Tender is the Flesh Book Review

What happens when capitalism finally strips away every last pretense of civilization? What happens when human beings become just another commodity, their bodies reduced to inventory, their suffering transformed into profit, and their existence measured by their usefulness to the market?

Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh offers a grotesque answer: nothing fundamentally changes. The language becomes more clinical, the machinery more efficient, and the violence more socially acceptable, but the underlying logic remains disturbingly familiar.

In this dystopian novel, a virus renders animal meat poisonous, forcing society to embrace the industrial slaughter and consumption of human beings. People are bred, processed, butchered, and sold as meat. An entire economy emerges around the practice, complete with factories, regulations, specialized labor, and consumers who would rather not think too hard about where their dinner comes from.

The premise is horrifying, but what makes the novel so effective is that its world isn’t governed by perpetual chaos. It is governed by bureaucracy. The slaughterhouses operate. The workers perform their duties. The wealthy purchase their products. The government establishes regulations. Society adapts. And that is precisely where the horror lies.

One of capitalism’s defining characteristics is its ability to transform the world into something that can be bought, sold, and exploited. Land becomes property. Labor becomes a commodity. Time becomes money. Human relationships become transactions. Even suffering can be packaged, marketed, and sold when somebody discovers a way to profit from it.

Tender Is the Flesh takes this logic to its most repulsive conclusion.

Human beings are no longer recognized as individuals possessing an inner life. They become products with measurable qualities, market values, and designated purposes. Their bodies are assessed, processed, and distributed according to economic demand. The distinction between a person and a product disappears, not because humanity has suddenly lost its capacity for moral reasoning, but because an entire economic system has been constructed around the financial benefits of pretending that certain human beings are no longer people. This is the terrifying brilliance of Bazterrica’s premise. The transformation doesn’t require everyone to become a sadistic monster. It requires people to accept a new category of commodity. Once that category is established, the machinery can take care of the rest.

The slaughterhouse isn’t merely a place of physical violence. It’s the logical endpoint of a worldview in which living beings possess value only insofar as somebody else can extract something from them.

What disturbed me most about the novel wasn’t simply its graphic depictions of brutality. It was the normalization of that brutality.

The characters inhabit a society in which atrocities have been incorporated into everyday routines. The language surrounding the industry is sanitized, technical, and impersonal. Euphemisms conceal the reality of what is happening, allowing people to participate in horrific practices without confronting their full implications.

Modern capitalist societies routinely obscure the human cost of their comforts. The exploitation of workers occurs far from the eyes of consumers. The suffering behind cheap products is hidden within global supply chains. Environmental destruction is treated as an externality. Poverty is reframed as personal failure, while wealth accumulated through exploitation is celebrated as success. The distance between consumer and victim makes indifference easier.

We are encouraged to see products rather than processes, prices rather than consequences, and convenience rather than the suffering that may sustain it. The system functions most smoothly when its participants can enjoy its benefits without examining its foundations. Bazterrica magnifies this arrangement until it becomes impossible to ignore. Her fictional society doesn’t eliminate violence. It industrializes it, regulates it, and gives it a respectable place in the economy. The horror isn’t that violence exists. The horror is that violence can become an ordinary job.

The novel also exposes how dehumanization can become a prerequisite for exploitation. If the victims are understood as fully human, the industry becomes morally indefensible. Their suffering becomes impossible to dismiss as a technical detail. Their existence challenges the legitimacy of the entire economic arrangement. So the system depends on distinctions: between those who count as people and those who don’t, between lives worthy of protection and lives available for consumption. These distinctions are not simply personal prejudices. They are reinforced through institutions, professional language, economic incentives, and social expectations.

Once an entire population is classified as a resource, cruelty can be presented as efficiency. Exploitation becomes production. Killing becomes processing. The moral question is replaced by a logistical one. How many units can be produced? How much can be sold? How can waste be reduced? How can demand be satisfied?

From an anarchist perspective, this is especially disturbing because it reveals how institutional power can organize domination until it appears natural. People learn their assigned roles, obey established procedures, and reproduce the system through everyday actions. Nobody needs to defend the entire arrangement every morning. They only need to perform their individual tasks.

