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My contradiction exists in the gap between my two most sincere desires: to be Puckish and elusively witty, and to be revered à la Old Testament. The jester may be near the king but he does not sit at the hand of the father. The expectation is coherence: be one thing and remain as one (for others and for your own sanity). Online, you can be funny or you can be esteemed; you can be entertaining or you can be hero-worshipped. In reality, you can be both, but the medium of the Internet somehow trims off all nuances in your messages, losing them somewhere in those thin fiber-optic strands that transmit data via lasers. Alas, all genius is lost at light-speed under the sea.

Offline, there’s really only one condition that truly helps a budding writer, and it’s a trifecta of bourgeois stability, slight sexual perversion, and a proclivity for alcoholism.

The unpunishable woman—my Übermensch, my teleological argument—she’s too openminded for the conservatives and too prude for the liberals, too timid for entrepreneurship and too feline-feral for employment, too nerdy for the hedonists and too sensuous for the ascetics, too vain for sainthood and too philosophical for vanity, too private to perform and too proud to stay anonymous, too disciplined for degeneracy and too decadent for piety.

And when you don’t belong anywhere at all, and no one can discuss with you about what you want, and no one cares about your opinions anymore, what do you call that? Unpunishable and free? Or estranged and alienated?

So, what do I do?

I’m glad to be here and I wouldn’t take it any other way, which is the closest thing I have to stoicism right now. I may get jealous when I see others getting what I’ve worked hard for, but I’d rather be this porous than sealed off. I may get embarrassed by tiny things quickly, but I’d rather be this impressionable than whatever else. I think I want to stay malleable enough to change like a chameleon without becoming so protean I vanish.

I think the only fate worse than misfit-hood, for anyone, is self-pity. The loser mentality is an insult to God because you’re handed a singular unrepeatable flame of consciousness as a specific individual with specific gifts and are choosing to let it gutter out in self-pity. Feeling small is more like ingratitude than humility. The creator doesn’t make surplus people. The fact that the egg chooses the sperm means every cell in the body proliferated from a messianic selection. Not believing in yourself is against the verdict of life on every level—biologically, metaphysically, theologically, etc. (see: exuberance)

The unpunishable woman, when she gets off her high horse, remembers that she’s just like the other 8 billion people in her neighborhood, that she should unclench her jaws and peel her shoulders away from her ears, because it’s really not that serious. Or, maybe it is. But, whatever, in the end, only love and death can change all things.

~

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There is vitality in the sound of thunderstorms—BOOM, CRACKLE, RUMBLE—the popping of spring’s sleepy joints; Persephone is awake, and the verdant world swells and opens and reaches with her every stretch and yawn. Last night, you slept with your cheek against the pillow like a child listening through a wall. Lovers know God better than theologians. Life is begetting life is begetting life is begetting life.

Summer is for passion and delusion. Fall is for fashion and forgiveness. Winter is for drugs and sleep. Spring is for joy and openness. Spring is for tulips and two lips. Spring is for possibilities and choosing whatever makes you feel more alive. The universe is in estrus—seed now or regret it later—whatever you ask for in spring, you shall receive.

Come, let’s step outside.

The fingertips of trees are lime green and shy. There are broken beer bottles on the sidewalk. The youth are rowdy again and those thrice their age have forgotten what liberal idiots they once were themselves before they became conservative ones.

A pale yellow dog with a glossy fat rump suddenly rushes to a spot on the grass and circles a few times before arching its back and stepping its hind legs forward like a compass deciding on a smaller radius. Then, under the stiff root of a tail half-lifted, a pink bulb of flesh swells and squeezes out two or three earthy slugs before the folds of yellow skin close again and its tail releases back into a wagging rhythm.

Look—there’s a sketch of a stick figure on the ground, the stub of chalk still by its side. Crucified on cement, the figure smiles at the sky with a plain face, only two dots and a curve for a mouth. Today, the sun is dazzling, evaporating pluvial mercury pooled in potholes from last night’s April shower. How can death exist on a day when even the puddles look like blue skies?

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Do you ever think about how unlikely it is for you and I to exist? Did you know the odds to be born on this Earth is one in four hundred trillion?

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In seventh grade, my science teacher had a great poster on the wall that read Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

A decade later, out of curiosity, I walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that was happening across the street from my house, where I first heard of the motto: Your best thinking got you here. If our thoughts steer our destiny, why is there still so much suffering among people who know better?

The tension between these two sayings is the most important question you can ask about what it means to become someone better: the first puts you in the driver’s seat; the second suggests the car has been going somewhere you didn’t choose. The Nietzschean wrinkle in the promise of agency is that you are as responsible for your own destruction as you are for your glimmering success, so, what happens when we come to the end of ourselves? If thinking is the epicenter of our lives, why can’t we simply think ourselves out of addictions, pits of depression, or panic attacks? Why do people leave their families? Why can’t we shed our worries? Why do people commit suicide?

Why does education not reduce sadness? Why does memorizing the teachings of prophets not make a person feel comforted in times of crisis or closer to God at all? Addictions are called addictions precisely because they make you feel like you no longer have agency. Your best thinking got you here means: the tool you’re trying to use to escape your disease—your conscious, watchful, rational mind—has been running the whole time, and it hasn’t changed anything.

The “watch your thoughts” motto is useful, but it puts on a pair of Cartesian glasses that are hard to take off. I think therefore I am quickly becomes I am my mind. And from there, most people adopt the assumption that human beings are thinking animals.

But behavioral finance, advertising, and every romance movie ever made clearly show the opposite. We panic, we lust, we fear, we envy. We are largely irrational creatures whose behaviors stray wildly from our theorems, our equations, our stated values, our best intentions. So the paradigm shifts: maybe we are feeling things that think.

But clearly, living by the whims of passion doesn’t get us far without discipline, budgeting, and principles. So, we teeter-totter between thinking and feeling, balancing how to satisfy both the Cartesian and the Romantic—because both are real, yet neither get to the core of our nature.

The center of the human being is the heart. Humans are not thinking things that feel, nor are we emotional things that reason. You are what you love—what you practice, what you pay the most attention to, what you worship, what you desire. Before you are a thinker and a feeler, you are, first and foremost, a LOVER.

Our culture has warped the word “heart” to mean sentimentalism or something sappy and emotional, but it’s not what the Greeks meant by kardia. The heart, in its original and serious sense, is the fulcrum of your most fundamental longings: it’s a visceral orientation to the world. The center of gravity in the human being is love, and we fall towards what we desire.

We all seem to know that the heart means something deeper than mere belief, that it points at conscience, morality, and things that matter. It’s what we mean when we deliver bad news “with a heavy heart.” It’s what Lady Macbeth’s doctor means when he says that “the heart is sorely charged” and that “more needs she the divine than the physician”—only absolution can reach what medicine can’t, because guilt and truth are matters of the heart, not the intellectual head or the emotional gut. So,

What are we made for?

We are made for wanting. A person is an appetite.

When we stop wanting, we are diseased (literally, dis-eased, not at ease). We know this physically: when we have the flu we don’t feel like eating, and we know we’re recovering when our appetite returns. The same is true at every other level. It’s what Ezekiel meant by, “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” A hardened heart is not just stubbornness, it’s spiritual sickness. Think of how a healthy person has a robust metabolism, a strong digestion, a high libido, and a high cell turnover rate. Healthy means physically active, happy, and flexible. Healthy means being antifragile—Nassim Taleb’s concept that something is good not just because it’s resilient but because it recovers quickly and improves from disorder. To be alive—on all levels and in all things—means to be capable of change. To be made of flesh instead of stone is to live, to hunger, to transform, and all desire is a desire for being.

