way, that you make hollow justifications. I mean, what good am I to those who depend on me if I remain too stubborn to play the game?

Understanding why you don’t fit in feels liberating—that is, until you have to keep living in a world that runs on rhythms you can’t match.

My mind isn’t the enemy, it’s a gift to cherish. My pace isn’t a flaw; it’s a feature to embrace. Wondering and questioning isn’t a problem to be fixed, but a way of being that can lead to a more peaceful relationship with the world.

To ask why, to wonder about the nature of reality and how things work, is a sign of care. It’s not a burden; it is evidence of love. Understanding my resistance to ambition can serve to bring me down, or it can serve to align my intention. I choose to cut out anything that doesn’t align with who I want to be, and I will focus my energy on the things that do.

Because neither isolation nor blind following of the masses can create a life of meaning. At least not as far as I can see. Peace, instead, is found in standing beside your thoughts rather than wrestling with them, treating them as traveling companions rather than adversaries you’re meant to vanquish.

I can be deliberate and curious and still build the life that is all mine. Maybe I won’t enter a traditional winner’s circle. But maybe that circle was never meant for people like me. Besides, the path of the philosopher always suited me better anyway.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

How do you unlearn that which once kept you safe?

I am the avoidant child who learned long ago how to guard his emotions.

Now, I feel detached and incapable of true intimacy. Vulnerability feels like a world-ending event, so I fade slowly—creating distance, finding flaws, and using logic to rationalize my return to isolation.

I thought this made me strong, but now I’m in a cage I can’t break out of. I’m trapped in time, a relic of the traumas of my teenage years and early adult life.

And even if I could leave this cage, why would I? I’m afraid of what’s out there—scared to bring the wall down.

I can’t risk it, and that’s exactly what vulnerability is: a risk. A risk of heartbreak, of over-reliance, of the loss of self. But in my isolation, those risks don’t exist. In my isolation, I stand on a firm foundation. I’ve faced the world from this foundation. I’ve survived—finding sanctuary in this fortress of mine for so long. How could I ever leave?

But safety is a lonely kind of victory.

If I step out there, I’m exposed. If I let somebody all the way in, and things don’t work out, what then? I’ve got scars from before—wounds that haven’t healed properly.

I’ve been there, and I’m not sure I can go back.

Share

Fear of Dependence

The pull toward isolation—or more so, toward independence—was born from necessity. Emotional openness was foreign in my childhood home. You didn’t speak up about how you felt. Depression and anxiety were sneered at. If my emotions were in tatters, I had to tough it out. I had to find a way through it. Alone, in my isolation, I learned to survive. I found power in my independence. And the older I got, the more that lesson was reinforced.

In a way, growing up like this is the reason I’ve made it this far. But the truth is that my overreliance on independence has become unhealthy.

When I was twenty-two, I went through my first major breakup. Amid the raw emotions, I had to make a choice. My ex and I lived together in a small apartment, splitting the bills. I could go back home, at least for a bit, until I was sure I could afford to live on my own. Or I could get a place and figure out how to swim in real time. I decided to take the plunge.

In my eyes, going back home wasn’t an option, so I risked drowning. Things were hard at first. I couldn’t afford a cushy luxury apartment; instead, I had to settle for a roach-infested studio within eyesight of where my ex and I had lived together. Every day, I saw that apartment we once shared and was reminded of how I’d failed.

And even with that, the freedom I’d gained—living alone, being truly independent—it was intoxicating. With time, I cleaned up the place and created my sanctuary, my place of peace.

Roommates, living with my family again, or even moving in with a partner, now felt like a sick joke.

I didn’t like feeling dependent before, and now that I was proving I could stand on my own, my fear of dependence took on a primal form. The prospect of being consumed by another person and their life makes me anxious. I’m afraid of losing the self I created during my years of solitude—the self I built when I was young and lost, the one that’s felt the highest highs and lowest lows. The one that survived it all, that dreamed and cried, but is still fighting, still standing.

I learned that nobody was coming to save me, and the coping mechanism that once protected my sanity as a child is slowly becoming my undoing.

The Weight of Isolation

I’ve always carried a morbid conviction that I’d end up alone. I’ve felt this way because I know myself—I know how I self-sabotage, how the idea of merging my life with another person’s terrifies me.

But my desire for solitude was challenged this year when I decided to move into a bigger place so my mom could move in with me—and I feel like an awful person for admitting this, but it wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do.

I love my mom dearly, but living alone has always felt like the pinnacle of peace. The very idea of such a drastic change to my environment ignited a fire of resistance in me.

Still, the choice felt like the right one. I felt a tinge of sorrow each time I’d visit my mom while she lived alone. I helped her financially—so why feel guilty? Because my mom felt the weight of isolation, and for her, it didn’t feel good.

The guilt tugged at my spirit. And though I knew her situation wasn’t my fault (I was the only one around who was actually helping), I also knew I could do more. I wasn’t under some external obligation to make the choice I made, but I felt an internal call—the moral responsibility of a son who loved his mother.

But why this internal fight? Why so much resistance? Because solitude saved me. I’ve survived alone, and so I must march on alone. When you merge your life with another person, eventually, they will disappoint you. Or you’ll disappoint them. Or you’ll disappoint yourself.

Things change—especially feelings. Why risk it, I ask myself? Why bring another person along to deal with your mood swings and issues? Moving in with my mom is one thing, but what goes beyond that—living with a partner again—is what really makes my palms sweat and my heart rattle in my chest.

I’ve held out as long as I can, but something has to give. And if I stay in this fortress of isolated comfort—where my life is mine and mine alone—where do I end up? I know the answer, and it’s not an encouraging one.

Maybe that’s the real weight of isolation—it convinces you that safety and loneliness are the same thing.

The Need for Identity

At the heart of this entire puzzle, there’s a question shining in bright neon lights right in front of me.

Have I built my sense of self around the idea that I don’t need anyone?

I had to figure out so much on my own—applying for college, getting credit cards, renting apartments, buying cars, navigating heartbreak, and fighting through all the quiet battles that come with growing up from a young boy to a young man.

And I’ve come so far. I’ve survived—at times, even thrived. Nobody held my hand or cleaned up my messes. Nobody laid out a blueprint for me. I’ve failed—over and over again. And that overreliance on myself has sharpened my edges. I’ve often felt pride over how little I’ve needed other people.

I alchemised the trauma and shame of my younger years into a superpower. But those same powers are now holding me back. I’m not sure how to balance my need for solitude with that small spark in me that calls—that begs—for connection. I resist vulnerability like it’s a disease. I’m terrified of rejection and am a creature of habit. My routines and space are sacred to me. To risk any of that for the sake of vulnerability feels unbearable.

I know that, in a way, I’m being irrational. I guess that’s why I had to write this essay—to argue with myself. I try to hype myself up, only to flake on opportunities to step outside my comfort zone, retreating to the safety net of isolation.

It’s frustrating to be so self-aware—and at the same time—so subservient to your own coping strategies. Especially when you can see the damage left in their wake, that’s why I can’t keep ignoring the spark, the voice—the one screaming at me, willing me to change before it’s too late.

What Does It Take To Change?

Is my overreliance on independence a condition to fix or a truth to understand? I’m still working my way through that puzzle. The compulsion to self-sabotage, to burn everything to the ground—where will it lead me in the end?

Staying in this comfort zone feels like a slow death. I can see the future that awaits me along this path, feel the hope draining from my spirit.

I feel the weight of a life squandered on the horizon. I haven’t achieved the grand dreams of my youth, and I’m too scared to follow the safer path of commitment, marriage, and kids. So where does that leave me? Right in the center, possibly the worst place to be. Noncommittal and indecisive. Bitter and regretful. And yet, I’ve been told I still have time. I’m not out of chances.

But until I’m willing to give more of myself, I don’t see how things will change. I wonder what could finally soften me. Time? Loss? Love? The slow decimation of my own will? Love has tried before, loss has as well. Time has nudged me with more urgency lately, but it hasn’t been enough. And spiritual exhaustion has been a constant companion, the dull hum beneath everything I do.

Maybe I should be more optimistic (I could always be more optimistic). But I refuse to delude myself any further. I am doubtful I’ll figure this out without something major happening. Maybe writing this counts. If not, then the battle rages on—at least until something finally breaks me free of this prison I’ve built.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Everyone wants to save the world, and then they realize that they can barely save themselves.

Each day I scroll, read, and absorb a new wave of chaos—wars, greed, corruptions, and collapse—and each story only makes me feel smaller.

