I’ve taken an interest in going back over some of my old journals, the really old ones from childhood. You see, at last count, I have over 300 journal books filled with long-forgotten memories from my earliest years on to the present.

I randomly picked a book from the chilly spring of 1976 when I was a blond-haired, freckle-faced 15-year-old about to graduate from the eighth grade. Two of my younger brothers, Donald and Mark, asked me to take them fishing after school in Lake Michigan, about a half mile from our house; a short fifteen-minute walk. The walk was as enjoyable as three brothers could make it. Don joined the bush club three times after I shoved him into neighbor’s hedges, while Mark suffered the indignity of an identity crisis after he asked me, “Joey, why did Mom name me Mark?”

I remember glancing at a bus in thought and coming up with an entirely plausible answer to his honest question; kids can be so naive. “Mark, the day you were born, Mom looked down at her deflated belly and saw a birthmark she never noticed before, so she named you Mark.”

“Really?” He looked intrigued.

“Yes, really.” I winked at Don. “As a matter of fact, if you look at your birth certificate, it says that your full name is Mark on the Stomach Moeller.”

“No, it’s not!” He protested.

“Yeah, it is; ask Mom.”

He forgot to ask, but I have to say, this is the same brother I coaxed into milking my Aunt Karen and Uncle Bob’s goat named Alfalfa the previous summer, which resulted in a cloven hoof print on my unconscious little brother’s forehead for two weeks. Apparently, billygoats don’t care to have their little caprine penises yanked on hot summer days. And yes, I got grounded for 47 years following that prank.

I forgot to mention that my little brothers regarded me as the evil big brother with ogre-like intentions, yet, for reasons known only to younger brothers, they followed me everywhere as though we were tied together with fishing line.”

Back to the lake. We arrived at North Avenue Beach, set up our poles on the pier, hooked our worms, and dropped our lines into the still frigid water. Back then, you either caught lake perch, trout, salmon, smelt, or the dreaded and smelly alewife. Today you’d probably hook an abandoned shopping cart or electric scooter before you caught a perch. And yet I digress.

I preferred fly fishing while my brothers liked to dangle their little legs off the pier and watch their bobbers bob for a nibble. I caught two decent-sized perch that would be suitable for dinner; Don caught an equally delectable lake trout. And Mark, on the stomach, felt completely left out and began to cry until his bobber took a nibble, submerged, and immediately lifted his flagging spirit.

He rose to his feet in nervous anticipation of his catch, firmed his hold on his bamboo fishing pole, and stood patiently, getting ready for the pull that would hook his fish. Then, mayhem ensued as Mark stood; I inadvertently cast my pole as my hook and fly grabbed hold of the hood on my little brother’s hoodie, unsteadied him, and he and his pole pitched headfirst into three feet of ice-cold Lake Michigan with a splash that probably startled fish halfway to Milwaukee.

His screams echoed off the pier to the surrounding beach. Don and I both laughed, and I know what you’re thinking, but no, I was neither an ogre nor an evil big brother, and I jumped into the three feet of water and rescued my freezing little brother. Of course, he blamed me for losing his fish. He swore up and down that I robbed him of a Coho Salmon or a beautiful lake trout, and I let him have that dream. I never told him that when I retrieved his pole, all that was on the hook was one of the dreaded and smelly alewives.

When we got home, I told my mother that Don caught the trout, and Mark caught the perch. I figured I did enough damage that afternoon; why add insult to injury? Besides, the poor little guy was still sore about the permanent hoof mark on his forehead. All in all, I feel my mother chose a good name for him.

Mark eventually figured out that his name had nothing whatsoever to do with a mysterious birthmark on my mother’s stomach. By then, however, the damage had been done. To this day, every time I see him, I have to resist the urge to ask, “Hey, Mark on the Stomach, want to go fishing?”

Brothers never really outgrow childhood.

We just get older while our stories keep us fifteen forever.

And, Happy Birthday, Mom. Your spirit lives in our hearts forever.

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Every now and then, it happens: I get stuck. I cannot think of a damn thing to write. This time, I thought back to something my college English professor at Loyola told us whenever writer’s block occurred.

Dr. Brogno said, “Pick an object—any object at all—describe it in detail, and then make up a story about it. This will reset your block.” I did this last night. I began describing my grandfather’s gold fountain pen. Then, a memory kicked in—not about the pen or my grandfather, since he died when I was two years old and I have only a very faint memory of him.

Instead, my mind transported me back to the schoolyard at St. Gregory’s Grammar School. In my mind’s eye, I saw the formidable Sister Mary Rose, one of three remaining nuns at the school, in a full-body black habit with a white wimple that held up her black veil. Sister Mary Rose scared the crap out of me, especially since she used to hang out on the roof of the school at night to say her prayers with the other full-habit nuns, their habits flapping in the wind. We lived across the street from the school, and I would peek out the windows of our sun parlor and scream whenever I saw them up there.

Mom said they were praying, but I swore they were witches. My older sisters said they were just haunted, furthering my fear that they would come snatch me while I slept.

Sister Rose also happened to be the schoolyard attendant at recess. I swear that woman was seven feet tall, holding the largest brass bell, which she would only allow the smartest girl in the class to ring for her. My nemesis and antagonista was Miss Debbie Ritt. Debbie’s face was the size of a pea, her nose was pugged like a pig’s, and her face seemed to gnarl around her awful nose.

The inner sides of her black eyebrows pointed down in perfect symmetry, as if to say, “Look at my pea face and pig nose.“ To me, Debbie Ritt simply looked like a booger.

Well, one day, while we were playing dodgeball, Debbie walked up to me and told me I looked like Moe Howard from the Three Stooges because of my haircut—a neat “baldy sour,” as we called a crew cut in those days, with a cowlick held up firmly with Lucky Tiger Butch Wax. I didn’t like what she said, even though I loved the Three Stooges. So I said,

“Debbie Ritt, you look like a booger. If you’re not careful, someone is going to pick you and flick your slimy pea face with the pig nose right off their index finger and onto Sister Rose’s forehead.” Well, she didn’t like that and kneed me painfully in my boy parts, sending me to the asphalt in tears.

Sister Rose witnessed the assault on my developing pre-pubescent manhood and marched over to Miss Debbie Ritt. She rang her large brass bell right over Debbie’s head, because nuns could do that back in the day. The entire schoolyard fell silent as Debbie’s stunned pug face scrunched further inward. Then, the most miraculous thing happened: the schoolyard erupted in applause, because apparently, I wasn’t the only one who despised little Debbie.

