I was fifteen rungs up someone else’s ladder when I realized I had no idea where it led or why I was climbing it. I had been scaling heights that belonged to other people’s dreams. When did external expectations become so loud that my internal voice became inaudible?
Success feels different than you imagined because you imagined it would change you in ways that only you can change yourself. The promotion came with a hollow realization that reaching the summit feels nothing like you imagine when you’re climbing.
I compare my 3 AM anxiety to their Instagram confidence, my private doubts to their public achievements. This is the mathematics of misery: measuring your interior against everyone else’s exterior and wondering why the equation never balances.
“We are storytelling animals trapped in a universe that offers no inherent plot. When reality becomes unbearable, we wrap it in narrative until we can carry it.”
“We are the only creatures who must live with the knowledge of our own extinction. This awareness creates a unique form of existential loneliness, yet it might also be what makes us uniquely human in our capacity for connection.”
We all carry this deep sense of being displaced, of searching for something we can’t quite name. Maybe home isn’t where we’re going but how we travel. Not the destination but the company we keep on the journey.
If moral facts exist independently of moral agents, who or what are they facts about? Moral facts might be facts about us in the deepest sense—not about what humans believe, but about what consciousness and choice essentially involve.
The threat of loss creates energy that the promise of gain can never match. Loss aversion makes us prisoners of our current circumstances, more committed to defending what we’ve accumulated than exploring what we might become.
Success whispers its lessons in a language of validation and confirmation bias. But failure is a forensic investigator with unlimited access to evidence. Success creates students. Failure creates scholars.
I had been so busy editing the past that I had forgotten how to write the future. The day I stopped trying to rewrite my past was the day I picked up the pen and started writing my future. My past is not a mistake to be corrected but raw material to be transformed.
Curated insights, thoughtfully delivered. No clutter.