I want to make a difference, but I’m exhausted. I’m soaked in cynicism and feel powerless to do or say anything that could possibly move the world in a better direction.

The house is burning, and I don’t see a way out. Some people don’t even try to escape. They don’t try to put out the fire. Instead, they cast blame and think that alone makes them righteous.

Everybody’s yelling, but nobody is really listening.

Some still have hope; others think it’s all already over.

I’m just a regular guy who’s always wanted to do extraordinary things. I’ve been a dreamer and a cynic, the one who wants to make the world better, and the same one who wonders What’s the point? That’s the tension I live with.

I want to explore the quiet erosion of hope inside the person who wants to make the world better, but can’t get out of their own way. Because I relate to this person. I am this person. The hope is deteriorating, but it hasn’t vanished completely. If it had, I don’t know if I’d still be writing. Honestly, I don’t think I’d be doing anything at all.

So, even though I feel hopeless and powerless, something inside me keeps me going, though truth be told, I don’t know what for.

We talk a lot about how constant scrolling makes us anxious. But beyond anxiety, I feel something deeper. I don’t just feel anxious—I feel…inconsequential. That’s the best way I can describe it. Navigating the endless carousel of content makes me feel insignificant.

Maybe I’m just projecting. Maybe I should get off my soapbox. The more I scroll, the more I tell myself I’m just trying to stay informed. But really, I’m trying to bridge the gap between control and chaos, as if more information will somehow make me feel less hopeless.

Share

Since I was a kid, I’ve loved superheroes. My mom wouldn’t buy me comics, but she’d take me to the public library, where I’d check out stacks of comics and graphic novels.

I wanted to be like Static Shock—saving the day, nerdy but still kind of cool. I also wanted to be like Robin from the 2003 Teen Titans era: no powers, just integrity, a devotion to justice, and a competitive spirit nobody could truly match.

As a kid, I lived in my imagination, trapped in my mind. I built stories where I saved the world, rescued my friends and family, defeated villains, and protected those who couldn’t protect themselves.

A young boy wanting to be a superhero isn’t unique, and the desire probably doesn’t come from some noble instinct or higher calling. Kids just like superheroes.

But I still want to save the world, and I feel like a fool for it. How can anyone save the world when they’re still at war with themselves?

I can’t get out of my own way. I can’t stay disciplined, can’t face my demons, can’t even fully commit to someone I’ve been with for years. I’m no good to the world like this, and I know it.

I’ve gone from the boy who wanted to save everyone to the man who can’t even save himself.

And somewhere between these two versions of me, the world has gotten louder, while my will to fight is fading.

You Can’t Save the World Until You Save Yourself

A friend once told me that the world doesn’t need a savior; it needs people who still care. Maybe, he said, saving the world isn’t about fixing everything, but about tending what’s within reach.

The body. The mind. The people we love. The small choices within each day. It’s about looking forward with courage instead of pretending the carnage doesn’t exist.

As I write this essay, I think about this friend and how I’ve often thought he was too idealistic.

Maybe he’s right, though. Maybe I’ve spent so much time mourning the world I can’t change that I’ve neglected the parts I still can.

Our sphere of influence can often be a very effective counter to despair. Because despair and apathy are the real diseases, the ones that bring everything crashing down.

You can even witness it happening in real time. I’ve started to notice a dimness in people’s eyes, like the will to care is burning out from overuse. I wonder if they see the same thing in my eyes.

We’re tired. Most of us trade our time for a paycheck that disappears into rent, food, transportation, and healthcare. We’re physically and emotionally spent. Overwhelmed by information. Running on fumes, trying to hold on. For what? For more empty promises? For more hollow displays of we’re-all-in-this-together-talk from insulated celebrities and rich people?

I see the protests. I hear the calls for revolution. But how do we turn a system on its head and mobilize like the revolutions of history when so many are distracted, insulated, or too burned out to care? Honestly, apathy feels almost inevitable.

But we have to care, no? It’s our last line of defense. Once we stop caring, that’s the true Apocalypse. So let the rage burn. Let the tears fall for injustice. Call out the lies when you hear them. Boycott what you can, not just with money, but with your attention.

I get it. I, too, feel the burden of hope. I want to run away. I want it all to go quiet. But I can’t run. I can’t give up because people depend on me—to be here, to endure, to keep showing up.

I’m tired of being resilient, but people depend on me to keep being just that.

Trying To Pour From an Empty Cup

I don’t have a grand plan for healing. But through the years, I’ve become better at recognizing what pulls me back to life, and what pulls me away from it.

The things that keep me apathetic, that isolate me, are usually rooted in escapism.

I wish I had more to offer the world. But maybe what I need right now is to understand where I stand with myself. When all I want to do is crawl under the earth, what can I really give?

When the inner void is at its strongest, I often look to the world for relief. But the world can’t make me whole. I have to pull myself out of the mud. The truth is, I’m most selfish when I feel empty. It’s in that scarcity—when I’m lost in me, me, me—that I’ve made some of my worst decisions. Decisions I still regret.

I know what it’s like to want more, to feel that the world owes you something, to believe something is always missing.

You want to save the world, but you can’t save yourself.
You don’t even know where to start.

Start with the simple things: noticing your emotions instead of running from them. Building habits that ground you.

For me, that looks like the gym. It looks like reading a good book. The sweet smell of the outdoors. Shooting hoops alone.

Of course, things like the gym and reading aren’t magic cure-alls—I know that. But it’s in these small, personal spaces that we shape ourselves into the kind of people strong enough to take on what the world demands of us.

It’s ironic but true: the more I learn to show up for myself, the more capable I become of showing up for everything else.

Save Yourself, and the World May Follow

It’s hard to accept, but you can’t save them all. You can’t even save most. And yet, I still feel the tug to try.

Like I’ve been told, maybe that’s the point: the refusal to look away, the insistence on leading with care even when it feels pointless.

A perfect world will never exist. It’s a sign of hubris to think any one person could create it. It’s not about perfection, but persistence. And it starts at the micro level. One person refusing to give up. One person healing enough to offer love without needing anything in return.

If all I can do is save myself just enough to give something good back to the world—maybe that’s all I ever needed to do.

The noise won’t stop, the chaos won’t either. But I am free to choose: fight or give in. Saving the world might look like figuring out who I want to be, not who I think I’m supposed to be.

And maybe one day, if I can clean up my inner world, I’ll do something that truly makes a difference.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

If you asked me how I’m doing, I’d lie to you.

I’d say I’m good, that everything is fine. But things are not fine, and I’m far from “good.”

Deny your true feelings long enough, and your mind, body, and soul start to revolt. Each time you swallow the truth of how hurt, anxious, scared, or guilty you feel, the shadow of self-betrayal grows darker.

I feel its eyes on me every day, watching and waiting—daring me to acknowledge it. Finally, I have.

The truth is: I have lost faith in the God I was raised to believe in.

I carry a lot of guilt for this. But I can’t force myself to believe anymore, and I’m tired of pretending I do.

The Weight of Guilt

We are all vulnerable to our truths, and our reality is usually filtered through contingencies—that is, through circumstances we never chose, at least not at first.

My mom converted to Christianity when I was very young. Church, multiple times a week, became mandatory. Evangelical values, worldviews, and rituals became law. As a kid, those values framed my reality, and they stayed with me long after I stopped going to church.

That’s why the guilt feels so heavy.

I didn’t get a say in the worldview imposed on me as a child, so why feel guilty now for letting it go and reaching toward something I can build for myself? Even when I try to reason with it, the guilt clings to me. It sits in the pit of my stomach and wraps its fingers around my throat, refusing to let me rest.

I wish more people could see how easily their beliefs would change if just one detail in their lives had played out differently. How can anyone be so certain their beliefs hold the entire Truth?

It’s that certainty—and the air of superiority it often carries—that drives me insane. A belief system alone doesn’t make you a good person. It doesn’t make you right. Especially an inherited one. Inherited faith is like inherited wealth: you can possess it without effort, flaunt it without merit, and mistake it for virtue. But even knowing that, the guilt doesn’t let me go.

All I Hear Is Silence

When faith collapses, what do you do with the void that’s left behind?

For me, faith was held together by fear, mostly the fear of hell. That was it. That was the glue holding it all together. In my house, embracing secular ideas and perspectives was dangerous and proof of weak faith. Open-mindedness felt sacrilegious, and nuance never held a place.

But I’ve always been curious, and though I didn’t speak my doubts out loud very often, they pinballed inside me with nowhere to go.

