Noahie's Blog

Thought Through

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've decided to make my sprints here an hour long now, but even when they were at 45 minutes, I tended to go toward a certain word count instead of writing the whole way through the timer. Usually, I'd end up getting to that desired word count before the timer went up, so I'm hoping this time I can increase that word count target. When I first started this practice, the intention was to write as fast as I could, with little to no pause for the duration of the exercise. When the timer would go for 10 minutes, that's a fair expectation. But now that it's an hour, I think there would be a benefit in taking slight pauses between thoughts. There's a slight worry I have that it'll make me lose momentum, but I guess that's why I have the timer.

Today is day 5 of my fast. The hunger pains are still so hard to push through. It comes and goes in waves, but when the hunger waves hit at their strongest, I've felt the urge to give up so many times. I think the pain from the hunger is important to feel, though. Even with taking my supplements and medications, I still feel a general wave of depression. Thankfully, it's not as debilitating as it once was. I can still get through regular and routine tasks, but living the rest of my life has been difficult with it. It's always been so tough to describe—this feeling of total and immense dread that physically hurts, and I feel it all the time.

I moved a recliner into the office area of the house. No one really uses the room except for my sister when she's here on weekends since there's a laptop in there. I decided to move my prayer materials into the room as well, so I can have a space to pray and relax. I've found I retreat into this room a lot, and much of my day is spent either in that room running through the prayer rope or in my room pacing back and forth. My frustration feels so immense that I spend most of my day trying to decompress. Even the littlest of things can ruin my day, and it makes me feel useless and miserable.

People who fast for a prolonged time will say they feel closer to God or their mood generally improves, but I don't think that'll happen for me. Getting on the other side of all these vices makes me feel there's nothing good at the end of it, and maybe there shouldn't be. I don't think anyone deserves anything good that happens to them. I say this not out of malice or contempt, but as a plain opinionated statement. Love isn't given to others because it's deserved. Life is hard. Every day, it gets worse and worse; but somehow, it gets easier.

When I think of other writers, I have noticed they carry some kind of interest or niche that propels their work forward. I used to regularly read Cory Doctorow's blog</a>, but stopped reading it regularly because he complains about stuff too much (rich coming from me, I know). I also just generally don't find his work with the EFF all that meaningful; it seems that they haven't made much progress over the last few decades. Despite my criticisms, I still look up to Cory. He writes just as much if not more than I do, and he was a pioneer of the Creative Commons, so stylistically and artistically, he's really got it going on. However, when I think of reasons why people read Cory's blog, it's because he has an interesting foothold in a particular domain (technology). When I think of my writing here, it makes me wonder what my domain would necessarily be.

There's a certain kind of reader out there who feels motivated to read this sort of daily confessional. But when I think of the question of "what is this project even about?" I want to say that it's about me, but what does that even mean? In most cases, people talk about themselves as a form of status-signaling. They define themselves by things they've done and who else they affiliate themselves with. Status-signaling is a tough thing for me, and I guess that's because as a low-status person, there's not really a lot I can write about regarding any kind of vocational or exclusive activity. I'm painfully average, below average in a lot of ways. I don't care to make this a point about self-esteem, but I've always found others in their attempts to perpetuate their status to be painfully dull and hard to be around.

So what is this project all about, really? It's a record of not just a life lived, but one thought through. I think when I ask myself what the project is about, what I'm really trying to figure out is the value in it. I keep circling back around this thought, and to my readers, I'm sorry if it's annoying. I want this to be a proof-of-concept so badly. I appreciate how certain bloggers have been able to prove it already, like how I mentioned with Cory. When I say a proof-of-concept, it's less about the mechanism (daily blogging) and more about my own sense of self-worth. It's the constant question of "are my thoughts worth being written down and shared?" And to a lot of people, they're probably not.

The whole idea of "I'm just doing it for me" is a load of bullshit. If I were just doing it for me, I wouldn't post it online. No, I want someone else to read what I'm thinking. I want people to care about my thoughts, even if they don't reach out or whatever. I've had such a desire to be noticed, to be seen. It makes me feel like a total asshole to want attention, and I think the stoic disposition I give off in my writing makes it difficult for me to say what I really want sometimes. I want to be seen, acknowledged, and respected. That's it.

I was reading through the Cogito entries I wrote before I started posting them online. Those entries were a lot more visceral than these, but there were still some bangers I wrote back then. Here's an excerpt from 2025/04/20:

I'm not after any kind of fame or monetary living with my writing. All I want out of this is respect. I want people to read my writing and say that I actually am an honest-to-God, fully-fledged writer. People will read my stuff and see the true pinnacle of skill and dedication to the craft. They'll see that there's so much more they can do than what they already do now, and hopefully that'll touch enough hearts to make the next generation of honest-to-God fully-fledged writers. I have to understand that if I want my work to have any kind of meaningful impact, it's got to have eyes on it that I will never meet. I'll never hear those people thank me. I'll never hear what my work did to impact them, and it won't matter to me at all. I'm not after adulation. I'm not after any kind of recognition or anything similar to it. All I want is respect. I want to be put up there with other great writers as an equal and in order to do that, I have to get over myself and keep going no matter what anyone says. I want it to kill me. I want it to ruin me. I want it to be my demise. No matter what happens, my words will come out onto the page with full force and decimate any doubts that I ever carried.

It's not enough to say that I want it. I have to suffer for it. I have to let it hurt me and hurt me over and over again until I can't take it anymore, and then let it hurt me again. There's nothing less I will give in order to make it happen. I will be dead and gone and that's when it will truly start to come together. Nothing less, nothing more.

Let it kill me.

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Ascetic Containment

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today is day four of my fast. I'm officially under 300 pounds.
This is basically a water fast. I'm allowing myself to drink water, coffee, and diet soda; I'm also letting myself chew gum and eat a few hard candies throughout the day. It's ironic to start a fast after Great Lent, but fasting is still something one can do any time of year. When I first considered doing the fast, I wanted to do it for spiritual reasons</a>, but as I've been going through this process so far, my perspective is changing. Many of my physical ailments are due in large part to my obesity, and for the last several years, losing weight has been a difficult process. I struggle with gluttony, and feelings of hunger have always been difficult to push through. But as I've lived my life over these last few years, I've become so angry with everything.
This includes food. Food pisses me off. The industries that propagate addiction to it are horrible, and this whole idea of "healthy eating" has always felt like an immense cope to me. We need food to live, but it's so easy to forget how dangerous food can be. While thinking about health, I have come up with three basic pillars that dictate just about everything: what you ingest, how you move, and how you sleep. If there's some kind of deficit in any of those three pillars, that can cause health difficulties in the short-term and long-term. But even beyond that, I wonder to myself why I want to be healthy.
Life sucks ass, and being healthy might make it suck less. This feeling, on top of the general anger I have toward food, is what's propelling me in this fast. There have been many instances of obese people going on prolonged fasts to lose weight, most notably Angus Barbieri</a>. He fasted for over a year and lost 276 pounds. What's more impressive is that he kept it off. This is because he totally rewired his relationship with food. Any fat person will tell you that they have a hard time saying no to food; a prolonged fast is the ultimate response to that. If I can refuse the pleasure that a big greasy meal gives me for an extended period, then I'll know that in the future, I can always refuse it.
I've also been more inspired by monastic saints and their dedication to fasting. Saint Anthony lived to be over a hundred years old and could go days without eating at a time. On the days he did eat, he'd only have a small amount of bread and oil. When his students would see him emerge from his self-built tomb, he didn't look emaciated at all, but healthy. The truth is that the desire for good food is laden in the same desire as so many other sins. Food, while needed to live, is still a pleasure of the flesh; it is important to me that I refute these carnal appetites. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
There is a certain fear I have about engaging deeper in asceticism: that my practice of it comes from a place of pride. I think that many people are ascetic from a place of pride, to prove that they are tougher and more strong-willed than others around them. I came to that thought after reading Katabasis by R.F. Kuang earlier this year. It's a fantasy novel where two magic students go to Hell to save their professor. The professor is a super strict, arrogant asshole. He's a brilliant magician, but dedicates himself fully and totally to being the world's greatest magician. There was a section in the book where the two students are discussing his asceticism and how they'd all have to forego many necessities and pleasures in pursuit of their work.
I'm also reminded of the stories of different professional athletes like Jerry Rice and Kobe Bryant. Their feats of asceticism were in pursuit of their craft and their position within it. They worked so hard and sacrificed so much because they wanted to be the best in their field. When I think of my own desires for asceticism, I am wary of any sense of pride. When I think of doing all these things, I do them not because I want to prove anything to anybody; doing things for others' approval is a useless pursuit because you'll never get it. I don't even want to prove anything to myself. I am so sick and tired of trying to attain a certain sense of self I know I'll never find. There's no point in being tougher than anyone.
I want to engage in this asceticism because I've been exposed to the demons that prowl about this earth. I keep thinking about all the horrible hallucinations I've seen and the nightmares I've had. I came to this strange conclusion that I can't shake about them: these demons who haunt me—God allows them to do this because He knows I can handle it. And I think the reason why He's giving me this cross to bear is because in a sense, I am a sort of containment vessel for those demons. I can bear the weight of their presence and still maintain a soulful disposition. When I go about in the world, I am essentially a spiritual vacuum. There's a lot there that might not be right, and more than likely I don't have that much impact at all, but it makes me feel comforted in a way. It makes me feel like there's something I'm doing right, even if it's not a whole lot.
When I think through all of this, I can't help but consider myself some kind of fool. "Dude, you take your dreams too seriously. They're just brain farts," someone would say. Maybe that's true. Maybe there's nothing really going on and it's all in my head, and I keep allowing myself to get in my own way over all this shit. Many don't wish to think about why they do anything. It's difficult to handle the contradictions they allow themselves to live with. I don't like living with contradictions, but more than that, I hate hypocrisy. If I've come to a certain set of conclusions about how I should live my life, then I'm going to live by them, even if they're wrong.
Even if I can't stop getting in my own way, I'm going to keep pushing through.
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Tough Guy

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Never underestimate time alone.
It's a weird thing when I'm alone. Sometimes I think I might actually have autism because when I am actually alone, I can really let the wiggles out and all other kinds of silly little behaviors. I was skeptical of the idea of "masking" for a long time, but I think it makes sense for someone who is intelligent enough to take criticism for self-soothing behaviors in public and act to correct them. I know that I understand social cues and the like, so I try not to consider autism, even though I've done that in the past. However, one thing I've always guaranteed for myself is some kind of condition related to sensory sensitivity. In that sense, there are certain sounds or things that happen to me and they build up irritation over time, and they can turn into a big meltdown. I spent several hours alone last night. I was sitting in my car in a parking lot, crying and listening to music for about four hours. I had a feeling that I needed to let a lot of stuff out, and I did. There's a sort of electric plumbing that goes through my nervous system during these outpourings of emotion; it's as if I can feel all the bad vibrations flying away from my body when it happens. I get very tingly all over, and it feels as if every part of my body—down to the microfiber—is vibrating just a little bit. I had gotten to a point yesterday evening where enough was enough. I had to get out of the house for a while, and that's what I did.
I know that when I'm alone, I usually like to rock around in my seat or constantly make some kind of rhythmic adjusting behavior. In a sense, that rhythm has always been a self-soothing thing. I think it's why I've always liked listening to music so much too; having some kind of pulse to follow helps calm me down. For someone who looks like me—a large, imposing man with a "tough look," according to some people—it can be surprising to many that my nature is quite gentle. Those who have known me for a while aren't surprised by this. Well, even people who have had one conversation with me aren't surprised by it. I'm sure that when I go around in public, people might have certain assumptions. I can sense it sometimes, like when people give me more space than they normally would if we're waiting in a line or sitting on a bus or something; there's a certain "I shouldn't mess with this guy" vibe I can sense. That can be convenient at times, but it's still a funny thing to navigate. I never feel like I have to "play" a tough guy or anything; my candor dispels that quickly.

While I've been in better spirits, I have been tired most of this morning. I've been still praying fervently, but I also started a fast yesterday. It's an absolute fast; only water and coffee, but I also decided to allow myself to chew gum too. I want to maintain this fast until Pascha, but honestly, I might keep going afterward. My body has felt better since starting the fast yesterday, and of course with conditions like diabetes and the like, a fast is quite literally the perfect way to reduce blood sugar. I've discussed my problems with certain spiritual maladies before, and how my bishop told us in a homily that prayer and fasting</a> is the best way to deal with them. I wish I would have decided to keep a fast earlier—you know, during the time of year you're actually supposed to fast for a while—but I'll accept the position I'm in currently.
I also understand that endeavors like these are supposed to be done under the strict supervision of a spiritual father, but when I technically don't have one yet, that's a tough thing to pull off. My efforts in prayer have been in service of finding a way through this situation I've found myself in, and I just have this feeling that an absolute fast will get me closer to a feeling of actual peace and spiritual contentment. All of these visions, dreams, and hallucinations have to stop, and I've felt continuously failed by systems before. Every time I try to go to the system, be obedient, and do what they say, I am met with failure. I'm so sick and tired of waiting for permission to do anything. If I'm being spiritually greedy or unwise, then that's what will have to happen so I can figure this out. At this point, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
I'm still taking my supplements and all that, so I'll have all my necessary nutrients during this time. Like I said, I've felt a lot better since starting this fast yesterday, and right now while I feel hungry, there's a certain other feeling of replenishment I'm experiencing. Getting through all these vices and all these issues in my life has been such a tough thing. It's taken years of suffering and failing, of trying and facing setback after setback—but this time things really do feel different. One question I have for myself is this: when it's all said and done, what comes next? Say I do finally get all of these demons out of me. Well, what am I supposed to do after that?
I have expressed countless times the value in this practice, that I wouldn't trade it for anything. Of course, I will keep writing. But when I have all this extra time and energy given back to me, how am I going to spend it? I've had to drag myself to church, but maybe I'll actually get more involved, whatever that may look like. Before I get too ambitious, I think it's important I curtail any sense of expectation. I've been hurt too many times before, and I'm not going to let it happen again. I'm not going to expect anything good to come out of anything; there's no sense in doing that anymore. I've had to push through this for so long, and I'm going to push through it regardless of what happens. Each day isn't entitled to me; it's given as a privilege.
I don't expect to be given much else, and I'll be better for it that way.
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Bread Alone

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It's Holy Friday, and I intend on going to my parish's service tonight. One of the subdeacons was saying that it's supposed to have some of the most beautiful music the church sings all year, so I'm excited for it. I haven't attended any services during Holy Week, but I'm hoping to make this weekend the best I can of it. I haven't fasted at all during this Great Lent, but I'm going to try and keep an absolute fast until Pascha. May God have mercy on me in this time. Prayer has been much more fervent lately, but my emotions have been rather difficult to contend with. I've been much more irritable lately, and everything seems to just keep upsetting me. I've been in these throes of contempt at most aspects of life, and things have felt rather joyless over the course of this Holy Week. One would say that joy will come soon, but I'm holding my breath until then, if I'm being honest.
My sister's been home since last night, and while I love her dearly, it's so difficult dealing with her most of the time. Most people tell you that you gain a greater sense of compassion growing up with someone like her, and you do; no one likes to talk about the hard days, though, and just how many of them there are. Hearing her constantly scream and yell all day, especially with me being so sensitive to sound, is a tough thing to get through. There's no way of rationalizing with her, and I usually try to either get out of the house or turn my music up loud in my headphones and stay in my room. I have earplugs too, and I'll use those sometimes, especially when she's yelling at night.
I've already been irritable, and even though there's a predictability in this irritability, it still is a difficult thing to bear. There's so much I can feel in my body, and all I want to do is numb myself somehow. This feeling has persisted so much in my adult life, and it's one that has defined so much of it. There's a lack of deliverance I feel, but more than that, the lack of stability has pressed my mind and body to its absolute edge so many times. I have no idea how I'm not dead, truly. I didn't expect today's entry to be so emotional, and having these kinds of thoughts go through my mind is unbearable at times. I've been doing so much to abstain from sin, and to let myself feel all the things I need to feel, but going through this day in and day out with no sense of rest or respite—it's something I feel like I can only bear alone, save the mercy and comfort of God.

Life for so long has been nothing more than a waking nightmare. Looking into the cosmic void every day and getting attacked by evil spirits left and right becomes too much. Every moment is a cataclysm of sensation, and it really does feel like I've seen too much, been far past the lines that a human mind is supposed to go. I feel remarkably cursed; each day is a further punishment for sins that I can't remember. One day, I'll be washed of them. But until then, I have to push through. There's nothing else I can do. In spite of all of this, there's a deep and unspeakable impulse to live. Nothing gets past it. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how much I tell myself I can't take it and that I can't keep living—this pulse keeps beating. My body keeps doing what it does; it doesn't stop.
What is it like for the soul to leave the body? There are many days where I want to experience that and get away from the trappings of this weak and volatile flesh. I can't say that it'll be a pleasant sensation when it happens for real; death is a bridge that isn't marked by how easy it is to cross. However, I know that time will come on its own. I can't impose my will onto it because if I do, there are a lot of horrible things that could happen on the way to Hades. An unsupervised soul is bound to get lost in that cosmic void and consumed by greater and more malevolent spirits. Safe passage is necessary, and it's one that I hope to have when my time for it comes. Until then, I just have to keep feeling that pulse, taking those breaths, and experiencing the Word of God to the very end.
There's no telling what life will be like in that age to come, when we come back after Judgment. Surely it won't be all sunshine and daffodils; but in that life to come, what will be waiting for us there? Will it be more of these trials? Trusting in God for all of that is essentially impossible to wrap my head around, and getting that spiritually grandiose is starting to make my head hurt. I never have any idea how these entries turn out as I'm writing them. Going with these flows is so unpredictable. Sometimes I have plans for them, and I'll tell myself "yeah, I'm gonna write about that today!" And it never happens. Something else always comes up. Is that Divine Providence? More than likely, it's just divine inattention.
I'm so hungry right now, and dealing with hunger is one of the worst urges to surf. It's worse than cigarette withdrawals, porn withdrawals—I've even been through benzo withdrawals and being hungry is worse. I made a commitment to myself to keep this fast until Pascha, but just sitting around all day being hungry sounds worse than just about anything else right now. I know God wouldn't put it on my heart if I couldn't handle it. I can indulge in His gifts at any time, but for true spiritual perfection and healing of ailments as great as these, prayer and fasting is the only way.
I've said this to myself so many times before, but I'm going to say it again:
Man does not live on bread alone, but from every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Stay loved, friends.
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Theotokos

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It has been about a week of no cigs and no porn. Go me!
While the time apart from those things is irrelevant, I am more optimistic about this attempt at abstinence. Especially regarding the pornography, I'd be having all kinds of insatiable somatic urges at this point, but I haven't really been feeling much of that, oddly enough. It seems as if my body really is starting to catch on. I will absolutely say it's been easier this time around because of the increased fervor in my prayer. I had this idea for a while, but didn't implement it until recently because I was scared of doing it: any time I feel an urge, do one circle around the prayer rope. If the urges continue, stay at the prayer rope until they leave. I was scared of it because I doubted the prayer—that I'd relapse anyway and begin to lose faith in it. But so far, prayer really does work.
In addition, I heard a deacon at my church say that he was delivered from consuming pornography after he began making more regular prayers to the Theotokos (the God-bearer Mary). I didn't know how to proceed with that. Of course, I didn't want to put her on the same level as Christ, so I didn't want to make it seem like she was the one making all the movements in my life. The way it works for her and for all the saints is that you ask them for intercessory prayer, meaning that you pray to them so that they in turn pray for you to the Lord. While I can understand that intellectually, I was a bit nervous to actually pray to her in practice.

In that book I'm reading, Everyday Saints, there was a nun who would pray to Mary and Saint Seraphim of Sarov, and I was surprised that she would talk with them in the same way she would with the Lord—as if they held a similar sort of omnipresence. She'd say things like "Oh Queen of Heaven, please make this happen!" That surprised me, but after reading about someone else doing it in practice, I became more comfortable with praying to the Theotokos. I will say that when it comes to chastity, no one knows it better than Mary. It makes complete sense that she would be the most receptive to prayers regarding lust and fornication. As part of my prayers, I've been making more efforts to come to her directly, and have asked her to give me ways to know her better and understand her role in my spiritual life. As I keep pursuing my faith, I'm confident that more understanding will emerge.
In more mundane news, I started using a French press again to make my coffee, and it's been wonderful. From ages 18–23 or so, I used a French press to drink coffee. I did this because I thought it would be the fastest way to make coffee, and also make the best-tasting cup. Both of those things proved to be true. When I moved back in with my family, my mom purchased this expensive coffee machine. You put whole beans up top, and there's a container for water on the side. You press the button to brew your coffee, and it grinds the beans and brews a single cup for you. The coffee it makes tastes pretty good, but it's a bitch to clean and maintain. You have to descale it often, which sucks. I went back to the French press because I wanted simple coffee again, and it's worked wonders.

More than that, the coffee it makes is better than that six-hundred-dollar contraption. The coffee is more full-bodied, almost creamy. It has more flavor too, which is awesome. The best part is that I can make and drink it by the pot instead of by the cup, though in practice a pot in my French press is only about two cups. Over the last few days, I've been drinking about two pots a day: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Even though I still get tired during the day after drinking all that coffee, I don't care. Coffee just tastes too good. I used to love pairing it with my cigarettes; it would make me feel like I was in a 1950s diner every time I went out to my back patio. And the coffee first thing in the morning can definitely increase my cigarette cravings, but it's not too bad. The coffee is so good that I don't want to give it up.
I feel a weird sense of comfort, one that feels undeserved, but that I've been given anyway. That's grace at work, perhaps, but I think I'm beginning to see the importance of the "works" part of the "faith and works" equation. A lot of people misconceptualize the idea of works in relation to faith. Many will ascribe it to acts of charity, donating money to your church, or just generally being a kind person. While all of those things are important, I think they miss the essence of what it means, particularly when juxtaposed to faith. Works of faith are not social things; you don't work in your faith by improving or maintaining your social standing. Real works of faith are mostly solitary in nature; you are to work within yourself and between God to find your way toward keeping his commandments. Repentance doesn't always happen socially, and most of the time true repentance comes when you are alone.
As I continue my life in prayer and try to cut out as much sin as I can, I pray that God gives me the wisdom to continue my work in a way that works toward His will. Coming here and writing every day for all of you is something I hope makes someone else's life just a little bit better. In spite of all the trappings and pitfalls I've found in my life, there is respite and comfort in having this space to think through things. I don't know how long this project will continue to last, but I will never stop writing. Day in and day out, may this space be one that helps us all be more honest and a testament to not just a life lived, but one thought through.
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No Enemies

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I, like many Christians, have been having a tough time loving my enemies.
I mean this not just in relation to my car crash earlier this week, but in most facets of life. The real essence of the law is to try and not get angry in an unrighteous way with others; there shouldn't be any feelings of malice or contempt in your heart and mind. But of course, this is much easier said than done. I'm fortunate for God's grace on this matter and many others, but working toward that perfection is a tough process, and it's one that can really make life feel much harder once you keep it as an object of focus. Showing love to people who love you back is easy and at many times joyful, but showing that same love to those who hate you or do you harm—that's a true feat of the human condition, and while difficult, yields much more joy.
I'm reminded of that popular manga, Vinland Saga. I haven't seen it the whole way through, but basically it's about Vikings. So with that, there's lots of violence and killing. There was that one part that became a meme—the one where the protagonist's dad or whatever is telling him that he has no enemies and no one he needs to hurt. I'll be honest, the edits from that go so hard. But anyways, that kind of thinking is fundamentally right. I've been trying to go through my life thinking of the people who have hurt me, and I've been trying to make peace with the fact that they aren't my enemies. People who hurt me, even if they do so intentionally, do so out of ignorance. They truly don't know what they're doing. As much as I want to place blame on them and find some kind of retribution, the truth is that I'll never be the one who actually swings that gavel.

But even beyond placing hope for retribution in someone else's hands, I don't want to hope for that retribution to come. God loves, but His wrath is also strong. Not only do I want His mercy for myself, but for everyone I've ever known—even those who hurt me. I've taken a small glimpse into Hell. The gnashing of teeth doesn't even begin to describe its darkness. Even for the worst people to have ever existed, Hell isn't something I would wish on them. I want to do everything I can to make sure that no human soul ever experiences the depths of Hell, because when you realize that God has truly left you, there's nothing else that could possibly be worse.
Like I've said before, when I pray, I do so for all of humanity. That power of prayer isn't something that I take lightly, and regardless of whether or not someone else shares the same ontology as I do, I am going to do my part and pray for them because it isn't some kind of intellectual exercise. There is so much going against humanity; the forces that want us to perish are so strong, but I can feel isolated at times because most people can't see what I'm seeing. I've learned that I have to focus on my part: reaching out to God whenever I can so that His mercy extends to every corner of the earth I can see. Even if my perspective is limited, I know it counts for something.
Thinking of Christ's perfection, I find it's important to distinguish that perfection from simply having "good morals." A lot of people, particularly heterodox Christians themselves, parade the faith as some kind of pillar of morality. They act in faith not to please God, but to give off the impression that they themselves are "good people." I think it's important to distinguish what the faith is and what it isn't. The faith is not an ethical framework. The faith is not there to make you a good person. The faith is the understanding that Christ is Lord, and that we follow His statutes not for our own personal benefit, but because that is what He commands us to do. I love my fellow man not because I think it's a good thing to do, but because God sets the example.

When it's all said and done, any pondering or questioning about existential affairs is a pointless endeavor. All it does is show that those who do so simply do not trust God. Over the course of my life, I've prided myself on being a skeptical person. Questioning things made me cool; rebellion against those things made me even cooler. I was that kid who went around telling his whole class that Santa Claus wasn't real. If there was a way to question authority and stick it to them in a way that I felt just, I did so. As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that skepticism really isn't that cool. Asking too many questions really isn't that cool. Some might place me as some kind of conformist, and honestly, I'll take that label. If someone wants to presuppose that I'm advocating for blindly accepting something as true, then they can go ahead and do that. I know that no matter how much I open my eyes, I'll still be blind anyway. At this point, I'd rather blindly accept that than remain a blind skeptic.
I've been making more progress in memorizing important prayers. I finally have the Nicene Creed memorized, and I'm hoping that as I incorporate it into my daily prayers, I'll be able to get through it without stumbling. It's been a real pleasure to memorize these important things. I'm thinking my next prayer to memorize will be Psalm 50 (LXX), but I need to see if I'm overlooking anything else more fundamental first. I have the Jesus Prayer, Hail Mary, prayer to Saint Michael, the Lord's Prayer, and the Nicene Creed all memorized. My intention is to keep these prayers memorized for as long as I can because I'll never know where I'll be, and I might not always have access to certain texts. If it's in my mind, no one can take it away from me.
Today's entry has felt dense and like I jumped through a lot of points rather quickly. That's just how I am, always have been. I've noticed some differences in these recent entries compared to ones from when I first started this project. When I first started, I wrote like a bull in a china shop. There was a certain looseness in the style, and while it was clear that my voice was there, it wasn't as refined. Given how much I've written over the last several months, I've found that my prose has matured quite a bit. I've gotten better at nipping bad habits and building good ones, and overall I notice the quality of my writing has improved. Not that I look back on my old writing and cringe, but I'm glad I can see the progress so tangibly.
My hope is to see the same fruits with my faith and prayer.
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Crashing Light

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I got in a fucking car crash yesterday.
I'm doing okay. I'm not severely injured, but my right toes are a bit messed up and I'm somewhat bruised. Other than that, I'm alright. My car got totaled. I was on my way to the gym and my whole day got fucking ruined. I was driving about 40 MPH on a main road. There was a woman stopped at a stop sign on a street on the right-hand side; she was trying to turn left against traffic. She thought it would be a genius idea to stop in the middle of the road right in front of me, and the second I saw her, it was already too late. I slammed my foot on the brake and braced for the impact. I t-boned her. It was a pretty gnarly crash, and it held up traffic for a good twenty minutes.

I left the car dazed, and I decided to go over to the woman to check on her. I tried maintaining my composure so that there wouldn't be any tension between us. I went up to her and asked her if she was okay, and then I saw that she had her infant son in the back seat. Thankfully the impact was on the back driver's side and no one was there; the baby was in the back passenger side. She had ignored me because she was too busy tending to her son, which was understandable. I called my dad to let him know what happened. He asked me whose fault it was, and over the phone I said it was hers. She heard that and immediately decided to start arguing with me while I was still on the phone. Instead of holding herself accountable, she tried insisting that it was my fault because I t-boned her. It was clear that she was just in denial, so I decided to ignore her while the paramedics checked on us and the police filled out their paperwork.
Weirdly, the police didn't ask me for a statement, but just kept talking to the woman the whole time. I think they were going to be more sympathetic because she had her son with her, and I wasn't horribly injured and remained calm, so I don't blame them for not giving me much time. They still haven't released the report yet, but they better indicate the woman was at fault. It was a pretty cut-and-dried deal, and I hope she didn't bullshit the cops and somehow convince them I was at fault. The whole experience was just so bad; the way it was handled by everyone else irritated me.
The paramedics kept trying to convince me to take an ambulance ride to the emergency room because my heart rate was "too elevated," and it's like, no dumbass—I just got in a fucking car accident less than fifteen minutes ago and I'm not going to pay a ten thousand dollar ER bill just for the doctor to tell me to calm down and fuck off. Once our cars were towed off the road and the paramedics left, the cop gave me a card with the report number on it. I tried asking him for a ride home but since I lived in the next city over, he "couldn't do it." Yeah, protect and serve my ass. Thankfully I was able to get a ride home from family, but I'm still reeling at how much it fucked up my day. I was already not having the best day, and I was hoping some time at the gym would improve my mood, but instead I got in a fucking car wreck. Truly lovely stuff.
What's funny too is that I was on day 3 of quitting cigarettes again cold turkey, and guess what? I didn't relapse! Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
The idea of optimism sounds cheap right now. I could think about what worse things could've happened but didn't. I could be grateful that no one got hurt or that everything went smoothly. I want to be mad, but I'm not even mad; there's nothing in me. I'm done. Things aren't going to get better. They're going to stay just like this, where every day is a new cross to bear. I hope for nothing in this life; hope would be an immense waste of time. Every day on this earth is a crucible for that Day of Judgment, and I am going to do everything I can to have a strong case. So even though life is a horrible illusory sham, I will do what I can to get through it because that's what the Lord my God wants me to do. He knows that in spite of all of this shit, I can handle it. Even if I don't believe it myself, He'll carry that weight for me. It doesn't matter how silent He is; His vibrations still echo throughout everything.
With all of the shit that keeps happening in my life, it's really taught me to let go of any expectations. I was thinking a bit about how one could perceive these events and circumstances as "unlucky," but as I kept thinking about it, I started to realize that the idea of fortune in general is a sham. The way I see it, there's the things that happen to you, and then there's your reaction to them; that's all there really is. Fortune is just a matter of perspective. Being lucky or unlucky is quite literally a choice. If you claim yourself to be lucky, then you'll see all the good things in your life more clearly. It's simple confirmation bias</a>, really.
What's interesting in my thought process, however, is that I don't want to make the claim that I'm lucky. I don't want to make that claim because I want God to show me the world for what it actually is, and not make any kind of excuses about it. I know that goodness only comes from the Lord, and it would be a disservice to Him to claim that I am a benefactor of some kind of great fortune. I really don't see it that way. There's all kinds of trappings and deceit happening all around me, and beyond any kind of fortunate or unfortunate set of circumstances, the real treasure I wish to possess is wisdom; that is, I want the ability to discern the world around me in a way that pleases God.
So when I think of silver linings for this whole situation, the one I find most satisfactory is that I have the ability to handle even drastic situations with a general sense of patience and kindness. God has made me uniquely qualified to go through a set of trials I know will come in the future, and every day moving forward is an act of preparation for those events. In my lifetime, I expect the world to get a lot uglier and much harder to live in. More than ever, we'll need Christ's light to guide us through those times. My intention is to work toward cultivating that light for others so that we may work through whatever circumstances arise.
In the same way I can choose to be lucky, I can choose to be a light.
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Nourishment

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Palm Sunday was good yesterday, thanks for asking.
Getting through the Divine Liturgies has been easier. My feet still hurt, but not as much. I'm usually quite drained afterward, and instead of chatting around at the coffee hour, I just go to a gas station and hang out on my own. Having all the people around is a bit of a draining thing. It's strange how much more introverted I've become over the years. My spells of extroversion come and go, and it's not that I have any social anxiety. Instead, it's just regular anxiety. Being around people doesn't make me anxious, but it's just draining. Ain't no time like me time, know what I mean?
It's been on my reading list for almost two months at this point, but I'm finally plowing through Everyday Saints</a> and it's been great. I said I've been trying to abstain from cigarettes and pornography, so reading this book has been an immense aid in that endeavor. More than reading through this work, I've also been trying to increase my prayer. I'm currently working on memorizing the Nicene Creed, and I'm about halfway done with that. I've been trying to get as many rotations around the prayer rope in as I can; there was some burnout with it</a> over the last month or so, but the fervor is still there. When I pray, I feel something working within me. It's as if I can feel the spiritual forces in conflict within me, and I just hope that I can maintain my strength and vigilance in prayer.
It shocks me how easy it is to forget how central God is in one's life. There are endless, boundless distractions and departures from what really matters. I've been glad that my position in life has allowed me to go through the arduous process of sustained prayer. Without it, there really wouldn't be much point in anything. As disillusioned as I've been, I truly am glad to have this in my life. There's an immense power in consistently showing up to prayer, but more than that, there's power in the orientation one has around it. Sometimes prayer can feel like a slog, that you're just plowing through it so that you can fulfill a sort of spiritual obligation. That can be okay at certain times; not every day should we expect ourselves to feel a pulsing zeal.
However, there's an extra amount of power one can give to their prayer, and it's dependent on the emotion put behind it. The foundation of that emotion comes from one's perspective on prayer at that given time. If one is feeling sort of bland, the prayer itself can be bland. It's been said that the strongest prayers are ones that come from a place of desperation, and I believe that's true. Think of the emotion behind a desperate time; all that anxiety and angst can become channeled into feeling God's presence, and I think God takes all of that into account when one prays. This isn't to say that every time we pray, we should do it with a great sense of emotion. Instead, I think it's just important to take whatever we have and give it all to Him, whatever that may be on a given day.

I think through this because I can find it difficult to engage in a particular prayer rule or routine, or I can get burnt out from praying too much. I don't want to view prayer in the same way one would view working out or improving at some kind of skill. Prayer isn't supposed to feel like a grind. There shouldn't be any sense of "hustle" when one prays. Instead, one should pray the same way they eat or drink. We pray not to improve at prayer, but to feel the nourishment from it. If there's a certain day where I can say the Jesus Prayer a few thousand times, say multiple Psalms, and be glued to my prayer corner, then God bless that day. But if there's a day where I can barely muster the courage to say a single prayer, my hope is that God blesses that day just as much as the former.
Many don't believe that the words they say—and the feeling behind those words—have a great effect on the world, especially when they are by themselves. They might think words only facilitate communication, that anything beyond that is superfluous or made up. But I'd say that there's a great effect one's speech has. When we speak, our vocal cords vibrate and that vibration projects out of our mouths and into the world around us. At its most fundamental essence, the universe is built on the waves that vibrate throughout space. Those waves can interact and produce new waves, new ways of being. So when we speak, even by ourselves, we are literally changing the universe.
This week is Holy Week in the Orthodox church. Every day is supposed to have a long service leading up to Pascha. Most celebrated Easter yesterday, but Orthodox Christians celebrate it this upcoming Sunday. This will be my first Pascha I am celebrating, and I was surprised to hear that the service is at midnight, and that festivities will last all throughout the day. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to attend that service, or any other service for that matter. I have a tough time getting through a standard Divine Liturgy that lasts an hour and a half, let alone an all-night service. I'll try to get through what I can, but I also know that God has every way of meeting me where I'm at. I won't feel bad for not attending that much or not being able to get through the whole thing, but I also want to do my best to show up for what I can.
For Christians, Pascha is supposed to be a joyous time of year. However, I have a tough time finding joy at any time of the year. Life is usually overwhelming, and my brain can only handle a small amount of stimulation these days. Calm moments can be sparse, and tranquility is something that while I try to spend a bunch of time cultivating, only comes in short batches. Despite the world feeling so vivid sometimes, I fear that this vividness will eat me alive one day. I fear that I've seen too much, and that I've been given a brief amount of time to live—I couldn't handle much longer otherwise. It's as if there's this little virus in me that's spreading slowly throughout my brain and my body. One day I'll wake up, and it'll have me fully and completely possessed.
Until then, I'll just have to keep going, however I can.
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Reprise

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, I felt emboldened to make more effort toward my spiritual life. Last night, I ran out of cigarettes, and I decided that now would be the perfect time to quit again. With the weather heating up again soon, I would rather not have to be outside for a decent portion of my day just to smoke cigarettes. It gets too hot and disgusting out there. More than that, I really just need to quit again. I had picked my habit back up sometime around February, so it's been about six weeks or so of consistent daily smoking. But this time around, I've had enough. I'm hoping to truly be done with it for good this time. I had a good seven months prior to relapsing, and I'm confident I can achieve similar results again.
As I give up this vice yet again, I am also feeling emboldened to give up another, more powerful vice: consumption of pornography. I made this resolve at the beginning of this year</a>, and while I had a good first few weeks, I eventually relapsed and fell into despair. I thought to myself that quitting would be impossible. From there, it morphed into a horrid realization: I liked it. I didn't feel guilty about it, but felt excited to watch it. It was a part of me that I had to truly confront because I saw a contradiction between that part of myself and the one who felt conviction toward certain values. I don't like being a hypocrite. I hate hypocrisy more than I enjoyed the carnal pleasure of watching pornography, and beyond any kind of addiction science or "practical reasons" to quit, I know that the reason I have to give it up is far beyond an act of self-service.
I have to let go of this idea that I'm not doing anything wrong when consuming pornography. With every view and click I give the sites that host the videos, I am directly supporting an industry that only wants to perpetuate harm onto others. It's a strange thing because those involved will hide under this veil of consent—the idea that as long as everyone agrees to the actions, there's no harm in it. But clearly, those people don't understand the impact of their actions. Or worse: they do understand, but they either don't care or want to actively participate in the harm they cause. In spite of this righteous indignation, however, I still find myself at my wit's end when it comes to finding true abstinence. Even when I sit through every urge or try to replace my time with something better, I still found myself unable to escape it on that somatic level. It was as if my groin kept screaming at me nonstop and there was nothing I could do to replace the sensation.

I still don't know if I can be delivered from it. Truthfully, it took up a lot of my time. I have to confront this idea that I really need to spend every waking hour doing something in service of the more important things in life: faith, service, creativity, health, and all the other things that matter more than those base carnal pleasures. No matter what I seem to do, though, no matter how far I think I'm beyond their grasp, I end up coming back to them eventually. It is a constant failure of self-will. I can't seem to do the right thing, make the right choice. It's as if I don't want to. Clearly, anything good in my life isn't a result of my own doing. Anything I have to be grateful for is because God let me have it through His grace and mercy; any other explanation would be a gross cop-out.
Every moment is a new temptation to do something wrong and stupid, and I can't seem to find my way through it. Even when I pray, even when I try to enrich myself with the lives of the Saints, or even when I go to church, it all seems to have no effect on my ability to make a good choice. No, the only way I learn is when I suffer the harsh consequences of my own stupid actions. Even then, I'll grow complacent with God's mercy and fall right back into that same trap yet again. It seems that the only way out is through. If I have to shoot myself in the foot a hundred times, why not go ahead and double it? My only way to learn is through suffering, and I guess that's just what will have to happen. Even then, I'll probably mark it as some point of pride. Humility isn't something I'm good at.
Even though I have all of these things I can yell at myself about, I don't want this entry to be marked by some kind of self-hatred. I've made distinct efforts to keep working toward being compassionate toward myself, but I do this not because I feel compelled to on my own volition; I do it because that's what God commanded me to do. I displease God every day, but I know that life is an iterative process. Every day is a new opportunity to try again, and that's just what I'm going to do. If I fail, then let it happen however many times it takes until I get it. If I never get it, then so be it; I just hope that God will have mercy on me either way.
What this is really all about is how much I fear God's infinite power. See, I go about most of my day trembling. I don't want Him to cast down anything on me that I can't bear. Most days are too much as it stands, even if my yoke is easy. At any moment, it could get so much worse. There's already too much on my plate, and most days all I want is to go back home. Out of the few things I do know, the one thing that keeps me going is understanding that I don't work on my own time. Everything good in my life is there through the generosity and grace of God, so if He thinks that I can handle one more day on this earth, I'll do my best to trust in that.
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Revelation

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was quite tiring. I was asleep for practically the entire day. That kind of thing happens whenever I take my olanzapine, which is what I did the night before yesterday. That night, I had slept from 5 PM till about midnight. Since I didn't want to ruin my sleep schedule, I decided to bust out the olanzapine so that I could fall asleep. Unfortunately, this makes me sleep the entire next day, which is exactly what happened yesterday. I'm thankful that I don't have any major obligations that force me to stay awake throughout the day, but it does make me sad to be in such a state. During better periods, I'll think to myself that I'm ready to take on another job or stack on some other kind of obligation in my life. After days like yesterday, I am forced to reconsider that line of thought.
During those days when I sleep all day, I usually have several dreams that I can vividly remember. The most common type of dream I have is one that takes place in an infinitely sprawling resort. Sometimes it's a hotel-like resort, and other times it's a cruise ship. The objective in these dreams is usually the same: I try to get back to my room, but keep getting distracted in the labyrinthine twists and turns of the resort. The resort itself is hedonistic; there's infinite food to eat, games to play, journeys to go on. There are all kinds of experiences to be had with the people I encounter, but despite this seemingly never-ending journey of pleasure, all I want to do is get back to my room and get away from it.
Yesterday's dreams involved this resort, but this time there was something intriguing that the resort was offering: new biohacking tools. I remember they were offering to put literal parasites in my body—little tapeworm-looking things that apparently had some kind of nanomachine in them that would augment me in some way. There was a worker who was offering to give me this worm, and he was holding it over my arm. It was this glowing pale white thing, about half as long as my forearm. I rejected the offer, but am still curious about what that even meant.
Then there was this other technology they offered me: a flesh-like sac that I was supposed to put over my face to create an augmented reality experience. I remember putting it over my eyes and I could smell the sac; it smelled like the rubber you'd find in an inflatable pool tube. Everything around me looked cloudy, but I was surprised that I could see anything at all with an opaque sack over my face. I remember having it on for a few minutes and walking around with it, but shortly after I woke up. As usual, I was confused.

I do find it strange that my dreams involve this hedonistic treadmill, and it makes me wonder why they recur as often as they do. I wonder if there's a certain inlaid desire in being there, or if it's supposed to be a reflection of my current conditions living here in this world. I can't say for sure, but all I know is that with all of these dreams I keep having, it really does feel as if I'm going somewhere else. I haven't looked too deeply into whether or not other people experience similar phenomena, but I'm sure they do. The vivid and hyperrealistic nature of my dreams has given me a metaphysical worldview that probably seems insane to some people, but makes complete sense to me.
Since I was a teenager, I've had deep experiences regarding Simulation Theory and the like. I remember during one of my first LSD trips at 17, I had come to this strange revelation that all of waking life was a simulation and that nothing was real. Unfortunately at the time, that also led me to the false conclusion that my actions didn't have consequences. I went a little crazy, to put it lightly. Several years later, I had a dream that still haunts me to this day. At that point, I had been off drugs for a few years and my dreams were getting stronger and more vivid. I remember the dream like this: it was a loading screen for something called DreamOS. It was a blue background with clouds with black text overlaid. I saw a loading bar with text underneath it like "refining textures" and "curating dream logic." It felt like I was actually in that experience, like I had some kind of virtual headset on and that I was going through this loading screen like I had thousands of times before. I didn't know what to make of it.
All of this makes me look at waking life with a huge degree of skepticism, but not in some kind of cynical "everything is rigged" kind of way; it's more like an existential "DO YOU PEOPLE NOT SEE WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE??!!" kind of way. I have to try and reel back a lot of these woes because it makes it harder for me to connect with people. Whenever I try to recount these dreams and revelations to other people, the reaction is usually a mix of awe and overwhelm. Some try to push back a bit, but most are put off by it. That's understandable, especially because a lot of it sounds like nonsense. I understand that most people can't or don't want to carry the weight of the implications my experiences bring, but at times it can feel isolating—like I'm the only one who has seen experience in this kind of way.
Really, I have no idea what conclusions I should even come to. On the one hand, it would probably be a safer option to dismiss these things entirely as machinations of an overactive subconscious and imagination—funny brain farts that make for interesting diary entries. But there's another part of me that at least wants to try and understand what's going on here. Is there any kind of epistemic layering here? If even a fraction of what I experience in my dreams is real, what are the consequences of that? How come these things are being revealed to me, specifically? There's an unfortunate desire to push that envelope further, but I'm not sure it's something I can handle. At the same time, I don't want to repress these things and claim that they don't have an impact on my waking life. If I think about them frequently and can recall the events months and years after the fact, that to me indicates there's something real there.
As for what that is, there's still more to find out.
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Superpower

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was listening to Ye's newest album Bully</a> earlier this morning, and it was good. The standout track for me was "Mama's Favorite." Ye had a wonderful relationship with his mom, and the part at the end of the track where she tells him that doing something so well for so long has got to pay off—that made me cry. Regarding my personal relationship with Ye's music over the years, it's been interesting seeing the progression of his career. I only started listening to him when he released The Life of Pablo, and the vibe that album cultivated was one I miss quite a bit. Of course, seeing Ye go through his bipolar diagnosis and subsequent psychotic episodes hit home for me personally. I understand exactly what he's going through in that respect, and I also understand how much it can consume you if you let it. However, Ye has always done everything in service of his art. When he said it was a superpower and not a disability, I wanted to believe him so badly.
And when I first heard him say that on the track "Yikes" from his 2018 self-titled album, I really did believe it. When that album came out, I hadn't been diagnosed yet, but I could see the signs and didn't want to address them. When life kept spiraling, I kept telling myself that I had to keep riding the wave, to let myself embrace whatever would happen. But then when the COVID pandemic happened, all that came to a crashing halt. Psychosis brought it all to a disastrous implosion, and rebuilding my psyche from that fallout has been a complex process, to say the least. When you really think your life is about to end, it takes all your preconceived notions and throws them out the window. I still remember being in that psych pod in the emergency room, thinking that I had been banished to hell for refusing to make a deal with a demon. I thought I was going to spend an eternity in that cell, and even though it felt that way at the time, life still moved on.
Every day still feels like a sick day, but when sick becomes the new normal, how much worse can it really get? I still have those days where I go to bed at like 5 PM and sleep all the way through to the next day. It feels like my general sense of stamina is so painfully low, and even though it's gotten somewhat better over the last year or so, it still feels like a fraction of what I used to have. As a man, it's tough to say that you feel weak. Most of us try to conceal that in one way or another, but for someone in my position, it's almost impossible to do. When most things feel overwhelming and when I can lose my marbles over a minor inconvenience, feigning strength isn't exactly something I want or care to do. I also don't want to fall into self-deception where I try to say that vulnerability comes from a place of strength; it doesn't. I am vulnerable only because I have no other cards to play.

While that's frustrating, I don't want to bemoan it further. Circling back to my reception of Bully, I thought the album was good, but not great. Ye's style is so established and pinned down that he's almost put himself in a corner. The same samples, keys, and motifs found on Bully were found in albums from ten years ago. I know I said earlier I missed the vibe cultivated from The Life of Pablo, but now that I'm thinking about it, this rehashing feels undeserved. Music has changed quite a bit over the last ten years, and I think Ye has failed to keep up with the times. There were attempts to ride certain waves, particularly in his collaborative projects like Vultures and Kids See Ghosts, but Ye isn't as adaptive as he thinks he is.
And I get it; being adaptive is a hard thing, especially when the things you used to do are so well-received and constantly praised even today. Ye's fanbase seems as if they're stuck in time themselves, thinking 2007 will last forever and that Ye will forever be the greatest to ever do it. But things change, and if you don't live up to that, it makes you look pathetic. I don't necessarily think Ye should retire from making music or other artistic pursuits. That would be a shameful thing, particularly because it's become clear that making great art is his life's greatest pursuit. But I hope over the next few years, Ye can make peace with his past and move on to a future where he's willing to see outside the trappings of constantly pursuing relevance. Instead of trying to play the fierce provocateur, he should focus on tuning back into manners of truth-telling that are more resonant with the waves flowing through him.
Of course, I relate to Ye quite a bit. The whole bipolar artist shtick, while a box that can feel annoying to be put in, is one that helps me think things through. Everyone has a unique temperament and talents, and not understanding what they are—and wasting them—is a tragic thing. So really, that's why I felt compelled to give my take on Bully. Ye's arc is a signaling beacon in a lot of ways for me. It's a cautionary tale just as much as it's an enlightening one about building hope and self-esteem. I don't know exactly where my life will go, and I would hope I never reach a level of notoriety like Ye, but I do hope to learn from his life and figure out how I want to proceed with mine. It's a tough path to be married to your craft, but it's one that, in spite of everything, I feel uniquely qualified for.
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Getting Slower

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There's been a certain gloominess I can't shake, but despite that, I feel calm. I don't know exactly where it's coming from. I'm not sure how well I'd be able to think my way out of it. It seems like life really has just become a regimen of thought, which while I'm not displeased by in and of itself, does make time seem like it's going by a lot slower. Pretty much every person over the age of forty I've talked to about getting older says the same thing: the older you get, the faster time flies by. I don't feel that way; if anything, time has gotten slower when I compare the last ten years to the ten years before that. The days feel longer in spite of finding comfort in certain routines. Even beyond my own personal disposition, one thing that might be making me feel this way is the information deluge. Since information is so dense and goes by so quickly, it's a bit of a tough situation to be in as someone who tries to think deeply.
There's constantly new connections to be made, things to be discovered, and conclusions to draw. I have an immense desire to understand life, the universe, or whatever else. At one time, I believed this was a strength of mine; curiosity and openness are generally seen as positive traits in Western society. As I've gotten older, the weaknesses in these traits have made themselves apparent. The world is so vast and expansive that there's no way I can wrap my head around even a fraction of it. I simply don't have the processing power to hold that weight. Yet despite seeing that reality, accepting it is a whole different thing. Weirdly, there's a certain grief I hold onto—that I won't be able to truly "get it," so to speak. Over the last few years, it's been a tough thing to let go.
Not only do I crave understanding, but I crave to be understood. I am rhetorically savvy, but can overuse those skills in contexts that don't need them. I provide deep context, explain exact throughlines of thought—all two hundred and twenty-seven of them—and used to expect people to carry that in the same way I do. These days, I get that most people don't think through things the way I do. That's not a flex from me, nor a diminution of the capacities of others; it's just that we're all different, and no amount of context or empathizing can make us all the same. I used to have this misconception that conversations should be solely about sharing understanding and connecting with others. There are many conversations that do this, of course, but I know now through harsh confrontations that there are other arguably more important components to them. Namely, the idea that conversations aren't to facilitate connection, but to achieve outcomes.

