thoughts of a dying athiest

We operate under the collective social delusion that human beings are fundamentally invested in preservation. We build our societies, relationships, and families on the quiet assumption that when a fire breaks out, the people around us will naturally reach for a bucket of water. We mistake proximity for safety, and we confuse the concept of… Continue reading

We are a species completely obsessed with symmetry. From the time we are children, we are fed a steady diet of narrative structures that promise a clean resolution to every conflict. The villain is punished, the lovers reunite, the fractured family heals, and the hero gets to sit in the quiet satisfaction of a completed… Continue reading

We tend to categorize human failures into neat, separate compartments. We treat financial ruin like a macroeconomic tragedy, and we treat daily forgetfulness like an innocent quirk of personality. We look at a person who burns through their rent money on a spontaneous vacation and call them irresponsible. We look at that same person leaving… Continue reading

It is an incredibly draining experience to walk through the world when you are one of the few people paying attention to the baseline rules of reality. We are taught from a young age that human beings are rational creatures, capable of foresight, logic, and self-reflection. But if you spend even a single afternoon observing… Continue reading

We live in an era of conversational cosmetics. We have developed a highly sophisticated, completely hollow vocabulary designed to mimic the sounds of deep human connection without requiring any of the actual labor. We all participate in the ritual. We run into an old friend at a coffee shop, or we text a distant sibling,… Continue reading

I have spent a lot of time watching the people around me complain about the cages they live in. We all know someone who is trapped in an objectively miserable existence. It is the friend who spends five years calling their soul-crushing job a modern form of slavery, detailing every slight, every administrative absurdity, and… Continue reading

I have been watching what happens to a room when an absolute horror enters it. Every now and then, someone in a community, an office, or a friend group gets hit by a tragedy so sudden and so sharp that it leaves a physical dent in the air. A freak illness, a sudden death, a… Continue reading

We have spent the last two decades laughing at the image of the “iPad baby.” We watch them in restaurants, their faces illuminated by the blue light of a screen, their tiny thumbs scrolling with an eerie, mechanical precision before they can even speak. We treat it as a parenting failure or a minor cultural… Continue reading

I have been quietly watching the way people come apart for years. It is a strange, unsettling thing to notice how quickly the architecture of a relationship can be dismantled. We spend years carefully laying the bricks of intimacy, trust, and shared history. We tell ourselves that we are building something permanent, a fortress against… Continue reading

I have been thinking about what it means to be a passenger on a ship that has no captain. For a long time, we were comforted by the myth of a Grand Architect. We believed that history was a ladder leading somewhere higher, or at least a circle that would eventually return to justice. We… Continue reading