We all come into this world bequeathed with a set of unique qualities and capacities that seek to find expression through the circumstances of our existence.

The very circumstances that may seem unfavorable can serve as the soil most conducive to the growth and maturation of those capacities, enabling you to achieve what you came here to achieve.

The quote by Marcus Aurelius, “Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear,” comes to mind in that regard.

Recognizing this quality of life is difficult because our world runs on comparisons, stereotypes, and “rules” that shape how we view and relate to our circumstances.

Most of these leave one unsatisfied with life and desiring to change it so that it resembles someone else’s.

A battle ensues in which one contends with oneself, hollowing oneself out to fit a standard that one has been conditioned to believe is the norm, not knowing that there is a unique nature within seeking expression and containing much of what is needed to navigate life.

Many comparisons and stereotypes would lose their power if people recognized the uniqueness of their own natures.

Many wish to change their circumstances, and if they had the power, they would do so with the wave of a wand.

But material reality is inert, and we don’t possess the power to instantly alter our realities into what we desire.

Eventually, once you realize how fruitless it is to endlessly battle with outer circumstances, you turn inward and recognize that your inner circumstances, the sum of your behaviors, habits, beliefs, and attitudes, may have contributed to or sustained some of the unfavorable conditions in your outer life.

And that’s when the desire for spiritual growth comes in. You begin deploying self-improvement tools and practices to heal and develop your inner life so that you can relate to the external world in ways that move you toward what you want.

There’s a plethora of material that exists for this purpose, and at the onset, it is exciting to see the infinite possibilities available to you.

That is how I felt.

My journey with self-improvement began when I was around 10. I sought to understand the workings of the mind and why mine behaved the way it did.

I had what would possibly be considered a case of scrupulosity, a form of OCD, and I wanted to find a way through it.

All these dark thoughts would flood my mind, and I wasn’t sure why or how. I would later realize that their recurrence was partly sustained by the attention I continually gave them, though at the time I was oblivious to this.

It was hard to disclose anything about them, as they were really dark, and I feared that my parents would think I am schizo and take me to a mental facility.

My father had some books on psychology and personality disorders, and over time I came to understand the mind as something like an antenna that tunes into different frequencies of thought.

The attention you give determines which thoughts most occupy your mind. Over time, I learned to ignore the negative and focus on the positive, which helped me get through it.

But one of the side effects was that it set a compulsive gear in motion around self-improvement, doing things right, and “seeking higher knowledge.”

I read books, took courses, and joined communities to fulfill this artificial thirst for knowledge. Whenever someone mentioned a new book that had “changed their life,” I would go online and search for it or order it because I wanted the same effect in my own life.

This happened many times, so you can imagine how many times “my life changed.” You would think I reaped compound returns, but I didn’t. I invited more confusion into my life, if any.

I have a bunch of books sitting on my shelf that I procured out of compulsive excitement but probably won’t read because I realized their contents are incompatible with the season of life I am currently in.

When you’re getting started and trying to figure out a path forward, instruction manuals can be immensely helpful in setting you in motion.

Over time, however, you realize that a framework often worked because it emerged from the direct experience of the person who created it.

Although some are written like instruction manuals, you shouldn’t treat them as such because your circumstances are different.

Waking up at 5 a.m. may work for your guru, and at the onset, adopting a new routine may work for you too. Eventually, however, you may realize that the best time to wake up isn’t some universal hour.

It is whatever allows you to tend to your duties and responsibilities, make time for your relationships, and still get enough rest.

The same applies to diet.

Your diet guru may recommend a particular diet or fasting protocol and claim that it is superior to others. When you’re beginning your health journey and trying to become more conscious of what you consume, how often you exercise, and so on, you may adopt it, and it may genuinely help you.

But eventually, you realize that your body is different and has different needs, so the best diet or exercise regimen is the one that works for you.

Ultimately, it’s about being honest and evaluating whether your choices are bringing greater health and coherence into your life.

Instruction manuals are easy to provide because they save the consumer the trouble of thinking and assuming conscious responsibility.

Exercising discernment over one’s choices requires effort, as does taking ownership when those choices lead somewhere unfavorable.

So it is easier to blame a guru or figure whose philosophy you were following when it fails you, without recognizing that you made the choice to follow it without sufficiently assessing whether it was suited to your circumstances.

The other risk of taking frameworks verbatim is that you become dogmatic about them and ignore the fruits they are actually producing in your life. They cease to serve you and become your masters.

There are seasons for being a hermit, retreating into one’s cave and doing the inner work, but eventually you have to return to reality and tend to the matters of everyday life.

It is easy to lose oneself in the ephemeral world of ideas when one has a deep hunger for improvement and knowledge. You could spend multiple lifetimes going through the wealth of information that exists in this world.

But the desire to experience life is core to our humanity.

No matter how much time you spend exploring knowledge and learning, that impulse will eventually seek expression. If it lacks outlets in lived experience, it will act through imagination and fantasy.

Fantasies can become dangerous because they allow us to extract the emotional payoff of a scenario without actually experiencing it.

It is a form of subtle voyeurism in which one is both the director and the actor. Naturally, the play is directed in favor of the one fantasizing, giving them the illusion of fulfillment and satisfaction from an experience without actually meeting it in reality.

If the subject of the fantasy is intimacy, one may imagine a lover meeting them in precisely the ways they desire and fulfilling their passions to the point of climax.

But that experience may bear little resemblance to real intimacy, where there may be conflict, uncertainty, vulnerability, imperfection, and discomfort that both people have to learn to work through.

These elements are easily omitted from fantasy. It gives you a one-sided view of things.

Fantasy is not inherently negative in and of itself. It is just your psyche directing you to missing elements in your life that you desire. Parts of you, most of which are repressed, are trying to live through you.

That is one of the subtle traps of being lost in the ephemeral world of ideas.

Someone may be wise, understand complex ideas and philosophies, and even be able to articulate, diagnose, and prescribe them correctly for other people’s circumstances without having lived through what they speak about.

That is why taking advice from gurus, or knowledgeable people, can be dangerous.

Their words may be sweet and perfectly suited to your situation, and you may be inclined to follow their advice without assessing whether their lives actually embody the principles they are dispensing.

Anyway, to circle back, tools for spiritual development should help you live better, not escape from life.

They are meant to help you better express the unique talents and qualities that exist within you.

They help you refactor your inner world, rid yourself of incompatible beliefs, and build structures that support the life you came here to create.

At the end of the day it comes back to living in this material world and tending to the duties and responsibilities that you possess within it.

Our task is the transformation of the earth. Therein lies the only reason for seeking higher knowledge. The earth as we know it with our senses depends on the spiritual world, and this means that we can truly work on the earth only if we share in those worlds where creative forces are concealed. This realisation should be our only motivation for wanting to ascend to higher worlds.
— Rudolf Steiner

And spiritual practice can be simple.

You don’t need to read complex books or take programs and courses to develop spiritually.

Honesty can be a spiritual practice.

If you have a tendency to exaggerate or obscure facts without realizing it, you can practice honestly presenting your ideas to people without sprinkling in those added elements.

Dishonesty, no matter how minuscule, creates illusions. And as long as you are being dishonest with others, you are likely doing the same to yourself. You cannot legitimately grow if you are unwilling to be honest with yourself.

The gold within you will remain covered by the dirt of your own lies.

Repairing relationships can be a spiritual practice.

If you have strife with your parents, siblings, or loved ones, you can tend to that wound and take responsibility for your part. You can apologize and own your mistakes when needed, forgive, or learn to love someone from a distance.

You let go of resentment, anger, and frustration that do nothing but embitter the heart.

And you may be surprised by how something as seemingly simple as this can bring growth and uncover parts of yourself you didn’t know existed.

It is so easy to be advanced in knowledge and understanding that one forgets the matters of daily life and the simple things that could be tended to.

Legitimate practice and growth require engaging with reality and its matters.

You use the knowledge you have gained as your guiding principle for how you relate to yourself and your body, to others in your relationships, and to life overall.

Thank you for reading

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Since childhood, a collection of beliefs, dogmas, stereotypes, and values are programmed into us through external influences. These ideologies coalesce to become the primary lens through which we interface with the world.

A huge component of growth is developing awareness of those beliefs, assessing their truth, and consciously choosing the ones that support the reality we want to create.

We consciously or unconsciously gravitate towards the experiences and circumstances that align with our level of awareness.

And as much as we have free will, how we enact it depends on how aware we are.

You may think that you are consciously choosing something when in reality it is a programmed belief that is pulling the strings.

That idea may have been passed down through generations and gained wide acceptance in the culture, religion, or society you inhabit. Your life may thus become a copy of that of your parents, grandparents, friends, or tribe members, aligning with that programming.

While there is nothing wrong with following a standard way of doing things, there is a huge risk in suppressing how you want to authentically express yourself, as the program will flag this as a bug rather than recognize how core it is to your being.

Just because something has been done for eons by generations of your family or society doesn’t necessarily mean that you must follow the same path. Especially if following the “generational path” gives you an inner sense of suffocation, which may be your soul resisting that path.

Your soul wants to build a life of its own, not a copy.

“We’ve been doing it for years” may carry wisdom, but it can also be used to justify beliefs that bind and constrain people rather than create love and freedom.

Yet this won’t be recognized as binding due to the programming, so it will simply be followed while the adherents experience an inner sense of dissatisfaction.

This is why conscious participation in a belief is important to ensure one’s autonomy. Otherwise, an unconscious belief may be running your life.

You may even possess high intelligence but still find yourself subject to these unconscious forces, which can leverage your intellect to meet their ends.

You may think you are being rational in your choices and actions when the forces you are unconscious of are actually running the show.

So, for as much as we possess free will and the capacity for consciousness, there are a lot of forces within and without that influence how we live and the choices we make.

To the degree that we are aware of them is the degree to which we are able to take more conscious control of our lives.

Unless you are a highly evolved soul, that awareness is not present at birth, and only a rare few seem to come online with it early, carrying a burning certainty of their path and living in alignment with their soul, free from family, societal, or worldly expectations.

Most people develop this awareness through trial and error, by witnessing the fruits of their beliefs and actions, specifically whether they lead to greater love, harmony, and freedom or whether they bind them and bring death and destruction.

These variables make our world a sandbox for growth and development.

People are at different stages of development and thus will grasp ideas and concepts according to their level of consciousness.

As they evolve their awareness through life experiences, they naturally come to grasp ideas and concepts that were once incomprehensible to them or seemed like foolishness when they first encountered them.

You may be surprised by why some people make bad or suboptimal decisions despite the advice they receive against doing so.

But the thing is, they can’t see things as you do. What looks like wisdom to you is merely a collection of ideas to them, and no matter how hard you try to drill those ideas into them, it will never work.

It is like teaching a child philosophy.

The child would rather play with toys and will get frustrated with you. You will also get frustrated, thinking that you are trying to deliver something of value that could help the child make better choices in life, wondering why they can’t clearly see the path you are trying to show them.

There are unconscious impulses running within people that push them toward certain ends. Sometimes, it is only through direct experience and witnessing the consequences of their actions that they are able to wake up.

And some have to experience death and destruction multiple times before they learn.

The other thing is that people have a right to experience life on the terms of their awareness. You can give someone advice, sure, and you can be present, but ultimately, you have to respect their right to choose, even if they are unconscious of the forces shaping those choices.

When you reap the fruits of conscious growth and development, you may want those close to you to reap the same benefits, and you may extend your intention to help them along that path.

But the risk lies in becoming tyrannical and trying to force them to do things based on your current perception of reality. Even if those things may be good for them, they may not perceive them as such and you have to acknowledge their right.

They will feel constricted and even more emboldened to go their own path out of spite.

It is thus important to acknowledge that people are on their own journey of growth and development, even if they are acting retarded and blowing shit up according to your perception.

There’s an impulse to even things out and eliminate all the suffering in the world because of the pain people experience due to decisions they are making unconsciously. You may think that someone just needs to tell them or show them.

But the thing is, some people can only know light through darkness.

The suffering they are going through may be the world teaching them how their unconscious behavior is bringing them pain. Through that experience, they may eventually recognize the higher paths you tried to show them but which they couldn’t yet see.

You also get to recognize yourself in them as you see the numerous ways in which you acted unconsciously in your own life, and still do, and how the pain and destruction that came from those actions woke you up.

I am not advocating for passivity and letting the world crash and burn. Battling with the world and trying to change it to your liking is energetically expensive.

You also expose yourself to numerous elements that are not to your liking, as once you become attuned to them, the world will provide no shortage of things to oppose. What you orient your awareness toward determines what occupies your reality.

It is more productive to shape your reality around the elements you value than to dedicate your life to fighting everything you oppose, while still acknowledging the sandbox’s function.

You can continue your work to guide others and help them grow, while acknowledging their right to choose and recognizing that the world is a sandbox for all human experience, even experiences that may not be to our taste.

You are an element of the light that may help them recognize the light and develop life-affirming habits that bring greater love and harmony into their lives.

So guide, give advice, and show others, but do so without tyranny, being careful of any idealistic projections you may be placing onto them and the world in general.

And even despite your higher awareness, there may be unconscious impulses at work within you, indicating further opportunities for growth and evolution, a process that continues for as long as you’re part of this sandbox.

Thank you for reading

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It’s a beautiful thing to share our lives with others and participate in theirs. It is an essential element of our humanity.

However, the bonds we form are fulfilling when they allow us to be ourselves and express ourselves authentically.

If you have to shape-shift to fit into a social group, you may have many connections yet experience the same isolation and loneliness as someone who lacks them entirely. On top of that, playing roles drains your soul and makes you resentful.

There are a lot of norms about what is considered cool, what a successful social life looks like, how to pull girls, how a woman can max out her magnetism, how to be like so-and-so, and so forth. There’s a plethora of guides available, depending on the element of your social life you are trying to improve.

Considering their ubiquity and mass adoption, most have been adapted as the de facto standard for building a social life and forming connections. While there is useful advice in these guides, the biggest pitfall is in their application.

You can end up ignoring your own nature and blindly following the prescribed steps without considering your personal context. Your strivings, temperament, and interests all influence how you naturally show up in the world.

In my late teens and early twenties I was developing a model of what a social life looked like. I got swept into popular notions and tried to emulate them.

I had always been drawn to quiet and intimate spaces. I found loud and vibrant ones overstimulating and draining. So my hobbies and activities were centered around stuff like reading, journaling, nature, and other quiet things that I enjoyed.

However, I was passive in finding ways to connect with people on those terms. I compartmentalized those interests into one part of my life and began exploring the vibrant social life that seemed to be the standard among most people I knew.

I thought my introversion was holding me back and that I should rid myself of it. I tried to emulate some of the people I knew who were naturally extroverted and could talk on end, as I believed that would help me build more connections.

Partying, drinking, and clubbing became my new indulgences. Everyone was doing it and thought maybe it would make me cooler and that I would make more friends so I engaged in them.

I thought I would discover a new way of having fun too. It seemed like everyone had all these cool stories about night outs and partying, and a part of me wanted to see what that was like.

The loud environments were draining and I did a lot of dumb and regretful things under the influence of alcohol and other substances and got my own stories to tell.

I met more people, yes, and it seemed like I was making more connections. But it was all superficial because I was constantly changing masks, having grafted all these foreign traits to myself.

I avoided talking about the things I genuinely liked, as I thought that would make me uncool. The side effect is that the connections I formed were hollow and not as fulfilling as I thought they would be.

That is not to say that those people were themselves hollow. They were authentically being themselves at the time, while I was unsuccessfully trying to become someone else.

And they could tell.

Whenever I turned back to the things that I loved doing, there was that profound sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that was absent in my new hobbies.

Eventually, I stopped fighting against myself. I chose to embody who I was and embrace the things I liked. That decision freed an enormous amount of energy that had previously gone into maintaining masks and living a disjointed life.