The naivety of my earlier youth exposed me to that harsh truth. Most people have conversations not just to connect, but because the other person has something they want, and they have to work to get it. I've never been a results-driven person; I am process-driven. When I do something, I usually do it "for the love of the game," as it were. This probably comes from the idea I have that outcomes are uncertain, so instead of letting outcomes dictate my decisions, I try to focus on what I can control—the process. However, most people do not see it the same way I do. Despite the uncertainty latent in every outcome, many still orient their lives around them. They only do things based on what's in it for them. Altruism is seen as a waste of time, which for a long time made me feel bitter and resentful.
Despite those harsh realities when dealing with certain people, I also understand that I don't have to put myself in one position or the other. A big thing I've learned to do recently is holding multiple truths simultaneously and breaking down dichotomies. I've found that this greatly helps my thought processes and reduces my tendency toward black-and-white thinking. In this case, conversations can facilitate connections and outcomes; it doesn't have to be either-or. Even if that's something I didn't conceptualize for a long time, I think that's how I—and others to an extent—live out relationships in practice. Much of life is negotiating and making compromises, and while I can find certain aspects of that exhausting, I know that I can do my best to work within it and not let it make me bitter.
With all of that in mind, the granularity with which I think things through has genuinely made life feel so much slower. In some ways, I have a tough time dealing with it. Life is challenging and brutal, even if the yoke one carries is easy. There's a certain part of me that just wants to get it over with, you know? Like, I don't want to feel this constant slog every single day. I know that we have different seasons and that things can get better or worse, but there's that part of me who keeps gasping for air. I don't know how to quell him, and it makes even the good days hard to get through, it seems. I keep thinking that writing through this with vulnerability and candor will be my way to the end of that tunnel, but even this is exhausting. There's a satisfaction I feel in getting through to that next sentence, but sometimes that's the only thing that keeps me going.
Like I said, I am a process-driven person. It doesn't matter what's at the end anyway. If I'm in a tunnel, I'll be in a tunnel. If I'm in the clouds, I'll fly high then. I can only focus on what's in front of me. Anything more is too much, and I don't know how much longer I'll keep holding on. Writing through this gloom is a tough thing, but at this point, there's not much else that'll get me through it. Even when I see progress, I still feel just right where I'm at. Same day, different blank page. The ebbs and flows of life can make me feel like I'm drowning.
Maybe one day, I'll learn how to breathe underwater.
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Jazz School No-No

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Divine Liturgy was pretty good yesterday, thanks for asking.
Even though it's only been about 48 hours since my last entry, it feels like it's been much longer. It really has gotten to a point where my life is so enmeshed with this project that I feel strange when I don't write an entry for the day. I don't know exactly how I feel about that, but I think that regardless of whether or not I have this project, I'd still be writing. A lot of folks have gotten into furious note-taking, and I think that's a cool way to do it too. However, the stakes of putting this online for anyone to read give me an edge, and it's one that I don't take lightly.
I was watching some videos this morning of saxophone players that I used to know back in high school. Back then, playing saxophone was the most important thing to me. In the same way that writing here gives me a chance to express myself and quiet the voices and melodies constantly in my head, music was my outlet back then. Whenever I'd practice or play a gig, there was a feeling of satisfaction I'd have afterwards that really kept me going. There's always been a lot of bullshit that I've had to deal with in life; whether it be conflicts with other people or shitty sets of circumstances, there's always been a lot on my mind. Not to mention back then as a teenager, music helped me quell my hormonal spikes.
I had fallen out of playing music when I finished high school. On top of not achieving my goal of making the all-state jazz band, I also saw the path ahead for a burgeoning saxophone player, and it looked bleak. There's not really a large market for professional saxophone players, and with music education as an industry, there's a high saturation of talent. Because of that, the main way that a professional would make a living is through teaching, which was something I had no desire to do. I was a bit of a rarity as a student: precocious and with an insatiable appetite for learning the craft. I knew that as a teacher, most of my students wouldn't have the same fervor I did. As I would've progressed in that career, I saw myself becoming resentful.
Beyond that, most professional saxophone players are basically the same person; when I watched those videos of guys I went to school with, I felt vindicated. Those guys, even ten years after high school, sound the exact same—playing the same twenty licks or so every song, doing the same trite jazz combo gimmick. I was getting tired of it by the end of high school, so if I found myself still trying to do that shit ten years later, I'd probably want to die. That was one thing I hated about jazz education: there's no sense of innovation. Everyone wants to sound the same, be the same, and do the exact same thing for the rest of time. When I'd work with teachers, they'd always tell me I'd have to constantly be transcribing solos and studying the greats. I think that's a good use of time, but there are significant diminishing returns in it after so long. You know who my favorite person to transcribe was? Myself. I always had melodies in my head I wanted to work out on the horn, so most of my practice involved singing the melodies and trying to get them to sound how they did in my head. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
That was the main gripe I had with all those jazz guys back then: it was all cerebral for them, and they didn't have an ounce of creativity. Any creativity they did have was always pretentious art-house stuff, which was a product of going to a prestigious music school. All those guys could muster was derivative and banal, and the pushback that I'd receive from teachers and peers alike was intensely frustrating. More than likely, those guys probably presumed me to be arrogant, and I think there's some truth to that. I can tend to have an I-know-better-than-you attitude sometimes, but for me, music was my primary emotional and existential outlet. In a sense, I felt obligated to protect its purity. I didn't want attention, but to take my creativity to its greatest extent. Any attention I received was a byproduct of that, but especially back in the day, there were certainly behaviors that were interpreted as status-signaling.
And that's true. I was status-signaling, but not out of a place of egotism or arrogance. There was a sense of playfulness in it that gave me something nothing else could. I remember so many days in the band hall or at friends' houses—we'd just jam for a while. I could feel the electricity pulsing through everyone, see the joy in their eyes. It was a feeling I haven't experienced since, and I don't know if I will again. I don't want to chase it like some kind of high, though; people move on, circumstances change. That time should be left where it is. I will be eternally grateful for those experiences, and I hope that the people I impacted keep that same joy in new ways.
It's what I try to do here. I haven't busted out my horn in about a year or two, but I don't feel too bad about it. I've given myself a new craft, and the novelty in it is still shining bright. It's been said that the best time to learn what your career and life pursuit should be is in your twenties. That's why this time is marked by self-exploration and discovery. Feeling lost is a normal and acceptable thing. Many in my age group feel dejected from life and have periods where they give up. That's what happened to me, and I used to feel horrible about it—that I irrevocably wasted precious time. But looking back, I understand that it was all part of the process. Giving up is a normal thing too. Every day is an opportunity to stand back up and face that unknown, to keep exploring.
I know now I've been given something special, and I'm not going to waste it. I'm taking every single day and using it to refine this voice I have, to keep channeling that divine essence that pulses through me from brain to fingertip.
Chaucer said it best: "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."
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Worse

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It could always be worse.
I had a great day at the gym yesterday. My workouts have been getting easier on me. I'm not too sore at all today, and I've been lifting heavier with every workout. When I first started, I could barely lift much weight at all. I would hit the leg press and my legs would be shaking. I could feel the pain in my knees with every movement. But now I can lift heavier and don't feel the stress in my knees at all. It's crazy because it's only been a few weeks of this regimen and the progress has been so significant. I feel much more confident about the fitness journey ahead.
Even though I deal with some melancholic feelings and a general sense of disillusionment, I can say that my life is in a place that I never thought it could get back to. Granted, there are a lot of things that are difficult to contend with, and in spite of those difficulties, things finally feel like they're trending upward. There was this phrase I used to tell myself when I was depressed: you don't know how good it can be until you know how bad it gets. Even in the throes of complete and total mind and nervous system shutdown, I still wanted to find that light at the end of the tunnel. When I think back on those days, it feels strange to confront that ineffable impulse to live; through all of that, I still found a way to persist.

As I've grown in my faith, the object of my gratitude has increasingly been the Lord. I've come to understand that all the prayer and study of scripture wasn't to achieve any desired outcome, but to foster an internal change that I can carry with me regardless of my circumstances. While I'm thankful for this newfound resilience, I am anxious about what comes ahead now that I have this more robust set of spiritual armor. Things aren't going to be all sunshine and daffodils from here on out, but the troubles that lie ahead hide behind a cloud of unknowns. My yoke has been easy thus far, but there's a strange feeling I have that it's going to get much harder.
Even beyond cleansing myself of vices, there are a multitude of battles I feel I'll have to pursue. Many people who care about me don't share my faith, and from the lessons I've learned, I know that it would take far more than just my efforts to bring them to it. That isn't to say I'm predicting arguments about theology in the future, but there could come a time where the rubber meets the road circumstantially. The people I've been seeing at my parish have been wonderful, and I've had a great time getting to know them and connecting with them, but I fear that tension might form between my parish community and the one I've already ingratiated myself with. I can't say that with absolute confidence, but it's something I want to be on the lookout for, I suppose.
I was thinking about the events following the COVID pandemic on a personal and societal level. Personally, the pandemic was horrible for me. I got laid off from my job, and the disruption in general was hard to cope with. I went from working 14 hours a day to being isolated at home for months with nothing to do. It was such an abrupt transition, but one that I survived nonetheless. I remember back then, many people didn't believe it was such a severe event and thought we were being lied to by our government for reasons they couldn't explain. Levels of paranoia were at an all-time high, and we all felt there was no end in sight.

However, most of us got through it. This was the perspective I had: at the time when the virus was first spreading, it was found that there was a 1% death rate for those who contracted it. Since the virus spread so easily like a flu, the idea was that if we didn't quarantine and everyone in the world got infected, essentially 1% of the world's population would die. That's over 80 million people, a death toll potentially higher than the Spanish Flu and Black Death combined. So the panic and quarantine measures were completely justified, and looking back now a few years later, it actually seems like we did a great job. From a cursory lookup, I found that since the start of the pandemic, just short of 8 million people died of COVID. Given what we were dealing with, that's honestly a monumental performance.
Of course, life hasn't been the same since. Things feel like they're on some kind of weird autopilot that we can't stop, but we're still chugging along somehow. That gives me a lot of hope and optimism. People love to decry all the errors and follies of those in power or the systems in place, but even though they aren't perfect, they still basically work. There's a collective anxiety we all feel about the present and the future, and that's a warranted thing. Innovations in military technology and the global arms race we find ourselves in are a fearful prospect. The kayfabe that is the global economy feels more fragile with each passing year. Old people are dying, and young people aren't having kids. Whole cultures could be wiped out in my lifetime. Even though all of this anxiety looms around me, I feel a certain sense of optimism. It doesn't come from my own personal capabilities, but from the indomitable spirit we all share when we come together.
Some days it feels like the world really is going to end, but something tells me that just for today, we'll get through it somehow. Even when I feel completely and utterly alone, there's a certain endearment in seeing the world go by. When I go outside and see everyone living their lives, it gives me reassurance to know this thing we've got will keep going long after I'm gone. I used to feel like I was standing still and the world was passing me by, that I couldn't get out there and go with it. But now I know it'll never stop. Even on days when I'm tired and can't be arsed to go anywhere or do anything, life outside of me still persists. Instead of lamenting that, I really do see the beauty in it. The Day of Judgment won't come just yet.
It could always be worse.
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The Wall

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I might be hitting a wall.
This project has helped me so much in learning how to write, develop routines, and instill a sense of stability in my life that I haven't felt in a long time. I am so grateful to those of you who keep coming back to read my work; it's really given me something to look forward to in life. This act of exploring my thoughts and turning them into something helpful or entertaining has given me so much, but it can sometimes feel as if there's something that's not all the way there. More than likely, that feeling is going to exist regardless of whether or not I continue writing, but the act of working through it can be tiresome in its own ways. It's easy to feel like I don't matter or that the value conjured in these entries has an opportunity cost I'm overlooking. It makes me wonder what else I could be doing with my time, but whenever I start to think about it, I get stuck.
Yesterday had some challenges. They weren't anything I haven't dealt with before, but they were felt nonetheless. The day prior, I felt a sort of emptiness after getting back home from trivia. It was a good time and I was glad to see my friends, but I couldn't help but feel like something was missing. Then yesterday morning after writing my entry</a>, there was a certain wave of emotion I started to ride. Some days after writing an entry, I feel accomplished and like I did something valuable, but some days when I write more emotionally charged entries, I still experience a certain degree of angst that persists throughout the day. Around lunchtime, I was eating a bag of chips and my muscles randomly twitched and most of my chips spilled onto the floor. This triggered a meltdown and I was having a tough time getting through it.

Usually in the afternoons, I've started to take a small dose of buspirone and do a session of non-sleep deep rest</a> before heading out to the gym. I was in a heightened state of emotion, so I took my medication and decided to lay down and decompress. This ended up turning into a 3-hour nap. I don't like it when I take those naps during the day because it makes me groggy and tired when I wake up in the evening. Most days, I try to push through it by having another coffee and heading to the gym. Usually I start to feel more awake and alert as I'm driving there, and I typically feel a lot better after my workout. But yesterday, I couldn't make it to the gym and decided to take it easy that evening.
As I'm writing today's entry, I'm still feeling that post-meltdown sadness a bit. I think in this state, it can be hard for me to think and write about more cerebral or interesting ideas, and it can feel like a disservice to my readers because there's a certain obligation I feel to make my writing more entertaining to read. Within my more emotionally charged entries, though, I think the value in them is in keeping a record of each day as it is. There's a certain level of genuineness in that, which to certain people can be valuable. I know that when I read a lot of blogs, many writers have a ton of filters they're writing through. I can sense the blockages in their prose; some sentences feel forced or they talk around a certain idea instead of trying to pierce through it. When I write, I make a distinct effort to be direct and honest when saying what's on my mind. I don't want any room for circumvention. More than that, I want my prose to have a certain rhythm. There's a flow I'm always trying to keep here.
It's an odd balance between writing for self-discovery and writing to be read. Everyone reads for two main reasons, information and/or entertainment</a>. So as a writer, I am trying to encapsulate my words somewhere within this dichotomy. It can be tough to make a diary feel this way, especially when my life is generally quite mundane. If I were some kind of ultra badass who was out doing cool shit, the diary would be more entertaining to read. Most days could feel like a real and true story, but when my life is as mundane as it is, that can be a tough thing to pull off. I don't mean that to self-deprecate, but to be honest about the nature of this work. I think many writers have this idea that they have to warp their ideas or sense of self to please their readers, and for some projects, that can be necessary. But I have a more unique opportunity here: I can give people a genuine way to connect with me, and there don't have to be all these expectations surrounding it like there are with most relationships in life.
I give people the opportunity to come in and observe a life in practice without any expectations. I don't ask you to share my work; I don't ask you to validate it with metrics; I don't track when or how you read my work; I don't explicitly ask for anything in return (though I do keep Bitcoin donations open), and I think the value in that comes from the waves I make in the lives of a small pool of people who don't have to do anything but just check in when they can and see what's going on. A lot of cultural critics have pointed out the decline of social media; all the major platforms have seen less engagement over the last few years. That on top of generally poor public perception has pushed a lot of people into trying to find real connection through the internet, and not any of this data-mining engagement-bait bullshit.

Beyond that, those critics have observed and speculated on the changes in the so-called "Creator Economy." Instead of chasing large followings, creators are leaning more towards building smaller communities of dedicated viewership around their work. Some butthole said something along the lines of "if you want to make a living with your art, all you need are a thousand true fans" or something to that degree. While I've felt a certain inspiration to monetize somehow or try to garner "true fans," I keep circling back to just how stupid that is. There's this weird phenomenon where people romanticize a struggling artist, but then when that artist starts to become commercially successful, people start to see that artist as a disingenuous sellout. Some successful artists have pointed this out in interviews and such, and they'll try to either signal that they're still the same as they were when they were struggling or simply just flat-out say that they don't care what anyone thinks.
When I think of where I stand on this issue, I think there's a certain degree of truth to that weird phenomenon. Intellectual property law exists around the idea that a creator has the right to be compensated for their work. I think that's bullshit. Anyone who actually has respect for artistic expression knows that once you put something out into the world, it's no longer yours. When you give the world that art, you can't get it back. Once it's in someone else's head, you can't just take it out. It's in there and it's going to change the world in some way, no matter how small or insignificant that change may be. And anyone who really understands why they make art knows that they're not doing it to get compensated for it; they're doing it to literally change the world.
So fuck the money, fuck entitlement, and fuck anyone who's in this shit just to make a buck.
I'm changing the world, whether anyone wants me to or not.
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Pilgrim

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, I've been thinking about my past, particularly the crossroads I found myself at when graduating high school. During my senior year, many of my classmates were rampantly applying to dozens of different universities. Many were applying to out-of-state schools that were prestigious and in cities that were culturally more intellectual and liberal. They were looking forward to what the future held and kept their aspirations close. Back then, I was more or less done with it all. I was becoming tired of life at home and was intellectually bored at school. It seemed like things were moving along, but I felt like I was standing still. I had my heart broken a few times, and there were certain aspirations I had that were never realized. I wanted to make the all-state jazz band, but after four years of tirelessly practicing, honing my craft, and auditioning, I fell short. My grades were good, but I fell out of the top ten in class rank, a position I held for most of my time in school.
I begrudgingly went to graduation after some pressure from my brother. I didn't even order the gowns my school wanted us to buy, so I had to rush in an order from some cheap third-party outlet, so I stuck out like a sore thumb. A girl who broke my heart was the salutatorian, and I had a hard time sitting through her speech. The whole ceremony felt forced, and I felt stupid for going. When applying to colleges, I didn't think too much about the process. I applied to two schools: The University of Texas and the University of Arkansas. I knew I didn't want to be too far from home, but far enough to have my own space. I applied to Arkansas because one of my friends was dead set on going, but I knew I wasn't going there because it was a bit too far, and I didn't think I'd receive a good education there. I ended up going to Texas because it was prestigious, cheap, and thought Austin would be a good city to live in.

I ended up getting accepted to both schools; Arkansas let me into their business honors program. Texas let me in too, but I couldn't get accepted into either the business or communications schools, so I had to attend with an undeclared major. Later, I learned this was basically a sentence to the liberal arts program because internally transferring into the other degree programs was too competitive. I decided on Texas because I thought I could take a crack at an internal transfer and experience life in Austin. To make a long story short, I dropped out after two and a half years. Throughout the whole experience, I felt like I didn't belong anywhere. I kept getting rejected from everything—degree programs, student organizations, internship opportunities. As the years kept going on, I felt like I was slipping further and further away from who I wanted to be; I didn't know what I wanted, but I couldn't get anything to begin with.
That attitude from senior year of high school stayed with me for a long time. I became further detached and disillusioned. I lost trust in the systems I spent so long being raised in. Even though I had faith in the system and its processes, it failed me. For a long time, I thought I was incompatible with the world and that I was forever going to be some kind of pilgrim trapped in a perpetual journey to a destination I became convinced wasn't actually there. Looking back on those years, I was wondering what I would've done differently. I don't think I made any major mistakes, but when I think back on what I could've done differently, I don't think I would've changed a thing. The real truth is the best I knew how wasn't enough, and the harsh realities of life aren't compatible with my worldview and sensibilities. I expected too much from the world, and I paid way too much money and wasted too much time learning that lesson.

Even after dealing with psychosis, depression, demons, and the depths of Hell, I still think I expect too much from the world. Despite my disillusionment with systems, I place too much faith in people. I want to believe they're good and they're figuring it out, but I'm starting to believe even that is too much. I was so preoccupied with being understood and understanding the world, I lost sight of what made me enjoy life. I know any enjoyment I get in life isn't going to be given by someone else; it'll come from those moments where I'm alone with God, pouring my heart out because He's the only one who truly listens and understands. Everyone else is too concerned with themselves to give a fuck about me, so I'm tired of trying to garner their acceptance. It doesn't make me upset, and it doesn't make me want to stop loving people, but it does make me want to stop seeking their validation.
What I do for others is never going to be enough, and it doesn't matter who that is. No one will ever be fully pleased with what I do for them, so I'm going to give up pleasing them altogether. Loving someone doesn't necessitate pleasing them. A lot of people are intimidated by my perceptive nature, and I've found that this breeds a lot of resentment in others. I'd try to use my gifts with language to persuade them into seeing the world the way I do, but it's a futile pursuit. No one is ever going to see the world the way I do, and that's okay; I don't need them to. I have a deep capacity for love, but I am not going to make the mistake of misconstruing that for restraint. If some people are going to push me around, I am going to push back. I'm not taking any of this lying down.
I keep thinking that writing here is going to be some kind of salvation, and I need to stop doing that. There's never going to be a day where it all snaps into place. There is no way out. It's just me, sitting here, figuring things out in a way that doesn't cater to someone's standards. Salvation, if it comes, will be found outside these pages.
I'm still that same pilgrim, but my destination feels a bit clearer now.
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Vivid

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today has been slightly annoying. We've been having some problems with our refrigerator, and yesterday, we had a guy come out and "fix" it. He ended up being here for most of the day, but all he did was use one of our credit cards to drive over an hour away to purchase a cleaning tool, charge us for labor, and call it a day. This morning, my parents discovered that the fridge was still broken. So, they disputed the charges to the credit card and called another person to come by and take a look at it. Then my dad found another guy who he thought would be more reputable, and my mom had to cancel the appointment with the other guy at the door. I was outside on the back patio when it happened, but she said he was pissed. The allegedly more reputable guy is working on our fridge right now, but he's saying that it might require either a very expensive repair or a replacement of the whole unit. Some time ago, we had to get the refrigerator repaired for similar reasons, so overall, this is turning into a bit of a fiasco. My mom's been stressing about it all morning because she's worried she won't have cold soda. Understandable.
With this situation going on this morning, I've been held off from writing, which adds to the annoyance. I like to get these entries out in a single sitting without distractions, so all of these distractions this morning haven't been helping with the endeavor. But right now the guy is working on the fridge, and my mom seems like she'll be able to handle communicating with him for the time being, so now I'm here finally getting my thoughts out onto the page for today.
My neuropathy has been getting worse, especially since I figured out I'm not getting my Mounjaro prescription</a>. Without the Mounjaro regulating my blood sugar, I've been contending with more numbness and nerve pain in my appendages. I take a heavy dose of metformin, but this only does a little bit to help. Of course, my worries have been escalating. It's not getting horrible yet. I still generally have sensations in my appendages, but the nerve pain is discomforting.

When I was at the gym yesterday, I spent an hour walking on the treadmill. As my walk progresses, the nerve pain and numbness get worse in my legs and feet. I can manage it alright, and I know that working out is still important for my health. Still, the whole situation has me worried. While I was showering after my workout, I was hit with a wave of sickness. I got lightheaded and nauseous, and since I didn't eat much prior to going to the gym, I dry-heaved at the toilet. After my shower, I had to sit down on a couch for about twenty minutes, but thankfully I ended up feeling better after sitting down.
I don't know if that's related to my diabetes, but I suspect that it is. I also recently started taking buspirone again, so that might have something to do with it too. Generally, I feel fine, but as I monitor the situation, I want to take more efforts to lose weight. Weight loss has been quite the uphill battle, but when I got my Mounjaro prescription, it felt like a true miracle. I was feeling better throughout the day and I was dropping weight like a rock. In the month that I was on it, I lost ten pounds. However, I'm coming to a certain understanding about the whole experience. At first, I began thinking that the prescription would be the only way I was going to lose weight. But in the last few weeks since I've been off it, I haven't gained any weight. In fact, I still lost a few pounds. It wasn't as much as when I was on the medication, but I realized that I have every way to lose the weight without the medication.
More than that, if I don't have the medication, that'll help me keep it off.

At my heaviest, I was about 335 pounds. These days I'm sitting at right around 300 pounds. That weight loss has occurred over the last two years or so. It's not monumental, but progress nonetheless. To reverse my diabetes and sleep apnea, I estimate that I'll need to get somewhere between 200–220 pounds. While 35 pounds down, I've still got about 80 to go—so I'm only about a fourth of the way there. I've been dealing with bouts of increased appetite, and while I'm hungry while writing this entry, I have no desire to eat. Not only do meals give me spikes in nerve pain, but the chance at excess calories is something that I can't chance right now. The fork in the road is abundantly clear, and I've got to make the choice about which path to take yesterday.
While weighing my worries and symptoms, I can't deny that progress has been made. My physical fitness has improved significantly over the last year. I have so much to be thankful for. Since I've been strength training over the last few weeks, I've seen remarkable progress. I'm getting less sore after workouts, and I'm increasing volume with practically every workout. Even though I used to dislike strength training</a>, I've come to enjoy it now. It gives me something to look forward to, which is something I've been lacking for years. Writing, strength training, and going to church have been my saving graces so far. Man, I really am a Zoomer.
Despite the problems I've gone through, life really has been getting better. With how bad it got, I understand with more clarity than ever the importance of taking things one day at a time. I thought I'd never get out of that hole I was in. The depression was debilitating and the mania was traumatizing, but I've felt an attunement that I don't think a lot of other people get to experience. It's as if my brain's min-maxed neuroanatomy has opened me up to emotional and cognitive experiences that many don't get to access. To say it more simply and clichéd, the bipolar really has become a gift. The sensitivity it forces me to perceive the world with has allowed me access to a certain set of vibrations that make things feel so surreal, yet unequivocally vivid.
There's so much more to do.
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Mirror

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been having a few different threads of thought over the last 24 hours or so; lots of theses swirling around in my head. I want to try and combine all of them into a single cohesive piece, as is my writerly instinct. I also decided to bump up the sprint time dedicated to these entries from 30 to 45 minutes, so expect longer pieces to come out in the near future. Overall, I'm satisfied with the output of my entries, but I was getting a bit peeved at how short they were. It seems that my groove is a solid six paragraphs, a few tags, and that's it. While better than nothing, I think I've proven to myself that I've got what it takes to go the distance, so why not go there?
I've been keeping up with didntask's blog</a>, and today's piece was interesting. He talked about a guy who made this long social media post about how his previously promiscuous wife has now become "more pure" after meeting him and marrying him. Ask went on to aptly describe how that was not only theologically incorrect but also generally emasculating and, quite frankly, extremely embarrassing. He also pointed out how a message like that would tell people that promiscuity is permissible, which it really shouldn't be. People are sexual creatures, and we should be okay with expressing ourselves as such, but also understand that blatant promiscuity devalues sex and romance as a whole. In Christianity, marriage is a sacrament, and the process of two people becoming one flesh is a Holy Mystery and is an aspect of the human experience that helps us further deepen our understanding of God.
So while promiscuity shouldn't be promoted, I don't think it's something that needs to be harshly punished. That guy talking about his wife, while being semantically incorrect on the theology of things, was generally just trying to say that his wife learned from her mistakes and that her relationship with him has helped make her a better person. Really, that's a good thing and should be celebrated. Lots of people make mistakes that have lasting consequences throughout their lives, but we shouldn't be defined by those mistakes. From what I've seen, promiscuous women pay for their promiscuity in their own way. It can make them lonely and lose people they care about. Their reputation becomes harmed, but like anyone who makes a mistake, they have the chance to learn from it and move on.

Personally, I don't want to shame a woman for being promiscuous, particularly if she's a young woman who doesn't quite understand her place in the world yet. A lot of women convince themselves that objectification can be a route to certain freedoms, and this doesn't help when everyone judges them primarily based on their appearance. A woman can be fully grown but still treated like a teenager well into her adulthood. The ones who are smart enough to see through that grow from it, but there are many who never do and become developmentally stagnated. They can become entitled and expect the world to bend at their feet just because she worked out and got her hair done. For everyone, though, looks will fade, and the only thing that truly remains are the personality and relationships. If those aren't fully there, the whole house of cards topples.
I don't want to claim that I understand women here, because I don't and I can't. I have no idea what it's like to be a woman, and all I can do is speculate. However, I spend a lot of time interacting with women, and so I try my best to see them as who they are. Despite that, I still struggle with it. I've never really had a long romantic relationship with a woman. I don't know what it's like to live with them in that context. When I have dated women, I've found that there's something they want from me that I don't think I have. When I try to get closer with a woman I'm dating, there's something about how I present myself that pushes them away. Sometimes, I'll be too vulnerable. Other times, I'll be too cagey and not really take command how I should. Well, at least that's what I think happened, anyway. Love is a complicated thing, and I've been hurt a lot.

Getting married and having kids sounds like a promising thing, but as I've gotten older, I've lost the expectation that it's going to happen. That isn't to say I've lost hope in it, but I also understand that love isn't an achievable goal. For most pursuits in life, one can set goals, make a plan, and take action to achieve them. Love doesn't work that way; it's a measure of compatibility and requires the more tender parts of our spirit. There's a worry I have that there's something in me that's fundamentally incompatible with most women. I can't say that for sure, because there might be someone who comes into my life that disproves that. Until then, I'll just have to sit with that tension and maybe focus on other things for a while.
That's a perfectly fine thing for me to do, anyway. What I've learned from the past pains of a broken heart is that I don't have to settle for the first girl who tells me she loves me. I can have standards. I don't have to seek her validation, and can instead try to be alongside her in the best capacity I know how. If that's fundamentally incompatible, then so be it. I have enough self-respect to be who I am without needing to accommodate for others. There's nothing I owe to anyone. Love doesn't keep score or curry favor, and I don't want to love someone under false conditions. My life is mine and mine alone; no one else lives it but me. I do hope that if the time comes for me to love someone again, that I'll work past my fear and take that first step.
Men, especially younger men, love to bemoan how disaffected men are these days. They'll tout on about how they're economically doomed and their place in the world has been taken from them. We're the middle children of history, as Tyler Durden put it. However, I don't feel dejected in any way. That economic pain affects all of us, and it's not that our place in the world has been taken, but that we all have the capability to become whoever we wish to be. I think that capability scares most men shitless. It scares me shitless.
When I can be anyone, how can I know who that guy is staring at me in the mirror?
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The Pursuit

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last night, I was reminded of this clip</a> from Slavoj Žižek where he discusses the futility of happiness. To summarize, he says that happiness is an "unethical category" because people think they want it but are actually more driven to objects of desire and longing. More than that, when people are in moments of inspiration, they do not find happiness there; usually, they are willing to suffer for the sake of actualizing that inspiration. He brought up America's Declaration of Independence and how happiness itself wasn't the right the Founding Fathers were proclaiming, but rather the pursuit of it. It makes me wonder if happiness is that "unethical category" Žižek proclaims it is.
Really, I find ethics in general to be a useless concept. Underneath any ethical argument is some kind of dogma, and ethics are really only applicable under some kind of authoritative force. Without that force, ethical arguments don't really stack up to anything. In the context of happiness, then, it seems that you really are damned if you do and damned if you don't. If someone tries to assert "YOU WILL BE HAPPY," then happiness can't really be found because it won't always be aligned with your personal desires. Conversely, if someone says "YOU WILL NEVER BE HAPPY," and if they have the authority to make that happen, then you're also categorically screwed.

Initially, Žižek's argument seems compelling, but the argument becomes harder to accept once you realize what he's doing rhetorically. By saying that happiness itself isn't virtuous (that "unethical category"), he allows himself to make the argument for the converse, which is that the opposite of happiness—that is, suffering—is what is actually virtuous. I've had a bad habit over the course of my life of using this as an unhealthy rationalization. I would often tell myself, consciously or otherwise, that in order for anything good to come out of my life, I had to suffer for it. Suffering has the ability to produce good outcomes. This is evident in the cliché "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But where it gets messy is believing that suffering is the only way to produce good outcomes.
Suffering can produce good outcomes, but it can also produce bad ones. Many people are socially maladjusted due to certain trauma, which in turn affects their ability to maintain good relationships, which inevitably causes more suffering. In the same light, happiness can produce bad outcomes just as much as it can produce good ones. To that effect, it is more categorically ethical to live a life that allows for suffering and happiness to coexist in some kind of way. If you put yourself in this all-or-nothing, one-or-the-other kind of attitude, that causes negativity to ripple through the lives of those around you.

Enough amateur philosophizing, though. I feel that the thesis of the original aforementioned video title—"Why be happy when you can be interesting?"—is achieved not outside of happiness, but through the intricate combinations of emotions we encounter every day. I know that for me, especially after I sobered up from drugs, my emotional registers have been heightened. Whether I like it or not, I experience plenty of emotions that I don't enjoy. However, I know that those emotions have their place just as much as the ones I do enjoy. All of them, interwoven together, consummate my perceptions and experiences in a way that I try to use to help me live with myself in a way that I can accept.
And that, to me, is the most important thing: whatever effect I have on the world is going to happen regardless of what I do, but if I can't accept myself and live in my own skin, then I will only suffer. What I've found is that suffering and happiness are both facts of life, and instead of trying to sacrifice one for the other, I really can let them both exist as simultaneous and mutually exclusive truths. As I've come to integrate this into my daily life, I've found that it makes the bad times more bearable and helps me further appreciate the good ones.
If it doesn't kill me, it'll at least give me a story to tell.
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Burnout Phase

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Divine Liturgy was great today, thanks for asking.
I had a really good thought while I was out on my patio earlier, and I wanted to make it the central theme of today's entry, but when I sat down at my computer to start writing, it just completely vanished from my memory. My work short-term memory is like a game of Russian roulette: sometimes I get it, but there are plenty of times where I shoot blanks. Oh well, c'est la vie.
My church attendance has been sporadic, but I'm glad to be going at all. The last few times I've been, though, I usually head out whenever it's time to take the Eucharist (still not even a catechumen yet!) and haven't been going to the lunch hour or classes. I've been wanting to speak with a priest and get my catechesis started, but I've been hesitant to do so because of social anxiety and because I have a hard time asking for things. I generally don't like being put in a position where I have to seek something from someone else, whether it be for help or even for strictly transactional reasons. I had a streak of hyper-independence when I was younger, and I'm still trying to mend some of those old wounds.

Regardless, Divine Liturgy was good today. It's Great Lent, and our bishop gave a homily on the passage from the Book of Mark where Jesus casts out the mute demon in a young man after his father cried out to mend his own unbelief. After Jesus cast out the demon, the people around Him asked how it was supposed to be cast out, and He said that it could have only been done through prayer and fasting. The bishop, while giving his homily, expressed the importance of the inclusion of the word “fasting” in that passage due to how common it is for other denominations to exclude it in their respective biblical translations. The core message was that fasting is an essential discipline required for spiritual battles that faith alone cannot always win.
I haven't been observing any of the fasts during Great Lent, particularly because of my already inconsistent attendance of services. Often, I feel that when I want to do something, I've got to either go all the way or don't bother. As I've gotten older and faced my particular life challenges, I've come to understand that this dichotomous thinking isn't sustainable. While it's important to give undertakings your best effort, it's even more important to be aware of what that best effort should look like. For me, I have an additional bad habit of setting myself to unrealistic standards, and so when I encounter inevitable bumps in the road, I would usually prescribe that as a personal failing. The shame that created would grow over time and sometimes led to resentment—usually of the thing I was pursuing or other people that were part of it in some way. From there, I would burn out and give up altogether, making the aspiration of that month erode like dust.

As I've matured, I've come to a better understanding of what my best effort should look like. I can still be ambitious and creative with my ideas, but nowadays I try to think an idea through past the one-month line. I try to ask myself questions like, “Is this something I see myself still doing next year? What kinds of efforts would make that possible?” I've found that this often filters out a lot of my shitty ideas. I used to annoy a lot of my friends with my ambitious schemes, and one of them would say, “Oh, looks like Noahie's having another phase!” after I explained how I was totally gonna be the world's greatest psychedelic brain surgeon.
I probably should try to keep some kind of fast during Great Lent, even if I can't hold the full yoke of it. If I get a chance to speak with a priest soon, I'd like to ask for some kind of advice. I still feel like I'm barely maintaining the bare minimum regarding my works of faith. I know that's not a unique position to have, so in that sense I feel emboldened to keep pursuing what I can further.
After all, faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain.
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Affording It

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tensions are running a bit high today. Over the last few weeks, I had been waiting on my Mounjaro prescription to get filled. At first, I thought that it was an oversight on my doctor and that they hadn't renewed it. I tried calling their office, sending refill requests electronically, but couldn't get anywhere. My pharmacy has an automated phone system that tells me when my prescriptions are ready, and it's been the same "There are no refills remaining" message every time I check. I suspected that it had something to do with my insurance, and I was right. I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for my mom and asked the tech what was going on with my order. He informed me that my insurance company only covers one prescription—a month's supply—every six months. How does that possibly make sense? I pay decent money in insurance premiums and have what the idiot who sold it to me said was the "best plan," but apparently even their best doesn't cover it. So not only do I have to pay these jacked-up premiums, but they don't even cover my medication.
Needless to say, this whole debacle has me thrown up a wall this morning. I've been having to navigate this broken medical system essentially by myself for years, and at seemingly every turn, there's less and less to help me. I try doing research, being patient, and following my doctors' advice, but even when I do everything that I'm supposed to do, the system still fails me. I know I'm not alone in facing this problem; most people I talk to express similar grievances, but none of us seem to have a foothold on what to do about it. Every conversation ends with some petty aphorism about the world being fucked up, and that's usually it. Since discovering this information this morning, it's made me go down a negative rabbit hole.

It makes me think about how life would be if I were more independent. If I were somehow able to hold down a job, what would I even be doing? People don't want to solve problems or get anything done. All they want to do is talk shit, bicker, and fight for resources and status. The symbolic order of things is so ineffably warped that it doesn't make anything feel worth pursuing because, ultimately, it leads to that thing we pursue giving us nothing back in return. If my life has value on the condition that I buy things all the time, what's the point in producing anything meaningful? I feel like I'm running around in circles trying to wrap my head around the essence of these problems. I know that I have to hold myself accountable for my own issues, but when it feels like the whole world doesn't operate on that principle, the whole question of whether it's my problem or their problem becomes moot.
This is just one of many peddling frustrations that happen in life. There will be more, but I have my doubts as to whether I can handle it. The wisdom that keeps me going is that God provides and that He doesn't give us more than we can handle. Last night, I was thinking about the notion of "saving for retirement." When I was younger, the idea was that I'd have to save money and let it grow so that when I got older and couldn't work, I could still live comfortably. Unfortunately, I hit that wall a lot quicker than I thought I would. The way I see it, there is no retirement to save for anymore. More than that, I came to the conclusion that, based on the aforementioned guiding wisdom, if I can't afford it, I don't need it.
If I can't afford it, I don't need it.

What about a place to stay? Or food? Or whatever else? If there comes a point in my life where I can't afford those things, I will either rely on the generosity of others or sleep on the streets and starve. I don't have any regard for financial stability or personal security; if God decides that I need something, He'll give it to me. I don't need to rely on these flawed man-made monstrosities to keep living my life. They clearly don't give a fuck about me, but I know that God loves me in a way that's far beyond my meager understanding. I know that through whatever crucibles come next, I can rest assured that it is all part of a good and perfect plan. Even if it doesn't feel that way in the moment or if I perceive some kind of impending doom in the near future, I know that my judgment—when stacked against God's judgment—is fundamentally flawed in some way. So with that, who gives a shit if I don't have a medication or a gym membership or a nice computer? If I don't need it, God won't give it to me. If He takes something away, I know with absolute certainty that it's in my best interest, even if I can't see beyond the moment.
I'm sick of conforming to the world's standards.
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Interactive Entertainment

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes in between writing these entries, a certain set of thoughts will come about. I'll think through the ideas and say to myself, "That would make a good Cogito entry," but then I'll end up sitting on the thought for a few days because I inevitably end up writing about something else. Eventually, I'll look back on the thought and gather that it's not worth writing about, and discard it altogether. There's something to be said about my thought curation process; a lot of it involves going through memories or conversations that I have with people and forming some kind of thesis on it. It's as if I've put myself in this sort of corner where I have to write about something in order to fully "finish it" as a thought. I don't think that's entirely true, especially considering the sheer volume of things that I think about.
On my mind recently: there were a few Discord servers I was in. They were 4chan-adjacent servers. The people in them would get there through invites posted on the site, and they always tended to attract people of a certain chronically online milieu. These days, this describes most people. However, what I've found is that in those particular communities, there's a certain ethos that dictates interaction as entertainment. Most people weren't there to be themselves or find any kind of meaningful connection; they were there so they could dissociate from their lives and engage in a sort of postmodern theater. Everyone was aware of their performance but didn't want to confront it as such. Those people weren't interested in sharing interests or ideas. All they wanted to do was exploit the eccentricities of others.

I had been engaging in those communities for years. Pretty much ever since I left my last job around early 2024, I got pulled into this strange and precarious world. People wanted to be seen but not known. At first, my interest in joining these communities was a blend of curiosity and a desire for connection. I'd been browsing sites like 4chan and other imageboards for over a decade, and when I joined those communities, I felt a need to find like-minded people in a similar position. Many in those communities were unemployed or disabled, but many others were regular working-class people. As I ingratiated myself, I found there was a certain sad reality to many of them I found fascinating, albeit strange.
The sadness came from seeing just how chronically online these people were. They would be on calls throughout the entire day, constantly switching between sending messages and scrolling through social media. For many, it felt as if there wasn't a single moment they weren't connected to some sort of device. Because of this, I could see some of the most intimate aspects of their lives being consumed for entertainment. I'd see people get into domestic disputes, do drugs, and even have interactions with the police. It was something that, despite making me feel uncomfortable, I kept coming back to. Discord, like all the other social tech platforms, stays in business by keeping people glued to their application for as long as possible. Despite my own issues with social media addiction and quitting many of the major platforms, I found myself just as entrenched.

My thinking was that as long as it wasn't an infinite feed of algorithm-generated content, I was safe. I felt that because I could have conversations with people, there was a certain value there that platforms like Xitter or Instagram couldn't give me. In some aspects, I think that's fair. I really did get into some good and meaningful conversations with people. Despite the weird parasocial nature, I did receive some genuinely fruitful insights from a cast of unlikely people. Those moments kept me there for as long as they did, but I've found that the signal-to-noise ratio couldn't justify those increasingly scant good moments. I wanted to make friends, but those platforms don't optimize for it.
I was in a small handful of these servers, and earlier this morning I made the decision to leave all of them so I could get some time back. I don't want to use people for entertainment. Even if I have that good intention, that's inevitably what happens. It's the way the wave moves. What's more important is that I clear this cache so I can achieve a more refined thought curation process. In those communities, the only thoughts I got were social media slop discourse and weirdly intimate psychoanalyses of people I can't really ever know. I hope to fill that gap with something more substantive, but when the main way to live is online, is that really where I want to keep pulling from?
I've tried thinking of what else there could be. There are options, of course. Getting out in the world, doing real activities with real people—all of that sounds great, but something makes me feel like it wouldn't be any better.
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Water Delivery

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My dreams have been going crazy lately. I find myself in these periods about every few weeks where my dreams will be particularly vivid and memorable. More than likely, this is because my body is finally catching up on the sleep debt that it accrues over the course of a few weeks, and I am able to get some kind of decent rest. Otherwise, I would literally be dead. For someone who has strong dreams and really enjoys literary things, I've never been too keen on dream analysis or anything of that sort. I think this is because I have a fundamentally different metaphysics compared to your everyday Jungian psychoanalyst. Whereas they would ascribe dreams as a sort of manifestation of the subconscious—that is, what you're really thinking—I personally believe that dreams are simply another layer of reality itself. Of course, the rules in that reality differ from those here. Regardless, my dreams are so vivid that I simply refuse to believe that they are anything but real.
Last night, I had a particularly memorable dream. I was laying in bed asleep, but thoughts were circulating through my head about supposed plans to hang out that I had made—with guys I went to middle school with. There was this feeling in my mind and in my body that I was younger than I am now, as if I almost transported back in time to when I was that age. However, I was in the house that I am currently living in, and not the one I was living in when I was that age. It was the middle of the night, and it was pouring down rain; it was one of the heaviest downpours of rain I had ever seen. I could hear the rain pattering on my window. Suddenly, I saw that those guys I made plans with had opened the window next to me from the outside, and they were trying to coax me into hanging out with them.

In the next moment, though, they were nowhere to be seen. I heard a loud knocking on the front door of my house. I woke up, still feeling rather languid, and walked out of my room to the front door. As I walked to it, I saw that it was already completely open. Weirder still, there was a group of people bringing in cases of bottled water—in the pouring rain. They looked like they were in a hurry, too. Then one of them approached me; she was an elderly Black woman and looked like she had just gotten out of church. She told me that she needed help getting this water delivered to everyone in the neighborhood. Despite dreading the idea of going out into the pouring rain, I eventually assuaged because of pressure from my parents who were witnessing this strange delivery take fold.
From there I donned a hi-vis vest, took some cases out of the trunk of a car, and went to work—delivering cases of bottled water—in the pouring rain. The only delivery I remember making was one where I knocked on the front door of someone's house, and they opened it. I tried explaining to them that I was there delivering water for them, but they acted shocked. "Why the hell are you delivering water right now? It's like five in the morning and it's fucking pouring rain," the woman at the front door said. For some reason, I felt indignant toward her remark, even though I knew the situation was totally absurd. We ended up exchanging a few verbal blows, but then I ended up walking off. Suddenly, I saw one of my coworkers walk up next to me; it was one of my old middle school friends. "Man, this job sucks," he said. "You know what's even worse?" I asked him back. "I'm not even getting paid for this shit. They just conscripted me from my house. You know we can just leave, right?" My friend's eyes started widening. "Yeah, you're right. Let's get out of here," he replied. Then we threw off our vests and ran off into the neighborhood to play in the rain.

All in all, I do see some Jungian layers at play in that dream. Right off the bat, the irony of delivering bottled water in pouring rain screams in a way that only I could muster. Still, I'm not entirely sure what my bottled water or pouring rain is. It could be the writing that I do here, or some other extraneous thing I'm trying to give people that I'm not aware of. I don't think there's much use in trying to tie some kind of thematic bow onto it, but the fact that I can recall the dream almost scene-by-scene hours after waking up is profound. I can do this with dozens of dreams that I've had, but I don't know how unique that ability is. My dreaming capabilities strengthened massively after I quit my daily weed habit, and ever since then over the last several years, I dream more than ever.
That itself is the real indicator.
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Guardian Angel

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I got sick again and slept all day. Thankfully, I woke up this morning feeling a bit better, but I still don't feel the best. When I have these periods of sickness and I sleep for most of the day, I typically experience several strong lucid dreams. I don't really like experiencing these because, due to my sleep apnea, I typically find myself aware of when I'm suffocating in my sleep. I can feel how strained my breathing is, and it makes me panic a bit. I've become so used to the fractured sleep that it's just a baseline I've come to accept. But during these lucid dreams, it makes that quality of sleep apparent in such a way that feels unsettling.
A few days ago, I looked into how Orthodox Christians believe in guardian angels. They believe that everyone has one and that we should pray to them so they can help us in our lives. As a lucid dreamer, I've faced several encounters with what I believe to be spirits in my dreams. On Sunday afternoon, I took a long afternoon nap. Typically, when I take an afternoon nap, I have the strongest lucid dreams. When I take these naps, I often recognize that I'm dreaming right away, and so in many cases I have the chance to essentially conjure up a dream environment. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I remember my eyes were closed during the nap, and I knew that I was dreaming. I looked up and I asked my guardian angel to reveal themselves to me. Suddenly, I found myself flying and descending onto a planet that looked to be on fire. As I was flying through the sky of this planet, I saw below me an androgynous cartoon child with blue hair and a light green gown flying below me. We locked eyes for a moment, and then it ascended past me. While it was flying past me, it turned into the Pokémon Bulbasaur, gave me a wink, and flew off. I was expecting something you'd find in a Renaissance painting, but instead I found cartoons. Lovely.
The whole experience was remarkable, albeit somewhat disappointing. It left me with more questions than answers, that's for sure. The main question I have is this: was that really it? In many of my dreams, I am visited by spiritual beings, and most of those beings are not kind or come with good intentions. I know that I am predisposed to a certain degree of spiritual delusion from these dreams, but these kinds of encounters aren't something I can simply just explain away rationally. I was where I was. I saw what I saw. I do believe that spiritual beings can manifest many different physical forms, particularly ones that they feel would be most effective in communicating with humans. So then why a cartoon child and a Pokémon? My immediate instinct is to say that I'm full of shit and that it was all some kind of weird fabrication, but even then, why that one?
A lot of people these days are annoyingly confined to earthly things. Many people discuss how important it is to have a family or keep money stacked in the bank for when you fall on hard times. But for me, with the things I've seen, I couldn't care less about any of that stuff. I feel almost too far gone, in a sense. It's as if I've seen things that won't let me go back to "normal" lines of thinking because of all the supernatural implications of everything floating around us. In a practical sense, it can sometimes manifest as paranoia, which is an unhealthy thing. But on a day-to-day and even moment-to-moment basis, it feels more like a constant sort of derealization that I can't fully explain or describe. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Despite that, it's still something that I have to live with, by myself, day in and day out, regardless of who understands. There's a certain degree of loneliness there at times, but I know that loneliness is the last thing I should be feeling. These spirits who have revealed themselves to me—they float around the air like water. We're constantly enmeshed in a sea of them at all times, and even though I'm one of few who can notice them, it doesn't mean they're not there. I know that even if I can't fundamentally prove their existence to others, I can still find some level of solace in their company.
Through writing today's entry, I feel like I might be coming off as a bit crazy. When talking about stuff like this, though, there's not really any good way to sound sane. However, I've found that through encountering these phenomena, the main thing I can do is foster a greater sense of faith in Christ, who reigns above all of these lesser spirits who reveal themselves to me. Regardless of their intentions, I know that I can always call to Him for protection, and He will provide. In that sense, I feel that I have become uniquely qualified as a witness to a life that examines this world we can't see.
Any other worldly ambition palls in comparison to it.
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Strength Training

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week has been marked particularly by fatigue. While not out of the ordinary for me, it's always frustrating to run into my own limitations. I was only able to hit the gym twice this week, on Thursday and Friday. I'm still feeling sore from my strength training on Thursday, which I'll take as a good sign. I recently started implementing strength training in my workout routine. Prior to that, I only did zone 2 cardio on the treadmill, which typically consisted of 45–60 minutes of walking. The walks themselves have gotten a lot easier, even though I still break quite a sweat and feel some pain in my feet after a while. I realized that in order to get a better base of physical fitness, strength training had to come into the picture.
For a long time, I felt reticent to include it. It's always been a frustrating thing for me. Back when I was on my middle school's football team, we would do strength workouts with free weights during the off-season. We would hit different exercises in groups of four: bench press, squat, power cleans, and other basic movements. Of course, when fifty fourteen-year-old boys are all in the same room working out, there was machismo peacocking around every corner. There were boys who could squat over four hundred pounds, and others who could barely bench press the 45-pound bar. Back then, I was around slightly below the median of this wide spectrum of physical strength. Throughout my K–12 schooling, I never prided myself on my fitness. I was uncoordinated, clumsy, and a bit chubby. My masculine-eyed way of compensating for that was by being studious and clever, but in the football program, that didn't count for much.

There was this one boy I remember from back then. He was in my small group when we'd hit the free weights. When we'd work out, he would always try to motivate the rest of our group to lift heavier. His intentions were benevolent, and he tried his best to be encouraging when making those efforts. However, I'd have to push back his encouragement because it was clear that his efforts could have led to one of us getting injured. I would try to tell him this, saying that "we need to be safe," but he found that to be a ridiculous excuse. Ultimately, he acquiesced and didn't push the issue further, which I remember appreciating back then. I hope he's doing well these days.
Those adolescent experiences were formative in how I saw strength training. For years, I found most of it to be flashy, overcompensating, and at times masturbatory. As I've gone through my experience becoming a frequent gym-goer, my perspective has matured quite a bit. Gyms can often be places of vanity; all the mirrors and people recording their workouts for social media make this an annoying facet of it. But after building my own habit over the course of almost a year, I've observed the people who go and the ones who keep coming back. What I've found is people of all ages, sexes, ethnicities, and creeds all cohabiting the same space with a key objective in mind: physical and mental wellness. For many of these people, the gym is an important part of their self-care routine. Regardless of skill level, most generally have the same attitude—maintenance, gradual improvement, and mental replenishment. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Going to the gym has really helped me let go of my pride in that respect. More than that, it has helped me take that look in the mirror and not see vanity as the only option; there's a real opportunity to be honest with myself, and I try to make that effort every time I go. My skill level, especially for a man my age, is particularly low. Really, I often see myself on par with guys twice or three times my age, which really puts things into perspective for me. However, I've found that the environment my gym provides helps make certain aspects of training I felt insecure about more approachable. For my strength training, I do a 30-minute full-body workout twice a week—three sets of twelve reps on four or five machines. The weights I lift on those machines are embarrassingly low, but I know that the real victory comes from lifting any weight at all. Even further, the real victory is in getting in my car, making the drive, and showing up.
I hope that as I continue making progress with my physical health, I can see more opportunities open up. I've already felt better able to do things in everyday life, and I know that as I keep making progress, I'll see the results compound over time. In these ten months or so that I've committed to this practice, I've been a bit disappointed in the slowness of the progress. It makes me feel a certain sense of grief over what I lost, particularly compared to my fitness in my early twenties. Despite that grief, I know that I have the chance to achieve levels of fitness beyond what they used to be even back then. It might take several years, but the journey in getting there will be sure to bear plenty of fruit on its own.
One foot in front of the other, day in and day out.
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Museums

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today's entry is dedicated to this month's IndieWeb Carnival</a>, a project where independent websites write monthly blog posts dedicated to a certain theme. This month's theme, hosted by James G.</a>, is Museum Memories.
When I think about museums, the first thing that comes to mind is all of the field trips I took to the DMA</a> from elementary school to high school. The DMA is a great museum, and while it doesn't fully chalk up to big museum cities like NYC, Boston, or wherever else, it's got a good foothold in the art world. It's a relatively large museum with six floors (if I remember right) and tons of different galleries. There are always unique galleries being rotated throughout the year too, and overall it's a good place to spend a quiet day. I remember as a kid, my friends and I would walk through the museum mostly with an irreverent attitude. We'd poke fun at the paintings and sculptures of naked people, make a ruckus in the galleries, and generally use the space not to appreciate art, but just to shoot the shit and hang out.

I've never had a great affinity for visual art. I typically think in words, not pictures. When thinking of images in my head, all I can really get most of the time are rough lines and no colors. There's a good sense of space when I try to conjure an image, but the substance itself is harder to muster and requires deep concentration just to produce an overall rough estimation. I think that, visually, my mind would be more attuned to an engineer and less of a visual artist. Geometries are pretty easy to conceptualize, but color, shading, and details? Forget about it.
However, I can appreciate what I deem to be "good" art. From a visual perspective, I've come to understand that technical skill is important to have, but doesn't make art "good." That's a much more complicated judgment and is subjective in a sometimes infuriating way. I say this because of the old cliché "everyone's a critic." Making art can be a difficult process that requires a deep and complicated mix of craft, discipline, and intuition. Criticizing art takes substantially less effort; in the digital world we live in today, most seem unable to resist the urge to give their take, cold or tepid. The art of criticism is one that I find more interesting because I write and is more suited to my personal skill set. However, I am usually too fatigued from the constant overload of discourse that surrounds most art.
So when I think of spending time in museums as an adult, I try not to see the art from a critical eye, and instead I try to let the curators edify me in some way. I've gone to the DMA by myself a few times as an adult, and it usually makes for a peaceful and interesting day. Instead of an attitude of irreverence, I would say I feel a certain sense of equanimity when I check out the galleries. I spend my time reading all the placards on each piece of art and try to immerse myself in the history of a certain piece or period. Sometimes there will be staff present in the gallery, and I'll strike up a conversation with them about the art and their thoughts on it. Overall, it's a low-stakes way to get out of the house and enjoy a day out, barring irritation from traffic on the highway and outrageous parking fees.

Back in 2023, a few close friends and I set out on a road trip to West Texas and New Mexico. We went to places like Prada Marfa</a>, the Roswell UFO Museum</a>, and Canyon Road</a> in Santa Fe. One of my more high-minded friends planned that trip, and I was thankful that he made a good itinerary for us. Looking back, it was a culturally immersive experience. We saw a lot and really did get to see some cool and interesting stuff. Of course, there was still a slight attitude of irreverence, but throughout the trip, there were also many thoughtful and insightful moments. I hope that we'll be able to do another trip like that soon.
Overall, I think that museums have become a more humble institution despite their aristocratic beginnings. These days, good art is accessible to everyone, and I think that's important. The influence it has had on my life is vast, and these days, it's one of the things I most look forward to in life. Whether it be making my art here on my website, or going out into the world and seeing what art is out there, I know that it has a deep and meaningful impact on my life and who I am.
More than anything, it reminds me every day that I'm human.
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Retardmaxxing

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a good day so far, and for that I'm thankful. I would say that I've been focused on that constant internal dialogue on a deeper level lately. I think about my personal circumstances and the circumstances of the world around me, and I feel as if I'm making slow but meaningful progress in the way of improving my relationship with my environment. Over the last year or two, I've been interested in the retardmaxxing movement. Originally started by Elisha Long</a>, the movement is adjacent to manosphere</a> content but tries to cut through criticisms of it by engaging in a sort of post-ironic sincerity that speaks mostly to young men in the West.
Retardmaxxing is one of many different "maxxing" practices. As a suffix, "maxxing" derives from old pick-up artist and incel forums that espoused the idea of "looksmaxxing," which is the prevalent idea that one can maximize achievement in all areas of life through intense focus and attention on their physical appearance. These practices range from rudimentary self-care to downright harmful ingestion of substances and hormones, or undergoing intense plastic surgery. To the looksmaxxer, anything that they can do to improve their appearance is worth the potential drawbacks of any dangerous or harmful behavior. This is because, to them, they can only have a fair shot at life if people perceive them as attractive.