We are existential sharks: never static, always oriented toward something, always moving. This is what philosophy means by telos: there is a longing deeper than knowing or believing, a desire that defines you because it points you toward where you are going. It’s our mission, our direction of growth. We are human becomings as much as we are human beings.

You can’t not love. The question is never whether you will orient yourself toward something ultimate, but what that something will be. And since our hearts are made to find their end in what makes us most fully alive, we inevitably get stuck in anxiety and restlessness when we aim at substitutes, when we apply ourselves to anything less than what we actually love. It’s why loving the right things feel like falling upward.

Winnie the Pooh once said, “Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart,” which is similar to King Solomon’s, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it”: both get at the same point, which is, what you let occupy you becomes your future. It determines the direction of your days, the person you are growing into. Change doesn’t begin in your thinking, but in the orientation of your loving.

Love is the condition for knowledge. I used to think that I must know in order to love—that I must learn about something before I can love it, that I must understand someone before I can make up my mind about how I feel about them—but, truth is, it’s the opposite: I love in order to know. When you’re heart is postured at the Right Thing, more of that thing is revealed to you.

Ultimately, what I’m trying to say is,

You cannot think yourself into a new person

When we want to change, the metamorphosis we look for is not intellectual (you can’t just “know” what’s good for you and suddenly get better). The addict doesn’t need more information about why their habit is destroying them. What they need is a different want, by practice and intention—by submitting to different desires. You don’t recover from an addiction when you’re deprived of that thing, you recover when you don’t want it anymore, even when it’s placed right in front of you. A true change in being is a change in appetite. True conversion is a change in heart.

When people think of religion, they typically think of rules and punishment without getting to the core of why these structures exist in our creaturehood—anthropologically and psychologically, collectively and individually, mythologically and pragmatically. All religions are more alike than they are different in the sense that they all have to do with surrendering the self to the Other, submitting one’s heart to a greater Love and letting all other desires pale in comparison. The very word Islam means submission; Buddhist vissagga is about letting go of worldly concerns; it’s what Judeo-Christianity means by loving God with all your heart and placing no other gods above it.

Living a heart-led life is saying, how you do one thing is how you do everything. The path upward is not more consciousness or more rigorous self-monitoring, but the embodied work of reordering your loves: finding something worth loving completely, and letting that love do what only love can: shape you, from the inside out, into someone new.

~

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When you meet whom you desire, let the world go, give it up.

—Forugh Farrokhzad

You’re not falling in love because you lack desire—deep, blood-thick, singleminded desire. You’ve armored yourself too well against the terrible, wonderful, ecstatic gift of being wholly captured by another. It’s no wonder we fall in love and have our hearts stolen, because genuine desire feels like succumbing to erotic gravity, letting our heart be robbed against our instinct of keeping it safe. You think that keeping your options open and controlling your feelings is freedom, but you’ve made yourself incapable of encountering the Other in its irreplaceable and indescribable Otherness. And so you remain forever yourself, unchanged and unchosen, wondering why no matter where you travel, there you are.

The interruption you’re looking for is in the vertigo you’re avoiding. You “fall” in love because standing still would mean remaining the same.

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Love demands that we become penetrable, that we allow another person to reach into the carefully constructed fortress of our identity and rearrange things. It’s why we describe the feeling of love as being shot by Cupid’s arrow: having your flesh pierced, digging deep through all the layers of who you pretend to be. Perhaps it’s why the Crucifixion of Christ is the greatest love story; it’s saying that the invitation for union comes in the form of a wound. As communion goes, this is my body and blood, eat me and drink me, and you shall be joined to me. Gaze into my wounds and we shall be married.

But who wants to be pierced? Who wants to be torn open when you’ve worked so hard on becoming whole all on your own? You want to remain intact, autonomous. You want someone who affirms who you are and reflects your completeness back at you—what kind of a lover is that? You want love only as a project, something customizable, checking boxes: a certain profession, a certain height. Sure, we all have preferences, but what’s perfect on paper can only exist on paper, in the realm of compatibility metrics and shared values. If you speak of “emotional labor” or “meeting needs”, you’re already missing the point—true intimacy is not a service economy. You’re not falling in love because you’ve reduced the Other to a function, and love asks for surrender, not balance.

YOU SHOULD FALL,

FALL,

FALL,

FALL INTO THE INFINITE, THE RADIANT INFINITE.

Desire is a rapture that levitates you out of isolation. It should possess you, should fly and take you away with it—otherwise why would we call our beloved “angel,” that ethereal winged being who descends from heaven to rescue us from our ugliness or worldliness? Why would we make Eros an archer, Cupid a bearer of arrows instead of facts and logic? “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of,” said Pascal. Why would we speak of being struck by or sick with love as though it were an injury, a disease, we suffer rather than a choice we make? All intimacy is an encounter with a Significant Other so Significant in its Otherness that it forces you beyond the narrow confines of your own subjectivity, like catching a glimpse of eternity.

Desire isn’t caused, it is. It’s what St. Augustine meant by, “I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love. I sought what I might love, in love with loving.” Wanting is the point. “Because I prayed this word: I want,” said Sappho.

Desire should wake you violently from your long sleep, mortify you with how little you’ve made of yourself. Why else does love ignite this furious need to become better, why does the blossoming of a crush indict our laziness and smallness, and why does their arrival make our previous life seem like a timid dream, embarrassed and translucent, suddenly forced to walk among the awake?

I have a hunch that we’re all romantics pretending to be pragmatists, terrified that if we admitted how honestly we want to be swept away by love, we’d have to face what we’ve become: cowardly keepers of desires too weak to break us open. We’d have to admit that we’ve made our lives so small, our wantings so manageable, that nothing glorious could ever fit through the door.

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

You’re not letting yourself go after what you want because you’re not willing to be changed. What you’re looking for isn’t more self-help—you’re looking for beauty and courage that will save you when you’ve reached the end of your Self. You’re not falling in love, but you always could. You just have to want it more than you want to perform wanting it, you have to want the real thing more than you want the story you’ll tell about it.

~

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These days, I’m browsing white dresses and having dreams of giving birth to a wasian baby. These days, I’m hit with tsunami waves of realization that I’m going to be doing a lot of things for the very last time as a legally single woman.

A bachelorette lives on an island in her head: she holds onto her “last time” experiences—she counts down the number of times she’ll have breakfast alone, in her own apartment with Fitzgerald and no roommates; she counts down the number of times she’ll still sign her father’s last name. This February 14 will be the last Valentine’s Day she’ll spend with someone who isn’t a husband. Last November 27 marked the oldest age she will ever be as a single woman before God and the law—her next birthday will mark the youngest she’ll ever be as a wife. On this island, she is Penelope with apodictic certainty, counting down to the end of waiting, to Odysseus’s first and final landing.

Falling in love in a single-player game

In Room 11 of The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, you’ll find this diptych of Adam and Eve by Cranach:

Painting them separately symbolizes the importance of their difference before union: man and woman as parallel creations, equal but distinct, mirroring each other across the hinge. I always feel like they’re more idyllic when painted like this instead of being on a single fresco, together in the Garden. Compared to Michelangelo’s, done around the same year,

the separated Adam and Eve are frozen in their perfection. They lack story, they stand posed like asexual specimens in a textbook, free from trauma and desire, pain and passion.

The creation story in Genesis has always been my favorite because it’s about how people fall. We say “falling” in love or that people “fall” for one another because the feeling of love is exactly that: it’s a straying away from what’s planned, it’s something unexpected, it’s something that opens our eyes to see a person in a new light (and we become conscious of how they make us feel), it’s Emily Dickinson’s “The heart wants what it wants or else it does not care”—love makes us break rules, even when they’re our own. The story of Adam and Eve is the archetypal story of two people who fall together, who break the rules together and for each other.