Oppression becomes routine. And routine is one of the most effective ways to make the intolerable seem inevitable. The banality of evil and the machinery of obedience

There is something profoundly unsettling about the novel’s emphasis on procedure. The people operating this industry are not all depicted as extraordinary villains. They are workers, managers, officials, and consumers occupying recognizable social roles.

Their participation raises a question that extends far beyond the fictional world: how much cruelty can a society normalize before its members stop recognizing it as cruelty?

We often imagine that evil announces itself. We expect it to look monstrous, to speak openly about its intentions, to announce its hatred of humanity. But institutional violence rarely needs such theatricality.

It can arrive in paperwork, regulations, workplace expectations, and the reassuring claim that everyone is simply doing their job. It can be defended as necessary, profitable, legal, or unavoidable. People can distance themselves from responsibility by insisting that the system would continue without them.

And perhaps it would.

But that does not absolve them of their participation.

One of the novel’s bleakest implications is that civilization is not necessarily the opposite of barbarism. Civilization can provide barbarism with infrastructure. It can make cruelty more organized, more productive, and more difficult to challenge.

What makes Tender Is the Flesh such an effective anti-capitalist novel is that its central horror does not depend on the existence of universal hatred. The people being exploited do not have to be hated by every person who benefits from their exploitation. They simply have to be profitable. That distinction matters.

A system organized around accumulation does not need to recognize the intrinsic worth of the lives it consumes. It needs only to identify resources, establish ownership, organize production, and generate returns. Human suffering can become an acceptable cost when it is borne by somebody whose interests carry little economic or political weight. This is why the novel’s world feels less like an impossible nightmare than an exaggeration of existing tendencies.

Capitalism has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to adapt to moral criticism without surrendering its underlying priorities. It can market ethical consumption, celebrate corporate responsibility, and turn rebellion itself into a brand. It can acknowledge suffering while continuing to profit from the conditions that produce it. The system does not necessarily collapse when its contradictions become visible. Sometimes it simply finds a new way to sell them.

Bazterrica pushes that adaptability into the realm of the grotesque. Even the unspeakable becomes an industry.

The novel is also interested in the psychological consequences of living inside such a society. Its protagonist, Marcos, occupies a position within the very industry that makes the novel’s world possible. His private life and emotional struggles unfold against a background of organized human exploitation. This creates an uncomfortable tension between individual feeling and systemic violence.

Can a person remain compassionate in one area of life while participating in cruelty elsewhere? Can private grief or tenderness compensate for complicity in a brutal institution? Does an individual’s capacity to care for particular people mean much if they continue to benefit from a structure that treats others as disposable?

These questions resist easy answers.

We’re often eager to judge ourselves by our intentions, our private virtues, and the people we love. But institutions are sustained by actions as well as beliefs. A person can experience genuine tenderness without challenging the machinery of exploitation surrounding them. Compassion confined to the private sphere may offer personal comfort while leaving the public world untouched. That is one of the novel’s most uncomfortable challenges: whether our morality extends beyond the boundaries of our own lives, and what happens when it doesn’t.

Beyond its political critique, Tender Is the Flesh is a deeply existential work. Its world offers no comforting assurance that human beings are naturally moral, that civilization steadily improves, or that technological and bureaucratic sophistication represents genuine progress. Instead, it presents a society capable of organizing immense cruelty while continuing to regard itself as functional. The result is a particularly bleak vision of humanity.

Perhaps the most frightening possibility isn’t that people are inherently incapable of compassion, but that compassion is fragile when confronted with convenience, conformity, and material incentives. People can recognize suffering and still look away. They can understand that something is monstrous and still participate in it. They can construct elaborate moral justifications for arrangements that benefit them.

The novel doesn’t allow the reader the comfort of imagining that barbarism belongs exclusively to some distant, uncivilized other. Its monsters wear ordinary clothes. They have jobs. They follow procedures. They live in a society that has decided certain lives are worth less than others. And they eat dinner.

Tender Is the Flesh isn’t a political treatise, and it shouldn’t be reduced to a simplistic allegory in which capitalism alone explains every act of human cruelty. Its dystopia is also concerned with conformity, institutional power, moral compartmentalization, and the disturbing ease with which human beings adapt to the unacceptable.