Looksmaxxing has received a lot of media attention and discourse over the last few years, and with that has come an overall negative impression of manosphere culture in general. However, retardmaxxing attempts to "chew up the black pills and spit out white pills," to use the colloquial terminology. Essentially, retardmaxxing as a movement attempts to take certain "unfortunate realities" that manosphere culture perpetuates and turn them into something actionable and productive for young men. Retardmaxxing can axiomatically be described as "don't overthink." A lot of young men, like most people in general, are constantly inundated with ideas of who they should be and what they should think. These ideas come from advertising, social media, and film and television. A retardmaxxer would say to take all of these influences, throw them out the window, and focus on what's right in front of you so that you can attune yourself to who you actually wish to be.
Of course, this movement does come with certain preconceived ideas already due to its derivation from manosphere culture. It's why the movement is called "retardmaxxing," which takes a subversive slur and tries to reframe what it actually means so that it can buy social capital and get credibility from the young men it targets. As a younger guy myself (not even 30 yet!), I understand why the reframing is appealing. As a teenager and young adult, using certain slurs was a key way to create in-groups. The subversive language was an effective way of gatekeeping certain people, and this was done mostly because we felt disenfranchised ourselves. With the rise of movements like third-wave feminism and post-structuralism, many young men have felt culturally cornered due to certain assumptions made by people from those separate movements.
Particularly, the idea of a patriarchal society—particularly the idea that all or most men are distinct benefactors of this ideological system. What I see, however, is that while society is patriarchal, its benefactors are mostly those in more powerful economic positions. Those men who hold that economic power have historically upheld ideas of patriarchy and have benefited from the in-groups that it facilitates. However, most men do not hold that same degree of economic power and, to certain extents, have similar levels of disenfranchisement as women or certain minority groups. Most men die in wars, receive substandard healthcare, work dangerous jobs, and receive little to no emotional support. That's why manosphere movements have been so culturally impactful; they provide a "way out" for those disenfranchised men. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Despite this appeal, I still think that movements like retardmaxxing don't effectively speak to the struggles of men in general. Reframing subversion doesn't suddenly make certain things non-subversive. I think that if we really wanted to speak to men's issues, we need to look not at individual psychology in and of itself, but at how that psychology affects relationships and overall social structures. With men receiving little emotional support, I think it's important that we look to how men treat each other before pointing fingers at other demographics. I know that in my life, most of the men I know are emotionally repressed and don't feel comfortable properly expressing their thoughts and feelings. In turn, I've seen the quality of certain relationships greatly diminish for reasons that, at least to me, seem totally preventable.
Most men claim to have little to no close friends. I've been fortunate enough to have many close friends throughout my life. While those relationships don't always last, I can confidently say that their impact does. The male friends that I've had made me the man I am today, and I will be forever grateful for the good men in my life who have helped me through my darkest and brightest moments. My hope is that I can take what I've learned and how I act, and make a better template for men in the future. I know that ultimately, we are all loved more than we could ever know, and I think it's important to use that love to make ourselves better each and every day.
You matter. Keep going.
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Comfort

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have this fear of a growing complacency among more peaceful days in my life. Things have been going well, and for some reason that makes me suspicious. I might be inadvertently preparing for something bad to happen, but honestly, I think I might be setting up some kind of self-sabotage in my head. In another piece I have since deleted, I espoused the idea that people don't actually want to be happy; they want to be comfortable. Truthfully, everyone has the ability to always get what they want. It's one of humanity's most persistent features. However, we seem to have this misconception that we aim for happiness as our primary objective in life. But really, everything we do aims for receiving and perpetuating comfort.
This might seem odd to some people because they might think to themselves, "well, I don't always get what I want." To that I would ask them: do you really know what you want? What I suspect is there might be some things they want and don't get, but there are other wants taking precedence. I know that I've faced this before; in my life, I always thought my ambitions were most important to me. However, I've come to realize that all I cared about was being safe and having fun. My ambitions were never set to fulfill my expectations, but those of others. I felt that if I had this or that credential or job, I would receive the social capital and security to do what I really wanted, which was to be safe and have fun.

Ultimately, I understand now I was always pursuing that initial desire, even if I thought I was doing things out of ambition. I did well in school, performed well at work, and tried to be genuine to others. I did those things not to secure some kind of ambitious future, but to feel a sense of safety and entertainment in the present. I studied in school not to do well on the tests, but because I enjoyed the process of studying and learning. Work wasn't something I did to make money primarily, but to feel needed and respected in places where I felt like I wasn't getting it. When I was in college trying to figure my way around more ambitious career paths, I ended up having to confront my ambitions in ways that I previously never had. I couldn't get into prestigious degree programs or student organizations, and for a long time I blamed myself for that.
But then I realized I couldn't get into those programs not out of a lack of skill or merit, but because I didn't have my ambitions as my primary focus in life. That's when I ultimately realized I never went to college out of my own desire to do so, but because I thought it was expected of me. I fell for the myth that the only path to a fulfilling life was through some kind of higher education and access to certain job markets. As I went through school, I realized I didn't want anything to do with it. Honestly, I felt like Holden Caulfield most of the time at school; all my classmates and professors were collectively participating in this elaborate and petty lie. Unlike Holden, I didn't feel like I was the only one who saw through it. The people at my university were smart enough to see through it too, but it genuinely upset me that they kept pushing forward anyway. My denial grew to really eat at me and made me feel sick to even be there.

I just wanted to be in a place that felt real, like people were doing something that actually mattered. That's when I became a bike messenger and a bartender. I wanted to feel like I mattered and that the people around me weren't being fake all the time. I dove headfirst into work and dropped out of college, and for the first time in years, I felt like things actually mattered. Looking back on it now, I might've found something else if I stuck with school. I could've found a certain level of fulfillment in a job that required a college education, but I was too disillusioned to even proceed forward. Knowing what I know now, I don't think I would've made an effort to finish school; I never would've gone.
The only thing I wish I would've known back then were all the lies surrounding it.
I feel fine where I am now. I've always believed everything happens for a reason and that the universe is unfolding just as it should. I have no regrets about what I've done in life, and am optimistic for the future. I know now I can prioritize a life where I feel safe and try to not take things so seriously. I can look up at the birds in the air and see that they don't sow or reap and know that the Lord provides for them in the same way He does for me. I know that no matter what happens, I have something greater to look forward to in this life and the next.
And that gives me comfort.
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Post-Irony

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Just before starting my timer to sprint out this entry, I sat for a moment to try and think of some kind of game plan for how I wanted to structure this entry. After about maybe fifteen seconds of thought, I realized that I was going against my own stream-of-consciousness principle I set for myself when I first started this project. Perhaps the reason why is because I might actually be running out of things to say, and so I am trying to pull from a more planned and rational source to compensate for that. However, I've found that this always produces subpar writing for me, and so I hope that as I write today's entry, I can continue to tap into that deeper consciousness I always yammer on about.
Despite certain things, overall life is generally good right now. In a way, the equanimity can make for "boring" writing because there's a lack of conflict to generate something interesting. That, to me, is strange. The idea that substance necessitates conflict is one that feels like it should be generally frowned upon by us, yet what we see generally is the exact opposite. There is certainly media out there that perpetuates calm narratives. The first thing that comes to mind in this regard is slice-of-life anime, where the mundanity of life is the story. There's a certain value to that, and I think the fact that an unreal medium being used to tell the story holds a sincere irony that a lot of people appreciate. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
This project doesn't really hold that kind of irony. I do tell a sort of story of the mundane world through expressing my thoughts on life here, but the medium upholds that message without any sort of irony. Truthfully, I've become burned out on irony. Over the last ten years or so, social media has invoked the hyperreal to such a dangerous level that most of what we see on there is nothing short of a cognitohazard. I think a lot of people are either unfamiliar with or forget the fact that these companies make most of their money off nation-state propaganda. The whole idea is that enemy threat actors try to attack us psychologically to make us feel despair so that we are less productive, giving them an edge on us in everlasting international competitions. It's tough to point a lot of it out and produce genuine evidence for this narrative because obfuscating evidence is part of those threat actors' content strategies.
In that sense, a lack of irony is something that I think most people are looking for in some way or another. I would say that we live in a truly post-ironic world. Long gone are the days of provocateurs and any kind of fundamental guiding principles in culture, politics, and economics. Call it a vibes-based whatever; it doesn't matter. Ultimately, we have become entrapped by post-structuralist thinking. What was meant to challenge institutional authority in a measure to hold those in power accountable has now become the very tool those in power use to obfuscate accountability altogether. I don't think it's completely hopeless, though. What I hope to see in the coming years is a return to some kind of reformed structural ideology or realpolitik that works to better empower regular everyday people. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I think it's easy to have grim visions of the future given all the sensationalized press and fear-mongering, but historically speaking, the regular folk have the edge. If we compare global rates of poverty to even fifty years ago, the progress is staggering. Of course, there's still much more work to do in that effort, but generally we are better off despite certain institutional follies. More than that, a regular person in most developed countries lives better than any monarch in past history. That speaks to something we are fundamentally doing right, even if things feel like they're going wrong.
With recent press campaigns surrounding a lack of political accountability, it can be easy to say that the world's gone to shit because of those at the top. But honestly, it was way worse, historically speaking. Monarchs used to think that their power was absolute and that their authority was divine. Philosophers of antiquity believed that slavery was a fact of life and that it would always exist. The progress we have made is undeniable, but I think, generally, that perspectives have been myopic. The fact that we have the criticisms we do is in and of itself a measure of progress. More than that, it's lonely at the top. It's easy to think that if I had the reins, I would be doing a way better job than those in power. But is that really true? For me, I find that level of power to induce extreme fear. The lives of others being in my hands, having everyone constantly hate me and criticize me—it's just not something I'm built for. But for those who are, the only thing I can do is hope and pray that they make the right decisions.
God knows I wouldn't.
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The Switch

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last day or two, I've been dealing with an onset of fatigue. A few reasons for this: I ran out of my Mounjaro prescription, and despite seeing my provider to get a refill, it's been several days and they haven't put in the order. I keep checking with my pharmacy, and it's been rather annoying that it's taken this long. I don't know what the issue is, because I also received a few new prescriptions and those orders got filled. I've tried calling my doctor's office a few times, and they don't answer the phone. So with that, I've just been rather hungry and sleepy. On top of that, I started taking one of my new prescriptions and I've been dealing with side effects from that. It's buspirone, an anxiety medication, and it's one that I've been on before but stopped taking because I couldn't deal with the administrative bloat of my pharmacy and doctor.
Since I started taking Mounjaro, I've had to get back on the incompetence carousel. I truly cannot stand how ineffective the healthcare system here is. It's expensive, and it seems that I can't get past the bureaucracy to get access to medications that I need. My A1C was 11 when I last did my blood work, and so the Mounjaro is beyond necessary for me to take. The medication itself has been extremely effective; I've lost over ten pounds over the month I was taking it, and the symptoms of my diabetes were drastically reduced almost overnight. Yet in spite of this, I can't get past the bureaucracy of the system that produces it. I don't want to be too pushy with people, and so I've mostly held my tongue whenever I interact with them. I try to be cooperative and do the right things, but that doesn't seem to really matter.

Because I've been so fatigued, I wasn't able to get any writing done yesterday. What I've noticed as I've continued pursuing this practice is how necessary it has become for me to maintain and regulate my thinking. I'm the kind of person who has a constant and pressing dialogue going on in my head at all times, and it never stops. Writing in this way helps me process my thoughts so that they don't mutate into actions or lines of thinking that could potentially be harmful. Here, I have to slow down and figure out how I want to articulate what's on my mind so that whatever is in my head can resolve itself and I can move on to the next thing. It's essentially become cognitive hygiene, and so when I don't write, I feel a bit cognitively gross, so to speak.
I've been thinking about how I calibrate myself every day. I truly don't understand why I am so predisposed to things like substance abuse and other addictive behaviors. Over the last month or so, I have completely relapsed back into smoking, and am essentially back where I started before I quit. About two months ago, I tried quitting masturbation and consuming pornography. I got about two weeks in until I relapsed and fell back into the same habit. Meanwhile, things like my prayer rule and church attendance have been mediocre. Every day seems like a fight to not make the wrong choice, and I lose every single time. I am by nature an archetypal overthinker. I try to figure my way into a better life by reasoning myself into it, but I am at a point where that just simply doesn't work.

At this point, I am stumped as to any answers to these problems, and the lack of resolution eats at me constantly. It makes me want to spiral even further, and that no matter what I do to build sustainable habits that keep me from making even more wrong choices, I still inevitably fall back into that chasm. I won't deny progress that I've made, albeit small. I still get up most mornings and have a decent routine; I've made progress in the gym; I've maintained this writing practice; I socialize regularly and go to church. Still, it feels as if there's something missing. I think that it'll always feel this way to a certain extent, because even if I were to get everything I wanted, that would just make me figure out more things to want. Ultimately, I have to be okay with where I'm at and try to focus on the things that I already have.
I think what I crave more than anything is to understand. I want to understand what's going on, to understand how everything works, to feel secure in my decisions. Unfortunately, no one can have a complete understanding, but I seem to have a difficult time accepting that. My mind doesn't stop going. Even when I sleep, I still find myself awake in my dreams. The never-ending deluge of thought constantly overwhelms me, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, I don't think. There are plenty of times where I'm happy to be alive and experiencing sensations or thoughts, but there are seemingly just as many times where it's all too much and I can't find the switch to stop it.
Maybe there isn't one.
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Praying For Humanity

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

These days, I find myself in a relaxing tedium. I'll take that over being manic or depressed every day. For the first time in a long time, things feel predictable. I finally feel like I have some kind of grasp over myself and my circumstances. I feel more confident in who I am, and who I wish to become. I do my best to let my faith ground me and attend to it through prayer as much as I can, even if there are days where I pray less than usual. Over the last several weeks, I fell out of my morning and evening prayer rule. What I ended up doing instead was a quicker version of the Jesus Prayer (simply, "Lord, have mercy"), and on some days I would do several runs around the prayer rope, reciting the prayer thousands of times.
It was a good thing, but it made me lose my steam on prayer in general. Weirdly enough, even with certain strategies in place to make it easier, it was still mentally taxing. However, I take that as a perspective on the depths that one can have in prayer. To me, it's not a shortcoming, but a sign of just how much work there is to do. I remember seeing this documentary</a>, a series called Extreme Pilgrim. In each episode, a British priest would live under different monastic traditions around the world and try to glean different universal truths from all of his experiences. In the episode I watched, he spent some time in the Egyptian desert with Father Lazarus, a modern desert monk living under the same conditions as Saint Anthony. Specifically, there was a clip where Father Lazarus discussed prayer. To loosely paraphrase, he said that when he prays, the whole world benefits.
I realized that the same is true for me. When I pray, I do so not just for myself, but for all of humanity.

That really puts the true purpose of prayer in perspective. Coming loosely from more Protestant traditions, I was used to seeing prayer as this performative thing. More than that, it seemed that most people I knew used prayer like a slot machine: they say what they want for themselves and expect God to make it so. If they prayed enough, God would hear them and bend the world to their will. Of course, many of those Protestants I prayed with had benevolent intentions; they would pray for their loved ones' safety and prosperity. While that's a noble and good thing, I found that it didn't speak to the essence of prayer itself.
There were many Protestants who asked God for simple and sometimes selfish things. "Lord, I pray that I pass my exams tomorrow. Lord, I pray that I get that sale at work." Coming to God at all is a good thing, and I don't diminish the efforts of those Protestants to have Him assuage their anxieties about outcomes they can't control. However, I think it's important to understand that we don't pray so that God makes our lives better. We pray so that God can help us understand His will and walk with us through the challenges of everyday life. Most of the time, that involves understanding the idea that what we want out of life can be flawed, and that we need the Lord to help us reframe our judgment so that we can better walk with Him, especially when times get tough.

It's easy to praise God when things are going well, but much harder to maintain that gratitude when something horrible happens to us. I've met many people who grew up Christian and were raised in Protestant churches, and when life begins to get rough in some kind of way or they have questions that don't have straight answers, they give up their faith completely and begin to rely on other things for comfort and respite. I don't condemn those people for doing so; in spite of their lack of faith, they are still decent and humble folks. More than that, I've been in the same position as them, so it would be hypocritical of me to pass any kind of judgment. However, as I've come back to my faith and strengthened it over the last few years, my hope is that more people around me can do the same. I know that ultimately, their decisions are out of my control.
But like Father Lazarus said, my prayers can help all of humanity.
This isn't to say that God keeps any kind of score. His judgment will always be beyond our understanding. But the most important thing is to stay aligned with Him by keeping our hearts pursuant in prayer. It's a constant act of calibration, and it can be easy to forget about God's infinite love and mercy. In spite of that, prayer is one of the most accessible divine actions we can perform. Any time, in any place, and under any circumstance, we can always reach out to Christ and pray. Whether it be out loud or silently in our minds, in public or in private, in church or a dive bar, God hears all of it and wants only the best for us. Even if we can't fully see the road ahead, we can keep Psalm 119:105 in our minds and hearts:
"Your word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path."
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Beyond Privacy

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been thinking more about my position on tech privacy. My position is one that I haven't really seen anyone else articulate, and I think it would be valuable to share. I've read several sites and watched videos related to increasing your digital privacy. While that alone is an egregious thing (Why should we have to increase it at all? We should just have it by default.), the measures that most people take to increase their privacy don't even work. On every level of computing—from web apps to CPU firmware—there is a way for some kind of threat actor to track you. Especially if you find yourself on certain shady corners of the internet, there's no stopping the government from finding out your activity and exacting whatever kind of surveillance they want. Even if you take all the "proper" steps to increase your privacy on your personal devices, you still have to contend with things like security cameras at every corner.
Ultimately, the technology we use is critical societal infrastructure. Your right to use it will always be dependent on the state.
However, I am not espousing some kind of futile message. Instead of trying to "increase" privacy in the typical sense, what I am suggesting is that we understand what our priorities should be. I use hardened browsers, content blockers, DNS resolvers, and other privacy-focused technology, but I don't use them to mitigate surveillance. Instead, I use them to protect myself from advertising, propaganda, and disinformation. Most people use their personal devices for one major purpose: consuming media. Our desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets are sophisticated media-consumption machines. Compared to even a hundred years ago, we consume at least a hundred times the amount of media our predecessors did. More than that, this media is extremely saturated, dense, and realistic. Whether we like it or not, our lives are defined by the media we consume.

Thankfully, we still have the choice to curate that media. We can still choose what websites we visit, what books we read, and what films we watch. Privacy-focused technology empowers us not to curtail surveillance, but to properly curate our media consumption so that we can protect ourselves from harmful and potentially even traumatic messaging. This messaging runs deep in our culture. The average person consumes thousands of advertisements every single day. We watch dozens of hours of video every week. Most of our days are spent in front of our media consumption machines. So with that, it is our responsibility to contain the deluge of information we find ourselves in and work to maintain our sanity and vigilance in spite of the many snares that digitally surround us.
As someone who produces digital media, I understand the importance of this curation. Whenever I'm consuming media, this question always comes to the front of my mind: What is the producer of this content trying to get me to think, and why do they want me to think that? I've found that as I keep asking myself that question, I can keep a cool head when ingesting information. More than that, though, I try to limit my exposure to sources that thrive off harmful information. All mainstream social media is built on propaganda, scams, and outrage. I try to avoid having any accounts there where I can so that I don't get data-mined and fed content that is designed to manipulate me into a certain way of thinking. If I do consume social media content, it's because a friend sent it to me in a message directly. I prefer this way of consuming the content because I get to curate the spaces in which I consume it instead of being fed directly by the beast itself.
I am passionate about culture, and I think it's important to have a certain degree of cultural literacy. Unfortunately, most culture permeates from mainstream social media. That's something I can't control, but I can control my relationship to it by mitigating my exposure to it. I find that, generally, as long as what I'm seeing is shared with me by a person I directly know and can talk to—and not some algorithm—there's a greater degree of validity in that. I can give my feedback to the person sharing it, discuss how it affects us both, and try to come out of it more informed and equipped to handle what will come ahead. I prioritize keeping a clear head in the face of technological upheaval, and I want to do my part to help make the world better. Even if it's just through a personal website, that to me is meaningful enough.
Protect your minds. No one else can do it for you.
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A New Reality

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lately, I've been feeling a certain staleness in writing these entries. This is mostly because my emotions have been stable, and while it's a welcome season in my life, I can't help but feel like I've lacked a certain visceral emotional nature that has marked previous entries. I don't think that's a negative thing by any means. Of course, stable mood and emotions are quite literally a major outcome I hoped to glean from this practice. If anything, I see this as a challenge to push the envelope further and dig deeper into self-discovery through these writings. Now that I'm at a point in my life where I'm not as concerned with my situation, I can start to truly discover parts of myself that otherwise couldn't be expressed.
The main aspect of my writing process that I work to maintain is the uninterrupted flow of my voice as I write my thoughts down. I've spoken on this before; a certain thing flows through me when I write, and I am just a vessel</a> for it. To me, this voice is what really speaks through me when I write, and the best way to cultivate it is through sprints and foregoing hesitation and revising mid-sentence. The first thought is the best thought, and any prior planning or meditation only works to dilute that fundamental voice. But then I have to really confront myself with this question:
What's really on my mind? Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I think that when I write, my anxiety typically shows up most frequently on the page. Anxiety stems from fears of things that are unseen, and so I find that much of my work here involves trying to give that thing I'm afraid of some kind of form so that I can give it a name and confront it in real time. However, there are plenty of times when it's something that can't be named because, ultimately, it's not something that's really there. There's a constant song and dance I perform when describing my reality; my ability to write things down gives me the power to invoke a reality that bends to the will of my prose. What I do here every day is an exercise in manifestation.
Every day is a new reality to create.
So then the question becomes this: what reality am I looking to cultivate here? As my catalog has grown over the course of these several months, I've done what I can to create an extensive map of my inner world. In that world, everything has a throughline and cohesive logic to it. The causal relationships flourish over the course of several unconnected entries. I might mention one thing several months in the past and then finally build on that thread after it's been broiling in the back of my mind for a while. There's a certain power to that, one that I don't think I've seen many others in position attempt to cultivate.

The closest models I've seen to what I do here are Gwern</a> or h0p3</a>, except the difference is that those guys rely more on a nonlinear, encyclopedic way of writing. My writing focuses more on building a sense of who I am over the course of an extended period of time through linear standalone entries. I don't crosslink myself very often, mostly because I expect my readers to develop those threads on their own. I trust that y'all are smart and willing enough to do that.
I often find that I keep asking myself: what's the whole point of this practice? Of course, I've answered this question before. Whether it be because this helps someone feel less alone</a>, helps me become a better person, or because this concept of daily documentation of someone's inner world is genuinely interesting, there is an inherent value to this kind of practice not just in the moment, but outside of it as well. There's no telling where this text will go in several decades, but what I do know is that it will be a testament to this very day, this very moment. Someone will read this and gain an understanding of what it was like to be alive in this time, under these circumstances, and know that in their time and circumstances, they just might be able to do the same.
So if you're reading this the day it's published or some time in the near or distant future, just know that I lived this day and appreciated it for all of its moments, flawed and all.
I hope you can do the same with your day.
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Choices

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Early yesterday afternoon, I fell asleep and slept throughout the rest of the entire day and through the night. That antipsychotic I took the night before really wiped me out. I woke up this morning at my usual time and got my day started as I normally do. I had a doctor's appointment this morning, and I almost forgot about it, but thankfully I set a reminder on my phone and was able to see the reminder in time so that I didn't arrive late. Most of the appointment consisted of me waiting in the office. I was there for about an hour and spent maybe five minutes talking with my provider. I got a refill of some medications and started back on an anxiety medication I used to be on.
I've been feeling normal, but I still can't help shaking some looming thing I can't put my finger on. I'm safe, fed, and all the other good things, but I guess I'm just dealing with the fact that things aren't completely optimized. I think that's something that will always be there. You can always be doing better, doing more. I'm just trying to contend with what already is, and I think that's where the real anxiety is coming from; just knowing that things are the way they are is a weirdly harsh thing to confront. I guess that's why most of us spend our time trying to get outside of that. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
But for me, I know that there's no getting around it. There's no getting around the fact that this is it, that this is life. Every moment is spent in it, no matter how much I might want to get outside of it. Strange things happen all the time: little pockets of time slip by, the stars at night look like they're moving, information and media feel unreal. I don't think that's unique to me by any means, but it is something that I uniquely contend with. Derealization is just Wednesday for me. But more than that, I feel a strange sense that this body of mine isn't my own, that my life is being rented out to somebody else. There's not another way to explain it, I think.
Even if that were the case, I don't think I'd mind that all too much. I still viscerally feel the things around me. The things I see, feel, touch, and think about are still undeniably there, albeit different. That's more than likely something everyone experiences at different points in their lives, even if they can't or don't want to explain it that way. Ultimately, the times will always be changing. The world of yesterday isn't the one we live in today. Everything might feel identical, but the truth is that we wake up to a new reality every day whether we want to or not.
The only thing that keeps life the same is our choice to make it so. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
It's also our choice to make it different. I look at my life, and I wonder what I'd want to be different. Sometimes I think about what I'd change, but I always come back to the same constraints. I know that those constraints are there because of my choice to keep them there. Things don't have to be this way, but I think I want them to. In a lot of ways, life is perfect. I know that I am comfortable where I'm at, even if I'm afraid that those comforts might one day change or go away. I know that things will change, but right now, I could use more of the same.
I've been losing a lot of weight lately. By this fall, I'll be at what I would consider a healthy body weight. Life will be different because I'll be more fit to take part in things I previously couldn't. That's something to look forward to. I look forward to better sleep. I look forward to doing more things. Most of all, I look forward to having more agency. Even if I'm working with the same constraints, I know that I'll be able to work better within them to become someone who I've always wanted to be.
I want to be the best version of me that I could ever be.
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My Best

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I went to the gym yesterday, I finally decided to do some strength training. I was a bit nervous to start since I didn't know how I'd fare. Things ended up going well enough. I used a few machines: leg press, chest press, lat pulldown, and leg curls. I was able to manage about as much weight as I thought I could—that is to say, not very much. The strength training lasted about 20–30 minutes, and it was difficult enough, but not too bad. I'm feeling sore today, but it's manageable. I plan on doing strength training twice a week along with my walks on the treadmill. I know that progress will be gradual, but I feel confident that I'll get there since I already have a decent habit and routine going to the gym.
I feel a bit embarrassed at how much I let myself go. I knew I was out of shape, but years of sedentary life compounded with aging have made me physically quite below par. However, I know that it's not too late to get back into shape and that I have the potential to get into better shape than I was in my early 20s if I keep at it. The way I see it, physical fitness isn't something you do for just a season, but should be a lifelong process with its own hills and valleys. I'm confident that as I keep getting into better shape, that'll lead to more opportunities I previously couldn't pursue. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
When I first started going back to the gym in May of last year, my fitness goals revolved around doing triathlons. I've run a few half marathons and cycled a bunch for work, so I felt like that would've been a fun thing to try out. As I've continued working out, my goals have changed. I thought about how cool it would be to go hiking and see cool things. It would be an interesting opportunity for travel as well. Before, I never had much of a desire for traveling because, in my mind, I could do all of that stuff at home and not have to worry about airplanes and the general tedium of traveling. Nowadays my perspective has changed; there are a lot of cool and interesting hiking trails all over the country, and that would be a fun thing to see.
I also think it would be cool to do backpacking trips. I could hike an extended trail with a backpack, sleep along the trail in a hammock, listen to tons of music, and write while I'm not walking. It would be a great solo adventure and a fun way to just decompress and get away from the regular stressors of everyday life. As it stands now, I'm nowhere near in the shape I need to be in so that I can make that happen, but so far I've been making good progress toward it. To me, it seems like an ideal mix of fun and functional.

Last night, while hanging out at my usual cafe spot and writing, I felt strange as I was driving home. I felt more up, like the mania was creeping back in. My thoughts started becoming strange and deluded, and I felt that usual manic creep; things felt more on edge. It scared me that I was having those thoughts, and I knew that if I didn't take action, it could have begun another spiral. Thankfully, I have a stock of antipsychotic medication that I take as needed for when this happens, so when I got home, I took some of it and went right to sleep. Unfortunately, the major side effect of it is that it makes me tired the next day. As I'm writing today's entry, things feel a bit groggy. I'll take that over being manic any day.
It seems that my life is a constant act of calibration. If things get too out of whack, everything gets so much worse. As I've gotten older, I've learned the importance of taking it easy and listening to cues from my body. When I was younger, it was easier for me to ignore that because I was more resilient due to the fact that I was still developing. But nowadays I don't have that buff, and while the descent into old age is a slow one, I know that I can be proactive and make that a more gentle process as long as I do everything I can to take care of myself.
I'll do the best I can.
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Humble Spirit

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

CHECK OUT SOMNIA</a>, A NOVEL | NEW CHAPTERS (ALMOST) DAILY
I've finally gotten the ball rolling on Somnia. It's a project I've been stewing on for a while, and I finally feel like, after a period of meditation and logistical setup, I can get into the flow of publishing chapters more frequently. I've wanted to write more and get my weekly word count up to something even more substantial. Now that I have this project, that should be easier to achieve. I figured that with this kind of workflow here in Cogito—short, daily vignettes—I could take that same serialized publishing style and incorporate it into a novel.
I was also inspired by Fredrik Backman, the guy who wrote that book that got adapted into that Tom Hanks movie</a>. His novels are written with very short chapters, and he pulls it off masterfully. I remember being younger and reading James Patterson books, and those had a similar structure and cadence, too. Honestly, I think that's a pocket I can most definitely grab from. My ability to retain attention on a single thing over 5,000 words is not that good, and I felt that for a long time, I had to work diligently to try and work my way toward it. However, as I've shown with this project and hopefully Somnia, the vignette is my best asset, and I can still maintain longer threads over an extended period. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Overall, I'm feeling excited for this creative chapter in my life. I feel like I've worked toward establishing a lifestyle that's conducive to it, and now all I have to do is stay with it and let it bear whatever fruits come from it. For me, my ambition lies in this constant work of diligent attention. It's something that the world is missing; we've become so lost in digital ephemera that we forgot the importance of sitting alone and thinking things through. Of course, there's a growing subset of people who wish to take technological progress and make good use of it; many have created spaces to catalog and parse through the information they consume through note‑taking apps or personal websites.
For me, there's an added bonus to doing this kind of thinking in public. It's a similar principle I've observed when developing software: the only way to know if a program works well is to put it in front of users and get feedback. In the same way, writing can only improve if it's put in front of readers. I know that as I've grown in this practice, I've developed plenty of rhetorical tricks, scaffolding for ideas, and refinements of language that have served my ability not just to write, but to think deeper and more efficiently. I know now that I can take a certain thread of ideas in my mind and directly translate them into an actionable piece every single day. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Life has given me plenty of challenges, but I've taken what's happened to me and used it to make myself better. I can write from this place of gratitude and hope today, but I know that I won't always have these feelings. I've written at length about my issues, but that writing has helped me process them in a way that doesn't mold to any prevailing structure; it's something I had to build myself from the ground up, but now I can use those workflows I've developed and maintain a steady course ahead. For me, that's not just self‑care or a hobby. It's my entire life, and I couldn't be more grateful.
Of course, there are always new threads to weave and challenges to face, but I know that I have a greater wisdom than I did when I was younger. It's wisdom that's been hard‑fought for, and something that will keep me going when trouble inevitably comes again. I do my best to remain vigilant in prayer, and I've noticed that there are forces that actively try to keep me from it. The act of keeping Christ as the pinnacle of love and keeping that love in my heart at all times is a constant and evolving process. Many thoughts are ephemeral and are like flashes in a pan, so the choice of actively discerning to keep Christ at the forefront of my mind is a deep and arduous challenge. Thankfully, it's one that rewards vigilance and a humble spirit.
People can dislike me, hate me, and try to make me into someone I'm not. While that kind of thing can make me angry or sad, I know that the best thing I can do is pray for them because I know that, ultimately, I have no enemies. Even if there are people who see me as one, I don't have to return that kind of animosity. Instead, I can work to be like Christ and approach them from a place of love and mercy. It's undoubtedly the narrower path, but one that ultimately keeps me the safest. If my love makes them hate me more, then so be it.
That's between them and God.
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Standards

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I think I've been struggling with standards lately.
I say this because I'm not attending Divine Liturgy today. Instead, I decided to stay home and write. There were a lot of things going through my mind when making the decision not to attend. I wasn't looking forward to the drive. I wasn't looking forward to the crowd. I didn't have any cigarettes this morning, so I decided to drive to the gas station, buy a pack, and go back home. I didn't know how I'd fare not having a cigarette in my mouth for several hours, because I know it's against church policy to smoke there. More than that, I have this meager set of standards I am trying to hold myself to, but it seems that I'm struggling to uphold them.
I want to quit smoking again, stop consuming pornography, go to church every week, engage in a prayer rule every morning and evening, eat healthy, go to the gym, and write every day. But what I've found is that it's basically impossible to hold all of these spinning plates at once. It makes me feel weak, that I'm not capable of maintaining the stresses necessary to live a good life—at least, a life where I can maintain a sense of responsibility. I want to be someone that other people can count on, but I'm having a tough time showing up just for myself. It makes me frustrated that I can't seem to hold the prerequisites, but I'm not sure how else I can keep things up. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I can hold myself accountable to a fixed number of things. I can write most days, go to the gym most days, eat decently (thanks, Mounjaro), hit the prayer rope when I can. But my vices are still demonstrably entangling me. It seems that there's something that I can't let go of, but I'm unsure of what baggage that is. I feel like I'm possibly being selfish, that I'm so concerned with what's going on in my world that I'm not able to accept the responsibility of being reliable for others. I know that I can't really do a whole lot with my disability, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't at least try to be there for the people who care about me. I want to be someone others can count on. I know I'm smart enough to make good decisions, to see things past certain logical peripheries. I know that if I can just tap into my potential, I can be that true force for good</a> I think I should be.
Another thing that precipitates these feelings is the idea that there will be challenges later on in life that necessitate a certain degree of preparation I feel I'm not aptly striving toward. I guess I just want to be ready for struggles of the future, but that just makes me not focus on the ones I'm facing today. I don't know why I feel ambitious in this kind of way. It doesn't feel right to have that kind of desire. Truthfully, I am doing well in this moment today, but I'm letting this desire for more create a hole in my heart. Even if that "more" is a good or noble cause, that doesn't mean that the desire for it isn't digging that hole further into myself. I think, weirdly enough, that what I'm talking about is vainglory, a sin itself.
I recently watched a video</a> about the life of Saint Nicetas of the Kiev Caves. He became a monk in a monastery in Kiev, and while there, he wanted to become a recluse so that he could ask God to make him a wonderworker. His abbot ordered him not to do so because he felt it would be better for Nicetas to serve his brothers in the monastery. Nicetas refused to obey his abbot and became a recluse anyway. While praying in his cell, he was visited by a demon that he thought to be an angel. The demon gave him visions of clairvoyance, and he became well-known in the area for his abilities. His abbot, however, knew that Nicetas was being deceived by a demon because Nicetas refused to tell people wisdom from the New Testament, only the Old Testament. Through the prayers of his abbot, the demon was cast out of Nicetas, and he was able to live in the monastery peacefully thereafter.

I feel a similar sort of struggle as Saint Nicetas, that even though my intentions are good, I struggle to accept the basic tedium of the moment. I want to be ready for tomorrow, but I fail to focus on what's happening today. I hope that I can work to stay more present in what's happening today. I have a good practice of attention here in Cogito, but there is so much more to do in a day outside of writing these entries.
I hope I can figure out the rest of today.
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Every Word

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

"It is written that man will not live by bread alone, but by every word from the mouth of God."
Life has been good lately, but I still deal with fear. It's not an irrational fear, but what I think is a healthy one. I think it's important, especially in times of blessing, to maintain a fear of the Lord. Just as He gives, He can take it away. I don't want to say that I think there's some kind of imminent danger or punishment in the near future. While I know that my sinful behavior will be corrected, I don't think that I'm going to see some kind of direct punishment for it. Besides, this fear of the Lord doesn't come from a place of fear of punishment, but a deep reverence for His power and understanding.
If anything, I want this fear to be a constant measure of humility. I know that compared to the essence of God, I have not even the faintest understanding of what's going on in my life, the world, or anything metaphysically beyond that. I know that all I am is a vessel, an agent of God's divine and perfect will expressing itself through these words you see here. That's not to say that I am some kind of divine being, but just that I'm like everyone else: a human made in God's image. There's a deep and profound mystery happening all around us, but it's up to us whether we want to observe it.

Typically, I don't discuss the news or anything like that because I don't pose myself as any kind of commentator, especially regarding the specifics of political discourse. The acts of war that happened in Iran today, for a deep and strange reason, don't make me feel any kind of way about it. I saw a video of an all-girls' school get bombed. The desperation of the parents was otherworldly; their cries were ones that came from the deepest source I could imagine. It put me in a state of disbelief, that something so horrible and tragic could be part of God's good and perfect plan.
More than that, I am almost ashamed that I couldn't muster any kind of visceral emotional response from it, that I feel so far removed from what's happening over there. It makes me wonder how I'd fare if something like that happened in my hometown. How would I respond to something like that? Would I fight back? Would I flee? What would I give up? I'm fortunate enough to have never confronted that kind of reality, but just knowing that for whatever reason I might gives me goosebumps like no other.
A few days ago I spoke on empathetic detachment</a> and how I use that to keep myself safe under cognitive warfare. Whether we want to admit it or not, the American citizenry is fighting this war too, just on a different front. Our perception is constantly in conflict with forces that want to keep us outraged and disposed so that we don't try to build forces that could compete with prevailing narratives. It makes me ask myself what I should be doing, how I should be feeling. It makes me wonder what I even can do.
All I can think of is to write.

People take certain tragedies and put out "thoughts and prayers," which to many is the same as doing nothing. Ultimately, I alone am not in control of the affairs of politicians or the military or the industries that fund them. But here's what I do know: Christ is the only one who reigns over all of it. I might not be able to get the president on the phone, but I do have the ability to directly access God whenever I want, tell Him everything on my mind, and garner some kind of response. Whether it's a response that I intend for is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that I reach out and put my heart before Him, let Him know how I feel, and ask for His mercy and grace.
The sins of the world can place a heavy weight on my heart, but I know that in spite of the wretched horrors that come from everywhere, there is a way through. If someone wants to call that a "cope," that's fine with me. I know that they are dealing with the same insecurity, and all I can hope for is a way they can find comfort in their own lives. We all face God at some point, but it's our decision whether we turn our backs on Him.
I'm not turning back.
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Sigils

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few months back, I discovered the idea of chaos magick</a> and have been thinking about it a lot in spurts since then. In chaos magick, the main idea behind it is that one can effectuate change in certain domains of the world based on the craft and meditation of sigils. Sigils are symbols that embody the change you want to take place. What makes chaos magick unique from other forms of magic is the idea that there are no inherent rules behind making a sigil, so anyone who can draw one has the ability to practice whatever form of magic they know and can incorporate different schools of thought into a single sigil and individualized practice. The thought I've had that's fascinated me is this:
All words, when written down, are sigils.
I remember seeing this video from Alan Moore</a> where he discussed practical advice given to magicians that also applies to aspiring writers. As I stated in that previous post on chaos magick, I believe that as a writer, I have the ability to put thoughts into people's heads, make the thoughts more real, and turn that into some kind of real-world impact. This, of course, is literally magic. With an unprecedented level of literacy throughout most of the world, we've seen levels of magic that are equally as unprecedented. It is as amazing as it is horrifying. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Most people who are literate don't typically ponder the powers that they have within them. Instead, what we see is a constant battle for their attention from all different kinds of places. This is literally energy harvesting on a spiritual level. If people only knew how valuable they were, the world might look a lot different. Of course, this power doesn't come from nowhere. All this power that we have to effectuate change through transmitting messages through words and language comes, to me at least, directly from divine sources.
I think of things at church like the Divine Liturgy, hesychastic practices, or writings from the saints, and I realize that magic is right along the same lines as those things. This is why, ultimately, it's dangerous. The second we try to think that spiritual power comes anywhere else than the Lord Jesus Christ, we lose our grip with our own personal spiritual power immediately and become victims of demonic influence. All of the occult rumors, practices, and rituals are in direct conflict with our salvation. They are misguided spirits that have to be cast out.
I've been doing well in life since I started Cogito, and I think that's due largely to the spiritual channeling that comes with this practice. Every entry here is its own sigil and becomes charged by spreading it to those who wish to read it. But my intentions with these sigils are benevolent, as I've made clear many times before. However, I need to check with myself and make sure that my understanding of the power I hold here is in line with divine intellect. My whole pursuit here is one meant to change hearts through showing a direct connection to Christ and to strengthen my case for salvation. Anything else that might come of it is either inconsequential or, worse, a temptation of some kind.

I hope I don't come off as utterly unhinged with these kinds of confessions here. Ultimately, the ideas that I'm espousing here are complex abstractions and difficult to parse through. But that's also why I'm here writing them down. Through this constant act of exploration, I hope to unlock a uniquely good and powerful force that helps the world in some way. It might come off as grandiose, but like I said earlier, most people aren't aware of this latent power they have. For some reason or another, I've come to this line of thought and discovered this important truth, and so now it's my responsibility to channel that truth into something that can help someone.
Truthfully, I've become more paranoid as of late. Thankfully, it's not in a completely manic or delusional way, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't derived from that state of mind. Considering how deep I've been in it before, this is nothing; if anything, it's more lucid. It's as if I can see the writing on the walls but can't do much more. This paranoia manifests itself in ideas that are tangible and real: the surveillance state, cognitive warfare</a>, and geopolitical tensions. However, the thing I try to remember to keep myself grounded is my position within those things. I might discuss the latent powers of myself or anyone else, but those things are ultimately a lot more mundane than a state of delusional mania would try to make me think.
Still, I have these little glimpses of things. Simple coincidences don't feel so simple. New people that come into my life raise suspicions. The world feels not quite normal—its hues are just a bit more saturated. I hope that as I write through these saturated hues, I can give myself the comfort of knowing that I'm safe. I know that regardless of whether or not I wake up tomorrow, the world will keep spinning.
Let it spin, then.
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Who are You?

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A poem
I'm the writing on the walls
I'm nothing at all
I'm the ghost you keep on seeing
I'm the check you never cashed
I'm the thing you keep putting off
I'm the thing you keep on chasing
I'm the freckles on your face
I'm the wind blowing through your hair
I'm what makes you cry
I'm a figment of your imagination
I'm your worst nightmare
I'm a part of your salvation
I'm the one who got away
I'm the one who never left
I'm something you can't replace
I'm something we can't understand
I'm a sad creature that keeps worrying
I'm seven missed calls from your mom
I'm what's keeping you from falling apart
I'm why you give it your all
I'm the circuit in your spine
I'm two more things to say
I'm the eyes you didn't know you had
I'm the reason you should try
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Cognitive Warfare

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A thread I've been weaving lately: the consequences of cognitive warfare have completely changed the way we interact with the world. To throw out a phrase like "cognitive warfare" is quite alarming and might come off as vague or conspiratorial in some kind of grand way, but the reality is much more mundane than that. I'm defining cognitive warfare as war waged with information: every news headline, social media post, and other platform for spreading information have distinct agendas to manipulate certain sets of people into certain patterns of thought and action. This isn't anything new. Propaganda has existed as long as media itself has existed, but due to the sheer volume of information being transferred today, the wars we fight are no longer won with sheer firepower.
They are won with information.

It's easy for most of us to think that we aren't participants in this war. Even if you do everything to avoid the news, social media, and television, you still have to contend with the fact that most around you do not and that you are subject to the things that influence them. For me, I try to avoid watching TV or watching the news, but my parents still heavily engage in it. Since I live with them, the influence of those programs rubs off on me, whether I want it to or not. I think it's important to clarify that even though avoiding propaganda is extremely difficult, it's not some kind of futile thing that should make us give up our sense of self-control and sanity.
Losing your self-control and sanity is what the enemy wants.
Defining that "enemy" is part of the war itself. On a more spiritual level, one could identify that enemy as Satan or demons. That's already tough territory to inhabit, but more literally, that enemy can be identified as a nation-state whose interests are not directly tied to your own nation's interests. For me as an American, any non-American nation-state can fit this bill. It could be the Russians, the Chinese, or whoever else. If you're Russian or Chinese, the enemy could be America or Western Europe.
There was this anime that came out back in the 80s called Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Basically, it's Japanese Star Trek. The show centers around intergalactic navies in some distant future. Many of the plots in that show revolve around diplomatic relations between different factions. One of the characters, Yang Wen-li, was an officer for a military force of a democratic state, the Free Planets Alliance. He summed it up perfectly:
"There are few wars between good and evil; most are between one good and another good."

Still, this doesn't change the fact that the wars are still being fought. With that, it's more important than ever to maintain strength and resilience. As regular citizens, we don't have much say in what news outlets or social media throw at us, but we do have a say in how we respond to it. Most of that media is designed for engagement, usually through rage baiting or an attempt to incite some kind of viscerally emotional response. The obvious thing to say would be to try to suppress whatever emotions a piece of media incites, but this usually leads to more negative responses further down the road. The more you accumulate that "emotional debt," the harder the crashout's going to be.
So what do we do instead? I try to take whatever emotions that might come up from an outrageous headline and direct them into something more productive. For me, I do what I can to exercise a sort of empathetic detachment. I can feel whatever is happening in the headline, but I also know that it's not right there in front of me either. I typically try to engage compassion by asking myself questions like "If I were seeing this person going through this experience in front of me, how would I try to comfort them?" Many of us feel the rampant anxieties perpetuated by most media, and the most important thing we can do is figure out more ways to be kinder to each other.
It's never as black and white as "us" versus "them." We're more alike than we give ourselves credit for.
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Saved by the Bell

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been on Mounjaro for three weeks now, and just had my week four dose today. People keep calling it a miracle drug, and they're not far off. Many of my current health issues—type II diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea—are caused largely due to my obesity. Maintaining a weight-loss diet has been an uphill battle for years; antipsychotics increased my appetite and blood sugar. On top of that, other symptoms of my bipolar disorder (depression) made it more difficult to have an active lifestyle. Further on top of that, the Covid pandemic made it even harder to go out and stay sane. Overall, there have been many factors that caused me to gain over a hundred pounds, and taking it off has been a massive struggle—until now.
I struggled with a big appetite for a long time. It was hard to feel full and when I would feel full, I'd get hungry again after only two or three hours. But with the Mounjaro, overeating just simply isn't an option. If I do overeat, I have to face the consequences of puking most of it back out. But even then, there's no cravings to binge anymore. Big meals have now become a thing of the past. I've been dropping weight like a rock, too—ten pounds since I started. At this rate, I should be at a healthy bodyweight come fall. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I still have certain things I'm skeptical about with the medication. I don't want to be on the medication forever, and I'm concerned that once I stop taking it, I'll put the weight right back on. The wisdom I've heard on that is that while I'm on it now, it's important that I cultivate healthier eating habits so that when I do get off the medication, I can fall back on the habits I've set up. Even before starting, I tried to establish a healthy routine around meals. I try to eat roughly the same meals at the same time every day. The more I can reduce decision fatigue, the lower my chance of binge eating. But while I'm on the medication, I don't have to worry too much about it. It's almost scary how effortless dieting is now.
Outside of appetite and food intake, the medication has also helped reduce my blood sugar levels drastically. I was experiencing early symptoms of neuropathy. I'd get shooting pains in my hands, arms, legs, and feet. I'd have extended periods of numbness. When I'd lie in bed to fall asleep at night, my feet went numb. Since I started the medication, these symptoms have reduced by over ninety percent, I would say. At night when lying in bed, I feel the blood vessels in my feet doing a lot of work.
I like to think my body is repairing itself.

I received a prescription for Mounjaro a few years ago back when it first came out, and I was the perfect candidate for it. However, my insurance refused to cover it. If I wanted it, I had to pay over a thousand dollars a month for it. Instead of remaining complicit in highway robbery, I decided to not take it. The consequence of that made itself clear over the years; my diabetic symptoms kept getting worse. I finally saw my doctor again earlier this year after not seeing him for three years. I got new blood work done and another Mounjaro prescription. I received a letter in the mail from my insurance saying that they approved coverage for it this time. Now I only have to pay twenty-five dollars a month for it. For what it gives me, I'll pay that any day of the week.
While I am upset that the powers that be wouldn't let me get it sooner, I'm just happy that I have it now. I knew that if I kept going without it, my diabetic symptoms would have ramped up like crazy. I most certainly don't want to lose balance while I'm walking or start losing my eyesight. I feel like I've been saved by the bell, so to speak. I'm happy that things will start getting better. As I keep losing weight, the diabetes and sleep apnea will reverse, and I'll finally stop being so fatigued all the time. My performance in the gym will improve drastically, too. I can really start to live a more active lifestyle. Whatever that entails, I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to experience that again.
Since 2020, life had been horrible. I had no direction. I was hopelessly sick. I kept losing my mind. But now I feel that I am finally in a place where life feels truly worth living. I look forward to what's next. In the midst of that horrible tempest, Christ reached His hand out to me and called me home. I found my calling: to write. Back then, I knew that I had something important to do with my life. I knew that I was here for a higher purpose. I know that purpose now, and all I can ask for is more of the same when I was at my worst.
Wisdom. Perseverance. Rest.
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The Program

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I still feel gross from my flu, but I'm about 90% recovered. It's been tough getting up in the mornings, but that's nothing new. The best strategy I've found that consistently gets me up in the morning is keeping my phone by my desk so that when my alarm goes off, I have to get up to turn it off. From there, I go straight into my morning routine. Most days, this is a sufficient way to get my day started. Some days, I wake up too tired to even get the morning routine started, and I go right back to sleep. Usually when that happens, I'll sleep the entire morning and wake up at noon. Truthfully, if I need the rest, then there's no getting around that.
Of course, I want to try and start my day off right, and even though it's discouraging when those kinds of days happen, they're not as frequent as they used to be. To me, that kind of tangible progress matters. I've had to learn the importance of taking things slowly with myself and to stay patient and compassionate. I've had a bad habit of dialing up the intensity of things too early, which historically has led to some kind of burnout. I know now that I can be dedicated to something but not get myself stuck in tunnel vision.
All-or-nothing thinking is dangerous.

For me, I just have to take the day as it comes. There's no sense in worrying about yesterday or tomorrow. I've found that the more I stay in the present, the better off I am. Most things in life are fleeting, and fortune is most certainly one of them. Good things can happen, and when they do, I try my best to retain gratitude. Bad things happen all the time, but I know that I don't have to let them define me in any kind of way. When dealt a bad hand, I try to practice radical acceptance.
I think it's important to understand that the circumstances we find ourselves in are simply accessories to the internal experience we live. Most people have this basic metaphysical ontology: there's the material "real" world where other people and things live, and then there's an immaterial "fake" world where we find things like thoughts and ideas. Because of this dichotomy, people place more prescience on the material world, since that's the one they receive the most feedback from. However, I believe the inverse.
The material world is the true illusion, and the only "true" source of reality comes from that immaterial place where thoughts and ideas live. I am not influenced by my external circumstances but my internal ones; my thoughts shape my reality. This is why I find it crucial to have a proper "information diet" and positive social relationships. The ideas that come from those things literally change who I am, day in and day out. The change can be rapid and punctual, but it can also be gradual and not easily noticed from one day to the next. When I look back, however, the gradual changes are more monumental than the rapid ones.

Mental resilience is the single most important skill to develop. No one has innate talent for it; the only way to shape it is through experience. But when it is developed, the returns from it are nothing less than substantial. I believe that we are all uniquely qualified to live our own lives, that there's no way I can go through what you've been through and vice versa. But through the cultivation of a rich inner world, one can build resilience in ways that go far beyond matters of fortitude. Discipline, something we all wish we had more of, is itself an emotion; it isn't meant to last and can only be accessed when certain conditions have already been met.
That's not to say that one should put off this or that and "wait" for discipline to come. Instead, it's important to build a house for it so that it has somewhere to stay when it does come. But it's important to not keep it hostage; those moments where you're running on fumes don't make it easy for discipline to come back further down the line. I find myself searching and digging for discipline frequently, but the main way I get it is through doing the small stuff right first. As simple as it is to brush your teeth when you wake up in the morning, that little habit goes miles for things down the road. I found myself asking the question of "how do I write that great work?" What I did was that I tried skipping to step ten when I should've been focused on step one: I had to build the routines around the writing so that I could prime myself to write properly.
Once I figured those out, the rest was simple: stick to the program.
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True Good

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been feeling better from my flu, but not fully.
It makes writing here an even tougher task, but I know that once I get the ball rolling, I'll finish out just fine. Even with the embedded routines, workflows, and whatever else, the difficult days are still undeniably difficult. But instead of letting that get in the way, I think it's important to let that add color to whatever decides to come out onto the page. I know that as long as I keep searching for that next word, something will come out. It may not be beautiful. It may not be artistic. And, of course, there's a high chance that it likely won't even be good.
But it'll be something, and that matters more.
I've already displayed a strong proof of concept here. There's not really anyone who writes like I do; in this medium and context, there's not really anyone who writes "from the ground," so to speak. Many of us have that inner narration throughout the day, but most of us—bloggers in particular—do what they can to condense that experience into something that can be neatly tied into a nice rhetorical bow, structure and all. Here, each day is a bead that contributes to an overarching thread. The most significant part is that each entry is written by the day, and to a greater extent, by the moment. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
For me, it's important to take my personal thoughts and feelings and craft them from a literary perspective. I want to take what I've learned from great writers of all mediums and genres and incorporate them into a single unified piece. The real-time nature of it is the most fascinating and unprecedented part: the story is being told as it's being lived. That's something not even a format like a documentary can do. Curation is a minimal aspect of this format; it has to be so that the moment can express itself in the least filtered way possible. Of course, there are still moments of curation, conscious or otherwise. Self-censorship happens all the time and is essentially unavoidable.
But even then, I have direct control over every filter.
My whole ethos behind this project comes from tapping into that voice that's always in my head. Most of the time, it can lull in the background where it dictates whatever thoughts I'm having. Bringing that voice into the foreground and channeling it to type these sentences is an intense meditative task, but one that bears many fruits, particularly at the level of consistency I strive toward. The most important thing I've learned is to take off as many of the unnecessary censors as I can. What I've come to realize throughout this whole process is that the voice refines itself not just from head to keyboard, but the other way around, too. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
The more the words come out here, the better the ones in my head are throughout the rest of the day when I'm not writing something. It's something most people don't actively train or even have access to, but for me, the rewards for my effort have only compounded. It's only been about six months, but I think I've seen the most positive change in my life because of maintaining this practice in this specific way. I was journaling actively for about a year before I decided to publish Cogito. I thought that I needed a place to write that wouldn't give me the fear of judgment, and for that year, I trained my voice diligently in silence. But now that this project is public-facing, that change in stakes makes a significant difference.
I've become more acutely aware of my self-censors: the necessary ones, the harmful ones, and the ones that I didn't know about until I confronted them on the page. We all have this kind of process we work through in one way or another, and all of life revolves around tuning into the frequency of our highest selves. It's a constant process of becoming, with slips and all, but I know that as long as I maintain some kind of connection to it through my writing, it will result in something that is truly good.
Not phony good, not selfish good.
Truly good.
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Decades

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Late Friday evening, I caught the flu. I've been sick as a dog ever since.
Yesterday, I slept for the entire day. While asleep, I kept cycling through different nightmares and thought patterns. Most of the time, I couldn't even tell I was asleep. My body was aching all over from the flu, and since the sleep apnea makes it worse, it was difficult to get substantial rest. Still, I feel like I've gotten through the worst of it. Now that I'm back here writing, I know that things will be alright. After several scalding-hot showers and doses of allergy medication, I am feeling better than I was yesterday.
I remember on Friday evening, I went to dinner with some friends. A few hours prior, I decided to go to a coffee shop and hang out for a while. While there, I felt myself getting some sniffles. At the time, I thought it was just because of the weather. It's been a bit colder than usual, so I figured I was just having some seasonal allergies. Throughout dinner, though, I started feeling worse. On the drive home, my head was pounding. When I finally got home and into my bedroom, the sickness hit me like a train. I found that funny; it was as if my brain and body knew I had to stay strong for a certain amount of time, but then once I knew I was safe, the "punishment" could begin. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
This is the third week in a row I've missed Divine Liturgy, which is upsetting. Still, I know that I just have to remain patient. I'll get it figured out soon. I hope that I'll remain vigilant in my prayers throughout, because ultimately, I know that's what matters most. Getting closer to God is an everyday process—just as mundane as it is profound. I know that I have what it takes to keep pushing through. The Lord has gotten me through every day leading up to now, and that's not going away any time soon. There's not a whole lot I can get done in a day, but there's a whole lot I can get done in a decade.
Don't think in days. Think in decades.
When sitting here, thinking of things to write, it's tough to push through the aches and pains of my body. To me, there are blockages in all areas, not just physical ones. Despite that, I know that it's important for me to push through and keep seeking those next few hundred words, because I've gotten far enough in this practice to know that there's always something I have to say. Whether or not I say it is a personal choice. So for today, I want to make the choice to keep pushing through despite my body telling me not to. A few hundred words could be enough, but I want a few hundred more.