It’s also the first horizontal fall. Religion is full of heirarchies: God is above all and everyone strives upwards, like Moses climbing Mount Sinai. With this height comes a lot of falling: Israel falls. The Tower of Babel falls. Adam and Eve fall. Everyone fails to live up to perfection. But, in breaking away from God together, Adam and Eve rediscover themselves as two people standing side by side, suddenly aware of one another in a new and unsettling way. They’re no longer only people beneath God; they’re companions facing the same world, sharing the same consequence.

They’re no longer a diptych. What matters now isn’t perfection, but the choice to stick together—after all, isn’t that what love is? An opportunity to keep meeting one another on the same side of reality—the imperfect side—to recreate heaven by sharing a private language of care and attention? By choosing presence over idealism and loyalty over escape? An opportunity to fall so deeply into each other that a glimmer of paradise lost can be found by looking to your side instead of above? (Heaven is a place on earth with you—Lana Del Rey)

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Having multiple passions and being good at everything is a silly excuse for not actually doing The Work. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Anxiety is the privilege of the talented: it dresses up as ambition and fills your head with grand plans so that instead of actually working, you can sit back and feel satisfied wishing to accomplish impossible things, convinced that you’re someone who dreams big or has high standards rather than someone who simply won’t begin.

You—seasoned daydreamer, well-traveled in imagined futures, professionally wistful—are an irredeemable romantic, and I’m not saying that curiosity is a problem, but if you’ve looked for clarity again and again amidst your thousands of passions and still haven’t found it, then maybe what you need is humility: The humility to accept that you can’t do everything, that most things begin badly and many of them can end pretty badly too. That choosing something acute and provisional is not renouncing greatness, and, if your ambition is truly infinitely big, then maybe the greatest embodiment of it is to stuff that leonine appetite for brilliance by mastering one, specific thing. Ars longa, vita brevis—art is long, life is short.

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Anxiety wants you to think that your career must arrive fully formed, but notice how that ideal is always blurry. Reality is more high-resolution but less complete: it’s a series of imperfect commitments that slowly shape who you’re willing to become depending on how hard you’re willing to engage. You stand in front of ten doors, convinced that choosing one will permanently betray the other nine, as if a single decision could ruin an entire life rather than simply produce a next afternoon. The most laughable part is you think there was a “right” answer to begin with. Careers are built much more by tolerating the discomfort of partial answers and leaning pigheadedly into the faith that things will work out than by thinking harder or reflecting deeper.

The irony is that people with many interests are the most adaptable, the most sensitive to patterns, the most capable of synthesis. But none of that matters if every choice must be justified in advance by destiny. How pathetic—all those strengths wasted on someone who blames cosmic apathy for their own inability to commit to anything.

Solvitur ambulando—it is solved by walking. If confusion is stressing you out, get moving. Pick something. Touch it. Poke it. Play with it. Fight it. Struggle against it. Hate it. Love it. You get better at it by doing it.

One action is worth a thousand perfected visions spinning in the mind. The anxiety of not knowing what you want to pursue is a fog that thickens the more you stare into it and fades away as soon as you place your hand on something real, because unlike fog, reality has edges, it pushes back and might not flatter you or accommodate your anxiety about whether this is the destined hill to climb, but in its encounter you discover what no amount of soul searching could reveal: that The Work answers when you call it, that your path appears beneath your feet as you walk it—but only if you call it and only if you walk it.

I wrote a book for all those who have a suspicion that they were meant for more:

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Happy 2026,

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Gone are the days of bougainvillea, linen, feeding stray cats, and 10PM sunsets. Gone are the days of sending risky texts without a care and making life happen. It’s the free-spirited feeling of underwear sticking to salty biscuit-odored skin. It’s the spectre of dreams and ambitions floating through the air and the smell of kisses and car tires emitting from the city tarmac. In December, gone are the days of leaving the house with no socks.

I long for a riot of flowers, sun-ripened heirloom tomatoes, enormous oxblood cherries with wet ruby burst-splits, a room full of warm bodies in skimpy outfits, a night so humid the air feels like a giant angel cake waiting to be eaten with my hands tied behind my back. I long for a neverending summer.

If summer is for summoning what you desire, then winter is for becoming what you endure. Maybe I do believe in the effects of mercury retrograde, maybe I don’t. But what I like about it is that it makes me feel like I live in a magical universe. How comforting is it to think that there are recurring pullbacks in nature, that taking a step back is necessary for the next leap forward? Maybe that’s why we still dream of people we try not to think about when we’re awake. Maybe that’s why memory replays old moments, not to torture us, but to see if we can bear to look again, and if the looking might change us.

Winter solstice: the longest night of the year, it literally means “the sun standing still”. Winter solstice is for remembering old stories: the time you lived on savings and didn’t know what you were going to do next—your taste in music a decade ago—the years you toyed with anorexia—the era that was defined by the joy brought to you by one best friend—Winter reminds us of the human condition, that we love and hesitate and protest and ache. Pay attention, and you’ll be able to travel through time.

The veil is thin. Portals open like keyholes. What you notice now will follow you for a year. Time feels permeable, blessings become negotiable, and the boundary between what you fear and what you wish for bends just enough for a miracle to slip through. Holy night, holy night!

At winter solstice, the sun stands still for tender, perilous questions that unravel the last week, month, or decade of my certainties, asking whether the life I’m living is smaller than the one I should be building.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!! 🎄 Thank you for reading—if you like what you see and wish to support my work, please upgrade to a premium subscription.

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I asked myself about my identity a lot this year, giving close friends the license to be honest, seeing the mirrors in interactions that revealed who I could be, and questioning when I could be the unreliable narrator. The rest of this post is a list of 18 questions I’ve compiled over the last three-ish months that gets at this kind of reflection:

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Then, November arrived without my permission. I got another year older. I feel like I should belong in a tribe, like I’m waiting for a rite of passage to initiate me into becoming something else. Perhaps your 20s are meant to be one long liminal stage—the in-between phase where a person is no longer what they were, but not yet what they will become. A caterpillar liquefying in a cocoon to reorganize itself into a butterfly. A tadpole absorbing its own tail to turn into a frog. I think I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what to do.

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This year, I learned many things (against my will, but for my own good, I think). I learned to not tell my friends everything, not even the best of best friends. I learned to be careful about the music I listen to. I learned that there’s always someone who loves me more than I love myself. I learned that I truly cannot control the narrative of me that exists in other people’s minds. I tasted, once more, that made-up word “sonder”—that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—I look out of my window and onto the building across the street with its windows arranged like neat rectangles of a chocolate bar: someone’s vacuuming, someone’s doing yoga, someone’s playing League of Legends, someone’s on a work call while bouncing a leg, someone’s silvery blue British Shorthair is staring out the glass, someone’s bedroom is neat and empty and cozy like the background of lofi streams. Truly, we’re all so insignificantly small in front of each other yet we’re the biggest, most important thing in our own heads.

Have you ever felt ready for your next stage but don’t know what it is yet, or felt a deep longing for a cooler, more collected version of yourself that’s so tangibly close you just wanted to birth yourself out of your chest and make a run for it?

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Ennui is a floating sensation, moving forward in time indefinitely with no direction. You’re dying with the potential inside of you kicking and screaming to be expressed in great creations. Everything looks interesting for a second, then, nothing does. There’s so much to see yet none of it leads anywhere. You’re awake but half-alive, like being cursed to exist forever with nothing to really live for.

It’s an apathy that convinces you everything worth doing has already been done, and you’re not that important. You don’t want to die, just disappear for a while. You’d like to hibernate until fate intercedes, except you can’t imagine surrendering your sense of agency. You feel duller than a statistic, smaller than a worker bee, yet somehow still more precious than the next person.

The Other

We don’t love anything anymore because the Other has disappeared. When love flattens into a recipe for enjoyment, “love” becomes self-indulgence. When the Other disappears, things become mirrors instead of portals: everything reflects what you already know instead of transporting you somewhere else. After all, isn’t that why Eros—desire—has wings, so he can take you yonder?

Without the Other, everything becomes the smooth surface of selfhood. Today, love means satisfaction and security, not desire or renewal. We refuse to be changed, even if we want to be. Business-speak has taken over our personal lives: a human is a consumer or a user, and the world has become one big product. There’s no more wonder because mysteries have become “problems” that need to be solved (eg. effective accelerationism). Even romantic love has become something to be consumed instead of experienced (e.g., using dating apps to feel confident). People are using each other to benefit themselves. People are consuming people while packaging themselves to be consumed by someone else. (e.g., date-me docs)

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

— C. Jung

Encountering the Other is always an interruption. It breaks the loop of self-recognition. Love asks for surrender, not balance. You “fall” in love because standing still would mean remaining the same.

August 7, 2025. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Ben and I spent most of that day wandering the upper levels of the museum of art history. Each grand room bore the name of a star artist, but when we reached the “Vermeer” room, there was no Vermeer. “It’s definitely there, we just didn’t see it,” Ben said, so we circled back, retracing every corridor to find it.

In the search, the Vermeer became holy—literally, set apart. Everything else turned ordinary by comparison. It wasn’t that the other works lost their beauty, only their claim on our attention. In that search, nothing else mattered except for Vermeer. Finding the Vermeer became the day’s salvation, the promise that our wandering and wanting would be redeemed. It meant that our long trek and our painful longing for it in its absence would all be worth it.

Perusing the galleries felt like….doomscrolling: looking, checking, moving on. We breezed past tourists contemplating Raphaels and we scrolled past Titians and Veroneses. When I open Instagram or Twitter, I feel like I’ve entered a gallery, except, I don’t know what I’m there for. Why am I scrolling? What am I searching for? Ennui is the absence of a promise. Restlessness haunts the seeker who doesn’t know what they’re pursuing.

At last, we found the Vermeer. We stood in front of it and it awed us. Part of the satisfaction was that it met our desire to look for it. Seek and ye shall find. We sought, and we found.

What we’re all looking for is that existential Vermeer, the thing that exists not to be used but to be with, that invites us to revel in it. The thing that’s worthy of a long search. The journey of desire is glorified in hindsight.

Eros, in its original Greek meaning, is the principle of attraction. Desire is always a pull, and it’s pulling you towards beauty, or some big realization that can move your heart—it’s the feeling of being raptured out of your own body. Love feels like a convergence: everything begins to merge toward the core. All the arrows point in one direction, and life feels charged with purpose, like there’s a kind of eternity to look forward to. It’s why depression often feels like living the same day over and over again, like there’s no future you’re bound for, like there are no tomorrows. The Self is circular while the Other is linear.

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Yet, Eros can be terrible. Yearning can leave us in despair, it can cost us extremely painful levels of awakening. Yet, we reach for it over and over again. Why? Because love feels like hope. The verb that comes before love is always “fall”—we want to surrender even knowing it might break us. It’s why the sensation of love is described as being shot by Cupid’s arrow. Love begins with getting shot because it requires a death of the Self. Italian literature plays with the words amore, love, and morte, death, because they can’t be talked about separately. How can love enter without a wound?

Encountering the Other is meeting a portal, an invitation to give ourselves up in order to be changed. The Other is not something we try to have, it’s something we try to be with.

Passion (passio) means to suffer—to make love into labor, creation, offering. The body can endure hard work, but it’s the soul that collapses under ennui. Burnout is the slow suffocation of pretending, it’s the mind revolting against living on autopilot.

Someone once told me, “God breaks your heart so He can enter through the cracks.” Desire—the pain of knowing you lack something—lets in a spirit that pulls you towards tomorrows full of hope. In bouts of deep existential boredom, what you really need is to be wounded by something that makes you feel fully human, fully alive.

Would you rather remain the same, or let the agony of love break you into pieces so you can be changed by the Other?

In the same vein:

Self-esteem is one of those terms used so ubiquitously that it no longer means anything; it’s prescribed for every ailment of the psyche, like how “stay hydrated” and “go work out” are generally good health advice that don’t target anything in particular, yet, being chronically dehydrated or fat can be the root problem for everything.

Self-esteem, today, roughly means “I feel good about myself”, but I think it really means something like “I trust that I can do the things I want to do” or “I have faith in my ability to not disappoint myself”. Confidence is your self-evaluated competency more than it is about fulfilment or contentment.

A rough table of contents:

• What is intuition? How is knowing different from believing?

  • What is perception? The ass cheek theory of knowing.

• How to listen to both instinct and intellect: when feelings are the facts.

• What does it mean to love yourself? The moral weight of doing the dishes.

• How to trust yourself more—you are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.

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Attention is a vector: there is always a direction to its magnitude. To attend is to stretch toward (Latine, attendere), like a limb straining or bending to reach something. That’s why attention is measured in payments: it’s costly to pay attention because to reach toward one thing is to withdraw from others. We call it the attention economy because it, too, abides by the law of scarcity. Attention moves like a liquid, flowing from one thing to another like a pile of magnetic dust coagulating around a pole.

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You are an appetite.

What is a person? A person is an appetite.

When you strip away all your thin desires you find yourself a body of directional hunger. You are a mimicry machine, waiting for the next thing to imitate. You are an appetite, waiting for the next thing to want. Attention is like metabolism: you become what you gaze at. Just like your body digests food and turns it into cells and tissues, your attention digests the things you focus on and turns them into thoughts, habits, and eventually, a way of being.

For where your treasure is, there also is your heart.

—Matthew 6:21

If you constantly feed yourself gossip, you become suspicious. If you feed yourself beauty, you grow more sensitive to it. Attention is the mouth of being, and what you choose to focus on forms the diet of your becoming. It’s not a coincidence that taste is the only bodily sense that has been adapted to mean preferences: the way your attention forms predilections imitates how your tongue has a liking for certain flavors.

What seizes your imagination will change everything.

—Fr. Pedro Arrupe

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Everyone is religious.

My grandmother is a scrupulous woman. She’d repeat the things she finds important until she made sure you wouldn’t forget, and she’d pick up crumbs no one else could detect on the dinner table. She isn’t religious in the traditional sense; she’s not part of an organized religion, she doesn’t follow the principles of a denomination, she doesn’t believe in spirits. But, she’s religious in the way that her days form an ongoing ritual of demonstrating her values, and it shows in her cooking, sewing, and dancing. How she does one thing is how she does everything. Like how some people claim to be spiritual but not religious, I think my grandmother is religious but not spiritual.

The word religion comes from Latin relegere, which means to “go over again”, to “carefully observe”. Religion, in its purest sense, is not about dogma, rites, monasticism, or indoctrination; it’s about attention.

It’s why the verb that precedes religion is practice. Religion, like the violin or dentistry, is a practice because it isn’t a one-time declaration, but a repeated discipline of paying attention. The Latin practicus means “concerned with action.” To practice religion is to return, again and again, to the same gestures, words, and rituals until they shape you. Belief on its own is abstract; practice is belief made flesh through repetition.

Like a musical instrument, a sport, or a profession, anything that’s practiced is directional. Are you getting better at or closer to something? Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes,” likewise, what you practice shapes the way you look at things. This is why the placebo effect works, because while it doesn’t change any material thing, it changes the shape of your attention, which is the fabric of perception. The placebo effect is your belief made tangible.

