One day, while his bandages are being changed, light strikes his eyes and he realizes his sight is returning, and that his inner vision is burning away. When he can see again, the dreams vanish, and he never visits the sorceress again.

With great despair, he destroys his eyes to return to his desire. In cries of pain and triumph, he stands on the bank as bright carmine covers his cheeks and hands in blissful mortification.

Blind once again, he sees once again.

Eyes have two meanings: to look, and to see. Looking is the act of paying attention. Seeing is the embodiment of understanding: it’s what we mean when we say “I see what you mean”; it’s the vision a founder has for their company; it’s MLK Jr.’s dream. People take a (seemingly blind) leap of faith and act on their visions all the time: the college dropout goes all-in on a startup idea; the small town singer moves to Santa Monica to chase a dream; the MIT-educated neurosurgeon quits his job to trek the mountains. Pascal had one mystical vision and became a believer overnight. Whenever people describe these decisions as irrational, I think they’re forgetting that rationality is not the root lever of decision-making:

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

—G. K. Chesterton

The truest driver of a decision is not whether it makes sense but whether it makes you more: more awake, more free, more alive, as if a magnetic pole has been planted somewhere in the earth just to make your heart expand the closer you are to it.

I am an appetite, a will, a wanting machine with my heart dialled permanently, restlessly, and ungovernably toward metamorphosis, and will detour off sensible roads out of a deep faithfulness to the potential I know I have in me, to the self I know can be born if I gave it a chance. The diplomat forfeits his career to write freely in exile; the stockbroker gives up a comfortable life to be a painter; priests and nuns leave their institution for marriage. To be alive is to live wanting something, and it’s an idea I love so much that I wrote a book about it:

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Phantom heart syndrome

When a body loses a limb, the nerves often retain the sensation of that limb still being there. I think the heart is no exception to this phenomenon: Desire signals that there is something out there that makes it complete. Like how thirst alone proves that water exists, the shape of what is absent tells you what you were made to seek.

The point of desire isn’t about obtaining or achieving something: if we were satisfied once we bought what we wanted, we would never catch ourselves overspending. The point of desire is in its direction and momentum: it’s as if every cell in your body eavesdropped on what you know you want, and that act of desiring itself changes you.

Think of what happens when you have a crush: suddenly, they become a source of motivation and everything you do is oriented toward becoming a better version of yourself in a way so that you might get their attention, impress them, and become someone they would want to be with. My friend has mused about this, about how crushes can be misplaced ambition, representing things you want to see yourself becoming.

Every great desire wakes you up to how embarrassingly far away you are from it and triggers an urgent need to move closer. The word desire comes from the Latin de sidere—to be far from the stars. We change in the direction of what we worship, and we do all things in service of it. To worship something (worth-ship, Old English) literally means to be in a state of worthiness of that thing: Every desire is a desire for being; not to have something, but to become someone.

So, what are we pursuing? What are we making ourselves worthy of and worthy for?

Country roads, take me home

I think if an apocalypse reset civilization, the first thing we’d reinvent (rediscover?) is the concept of heaven. An idea of an ultimate home, that there is something somewhere over there, and we are not there yet, but we will get there someday. Everyone feels a bittersweet pang when Take Me Home, Country Roads starts playing—people gather to chant for home (…To the place I belong…), momentarily turning back into tribal creatures around a fire, seized in joy by that primal, irrational, transcendental urge to do things like climb into dangerous caves just to leave handprints on the wall. Everything we do is, by proxy, to create an image of heaven, a little taste of Home. Our phantom heart syndrome calls us to move closer, and closer, and closer… Almost heaven, West Virginia….

That song has the power to reveal our nature as worshipping beings: we always have an ultimate object of desire, something like an ultimate crush, something that makes all we do justifiable in the very end. All walks of life happen on country roads that lead to the same place—like what psychoanalysts say about the sex drive, I think we have a heaven drive, a libido that insists on moving toward wholeness, toward what tries to satisfy the phantom sensation.

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So when we feel great boredom, it’s because (quoting C. S. Lewis) our desires are not too strong, but too weak: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” We are nihilistic when “we are far too easily pleased.” The opposite of that—feeling rich in purpose—is wanting more, aiming for heaven and nothing less.

I recently read ’s Mating in Captivity, a book about how desire is the thing that doesn’t resolve, that it’s “being in the space between the self and the other.” We feel the most alive when we’re sitting on the edge of the known world, feet dangling above the abyss, while gazing into the unknown with hearts reaching for the stars. And we miss out on the glorious country roads that take us home when we treat wanting as waiting…. waiting for aliveness to happen to us when coming alive depends on us making that leap of faith into the portal of infinite otherness.

Posts that inspired this one!