I know that I can look back and show myself demonstrable evidence that I can push through just about anything. Whenever I feel like I can't get the words out, I just have to look back at this catalog and remind myself that I always can. To me, that's the most important thing. I know that any sense of blockage I feel is a matter of the heart, and the only way to get past it is to write through it. Everything else is a distraction. For me, I know that as long as I remain honest with myself first and foremost, everything else will fall into place.
Despite feeling so uninspired, I know that I have my precedents pulling me through. Not every entry here is created equal, but created nonetheless. The value of that means more to me than to anyone else, especially at this stage as it's still being written. The work will be here long after I'm gone, but for right now, the main person it serves is me. This act of coming here, letting out words, and gleaning something from them is what keeps me going, day in and day out.
I don't know what the future holds, but as long as I'm still of able body and mind, I'll still write about it.
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Monastic Prince

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I started a new project last night. I plan on releasing it later today.
My life has been a series of these vignettes since I started Cogito. I feel myself continuing to refine the process here. There's more consideration for coherence and structure, but there's still an unfortunate reality: not every day feels so inspired. These entries are not written equally. Every day, I come back to the page a different person. In a sense, my job is to tell the story of the moment itself, day by day. The tedium behind that is more than noticeable, but after more than 150 entries, I've shown the world that I have what it takes to build something great.
Most would look back on six months of almost daily writing and pat themselves on the back, say "good job," and try to ramp down into something less taxing. But for me, the only thing I crave is more. After writing, I feel a release that I can only compare to when I was younger, playing gigs on my saxophone. To let it all out and leave it there is something that feels important to me on a level that transcends just about anything else. But as a musician playing live gigs, there's a certain ephemerality to it.
Here, these entries are written in the moment but stay long past it. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I've reached a point now where I have an extensive catalog: easily over 100,000 words. Each day, I wrote vignettes, but looking back I now see that I have a novel’s worth of coherent work. The thing that baffles me further is that six months, when put into perspective, isn't even a long time—only two seasons, really. I'm 28 years old, so if I have the privilege of living a somewhat long life, there's still so much ahead. I know that as I keep writing, the catalog is only going to get larger. More than that, it'll be there long after I'm gone.
The musician Prince was about as prolific as a musician could get. He's one of the only famous musicians who could say he literally had a vault of music. Thousands of unreleased records line its shelves, and we've heard only a small fraction of it. I put that into perspective with Cogito and think that, out of the potentially thousands of entries I could write here, only a few would be widely read, if any at all. Yet despite that, I still come here and write every day. Prince’s collaborators who helped him make his music—his sound engineers and such—have shared profound anecdotes about his creative process. Prince, despite being a rock star, had a monastic dedication to making music. It’s more impressive than the approach of artists who spend two or more years working on a single album; Prince could have one done in an afternoon. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
That's because his whole life was devoted to his creative process. Every routine he had was centered around the idea of facilitating composition. Every moment was precious: he'd squeeze time wherever he could while on tour to write lyrics, try out new song ideas during sound checks, and even had a bed put in his studio so he could be closer to the equipment. To Prince, music wasn't just a job or an outlet but a lifeline. For me, writing here is the same thing.
My whole life revolves around it. I know that every morning at around the same time, I'm going to be sitting here at my computer letting some kind of words come out of my fingertips. I go to the gym and stay healthy so that I can write better when I go out to a café that evening. Every day is built around pushing out an entry, pushing out as many words as I can, and poring over the revisions so that I can say what I have to say in the exact way I intend. Each sentence is special to me, and I do everything to make sure they’re the best I can make them.
I know that for me, nothing else really matters. I'm safe, comfortable, and work through a series of habits that conduce to a prolific and layered writing workflow. I remember when I was 22, still living in Austin. I was bartending, selling drugs, and delivering food on my bike. It was a good life because I was independent, making money, and living freely. But one day I was lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and thinking that one day I was going to blink and turn 30. If I were still doing what I was doing, I'd have failed. I knew there was something bigger calling to me, but I didn't know what.
Now I know.
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Speedometer

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last day or so, I've noticed a major increase in my mood. Most would interpret that to mean I’m feeling happier, but for me, it’s a different sensation. Instead of using more abstract descriptors like “happy” or “sad,” I find a more accurate way to describe my mood is this:
A speedometer.
To me, mood dictates the speed of my thoughts. When my mood is high, the needle on the speedometer rises. When my mood is low, the needle falls. When that speedometer runs high, it’s a symphony of connection. My thoughts run so quickly that it’s easier to freely associate stimuli and go down whatever rabbit hole I want. I get into dialogues with myself about a vast array of topics. I replay old conversations, simulate new ones, and let whatever stimuli I’m exposed to inform all of it. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Of course, this can have a snowball effect when not kept in check. The faster my thoughts go, the deeper down the rabbit hole I get. Next thing I know, I can’t find my way back up. Mania is tough to check, and it’s something I have to remain constantly vigilant toward. The main symptomatic indicator for both it and depression is sleep. People have come to understand that bipolar disorder is a circadian disorder. For me, if I sleep less—and find myself needing less sleep to get through the day—that can indicate mania. If I find myself oversleeping, that can indicate depression.
Historically, a lack of sleep compounds mania drastically for me. The further I go with reduced sleep—or worse, no sleep at all—the more it exacerbates manic symptoms. The exacerbated symptoms feed on each other and push me further from sanity: heightened impulsivity leads to dangerous decisions that, in turn, lead to even more extreme decisions. This has typically manifested as substance abuse; the drugs make it even worse. In the past, I would chalk it up to a sort of lust for life. I didn’t want to confront the idea that I was hurting myself.
More than that, I was ignorant of the damage I was doing anyway.
I’ve had a handful of experiences where, no matter what I did, there was no way I could sleep. I’d pull all-nighters like they were nothing. The succeeding days would inevitably lead to further descension into the rabbit hole: I’d read cognitively harmful material like obscure esoteric books, paranormal imageboards, and social media discourse. That would further compound even more dangerous symptoms like paranoia and, at its worst, auditory and visual hallucinations. Soon enough, I would be in a full state of psychosis, where reality completely melted away and I had no metaphysical grounding. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I’d hear whispers in a language that didn’t exist and see writing on walls in what appeared to be that same language. To this day, I still can’t fully wrap my head around that. To me, demons are not theoretical but very real, materially and spiritually. After going through my psychotic experiences, I want nothing more than to feel real, normal, and safe. No matter what I do, there is a large portion of the day when I feel on edge. My heart beats fast, I sweat and shake, and I’m always looking over my shoulder.
My whole life over the past six years has revolved around quelling these feelings and the trauma associated with them. It’s not fun losing your mind. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. However, I know I’ve built an important repository of tools and methodologies to keep myself sane. At the end of the day, nothing else matters to me. I don’t care where I am or what I’m doing; all I want is to keep my head screwed on. Worldly things have no importance to me anymore because I know it’s all an illusion. I’ve been unplugged, and I never want that to happen again.
So as I continue to check in with myself and continue using my tools and systems to maintain sanity, I know that the most important thing I can do is ask Christ for His mercy. I’ve been through a lot. I’ll go through even more. With that, I want to make sure that as I keep moving forward in life, He’s by my side, walking with me. Even with my overclocked brain, I know that I’ve barely walked through a single grain of sand on the beach of the universe. If I had it my way, I’d be looking down at my own two feet forever.
But I know I have to look up.
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Diagnoses

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Life has been good, but there’s still so much looming in the background.
I’ve been starting to feel a lull in my ability to write these entries. If anything, I think it’s just doubt creeping in. My thought on writing has still been the same: there’s always something I have to say. What helps most is cultivating the routines around the writing habit. If there’s any sense of writer’s block, it comes from being afraid to say what you want to say. I don’t want to be afraid of that. Instead, I want to keep channeling that deeper source where I know all of this comes from and let it dictate the course of these entries.
I’ve still been smoking again. I’m on my fourth pack now, and it’s only been about two weeks since I relapsed. My pornography addiction is still rampant. Acedia—listless apathy—is a persistent problem. I’ve found that routines are fundamentally important to my peace of mind and my sanity, but, like I’ve mentioned recently, the variance is hard to deal with. I had to attend an appointment for a medical exam to assess my disability for my SSDI application. Just having that one appointment threw off the day completely. I couldn’t find the groove I wanted to be in to write. I still went to the gym, at least. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
The appointment yesterday was a joke. I had to drive twenty-five minutes from my house to this run-down strip mall in the boonies. The doctor’s office looked dilapidated, as if the doctor had just moved into that building. The whole thing was shady. There were no credentials posted anywhere, and it was just a small waiting room, a nurse’s office, and a patient exam room. Everyone I was waiting with was there for the same reason. My appointment was at two o’clock, and I didn’t leave the doctor’s office until five o’clock. I wasn’t seen until four-thirty, and the exam itself took about thirty minutes. Most of that exam was the doctor shuffling through and reading the paperwork and making dictations into a recorder. For most of it, I sat in silence.
With it being a completely government-sponsored affair, I knew it was going to be a bit of a dumpster fire. Especially with Social Security, the whole thing moves like molasses due to administrative bloat and incompetence. I did my best to remain patient, and really it wasn’t so bad. I’m just glad that it’s done. That exam was to assess my physical disability, but thankfully I am not physically disabled. I’m pretty out of shape, but that’s the worst of my problems. I’m a bit worried about how that’ll impact my case, but I was honest, and that’s the best I can do. Bipolar disorder is one of the leading causes of disability in the U.S., so I know that my case is solid.
It was funny: when the doctor was dictating his assessments from the paperwork he was reading for the first time in front of me, he stated that I was diagnosed with ADHD. I don’t remember receiving a diagnosis, but I think it probably came from my primary care doctor when I took a questionnaire. I’ve been on the fence about whether I have ADHD, but it was strange getting that confirmation for the first time. I didn’t get clocked for a diagnosis when I was a child because I got good grades in school and was obedient and personable with my teachers. However, I think I’ve developed coping mechanisms for it since I was a child.

I’ve always tried training my “focus muscles,” as it were. The main thing that helps me is having something to do with my hands while I’m listening to lectures. Also, while teachers were lecturing, I’d grab a textbook from the shelf and start doing the homework while they were teaching. A big thing that helps, too, is listening to something while working on stuff. I’ll stack different tracks together, too—like rain sounds, binaural beats, and any kind of ambient radio. Lofi, vaporwave, classical, IDM—they’re my lock-in fuel. I can accept an ADHD diagnosis, but I’ve developed the wisdom to know that the best way to manage it is through developing proper therapeutic mechanisms.
Although, with the knowledge of this diagnosis, I might get an Adderall prescription. I don’t know.
I still have many moments of anxiety throughout the day, but, like many things, it comes and goes. In spite of my maladies, I’ve been doing well. God has been kind to me the last several months. More than anything, this practice of writing most days and getting it published on my website has been my absolute saving grace. I know that no matter what happens, I can come here and write about it honestly and not have to worry about how it’ll be perceived.
I do hope it helps you, though.
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Fasting

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sin surrounds me, but God is greater.
I've been using my prayer rope more intensely, in spite of certain vices coming back into my life. I'm on my third pack of cigarettes now. I've been succumbing to lustful tendencies. As I've mentioned many times before, it is a constant battle with them. However, I've been reading more about the lives of the saints, particularly the Desert Fathers. I've been inspired by the lives of Saint Macarius and Saint Anthony. Their complete and total dedication to the solitude of the monastic life is inspiring, to say the least.
I think of all the comforts of society I would have to abandon to immerse myself in that life. Many pilgrims take sojourns to monasteries to emulate even a fraction of the monastic struggle, and many can barely take it in. It's more than just confronting your shortcomings; to leave this world with your complete mind and heart for the sake of something greater is a direct act of war against demonic forces. The longer you stay in that solitude, the more you realize just how bereft this world is. Even if it's difficult to see the beauty of that next life, I have no doubt in my mind that it's there.
Even when illusions are shattered, new ones take their place.

Saint Anthony spent decades in solitude with barely any food to eat. He subsisted on only a small bit of bread and oil, and most days he fasted entirely. When his students—whom he didn't even want to have—finally persuaded him to come out of solitude to meet and teach them, he didn't emerge emaciated. He came out looking healthy and full of life. As the Zoomers would say, he had aura. However, this aura didn't come from his own volition at all; it was entirely the work of God's grace, day in and day out. Saint Anthony was born into a wealthy family, but once he received his inheritance, he gave it all away to the Church and went out to the desert.
That wilderness is something we all face at some point. Even if our jungles are made of concrete, they're still perilous. There are nights when I'm out driving and the streets are completely empty—no cars or pedestrians in sight. All I can see are the lights and the pavement. In those quiet moments, it can feel like I am completely and totally alone. I realize that the wilderness isn't a place you go out to, but a condition of the heart. Yet despite that, I feel the presence of Christ. I know that even in the wilderness of my heart, I can work to build that monastery.
All I have to do is pray.

Meat fasting for Lent has begun as well. I'm not sure how I should proceed with fasting since I'm not received yet, but I feel emboldened to try something. I want to ask my friends from church what exactly I need to do, and I hope that their advice will be helpful. If Saint Anthony can fast the way he did, I have every reason to do what I can. For me, fasting is a tall order. I am not good with dietary restrictions, but more than that, I fall victim to gluttonous tendencies as well. I've been obese for several years now. When I was on antipsychotic medications, that increased my appetite quite a bit. On top of that, I became inactive after the onset of my bipolar diagnosis and due to restrictions from COVID.
All of those things together have made it difficult to feel healthy, among other problems. But even beyond matters of physical health, I feel more inclined to be spiritually disobedient because food can be a powerful anesthetic. I grew up very blessed in that I've never experienced any kind of food insecurity. I never had to worry about getting my next meal; food was always there, regardless of personal circumstances. However, a lesson I need to apply is that just as food is always there, so is Christ. Instead of relying on food for comfort, I need to learn to fully embrace the comfort that Christ can give through prayer.
I pray that I may find this repentance.
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Young Monastics

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I skipped Divine Liturgy—again—because I slept in until noon.
This whole week, I've been waking up late, going to bed late, and it's really been throwing me off. I know it's because my sleep apnea is forcing sleep debt. It makes my heart rate go up like crazy when I go weeks without a good night's sleep. It's become a cycle: go to bed at a normal time, sleep like shit for two weeks, spend a bunch of time in bed recuperating, repeat. Usually there will be a day when I sleep all day to recuperate, but lately I've just been waking up at noon every day instead. It sucks because I feel like my mornings were stolen. I take a lot of pride in my mornings because it's usually when I write these entries. Since I've been waking up late, it's thrown off my whole routine, and I've been relegating Cogito to the evenings.
Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I bought another prayer rope, and it came in the mail today, though. I now have four: one at my prayer corner, one at my desk, one in my purse, and one in the car. I try to practice that ceaseless prayer as much as I can. It helps, but there's still the feeling of tedium, which can muster a sense of spiritual incompleteness. Of course, the work itself comes from that tedium, but it's still something I contend with. That tedium is something I've learned to find comfort in. I used to feel empty in it, but I've come to learn that, after a while, I wouldn't be able to imagine my life without it.
I was upset about missing Divine Liturgy today, but I know to keep it in perspective. Salvation is a lifelong process; there will be many more to attend in the future. God knows my heart and knows that I want nothing more than to spend as much time at home as I can. I was able to attend Great Vespers yesterday, so I am not as spiritually bereft as I felt this morning. When I was hanging out with folks from church earlier this week, I was chatting with a young guy. He's a catechumen, and I can tell he has a lot of zeal. We talked about how great it is that Orthodoxy is surging here in America and that, since we're young, we'll be part of that wave for decades to come.

We also talked about how cool it would be to see a beachside monastery. I said that we'd be the generation to make it happen. I don't know exactly how I'll contribute to Orthodoxy's rise in America. I could do it as a layman, a member of the clergy, or even get tonsured and become a monk. Reading about the lives of the monastics has been spiritually edifying. One priest called them the “Navy SEALs of Orthodoxy,” which I completely agree with. Through the monastic life, monks can draw the presence of Christ to all who encounter them in ways not always accessible to laymen or even clergy. It must be a profound experience to go to a monastery.
If I'm lucky, God will bring me to one.
I think it's also important for me not to be tempted by spiritual greed, which is an easy trap for new converts. More than that, it's easy to romanticize monastic life. Many want the aesthetic of being a monk but don't want to pay the prices associated with it. Tonsure involves celibacy, renouncing all possessions, and complete and total devotion to monasticism for the rest of your life. That's a lot to give up, and many can't and shouldn't. We all have our role to play in God's kingdom, and salvation is a unique process for everyone. Different sins can control different people. Circumstances are never identical between two different people. Besides, the monastery isn't always something external.
We all have a monastery inside us.
It's up to us whether we choose to find it.
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Empowerment

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!
Right now I am sitting at a cafe. I had dinner, some coffee, and I'm now finally getting to writing today. Earlier, I attended Great Vespers at my local parish. It was a particularly wonderful service. I decided to follow along with the choir for most of the service. It was my first time singing at a service, and it felt empowering. Over the last several occasions I've attended services, I usually would stand there, unsure of what to do. My feet would hurt, my attention would dart all around the cathedral, and overall, I felt nervous. Now that my attendance has been more consistent, I am beginning to feel more comfortable in worship.
I've also been attending hangouts organized by some men in the parish. I've met some kind folks there, which has helped me feel more comfortable when attending services. I am immensely blessed to have the opportunity to leave the house and be as involved as I can in church. It has made life so much better and given me much to look forward to. Of course, I still have reservations. There will be many times where I question whether I should go. Ultimately, I try to get out of persuasions of comfort, and when I do, I know I'm better for it. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
My anxiety comes and goes, but there's a lot I deal with throughout the day. However, I have become more zealous in my prayer. It comes and goes too, but I know that as I continue this process bit by bit, my resilience will grow. I hope one day to maybe even forget what life was like without it. I recently purchased a cross for my prayer corner and it puts the whole thing together. I also got some more prayer ropes so that I can keep them in different places like my car and my purse. Overall, I hope to continue my repentance through this essential practice.
I slept in until noon again today. I spent a bit too much time at the cafe last night and didn't end up falling asleep until around 4 AM. I know I needed the rest, but sleeping in that late—especially with this continued streak I've had—throws off important routines. However, I know it's important to not obsess over the variance. The fact that I can still do what I need to do in spite of any variance shows the progress I've made with systems I've put in place. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I recently got back into Bash scripting too. I wrote a short deploy script for my blog and link log, which helps now that I have version control and backups on GitHub. I also wrote a short script to update all of my package managers simultaneously. It updates APT, npm, and pipx. I could get even more into Bash scripting and there are tons of forums out there dedicated to cool scripting ideas, but at this point I feel that my workflow is quite optimized. More than anything, I'm thankful that I have cultivated more knowledge of computers since switching over to Linux.
User empowerment is important to cultivate, especially with all the discourse surrounding surveillance and diminished user freedom. These days, a major lack of empowerment comes from ignorance. Most people want their machines to just work, which is understandable. However, with the ubiquity of computers and the internet, there should be more awareness for tech literacy. Unfortunately, large tech conglomerates profit off ignorance, so there are many efforts being made to control the narrative. It's a complex issue with myriad perspectives and solutions.
I know that, as a Linux user, many in the community push toward the Free Software Movement, but there are many incompatibilities between it and mainstream society. Still, we are empowered to push toward solutions more oriented toward that ethos. Just as it is with prayer and coming to Christ, we simply just have to do what we can with what we're afforded with. On an individual level, what works for one may not work for others. Instead of virtue signaling with dogma, it's more important to meet people where they're at.
That's what Christ does for us every day, so let's return that favor to each other.
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Hymns

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My heart has been beating so fast lately. I feel it pounding constantly.
I've been drinking too much coffee lately. I've gotten to the point now where I have caffeine all day, even at night. I can still fall asleep okay, but now, when I don't have coffee, I get headaches and become extremely tired. I slept in until noon again today. My health feels so fractured, and even though I'm taking steps to improve it through the gym and medications, there's still so much wrong with me.
I'm too young to be feeling this damn old. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I also started smoking again. I went through a whole pack yesterday and have been smoking today, too. The impacts have been readily apparent: my heart is beating even faster; my stomach churns with nausea. I feel so bad after smoking, but I keep coming back to it. There was this phrase I heard: "Recovery is giving up one thing for everything." Well, I feel like I have to give up twelve things, and they're constantly fighting for my attention. I don't have a monkey on my back but a whole troupe of them.
I've been trying to pray more. Throughout the day, I say the Jesus Prayer. I pray every morning and evening. I try to keep myself as close to God as I can because I'm afraid—of what might happen, of what won't happen, of what shouldn't happen. I do everything I can to assuage my anxiety, but it feels like it's not enough. Even when I feel close to God, I still have demons screaming at me from the periphery.
Life has been good. Despite these problems, there's still so much I have to be thankful for. I felt horrible not writing the last few days. There are all these thoughts on my mind; my inner dialogue never stops. I want to share this experience with you all, but it can seem like there aren't enough hours in the day. Coming here every day to make my mark is tough work. It's work that I love, but I feel myself putting so much weight on it.
There's so much more to life than what I feel like I can handle. Every moment of every day is a visceral sensory experience. My nerves constantly tingle as my mind zips through every minutia of experience. Down to the last millisecond, there's always something happening. I want to slow it down and take it in, but I constantly feel consumed. My intention isn't to say that I'm struggling, but to say that I'm afraid, tired, and not sure when I'll find that moment of rest.
I want to slow down, but I'm not sure if that's possible—in this moment, that is.

I know God hears my prayers. Whatever is helping me write these thoughts is trying to tell me that I don't have to be so vigilant. Yet in spite of that, I still find myself going through the process. It's something that doesn't feel real. I constantly feel as if I'm under siege, that little bugs keep buzzing all around and that there's something inside of me that they're flying to. Why do I feel as if there's something out to get me? The paranoia hurts. It's as if, at any moment, I'll just spontaneously combust, and I'm trying to prepare myself for it despite the fact that there's nothing there.
I don't want anyone to worry about me. I am safe, protected, and comforted. I know that there is boundless love everywhere I go, even if I can't always feel it. Even when I'm alone, there's always something I can turn to. I can always pray. I can always seek. I will keep knocking—I must. My internal world is in progress. I will cultivate it in whatever condition I find myself in. I know that rest is coming. Even when I find myself in a perpetual all-night vigil, I will keep praying.
If God wills it, I might even hear the angels sing.
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Complacency

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have a backup of my blog and link log on GitHub</a> now if that's relevant to anyone.
There's this constant fear of complacency. If I'm not seeking, finding faults in things, improving—I feel like I'm failing.
Or worse: I feel like I'm dying.
I remember taking an Uber to a job interview a few years ago. An older guy with long gray hair picked me up. He was driving a white minivan. I get in the car and while driving me to the interview, we chat about how much the Dallas–Fort Worth area has changed over the last few decades.
"Yeah, lots of construction everywhere," he says. "But that's the thing. If a city isn't growing, it's dying." Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
He said it so casually, but it was a profound observation I still think about regularly. At first, I interpreted it as some kind of subversive critique of capitalism. I thought it was a fair estimation of the "growth at all costs" ethos that's dominated this century. Many have made that critique before and have proposed solutions oriented around sustainability or even letting decline be accounted for. That sounds nice on paper, but the dichotomy of growth and decay goes beyond societal planning.
In human biology, the dichotomy presents itself as a matter of fact. When we age, there are the days we grow and the days we start to die. There's not really a period where you're just there. You're either growing or dying. Of course, we don't feel like we're dying as we age, especially not right when the process starts. I'm 28 years old, and over the last few years, I've come closer to accepting I'm no longer growing or developing.
I'm dying, albeit slowly. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I think that's where the fear of complacency comes from. It's my way of grappling with the inevitable decline that happens every single day. We all deal with it in different ways, but it's important to be honest about what it is. However, I don't want to use it as an excuse to give up. There's that fear of complacency again. I think, beyond complacency, there's a difficulty in accepting change as the only constant. Most days, I am stressed out by the constant dialogue in my head. Some don't have a dialogue, but there's constant chatter in my head that never stops, even for a second. I learned I could write here every day because of it. But now I know I have to do it; otherwise, the volume would get louder, and it would get so loud I'd have to act on it in harmful ways.
I don't want to come off like I have dangerous impulses. There's no animal inside to awaken, as it were. Throughout my life, I've had outlets outside of writing that have helped quell the voice in my head. I did creative projects as a kid: made brickfilms</a>, learned magic tricks, built card houses, etc. Throughout my adolescent years, I played the saxophone in school. Practicing was one of my favorite pastimes, and I felt the same release from practicing as I do writing here today. In college, I was a bike messenger and became enamored with cycling.
In many ways, I feel less a fear of complacency, and more a sense of withdrawals when I'm not working on something that fascinates me. That growth-and-decay dichotomy also manifests itself in craft; you use it or you lose it, right? In that sense, I feel it's even more important to keep pursuing this project. I hit 100K views on this site today. I used to have barely 100 views a day, but now I easily average about 700–1,000 views a day. My site has found its way to active directories and has been mentioned by several other webmasters. I've also received lots of kind messages on my guestbook</a> and through email from readers. I don't track metrics with my RSS feeds, but I'm confident that I have at least a small handful of consistent readers.
I've thanked y'all before, but I'm gonna do it again.
Thank you.
Be on the lookout for a new project coming up on this site. It's been stewing in my mind for a few weeks now, but I'm getting ready to pull it off, and when it happens, it's going to be awesome. And yes, you'll get another RSS feed of mine to follow. Isn't that exciting?
Stay loved, friends.
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The Purple Orb

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There have been a number of things swimming around my mind today, so I hope to get them across the best way I can.
Last night, I had a relaxing time at the pool in my gym. I found a spot where I could comfortably lounge in the pool, and I felt a nice sense of calmness for a while. It was, as Andrew Huberman would call it, a classic session of non-sleep deep rest. It can be difficult to achieve that state, so experiencing it last night was an important reprieve for me. After the gym, I went to a café and got some dinner. Lately, I've been going to this café after the gym because it's open 24 hours, has good Wi-Fi, and a bottomless coffee bar. I spent a few hours there hanging out, browsing on my computer, and trying to maintain some kind of serenity.
I got home late at night but felt empowered to get back on my prayer rule. I stood in front of my icon for a long time praying to God for rest and safety, and that His will be done so that I can relinquish myself to His good and perfect plans. I did my nighttime hygiene routine and lay in bed to fall asleep. I am a strong dreamer; as I've aged and sobered up, my dreams are more frequent and more vivid than they've ever been. Most nights, I can recall my dreams the next day, and can recall dozens of dreams from throughout my past. I also tend to lucid dream frequently, with varying degrees of success. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Last night, I had a dream that I was in space. I was flying around the black void when, suddenly, I saw a purple orb in front of me. My stomach sank. I've had this feeling many times before: it was a spirit that wanted to speak with me. I've had many of these encounters, with most of these spirits being demons. Usually, when these demons confront me, they say things that don't make much logical sense. They speak in English, but their sentences have no coherent grammar. However, their words always fill me with a deep sense of fear that continues well after I wake up.
With this purple orb spirit, however, its words were clear and instead of fear, I felt what I can only describe as a deep reverence. I knew it carried immense power, but it had no intention of harming me. The spirit said something groundbreaking:
"The angels are real. Listen to them."
I want to be clear: I am not telling this story as a matter of prelest. I do not want to say that this purple orb was an Angel of the Lord. Truthfully, I have no idea what it was at all. I don't want to make any kind of conclusions that don't need to be made. However, I think it speaks to a deeper sense of self-knowledge. To me, dreams are an inward expression of outward stimuli. As I've continued to engage further in my faith through prayer, I've been building a stronger relationship with Christ.
I do think there are spirits that guide us, even if we cannot perceive them in their true form. Even if I can't perceive them in the same way I would a conversation with a friend, I know they communicate with me in ways I might not fully understand. I think when I listen to the angels, that means that I am trusting my gut and personal sense of judgment. As I continue my prayers, I work closer towards a complete alignment with Christ. Because of that, it's easier to trust myself when making decisions.
When things don't seem like they're working out in the moment, I can be confident in the bigger picture—even when I can't see it. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
This bigger picture is something that eludes all of us; we are all limited in our perception. Every day, I try to maintain my inner world through a deep and meticulous curating of information. This is because I know that wars are no longer only fought with guns and bombs. The most impactful wars of our time are fought with information. Deception is rampant. We are constantly bombarded with confusion and disorientation, primed to accept the first thing that sort of makes sense. One can argue that it's a spiritual war, but it's important to understand that we participate in this war, knowingly or otherwise.
It isn't something that we defend ourselves against either. Wars are always won on the offensive. For me, the offensive looks like writing here, maintaining good relationships, and trying not to read too deeply into things. More than anything, though, it looks like surrender. I understand that I am not in a position to win this war on my own, but I know that as long as I consistently defer to Christ through prayer and repentance, I have a fighting chance.
He came here to bring us a sword, and I'm taking it.
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Daily Bread

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I skipped Divine Liturgy yesterday because, when I woke up, I was too tired to get ready and decided to fall back asleep until noon. Over the last several days, I've been sleeping rougher—waking up several times throughout the night, unsettling dreams—the usual. On top of that, I still haven't picked myself back up after relapsing into masturbation and pornography. Even further, I've been neglecting my prayer rule and nighttime hygiene routine. Altogether, I feel like I'm slipping.
I don't like the loss of control.
It's strange; I have this implicit assumption that as long as I adhere to a strict routine and check all my boxes every day, my consistency will contribute to an overall sense of restoration. However, I've noticed that this adherence isn't, well, very adherent. More than likely, it has to do with the fact that I don't really give myself "days off."
The thing is, my life isn't a particularly arduous one. I don't work a demanding job. I get to go to a nice and expensive gym most days of the week. I have many creature comforts that make my life significantly easier. So for me, doing the things I feel the need to—writing here, going to the gym, basic self-care, prayer—shouldn't be something that requires time off. Every day feels like a day off and a day "on." Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I don't have many obligations. I don't have clients to please, meetings to attend, or managers to assuage. For me, I am in the business of taking care of myself, getting closer to God, and writing for all of you who choose to read here every day. With that, I don't have any worldly obligations. I am fortunate enough to have been born into a family that can keep the bills paid while I focus on this little project of mine. I know how blessed I am, but even then, I still feel that I'm struggling to "keep up," as it were.
I don't mean that I feel behind socioeconomically, either. I couldn't care less about that. My metrics are different. I want to feel successful in my relationships. I want to feel like I'm using my creative talents for good. I've worked physically taxing jobs before; they give no true sense of fulfillment. I don't want to keep score of my life based on how much money I make or who I know or whatever else. I want to surround myself with humble and honest folk and to feel like I'm making a significant difference in the lives of a few as opposed to a small difference in the lives of many.
I am just one person. I am ordinary.

Still, there are many instances where I nag at myself. That nagging directly opposes my fatigue. Even in moments of total mental and physical exhaustion, there is still that small voice nagging at me and telling me that there's more I ought to be doing. I've had a bad habit of fluctuating between different projects and never really finding a place for them. The novelty of starting a new thing is intoxicating, but through this project I've come to understand the necessity and importance of tedium.
Even when it feels like there's nothing I have to say, my mind keeps going anyway.
There's a lot that I wish I had. I wish I was financially independent. I wish I could more directly see the impact of my work. I wish I could make a living doing this. More than anything, I wish that I was content with what I have. This longing that I feel for something more—I understand that it's something we all experience. But for me, that "more" isn't found in conventional places. If anything, that "more" is a desire for internal mastery; I want this so I can get closer to God. I want my life to remain examined, to seek greater self-understanding. I know that all of this is only possible because I don't have to worry about the basics. Food, water, and shelter are always accounted for.
Every day, I receive my daily bread.
All I hope for now is to be delivered from the evil one.
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Remedies

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like shit today.
I've been having too much caffeine—going through four cups of coffee a day at this point. It's not good. Generally, I just feel off for a variety of reasons. There's been a bit of a collapse in my routines. Over the last several months, I've become more confident and resolute in my routines. I had to build them from the ground up, one habit at a time. I kept a spreadsheet of little tasks I needed to do each day, and it helped. These days, I have good routines. However, there's an urge to spin out and stop doing them.
Ultimately, I struggle with balancing rigidity and flexibility. There's that overachieving perfectionist in my head telling me things have to go a certain way and if they don't, that's a personal and moral failing. I understand this absolutist thinking is unhealthy, but it's difficult to reconcile with its certain perceived benefits: I am good at being consistent with something once I build a coherent system around it. Case in point—this blog. I also have hardened discipline, which can put me ahead when it matters.
However, this rigidity eats at me after a while because I end up facing the inevitability of variance. Some small variable can change internal or external circumstances. When stacked up, it can cause internal strife. It seems when the system fails, I fail. I know that's not fully resonant, but it hurts dealing with the anguish I feel when something small can ruin my whole day.
Holy shit, do I have autism?

Neuroscientists speculate about some kind of link between bipolar disorder and autism. I have anecdotal evidence of this with my sister, who has autism. But honestly, I have the "Do I have autism?" identity crisis about every six months or so. There are definitely some elements there, I think, but the main thing that dissuades me from convincing myself into an autism self-diagnosis is that I maintain good social relationships. Since I was young, I've typically been able to intuit social cues and can understand what makes people tick.
Still, there's a lot of things I relate to when it comes to symptoms of autism. I have many sensory issues: I keep earplugs on my keychain so I don't get overwhelmed by loud environments. I am photosensitive and have had two seizures due to intense flashing lights. Even these days, I get dizzy when I'm around them, so no raves for me. I generally do not like physical contact. I'm also generally jumpy and uncoordinated. If I'm not autistic, I'm definitely a nerd.
Whether or not I want to identify as autistic doesn't matter. It's not something you are, but something you have. A diagnosis is just a roadmap. It doesn't have to be a life sentence or something to base your entire personality around. What matters more is finding out how to live life in a way that's sustainable and works for you. We're all unique, and remedies are hardly ever one-size-fits-all.
I still feel like shit today. I'm tired despite being on my third cup of coffee. Sitting here at my computer during these sessions can feel like some kind of fugue state sometimes. If anything, there can be more confusion than clarity. While that's frustrating, I also understand that it's normal and not unique to me.
Writing is still a remedy that works for me.
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The Green Dot in Windsor Park

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Don't get a donut today.
All Marty has to do is make a single sale by the end of the day. If he doesn't, he'll be buying himself a one-way ticket to the Unemployment Office. He has been walking this neighborhood for almost two weeks now. He got this job doing door-to-door sales with Shining Circle Solar about a month and a half ago.
During training, Marty met with some of the more experienced salesmen. Some of them were twenty-year-old kids that skipped college to join the apparent gold rush. These kids were making six-figure salaries, all commission.
"I just got a sale the other day, eight-thousand dollar commission. Seriously," said Devin, a twenty-one year old who has been with the company for a year and a half. "When the money hits your bank account, it's one of the craziest feelings. I love it. If I keep pushing I'll hit 30k just for this month."
Marty and his cohort learned the technical aspects of making a sale. They received electronic tablets and a comprehensive tour of all the software the company used: lead tracking, layout designs, collecting payment information. Most people wouldn't even answer the door. Those who did were instantly hostile. "You're the third person that's knocked on my door this week. I'm not interested," people would say during his pitch.
"You just gotta air it out man," Devin told Marty during a pitch rehearsal.
"What?" Marty asked.
"Yeah check it," Devin said as he approached the whiteboard. He opened a dry-erase marker and started writing. "Agree. Ignore. Resume."
Marty looked visibly confused. "Isn't that rude? Wouldn't that make the prospect upset?"
"Nah, you gotta be assertive." Devin said. "If you don't seem like you got a purpose and know what you're talking about, they'll slam that door right in your face. You gotta get past their programming."
Two weeks ago, Marty had a one-on-one meeting with Ashton, the VP of sales. Ashton called him into his office. He went around his desk and gestured towards the seat across from him. "Have a seat," he said. The chair was made mostly out of plastic. It looked like a surplus piece from an outdated catalog. Ashton's seat was plush, made out of pleather. Marty pulled out the plastic chair and took a seat.
"So here's the thing," Ashton began. "It's been great having you around, really. Honestly, you're a really nice guy. You just haven't made any sales yet." He leaned forward a bit. "I want to help you, Marty. That's why I'm making sure that you get the best neighborhood. You know that new one that popped up, Windsor Park?" He asked.
"I think so," Marty said.
"Yeah, new neighborhoods are prime territory. Hell, you might even get two or three sales if you work it right," Ashton said.
Marty has been walking his route all afternoon. He keeps track of each house in the neighborhood on his tablet. Each house gets a dot. When someone slams their door in his face, their house gets a red dot. If he needs to circle back at a better time, their house gets a yellow dot. When he gets lucky, he gets a prospect to schedule a separate appointment where he closes the sale. Their house gets a green dot.
The neighborhood map pops up on his tablet. It's a sea of red dots with a few yellow dots scattered around. On the far west end of the map, there's a green dot. Marty met this prospect earlier in the week—an elderly woman who eagerly accepted an appointment for this evening. He just received the design proposal for her home. If he gets this sale, he's looking at a six-thousand dollar commission. The appointment is in about ten minutes, so he heads to the house.
During his walk, the sidewalk ends. The street turns from concrete to asphalt with cars parked on either side. In the neighborhood's newer sections, many houses look the same. In this section, the houses are all unique and older. He approaches the prospect's house. Its architecture is a 1970s contemporary style with distinct slanted roofs. The house is smaller than other ones around it.
He arrives at the house and goes up to the door and knocks. It unlocks and opens. Inside is an elderly man. He's wearing a white undershirt tucked into a pair of khaki corduroy pants strapped with a brown belt and tattered work shoes. His build is short and stocky. There are bags under his eyes. Balding gray hair rests on his head and white stubble sits on his face.
His eyes squint at Marty.
"Hello sir, sorry to bother you," Marty begins. "I'm with Shining Circle Solar. I scheduled an appointment with Judy to look at some designs."
"What?" The man says. He turns around. "Judy, c'mere," he hollers.
Marty and the man stand in awkward silence. Judy approaches the door behind the man.
"Marty, good to see you," she says. "Come on in."
Marty begins to walk inside, but the man stands in front of the door and blocks him.
"Now just what the hell is this?" He asks, turning his head towards Judy. "You ain't tell me bout this."
"I just wanted to see what them solar panels cost, Al," Judy says. "You been seeing 'em pop up all round, too. I was curious bout 'em is all."
Al looks back towards Marty. He sighs and rolls his eyes slightly. "Alright then," he says. He stands back and lets Marty inside.
He walks inside the house. It smells of cigarillos and honey. There are pictures all over. Most of them are of a younger couple. They look happy. Papers are scattered all over the dining room table. Small cracks scatter throughout the walls.
Judy walks Marty to the living room. There is a large leather sofa tucked against the middle back wall. To the right of it is a brown recliner chair with a gray seat cushion and some tears on its arms. To the left of the sofa is a smaller recliner chair that looks newer. Judy gestures for Marty to sit in the newer chair. She takes a seat on the large sofa. Al slowly moves over to his recliner and takes even longer to sit down. He struggles, but no one helps him.
Marty shuffles around in the recliner a bit and leans forward. He takes out his tablet and taps through to the presentation. This was only the third time he'd opened one. The title slide reads "JUDITH AND ALBERT'S SOLAR PANEL SYSTEM WITH SHINING CIRCLE SOLAR" in bold letters along with a stock photo of a roof with solar panels over a white background. He flips the tablet around.
"Can you guys see the scree—"
"Yeah, just fine," Al says.
"Do you need me to get you your glasses?" Judy says, turning to Al.
"Nah, don't need 'em. Can see just fine," Al says, eyes squinting.
Marty leans forward further towards Al. "Right, so thank you both for being here," Marty says. He swipes over to the next slide. "We ran those numbers on your house and got that credit check, and things are looking really—"
"You made them run a damn credit check?" Al says. "Last thing we need is a ding on our credit."
"We didn't get no ding on our credit," Judy says. "They told me these don't ding your credit."
"The financing companies that work with us don't report anything to the major credit reporting companies, so you're in the clear," Marty says. Al leans back and crosses his arms. Marty continues with the presentation and swipes to the next slide.
"Our design team made a layout of what would best fit your home," Marty continues. On the slide is a design drawing laid over an aerial photo of the house. "Your roof faces south, which is the best direction for installing solar panels."
"Why's that?" Judy asks.
"Sun sets east to west, Jude," Al interjects. "Gets more coverage that way."
Marty points at Al. "Yes. Yes, that's right," he says. "And because of that, your electric bill is completely offset if you end up installing the system."
"That's interesting," Judy says. "So we ain't gotta pay an electric bill no more?"
"Correct," Marty says. "Your electric company started a net metering program earlier this year. If you install the panels, they credit you by dialing your meter back. Your home would generate electricity that goes back to the grid. And so, uh, you get compensated for it."
"Yeah, until they raise the prices like they been doin' every year," Al says. "Our electric bill has doubled over the last ten years. You want us to buy today so that you're out of the picture when shit hits the fan tomorrow, kid."
Marty stammers. "Oh, uh, well—"
"We'll be out of the house before that happens," Judy says.
Marty's eyes widen. Al leans forward. "What are you saying?" He says. "We ain't goin' no where."
"You know we keep gettin' them offers from them Windsor Park people," Judy says. "They want this whole little stretch here. Debbie and Gene just closed on their house. They got fifty thousand above asking, Al."
"And where do you reckon we'll go? Huh?" Al says, his voice raising.
Judy shifts in her seat and her eyes dart back and forth. "Well. Well, maybe we can get that RV and travel the country like we talked about," she says.
Al slams the side of the recliner. "Bullshit. You know I can't get around too well no more with this damn sciatica. That ain't happenin' and you know it."
"Something's gotta," she says, her voice getting softer. "We gotta get out while we still can. I just thought that, well, if we get them solar panels on the roof it'd sweeten the deal when we start negotiating with 'em."
Marty speaks up. The tablet is sitting in his lap. "Yes. Right, that's what would happen," he says. "We've seen a home's value increase by up to eight and a half percent."
"See?" Judy says. "If we sell by the end of next year we ain't gotta worry bout no new bill or nothing like that."
Al rolls his eyes. "Jude, think with your damn head here," he says. "If we get more money selling the house with them panels. And that's if. All that's gonna do is pay them panels off and get us out of a damn loan we didn't need in the first place."
"You really think we wouldn't make money? Really?" Jude chides. "What I just say bout Debbie and Gene?"
"Debbie and Gene ain't got nothing to do with us," Al says.
"So what then?" Judy says. "What are we gonna do? Just sit here? We're getting out of this house, Al. They'll let us sell it now, but if we keep being stubborn then they won't be so kind later on."
Marty's head lowers. He crosses his arms, pinning the tablet against his stomach. The tablet vibrates. He peeks at the screen. Five percent battery life.
"And just what are they gonna do?" Al chides back. "We got this house fair and square and as long as I'm payin' that damn mortgage, we ain't leaving."
Judy's face becomes flushed. "These people don't play fair."
Marty looks over to Al. "I was at your neighbor's door the other day. Ernesto, all the way towards the end of the neighborhood that way." He points his thumb back against the wall behind him.
"What about it?"
"He told me that he received a letter from the city. They rezoned his house, said that his lot got declared a historical landmark. He has to vacate by the end of the month or the cops will show up, arrest him for trespassing."
Al's head lowers. His eyes widen. His face flattens.
"You remember when Ernesto told us about that fancy guy in a suit, said he was with Windsor Park?" Judy says, putting her hand on Al's knee. "Told him to go straight to hell after making an offer on his house, right at the door."
The room turns silent.
"Kid, just get the hell out of here," Al says. He cusps his face with his hands. "Oh God damn it! What are we gonna do?"
Judy stands up. Marty follows. "I'm so sorry about this. We'll call you back another day, see if we can reschedule."
Marty stays silent as she escorts him to the front door. She opens it for him. He walks outside, waving his hand behind him. He doesn't turn back. The door shuts. Loud muffled crying hums through it. He looks at the screen of his tablet and presses the power button.
It's dead.
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Is It Blissful?

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm becoming worried. I keep relapsing into using pornography.
The despair is marching its way back into my life. I am losing motivation to pray for deliverance because I feel so ashamed and alone. It's as if I can't learn from grace; I can't learn to remember how it feels to receive it and instead, I fall back into the same traps. I'm also frustrated because I feel so constrained by my situation. It's not like I can just throw my phone away or get out of my house. I have tied myself so directly to my circumstances that it feels as if there's no way out.
Ultimately, I know that I can receive that deliverance and grace, but I don't know if the doubt comes from demonic presence or if it's from myself alone. It's one thing to blame your own iniquity on demons, but true accountability seems even worse. It's worse because it's something that I have to work on. It's not a demon that I have to cast out, but a part of myself that I have to change.
And I don't know how to let it go. I don't know.

I watched a video of a deacon from my church. He was doing an interview with someone. In the interview, the deacon talked about how he received deliverance from lust and pornography addiction through the intercession of the Theotokos (Mother of God, Mary). That, to me, makes more sense. She understands chastity better than anyone else ever has, so it's an issue close to her heart, I suppose.
I was so beat down and tired last night that I didn't go through my usual prayer rule; I barely prayed at all. I didn't even brush my teeth or wash my face like I usually do at night either. All I could do was go straight to bed. I woke up this morning and still felt zapped. I couldn't even face my icon and pray. I could barely even get ready.
There's a clear inverse relationship between prayer and sin.
It's such a difficult trap to find myself in. To stop sinning, I need to pray more, but the sin makes it harder for me to pray—a difficult catch-22, it seems. Really, my whole life feels as if it's coming to a halt. I couldn't even go to the gym yesterday. Why is it that I can't maintain a simple program for an extended period? My life is an easy one, yet I feel so weak. I couldn't imagine facing more difficult circumstances; I wouldn't survive.
I guess that's why most people don't.
I'm just frustrated. I feel that deep lamentation again. Lately I've been listening to the classic Dream House</a> by Deafheaven and feel a deep resonance with it. The song is about a man's struggles with alcoholism. You probably have to look up the lyrics, since it's a black metal song and the singer is screaming the lyrics in this guttural way that's hard to understand. This section feels most resonant:
"I'm dying."
"Is it blissful?"
"It's like a dream."
"I want to dream."

I remember a few years ago—it was a few months after my first hospitalization. I had just started this new job as a server at a Tex-Mex restaurant. In the middle of a chaotic dinner shift, I had this aching realization. Once the thought crossed my mind, I walked out in the middle of the shift and never went back.
I realized that I was already dead.
In that way, there's nothing that I feel the need to live for. Every day feels like a dream. I feel like the worlds I go to when I'm asleep are the same as this one. There's never any true rest. At least, I haven't felt like I've rested in a long time. Even in the midst of prayer or in the midst of mercy, there's nothing I can do to truly find comfort in anything. It's all a trap. It's all fake. It's a dream that keeps playing on repeat.
Is this hell?
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Personal Prayers

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have been feeling particularly blessed lately; this directly coincides with a recent change in my prayer life. Since I reconverted in late 2023, I have tried to establish a consistent prayer life. Through discovering Eastern Orthodox Christianity, I found a treasure trove of resources to guide me in this endeavor. Namely, I have a prayer book and a prayer corner with an icon and a small stack of literature. From the prayer book, I have memorized the Jesus Prayer, the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Prayer to St. Michael. I haven't received a prayer rule from a spiritual father yet, so I decided to make my own for now.
Every morning and evening, I recite my memorized prayers. Over the last month or so, this has proven to be a wonderful centering exercise. My prayer book includes morning and evening prayers, but I struggled to do them because certain parts are only for those who have been fully received into the Church. Still, I haven't let that deter me from prayer. Particularly after reading The Way of a Pilgrim</a>, I understood that a hesychastic Jesus Prayer practice would be an excellent start.
It has been a blessing to build this spiritual foundation. Prior to my discovery of Orthodoxy, I prayed only “from the heart.” However, instead of saying them out loud in private, I wrote them down in a small pocket notebook. I was experimenting with a type of prayer that I thought would be most beneficial for me, and I think written prayers are a decent way to pray. Truthfully, though, I was simply bashful about praying out loud. I thought it would make me look and feel stupid, even if I did it in private.

Recently, I started praying from the heart out loud after reciting my memorized prayers. I spend a few extra minutes at my prayer corner, looking up at my ceiling or at my icons, and trying to confess my heart to Christ. I struggled to find my confidence at first, but I quickly found my footing and marveled that I had decided against doing it for so long.
I found that God is a great listener.
Beyond that, I found comfort in knowing that I can let my heart out to Him in the privacy of my room, and He listens to every word. The words "seek and you shall find" ring truer than ever. I have become much more attuned to my sin and have been finding more repentance each day. It's easy for me to become prideful and think that I have myself figured out. Complacency is horrible; I want to do what I can to continue my journey of repentance so that I may be worthy of salvation.
From a book</a> I've been reading, I learned that if an Orthodox Christian receives Holy Communion on the day of their death, they ascend immediately to the throne of God. If only I could receive that kind of grace. Still, I know that it's not healthy to place expectations on most things, especially my salvation. I guess I'm just awestruck at how close God is to us in a culture that constantly wants to reject Him. At this point, I am more than convinced that wholehearted faith is the only way to live life. I want nothing more than to let my faith dictate my every move.
Only through the power and grace of God. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
In many ways, the world—and life itself—can feel like a prison. Being trapped in my head makes for feelings of intense loneliness at times. However, I know that even in a state of personal imprisonment, God leans in closer to our hearts. I recently learned of a Russian prisoner's motto that encapsulates my approach to the world perfectly:
Don't believe. Don't fear. Don't beg.
The world is a hard place. There is a lot of suffering here, but we have so much capacity to receive God's grace. I only hope that I can open my heart to it.
Don't believe. Don't fear. Don't beg.
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Theosis

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

CHECK OUT MY LINK LOG</a>
I couldn't write yesterday, which was horrible. The problem was that over the last two days, I've been trying to fix an issue with the blog's codebase. Well, it wasn't so much an issue as it was an attempt to optimize for later down the line. Either way, while I was vibe-coding the fix, the model I was using completely changed one of my template files. Since I was living on the edge and didn't implement any kind of version control, I lost my working version of the template and couldn't publish anything here until it was fixed.
I thought it was completely over—that I had destroyed my blog—and I melted down over it. I couldn't write about it in my usual way either, so the whole thing made yesterday a hard one. Thankfully, by the grace of God, I found a solution before going to bed. When I built my Link Log just a week prior, I used copies of my templates there. So with that, I was able to copy my lost template from the Link Log back to here and voilà, I'm writing again.
On top of that happening, I also relapsed into pornography. Yesterday, I hit a streak of two weeks, which was the longest I've gone in over a decade. Then I relapsed. A few days prior, I had struggled with peeking and let the temptation become stronger over time. Eventually, I completely lost my self-control and relapsed. It was horrible—I had a tally by my desk that I looked at for encouragement, but it didn't seem to work. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
What I've found with repenting my lust is this: true repentance does not involve fighting the urge to sin, but from understanding that it is not something that should be urging you in the first place. If you spend too much time trying to fight the demons, they win. That's why prayer is so important. The demons know that if you try to fight them yourself, they will win. They have the upper hand because they are older, wiser, and have successfully killed many before. That's why when we pray, it makes them the most upset. They know that once we seek power from the Most High, there is nothing they can do to stop us.
It's made me think of the story of Adam and Eve. I'm not entirely convinced that it's a literal origin story for humanity, but I do think that it tells a spiritual origin, which is more fundamental and important. It's one that can be understood in human terms, and that universality is why it is such an important story. I think about the serpent's temptation. From the story, it's clear to me that the oldest trick demons pull on us is getting us to think that we're all alone and that we not only have to handle life ourselves, but that we should.
I don't want to make the same mistake that Adam did. I don't want to lean on my own understanding of anything, and I don't want to think that I am the one who is solely responsible for my fate. I know that every day, we make choices. Every thought and action is a choice. Emotions are responses to these choices, and they can fuel the fire or dissipate into smoke. I now realize that every choice I make isn't clouded in some kind of aesthetic vapor. There are two outcomes: it pleases God, or it displeases Him.
I only want to do what pleases God. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
This, of course, goes back to the first and foremost command that Christ gave us: to love God with all our mind, heart, and soul. True repentance comes from understanding this on the deepest level and living it out with our actions. I also understand that this choice isn't supposed to be an easy one. We have been told of narrow and wide paths, and seeking Christ is undoubtedly as narrow as it can get. For whatever reason, there is a constant push and pull with this.
I have found only through deep and intense lamentation the glory and grace of God. That isn't to say that we should suffer more and more so that we can find God, but that we have the choice to let that suffering bring us closer to Him. Why would a good and perfect God let His children play in a field of snakes? Why would a good and perfect God allow his children to suffer if He has every way of preventing it?
Theosis.
We cannot live with God unless we understand the snakes. We cannot love unless we know what it is like to live without it. Through the trials, we have the chance to ascend to the throne of God and achieve everlasting life in pure communion with Him. Even Christ, in the midst of His crucifixion, expressed doubt and lamentation. If Christ—who has the divine nature of the Father within Him—had to face that doubt, then how can we expect ourselves to not do the same?
For whatever reason, even if we cannot understand it, this is all part of the plan.
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Self Denial

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I had a medical evaluation for my SSDI benefits.
I've been in the application process since December 2023. I was initially denied, but that's a common circumstance. Currently, I'm in the appeals process for my case, and am waiting on a decision from Social Security. The evaluation itself was short; I've been through several of these already with different healthcare providers. It's a usual procedure when going through a mental health treatment—like a partial hospitalization program or whatever else: you get asked dozens of questions on your history with your condition, how it impacts you, and all that. It's an exhausting song and dance, but one that I have to do. They used to be hard, but these days I don't mind them as much.
During my evaluation, I was asked many questions that I had been asked before. At the end, I did a screening with a clinical psychologist. Toward the end of the evaluation, the psychologist asked me if was sure that my diagnosis was bipolar disorder. I told him I was confident it was. He then said that "Well, Social Security treats all these conditions—schizophrenia, schizoaffective, bipolar—they treat them all the same. But out of all of them, bipolar has the best prognosis since you're not cognitively affected by it."
Then he looks at his notes. "Usually people who are lying don't know all of these medications you told me you've been on," he said matter-of-factly. I assured him that I was speaking from experience. He then said that his office doesn't know anything about Social Security's decision—that they just send them the paperwork—and he sent me on my way.

