I’ve only written two poems in my entire life. Well, that’s not entirely true. I used to write lyrics for a band my friends and I were forming that never got off the ground. I’ve been in a bad place as of late and jotted this down last night to kind of try to help me through what I’m going through. I don’t know if it makes sense or if it’s any good, but I thought I’d share it here. Maybe it can help someone else. Maybe I’m just screaming into the void as usual. Like I said, I’ve just been in a bad way and felt the need to write something and couldn’t come up with anything but these words. I didn’t do much thinking on it. I just wrote down what came to mind. Just my own discombobulated mind spilled out on paper and now here on the Internet.
I wake up each morning
as if returning to a mistake I didn’t make.
The sun rises out of habit,
and I rise out of spite.
Some days my mind is a broken cathedral,
echoing with sermons I never asked to hear.
Other days it’s a carnival mirror–
every reflection warped
every laugh track broken.
There is a rhythm to the collapse,
a pulse that insists I keep going
even when I want to negotiate my exit
with whatever god still bothers
to read the fine print of my thoughts.
Bipolar dawns come and go:
one morning I am incandescent,
a lighthouse for a ship that will never arrive;
the next I am the ocean floor,
quiet enough to make silence uneasy.
But existence refuses to end on cue.
It drags on with the stubbornness of a bad joke
that no one remembers telling.
And I still stay for the punchline,
not out of hope,
but because even futility has a texture
I’ve learned to hold without breaking.
If there’s any mercy in this world,
it’s that numbness, too, is a kind of shelter.
And on the days when the abyss leans in
as if to whisper a shortcut,
I answer the only way I know how:
Not today.
I’m busy watching the ruins glow.
Tag: love
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.
Does Love Exist? A Cynic’s Reflection
Keep in mind that I’m writing this as a cynical, misanthropic pessimist, okay? But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people declare with a mix of bitterness and certainty that “love doesn’t exist.” As if it’s some grand revelation. As if anyone who believes otherwise is naive. Again, coming from a cynist, I think this particular claim misses the mark. Love is real and it’s one of the most undeniable forces in human life.
When someone insists love isn’t real, they’re usually speaking out of pain, disappointment, or distrust. Maybe they were betrayed by a partner, so now love seems like nothing more than a manipulation. Maybe they’ve embraced a biological reductionism: “love is just chemicals firing off in the brain so it doesn’t count.” Maybe they’ve taken their own misanthropy so far that they can’t imagine people acting out of genuine care for one another. I sympathize with all of that, but I don’t buy the conclusion.
If we deny love because it can be explained chemically, we’d have to deny everything else too such as joy, grief, awe, even the taste of a favorite meal. Reduction doesn’t mean negation. Love might be tied to hormones and neurons, but so is every other human experience. That doesn’t make it unreal. It makes it embodied.
If we deny love because people fail at it, because they betray or exploit in its name, then we’d have to deny courage, kindness, or justice too. Every virtue gets betrayed. That doesn’t erase the thing itself, it only proves how fragile and valuable it is.
Love shows up in too many undeniable forms to write it off. A parent staying awake with a sick child. Friends carrying each other through decades of hardship. Strangers risking something for people they’ll never see again. Protestors linking arms against police lines for the sake of those they’ll never meet. Even grief is a form of love. What else is mourning but love with nowhere to go?
Cynicism has its uses. It can cut through illusion and sentimentality. But cynicism that denies love altogether becomes just another illusion, one that pretends detachment will protect us from hurt. In reality, it only leaves us emptier.
Love exists. It’s not perfect, not eternal, not invulnerable. But it is as real as anything else that shapes our lives. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make us stronger; it only makes us lonelier.