I am grateful for that experience, as it made me realize that to nurture authentic connections, you must first connect to yourself and embody your traits unapologetically.

The need for connection should not override your essential need to be yourself.

If you organize your life around the fear of loneliness or isolation, those very conditions will find you. You will mute yourself to fit in, and that creates its own form of loneliness.

Without a strong sense of self, you become susceptible to other people’s definitions of who you should be. Your identity gradually gets shaped by forces outside yourself.

Internally, you will become resentful because you are not expressing yourself honestly.

Instead, create a life that gives both you and compatible people ways of encountering each other.

And the cornerstone of that life is you.

It starts with you.

What genuinely interests you?
What makes you happy?
What do you enjoy doing?

Lean into the things that give you a genuine feeling of joy because they are authentic expressions of who you are, regardless of what others may think of them.

As long as you’re not hurting anyone or infringing upon their freedom, indulge in the things that make you happy.

You must also learn to enjoy these things despite people’s opinions and without needing anyone else to be present to enjoy them.

Ask yourself whether you would still do an activity even if no one approved of it or if there were no one to do it with.

That will clarify your intentions.

We do the things we truly enjoy simply because they bring us joy, with no end goal or agenda attached.

Doing more of them helps you cultivate joy and love for yourself, making you less dependent on others to provide those things for you.

The next step is finding spaces, places, clubs, events, or activities that genuinely interest you and that you can enjoy on your own. This is especially valuable when they are recurring events or places you can visit regularly.

There, you will naturally meet people. You can have low-stakes conversations, introduce yourself, take an interest in another person, and connect over whatever interests you share.

You do not have to be perfect.

Awkward moments will happen, and that is okay. Do not place too much significance on them. Repeated exposure creates familiarity, which can gradually develop into a meaningful connection.

The key is that you’re not desperate about making those connections happen. You’re already creating happiness for yourself, so you’re less dependent on others for it.

I can’t explain why, but connections often seem to emerge when you’re less attached to finding them.

The foundation is learning to become internally self-sufficient and cultivating joy for yourself. The rest involves showing up consistently and nurturing the connections that naturally develop.

While building that self-sufficiency, avoid the pitfall of aiming for perfection. Perfectionism can lead to passivity, making you avoid necessary steps, messy as they may be, because you think you are not ready.

Self-sufficiency is not another perfect state you must attain before meeting people.

It is simply a principle to keep in mind, a reminder that you can cultivate happiness for yourself and do not have to betray yourself to obtain it.

People will often tell you to try this activity or join that club to meet others. That can certainly work.

But if those activities don’t genuinely interest you, you’ll find yourself needing to obtain a connection from them. Ask yourself whether you’re willing to carry that weight while doing something you don’t truly enjoy.

The choice is yours.

But what if you don’t know what your interests are?

In that case, then try anything.

Put yourself out there. Cycle through different activities and interactions, and your interests will reveal themselves through experience.

The things you’re drawn to and the things you repeatedly return to show you where your interests lie.

Once you identify your interests, lean into them, create happiness for yourself, and nurture connections where you can while expressing yourself honestly.

All in all, lean into who you are.

Take responsibility for your authentic expression, and nurture connections that make room for it while encouraging the same honesty in others.

A life that is yours will not repel the right people.

Thank you for reading

Polarizing ideas and statements are ubiquitous. They are widely used on the internet to challenge commonly held beliefs or societal constructs in a manner that evokes emotion and creates an us-versus-them dynamic.

“If you do this, then it implies that.”

“If you are this age and haven’t done this...”

“If you are a man or woman, then you should...”

These are examples of polarizing statements designed to challenge particular beliefs and positions within society.

Content creators deploy them to exploit the division they create, cultivating loyal fan bases and, in some cases, cult-like followings among people who hold and live by those beliefs.

This tactic has existed for eons and has been deployed across nearly every social sphere, from politics and religion to philosophy. Polarizing ideas are used to rally people and turn them into strong adherents of a particular side. The collective energy that is harnessed sustains the belief, ensures its continuity, and often benefits its orchestrators more than its adherents.

The funny thing is that the progenitors of these polarizing ideas do not even live by them. Opposing politicians are always in bed with the incumbent government. Religious leaders often have mortifying skeletons in their closet despite preaching moral purity.

We also know of male influencers who promote rigid macho philosophies while failing to embody them, as well as female creators who advocate against marriage while privately enjoying married life and raising children.

All that is presented to you is the illusion that they live like that.

Polarization creates strong adherence because it reinforces a belief a person already holds regarding something. Wherever there is a strongly held belief, there is often an opposing position that the person rejects.

Most of the time, we are unaware of the polarities within us because many were subconsciously programmed by the tribes and social groups we inhabit.

For example, if you had a strict religious upbringing, you may believe that virtue or morality is possible only through your religion. The belief that your path is right and others are wrong polarizes you, making you a strong adherent of that religious structure. This polarity grows stronger when you surround yourself with people who share the same beliefs.

Polarities may also develop through life experiences.

If you were betrayed and heartbroken by a partner, for instance, you may come to believe that the opposite sex cannot be trusted and will only hurt you.

Polarizing statements such as “All men are...” and “All women are...,” along with declarations about what men and women should do, echo across the internet. The justifications offered for these claims are often drawn from one person’s experiences across one or several relationships.

The more hurt one has suffered, the more rigid their stance is likely to be and the more likely they are to remain trapped in that polarity.

When someone is reeling from heartbreak, they may internally register the opposite sex as a threat, even though one individual caused the wound. That belief can then shape their future interactions and relationships.

At its root is a psychological need for safety, which is understandable. However, the way that need is enacted keeps the person organizing their life around a potential threat rather than healing and moving forward with the knowing that good men and good women exist.

Influencers capitalize on these wounds, hence the gender wars we see today.

Polarization sells, and it is an effective way to generate engagement because we carry numerous polarities within ourselves. You can uncover them by examining the beliefs you hold about different areas of life, especially those you feel strongly about.

You may also discover them when you encounter something that triggers you. When you are attached to an idea, philosophy, or belief, you will feel discomfort when someone or something challenges it.

The internet is full of polarizing ideas, and if you are unconscious of the polarities within yourself, you may find yourself recruited into a camp, believing you are defending what is right.

It is easy to reason in absolutes, reducing everything to right and wrong, good and evil, or black and white. However, truth is rarely possessed entirely by one side. It is often found somewhere between opposing positions or distributed across both.

To evaluate nuance and assess where truth lies takes conscious awareness of the beliefs within oneself.

If you are truly honest with yourself, you may discover that many of the beliefs you carry are polarizing ideals that you subconsciously inherited from your tribes or developed from unholistic processing of your experiences.

It takes conscious development of your faculties to recognize where you are holding these polarities and then question whether the ideas they present are actually true.

It also takes courage to release them when you discover that they no longer serve your life. At times, doing so may require severing connections with people whose identities and relationships depend upon those polarities.

Yet in releasing them, you develop a greater sense of personal freedom. You begin living according to your nature, unshackled from the divisions imposed by external ideas. You cease renting yourself out.

The mental and emotional energy you once spent maintaining those polarities is also freed. You no longer feel triggered when your beliefs are challenged or validated when they are affirmed. You become empty of the emotional charge and neutral toward the conflict, having transcended the polarity.

You simply live by your credo and let others live by theirs.

Thank you for reading

Growing up, my mother told my brother and me to do as she said, not as she did. I never understood why she told us this, as it seemed so counterintuitive. Why would you advise us to act in a certain way when your actions say otherwise?

Such behavior might imply a sense of manipulation, a mechanism to control a subject’s behavior to meet one’s ends. We see this phenomenon across social spectrums, from politics to culture, where the people pushing ideals onto us don’t live by them and seek to take advantage of your adherence to them.

My mother, however, was honest about her condition.

She would acknowledge her shortcomings, some of which, at the point of pressure, would override her desire to act in coherence with the values she advised us to follow, leading her to acts she would later regret.

Her feelings from the backlash of those actions informed her that she hadn’t followed the most optimal path and that better ones had been available.

That inspired her desire to enlighten us on how to best act when faced with similar circumstances, using herself as a baseline so that we could do better.

As children we naturally look up to the bigger people in the room and emulate their behavior, even when those acts may lead to negative consequences.

Our moral faculties are still in their nascent states, and our conception of the world is still very narrow.

It was thus puzzling to my child brain when mother would tell us not to emulate her but to follow her words. At times, my mother didn’t live by the same advice she gave us, which led me to question its validity in the first place.

As we grow older, we acquire other father or mother figures. Wise men and wise women. People whom we look up to, or who are at an advanced level in a particular realm of endeavor, some of whom are open enough to give advice on how to get to where they got.

They have a Substack, YouTube, or Twitter. They may even run seminars and workshops where you can meet, spend time with, and learn from them.

But the pitfall lies in your idolization of them.

You closely couple the ideas with the person themselves, forgetting that they are human, have weaknesses, and have potential skeletons in their closets.

So when their weaknesses become apparent, you abandon even their best ideas because the person you admired failed to live up to them. So you falsely demerit those qualities based on that failure.

A lot of the people we admire throughout history had vices, some of which would mortify you, and the dark side isn’t discussed enough due to the sheer heartbreak they would wreak upon the admirers of these great men and women.

The heroes we love all have their flaws. Someone we admire on social media may disappoint us, and in that moment, we may feel the need to distance ourselves from the ideas that have supported us until then.

Or we may feel driven to defend them, even when their shortcomings don’t align with the values and beliefs they profess.

What causes this distortion is the idolization we place on the person. And the danger of idolizing someone is that it either makes you a blind follower or a harsh critic who conflates the person with their ideas.

In both cases, you are living out the child archetype. If you follow someone blindly without assessing the merit of their ideas, or if you reject someone’s ideas because of their character, you are effectively a child.

As children, we lack these faculties and use mom and dad as our GPSes on what to do. But as we get older, our consciousness develops, and so does our ability to be our own guides.

You thus have to filter the ideas you receive to assess their truth and validity to your circumstances in life.

And know that it is possible to have profound spiritual epiphanies and still not have integrated them.

Someone can genuinely glimpse love, forgiveness, detachment, humility, surrender, or non-attachment, but still behave from ego, fear, resentment, avoidance, control, or insecurity when under pressure.

It doesn’t mean that the insight was fake. It just hasn’t become embodied in them.

Your heroes might understand those ideas deeply but not yet hit that point of integration, and the truth becomes obvious when they fall.

But just because they fell short of embodying that ideal doesn’t mean the ideal is false. It simply indicates that they have a chance to grow, while you must test and evaluate it to determine its validity for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, there are hypocrites and people who profess values they don’t follow, and that should be called out. But their lack of adherence to an ideal doesn’t make the standard invalid.

Holding the ideas presented to you and assessing them from your center will enable you to holistically weigh their merit in your life, and you wouldn’t need your hero or anyone else to perfectly embody it for it to be true or useful. That is what becoming an adult is.

You will see your idols not as infallible beings but as normal people like you, walking this path of life. You won’t be heartbroken when they fall short. You will see them as they are.

Ultimately, your soul knows what’s best for you, even when you don’t have access to that data. And the best teachers won’t come to you as teachers but more as messengers who direct your attention to the message rather than to themselves, asking you to introspect on that information for yourself.

They know the danger of putting themselves at the center of the message.

They don’t want to be considered idols or heroes, because that would create a dynamic in which you endlessly look up to them and never find or nurture the love, strength, or wisdom that already lives within you.

A strong man cannot help a weaker unless that weaker is willing to be helped, and even then the weak man must become strong of himself; he must, by his own efforts, develop the strength which he admires in another. None but himself can alter his condition.
— As a Man Thinketh, James Allen

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Social media platforms are engineered to monopolize your attention. The longer you stay, the more the algorithm learns about you, refining your feed to keep you scrolling while delivering ads or selling your data downstream.

Creators play the same game, optimizing for what the algorithm rewards because status and payouts follow engagement.

What gets rewarded, unsurprisingly, is content built on shock and drama. People say outrageous things in absolute terms because absolutes provoke reactions:

“These people are _”

“These politicians are _”

“The war must be _”

Others are drawn in like moths to a flame, voicing their opposing opinions with emotions running high. Within minutes, strangers are wishing death on each other and their loved ones over a take they encountered seconds ago.

Immense psychic energy gets siphoned this way, and the creators who started the fire profit from every spark.

Even with politics and drama filtered out, a post will eventually seep through and vex your spirit, ruining what had been a good day. Maybe you replied. Maybe you did not, but you spent the next hour debating that person in your head.

Either way, your energy was already drawn out, and the bait worked exactly as designed.

I have had countless encounters with people online that led to unnecessary arguments. Those arguments left me frustrated and angry, disrupting what had otherwise been a calm day.

This experience is not unfamiliar to you. I am certain you have had your own experiences on social media that unfolded in a similar way.

But you get wiser. You see the ragebaiters for what they are and maybe even feel sorry for them. You set draconian policies on your feed, banishing certain accounts, words, and topics to the shadow realm. You take detoxes and periodic breaks, going offline to touch grass and watch the trees dance in the wind.

Yet no matter how strict our policies may be, some posts still seep through the cracks.

And boom. You are thrown off balance again.

The internet generates new topics faster than you can filter them, and a new flavor of disgust always finds a way in. Unless you wipe your presence off these platforms entirely, you will continue to encounter content that elicits a negative reaction from you.

The work, then, is not to eliminate the encounter, but to mature in how you handle it.

That is what I want to talk about.

I recently reread Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland. It is a chunky book, and this was my third time studying it. One chapter discusses the concept of importance, the meaning we attach to things, and how that attachment distorts our relationship with them.

In the book, Zeland discusses inner and outer importance.

Inner Importance

Inner importance is the importance you attribute to elements within yourself: virtues, emotions, attitudes, insecurities, perceived deficits, and so on. This often creates distortions that influence your relationships with things in the external world.

For example, if you carry a superiority complex because of your abilities and virtues, you carry excess inner importance. If, on the other hand, you consider yourself unworthy of a goal or milestone because of perceived deficits, you also carry excess inner importance, but in the opposite direction.

In Reality Transurfing terms, excess importance creates imbalance, and life has a way of correcting such imbalance, often through circumstances that humble you. This is especially true in the case of pride, where inflated self-importance invites situations that strip the inflation away.

The opposite distortion happens when you fixate on your flaws and perceived deficits in relation to your goals. This makes your goals seem distant and unattainable. Your execution becomes lackluster, and you may fail to pursue what your heart wants with the intensity and passion required because you have attributed excessive importance to your deficits.

The distortion happens when those weaknesses become magnified into an identity, a verdict, or a reason to disqualify yourself from the path altogether.

When you strip your flaws and perceived deficits of importance, you free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of your goals. This makes success more likely. And even if you fail, you can live with the peace that you went after what you sought. Either way, you are no longer wasting your psychic energy worrying about your insecurities. You are channeling that energy into execution.

Outer Importance

Outer importance is the importance we attribute to things outside ourselves. Opinions, judgments, trends, social structures, authority figures, and cultural expectations can all become forms of outer importance when we inflate their significance beyond what they deserve.

Again, the issue is not that external things have no value. Advice can be useful. Culture can contain wisdom. Authority figures may have genuine insight. The distortion begins when we give these things power over our discernment, outsourcing our judgment to them because we have made them too important.

Those close to us may judge us, advise us, or give us opinions on how to navigate different areas of our lives. Celebrities, politicians, mentors, and all forms of authority figures may lay down rules on how to do things, and we may feel inclined to follow them because of the status they carry or because we want their approval.

Some may even mean well. But if we follow blindly and refuse to listen to our discernment, we have attributed excess importance to their views. That can become a recipe for problems.

We end up following paths not meant for us and trying to adopt philosophies that are clearly incompatible with us, yet we still push through, forcing them into our lives because the meaning we have attributed to them distorts our relationship with them.