• get out of your head, by

• Riding the Leopard, by

• Hungry for it, by

• Method acting, by

• is there a correct way to capture your life?, by

• Being Alive, by

• How to Channel Your Inner Mystic, by

• Erotic Decisions, by

• The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon, short story by J. G. Ballard

~

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The Instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory.

—Daniel Kahneman

In the previous decade, a phrase we used to say on Instagram was “camera eats first” which is when you took a photo of your meal before you enjoyed it for what it is—something to be eaten.

Amidst the pressure to record everything, I feel like the entire world has become a pretty dinner setup, and we’re all standing by, hungry yet afraid to dig in because we all think that documenting and sharing our memory of that moment matters more than getting inside our bodies and enjoying that moment from first-person-perspective in real-time.

In a way, everything is marketing. In the commercial sense, it means that a company curates a brand to sell something for profit. In the personal sense, we curate ourselves into certain types via our taste in clothes or our beliefs in order to be perceived as attractive, affluent, avant-garde—whatever it might be—and we do it for networking, dating, socializing—it’s to “sell” ourselves to something or someone, whether it’s for a feeling of self-assurance or creating an impression. A bull elk grows up to 40 pounds of bone from his skull every single year, then burns through 20% of his body weight during the rut to secure a harem; birds of paradise perform equally bizarre rites to do the same; men and women have always enjoyed shiny cars and hip-waist ratios for the admiration they win us.

In a way, nature has always been driven by marketing. However, the digital world creates a matrix-reality where the lifestyle we say we live remains manicured forever and can feel more tangible than the grass outside. If you sleep for 8 hours per day and have a screen time of 8+ hours, you are spending more than 50% of your conscious life in the matrix!!

When everything is “curated”, we create a gap between our life and our lifestyle.

Or, in Pope Leo XIV’s words:

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

My oversimplified version of this is, “it’s now easier than ever to lie and live an entire life in that lie without even knowing it.” While the synthetic world we create online is REAL in its own way, it is is never TRUE.

The urgency to post-and-share everything makes us stage our life for the sake of its documentation. We live to serve our images, like how restaurants and bars are arranged being mindful of how it will look in the pictures that people will take of it. A restaurant’s name might be printed on its plates. A shop’s window might have a decal of a hashtag so a post of it would look like it’s already captioned. Rhode’s phone case is so viral because it uses the medium of the mirror selfie to promote its lipgloss—the back of your phone is ad space!

“The Instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory,” means that the three-dimension reality we inhabit is now being arranged with the post hoc two-dimensional picture or video of it in mind. Weddings are arranged for the cameraman; podcasts are arranged for the 16:9 YouTube rectangle.

In “Get Inside Your Body” on , I said that what creeps me out about intelligent machines isn’t that they’re becoming more and more human, but that WE’RE the ones losing our true nature and becoming machinified:

We are becoming less embodied. The distance between reality and our ability to experience it—five senses and beyond—is widening. The way our digital reality rules over us resembles how Carl Jung described the way slaves silently overshadowed Ancient Rome: “Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence.” Did every Roman have a slave, or did every slave have a Roman? Are we using AI to help us create more human things? Or is AI using us—OUR language, OUR engineering—to reproduce more AI?

So, like Pope Leo says, reality and its simulation becomes more and more similar which makes it harder for us to discern what matters. What tweeted in 2017 still rings true, “15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet,” except, now, the internet has become its own set of reality that makes leaving it feel optional, and you might realize at the very, very end of it all that nothing could’ve been further away from the truth. It’s all starting to feel like:

Get inside your life

What does it actually mean to be in your life? Is it just counting the years? Or being able to recall the highs and lows of it?

Actually, being in your life is just this present moment. I read this piece of advice that Donagh O’Shea, an Irish Dominican friar, gave to someone who was anxious about aging (from ’s “No distance”):

Whenever something wonderful is going on I am wholly taken by it; I am fully in that moment; I am immersed in my experience, there is no distance between me and my life. This ‘no distance’ is another word for love. When we love what we are doing, we forget about ourselves, we don’t say things like “I haven’t much time left.” Our whole life is somehow crystallised in this moment.

I heard this story about how the bodies of people who die of thirst in the desert are often found carrying full bottles of water because they’re afraid that if they drink it they won’t have enough left to make it out of the desert. When we’re fixated on the lifestyle and not life, we stay stranded, wasting the right moment in front of us by waiting for “the right moment” when it was, is, and always will be the moment of now. We waste youth on being anxious about aging. We waste good company worrying about being alone forever. We waste nice candles by not burning them, and pretty dresses by never getting them dirty with sweat, rain, and makeup.

When we spend life contemplating its finitude, that’s when we’re actually wasting it the most. Life is just this moment. What you’re doing right now, what’s happening around you, that’s it. That is your life.