Anti-Natalism Isn’t My Most Extreme Position
Most people recoil at the idea of anti-natalism. “But my legacy!” “I need the family name to live on!” “You’re not full until you’ve had a child!” Spare me your bullshit. There’s no altruistic reason to have children. Every reason anyone gives is selfish and self-absorbed. Most people feel like being an anti-natalist is a spit in the face of them and their progeny. Let them think that. I will not back down from this view. I don’t stop at anti-natalism though. My position goes further. I’m pro-omnicide. Yes, I mean that literally: I’m pro the end of all life. Not just humans. Not just animals. All of it.
Life is suffering. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biology. Every living being spends its existence avoiding pain, hunger, sickness, loneliness, decay, and finally death. Even joy is temporary, always shadowed by loss. The very structure of life is cruelty: to live is to feed off of other life.
The one and only true solution to suffering isn’t better medicine or fairer societies (although I wish for those to ease the suffering as well as ending capitalism before we go.) It’s ending life itself. Omnicide is the clean cut, the only guarantee that no more beings — animal or human — will be forced into pain.
There can be comedy in this as well though. It’s not all doom and gloom. Billions of years of evolution, countless wars and inventions, all the books and religions and empires, and it all ends with nothing. Lights out. Curtain call. The universe shrugs and deletes its own save file.
People keep searching for meaning, for some grand story about progress, destiny, or utopia. But the joke is that there is no meaning. The only punchline left is extinction; not tragedy, not triumph, just silence.
Why say this publicly though? Because most people won’t even look in this direction. They’re terrified of questioning the assumption that “life is good.” But if we really care about ethics, if we really care about suffering, then omnicide is the most compassionate conclusion. And if we really embrace the absurd, then there’s no need to dress it up as anything other than what it is: the end of the joke.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, but I also don’t think the can refute me, try as they might. They can’t deny that suffering defines life. And they can’t deny that omnicide would end it once and for all.
That’s why I’m pro-omnicide. Not because of a hatred for life, but because I see life for what it is.
Overthinking, Pandora’s Box, and the Mercy We Don’t Deserve
By someone who’s tired of dodging landmines in family group chats.
I posted a photo on Snapchat the other day—Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy. I didn’t think much of it. Just one of those small, nerdy flexes you throw into the void. But then my aunt replied:
“I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I guess everything has some sort of philosophy.”
Okay, fair. Not everyone grew up reading Plato or spiraling into existential dread during sophomore year. I responded:
“Western civilization’s been overthinking everything for like 2,500 years. They had to write it down eventually. Even things like math and science have deep philosophical roots.”
Her response? “Some things are just overthought, and need to be left alone I think. Just my opinion.”
That’s when I felt it: that itch to argue. To start listing how “overthinking” gave us medicine, civil rights, space exploration, critical thinking, and the ability to ask whether the status quo even should be left alone.
But instead, I replied calmly:
“Sometimes overthinking is how we uncover the stuff hiding under the surface.”
She came back with:
“That could be really bad and in the long run not helpful. Kinda like Pandora’s box. But I understand some things need to be known.” I went full myth nerd:
“Yeah, opening Pandora’s box definitely unleashed chaos—but also hope was in there too. Can’t forget that part.”
Then came the turn I knew was coming:
“Yep, you are right on that. And mercy, which we don’t deserve.”
Ah. There it was. The theological twist. The Southern Baptist worldview shining through. Mercy as something we’re lucky to get, not something we’re entitled to. A cosmic handout, not a human right.
And that’s where I bit my tongue. Because yeah, I could’ve said that if mercy is real, it shouldn’t be conditional. Or that maybe people don’t deserve suffering either. Or maybe we do deserve mercy because we’re born into a broken system we didn’t ask for and spend our lives trying to make sense of it.
But I didn’t say any of that. I kept the peace. Not because I agreed, but because sometimes family isn’t where the fight lives.
Still, it stuck with me. The way generations talk past each other. The way questioning becomes “overthinking,” and curiosity becomes a threat to tradition. The way a simple book post turns into a theological minefield.
So here I am. Overthinking it, of course.
Just like the philosophers taught me to.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s where hope still lives.