The Social Media Pendulum

Now back to social media. The concept of importance applies equally here, both inner and outer.

When you see a post that vexes you, there is a good chance you have attributed excessive meaning to what the person presented. What compounds the importance you assign to a post is the amount of engagement it receives: likes, reposts, comments, and shares.

In Reality Transurfing, these outrage cycles resemble pendulums: collective energy structures that feed on attention, emotional reactions, and conflict. The post itself may be insignificant, but once you grant it importance, you plug yourself into the pendulum and begin feeding it.

Thousands of likes. Hundreds of reposts. A small voice starts asking whether so many people could really agree with something so absurd or whether the take might have merit after all.

That is outer importance pulling on you. The most ridiculous content tends to spread the fastest precisely because it provokes a strong reaction. The truth is that people will agree with the most diabolical nonsense, and it is rarely worth your time to ponder why.

Social media can be a radical place where people play with ideas, identities, and outrage. It should not always be taken so seriously.

Then there are the posts that, while not directed at you, land like personal attacks. They graze a virtue you hold or a belief you live by, or worse, they brush up against an insecurity.

The mechanism is the same. Once your attention is hooked, excess meaning gets assigned, this time to qualities inside yourself.

Gender-related posts are the worst offenders. “A man should _” or “A woman should _” content tends to provoke because people read it as a verdict on themselves. A man at a low point who scrolls past such a post may turn the words inward, criticizing himself for not measuring up. A woman in the wrong moment may read it as a proclamation on her worth.

Either way, the response comes from the meaning you have already assigned to those qualities in yourself.

Everyone carries insecurities. They rarely originate from within alone. They get installed by a lifetime of exposure to external standards. The world tells you what beauty looks like, what success looks like, what a good voice, a good body, and a good career look like.

You spend years chasing those standards in the hope that meeting them will finally bring acceptance, only to be met by another milestone the moment you arrive.

While it is difficult to rid yourself of insecurities, especially because they are embedded into the subconscious through a lifetime of programming, practicing self-love and self-acceptance is one of the most important things you can do for yourself.

It frees you from the battle with yourself to meet perceived external standards. Your energy can then go toward setting your own standards and creating the life you actually want.

When you love yourself unconditionally, your insecurities shrink because you are no longer beholden to someone else’s scale. You begin living by your own.

Even when your values are attacked, the impulse to defend them online is usually a trap. You will end up arguing with a troll or a person who is ragebaiting for engagement. The life you live is the strongest argument for the values you profess. You need not defend them in a comment section. They will defend themselves.

The fact that they are working for you and guiding you toward a path you love is enough. You should be satisfied with that.

And we also grow over time. We are not static beings. The values I professed and stood by with all my might in my teens fell away by the time I was twenty. The things I fervently believed in and argued for also fell away by my mid-twenties.

Thinking your values are absolute is itself a case of excessive importance. Values are meant to orient you, not imprison you. Life will always find a way of humbling you, showing you how wrong you were and how much more complex things are than you once imagined.

That being said, not all social media posts are ill-meaning. Some creators do mean well and genuinely want to put out content that guides and helps people.

It is just that the human psyche is plagued by insecurities, and the excessive meaning we attach to things, whether inner or outer, influences our perception of reality.

Are You Hiding From Something?

So when you come across information online that arouses indignation within you, the first thing you can do is take a timeout, especially if the feeling is strong enough that you may act unconsciously.

Log off. Take a walk. Go touch some grass.

Then, later, you can perform self-inquiry on what you encountered and assess why it made you feel the way it did.

At that point, you are observing from a more neutral place. Your emotions will have settled, which will help you examine the matter more carefully. Through introspection, assess why the post affected you and whether it is pointing to something within you: an insecurity, a flaw, a habit, or a wound you fear addressing and keep hiding from.

As much as the internet is filled with nonsense and radical ideas, some of the things that slip through our filters point toward unconscious material within ourselves. They may reveal what we hide from and refuse to integrate. The negative reaction is often an ego defense against that very thing.

How often you do this is up to you. But the things you hide from will tend to meet you in the external world in one way or another. It may not necessarily be through social media. It may appear through the people you meet, the circumstances you find yourself in, and the recurring themes that keep resurfacing.

Often, this is life trying to tell you that there is work to do.

You can duck from those things as much as you want, but they will find you in the external world for as long as you refuse to face them within yourself.

The goal, whether through reducing importance or introspecting on what you face, is to develop conscious awareness and control over your life. You do this so that you are not easily thrown off balance by external actors and so that you can move toward a more cohesive life, one congruent with what you truly desire.

Conscious awareness helps you recognize the bait people place online to draw your energy. It helps you identify the excessive importance you attach to your internal attributes, as well as the excessive importance you attach to external voices, trends, and collective outrage. It also helps you notice the feelings that arise when a valid, well-intentioned idea is placed before you, but you take it the wrong way because it brushes against an unexamined wound.

Practiced consistently, this strengthens your sovereignty. Perhaps the beautiful thing is that you learn to take what you see less seriously.

After all, you have decided what is important to you. You have decided what life you want to live, the virtues you value, and what meaning-making is to you.

People will always tell you what to do, what you should value, and what you should aim for. If you do not have a center, insecurities will always plague you, and opinions will sway you left, right, and center, bankrupting you of the energy you could have directed toward things that actually matter.

Develop the habit of asking, is this really true?

Most of what you hear is a facade, designed to recruit you to causes that do not have your interests in mind. The more you question, the harder you are to pull off center. The harder you are to pull off center, the more your life starts to look like the one you actually want.

You always have the right to choose. The world is a museum of all sorts of art. You can always walk into a different room that contains art that appeals to you without having to protest the art that disgusts you.

Thank you for reading

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The child archetype is a concept from Jungian psychology that represents the part of your psyche tied to dependency, innocence, emotional needs, and early conditioning.

It is the part of you that seeks safety, comfort, and validation; looks outward for guidance and approval; and reacts emotionally rather than acting intentionally.

It is a fundamental psychological pattern that shows up (even in adults) in both healthy and distorted ways.

You may have the physical body of an adult and you may be meeting all the external responsibilities that entail adulthood but you may still be a child internally, outsourcing tasks that are ultimately yours to accomplish.

One realm where this unintegrated child often hides is happiness and fulfillment.

Happiness is often viewed as something that happens to you, delivered through phenomenal experiences, good people, or auspicious turns of fate.

When the sun forsakes you and leaves you in darkness, you can be left reminiscing on the happy times and yearning for when those moments will grace you again.

You are at the mercy of fate and that of things outside of yourself to provide those moments for you. However, external events are only a small part of the overall experience of happiness.

The greater contributor is the internal factors within oneself, as with them you are able to create happiness for yourself even when fate abandons you.

When you rely on external factors for your happiness without taking responsibility for creating happiness for yourself, you remain vulnerable to fate. When she refuses to acknowledge you, you lament the cruelty and unfairness of life for denying you its joys. You are living out the child archetype.

If you don’t take responsibility for your happiness, you rely on people and experiences to provide it for you. The intentions behind this outsourcing are often misaligned. You do it to alleviate boredom, escape reality, or stave off loneliness.

You create co-dependent relationships with these external elements, putting yourself in a position where you cease to function without them.

You need this person to feel okay. You shape your behavior so you may be liked. You procrastinate and distract yourself to escape your reality. You seek highs from drugs, sex, validation, and all manner of activities, leaning on them heavily.

These things become crutches and, in the worst case, addictions that you can’t operate without. None of them are arbitrary; they essentially represent your psyche attempting to fulfill needs that it is unaware of how to satisfy internally.

Growing up is not just about taking responsibility in the external world. It is also about emotional and psychological self-sufficiency. It is about learning how to create your own sense of fulfillment and joy without relying on the world to provide it for you.

I am not advocating isolation or withdrawal from the world. That is simply the opposite extreme.

What I am advocating for is sovereignty, where relationships, experiences, and pleasures become choices, not dependencies. You engage with people because you resonate with them, not because you want to escape loneliness. You indulge in activities because they express what you enjoy, not to distract yourself.

So it isn’t really a matter of what you choose but the relationship you create with it. What could have morphed into an addiction becomes a channel through which you “happy-make” for yourself because you have developed a healthy relationship with it.

And you can only develop a healthy relationship with the external world when you develop a healthy relationship with yourself. And that includes knowing yourself deeply enough to understand your needs, natural inclinations, and desires.

You can only develop a healthy relationship with the external world when you develop a healthy relationship with yourself. That includes knowing yourself deeply enough to understand your needs, natural inclinations, and desires. Part of that knowing is honesty with yourself. After all, the external world is a mirror of your internal.

Deep introspection would reveal a lot about the things that actually motivate you and whether you are living for yourself or merely living for others.

You should aim to live a centered life - living on values and beliefs that you chose, not what the world chooses for you.

The more centered you are, the less effect the external world will have on you. Notice where your state depends on something external. Then build small instances of self-generated stability: do things on your own, sit with discomfort, and slowly reduce your reliance on those crutches.

I recommend spending ample time in solitude, introspecting or engaging in things you genuinely enjoy.

We are bombarded with so much external stimuli daily that we have forgotten how to spend time with ourselves. Co-dependencies form around these stimuli. It feels as if you must listen to music during downtime, watch a YouTube video, scroll a reel, or consume some form of entertainment.

We have forgotten how to entertain ourselves, and it is unfortunate that this has been normalized. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Some of the ways I happy-make for myself: spending time in nature (without technology), long solo drives, cooking for myself (meat stew with chapati, using a technique I learned from my mother), reading, and writing. The way you happy-make may be different.

You won’t be at the mercy of fate.

As you take more responsibility for your happiness, you solidify your capacity for self-reliance and self-regulation. External pleasures and inputs become optional. You cease to be a child - you become an adult.

You choose to engage with them, and even without them, you are okay. You won’t suffocate when the world refuses to grant you auspicious moments, because you can generate your own.

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When I told my parents I wanted to defer med school, move abroad, and study something else, they were shocked.

I had been in med school for about a year and a half, had relatively good grades, and all I needed was five more years of study and an internship before becoming a doctor.

It seemed like the proper path.

I had gotten excellent grades in high school, and medicine was the typical route someone in my position would follow. Become a doctor, engineer, or lawyer. Anything that sounded like a big-hitting profession.

I would have been the third doctor in our extended family. My cousin is one, and she’s built a successful career from it.

So if I saw it through, I would be the next in line.

My parents were excited. They had always wanted me to have a successful career, and medicine seemed like the pathway.

I, on the other hand, had no idea what I wanted to do.

I went along with med school because it was the path my parents and relatives had pointed me toward. Throughout my schooling up to that point, we received encouragement to study hard and pursue careers as doctors or engineers. Those were the marks of a successful life.

When you receive daily reinforcement of that message, you inevitably come to believe it is the sole path.

Anything unconventional or untried was treated as unsafe, and you were discouraged from even considering it.

So I optimized for good grades and whatever else would guarantee me a safe path.

When I got into med school, my parents and extended family were elated. I guess I should have been too, but I was neutral about the entire thing and somewhat surprised that I didn’t feel the same way.

Even without knowing what I wanted to do, something felt off during my short time in med school.

It was that feeling of, “Surely this isn’t it?”

A part of me wanted to travel and explore something else, which greatly deviated from the type of life my parents and those close to me wanted me to have.

Granted, they had noble intentions.

My parents lacked the resources needed for a proper education and to build the careers they might have wanted.

My mother only made it through two years of high school and never went to college. My dad finished college but lacked the means to pursue a master’s or a PhD.

So education was heavily emphasized growing up, and my parents always pushed me toward the highest level possible, as that seemed like the viable path to success in their worldview.

I took in a lot of these beliefs, which led me to ignore much of what I used to like doing growing up.

I used to draw and create artwork, but I set that aside to make more time for studying. School holidays were spent revising. My brother and I would draw up strict timetables, focusing on subjects we had performed poorly in.

Having free time felt like a crime.

Even when that “nothing” was playing with friends, reading novels, or drawing comics with my brother, there was always a quiet unease. We had a knack for storytelling, creating characters, arcs, and entire worlds on paper.

But we optimized for study. And it worked. We did well in school.

I was on the ramp to success. I just needed to follow it to reach the destination everyone had told me about.

But then I got off and decided to do my own thing. Despite my adherence to discipline, I have always been stubborn when it comes to choosing my path.

Some would say I gamble too much with life. And perhaps I do.

My dad was most shocked and wondered why I would leave what I had for an uncertain path. My mother, who had a sharper sense of the gambling archetype that lived in me, was not as surprised.

After some back and forth, they eventually came to terms with the decision I made.

Granted, I had no idea how my decision would pan out, and some of the wider family were opposed to it, but I was willing to grapple with the winds of uncertainty and figure out what the path I wanted to follow looked like, rather than following a path that, while offering a guarantee, left me wondering what if I had gone a different way.

I took a philosophy class in college, and that was when I read The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy for the first time. One quote has always stuck with me:

The story is about a man who optimized his life around what society, his family, and his environment deemed successful.

He did everything right. And yet, at the end of his life, he realizes none of it was truly his.

That realization destroys him.

His career, his relationships, and his identity were all built for status, not truth. And he only sees it when it is too late.

We all know a version of Ivan. People who had dreams but never gave themselves permission to pursue them.

For pretty much my entire life up to that point, I cared much about being approved of by those closest to me. The messages I absorbed growing up taught me to distrust my own voice. My desires were labeled irrational. My instincts unreliable.

So I lived largely for others and their expectations of me, even as waves of discomfort moved through each fragment of my spirit, signaling that there was another path. That there was another door.

Even if I was unaware of it, that door existed, and the life I had deemed irrational was actually accessible to me.

The thing about listening to others for too long is that your capacity to listen to yourself diminishes. You adopt others’ beliefs and follow the advice they give you as if they were instructions, without assessing whether there is alignment.

A clear sign of misalignment is when what you do makes you unfulfilled.

Something can be difficult, but if it is aligned, there is a quiet sense of rightness within it. You accept the difficulty because it feels meaningful. But when there is no alignment, even ease feels heavy.

Much of life is oriented toward optimizing for the safe path. Taking risks is highly discouraged. Those closest to us, some of whom genuinely care about you, reinforce this theme.

The task then becomes assessing whether you will listen to them or follow your own path. And following your own path comes with its own set of difficulties.

You have the right to choose your own path. Even if you are young or lack experience in the area you want to chart your own path in, you have the right to choose.

Because ultimately, you know what is best for you, even when your mind might tell you otherwise.

We end up in jobs, friendships, and relationships that are optimized for certain outcomes. Stability. Validation. The avoidance of loneliness.

And we rarely check whether we actually like what we’re doing, whether we truly enjoy our friends’ company or it is just for show, or whether we love our partners or are merely with them to avoid loneliness. We optimize for everything except truth.

Your soul will always be at unease whenever the way you are navigating life is antagonistic to its desires or a disgrace to the potential that resides within it.

This sentiment will bubble up from its depths, and it is inescapable. It will find you in some way, shape, or form. It will cut through the walls of excuses you set up to comfort yourself.

The existential ache that plagued Ivan and others will inevitably find you. You will be successful and compliant on paper, but deep down you will feel some sense of unease.

The beauty of illness is that it points to the existence of health. When you are sick, you long for how things used to feel.

Your soul operates the same way. It expresses its unease not to torture you but to signal that there is a path to health. A path to accessing the life you desire in a manner that fulfills you in a way that no artificial path ever could.

It is merely trying to tell you that the path exists and that it is accessible to you.

If it were not accessible to you, you would not feel the tension. If health did not exist, sickness would have no meaning. Opposites reveal the existence of their complements.

Wouldn’t it be splendid if you lived honestly?

And when I say "honestly," I am not just talking about making an honest living but also living true to your desires and needs. We often forfeit ourselves for the sake of what others and society want.