Nevertheless, its central premise lends itself to a devastating anti-capitalist interpretation.

When everything must justify its existence through utility, when every resource must be exploited, and when profitability becomes more important than the lives sacrificed to achieve it, the distinction between a society’s productive capacity and its moral progress begins to collapse.

A society can become more efficient without becoming more humane. It can become wealthier without becoming more compassionate. It can develop increasingly sophisticated institutions while using those institutions to administer increasingly sophisticated forms of cruelty.

Progress measured exclusively through production, consumption, and economic growth is a profoundly impoverished definition of progress.

As an anarchist, I find the novel’s portrayal of normalized domination especially compelling. It exposes the danger of accepting institutions simply because they’re established, laws simply because they are enforceable, or economic arrangements simply because they are profitable. Legality does not make something ethical. Social acceptance does not make something just. And the fact that a system functions does not mean it deserves to survive.

The most horrifying aspect of Tender Is the Flesh isn’t the idea that humanity might one day become meat. It’s the suggestion that we could construct a world in which this happens, surround it with regulations and professional terminology, turn it into a source of employment and revenue, and eventually stop asking whether it should happen at all.

Capitalism’s ultimate horror is not merely that it can turn everything into a commodity, it’s that, given the right conditions, it can teach us to mistake the commodification of life for the natural order of things. And once that happens, the slaughterhouse no longer looks like an aberration.

It looks like business as usual.

No Longer Human: A Review

There are books that entertain you, books that challenge you, and then there are books that feel like they quietly crawl inside your head and sit there long after you finish them. No Longer Human is one of those books.

At first glance, the novel seems simple: a deeply alienated man drifts through life unable to connect with other people. However, the deeper you get into the book, the harder it becomes to reduce it to something that neat. It’s not just about social anxiety. It’s not even just about despair. It’s about what happens when someone becomes convinced they are fundamentally incompatible with humanity itself.

What struck me most was how early Yozo (main character) learns to perform. As a child, he realizes he doesn’t understand people, so he becomes a clown. Humor becomes camouflage. Every joke, every exaggerated expression, every ridiculous act is really an attempt to avoid scrutiny. He isn’t trying to stand out. He’s trying to survive unnoticed. The idea hit harder than I expected.

The novel repeatedly asks an uncomfortable question: how much of social life is performance? Yozo just experiences that performance at an unbearable intensity. He watches other people interact as if everyone else received a secret manual on how to be human and he somehow missed it. And yet, despite all his insistence that he is “disqualified” from humanity, the emotions driving him are painfully human:

Fear.

Shame.

Loneliness.

The desire to be accepted.

Terror of rejection.

That’s what makes the title so tragic. By the end of the novel, I didn’t feel like I had read about an inhuman person. I felt like I had watched a human being slowly convince himself that he wasn’t one.

The epilogue completely reframed the book for me. After spending hundreds of pages inside Yozo’s self-hatred, another character casually describes him almost tenderly, as an “angel.” That single moment changes everything. Suddenly you realize the story may not be about a man who truly lacked humanity, but about someone whose self-perception had become catastrophically distorted. That possibly makes the novel far sadder.

There’s also something disturbingly modern about the book. Even though it was published in 1948, it feels intensely contemporary in its depiction of masking, alienation, and emotional dissociation. Yozo constantly performs versions of himself for other people while privately feeling hollow and fraudulent. That experience feels familiar to a lot of people now, especially in a world where identity itself can become performative.

What makes Osamu Dazai’s writing so effective is that he never turns Yozo into a romantic antihero. He can be passive, frustrating, selfish, self-destructive, and emotionally exhausting. But the novel doesn’t ask you to admire him. It asks you to understand the psychology of someone collapsing under shame.

Maybe that’s why the book lingers. It’s not because most readers literally feel “no longer human,” but because many people know what it’s like to feel out of sync with the world around them, to wear masks for survival, or to fear there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

The horror of the novel isn’t that Yozo loses his humanity. It’s that he can no longer see it in himself.