Waiting for the End
I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t sign up for this whole “life” thing. I just opened my eyes one day and the clock started ticking. Expectations piled on. Rules I never agreed to. A world I didn’t create.
By now, I’m 38. No spouse. No kids. I still live with my mom. That fact alone makes me feel like I’m not a “real adult,” even though I pay attention to the world, think deeply, and try to be a good person. But none of that matters, right? Not in a world where adulthood is measured by mortgages and marriage licenses.
I look around and feel alien. Tired. Like I missed a train everyone else caught, or maybe I was never invited to the station. People around me post pictures of weddings, kids, vacations, “success.” I sit with the weight of just surviving, and sometimes even that feels impossible.
The truth? I’m tired. Bone-deep tired. I’ve had days where I didn’t want to wake up. Days where I felt like checking out would be easier than dragging myself through one more empty cycle of eat-sleep-repeat. I’ve thought, “what’s the point?” more times than I can count.
I didn’t ask for life. But life was handed to me like a debt I didn’t incur, and now I’m supposed to be grateful just for enduring it.
Still… Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I told someone how I felt. And I wasn’t met with judgment. I wasn’t told to “cheer up” or “get over it.” I was just heard. And sometimes, that’s enough to get through another day. So maybe this blog isn’t a rallying cry or a solution. Maybe it’s just a flare shot into the dark for anyone else who feels this way. You’re not alone. You’re not a failure. And you don’t have to carry this on your own. I don’t know what comes next. I’m still here, and for now, that’s enough.
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.
Love is a Choice
We’re taught to think of love as something that happens to us, like a lightning bolt out of nowhere. Movies and songs frame love as this overwhelming emotion that sweeps you off your feet and takes over your life. But that version of love, while intoxicating, is incomplete.
Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a choice.
Anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship—romantic, familial, or platonic—knows that emotions are fickle. Some days, you feel deeply connected. Other days, you don’t feel much at all. Life gets in the way. People change. Routines dull the spark. Stress takes a toll.
If love were only an emotion, it wouldn’t survive these cycles. But if love is a choice, then it can endure. Because choice isn’t reactive. It’s active. You decide to keep showing up, to keep caring, to keep investing.
When you choose love, you take ownership. You’re not just along for the ride. You’re steering. That means:
You don’t walk away when it’s hard.
You apologize when you screw up.
You listen when you’d rather be right.
You support when you’re tired.
You stay when it would be easier to leave.
It’s not always romantic. It’s rarely easy. But it’s real.
“Falling in love” is passive. It implies we had no say in the matter. That sounds nice until things fall apart, and then suddenly, we’re powerless again. But love, when it’s a choice, gives us power. Not control over the other person, but control over how we love.
You don’t “fall” into long-term love. You build it. Brick by brick. Day by day. Choice by choice.
Like a craft or a discipline, love improves with practice. You can get better at being patient, at setting boundaries, at giving grace, at showing up. None of those are feelings. They’re skills. Feelings can inspire love. They can deepen it. But they can’t sustain it alone.
Love that’s only emotional burns hot and fast. But love that’s chosen—again and again, on the good days and the bad ones—is firewood. It keeps you warm for a lifetime.
From Absurdist to Nihilist (Tentatively): Watching the World Undermine Meaning
I never expected to inch toward nihilism. For years, absurdism kept me afloat. Camus’ defiance in the face of meaninglessness, the idea that you can laugh at the chaos even when it’s crushing you. That you can push the boulder up the hill again and again and still find joy — or at least rebellion — in the act.
But lately, I’ve been staring at that hill and wondering if it’s even worth approaching anymore.
The world feels like it’s daring us to stop believing. The U.S. is caught in a feedback loop of delusion and decay. Billionaires play empire while the rest of us drown in rent, debt, heatwaves, and endless headlines. Climate collapse isn’t creeping anymore; it’s sprinting. The political system’s not broken, it’s working exactly as designed to protect capital and crush dissent. The cruelty isn’t a glitch; it’s a feature.
