Author: admin

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ghosts. When I was a kid, my parents were often at work, and I was alone in the apartment. Their bedroom was off to the left side through a hallway, and when it was dark outside, and the lights were on in that room, it felt as if something was there. Maybe it was just the fear of a young kid alone, or maybe it was more. That memory-the blackness of a room-has stayed with me to this day. I often wonder about whether or not energy remains in a place. Whether we leave some sort of trail behind; some electric pattern of being. I often think that this question gets lost in the religion debate. It seems almost irrelevant to discuss whether or not there is a “higher” power, when all you want to know is if memories have some way of lingering in the air.

For my money, Ernest Becker’s book: “The Denial of Death” is a total encapsulation of man’s often fruitless search for meaning or purpose as a way to defeat death. And how do you try our best to escape death? Through control. Always beyond our grasp, control is what we strive for in everything we do.

Ram Dass has this amusing recording from 1999 where he discusses how things seem to be moving too quickly. Political, social, environmental upheaval made people exceptionally nervous and that nervousness-the lack of control-breeds fear. Fast forward to 2025 and it feels like that on steroids. How absurdly predictable we are as a species. We exercise harder, take more supplements, work more, consume infinitely more, worry more. Everything more. And we do all of this-all of it-in some outdated form of trying to control the uncontrollable. Always on the wheel, always spinning, never understanding what it is we are spinning for.

Meditation has been culturally prescribed as an elixir to this madness. As a way to escape these thoughts or, rather, control them. But just like any medication, when it’s not used for its intended purpose, it does not cure the ill. One cannot meditate if one cannot sit still, and 95% of the difficulty in meditating is the sitting still. One (I) cannot sit still, because of the constant fear that something must be taken care of. That this is not productive. That this will not help. That the you in you is not a meditator. That you have so much to do. That you can’t find the time. In reality, the quiet is the terror. The quiet tells you that all around you, life moves on without you. That your work, your goals, your striving, your concerns, your worries, your end games, your everything is meaningless. It is meaningless because everything is meaningless. Everything is meaningless because everything is impermanent. But this capital T truth is terrifying and so we spin instead. We contort and plan and scheme and cry and work and book trips and do anything you can to avoid staring at the abyss, even though we know it’s right in front of us.

The terror lives in ourselves. It needs nothing to survive. In fact it feeds off of our strict schedule of denying it exists. But what if we befriend it? That’s not a hypothetical question either. What if we actually befriend the terror. That would mean we shatter our ego in the process. It would mean that certainly our goals are not really ours. That our identity has been formed not through our own conscious attempts at becoming this thing, but rather as the reflections of everyone around us. It would mean we’d have to put down the hopes and dreams and struggles and complaints as not our own. And then we are left with what? With a perplexing lack of self and no closer to the meaning we are quite literally dying for. And while this is unsatisfying, it is likely the only real truth there is. We may find that when we crack our ego and ourselves, we may find love there, deeply hidden, ready to emerge. We may find that all we wish to do is give and receive love. That we want help and want to provide help and we want nothing other than to live. And may that be enough.

The problem with success is that it’s really tough to wean off of. You follow this linear pattern of up, up, up, and you don’t quite understand when you’ve actually made “it.” Thousands of years ago, you made it when you found a mate, or hunted food or gathered enough materials for a shelter. Now, not much is tactile. You no longer feel success, or see it in front of you. What’s worse, you often have to look to the left and right to see what your neighbors level of success is and compare it to yours.

The solution to this cannot simply be to step back and realize that success is amorphous anymore than telling a cigarette smoker that he should fight the urge to smoke by thinking about how silly all of it is. It’s deep in you, it’s got control, and it needs slaying.

What is your life if you’re not pointing to some far away goal? In what universe are you simply permitted to just “be”, rather than attain something. What if you can’t sit still? What if fear pervades any attempt to stop? How do you measure your worth? How do others measure your worth? What is life worth? What is your life worth? What does a good life look like? What if you just spend it goofing off? What if everything you know about yourself begins to implode because you can’t distract yourself? How does silence feel for you? What if there’s nothing to take care of right now? What if there is too much time and not enough time at the same time? What if this is all there is? What if these questions have no answers? Who do you become then? How do you compare yourself to anything? When if the lack of effort is the point? What if it all implodes?