All in all, I feel like I represented myself well. I tried to be as honest and descriptive as I could. I did not mention that I have this public diary, but I did mention that I have a website. I was asked what I do every day. I work on my website every morning, so I just left it at that. I did not discuss the fact that I write about my bipolar disorder on the internet for everyone to see, but I did mention that one of my coping skills was journaling. So, good for me, I guess.
All of this had me thinking about what will happen next. I know that once I get my disability income, that'll help me apply for other programs such as low-income housing and food stamps. Once I get those things, I have every intention of moving out of my parents' house so that I can get some independence and peace and quiet. There's familiarity being here, but there are many things I wish that I could do with my own place that I can't do here.
I'd like to have guests, be in control of my own space, manage myself on my own terms—that kind of thing. Whether or not I own property or do this thing or that other thing doesn't concern me. I just want independence and personal stability without having to rely on a job. I prefer the idea of living simply, anyway. It doesn't take much for me to live well. I just need food, a safe place to stay, and simple creature comforts. I don't intend on having any kind of savings or anything like that.
If anything, I prefer a life lived hand-to-mouth. I think it's important to be honest about that.
I'm reminded of the Lord's Prayer, particularly the phrase "give us this day, our daily bread." I learned a while back that this part of the prayer was a reference to Moses guiding Israel to the Promised Land. The Father only gave them the exact amount of food they needed each day, and nothing more. Many Israelites were, of course, upset at this notion—hence why it took them so long to get to the Promised Land. The lesson itself still stands: don't ask God for more than you need. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I have a gross bad habit of overthinking and hypervigilant self-awareness (obviously), so I tend to question myself frequently. "Oh, am I doing the right thing? How much is exactly what I need? How can I know so that I can always be right?" An important lesson that I've had to learn is that I cannot be afraid of being wrong. It's better to be honest and wrong than right and a liar. As cliche as it sounds, honesty really is the best policy.
Even though I might not know exactly what I need, that's really not even up to me anyway. In this life, I only have two important tasks:
First, to love God with my whole mind and heart.
Second, to love my neighbor as myself.
Everything else isn't just extra; it's an illusion. Nothing else in life matters more than loving God, my neighbor, and myself. I've learned that for me, loving God is innate, even if I'm not always aware of it. I've always been friendly, and do a good job with loving my neighbor for the most part. For as long as I can remember, however, I've struggled with loving myself. I've hated myself for a long time. But through prayer, contemplation, time with loved ones, and engaging in creative works, I have found a deeper connection to myself that will help me love more fully and with greater conviction.
I don't want to affirm myself; instead, I want to deny myself. That, I have learned, is the greatest form of love I can give to myself.
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Muscles

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since yesterday afternoon, I have been tired and sleeping a lot. I fell asleep at around 3 PM yesterday and woke up at around 9 PM. I had some dinner, hung out for a while, and went back to bed at around midnight. This morning, I was able to wake up and do my morning routine, but once it was done, I was still tired and slept for about an hour and a half. Now I'm awake, on my second cup of coffee, and still trying not to fall asleep as I sit here and write today's entry.
I talk a lot about being fatigued and consistently tired. That itself is tiring. Instead, I want to try and let today's work be one that expresses joy rather than lamentation. Being tired when you want to be awake is not fun, but I know that I have what it takes to keep going. I might sleep more; I might find my way through the day without sleeping until bedtime; either way, the day is going to happen regardless, and I can choose to face it however I wish.
I wish to have a good day today. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
In my prayer book, there are some prayers regarding work. There is a prayer you can say before work and after work. Recently, I started incorporating these prayers into my writing practice. The beginning prayer goes like this:
"O Lord Jesus Christ, Only-begotten Son of the Father without beginning, thou hast said to us with thy most pure lips: without me thou canst do nothing. O Lord my Lord, I believe with all my soul and heart what thou hast said; and I fall down before thy goodness and pray thee: Help me, a sinner, to complete this work that I have begun on thy behalf, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, through the intercessions of the Holy Theotokos and of all the Saints. Amen."
Once the work is complete, I say a short prayer that goes like this:
"Thou art the fulfillment of all good things, O my Christ; fill my soul with joy and gladness, and save me, O most merciful Lord. Glory to thee!"
I have these prayers saved as a text file on my computer, so I try to have a tab in my terminal open with these prayers so that I don't forget to say them. I've been incorporating prayer further into my day through implementing it as parts of my routine. I want to pray before doing anything; then, I want to pray after; if I'm lucky, I'll even pray while I'm doing whatever it is I'm doing. I want to keep the implementation process gradual. I had a conversation with a friend the other day and he said something profound:
Everything is a muscle.
All of these little habits and activities are things that can be trained. They can grow stronger or weaker depending on how much attention we give them. Emotions are muscles, too. If you keep giving attention to negative emotions, then your negativity will be strong. It'll be easier to approach things negatively, which will in turn reinforce a cynical and disparate worldview.
Conversely, the same is true with positive thinking. Of course, it is true that too much valence in either direction can be toxic. I know we've all met a toxic positive person before. With some people, I've felt like Tony Soprano in therapy discussing how he wants to assault the "happy wanderer" he sees on the street. For as horrible of a person as Tony Soprano is, that sentiment is a realistic one. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Still, I know that it's not right to envy the blissfully ignorant. I'd rather face the truth than to have it hide from me. As much as I might not like to hear certain things, I understand that it's the only way I'll grow as a person. Every day is a constant wrestling within my mind, but I've become more equipped to deal with it and make myself a better person.
I hope to keep training my muscles—all of them.
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Smelting

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had another meltdown yesterday.
It's been about a month or two since my last one, and they never get easier to deal with. I hate it when I hit myself and bite myself. All the electricity in my body puts my nervous system into overdrive. I cry so deeply. The worst part is that when I'm having a meltdown, it feels as if there's no one to console me. I feel completely and utterly alone. All I can do is sit on the floor and sob until it all stops. All that's left is a deeply wounded aftermath. My body is depleted. It can seem like there's nothing more I can do to keep living; there's no energy left to move forward.
Yet despite this seemingly ineffable conclusion, I move forward anyway.
I went to the gym, worked out, and went to a men's gathering hosted by some folks at my parish. The men's gathering was good. It felt nice to get out of the house and not have to worry about things going wrong. When I'm at home, the only place I really feel safe is my bedroom. Everywhere else is a minefield. Some of it is unavoidable, but a lot of it is the result of deep and wretched sin. It feels good to get out of the trenches. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
As I continue to rack up more time reprieved from psychiatric maladies, I feel the battlefield I'm in revealing itself more and more each day. I knew that I was sick, but I now have an irreversible knowledge of how sick I was and I pray to God that I never have to go back to it. The depression and mania are something that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. With bipolar disorder, there is a common narrative that it can be a "superpower," which isn't necessarily bad or false. If anything, it's a silver lining and can help make the best out of a bad situation. However, it's still important to acknowledge its profoundly devastating impacts and just how hard it can be to live with it—let alone when it gets bad.
Coming up, I have an assessment appointment with a physician regarding my application for SSDI</a>. I initially applied in December of 2023. I was denied the first time, and now I'm going through the appeal process, with the assessment appointment being a critical component of my case. Bipolar disorder is one of the leading causes of disability in the United States, and I have a mountain of medical evidence supporting my case. I've been hospitalized several times, been to all different kinds of treatment programs, and have been on so many medications it makes my head spin.
I know that I can't work. I have a good work ethic and can work hard, but the main cornerstones of gainful employment are stability and reliability. People need to know that you can come to work every day—that you are in a sound condition to do so. Bipolar is characterized by instability; trying to predict an episode is like trying to predict a tornado or a hurricane: you can know it's coming, but there's not much you can do to stop it. Sometimes, an episode can come out of nowhere. More than that, stressors and triggers are often unavoidable aspects of life. There's no amount of sheltering you can do to keep yourself away from every trigger; the storm just has to be weathered. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
It sucks because I would like to have a "real job." I think that it's important for people to give back to society, considering how much it gives us. There are many problems with society: wealth and income inequality, bigotry, violence, war, and daytime TV—just to name a few. However, there are way more good things that we receive as a result of living in human society (in the US, anyway): toilets, sewage systems, clean water—and, of course, the goodwill and generosity many of us willingly offer through our labor and kind hearts.
That goodwill is something I want to contribute to, not just take from.
So even if I just have a little blog on a small corner of the internet where I get to tell my stories and share my thoughts, that's fine with me. I hope that you find something useful out of all this.
I'm rooting for you, every step of the way.
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The Sword

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This morning has been mundane like any other, but the spiritual battles I fight still constantly rage within me like some kind of muted tempest. My emotions are quite volatile, and working through them has been a difficult task. Through much of the day, I face the temptation to lash out in anger. In my mind and in my heart, there is a deep and complicated anger that I try to work through. I've learned the importance of hating the sin and not the sinner, but I still have difficulty discerning the difference between righteous and demonic anger.
I was picking up groceries earlier, and I got short with my mom because of the anger and irritation I was experiencing. My sister was making a lot of noise, as she usually does. All of these small irritations can add up and make me spill over with unrighteous anger. I've encountered mostly demonic anger in my life. It's an infectious disease; once someone lashes out at you with it, you feel tempted to fight back with the same fury. In that way, the demons are playing both sides of a situation. Because of that, it is even more important to remain temperate, hold your tongue, and act without indignation.
I've encountered a few interpretations of Christ's teaching to "turn the other cheek." The most widely recognized interpretation is that belief in Christ should render someone a pacifist—that violence is sinful and should be avoided. Tolstoy most famously popularized that belief, and many Christians today hold that pacifism is a righteous thing. However, Christ told the apostles that He didn't come to earth to bring peace, but a sword. More than that, God gave assurance to Joshua during the fall of Jericho. It's easy to be a pacifist when the world is peaceful, but that worldview immediately falls apart at the sight of violence.
I hope to take Christ's sword. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
That isn't to say that I want to welcome violence into my life, but I know that if it were to come into my life, Christ would hand me that sword so that I can work to execute His will to the fullest extent I know how. But, of course, I do not want to beget any violence. I will never openly act out in violence, especially when it's not initiated onto me first. Strength comes from many places, and most strength is nonviolent. I've learned over the years that I can exude strength without the need for violence, and that is the kind of strength I hope to continue to cultivate.
The other interpretation of "turn the other cheek" is that it was a cultural reference to the time of Imperial Rome. Back then, it was custom to discipline an inferior by slapping them with the back of the hand. So when Christ said to "turn the other cheek," that meant you were to turn your other cheek so that your superior would have to strike you with their palm. This was a way to equalize the power dynamic: if someone had to hit you with their palm, that meant they had to confront the fact that they were striking another human being, and not some meager slave.
To me, that feels like the more accurate interpretation. Nonviolent resistance has proven, time and time again, to be the most sustainable act of regime change. From Gandhi to MLK, there is clear and recent historical evidence that turning the other cheek is the true path to the Kingdom of Heaven. It's a difficult thing: it degrades the ego and demons swarm you and tempt you toward their unrighteous and unsustainable anger. However, it is important to remain steadfast when confronted with this temptation. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
This is the main battle I am fighting right now. I become enveloped with this demonic anger, but I know that I can rely on Christ to save me from it. What's important is that I don't fall for demonic delusion and that I continue to pray as much as I can. I cannot begin to emphasize the importance of prayer in relinquishing my passions. I know that I am far from escaping their clutches, but I also know that I have what it takes to do so.
There is a story I heard. Three demons came into Satan's court to give status reports. The first demon approached Satan and said, "I sunk a ship and killed many people." Satan struck him and said that he didn't do enough. The second demon approached Satan and said, "I found myself at a wedding and sowed as much discord there as I could." Satan struck him, too, and said that he didn't do enough. The third demon approached Satan and said, "I found myself in a monastery and successfully tempted a monk to fornicate." Satan, overjoyed, gave him a hug and said that he did more than enough for the demonic cause.
I know that as I keep fighting my personal spiritual battle, the demons will only do more to prevent my salvation. However, I know that the more they fight, the stronger I become. So with that, I know that I can have the same confidence as Joshua.
I will be strong and courageous, not terrified or dismayed.
God is with me wherever I go.
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Needless Ambition

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a week on NoFap; praise God!
I've struggled with lust for a long time, but I finally feel that I have been given grace from this sin. My prayer life has only become richer over the course of this week, and for that I am eternally grateful. I hope that as I keep growing in my faith, life will become more bearable and that I can continue to receive strength for the trials to come. I've learned so much over the last several years. Life has been bleak, stressful, and empty for so long, but now, through the grace of the Lord my God, I can clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As I've done this work, I have begun to see the true grasp of sin and the demons that command it. There were so many deeply embedded layers of deception. More than that, the tribulations themselves were ones that I didn't think would have an end. However, I know now that I can bear anything that's put on my shoulders. Whether I have the conscious awareness or not, there is always someone there helping me carry that weight. I've heard a bit about guardian angels but don't know a lot about them directly. Orthodoxy stresses the importance of a guardian angel, but I can say for certain that they've been there for me much longer than I could ever know. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I struggle with accepting the demons' attacks, but I know that I went through them because God and His angels knew I could handle it. It has made me understand, with profound depth, the power and purpose of prayer. This isn't something that is to be taken lightly. I see demons everywhere. They envelop the entire earth and all of its cracks and crevices. Most don't understand the depths of the spiritual war we're in. I don't say that to imply that I'm better than other people; if anything, I don't want to be better.
I wish I didn't have to carry this cross, but I do it anyway.
I've stared into the void for too long, so it makes it difficult to relate to others in many ways. I do what I can to fit in and feel like I'm a part of whatever group I'm in, but the traumas of my past weigh on me. There are many days where I feel that I can't connect with anyone. It's lonely. This writing is my beacon, a way to send the signal to someone who needs it. But really, I need them more. I don't want to feel like I'm the only one who sees what I see. If others want to dismiss me as arrogant, I don't care anymore. I'm sick and tired of feeling like I have to be defensive so that I can conform to other people's perceptions of me.
I don't like being angry, even if I feel a righteous anger. I'm so afraid of being a hypocrite. I've known many hypocrites and they've hurt me so many times that I want to do everything I can to avoid any sense of hypocrisy in my own life. Everything has to be a contained and unchanging system for me, but I know that this desire is unrealistic. I can't be afraid of being wrong. There are many occasions where I'll hold my tongue because I'll make myself a hypocrite or that people won't listen to me anyway. I've had so many occasions in life where people wouldn't heed my warnings and we all suffer because of the pride and impudence. It's not right.

Coming to this attunement is a constant and delicate exercise. Every second, every micro-moment is meditated on. Being able to see makes me blind. It's so hard to just sit there and let go. Writing here is important for me because it forces me to let go, to not be so judgmental of my own thoughts that I don't let them out. I can deceive myself into thinking that it's discernment, but I know better. Discernment doesn't hesitate. I wish that I could receive more of the Holy Spirit and become a true vessel for it. In many ways, I want to have my own moment of Pentecost.
There's nothing else I can do but pray.
I struggle with balancing worldly ambition and spiritual fulfillment. It's so easy to say that they are diametrically opposed, but I think both can exist at the same time. The difficult act of balance is to not marry myself to that worldly ambition, to embed so much of myself in it that I lose what really matters. I can say with confidence that I write, that I wish to be seen as a respected writer, that I wish to get paid for my work, and that I have what it takes to create a positive impact on others with my words.
My life has led up to this very moment. There's nothing else I'd want to ask for.
In this moment, I feel Christ in my heart.
For that, I have nothing else to ever need.
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Prayer and Patience

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Prayer continues to be a great source of personal fulfillment. More than that, I've come to a deeper understanding of how to use prayer to ward off demons. This video</a> was an important piece of instruction for me. I watched it for the first time yesterday and had that classic moment where you feel like someone said something just for you. It took many things I struggle with and addressed them directly, honestly, and practically. I felt like I was breathing air again after holding my breath for years.
My prayer practice has been simple: I have a prayer rope with a hundred knots and a small prayer corner in my room. In the mornings, I go around the rope and say the Jesus Prayer</a> for each knot. After that, I say a Hail Mary</a> and the Lord's Prayer</a>. These morning prayers take about fifteen minutes. In the evenings as part of my bedtime routine I go around the rope again, say a Hail Mary, and pray to Saint Michael</a> for protection against demons in my dreams</a>. This prayer time also takes about fifteen minutes.
Overall, it's been a rich and fulfilling addition to my life. My prayer corner is a humble one, but I hope to add more icons and incense soon, as I keep attending church and becoming more involved with my parish. I am excited to start my catechism and be received as a catechumen. Honestly, though, I am feeling impatient about the process. I know that it takes time and I am willing to be patient, but I still don't want to deny my feelings of impatience. Regardless, I know that as long as I remain vigilant in prayer and consistent in my attendance, everything will fall into place exactly as it should.

Last time I went, I asked a few people about whether Old Testament characters are canonized as saints. My name is Noahie, which is a nickname for Noah, so I was curious about whether that was an acceptable Christian name in the church. The people I asked told me that it was an acceptable Christian name, which is a relief for me. I didn't want to pick a new name. I've never gone by Noah, always Noahie. Noahie is my legal name, and it is what everyone has always called me. I think it'll be a good change of pace, though, to start going by my Christian name once I am received into the church. That'll be a true mark of transformation and an important next step to take.
Funny enough, I've never felt a deep connection to the name Noah or the patriarch himself. Of course, I know the story, but it has always been a strange thing for me to accept. Really, most of Genesis is difficult to accept. There have been many narratives about Darwinian evolution and how it is supposed to be directly opposed to the creation story found in Genesis. When I deconstructed from my faith back in high school, I became convinced that Genesis was a fairy tale, or at least not something to be taken literally. I was sure that it was a story told to manipulate people into a certain way of thinking.
However, I don't necessarily feel that way anymore. I don't think that Genesis is supposed to be taken as historical fact, but I also don't want to assert that it's a metaphor either. Really, I think that the creation of the universe is something that humanity is unable to wrap its head around. If anything, the creation story in Genesis is just an approximation, something that takes a process we can't come to know, and explains it in human terms. More than that, it is a mystery. It's something that we shouldn't think too much about because we have more important matters to attend to, such as our salvation. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
That applies to my skepticism about the story of Noah as well. How did it literally happen? I don't know, and it's not important. There's something deeper than historical accuracy at play here, and that's what I'd rather concern myself with. In terms of his character, I think that's more important for me to focus on than the plot of his story. Noah was righteous; he listened to God. It was important for him to take the promises of God and see them through so that they could be fulfilled. To me, that's the most important work.
Everything else is just plot.
Other people at my parish talked about their Christian names and patron saints. It's nice to hear their stories. Some had to find their patron saint since they weren't born with Christian names. Others found out about their patron saint through their given legal names. There were some who had a legal name that could have been their Christian name, but their patron saint revealed themself instead. Where am I going to fall?
I'll just have to be patient.
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Other Unreal Worlds

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was reading a post from Ran Prieur</a> about being able to tell the difference between AI- and human-made images. It's been tougher for me to think about because the newest models from Google, OpenAI, and the like can produce extremely realistic-looking images and videos. The biggest problem is that everything looks so polished and perfect; the style becomes inevitable and easy to spot. Still, there are lots of people—particularly older people—who can't tell the difference. This makes them even more ripe for scams, but they were extremely susceptible anyway, so that doesn't change much.
Either way, Ran made an apt point:
"Here's a quiz</a> to tell the difference between human-made and AI-made images. This is often framed as AI vs "real", and this makes sense if AI is trying to fake a photograph. But human imaginative images are already unreal, and then the only question that matters is: Do you like it?"

That, to me, was profound. I love my Baudrillard, so seeing the idea of aesthetic taste informing reality in this way feels fresh and relevant. Seeing these AI images and videos is unprecedented, so this advice resonates with me in a way that makes me feel seen. It's important to know that as humans, we have so many little flaws and imperfections that show up as personal signatures. These signatures—even the ones we don't actively perceive—are how we identify ourselves to each other. Even in images and text, these signatures make themselves known.
All we need is taste.
I've been worried about the state of media for quite some time. I've talked before about my general disdain and distrust for film, but now I don't believe about 95 percent of the things I see on the internet and about 99.9 percent of what I see on TV. I feel constantly surrounded by lies and manipulation, and I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the growing consensus that the internet is the real world.
Baudrillard said that the map now makes the territory, but is the internet really the map?
I often find myself remembering that scene in Good Will Hunting where Will and Sean are talking in the park. Sean tells Will that there's a difference between reading about Michelangelo and standing in the Sistine Chapel. I feel that on the internet, we can read about so many things, watch documentaries, or even see footage of real events—but there's a clear difference between experiencing something through a screen and being there yourself. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Here in America, people are sheltered and comfortable. Any citizen who isn't a soldier and never left the country hasn't experienced the devastating impact of war or displacement. We have political tensions here (I'd rather not comment on ICE, thank you), but overall we are in a safe and controlled bubble. That's why so many want to come here: it's strategically and culturally one of the safest places in the world. America is a land of opportunity, as many would say. However, many Americans haven't seen the world outside its borders.
The world is a big place, and there are many competing visions of what a well-run society should look like. Yet despite that, many Americans obstinately view their culture and values as either superior—or even worse—the only ones around. I haven't been to many places outside of America. I've been to Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. About 99 percent of my life has been spent within my country's borders. For me, this is the only world I really know. I don't like traveling, but I also know that there's so much more in this world than my state, my city, or even my damn house.
I know that other worlds are out there.
I just have to wait for God to let me see them.
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Shade of Pink

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This winter storm has been interesting enough, although I think they messed up naming it "Fern." That's just silly. Thankfully, here in North Texas, we haven't had any major issues. The power has been on this whole time, which is amazing considering the debacle</a> we faced in 2021. That was a disaster. But this year, things have been alright. I think Oncor learned their lesson. It's been nice to see the world slow down a bit. At least this time, it won't come to a halt and stand still for two or three years. Instead, it's just for the weekend.
I'm a bit sad that I can't attend Divine Liturgy today, but I think God's cool with me staying home this Sunday. I was catching some good momentum with my consistency as well, but salvation doesn't happen over the course of a single weekend. Still, I'll make sure to do my prayers today and hope that everything goes well. If that's all I can do, then that's what I'll do. I will say that the demons have been hard at work in my life, as they always are, but I feel like I've finally gotten the upper hand with them. Things seem to be on an upswing, which is wonderful.
CW: Sexual Content
The most prevalent issue at hand for me recently has been conquering lust. It's been a struggle for a while and regular readers know that I've been talking about it a good bit</a> over the last few weeks. However, I am proud to say that I am on day five of NoFap. So far, quitting pornography and masturbation has been way harder than quitting nicotine. It's been at least ten times harder, if not more. The urges to masturbate and view pornography have been way stronger than the ones I had to smoke. Thankfully, I had this timeline from SRG on /x/</a> to help:

Honestly, SRG has been a Godsend for me. Last night, I was dealing with serious urges while trying to fall asleep. I ended up getting an erection in bed, but I got a crucial tip from SRG: hold your breath for as long as you can until the urge goes away. That was an instant cure. My erection went away immediately. The urges calmed down. It was awesome. Also, viewing the motivational material there was nice. Seeing other anons talk about it in a positive light was encouraging as well.
I am still feeling strong urges, but I know that I have plenty of tools to help me get through them. More than that, I already have plenty of experience with recovering from addiction. I could do it with nicotine. I could do it with nitrous oxide. I most certainly can do it with pornography.
One day at a time.
Coming here and writing out this public confessional has done so much for me. When I come here and write it out for people to see, it does wonders for my internal state. I don't get tons of messages from this work, but I know I have people around the world reading this blog and cheering me on from the sidelines. To all of you, from the bottom of my heart:
Thank you.
Thank you for being here with me in your RSS reader, the site itself, or wherever else this thing has gone to. I may not make any money doing this, but at this point I don't think that would change the value of this work. If anything, I should be paying you. I should be paying you to take the time out of your day to check in on me for whatever reason. Without you, I wouldn't be here. I feel so overjoyed to have you here. I promise I'll do whatever it takes to keep going. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Whatever happens—whether that be through fiction or nonfiction—I want to be here for it, because we all deserve it. We deserve to have joy during this little sojourn we're on together. Even when I feel depleted of joy, even when I can't experience it, I'll rest through that dark night of the soul just so I can wake up to find the oasis that never left. I don't know where my life will end up, but I'll take Oscar Wilde's position:
When I die, my sins will be scarlet, but my words will be re(a)d.
I look forward to the day when I'll go back to white as snow.
Until then, I'll contend with a nice shade of pink.
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Putting Out Fires

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, while I was making breakfast, my dad was trying to put a nicotine pouch on my sister because he'd heard somewhere that it could help with her symptoms. While he was trying to put it on her, she screamed and cried as loud as she could. I had to cover my ears because it was so loud. She's done this so many times in my life now, yet it still makes me feel deeply sad. More than that, it made me feel afraid. I had to retreat to my room, and it took me about half an hour to decompress from witnessing it. I put on a comforting song, ate my breakfast, and took some deep breaths. I felt my nerves tingling and tears flowing down my face. It brought back a lot of personal trauma, and dealing with it never gets easier.
I still deal with it nonetheless. That's the thing with trauma responses, or really any kind of intense emotional disturbance: they are ephemeral. The important thing I've discovered is that emotions are like fire. They get bigger and more intense if you give them more fuel, but they will always dissipate if left alone. I see my mind as a field of controlled fires.
Each fire is a different part of myself that I tend to. Many of these fires are controlled, but there are many instances when a misplaced spark will start a new one that I don't want around. When I was less battle-hardened than I am now, I would see the fire, freak out, and try to put it out with water. Anyone who has seen or experienced a kitchen fire knows that water only makes it worse Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
From there, you can either cover up the fire—if it's small enough—or let it burn out if it's too big. Letting it burn out is a tough process. You have to acknowledge that it's there, let it do its thing, and wait for it to burn out. Everything in your mind will tell you to address it somehow—that if you don't do something, it'll get bigger and bigger until it takes over completely. The truth, however, is that it'll get bigger when you do try something. It feels contradictory, which is why it's such an elusive truth. I've had to learn that the hard way in my life, but I'm thankful that I've figured it out.
Unfortunately, the truth is easier known than practiced.
In the past, I've had to deal with my body screaming at me to put out so many fires. I complied so many times. When I'd have a negative experience, I'd try to treat it with a vice—smoke weed about it, huff some nitrous about it, pop a pill about it, jerk off about it, binge-eat about it—whatever it took, really. My body can't see the future like my brain can. My brain will try to convince my body that it's going to be alright in a little while, to "surf the urge," as it's known in recovery. My body, however, does not listen to reason. My chest tightens and my hands tremble. It is the epicenter of the Freudian id, as it were. It's funny how I can let my brain be a slave to it so often.
It made me lose my self-control. My self-control.

As I've grown in my faith in Christ, I've come to understand a more spiritually refined perspective on my recovery. When I frame my body as the id, I think it's just as accurate to refer to it as Paul does in his epistles: the passions. Of course, cultural context is difficult to parse here. "Passions? I thought it was good to do something you're passionate about! La pasión, hermano." Within sinful passions, however, lie impulsivity and a lack of patience. It's tough because people—particularly Protestants—frame the passions as a failing of moral character. We can feel like it's our fault when we succumb to them.
The truth is that it's a sickness.
Is it someone's fault when they're sick? We don't ascribe blame to a sick person. I see the ailments of myself and others and don't want to feel contempt.
I want to feel compassion.
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TFDOTROML

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, I've been meditating on new beginnings.
I remember a few years ago, before my first psychiatric hospitalization, learning the actual etymology of the word "apocalypse." Culturally, people conflate "apocalypse" and "Armageddon". They often think that both are synonymous for a catastrophic end-of-times event. However, "apocalypse" is a different word. "Apocalypse" means "revelation" or "disclosure" and was a genre of literature at the time of early Christianity. Of course, the biblical Book of Revelation is the most famous in this genre. However, there's often greater emphasis on the struggles told in that disclosure, not solely the prophesied outcome. We all know the story of the Lake of Fire, the Antichrist, and the final spiritual battle that will commence.
Armageddon.
However, people don't often focus on how that battle ends. We're told that the world will be made new and that the life we so desire, the everlasting one, will be given to us through the grace of God. The world will be made new. We will achieve theosis. Today, we see the increasing popularization of a different false ending. We hear phrases like “nuclear Armageddon” and consider the potential extermination of humanity, and we think this is true Armageddon. Unfortunately, this fear stems from an increased lack of faith among humanity. With the rise of atheism and secular humanism, it has become easier to convince ourselves that we are truly alone in this universe. The pale blue dot rests in a sea of black and sees itself as an accident.
Thankfully, we know that's not true. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I look on how I've been handling things recently, particularly my abstinence from my vices</a>, and understand that while it might not feel that way in a sober mind, there is a deep and almost imperceptible spiritual battle happening. I feel a distinct tension that is different from physical ones. I have withdrawals that I'm going through and I can feel them, but there is a war being fought in my mind that is much more constant and draining. I have to think my actions through, and it's hard to keep myself safe from temptation and evil.
Still, I know that it's important to go through this personal Armageddon, as it were. At the end of this battle, something will be made anew. I will feel it when it comes, and I'll come to understand why it all had to go the way it did. However, I'm still in the throes of it at this moment. This writing is my earthly meditation on the battle that I can't see—yet I fight it every moment.

I recently read something</a> that struck me. People who read personal stories by those who have been suicidal don’t spiral deeper into suicidal ideation. I’ve struggled with understanding the point of Cogito—of writing these entries every day. I'll ask myself "Well, why do I feel like writing this? Why does it feel like this is the only thing I can write?" Well, I figured it out. Here's a quote from the article:
"Reading stories written by people who have lived through suicidal thoughts or survived suicide attempts made people feel more hopeful about their own future, and hopefully reminded them that no matter how alone suicidal thoughts can make you feel, other people experience them, too."
I remembered my second C</a>: connection. Somewhere, either now or later on, someone will come across this blog and feel what I've felt. They'll feel it and know that they can make it. So while I fight my own battles, I can know that every day I come here is a victory. This isn't for me. I have to stay strong for you.
It's the first day of the rest of my life.
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A Positive Entry

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I received a comment on my guestbook</a> saying I complain too much. At first, I tried justifying it to myself. I tried telling myself, "Well, you know, I do a Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul—type thing and find silver linings," but then I realized that Norm was correct. So with that, I'm going to try to complain less and write more positive entries. Thanks, Norm.
It's difficult to be positive when I'm depressed. Thankfully, I haven't had a major depressive episode since September, so no real need to be so woeful. A positive thing that happened yesterday: I decided to try a new gym. My regular gym was fine enough. It had all the equipment and amenities I needed. It was also a five-minute drive from my house, which was the best part. Other than that, it was shit. It was crowded, which made it hard to find good parking most days. It also wasn't cleaned well or regularly, so it always felt gross. The bathrooms were especially horrible. A lot of the equipment was in disrepair. Most of the treadmills were broken and getting a good one was a roll of the dice. I also liked to use the sauna, but no one at that godforsaken gym used it correctly</a>.
This new gym, however, was sent to me from heaven. Every little quality-of-life thing I disliked about my current gym was executed perfectly at the new gym. It was luxurious. The locker rooms were clean, and they had complimentary hair dryers, lotion, deodorant, towels, soap—there was even a lounge with couches and a TV. They had a cold plunge, too. It was the coldest body of water I have ever been in. I could barely walk into it. I wanted to dunk my whole body, but it was just too cold. That extremely cold water is a perfect reset for my nervous system and is a wonderful drug-free way to reduce anxiety instantly. The catch, though, is that the membership costs five times that of my current gym. Is it worth the price?
You bet. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I feel excited even just talking about it. I haven't looked forward to anything in a long time, but now I look forward to going there regularly. Of course, the novelty will fade, but I am still immensely thankful for the experience. Over the last few weeks, things seem to be on an upswing. I've also started going back to church, and I feel much more confident about it. I went to a men's group I enjoyed. I'm getting out of the house on a regular basis again and it's wonderful. I was so trapped and isolated by my mental illness for years, and for the first time since my diagnosis, I feel a sense of freedom I didn't think I was going to get back. I feel like I've changed so much; my wisdom has amplified. I've been battle-tested in a way that I never expected myself to be.
I only have the mercy and grace of God to credit for this.
My prayer life is getting richer too. I don't pray a whole lot, but I do about fifteen minutes in the morning and another fifteen at night before bed. It makes me feel pious and whole in a way that I used to think was phony bullshit. Now I understand what it's all about. There are still many things that aren't all the way right, but that's part of the contract we sign every morning; it's something we all contend with. We have to deal with a multitude of variables all at once, but we can only focus on one at a time. It's a tough thing to accept, but I've found you can only build a house one brick at a time. It felt like I had nothing, but I've worked every day towards figuring out a life I can live with and it feels like I'm getting closer to it each day. Even if it's a slow crawl, I still cover distance every day. I feel Andy Dusfrene picking those walls bit by bit.
If I'm lucky, I'll have my moment of redemption.
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Vice

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm looking for some new books to read or listen to. If you have a suggestion, send me an email</a> and I'll be happy to consider it.
CW: SEXUAL CONTENT
I talked about it in my New Year's entry</a> and feel that it's necessary for me to bring it up again. One of the toughest addictions I've had to fight is with pornography and masturbation. Many have covered its detrimental effects already, so I'd rather discuss my personal recovery and not make any broad cultural claims.
My origins with the addiction are typical: I was a kid with unrestricted internet access, and discovered pornography early. Even before I used computers, I understood what masturbation was. The first time was when I was five years old. I didn't yet understand lust or sexual desire; masturbation relieved stress. I'd orgasm and feel release, opening the pressure valve.
Pornography only amplified this. I'm thankful that I haven't developed fetishes, but I still objectify others. As a kid, I didn't have an understanding of women. It felt strange and foreign to be their peer. Even now as I'm pushing thirty, it still feels this way. I've done alright making female friends. I've had girlfriends. Hell, I even have a good relationship with my mom. Despite that, I still can't fully understand women. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Pornography put a weird taste in my mouth I can't spit out.
When I first started watching pornography around ten, it was my first experience with women in that way. I only saw them as performers and objects whose sole purpose was to gratify me sexually. I didn't see women as dynamic—they didn't feel as human to me. As I matured, there was a change of mind. Once I started having girlfriends, I realized just how corrupted I was.
The worst part was that pornography got to me first.
As I try to get my life back, I feel a deep sense of injustice. People profited from my addiction, and that makes me sad and scared. Many of my male friends experience a similar battle. Some even consider pornography harmless. I've struggle romantically. I am a fairly attractive and interesting person, and women have shown interest—but I feel like a fraud because of my addiction to pornography. It's tough to not see women as sexual objects when in public. I'll be at the gym, store, or restaurant and I'll see a female stranger. I begin to undress them in my mind and can catch myself glaring—sometimes even staring. It makes me feel gross that I do this and have a hard time controlling it.

I've been frustrated for years. I've tried quitting pornography many times, but always find myself coming back. When I quit nicotine</a>, I found out that I wasn't actually quitting nicotine, but getting my life back. I've tried applying this philosophy to quitting pornography, but find myself telling more elaborate lies. The withdrawals are much stronger than nicotine. Relapsing is way easier too—the phone's right there, my penis is right there; you see what I mean.
I've heard of the Easy Peasy Method to quitting pornography and started, but never finished. It's not even that long, but what can I say? I'm a hyper-speed Zoomer. I stumbled on the Flying Eagle Method</a>, an abbreviated version of Easy Peasy. I was able to finish in less than an hour and felt emboldened to quit for good. The click came from this statement:
There are no advantages to the vice.
It's deceptively simple. Despite that knowledge, keeping it in the forefront of my mind is challenging. I have had way too many vices: porn, cigarettes, nitrous oxide, marijuana, opiates, caffeine, and fast food. There's probably other ones too, but those are the main offenders. Quitting all of them involves utilizing that same principle. There is no advantage to any of them. They hurt me. They hurt others. I can't keep hurting other people.
It's just not right.
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Never Claim Defeat

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last night was tough, but I got through it. I had thoughts of relapse and felt trapped in my own skin, but I got through it all the same. I feel better about including good habits into my life, but there are still many urges to return to bad ones. The main thing I've had to learn about addiction is that I have to constantly remind myself there are no advantages to it. If I maintain an addiction, it is a slow poisoning. There is no way around that. Why would I poison myself at all, let alone slowly? There's an unattributed quote I saw yesterday that encapsulates the recovery gospel perfectly:
"Addiction is giving up everything for one thing. Recovery is giving up one thing for everything."
Another idea that helps with recovery comes from a contentious place. My friends watched the new Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice last week. I had seen the movie sometime last year, but didn't give it too much thought. Since my friends watched it, though, it's been circulating in my head. I don't want to make any political commentary here. Instead, I want to direct attention to the three rules Roy Cohn (Trump's former lawyer and mentor) gave to him for career success.
First, always attack.
Second, never admit wrongdoing.
Third, always claim victory. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
The first rule is just ripped from Sun Tzu—nothing special. The second and third rules are essentially the same to me, but I like the third one most. Of course, the broader cultural consensus is that the third rule is harmful. It's the rule that has been most important for Trump's career strategy. Again, I'd rather not delve into political commentary here, so instead I'd like to propose a semantic reframing of the third rule. If the third rule is to always claim victory, then there is another implicit way to state it:
Never claim defeat.
Instead of applying that rule externally, it serves as a great way to frame things internally. I've struggled with depression for a long time. It infects my mind by making me feel constant defeat and rot in despair. It's tough because it'll make me think that everything I've done has led to this suffering and that it's all my fault. It's a horrible place to be, and there are many who do not survive it.
However, the idea of staunch defiance toward depression is a radically appealing one to me. I am not saying I wish to deny my depression. Instead, it's more radical to say that it will never defeat me, no matter how horrible it makes me feel. It's factually true to claim victory over depression if I make it to the next day. That next day might be torture. It could be worse than today. The fact that I made it is the true victory.
Everything else is meaningless.

Love him or hate him, I think Trump uses those rules for his personal life too. I know I've talked about fighting demons</a> before, and it's important for me to understand that demons thrive on self-defeat and despair. They are most powerful when we feel that we don't have any respite. Their greatest strength is that they can convince us we lack options, that the only way to continue living is to succumb to our passions.
The last thing they want us to do is look up.
I know when I struggled with my thoughts of relapse last night, I desperately wanted to claim defeat. I wanted to tell myself that I had no other recourse but to relapse, that I was powerless against the feelings in my body and thoughts in my mind. However, I now understand the importance of holding victory close and never claiming defeat. I will chalk last night as a victory, because that's exactly what it was. To claim it was anything less would be a disservice to me and my fortitude.
Never claim defeat.
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Obsessive Revisions

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I start my timer to write these entries, a small fear likes to return. I'll sit down and start writing, but then realize that I have nothing to say. I'll realize it, the timer will keep going, and then it'll stop. I'll see the notification that time's up and only see a few words on the screen. I still have this fear today, even after all of the times I've succeeded in spite of it.
There's a certain level of perfectionism that's present while I write. The urge to constantly self-edit is a difficult one to fight. Even now, it chews on every sentence. I tend to forget that there's always time to revise later—that it's better to revise when the sentences are already written.
A great piece of advice came from Jerry Seinfeld. When it came to his writing process, he said that you need to harness two people. The first is a baby. Babies don't know anything and they haven't experienced failure, so they're open to new ideas. This openness is what gets the ideas out of your head and onto the page. Nurture that baby so you consistently have ideas. The second is a relentless adult critic. This one eliminates all the baby's bad ideas. It also takes the ideas that were almost good enough and whips them into shape. With these two sides of yourself harnessed, you can produce good writing. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
So with that, I try to be the baby while I'm drafting: pure openness. The most important thing this helps with is instinct. It's important to hone instinct because without it, the writing is devoid of soul. With the prevalence of LLMs, people are sick and tired of robotic and overly polished prose.
The roughness makes it real.
I know that I've spent a lot of time harnessing the relentless critic. Perfectionism is a tough character flaw to compensate for, but this practice has helped with it. I've found that when I just write what's on the top of my head, there's usually something there. When I'm out and about in the world, the thoughts are there too—a reliable internal dialogue.
So why not bring that here and make it tangible?
Structure is something that I struggle with as a writer. I'm afraid of losing coherence, so I write short. The longest piece I've written is around 7,000 words. Even then, I added too many unnecessary details. I'm often annoyingly verbose. In essays, I'll repeat myself too much. In fiction, I add needless plot. I'll have something written, feel proud for a while, then find some way to cut it in half.
Of course, I'm mature enough to know that tracking words isn't a direct measure of improvement. In fact, most writers I know focus too heavily on word count. Younger writers will pour out hundreds of thousands of words into their first novel or two, often without a single revision. The result is an absolute chore to read. I've seen books that are 70% dialogue. I've read prose so purple, you could've swore it was a grape soda. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
This isn't to say that I'm more enlightened than other writers. Those writers have something I don't: a better baby. Their openness is an important thing and it's something that I still openly covet. I still fear writing anything longer than 10,000 words. I tell myself that I still need to "learn how to finish right" and to a certain extent that's true, but I still get paralyzed enough to not even start.
I also convince myself that I need to have every detail planned out ahead of time. Then, I obsess over the planning until nothing actually materializes. I've come to understand I don't need an outline to write anything. All I need is commitment and good judgment. Successful novelists share a practice: in a given writing session, they'll spend the first half revising yesterday's material and the second half writing new stuff. I've attempted it before, but revert to revising right when I'm done. That's usually what I do with these entries too.
It's easy to see why one would wait until the next day to revise. If you give your mind time to rest for a while, your revisions will improve. But I like to revise when the timer stops. In immediate revisions, it can be easy to overthink everything, get obsessive, and burn out faster.
My only problem is that I like being obsessive.
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Repentance

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Divine Liturgy was great today, thanks for asking.
I feel like today has been a good day, despite the fact that I'm coming here to write in the evening as opposed to the morning. Most days, I have a strong routine. I wake up, take care of hygiene, pray, have breakfast and caffeine, write, break for lunch, go to the gym, have dinner, write, and then go to bed. It's a series of habits I've built, and while I'm not militant about sticking to all of them, they're a good anchor. I know that I do that after this, and so on, until the day is done. There's a comfort in that. My internal world is often unpredictable, so having an external anchor is important for my health.
I had something in my mind that I want to discuss. It's an idea that's been in my mind for a while now:
Repentance.
It's something that's widely misunderstood. Popular culture characterizes it as telling God you're sorry and asking for His forgiveness. Asking for God's forgiveness is a part of repentance, but people don't understand the exact reason why one would do this. It's easy to think of repentance as attempting to curry favor with a tyrant, that since you broke one of his six hundred complicated rules that you have to come to your knees and grovel so that you'll receive mercy.

Thankfully, God isn't a tyrant who will smite you at the smallest offence. The etymology of the word "repentance" is important. It stems from the ancient Greek word "metanoia" which means literally to "change one's mind." The core of repentance is an internal change of heart. It's not about settling a debt with God, but about understanding, with your own mind, the nature of your wrongs. God doesn't want to punish us for our sin, but to help us understand and conquer it. Since the beginning, He has made it His mission to rule over the cosmos with us. To do so, we need to know the nature of sin so that we can avoid it later. Because of this, repentance isn't just about asking for God's forgiveness, but the foundation of personal growth itself.
To live is to iterate.
Most of my life is embedded in comfort. We all have comfort zones and in mine, things usually don't go wrong. But when they do, it's easy for me to blame what's around me rather than my attachment to comfort. Demons thrive in comfort. Within it lies complacency. When I'm comfortable, I'm not as willing to question things. But when I do, I can come to understand the nature of my sin and repent.
At the core of my repentance is self-awareness of my mistakes and shortcomings. Through that, I can seek grace. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of making myself my own worst enemy. I tell myself that there's no way to redeem myself from my past and that the only recourse is to avoid confronting them—I shut myself away from life. It's no way to be. Grace abounds, but it's only worth anything if I choose to accept it.
I know that despite my adherence to certain routines, life always changes them. New circumstances arise and I have to learn how to live with them. There will be struggles. Trouble is always right around the corner. But for me, I know that no matter what comes, there's always a chance for repentance.
There will always be a way to move forward with Christ.
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Demons in Dreamland

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today has been a tiring day. I'm too tired to even write, but I still feel the need to drag myself to my computer and get my words in. There's this sense that I can come here and start to figure myself out, my feelings, and what exactly is on my mind. Despite this seemingly beneficial impulse, there's another part of myself that's saying, "Don't write, don't write," as if to say that there's something I need to conceal. I have an idea what that thing is, but I don't want to open that can of worms just yet.
I've been a bit thrown off from my routine these last few days. I haven't been doing my rituals at the same times, but instead kept delaying them. It feels like I'm losing steam. The schedule has been harder to maintain. I don't know exactly what I need to do so that I can legitimately rest and reset. I've been making some progress with my CPAP, but I still don't sleep with it the full night. I still get about two hours in and fling it off my face in my sleep. I still don't fully trust it. My sleep is fractured, and so my body is screaming at me, telling me that I need to sleep.
Once every two weeks or so, I have a day where I just sleep the entire time. I accrue sleep debt despite going to bed at a reasonable time. Every night, I wake up multiple times from some kind of dream or nightmare. The world of my dreams is so vastly different from this one. The rules there are completely other. Sometimes I think I gain fascinating metaphysical insights, but then I wake up and become disenchanted again. In many of my nightmares, I am harassed by demons. They instill a deep fear in me that I can't explain. I feel it while I'm awake too.

Today feels like it should be a day to sleep it all off, but I hate that I feel this way. I wish I could feel better—be better. I am constantly frustrated with myself and all of my ailments. I look healthy on the outside, but inside is a total shit show and no matter what I do, people won't be able to see it. It makes me feel alone, even though I know I'm not. I have a hard time fighting that illusion.
Everything seems like an illusion. I don't know what's real, especially since my psychotic episode in 2020 that led to my bipolar diagnosis. Life feels increasingly difficult to navigate because I can't be sure of my own thought patterns. I can't trust myself to know what's right, not after that betrayal. Every day I question my existence. I question the fabric of reality itself because to me, it's not there anymore and I don't know how to get it back.
I've been able to ground myself with my faith. Knowing that Christ has everything taken care of, even when I can't feel it, is reassuring. I have to remind myself that I can always rest on that, even when the demons try to convince me I can't. I wish that I knew how to properly invoke my guardian angel or patron saint. I know that with my recent return to church, I can seek those answers. I feel that I need them now more than ever. Recently, I began praying to the holy archangel Michael for protection against those demons. On nights I haven't done it, the demons harass me.

I know that I can't logically come to the conclusion that praying to Michael protects me from dream demons, but these affairs are not inherently logical.
You don't reason with demons.
There are other things I want to discuss, particularly regarding certain metaphysical theories I have surrounding my dreams. However, I also know that I can't articulate them without sounding unhinged, so I'll try to work through it a different way. I hope that I can find someone I can trust to speak with on these matters. There's a vespers service at church this evening. I want to talk to a priest as soon as I can, but I also want to be wise, show restraint, and not rush the issue.
Thinking about these kinds of things makes me swell with emotion, so much that I want nothing more but to cry. Crying is a good thing. When I'm alone, I often find myself thinking about things that trigger a stream of tears. My nerves jolt and my entire body tingles, overwhelmed by the electricity of emotion. The tears just flow out and I can do nothing but just let them swell.
Sometimes I can feel a good friend holding me in their arms when it happens.
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Information or Entertainment

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been a casual user of the Melonland forum</a> for a while now. I first made an account back when I launched this site in February of last year. Melon has done a great job running his forum. His art and software projects are always a pleasure to engage with. Also, he got interviewed by Rhizome</a> and that made me kind of jelly. Recently, I followed the RSS feed for the forum, which has made it easier to keep up. I never really posted on forums when I was younger, but it's been a fun experience getting to know this one.
I responded to a post</a> earlier today and it really got me reflecting on my journey writing online over the last two years or so. It's been quite the experience, that's for sure. I remember when I first started, I called myself a "freelance writer." I thought that it was a grand dream to get paid to write. It was enticing. Unfortunately, I learned quickly that the space is much more competitive and saturated than I thought. It turned out that a ton of people had the same idea as me. Go figure. With the advent of LLMs, it made the space even more competitive since there were now fewer jobs. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I found a guy who was a professional copywriter back in early 2024. His website was impressive and he seemed to have a lot of experience. I sent him an email soliciting advice on how to get into the industry. His reply was harrowing. He said that he lost most of his clients because they had a better experience with ChatGPT because they could get results quicker and cheaper. He was forced to transition to resume writing and told me that I wasn't going to find any work in copywriting.
Around that time, I posted some ads on different websites to promote my services. Conventional advice was to pick a niche, usually something you were interested in and knew a lot about. People can write about beauty, tech, dogs, cats, or whatever else. I considered picking music as my niche, but decided instead to go against conventional advice and become a generalist. I offered writing and editing. I got one consistent client and a few one-offs over the course of a few months, but quickly became dissatisfied with the work.
The pay was shit, it was competitive, and it was boring.
I realized quickly that I wanted to write things that actually interested me and I wanted more control over my platform. That's when I discovered Substack and decided to have a go at becoming a newsletter merchant. I found that it was tough to figure out what I wanted to write about. I couldn't get past myself, and ended up publishing things that were subpar. Moreover, I wasn't publishing frequently enough to get favored by the algorithm. Soon enough, I felt like I was at a dead end. I couldn't pull in any readers. The only people subscribed to me were ones I knew personally. My work wasn't getting on anyone's feeds. Promotion felt impossible. It was bullshit.

On top of that, I felt like I wasn't going anywhere. To write as a career, I now know, is a pipe dream. Talent and hard work aren't enough. You also have to sacrifice your values, denigrate yourself, and if you're lucky, you might be able to make a living as a second-rate hack. I used to aspire to be a guy like Hemingway, Dickens, or even Faulkner. I wished that my words were good enough to get printed and into people's hands. I understand now that it's more realistic to be like Bukowski, working a regular job and having the books just be a side thing. Of course, Bukowski's main passion was writing, but the hard lesson is that passion rarely pays the bills.
I'm conflicted about whether I even want to make a living with my writing. Seeing the popular Substack publications was a sobering experience. The writing was devoid of soul. I've learned that when it comes to reading, there are two reasons why people read anything.
Information and entertainment.
Those are the only two reasons why anyone reads anything. I'm at a position now where I have to ask myself, do I wish to perform? Am I informative? Do I have any business being persuasive? Is Cogito meant to entertain? I guess it's time for me to have my Maximus moment.
Are you not entertained?
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Serial Bones

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A milestone: today is the first day I set my sprint timer to thirty minutes.
I am excited to see how this goes. The longer these sprints get, the longer these entries should get in theory. However, I don't know if I want the entries to be longer than about 1200 words. These entries are vignettes—read quickly, but slowly enough to demand a certain rigor of thought. Historically, my sweet spot has been around 700—1000 words. That allows enough expansion toward a single well-developed thought. At least for me, anyway.
I've been a bit downtrodden with my writing lately. I put some earlier pieces through the newest Claude Sonnet model. As I stated yesterday</a>, I ran my Nowmina essay through it and got absolutely eviscerated. ChatGPT was way more sycophantic, which made the evisceration a tougher pill to swallow. It can be easy for me to fall into the trapping of thinking "I'm not good enough" and "I'm better than most people" at the same time, so seeing Claude's long and sharp critiques was a real shot to my ego.