To assess who you are living for, deep introspection is needed. In a quiet place where you are undistracted and with a pen and your journal book, write down these questions and introspect upon them:

• Am I living the life I want?

• How much of my life is my choice vs. the influence of what society or those closest to me want for me?

• Would I be at peace living like this for the next 10 years?

• What life do I want? What am I doing? What type of friends do I have? What does love look like and mean to me?

• What do I stand to gain and lose if I go for that life?

You can ask yourself these questions in any way you like, but you may find that you're living for others.

Even if you are autonomous and independent, you might still find that you are living out the beliefs and advice of society and other people.

Despite choosing my path multiple times, I still realized that in some cases I was acting outside myself, living off what other people had told me, even when it was not aligned with what I wanted.

I encourage you to deeply introspect and ask yourself whether the life you are living is yours, or whether it is someone else’s. You will likely find that you have been living for someone else.

And this is not advice to purge the beliefs you have held onto for so long. They have perhaps served you in ways you did not anticipate.

What I am advocating for is bringing conscious awareness and checking for alignment so that you are not blindly adhering to beliefs and psychological systems that have been passed down to you.

Get into the habit of questioning and not just questioning, but asking yourself whether this aligns with what you want.

This becomes clearer when you are clear on what your goal or dream is. The goals and dreams we carry are so heavily distorted by the perceptions of others that they cease to be ours.

We achieve things that people find appealing and even applaud us for when deep down we do not care about them, even when we try to convince ourselves to.

Ask yourself:

What is my dream?

What do I most desire?

When we are children, we dream big and believe everything is possible and accessible to us. But as we get older, and as we absorb society’s beliefs about how we should live our lives and what success is, we start to doubt ourselves and our abilities to attain what our hearts desire.

And consequently, we lose the ability to listen to our souls. We ignore it and deem its inklings irrational and improbable, even when those dreams are achievable, and we have examples around us showing us that they are indeed possible.

We then tell ourselves that those are the chosen ones. That they are anomalies and outliers. And we further put ourselves down, telling ourselves that we cannot be like them.

What makes your heart different from theirs? You have the same beating heart, don’t you?

The chosen ones chose themselves. They decided that no matter what the world tried to impose upon them, they would be adamant and stubborn in the pursuit of their goals, and they would make their dreams a reality.

That life, too, is accessible to you.

You just need to choose and give yourself permission to have the things you desire.

The entire idea of contemplating your dream is to widen your comfort zone. To expand the limits within your mind of what is possible. And once those limits increase, and as the belief you have within yourself grows, this will inevitably reflect in the actions you take to make that dream come true.

You do not want to get your head stuck up in the clouds contemplating how grand your dreams are. You inevitably have to act with intention toward making it a reality.

This is not about becoming great or achieving something monumental.

At its core, it is about following your soul path or life’s purpose, which is everyone’s birthright. Whether the consequences of your actions yield greatness or not should be of no concern to you, as those are merely side effects.

What should concern you is whether you are living true to yourself.

If not, what step can you take today to live honestly?

What can you let go of today that has been holding you back?

Whose approval do you need to abandon the need for so that you can start living for yourself?

You will have to make peace with the fact that this will only make sense to you. And the people you would like to support you, those closest to you, will not understand the path you are trying to take.

It will not make sense to them, and that is okay. Relinquish the need to convince them.

Bootstrap yourself with the hope, support, and faith you would have received if you had been understood, and chart the path you desire, however vague and uncertain it may be.

Although the how is unbeknownst to me, everything shall work itself through.

— Reality Transurfing

Thank you for reading. Hope you are well. If this resonated, feel free to share, and if you haven’t subscribed, go ahead to support my work.

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When things are difficult and circumstances are unfolding in ways that run contrary to your desires or expectations, you are likely to experience internal discomfort. It may also be the case that things have been this way for a while, and you begin to wonder whether you will ever catch a break.

Then the doubts arrive, and your mind spirals into negativity, perhaps even anguish, as you try to piece together why your circumstances are unfolding the way they are. It can feel as though the entire cosmos is conspiring against you, erecting obstacle after obstacle to prevent you from reaching your goal, despite the effort you have put in.

We have all been here at some point, in the pursuit of something we care deeply about. We hope for auspicious conditions, a clear path, and minimal resistance, but things rarely unfold the way we anticipate.

More often than not, they unfold in precisely the way we least expect.

The truth is that the external world does what it does, and we have no control over it. We may wish we could eliminate every obstacle or engineer our environment to be frictionless, but life is indifferent to those wishes. Things happen that you did not plan for. That is simply the nature of it.

When things start going awry, you may feel compelled to give up, citing how hostile the world seems toward your goals and dreams. But here is what is difficult to see when you are in that low place: the world has nothing against you.

It is merely indifferent.

What tends to happen is that we attribute excessive weight to the challenges we face, inner or outer, distorting their actual severity in the process.

And so it comes down to perception. If you perceive the world as cruel and harsh, your mind will be tuned to difficulties, amplifying their weight even in the thick of them.

But if you choose to perceive challenges differently, not as obstacles on your path but as inherent elements of the journey toward what you seek, your mind will orient accordingly.

It will not burn unnecessary energy by catastrophizing.

Instead, it will acknowledge the difficulty, choose to be at peace with it, and focus on the path forward rather than dwelling on the severity of what stands in the way.

This is not easy, by any means. It requires practice and conscious awareness. When you have taken brutal beatings and are in pain, the last thing you want to hear is that you have the option to see things differently.

Reframing your perspective is probably not even on the table when your mind is in anguish.

To that, I would say, let the steam out. It makes no sense trying to shift your perspective while you are clearly in pain.

But once the steam has cleared, take conscious note of what happened and practice next time. Don’t beat yourself down for not staying calm. You don’t need to add any more trouble to yourself.

Over time, you will notice the difference. You will begin to see that the universe is not trying to get you.

When you start seeing obstacles as part of the journey rather than interruptions to it, you begin to recognize how essential they are in shaping who you become.

Think back on the goals you have already accomplished. The memorable ones, the ones that actually mean something, are almost always those in which struggle was present, and you found a way through it.

Your success is more precious precisely because of what it cost you.

Ask successful people which period of their lives they valued most, and rarely will they point to the present, when things are comfortable. Most will tell you it was the time spent in the trenches, figuring things out, grinding through uncertainty, and learning to overcome.

Some even grow miserable once they have become so capable that nothing challenges them anymore.

The worthy opponent disappears, and with it, the aliveness that difficulty once provided.

I have felt this myself.

I look back with genuine fondness on the times I was struggling, when I was deep in the pit, failing repeatedly, sometimes sinking into despair, but having to summon the courage to try again anyway.

In the midst of all that effort, growth was happening within me even when I could not feel it.

It only became clear once the storm had passed.

The world was still taking care of me, embedding the very software I needed to overcome what stood between me and what I sought. The harsh circumstances were teachers. They were not out to get me.

This is why I believe you should not limit the scale of the goals you pursue. Go after the grand ones. Shoot for the stars. Best case, you win. Worst case, you lose.

But in both cases, you learn, and that may be the most valuable thing that could happen to you.

Abandon the excess importance you place on your flaws and the weight you inflate your external problems with. Remember that the world is merely indifferent.

Rather than exhausting yourself trying to engineer favorable circumstances, turn your attention inward. Through deliberate practice and conscious awareness, you will come to see that struggles exist not to break you, but to forge you.

We appreciate the day because of the night, summer because of winter, and light because of darkness. Our struggles merely do the same.

Take joy in their existence.

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A hot topic right now is artificial intelligence and its long-term implications across society. One of the major concerns is its effect on the job market. Most projections suggest that white-collar roles are the most exposed, largely because they are structured, technical, and built on data that AI can easily learn from and replicate.

I work in technology and I have seen this shift unfold in real time.

Less than a year ago, we were using AI as an assistant. We would ask it what was wrong with our code, then manually implement or review its suggestions. It was helpful but limited. At times, you still had to dig through documentation or scroll through Stack Overflow like it was 2021.

That is no longer the case.

Now we have tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Copilot. With a terminal, you can spin up agents to work on tasks in parallel. You can now complete tasks that would have taken a week in just one or two days.

I barely use a code editor anymore.

With a well-structured prompt, AI can one-shot the implementation. It can pull documentation faster than I can read it and debug issues with surprising accuracy.

Most of my time now is spent understanding systems, learning how to think better, or working on my projects while agents execute tasks in the background.

My company is pretty much pushing us to use AI across everything under the guise of efficiency and optimization, but we all know the bigger picture.

The writing is on the wall.

I have had similar conversations with friends in other fields, and the sentiment is consistent. There is a growing sense of uncertainty, especially among those in roles most exposed to automation.

Social media amplifies this.

Every day, there is news of a new model, a new capability, and a new claim that entire industries are being replaced. Some accounts exaggerate this for attention, feeding into a narrative that collapse and a Skynet reality are imminent.

Beyond the overblown hype, there is a steady stream of negative sentiment, and if you spend enough time on these platforms, it begins to seep into you. The doom largely stems from the assumption that AI will automate everything, leaving us with nothing to do.

This fear is understandable.

Our education systems were built on a simple premise: the more information you can retain and apply, the more valuable you become. This model rewards analytical ability, memory, and structured thinking.

Do well in school, get excellent grades, secure opportunities, and achieve stability.

That is the system that has been in play and in which most are encouraged to go through. It gives confidence and reassurance that this is what has worked for everyone else so it should work for me.

But now we are facing a system that can retain, process, and connect information at a scale far beyond human capability.

So the safety that the traditional system offered stands on shaky ground, which explains the mass anxiety we see across social media.

I always believe there is a bright side to everything in life, no matter how bleak things may seem.

In this case, all the AI stuff has invited us to take a step back and evaluate whether the left-brained analytical approach to living is the only path.

In the face of a reality where it is estimated that all occupations will be automated in one way or another, we are forced to sit down and introspect about whether we can shift to a different path.

And I believe we can. It’s a path that has always existed.

Social media will tell you that you are cooked, that everything is gone and that we will be zombies living on universal basic income. But that’s not true.

Human beings are creative beings, and each of us carries something that AI cannot automate: a personal path, a set of proclivities, and a purpose that feels native to who we are.

Historically, every major invention that altered the course of civilization was followed by adaptation, and even those grand inventions, where do you think they came from?

Nikola Tesla, for instance, claimed that some of his ideas and inventions came to him in dreams. Great paintings and outstanding books are, at their core, expressions of the soul. And the soul that produced those works is no different from yours. The paths may differ, but that does not diminish what your expression can offer.

To put it plainly: we all have natural proclivities toward certain things. They come to us with ease; we can implement them without struggle.

These are clues to what your soul’s path might look like. And I believe they are worth exploring, especially now, when circumstances are forcing us to step back and reckon honestly with where we stand.

Whatever position you are in, whether you went through the traditional system or carved your own way, these proclivities are worth pursuing, not merely as a contingency, but because they carry genuine joy and fulfillment. Any alternative they create is a byproduct, not the goal.

As much as AI has optimized my workflow, it has also quietly taken something from me: the joy of figuring things out on my own. Whenever I faced a coding problem, I would sleep on it, and miraculously, the solution would appear by morning.

The satisfaction of that process is difficult to replicate. Now that AI handles most of it, things get done faster, but there is a flatness to it: the trenches are gone, and with them, some of the joys of being in them. This cuts across every field.

One of the joys of writing, for me, is waking up and deciding what to put down, completely off the cuff. I don't follow a content calendar or strategy; I just write whatever comes to mind. The joy is not in having the finished piece; it is in threading words into sentences, in recalling personal experiences and making them legible.

AI would strip that from me, and I suspect many writers feel the same. In fact, this applies to anything you love doing; the loving is in the doing.

The process, the friction, the figuring out. The destination usually lacks the joy you imagined. Deploy AI on your soul path and it tends to hollow it out, which is precisely why people resist using it there.

Perhaps the bright side of all this is a forced invitation to look within: to evaluate whether we can build lives less dependent on the systems we inherited and more rooted in what is genuinely ours.

Either way, there is a path forward.

The doom and gloom rests on the assumption that we are finished, and while that can be true if you choose to believe it, you can also choose differently. You can believe that a path exists and that opportunities will emerge.

Everything ultimately comes down to perception. If you buy into the doom, your mind tunes to the dirt, and you will miss the flowers.

But shift your perception toward what the world has to offer, and you will start to see the blue skies and the butterflies.

Whatever happens, never doom.

Although the ‘how’ may be unbeknownst to me, everything will work its way through.

— Reality Transurfing

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There is a popular trend going around called looksmaxxing where young men, especially Gen Z and younger, are experimenting with different tactics to modify their facial symmetry, jawline, skin, and overall appearance.

The standard they are aiming for is usually based on the traits that women tend to find most physically appealing, with a chiseled jawline being the trait most people are optimizing for.

Young women are also joining this trend. There are several looksmaxxing tactics marketed specifically toward women.

There are now dozens of AI apps that offer routines and tactics people can deploy to maximize their appearance. If you scroll through social media, especially platforms like TikTok or Instagram, you will see countless looksmaxxing videos.

Many of them feature before-and-after transformations, showing how someone’s face changed after thirty days of mewing, thumb pulling, orbicularis training to achieve “hunter eyes,” growing the jawline, or tucking the chin.

You will encounter an endless stream of tutorials guiding people toward the facial structure or aesthetic they want to achieve.

There are also plenty of humorous memes surrounding the culture. Many memes revolve around getting “mogged,” especially by someone with a sharper jawline or by cats, which people jokingly claim have the ideal facial structure.

Some of them are genuinely hilarious.

The Good

Looksmaxxing attracts a lot of criticism, particularly from older generations who view the trend with skepticism. For them, these kinds of optimization tactics were never part of the conversation growing up.

How someone looks is largely influenced by genetics, and most people agree on that. However, modernity has introduced ways to sidestep what people consider “bad genetics.”

If someone wants to get taller, there is surgery. If someone wants lighter skin, there are clinics that offer treatments. Fuller lips, cosmetic body modifications, Botox, Ozempic, and weight loss surgery all exist as solutions beyond traditional methods like exercise and diet.

Looksmaxxing has emerged as another addition to this landscape.

And while it may seemingly get a bad rap, some of the practices recommended within certain looksmaxxing circles actually have legitimate health benefits. Routines involving sun exposure, proper hydration, posture, and correct breathing can positively affect overall health.

Breathing, for example, is a major issue for many people. Poor breathing habits can affect facial development. Mouth breathing has been shown to alter the positioning of the tongue, jaw, and facial muscles.

Beyond aesthetics, it can lead to health problems such as nasal congestion, allergies, anxiety caused by shallow breathing patterns, poor posture, and reduced sleep quality.

Another area emphasized within looksmaxxing communities is skincare.

Some advocates go beyond superficial treatments and recommend examining internal systems such as diet and stress levels, since these factors directly affect skin health. Many internal imbalances eventually manifest externally. Skin conditions often reflect deeper issues within the body.

Practices such as meditation, stress management, and proper breathing help restore internal balance. When the body is functioning harmoniously internally, that state often reflects outwardly through healthier skin.

Conversely, when the body is under chronic stress or imbalance, the skin frequently reflects it.

Some looksmaxxing advocates therefore recommend natural approaches rather than chemical interventions. Many cosmetic products contain substances that may accumulate in the body over time. Their effects may not be immediately visible, but long-term exposure can have consequences.

The skin is not merely a barrier. It is an organ, part of the body itself. It contains pores through which substances can enter the system.

Personally, I switched to using coconut oil on my skin. I stopped using body lotion because it was expensive and many contained phthalates, which are used to make plastics more flexible. Virgin coconut oil is affordable, easy to find, and works as a solid substitute. The soap I use is also free from phthalates and sulfates and contains mostly organic ingredients.

Anyway, there are looksmaxxers out there who are doing solid work in terms of approaching the body holistically and recommending routines that are harmonious with the internal systems in the body.