I used to think absurdism gave me a way through it; that laughing at the system, mocking it, refusing to surrender meaning to it, was a form of resistance. And maybe it still is. But there’s a point where the laugh feels hollow. Where the defiance feels like theater, and the audience left the building years ago.
I’m not fully gone. Not yet. There’s still a part of me that wants to spit in the face of despair and dare it to flinch. That wants to imagine Sisyphus happy, even if only out of spite.
But I’d be lying if I said nihilism isn’t whispering louder lately. Not the cartoon nihilism that gets misrepresented — not the “nothing matters so do whatever” kind — but the cold, empty realization that maybe there really is no justice coming. No redemption arc. No meaning to extract or invent. Just survival, until we can’t anymore.
I don’t know if this shift is a phase, a spiral, or a new state of being. But I know I’m not alone in feeling it. The world is making nihilists faster than it makes meaning.
And maybe admitting that — even tentatively — is the first honest thing I’ve done in a while.
What Radicalized Me
I didn’t pop out of the womb swinging a red flag. I wasn’t raised by union organizers or taught to quote Marx before I could walk. Like a lot of Americans, I coasted on autopilot for a while. I figured the president—whoever they were—probably knew what they were doing. The system seemed fine, or at least functional. Corrupt, maybe, but stable.
Then came Trump.
That was the first crack in the illusion. Suddenly the office of the presidency wasn’t just some boring institution, it was a circus, a cult, a threat. It wasn’t just bad policy. It was kids in cages. Racist dog whistles cranked up to bullhorns. And half the country cheered. That’s when I realized the system wasn’t broken. It was functioning exactly as designed.
That’s when I started reading. Rand again, first. I loved her in high school—thought she was deep. Then I picked up Atlas Shrugged as an adult and felt like I’d been duped. It wasn’t philosophy. It was selfishness with a thesaurus. The heroes were sociopaths. The poor deserved it. The rich were gods. It clicked: capitalism doesn’t just tolerate cruelty. It requires it.
From there, I fell down the rabbit hole. Camus hit me like a freight train. The Myth of Sisyphus gave shape to something I’d felt but couldn’t name. This low, constant hum of absurdity. The rock rolls back down the hill, and we push it again. Not because it’ll change anything, but because we refuse to give up.
That absurdism became fuel. So did my misanthropy. Not in the “I hate everyone” kind of way, but in the “I don’t trust people to do the right thing unless they’re forced to” kind of way. I watched people defend billionaires like they were sports teams, as if Apartheid Clyde was going to show up and hand them a Tesla for their loyalty.
I started arguing online. Then organizing. Then donating. I joined the Democratic Socialists. I started lurking at meetings, listening more than talking. I wanted to shake things up, but not just with signs and chants. I wanted disruption. Chaos. Direct action. Guerilla organizing.
I kept reading. Kept pushing. Anti-natalism hit me hard—David Benatar, Cioran, all of it. The idea that no one consents to be born, and that bringing someone into this world is an inherently selfish act. In a dying planet, under a dying system, having kids felt like feeding bodies into the machine.
All of that coalesced into anarcho-communism. Because socialism wasn’t enough. The state isn’t neutral, it’s a tool of capital. Voting helps, but it’s a bandage on a severed limb. I believe in mutual aid, in decentralized power, in horizontal structures. I believe in burning down what doesn’t serve us and building something new from the ashes. Something where people matter more than profit. Where community matters more than hierarchy.
And yeah, I still own guns. Gifts, mostly. I don’t shoot much. But they’re there—”just in case” feels more relevant by the day.
What radicalized me? The cruelty. The absurdity. The lies we’re told about success, about work, about life itself. And the quiet hope that maybe, just maybe, we can break the cycle. So I meme. I write. I organize. I fight. Because if this is a pyramid scheme called life, I at least want to go down pissing off the billionaires at the top.
Sisyphus Shrugged 