Like many, I crave validation and attention. As I've said before</a>, our deepest desires and fears revolve around being seen. It's one thing to have someone reach out and express their appreciation for my work. When that happens, I feel good about myself. I feel the dopamine rush for a little bit, but then it's right back to the grindstone. Negative criticism, though, is harder to deal with. I've received a few negative comments on my guestbook</a>. Usually when I get an email about a new note, I get excited. "Oh boy, someone decided to pay attention to my work," I tell myself as I click the link to read the comment. When I receive a negative comment though, it's tough to get through it. Thankfully, I've gotten better at getting past it. Still, it probably wasn't the best idea to put ads on 4chan in the first place. Whatever.
I still feel confident in this project, though. The bones are here, and the future of all writing is here in this kind of format: serial, daily, and iterative. If I were an executive at a big publishing house, I would stop printing most physical media and prioritize serial digital media. Sites like Royal Road and even AO3 have the superior publishing model: hosted platform, serial works, and a community built around the platform. Their weakness? Ninety-eight percent of the writing on there sucks.
Since big houses have access to the best talent, I would go all-in on a platform for their writers to publish serially. Pay writers directly to publish on a premium platform, and copy the Patreon model with reader tiers. This will pull readers in because instead of having to pay for the works of just one author, they can access an entire library of best-in-class work. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Of course, the biggest stick in the mud here is Amazon. They have distribution locked in, so any move to escape Amazon's clutches would be met with a swift and decisive punishment. That punishment would, of course, be to just copy the idea. More than likely, they would turn Goodreads into a Royal Road. Maybe that's their long-term play and they're just keeping their cards close, I wouldn't know. Goodreads is already the de facto Book Social Media site, so there's already immense integration there.
I usually don't like to think too much about business strategy. It makes my stomach churn. I wouldn't want to be in any kind of position to make those calls. I'm a smart guy, but I'd rather be an artisan than a businessman. That's just me, though. I used to have plenty of anti-capitalist sentiments, but these days I try not to think about it that much.
Capital and profit are just the drapes. Power is what lives behind the curtain.
Today's writing has felt like a lot of meandering. I don't feel particularly charged about it like I usually do. I think that's just part of the harsh reality of daily publishing like this. Some days are just part of the slog. It's tough to keep up a charade of useful or entertaining content for long.
Thankfully for me, I don't have to deal with that problem.
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Sick Internet

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I use LLMs to help edit my writing. For a long time, I had a ChatGPT Plus subscription. I stuck with ChatGPT because I was a fan of the memory feature, which kept coherence across threads. It was nice not only for working on writing projects, but also for self-discovery, weirdly enough. I know many people dislike the latter notion, especially with recent "AI psychosis" stories. As someone who has experienced "pure" psychosis, I've ironically avoided that trap. Takes one to know one, I guess.
I had been hearing that Claude's models were better for working on prose. I tried out Claude when it first came out back in 2023. While I enjoyed working with it, ChatGPT won because it was still the only platform with the memory feature. Then I found an AI software</a> that was far superior. It allowed not only for use of all mainstream LLMs, but also had their own refined versions that have proven to be superior to the originals.
On MyNinja, I decided to test out the flagship Claude model and was blown away at how much better it was for editing my Cogito entries. There was a bit of a problem, however. With ChatGPT, it would give me a few edits here and there and make sure to catch glaring errors and typos. With the new Claude model, it gave line-by-line copy edits. Every single sentence had to be sanitized. I can also be a fierce copy editor, so I get it. However, it was clear that the model was over-sanitizing my prose. It was attempting to convert it to the classic AI style we can't stop encountering.

Of course, I took some of its edits—there were plenty of spots that needed improvement. It reminded me a lot of Grammarly. Back what I first started publishing online, Grammarly was the hot tool. I wrote a few pieces with it and grew dissatisfied. While writing, it would give corrections mid-sentence, which halted my flow. Moreover, the edits were not always ones that I preferred. Even when I turned that off and had it look at pieces as a whole, I still wasn't happy. I kept rejecting a lot of the edits because I knew that if I let all of them go through, I'd sound like, well, a fucking robot.
I self-publish most of my writing (I'd love to have other people publish it IF I WAS GOOD ENOUGH AT WRITING) and it's nice to have a cheap second set of artificial eyes look at it and catch my mistakes. Despite countless passes and multiple revisions, mistakes still slip through. That's not just me, every writer deals with it. With how often I publish, and since I don't want to put a bunch of money into it, LLM editing is a solid option for my needs. Working with them has taught me the importance of discernment. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
LLMs always offer to rewrite my stuff for me when I pass it through for edits. I despise that. It's a waste of time. I'll try it out occasionally and it's always the same sanitized bullshit I see from idiots who trend on Substack and Medium. It's wild how so many of their readers are blissfully unaware of that. I read comments and feel disgusted. Many have discussed the Dead Internet Theory</a> before. There is a lot of bot traffic online, sure. There's also almost nine billion people on the planet and basically all of them use the internet.
The internet isn't dead. It's sick.
People have become helplessly reliant on LLMs to parse information. It makes sense because there's so much of it. But for many, their discernment has atrophied. Most search engines are completely useless now (I made the jump to pay</a> for mine), and no one is able to recall anything because our attention is constantly shifting. I don't want to harp on points made ad nauseam. None of this is original, anyway. Still, despite the exposure, we don't seem to have any respite. It can be hard to talk with friends or acquaintances about it. Often, what I say falls on deaf ears—at least it can feel that way. I feel confident in my space here on the Small Web.
I just wish it wasn't so small.
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Eaten Alive

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I didn't write because I went back to Divine Liturgy after six months of absence. It felt good to be back. When I first attended services, my feet would hurt the whole time. I was so out of shape that I couldn't even stand for two hours. Now that I've been going on walks every day, it's easier to stay on my feet. It was a small thing, but I'm proud of it.
It's crazy because I used to be so in shape and I really let myself go. I used to ride over a hundred miles a week as a bike messenger; after years of bullshit, I was barely able to stand for church. I knew something had to change, and thankfully it has. So much was taken away from me, but I know that I can get it back and become stronger. I have to become stronger.
I was reading my essay on the Nowmina</a> and cringed at myself. It really wasn't a good essay, even though I worked hard on it and spent a lot of time on the ideas. I found that it fell flat on the philosophy and the practical digital advice. It tried doing too much at once—a bad habit of mine. I've been faithful to myself with this project, but I fear that I still have a long way to go in writing anything else. I question if I can do it. I don't know if it's something I can aptly do.

There's my fascination with prose style that makes writing fun for me, but I don't think I have many good ideas. Most people don't have good ideas. Really, we're all lucky to get just one good idea in our whole lives. The other tens of thousands of ideas are all garbage. All we can do is wade through the bad ideas, try to develop some into mediocre ones, and wait until that one good idea blesses our minds. Then, all that has to happen is complete and total focus towards making that idea real. If it stays in the mind, it will be forgotten—then you'll have to wait again for another good one that might never come. That's why I work here every day. It's a form of waiting. I have to wait for my good idea to come and make it real. There's no other way.
There's no other way for me to go with my life. I don't really have the gumption or fortitude to deal with anything else. I burn out too quickly. People get upset when I try to contribute. My fitness is improving, but I don't know if my body can handle another physical job, despite my desire for one. The thought of applying to become a union electrician still crosses my mind a lot. It's easy for me to fantasize about it, to imagine myself jumping those hurdles and becoming a real working man. Fantasies don't enter reality—that's why they're fantasies.
Despair comes for me often, especially when things feel like they're going well. When I feel like I'm making progress, that despair comes back and convinces me that it's not real. Even when I try to remember the great wind that carries us all, I still go about in pity for myself. I don't tackle life anymore. All I do now is let it pass by. I guess that this writing is my attempt not to let it pass by, maybe try to take a snapshot the best way I can. I don't think that's the way it works, though. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I tried reading some of my entries from August, back when I first started publishing Cogito. I couldn't get through any of them. I didn't want to read any of that shit. It didn't feel valuable at all, just another piece of meaningless ephemera that has no say in what happens today. The guy who wrote Ecclesiastes was right: it's all an intangible vapor. Nothing here in this world is real. Hegel said that once you learn that the world of the senses is an illusion, that's when the real work begins.
But I don't know if I have what it takes to clock in every day.
Yet no matter what happens, things keep happening. The only way we know how to go is forward. The tape doesn't ever stop. It's always rolling, rolling, rolling. There's always something to experience, something to think about, maybe even understand. I don't know if I want that anymore. Most go about their lives without understanding the darker truth of our perceptions. Others do, but I don’t know if they let it eat them alive the way it has eaten me.
At least I think I'm alive, anyway.
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Some Supplements

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I started my timer, as is custom when I sit down to write. Usually, the timer sets off something in me that makes me able to come up with a structure for these entries on the fly, but this time I don't have much of a structure at all and feel more akin to Joyce writing his free-associative tirades. In practice, though, I know that I am just working to embrace my pantser temperament a la King or Hemingway. Either way, there will still be something that comes out of my head because that is what I trained myself to do, other obligations notwithstanding.
Luckily for me, inspiration comes at the same time every morning.
I've been on a strict regimen of a few supplements that are typically called nootropics. They are meant to increase cognitive ability. The main ones I take are lion's mane, ashwagandha, and bacopa monnieri. Lion's mane and ashwagandha are relatively well-known. Lion's mane is supposed to help build new neural connections in the brain and help with nerve health. Ashwagandha is supposed to ease anxiety and improve mood, which is key for me since I have bipolar disorder. Bacopa is a newer one I started and is supposed to have similar benefits as lion's mane, but acts on different neurological subsystems. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I've been on all three of these supplements for over six months now and I think that there's been a noticeable improvement in my life. Firstly, I haven't had any major mood episodes for about four months now. Second, I think that my cognition has improved. One noticeable side effect, however, is a sort of half-drunkenness I feel. It's hard to describe. It's like brain fog, except instead of feeling zapped, I feel a bit cloudy. Things feel slightly slowed down, as if life is playing on 0.95x speed. I don't think it's a bad feeling, but it does feel markedly different from more 'default' or 'sober' mental states I am usually in. Granted, I haven't experienced those states as much as the average person due to my bipolar disorder, but it still feels foreign to me.
Despite these side effects, I would rather contend with them than psychiatric medications or no treatment at all. It can be argued that I'm self-medicating, and I would say that's true. The problem is that getting medicated by doctors and dealing with the healthcare industry as a whole does not adhere to my best interests as they should. I know this from personal experience.
A few years ago, I was on a new antipsychotic that hit the market. Since it was so new, it didn't have a generic version yet. The company that made it needed to earn the money they spent making it quickly, and so they charged $1,000 for a month's prescription. My insurance company was supposed to pay it and they did for several months. Thankfully, I responded well to the medication. When I went to the pharmacy, I didn't spend more than $40 for my monthly prescription.
Out of nowhere, however, my insurance company decided to stop covering the medication and forced me to pay out of pocket for it. My provider, instead of making a case for me with my insurance, prescribed me a new medication that—lo and behold—had the exact same issue as the previous one.

After that, I decided that I didn't want to be bound by a system that obviously didn't care about my health. I knew that I had to take the situation into my own hands. I did some research and found that there was some evidence showing that my supplements could help with managing my bipolar disorder. Granted, there wasn't substantial evidence, but there was enough to give it a shot. I didn't have other options, so I went ahead and made the decision to stop taking my psychiatric medications daily. I relegated that to my supplements.
I still have a generic antipsychotic that I can take as needed if I feel myself going manic. I don't take any more antidepressants or mood stabilizers—those didn't do much for me either. I went from a bureaucratically prescribed chemical cocktail to a self-prescribed one, and so far the latter has proven to be better not just for my health, but also for my sanity and my wallet. I don't have to go to a pharmacy to pick up my treatment. I can buy them through less red tape.
I'll drink to that.
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Tread

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I didn't get to write yesterday because I had a doctor's appointment. The day before yesterday, I scheduled the appointment because my cheap blood pressure machine at home told me I had a blood pressure of 155/100. I hadn't seen the doctor in three years. I got scared. When I went to the doctor's office, two different nurses checked my blood pressure the old-fashioned way. The first reading was around 130/80. The second was 115/70.
They also took my blood and urine to run basic tests like my A1C and cholesterol levels and a lipid profile. I already know my A1C is going to be astronomical, but I hope that I'll be able to get back on medications for it. I used to take 2,000 mg of metformin daily to no effect. I was on Ozempic briefly, but stopped taking it because I had severe stomach pain with it. There have been several breakthroughs for diabetes medications though since my last doctor's visit, so hopefully something else will come up, God and insurance willing.
After my doctor's visit, I came back home and decided to take a nap. It lasted about four hours. The evening came along and I was still tired and groggy, so I decided to skip the gym as well. No writing and no gym make me feel grossly unfulfilled. It's easy for me to take that as a personal failing, but yesterday came and went. I'm writing today, and that's what matters.

I recently discovered Bix</a> through a backlink checker and saw that he has been reading my blog and sharing some of my posts on his site through his shared RSS feed. Bix, if you're reading this, then hello. Thanks for checking out my stuff. Usually I would send an email to you directly, but I think that given both of our proclivities with blogging-as-living, it's appropriate to share my thoughts on the blog rather than just through email.
I related a lot to Bix when I first encountered his blog, particularly with his status as a disabled person who can't work and is supported financially by family. His mom</a> also blogs. Hi Elaine. I find myself in a similar position, living a disabled life and finding solace in simple routines and, of course, relentless blogging. It was inspiring to see someone a bit further along in life than me and still finding something meaningful in a world that doesn't comply with modern social paradigms.
For me, writing is a magical and sacred thing. I can take all of this noise that's in my head and turn it into something that can inspire someone and incite action. That's the most powerful thing I can possibly think of, and I have the opportunity to wield that power and use it for good. I don't think of that lightly. Every word and every thought matter more than I could ever know.

There's a part of me that wishes for a greater impact with ventures like this blog. Then there's another part of me that wishes I could find that Great Work and make it so that I could help everyone out now. Then there's that other part of me that tells me I will never get to have that privilege because the only thing I am worthy of is torture and death. That part is loud and doesn't stop talking. No matter how many times I vanquish him and put him in the back seat, he still finds his way back to shotgun. Pesky.
These entries used to be outpourings of emotion onto the page. They served me well as bleak and cathartic releases, but the weight of knowing that people read these makes me push myself towards something more substantive and less self-serving and self-mythologizing. I have no idea how this project will shape up moving forward. I have no idea where my life will be even tomorrow, let alone next year. Every day is a landmine and I have to tread carefully.
But still, I tread.
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Forget

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I collapsed.
I remember that after lunch, I took a nap and was just so upset at how tired I've been. I've been making progress with my CPAP. I'll put it on and can fall asleep with it, but can't keep the mask on throughout the night. I'll still wake up from apnea episodes and have to throw my mask onto the ground. I'll keep it on for about two to three hours, but still don't feel a lot of the positive effects of it throughout the day. I still feel tired. I still feel leveraged beyond what's healthy. I took my blood pressure yesterday after my nap and got a reading of 155/100 with a heart rate of 115. My blood sugar was over 200. It felt as if no matter what progress I made or how hard I tried, it wasn't going to be enough.
This made me have a nervous breakdown. I was pacing around my room, biting myself and hitting myself. I had thoughts of relapse. All I wanted to do was get away from it all, from my own body. My weakness and incompetence were going to lead me to an inevitable hell. I was sure of it. Amid this spiral, I somehow mustered the wherewithal to get my gym bag ready and go to the gym. Somehow, I was still able to maintain my ritual.
I went to the gym, but cut my walk down to twenty-five minutes. I sat in the hot tub and tried to relax. With the new year, the spa area was more crowded than usual. I found my spot, sat in the hot tub, and tried to tell myself that I was okay, that I was doing the right things. I went to the shower and stood under the cold water, which always gives my nervous system a hard reset and calms me down. I cycled between the shower and the hot tub. It felt nice. I left the gym feeling more relaxed, but even as I'm writing today's entry, I still feel myself slipping.

A hard lesson I've had to learn in life is that no matter how hard you work towards something, there are no guarantees. You can still fail, even if you give something your best effort. It's something that people don't like to talk about. Most stories we tell are centered around a person getting what they want and having that change them in some meaningful way, positive or negative. Rarely do we tell stories about failing to do that. The story always revolves around the winner, the successful one.
This is a harsh reality of life. Most people deal with it, yet the only way we approach dealing with it is through aphoristic perseverance. "Fall down seven times, get back up eight," the story usually goes. Unfortunately, we can't always get back up. That's not due to a lack of perseverance, but a lack of opportunity. We can do what we can to pursue an opportunity but if we fail, the opportunity won't always stay there. It'll go away eventually if we don't succeed, and then we are left with one of the truest expressions of human pain.
Grief.
No one talks about how to deal with it.
The only way to deal with it, really, is to let it die. The further that failed pursuits go towards the past, the easier it is to let that pain dull. It dulls because we forget about it. Maybe that's why forgetting is such a good thing. Sure, we can forget good things and that's horrible, but we also have the chance to forget about pain. In many ways, to forget is to heal. I've been there many times, trying to forget about myself in the past. All those memories do is bring up the failed opportunities, things I'll never get back. For me, grief seems to be the dictator of my past. It signs decrees I don't get to see.
The only way to get past it is to forget.
What's the best way to forget? Focus on today.
Yesterday, I let grief dictate my emotions. Today, I have the chance to forget and move on.
I don't want to persevere anymore. I want to forget.
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Masculine Prose

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I am six months nicotine-free.
I never thought I'd make it this far, honestly. Every day it gets easier, but there are still many triggers. It's crazy how much I notice smoking in media I watch. Every time I see someone smoking a cigarette, I get a bit envious. Soon enough, though, I forget all about it. Thankfully as time has gone on, staying off of nicotine has gotten easier, not harder.
I'm proud of myself for getting this far. The back half of 2025 was a pivotal time for me. I got an exercise routine figured out, wrote a lot more, started publishing here, wrote short stories for submissions, quit smoking, and feel like I've been becoming healthier each day. I haven't had a mood episode in almost four months. It seems that I've made more progress in digging myself out of all of those holes. Now that I can see more of the light, I only want to go higher.
My discipline with writing has reached new highs. My goal is to get comfortable with around 2,000 words a day. To be clear, this is 2,000 good words a day, ones that survive rounds of revisions. Lately what I've noticed is that I can pump out a good amount of words, but I've also been cutting a lot of them out once they get written down. Usually I realize that I can cut many sentences in half without losing anything. I'll also cut entire sentences—sometimes entire paragraphs—because there's no purpose in the overall piece after writing them.
Fortunately, I've gotten past my pride. I don't feel bad about cutting large amounts of words out during revisions. The thing I've said over and over again: the best writers are the best revisers. If you don't know how to pull out that red marker, you aren't going to make it. I might be picky with my prose, but I think that's one of my most important attributes. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Recently, I downloaded software to get totally legally obtained audiobooks so that I could listen to them while doing walks at the gym. A few friends and I have a book club going and for this month we're doing Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. It's been a great time listening to the audiobook so far this month. Kuang has a very mature prose style, which is great considering that she's still in her twenties. There's a bit of envy I feel with her mainstream success, especially considering that she's around my age. I will say, however, that she's written a lot more than I have and started taking writing seriously way earlier than me, so it's not a fair comparison when put rationally.
Despite my childish feelings, the book has still been a pleasure to get through. It's nice that there's a novel published recently that I like. Writers like Kuang give me confidence for the future of our generation, and I hope that I can be recognized in that same light. Gen Z male literature is scant for reasons that I intimately understand.
Gen Z guys have many other priorities outside of producing works of literature. Many Gen Z guys are more focused on getting their lives in order by establishing the basics. They want good careers and to secure a good future, even if their outlook is pessimistic. Because of that, the whole notion of the romantic bohemian male writer a la Burroughs or Kerouac is way out of fashion. Most people my age look back on guys like that and see them as either big fat phonies or as spiritual predecessors to today's Performative Male. You know, the guy who can be found outside of coffee shops drinking green matcha lattes and pretending to read Simone Beauvoir.

The spirit of guys sticking shit out in that restrained masculine prose is a fading archetype, which is mostly due to the compounding effects of industrialization. Guys don't need or want to know how to fix stuff around the house anymore because, well, most of them don't own one. We're all too busy puttering around on our computers or phones consuming media by the terabyte. Well, truthfully, that's just a cosmopolitan male of today. There's guys out there still getting their hands in the mud and living that hardened kind of life. The problem is that they don't write about it or even get written about.
That's my lane. I want to give those men a voice.
After all, I'm one of them.
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Highlighter Brains

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've had a good morning so far. I finally figured out a good way to get morning and evening prayers back into my routine. I was originally reading prayers out of an Orthodox prayer book that I got when I visited a local parish. Reading the prayers took a long time and it was tough reading them out that way. The prayer time was almost half an hour, morning and evening. I just didn't have the prayer muscles for it.
Thankfully, I figured out a new way of doing it and it's based on tools that were already in my spiritual toolbox. I am a big fan of the Jesus Prayer, which goes like this:

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." </blockquote>
It's a concise and simple prayer, which I find very useful. For a long time, I thought that the only way to pray was informally where you just kind of chat with God directly. I mostly saw this in groups, and always had a hard time with prayer in solitude. However, I then heard about noetic prayer. Noetic prayer involves saying the Jesus Prayer, and then internalizing it into your heart. I bought an Orthodox prayer rope with 100 knots in it with the intention of practicing noetic prayer daily. I lost sight of it, though. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Once I finally established a solid morning routine, I was able to borrow from Atomic Habits and put morning prayers after my hygiene routine and before I eat breakfast. After I finished up in my bathroom when I woke up this morning, I went straight to my prayer corner with my icon, grabbed my prayer rope, and did one revolution of the Jesus Prayer. One hundred times. Pure rote contemplation. I also did the Lord's Prayer at the end for good measure. The whole process took about ten minutes, which is much easier for me to accomplish. It felt much more effective than reading morning prayers out of the prayer book. I hope to keep continuing this practice.
A thought I had yesterday that I wanted to write about: I think I figured out why second brain apps are so popular. A friend of mine told me about the concept of the highlighter brain. Younger people will understand this more, but the idea essentially revolves around studious girls I went to school with. These girls were academically focused and loved studying and organizing. When you would see their school supplies, they always carried large binders and bags filled with pencils, pens, and highlighters.
They had highlighters of multiple colors and inside their binders, all the pages in the binder were meticulously colored with multiple highlighter shades. Almost every word on every page was highlighted or styled in some way. It always made guys like me wonder, "what the heck are they doing all that for?" With all of that color and formatting on their notes, the notes themselves were hard to read. I was studious myself back then, and I tried the highlighter approach. I couldn't study because it was a hindrance on actually absorbing the information. I realized quickly that many of those girls weren't actually studying like I thought they were.

Then I looked at those second brain apps and figured it out.
It's the damn highlighter brain!
These apps scratch the same itch they did for those girls back when they were in school, but now they can do it for everything. Work, hobbies, relationships, paying bills, hoarding links for stupid online articles (literally just use the bookmarks feature in your web browser holy shit), and every other little thing they think can be micromanaged.
It's a weird thing, seeing how deeply institutions influence our thinking. So many people find these kinds of phenomena to be beneficial to society, but it's just layer upon layer of bureaucracy that obfuscates the core problems with humanity. We want to build these intricate systems to keep track of everything so that we can feel in control. Unfortunately, we can't control every little thing that happens in our lives. It reminds me of when God told Job that he couldn't possibly conceive of all the little details in the universe and how much of a relentlessly chaotic butterfly effect it all is.
This is why I engage in noetic prayer.
I want to humble myself before the magnificence of God's mysterious and all-encompassing power.
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Past People

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was texting some friends in a group chat earlier this morning. We've been pals since high school, nearly fifteen years at this point. On occasion, we'll talk about people we went to school with. There's been a lot that's happened to our old cohort. Many of them have ended up being decent regular working people. Some have died. I even heard of one guy who just got recruited by the Secret Service. One of my friends posted a picture of someone from social media and we exchanged comments about it.
It then reminded me of a time where I had an unlikely encounter with someone from back then. I was at a random gas station in 2023 grabbing smokes and a snack. It was in the metro area we grew up in, but decently far away from where we went to school. While I was walking out of the gas station, I get flagged down by someone. It took me a moment, but soon enough I recognized her. She was in my graduating class and we had a few classes together. She was a teacher's daughter, studious, straight-and-narrow type person. I remember that after college, she ended up getting a swanky job at a place where their website ends with dot gov.
She was with her boyfriend, a tall lanky jock-looking guy, and introduced us. We shook hands, exchanged polite smiles. She told me that she lives in this part of the city now with him and that she just bought a house there. I said "that's cool man." She asked me what I had been up to since graduating. There was an awkward moment of silence. It wasn't a long moment, just a quick beat that gave me enough time to think of something generic.

I didn't have the guts to tell her "yeah so I dropped out of college, became a drug dealer, went insane, and now I live with my parents in the town we grew up in." Instead, I just kept it on the surface. "I'm back in the area, yeah. Between jobs right now, you know how it is." There was a strong sense of shame and inconvenience I felt. After that she said "I'm glad you're doing well" and we parted ways. The experience was so awkward that I didn't have the guts to tell my friends about it until just today.
With everything I've been through, I try my best to keep things in perspective. I know the modern wisdom of "growth isn't linear" and that "comparison is the thief of joy" and all that, but thinking back on stuff like that is still a hard thing for me. I've grown a lot since then. I feel more at peace with my lot in life, and I know that I still have a lot to do with it. I know that I've done more than I give myself credit for, but the fact that I don't fit into modern conceptions makes it hard to confront my past.
With a lot of the people I went to school with, there was a sense of forward momentum that was conveniently packaged for modern sentiments. I remember at the end of high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career. I held it off because I was too busy having fun with my friends and playing my saxophone. Once I was caught at the finish line, though, I had to make a decision. I shot from the hip and told people I wanted to be an investment banker at Goldman Sachs because it was prestigious and made a lot of money. Later down the line, I had to confront my beliefs and admit to myself that they're diametrically opposed to a job like that. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Back then, I was ostensibly bright. I did well in classes. I enjoyed learning. There were many precocious moments, but nonetheless my teachers and peers viewed me as someone with potential. For a long time, I convinced myself that I failed them. I know now that I haven't failed anything. I was still figuring out the mission. Today, the mission is more apparent than it has ever been. I looked back at my past and called the race before it even started. There's still so much more to do.
My friends have also talked about who would be the first and last to die among us. It's been readily apparent that given my conditions, I'd be the first one to croak. If I had to bet on it, I'd say the same thing. More than that, I've experienced so much pain as a result of depression that my outlook on life is less than stellar. I wouldn't mind being taken out early.
Unfortunately, God invented irony for a reason.
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Exponential Curves

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm awake, and so far my morning has been peaceful and routine. It always feels nice when things go the way we expect them to. I'm a bit upset though because I've still been dealing with more sleepiness and fatigue lately. Yesterday I took another long nap in the evening. I don't like being so tired when I'm in a decent mood because I still want to try and do things. I want to switch over to a local LLM setup so that I can cancel my ChatGPT subscription and have more control over my data, the model I use, and my privacy.
Also, I am over the honeymoon phase with LLMs. I've explored the whole garden, as it were. It's always nice to have an interesting conversation with an LLM or work through different ideas with it. There is a different flow to brainstorming with an LLM compared to collaborating with other humans. It has its advantages and disadvantages. I would say the principal advantage of brainstorming with an LLM is that I can fully dictate the pace. That level of control is nice.
However, a main disadvantage I've seen as the technology has progressed is that I've started to see a similar uncanny valley with AI prose as I have with images. Every writer has a distinct style, including LLMs. Many have talked about the "fifteen most glaring signs you're reading AI-generated text," and I think that we've all gotten sick of its prevalence and monotonous use of syntax and rhetorical devices.

The more that I use ChatGPT myself, the more my disdain for the writing style grows. This is also because with their latest models, the style has become even more pronounced and jarring. That makes sense, though, considering that most of the training data used to improve those models came from, well, previous ones. There's not enough human-made data for the companies to gobble up anymore, so they settle with inferior synthetic data and convince themselves it's actually better. Funny how that happens.
I've outlined my general opinions and uses for AI here</a> and those words still carry their weight here. Enshittification is most certainly upon us, and I want to find my way out of it. ChatGPT has been a great tool for my writing. Most people use it as their personal freelancer and make it generate all of their writing. That's fine if your focuses are beyond just writing and things like performance metrics matter more than actual performance.
I find that ChatGPT works best for me as a copy editor. It finds errors that standard spell checkers miss, especially more complex ones like idiomatic errors. It also helps with clarity and trimming certain sentences down, which I am always a big fan of. Then, of course, it also helps with big picture ideas for certain pieces and makes sure that there's follow-through. The best part about this is that I can choose to agree with its editing choices and make the changes or disagree with them and keep them as is. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
This is the main thing I use it for. I'm not a fan of how it still constantly glazes everyone and tries to make everyone think they're a genius, but I've learned to harden myself towards its sycophancy. I use it a lot less than I did a year or two ago, and this lowered usage is another major reason I want to switch to a local option. I don't need as much compute as I used to, and I think that I might even be able to lower my costs in using it from OpenAI's $20 per month price tag.
From what I understand, I can use programs like Ollama to host models and then rent a high-end virtual GPU that the model uses to compute answers and work either in the terminal or make some kind of basic web front-end. I've also seen KoboldAI's stuff too and that seems like a good choice too, even though it's geared more towards users who use LLMs as roleplay partners.
Ultimately, I just want to keep myself ahead of the curve.
It just sucks that it's an exponential one.
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Crafting the Sword

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I feel well today. Yesterday, I ended up taking a long afternoon nap. I was fine with doing that because my body was still a bit sore from drinking the night before. This morning, though, I feel better. I think I'll have to stop drinking alcohol for a while. I'm fine with it, though. I don't get a whole lot out of drinking anyway. If I'm being honest, I never really did. It was never a fun time for me. Other substances were fun, once. I'm old enough to be more accepting of the mundane. There's comfort in it now.
A simple life has so much potential to be meaningful. I find that a rich internal world has always been more interesting than a busy relationship with the external one. I've lived on both sides of that coin, and I still find the former much more exciting. This is because I like to spend my time making things as opposed to doing things. I enjoy tinkering with things, figuring things out, and thinking about stuff.
I'd rather craft the sword than wield it, I suppose.

Still, I have confidence in the world I live in. I spent a lot of time in the proverbial labyrinth, trying to do whatever I could to get my way out of it. Alternatively, I felt like I was untangling a long cord, but now that I have to plug it in, I can't seem to find the right outlet. Truthfully, while untangling the cord, I didn't think I'd get far enough to even think about finding the right outlet.
I'm coming up on four months without a major mood episode. I'm starting to feel momentum again. I still have a ways to go, absolutely, but I now feel unsure of my overall direction. I have to do another calibration, think my way through the next steps. There's a lot of forks in the path ahead. For me, I'm not as much worried about picking the right path as I am staying consistent with my choices. I understand that I am a very top-down thinker. If my choices don't reflect the systems I make for myself, I get worried.
A lesson that I've come to understand the importance of, then, is one of accepting exceptions. It seems that the only hard rule is that there's always going to be exceptions, and so it makes more sense to ride the wave as opposed to trying to expect them and plan around them. Of course, it's still important to try and plan for things. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
In the past, I was too confident in my improvisational approach to life. More than that, though, I have always been bad at planning for things. I always struggled with being prepared. This was always most apparent when doing any kind of trip. I was always bad at figuring out what I needed for trips and thinking of things to bring in case of certain situations. I've tried improving that, but it's still hard. My brain just isn't wired for that kind of thing. The problem, though, is that I really want it to be.
Even though I have a tough time being prepared for things, it's not something that is innate. It is a learned skill that can be taught and improved on. I can still make efforts to be organized and prepared for things, even if I fail. I can always seek help and iterate based on what works for me. There's no sense in feeling defeated about any of it.
I've been making progress as well. One of my cousins visited my house a few months ago. I also told her about my website so if she or her husband are reading, hi y'all! Anyways, I gave her a quick tour of my bedroom and she told me that it was "tidy," which was a great compliment. I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to organize my life and going through all these iterations of things and only having myself to judge them. Because of that, it can be hard to see progress. So when I got that tangible praise from someone who wasn't my mom (hi mom!), it was reassuring.
There's a lot more ahead.
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The Year of Addition

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year, everyone!
My New Year's Eve turned out well. It was a calm one. On Wednesdays, I typically go to trivia at a bar with my friends and this week, everyone who usually shows up had other plans. It ended up just being me, my friend, and the host. The bar also had hardly any people in it. There were just cooler things going on, I guess. But we still had a good time. The bar also hosts amateur tournament poker on Wednesday nights and since we decided to end trivia early, we thought it would be fun to play some poker.
Honestly, I wasn't a big fan of it because despite it being amateur poker, the people there were taking it a bit too seriously. There was one guy there who looked like the most stereotypical millennial/Gen X person I've ever seen. He was wearing a backwards flat cap, glasses with circular lenses, had a handlebar mustache, and was covered head to toe in tattoos. Of course, he projected the stereotype completely. He played with us at our table for a while, kept walking away from the table when it was his turn, and then had the audacity to complain that we were playing too slow. He said that "we're only going through two hands an hour here." I laughed to ease tension, but then he said "it's not funny" and moved to another table. I decided to go all-in a few hands later so I could leave. Thankfully there wasn't a buy-in.
After that, I decided to head home early and have some hot chocolate with my mom to celebrate the new year. We finished our hot chocolate and I looked at the clock. It was 11:45 and I looked over to my mom and said "you know, I really wanted to stay up until 12, but fuck that shit I'm going to bed" and proceeded to go to bed. Suffice to say, it was a calm new year.

Now I'm awake on New Year's Day, and for me it's just another day. I won't be able to go to the gym today since it's closed, but that's alright with me. I can still go on a walk outside, which I intend on doing since the weather is nice. I'm feeling a bit of nerve pain because last night I decided to drink alcohol and as a type II diabetic, that is not a wise thing to do. I don't drink very frequently at all, maybe once a month on average. Still, my body feels the consequences of it regardless. I'm not hungover, but my neuropathy is acting up more than usual. It's alright, I can take it easy.
CW: SEX STUFF
My hope moving forward this year, along with the hopes I discussed yesterday</a>, is to cut back on vices. I developed many of them and I'm trying to take them out of my life. Over the last several months, I've been successful on a few fronts, but I know that I have to cut each vice out one at a time. I'm almost six months nicotine-free now. My next vice that I'm trying to quit is masturbation and pornography. I've tried engaging in NoFap and things like that before with little success. The most I've gone without PMO (pornography, masturbation, orgasm) is about three weeks, I think.
My sexuality is of course a very personal thing, but I don't have shame in discussing it. I've been masturbating since I was five years old, long before I even learned what it was. For me, it's a key behavior that I knew I could lean on to reduce anxiety. It was free and abundant, much more so than other vices I've had. For a long time, I rationalized it in many ways. I used to convince myself that it was morally acceptable, even healthy. However, I know that it takes away from my life more than it gives. It has become a crutch. It has also made it difficult to maintain romantic relationships. It reduces my confidence.
The main course of action I've taken to eliminate this vice is that I have made a hard rule for myself: no phone in bed. I, like many men, mainly watch pornography on my phone. For me, laying in bed is a key signal for the bad habit. I would masturbate to help myself fall asleep. I gave myself a bit of grace, though. I've been letting myself masturbate without pornography in bed, but my idea is that as long as I don't view pornography, I'll be able to wean off of masturbating. It's difficult because I get strong urges, and these have been way worse than the ones when I quit smoking.
Still, I know that quitting this vice will add more to my life than take away.
This year, I am going to add more than subtract.
To 2026, the Year of Addition.
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NYE Reflections

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year's Eve, everyone!
It's been a great year with Cogito, even though I only started publishing in August. I am proud of myself with maintaining a consistent practice here despite the ups and downs of life. Writing these entries gives me immense purpose, and I'm glad that I've accrued a nice audience of readers over just these few short months. I'm also proud of the growth of my website. When I first started, I was barely getting 50 views a day, but now I get at least 300. I'm hoping that as I further network with other webmasters and promote my work further, my audience will continue to grow.
Since the new year is upon us, I think it would be fitting to reflect on my desires moving forward. I feel that I've found my voice as a writer, and I feel prepared to truly make an attempt to break into the literary world. My main focus for 2026 will be to write as many short stories as I can and get published in a reputable literary journal. I'll explore publications that would accept my essays as well, but either way I need to focus on getting more pieces published at places that aren't just my website.
For a while, I let my pride get ahead of me. I thought that publishing exclusively on my website would be the best way for me to build my writing career, but a small self-hosted website alone isn't enough. I need to put myself out there to other people and show my work with confidence. Truthfully, I was just afraid of rejection. I've always had a hard time dealing with rejection, but I know that I can still work to grow past that and make something of my work. I see so many other writers publish their work on large platforms like the New York Times and similar outlets, and I know that I am skilled enough to be right there with them. All I need is the confidence to take that next step.

While I'm trying to break into the industry, I still want to tend to my work here. I want to keep writing Cogito entries, publishing IOKTIKN pieces, and adding more features to my site. I've also considered spinning up a newsletter so that people aren't bound just to RSS or visiting the website manually to stay updated on my writing. When considering a newsletter previously, I felt that it was redundant. However, I also understand that most people don't have an RSS feed, but everyone has email. Even though I urge readers to get one</a>, I also understand that reading my site alone probably isn't enough of an incentive to start one. Perhaps I should recommend more sites to help readers make an RSS feed.
It's a sad thing with email. Most younger people don't even use their email to actually read emails. Their personal email only acts as a way to make accounts on websites, that's it. If they actually email people, it's usually for work on a work email. But emailing IRL friends or e-friends? It's unheard of for the Zoomer. As an older Zoomer myself ('98 baby) I feel like an old fart, a "chopped unc" if you will. I try to get people to use RSS and email even though I know most people my age only use instant messaging. I'd probably be better off making a Discord server, I don't know.
All this is to say that there are a lot of ways I can build my writing career. The main thing I hope to achieve this upcoming year, though, is an increased writing output. I've made great strides this year and I feel that I now have the key ingredients to make myself even more prolific than ever. I thought I was towards the ceiling when it came to output, but then I heard of pirateaba</a> who writes 40,000 words a week and realized that I've barely even crossed the first threshold. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Truth be told, though, I don't think I would even want to achieve 40,000 words a week. As it stands now, I can write about 1,000 words a day, or somewhere around 5,000 to 7,000 words per week. I think the ceiling for me would be somewhere closer to 2,000 words per day or around 10,000 to 12,000 words per week. While 40,000 words per week would be glorious, I also know that revisions are scant at that level of output. Also, writing like that usually involves single sessions that last upwards of 8 hours. I don't think I could ever write for 8 hours straight. I don't think I'd ever want to write for 8 hours straight. The most I'd muster would be 4 hours, but really I find that my best writing comes from sessions that are at most 2 hours.
As I reflect on all of this writing, I just hope that I get to keep going, regardless of what happens. Writing gives me joy. I don't want that to be taken away.
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Sentences

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few days, I've been dealing with remarkable amounts of fatigue. It's something that I deal with frequently, but is frustrating. I wake up some mornings and the only thing I can manage is to fall back asleep. I'll have these vivid dreams during these daytime naps that last for hours. I never enjoyed these dreams because I would rather contend with life here than in worlds I only occasionally get to visit. When I sleep at night, I always toss and turn in bed, wake up multiple times throughout the night, and never feel like I'm actually sleeping. If I do sleep, it's punctuated by nightmares.
Life feels like it's constantly being stolen.
Even when I drink caffeine to keep myself awake, it rarely does the trick anymore. I find myself at the upper limits of acceptable caffeine intake most days and still feel consistently tired. Working out has helped with this tiredness, but now I think my body has adjusted and my default state of fatigue is back. Recently, I've been doing two writing sessions daily. The first is in the morning where I write these entries, and the second is in the evening after dinner and a bath where I work on more extended projects. Yesterday, I didn't even have the energy to do my second writing session and went to bed early. It made me feel bad because I really wanted to keep going, but I knew that I didn't have the steam to do so.
Even now as I'm sipping on my second dose of caffeine, my eyes feel groggy. Sleep is tempting. It's still morning and I've barely been awake for a few hours, yet all I want to do is go back to bed. It's a major impediment to my life. I don't want to do most things because I just know that I'll be too tired for them. When I try to fantasize about having a job, it's harder to do so because of the state I find myself in presently. The fact that I can't handle a more intense and consistent work schedule breaks my heart. It makes me feel like I've been robbed of a fuller experience.

I'm fortunate to have a life that's comfortable and that I don't have to stress about major financial burdens like rent or food, but there's a part of me that feels like I don't deserve it. Instead of staying home and focusing solely on taking care of myself, I should be out in the world working and contributing. It makes me feel immense shame and self-resentment that I can't do more.
The deepest desire and fear we have as humans is that of being seen. The greatest thing we want is to be acknowledged and seen as useful. We want to feel like our actions have an impact on others and if we can't find those feelings, we get lost in despair. I know that's true for me. The worst feeling is to feel like I don't matter. It's one reason why I write here. I want to feel seen. I want to inspire or help others in some kind of tangible way. Even if I might not be able to do it with more conventional means, I can still try to do it here.
These entries are a testament to my will to live.
The last thing I want to feel is that despair creep back into my life. I've wrestled with it for so long, so deeply. At this point, I want to get past the doubt and try to push into the actual substance of my life's work. I can lament about certain opportunities being taken away from me, but instead I have to focus on the ones that I do have, the ones that I am uniquely qualified for. I have this computer that I type with, a platform that I alone control, and a life that gives me the chance to make something special if I maintain my focus. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I recently saw a video of a writer I greatly admire, James Carlos Blake. He was asked the classic question, "how do you know if you have what it takes to be a writer?" He quoted another famous writer, one who I wasn't familiar with. He said that if you enjoy making sentences, you have what it takes. Everything else is easy because they're abilities we're all innately born with. Everyone can tell a story, but only a writer can make the sentences for it.
I look back on my life and realize that I have always had an affinity for language and stories. Most of my thoughts are just words. I've always had an innate ability to spell and recall words. Many times I'll find myself writing something and conjure a word that I am most certain is fake, but then after looking it up I find that it's the exact word I wanted to use for that sentence. I love revising sentences. I enjoy figuring out how to more accurately and eloquently articulate an idea. I love deliberating over diction and the rhythm of a sentence. It's something that just comes to me.
I have to keep going.
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Hiveminds

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A fear that I have with writing these entries, especially at this frequency, is that I circle the same few topics over and over again and that I lack the ability to say anything unique with each entry. To me, this fear stems from much of the writing that I see online. Many writers today seem able to maintain uniqueness with each piece, which I first attributed to an overflowing stream of ideas. However, I thought about it further and realized that it's something even more bland and sinister.
The hivemind.
I remember the earlier days of the fabled website Reddit dot com, particularly around 2012-2014. One concept that got brought up across multiple subreddits was that of the Redditor hivemind. Around 2014, I realized that this hivemind was only going to get worse, and so I stopped browsing Reddit and social media completely. It was a great decision, despite the fact that I reversed it in 2016 once I made a new Facebook profile after starting college. Thankfully, however, I made the decision again to get off of social media in 2023. My mind has been much clearer ever since.

Still, I can find it a bit difficult to come up with something new and original to write about, especially since I try to publish something every day. With other writers, I realized that they felt more novel because they ripped from someone else. Is it the Volksgeist ebbing and flowing through the proverbial vibe-o-sphere? No, it's just people ripping each other off ad nauseam until the Sun explodes, apparently.
Of course, it makes sense to be inspired by certain works and pull certain pieces of them for inspiration. Unfortunately what we see instead is full-blown unadulterated and culturally revered plagiarism. People not only read the same stories and hear the same few opinions over and over again, but enjoy this process and actively participate in it every single day. When I realized this, I understood that my practice here is even more important.
Even when I do circulate certain ideas or repeat certain things, that is actually a good thing. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
I don't think I've seen a publication that really sits with a certain idea. They don't chew on it or view it from other angles. They don't try to see what's wrong with it or how it could be made better. Instead, a single shot fires, sparks fly, and the idea fades away into obscurity so that the next shots can be fired. People would rather dart to and from different interests and extremes instead of sit with one and watch it grow.
Regarding ideas, we have let the flower take precedence over the gardener.
A major part of this has to do with a greater sense of immediacy. Information gets zapped into our heads repeatedly in nice little packages. We think about it only as we absorb it, and seldom a second after. People today feel that if they are not engrossed in information, they are falling behind. My contention, however, is that we need to spend more time thinking on our own. It's one thing to absorb information, but it's a whole other thing to synthesize it.
I hope that with this style of writing practice, people can come to see the importance of this kind of work. My intention isn't to have a large audience sitting at the tap ready to soak in my words every single day (that would be a big ego boost if I'm being honest, though), but to empower others to do the same thing, privately or publicly. I've seen other mediums that encourage this kind of thinking. I can harp on tools like Obsidian or Notion, but the intentions behind them are good. Still though, it would probably be better if more people used physical journals or text editors like Vim or Emacs.
Fuck discourse.
Fuck the hivemind.
Think alone. Think out loud. Think for yourself.
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Endure

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I couldn't get any writing in yesterday because I spent the whole day asleep. I woke up in the morning, did my usual routine, and even after some caffeine, my body still urged me to go back to bed. I usually don't like going back to bed in the mornings, but there are many of them where I'm too tired to start my day, so I oblige anyway. When I went back to bed yesterday morning, I slept from about 9 AM to 4 PM. This isn't a strange occurrence either. Usually after about 3-4 weeks or so, there's just a day that comes by where I have to sleep the whole day. It's something that I'm unfortunately used to.
I already know that this is because my quality of sleep is very poor. I still have my CPAP next to my bed, but haven't had a single successful night with it in years. I know that the only thing that's going to fix my sleep is losing a substantial amount of weight, even though it's harder to lose the weight because my sleep quality is so poor. It's just one of many Catch-22 situations with my health. Still, I just have to keep going. There's not much else I can do. I don't want to rot, so I'll have to contend with my ailments as best as I can.
Even though there's not much that I can handle during the day, I still try to achieve what I can. Lately, my word count has exceeded 1,000 words per day on many days. That's something I'm quite proud of. For a long time now, my word count has been around 5,000 words per week. If I keep my pace up, I'll be on track to reach about 7,000 words per week soon, which is a level of progress that feels monumental compared to when I first started. The other thing that I'm proud of is my consistency. I show up to the page every day and always write something new. This has been a big step in fostering my discipline for the craft, and it's something that I hope to keep with me for the rest of my life.

This practice has been an immense help for me. I've learned a lot about not just cultivating discipline, but also how to refine my voice and make first drafts better. I feel that with engaging in this practice, I have better instincts. More than that, I try to keep writing, regardless of any urges to stop. What I've found is that it's important to keep the flow pushing because even if the words themselves aren't to my standards, I can always revise them later.
You can't mold if there's no clay.
Earlier this morning, I helped a friend load a washing machine in their truck. Even though I had a good time with them and got a free lunch for it, my routine got thrown off a bit and so I'm sitting here writing today's entry later than I like to. Typically, I try to write my Cogito entries in the morning as I'm most fresh, but instead I'm writing today's in the afternoon. The afternoon slump is real and typically I try to not do a whole lot then if I can help it. I usually try to meditate and work out. I try to write in the mornings and evenings and at nighttime. I still intend on keeping that same flow today, but I'm just a bit behind.
My days are generally low-intensity. Everything I do in my day is dictated by me. All of the motivation has to come from me, and there are lots of times where I can be too tired to do things. But what I've found is that over time, I can stack little habits onto each other and build my life around them. I wish that I had the same maturity when I was younger. Back then, I put all of my time and energy towards so many things. I worked a lot. I went out a lot. It was a good life, but there were also a lot of self-care items that I consistently neglected. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Today, I try my best to stay clean and tidy. I do what I can to take care of myself. Even though I feel a lot more fragile than I used to, I think that this has come to help me with the basics. I feel now more than ever the importance of taking care of myself. When I think of managing my life, I try to approach it with an almost monastic set of principles. Strong routines, less indulgence, more quiet time. I try my best to center myself and be comfortable in my own skin, even though I've tried escaping it for so long.
What I attributed as self-exploration in my early twenties was actually a prolonged period of self-avoidance. I hustled and bustled every day, did all kinds of drugs, felt all kinds of things. It was all in the name of trying to forget that I was inside of my own head, viscerally experiencing reality unfold every single day. I held so much of that inside of me. My sins burned the pavement as I refused to look in the rearview mirror. I didn't want to face them with my fellow man.
These days, I don't want to escape anymore.
I want to endure.
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Mania and Depression

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Even after drinking caffeine this morning, I'm still tired. As I sit here on my computer attempting to clack away at my keyboard, my eyes feel heavy and I'm not all the way there. If I'm being fully honest with myself, there's an immense temptation to get my hands on a stronger stimulant so that my writing here can feel more inspired. There are a few problems with this, however. First, procuring a stronger stimulant is illegal in most cases, and my days of intentionally breaking the law are behind me. Second, stronger stimulants can increase the likelihood of going into a manic episode. That is a dangerous place for me to be, and I'd prefer not to put myself there if I don't have to.
Mania is a strange thing. Hypomania is arguably one of the most superior states a person can be in. It's got a similar feeling to being high on a stimulant, except the high itself is much more pure and euphoric. It makes you love life. It makes you love your life. You don't need to sleep as much and you wake up every day feeling excited. Energy and creativity feel boundless. It's a productive time, one that feels like it's never going to end.
Except when it does.

For me, hypomania will last at most a week, then either goes one of two ways. It'll either make me go higher into full-blown mania or crash down into a deep depression. Mania, compared to hypomania, is something else entirely. Instead of being immensely creative and productive, I am delusional, paranoid, disorganized, and impulsive. I will easily make horrible decisions, one after the other. At its most perilous height, I become psychotic and completely lose touch with reality. I believe that I am in hell and that I am the Antichrist. I hear whispers in a language I don't speak and see its text hovering on the walls. At those times, I am absolutely sure that my entire life is some kind of elaborate government-sponsored psyop—that I am in a simulation where my actions don't have consequences.
In a state of intense mania and psychosis, I am like a powerful explosive. In the past, these periods of mania were assuaged by my job as a bike messenger. The intense physicality of that job was a wonderful complement to my brain's hardwired exuberance. Once that chapter in my life ended, though, I found out the hard way about the importance of that kind of outlet. Multiple hospitalizations were a traumatic thing to go through. My brain still feels the weight of those times every single day. Today, I think back to when I was in that state of mind and have to deal with the post-traumatic stress every single day. It's a great tragedy I still carry. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
Depression is another problem that has its own complications. Everyone gets depressed. For me, it's chronic. Chronic depression is a beast all its own because not only can episodes last much longer, but they are also much more frequent than in a more "typical" brain. Ever since I turned 18, I've dealt with the fact that I get depressed and feel this way for almost half the year at times. Especially when I was younger and my bipolar was first onset, these episodes would last for months and impede so much of my life.
A horrible habit I had was that I'd be feeling stable or manic and assign myself several different obligations. When I was in college, I was not only a full-time student, but I also worked full-time and was an officer in different student organizations. Juggling all of those responsibilities was manageable when I was fueled by manic energy, but would crash and burn once I got depressed. I ended up dropping the ball on many people and instead of being more balanced with my responsibilities, I would instead treat them like a roller coaster and ride the rise and fall of my moods.
Dealing with this for so long has been something that feels hard to explain. For many, they would diagnose my life as a series of character flaws. It's easy to look from the outside and criticize me for a lack of better judgment. I know that I feel that way about myself a lot. The last thing I'd want to do is try to justify my decisions by playing the "bipolar card," but it's always a tough thing to discern the line between my illness and my character. I try to do what I can to hold myself accountable where it matters, but sometimes I feel like I've repeated the same mistakes so many times.
One day, I'll learn from them. I have to.
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Christmas Musings

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Merry Christmas, everyone!
If you're a consistent reader of this project, I am deeply grateful for your continued support. It's tough because since I don't actively track viewer statistics or farm engagement, it can feel as if I'm writing into a void. However, I know that I have at least a good handful of consistent readers. Whether I know you personally in real life or became acquainted with you over the internet, I still appreciate it when you check in.
So far, Christmas has been just another day, but that's nothing to complain about for me. I received a new beanie from my brother and sister-in-law that I enjoy. The beanie looks great and fits well, so I'm happy to have received it.

I feel that I've been getting into a better groove with my writing. I finally finished my essay on how I quit nicotine</a> and since finishing that, I feel freer now that there's nothing on the docket. A significant error I encountered while writing the piece: my outline caused a huge block in my writing process. The essay, despite being so short, took months to finish because I felt so confined by the outline. The main obstacle was target word counts for each section. I wanted each section to be about twice as long as they turned out, but I was struggling to add more words.
Feelings of inadequacy plagued me. I felt that the lack of words translated to a lack of substance, but the truth is that I didn't want to put too much unnecessary padding into the piece. The brevity was actually important here because the personal arc and the philosophical themes were naturally concise. If I spent too long on them, it would've drowned out the whole piece. I've told myself before that I'd rather write 500 substantive words in a day than 2000 mediocre ones. I still stand by that statement, but found myself going against my better judgment.
Now that I'm done with the piece, I've focused on my approach toward my next one. I started it yesterday. It's another short story that I'm hoping to submit to lit mags and journals. Fingers crossed on that one. This time, I'm taking more of a pantser's approach—no outlines, just a rough premise and divine inspiration. When I wrote last night with this approach, it was much easier to produce the volume I was looking for. I wrote about 600 words and condensed it down to 450 after revisions. It's the exact pace I was looking for.