Sister Rose bent over, the shadow of her veil falling over me like a shroud, and glared into my eyes. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice gravelly like grinding stones. “I’ll live,” I responded with tears in my eyes. “Well then, remember the sting, boy; that penis will cause you far more agony than Debbie’s knee if you’re not careful how you use it.”

Great words of wisdom, I guess. Next time I suffer writer’s block, I’m going to think of my grandfather’s pen. It may have stimulated a silly story, but it’s true and a great memory, even if my boy parts don’t agree.

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Maybe not, but I think I bit off more than I can chew. The title of this essay is a reflection on a quote by Carl Jung I want to figure out. Your help would be appreciated.

When I first read the quote, I thought to myself, God isn’t low; He’s in heaven on high. We should always focus upward if we want to be Godly. I wanted to explain to myself what Jung meant without reading the meaning, so I began writing about the possibilities of where I could find God in lower places.

First, I realized that the ordinary walk of human beings, to which I am obviously included (minus my balding head), usually casts their attention on the higher and more remarkable aspects of our lives. Our success, status, intellectual brilliance, what power we wield, our technology, and confidence in our certainty about just about everything except the regrowth of my hair; that would take a miracle.

Sorry–Poor attempt at humor.

There’s a paradox with Jung’s quote. When using the bible as an example, God appears in places that are not so lofty; He doesn’t appear in Caesar’s palace; no, we find him in a stable. He’s not hanging out among the elite nobles of the time talking about the ancient stock market; no, not at all. Jesus Christ could be found tying a line to a fishing hook with impoverished men that became the apostles or breaking bread with a prostitute or two. He didn’t sit on a throne in some palace; He hung on a cross and died–the ultimate humility and gift to humanity.

I think what Jung said is that we spend an enormous amount of time trying to appear competent (guilty). Moral (I’m working on it.) Successful (Success, what’s that?), and maybe intelligent (I’m smart enough to know that I know nothing). Oh, Socrates, you nasty, nasty little buzzkill, harsh my mellow, why don’t you.

Jung may be telling us that we need to descend into our own shadows to honestly face our dark side, complete with the thorns of envy, pride, fear, resentment, selfishness, and insecurity, and the denial to face truth even when it shines so brightly in front of us, our face sunburns. It is in confronting these specific, thorny aspects of the self that the framework of the Twelve Steps becomes not just a tool for recovery, but a pathway to that very descent.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, at a meeting I run, I talk a lot about truths in the Twelve Steps that I don’t dispute, yet I challenge the narrative that addiction is a “lifelong affliction.” Instead, I view it as a temporary state—a temporary affliction of a mind lacking control that can be transcended. This shift in perspective centers around—

Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. In other words, I can’t do this alone. Who might be down there in the gritty details of the abuse that brought us there? For me, I had to look low; I had to look down at God and trust that He could lift me up and help me to strengthen my mind enough to make my alcohol addiction the temporary affliction of a mind without control. Others who disbelieve in God find other higher powers who work in the same way. Is that help temporary? I don’t think so.

From a Stoic standpoint, Epictetus argued that wisdom begins with admitting our ignorance—humility opens the door that pride slams shut. Similarly, Neville Goddard teaches that we must look deep within our subconscious to find God, using imagination to actively reshape our reality.

These aren’t just abstract ideas; they are the tools we use to clean the basement of our own minds. By looking low and confronting the discarded trash of our past, we engage the work of transformation. This is how I’ve concluded I must find God: by meeting Him in the basement, where He can elevate me to the attic, turning that very trash into the treasures of a new and virtuous life.

I invite you to share your perspective in the comments.

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Another essay.

Anxiety is a thief. Yesterday morning, it tried to steal my peace of mind before the sun had even risen.

A question arose during one of those precious moments I often write about, and it unsettled me. Suddenly, my morning became clouded with an unknown anxiety—a negative wave of emotion. Digging for the source of this sudden dread, I realized I was feeling insecure about my writing. Why aren’t there any comments, criticism, or even likes on the work I produce? These thoughts threw me into a spiral of negative self-commentary.

“I write like crap; my content is boring. Nobody reads my junk. I’ve taken too many days off. I’m done—I’m never writing again.” It was a lot of “blah, blah, and more blah” that snowballed into the dreaded state of “poor me” victimhood. Anyone who knows me knows I abhor a victim mentality. It’s neither productive nor brave, and it reeks strangely of pride.

I’m used to moving through my day as an upbeat person, so this cloud of uncertainty and mild melancholy destroyed my good mood and threw me for a loop.

It was time for action. It was time to self-examine.

I removed all distractions (not difficult, it was, after all, 4 AM). I went out onto my balcony, lay on my chaise lounge with nothing more than the din of pre-sunrise city sounds to calm my anxiety, and closed my eyes. It was then that it occurred to me that I was channeling past insecurities, and they were making themselves known loudly in my precious present moment.

Naturally, I took it to my journal to diagram the problem. I revisited the whining I had allowed into my conscious thoughts and asked myself a few sincere questions:

Do I write like crap? No. Does anyone read my work? Of course they do, and it isn’t “junk”—I write essays from the heart. Do I take too many days off from posting? I take some, but a man needs to rest. Would I ever quit writing? Oh, hell no. It would be less painful to cram bamboo shoots under my fingernails. Writing is my soul.

I analyzed pieces of the past, questioned them, and then ripped the fangs out of those stubborn, illogical insecurities by neutralizing them with reality. Immediately, I felt better and returned to a good mood that carried me through the rest of the day. I changed my perception of reality before the sun had risen.

And yet, good moods have mortal enemies.

It made me think about how important our moods are as we navigate our day around other people. As human beings, we operate on a frequency that transmits our moods to those around us, creating reality. In the office where I work, we have an employee, a politically obsessed news junkie who is always in a bad mood; amazingly (or not), she transmits that negative energy to anyone in the room with her. As a result, our little office of nine souls winds up at each other’s throats in what sounds like a chorus of nine alpine yodelers–I’m not kidding.

Luckily, I have an office with an emotion-proof door I can close to protect my peace. But it makes me wonder: if we all took the time to neutralize our own “buggers” before stepping out into the world, what kind of frequency would we set for those around us? Perhaps we owe it to one another to guard our good moods a little more fiercely–who knows? We may change the reality of the world through positive transmissions.

Stranger things have been known to happen.

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Again, I was brutally reminded about the fragility of life and the pain that comes along with aging from the perspective of reaching a certain advanced age, and how it is not that we necessarily fear our own deaths as much as we have to endure the deaths of our lifelong friends, family, and other people who happen to grace our lives–for the rest of our lives.

Beyond death itself, we also face the difficult task of walking alongside family and friends as they navigate their own fears and struggles with illness.