In a way, I was always going to end up here—floating in uncertainty and guilt. But I don’t want to stay here. Nihilism doesn’t feel like home. I can sense a frontier beyond disbelief, but still don’t know how to cross it.

I once believed the church held the key to Truth. Now I see how those “truths” distorted everything—from how I saw myself to how I saw other people. It’s a tension that feels like begging for answers and getting only silence in return. Silence is all I hear—it’s maddening. I’m less sure than I’ve ever been, and it’s terrifying. But the world is much more than I was raised to imagine, and the teachings from my childhood no longer bring the comfort they once did.

And yet, even fear doesn’t rewrite a life in an instant. Radical shifts in worldview typically take years. Mine has grown slowly, nurtured by curiosity and a growing need for self-discovery.

Why do I believe what I believe?
Am I just trying to convince myself, or am I simply afraid?

The more I asked, the more I learned about myself. I want nuance instead of dogma. Understanding instead of blanket judgments. I want values that can stand up to scrutiny, and beliefs that ring true all the way down to the crypt of my spirit—not ideologies rooted in fear.

Religion felt like the opposite of everything I wanted.

But…the guilt. The unrelenting, unforgiving guilt. Letting go of inherited beliefs feels right, yet also like a betrayal, not just of ideas, but of the people and institutions that once gave my life meaning. There was a foundation there, once, however shaky it was. Now, I float in the ether.

The Stages of Building a Worldview

Is the void proof I made the wrong choice, or is it the price of building a worldview of my own? Does it get easier, or am I destined to carry this guilt for the rest of my life?

What’s on the other side? Getting there isn’t a single leap but a series of stages—each one moving aside and laying a new foundation for the next. Seeing the steps is one thing. Climbing them is another.

Stage 1: Inherited Certainty

I used to be terrified that my thoughts alone would damn me to hell. I had so many doubts, but I buried them because I thought the doubts made me a bad Christian. Questions felt like rebellion, and defiance was rebuked.

Over time, though, I started to notice the cracks within this system of certainty. I stopped going to church. I met people with completely different faiths, each one just as certain as the Christians I grew up with. They, too, thought they had the ticket to paradise.

Certainty itself was the deception. I grew disillusioned, shifting from angsty and naive to spiteful and dismissive, becoming the kind of person who grew angry at the mere mention of divinity.

Stage 2: The Void

By my twenties, the sliver of faith I had eroded. My prayers felt wasted, tossed into silence. I was told God knew my needs, so why did I have to beg? That contradiction infuriated me.

Good things happened. Bad things happened. It didn’t seem to matter if I prayed or not. Divine justice was nowhere to be found, and “turning the other cheek” just left an opening to get hit again.

In the midst of this jaded haze, the guilt whispered. And I shouted back: Why? Why should anyone feel guilty for rejecting what they never freely chose?

Again, all I heard was silence, and so I felt despair.

I was indoctrinated young. I never stood a chance.

And when those beliefs finally stopped speaking to me—when they no longer gave me strength—I was still expected to feel guilty? As if I owed eternal loyalty to an accident.

Stage 3: Reconstruction

Now, in my thirties, nuance has begun to replace much of my rage. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still angry, but I can zoom out now and see things from more angles.

It began with curiosity. I fell back in love with reading, learning, and writing, releasing the emotions that once festered in my silence. I found philosophies that spoke to me.

Nihilism gave way to hopeful skepticism. And through it, I realized that true meaning can’t be handed down. It has to be created. I see that all this guilt is a side effect of questioning and building a worldview of my own.

I don’t need delusional certainty. I want something different. Something I can build myself. And it’s on me to build it.

Share

Not Certain, Still Trying

I have a bit more clarity, but I don’t have peace of mind yet. Faith still feels so fragile. The teachings from my childhood still echo like an old operating system, and guilt lingers as proof that the old operating system was strong.

I’ve learned more about myself and the world than I ever could have while chained to dogma. But contingency cuts both ways. If my inherited beliefs were contingent, so are the ones I hold now. I outgrew the old framework, and may outgrow this one. Maybe I’ll circle back to religion one day—with nuance, with choice. Or maybe I’ll wander forever.

Some will never wander. Their inherited beliefs still sustain them, or their worldview feels so solid and sure that what I describe here is foreign to them. I would never tell someone to abandon their faith. But I wish more people saw how fragile certainty truly is—how a different birthplace, family, or encounter could have built an entirely different worldview.

Instead, we shout our truths at one another until it all becomes noise, and what’s lost amidst this noise is the recognition that our paths—physical, mental, spiritual—are shaped by circumstance as much as conviction.

It takes empathy to recognize this. I didn’t choose my birthplace, parents, or traditions. I inherited them. Rejecting them isn’t betrayal, it’s freedom. It’s the opportunity to become the author of my own life, instead of marching to commands I never understood.

I want a belief system I can be proud of, because I helped build it. I want to see how others built theirs. And I want to accept guilt for what it is: a leftover from a time already passed.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

Author’s Note:
This essay first appeared as a paywalled piece, and a few of you may remember reading it then. I’ve decided to share it more openly now because I want these words to reach beyond the smaller circle that first saw them. Sometimes writing feels too close to keep tucked away—I’d rather let it breathe in the open.

My high school years now feel like a blur. With each passing year, the jungle of the public school system feels more and more like a fever dream.

But some memories I’ll never forget.

I remember graduation night: the smiles, the misty eyes of classmates and their families, the anticipation in the air. I remember walking the stage and feeling a mix of pride and relief. My last two years of high school were some of the most confusing and maddening of my life.

What stuck with me most about that night, over a decade later, was what came after the ceremony, when graduates met with their families to revel in their accomplishment truly.

While my mom and friends congratulated me, my stepfather's attention was elsewhere. After scanning the room, he asked why I hadn’t been given one of the gold tassels he saw several other students wearing.

I told him those were for the kids who had graduated with honors.

He shook his head, and as he’d done so many times in my life, he made sure I knew how disappointed he was.

He gave a quiet grunt and muttered:

“If you ever actually applied yourself, you could've earned one too.”

You see, I was used to remarks like this. It was annoying, sure. But I didn’t expect anything less from him. I, like most of the other people—students and families—felt a sense of pride. I was hopeful. Excited. But what felt like “no big deal” at the time altered my view of myself.

Slowly, I became obsessed with proofs of success. Totems of worth. Not success itself, but proof that I had succeeded.

I wanted to appear successful, to outrun the sting of mediocrity. As a result, I became preoccupied with myself. With my goals. My feelings. What I wanted. I became (and sometimes, despite my best efforts, still am) a very selfish person.

But that’s not who I want to be anymore.

Thanks for reading the Deep Thinkers newsletter. Consider subscribing to support my work and receive new posts.

The Paradox of Desire

I was made to feel inadequate from an early age. And as I ventured into the world, the more inadequate I felt. Social norms, materialism, distorted images of success—this was the water I swam in.

I had no values, no philosophy, no rooted identity to stand on. That lack of foundation left me vulnerable to my desires, which led me down a path of isolation and self-loathing.

I pursued achievement like a rabid dog, believing each win would deliver permanent peace.

No matter what it was, it was never enough. And the more I chased, hoping to soothe my inner turmoil, the more that pain multiplied. The more external achievements I collected, the more the hunger seized my soul, the higher my expectations rose. I was imprisoned in a never-ending loop of desire, and I didn’t know how to escape.

James Baldwin once wrote:

"(...) the world in which we live in is after all, a reflection of the desires and activities of men."

Desire is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. It drives our actions, shapes our goals, and even influences our emotions. It is, however, also one of the most confounding human compulsions. It refuses to be satisfied, driving us forward while hauling our regrets behind us like ghosts with unfinished business.

So many are trapped in this very cycle: driven by desire, forged by pain. Striving and suffering. Never satisfied. Rarely arriving.

The thing is, while life brings with it suffering, there sits desire in a red dress, promising relief. Claiming to be our salvation. We crave, consume, and compare, convinced the next thing will bring what the last thing couldn’t. And so the loop continues.

So who’s to blame?

Is it society, this modern world, that dangles products and promises in front of our faces like the proverbial carrot on a stick? Or is it us? You and me? The ones who can’t stop reaching, can’t stop buying, and can’t stop looking out to a far-off horizon, while the beauty of life sits quietly at our feet?

According to the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer:

"Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

Meaning, we are free to make choices, yes. But we don’t choose what we want. So if desire lies outside our control, are we actually free? It’s this failure to even recognize the insidious power that desire has over us that ultimately leads to more suffering.