This is why writing in Cogito has been so important. Over the last year and a half of maintaining this practice, I’ve realized my instincts are much sharper. I write with more confidence and less apprehension. My prose is not only more direct, but I can produce it at blazing speeds. Even on days where the iron isn't as hot, I can still produce a large amount of words. Becoming prolific is more important than ever in today's market. The supply is heavily saturated and the demand is constantly shifting its attention. I've come to find out that the people who actually make it as writers do so through hard and smart work.
I've struggled with maintaining a consistently strong work ethic over the last two years, which is of course a normal thing, especially when one is first starting out. But instead of giving up or darting my focus elsewhere, I decided to stick with it despite the lack of success. As I've gone through my twenties, I've realized that this is the time in life where I have to pick my trade. It's best to find it sooner rather than later, and for me I've resolved that my life's work will revolve around the written word. Whether it be through fiction or nonfiction, my work here will be a lifetime effort. Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a day and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.
On Christmas day a decade from now, I want to give myself the gift of being proud of my progress.
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Compasses

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today is Christmas Eve, but to me it just feels like another day. There's no major event happening at my house for the holiday, which I find to be a good thing. I find that there's a good spirit behind Christmas, but nowadays the holiday just celebrates American decadence and consumerism. It's something that makes me sad and adds to the pile of things that I feel disillusioned with. Despite these sad feelings, I know that there are still things to be thankful for. I'd prefer to focus on gratitude over disillusionment today.
I've reached another stage in life where there's nothing on the docket. I was having a hard time sleeping last night, and realized that I still had a few as-needed antipsychotic pills that I take when I need help falling asleep. I took one of them and I slept past my alarm and woke up at noon today. When I finally woke up and checked the time, I was upset about skipping my entire morning, but also came to the realization that it didn't matter anyway. Like most days, there are no obligations I have to wake up for, no Big Thing keeping me tethered to a specific wake-sleep cycle. However, an inconsistent sleep schedule inevitably leads to more disorientation.

There's no reason to beat myself up about stuff like that anymore. It just happens and I deal with it, and that's it. Despite a calm that I've felt recently, there is still a great sense of fear that I feel. I know that at any time, this can all be taken away. I fear for trouble ahead because I know that it's coming. Scripture states that God doesn't give us more than we can handle. These days, however, even a simple minor inconvenience makes me repeat the phrase "I can't do it" to myself over and over again. The overwhelm consumes me, I'm afraid.
It makes me want to wish that I could become a stronger person. I wish that I could take the harshness of life and conquer it through my own will, but I have spent so long feeling oppressed by my own mind. I don't think there's anything I can do other than just wait it through or run away or submit to it altogether and constantly force my conscious mind to take a back seat. It's a tough thing to not know how my mood might shift during the day, to lose my bearings. Regular stressors that happen to everyone can be the difference between a period of remission or relapse into another episode. Toeing that line every single day is exhausting.

It's easy to blame myself when I feel another episode coming on. Even though the triggers can mostly be unavoidable circumstances, I still feel a distorted sense of comfort in blaming myself. It's a warped way of trying to feel in control. That self-blame becomes a false map. Not every bad thing that happens to me is a personal failure. A lot of the time, bad things happen, but they aren't prescriptions. Nature, more often than not, is simply indifferent.
Good things happen too and it feels right to make those prescriptive, but whether or not a good thing happens or a bad thing happens, they both share the same conclusion: the feelings towards them fade away. The person I was in the past is gone. He exists only as a memory. The person I'll become doesn't have any say in the present, so it's best to not put him where he doesn't belong. I know that I am a fluid and dynamic being. There is always a chance to change, to become something different.
My emotions are a compass, not a prescription.
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Reflecting on the Future

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been reflecting on what I want my future to look like and my plans for it moving forward. As it stands, I haven't been employed in about two years. The main focus that I've had in these two years is writing and managing my bipolar disorder. When I first started taking writing seriously, I pursued a career in freelance writing. I made ads on websites, filled out hundreds of applications from job boards, and made a little bit of money from a few one-off clients here and there. As I kept going down this path, however, I felt unsatisfied with its optics. Not only were jobs getting more scarce due to the emergence of LLMs, but there were also more and more scams surrounding the hiring process. It wasn't a sustainable path in the long term, especially with the way I was pursuing it.
From there, I found sites like Medium and Substack where writers could build their own audience and generate income based on their own writing. Through joining Substack with my first iteration of IOKTIKN, I started to find my voice and come to enjoy writing as a craft. Unfortunately, I couldn't experience a significant level of growth on the platform because I wasn't writing content that was favorable to Substack's algorithms. On top of that, I wasn't producing articles or using the website frequently enough to appease the algorithm and gain exposure to a larger audience. I felt locked in by the platform and that catering to it was unfair and a waste of my time and readers' time as well. Then I started to write on my own website, and have been growing my audience here with more success.
I have since deleted my Substack account and decided to focus on building my audience here full time. As of writing this entry, my site has gained roughly 64k views since I launched it in February of this year. This is a much greater level of success than my Substack, which got maybe a few thousand views over a similar amount of time. On top of my independent writing, I have also made some efforts toward getting traditionally published in literary journals and magazines. The idea for me is essentially doing what an MFA student would do without incurring the costs of a formal program. With the degradation in relevance and prestige of mainstream literary institutions, this feels like a fair play to make.

Also since I started writing, I applied for disability income through social security. I have since been denied (a common occurrence) but the law firm that I'm working with has filed an appeal and I am waiting for a second decision as of writing this entry. I haven't had a job on paper, even though I received a very small sum of money from the few one-off freelancing gigs I did. My intention is to get disability income while still maintaining my website and making attempts to break into the literary world. With disability income, I can more aptly stand on principles I believe in such as not putting my work behind a paywall or "selling out" in any major capacity. To me, the integrity of my work matters more than what I could get paid for it. I don’t love that this is my path, but it’s the most honest way I know to protect both my health and my principles.
I am at a bit of a crossroads with this situation, though. I don't want my disability to impede on my ability to be a functioning member of society. I like the idea of being a normal dude with a job who helps keep the world spinning. Society is flawed, but there will always be a need for people to contribute to it. That is something I truly wish to do. I don't want a bullshit white collar office job, though. In the past, I've been successful in jobs that are active. I’ve always done better in jobs where my body is engaged and the work has a visible, tangible result. Not having to sit at a desk in front of a computer all day sounds like a fulfilling prospect.
My main aspiration regarding employment is to join the electrician's union and become an electrician. The most significant obstacle towards this, aside from my bipolar disorder, has been my base of fitness. Thankfully, I've made progress this year towards improving that, but I still don't quite think I'm at a level where I can sustain a physically demanding job like that. So with this year coming up, my crossroads is between continuing my path as a writer full time or trying to become an electrician as my main vocation and write on the side as a passion project.

I'm not too sure where I want to go with it. The financial support from my family lets me take this kind of risk without having to think too much about bills and other typical adult anxieties. I'm also single and don't have children, which minimizes my responsibility further. At this point in my life, I am really only responsible for myself. It might pain my ego a bit to say this, but realistically that's all I can handle right now, I think. I still want to make progress in the gym. I still want to keep writing here and attempting to break into the literary world. I still want to be independent. All of these aspirations loom around me, and while I can easily become overwhelmed by them, I know that God has good things in store for me as long as I remain faithful to His process and timing.
This temporary monasticism can feel like a sentence, but as I keep going, it feels more like a forge.
Things can go wrong, but they can also go right.
I hope they go right.
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Power Meditation

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been thinking a bit this morning about power. Power is an odd thing because to those who don't have it, there's a great sense of disparity. Yet for those who are powerful, they still have to contend with their humanity. Thus, the responsibility is inescapable. When I was a bit younger, I had distinct phases where I was reading a lot of the Young Hegelians (Marx, Stirner, etc.) and felt that there could be a way toward a world where power structures could be toppled and there could be true equity among all. To me, this equity felt like the true ideal that humanity is meant to strive for. Nowadays, however, my position has changed.
As humanity has progressed through different governmental and economic paradigms, it has often been argued that there is a clear distinction between systems such as feudalism and capitalism or monarchy and the constitutional republic. The way I see it, however, is that behind all of these paradigms exists the same fundamental principles of human nature. In early human history, it seems to me that there is a more direct consent between those with power and those without.

Scholars of the past, even going as far back as antiquity, have stated that masters and slaves exist in the same way as wind and rain. These positions are immovable fixtures, yet during Hegel's life and after, a deconstruction emerged. Hegel claimed that the existence of the master/slave relationship hinged entirely on the mutual acknowledgement between master and slave. Without this, there is nothing at all.
What we've seen from this deconstruction are less genuine paradigms. Power still rests in the hands of a few. People still consent to subjugation. But instead what we see today is a slew of propaganda that claims false ideals like individual liberty and democracy are what make the world go round. This illusion is comforting because it absolves us from asking whether we would behave any differently if we were the ones at the top. Those who are truly in power, such as heads of state or billionaires, are lauded now as individuals of great merit and that any one of us could sit in their seats if we work diligently and intelligently enough. To those without power, they lack it due to flaws of character and not any kind of systemic inconsistency.

But here's the thing: this idea that power is unfairly distributed is actually positive. I say this because God will always be above all of us. Spiritually, hierarchy is an important function of order. Organizations run better when there is a clear chain of command. The discomfort people feel toward unequal power is denial disguised as injustice. It's also important to remember that through this chain of command, there is always going to be a great responsibility for those in power to treat their subjects fairly. As Hobbes famously put it: power ultimately rests with the governed.
I think about all of this because I always struggled with feelings of distrust towards institutions. Corruption is an unfortunate reality within them, and it's easy to look at that and call the systems behind institutions broken and that we need to think of better ways to run things. What I understand now, though, is that these institutions will always be experienced as broken because my criticisms towards corruption aren't systemic, but relational. The problems will always stem from the people within the institutions, not the institutions themselves. Redemption, then, becomes a personal issue and not a systemic one.
There's no system that will protect us from ourselves.
The more we try to eliminate corruption, the more it amplifies.
Instead of trying to abolish power, we need to become more thoughtful with who we choose to wield it. The real test of any society isn’t who holds power, but whether those who don’t would refuse it if it were offered.
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Embracing Vulnerability

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Upon writing the date for today's entry, I realized that today is the first day of winter. That's a nice thing. Today, then, signals a transition of some kind. A transition into what? I'm not sure, but a transition nonetheless. That's something worth celebrating, I suppose.
As I was thinking about what I wanted today's entry to be about earlier this morning, I started to think about my older sister. She's two years older than me and has autism and an intellectual disability. We see her on the weekends when she stays with us. During the week, she stays with her teacher/caregiver who has been with her for several years now. When she's at home with us during the weekends, it can be a challenging experience. My parents are older and it's harder for them to take care of her. I don't do as much as I probably should, but it's tough to take that initiative when I've spent so long deferring to my parents and respecting their authority as her primary caregivers.
My sister is the epitome of vulnerability and innocence. As a result of her conditions, she doesn't communicate much outside of her wants and needs and finds herself easily overwhelmed at most situations. She exhibits many classical self-soothing behaviors for people with autism: vocal stimming, pacing, biting things, etc. The other day, my mom was lamenting to me about how hard it can be to see her when she gets upset. It's an oddly painful sight to see someone trapped in their own mind.

My mom and I have made the analogy many times before that my sister has to be cared for like a pet. An animal can't communicate when they are feeling sick or in pain, and so the animal's caretaker learns to observe when their pet might be feeling under the weather. The pet might not be eating or drinking, appear lethargic, vomit, or other things. For my sister, we've learned to observe her in the same ways. We know that when she's feeling sick, she takes multiple baths throughout the day or refuses to finish meals. We've learned to notice these things and then act accordingly to treat her.
It's easy for us to neglect our own self-care, but when dealing with someone like my sister, awareness and anxieties over quality of care become heightened. My sister wouldn't know how or when to do these things herself, and so it is incumbent upon us as her family to increase the standard of care. There are many lessons I've learned surrounding compassion and sensitivity not just with disabled people, but everyone I come across.
Dealing with ostensible vulnerability in others can be a hard thing, but this indicates a flaw in the average person to me. Most people are constantly concerned with appearing strong and capable, typically as a means of perpetuating status. Deeper than that, though, it's typically because we want to shield ourselves from getting hurt. If we appear strong, others will think twice about hurting us. But then I look to people like my sister who not only have no concerns about this, but couldn't posture like that anyway. Yet despite this supposed lack in agency, she instead becomes surrounded with care and concern.

To me, this sheds a lesson we all should remember. We shouldn't be afraid of the world or others in it. Yes, they can hurt us, but that doesn't give us the right to posture and try to appear strong when we don't need to. Perhaps if we all tried to be more vulnerable, it would inspire that same care and concern that people give for those like my sister. I remember when I went to a long-term treatment facility a few years ago for my bipolar disorder, one of the therapists there said something that still resonates with me to this day:
Sometimes, the strongest thing you can do is ask for help.
I try to remember this myself, particularly as someone who is almost the opposite of someone like my sister. It's easy for someone like me to posture because I am strong and smart, but to me this empowers me even further to embrace my vulnerability. If even the most capable-seeming among us need care and concern, that should indicate to everyone the constant need for compassion and drive us further to help our fellow man in times of need.
You don't have to be so strong.
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Discipline and Confidence

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I woke up a few minutes before my 8 AM alarm this morning, which to me is always something I appreciate. It can feel as if my body is telling me "hey, I'm used to this little routine we have. Let's keep it up." I felt confident going through my morning routine as usual, but after my first dose of caffeine and breakfast, I felt tired. I decided to lie back in bed because it felt comforting to lull myself back into rest, but as I was beginning to drift back to sleep, there was something in me that drove me out of bed. That thing was the rest of the routine: my self-directed obligation to come here and write this entry before lunch with a fresh mind.
It was difficult getting myself back out of bed to come onto my computer and start writing, but now that I'm here, I feel proud of myself that I came back to the page with discipline. It's a small win, something that I need to keep track of more. So with that, I'll state it plainly for posterity:
This entry is a small win. It will build into something greater.

With the year coming to a close, I want to look back on my progress with this blog. I started it later this year, back in August. I had been writing these entries but not publishing them publicly since July 2024. Back then, the entries were much more emotionally visceral and were more like venting. Today, though, these entries feel like vignettes—small personal essays with clear themes and theses. It's been a pleasure receiving positive feedback from readers and maintaining an audience that receives something good from my work. I feel motivated to keep pursuing this venture and foster positive change in the mindsets of my readers.
My life is quiet and mundane. There's not a whole lot of external variance day-to-day, but this mundanity is the essential backdrop to my internal world. New thoughts on life consistently emerge and I enjoy wrestling with them publicly. Many of us wrestle with ideas internally, but seldom does anyone really show what it's like to think through something from beginning to end and put it in a neat little package. For me, I hope that my work exists as a time capsule. It'll be interesting for those in the future to read these entries and get an insight into what it was like to be alive at this time in history. I get to make my mark indelibly.
No one will be able to take that away from me.
I look at my literary heroes and see how much they were able to accomplish in their lives. Vladimir Nabokov published 17 novels in his lifetime. Not only was he prolific, but also a stylistic genius. It's something that makes my work here feel insignificant. Granted, there's a difference in the times to contend with.

I think that the literary giants of the last century would have had a much different fate if they knew about blogging and digitized writing. It's a vastly different world than print, that's for sure. But even still, I haven't even written a single manuscript for a novel, let alone published any. I'm getting closer to 30 years old, and it's easy for me to feel behind in my career, if one could even call it that. I haven't even come close to breaking in yet. Writing those longer, more coherent pieces is something that's been such a challenge for me.
Over the course of my career so far (about 2 years), I've self-published maybe 20-25 pieces. These have been mostly essays and short fiction, and many of them I have since deleted and removed from the internet. As it stands, I have all of these Cogito pieces (this might be somewhere between 60 and 80, but I'm not sure) and my six or seven IOKTIKN pieces that I feel proud of that I put on this site. I haven't written any novels. In terms of published writing, I would estimate that I've published around 50,000 words worth of writing. If I include non-published writing, I'd venture to say that I have written about 200,000 words over the course of two years.
When I write it out, I know that I've been diligent in refining my craft. The biggest obstacle, as always, is myself. I constantly feel reluctant to put myself out there. I've only submitted one short story (Riding Into Caskets</a>) to publications despite the fact that I've written several. I always teeter between wanting to be published by a larger publication and putting everything on my site for my audience that I've built myself. There's a distinct mix of pride and shame I feel towards that. As I move into next year, though, I hope to have more confidence in keeping pieces in my back pocket so that I can submit them and maybe even get them published elsewhere.
I know I have what it takes. I just hope that God gives me the courage to follow through.
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How I Quit Nicotine

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I come outside to the back patio and everything is untouched, still in its place. The fan hums at full against the still air. I sit on my recliner and let it lift my legs slowly. Next to me is a small foldable table where I keep my pocket notebook, pen, ash tray, lighter, and a carton of cheap menthol hundreds. I queue some music, pull out a cigarette, let the lighter flick a few times until it catches and puff out a cloud of smoke—a hug that doesn't let go when I do. Each cigarette becomes an engine of my thoughts and dreams.
Nicotine isn't a villain, but a reliable timekeeper. Every ceremony on the back patio flows with control and release. But this ritual bears a familiar disguise: dependency lies underneath the mask. I believe that the repetition creates peace. The lie becomes harder to tell myself. I develop a cough and spit up phlegm. My lungs tighten; a single flight of stairs leaves me winded. But I'm at an impasse—a habit that ticks at the top of every hour.
Every habit can be taught, but can still be forgotten.

A Habit's Architecture</h2>
At the backbone of any habit is the environment. Environments create the stage for reinforcing behavior; they stand as a reflection of the actors that live in it. For me, my back patio is the culmination and consolidation of my habit. It allows me a sense of familiarity. The repetition of flicking the lighter and disposing butts in the ash tray doles out reassurance. Putting it all in one place becomes a foundation and refuge. As the habit progresses, leaving it all behind feels more like betrayal.
Vice thrives in comfort. Addiction rises out of a false sense of safety. A void emerges and the substance fills it, even if only for a short time. Soon enough, the substance becomes the answer to everything from minor inconveniences to major traumatic events. If anything stressful happens in my life, a cigarette takes care of it. Even though I know that's false, I still feel the relief neurologically and psychologically. Nicotine primes the dopamine pump. It doesn't just make the moment, but dictates it. It's easy for me to feel in control—but more often than not, I forget that I'm not always in the driver's seat.
For me, conquering the addiction is an attempt to attain independence from impulses that don't have my best interests in mind. It's a constant battle to deal with suggestion after suggestion. I begin to lose the ability to anticipate not just the world, but myself. Quitting nicotine then becomes a fight for personal agency and freedom. But for this freedom to appear, something needs to be deconstructed.
The Click: Gaining, not Losing</h2>
I realize something crucial: the phrasing of 'quitting nicotine' obfuscates the problem. If I'm quitting nicotine, that consciously tells me I am giving something up in my life. To quit nicotine is to destroy the habits that cultivate normalcy and comfort. There is a real fear in losing that. Instead, I need to have an attitude of addition, not subtraction.
To quit nicotine isn't to destroy normalcy, but to rebuild an even stronger sense of freedom. It's so easy for me to get caught up in rationalizations that make nicotine seem like a positive thing. I always tell myself that "it makes me think better" or "many great writers smoked." It's dangerous to think this way because it becomes more and more embedded in my identity. Soon enough, life without it feels impossible. The loss would be unbearable.
Rebuilding this sense of freedom is crucially important. If I quit nicotine, I restore so much of my life. I don't have to be bound to my back patio; there's no need to escape when trying to relax; I don't have to isolate myself in social situations; I can become more physically fit. Quitting gives me back everything nicotine made me forget I had. It's figured out. I know what I have to do. Quitting feels like the most natural next step. I want to do what I can to get my life back right away.
Still though, there are quieter valleys ahead.

Withdrawals and Acceptance</h2>
I decide to quit and go cold turkey. I remove everything from the back patio and throw away the few packs of cigarettes I had left—straight in the trash, no regrets. I get rid of most of my lighters and my ash tray. I take my fan and put it in my bedroom. My end table becomes a prayer corner. The first few hours feel vindicating. I tell myself that it's really going to happen this time and that I mean it. I go to the corner store and instead of buying more cigarettes, I buy several bags of hard candies. No oral fixations for me.
The first week is the hardest. After those first few vindicating hours, real cravings start to settle in. My psyche, however, is resolute. No matter what happens, not a single molecule of nicotine enters my body. I take several trips to the donut store to assuage the cravings. Eventually, though, the trips to the donut store become scant. I forget that I even ate hard candies in the first place. Then things begin to become clear.
My smoker's cough goes away. I see immediate progress in my cardio; basic daily activities don't leave me winded anymore. My breath becomes deeper, my throat clearer. My progress in the gym improves. Soon enough, the back patio becomes a distant memory. Despite gaining these things back in my life, I don't feel a deep sense of victory. Relief would be more accurate to say. I feel as if there's a return to equilibrium. It's comforting to realize that I go about my day and don't feel obligated to take these pauses anymore. My day just flows from beginning to end, no interruptions.
Returning to the Back Patio</h2>
I quit smoking on July 6th, 2025 after about 4 years of daily use. As of the release of this essay, I am over 5 months nicotine-free. About a month or two ago once the weather started getting colder, I decided to return to my back patio so I could sit on the recliner that remained out there and relax, perhaps even enjoy the day. As I sit on the recliner with my headphones on and my eyes close, there are not intrusive thoughts to light up a cigarette. The back patio is mine again.
I realize now that not just with nicotine—but any vice—that its removal is not a loss, but an invitation for something better to enter. For me when I sit at the back patio, I now enjoy true rest and relaxation. I don't feel like I'm killing myself every time I go out there now, and to me that's a blessing that I hope to cherish for many more days to come.
I can take a deep breath and finally let it all in.
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On Sexual Immorality

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I've been thinking about sexual immorality, a hot-button issue for Christians. As a man living in today's world, it seems that being pure of sexual sin is an unfair deal. The idea of not being able to hook up with anyone before marriage or even engaging in any kind of self-pleasure before marriage is a tough bargain. The whole idea of a "romantic relationship" that is non-marital is a recent cultural invention. It's one that seems to delude us into thinking we can have our cake and eat it too. What we call sexual freedom has quietly hollowed out marriage without giving us anything stable in return.
"Oh, well, I just want to make sure that we're compatible before getting married," says the person who then simulates marriage for three years before ending the relationship and learning nothing.
To me, having a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever is a cop-out. We are so doubtful that God will put the right person in our lives that we invent these secularized versions of marriage because we're so afraid that the relationship won't be good enough for us. People wonder why divorce rates appear so high. They wonder why more and more young men are remaining virgins. They wonder why more and more women remain childless or become single mothers.

Today, the act of marriage has become so frivolous that it has become functionally unnecessary. Marriage today is simply a status symbol and a legal tool. The spiritual functions of marriage have been completely abandoned by Western society, and the resulting wounds are only getting deeper. Many of my friends lament the state of dating today. We seem to only be able to hurt ourselves and each other despite everyone's mutual longing for true romantic and sexual connection. We're so busy acting entitled to certain romantic and sexual conditions that we've lost sight of the sanctification of marriage and what it means to truly love a husband or wife.
I know that for me, it's a tough deal. It's tougher to get out there and meet women, especially as I go through my late 20s. More than that, the cultural expectations and the established meta of courting rituals makes it essentially impossible to remain sexually pure. Most women see sexual purity as an oppressive regime, which is understandable when taken into historical context.
It's easy for younger men today to lament women's sexual attitudes and say things like "our grandmothers were such better women than the women of today" but when we look back, our grandfathers were such horrible husbands. Women carry their current attitudes largely due to "traditional" men being chauvinists who didn't properly lead a marriage like they were supposed to, and now we have seen the consequences of this. The cultural deadlock makes us all squirm.

So with that, I think it's completely fair for women to pull back on sexual purity. They had the shitty end of the stick for a long time. Still, it's easy for me to adopt an attitude of resignation towards finding a wife. The game has become unapologetically rigged and it's so easy to throw in the towel. On top of that, the ease of access and novelty of pornography makes it even more difficult to remain sexually pure and show God that I'm ready for marriage.
The women on the screen don't talk back.
They can't hurt me.
I can have my cake and eat it too. All the while, I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.
It feels like a tall order to be right with God regarding my sexuality. To me, sexual immorality is one of the strongest challenges we face culturally. The vast majority of people are on the hook with it due to how we have positioned ourselves culturally. The Sexual Revolution of the last century was meant to liberate us sexually, but instead it has made us even more lost and confused. I hope that God will help me with my own sexual sin and show me the way towards a purer expression of my sexuality through finding someone I can trust enough to be comfortable with. Lord knows I've struggled with that for such a long time.
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Crafting Sharp Tongues

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I decided today that I am going to increase my daily timer for writing these entries from 20-minute sprints to 25-minute sprints. Honestly, I go over the 20-minute window most days anyway. Realistically, most days I spend about 30-40 minutes on these entries. It's still a good bit of progress to see the baseline slightly increase as my confidence builds, though. I've always enjoyed taking a sort of sportsman's attitude towards the arts. I mean this in the sense that there is value in training and practice, and having that sort of militant dedication to it is something that I enjoy.
When I played saxophone back in high school, that was the type of dedication I put into practice. Whether it was towards rudiments like scales and long tones or memorizing heads for jazz standards and improvisation, the whole effort made me feel like I was an athlete of sorts. I think that came from the fact that there's a level of endurance associated with practicing, especially when it came to longer sessions. In the same way that I try to improve my writing by being consistent and showing up every day, I did the same thing with practicing saxophone.
When I first started playing, I would practice for maybe 20 minutes a day. But as I began to further enjoy playing and maintaining a consistent practice schedule, I could practice for extended periods. Then during the summers when I didn't have to go to school, I could practice upwards of 4 hours a day. It was a rewarding endeavor because after an extended practice session, the leaps and bounds in progress would feel rewarding. I could play sections in pieces at tempos that I previously couldn't. My sound felt more focused and refined. The melodies I would improvise were more mature. There was always a great level of personal satisfaction from that.

With writing, the progress isn't always as tangible. Of course, there's still that component of endurance. It feels good when I write a lot of words in a certain period of time. In many writing circles, there is a huge focus placed on hitting word count targets and writing as much as one possibly can. The problem, though, is that writing more doesn't always equate to writing better. Of course, the more one writes, the better one generally gets, but this suffers from diminishing returns after a while.
The main problem I've seen in amateur writing circles is that there's a greater emphasis placed on output as opposed to what I consider the more important piece: revision. The best writers are always the best revisers. It is one thing to be able to produce a lot of words, but if they aren't good words, then there's not a whole lot of value in that for readers. I've said recently that I want my inner critic to take a back seat—which is true—but I also know that once I have a set of words written, I am relentless in my refinement of them. With my writing, I truly feel like a blacksmith smelting my metal over and over again to make the sharpest sword.
I've done several critiques and edits of works from other writers before, and I am noticeably relentless in my criticisms. I can write entire essays deeply criticizing someone else's writing. My edits will make the page look like it's been ransacked. For me, there is a standard of quality that I am used to and when I see others that don't meet it, there's an obligation I feel to rebuke them for their errors and show them just how far they are from true excellence. It's something that, while seemingly cruel, is utterly necessary to me. So many people want to be a writer, but they don't have an understanding of what that entails.

For many, there is no dedication to the craft and study of good writing. So many younger writers today aren't even good readers. It's a sad thing to see, but it's something that weirdly enough gives me assurance of my talent. I know that it is absolutely conceited and perhaps even selfish to say something like that and while I try to maintain modesty in other areas of my life, this is the one thing that I'll be more disagreeable with. This is because I care very deeply about good writing. When something is well-written, it is such a pure and sweet experience reading it. It's something that many today don't take in enough and so because of that, I feel emboldened to be a sharp critic not just to others, but myself as well.
My tongue is a blade that I constantly sharpen.
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All Killer, No Filler

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been thinking more about how easy it is for me to become too distractible and procrastinate on writing. Writing itself is such a cognitively "expensive" task, and while it is rewarding to do it, many of us still contend with the fact that there are times where it's so hard that it becomes miserable. This is especially the case when it becomes more difficult to formulate sentences for whatever reason. That lack of flow makes writing an even more painful task.
When inspiration strikes and the muses benevolently give me an immense amount of energy and flow, writing incites intellectual ecstasy. Unfortunately, though, these periods are rather infrequent and unpredictable. With writing as a vocation, one of the most important skills to develop is being able to write when there's no inspiration or flow—a more common situation.
Getting out words feels like it's an absolute slog. I'll laboriously type away at something and in the midst of trying to maintain a voice and style that satisfies me, I grow tired very quickly. I look at my word count: barely even 100 words. Holy shit, there is fucking nothing coming out of my head. I have nothing to say. There's a greater trend in writing that I've seen as well. Writers will go on and on and harp about the same point for thousands of words. They will take something that could have been communicated in 500 words and make it a 3000-word mental jungle gym that no one wants to climb through. Long-winded writing disgusts me. I think it takes true talent to be terse, but still dense in substance.

That's why I feel more gravitated to shorter writing, especially these days. There are so many published books that don't need to be 300 pages. Hell, for a lot of nonfiction titles there are even services that exist to provide summaries of these texts because we all know that it is absolutely unnecessary to be reading all that shit. Of course, there is an importance in letting a piece breathe and having every moment and progression forward feel earned. There is a lot of harm in bouncing between too many things too quickly. It's jarring to a reader and is always spastic and uncomfortably manic. Even still, I find myself more comfortable in shorter form writing.
Honestly, I think it takes more effort and talent to write things like short stories or essays than something like a novel or whatever nonfiction is trending on the New York Times bestseller list. That's because there is a significant challenge in taking the emotional impact one would get from a novel and doing that same thing in a tenth of the words. That restriction, to me, cuts out all the fat. All killer, no filler—not a word or comma wasted. That's the good stuff. I'll also concede and say that a great advantage of longer form works, especially when done right, make it so that readers don't want to close the book or leave the world the writer creates. I've read plenty of solid page-turners and those are always an absolute pleasure. If I could write something like that for someone one day, that would bring me immense joy.
Still, I've always been obsessive with making my prose as stylistically distinct as I can. If my rhetoric isn't airtight, I don't want to write it. The details are everything for me. Without the details, the work falls apart. This has become a major obstacle in its own right too, as I've discussed many times before. Being obsessive over details makes the most friction between my thoughts and my fingers. My greatest strength inevitably becomes my greatest weakness. My work here is an effort to compensate for it. That's why I show up with these entries, try to keep room in the tank to work on longer works, and tell the inner critic to take the back seat.
Every day is a lesson and an opportunity. All I have to do is show up.
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Demographic Lotteries

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I read this article</a> posted by a friend in a Discord server earlier this morning. To summarize, the article is a several-thousand-word diatribe on younger white males becoming ostracized from prestigious institutions. The writer (a younger white guy) laments on being passed up for a career as a television writer. He spends most of the article quoting demographic statistics from several industries, namely media, academia, medicine, law, and tech. White men used to be a strong majority, but their representation has dwindled. The writer of the article points out that this has been a result of a decade of DEI initiatives and a surreptitious collusion against younger white guys. Essentially, the claim made in the article is that institutions have become less focused on merit and have become increasingly identitarian.

As a younger white guy myself (younger than the author, a 40-something millennial), I haven't really felt the pains that he was describing. Granted, I haven't gone out and tried applying for positions at big newspapers or attempted to become a staff writer for a network television show or pursued tenure at an Ivy League university, but even in my experiences in college and at work, I haven't felt a strong sense of identitarianism either way.
I went to the University of Texas and got accepted there automatically because I had a high enough class rank in high school. I didn't get into the business school like I had hoped for, so instead I spent most of my time as a student figuring out what major I could even get as an "undeclared." At that point, though, I had enough of the university life and felt like I wasn't going to get what I wanted for my career with a degree, so I dropped out.
I never blamed my lack of acceptance into UT's degree programs on my whiteness. Instead, I internalized the lack of acceptance into those programs as a personal failure. It was my fault that I couldn't do it. It was me who was not good enough. As a younger white guy today, it's easy to take the piss on things like DEI initiatives and build resentments over a different-looking person getting hired over you and ascending to a senior position in record time, but those things are neither applicant's fault. Instead, it's the institutions themselves that need to be examined.

The truth is, being something like a writer or an academic or some kind of managerial professional is ultimately a much cozier job than many. It's a nice gig to sit inside and clack away at a computer all day and get paid very well as opposed to working outside in dangerous conditions doing dangerous work and getting paid pennies on the dollar. It doesn't matter if you're a young white guy or a black lesbian—a white collar job is just a better deal. This heightened competition for these jobs has become utterly contrived and not based on talent or even pedigree. It's a fucking lottery. I'd rather just not even play a rigged game at all.
I reflect on these things and again wonder about my own hopes and dreams for my work. Clearly, money is off the table. Prestige seems to be a more fleeting thing as well. Whether the prestigious institutions want me or not isn't even the issue. The relevance of the institutions themselves is waning. Still, I wonder where space for my kind of work will go. I wonder and wonder, yet never find myself with a satisfactory answer. My work here feels like a complete shot in the dark, a Hail Mary, and many times nothing at all. What will I have after all of this is said and done?
It doesn't matter. I play the lottery either way.
No matter what I get, I'll still have to give it all away in the end.
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Living in the Nowmina

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At this moment in human history, we find ourselves in a paradox: the present moment floods us constantly, yet slips away more easily than ever. There is so much going on all the time and all at once, making it a persistent challenge to live in the moment. The present moment is and always has been in the realm of the noumenon, in and of itself and independent of our experience. But what Kant placed beyond experience now presses against us in real time. With the advent of digital communications, the gap between our minds and the zeitgeist is shrinking. We can get a more immediate and distilled idea of what the world is thinking and feeling, but at the same time feel like we're in a labyrinthine house of mirrors. The poignancy of the post-structuralists feels less like a revelation and more like shattered glass—a fracturing and balkanization of our beliefs and convictions.
The ideals that held up institutions in the past are dots in the rearview mirror, but the road ahead remains uncharted. The great post-structuralist thinkers of the last century had no way of seeing the landscape we find ourselves in today and as such, their models of the world are not as relevant as they used to be. People are distracted by too many stimuli around them. This creates the inability to focus on a single goal or direction and instead, their attention is spread across different interests. I propose a new model that appeals to the 21st century: the Nowmina.

A Definition and Explanation</h2>
The Nowmina is a model of thinking in the present moment. It is the awareness of the present moment as a noumenon—something independent of experience and ownership—and to work within that framework to stay attuned to it regardless of our personal biases and conceptions. It is very easy for us to become temporally misaligned and place too much stake into the past or the future. We often misconstrue these periods of time as the basis on which we should experience our reality. Many believe they are a product of where they come from and live in grief over moments that have already passed. In the same way that one can place too much emphasis on the past by letting past actions define us, it is easy to do so with the future as well. People talk about delaying gratification for the future, yet they never let that future come. We often let our anxieties of the future consume us, whether it be through fear of global heating or agonizing over stock futures.
In this age, it is easier than ever to see time as something to possess. The Nowmina as a practice is something akin to a mandala: built on briefly, constantly fading away, and appreciative of that beauty and splendor. It is a dialectical understanding of the illusion of permanence—that every moment is a new essence to independently build upon regardless of what came before or after it. JFK said that America wouldn't go to the moon because it was easy, but because it was hard. There is a greater motivation now more than ever to take this approach not just towards the astronomical, but also the mundane. We live in the Nowmina not to invest in an uncertain future, but to understand and appreciate the impermanence and hardships of the present.
We are at a constant inflection point where today's news becomes tomorrow's history. This inflection point is where the Nowmina lives. Unfortunately, this is also the point where the pulse of the current moment can become distorted and unwieldy forces can attempt to challenge the irrefutable 'capital T' truth of the present moment. This is where the importance of the Nowmina lies: it calls us to respect the essence of the noumenon of the present and live in accordance with it as opposed to letting clouded perceptions and biases impact our relation to it.
To live in accordance with the Nowmina, it's important to limit the noise that digitization imposes. This is not a Luddite charge, but an effort to present alternatives to the way in which we navigate digital space. The teleology of information itself is at its own inflection point. Information is no longer synonymous with knowledge or truth, but circulation and control—a currency all its own. The sheer quantity and speed of the transmission of information is far beyond the mental capacity of any human; where there is speed, there is distortion. To get a better signal to noise ratio, we need to understand the enemies of the Nowmina and how best to combat them. To quote Sun Tzu:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." </blockquote>
Propaganda and Simulacra: Enemies of the Nowmina</h2>
Many large and powerful institutions don't want the general populace to live in the Nowmina. Living in the Nowmina reduces impulsivity and insecurity, things that reliably generate profits for capitalist entities. There are myriad perspectives and motivations in media. People can find any take on any given issue and live in bubbles of ignorance if they so choose. But to truly embrace the Nowmina, we need to understand the intents and purposes of these bubbles and how institutions benefit from people staying in them.
People have been saying that technology like social media has radicalized ideologies and pulled people further towards 'extremes' and away from a sane, moderate 'center'. The thing is that people aren't as far apart as those who manufacture our consent</a> would like us to believe. Minor protests are filmed from dozens of angles, looped on repeat, and packaged as national crises. This sensationalism often presents itself in this conversation as well—the notion that outrage creates engagement and bolsters viewership. News media creates a sense of trust by outlining the 'facts' behind an enraging happening somewhere in the world, keeping people tuned in so that they can 'understand what's really going on'. Unfortunately, these machinations are nothing but an elaborate ruse.
It's clear that most of what people watch on their televisions, phones, and personal computers is some form of propaganda. We are aware of this, yet don't have the organizational skills or language to call it out specifically and have shot ourselves up with fatal doses of irony. Tragedy and depravity are now packaged as 'edgy memes.' It's an irony that has become the song of a bird that has come to love its cage. Even satire can't seem to find its way into the essence of the current moment; it too lives in distortion.

Today, the progression of social media technology has created the ultimate propaganda engine: the infinite feed. It is an algorithmic hydra—a beast that multiplies with each piece of engagement thrown at it. Every swipe and tap creates a unique fingerprint of the user and gives them exactly what it calculates they need. It is the greatest engine of propaganda ever conceived, and we fall for all of it.
Social media embodies the true essence of Baudrillard's simulacrum, a place that feels more real than the real world, yet everything is manufactured and choreographed. People dwell in this hyperreality for hours each day, until keeping up with the kayfabe becomes too exhausting. Disillusionment spreads like a virus; self-awareness becomes a new cancer.
We still have the choice to reject this hyperreality and re-instill the pillars of the real. This is the essence of the Nowmina—and this realization is one that reveals the Nowmina not as a painful truth, but an exhilaration of freedom.
The Nowmina Demands Exhilaration</h2>
We all understand doomscrolling. It's a term born out of the fatigue that comes with information overload in the digital age. This level of technology has clearly affected our brains and minds in ways that are unprecedented, but it seems that most people today wish to only discuss the maladies of technology and not the core benefits of it. The days of Frutiger Aero and techno-optimism are far gone. Instead, people turned the benefits into maladies themselves. The propaganda of 'constant connectivity' felt real and innovative, but we didn't see the forest for the trees—a complete upheaval of systemic privacy. People see instant connectivity more as a curse nowadays. Entire families have apps that track each other's location. We feel pressured to tell everyone every little aspect of what we're doing because, well, that's what everyone else is doing, right?
But here's the thing: we have the ability to feel free just as much as we have the ability to feel trapped. People are crafty; there are always options and alternatives. We can choose to browse the same ten sites every day—or figure out how to build a digital life outside that walled garden. It's easy to think that a digital life beyond the mainstream is an uphill battle, but this is a call for liberation. This thought should inspire joy, but joy alone is nothing without practice.
The Praxis</h2>
The praxis behind living in the Nowmina is simple in concept, but difficult to achieve in practice. The praxis itself is simple: take the concepts found in asceticism and bring them to digital media consumption. Asceticism itself is a wide-ranging and varied concept handed down over thousands of years from multitudes of religious traditions. But the core principles are straightforward:
Cultivate grounded routines
Eliminate distractions
Discern with divinity
Cultivating Grounded Routines</h4>
People have always been creatures of habit. One's entire life can be summarized by their habits. Habitual digital media consumption takes up the majority of our lives these days, so it is important to break down these habits into their essences. Most people live on impulse regarding their digital consumption; if they have a spare few moments, they'll scroll on their phone; the second they get a ping, they read it—and so on. A person living in the Nowmina has grounded their digital consumption routines; they only consume digital media under certain circumstances; they only answer their messages at certain times of day. To live in the Nowmina, it is important to create routines around digital consumption.
Eliminating Distractions</h4>
Most people like to see themselves as refined and civilized—the same goes with how they see their minds. However, most people's minds are actually rapacious and savage. The mind of the average citizen is latent with digitized slop, growing ever more obese and lazy. This, unfortunately, is the case by design. If one's mind is constantly inundated with crap, the harder it is for them to be thoughtful of their situation. If true thought were to come to most individuals, they most likely couldn't handle it.

But of course, true thought isn't something that should be embraced as a constant thing. The essence of the Nowmina lies in eliminating distractions so that those doses of true thought come meaningfully and at the proper times. Unless one lives in an actual monastery, distractions can never be fully eliminated. Still though, it's always worth it to reassess every once in a while and find out where distractions happen and do something to mitigate them.
Discerning with Divinity</h4>
Monks who practice their ascetic lifestyles do so with the sole purpose of attaining interaction with the divine. In today's increasingly apostate and secular world, the divine has receded from view. Due to the post-Enlightenment and ever more individualist age, many cultures value reason contained within the self and seldom take the time to question where exactly their oh-so-rational thoughts are really coming from. But the monks of the world's religions understand the true source of this rationality: the divine. Whether one views this divinity as trinitarian, unitarian, knowable, unknowable—or something else entirely—doesn't change the fact that it is still, without a question, contributing to the phenomena of the universe.
The most essential praxis to live in the Nowmina is this: to communicate with and come to know that divinity, regardless of whatever shape it may take. It is this divinity that will help us discern the true nature of the noumenon that is the present moment. Only through this contact can perception be purified of distortion; only then can the present appear as it truly is.
This praxis does not involve gate-keeping of any kind. It is available to anyone at any time. There's no need to go to a monastery or some other kind of place. Living in the Nowmina is something that can be done regardless of equipment, environment, or constraints. This is not an elitist charge, but a populist one. To live in the Nowmina is to live with the People with a capital 'P.' But from this practice flows not just clarity, but ethical weight.
A Metaphysical Commitment</h2>
The present moment exists as something fragile and democratic. It is our shared noumenon. It is therefore of the utmost importance to preserve our independence from distortion, to dwell within the present moment and witness it without possession. Living in the Nowmina is fraught with dialectical tension. It is difficult to capture the essence of the present while remaining apart from it.
A good way to think about it is like this: we have the ability to record every single moment of our lives if we so choose. Many people record a good portion of their lives and store these moments through subscribing to cloud storage or buying terabytes of hard drives. They don't want to lose certain moments, but what if we let them get lost on purpose? What if we let ourselves forget? Our devices remember everything, but we are blessed with the chance to forget. Through this self-imposed amnesia, we can find comfort in the Nowmina—let the moment come, but find bliss when it slips away.

This isn't a charge to stop and smell the roses. Plenty of people do that already. Instead of embracing the present moment, try to let the present exist without assuming it needs anyone's permission. The world is so much bigger than what's in between someone's ears. It was here long before us and it'll be here long after. This thought doesn't instill doom, but offers the opportunity to seek joy. Within this opportunity, however, lies a commitment and a duty: to make this choice over and over again, every single day.
It's difficult to remember living in the Nowmina. There's so much sensory input with every moment that passes. Curating that input carefully is a holistic and distracting endeavor, but still possible. Every click and movement of the cursor is quantified and sold; the world’s markets trade in fragments of our attention. In a world that wants nothing more than to extract essence, it is more important than ever to understand that we are not commodities or derivatives or figures on a balance sheet. We have the ability to sense a higher frequency. All that's left to do is shift the dial.
Tune into the pulse. Live in the Nowmina.
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On Prose

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Something that I've been thinking about lately: there is an immense difference in most prose written in the 21st century as opposed to the 18th-20th centuries. This is an obvious observation, but to me this difference is something that has made me question where I stand in the current literary moment and how I can help to move it forward. In prose of centuries past, there was a greater command of the English language. Semicolons were used audaciously and sentences were much longer with more complex clauses. To me, this signals a deeper investment in thought. Thoughts back then felt much deeper than they do today, but this makes sense.
For most of human history, information has been a much more scarce resource. It was more inconvenient to access and was therefore much more valuable. But more than that, its slowness made the fruit of past prose much sweeter. There was a certain labor felt when writers would craft their texts, whatever those would be. Whether it were works of fiction, technical nonfiction, or even copywriting, the prose felt more controlled and precise and more than that, it was rich in meaning and sophistication. To be a man of letters, as it were back then, was truly a privilege and a measure of prestige. Today, however, this prestige has been replaced with something much more milquetoast and manufactured.

If Hemingway revolutionized prose with his terse and precise style, the 21st century has taken this approach and twisted it and wrung it out so repeatedly and mercilessly that prose today feels not only predictable, but usually an insult to one's intelligence. Writers today are much more concerned with mass appeal than any kind of intellectual merit, so the strategy today is one where it is best to assume that the reader is stupid and that we must coddle them and hold their hands every step of the way so that they don't feel lost, overwhelmed, or offended. We have seen this in popular traditionally published works and in advertising and educational materials, but the most prevalent place for this type of grossly despondent prose is on internet forums.
Users on mainstream forums like Reddit and 4chan have changed modern prose forever. Whereas more antiquated prose feels like a drink sweetened with cane sugar, the prose of today feels like ingesting high-fructose corn syrup. The prose of today is fast, easy, and cheap. The diction is significantly watered down. Never will one see more than a single independent and dependent clause in a sentence. It's the kind of writing that makes one feel dumber after reading it. When comparing an AskReddit thread with even an article in a 1970s Playboy, the difference in sophistication and depth is astounding.
To make matters even worse, the age of AI slop has exacerbated this problem even further. Those who prompt LLMs to generate pieces of text will specifically indicate that they want the text to be easily read by a low IQ person or a 4th grader. With that, the swaths of horrendous prose promulgated by LLMs and redditors alike have made it much more difficult for writing of a higher register to break out into wider appeal.

As for me, I have always enjoyed reading and writing in that more classic "literary" style. Growing up, I enjoyed reading the classics as well as contemporary middle grade work. I always had a great interest in understanding different ways to manipulate language to eviscerate certain ideas or emotions. It was always a pleasure to learn from the masters and take their lessons with me in my own writing. But with today's literary landscape, it seems to be a turgid place.
On the one hand, I want my writing to be simple enough to understand, but still hold the weight of complexity needed in order to espouse unique and interesting ideas. On the other hand, I also want to step away from the pretentious attitudes of more established literary institutions and write in a style that is distinctly working-class and founded in intellectual humility. It's a tough tightrope to walk, but I know that there are readers out there who would appreciate this approach.
On top of that, a big reason why the type of prose that plagues our century is so pervasive is because it is simply easier to write and because of that, it is much easier to produce in high volume. I know that for me, I have a tough time writing the output that contemporary writers must produce. This is because my inner critic is too harsh; it's easy for me to get paralyzed by my own doubts and desires for perfection, but I've been making efforts to overcome this. This diary has been helpful in that. I think too that I have misled myself into thinking that I need detailed outlines and strict plans for pieces. Truthfully, I would say that my best writing comes from a place of improvisation. I struggle with owning my true identity as a pantser.

It's been about two years since I decided to attempt writing as a vocation. While it's been a tough and monetarily fruitless road up until this point, I know that there is still much more that I need to do to become the writer I have always looked up to. I know that I haven't produced a lot of works, but I'm hoping that as I keep pursuing this vocation, I can get closer to finding that groove that I'm comfortable in. I hope that as I get older, I can learn to better lean on my talents and trust my instincts.
With luck and a whole lot of hard work, something will come of all of this. Maybe.
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Turning the Dial

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had another night of horrible sleep last night. This time around, I had several nightmares throughout the course of the night. Unfortunately, this is a rather common occurrence these days. Usually the nightmares consist of demonic monsters that try to frighten me as often as they can. When these nightmares happen, I usually don't fall back asleep for a few hours. Since most of my night was interrupted by nightmares, I decided to sleep in this morning. I didn't wake up until around 11 AM, but it's not like that makes much of a difference in my day anymore. I don't have obligations or responsibilities to jolt me out of bed nor anything to look forward to. So with that, I decided to sleep in. Why not?
I'm still sick. I've been hacking up a bunch of brown and disgusting phlegm for the past few days. Gross. I've also had an immensely sore throat and my voice has been completely gone for the last few days. It hurts to talk, so I've been taking a forced vow of silence, I guess. I don't have much I want to say anyway since my mood has been a bit down in the dumps as well. Thankfully I haven't felt as hopelessly depressed as I have in the past. Truth be told, it's been about three months since any significant episode has occurred, which is actually quite the blessing. This year has been a major effort in trying not to completely give up on life, so I think that I've been seeing some fruits from that pursuit, surprisingly enough.

I told myself that I wanted to have more IOKTIKN pieces written by the end of this year so that I could have a decent enough content bank to begin a more regular publishing schedule, but I've only finished one piece so far and am only halfway through my second one, so progress has been less than satisfactory, especially considering that I started this process months ago. I thought that I'd have a greater output by now, but most days I finish writing once I publish the day's Cogito entry despite the fact that I need to keep pushing towards other pieces.
I'm proud of the work that I've done here and it's been fruitful in its own ways. I think that it's a medium that's been glossed over and forgotten, so for me I feel as if I'm at the cusp of a renaissance with it, truly. More and more people are coming to self-hosted websites as a replacement for social media, so I think that within the next few years there will be a greater cultural presence with the medium that I'm writing in now. On that front, I think I got in at a good time, but it's still a matter of remaining consistent with my practice.

Despite this, however, there is still a greater level of productivity that I need to achieve if I want to have a sustained presence in this field. Daily shorter entries are a good rhythm in themselves, but I know that I have more to strive for. Whether it be longer form essays or short stories or even a novel, there's still broader horizons regarding my work. The biggest obstacle in these pursuits has been myself. I continually tell myself that this or that thing isn't worth writing about. It's not developed enough. It's unoriginal, bland, boring, unintelligible, whatever. All of these doubts that I bring upon myself only push myself further away from any kind of actualization at all. Of the few things I've published, only a few works within that group were ones that I considered worthy of my own personal canon. More than anything, though, the hardest thing about it all has been the tiresome work itself of writing.
Some days it comes so naturally and effortlessly, but there are many more that are a slog. The words feel like drivel and merely sputter out grossly and incoherently onto the page. It's disgusting. Still though, it's an important effort to push through those days because even within those, the dial still turns.
Only ever so slightly, though.
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Sleepless Dreams

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had another extended hiatus. Last weekend was the final of my best friends' weddings. Once that was all said and done, I got sick and have been dealing with that for the past week. I've mostly been sleeping all day and dealing with horrible sleep during the night. I've been having the kind of sleep where it doesn't feel like you're getting any rest—just dreaming. I've felt like Rust Cohle from True Detective, basically.
So all that is to say, this week has been less than stellar. I was too tired to do anything productive or engaging. Well, I was too tired to do anything at all, really. Most days I woke up, did my morning routine, and was so tired that I immediately fell back asleep. There are lots of periods in my life where this happens, so strangely enough it's something that I'm just used to at this point. A lot of my life over the last few years has just been spent in bed, usually as a result of depression. I don't even scroll on my phone anymore. All I do is sleep or stare at the ceiling.

Last night I had another cruise dream, which is a recurring dream type I have. I have a lot of dreams where I am in some kind of transit, like a cruise or a plane. There's always a feeling of being in between worlds. I genuinely don't like having dreams anymore, though. There's too much scary shit that happens in them and I just wish that I'd fall asleep, not remember any of my dreams, and wake up. But for some reason, I've always been a strong dreamer. Unfortunately though, strong dreams don't always equate to good rest. If anything, stronger dreams typically correlate more with poor rest.
More than anything though, I feel as if my brain is just not firing off right over the last week. I've been struggling more to make coherent sentences even in conversation. Thoughts feel more airy and less solid. It feels harder to think. It's a tough thing because I want to keep writing here and pursuing my other projects, but there's been a weird stalling in my cognition.
That frightens me.
I could have everything I'd ever want, but it still wouldn't satiate my internal world. I could have my dick sucked every night, a yacht even—but none of that would do a thing for me. In that same vein, I could be homeless and starving, but still feel the same as I do now in a more comfortable environment. My capacity for joy is so much more limited than it used to be, which makes life harder to live. I don't want to be ungrateful for the things I have or take any of my blessings for granted, but I still feel the need to acknowledge that I am on a different playing field than the average individual. I am not in a position to seek grander goals or achievements. None of that would satiate me. The emptiness I feel would persist regardless of what happens to me externally.

Weirdly enough, there is a silver lining to this. I see through essentially all bullshit. It's harder for others to take advantage of me. Overall, life feels different for me than the average person. There is nothing to be gained, nothing to be lost. I know that no matter what happens, I'll get my daily bread, and that's enough for me. Everything else is just a bonus.
It's all the same dream anyway.
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A Cultivated Vessel

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My thoughts have been getting slower, less pronounced. More than that though, there are fewer novel things for me to say as I write more in this public diary every day. I, like many others, have thoughts that get repeated over and over again. There's loops that I enjoy going through; there's a sense of comfort in my internal routine. It's easy for me to say the same things over and over again and call them self-examination, but the truth is that it's more of a masturbatory experience. I am not confined by my inner critic or restricted by artistic constraint. Here, I am free. But still, the words that come out are still a cage all their own.
In past entries, I've said that these thoughts aren't truly mine, but that I am simply just a vessel for a greater force that my discipline of writing only works to further cultivate. I still think this is true, but there's a greater sense of wrestling that I deal with every day. This wrestling, to me, is part of the greater work: refining the line between myself and the one who writes these words. For most of my life, I've loathed myself and who I am. I've seen the ego that speaks as me and I want nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do outside of suicide that will let me part with it. I wish that I could leave it behind and go back to the great divine essence that houses us all, but I also understand that there is a reason why I have to be here, even if I can't know it fully.
So with that, I hope that I can do what I can to cultivate a better relationship with myself and learn to grow more comfortable in my own skin. I have my challenges: my bipolar has been a tough obstacle to deal with. I can have all the comfort and fulfillment in the world, but for whatever reason my brain forces me to have times where I am incapable of feeling even the smallest amount of joy. I've lamented this more times than I can count. I've been brought to the edge so many times, considered what it would take to truly leave it all behind.