From O’Shea:

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Yesterday afternoon, I found myself on the second floor of the Natural History Museum in London staring at a giant meteorite that dates back 5 billion years. A rock that has travelled millions of miles from deep space, beyond the asteroid belt, was now inches away from my face across nothing but a layer of glass. We closed a gap so galactic that the word “distance” felt inadequate.

I felt the collapse of time, distance, and physical material. The iron in this rock and the iron in my blood are both downstream of the same ancient stellar explosion; we are two different arrangements of the same nebular dust. One of us will live for an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the other—a number so boggling that it puts biological lifespans into entirely new perspectives, like, when we complain that life is short I wonder if we’re just complaining that life is finite.

A week earlier, I got married. Two very different people with very different stories found that their souls were made out of the same stuff (whatever souls are made out of), and decided to close a galactic gap and merge into one.

What makes a union, a union? Do we bond with people by chasing them, by attracting them, or by a third more mysterious way? What is desire anyway?

Desire is the awareness of something’s absence.

It literally means to be far away from the stars: desiderare, de- (“away from”) and sidus (“star”). Desire is the ache that reveals that something matters, and you are distant from it, like feeling homesick for what is beyond you. To desire is to recognize a separation.

Where have you been all my life? —Rihanna

Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad. —Carly Rae Jepsen

Most importantly, the Latin infinitive ending -are means that “desire” is a verb: Desire is not the push at the top of the hill but the velocity itself as you fall towards the gravity of your heart. Desire, in its truest form, is relation. I used to think of desire as a motivation for relation (“I move towards xyz because I want it”)—turns out, desire isn’t a reason for human relationship, desire IS the relationship, because it’s the perpetual will to encounter something that remains Other. What we’re all looking for is a thing that exists not to be used but to be with, the thing that sparks wonder and invites us to revel in it. Wanting is always in motion!

When you wish to have something, you expect a return on investment. When you wish to be with something, you enjoy it experientially (in all its pleasures and pains). Paradoxically, the transformation you undergo by diving into the unknowable IS the reward. Coelho’s The Alchemist is my favorite parable for this phenomenon: the treasure you seek is what becomes of you when you seek it. The treasure hunter ends up where she started because she can’t escape her own existence, therefore all transformation is embodied. Time yields treasures when there’s momentum, hence the alchemist: someone who transmutes ordinary material into gold by being in motion—by seeking, wanting, and paying attention.

I find that all good relationships—romantic, platonic, professional—work like a smooth zipper. The two halves of a zipper join not because they’re fixated on each other, but they’re both fixated on a common telos, accompanying each other step by step on the way up and down. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do them part. From the backpacks of schoolchildren to the suits of astronauts, the zipper is a small but mighty technology that advances human civilization when assembled properly.

A good zipper is a wife and a husband; two movers hoisting a sofa up a flight of stairs; a writer and an editor; a pair of co-founders; a robber and a getaway driver. It’s the image of two equally yoked oxen ploughing a field in straight lines that St. Paul invokes when writing to the Corinthians about partnerships, from matrimony to business.

All happy families meet at the top

Anyone who has ever tried to impress a crush by picking up a new hobby or becoming a subject matter expert overnight knows that all efforts dedicated to forcibly chasing or attracting someone often dwindle into asymptotes: you try to become someone you’re not, and due to your inauthenticity, you can only get closer and closer but you can never touch. But, when two people aim for a common joy, independent of the other’s efforts, they inevitably merge:

Two people genuinely oriented toward the same thing will, by the logic of geometry, inevitably arrive at the same place. It’s why Maya Angelou advised, “A woman’s heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”

Think of it this way: two people standing on opposite sides of a pyramid get closer when both climb towards the top, but will never meet if they loiter on ground level. Distance is closed by aiming for the same truth; the same ideal; the same utopia. Go on the journey and the people looking for you will find you en route to heaven. This is what Tolstoy meant by “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—there is only one heaven but there are as many hells as there are couples. The pyramid has only one tip, but a myriad of spots at the bottom. There’s one way to rise and a millions ways to fall.

When mirrors turn into portals

All true desires are portals into the deep, not reflections of what you think you deserve.

All encounters—a conversation, a relationship—are ultimately a moment of entering each other’s universe and being awed by its infinite depth, not an interface for the analysis of any one specific dimension of so-called compatibility.

The magical thing about convergence is that it recreates paradise: when two people look up together at the same star (a common desiderare) instead of looking sideways, they transcend the alien distance between them by existing in a state glorified by an ultimate concern, something that makes all other concerns—from folding laundry to disputing parking tickets to arranging a parent’s funeral—feel like child’s play.

Dishes still pile. Death is still as unavoidable as taxes. But when something ultimate is present, the highs and lows of ordinary life fall into their places. Perhaps that’s why love feels like heaven, like the plot makes sense, and that everything is, on the whole, going to be alright.

~

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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: