thoughts of a dying athiest

Culture operates on the comfortable assumption that human survival is driven by an innate, self-interested terror of non-existence. We assume people cling to life because they fear the dark, because they are greedy for more time, or because they hold out hope for a better tomorrow. That is a fundamental misreading of the human condition.… Continue reading

We are conditioned to think about our own ending as a future event, a definitive line marked by a sudden medical emergency or a dramatic final day. We picture a clear division between being alive and being gone. That is an optimistic lie. The end of a human life is rarely a sudden drop off… Continue reading

There is a point in every long, exhausting storm where fear quietly burns itself out, leaving behind something far more useful: indifference. You spend the first half of your life frantically bracing against the wind. You manage the maintenance, you absorb the noise, you worry about the trajectory of a broken society, and you carry… Continue reading

We are living through the quiet, total extinction of the human mind in real time. It is not an explosive, cinematic collapse. It is a slow, gray evaporation. We walk into glass towers and corporate campuses under the mandated banner of “collaboration,” sitting in ergonomic chairs surrounded by hundreds of breathing bodies, yet we are… Continue reading

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

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

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

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

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

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