Some people within the looksmaxxing space genuinely promote holistic approaches to health that align with the body’s internal systems.

In many ways, this perspective is actually taking us back to how people lived before modern lifestyles disrupted our physical habits. Poor posture, poor breathing, and many chronic physical issues are consequences of modern living. People sit at desks all day. Children develop mouth-breathing habits that shape their facial development. Physical inactivity has become the norm.

From this angle, certain aspects of looksmaxxing simply encourage a return to healthier ways of living.

Of course, there is also a darker side. Some individuals pursue dangerous chemical treatments or undergo painful surgeries to chase unrealistic beauty standards.

Yet even the more wholesome version of looksmaxxing still carries risks, such as potential dissatisfaction with results or the psychological impact of constantly comparing oneself to idealized beauty standards.

Insecurity

For a long time I was insecure about my smile.

For a huge chunk of my childhood I never really cared about it. I just took pictures with family and other kids and never really cared about how I looked, but as I got older in my teenage years, I started to take notice of it.

In my early 20s, I was so self-conscious about it that I would try to “lock in” before a picture was taken to make sure that I had the ‘right smile’.

During moments when I was ‘caught lacking’, a part of me would look at the pictures in frustration, hating the asymmetrical smile and wonder why it did not look like everyone else’s.

I would then wonder what other people thought about my smile. They must think it’s ugly or that is what I would think of myself.

The internet only intensified those insecurities. There were countless videos I was now tuned to explaining how to smile correctly, how to pose properly, and how to present yourself in ways that supposedly signaled higher status.

All of these issues made me even more self-conscious about my appearance.

Most of us have experienced insecurities about our bodies at some point. Those insecurities usually arise when we compare ourselves to someone else and create an imaginary baseline for how we should look.

Social media has amplified this. Social media exposes us to endless comparisons, and there is always another metric through which someone can feel inadequate.

Insecurity heavily fuels the modern practice of looksmaxxing.

Even when people adopt healthy practices like improving their diet or skincare routines, if the underlying goal is to “look better than someone else,” comparison remains the driving force.

If you watch enough transformation videos online, you will notice a pattern. Many people began their journeys because they disliked how they looked compared to others.

Comparison can sometimes be useful. It shows what is possible with effort and discipline. But it becomes destructive when it is driven by insecurity and external standards that you cannot control.

This phenomenon is why some people push themselves to extreme lengths, using harmful substances or undergoing invasive procedures to meet those standards.

Insecurity is a case of inflated significance.

It arises from the excessive meaning you assign to other people’s perception of you.

In reality, most people are not thinking about you nearly as much as you imagine. They are occupied with their own concerns and problems.

Insecurity is an imaginary weight you impose upon yourself because it ties you to a set of external standards that you have no control over.

It hooks into you because you care about how handsome or beautiful you look in people’s eyes, and negative feelings get triggered if you perceive that someone else “is better than you”.

These negative feelings weigh you down, and you expend a lot of energy managing those insecurities when you could have directed them toward more meaningful matters in your life.

It is difficult to be rid of all our insecurities, but the truth is that when we loosen our attachment to external standards, our insecurities fall away, freeing up that energy for other things.

Even healthy habits like exercise or dieting can become sources of insecurity if they are driven by comparison rather than by a genuine desire for self-improvement and well-being.

These are things you do when you choose to care for yourself. You deem yourself worth the effort and adopt them because you believe in yourself and want the best for yourself. A healthy body and mind are the natural outcome.

Looksmaxxing capitalizes on most people’s insecurities and attempts to fix them through cosmetic improvements, often leading individuals to feel more confident and socially accepted.

People treat you differently based on how you look, so you may see some fruits in the looksmaxxing strategies you deployed, such as increased social interactions and positive feedback from others. People opening doors, strangers complimenting you, and serendipitous encounters may grace you. This may even make you more confident and you can make the case that it cured your insecurities.

But your insecurities will never go away. There will be someone with a more chiseled jawline, someone with skin glowier than yours, or more symmetrical features.

And you will keep deploying more tactics to catch up to them. This will only perpetuate a cycle of insecurity. You have attached your worth to your looks and external standards, putting yourself in a cycle that will never end.

The Spirit

Many of the greatest individuals in history would not pass today’s beauty standards. Yet their influence came from something far more powerful than physical appearance. They possessed immense spirit.

Many of the men whose facial features are admired today were not developing “hunter eyes” by performing facial exercises or getting a jawline by mewing all day.

They were out in the world hunting, building, fighting, exploring, and striving. The life they lived shaped their bodies naturally.

And those who did not possess ideal physical traits often carried a presence that overshadowed appearance entirely.

We have all seen a Gollum-looking dude pulling the hottest chick with ease. He is short, unkempt, and gangly looking and would fail every physiognomy check by modern standards. Yet he has something immeasurable: spirit.

He possesses an intangible quality that makes him magnetic and charming, surpassing all external standards.

It is the spirit.

People can sense the type of spirit you carry even if they cannot articulate it. And women in particular have a good sense of this. They can somewhat sense the type of man you are underneath your physical appearance.

You may be tall and good-looking, but women will snuff out your spirit and see its components.

This principle extends far beyond relationships. In business, friendships, and leadership, the mentality and character you carry matter far more than superficial attributes.

If you looksmaxx all day, you will probably receive more female attention once your fruits materialize. But physical attraction eventually fades because people get used to it. After that spark, your spirit determines what happens next.

If your character lacks depth, it becomes apparent quickly. You may attract attention, but it will mostly come from women who see you only for your appearance. Even these women will eventually see through you.

The same applies to women. You can looksmaxx and become a Barbie, but if you don’t cultivate your soul and character, you will only attract men who see you as a beauty pageant and nothing more. You will have men flocking for sure but the types that discern your spirit will keep their distance if they find it lacking.

Physical attraction may open doors, but the spirit determines what happens after those doors open.

In the end, spiritual development produces far greater returns than external optimization.

Consistent introspection, confronting internal weaknesses, refining beliefs, and dedicating yourself to meaningful pursuits naturally create a presence that others recognize, admire, and respect.

The paradox is that when you abandon the need to be perceived in a favorable light by others, people often end up perceiving you that way without you trying to optimize for it.

The more you obsess over your image, the more insecure you become because your sense of worth becomes tied to how others perceive you.

Eating well, exercising, maintaining skincare routines, and taking care of your body are valuable practices. They promote health and well-being.

But when those habits are tied to external validation, they easily become another source of insecurity. Care for your body, because it is yours to take care of. Adopt practices that are harmonious with your body, and make peace with its asymmetries.

Beyond optimizations that genuinely improve your health, most of the rest is noise, hooks that pull you into cycles of insecurity.

Having a mission, stepping into the arena, and striving for something you deeply care about naturally cultivates the qualities people try to imitate through appearance.

But those qualities arise as side effects of the nature of the life you lead as opposed to goals you were trying to achieve.

And paradoxically, when you live in that way, many of the things people chase through looksmaxxing tend to come to you without you optimizing for them.

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When you have people you love, you cultivate strength across different facets of life so that you can care for them.

You learn to wear many hats and acquire competence across different domains, not just for your own sake but for your people, because they are near and dear to you.

This resolve burns brighter when you witness or experience the suffering of those you love.

It is this very pain that pushes you to overcome and annihilate the obstacles you face to acquire the strength needed to protect and care for them.

If you grew up in family conditions characterized by lack or strife, some of the problems you witnessed your parents and siblings endure, and even those you experienced directly, leave a mark on your soul.

While much of the suffering families face is material and financial, some wounds are immaterial. Parents can be absent not only physically but also emotionally.

There are parents who provide all the material resources they can, yet overlook the importance of offering an emotional sanctuary, which is often what children need most.

That said, material lack often precipitates mental stress in parents, which can lead to emotional absenteeism.

Their minds are consumed with bills and the struggle to meet their financial obligations.

Perhaps they worked multiple jobs just to survive, so you grew up under someone else’s care and only saw them for a few hours each day.

Conflict between them may exacerbate these conditions.

Constant fights, arguments, ultimatums, and strife unfold while you sit playing with your toys. You wonder why mommy and daddy are raising their voices.

Even if you cannot understand the context, you can sense the emotional tension, and you do not like how it makes you feel.

Adults often assume children are too young to understand what is happening. When emotions run high and arguments erupt, they assume their children cannot grasp the issue at hand.

While that may be true intellectually, children still read the emotional atmosphere. Even if they cannot form full sentences, they feel the dissonance.

It induces suffering within them, a pain they lack the faculties to understand, let alone carry.

Even if their parents try to play it off and act happy around them, children often know something is off. They may not articulate it, but they know it is all BS.

Some children are precocious. They understand more than adults realize and may even try to intervene. A friend once told me that when her parents fought, sometimes violently, she would step in to separate them and calm things down. She was eight years old.

Some children’s faculties develop quickly, enabling them to grasp the strife and suffering around them.

This deepens their pain.

They empathize with their parents and see patterns of trauma and how it affects their family.

So they seek to become strong.

You study hard. You read. You assume responsibilities early to ease the burden on your parents and free up emotional bandwidth.

When conflict arises, you try to distract their parents with a drawing or good grades, hoping to show that you are doing your best.

You learn to parent yourself and your siblings. You avoid sharing your own problems, choosing instead to solve them quietly.

You become independent early, cutting off parts of childhood because you deem them unnecessary. Yet the longing remains. The desire to simply be a child lingers, but you suppress it and continue forward.

Soon, you become a light in the household. Siblings are told to emulate you. Parents beam with pride. Even other parents like you and ask their children to emulate you.

Though problems persist, your efforts seem to bear fruit, and they keep pushing.

Soon you become so strong, not in the absolute sense but relative to those around you, that you can one-shot the problems they face.

You become a mythic figure to your people because they see your feats as extraordinary.

Yet many days you are simply putting one foot in front of the other, thugging things out while that fire burns. You do not offload your burdens because you do not want to add to the weight others already carry.

Eventually, your efforts yield material success. You become the go-to, the fail-safe, the one deployed when anything goes awry.

And then you realize that material provision isn’t enough. Some wounds run deeper. So you cultivate spiritual strength. You read. You learn. You guide. You counsel. You become the therapist, the regulator, the pillar.

Whatever you want my dear, I will provide.

Whatever you need me to be, that’s what I will be.

You are thrilled that your efforts over the years have paid off and that you have become a pillar. And it eventually hits you that this is the problem.

You become the default savior. That even some things that your people should be able to handle are now yours to take. Your strength, once a gift, becomes a crutch.

You begin to see that your strength, beautiful as it is, may be stunting the growth of those you love.

It justifies victimhood, negativity, and passivity.

Because you are strong.

Because you can handle it.

Because you always do.

You realize that while you softened many burdens, you may have inadvertently fostered learned helplessness. Loved ones grow accustomed to depending on you, forfeiting the development of their own strength.

Perhaps you should have disclosed that there were days when you had no clue where you were going and you were struck by darkness. Nights when you couldn’t sleep because your mind was spiraling out of control. Parts of you that had to die, stuff dear to you, to become what you are.

Perhaps you should have been honest and given them a full picture of how things were actually going for you. And you even try to tell them so, but they dismiss it because the mythic image of who you are has been engraved on them.

You think you could share this strength with them, but you don’t know how.

You try to share the blueprint.

You try to share practices and insights that helped you, but they are dismissed. You try sharing knowledge and doing some of the things you do to regulate, but they ignore them.

You get frustrated when you notice no change and try to be direct, telling them how engraved and deep their habits are and that if they don’t change, it won’t make their lives any better, but this breeds resentment, and you are accused of arrogance.

Your attempts to demonstrate that you developed your strength in the face of uncertainty and hardship are met with silence.

And your attempts to show them how to build their own come off as hubris and tyrannical control.

And perhaps there was tyranny because it is easy to become so strong that your empathy gets nerfed. But at the same time, misapplied empathy weakens others.

Life is funny that way. Ideally, if you could, you would erase all their problems, as that was your mission from childhood. To create the “happily ever after” you saw in Disney films after you defeat all the bad guys and rescue your people.

As you get older, though, you realize that you can’t save everyone. The best you can do is model strength and solve what is yours to solve.

You also realize that you can’t want that strength or growth for someone more than they want it for themselves. You cannot force someone into responsibility, even when you know it will benefit them.

Any attempts to tell them what to do, even when you know it will be good for them, will be met with resentment.

So you learn to make peace with your limits. You abandon the need to control the direction your loved ones take.

Some will not change. You can only love them, sometimes from a distance.

You carry hope that they will find their path. And perhaps withholding your strength may prompt them to discover their own. Either way, it is up to them.

You learn that some realms are deeply personal. People must traverse them on their own. You can guide from a distance, but you cannot carry them through.

And this is hard.

Especially when you were conditioned from childhood to be the one who fixes, regulates, and saves.

But you have to learn to trust them enough to handle things on their own. To allow them the dignity of struggle.

Strength is a beautiful thing. But sometimes, withholding it is the greater act of care.

P.S: Thank you for reading. If this resonated, you can support the work by becoming a paid subscriber or sharing it with someone who needs it. Paid subscribers get direct access to me for deeper conversations via DMs.

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As a child, while you are still growing and finding your bearings in life, there is much that you do not understand.

In your fragility and vulnerability, you depend on experienced individuals to protect you and help you navigate the world.

These experienced individuals are usually our parents or guardians. Their views shape the philosophies we develop and the lens through which we approach life.

Most importantly, they keep us safe. Not just physically, but psychologically.

Having gone through life and its various crucibles, their advice and guidance grant us a form of certainty. If we walk the path they recommend, we will be okay.

So we walk that path. It may not be free of peril, but we take comfort in knowing that someone close to us has trod it before. If they survived it, then surely we will too.

Most of the time, we do not even dwell on the dangers or uncertainties. Our guardians imbue us with confidence. Or more accurately, we borrow theirs.

Our vision remains fixed on the path ahead, and our energy is not spent managing anxiety or fear.

The Inevitable Departure

However, there comes a time when the child must depart from the nest.

In nature, this happens by design. As fledging approaches, the mother eagle reduces feeding for its offspring.

She perches nearby and calls outward to her chick. The chick begins flapping, hopping along branches, and building strength in awkward attempts.

Hunger competes with hesitation and instinct with fear.

The first flights are short and unstable. The parents remain nearby, but they no longer carry the bird. They are taught through discomfort. This is their crucible.

The offspring eventually generates its own lift and becomes its own being, shaping nature and its environment based on the capacities inherent to it.

Instinctively, it knows that this is its destiny.

In human beings, this dynamic plays out similarly and with more complexity. We are higher up the ladder of consciousness. Our needs go beyond basic survival.

The foundation is still survival, but it is multi-faceted. Physical, mental, emotional.

Whether animals or plants also orient themselves toward this broader spectrum of needs is something modern science has yet to determine.

There are studies suggesting plants respond differently to different treatments. Some bloom under tenderness. Others tense under indifference. Pets, too, respond emotionally depending on how they are treated. But I digress.

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The Creator

Beyond survival, we desire to shape our world according to the talents and gifts we possess.

Some capacities reveal themselves with age. Others through exposure. One of the clearest manifestations of this impulse is the urge to create.

We are all creators.

It may be an artwork, a song, a piece of software, a recipe, a poem, a formula, or a tool. No matter how simple, every creation is an expression of the self. A part of you brought into existence.

Some creations alter the trajectory of civilization, while others exist quietly. That does not make yours lesser.

Your drawing matters because it is yours. It is an extension of you.

The creator path is deeply personal. Only you know what your heart desires to bring forth. It is up to you to discover what that path looks like.

And that discovery requires leaving the nest, both physical and psychological, to actualize that goal.

The Role of Guardians and Authority

The most effective parents desire for their children to develop into independent beings.

The worst thing a parent can do is cultivate co-dependence with their offspring, shielding them from perils, in effect denying them of a development arc that is crucial for each being.

And this overprotection stems from not wanting to sit through the discomfort of seeing their children run the gauntlet. They do not want them to struggle.

The highest act of parenting is to provide tools, including psychological ones, that enable the child to navigate a world without them.

This dynamic extends beyond parents. We encounter guardians throughout life. Teachers. Spiritual leaders. Mentors. Authority figures in domains we wish to master.

We internalize them as filters. We evaluate our decisions through their imagined judgment, especially in areas where we lack experience.

This gives us psychological safety. Uncertainty is the greatest burden when making major decisions. So we seek reassurance. Even if things go wrong, it feels safer knowing someone endorsed the choice.

But there is something subtle here.

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Friendship means different things to different people. A common definition that cuts across many perspectives is this: someone who shares your values, reasons on a similar wavelength, and can be called upon when life gets dark and you need a hand.

I am not here to redefine friendship, and it will always carry different meanings depending on whom you ask. What I will say is that many people do not take the time to assess what friendship means to them, especially whether the friends they have actually align with the kind of friendships they want.

Over time, you adopt the same vocabulary, values, and philosophies across different facets of life. At the very least, people are encouraged to forge friendships with those who will not drag them down or influence them negatively but instead orient themselves toward “the good,” toward virtue and good manners.

While there is nothing wrong with this, it could lead to what I call the optimization of friendships.

This is when you lead with interests or fit. You become friends with someone because they meet a specific criterion you hold for what a friend should be. This could be shared values, the same religion, or even the fact that they are in a position you aspire to reach.

Whatever the basis, the friendship is built around the quality you are filtering for, not around the person themselves. In essence, you lead with your interests and attempt to optimize for the right influences to shape you.

In doing so, you narrow your perception to a single quality, a fragment of the much larger universe that the person actually is.

Yes, they may be a good influence. Yes, they may open your eyes in ways you could not see before. You may grow from the proximity. Some may even be more successful than you in a particular domain, and through that closeness you may be able to elevate yourself.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. These relationships have their place.

What deserves reconsideration is how we frame them in our minds and whether we mistake them for something deeper.

In elementary school, I did well academically and regularly topped my class. Teachers liked me, and other kids were encouraged to emulate me or spend time around me. I enjoyed the attention. Classmates asked to study together or hang out, and people joked that I had many friends. But it never felt that way to me.

Even though I couldn’t fully articulate it then, I sensed that my academic success was the real reason they gravitated toward me. The attention was flattering, but underneath it all, something about it felt hollow.

I had one friend.

He never asked me for help with homework or studying. We simply spent time together and played.

We were alike in that we were quiet and reserved, barely speaking around others. But when we were together, we talked endlessly about everything unrelated to school—anime, cartoons, girls, games, anything that caught our interest.

He was like a brother to me.

Eventually, he transferred to another school and his family moved to a different town. We lost touch. I didn’t have a phone, and neither did he, so there was no way to stay connected.

I had to move on, but that friendship remains one of the highlights of my childhood, even though I didn’t fully understand at the time what made it so meaningful.

Through high school and adulthood, I found myself returning to similar dynamics. At times, I optimized friendships by leading with philosophy, values, or shared interests, without trying to understand the person beyond what that quality meant to them.

I also found myself on the receiving end of the same treatment. People were interested in me only insofar as I embodied something they valued.

In both cases, these relationships were energetically expensive. I was trying to make them work through narrow metrics I had defined.

Upon reflection, I realized that many of the individuals I once referred to as close friends or confidants were actually associations tailored to fulfill specific criteria.

The most free or fulfilling ones were those that I let flourish on their own without steering them in a certain direction.

Friendships cannot be optimized. The best ones emerge spontaneously and are allowed to evolve on their own terms. What matters at the root is whether you like the person in their totality - someone you can be with freely, someone you trust, someone you feel aligned with.

Optimized friendships are energetically costly because they confine the relationship to the single variable it was built around.

A person may be a saint, the embodiment of values you admire. That does not mean you will be close friends. You may respect them deeply, yet still feel a subtle misalignment. This is not dislike. It is neutrality. Most people have felt this, even if it is difficult to articulate.

People want to be known. They want to share both their light and their darkness with others. Friendship is one of the primary channels through which this desire is fulfilled.

When you lead with what someone has that you want, you confine them to that container, even though they are far more than any single quality. People sense this, often subconsciously, and relationships remain shallow because they realize you are not interested in the rest of who they are.

This does not make such relationships wrong. They simply belong to other categories, not friendship. Friendship can be defined however one chooses. My point is that honesty matters.

It is worth examining whether your relationships meet your own baseline for what you consider a friendship. Many people deceive themselves, justifying connections that are not truly friendships.

A common example is the idea of wartime friends. If you cannot confide in someone during your lowest moments because you fear they will use it against you, what is the relationship really built on?

I have seen this often. Someone is struggling and confides in people they don't even consider friends, fearing that their real friends will judge them or exploit their vulnerability.

Optimized friendships can’t bear the weight of vulnerability precisely because they were built on narrow criteria rather than genuine knowing.

Many of these friendships are performative. They are competitions disguised as camaraderie, where each person postures as doing better than the other. In such relationships, vulnerability is unsafe. Not vulnerability as self-victimization, but the simple act of confiding when you are down.

Authentic friendships are rare and it takes cultivating the necessary qualities to have them. You can’t just expect them. There is also nothing wrong with acquaintances. You may admire someone’s world-class qualities and still never become close, and that is fine.

People want to be seen beyond the qualities we filter for because they are more than those criteria and more than what they represent. And this doesn’t mean abandoning discernment or values. This means that relying solely on those filters does not create intimacy.

There will always be people who walk alongside you because of shared beliefs, shared pursuits, or shared ambition. Those relationships matter.

But friendship asks for something more. It asks whether you can sit with someone when they are no longer impressive, no longer useful, and no longer strong in the ways you once admired.

Are you going to discard them when they are weak and lacking? Are you going to abandon them when they need a hand? Friendship asks for way more.

At the very least, it is worth being honest with yourself. To ask whether the people you call friends know you, and whether you know them. Because people desire to be known.

People have connections, some of whom they mistake for friends.

P.S: Thank you for reading. If this resonated, you can support the work by becoming a paid subscriber or sharing it with someone who needs it. Paid subscribers get direct access to me for deeper conversations via DMs.

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It is easy to lose yourself in the pursuit of something.

Not all at once. But slowly. Quietly.

At first, nothing feels wrong. You tell yourself you are just being practical, just being strategic and rational, as the task at hand demands.

Then one day, you realize you have started justifying things you once would have walked away from. Your ethical lines begin to blur, not because you stopped believing in them, but because they started getting in the way.

Eight years ago, I was pulled into a pyramid scheme. I was pretty naive back then and didn’t understand the business model, but I was elated by the idea of making money while I slept.

I was 19 and wanted independence from my parents. I had depended on them for sustenance for much of my existence and I wanted to be my own man, to make my own money.

What was presented to me was the prospect of not just doing that but a lot more. Flashy cars. Stacks of cash. Lavish vacations. There were real testimonials from people who had those things. I was told I could live like that too. That I could have it all. I just needed to take the first step.

So I made a decision that still makes me uncomfortable to admit. I took the loan meant to pay for my first semester of school… and I used it to invest in the “business.”

Pyramid schemes are masters of what I call selective vision. They show you the dream, never the cost of achieving it.

Once you are inside, reality reveals itself. Endless outreach. Constant pressure to recruit. Reach out to friends. Reach out to family. Contact that one guy you haven't spoken to in seven years but are still Facebook friends with.

Everyone is fair game.

You are also encouraged to project a wealthy lifestyle. The slogan was “fake it till you make it,” and we embodied it literally.

We would go to expensive restaurants, not to eat, sometimes just to order water, take photos, and later post them with those cringe captions: “finally financially free,” “while you’re sleeping, I’m working,” and “it’s lonely at the top.”

We recycled status updates from those at the top, praising how much the “business” had done for them. They were the ones actually making money and living lavishly. They took the photos. We cropped them and reposted them as our own.

If we had AI back then, we would have cooked. Gemini Nano Banana would have been put into insane work.

To show how petty it all was, I would wake up at 4 a.m. I would wake up at 4 a.m. just to post phrases like “up before the sun” or “winners are getting the bag,” and then I would go back to sleep just minutes later.

Anyone watching my posts would have assumed I was thriving. It was all a façade.

In reality, I could barely afford food. Whatever money I had went toward renting venues, buying tickets for prospects, and traveling for “business operations.”

There was a small café near where I lived at the time, owned by an elderly woman I had a nice relationship with. I would eat there and promise to pay later. Once, I missed a payment, and she was kind and understanding. Kinder than I deserved. One time, she even fed me for free.

She probably liked the prospect of seeing a young blood trying to make a name for himself. Maybe it reminded her of her own youth. Whatever it was, she helped me in ways I hadn’t earned.

Weeks passed. No money came in. Debts stacked up. I was starving. Not just physically, surviving on one meal a day, but psychologically. I desperately wanted a win, something to justify the sacrifice.

I began to reason that maybe I wasn’t being ruthless enough. I had tried to operate as ethically as possible, but I concluded that ethics were holding me back.

What I didn’t understand then was that the foundation of these schemes is unethical. No ethical strategy will ever prevail within them. The people at the top succeed precisely because they abandon their values. They sacrifice their integrity to serve the system and are rewarded with material wealth for doing so.

I slowly started giving in.

I deployed every tactic in the book, no matter how foul. I started lying, casually at first, then fluently. I told people they could double or triple their investment in a week. I recycled status updates shamelessly while eating like trash. I contorted myself into someone unrecognizable.

People close to me began to distance themselves. I don’t blame them. I led a double life, hiding the nature of what I was doing from those I loved because I was afraid of losing them, having already lost a few.

Then… it happened.

My schemes worked. I convinced two people to join. My team celebrated me. But I didn’t feel proud. I felt uneasy.

One of the men I recruited pulled me aside and told me he had taken money from his church’s treasury. He was the treasurer. He had invested it based on the false hope I sold him, believing he would make it back in a week.

I remember the excitement on his face, the same excitement I had months prior when I first joined, unaware of what awaited me.

I had heard that people had laid it all on the line—rent money, inheritance, tuition, medical funds—for the sake of getting this to work. It had been normalized. But this time, I felt the weight of it fully. I had persuaded someone to jeopardize a sacred item, all the while deceiving him about the outcome.

That night, I lay on my bed staring at my account balance. For weeks, I had been in scarcity. By every external metric, I had finally “won.”

But I felt disgusted.

I realized something:

I was no longer the person people once trusted for integrity. That had been my quiet pride, the thing people leaned on me for. And I had traded it away. Not for millions. But for some cash and a decent meal.

I was slowly becoming like the people at the top. Successful on paper. They could afford anything they wanted. But they were so impoverished on the inside. They had built their success off the backs of vulnerable people who wanted to build better lives.

Yes, perhaps due diligence was needed on the side of these individuals. But exploiting their insecurities, fears, and desperation to influence them into positions they didn’t anticipate was just wrong.

Some destroyed relationships with their families and friends and became cogs in the machine, reinforcing that exploitative cycle.

I wasn’t an entrepreneur. I wasn’t a business owner.

I was a scammer. But worse than that, I was the devil’s foot soldier, influencing the hearts of people and contorting them to be exploitative and manipulative for the sake of the machine. That was the real harm - poisoning their hearts.

I decided I didn’t want to be that kind of man. Something in me knew there were better ways to build a life without selling your soul or destroying others in the process.

I left. I never recovered my investment. But I rescued a part of myself that was slowly dying.

A mission is very impartial. Once you commit to a goal, a lifestyle, or a sense of security, ambition itself is not the problem. You will summon the energy and intensity required, no matter how arduous your circumstances may be.

I endured difficult conditions, eating like trash, sleeping in places I wasn’t mean to and a fractured identity for the sake of that mission. A mission built on false promises and the exploitation of vulnerable people for material gain.

In pursuing anything, it is worth asking:

Who am I becoming in the process?

There are parts of yourself you trade away so gradually you don’t notice they are gone until you finally get what you wanted and realize it cost more than you were willing to pay.

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In simping, a man forfeits his dignity and self-respect for the sake of a woman. He dances to her whims and alters his opinions, values, and stances in order to appeal to her and win her affection.

It is a strategy that ultimately fails.

While she may entertain his advances, at a deeper level she harbors repulsion for him, because his behavior runs counter to her desires. A man who forfeits himself for her, even when she claims she wants that, is unattractive because it signals a lack of spine.

What is less obvious is that this same forfeiture can occur through a different route.

Sexual competence can also become a pathway through which a man abandons himself for a woman. The outcome appears different on the surface. She may become obsessed with you if you know how to navigate her body and stimulate her mind in ways she has never experienced.

But if this does not arise from your core and from genuine desire, it is still a forfeiture of self, merely disguised as skill.

This distinction matters because sexual experience is relentlessly emphasized everywhere you turn online. You are told that you need to sleep with a certain number of women.

That you need to try specific techniques. That she will leave you if you do not know how to do certain things. That you must execute A, B, C, and D to keep her hooked.

Over time, this messaging places you in a reactive posture. You become led by the urge to perform and to prove yourself, when in reality you do not need to prove yourself at all. Rather than engaging naturally, you are constantly trying to demonstrate capability.

A few years back, I bought into this paradigm. What intensified the pressure was that everywhere I turned, the men I spoke to would boast about how they got this girl obsessed with them, how they had another one lined up for the next day, and so on.

At the same time, I had been celibate for much of my life, a byproduct of deep indoctrination from a cult I was in the process of leaving. In retrospect, that celibacy benefited me. But at the time, I believed it had been weaponized against me.

As I broke free from that framework, I developed the misguided sense that I needed to catch up to peers who had already been “in the field” and had racked up their notch counts.

The corners of the internet I exposed myself to reinforced this belief.

I applied myself obsessively to learning everything about sex. I studied female anatomy. I studied female psychology. I learned what to say, what to touch, how to caress, how to apply pressure, and when to switch from dominant to passionate. All the schizo tactics. The so-called dark arts. I learned them all, chasing thoroughness, chasing perfection in the craft.

What I did not notice at the time was the subtle cost of this approach.

When I related with women, it became performative. Yes, they liked it and responded to it, but deep down I felt off. I was moving through the motions like a robot executing a program.

I tried to ignore that feeling. Yet beneath the avoidance was a quiet recognition that there was more to intimacy than everything I had optimized for. I told myself it was just a phase that would pass. It did not. It lingered, signaling that something was fundamentally misaligned.

That misalignment came into sharp focus one night.

I had a girl over at my place. I had played all the cards I had learned and led her to that point. I followed the script, orchestrating everything that was supposed to happen. But beneath it all, I felt resistance.

I touched her in the ways I knew were effective. I said the phrases that were supposed to create desire. And she responded as I expected.

And yet, I felt completely disconnected from what was happening. The actions were correct, but they felt hollow, as though I were watching myself perform from a distance.

Eventually, I stopped. The resistance I had been overriding became too strong to ignore.

She was understandably confused. She said she was enjoying everything and wanted to continue. My withdrawal contradicted all the signals I had been sending. I told her I did not want to go further, which made no sense given the path I had deliberately created.

That moment forced clarity.

I realized I had been performing rather than engaging authentically. I was acting out scripts I had conditioned myself to follow in an attempt to demonstrate competence. At its root was insecurity. I feared being inadequate and failing to meet the standards I had adopted, standards that offered a narrow and distorted conception of what a man was supposed to be.

It was a performance meant to appease an ego complex I had built around sex. To uphold a false sexual identity. To flex on the boys and participate in the dick-measuring contests of locker-room talk.

This is the danger of mistaking technique for alignment.

It is possible to deploy strategies learned online or from books and know how to bind a woman into devotion or obsession. But when you act outside your core, it becomes hollow. You turn into a man who pleases her while neglecting himself.