Success, in one way or another, is a wonderful substitute for siting quietly and pondering those most uncomfortable questions we all are scared to us. It’s our cigarette that we’re all dying for, even though we know it’s probably not good for us and takes us away from the thing we really want.

Fear dictates most of the waking day. Fear of failure. Fear of embarrassment. Fear of not being enough or of being too much. Fear of meaninglessness. Fear or financial ruin or identity loss or physical fear or any thousands of other types of fear. We are absolute aliens to ourselves. We evolved in a world of predators and instinct. At some point, hundreds of thousands of years after our arrival, we’re asked to put that aside and find meaning in all of this. We’re asked to abandon that very thing which saved us. Our birthright. Our ancestral gift. We are placed in an ever changing world and set free. Animals on parade. And through this, we try our very best to mask fear or use fear as fuel. But fear is not a house cat you can toy with. It’s a black vapor that engulfs you. Your ideas of confronting it are not novel, nor will they likely be effective.

Fear is what paralyzes most people. Not the actual thing, but the idea of fear. The uncontrollable world around them. The failure to yield to what they wish the world to become. I have yet to figure out how to escape this loop. It goes on endlessly, whether I am conscious of it or not.

If you’ve spent decades trying to understand what in the world you believe, and still can’t quite pin it down, you’re in luck. The world’s institutions are crumbling, one after the other. For over 15000 years, the Church gave people a set of beliefs, requirements, and rules to build their life around. One’s heroic odyssey was part of the whole. Before that, the Romans, and before that the Greeks, and before that the Assyrians, and before that, who knows? Each society had it’s own set of rules. You did not need to strive very much beyond what your station in life as. We now spin, endlessly spin, searching for some capital T truth to tell us, in plain terms, on our timeline, what we should be doing with our lives. What level of morality we should accept as satisfactory. We are undeniably obsessed-I am undeniably obsessed-with what it means to be a good person, and how to hit that level in the game. The Tao tells us to allow; that if we strive we are ruining the whole thing. Our culture says we must strive. What would our ancestors think of us? Can our ancestors think of us? Does time move in a linear fashion? If the Theory of Relativity is correct, it does not. Time always is and always will be. We’re essentially playing out our parts. But, if that’s so, why would I chose a crappy place to eat lunch? Surely that wasn’t somehow predestined in the universe. If you often feel as if you’re plunging down a river, trying your best to hold on to any piece of detritus you can find, just so you have a decent grasp on something solid, welcome to the club.

The problem-the rather big problem- is the more we find ourselves in this state, the less we take action on the things in the world that call to us. We must wake up in our own, unsatisfactory way, and simply do the work, and allow the theoretical to live where it always has and it always will. That is the only certainty there is.

If we were put here but an all knowing being, then there is something to strive for. Some reason. Some meaning behind it all. If we simply arose out of millions of years of evolution, only to be wiped out at some point down the road, then it is meaningless. Small imprints of love are the only things on the path of life that give any of it much sense. So much of the day to day is spent wrestling with this in the background. So much of attaining something is, in reality, a subconscious quest to try and protect ourselves against a looming black void.

People often fail to perceive the rationale behind the choices they make. There is, in the recent lexicon, an idea of a hedonic treadmill. You buy things to make yourself feel better, but then you step feeling better and you have to buy something else. The inverse of this-minimalism-says that to truly feel content, you must get rid of many of your possessions. Both are an attempt to exhale, if only for a moment, all of the breath you’re holding in, staring at that void of yours. In other words, they are distractions. We want to be distracted. We yearn to be distracted. Anything not to stare at mortality. Any voice, any virtue, anything new, any return to old, any step is an attempt to look away from what is in front of us. The all consuming terror of it all.

There is no reason you cannot die right now. Nothing provides you some exquisite safeguard against the instantaneous nature of mortality. And yet, each day of your life, you gamble again. A gamble that you will survive to see tomorrow. And making that gamble gives you license to do all the comparatively meaningless things you’ll do all day. And, every morning, the moment you wake, this gamble is made again and again and again, until, one day, you lose the gamble you made.

This is achingly clear to anyone who has ever experienced profound loss in their lives. You become intimately clear with the finality of it all. The sheer, illogical nature of life. The predicament you face is what to do with this knowledge. What windmills shall you charge now? What do you use your life force for, exactly. How do you make meaning in life? How do you do it every day? Kindness, generosity, love, sure. But those appear as tactics rather than strategy. What, exactly are you to do with this one life?