It all begins with an eyeball and an arrow: to look at something—to focus—is the unit of measurement for reality. You transform in the direction of your greatest focus. What you work on is also working on you.

Our anxiety-burnout crisis is not directly caused by excess, but distraction. We are spiritually malnourished from fast content. Our mistake is thinking that being informed is the same as being smart, or being alive, or being, entirely. So, practicing relegere is not actually about “being a better person”. The point of exercising focus is not perfection, what matters is the daily return and the refusal to let attention scatter. The point isn’t to dissociate or detach yourself from desires—it’s the opposite. It’s to attach yourself to a goal so firmly that distractions no longer matter. It’s to care about one thing so adamantly that noise is no longer distracting. Focus is the crucible of becoming.

Focus is the effort against spiritual collapse. It’s how we become more than we are, reaching through the cracks of the material world for the infinite beyond the ordinary. The fact that we are bipedal, that we operate in the vertical axis, means that we’re the only species that seeks transcendence and not just comparison. We work not just for survival but for culture, beauty, and connection. Sometimes, we even make sacrifices, working against survival for the sake of those things. We’re the only beings with a need for meaning beyond information, for revelation beyond stimulation, for truth beyond news.

We’re not here to look left and right, we’re here to look up.

~~~

If you enjoyed this, you’d LOVE these:

And, “What Should Remain Hidden?”, written for Inkwell Magazine.

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The default profession of a baby is philosophy. All we ever wanted was to make sense of what’s going on and understand why. We forget our first cry, but the trace of that directionless complaint—that plea for God you never experience again except during turbulent flights or food poisoning—echoes across the years, sometimes as melancholy, sometimes as exuberance, sometimes as the vague restlessness that propels us to change jobs, lovers, cities, as though each substitution might repair the initial trauma, only for its soft, haunting presence to creep barefoot into our room late at night, to sit on the edge of our bed and pet our forehead when the rest of world is asleep.

God, why have you given me the ability to learn too much of myself, to know what makes me fearful or bitter yet not how to escape it? Was this your intention—that I, gifted with thought, should endanger my own peace? And is peace even the highest good if it comes at the expense of intensity? Exuberance?

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I hate that platitude about “healing yourself before…” before what? Before you start living? Who are you getting perfect for? Who are you rehearsing for? There’s no dress rehearsal, everyday is the real deal, and your entire life is made up of everyday’s—are you really going to spend it on gazing inward? There has to be something better than any kind of self-improvement or martyrdom. Does mindfulness matter to someone willing to kamikaze into their deepest, most vivid, excruciatingly genuine passion?

There comes a point you should stop explaining how you feel and just go live it out. Or let it roll off your back. Or whatever you want to do with it. Reject therapy speak, that empty signal of being an emotionally literate teetotaler who pretends to be open to talking about pain when all it does is make it easier to hide how inadequate they truly are at handling matters of the heart.

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Stuff I didn’t particularly love. Stuff with no serious meaning to it. Stuff I didn’t care about. Stuff that, if you had secretly tossed, I wouldn’t even realize went missing. Stuff I bought because it was trendy at the time, because my friend had it, because I had seen attractive influencers my age brag about it on Instagram, and it made me think that I could be her.

So, I did a bit of Marie Kondo-ing and produced a few large bags of clothes and trinkets and stuff for donation. Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. And the worst part is that I could’ve prevented it.

A movie scene that has stuck with me for years comes from Spirited Away, where Chihiro finds her parents turned into pigs. It’s comical to describe, but when you put yourself in her shoes, it’s terrifying: it’s every child’s nightmare to lose their parents to a force they can’t control. The panic she feels in that scene speaks to me deeply, the feeling of watching your loved ones do something that you know is wrong but being called “silly” when you try to stop them.

Materialism isn’t inherently evil; it can be gorgeous through the frames of abundance or art. Miranda Priestly’s “stuff” monologue from The Devil Wears Prada, for example, shows how material creates jobs, fuels culture, and shapes history. Miyazaki’s plates of food are dramatically overblown and colorful and delicious, but Chihiro’s parents don’t think about what they consume, only about how much. When she confronts them, her father shrugs: “It’s okay. I have my credit card and some cash.”

This is the mindset that will make you waste your life away into bags of garbage: the idea that shopping is a material issue, and overconsumption is a budgeting problem, rather than a spiritual problem. It’s easy to be Spirited Away, whisked into another world operated by desires that come from ads and friends and fleeting trends. Your appetite for novelty and your fear of missing out sucks the joy out of you—the more you eat, the hungrier you are. The more you spend, the more vapid you feel. You lack spirit, not another fashion identity. You don’t need another aesthetic, you need stronger values.

The title Spirited Away in Japanese is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, and kamikakushi means “hidden by the gods,” a folk belief where people mysteriously vanish into another realm. This film is about magical abduction and losing your identity. Chihiro loses her name and becomes “Sen”: to be spirited away is like being stolen from yourself, forgetting who you are under the influence of forces like greed, fear, anger—and who’s to say that emotions aren’t magical? That desires aren’t demonic possessions of the mind (“demonic” meaning “godlike divisive superfactor” in Greek)? Who’s to say that feeling horny isn’t its own kind of spell? We literally use “mania” and “craze” to describe the way people desire something: Beatlemania, the craze with Labubus, matcha being ‘all the rage’.

Lust, for example, is the feeling of wanting something really badly. It doesn’t have to be a carnal desire but it’s about a possessive craving that ends in a feeling of collapse, an appetite that, once appeased, reveals its emptiness:

Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination.

—Bernard Cornwell

Shopping has this effect on me, the voyage is more satisfying than the destination. There is such thing as post-purchase clarity: the moment when you buy something trendy and you suddenly sober up to how much you don’t care about it (let alone like it); you just want to be seen having it.

Who is No-Face?

Spirited Away is most known for the character with the least lines: a masked ghost who can conjure gold. He has no backstory, we only know that he is banned from entering the bathhouse. Chihiro, out of kindness, lets him in. No-Face is refused service at first, but the staff quickly compromise their values upon seeing his gold. They serenade him, “Welcome the rich man. He’s hard for you to miss. His butt keeps getting bigger, so there’s plenty to kiss!” while they fight for the gold nuggets that plop out of his fat hands. Then, he devours the workers in despair when he realizes their kindness is bought, and only Chihiro is genuine.

The painful part of loneliness is the realization that most people are ass-kissers and friendship is rare. Likewise, people feel the most alienated when they suddenly sober up to the fact that most of their desires are herd-driven, that most of them are no where close to the truth, if they even have a clear enough sense of what that is that matters to them. It’s like waking up from a trance state and realizing, What have I done to myself? I certainly felt this way standing in front of my garbage bags. Loneliness, alienation, addictions and self-defeating loops—these are not material problems, but ‘desire’ problems.

I’m finally coming to understand what Girard meant by,

“All desire is a desire for being.”

We think we want things, but every desire points to a way of life, a kind of person we long to become. Objects seduce us not with their utility but with their promise of transcendence—status, attention, belonging. That’s why No-Face has no face: he is desire itself, the appetite to become, the emptiness that consumes while wishing it were someone else.

Money reveals this: In Roman mythology, the temple of Juno Moneta was both sanctuary and mint (it’s where we get the words “money” and “monetary”). To strike a coin was to sanctify it with divine authority, so it circulated as both economic and spiritual power. It still does: money organizes meaning. Fiat currency works because we collectively believe it means something—fiat literally “let it be” in Latin—its meaning assigned by our shared narrative. And because money is tethered to desire, it doesn’t just reflect value; it follows it. It’s the pull of eyes when a sports car glides down a street. It’s Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, saying “when you create desire, profits are a consequence.” Shopping is not independent from the spiritual realm that strips away our names, and it’s a very literal form of kamikakushi.

When we feel the weight of our limits, we start reaching toward idols to imitate, goals to chase, places to explore, people to meet. What we’re really chasing is a sense of immortality or infinity, something that lives longer than we ever will. We want to be remembered long after we’ve left a conversation, the company, the world.

Desire is never about the object itself. If it were, once you acquired it, the desire would vanish. Yet, your wardrobe keeps getting stuffier while you still find yourself with nothing to wear. Desire is about what the object seems to promise us: a fuller, richer existence. This is why Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” test is great: it reframes consumption as discernment. It asks whether an object raises your spirit or weighs it down. Left unchecked, your possessions take away your freedom to be who you are. As Fight Club says, “The things you own end up owning you.”

Every now and then, I feel my value system collapsing under the seduction of Alo’s knitwear sets through their windows. Overall, none of this is about “how to spend less”, it’s about the freedom to just be… you.

You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.

—Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

Stronger values make you spend more mindfully because they shift the axis of desire. When you know what you worship—what you actually stand for and who you want to become—everything gets tested against that vision. Values act like a sieve: they filter out the empty cravings that come from comparison and they let through only the things that genuinely serve your spirit. Without values, desires lead you astray by following ads and algorithms and the envy of friends—a state commonly known as “being distracted”.

The scariest part of Chihiro watching her parents turn into pigs is that they could’ve simply walked away. The unattended food stalls feel like a test of whether one can resist charming distractions. Like the family in Spirited Away, you’re rarely forced to follow one desire over another (until you choose wrongly, and only later realize what you’ve done, if you realize it at all). But if you aim at your highest value—placing no other gods above it, coveting nothing of your neighbor’s—you free yourself from the distractions that split your soul and can refocus your being on becoming who you want to be.

~

P.S. if you enjoyed this, I recommend “Transcending the Rat Race” or “Stop Looking at Each Other” next.

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I'M A STUDENT :D

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m writing this as I wait for my (delayed) flight to Brooklyn, where I’ll be spending the last week of August, 2025. I just finished a bowl of oatmeal and a bacon sandwich. I feel my political orientation inch rightward as the paper straw in my juice disintegrates rapidly.

August is the Sunday of months. There’s an ancestral feeling of transition, from toil to harvest, from dreams to realizations. The soul wants to slow down, the body wants to rest, the mind wants to wander to different neverlands, all of them thousands of miles apart. The hands are idle. The heart is sleepy. The eyes are relaxed. The stone fruits are so ripe you can smell them through the plastic bag. The afternoons are too stuffy, too hot. People are booking their travels, either to go home or to find their last opportunity to get out before the plot reinvents itself.

August. The Janus who stands in the doorway of seasons, smiling with both welcome and warning because it’s a feast day for nostalgia, for the uncanny awareness that summer bliss is already a memory. The last week of August makes you live in two times at once, in that thin seam where abundance and loss pour out from the same cup.

Gelato. Celtuce. Cicada. Marigold. Sprinklers. Cornsilk. Moonrise. Languor. Rereading books. Rewatching movies. Saturation. Existential nausea. August. August. August.

Then comes September, the true New Year. January 1st is a glitter-and-champagne Gregorian spectacle meant to distract you from the dead weight of winter. September is the true rebirth. Soon, the air will thin and sharpen. The breeze will mimic the effect of caffeine. The mornings will start to smell like possibilities.

When I was a student, September meant binders and the pleasure of writing my name on the front of papers. I thought that ritual would disappear after graduation, but it hasn’t, and it makes me think that this rhythm is more archetypal than cultural and social. When September hits, I’ll want to reset everything—clean the entire house, change my hair, make promises. For now, I want to enjoy the last week of August:

Do not brace for the end.

Resist the tools of anticipation—countdowns, calendars, checklists. Treat it as a room with no clocks. Don’t try to “make the most” of it because those are extraction verbs, and this week will not be mined. The more you try to suck the marrow out of August, the more you lose time over-engineering what you could be enjoying. Instead, let it linger. It is both here and not here—you’re okay with leaving summer, and you’re okay with the upcoming renaissance.

August is a thirty-one-course omakase: eaten one piece at a time, in an order you don’t get to decide, and put straight into your mouth by the hands of the universe. You are not storing these for later (you can’t). August is about moving through water or a cloud or something, like the moments before falling asleep that you can never remember no matter how hard you try when you wake up the next morning. And you will wake up again, so, do not brace for the end.

Disregard sequence.

August is not linear. Have breakfast for dinner, read the first chapter of five different novels and forget about them for the next five years. Let the hours feel slightly out of order, like you’ve lost the script. This week is the closest the year comes to being unsupervised, and you should use that looseness to test what still feels alive when you take away its usual frame. Summon the alter ego: be someone else, wear a color you usually don’t, try a new cuisine, etc.. Also, resist the urge to document. Ditch the journal. This is the month for moments that will survive only if they can carry themselves. It’s survival of the most vivid and most meaningful.

Embrace excess.

In August, things grow past their own proportions. I’ve seen vines drooping to the dirt from the weight of their grapes, I’ve breathed air so humid and thick with heat it feels heavy enough to have a texture, and I’ve had conversations that wander three stories and seven tangents past the point. Don’t trim it back. Leave the table set for more guests than you expect (and you might find that you still don’t have enough chairs). Show too much skin, no one is going to remember by the time September 1st hits. Invite the unnecessary; it will make the necessary less brittle and more interesting when it returns.

Eat more vegetables.

August is the only month where they taste the most like themselves—like the place they were grown, like the weather that made them. Pile your plate until it looks like “a lot”, until you feel the weight of their colors. Especially these:

• Corn

• Tomatoes

• Zucchini

• Eggplant

• Bell peppers

• Cucumbers

• Green beans

• Summer squash

Offer something back.

This is your last chance to mark August with something that leaves no trace. In the myth, Orpheus stood at the threshold of the underworld, the hinge between death and life, and the act of turning back marked him forever. It’s not the underworld that remembers him; it’s his own memory that he takes away from the moment. The end of August feels like the beginning of a transformation that exists for whoever notices it and chooses to mark it. August doesn’t care about its travellers. The transition between seasons will not remember you, but the act of marking it will change the way you remember yourself.

When the temperature drops, you’ll be able to see clearly again. You’ll notice things without rosiness, like pet hair on the floorboards or the stack of books you said you’d finish this year. Life will steady itself, and the steadiness will feel like a new beginning. Soon, September will prove that beginnings are also judgments—it’ll offer both potentiality and mortality, giving you both ambition and the feeling that time is running out. The days will shorten and the future will press in. But, all year long, this will be the moment you’ve been waiting for to try again.

He believed that the eyes were the windows to the soul, and that the soul was too sacred to be depicted. “When I know your soul,” he once told a sitter, “I will paint your eyes.” The only person he ever painted with eyes was Jeanne, his 21-year-old wife, who threw herself off the fifth-floor balcony while pregnant with their second child two days after her husband’s death. Her epitaph reads, “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.”

The ears can ignore, the hands can distract, the mouth can lie, the posture can deceive, but the eyes insist on revelation. Of course, the unbearable intensity of looking and being looked back at is daunting.

There’s more than one kind of look:

• The quick dart (used to acknowledge beautiful strangers at a cafe or to get the waiter’s attention)

• The long stare (used to fantasize and/or dissociate while the other person is launching into their third tangent from the main story)

• The furtive glance that carries shame or naughtiness (used to communicate conspiracy or dirty jokes with a friend across the living room)

• The locked and hungry gaze (depending on the context, can either lead to fighting or fornicating)

To look someone in the eye is to try to contain dizziness in a little glass jar. To fall into the well of recognition and be terrified at the depth, the watery pit where you see both yourself and the other, doubled on the glassy surface of their cornea and distorted in their cortex. It’s why most people spend their lives glancing—at noses, at glabellas, at brows, at the safe geography around the eyes—because the direct path is too transgressive. And it is, actually, because when two people hold eye contact, they connect each other’s portals where their histories leak into the present: all the uninvited guests of memory inch forward, the childhood humiliations, the faces of dead relatives or exes (some half-forgotten, others half-forgiven), confessions you promised you’d never let influence your emotions, all of them rising like dust motes in a shaft of light, and suddenly the eye you’re looking into becomes a crowded theater where a thousand little heads gaze back at you, waiting for you to say something honest or clever or funny.

The dizziness comes from recognizing that both you and the other are complicated. You’re trying to make sense of the multitude you see in them, while confronting the multitude you have stowed inside yourself. It’s like the face you’re looking at has turned into a mirror. Perhaps this is why lovers and enemies alike are dangerous in their staring: both are willing to stand with you at the mouth of that well, refuse to look away, and demand that you acknowledge what you spend your waking hours pretending does not exist.

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Sometimes, I think of my life as a room with high white walls and one window that lets in mostly light, and just a little bit of air. I can see the world going on out there and see what everyone else is doing—building 7-8-figure ARR apps or publishing little poetry books with approximately ten words per page stacked in a little diamond shape on the top left corner of the page leaving most of it blank with, maybe, a line doodle beside it—and I think that I am behind. That time has been sprinting past me while I have been watching from my little white room diving into deep, deep wonderlands in my head or inventing noble reasons for my lack of action.

Everyone I know is doing something, building something. They are “shipping” (a word so crude, so proud) projects they have coded into being over a few sleepless weekends. Apps that match you to lovers with the same attachment styles, platforms that sell you nostalgia or meditation techniques in subscription packages. They are all so pleased with themselves. And I feel underestimated by the world, and worse, I feel they might be right to underestimate me becauseI have not done enough to prove otherwise.

Sometimes, I wake with the thought: I am late to the race. The world loves prodigies, and I am no longer the age when that word might be applied to me. The future I imagined has been receding as I move toward it, like a mirage that never grows nearer no matter how quickly I walk.

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I want something very badly and I don’t really know what it is anymore.

Some days I think the underestimation is my own doing, that I have hidden too well, that I have been too precious with my work, that perfectionism is killing me softly. Other days I think the world would underestimate me no matter what, because the world has no interest in what is not already loud, catchy, and easy to consume. It rewards speed, shamelessness, and an aptitude for self-mythologizing that I do not have, or maybe refuse to cultivate.

I don’t want to play politics, I used to think that that was all beneath me but I fear that I actually must play because it is a game thrusted upon me, and I’ll be trampled if I don’t. There is an idea that to do something great you must be ruthless, that you must trade in your own marrow to have your work be recognized, that Faustian bargains must be made. I’ve always thought I could find a third way, to keep myself intact and still build something monumental, but every path seems to demand the same toll: visibility. And visibility in this age is its own art form, requiring an exhibitionism I find indecent:

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Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

—Proust

We started off as friends. We met in November 2023. We started dating in May 2025. We got engaged 98 days later. Love is a friendship set to music, said Joseph Campbell.

Here’s my attempt at answering the age-old question: How do you know when someone is THE ONE?

You know they’re THE ONE the way rivers know which direction to take to merge into the sea, the way eyes don’t fret over their own blink because they have faith that they will open back up and be allowed to view the world again; there is never any hesitation, only recognition, only the soul recognizing the other soul that it wants to walk home with to heaven’s gates.

You know they’re THE ONE when laughter and prayer start to sound the same because everything in your heart and on your mind is too large to be delight and too certain to be chance; it’s as if God had kept this one breath aside when He was building the world, when He was busy with the cosmos, and said, “This—this is the breath I will press into her lungs the moment she meets him, the one I made for her when I designed the tilt of the planet, and she will finally exhale so completely that no breath she ever takes again will be taken alone.”

You know they’re THE ONE when it feels like they exist to prove how unbearable distance can be between two people, and to show that God doesn’t make mistakes, only metaphors, and that love is His favorite one, and if this is not what was meant for you since the first sunrise, then you want no other thing ever again.

You know they’re THE ONE the way love feels like one long, never-ending conversation, like the connection creates not just a relationship but a condition, like humidity or dusk, like it never really came into being by taking away from anything, but because it always was.

My dearest heart makes me feel like the luckiest woman in the world every single day. Saturday, August 9th, 2025—she is betrothed.

To matrimony,

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Below is a selection of essays that, in what is now officially hindsight, feel like everything that has led up to this post:

The problem with striving is that it makes people unnerved by fortune that arrives without commensurate suffering. We want the narrative arc and the montage of character-building setbacks. Sudden luck insults the myth of meritocracy.

Chances are, you care way too much about what you deserve and not enough about what you want. What’s so threatening about luck is not the fact of it, but the upward spiral that follows. When nothing is wrong, there’s no story to tell, no problem to solve. You’re left realizing that no one is coming to interrupt it. Most people will invent a disturbance just to feel grounded again because the paralysis of happiness is just too much. Most stress is invented. Some birthdays ago, I felt like I became fully conscious for the first time, and that included a realization about how, like stress, most limitations are self-imposed.

Why stop at competency? Why not be brilliant? Why stop at satisfaction? Why not be ecstatic? Why stop at gratitude? Why not be pleased? Just wear the dress and buy the shoes and burn the candle, do it because it feels good. Take your good timing and excellent taste and run with it. When something really good happens to you, you’re allowed to take it to your room and lock the door and use it privately and hide it under the bed when people barge in.

You may be—without fraud or favor—spectacularly, unfairly, stupidly lucky. You may be kissed without the curse, the inheritance without the fatal car accident, the view without the vertigo. Honestly, if you feel like it, you should just skip gratitude (the Protestant handmaiden to self-loathing), humility (the sly cousin of pride), and go straight to delight. Full-throated, well-dressed, unapologetic, indulgent delight.

After all, why shouldn’t you? Why should you lower yourself to second-class joy when you agreed to never settle for less? It is delicious to be envied. It is the side-effect of living well, and why would you redact your fortune for the comfort of spectators in wooden chairs? If they wished to be happy, they should have chosen more interesting lives. You should go on shining. They’re the ones who need to admit that they’re jealous.

But of course, this is intolerable to the masses, who find luck offensive unless you pay it back in some way. To be alive is already statistically near-impossible. To be well-fed, literate, kissed in the morning—cosmic thievery. How dare you feel unburdened, even for an afternoon? How dare you flaunt your naïveté of how the world really works? Sometimes, the answer really is, well, I really am just luckier than you.

So, how lucky are you allowed to get?

That depends entirely on how little you believe in deserts, on your stomach for asymmetry, and on how long you can stay madly in love before feeling like you can’t leave. Luck isn’t a test, but it is a performance, and the ones who do it best are always the most convincing. How open is your heart for plenitude? How empty are your hands for receiving blessings? How long can you stand to live as if life itself were a gift, undeserved, tax-free, and secured in perpetuity?

Some things are best experienced in moderation, but not luck. Because too much luck is just the right amount of luck.

~

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In the same vein:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

— JFK’s address on the nation’s space effort, Rice University, 1962

We need difficulty—for achievement and for orientation. Hard things anchor us. They give shape to time, depth to thought, weight to words. The fire is a rite, not a punishment.

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Student as consumer, people as projects

The university becomes a certification factory when students are rebranded as nothing more than consumers of knowledge or institutional strivers. “University” comes from universitas in the Latin phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium—a community of teachers and scholars—suggesting that a university is a whole, a totality where minds were formed through exposure to the vast and contradictory totality of thought. Now, it is a checkpoint in the logistics chain of career advancement, where the degree matters more than the metamorphosis. The student is no longer a person being transformed by learning, she becomes a project to be managed. A subject has turned into an object. The journey of studying has become a set of OKRs. The graduation has become a box to be checked.

Using AI to “make learning easier” erases the point of learning, which is to enlighten the mind and to make a pupil—a seeing eye—out of a freshman. AI can make it easier to pass tests but it doesn’t do anything about the actual, magical transformation of learning. The AI student is forever a tenant, never an owner, of their curiosity. It’s the Ozempic of learning—it thinks that intaking knowledge is the same as learning, like glueing paper wings onto a caterpillar and calling it a butterfly.

Slow down and struggle

The original purpose of academia was askēsis—discipline, struggle, the voluntary endurance of difficulty for the sake of elevation. The Greek askēsis also gives us “ascetic,” a person who denies easy pleasures in pursuit of a higher life. In the modern university, however, the ascetic has been replaced by the performative multitasker, constantly optimizing, exhausted, and distracted. The student doesn’t read; she highlights. She no longer contemplates; she completes. The degree has become a plastic trophy.

Difficulty is essential because it slows time. It’s a slow-cook approach incompatible with the instantaneous responses of AI. The hard thing cannot be microwaved. It must be dwelled in—and there is a prize in that duration that you can’t get anywhere else: Contemplatio, from which “contemplation” derives, originally meant to be with (con-) the templum, the sacred space. To contemplate something difficult is not to pass over it quickly, but to dwell in its presence, to let it work on you. This is the true aim of education: transformation. Not accumulation.

When we avoid difficulty, we also avoid transformation. Algorithms, despite calling themselves discovery tools, do the exact opposite: curating familiarity and showing you what it knows you want to see. But, growth is always disfiguring. It unmakes as much as it makes. The caterpillar dissolves entirely before it becomes a butterfly. Yet, we demand progress without dissolution, elevation without struggling.

In German, Erfahrung—“experience”—shares its root with Fahrt, a journey. True experience cannot occur without a difficult passage through the unknown. Today, for many, a university degree is not an Erfahrung. It is a credential, a symbol of having gone to a school. Sadly, for many, it confirms identity without changing it. The word “education” has forgotten its origin. From educere—to lead out. Education is meant to draw out the soul, not fill up the résumé. It is meant to be a Platonic ascent, a painful unshackling from the cave of illusion, where one gains vision—it’s no wonder students are called pupils.

Learning is more than just intaking information, and school is more than just a matter of passing or failing. The point of academia is to become. It’s why Santiago, in The Alchemist, finishes his hero’s journey empty-handed: the treasure he looks for is where he had his original dream all along. Likewise, academia is a crucible where people become something new. The purpose of learning is to acquire some kind of knowledge or skill, but also, to build character. I take Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry very seriously: in the end, all schools aim to be a kind of magical, cloistered, otherworldly place where those who enter become more. They gain powers and spells to change the world. They learn how to communicate, they even learn how to learn. They experience loyalty and friendship, and they practice romance and chivalry. They study how to become a person.

Resisting smoothness

In Saving Beauty, Byung-Chul Han warns us about the smoothening of the world. From Jeff Koon’s sculptures to the iPhone to Brazilian waxing, everything has become sans serif. While design is just a visible sign of this vapidness, we see it in psychology, politics, and lifestyle marketing as well: All abnormalities are diagnosed as this or that, people are either trad or woke, and the poster child of health consists of cold plunges, infrared saunas, and acai bowls. Nuance is dead. Smoothness—the lack of friction, texture, and variation—makes us slip and fall into one extreme or the other.

The university, if it is to be more than a certification factory, must recover this ethos: the task of a university is to serve the student by shaping the student—to lead her out of herself, into a larger, more luminous world. University should make you feel like a small fish in a big pond, again and again and again. The sculptor shouldn’t fear the resistance of marble; she relies on it. The student should not fear the resistance of thought; she should press into it.

We need difficulty. The hard thing is a temple—a place where one must remove their shoes, bow their head, and proceed slowly.

We do not need more degrees for the sake of having degrees. We need to choose to go to the Moon because it is hard. People are like diamonds—each with the potential to be brilliant but left ordinary if not cut properly. Artificial intelligence is making you genuinely stupid, not because it shortens your attention span or whatever, but because it’s not letting the rigor of learning carve into you the facets you need to shine.

In a world that seeks to eliminate all roughness, all difficulty, try harder. Reclaim education from utility. Reclaim time from acceleration. The hard thing is the real thing. And in choosing it, you choose—finally and consciously—to become human.

Truly,

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1. Morning. Coffee shop, Downtown. Young couple.

Jane Austen once said something like, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jewish man working in tech must be in want of an educated Chinese wife.” His laptop is covered in startup logo stickers. Across from him sits the obligatory Asian girlfriend, poking at the melting ice in her glass while staring so closely at her nails that her eyes slightly cross.

He’s declaring a project timeline to someone on the other side of a neverending phone call, occasionally ejaculating a ‘canyouhearme’ in-between phrases involving a strategy and an engineer, and it all sounds like furniture to her—bulky, beige, blocking the light. Boredom hunches her back like a cooked shrimp. They both smell strongly, she of lavender and he of ambition. A copy of Barbarians at the Gate sits between them. She listens passively while switching between scrolling Instagram and zoning out at a fake plant in the corner. They make brief eye contact for one…long…beat. Neither reaching, neither retreating. The moment is held still in a suspension shaped more by inertia than desire—two people who still meet to sit together, long after the point where it means anything.

2. Late night. Underground bar. Table of friends all ages 60s+.

The clandestine bar is fox-den cozy, once a speakeasy during Prohibition, now dressed in female nude sketches and vintage posters from the eras of Uncle Sam, President Reagan, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The second-youngest person in the room is likely twice my age. The table behind me talks about Trump, the acquisition of a Birkin for under ten thousand dollars, and an encounter with Helen Keller. The party is made up of three couples who seem to be old friends. Over rosé, they reminisce: when Peter could still run marathons, when Kelly lived across the country—and many of these had to be repeated, the second time, louder, so Kelly’s husband could hear.

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They are served by the manager herself, a very energetic blonde with very wide-open eyes who looks like she’s very experienced dealing with celebrities. Her speech is peppered with “love”, “darling”, and “dear” to a degree found only in posh Brits, passive-aggressive Southerners, theatrical gay men, and impatient TSA agents.

The sextet talk over one another with ease, interrupting and resuming with the rhythm of people who have survived one another’s divorces, disappearances, triumphs, and small daily vanities. The lamp softly illuminates their faces, and they glow with the stories of so many decades all at once.

3. Dinner. Dimly lit restaurant. First date.

They sit very close for people who’ve just met. You know it’s a first date because their conversation references things they already know about each other from Hinge, but also because they talk like they’re auditioning for the part they already want to give each other.

She’s wearing a blue dress that’s creased behind the knees from sitting too long. Its neckline is modest enough to be proper, like she chose it to deny the clichés of seduction while preserving its tools.

He, for his part, is dressed in the manner of men who have read at least one article about Italian tailoring and thereafter adopted its principles not from pleasure but from duty. His shoes, though expensive-looking, carry the impersonal shine of newness, making them say more about how much he cares what others think of him than about his actual style.

He stares at her like a scientist encountering an animal whose presence on Earth is being witnessed for the very first time. She stares at him as if it were his face that was holding the universe together, and that as long as she didn’t look away, nothing would go wrong.

4. Evening. In an elevator. Four girls on their way to a concert/rave/party.

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