Death is the last act, the final curtain call of the opera we all perform in this life, and no matter what the crossover entails, Act Finite is an aria performed alone. It’s a sobering and lonely thought, but for the survivors of the opera, who must exit the theater, we leave with the empty feeling of a loss so great that we wonder if recovery is even possible.

Yesterday, the best friend of my best friend sang his last aria from his desk. This morning, it made me think about how I live my life. Bill was a lifelong runner who once ran an entire 26.2-mile marathon from a treadmill. When I heard about this, I thought to myself,

“He’s nuts.”

He wasn’t nuts; he was Bill, and Bill loved to run. Some might imagine that being an athlete offers immunity, but when the inevitable end arrives—unannounced and remarkably intrusive—we have no choice but to open the door. It is a harsh reality, one that strips away the illusion of control, whether we are dealing with heart failure or the insidious creep of disease.

One of the profound drawbacks to living a long life is the inevitable role of witness, watching as loved ones succumb to illness and eventual death. This weekend, the weight of that reality felt particularly heavy when my sister shared that her husband—my brother-in-law—was recently diagnosed with bladder cancer. Her news comes while my other sister continues a brave, ongoing fight against the disease, a struggle I know all too well after my own encounter with the “C monster” five years ago.

These shared battles form a somber thread through our family history, reminding us that no one is exempt.

It was during that time that I realized how precious life truly is, and what matters most to me during my fight and afterward is that I cannot take a single moment of the remainder of my life for granted. Every blessed moment counts. Those moments are found in the moment, and I try hard never to reflect on facets of my often dubious past–I’m a flawed human being–and focus on what I’m doing in the now, with a little spice called hope thrown in for a bright future because the past sang its aria, and the future is a gift from the present moment, if we’re so blessed.

Within the athletic community, we often harbor a quiet belief that our fitness grants us immunity from this final aria, but that is a gambler’s foolish bet. The suddenness of Bill’s passing serves as a stark reminder that the music can end even in mid-stride; he was as unaware of his heart’s fragility as I once was of the hidden growth within me. Whether it is a sudden cardiac event or the insidious creep of disease, these health issues arrive unwanted, proving that even the strongest among us are ultimately subject to the same finite score.

I am blessed with the belief that this life isn’t a final aria, but merely an intermission between this stage and the next. As I move forward, I find comfort in imagining that my best friend’s best friend is now running a marathon along a heavenly stream around the Pearly Gates. And Bill, if you’re listening—running a marathon on a treadmill was always just a bit odd, but I hope you finally have the open road you deserve.

Rest in Peace, buddy.

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Oak Tree: Dulcey Lima, Unsplash.

I got to thinking, and thank God for that. It’s been a couple of days without writing (I needed a break), and I finally decided my lunch break was over. Honestly, I listened to a podcast about AI writing and how it is destroying writers’ passion to write by other would-be writers using the technology to generate drafts.

Fear comes in many forms, and what is a writer to do if he’s afraid to write? Well, the easy answer is to write anyway. That’s just what I’m doing.

You see, I listened to another podcast about writing essays while also reading a new book I purchased called The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges. I’m only a couple of chapters into the book, so I won’t comment much on what I’ve read so far, only to say that I’m enjoying it.

What do essay writing and The Intellectual Life have in common? Well, the word essay comes from the French word essai, meaning attempt, trial, or test. The French word comes from the verb essayer, meaning to try or to attempt. Going back further, it traces to the Late Latin: exagium: a weighing, examination, or act of weighing, or putting something on a scale and testing it.

My iteration would then be that writing an essay is a way to test a theory we may hold. By putting that theory on paper, writing about it, and scrutinizing it in words, we can see whether it truly makes sense. There would be no right or wrong answers, just a writer examining his or her thoughts and coming to a conclusion. As much as I took a break from public writing, I never take a break from my journal, and that is a personal law I hold dear to my heart.

In The Intellectual Life, Sertillanges quotes an unnamed source for the phrase, and I paraphrase it: “If you want to see a tree grow big, plant it small, as in a seedling, and watch it grow into a mighty oak. I may have exaggerated, but you get the point.

In terms of essay writing, it made me think about how often I want to write about multiple topics in a single essay and become overwhelmed by unifying the thoughts into a single piece, when what I should be doing is taking one thought, the seedling, writing an essay on it, and then moving on to the next, as I do when I write in my journal.

If I stick to that one-thought-at-a-time approach, great prose may happen.

Is then a journal entry an essay? I think so. I take a thought, an event, a person, or any experience, and then write about it. I question it, explore its parts, think about it, and ultimately give a conclusion or answer to whatever I wrote. Most of the essays I’ve written and published began in my journal, which also led me to research whether what I’d written was true or simply an opinion based on personal bias, also known as conjecture.

There’s enough conjecture in this world, and I’m not always right, so I leave my biases to myself and prefer to write essays on topics I can prove truthfully, rather than sounding like an online dilettante spreading fear and misinformation. A true expert understands the limits of his knowledge.

A dilettante often speaks as though no limits exist. Sound familiar? Humility works best for me when I prove my biases wrong, admit my error in thought, and then write an essay about it. Since good is the brother of truth and honesty, two horns on the same goat, I’ll take the sting of being wrong over the stubborn satisfaction of being blissfully, confidently, and completely mistaken.

Therefore, this essay—informed by a few podcasts, a new book, and the quiet records of my journal—has given me a renewed appreciation for the craft. AI was not needed; these thoughts are, and remain, my own.

When was the last time you wrote something down just to see what you actually thought, rather than to see what others might think of it? It’s liberating; the truth shall set us free.

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Every relapse of insanity. Insert insanity’s definition of choice, be it alcohol, drugs, fear, anger, or any debilitating irrational thought that begins with negative internal dialogue. With me, it’s two voices vying for attention. The loudest is usually the negative one, screaming from the mountaintop about how I should react to an internal or external emotional tempest.

The quiet voice, the me inside of me who happens to be rational, introspective, and the white angelic counterpoint to Mr. Doom and Gloom, has taught himself a very important lesson.

Stuff a tennis ball into the mouth of Mr. D and G, silence him with reason and intellect, thusly defanging the monster before he talks me into an emotional abyss I will later regret.

I like to briefly imagine what my life would be like if I engaged with the negative before imagining the end result of taking the high road and not giving in to the temptations of doom and gloom. No drugs or alcohol, no fears, anger, or debilitating irrational thoughts to sully the prospect of my bright future.

Without those deadly sins, I imagine I’m living in a bright future, and manifest that promise. As I love to say:

Energy flows where focus goes.

For sobriety’s newcomer, remember: Every relapse begins as that same internal conversational struggle before it becomes an action. It’s best to shut down the conversation before that happens.

I have a bunch of tennis balls at my disposal; they are free to all.

The first one goes by the name: Relax. Take a couple of deep breaths, settle down, and then prepare for action.

The action is simple; the method entails the employment of the conscience. Engage the internal dialogue that is telling you that life is tough and you deserve a drink or drug because the day was shitty and life is so damn unfair. That voice is not only negative but also the “poor me” victim that lurks deep inside each of us. Defang him with your inner voice of reason and a vision you create in your conscience of you living the life of a sober person today, tomorrow, and even a decade from now, because in your mind you’re now a person who takes charge through action and strikes back at the assassin of a bright future.

The second tennis ball in your kit is labeled “Seek Support.” When the internal dialogue gets too loud, reach into the bag for others’ perspectives. Call your sponsor, a sober, understanding friend, or pick up your copy of the Twelve Steps, and occupy your conscience with sober thoughts that carry you through those moments of weakness. You’re not alone; we all have them.

The third tennis ball in the kit—and my personal favorite—is “Recognize what fear is.” Fear is the emotion that destroys creativity’s potential. Imagine if Thomas Edison were afraid of electricity. I shudder to think. Fear is also the negative emotion that destroys the “I am” ethos. How much better is I am courageous and brave enough to overcome this crisis, than it is to say, I am an emotional sissy afraid of everything?

There’s enough of that all around us.

It’s not wrong to imagine yourself as a titan of good intentions: a sponsor to your dreams and aspirations, a person of good conscience who envisions a future that looks bright, and the assassin of the saboteur who wishes to make us afraid of our own shadows before declaring a victory over nothing as we stare at an empty bottle of Maker’s with 90 proof breath and tears in our eyes.

Now, imagine the endgame of your bright future; once the critic is silenced, the path to that future is finally clear, and your new life begins to materialize like the miracle it is.

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Some within the sober community have called me a heretic.

Why?

I believe in the power of consciousness and human agency. As creative beings, we manifest our desires by setting intentions and acting as if they have already been realized. Mark 11:24 captures this principle perfectly:

“Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received, and it will be yours.”

This is powerful stuff. Many addicts believe they are permanently broken or diseased, perpetually one resentment away from a relapse. They’ve been told this. But what if we flipped the script? What if we believed we were not victims of a lifelong “mind allergy,” but simply of a destructive internal narrative?

I am most successful when I imagine myself as a sober, productive member of society. This endgame reveals alcohol for what it is: poison. I don’t want it, I don’t like it, and it no longer tempts me.

Alcohol is as destructive to the mind as it is to the body.

I feel tremendous gratitude for the Twelve Steps; they provided the essential stability and clarity I needed to uncover why alcohol became a shroud for my past. Unlike the traditional, external Higher Power often cited in recovery, I found that my own conscious mind was the ultimate force for change. This foundation acted as my mental prosthetic and my initial higher power, eventually anchoring me until a deeper realization could emerge:

Self-empowerment.

The Steps cleared the road for philosophical study, leading me to realize how little credence we give to our conscious and subconscious minds. We have the power to influence our subconscious and affect real change by consciously envisioning exactly who we want to be.

When the clouds part, hope springs eternal—yet hope must be an action word if it is to yield results.

If I declare I am a broken addict with an allergy to substances, I settle for a life of hoping for change without ever taking action; I will always remain broken. On the flip side, if I believe that I am more powerful than my temporary defects, I can envision a life as a sober, productive member of society. By holding that vision as if it has already manifested, I awaken to a new life in and of action.

I begin to recover from the old ways that would eventually destroy me. Ultimately, I manifest a new reality, one where my conscious mind becomes the higher power it was always meant to be.

In Genesis 1:26-27, God says:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created him; male and female created them.”

If we are made in that image, then imagination, conscience, and creative thought are not trivial talking points. They allow us to envision our healthy selves and guide our internal speech to manifest a life free from addiction and other limitations. With intent, critical thinking, and imagination, nothing of the mind is impossible.

I believe we can be our own higher power. God’s design makes it so. What else can we do with that power? Stay tuned.

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The old captain has heard it before: men shouting from taverns, merchants selling fear, crowds stirred into panic by voices that grow richer with every wave of confusion. He knows that not every roar is a warning. Some roars are performances, and some performances are traps.

A sailor who wants to keep his ship steady must learn the difference between truth and noise. He cannot hand the wheel to every frightened voice, every angry crowd, or every man selling tickets to the storm. The sea has enough real danger without inventing more for entertainment.

So tonight, let me step away from the manufactured roar. Let me remember that my neighbor is not my enemy simply because someone with a microphone told me so. Let me seek honesty, critical thinking, logic, humility, and the quiet courage to remain sane in an age that profits from agitation.

Meditation:

Lord, guard the harbor of my mind.
Teach me to recognize truth without hatred.
Let me refuse the roar when it is meant to divide me.
And before sleep takes the wheel, return me to calm, reason, and the sunshine of truth.

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My Share.

Reflecting on my share yesterday and rereading it last night, I came to an unsettling conclusion: the American people are being trained to hate one another, and the media is one of the chief architects of this division. This is not just a political rift; it is a profound exploitation of Social Identity Theory. The media understands we are biologically wired for us vs. them tribalism and has mastered the art of turning our innate need for belonging into a weapon of mass division.

This is not a partisan problem—it is a shared human vulnerability, manufactured for profit and power through the availability heuristic. The media does not profit by showcasing decent neighbors raising children, paying bills, or helping their elderly parents; that is far too ordinary. Instead, they flood our feeds with the loudest voices from the fringes. Because these extreme examples are so vivid and easily recalled, our brains trick us into believing they represent the majority, rather than the statistical outliers they truly are.

Producers seek out the most performative characters—the flag-waving MAGA Republicans in Uncle Sam pants and the blue-haired liberal Democrats dressed in frog costumes—hand them microphones, and present them as the true faces of half the country. It is a performance that works because it bypasses logic and strikes the gut. As the media lions roar, facts are traded for clicks, and our perception of reality is systematically distorted for the sake of engagement metrics.

The tragedy is that most Americans have far more in common with each other than with the billionaire power elites who profit regardless of the winner.

We witness the banality of evil in real-time. This system persists not because of mustache-twirling villains in smoke-filled rooms, but because thousands of ordinary people simply follow the script—producers, algorithms, and users alike—all participating in a profitable cycle of outrage without ever questioning the cumulative harm.

We have been herded into what French philosopher Michel Foucault might call a digital panopticon. These are not just ideological pens; they are cages where we have been trained to police one another. We watch our neighbors for signs of heresy, ready to pounce on any thought that doesn’t align with the curated narrative of our respective sides.

We call this fence freedom while we voluntarily guard the perimeter of our own intellectual prisons.

We are told to see our neighbor as the enemy, while those selling tickets to the fight count the money. Where is the honesty? Where is the critical thinking, the logic, or the humility to admit that perhaps the other side is not entirely evil and our side is not entirely pure? We have been herded into ideological pens and fed the Kool-Aid, taught to call the fence freedom and democracy, and the Kool-Aid healthy and sweet.

When we set the rage aside, we find that what most people really care about is not ideological warfare. Most people care about providing for their families, keeping food on the table, finding decent work, staying healthy, protecting their children, and living with some measure of peace.

Most people are not extremists; we are simply exhausted. We are tired of being manipulated, intellectually insulted, and afraid—tired of having our attention hijacked by professional outrage merchants.

Maybe waking up begins with refusing to roar on command. Maybe it begins with turning down the volume, asking better questions, and remembering that sanity is contagious, too.

If hatred can spread, so can calm. If rage can be manufactured, so can reason. And if we can be divided by theater, perhaps we can be reunited by the sunshine of truth.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

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The old captain has learned that not every distant light deserves his attention. Some lights guide a vessel home, while others are only tavern windows on the shore, full of noise, argument, and men pretending to know the weather by shouting at the clouds.

A sailor who spends too long listening to every voice from the docks will forget the sound of the sea beneath him. He will mistake commotion for wisdom, rumor for truth, and theater for life. The world will always have performers willing to sell fear by the barrel, but a steady man must decide what he allows aboard his ship.

So tonight, let me lower the curtain on the noise I do not need. Let me return my attention to the real things: breath, prayer, friendship, work well done, a quiet room, a clean conscience, and the stars that do not argue for applause. Let me remember that peace is not found by winning every debate, but by refusing to hand my soul to every passing storm.

Meditation:

Lord, help me guard the harbor of my mind.
Teach me to distinguish between warning and noise.
Let me leave the theater when the actors begin to shout.
And guide me back to what is real before sleep takes the wheel.

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I did it to myself again. Having finished my scheduled tasks at work with a few hours of idle time left, I dove into the dreaded world of YouTube politics, followed by a few check-ins on X. Earlier yesterday morning, a colleague had shared something she heard on the news, and since I avoid morning media as a general rule, I thought I would catch up on what I had missed.

That was my first mistake.

The thing I know about political media is that whatever you believe, you'll find it validated somewhere. If you believe the world is ending, someone has a video for that. If you believe the other side is evil, stupid, deranged, corrupt, dangerous, or secretly plotting to replace your lawn furniture with government-issued compost bins, there is an influencer with a thumbnail, a shocked facial expression, and a promo code ready to confirm your suspicions.

I checked influencers and mainstream media on both sides of the political divide, and after my brain nearly exploded, I was left with one conviction: all media, all political influencers, and everything the professional “theys” of this world tell us is, at least in large part, pure theater.

Not only that, it is a Shakespearean tragedy designed to keep us divided, distracted, suspicious, agitated, and emotionally discontented. We are not merely being informed. We are being activated. We are being poked, prodded, frightened, flattered, manipulated, and sorted into teams that can be marketed more efficiently.

Why do they do this?

One fellow on YouTube gave a heartbreaking account—and by heartbreaking, I mean not heartbreaking at all—of how the platform shadow-banned him and demonetized his show, which naturally led to the portion of the broadcast where he asked for money. Others were selling merchandise while demonizing the “other side,” which is a nice business model if you can get it. First, convince people that the world is on fire. Then sell them a hat.

In frustration, I shut down my computer, realizing that none of this is healthy for the delicate sensibilities of the gray matter between my ears.

Why? Why? And more, why?

I don’t know the answer to that triple question. Trying to understand the full machinery behind political media would be like taking apart a tuba, identifying every piece, and assuming I could now play in the Chicago Symphony. Knowing the parts does not mean I understand the music. Knowing the incentives does not mean I can fix the orchestra.

But a thought occurred to me: if these media performances are theater, then much of this theater is fiction. It may contain facts, but facts can be arranged into fiction when they are presented without proportion, humility, context, or mercy. A true detail can still be used to create a false emotional reality. A single event can be inflated into an apocalypse. A single fool can be held up as the ambassador of an entire political tribe. And a single outrage can be polished, packaged, and served as proof that civilization is finished by Thursday.

This is where metaphysical writer and lecturer Neville Goddard came to mind. Goddard wrote, “An assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact.” He was writing about consciousness, imagination, and the creative power of assumption, but the line applies beautifully to the world of media consumption. If I assume all day long that everyone is angry, corrupt, stupid, dangerous, or out to get me, that assumption begins to harden into my experience of the world. It may not make the assumption objectively true, but it certainly makes it psychologically real.

And that, my friends, is the trap.

Theater becomes reality when I give it my attention long enough. Political entertainment becomes my mood. Somebody else’s outrage becomes my blood pressure. A stranger’s monologue becomes the atmosphere of my soul. I begin the day as a man with coffee, work, books, friends, family, faith, exercise, and a perfectly usable brain, and by noon, I am mentally living inside a badly lit cable-news panel where everyone is yelling, and no one is listening.

If my conscience is Godlike, then why am I flirting with the devil?

And then another thought occurred to me. What if I simply abandoned the theater for good and focused on what is real?

My family is real; the people in my life are real; the unread books on my extensive bookshelves are real; my fellow athletic friends working out on the beach or at the gym are real; so are the trees and birds in the park and Lake Michigan. These things don’t need monetization to matter. They exist independently of comment sections, thumbnails, or political angles, waiting simply to be noticed.

They represent real life.

Metaphysical writer and lecturer Neville Goddard taught, “Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.” I find practical wisdom in those words: I want to assume the feeling of peace and act accordingly—to be sane, grounded, and awake before reaching for the glowing rectangle that makes me none of those things but only nuttier than a bag of walnuts.

Peace is incompatible with rehearsing outrage. Clarity cannot coexist with a steady diet of suspicion. If I want to live in reality, I must stop buying tickets to a show that relies on my agitation.

Ultimately, the only winning move in this scripted drama is to stop playing the audience. The digital landscape trades our peace for controversy and the hollow satisfaction of feeling informed while becoming unwell. Being informed and being inflamed are not the same thing; there is a profound difference between paying attention and being harvested for it.

By disengaging, I’m reclaiming my attention. I want to give more of my mind to family, faith, books, work, and silence. I want to live less as a spectator of chaos and more as a participant in grace.

The theater will surely continue its run.

But from now on, my seat will be empty.

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A man can sail for years under a false flag. He can call silence peace, surrender loyalty, compliance love, and fear wisdom. He can tell himself the old story so many times that it becomes familiar enough to feel like the truth.

But the soul knows.

It waits beneath the noise, beneath the excuses, beneath the carefully arranged explanations, holding the one thing a man must finally face if he ever hopes to be free.

Truth does not always arrive gently. Sometimes it comes like the weather. Sometimes it breaks across the bow and soaks the deck. Sometimes it shows a man where he drifted, where he surrendered too much, where he mistook survival for living.

But truth, once welcomed, does not come to destroy him. It comes to return him to himself.

So tonight, before sleep takes the wheel, let us give thanks for the truths we are finally strong enough to name. Not every truth belongs in the public square. Not every wound needs an audience. But every soul needs a private altar where it can stop lying to itself.

Meditation:

Dear Lord, give me the courage to live in truth.

Help me release the stories that kept me small.

Teach me to protect others without abandoning myself.

And when morning comes, may I walk freely in the light of what I finally know.

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Yesterday, I wrote in my journal about a woman I met at an AA meeting. She shared a tragic story from her past and explained how the simple act of sharing it with others lightened her perspective. In essence, she turned to honesty and lessened her load. Her honesty set her on an attainable path to freedom.

This dynamic has led me to believe that the saying “misery loves company” is more than a tongue-in-cheek comment; it is a powerful tool for overcoming personal tragedy. Sharing honestly with others is one reason groups like Alcoholics Anonymous work for so many people.

The truth shall indeed set you free.

This reminds me of my own journey with alcohol addiction and how vital it was for me to be truthful with myself. I had to examine how and why I felt compelled to use alcohol as a way to hide from certain realities in my past, as well as recently discovered realities in my current life.

And I must be brutally honest here.

It’s no secret to any of my friends in the program that I drank to hide the stigma I felt from having an abusive stepfather. I’ve shared this reality at meetings and in my journal, and I’ve written about it in my essays several times. But was that all? Other than an unfortunate past with a physically and mentally abusive stepfather, were there other things I was hiding from?

Listening to that woman’s rigorous honesty on Friday night forced me to confront a gap in my own narrative. If she could find the courage to voice such heart-wrenching truths about her past, then I owed it to my sobriety to look beyond my standard explanations. I have long used my stepfather’s shadow to explain my drinking, but he had been gone for thirty years. I had to ask myself: what was I still running from at forty-eight that kept me drinking until delirium?

The answer was not only in my childhood. It was also in a second, quieter structure of control that shaped much of my adulthood. This second figure entered my life in my early twenties—coming in like a lamb, offering the stability I craved, only to exit like a lion upon his death. While I will not reveal his name out of respect for those he left behind, I must acknowledge the immense psychological weight he exerted over me, dictating my actions, my thoughts, and eventually, my very beliefs.

Having been controlled in my earliest years by my stepfather, I had no training in how to resist another force of psychological control, especially when he appeared bearing gifts, high intelligence, and other qualities I admired. In essence, I sacrificed my life for what I thought might be a better one, but it ultimately rendered me a spectator in a life that was no longer mine.

The hard truth is that I did not know how to advocate for myself. I mistook surrender for loyalty, silence for peace, and compliance for love.

The whole truth involves many people, some of whom I love dearly. To reveal everything would hurt them and might not solve anything anyway, so I must remain quiet to protect them, but say this much:

What they know and what I know exist in two different realities.

It took sixteen years of sobriety and the truth laid bare by a woman’s honesty to make me realize a difficult fact: I spent a large portion of my life as a coward. It is a hard truth to accept, yet essential if I am to know true freedom. Furthermore, writing almost daily about Stoic philosophy, self-awareness, and gratitude—without actually practicing what I write—made me realize I was courting another existential crisis. I was setting myself up to be a hypocrite, the type of person I will never be again.

What I repeatedly focus on becomes familiar; therefore, what becomes familiar shapes my habits and my reality. I wish to focus on truth for the rest of my life; I want it to be not only familiar, but practiced freely. Why?

For the first time in my life, I finally feel free and would like to enjoy that for a while. For that, I am grateful.

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The voice within.

Every sailor carries one. Some voices arrive sharpened by rage, trained by fear, or poisoned by old resentment. Some speak in gossip, some in panic, some in accusation, and some in the weary language of wounds that have never been allowed to tell the truth.

But there is another voice, too.

It is quieter, steadier, and harder to hear when the deck is noisy. It does not shout. It does not flatter. It does not demand revenge or pretend that evil is harmless. It speaks with the gravity of conscience, the tenderness of mercy, and the patience of God.

A man must learn which voice is trying to steer his ship.

So tonight, before sleep takes the wheel, let us lay down the borrowed rage, the careless gossip, the old accusations, and the burdens no soul should have been forced to carry alone. Let us remember that silence is not emptiness. It is the harbor where the true voice can finally be heard.

Meditation:

Dear Lord, teach me to recognize the voice that leads me home.

Guard my mind from rage disguised as justice and fear disguised as wisdom.

Let my conscience speak clearly, but gently.

And when morning comes, may I follow the voice that points toward truth, mercy, courage, and You.

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Yesterday, I had several conversations and interactions with different people, all of whom seemed to express different relationships with their conscience, that inner voice whose volume rises and falls depending on what we feed it, what we focus on, and what we allow to take up residence in our minds. By the close of the day, I had to write it all down in my journal to make sense of it, and one phrase kept returning to me:

Energy flows where focus goes.

Conversation A began with a neighbor down in the garage of my building. She trapped me near my car and began raving about politics, most notably her rage against the President of the United States after watching something on the morning news about Iran. I had to set a boundary. I don’t talk politics in the morning, and I especially don’t allow someone else’s emotional weather system to blow into my day before I’ve had a chance to protect my own peace, so I said, “Please stop. I cannot take part in your rage; it’ll ruin my day.”

She didn’t like that and began yelling at me.

Her inner voice seemed angry and unhinged, or at the very least trained by outrage, fear, and whatever panic machine she had allowed into her head before breakfast, so I walked away.

Conversation B happened with a friend at Starbucks, where else? He mentioned that he had just finished reading a book about intellectualizing our emotional responses by examining the inner voice that reacts before we do. Random, right? We were sitting outside in the sunshine when a large, overweight woman looked at us and said, “Good morning.” My friend then told me that, in the past, he had been so insecure about his own weight that the voice inside his head would have prevented him from even saying hello in return to anyone who happened to be overweight.

That confession stayed with me.

His inner voice had not vanished, but it had evolved. It had become aware of itself. It had moved from insecurity to recognition, from judgment to understanding, from reflex to reflection. That is no small thing. A man who can hear his own inner voice clearly enough to question it is already on the road to freedom.

Later at work, the ambient office chatter consisted of negative gossip about coworkers who were not present. I wrote about this last week, and my view remains the same: if you cannot say it to someone’s face, don’t say it at all. Gossip may look harmless because it often arrives dressed as entertainment, bonding, or “just venting,” but I’ve come to believe it sullies the inner life. It trains the voice inside our heads to judge, sneer, exaggerate, and grow comfortable with cowardice.

I didn’t want to let their gossip sully the integrity of my inner voice, so I followed my own advice, stayed silent, finished my work, and went home early. Protecting that internal space became my priority for the afternoon.

Carrying that commitment to integrity from the workplace into my personal life, I then went on to lead an AA meeting close to home. The meeting is called “Wild Card,” and I’ve been leading it for fifteen years. It is a space defined by a different kind of sharing, one rooted in honesty rather than hearsay. Attendees are issued a card with a topic printed on it and invited to share their relationship with that topic. As I designed this meeting to be the only crosstalk-friendly meeting I’m aware of in Chicago, it is unique in that everyone is allowed to share their personal experience with each other’s topics following their share.

One attendee’s card read:

Are you carrying a resentment?

This woman then went on to tell one of the most heartbreaking stories I have ever heard at an AA meeting, and I’ve been to thousands of them. She said that yes, she carried a massive resentment against her father, who, in a fit of drug-induced rage, shot and killed her mother and brother, then shot her and left her for dead. She went on to say that her therapist told her she had to forgive her father if she ever wanted peace in her life.

My heart skipped a beat when she finished.

Maybe I was wrong, and I pray I was not careless, but I looked at her and said that I did not believe anyone standing outside that wound had the right to demand forgiveness from the person who survived it. Forgiveness may be divine, but it cannot be forced into a human being by a slogan, a textbook, or therapeutic impatience. It cannot be demanded on another person’s timetable, and it certainly cannot be used as a spiritual club against someone who is still trying to breathe beneath the weight of evil.

Yes, to err may be human and to forgive divine, but this was not a cheating spouse, a dishonest friend, or some kid lying about his dog eating his homework. This was a pure act of evil. And when we speak about evil at that level, we need to be very careful not to confuse forgiveness with denial, reconciliation, emotional amnesia, or pretending the wound never happened.

I could never forgive Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, or countless other murderers who inflicted evil on the world, and I would never presume to tell a survivor of such intimate horror that peace depends upon offering moral absolution to the man who murdered her family. Perhaps one day, through God’s grace and in her own time, she may come to some form of release that frees her from being chained to him forever. But that release belongs to her, to God, and to time.

It does not belong to a therapist with a stopwatch.

As a matter of fact, I suggested that maybe, for her own sake, she might begin by changing her inner dialogue, forgiving herself for believing she had failed spiritually because she could not forgive the unforgivable on command. Maybe she needed to hear that her inability to offer forgiveness did not make her defective, bitter, or spiritually inferior.

Maybe she needed someone to say that trauma cannot be rushed into a spiritual slogan.

The comments around the room included other experiences with abuse, resentment, grief, and survival. The room grew deeply quiet, the kind of silence that feels almost restorative because everyone understands that something sacred and terrible has just been placed in the center of the room.

After the meeting concluded, she told me she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

I watched her face soften as she spoke. She did not have an immediate answer, and no one should have expected one. A wound like that does not close because a room full of people nods sympathetically, nor does it vanish because someone finds the right sentence at the right moment. She has a long road ahead of her, and therapy may very well be part of that road, but maybe the first step toward peace was not forgiveness. Maybe the first step was permission to stop condemning herself for not being able to perform forgiveness at the flip of a coin.

Sometimes the path to peace does not begin with forgiveness. Sometimes it begins with the permission to tell the truth.

That night reminded me that even holy people have known spiritual darkness. Mother Teresa wrote of her own long night and her painful sense of God’s absence, and yet she continued to serve, pray, love, and show up. Her example suggests that suffering does not always come with clean answers, and faith does not always arrive as warm consolation. Sometimes faith is simply the decision to remain present in the dark, keeping one small candle burning even when the inner voice says there is no light at all.

As I reflected on our shared humanity, I realized that my own inner voice had been tested throughout the day—challenged by neighborly rage, refined by a friend’s self-awareness, tempted by office gossip, and finally humbled by suffering so profound that ordinary advice collapsed beneath it. I kept that woman in my prayers, not because I had solved anything for her, but because she had trusted us with a truth almost too heavy to carry. Her story served as a final, stark reminder:

Energy flows where focus goes.

If we focus on rage or gossip, our inner voice becomes small and imprisoned. But if we focus on truth, mercy, and silence, that voice becomes a compass. The great work of a human life is learning to discern who is speaking inside us before we allow that voice to lead.

Only then, on our best days, does that voice truly become our conscience.

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He knows how quickly a calm morning can turn. One moment, the sea is smooth, the coffee is warm, and the chart lies open on the table. Next, some hidden crack below deck announces itself with a violence no man saw coming.

Life is like that sometimes. We sail along thinking the ship is sound, only to discover that one small fracture has been waiting in the dark, ready to remind us that control is often more illusion than possession.

But pain, as unwelcome as it is, has a strange way of sharpening gratitude. When it leaves, even ordinary peace feels like mercy. A quiet jaw, a clean pillow, a cup of coffee, a morning without agony—these become blessings large enough to kneel over.

So tonight, before sleep takes the wheel, let us give thanks for the pains that passed, the help that arrived, the hands that knew what to do, and the strange grace of surviving another day we did not get to command and a tooth well conquered.

Meditation:

Dear Lord, thank You for relief when it finally comes.

Thank You for ordinary mornings we too often overlook.

Teach me to meet sudden trouble without losing my soul.

And when morning comes, may I receive the first sip of coffee like a sacrament.

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I had to say goodbye to an old friend yesterday. He cried out from the back of my big mouth in a voice made of pure pain, radiating from my rear-most upper molar into every respectable region of my body.

I woke up Monday morning like any other day. I turned on the coffee, fetched my mug, sat down at my rolltop to write in my journal, and that first sip of Juan Valdez’s special brew passed over my molar and the resulting pain nearly threw me unconscious.

What the hell was that? I thought to myself through watering eyes.

There’s pain, and then there’s tooth pain. It makes your ears ache, your eyes water. It felt like the kind of pain that makes a man consider tying one end of a string to the tooth, the other to a doorknob, and letting a really bad judgment handle the rest. I grabbed my little flashlight, went to the bathroom mirror, and shone it on the tooth. Nothing appeared wrong, but now the pain had become constant.