In essence, you are no different from the simp who places her on a pedestal. You have prioritized her desires above your own, and in truth, you have not really won.

Over time, this approach also distorts how you evaluate women. You begin to see her as someone who simply needs to be screwed well, believing that this alone is sufficient to sustain a connection.

You overlook other dimensions of her being because you have internalized the belief that sexual performance can override deeper, soul-level components that must be assessed and vetted.

Eventually, disillusionment sets in. Beyond physical intimacy, you may discover that there is little else she can offer you. There are deeper spiritual and psychological needs she cannot meet, and the realization can feel bleak.

The greater danger is that you project this conclusion onto women as a whole. In reality, some women can meet both the physical and the spiritual. They are rare, but they exist.

The problem with obsessively buffing your stats in sexual competence and leading with that is that it narrows your perspective. It conditions you to believe that this alone is sufficient. You begin to base your identity around women and their responses rather than deciding what you value and acting from your core. Resentment follows, because you are neglecting yourself.

Many of the tools taught emphasize the woman’s needs and what she responds to, which can be informative. But they often place you into a performative frame. The obsession with doing it right becomes the very thing that disconnects you from your primal instinct. Performance anxiety emerges when you believe you failed to execute a tactic correctly. Even when she responds positively, you feel out of place and eventually resentful.

The advice I would give my younger self is simple: act from alignment.

Society and the internet will always tell you how to live, how to improve, and how to succeed. But when those prescriptions are disconnected from your soul, they bring suffering.

What you learn should serve as a vehicle for expressing the desires that already live within you. Sexual competence without the core turns you into a performer. Sexual competence as a vehicle allows you to channel masculine instinct cleanly and honestly.

If you pedestalize it, you may become a sex god, but it will come at a cost. At minimum, you will have allowed female response to dictate the man you become.

When you abandon your core for an image, a performance, or a standard imposed from the outside, you betray yourself. And self-betrayal inevitably corrodes the spirit.

This is why, as a man, unwavering self-belief and a cultivated core are essential. I would even argue that self-belief is the only skill that matters for a man. Because with it you can gain competence in any field that you choose to apply yourself to.

Nothing can stop you as long as you believe in yourself.

Outside influences will always tell you who you should be and what you should do. When those prescriptions are fundamentally misaligned with you, following them is a form of self-prostitution.

If you want to destroy a man, take away this capacity. Strip him of the ability to act from himself. He may even live in comfort, but his spirit will wither.

Acting from your core, building your own systems, and living by what you deeply value is the highest imperative of a man’s life.

My work done my way. Nothing else matters to me.

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I grew up in a Catholic household. My mother was deeply committed to the teachings and traditions of Catholicism, and many families in the area shared the same faith. Church was a central part of community life; it was where we saw friends, extended family, and familiar faces each week.

Catechism formed a significant part of my childhood, and my mother enrolled my brother and me in catechist classes. After progressing through the teachings, the process would culminate in baptism and the receiving of a rosary.

I have always been a curious person, almost obnoxiously so as a child. With age, I have learned to temper that impulse, but back then I followed my curiosity wherever it led, even when restraint would have been wiser. I asked priests countless questions about prayers, their origins, and the reasons behind specific rituals. I needed to understand not just what we were doing, but why it had to be done in that particular way.

I always have this knack for seeking meaning in things, and I always ask why, uncovering layers behind them in an inception-like manner until I attain a satisfactory answer. That instinct has always lived in me. At one point, I asked too many questions, and the priest leading the class grew visibly irritated. He told me to accept things as they were, because this was the structure everyone followed and that it had worked for years.

This rubbed me the wrong way and left me with even greater questions about the mechanics of catechism and why we needed to do all that. This is not an argument against Catholicism or religion.

It reflects my personal experience and the instinct to seek answers that satisfied me at a deeper level. I struggled to accept a belief or ideal without feeling personally convicted. Accepting something simply because it was widely practiced, because it provided structure or a moral compass, has never been enough for me.

This is not to say those things are not useful. They matter. They are important and vital. But to me, they are consequences of faith, not its aim. Moral action, at its best, is not performed merely because one is instructed to do so, but because something within compels it.

I needed to know that catalyst. That was the most important thing to me.

I sensed that if I could locate it, or at least understand what it meant to me (not rationally because intellectual faculties can't comprehend the spiritual), the actions would flow naturally. Acting without this felt like forced labor. It felt like a disservice to both the catalyst and myself.

That same instinct has always confronted me and called me out whenever I tried to settle for something without gathering a deeper understanding. I am not suggesting this is what others should do. Not at all. This was simply me acting in alignment with who I am. I was just living true to my nature. This path has led me to hell and down roads that I wished I hadn't taken, but those experiences have shaped me in ways I have grown to appreciate.

Things could have been easier; I could have had a lovely community and supportive network that matched my beliefs at the time. But I didn't. It would have been cowardice. The inner torment would have been unbearable. I would not have been able to live with myself. And I would not have it any other way.

Anyway, to circle back, I ended up leaving the classes because I could not find an answer to the questions I had. My mother was unhappy with this and tried several times to persuade me to return, but I was stubborn. In time, she made peace with it, accepting that she could not govern this part of my life. All she could do was support me in whatever path I chose. My father always granted my brother and me autonomy. He believed that if we were to find God, it would have to be on our own terms. God has no grandchildren after all.

My mother gave me her green rosary, and despite our differing beliefs, I came to appreciate the goodwill she intended in this gesture. As a teenager, I was rigid. Even when offered in good faith, I rejected symbols and acts that did not align with my beliefs. With time, I recognized the immaturity in that posture. I learned to appreciate gestures of love and goodwill no matter the source.

Religion, culture, and tradition merely serve as conduits for the manifestation of these acts of goodwill. The greater force at work is the gesture itself. The forms may differ across traditions, but rejecting an act of goodwill because it does not align with your beliefs is a failure to recognize that goodness cannot be contained by any single system.

Accepting such a gesture is not a betrayal of your values. It is recognizing that good transcends the structures we try to contain it in.

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Much has been said about attention, especially within the realm of intersexual dynamics. It is no secret that women, over the course of their lives, receive more attention than men due to a combination of sociocultural and evolutionary pressures.

This attention is largely centered on physical beauty.

A woman’s physical attractiveness makes her highly salient to male mating interest. As a result, she becomes the regulator of intimacy, choosing who gains access to her while seeking emotional stability and genuine connection from the man she selects. The pattern of attention given and received differs fundamentally between the sexes.

Women intuitively understand this. Instinctively, a woman wishes to preserve and share her beauty with a man she deems worthy of it. Yet this does not prevent her from receiving attention from other men.

Her beauty functions like a flame, attracting moths that cannot help themselves. They approach her, pursue her, and some even debase themselves through overt simping, offering favors or unearned devotion. She receives attention in many forms.

Her intuition is sharp. She knows what these men want. Some will never articulate it, others will be blunt, forcing her to reject them with tact and emotional dexterity, especially because not all men handle rejection well, even when it is delivered kindly.

This has always been nature’s design. The female is pursued and courted. Her responsibility is to choose the man she deems competent and worthy, physical attractiveness being only one factor among many, who can offer emotional intimacy and stability. When she finds such a man, she naturally wants to look beautiful for him.

She desires to be desired by him, and it pleases her to please him. In response, the man is inclined to protect her, both physically and emotionally, while providing that intimacy.

Both genders long to be seen beyond what nature initially designs them to be perceived as.

Women wish to be seen beyond their physical beauty. Being told she is beautiful countless times a day may seem flattering, but it can grow exhausting when she possesses depth she longs to share. This is why the man who engages her inner world, her thoughts, emotions, and interior architecture, stands out. He sees the components of her soul that she wants to impart, not merely the surface that others fixate on.

When a man sees her in this way, he captures her more easily. As she bonds with him, she offers physical intimacy merely as a consequence of having been psychically penetrated. She gives herself willingly because she has found a worthy man.

Physical intimacy becomes the natural outcome of the spiritual foreplay. The greater act was being seen. Her desire to look beautiful for him follows organically as an expression of her own desire for him.

Men, by contrast, are designed to become strong and competent. Yet strength alone is insufficient. Internal development matters more than external dominance. Society conditions men to prioritize material success and status, which can attract women, but often attracts women who are similarly oriented toward the material.

Like women, men also long to be seen beyond their external competencies. A woman who captures a man’s soul, who loves him before he has fully honed his faculties or reached his peak, leaves a deep imprint. She inspires him so deeply. From that love, he develops a profound drive to protect, nurture, and provide for her and their family.

He attains strength, physique, resources, and competence. Not to prove himself, but because he has been spiritually penetrated by a woman who saw him before he became. Love activates his latent potential. For such a woman, a man will move mountains, break perceived limits, and accomplish feats that previously felt impossible.

He will warp space and move multiverses to get things done. He will even do things that are beyond comprehension and his abilities because such an expression of love from his woman inspires him to break through barriers and go into levels he never thought possible.

That is why, as a man, if you have ever experienced this form of devotional love from a woman who captured your soul deeply, your baseline for what you seek in a woman (should things not work out) becomes elevated. It is as if you are marked until you meet someone capable of eclipsing that baseline.

There are layers to this. Just as with women, a man must have honed his soul and cultivated the qualities that inspire such devotion. Expecting this level of love without that inner work is delusional. Moreover, spiritual competence is harder to evaluate, which makes it rare and therefore carries greater weight in what one ultimately receives.

There is, however, another configuration.

The crazy archetype woman can also capture a man’s soul, but the dynamic is different. She has this appeal because she mirrors parts of himself he has yet to integrate. This is what Jungian psychology refers to as anima possession.

I have noticed, through both observation and personal experience, that such women often embodied qualities that mirrored aspects within me, which is what created the allure.

It is not merely how wild they can be, but the chaotic element they reflect in men who may be unaware of those qualities within themselves. This is soul possession in its inverted form.

It indulges the unintegrated chaos he carries rather than refining it.

The bond is intense, intoxicating, and destructive, not because the woman is inherently pathological, but because she carries what he has not yet learned to hold within himself. I will explore this more fully in a future piece.

By contrast, when both genders possess each other’s souls, they develop a transcendent version of devotion towards each other. And this is really beautiful because it takes nature’s base design and elevates it. She will naturally want to look beautiful for him and be desired by him. He will want to be strong, to protect and provide for her. Their actions flow effortlessly from alignment.

Soul possession was the primary act. Everything else follows.

This is exceedingly rare, which explains much of where we are today. Each gender acts according to nature’s base design while internally longing for psychic penetration.

A beautiful woman may receive endless male attention and even enjoy it, yet if she has depth, a part of her will always long for a man with whom she can share it. Such men are uncommon, but they exist.

Likewise, as a man you may become big, strong, and dominant across all facets of life, and you will command female attention. Loads of it. Yet many will appear shallow, interested only in your accomplishments and stature. They don’t really see you. To them, you are mythological, a symbol rather than a person. While this may inflate the ego, that hunger still remains.

That is why the murk can be beautiful for a man. When a woman loves you and is committed to you when you have nothing, you know she is a keeper.

The beautiful woman and the externally competent man who have cultivated depth face the same dilemma. Both wish to be seen beyond what nature prompts genders to perceive.

This desire intensifies with spiritual development. As one deepens, options narrow. You become attuned to seeking someone who shares or can perceive that depth. Subtle misalignments become glaring red flags. Others may call you picky, unrealistic, or delusional. They cannot see what you see. And it can be difficult to take this in. But that is the gauntlet that you have to run for living like that.

This is not a claim of spiritual superiority. It is simply the consequence of acting in alignment with your deepest values and beliefs.

As depth increases, the heart becomes selective. And the universe is fair. You will always meet someone who mirrors the depth you have cultivated within yourself. When you do, your actions naturally fall back into nature’s design, carried by the devotion they evoke in you.

Still, spiritual depth is not meant to be used to procure a partner. Its purpose is first to deepen the relationship you have with yourself and orient you towards a transcendent ideal. An aligned union is not the goal; it is merely a consequence.

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I have had many conversations here about books, and people have asked me which ones I read. I thought I would take some time to explore the books that have shaped me this year. Before I get to that, though, I need to share some context.

The Goosebumps Era

I started reading when I was about ten. My favorite series was R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. The suspense, the imagery, and the way he built alternate worlds, it all grabbed me. I had a strong imagination as a child, and those books fed it.

I would finish a book in three days, sometimes in one. I borrowed them from the local library and finished them long before the two-week return window.

Over time, I became a familiar face there. The librarians knew exactly what I came for. I would borrow three books at a time and finish them within the week. Eventually, I exhausted their collection and started rereading my favorites:

• Monster Blood (all of them)

• The Haunted Mask

• Night of the Living Dummy (all of them)

• The Cuckoo Clock of Doom

I can say with certainty that I read all the original Goosebumps series. The Horrorland series was also elite.

Even writing this brings back nice memories from childhood.

I read purely for indulgence, purely for wonder, and purely because it transported me into other realities.

R.L. Stine was brilliant at that.

The Self-Help Era

As I got older and went through high school and eventually college, I entered my self-help era. I stopped reading fiction because I convinced myself it was a waste of time. I told myself I needed to become better.

This idea of becoming better, while well-intentioned, was based on the false premise that I was flawed and that other people were doing better than me.

To be fair, I did need to address real things. Some habits had to change. Some internal systems needed rebuilding. But my approach was distorted.

I looked around and saw people who seemed more confident, more social, more vibrant, and more successful in school and in life. I assumed I needed to become like them. Emulation is not inherently wrong, and some of it helped. I did improve my health, my fitness, and my finances.

But eventually I realized something: I was applying patches to an operating system that needed an overhaul.

The 60 Laws, The 5am Club, How to Win Friends, various forgotten and ignored laws, and the fifty rules.

I read them all. I could talk of those things that I read, and while I did start making progress in my life because of them, I realized there was tremendous friction between my identity and the habits I was trying to onboard.

I would struggle whenever I had to wake up at 5am or go to the gym because the internal architecture was that of an individual who did none of those things.

Psychological Architecture

At some point, I realized that I needed to delve deeper.

What was needed was soul-level surgery—excavating the rot and faulty belief systems that were embedded in my psyche so that I could create room for systems coherent with who I wanted to become.

This is not an argument against self-help. Many self-help principles work. The structures work. The strategies work. But they only work cleanly when they meet a compatible internal system.

If you do not understand your psychological architecture, if you have not dived deep into your psyche and faced the truth about yourself, the beauty and the ugly, then you will keep trying to deploy strategies using someone else’s assumptions, and you will quit because it won’t work.

You are not an empty canvas. None of us are.

We each carry a particular inner wiring, shaped by temperament, childhood, experience, and unresolved wounds.

Self-help breaks down when habits are imposed on an unexamined identity, and principles are applied without first understanding the person expected to live them.

When you actually know yourself, your thoughts, beliefs, fears, impulses, and desires, you stop forcing.

You start building.

You develop your own system, one that fits your reality and is coherent with your soul. Habits stop feeling like foreign objects grafted onto you. They become expressions of who you are.

That was my epiphany after years of books, courses, and routines.

I also ran into another problem: contradiction.

One author would praise what another rejected. Because I had placed “experts” on a pedestal, these contradictions made me doubt myself even more. I over-trusted external authority and under-trusted my own inner knowing, even when my intuition was clearly signaling, this is not for you.

It is a simplified example of “trust the experts” haha.

That doubt kept me from looking inward long enough to discover what was already there.

Inner Exodus

The most important task you will ever undertake is that inner exodus, and it might also be the hardest.

You will be forced to confront what you have been avoiding: your shadows, your defenses, your traumas, and the parts of yourself that feel ashamed, angry, envious, bitter, or manipulative. It is difficult to admit how dark a human being can be internally, especially when the external image suggests otherwise.

