Between action and enjoyment as ultimate ends — So I wrote something about halfway between an article and a word salad a few days (two weeks) ago about finding your life’s purpose in a world which seems set up to discourage the finding of any inspiration beyond people richer than ourselves. But even the word “purpose” itself in…

The potential for progress and its depletion — Everybody’s clamoring to know when their apocalypse will hit. What was the talk of solidly fringe conspiracy bloggers, vloggers, authors, radio hosts and the like, 15 odd years ago, has turned into a shockingly commonplace agreement amongst Americans that the economic system our country has built all its vast wealth…

And how to find meaning in the madness — Someone opened up to me recently about their struggles with finding a sense of purpose in life. They expressed a long list of different reasons why life, as it is today set up by a longer list of outdated and openly hostile institutions that have not and will not allow…

Illustrating major theories in metaphysics today — Modern philosophy is overcomplicated and completely inaccessible. Most everyone agrees. But why? When people read ancient philosophy, they often report it being surprisingly imprecise and wishy-washy about the ultimate nature of things, because modern philosophy by comparison is obsessed with giving specific names of actors in or aspects of the…

Notes on the Story of Siegfried — I just recently read an old copy of “The Story of Siegfried”, first published in 1882, as a compilation of the many different myths of the traditional Germanic hero reworked into a coherent story. I did so only on account of the fact that the book was beautifully illustrated and…

The problem of inaccessibility continues long after admission — The story of how the rich swindle their kids into America’s top colleges is well-worn at this point; what has since been dubbed the “Varsity Blues Scandal” that broke in 2019 left exposed how faked extracurriculars, coupled with the classic bribing of coaches and admissions officers, had allowed dozens of…

The shine to democracy and its roots in white supremacy — Mount Rushmore is inherently unique among American monuments in that a lot of the experience of the monument is in getting there. Reaching the Black Hills of South Dakota — “island in the plains” — entails a drawn-out drum roll from the endless, colorless, flat fields of the American plains…

A short poem of sitting and watching the world burn — Colors once o’er ruled these flowing fields Now blue and black and white and worn I sat beneath a tree with poisoned leaves And I perceived a world’s a-maddened mourns Stains of red of men now dead did dot the snow The old already dirt beneath the freezing storms For slaughter it’d…

A short story on the fruits of dedication to our goals — Summer 2021. Black Hills, South Dakota. I got out of work at 4 PM, five days a week. For a whole week straight after work — the first week of August, the hottest of the summer — I set out on the same one adventure. I’d change clothes in our…