The Product

There’s a factory somewhere that manufactures meaning. Nobody knows where it is, but we all buy what it makes. You can’t survive without it. Every morning, I wake up to the same alarm sound — like a shriek filtered through cheap optimism — and I clock in at my terminal, typing things for other people who think they’re changing the world by moving numbers around. The boss says we’re “innovators.” I say we’re dream janitors, sweeping up what’s left of hope.

At night, I scroll through faces that look like me: sleep-deprived, smiling, sedated by purpose. They post about “grind culture” and “mindfulness,” like saints of a new religion where salvation costs $9.99 a month.

I used to believe I was different. I wrote poetry. I loved someone once. Then I started to feel the product wearing off. It began small. A crack in the script. I’d catch myself staring at my reflection in a window not recognizing the thing looking back. Like someone had replaced me with a cheaper copy, printed on recycled despair. My laugh started to sound overdubbed. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and resignation.

I told my therapist. She smiled, a perfect mechanical crescent, and asked if I’d tried “meaning supplements.” She handed me a sample pack. They were glossy pills the color of television static. “Swallow one before sleep,” she instructed.

That night, I dreamed of the factory. Rows of bodies in chairs, their eyes wired open, pupils projected onto screens. Every time one blinked, a machine printed out a new slogan: Live. Laugh. Persist. The air was thick with burnt plastic and serotonin. I tried to run, but my legs dissolved into assembly lines.

When I woke up, my mouth tasted like melted silicon. The mirror showed me someone else entirely. It was the same face, but smoother. Cleaner. My pores had been edited out. My thoughts too.

I went back to work and everyone looked perfect. No one blinked anymore. The boss said we’d hit a new quarterly record. He clapped, but the sound was hollow, like hands slapping a coffin lid.

Now, sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can hear the factory humming under everything: under the city, under my heartbeat, under the polite noise of civilization.

We’re not employees. We’re inventory.

Every morning when I swallow the next pill, I understand a little more: the product is us.

The Last One to Leave, Please Turn Off the Stars

The end began on a Tuesday, not with a bang, but a corporate memo. Subject line:

“Due to budgetary constraints, existence will be discontinued effective immediately.”

At first, no one noticed. Birds kept chirping. Influencers kept influencing. A man in Tallahassee still refused to return his library books.

Then came the second memo.

“This is not a drill. Earth is being decommissioned. Please gather all meaningful memories into a single shoebox. Label it clearly. Return to HR.”

No one knew where HR was, but rumors spread it was located inside a vending machine behind the moon. The vending machine offered two items:

1. A bag of Dust of What Could Have Been

2. The Answer (temporarily out of stock)

A philosopher named Dr. Linda Spoon attempted to rally humanity. She declared: “Omnicide is just suicide with a better view.” She received a standing ovation, then spontaneously combusted from the irony.

The whales voted to stay neutral.

The bees unionized and demanded severance pollen.

The cockroaches opened a jazz club called “The Fallout Lounge.”

Meanwhile, governments responded the only way they knew how: with committees. The United Nations formed the Final Task Force on All That Is (and Isn’t). Their final report read:

“We deeply regret to inform you that everything was a clerical error.”

Earth filed an appeal. It was denied on the grounds of insufficient vibes.

In a bunker beneath Antarctica, a man named Derek attempted to reboot existence using an old Nintendo console and a paperclip. He succeeded, but only in resurrecting Disco.

The skies filled with mirrored balls and Donna Summer.

The oceans turned into soda.

The dolphins began speaking in limericks.

In space, the Galactic Oversight Council convened.

“Who authorized this?”

“I thought you did.”

“No, I outsourced it to a freelance algorithm.”

“Oh god.”

“No, just Algorithm-7. God was laid off last quarter.”

They voted to cancel the universe’s trial period. Turns out, no one had upgraded to Premium.

As atoms began untangling like poorly made spaghetti, one child—unbothered—drew a smiley face in the dirt. The dirt began humming. The humming confused the laws of physics.

The universe paused.

Time asked Space, “Are we… still doing this?”

Space shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I was just here for the free gravity.”

And just before the final pixel flickered out, someone whispered:

“Maybe this was a screensaver.”

Then everything crashed to desktop.

The Existentially Moist Wish of Darlene Crumb

A friend of mine asked me to write a sequel to my last short story involving the genie. This is what I could come up with. I hope she enjoys it…

—

Darlene Crumb was a woman haunted by one, unrelenting truth: she was always a little bit damp. Not soaking wet. Not sweaty. Just perpetually… moist. Elbows. Neck. Behind the knees. The mystery persisted across climates, shampoos, and three failed marriages.

One Tuesday—because all the strangest things happen on Tuesdays—she wandered into the back of a defunct Payless Shoes, looking for nothing and finding everything.

There, underneath a pile of expired insoles and dusty Crocs, sat an antique humidifier. She plugged it in. It sparked. The fire alarm laughed. And then, in a cloud of grapefruit LaCroix mist, emerged the same genie. Hawaiian shirt. Aviators. Pursed lips of someone who had once dated an energy healer named “Blade.”

“You’ve summoned me,” he said. “One wish. No bartering. No do-overs. No wishing for more wishes unless you’re into recursive paradoxes.”

Darlene blinked, the condensation on her eyelashes catching the light like tragic disco balls.

“I want,” she said slowly, “to finally understand the universe. I want the truth. All of it.”

The genie’s brow did a little dance. “That’s the big one. Cosmic enlightenment. You sure?”

“Positive. I’ve been wet for 39 years and I think it’s related to everything.”

With a shrug and a snip-snap, the genie granted the wish.

Instantly, Darlene’s brain exploded—not physically, but conceptually. Her eyes dilated into portals of pure comprehension. She saw time as a Möbius strip braided into a cat’s cradle. She understood dark matter, gravity, and why bread always lands butter-side down.

She gasped.

“It’s all soup.”

Everything. Matter. Meaning. Morality. Relationships. Socks. Soup.

Existence was just soup, swirling in infinite flavors, none of them consistent, all of them burning the roof of your mouth if you tried too hard to enjoy them.

She wept.

Then laughed.

Then threw up alphabet pasta that spelled out THE VOID WAVES BACK.

For the next three weeks, Darlene became a guru. She wore bathrobes in public and answered all questions with the phrase, “Only the broth knows.” She gained a cult following among TikTok astrologers and people who read horoscopes ironically.

But her enlightenment began to curdle.

She couldn’t enjoy anything anymore. Romance? Soup. Art? Soup. Her favorite podcast? Two Blokes Talk Soup, suddenly too literal. She once screamed for 14 minutes in a Whole Foods because someone asked if she wanted bone broth.

Her moistness increased. Because, of course, what is soup, if not the ultimate damp?

Desperate, she found the genie again, this time running a hemp-scented vape bar called “Vaporwave Vespers.”

“You gave me enlightenment!” she hissed, dripping all over the floor. “Take it back!”

The genie looked up from his crossword. “‘Cosmic reversal’ isn’t in the contract. One wish per customer. Union rules.”

“But I’m unraveling!”

“You asked for the truth,” he said, handing her a complimentary kale-flavored vape pen. “Turns out the truth is kind of a wet noodle.”

Darlene now wanders the world wrapped in towels, whispering cryptic soup-based riddles to strangers in parking lots. Her cult disbanded after she declared celery “the key to death.” She exists beyond joy, beyond suffering, beyond dryness.

She knows the secrets of the universe.

And she deeply, deeply regrets it.

Moral? Never ask for everything. Especially from a genie who smells faintly of citrus and has strong opinions about ska music.

The Transactional Tragedy of Terrance Blip

Terrance Blip was a man of modest ambitions: toast with the perfect butter-to-crisp ratio, socks without holes, and a bank account that didn’t judge him every time he opened his finance app. He lived alone in a studio apartment sandwiched between a psychic who only predicted Tuesdays and a taxidermist who specialized in emotionally distressed rodents.

One evening, while trying to return a cursed air fryer he had impulse-bought during a depressive episode, Terrance tripped over a knockoff lava lamp at a garage sale. It shattered with a melodramatic poof and out came a genie wearing aviators, a Hawaiian shirt, and the resigned aura of someone who’d been summoned during Love Island reruns.

“Congratulations,” said the genie, sipping a LaCroix. “You get one wish. Not three. That’s a myth. Union rules.”

Terrance blinked. “One? That’s not very—”

“Choose wisely or stupidly,” the genie interrupted. “I grant both with equal enthusiasm.”

Terrance, who had been recently charged $4.99 to cancel a free trial, didn’t hesitate.

“I wish that every cent I’ve ever spent in my entire life suddenly reappears in my bank account.”

The genie raised a suspicious eyebrow, which somehow hovered three inches off his face. “You sure? No ‘make me happy’ or ‘stop climate change’ or ‘bring back dinosaurs but they’re chill this time’?”

“Nope. I want my money back. Every dollar. From diapers to drinks. Give it all to Future Me.”

The genie snapped his fingers with a bored sigh. “Done. Good luck, champ.”

At first, it was glorious. Terrance’s phone dinged. His bank app went from $3.87 to $1,042,335.72.

He screamed. He danced. He Venmoed a random stranger $12 just because he could. He ordered eight pizzas, six of which he threw out because they “looked judgmental.”

But by day three, things took a turn. Terrance received a letter from the IRS, handwritten in crayon and lightly singed. It simply read: “WHERE DID THIS MONEY COME FROM, TERRY?”

He shrugged it off—what could they do? He had a genie-backed balance.

But then his body started reacting strangely. He gained weight from meals he hadn’t eaten in years. He suffered recurring stomachaches from a Taco Bell binge in 2012. He began waking up with hangovers from drinks he hadn’t consumed since college, including the infamous Flaming Banshee Night.

By week two, he was pelted by karmic echoes of every regrettable purchase he’d ever made. An army of chia pets stormed his living room. The haunted Beanie Baby he bought in ’98 hissed “capitalist pig” in Latin. A 6-foot stack of receipts materialized and cornered him in the shower, demanding he relive each transaction line by line.

Even worse, people from his past began showing up. A barista from 2007 wanted her tip back. A woman he’d ghosted after paying for dinner appeared, holding a menu and muttering, “You owe me appetizers and closure.”

His bank account remained fat, but Terrance was broke in every other sense—emotionally, spiritually, gastrointestinally.

Desperate, he sought out the genie again, only to find him running a kombucha stand in a strip mall.

“You didn’t read the fine print,” the genie said, sipping his own brand called “Soul Rot.” “You got all the money back. But you also got the consequences. Consumption is a ritual. You broke the cycle.”

“Fix it,” Terrance begged. “I’ll wish for anything. Just make it stop.”

“Nope,” said the genie, smiling serenely. “Only one wish per customer. Union rules.”

And with that, the genie vanished in a puff of oat milk vapor.

Terrance now lives under a mountain of refunded guilt, knee-deep in cursed yoga mats and artisanal regret. His bank account remains full, but he spends nothing—terrified that each swipe might unleash another receipt demon or childhood Happy Meal toy with unresolved trauma.

He’s learned a powerful lesson: Sometimes, the cost of getting your money back… is everything you paid to forget.

America 2035

A dear friend of mine gave me the idea to write a blog about what will the U.S. be like if we continue on the course we’re on right now. I jotted it down in my own personal journal and thought I’d share it here. Let me know what you think.

If America stays the course it’s on now with no correction, no revolution, no collective awakening then 2035 will not be some sort of dystopian nightmare. It’ll be something worse. It’ll be a comfortable, numbing decline punctuated by chaos, distraction, and denial.

Corporations will no longer need to whisper in politicians’ ears, they will write the laws themselves. Amazon will own the postal service. Google will handle public education logistics. A few tech CEOs will rotate through cabinet positions like it’s a TED Talk residency. Elections will still happen, but mostly to decide which billionaire’s PAC can out-psyop the other.

The Midwest will experience a new Dust Bowl. Florida real estate will be underwater, but people will still buy beach homes thanks to delusion. Power grids in the South will collapse under summer heat, and water shortages will trigger hydration riots in Arizona. Don’t worry though, your smart fridge will still work as long as you don’t mind watching an ad every time you open it.

The rich and wealthy will live in gated green tech bubbles, shuttled by autonomous Teslas between sanitized, sensor-laden smart cities. Everyone else though? They live in logistics deserts, under-policed until they riot, then over-policed for sport. The economy has metastasized. People livestream their labor for tips, like Twitch but with more sweat and desperation.

Fascism will not wear jackboots. It wears athleisure. It smiles. It hosts a morning show, but it also bans books, surveils dissent, and locks up people in ICE-style “resilience camps” for protesting. The courts are rubber stamps. The media is infotainment sludge. The line between cop, soldier, and “private security consultant” has fully blurred.

The right will have armed militias, billionaire funding, and a 24/7 propaganda network. The left is still subtweeting each other over theoretical frameworks and canceling organizers for old tweets. Direct action is rare and criminalized. Hope is commodified. Revolution is a brand. Every year, a new savior candidate promises change, only to be eaten alive by the machine.

Citizenship is no longer a birthright. It’s a subscription service. The U.S. exports cultural dominance while its internal infrastructure rots. We’ll stream images of freedom to the world while internally dismantling it piece by piece. Freedom of speech remains, but mostly because no one in power takes anyone without a million followers seriously anymore.

Is it all doom? Not necessarily.

This future isn’t inevitable, but it’s likely if we continue business as usual: treating politics like fandom, trusting the system to reform itself, and refusing to disrupt the real levers of power.

We don’t need utopia. We just need rupture. Resistance. Imagination. Something that breaks the loop. But if we wait ten more years to try, we may not get the chance again.

Ash and Seed

The cities fell quietly. Not with fire or fanfare, but with a flicker. Supply chains snapping like old rope, currencies crumbling into irrelevance, and governments too bloated to breathe. People had waited for rescue. None came. Then, something stranger happened: they stopped waiting.

Maya lived in one of the Transition Zones, carved out of the skeleton of what had once been Pittsburgh. Skyscrapers stood hollow, colonized by vertical gardens and data relays. Streets were no longer roads, but corridors of barterless exchange: food grown by solar-fueled machines, distributed by drones with no masters.

She remembered the old world in fragments: clocks, ads, the endless scrolling of fake urgency. In this new world, days were marked by need and contribution. Some days she coded for the mesh network. Other days she repaired the water-capture towers or helped with conflict mediation—though those requests were rarer now.

There was no money. No one starved. The idea of “earning a living” had become as quaint as leeches in medicine. What did it mean to earn what had always been a birthright?

Occasionally, envoys came from outside the Zone—wandering emissaries from collapsing enclaves or liberated factories. Some brought new blueprints, others just stories. Maya loved the stories. One woman spoke of how a collective in former Indonesia had wired up an entire island to run itself, then dismantled their last police drone ceremonially, like a funeral for fear.

In the evenings, Maya sat under the wind trees, their turbines singing above, and read aloud to anyone who wandered by. Tonight it was McCarthy. Tomorrow, maybe Marx. No one made her do this. That was the point.

They lived without rulers or markets, not because they had to—but because they finally could.

And in the ruins of profit, something strange had taken root:

Hope.

But not the kind you wait for.

The kind you build.

Revisiting Blood Meridian

I’m currently re-reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is one of my top five favorite books of all time. It’s a brutal, hypnotic, and unrelentingly bleak book. McCarthy takes the myth of the American West and rips it apart, exposing it as a landscape of pure, amoral violence. He makes the violence seem surreal and inevitable.

The character of Judge Holden in particular is one of the most haunting literary figures. He’s part philosopher, part warlord, part devil. He embodies a vision of history and human nature that is completely devoid of redemption.

The book doesn’t offer easy conclusions of moral lessons; it just drags you through an endless nightmare and dares you to find meaning in it.

It’s one of those books that leaves you stunned when you finish it. Either you’ll be in awe of it, or you’ll never want to touch it again. Maybe both.

Blood Meridian reshapes how you see literature and maybe even history itself. It’s not just a Western, it’s a cosmic horror novel disguised as a Western. The sheer indifference of the universe in it is chilling, and Judge Holden is the embodiment of that.

Blood Meridian doesn’t just flirt with nihilism, it drags you into the abyss and makes you sit with it. There’s no redemption, no justice, no meaning beyond the endless cycle of violence. Even the protagonist, who seems like he might have a shred of humanity, is ultimately powerless against the chaos of the world. And Judge Holden? He’s basically an immortal force of destruction, dancing through history, laughing at anyone who thinks there’s order or morality. It’s the kind of book that leaves a scar.

There are some lessons in it though:

Violence is inherent to civilization.

McCarthy shows that violence isn’t just a byproduct of civilization but a fundamental part of it. The Glanton Gang’s violence is just business as usual in the American frontier. Human history is driven by war, conquest, and destruction, and making any romanticized view of the past naive.

Manifest Destiny was a Bloodbath.

The novel dismantles the myth of Manifest Destiny as a heroic expansion. The Glanton Gang which were hired to hunt Apaches turns into a lawless death squad, killing indiscriminately for profit. The Westward Expansion wasn’t just about pioneering and opportunity–it was also about genocide, greed, and chaos.

War is God.

Judge Holden represents a kind of cosmic nihilism. He believes that war is the only true human activity, the ultimate law of existence. If he’s right, then morality is just an illusion, and history is nothing but and endless cycle of domination and slaughter.

Fate vs Free Will.

The protagonist seems to have moments where he could choose a different path, but does he really have free will? The Judge suggests that all men are bound to the game of war, whether they admit it or not. The novel leaves open the question of whether the protagonist’s attempts at redemption matter or if he was doomed from the start.

At its core, Blood Meridian is a rejection of comfortable narratives about human nature, history, and morality. It doesn’t tell you what to think; it forces you to look into the abyss and decide for yourself what it means.

The Eternal Waiter

There was a man named Gregor who worked as a waiter at a restaurant that no one ever seemed to visit. The building was enormous. An architectural monstrosity that stretched far beyond what was needed for any reasonable number of customers. The windows were perpetually clouded with dust, and the floor creaked with every step. Still, Gregor showed up every day at 11 a.m., precisely on the hour, and stood behind the counter.

For years, he waited.

Occasionally, the door would swing open with a dramatic screech, but no one would enter. Yet Gregor remained, polishing the empty glasses, adjusting the already perfectly folded napkins, and rearranging the menu for no one in particular. The menu, of course, was endless; an impossible list of dishes that spanned all the way to the horizon. Some items, like Essence of Tomorrow and Stew of Yesterday, seemed more like philosophical concepts than food. But Gregor knew them by heart.

One day, in the middle of wiping down an already spotless table, he saw a figure in the distance, at the far end of the restaurant. It was a woman, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and an extravagant gown that shimmered as though made of forgotten stars. She walked slowly toward him, her shoes clicking on the floor in a rhythm that sounded like the ticking of a clock.

“Hello,” she said when she finally reached his counter.

Gregor stared at her, blinking. It was the first time someone had spoken to him in years.

“Are you ready to order?” he asked, unsure of the appropriate protocol for such an event. It had been so long since he’d expected an actual customer.

The woman smiled, but her smile seemed to vanish before it fully formed. “I don’t know,” she said, gazing at the menu. “What do you recommend?”

Gregor hesitated. The menu was a labyrinth of absurdities, and he knew better than to suggest Beef of Forgotten Futures or Chicken that Should Have Been Left Alone. But somehow, despite the meaninglessness of it all, he felt an odd sense of duty.

“The Soup of Your Dreams,” he said, pointing to a small, unassuming item at the very bottom of the list.

She nodded and sat down at one of the many empty tables, her eyes never leaving the menu. Gregor disappeared into the kitchen, though there was no one there to prepare the soup. The kitchen was, like the rest of the restaurant, a mockery of activity, a space where pots and pans hung still, gathering dust. There was no soup, of course.

He returned to the counter, holding an empty bowl, and placed it in front of the woman.

“Here,” he said. “The Soup of Your Dreams.”

The woman stared at the empty bowl for a long moment. Then she stood up without a word, turned, and began walking toward the door. The door squealed open, but she didn’t exit. Instead, she began walking back toward the horizon of the restaurant, getting smaller and smaller as she approached the other end.

Gregor watched her go. After a long pause, he stood up, walked back to the counter, and began polishing an already polished glass.

It was a cycle he knew all too well. A cycle that, like his waiting, had no purpose and no end. But, like the universe itself, he would continue the motions. The door would open again, no one would come, and the glass would need polishing. Always.

And so, in the heart of the empty restaurant, Gregor waited.