People who know me might describe me as chill. For a long time, I tried to uphold that image, even while chaos brewed inside me. I exiled parts of myself to maintain the persona, and what I did not face began to rot in the background.

There was a season where I became apathetic about life. Even a small emotion felt dangerous because it threatened to awaken what I had locked away.

Eventually, I had to face them because I realized that the image of the nice guy persona I was trying to maintain was destroying me.

Not a good person. Not a bad person. Just not a person at all.

When I finally confronted those ugly parts, it was painful at first, but over time I felt liberated.

I saw how much of my identity had been shaped by what I thought society wanted and by the simplified morality I absorbed from books without first understanding myself.

That is why I believe the best self-help books are those that equip you with tools for that inner exodus. They steer you to look within yourself, to understand why you believe certain things, to question your motives, and to establish your own system based on internal coherence.

The contemporary self-help books and the strategies in them become easier to apply.

Perhaps you would not even need them because in comprehending yourself so deeply, you will know what you need. You use the external models as inspirations to build yours, rather than following them as if they were religious texts.

This is why the people I respect most often hesitate to give rigid instructions. What worked for them might not work for you. At best, they offer frameworks that you can adapt.

Either way, the work of knowing yourself is yours.

And it never truly ends.

External Dependencies

“Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread”.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

The self-help industry is massive partly because people have been conditioned to distrust themselves and defer to external authorities. So they chase the next course, the next book, the next law, thinking the final formula is one purchase away.

But the cycle rarely ends. You jump from ship to ship, seeking externally what can only be found internally. The existential ache persists because you never face its source.

This became one of my concerns with systemic religion, at least in how I once used it.

I had questions I could not resolve. I felt that existential burden and wanted an answer that satisfied my soul, not just my fear. Yet I often accepted what I was told simply because everyone else accepted it.

It became a form of spiritual cowardice. I hid behind community and certainty instead of wrestling honestly to establish what would satisfy that angst.

This is not an argument against religion. It is an argument against doing anything without conviction, especially when your gut is telling you that something is off.

When I asked religious people about their conviction, I often noticed something: many were more loyal to the system than to the teachings. The system gave them safety, identity, community, and a purpose that quieted the existential burden. In some cases, it also uses them, hijacking their devotion to advance goals they never consciously chose.

If the system feeds you, clothes you, keeps you warm, and gives you belonging, you may never question what you are serving. If that works for someone, I am not here to condemn them.

However, I discovered through personal experience that the concept of "truth" is far more subjective than I initially wanted to acknowledge. My obsession with external certainty often led me into the hands of people who sold it for profit, status, or power.

And I became more lost than I expected.

What brought me back was alignment. Acting from conviction. Moving with my soul, not with borrowed scripts.

I cannot force myself to believe what I do not believe.

If I do, resentment leaks into everything, and eventually I blow it up. That spirit has cost me friendships and relationships. And I have been severed in the process. But the alternative, living without conviction, felt worse. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I always have this instinctual knowing that if I have a desire in myself, then there is something to meet it. And I have always acted having that belief within myself.

And still, life is beautiful. Love may be the apex of that beauty. A labor of love is one of the cleanest expressions of the soul.

I once heard an idea that stuck with me: if someone wanted to destroy you, they would corrupt your soul. Because once your soul is corrupted, your beliefs, emotions, thoughts, actions, and the reality you create all begin to rot.

Our world is full of soul-corrupting inputs, many of them subtle. These include the media you consume, the music you immerse yourself in, and the people you surround yourself with. They leave imprints, and often you do not notice until you have done enough inner work to detect the shift.

That is why the inner exodus matters. You have to go inward, remove what is malignant, and rebuild. Only then do external strategies land cleanly.

Book Recommendations

Before I go into it, I want you to take these books as models, not as sources of truth.

Take these books as mirrors and frameworks, not straitjacket strategies for you to apply and then suddenly your life will become exponentially better.

Reading these books doesn't alleviate the burden of introspection. That needs to be done.

Spiritual and Mental Development

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

I read this earlier this year, and it clarified things I had sensed but could not articulate. It breaks down how self-image shapes behavior and how external results often mirror internal programming.

Maltz, writing as a physician, explains how the mind forms the patterns that drive action, and he uses examples from athletes and high performers to show how visualization and mental rehearsal influence performance.

A major takeaway is the primacy of inner image. If you can refine the picture you hold of yourself, you can begin to calibrate action toward it. The book offers tools to examine your current reality, then deliberately shape a new internal image so that actions become expressions of alignment rather than forced discipline.

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

I reread this this year. The first time I read it, I dismissed it as abstract. This time it landed differently. It is a short book about cultivating the inner garden. If the inner world is polluted, the outer life will reflect it.

Thoughts seem small, but the quality of what you think shapes the quality of what you become. Anything by James Allen is worth reading, but only if you read with an open heart.

There is a free library of his work: https://james-allen.in1woord.nl/

Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland

I finished this book recently, and it is dense, packed with ideas. You could think of it as an elaborate synthesis for viewing reality, with elements of physics woven into it. I would not call it a source of truth, but rather another model through which reality can be interpreted.

It explores thought and how its quality shapes action, much like the previous two books. It discusses the unity between heart and mind, inner and outer intention, dreaming, and alternate spaces. There is a lot to unpack, and I plan to reread it soon, as much of it still needs to be fully synthesized.

One key takeaway for me was the alignment of inner and outer intention. Outer intention is about choosing a direction or destination, where you want to be. For example, my outer intention is I move toward land, autonomy, and simplicity. Inner intention is the execution power that translates this vision into concrete action, embodying the reality you want to live in.

At its core, this is about becoming the person you want to be now.

Thinking as they think. Acting as they act. When you do this consistently, the reality or goals you seek begin to materialize naturally.

I know this can sound abstract, so to simplify it, imagine your ideal version of yourself. Observe how they think, how they act, how they earn, and who they surround themselves with. Once you identify these qualities, ask whether you are living by them right now. If not, what small, tangible changes can you make to align more closely with that version of yourself?

This ties back to the mental image I mentioned in Psycho-Cybernetics. It becomes the vision you orient yourself toward with every breath you take. Visualizing this image and embodying the feelings of that person matters, because action then becomes a natural expression of alignment rather than forced effort.

There is far more to this book than what I have outlined here, and I may write a proper synthesis once I revisit it. It is one of those books best approached with an open heart. Ultimately, it is simply another lens through which to view reality.

Individuation

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette (men)

This book uses Jungian archetypes to map the male psyche: the mature expressions of these energies and their shadow distortions. It helped me see my imbalance. I was overindexed in the Magician and the Lover, and I had exiled my Warrior.

In this model, the Magician is the internal mapper, the strategist, the one who sees patterns and generates ideas. The Lover is the sensual connector, the one drawn to beauty and intimacy. But without the Warrior, these energies can collapse into analysis paralysis, boundarylessness, and the “nice guy” trap.

The Warrior is the one who acts, protects, and enforces boundaries. He shields what matters, including you, from your own worst tendencies.

For me, that is why action is medicinal. Without it, I can live in abstraction, drowning in theories that I may never conceive into reality. Routines and structures ground me in action so that I am not consumed by my internal world.

This book helps you identify which energies you need to strengthen so that sovereignty becomes possible.

The unity of the warrior, magician, and lover is requisital for the king to be made manifest.

Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola (women)

There is surprisingly little material that guides women through spiritual individuation, especially in a world that constantly pressures them toward shallow scripts. Much of the advice women receive is surface-level: self-care, friendships, and fitness. Useful, but incomplete.

Women have souls too, and spiritual development is not optional or gendered. It is a human responsibility.

Women have their own journeys and their own shadows to face. When this inner work is neglected, they become more susceptible to deception and vulnerable to societal forces that seek to mold them into compliant ideologies and beliefs that ultimately corrode the soul.

Female intuition is a remarkable gift and it comes naturally to women.

But that faculty can be taken much further through conscious spiritual development. While there are many external dangers a woman faces, I would argue that the most perilous forces reside beneath the surface of her psyche. When left unexamined, these forces sabotage her ability to navigate life with clarity, vigilance, and fulfillment.

In the book, the author uses the Bluebeard tale as a psychological map, a diagnosis of an inner psychic threat. Bluebeard represents a destructive pattern that severs a woman from her intuition, instincts, and inner knowing.

Under its influence, a woman makes premature commitments, rushes intimacy, or enters life paths to escape loneliness, fear, or scarcity. Bluebeard despises time. He rushes. He pressures. He demands commitment before discernment has had space to operate.

Over time, this pattern kills a woman’s inner life. Her creativity dulls. Her boundaries erode. Her sexual sovereignty is violated. Externally she may appear functional or even successful, but inwardly she becomes numb, exhausted, and hollow. A living dead.

There is far more to explore here, but I would recommend this book to any woman reading this. So many forces are attempting to crush you into compliance. Unless the untamed ego and shadow forces within are confronted, sovereignty remains out of reach.

You may be admired, desired, even placed on a pedestal, but without inner mastery those forces will tear you apart quietly, from the inside.

It is unfortunate how little emphasis is placed on inner work. Both men and women are trained to pursue the material while ignoring the immaterial, even though that is where the real treasure lies.

If you are a woman and you commit to shaping your inner world into a pristine citadel, life begins to move differently. Your instincts sharpen. You recognize ill intention immediately, whether it comes from men or women. This path can feel lonely.

The female nervous system values bonding and community, and when authentic bonds are scarce, things can be difficult. But that is the gauntlet you run for walking this path.

Outlier women often have few friends for this reason. It takes immense strength to walk this path. But for those who do, beauty becomes the guiding value, not appearance, but depth, truth, and coherence.

Beauty attracts beauty. Like recognizes like.

The beautiful women will see you. The beautiful man will see you.

This is not optimism or wishful thinking.

It is law.

It just has to happen.

Health

How to Eat, Move and be Healthy by Paul Chek

I eat clean and aim for high standards of health, but early on I made a mistake: I tried to optimize isolated parts of my health separately. That approach eventually cost me. I developed costochondritis in the middle of last year, training hard while under-recovering. The body is holistic. It must be treated as such.

This book helps you evaluate the body as an integrated system and build a plan that fits your physiology. Mainstream advice often fails because it ignores how intelligent the body is, which is one reason so many diets fail.

If you want to create, lead, and build, you need a resilient body, mind, and spirit.

Balance across those systems creates the harmony that makes high performance sustainable.

Fiction & Philosophy

At the beginning I mentioned that I stopped reading fiction because I thought “practical” books mattered more. That was nonsense. If I am honest, a large portion of what shaped me came from fiction.

There are some books that do a brilliant breakdown of psychology and human existence that resonate deeply with me, and I read them not just for enlightenment but for my indulgence. I love reading stories, as they engage the imagination that I retained. I love Dostoevsky’s work, and I have read his famous works: The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and Notes from the Underground.

These books fuse philosophy, psychology, and storytelling at an elite level.

They are dense, and they may not be for everyone, but they are worth it if you can sit with them.

Another novel that resonated with me this year was The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand captured aspects of the male psyche in a way that still surprises me. Howard Roark embodies a refusal to be crushed by the collective and a devotion to creating beauty even when society tries to punish the impulse.

Fiction is beautiful because it does not hand you rules. It gives you a story. And depending on who you are at the time you read it, you will extract different lessons.

When you return to the same book after you have grown, it reads like a different book.

The knowledge finds you when you most need it and when you are finally built to hold it.

P.S: Thank you for reading. If this resonated, you can support the work by becoming a paid subscriber or sharing it with someone who needs it. Paid subscribers also get direct access to me for deeper conversations.

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The origin story behind my handwriting dates back to when I was about nine years old in primary school. Part of the curriculum was an English class where we had to do writing assignments. My teacher was marking our work, and I remember the occasion vividly.

He called me out in front of the entire class and said my handwriting was trash.

“Rubbish,” he said. He went further and mentioned that I should do better considering that I was topping the class overall. That I should write more like other kids, some of whom were my arch nemeses in academics. I took it personal.

So after that, I set out on a vendetta to prove him wrong.

I worked diligently. Each sentence, each word, each letter, crafted to perfection.

It became OCD-like in intensity. I would write a word, and if I didn’t like how it looked, the image of being feathered would flash in my mind, and I would erase it and rewrite it until it met my standards. I got slower at writing, and homework took longer, but I didn’t care. I had to prove him wrong.

This spilled even into other classes—Math, Science, it didn’t matter. I was going to deploy the same thoroughness and intensity to my handwriting. Inevitably I got better until he eventually acknowledged that I had gotten far better than he had anticipated.

I felt a sense of victory from having proven him wrong, but it also felt somewhat hollow. I didn’t feel like I had won. It’s like that movie Whiplash, where the main character is tortured into becoming stellar at his craft. Not that I went through anything comparable, but the feeling was similar: the achievement felt less like mine and more like a win for him.

By that point, I had honed my handwriting so intensely that it became second nature. Teachers would have me write notes for them, girls wanted to read my notes or have me write things for them, and my homies would ask me to write love letters to their crushes—xoxo and all that haha. Could have had my own business, honestly.

Anyway, after the desire to prove him wrong faded, I realized I genuinely enjoyed sculpting letters and shaping them deliberately, almost as an art form. I was quite an artistic kid growing up. My brother and I would sit with huge sheets of paper and draw for hours. We took inspiration from cartoons and anime—Ben 10, Naruto, Bleach—and we’d draw characters and give them little life arcs.

But I used to do extremely poorly in kindergarten and early primary (usually at the tail of the class), so to get better academically, I had to lock in, and that included shaving time away from the things I enjoyed—drawing, calligraphy, painting, all of it. I spent less time exploring that artistic version of myself and optimized for the left-brained academic track.

And I rose in the ranks. It felt good to do well and receive praise, but the artist in me didn’t disappear. I still drew for classmates and even teachers. Drawing came so naturally to me. My exercise books were always filled with portraits and sketches at the back.

Looking back, that humiliation forced my artistic energy into handwriting. I didn’t realize it then, but every part of me, including the suppressed artist, rallied behind that mission to prove him wrong. It was only after the mission was accomplished did I realize that I felt the same childhood joy in drawing in writing the way I did.

Creating letters in a way that felt unique and aesthetically right to me became fulfilling. It brought out the artistic side I had suppressed in service of academic ambition. It’s part of why I write the same way today, because to me, writing is an art form. Beauty.

And this made me think about how we’re often steered toward certain life paths in the name of safety. Even when we excel, our souls still carry pre-embedded traits that seek expression. Many people follow the “practical” route, ignoring the natural inclinations that place them in a flow state where time disappears.

That state where hunger, fatigue, and the noise of life fall silent because you are doing something that feels like an extension of your being. It doesn’t feel like work. It is an expression of you. In that state of mind, time becomes irrelevant because it is being used as it should be.

I have written or journaled for hours without noticing the passage of time, fully absorbed. You have probably felt that too. In that locked-in state, every physical and mental concern evanesces until you are done.

That state is a gift.

Which is why I am against the idea of parents forcing children into hobbies optimized for academic performance or status. Yes, exposure is good, but imposing specific paths suppresses what might come naturally to the child.

A child might excel in chess but dislike it; at the same time, they may have a strong desire to draw or write. Children are not blank slates for parental idealism. They need guidance, not programming. Their cognitive capacities may be underdeveloped, and they may not have a good grasp of reality, but they are creators in their own right. One of the hardest tasks about parenthood is recognizing the difference between supporting a child’s interests and projecting their own onto them.

It brought me immense joy to handwrite a letter for one of my homies to include in his marriage documents a few weeks ago. The artistic instinct never left, despite attempts to amputate it. When I leaned fully into the left-brained track, I thought I would outgrow it, but it simply found other channels.

The artist lives on.

P.S: Thank you for reading. If this resonated, you can support the work by becoming a paid subscriber or sharing it with someone who needs it. Paid subscribers also get direct access to me for deeper conversations.

Subscribe now

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