I’m a morning shower kind of a guy, so when I jumped in under the water, I positioned my face upward and allowed the cool water to flow into my mouth, and I was confronted with yet another searing shock of pain. This time, it shot down as far as my toes, and I’m not kidding. It was a whole-body pain that caused me to scream out loud.

Later, I arrived at work, fetched another cup of coffee, and attempted to sip it from the other side of my mouth. Bad idea, see above for the results of such a foolish endeavor.

Immediately, I remembered that we have a dentist’s office in the same commercial space as ours, so I walked quickly down the hall, only to find a sign on the door that read “On vacation until June 30th.”

Just my luck.

I knew without a doubt that something had to be done. With this kind of pain, I could neither eat nor drink water. I would wither into a painful mass of pudding within days. This sadistic tooth had to come out, and it had to come out today.

I went online and searched for local dentists and found one two blocks away. I could have walked, but even the pounding of my feet sent sears of pain into my ears, so I drove over. When I walked into the dental office, the woman took one look at my face and said,

“From one to ten, how do you…”

“Twenty-five,” I finished her sentence. I know the pain scale. “Is it that obvious?” I said to her.

“Yes, you have that hangdog look in your eyes.”

“Hey, I know that line from the Birds,” I said.

“I watched it with my husband last night,” she offered. “We love old movies.”

With that, she put me at complete ease and relaxed me enough to tell her about the pain in my tooth. She went on to explain that tooth pain can be as severe as childbirth and asked if I wanted them to check it out.

Duh.

I filled out the necessary papers, had a couple of X-rays taken, and the dentist told me that I must be part Neanderthal, as the offending molar had five roots, one of which cracked, exposing the nerve. They could fit me in for an extraction in an hour.

Hallelujah.

I won’t gross anyone out with the details of the tooth’s removal, other than to say it involved copious amounts of blessed novocaine, sawing, drilling, and sounds that made fingernails over a chalkboard sound as innocuous as a summer breeze.

I left the dental office with a huge, bloody hole in the back of my mouth, corked with gauze and a warning not to eat that night (not that I had an appetite after the procedure), take aspirin (who wants to wake up to a crime scene?), or swish water around in my mouth for a couple of days (dry socket is very painful).

I didn’t sleep well last night; there was a noticeable throb, and I woke up to a bloodied pillow, a crime scene anyway, but the pain is gone.

Thank God for that.

The funny thing is, when I woke up yesterday, the sun was shining, the late spring air smelled good, and all was right with the world, until I took that sip of coffee. It left me thinking of how everything can change in the blink of an eye and a cracked Neanderthal’s tooth.

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He knows the devil rarely arrives with horns and thunder.

More often, he comes quietly, dressed as reason, comfort, appetite, outrage, or injured pride. He does not always command a man to wreck his ship. Sometimes he merely invites him to stop checking the compass.

A sailor does not lose his way all at once. He drifts. One small compromise, one unexamined resentment, one borrowed panic, one hour of noise after another, until the stars disappear and he can no longer remember which direction led home.

So tonight, before sleep takes the wheel, let us ask for the grace to notice the counterfeit before we mistake it for light. Let us lay down grievances before they become prayers. Let us turn off the noise before it becomes master. Let us close our hands long enough to remember they were made not only to grasp, but to surrender.

Meditation:

The soul needs silence the way a ship needs a lighthouse.

Dear Lord, keep my eyes open to what disguises itself as good.

Guard me from pride wearing the costume of wisdom.

Teach me to recognize Your voice beneath the noise.

And when morning comes, may I choose the true light, even when the counterfeit shines brighter. Amen.

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Sunday evening, I had a conversation with my friend David at Starbucks (where else?). He asked me a question no one has ever asked me before, and it floored me. It went something like this: “If you were the Devil, how would you get people to believe in you?” I told him that I would have to think about it for a while; a question like that requires a deeper thought than I can muster over an iced Americano with heavy cream. I then said I would take Monday to think about it in my journal and post it on my Substack Tuesday morning.

So, here, David, is my answer:

I would argue that if I were the devil and wanted people to believe in me, I would not appear as either a silly red monster or a billionaire’s kid named Damien Thorne. I would make myself seem reasonable, useful, flattering, modern, and very normal. I thought of a plan that might include five things:

First, I would make evil look intelligent. I might present pride as self-esteem, cruelty as honesty, lust as freedom, greed as ambition, and resentment as justice. I would never ask people to worship me outright; that would be logically ridiculous. No, I would simply teach them to rename their vices until they sounded like virtues. Victimhood would be considered a psalm in my bible.

Second, I would exploit pain. I would find people in grief, loneliness, poverty, illness, humiliation, or betrayal and whisper to them, “See? God has abandoned you.” The goal would not merely be to make people immoral. It would be to make them bitter, angry, irrational, and fearful. And as everyone knows, those with these vices are more easily led away from gratitude, forgiveness, humility, and hope.

Third, and my favorite, I would definitely turn people away from silence. Silence is a stake in the heart of evil because silence allows for self-examination. In silence, people hear their conscience, their memory, the voice of God, and His truth; in silence, people pray. So I would make sure to occupy their hands so they could never close them in prayer. I would fill every hour with noise like outrage, gossip, pornography, envy, politics, panic, entertainment, vanity, and distraction.

Not because all noise is evil, but because constant noise prevents the soul from listening to itself.

Fourth, I would make disbelief in me part of my strategy. Here is an old C.S. Lewis-style insight: the devil benefits both when people obsess over him and when they dismiss the possibility of evil altogether. If people become obsessed, they may become superstitious and afraid. If they dismiss evil entirely, they may become morally careless. Either extreme would serve me well.

Fifth, I would imitate light. This may be the most important point. I would not come and say, “Choose darkness.” No, not me—I’m the devil, too cunning. I would say, “Choose yourself; your ego is God.” I would offer peace without repentance, freedom without accountability, sex and pleasure without love and responsibility, knowledge without humility, and spirituality without surrender. Turn it over to God? Bah! An abject waste of time. I would make me—the counterfeit—so appealing that people would mistake me for liberation.

I told David that my greatest trick would not be convincing the world I do not exist, but convincing the world that my temptations are enlightenment.

I set my pen down this morning, realizing that our simple coffee shop chat had spiraled into something far heavier than I anticipated. I think back to David sitting there with his Caramel Macchiato, unbothered and scrolling through his phone, hands occupied, and I wonder: was his question just idle curiosity, or a prompt from a conscience trying to stay awake amid the noise?

Regardless, he’s not one of my Substack readers, so I think I’ll text him a link to my answer. And the next time we meet at Starbucks, I wonder what he’ll say.

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