We can’t just be. Instead, we always have to reach. To chase. To fix. To scratch every single itch we feel. But soon enough, life feels so repetitive that rather than a spiral that leads upwards, it feels like we’re running in place.

I think the ultimate source of modern suffering is forgetting, or never realizing, that we are more than our ravenous appetites. It’s a lack of confidence, a lack of inner value. Who is truly authentic anymore? So many people wear a mask of bravado, crafted from shame, soaked in fear. Afraid others will see who they really are.

I understand this fear all too well. I wrestle with it daily. And in a culture built upon a foundation of status and perceived scarcity, it’s no wonder the loop of desire is all we know.

The Hunger

The flames of desire often feel necessary for progress. It ignites the hunger to pursue meaning, build lives, fall in love, travel, to make things that we share with the world.

Without it, we wither into purposeless husks. At least, that's how desire appears on the surface. But the more I examine its role in my own life, the more I realize: it isn't just fire. It's also a dense fog, offering light through the inferno of passion and longing, at the same time, deserting us within a mist so thick, we can't see clearly.

It pulls and pushes. It binds us to love and guilt. It offers freedom but hoards clarity. It makes the promises a politician would make. Empty.

We are ushered into the world and are confronted by all the things meant to scratch the itch of desire: success, romance, status, and belonging. Oh, and can't forget the never-ending sea of material goods that we just have to have. By the time we're "free" enough to choose, we've been conditioned in ways we can’t even comprehend.

And for a while, the illusion of certainty feels like safety. It feels like clarity.

But eventually, the mask slips and the facade is exposed.

Share

In the Netflix series Dark, characters try to defy the one opponent no one has ever beaten—time.

Desperate to rewrite history or to grab hold of what's been lost, they let their desires escort them along, all while the knot of suffering and despair that connects them all tightens.

Almost every character, in one way or another, is to be pitied. None of them are 100% evil (most compelling characters aren’t). They are, like most real people, desperate to run from pain.

They want love.

They want closure.

They want peace.

But they can never just be. There’s always something else to do, fix, or undo. Always striving. Always slaves to the unquenchable thirst of desire. And in chasing without questioning why, they destroy more than they save.

In one of the more gripping monologues of the show, one character muses that:

“People are peculiar creatures. All their actions are driven by desire, their characters forged by pain.”

This is the loop. The paradox. The knot that continues to tighten as we try to “make things better.”

We are shaped not only by what we long for, but by the cost of that longing. Who we are is carved from the consequences of our craving. The bridge and the gap. The answer and the insolvable, despair-inducing question. We may know what we want, but we don't know why we want it, or how to get it without taking a sledgehammer to everything in our path.

Dark forces its viewers to ask: If we’re not free to choose our desires, are we free at all?

That question stays with me, steady and unyielding as flies at a summer cookout in the South, heavy as the scent of impending rain.

If trauma, culture, and unmet needs shape desire, can we ever trust what we want? Or are we doomed to keep running, eating, reaching, never full, never free?

The writers of Dark offer their version of a solution, their rendition of peace. The main characters, trapped in this loop for generations, do eventually find peace. But only when they let go of what they thought they needed most, not as a form of repression, but through wisdom earned through experience, through pain, through transcendence.

They choose long-term peace over short-term longing and, as a result, create something new. Something with potential for greatness.

They end the cycle by ending the chase.

A Solution to The Pull

Desire is not inherently evil. To see it that way is to fail to see the nuance. Desire animates us, breathing life into romance, art, effort, and growth. The problem isn’t desire itself. It’s never pausing to question our untethered march toward every craving. The blind, compulsive pursuit of one want after another, without reflection. Without asking why. Without considering the cost.

It is in that blind pursuit that we get lost, blindfolded and swinging blindly within the fog, hoping to hit something that makes us feel content.

If Baldwin's declaration is true—and I believe it is—then how we move, the choices we make in response to our desires, matter deeply. Unchecked, desire can lead to destruction. However, when questioned and consciously redirected, it can lead to actual peace.

I doubt I’ll ever stop caring about success. Blame nature. Blame conditioning. I don’t really think it matters. What matters most to me is this:

Once I know that desire can lead me astray, what can I do about it?

I believe in the liberating value of choice, and I know that everyone’s ability to exercise their right to choose is not the same. Privilege is a very real thing. But when I am conscious enough to stop and see that my desires are leading me toward emptiness or away from my values, I owe it to myself and those in my life to stop and examine what is going on inside me.

Now, I'm not naive. The modern world is a desire-printing machine with unlimited printing materials. Managing desire today is like being thrown into the deep end of a wave pool. Resistance feels pointless sometimes. The end appears imminent. Still, we must try. Because we all need a foundation. Something to come back to when the pull is too strong. When the waves threaten to pull us under. Something to help us move with desire, rather than be moved by it.

So here are three approaches I lean on, rooted in ancient wisdom, to keep desire from dragging me under:

1. Buddhist Non-Attachment

Buddhist non-attachment encourages you to let go of your desires and cravings without repressing or denying them. It invites you to observe them. Gently. With compassion. Without shame.

Notice your desires. Watch them come and go. Like clouds passing overhead, like leaves atop a stream.

You don’t have to act on every craving. Some desires align with your well-being. Others don’t. With time and practice, you’ll see: everything is temporary. Even, and especially desire.

Your desires don't have to be your destiny. You can always take back control of the ship.

2. Epicurean Moderation

Epicurus taught that not all desires are equal. He advocated for the wise pursuit of our desires. To him, pleasure was not the enemy. But it did require a companion: discernment.

Epicurus divided desires into three categories:

• Natural and necessary (food, shelter, connection)

• Natural but unnecessary (indulgence, luxury)

• Unnatural and unnecessary (vanity, envy, status)

Rather than feel shame for the things we want, each is given form. From there, we can then savor simple pleasures—a quiet walk, a deep conversation, a warm meal.

Epicurean moderation encourages us to see what we already have through the power of discernment. It nudges us to remember how much we once longed for the life we now have.

As Epicurus said:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.”

3. Stoic Resilience

Stoicism has been maimed and mangled in the age of online hustle bros and false wannabe gurus.

Even still, the philosophy holds a special place in my heart. It radically changed the way I approach life. I went from reading about living better to putting the lessons into practice.

It taught me that peace doesn’t come from proving anything to anyone with totems of achievement. It comes from aligning with my values.

A Stoic asks: Is this desire rational? Does it reflect who I want to become, or is it rooted in fear or ego?

Seneca wrote:

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”

Stoicism doesn’t ask us to be unfeeling machines. It asks us to reflect. To choose desires that align with who we want to become. It teaches us to be grateful, not as a task on a to-do list, but as proof of our power in a world hell-bent on making us feel powerless.

There’s Always a Choice

What do we do when the pain becomes too much? Not just our pain, but the pain of others. The ache of memory. The weight of disappointment, grief, loss.

When that pain becomes too much to bear, how could one ever turn away from desire? The desire to escape. The desire to soothe. The desire to forget.

This is the fundamental root of the paradox of desire. It's not always the villain of the story; sometimes it's the lifeline. The survival or coping mechanism.

A lie sits heavy on your tongue in the face of truth. To resist it, especially when you’re scared or suffering, is to launch a personal rebellion. It’s to take part in a struggle of attrition with yourself. A struggle most could never fathom taking part in.

Some say that trying to resist our desires is a waste of time—a foolish fight that goes against our nature. Because we do not control what we want, we should simply hop on the wave and let the currents take us where they take us. That fate decides. That biology decides. That culture decides.

But I don't buy it.

We may not choose the arrival of desire, but we do choose what we do when it does. We choose the values that anchor us. We choose if we’ll stop and ask: Why do I want this? What would it mean to say yes? To say no?

We always have a choice.

Where Desire Ends and You Begin

We live in a world where comparison is king. Value is measured in metrics. Proof. Net worth. Follower count. Is it any wonder everything feels performative, devoid of authenticity?

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can close the loop. We can always reclaim our power. Not through the acquisition of more, but through genuine care. Through gratitude. Through presence.

If I had graduated with honors, would that have satisfied the old man? Knowing him, probably not. He’d have asked why I wasn’t valedictorian or something along those lines.

What should’ve been a night of pride and celebration was warped by another person’s own dissatisfaction, and it changed me.

But I’m older and sometimes, a little wiser. I see what my insatiable thirst for more has cost me. How the loop of desire has twisted my relationships, hollowed out my joy, and made it hard to see myself clearly.

Now, I leave you with this.

