It's late here...

Brain dump @ 11:00 PM

Hi 👋 It’s been a while, eh?

There’s no excuse for me not to write; honestly, I don’t have one. Inspiration comes and goes, and honestly, I don’t care about my drive to always create something useful.

I promised myself to live and breathe in reality, to be truthful.

And so I find myself disillusioned. Not with people per se, but with the systems we’ve built and the stories we tell ourselves about work, purpose, and what a life well-lived truly means.

We’ve set the bar low. Our cultural narrative glorifies survival over curiosity, compliance over craft. We’ve optimized for productivity, not passion. Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that work is just a means to an end. A paycheck. A retirement. An escape. And maybe that works for some. But I can’t sit comfortably in that.

I love what I do. I love my craft. Not because it's easy or even always enjoyable, but because it challenges me, stretches me, and puts me in contact with something beyond myself. I don’t just work to get it done. I work to understand. I want to trace the contours of reality through systems, code, data, philosophy, or whatever tool helps reveal the pattern underneath. There’s something sacred in that; a form of devotion, a way to see.

I know not everyone feels this way, and that’s okay. I’m not trying to shame anyone who sees their job as just a job. I get it. Life is heavy. Sometimes the weight of survival leaves no room for exploration. But I also believe we’ve been sold a vision of adulthood so hollow that even those who could feel something more end up numbed out by the noise. Distracted. Disconnected.

What hurts is not that people struggle. Struggle is part of learning, and I respect it deeply. What hurts is when people try, and try hard, but the spark doesn’t come. The world doesn’t reward curiosity the way it should. It doesn’t always meet effort with clarity. When someone puts in the hours and does the hard work but still walks away without that click of fundamental understanding, it feels like a failure of the system, not the person.

I don’t want to change anyone. I know I can't; frankly, I don't like the burden of managing another's growth. But I want to understand. Not just ideas or patterns, but people. I want to learn how to accept others where they are, even when it confuses or frustrates me. I want to deepen my comprehension of the human experience, not just the elegant abstractions we build atop it.

In a way, I guess this is about meaning. But more precisely, it's about comprehension. The desire to grasp the structure of the thing, to see how and why it works the way it does. Including us. Including me. Because if I can see it clearly, maybe I can stop fighting the tide and learn to flow with it. Not in resignation, but in grace.

Maybe this is just what it means to care too much about the why of things. Perhaps it’s an affliction. But if it is, it’s one I’ve come to love.