In a few weeks, I will be 43 years old. Those words are difficult to comprehend. I have no idea how that happened. 43 seems a life lived. Not to suggest the precipice of death “life lived”, but enough to gleam some answers. I have more questions than answers, and the questions seem to multiply and the answers grow distant.

From my 20’s to my late 30’s, I sat on a rocket ship and pointed north career wise. More. More files. More clients. More money. More accolades. Next mountain. I didn’t ask where the ship was going, but I got on, frying my cortisol levels in the process. Equating money (not finance money) with stability. With control. With “optionality.” That no longer works.

I wake up every morning and think “what is being asked of me?” I am a father perplexed that he is a father. I am a husband perplexed that he is a husband. I have many trappings I thought I should have. Every morning, I think: “There is something missing here.” Some level of soulfulness or meaning or reason or goal or point. There must be others out there. Legions of middle aged men that watch the sunrise, horrified of a looming death in the distance or close by, unsure what to do today, let alone 10 years from now. Do I no longer have mountains to scale? Am I done? The best I can do is distract myself until the melancholy dissipates. I have absolutely no answers at 43.

My son’s room is blanketed by lego pieces. Some put together. Others waiting for his growing hands and fingers to construct something from nothing. In the calm silence of the morning, his room bathed in morning light, you can look around and almost feel him. Feel his potentiality in the space.

There is something I can’t quite express about the flatness of time. We’ve come to understand time linearly. This came before that. This comes after that. “In the past..” “Next year, we’re going to…” But there is this feeling that continues to visit me that tells me I’m wrong. Or that perhaps my calibration isn’t up to snuff. That the original sense of time is instead always and never at once. His room seems to be this encapsulation of that. These pieces are on the floor now, but in a few months they’ll be replaced by something else, but, to me, those pieces will always be on the floor. They will always live somewhere else for me for all of time. I find myself speechless quite often when I walk in there. This presence. This potentiality. This formation of a person, A soul coming into being and I am witnessing all of it, all of the time.

What can possibly make you care anything for a career when you live amongst magic? What can bring you down to the dirt to argue over imaginative things when the world is quite literally whispering in your ear “here is magic.”

A fun exercise would be to imagine what you would do if you lived in a socialist country (the good ones). Your children’s education is paid for, throughout college. Health insurance is guaranteed. Not a penny out of pocket. Housing is cheap and your family is able to live close by and support you. Childcare is taken care of. Children are mostly screen free and able to roam, unguarded, and do what children naturally do. You have absolutely no socio-economic worries at all, though it gets pretty cold and pretty dark pretty often. How then, in this imaginative world, do you live? Do you have the same job? Do you continue doing what you do or do you quit on the spot, laughing all the way to your car, or to public transportation?

How much of our lives are shaped by external factors that silently and cumulatively tilt the scales of our decision making. How many to-do lists that you fret over are filled with tasks birthed from the notion that these things must be accomplished. These activities for the children not to be bored or fall behind. These bills to be paid; the surprise presentation of them at your doorstep irrelevant to the creditor you now owe. How many conversations would you have about how your life worth is connected to the interest rate on the debt on your home, which you often do not love in the first place. What forced social disconnection do you endure in order to have your children in a school district who will do what school districts are supposed to do the things you imagine school districts doing in your school district hypothetical fed by someone else? In what ways do you try and hammer in “date nights” with the person you promised your entire life to, when your mind runs with the things that need to be done before the close of business? Is spirituality or religion now an additive to the recipe, rather than the base it was for centuries, and does that make things better or worse? And for whom?

Do you ever step back and thing about who is truly in charge of your life? Truly in charge. Do you ever wonder whether or not you’re part of a big game, and you’re unaware that you’re a contestant? Unclear as to when the game began, and what classifies as completing the game (absent death). What does winning mean? What does losing mean? Do you ever think about whether podcasts are actually teaching you something, or simply distracting you from teaching yourself something? How do you reckon how far out you’re able to swim before you get so far that you don’t have the strength to turn back, and instead float away; unaware of the knowledge that was right in front of you in the first place.

Open your eyes.