You don't need gold tassels or any other kind of trophy to prove you’ve achieved something great. You don't need more to feel whole. And you don't need anything outside of yourself to prove you are worthy.

You already are.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. Not in a morbid sense, but as a mirror for life. Watching the youth move through their first chapters has pushed me to reflect on my own unfinished book, and on the temporary place we all hold here in this world.

I think of my girlfriend’s nieces (a four and a one-year-old), and wonder what the future holds for them. What kind of world will they inherit, and what will they make of it? When I was a kid, I couldn’t even comprehend not existing, not because I was ignorant of death, but because the end of life felt impossibly far away. To be a child is to experience the quiet conviction of immortality in its purest form.

Eventually, we come to understand that life is not infinite, that we won’t live forever. More than anything, we come to see that we don’t have an unlimited supply of time, and every second that passes belongs to death.

The quote that shook me out of my recent bout of writer’s block and inspired me to write this essay was one by Simone Weil from her book Gravity and Grace.

She wrote:

Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.

These words reminded me of a seemingly unrelated experience (though I think they are connected). A few days ago, I met a friend for coffee. While we waited for our drinks, we chatted idly. Mid-sentence, he started fiddling with his phone. “Uh-huh, yeah, yeah,” he said. He wasn’t listening anymore. Then he stood up, aimed his phone at a nearby display, and began snapping pictures.

“I’m still listening,” he said.

But he wasn’t. He was trying to get the right angle. I stopped talking, then he sat down and tried to pick up the conversation, but the energy was off. I didn’t call him out (maybe I should’ve), I just let it slide, not wanting to sour the mood any further.

Now this wasn’t a one-off thing, and my friend is not the only person I know who does this. Many people I know have become accustomed to splitting up their attention this way. Usually, whatever hijacks their focus can be found on their phone, and almost none of them think they actually have a problem, because as a society, we’ve turned divided attention into a virtue. Like it’s something to be proud of.

As if never being able to focus on just one thing at a time is normal. Well, it isn’t. Our ability to focus, to live with presence, has been assaulted, and until we reclaim control over our most valuable resource (our time), those who profit off this heist will continue raking in money while our seconds, hours, years tick away, leaving us, in the end, with only a muddled recollection of how we spent them.

Why Are We Not Angrier?

Our attention has been debased, and I wish more people saw it for what it was—a crisis. No matter what you believe happens after death, one thing is certain: there is no immortality here on Earth. Our time is ticking away. So why exactly have we allowed so much of it to be stolen so freely? Ironically, we do know how valuable attention is; just look at the content creation space. It’s been a renaissance of sorts—anyone with a phone and an idea can change the course of their lives, and that is actually remarkable.

And yet. And yet, the internet, more than ever, is destroying us.

How much time is spent watching someone else live their lives instead of inhabiting our own? Just as troubling, our ability to maintain focus on anything that truly demands attention has begun to wither (and is only getting worse). Anxiety hums constantly in the background, pulling us toward the next task as we try to finish the one in front of us. Presence is all but non-existent. Moments slip through our fingers like sand, only here, nothing remains to show for what we’ve lost.

The more aware you are of the tactics used to steal your attention, the more overwhelming it actually feels. Maybe if it were just social media, it wouldn’t be as bad. But it’s every platform, every app. They want to take as much time from your bank as possible, and when they do, there’s no deposit to replenish it. It’s gone. Just like that. And it doesn’t feel right. None of it does.

People will shrug and say, ”That’s the way the world works now.”

No. Passive acceptance is part of the problem. We should be furious. We should feel the rage that burns crimson and refuses to forgive, the kind meant for revolution. Because revolutions only change things when enough people wake up and get really, really angry.

But what good is revolution if we can’t stay present with the people right in front of us? When a friend says they’re “fine,” do you notice the dimness in their eyes that says otherwise? Can you sit with the weight of uncomfortable silence without reaching for your phone, without looking to your feed for a lifeline?

Don’t worry—I’m right there with you. I know how hard it is. Discomfort and boredom have been trained out of us, and not by accident. We are amusing ourselves to death, conditioned to treat the endless scroll as natural. But it’s not. It’s engineered. Some like to call this age of technology a natural step in human evolution. Please. This isn’t evolution, it’s sedation. The cheap dopamine drip is easier to take than the effort it takes to resist, and so those who profit from that weakness keep exploiting it, again and again.

We are the free labor and the product for companies that profit from our screen time. Our attention is the commodity they crave, and the fight is not a fair one. Companies hire teams of brilliant people—psychologists, behavioral scientists, game designers—whose sole job is to figure out how to keep us hooked. They study casinos and other industries built on exploiting dopamine. They know the exact features to implement to light up our brains, and they use that knowledge to keep us fiending for more.

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, is on record, saying:

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.”

I can see how we got here, how so many people can’t see the effects even away from their screens. Fragmenting our attention is treated like a skill, multi-tasking worn as a badge of honor. But where is the pride for focusing on one thing and giving it our undivided attention? For lingering? For contemplating? The attention economy has eroded our desire for depth. It’s done this by removing what makes our attention valuable in the first place.

Our time is stolen so easily because we’ve forgotten what it truly means to lose it. It’s ironic—many say they don’t have the time to watch long-form videos or to read thoughtful essays, yet they’ll sink hours into a marathon of bite-sized clips like it’s nothing. Online, appearance outweighs substance, and performance matters more than truth. Pushing against such a massive tide can often feel pointless because there’s no singular evil mastermind pulling the strings from a dark lair. The infestation is systemic now. The chaos is rooted so deeply into the fabric of society that hopelessness seems to be the only certainty.

But I reject hopelessness. Those who’ve written about this topic (especially Tamara and Gurwinder, who each wrote outstanding pieces on the impact of the attention economy), the ones trying to pull us from a zombified state—these are the people who remind me that the effort is still worth it.

We are waging a war—one for our attention. A war that countless people are still blind to. One that will leave lasting ruins, like the remnants of wars once fought for liberty (and no, I’m not being hyperbolic). What makes this war especially insidious is that even its generals, the very people who built these platforms, refuse to let themselves or their families fight on the frontlines.

As Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president for user growth at Facebook, admitted in 2017:

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and toward each other. I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit.”

What does it say when notable figures in the tech space insulate themselves from the very platforms that keep them rich? They know what their creations are doing to us, and tech won’t stop evolving, so what can we do? How can we fight back? How can we reclaim control over our most precious resource?

We Are Not Powerless

For a few reasons, our fight is not a fair one. We are vulnerable to social approval, and our enemies know it. We seek opportunities of escape from our real lives, and of course, they know this, too. They salivate over the chance to exploit our weaknesses. And in the infinite scroll, we also lose more than time. We lose ourselves as well. In her essay, The Attention Economy Is Making Us Emotionally Poor, Tamara writes:

You are not seen, you are processed, scanned for resonance, repackaged for virality, forgotten as soon as the scroll moves on.

That’s right, we don’t just feel this way online anymore. We now feel it in the real world, too. People scroll past you, even those you know—those who love you. You become just one of the many things battling for their attention, your presence fragile and fleeting.

Honestly, it’s easy to see how the internet and the portals we use to access it have kept us captivated. Things like reading and writing demand cognitive effort. The payoff requires that you put in some work on your end. They’re the mental equivalent of lifting weights. Meanwhile, our phones can consume hours of our lives, leaving us mentally fatigued and emotionally depleted—all with very little to no exertion at all.

And even still…with all of that said, all is not lost. No one person or group is going to topple the empire of time thieves. But our brains aren’t permanently compromised. We can bend back the other way, and that is because focus is a skill. You can strengthen it, nurture it, revive it when it’s gone dull. Our brain’s plasticity lends its hand to this. In other words, the war may be rigged, we may be fighting an uphill battle, but we are not powerless.

I’ve always felt that a to-do list was essential. I like to have a plan for the day, to move from box to box, checking off tasks. But this preoccupation with productivity and “maximizing the day” leans so far into a rejection of presence more times than not. I’ve forgotten how to linger for its own sake. If there’s no end goal, I grow restless. The internet only amplifies this sense of restlessness.

Online, stillness is for the lazy and unmotivated. The ever-present feed whispers: don’t get out-hustled (to be fair, this could just be my algorithm). I am not immune to the whispers. Just one motivational reel can convince me I’m wasting my time sitting still, that presence is just procrastination masquerading as mindfulness.

However, the problem isn’t the message itself, but an inability to give it the proper context. Life isn’t a perfect balance, no matter what anyone says. Sometimes, burnout is inevitable. It’s the price of chasing goals, creating something lasting, or being fully present for someone else. The issue isn’t the extra work; it’s failing to remain present within it. It’s not allowing yourself to linger in even the most intense moments.

You can always reclaim your attention; you can always choose to treat time like the treasure it is. Start by taking long breaks from your phone whenever possible. And when you consume media, choose the kind that demands your focus, like books. Reading forces you to work for the payoff; it nudges you to imagine, to rationalize, to form opinions based on deep engagement, not passive consumption. That kind of effort sparks new ideas and strengthens your ability to think deeply. The same goes for films that require your full attention. Whereas social media and Netflix-exclusive content designed for second-screening don’t challenge us at all—they instead leave us bloated and dulled.

Freedom From the Feed

I usually see the glass as half empty, and this Substack is my way of trying to see the other side, to stay even a little hopeful. I write these words not just for you, but as a reminder to myself.

But of course, hope always comes with its own doubts. Is believing things can get better just idealism? Is it pure fantasy? Am I naive to think I can live a life of contemplation and still pursue what I want? I’m not sure. What I do know is I’m tired of having my time stolen. I’m tired of reaching for my phone the second life gets uncomfortable.

Because true presence—you know, really giving yourself to life and to other people—doesn’t always feel good. That’s what makes it so hard. Still. Something does shift when we step away from the feed for long enough. We may notice the issues we can actually fix. Or we might notice issues we didn’t even know existed. We may show up as better friends, partners, and neighbors. Logging off won’t stop the tide, but it does make us better equipped to ride the wave.

Depending on where you look, it’s easy to think that everything is bleak and that talking about this is pointless. But I know the joy of true focus—of slowing down, refusing to rush, and allowing myself to linger. It’s the closest I feel to being free. Free from all of it. The comparison. The anxiety. The stoked outrage. It’s in these pockets of presence that I feel like an actual person and not a cog in a rotten system.

We are all marching toward the end, our time floating into the ether with each breath we take. Presence doesn’t make us immortal, but it does remind us of our humanity. And remembering who we are, that might be the only real defense we have left.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

It hurts to disappoint someone you care about. So what do so many people do? They suppress who they really are to avoid it. The problem is, those suppressed feelings and thoughts will eventually manifest in one way or another—often impacting the very people we wanted to protect in the first place.

Avoidant liars (something I’ve often been) tell themselves they’re being empathetic when they lie to protect someone's feelings. They convince themselves there's nobility in sticking around when they know they should leave. But this isn't empathy, it's selfish and cowardly.

That's why a parent saying "I'm not mad, I'm disappointed" cuts so deep. Disappointment reveals the gap between who we are and who someone needs us to be. But as we grow and claim agency over our lives, disappointing others may be the closest we ever get to true freedom.

In one of my past relationships, the main issue we had was my need for compartmentalization. That is, sectioning off different parts of my life. My friends, my girlfriend, my family—all went into separate buckets. Each remained separate, rarely interacting with the other. The person who most disliked this was my girlfriend at the time. She told me she felt like an outsider in my life, like I was ashamed of her.

Back then, I didn't have the emotional intelligence or self-awareness to see things from her point of view. Instead, I called her clingy and accused her of trying to manipulate me. Nothing changed, and eventually the relationship fell apart.

I couldn’t be the partner she needed because what she was asking for felt so foreign to me. Dissociating and disconnecting is what men do, no? It took me so long to see how wrong I was—that I was someone living without integrity.

Here's what I missed: compartmentalization doesn't just keep people separate—it fractures your value system. When you're one person with your family, another with friends, and another with your partner, you inevitably start making choices that contradict your deeper beliefs just to maintain those different personas.

This is what I still struggle with to this day, and I see the same thing all around me. True integrity is one of the rarest things you can find nowadays. It’s easier to betray your convictions in the short term, all in the hopes of avoiding conflict. All to appease someone you care about.

However, when we do this, we are merely delaying the pain. For them. For us. Eventually, the pain becomes too much to handle, and as it looks for a way out, it creates a shockwave that leaves, in its wake, broken trust, lost relationships, and the realization that we’ve been living as strangers, even to ourselves.

If you were to ask a group of men if they live with integrity, I doubt any would say no. We all, not just men, like to believe we live with integrity. But it’s rarer than you think, and I don’t blame people for that.

Look at what society teaches us.

Men are told to act with integrity, but to live with integrity literally means to integrate—that is, the opposite of compartmentalizing, which is something men are also asked to do. Integrity means to act from a place of wholeness, to be true to every side of yourself. At the same time, men are encouraged and then praised for learning emotional fragmentation. A man is told to love his neighbor and practice compassion at his church, then be expected to show no mercy in business dealings Monday through Friday—separating his values like he’s doing the laundry.

To be a "real" man is to know how to suppress one’s true self. Self-denial is often all we know. There have been changes to this way of thinking, sure, but not enough.

Being true to yourself and how you feel, despite the immediate pain, takes integrity. But forget what you’ve seen in movies or read in books—living with integrity doesn’t come with a standing ovation. It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, because it requires you to disappoint people you love, time and time again, until the only people left are those who love you for who you truly are.

The ‘White Lie’ Fallacy

Every time you're given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.

—Glennon Doyle, Untamed

This quote hits home because I've lost count of how often I've made choices solely to avoid disappointing someone else. The regret from living this way is almost unbearable.

Integrity was just a nice word until my awareness shifted. Through reading Carl Jung and bell hooks, wholeness became more than a concept—it became a necessity for feeling at home in my own skin.

This lesson hit hardest when I looked at men’s mental health.

The realities are sobering. Men experience depression at similar rates to women but rarely get help. They die by suicide 3 to 4 times more often. They spend their lives performing—not just for women, but for other men as well. Most never experience true intimacy, never get to tell their whole truth to anyone. Instead, they suppress endlessly, treating self-betrayal like a noble sacrifice. But it's not noble—it's just an exhausting, slow death.

The question keeps rattling around in my mind: What can we do? Society values material success and perceived power, encouraging men to choose appearance over authenticity, rewarding hypocrisy while discouraging integrity. A man who lives with true integrity in 2025 is putting a lot on the line.

This struggle extends beyond men. Women also face the pressure to compartmentalize—to be one person at work, another with friends, yet another with family. Every environment rewards the best chameleon.

But we never truly forget our true selves, no matter how many fragments we split ourselves into. You can never fully extinguish the real you. Not fully. The tension between who you are and who you're pretending to be creates constant, low-grade suffering that will eventually demand resolution.

I used to think white lies protected people I cared about. But these lies were just excuses for avoiding tough conversations.

I know it hurts to see the pain in the eyes of someone you love. But the pain that cannibalizes us from the inside— what bell hooks calls “soul murder”— comes when you realize you've only ever lived for other people, to avoid their tears, their disappointment—all while walling off your own pain.

Tiny Transformative Truths

The concept of wholeness might not be foreign to you. You’re probably sick of hearing about it because you know how brutally hard it is to practice. We’ve all watched social media turn authenticity into a business model, seen culture reward people for performing vulnerability instead of actually being vulnerable.

Everything feels like one massive performance.

As someone still struggling to live with integrity, I say: stop waiting for integrity role models. Forget about finding beacons of authenticity out there somewhere. Start with yourself. Your value system is yours alone—not your parents', not society's, yours. Pick one person and tell them one truth you've been hiding. How you really feel about that thing everyone assumes you agree with. What you actually believe spiritually, not what you were raised to say you believe. What you want from your life, especially if it would disappoint the people who think they know you.

Learn about yourself. Why do you do what you do? Why do you believe what you believe? Real conviction requires brutal self-knowledge—not just knowing your opinions, but knowing why they are your opinions.

Living with integrity isn't a single moment of transformation. It's small choices stacked over time. Just as you gradually drifted away from yourself, the journey home happens the same way—gradually and slowly, through one honest conversation, one authentic choice, one moment of disappointing someone else instead of yourself.

If you've decided you're going to do this work, you're already ahead of most people. That decision alone is huge.

The Loneliness and Isolation of Integrity

Once you’ve lifted the mask, how do you resist putting it on again when things get hard? What do you do when someone you love dearly rejects the real you? When decades-old relationships that survived everything else shatter under the weight of your honesty? The fear is a primal one—it’s the terror of social death, of becoming an exile in your own life. All the work of conquering the false self can crumble in a flash. To suggest anyone can simply power through this kind of existential threat is to fundamentally misunderstand what integrity actually costs.

Going against expectations often brings with it loneliness and isolation. When you feel like you’re on an island, flanked by only your values, that’s when the whispers are the loudest:

Is it worth it to lose my friends, family, career, and everything I’ve worked so hard to have? For what? Integrity?

I want to be clear about something. Yes, I am calling for radical authenticity, but integrity isn't a license to be an asshole. Standing in your truth doesn't mean burning every bridge that requires effort to maintain, or retreating into isolation whenever conflict materializes. Real authenticity sometimes means choosing to show up for people even when it's inconvenient. It means learning to disagree without destroying, to set boundaries without building walls.

This kind of discernment is harder than hiding from the world. It requires you to stay engaged when you’d rather withdraw, to love people through their disappointment in your choices. When you choose integrity, the path becomes harder to walk. But if you can get through that phase between breakdown and breakthrough, then that is where the strength to keep moving lies.

Living with integrity is an ongoing process. Sustainable change doesn’t happen overnight. But we can stop telling the little white lies. We can speak up when someone habitually violates our boundaries. The key is small acts of integrity, stacked over time.

As far as we know (religious beliefs aside), this is the only life we get—no do-overs. So, if we refuse to live with integrity, if our values remain afterthoughts, if we continue to avoid the tough choices and conversations, then what kind of life will we create?

The Price You Pay

Anyone who chooses authenticity over acceptance, wholeness over convenience, faces a treacherous climb. The obstacles are real, the losses significant.

Some people will distance themselves; others will vanish completely. Relationships that felt essential will reveal themselves to have been built on your willingness to deny yourself. That loss cuts deep—it's no small thing.

What remains, however, is something nobody can take from you: the knowledge that your actions align with who you truly are. That you stopped lying to hold together something that was never meant to last. That you can finally be who you've always wanted to be—someone who can look in the mirror and be proud of the person looking back, whether anyone chooses to stand beside you or not.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

This is the song that inspired this essay.

Over the last few months, I’ve felt like I’m in limbo.

My days have been blending together, each one resembling the one before it far too often.

In a way, it’s as if I’ve exhausted the current stage of my life. I’ve learned what I needed to learn, and now I need to get to the next level.

But where is the entrance to this next level?

I’ve stalled, and I know I can’t keep living the same way if I’m going to live the life I’m trying to create. I think to myself: I need more. And I hear a response that says: No, you need to give more.

More effort. More love. More attention.

I keep jumping between two extremes.

1. Be more disciplined or

2. Run from the pain and numb yourself

One moment, I am high off life, ready to conquer the day like a modern-day Alexander the Great. The next, the weight in my chest returns with a fury, and all I want to do is crawl into bed and slip into a coma. In this state, not even the things that usually excite me can pull me from the depths of anguish.

So often, I drift through my days like a ghost in my own life. Even more, the knot in my stomach, the constant rumination happening in my mind—it won’t let up.

Something is off.
What is it?
I feel like I'm drowning.
From what?
Everything.

One moment, I am in a flow state, powered by my creative spirit, then I look at everything I’m doing and sense that none of it matters.

Rexx Life Raj, raps in his song “Somewhere:”

When I was grievin', it was heavy, I made it seem weightless

Now I'm on the verge of bein' great and on the brink of breakin'

These lyrics speak to what I’m talking about so poignantly. I feel powerful and fragile all at the same time. The surge to create and build the life I want is strong, and still, I break down several times a day as I am consumed with grief and regret.

Maybe I feel this way because this is the kind of pain I couldn’t experience before. Maybe it’s in the grasp of this unpredictable sorrow that the answer to the question Why should I keep going? is found.

Because I am me, I had to go searching for answers, and what I found changed how I see the entire landscape of mental health.

The Missing Middle

I needed a name for what I was experiencing. Something that wasn't depression, but wasn't thriving either. That's when I came across the concept known as languishing.

Positive psychology describes languishing as a state of stagnation and emptiness hindering motivation and joy in life. It’s a sense of ‘meh’ or ‘blah’ toward your life and the world around you.

Most people’s understanding of mental health misses this middle ground completely. They think of mental health like a single thermometer. There is a hot end (meaning, you’re mentally happy and thriving) and a cold end (you’re depressed, anxious, and mentally ill). In other words, you’re either moving to one end or the other.

Sociologist Corey Keyes rejected this idea. According to Positive Psychology, "contrary to the traditional view, where mental health and mental illness are seen as opposite ends of a single spectrum, Keyes's model proposes two distinct but interrelated continua:"

Put another way, we have two thermometers running at the same time.

Thermometer #1: Mental Illness (Presence or Absence)

• If it’s high, you have clinical depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc.

• If it’s low, you don’t have any diagnosable mental health conditions.

Thermometer #2: Mental Wellbeing (How You’re Thriving)

• If it’s high, you’re flourishing. Meaning, you are engaged in life, purposeful, energetic, connected.

• If it’s low, you’re languishing. You feel stuck, empty…’meh.’

According to Keyes’s model, you can be low on mental illness but also low on mental wellbeing, and many people who fall under this category don’t do anything to get themselves out of this state because they don’t see a problem to address.

Simply put, you can be high-functioning but languishing, have a mental illness but flourish, or you can be low in both or high in both.

Letting Pain Light the Way

As I’ve wrestled with the feeling of languishing, I can’t help but see that the answer lies within the pain I’ve felt.

Pain is a signal. The tears that stream down my face when I sense that I can’t go on are signals.

I wrote about how boys are taught to suppress their emotions, especially anything that would make them appear “weak.” That suppression is responsible for so many men remaining estranged from their own emotions. We latch on to anything that will keep us from facing the pain head-on. Work. Sex. Vices. Social Media. Spending. Anything.

So what happens when you begin to cut off these sources of coping?

The floodgates open.

And therein lies the first beacon of hope, the light that we may not even know we desperately need to see. When the pain becomes too much to handle, and it outweighs the fear of trying something new and stepping out of your comfort zone, discipline, effort, and motivation take care of themselves.

Ultimately, removing all the superficial things I was using to block the downpour of emotions from washing over me was the first step in really seeing what needed to be done. I needed to listen to the pain, not try to escape from it.

Talking and writing about it is easy; living it is a completely different beast.

The distractions and vices whisper for me to return, to give up the painful walk of becoming truly whole. Of undoing the damage and jumping into uncharted waters. In the immediate, it would “feel better” to indulge and go numb for just a bit.

Breaking down and letting the regrets confront me doesn’t feel good, but it’s necessary.

So, I want to look at what it takes to move through languishing and how to make it to the other side. Or at the very least, how to keep going, even when you can’t find a reason to.

The Elixir to Languishing

In his TED talk on the very subject of languishing, author Adam Grant suggests that languishing can be erased through flow, not optimism.

In the presence of flow, rumination cannot breathe because flow keeps you locked in a state of mindfulness and purpose.

When I first decided to write and share my work online, flow states came naturally. I was learning constantly and stepping outside my comfort zone daily. It was a quest—one that would teach me about myself and the world around me.

My life was far from easy, but I had a project that filled me with excitement every morning and night. Those early days of writing online simply wouldn't allow languishing to exist.

Now that I am comfortable with sharing my writing, I ache to step into a new frontier. I feel that I could find the same kind of flow by documenting my life through a different medium—video.

Besides pursuing new creative projects, I'm also finding contentment in small daily wins while completely reframing my relationship with pain. Instead of convincing myself that numbing out serves my mental health, I let the emotions hit me directly. Cry when I need to cry, wipe the tears, and then keep building.

Healing is Hard

How long will this feeling last? Will all this painful work actually be worth it? Self-help gurus love to promise that it will be, but honestly? Life doesn't come with guarantees.

Sometimes, counting your blessings and remaining optimistic aren’t enough. That doesn’t mean doing so is a waste of time, or that they don’t hold any kind of weight. But the work to change our lives requires more than mental exercises.

During the lowest of lows, how does one persist? If there is no target date for the end of the suffering, how does one find the strength to continue? I am still wrestling with these very questions.

No matter how often I am reminded, I still grapple with the reality that healing doesn’t always feel good.

In fact, healing, more times than not, is really really uncomfortable. It’s painful. It’s hard. Returning to the old ways of doing things is always so tempting. The path of least resistance, of comfort, is always whispering like sirens across the sea.

When the whispers get loud, I turn to voices that understood this exact struggle.

I find strength in the teachings of some of the existential philosophers who encouraged us to either create meaning ourselves (Jean-Paul Sartre) or to face the meaningless of the universe valiantly (Albert Camus). Or the Stoics who knew that every setback was a chance to practice virtue, to show what they were made of when life got hard.

Reading the works of those who once felt the same way as I do today and who found it in them, to keep sharing their work while forging the life they wanted to live, helps me deal with the ongoing tension of languishing.

This is what I hold onto: each day, I create who I am through my choices.

As Sartre wrote:

Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.

Tears in My Eyes and a Smile on My Face

Amid the absurdity of progressing one moment, while being smacked with the whiplash of wanting to crawl under a boulder the next, I see a glimmer of peace on the horizon.

Yesterday my spirit was running on tires covered in fix-a-flat, today I could bare-knuckle box a wild boar. Despite the emptiness that certain days bring, something is telling me to keep going—that I am headed in the right direction. I am teetering on the edge—afraid, lonely—and still…I can’t help but think that I’m doing something right.

These might just be the feelings I’ve been keeping at bay for so long. They’ve been here the whole time begging to be acknowledged. Maybe it’s the price I must pay to get to where I want to go.

I don’t know for sure. It typically takes the passing of time to really learn the lesson. But I do know this: I have to meet life head-on, and listen for what it needs from me.

Camus wrote, in The Myth of Sisyphus:

In truth, the way matters but little; the will to arrive suffices.

I hold onto these words as a personal maxim, seeing them as the only self-help I truly need.

Things rarely go as planned because chaos is woven into the fabric of existence. If you decide the only way you'll succeed is if everything goes according to your perfect plan, or if you need the path to be smooth and obstacle-free, then you’ll quit at the first real setback. You’ll fold when life gets messy.

But if you decide from the jump that a curious mind and your inner fortitude will be the only things you rely on, then you can endure it all.

And in the end, you will look back with blood on your knees and mud under your fingernails with a toothy smile. Because you knew from the beginning that it could always go this way. But you also knew that it would never be enough to break you.

I wish you well.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment

This week, my therapist is retiring.

That sentence alone would’ve made 20-year-old me’s head explode if he could read it.

The reason is that talking about my problems has always been a massive hurdle for me. And yet, when I found myself crumbling beyond what I felt I could manage, I finally sought help.

In finding the help I needed, I’ve grown as a person. But I still struggle every single day to appreciate the progress I’ve made. I can’t concentrate on how far I’ve come because I’m so fixated on my failures, or all I have yet to accomplish.

On and on and on, I am shrouded in shame, seemingly incapable of appreciating myself, of ever granting myself any credit.

Well, now that I know I won’t have regular talks with my therapist anymore, I’m forced to reflect on where I was 18 months ago. Since then, I’ve been challenged to view myself and my life experience through a whole new lens.

But how do I internalize this feeling of lucidity for good? How do I turn the inner critic—the one that only speaks the language of shame—to ash?

My default mode has become negative speech. It’s become habitual, and I’m scared that if I can’t find more compassion for myself, then all the progress I’ve made will slip through my fingers, leaving me in irreparable ruin.

Share

The Progress Paradox

So much of life is thinking about problems and then thinking of solutions to those problems.

For some of us, no amount of life experience can ease the anxiety. Even 5 million XP points won’t stop us from imagining armageddon around every corner. Rumination, neurosis, and obsession are all we know. Shame and regret the manacles around our ankles.

Progress doesn’t feel like anything to me anymore. All I can think about is what I’m not doing right, or some far-off goal that I’m hoping will be my salvation.

I’ve spoken with people who are also clawing their way up the mountain, only to realize that they don’t remember a single step they took on their way up.

I know why I struggle with this, but knowing why is not enough.

I feel frozen in time, like I’m in a never-ending fight with myself and some of the same issues. I’m hard on myself, and I just can’t help it. To feel ashamed of myself feels more natural than being confident or proud.

It’s only by sharing these words that I can dig into the center of this internal war. I’m forced to search for true relief—maybe not a perfect solution, but some kind of clarity of spirit.

When we are trying our best but can’t appreciate the progress, we are living in a paradox, blind to progress while grappling with the awareness of that very blindness.

In other words, our greatest strength (deep introspection, living in our minds) is also the main thing keeping us from seeing our growth.

Silent Healing

One of my favorite musical artists, Yeek, sings in his song "If I Could:"

I talk too much
But only in my mind
When these thoughts come out
They don’t come out right

I know all too well what it’s like to live with this kind of mental noise. When I do finally say what’s on my mind, it rarely comes out the way I intended. Each day, my inner dialogue feels more and more like a barrier, the ultimate barricade between me and genuine appreciation for myself.

It makes me wonder: Is progress inherently invisible to a progressive mind?

The push to improve—to be better—is often the very thing that prevents me from acknowledging how far I’ve come. I’ve noticed that many of those who’ve left a mark on humanity were rarely at peace with themselves. Their lives were driven by constant progress, leaving little time to sit back and reflect on what they had achieved. (I think of someone like Franz Kafka, who doubted the worth of his own writing so deeply he asked for it to be destroyed after his death.)

Many, sadly, passed away before they could see how their impact shaped the world. Others simply refused to pause and reflect.

Honestly, I think the mind that drives improvement might be unsuited to fully appreciate said improvement.

At least not for very long.

Anchors in the Chaos

The moments when I do reflect on my progress feel strange, but not in a bad way. It feels like I’m floating. Everything feels quiet. Not externally, but internally.

The self-criticism, the fear of the future, the worries of the present, all stop.

A confident quietude takes over, one that gently nudges me toward compassion and gratitude.

It feels like bliss.

But it’s fragile—fleeting. A peace that slips away the moment my thoughts get loud again. After all, life often feels like walking on a balance beam with two types of silence waiting on either side.

• Silence of Shutdown: depression, overwhelm, numbness, giving up.

• Silence of Arrival: the moment my mind stops antagonizing me and recognizes we are exactly where we need to be.

The silence of arrival reminds me: I’ve made it through before, I’ve never carried anything that truly crushed me, and I figure it out every time—so why would this time be any different?

Through the constant push-pull with my inner critic, one ritual has always been a saving grace: a long walk with nothing to distract me. No music. No podcast. No audiobook. Just the sound of my shoes on the ground and my own voice.

I've always found it hard to question my inner critic or limiting beliefs—at least in my head. But when I’m walking and talking out loud, detaching from judgment becomes easier. I can finally see things from a different perspective. It feels like the relief I need most.

Besides long walks, conversations with others help a lot. The oldheads remind me that I still have so much life ahead of me. Those younger than me remind me how scared I once was, and how much anxiety I had about the future.

These are my anchors. They pull me away from the riptide of my own thoughts and help me see things with more clarity. Ironically, these anchors give me space to finally breathe.

The Architecture of Perspective

We all need our anchors, the rituals or practices that bring us to that quiet place of appreciation for ourselves and all we’ve already accomplished.

The problem is, modern life constantly pulls our attention elsewhere.

But with the help of our anchors, we can build what I like to call an Architecture of Perspective—a kind of distance between us and the inner critic, the kind of distance needed to make sense of all that still lives within the catacombs of our mind.

The distance this perspective gives brings relief. Temporary, sure. But sometimes that’s exactly what we need to keep going. A release from the tension tearing us apart. A momentary break from shame and self-criticism. It’s as if, during that transient moment, the opportunity to sneak in a few steps forward presents itself.

Without zooming out, appreciating our progress is nearly impossible. I don’t think I’ll ever be an expert at zooming out. I think that’s ok. That’s why I have my anchors. My long walks. My writing. Conversations with others.

It is through the gentle pull of these anchors that I gain the perspective necessary to know that I am not living in vain. I am always becoming.

The Most Generous Act

What I’m learning more each day is that, rather than seeing my wiring as a defect, I can see it as an internal course-correcting system (if I choose to see it that way).

The truth is, I care.

I care about being better, about how I live my life, about how I treat or have treated others.

And care is the foundation of all progress.

We're led to believe that progress is about achievement, results, and metrics. But the true engine is caring.

I just want to give back to the world, to feel like I did something with what I've been given. I don't want self-appreciation for its own sake. I want it because my flow state exists in a dimension outside of fighting myself.

That is when I can really give back.

I guess I’m just looking for lasting self-compassion. Because one thing I’ve realized is that when we’re kinder to ourselves, giving love becomes easier. So, appreciation for ourselves truly is one of the most generous things we could do for everyone else.

Enjoying the essays? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more thoughtful, in-depth work like this.

Upgrade to Paid

Or leave a one-time tip—every little bit helps

Your support, whether monetary or simply sharing this essay, means the world to me.

✍🏾 In Case You Missed It:

Leave a comment