Despite all of the pain my brain has made me feel, there is still a fire inside of me that burns, even when I can't feel it. There is still, even in my darkest days, a drive for excellence that never fails. Even when I can't see it, the fact that it is constantly working through me is readily and unmistakably apparent. There is a price that I have to pay for a mind that is constantly connecting so rapidly and so deeply. It's one that comes with the danger of flying too close to the sun. But I know now that I don't have to be like Icarus.
I think of my heroes, the bipolar creative geniuses who fueled their work with the hot and manic pursuit of producing the greatest art the world will ever see. Hemingway, Van Gogh, Bird—they all let it consume them in the end. It was the ultimate price that they decided to pay in the pursuit of greatness. It's an offer that's been bestowed upon me, but I have a greater wisdom that I look to instead.
It's easy for me to think that I have to succumb to a great vice or suffering to achieve greatness. But I know now that's a lie. I don't have to make the same mistakes as my heroes to walk in their footsteps. Instead, my duty is to learn from them so that I can walk a better path than they did. If I'm lucky, it won't make me sacrifice everything for the sake of greatness.
If God wills it, it'll be one that brings us all just a little bit closer to Him.
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Glamorizing the Trigger

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am back after a brief hiatus. I was getting burned out on writing every single day and decided to use the holiday as an excuse to take a break. I feel that I had lost some momentum because I wanted to get started again earlier, but decided to let distractions and procrastination win. But at least now I'm here again, writing down my thoughts and trying to make sense of things.
There has been a bit of a detour in my diet over the course of the holiday. That's a typical thing, but it was also difficult to keep up with what I was doing. I was hungry all the time and constantly frustrated. I have spent so much of my adult life doing whatever I could to anesthetize myself from the pain that I feel so frequently. It's as if all I want to do is this or that unhealthy thing. Doing healthy things doesn't give the same rush as the unhealthy ones. It's less intense and feels less fulfilling. But I'm at a weird spot: does the "delayed gratification" even work if there's no feeling of gratification at the end? I see no gratification coming from working hard, at least not one that's guaranteed. All I can do is work for the mere chance of gratification.
It makes me question the point of doing anything that people consider "worthwhile." We love to showcase the times where it works out, but usually ignore the multitudes of times where it doesn't. Real failure does come in giving up, yes, but there's only so much "delay" in the gratification one can stomach until all there is to do is accept failure. To me, it feels like holding my breath underwater and then having to come up for air just to be told that I failed because I couldn't stay underwater forever. It's an impossible standard, metrics that aren't designed to be met.
So many of us feel this way, constrained by the walls we build for ourselves. We are the prisoners and the guards simultaneously, crabs in the bucket. It makes me wonder what there is I can do to refute the world and do better for those that have turned their backs from God.

It makes me think of that movie A Bronx Tale, where Robert De Niro plays a 1960s bus driver whose son is getting groomed by a prominent neighborhood mobster. The mobster tells the boy that "the working man's a sucker" because he doesn't do what it takes to get ahead. The mobster is smarter, stronger, and better because he can go up to the world, grab it, and put it in his pocket. The boy tells his father, a working man, that the working man's a sucker. His response:

He's wrong, it don't take much strength to pull a trigger but try getting up every morning day after day and work for a living, let's see him try that, then we'll see who the real tough guy is, the working man is the tough guy, your father's the tough guy! </blockquote>
So many of us glamorize pulling that trigger. We glamorize that carnal instinct to take the shortcut. We think that if we're not selfish and opportunistic, someone else will be and put us even further behind. But the truth is that opportunistic behavior is what will actually put us behind. It takes more strength to accept one's position and do the right thing anyways. We don't do so because it yields a greater material reward, but so that it inspires others to see the face of God in their fellow man.
There might not be much leverage in my words, but the truth doesn't shout—it whispers.
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Diet Tedium

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm feeling uninspired to write today, but that's no excuse not to write. Something will come out of today's entry, but I'm not sure exactly what that will be. Over the last several months, I've been expounding my thoughts on things and trying to write in what I suppose one would consider a higher register. There's also the fact that I have to contend with my life being very mundane. I really don't have a lot happening that I would find interesting to tell others, but I suppose that no news is good news.
I also have no desire to write specifics on other people because that's not really the true purpose of this diary. This is a space where I can cultivate my inner world, not track details of the outside one. There are days, however, where even my inner world is quiet. I genuinely don't have a novel thing to say and there's nothing burning in my head that needs to be extinguished. Weirdly enough, today is just an uneventful day inside of my head.
I've been getting a bit better with my diet lately. At least I think I am, due mostly to the fact that I'm constantly hungry but staving it off somehow. I don't know how far my willpower will go, but over the last two weeks or so, it's surprisingly held up. I don't think I've lost any weight, though, which is a bit disheartening. It's as if I'm starving myself for no good reason. The problem is that I deal with the hunger pangs, but I still eat a reasonable amount in terms of calories and macros. It's just that most of the food here at home is nutritionally bankrupt and essentially poison. Most of it is processed, but there's really not many healthy options.

I enjoy frozen vegetables. Those are seen as healthy, right? One would think so, but I noticed that in all the packages of frozen vegetables, they contain a significant amount of sugar. Sugar is the main thing that I'm trying to avoid as a diabetic, but I can't even seem to eat vegetables anymore. More than that, I don't really know how I'd cook with fresh produce. I've never done it. For my entire life, all I've really known is processed foods. Even in periods of significant weight loss, they were still staples in my diet; I was just somehow able to eat less of them through willpower alone.
Living at home with my parents doesn't help either. They don't know how to eat right and since my mom buys all of the groceries, I feel stuck in terms of my options. But even outside of that, the grocery stores in my town are mostly filled with unhealthy options. It seems as if there's no escape, that I can't get healthy even if I tried. There's no clear solution to this problem, so I guess I'm just going to have to contend with my hunger and forced willpower until something reasonable comes up.
I hope that I don't have to wait too long.
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The Meaning of Life

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I held off writing a bit today, mostly due to distractions and socializing. But I'm back to the grindstone sharpening the proverbial blade. I have been circulating back to my thoughts on this post</a> and I believe that I have found the meaning of life. So today's entry will be a somewhat verbose explanation of this new revelation.
I have made the claim that people are fundamentally evil</a> in the past, but felt that there was a lack of justification of this claim when I've discussed it in the past. What makes people fundamentally evil? I think that in order to best answer that question, it's important to understand what is good. There has been great discussion on what the Good is. Most believe that it is inherently altruistic in nature, even selfless. It is one thing to Socratically understand what the Good is, but the best way to find it is through theology.
If we look at Christianity and take the whole biblical story into account, the whole essence of that narrative is to attempt to explain what God is. There are many instances where God is described as love, justice, and of course, the Good. So with that, we can come to an understanding that a true look into the Good can be made through the life and resurrection of Christ. Of course, it is completely fair to say that the Good, like other Platonic forms, is an essence that is difficult to classify as a singular category. To me, that's why we have not just the biblical story to understand it, but stories in general.

Another major biblical theme is the idea of sin. Sin is defined not as being "bad" or "wrong" in our cultural context, but is better defined as "missing the mark," and that mark is Christ. There is a clear tendency for humans to sin, which is shown in every biblical story. That is, humans miss the mark as a facet of our nature. So, if we miss the mark of the Good, what does that make us? To me, there is a clear indication that for reasons we cannot understand, there is some unexplained part of us that tends towards evil, or more specifically, a movement away from God.
Yet there's an interesting facet of humanity that makes us different. Through our metacognition, we have the ability to self-examine and choose against this tendency. That is to say, we are evil but have the chance to do good things. It's not that we are good inherently, but we have the ability to see it and act on it if we so choose.
So with that, the meaning of life comes down to making that choice in spite of our nature. The fact that we have the chance alone to pursue something better is all we need to understand why we need to live. Many of us make the choice to stay evil every day, but through repentance, we have the chance to at least go towards the Good, even if we can't fully embody that ourselves.
So many people delude themselves into thinking that they're good people, but the truth is that we cannot trust our inner selves at all. Instead of relying on our own understanding, we have to do what we can to work towards discerning what the Good is and making the even harder choice of acting towards that instead of the evil that sits inside all of us. That discernment can only come through prayer and good works.
I pray that I can overcome evil and walk the narrow path, God willing.
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Lost in the Ick

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been reflecting on my sense of masculinity after having some interesting discussions on it. I recently learned an interesting theory on the psychology behind "the ick," which is basically just something that a man does that makes a woman less attracted to him. These behaviors can be anything from being a "picky eater" to just "being cold." The theory is essentially that the underlying trait that produces an ick is a behavior that makes a woman question a man's masculinity in any way. The main aspect of the behavior that women deem to be masculine is whether or not it is active or passive. If a man is doing something to his environment, that is traditionally perceived as more masculine. If the environment is doing something to a man, that is traditionally more feminine and induces an ick in women.
For my entire life, I have always considered myself a male and never really felt anything that I perceived as feminine. In terms of how I look and act, everything that I project is decisively masculine. Well, at least that's what I have always thought. I was always under this postmodern, liberal impression that women are more receptive of men who have a decent understanding of their "feminine side," as it were. It's good for a man to talk about his feelings, be communicative, etc. But over the course of my life so far, I have found that this is actually an obstruction of the truth.

Men have a standard that they always have to act a certain way. There is this weird disconnect that many younger men contend with regularly: the traditional standards of masculine behavior and their postmodern obfuscations. As it stands today, there are still many ideals that men are socially conditioned to aspire to such as power, competence, joie de vivre, etc. But the problem is that while these ideals have been historically accepted at face value, our postmodern and de-structuralized theorizing of these values has produced a series of mixed signals that many of us struggle to interpret.
Unfortunately, these signals are not something that one can intellectually sift through and come to understand. One thing that I've told other male friends is that when it comes to "being good with women" you either have it or you don't. Some guys—through a combination of their genetics and life experience—seem to have an intuitive understanding of socializing with women and understanding their needs and desires. As such, they can properly capitalize on them and have an easier time achieving their own desires, whether that be casual sexual relationships or long-term romantic ones.
For me, I've never had this intuitive understanding. I would say I'm socially well-adjusted otherwise. I have a much easier time making friends than I do romantic and sexual partners. There's a much more comfortable ground for me in making a friend than courting a woman. When it comes to making friends, the idea is to foster social parity by finding common ground through shared experiences. I've always had an easy time understanding and applying that in order to make friends. When I was a kid, I moved schools frequently, typically every year or two. I was conditioned into learning how to adapt to new social environments quickly.

As I came into sexual maturity, it was difficult to contend with the changes in both male and female peer groups. They both became more hostile, which was something that scared me. I always tried my best to be kind and maintain social parity with others through fostering that common ground, but I always felt that everyone else was playing a different game that I never cared to learn. I never cared to learn it because I saw how much more hostile it made people, and I was afraid of becoming someone who would be too dangerous.
I think ultimately, my struggle with sex and romance comes from an inner fear that I have of myself. I'm comfortable with being a man, but I don't think I'm comfortable with conforming to Western society's ideas of what a man should be. In all honesty, I am afraid of that monster inside me. If I wanted to, I could become sharper, colder. I could parrot what I learned from years of negative experiences with men and women and internalize them to become an apex predator, one that incites desire and exploits it.
At the same time, I'm afraid that if I did, I'd lose myself in the process.
I know that I was born to be something else.
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An Act of Becoming

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been getting better about the discipline of coming here and writing closer to first thing in the morning. I have my routines that I do: supplements, brush hair, brush teeth, deodorant, caffeine, toast. But then once all of that is done, I try to get right to writing, distractions notwithstanding. So here I am, another day with another allocated portion of time spent writing the first and only thing that's on my mind.
Yesterday was a hard day. I have these spells where I deal with an intense amount of frustration, irritation, and anxiety. I think they're panic attacks, but I don't feel like I'm going to die, just really bad. When I have these attacks, I shut down. The first thing I do on instinct is that I want to lay down and sleep, but usually the anxiety is too high for me to do that so I might pace around instead. I stumble, almost as if I'm drunk. I tend to repeat a certain phrase over and over again as if I'm clutching onto it for dear life. The phrase is usually something negative though, like "there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do."

I remember a time in the psych hospital, I was having one of these attacks and the nurses came to do my morning vitals and saw that my blood pressure was insanely high. In my mind though, I was practically catatonic from the anxiety. The nurses decided to have me rushed to the emergency room where they ran several inconclusive tests and sent me back. While I stayed at the psych hospital for another week or so, I got put on benzodiazepines for the rest of my stay.
Since then, I've been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Of course, I never internalized any of my dread as anxiety up until maybe last year or so. I didn't want to name it and frankly, it was something that I was so used to that I didn't even register it as anxiety. I thought it was just my baseline. In many ways it still is. Most days, I feel anxious. I always have that tightness in my chest and even little things set me off. There is a consistent run of adrenaline through my body, a slow drip. From the outside looking in, my life seems comfortable and mundane. Unfortunately though, there's a constant inner war happening that I come here to name and report.
I feel as if I keep hammering at my doubt lately, at least over the last several days or so. Instead of being doubtful, I want to try and be optimistic. Over the last year, things have gotten better, but in smaller and perhaps even more meaningful ways. I started going to the gym consistently this year, and I've made a lot of progress there. I used to barely be able to walk down the street, but now I get in five miles a day easily. I quit smoking and haven't had nicotine in almost five months. I started my website and began publishing here regularly and have amassed over fifty thousand views in less than a year. I've gotten tons of great feedback from people and made some good internet friends. I've seen two of my best friends get married this year and am seeing another one do the same in a few short weeks.

The improvement in my life has been gradual but still noticeable. Despite the internal war, there's still progress being made. I feel as if I'm getting my agency back, albeit slowly. It's been about two months since my last depressive episode, which has been a remission period longer than average for me. I credit that to the culmination of the achievements listed previously.
The thing is that those achievements are less of a 'doing' to me and more like an 'undoing.' It's been several acts of undoing bad habits and replacing them with better ones. The biggest lesson I've learned this year is this: life doesn't take away; it can only replace. That's why I feel like my achievements this year represent less of a progression and more of a metamorphosis.
Every day is an act of becoming.
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Another Bad Dream

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm confronted with a direct reality: I don't have anything particular on my mind I want to write about. I've done what I can to cultivate habits and routines to get the spark of writing something every day, but even when I make all my stars align, there are days where there's nothing stewing in the noggin, nothing that feels like it has been charging up and ready to be spewed out onto this page. But for me, I've come to understand that there's a beauty in improvisation and not knowing what will come out when you just let go and bring out whatever wills itself through your fingers.
My prose feels like it's gotten a lot tighter over the last year or so. The command I possess over style feels much more in my control than it used to, but more than that I feel a greater generative power than I used to. This practice of writing what's directly on my mind and reducing the friction between my brain and my fingers has been immensely helpful. I can bring out a significant output of words much faster than most at this point, but I still struggle with applying this to more planned writings.

I've written a few pieces for IOKTIKN over the last few months, but have been saving them so that I have a content bank that gives me enough cushioning to implement a more consistent posting schedule. But for these pieces, I have a much more difficult time getting the words out in a way that satisfies me. I think this has to do with the fact that I always write outlines for these pieces. They're a bit longer than these entries and I want to have a solid and logical line of thought for them, but I also struggle with keeping to that outline.
With these entries, the whole point of them is that I don't know how they're going to start or end, so there's a much lower expectation of completeness I set for myself. As a result, I can just let them go wherever they wish and not consider any plans or previously established ideas. Sometimes when I write these entries, I feel a very tight and consistent arc, which gives me confidence in my instincts. Unfortunately though, maintaining this arc for anything longer than a thousand words is a much harder endeavor.
There's much less friction here because I've attuned myself to that. When I'm writing something longer, though, that friction is still stubbornly there. I'm writing a piece right now and I've been putting it off for almost two months at this point because I can't seem to get past that friction and I distract myself with other things so I don't have to think about working on it. Most days, I call it when my Cogito entry is finished. I wish I could keep working on other things, though. I want that endurance more than anything at this point.

Not only do I want that endurance mentally, but physically as well. I've been walking every day and feel a great need to keep pushing myself more and more. When I started, I had absolutely no base of fitness. I was jelly—spineless, easily broken. But over the last seven months, I have seen a significant level of progress despite a lack of weight loss. I'm hoping that with my new change in diet I can start seeing it come together even more.
There's a fear of effort, but also a resistance to patience. I want my work to pay off immediately, but I know that's not how it works. I have to put my nose to the grindstone every single day for there to be results over an extended period. I still doubt the efficacy of this work, though. I doubt whether or not it will mean anything at all, if I'm just stuck in my own head and unable to ever escape.
I'm trying to build something real here. I want to speak the truth, not be turned into a spectacle. I hope that I can show others the importance of slowing down and thinking through things. For me, there's a certain self-mythology that feels incomplete. I don't know if any of this will translate to anything. More than likely, my ideas and my writings aren't as good as I think they are. More than likely, I won't be seen at all.
Maybe it'll turn into what it was always supposed to be.
The end of a bad dream.
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Questioning Maturity

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don't want to write today. I really don't. There's such little payoff to doing this, but I've put myself in this box where this is all I'm letting myself do. In my mind, there's a sense of delayed gratification, that all of this writing will eventually pay off somehow. But what if it doesn't? What if this is actually for nothing and I'm just distracting myself from other hardships I feel too afraid to confront? Am I that afraid of an overwhelming job? Am I that afraid of the rampant rejection from the job search process? Am I that doubtful of my skills?
It's tough because when it comes to the supposed "right paths" I see friends my age pursue—the quaint six-figure office job—and they lament about how they are living paycheck to paycheck and despite the fact that many of them even work from home, their lives seem eerily vacuous and miserable, just like mine. It makes me think that maybe I am not as far off as I might think. Even friends who are not in dire financial straits have certain things that make them miss the mark of the Platonic ideal of a young and independent 20-something. Many of them still live with their parents. I mean, imagine being a middle manager at some big tech company or whatever and still live in your childhood home. That's something none of my generation thought we'd experience as adults when we were growing up.

It makes me question our collective maturity. It makes me question maturity at all. I don't feel mature. I was one of those people who got told they were an "old soul" which is just a euphemistic way of saying I was a sad child, but despite these perceptions of intellectual and perhaps even social maturity, I don't think I possess any actual maturity. I think I remember reading that Jung posited that true adult maturity comes in one's forties. As I approach my late twenties, I am feeling this eerie suspicion that he had it right on the money.
But it's funny because just as we begin to feel mature then, we immediately begin to lose our ability to act on that maturity. Something I think about often: this idea of "growing old" being almost a fact of life is something that is extremely recent. The fact that almost everyone thinks that they're going to be an old person one day is strange. For most of human history, people were set on dying much younger and the thought of growing old was seen as immense feat of skill doused in privilege. But it seems now that we feel entitled to old age. Unfortunately, none of us have considered the ramifications of that.

My parents are older. My dad is 78 and my mom is 68. They both deal with incontinence and mobility issues. They're fortunately still rather independent, but their twilight years seem to be more of a gradual fade into obscurity than a blissful share of spoils. There are things I have to do to take care of them, but it feels that this exchange isn't right. It feels like a waste of resources. The idea that all life has an inherent and unchanging value is a new thing as well, but it feels as if the ramifications of that idea have made us all handicapped in some way.
I hope that I don't have to be a very old man, at least one who needs significant help in most daily activities. I wouldn't want to burden anyone like that, especially my children if I had them. If I get some kind of terminal disease, I'll do what those in antiquity did: understand my lack of control and face my fate.
Fuck trying to play God.
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Going On Hunger Walks

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I woke up this morning, I had a very interesting feeling. I typically set my alarm for 8 AM. Due to the fact that I don't have a job or any major obligations or responsibilities and the fact that I hate being alive and because of my fractured sleep due to untreated sleep apnea, I usually sleep in until about 9 or 9:30. But this morning I woke up at my alarm and was a bit tired and got out of bed to take a piss and in my bathroom, I realized that I had the energy to just get my day started with my morning routine and not go back to sleep. It was a strange thing, feeling like there were certain stars aligning.
I've spent several years now in what has felt like an unending war with my body. The fact that I wake up and won't know how I'll feel along with the compounding maladies from this singular issue has made it extremely difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For several years, I've felt that there was truly no hope for me, that I was bound to a depressing and isolating fate. I felt like I had no capacity for joy, for structure, for resilience. But since I've been slowly crawling out of the holes that I've dug for myself, I now understand that there's so much more to me than I could've imagined. Through the crucibles I've endured, I now know myself in a way that I never thought I would before. For that, I am grateful, but still treading lightly.

This entry</a> was a turning point for me, I think. The neuropathy I was experiencing was an interesting wake up call. Thankfully it's still early in its progression. I was experiencing it very badly at the time of that entry, but since then I've reduced my caloric intake significantly and fostered more discipline with my eating. I have reduced my carb intake significantly as well, and have brought my sugar consumption down to almost zero. It's been only under a week since I've made these changes, but the differences have already been extremely noticeable.
The hardest thing to manage has been the hunger. I'm not starving myself by any means. I still eat about 2000 calories a day, but for me that's a significant reduction in what I was eating. Along with that has come a lot of hunger, which is something that any overweight or obese person struggles with. Dealing with the hunger has been difficult. As it is with any significant dietary change, it is easy to go on a binge when too hungry and lose morale for the long game altogether. For me, the thing that I've learned from quitting nicotine is that in order to truly quit, you don't remove it and that's it—you have to replace it with something else.
It's hard to go on a binge when the mind is too distracted to consider hunger. So for me, I've come to understand that the calories I have reduced from my daily intake are actually being replaced with other things. I have been a steady gym-goer for a bit over six months now and have made a lot of progress regarding my fitness. This confidence has emboldened me to take that fitness outside of the gym and start going on frequent walks in my neighborhood. It's a nice thing because I don't have to drive to the gym and deal with the crowds or any of that. Instead, I just put my shoes on, walk right outside, and get right to it—no friction at all.

So for me with getting too hungry, the main replacement has been those frequent walks. A few times a day, I'll go on a 2 mile 45-minute-or-so walk. It feels nice enough, not too strenuous, but strenuous enough that I feel a good enough dopamine rush to stave off hunger. All the walking has gotten me very interested in the idea of going on extended hikes and hammock camping and all that. Of course, I'm not in the shape to do that right now, but it does seem like a very fun physical activity. Extended hiking trips along with triathlons feels like a good fit for me in terms of physical activity.
Overall, there's a sense of optimism in my life that I haven't felt in a long time. I hope to cherish it while I can.
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Atomic Lines

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I've been falling into a bad habit of postponing my writing throughout the day due to distraction and procrastination. I think it's because I put it in my mind that I have to create the "perfect" set of conditions in order to write. I have to be just the right level of energized, just in the right mood, just the right lighting, etc. But I need to realize that the exact perfect conditions aren't going to happen and that what matters more is the habit infrastructure itself.
I'm not the biggest fan of that self-help literature crap, but when Atomic Habits by James Clear became super popular, I was skeptical at first. I read most of it and internalized the message. To understand that most of our lives are actually these small rituals is something that I had learned when I was younger as a sophomore in my high school English class. Back in that time, my teacher (shout out to Jay Garrett by the way, one of the best to ever do it) showed us the importance of rituals as symbols and symbols as rituals, but I always interpreted that more through the lens of literary criticism than through actual, well, life.

For me, Atomic Habits really put into perspective that those little rituals are happening in sequence all the time and that if we want to live better lives, it's best to analyze and change those rituals themselves. I was a bit contrarian to the validity of that idea just because of the cultural popularity of the book, but also because this conventional wisdom was corrupted by Optimization Culture. I think that people generally understood the conventional wisdom behind the book, but applied it toward goals and ideologies that to me are inherently opposed to living a fruitful life. It also didn't help that James Clear himself was writing the book through that perspective of Optimization Culture.
Even still, I understand and appreciate thinking and writing stuff for people to read. Well, of course I do, considering that I have this site. But the unfortunate thing that I've seen is that this thoughtful studiousness is so grossly commodified now that it seems that everyone who wants to be thoughtful or creative now has to do so through this mercantile lens. These days I can't engage with a piece of video media unless I want to see a fucking ad somewhere in it, whether it be through sponsorships or even worse, a creator's own product that they use their platform to sell. It's disgusting.
For me, I have a tough time figuring out my life in relationship to finances, money, and that ever so famous c-word. On the one hand, there's a bit of envy in seeing Newsletter Merchants; you know, those who monetize their writing with those predatory business models. I will NEVER ask you to subscribe to my writing. Just read it, man. It's here, for free, forever. But if I want to be an anti-commercial writer, there's a certain level of acceptance I have to face: I won't make a "living" off of my writing. Even if I achieve any level of notoriety, I wouldn't want to leverage that notoriety for money. Truth be told, I have more important things to do than make money with this shit.

A thing I've thought about in regards to my true mission: I think about writers who have inspired me over the years and what I've found is that these people will write millions of words in their lifetimes, but typically the thing that gives them eternal glory and puts them in the annals of history is not even a single work, but usually a single line. They work their whole lives tirelessly trying to put out a message through walls and walls of text, but through all of that toiling only one thing emerges, just a single thing that gets them their spot in the Canon Club.
Money isn't what I'm after. No, I'm looking for that one line that will immortalize me. But for it to get here, I have to write all the other ones first.
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Speaking Through the Silence

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There's a certain swelling of emotion that I'm feeling right now. It's interesting because it's a moment that I don't allow myself to write in because I'm typically too consumed in my thoughts, but this time around I am actively riding the wave, which excites me.
The thing that made me feel a swell in emotion is listening to music and thinking about the silence of God. I'm listening to American Teenager by Ethel Cain, which has become a very popular song over the last few years. There's a line in particular that strikes me:

Jesus, if you're listening let me handle my liquor
And Jesus, if You're there
Why do I feel alone in this room with You? </blockquote>

There's a lot to unpack there, but it's a universal feeling of lamentation that people with faith experience. I think that a common interpretation of this lyric would be that the singer feels separate from God because they're sinning (getting drunk) and asking Jesus to hold their hand in their complicity with that sin. But honestly, that silence can come even if we're not sinning. Even if someone is a monk in a Benedictine or Orthodox monastery, they contend with that same silence as any other person, regardless of sin.
The unfortunate fact is that whether we sin or not, God still chooses to remain silent to us most of the time. This is because if we take the Biblical canon into consideration, we see that every single person who interfaced with God directly, without exception, ends up denying Him and His existence at some point. For reasons that we do not know, there is something inside of us that makes us reject Him even when confronted with the most direct evidence. So with that, it makes sense why God remains silent.
To me, this strengthens my faith even more. I know that I can't lean on my own understanding of the complexities and contradictions of my senses, so it isn't right to try and figure things out on my own terms. I know that I've been through a lot of pain in my life, particularly as an adult with the onset of my bipolar disorder. The depression is something that has been so difficult to contend with. It has made it difficult for me to maintain consistency, but I feel fortunate that God has shown me the way with my writing.

I've written many entries when depressed, which astounds me. When I get depressed, all I do is sleep and stare at the wall most of the day. But even in the thick of it, I decide to come here on my computer and write about it. To me, that's a form of grace I never thought that I'd receive. Even in the depths of my pain and emptiness, there is still a way for me to keep seeking within it.
I can lament about the world all I want. I can say all the things about how corrupt governments are or how the sun is going to explode or whatever, but none of that means a thing when I am constantly given grace despite my own faults and errors. It's easy to point outward at what's wrong, but it's much harder to point inward. In fact, it's so easy to point outward that people fall under the illusion that what's outward is the majority of life and experience. But the truth is that the game is always played inside of ourselves. Taking that step to peer inside is one that many avoid, but yields the most important results when done with openness and honesty.
I hope to keep looking inward with my writing, but I also want to do what I can to give myself mercy when I do wrong. If Christ can give me grace, then I can do the same for myself too.
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The Three Cs

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I watched this video</a> summarizing Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and it was a great summary of the whole book. Hegel is notoriously hard to read and I haven't read the book all the way through, but this video was an excellent primer for the overall ideas expressed in this foundational work. It was something that resonated with me immensely, particularly the idea of finding the self around the kata-noesis, or relation between ideas.
For a long time, I've struggled with building a self-concept because of the vulnerability that I felt in social situations. It was always easier to morph my beliefs into whatever was socially advantageous so that I wouldn't have to face a negation of those beliefs bare and unfettered. See, I have an easy time facing negation of beliefs in a more simulated or intellectual way. Like if I'm having a dialogue with someone, I have no problem switching between the affirmative and the opposition regarding essentially any position. To me, the ideas themselves always felt so fluid and malleable that I distinguished them as illusory.

But the official Hegelian take on it is actually quite liberating: those ideas are actually the only real thing to exist. The world that we experience via the senses is actually the illusory one, and I find comfort in knowing that this mistake in distinction is one that literally every person makes. However, I'm now at a point where the meta has been established, the curtain opened, and now I am forced to contend with establishing a stronger self-concept by taking my kata-noesis and finding what I deem to be true in those myriad relationships between concepts that are constantly shifting and morphing. Nonetheless, I feel that the process has not only been much slower than I anticipated, but also much more grand in scope.
It's taken several years, but I feel a callused and strong self-concept forming closer and closer with each passing day. For me, I had to borrow from traditional salesman tactics and foster my self-concept through an acronym. The acronym I use that determines my values and their applications is called The Three Cs:

Creativity</li>
Connection</li>
Compassion</li> </ol>
The way I see it, these values not only act as an ideological scaffolding, but also suggest practical steps in how I go about my day. Simply put, as long as I do something every day that is creative or fosters connection and compassion, that to me is a successful day. It doesn't matter what else happens. I could make a million dollars or get hit by a bus—as long as I keep to the Three Cs, there's nothing that can stop me.
Through the Three Cs, I hope to foster that Hegelian dialectic that will further strengthen my self-concept. Through this strengthened self-concept, it will become much easier to impose my Will onto the world. For such a long time, I was afraid of imposing my Will because I thought that it was a futile task. I defended myself from the harsh realities of hard work and failure so that I wouldn't have to make something of myself and deal with the negation of my self-concept. As I reach this stage in my life, though, I hope to continue pushing through that negation, no matter how narrow the path becomes.
Theosis is an inexplicable thing, but I will find it. I absolutely have to.
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Anxiety Meditation

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'll put it out there: I have a hard time trusting The Process. Controversial, I know. But anyway, there's this deep-seated thing inside of me that makes me doubt all the time. I think that it's a fundamental thing that exists in all people. I could spend time thinking about that and systematizing and theorizing about it, but I think that it would be a more efficient thing if I just posited it as is and move onto explaining how it affects me (and possibly others) on the day-to-day.
I think I remember reading from Kierkegaard about the nature of anxiety and how it's basically the fear of an uncertain future. The difference between anxiety and fear though is in tangibility; fear comes from the tangible, while anxiety comes from the intangible. The future is something that is always going to be intangible due to the fact that it doesn't exist. It's a strange thing, fearing something that doesn't exist. I think that it stems from the same place as all creation: thought turned to reality.
See, when we think and have thoughts, those thoughts are the fuel behind the material things that we create or encounter. All inventions and art were originally just thoughts that existed in someone's head, but then became reality through putting that thought into action. Anxiety, I think, stems from this individual power. In the same way that we can create wonders with our thoughts, the same is true with the evil and abhorrent. So anxiety, then, really isn't an intangible fear of something that doesn't exist, but is the fear of our own potential for creating something evil and abhorrent with our thoughts.

It's a sort of narcissistic thing though, thinking that I am that powerful. It's definitely something that doesn't get met with praise or admiration. If anything, it would make social parity feel threatened, and in turn manifest in soft rebukes from others. "Oh wow, I never thought of it like that. That's so cool, man haha." I think that's another source of anxiety: a fear of the imposition of Will upon others.
I feel weird admitting this in public, but I do have a tendency towards sadism and masochism. Obviously I don't mean that in the stereotypical way where it's like a kink or some kind of gay shit like that. No, there's a deeper part of me that derives actual pleasure from inflicting pain. It's something that I repress so much and so often that I rarely ever confront it, but now's as good a time as ever, I suppose.
You see, this pleasure from inflicting pain is something that I fear a great deal. It's especially true because I have so much potential to do so. I'm a big and strong guy and I'm smart, which makes for a rather dangerous combination in terms of self-weaponization. In a narcissistic but painfully self-aware kind of way, I often compare myself to Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, "a genius and an athlete." But instead of getting pulled down by society, I pull myself down. So with that, my sadistic tendencies are often turned inward and morphed into masochism as a means to protect those around me from, well, me.

Throughout my life, though, I have mythologized this self-sacrifice and used it as a means of nobility. "I can hurt you, but I'll keep my sword sheathed." Except instead of just keeping the sword sheathed, I take that desire to hurt and morph into a series of self-destructive tendencies that in effect make it difficult for me to maintain my side of relationships at times. The self-destruction typically manifests as isolation and in that isolation, I hurt myself.
But now I'm at a point in my life where I want to take this isolation and this self-destructive energy and convert it into something good. This is why I picked up writing in this way, I think. When I'm alone and I can write, it takes the bitter self-examination and turns the isolation into something actionable, something that can help others. It's easy for me to consider myself as a completely original person and that no one can really understand these plights and that this act of writing them out is nothing more than a selfish outlet of intellectual masturbation.
Thankfully, though, I am not original. In that lack of originality, I foster connection.
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Lacking Focus

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I woke up this morning very sore from all the walking I did yesterday. I ended up walking several miles because I felt motivated to do so, but I feel that there was a certain amount of desperation I was trying to quell yesterday with all of that walking. Granted, I do want to keep making progress with regards to my physical fitness because that is important, but I also feel as if I'm contending with a certain degree of masochism in the endeavor.
I have this notion in my mind that the pain is what will set me free, that I have to put all of this pressure on myself so that I can attain a self-ideal that makes me feel worthy of my own praise and respect. Unfortunately, this desire is vacuous and unrealistic. I have an idea of who I should be and what I should do, but no matter how hard I push myself, that ideal will never be met because I'll always expect more out of myself. I'll always want more and more and more until I collapse and burn out. This is how I've been for such a long time. On top of that, even the smallest setback or failure, often something not within my control at all, will burn me out even further and eventually I give up whatever it is I'm trying to do altogether. It's a toxic thing, really.

More than that, this fragile self-concept constantly shifts, which results in many changes in focus. This change in focus is what hurts me in the end. I often overestimate what I can accomplish in a day and underestimate what I can accomplish in a year or ten. There's a dissonance because of my lack of patience and inability to anticipate the future. I fail to see what I could build in a sustained period of time if I just keep doing little by little each day. No, instead I put in too much at the beginning of an endeavor and let it fizzle out over time because of a lack of self-concept and focus. It's a tiring thing, giving up and restarting. It feels like my greatest form of self-sabotage, something that I pretend isn't there.
I always forget that just a little bit each day is the key to consistent growth and improvement. I become obsessed with the new shiny thing in front of me because it's more rewarding to seek novelty than sustainability. It's one thing to be honest about these things, but it's another to keep that honesty at the forefront of my mind and stick to whatever it is I'm trying to do.
I feel good about the fact that I have contributed to this diary in a consistent way, though. It's something that lets me see how much I can do over time, even if it's just a small and insignificant thing. Writing down one's thoughts in this way doesn't give a whole lot to people, I don't think. But at the same time, what good is curation if there isn't a stream to fill up my ideological cup anyways? This way that I write, this active form of thought—that's what puts power in my ideas. It lets them come through uncensored, even when I don't feel like there's a lot there.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but ideas are bulletproof.
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A New Crucible

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been dealing with a lot more anxiety, so I decided to take a couple of walks today. I just go up and down my street and loop that however many times I feel is best. One loop is about a mile and I've done four, so I've gone about four miles so far today. The walks help with the anxiety momentarily. The walk will make my anxiety go away, but the second I come back inside my house and start doing stuff on my computer, it will begin to come back and make me feel like going on another walk. Frustrating.
A few things that have happened: I am a type II diabetic and haven't been doing a lot in terms of diet or medication to regulate my blood sugar levels. I've been diabetic now for about four years and within the last month or so, I've started to feel more and more symptoms of peripheral neuropathy and it's been scaring the shit out of me. My feet have been tingling a lot more, so have my hands and arms. I feel numbness and pain in my feet basically all the time now. I don't think it's affected my balance, but I don't know if I'm at the point of no return with this shit yet.

Either way, I know that I have to go full force on losing weight because if I don't, I am going to become wheelchair-bound before I know it. I think that fear is why I've been walking so much today, like I don't want it to be taken away so I'm putting my body into overdrive. I feel like I had the warning for years. I knew it could get like this, but didn't want to deal with it because it would be too hard, and now I'm paying the unfortunate price. My body is finally starting to scream at me, but I don't know if it's too late or not to start listening.
While walking, I thought of the importance of pushing through the physical pain of exercise and whatnot. In a way, it really is like a smelting furnace. The high intensity of the pain shapes people and molds them into something that can survive the environment. Well, the thing I've learned as I've become older is that it's not the environment we're trying to survive, but ourselves. That's a rather trite and cliche remark, but most people either forget this simple truth or do everything they can to distract themselves from it. For me, I'm sick of the distractions.
I know that I've really fucked up, living the way that I have. I don't know what else to do so that I can change my situation. I don't know what other crucibles I have to put myself through to figure my way through it. At this point though, there is one important one that I am starting today: getting my diet in check.

For the most part, I eat whatever I want regardless of its contents or nutritional value or whatever. A rationalization I made recently was that as long as I have supplements, the food that I eat doesn't really matter. To a point, I think that's still somewhat true, but the catch to me is this: I don't have the knowledge to grow or hunt for my food thanks to civilization and industrialization and what have you. I am bound to The Grocery Store in order to eat. With that, I am subject to all of the stupid hormones that are put in all the produce and meat or even worse, ultra-processed foods like frozen dinners or whatever. It's a losing game either way, unless I literally become an agrarian or hunter or some kind of stupid pastoralist.
So with that, the battle of cravings and desire with food is something that can't be won, at least not immediately. Basically all food now is manufactured and marketed to be addictive and calorie-dense, so no matter what I do, there is always going to be some kind of uphill battle when trying to figure out my diet. Our culture revolves around food, so it's easy for people to indulge in stuff and feel bad about it. An unfortunate reality that I have to contend with is that there is going to be a significant period of withdrawal that I will have to go through with my diet in order to start losing weight. It's not my fault that things have come to this junction, but I know that if I don't figure it out now, I will have a much harder life than the one I already have.
Luckily, this is something I've gone through before. My senior year of high school, I lost about 60 pounds and got into the best shape of my life. Over the course of college and dropping out and working as a younger man, I fell prey to Food Culture again and lost sight in terms of my diet. At that time, though, I was riding my bike over 100 miles a week because of my messenger job, so my physique and health didn't deteriorate that much. On top of that, I was still young enough to not feel the ramifications of my shitty decisions.

At 27 years old now, though, I have finally begun to feel the descent. My body is no longer growing, but dying. Everything I do now will be a glorious tribute to this descent, but thankfully it's slow and more merciful than many my age care to think.
When I lost the weight back then, I adhered to a strict calorie-counting regimen and significant drop in caloric intake. An average day for me is somewhere between 3000-4000 calories, but during this "diet", I dropped down to about 1500-1700. For me, keeping a record of what I ate did two things: first, it enforced self-accountability. Second, it enforced a dietary routine. For me, these two things together along with the drastic reduction in caloric intake allowed me to drop those 60 pounds in about 3 months. It was miserable, but it put me in my best shape.
The mistake that I made back then, however, was that once I lost the weight, there wasn't any kind of maintenance plan. I know that the method I mentioned above is not sustainable. I understand that it's supposed to be temporary, so I can go into this with that knowledge. I'll try to set some kind of milestone, but for now I have to focus on action and diligence. I hope that I can figure everything out soon, but right now it's time for another crucible.
I need to find out what I'm really made of.
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My Binaural Beats

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I neglected to write in here for a few days. There are a few reasons for that. The first is that I feel a wave of depression coming, so that always stops me in my tracks. Increased anxiety usually precedes these episodes these days. For some reason I held back on letting my thoughts rip as I usually do, probably because I was afraid of not having anything to say. More than that, though, I found that I wanted to sit with myself alone for longer stretches of time than usual. This time alone fuels my psychic power, I think.
I've been into meditation and the like for over a decade. My first introduction to it was actually back in the 8th grade because there was a popular phenomenon at the time: binaural beats. For a bunch of teenage boys with little life experience, binaural beats were posed as a free ticket to a drug-like experience without having to hang out with druggies, find a dealer, and of course, purchase the drugs with money—you know, since we were all broke. It was a strange thing. There were apps coming out on the recently released iPhone that promoted a drug-like experience just from listening to something.

I remember not wanting to use those apps because you had to pay for them, but I did look into binaural beats themselves to try and find what was really going on. Essentially, they're just frequencies played through headphones that are supposed to mimic organic brainwave frequencies in order to induce different states of mind. There were different levels based on the frequency named after Greek letters: delta for deep sleep, theta for better dreams, alpha for focus, beta for creativity, and gamma for transcendence. I figured that gamma was the coolest one since it was the highest frequency, so that's what I decided to try. Thankfully at that time, there were free YouTube videos that played the frequencies, so I was in luck.
For about two weeks, I laid down on my couch and listened to the binaural beat for about an hour each day. I felt that I had to let the tones do their thing over a course of time, so I did what I had to do diligently and patiently. At the end of the two weeks though, I had a sensation I have yet to forget: my back convulsed, everything went white, and I lost consciousness. I come back to and marveled at the spiritual experience I just manifested for myself, tell my friends about it, and didn't really think much of it throughout the rest of my grade school days.
It wasn't until I was a young adult that I realized what actually happened: I had a seizure. It wasn't a kundalini awakening or whatever, but just a weird accident I somehow engineered for myself. I realized this because when I was in high school, I had a seizure at a concert due to the powerful strobe lights. It felt similar to the experience I had when I was younger with the binaural beats. Years after that concert, I had finally put the dots together. It was a weird thing to accept—my brain was different for some reason.

Still though, there's a weird sort of confirmation with the binaural beats for me. They produced a result, albeit a negative one, but one that made me realize that there is something going on there. So over the course of my life since then, I've experimented with binaural beats and meditation on and off. I remember I used to study with binaural beats as well. They were a helpful aid for my focus, I think.
But anyways, I have gotten back on another kick with them and tried letting myself get immersed in the isochronic tones yet again. Of course, this has involved a lot of sitting around and not a lot of writing, but I guess that's what I felt I should do to maintain my creative juices, psychic power, what have you. More than anything, this act of sitting down and doing nothing is also a way I try to reduce my anxiety.
Along with listening to the binaural beats, I also do a basic breathing and concentration exercise: I try to focus on the in and out of my breath and use that as an anchor to keep my thoughts from running rampant. It's a lot easier said than done, though. But from what I've experienced, once you get over the initial hump of your mind resisting your attempts to center itself, it becomes tame and the body begins to relax further. That's why it helps so much with anxiety. Of course, it's a nonlinear progression in improving the skill. Some periods of time will be strong, but then others will be difficult.

My anxiety is a tough thing to deal with. I had only begun to name it within the last few years, so it's still something I work on dealing with. It ultimately is a symptom of overwhelm I feel about life. Things become too much to process, so my body goes into a constant mode of alert. Meditation helps with that.
Everything I do seems to be in service of reducing this anxiety, but it never wants to fully go away. Maybe one day it will, but I fear that day won't be today.
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The Echo Grows

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had a ton of resistance to write yesterday. The same thing has happened today as well, but here I am anyway. More than likely, this resistance is coming from too much distraction. Whether it be responding to messages or compulsively checking my RSS feed or just wanting to listen to music and let the theater of my mind play its usual shows, there's a lot keeping me from just locking the fuck in and getting to work.
This stems from a fear of doing it wrong, I think. I've always been a compulsive sort of perfectionist and have despised mediocrity in myself and others. Unfortunately though, this perfectionism is the main engine to my resistance. A big piece of advice I find myself giving to others that I fail to follow myself is this: give yourself permission to suck. Especially with writing, there's a difficulty in saying things and orchestrating text in a way that feels like how it seems in my head. It's a tough thing to let the words flow out and balance that with a desire to plan things out and make each part of a piece feel earned.

At the same time, though, especially in this project, there's a certain advantage in just letting it out and not worrying about coherence as much. But even then, the blocks that come to me are hard to dispel because of a stutter even in my thought itself. I'm sure that every writer deals with this kind of thing. It's an unfortunate thing because there's a certain academic nature to writing that throws a lot of people off of it. It makes sense, though, because it's important to have a clear understanding of grammar and spelling and other fundamentals so that a piece of writing can be lucid and simple enough to understand.
To get that understanding takes work and practice, so it's understandable that many would get thrown off by it. Some people have enough talent to get by, but the best writing is always written by someone who has seen enough of their imperfections to work past them. Unfortunately, writing as a craft has become too deconstructed. Lazy prose isn't just accepted, but has become a new standard of sorts. But it takes real work to say something real and beautiful; most people would rather have it fast and easy, though.

I constantly reflect on the nature of this practice and doubt the principles I have conjured from it. Web diaries like these seem like such a passe thing, but I think that there's value in seeing my progression of thought over time. I unfortunately enjoy and relish in deep and self-referential reflection. I enjoy being skeptical of myself and wrestling with ideas despite the fact that I might essentially be saying the same thing but just in different ways. I'm perceptive enough as well to understand that for my readers, there's a big mirror that I put in your faces when I write to you. When I write about my experiences, they feel entirely whole to me, but to you they are remixes of things that you have experienced.
In an odd way, there's a great sense of power I hold in having this space. I present myself to you so that I can persuade you to look inward. Even though this writing is ephemeral, its substance evolves over time. Past pieces echo in this one, just in between the words.
For me, I feel implored to keep exploring that space. There's not many who do it like me, so I have to relish in that.
Somehow, anyway.
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Reality and Chaos Magick

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I watched the video below and felt a strong sense of narratives that I've been telling myself and letting internet culture tell me for the past decade come back in full force, so I now feel compelled to speak on it and catalog this experience not only for myself, but for any readers out there who experience or have experienced a certain degree of thought manipulation over the course of their formative years. Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
To briefly summarize the video, the author essentially explains the origins and practices of chaos magick, which is a school of magick founded by students in Aleister Crowley's lineage. Crowley was an influential magician in the late 19th and early 20th century. If you know the phrase 'abra cadabra,' yeah, that's him. Anyways, chaos magick is essentially a deconstruction of occult practices. In ancient times, occult practices were constrained by specific rites and ceremonies and as such, there was a significant level of perceived gatekeeping.
Chaos magick was a method of lowering the barrier to entry for magic in general. Instead of having to perform specific rituals under specific rules, an aspiring chaos magician can perform whatever rituals they please under any circumstances they please. This became a popular method of occultist practice because of the more broad deconstructionist philosophical movement that took off in the back half of the 20th century. Once occultists figured out that belief was fluid and not static, symbols and aesthetics became the principal means to assert and perpetuate whatever perceived narratives or "energies" they wished to promulgate into collective consciousness.

In the video, the author states that this practice is akin to "reality hacking" because they perceive beliefs as the backbone to reality itself and so if beliefs can be changed, then so can reality, right?
This was something that enthralled me as a younger man, especially after indulging in psychedelic substances and browsing the mongolian basket weaving forums, but as I've matured and had life kick my ass more times than I care to count, I've come to understand that belief and reality are not as deeply intertwined as the chaos magicians would like to believe.
I do believe that there is a connection between our thoughts and our reality, but I don't believe that the abstractly constructed "self" is the progenitor of any kind of base reality. Unfortunately, our minds are too limited to understand the forces responsible for our sensory input. We've tried dissecting ordinary matter to its most fundamental parts and have been met with even more uncertainty than what's outside of an electron microscope; it seems as if the more we peer into the world, the less we find. If atomic theory holds, then what we find is that most of space is, well, empty. The world itself isn't something that has any truly certain substance to it, at least not one that we can constrain into a certain system.

However, I do respect chaos magicians for attempting to map out that empty space and give it substance; it's a deeply human thing, the act of creation. But I will not prescribe reality to anything because truthfully, that's none of my business. My business exists in things that I perceive, know, and can communicate in a meaningful and lucid way. True magic comes from being able to incite action into others—this is why I write.
If I were to cast any spell onto you right now, it would be this:
Do something kind for someone today. Even if the act is small, these kind of things reverberate and resonate into places you wouldn't even know were there.
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Idea Cartography

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been putting off writing today's entry because I am starting to feel a bit of fatigue with writing, but I feel that it's important to keep going in spite of this fatigue so that I can build my creative resilience and keep my momentum. We all have something to say; the complication is in having the guts to let go and not let self-consciousness dictate the medium we speak through. For me, there's a great level of importance I place on style and making sure that my syntax is clear, my diction is precise, and my control of my thoughts and ideas remains lucid.
I didn't publish anything in Cogito for over a year. I initially kept this project to myself so that I could refine my voice on my own and cultivate the discipline of daily writing before I put myself on a stage of any kind. This has helped me process my emotions, but also to develop my skills and my voice through consistency. These days, everyone is a writer. Literacy rates are higher than they've ever been and the platform for expressing ourselves through writing is more decentralized than ever. This has created new paradigms of thought and experience, but writing as a vocation still remains the same in many ways.

Though the landscape of expression through writing has become more decentralized, one thing that remains consistent in the vocation is constraints. The most important constraint that a writer contends with is their audience. As a writer, we write not for our own amusement or pleasure. We write so that our words will be read; we want our ideas to be metabolized and incite action. Whether it be through fiction or non-fiction, there is always a message to be found in a work of writing. Whether that message is explicit and clear or implicit and koan-like, the fact remains that there is still always something to be communicated.
It's an interesting thing—I remember reading this Baudrillard quote:

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. </blockquote>
I think that writing is something that has exhibited this notion for as long as it has been revealed to us. Once we found the ability to become cartographers of ideas, the cartography itself became the way in which we navigate them. If it can't be written, it does not exist. Thought no longer remains an uncharted ephemera, but is now constantly recorded and preserved. This is why I find writing, whether it be for myself or for my readers, to be a matter of utmost importance. I'm reminded of Shakespeare's 18th sonnet, the one where he compares his love to a summer's day, of its last lines:

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. </blockquote>

Even back in the 17th century, there was an awareness of the importance of recording and preserving thought. There's a chance for us to take the beauty inside of our heads and make it real so that those things can live on beyond the trappings of our constantly buzzing minds.
Well, at least I hope there's something beautiful inside my head. I'll just have to keep writing to find out.
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Solitude: The Holiest Calibrator

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In yesterday's entry</a> I said that one of my 'rules' for living a good life was to "do the right thing, especially when it's hard." That got me thinking: how can I properly communicate the essence of knowing what that right thing is? Christian theology has a relatively simple answer to this question I think. The third part of the Trinity, the mysterious and seldom explained Holy Spirit, is a signaling guide here. It is the little piece of God that's in all of us, connected directly to the sources that are the Father and the Son. It is essentially the nuts and bolts of our direct line of communication with God. When we pray, we channel the Holy Spirit so that we can commune with the Father and the Son.
Unfortunately, it's easy to warp this hardware into something nefarious. Many people will do the wrong thing because they believe that they are being compelled by the Holy Spirit, which makes it difficult to assert its authority as our spiritual compass. But despite these problems, we all have the same hardware, so to speak. I find that it's often difficult for me to tune into that compass and have it guide me into doing the right thing. My perspective on this difficulty is that there are opposing spiritual forces that fog our view of what is right. We let them take over slowly until eventually, we have completely lost the plot.

So how do we keep the compass calibrated and our view clear? This is why personal prayer is extremely important, perhaps even the most important form of prayer. It is one thing to pray at church in communion with your parish or congregation, but it is a whole other level to pray in solitude. And when I say solitude, I mean complete solitude; there should not be a phone or computer or anything else listening in. Unfortunately, this degree of solitude has become practically impossible to achieve despite its foundational importance. People have ignored this degree of solitude because it is a tough place to be. Blaise Pascal put it best:

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. </blockquote>
So to answer the question of how we can attune to the Holy Spirit, the answer is this: find time to be completely alone. Prioritize it. Put your phone somewhere else. Be silent. Let the surroundings of solitude be your music and tune into the frequencies the world doesn't want us to hear. From there, it'll be easier to figure out that next move. God will give it to you. Just make sure to ask for mercy, rest, and grace.
Be thankful and live in fear of Him—all He ever wanted was to make sure you were listening.
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Analyzing Evil

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So I've been doing things here and there today, mostly just doing chores and other household things. This afternoon though, I've finally come up with something for today: I wanted to expand on this</a> because I told y'all I would.
Yes, humanity is depraved and evil by nature. I believe that we are evil first, but have the choice to do good things. We will never become truly 'good' in the Platonic sense because this ideal is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. To me, love is something that comes from overcoming our nature and is not intrinsically a facet of it. This tracks with ancient wisdom, such as when Christ talks about walking the 'narrow path', as it were. Doing good things is hard; that's why they're good. Being evil is easy because that's more in line with human nature.
I think most people are too ashamed to talk about how evil they really are since shame is a learned behavior. Shame is the engine that drives order and that's why it's so much easier to shame others than to feel ashamed ourselves. We intrinsically know how capable we are of distributing shame onto others, and the fear of being shamed by them is what keeps us in line. Getting arrested is shameful. Getting cast out is shameful. Getting called out is shameful. We know that it is so easy to get shamed by others, so we feel less compelled to do what's good.

But also, the good thing is not synonymous with the right thing; that is a common misconception in modern language. To be good is to do something beneficial to someone else, typically at one's own expense. To be right is to do something that is not always beneficial to someone else, and not always at one's own expense, but because it's in line with how things ought to be. The good is something we want, but the right is something that should be—that's what the institutions typically miss.
In line with my previously referenced post, what is the way we solve the problem of collective oppression? The thing is that most people don't know what's going on with the world, with life, or whatever else. To have someone around telling them what to do is not typically oppression, but a twisted sense of security. The cost of that security is resources, influence, and power. People are afraid of the unknown, and as such are willing to give away a certain degree of their autonomy and power so that they can receive security.
This is of course the basis of the social contract, but as Hobbes famously put it: power is always in the hands of the governed. We see this in strikes, walkouts, or other acts of civil disobedience. No matter what we give to those who oppress us, we have the chance to take it away at any time. The only thing that's stopping us is our fear of that unknown. So how do we get over the fear of that unknown? The answer is faith.

To me, a good life is done with three simple rules and can be achieved regardless of whatever institution leads the world. Whether it be a totalitarian regime or an absolute utopia, always do these three things:

Have faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God</li>
Ask for mercy from Him every day</li>
Do the right thing, especially when it's hard</li> </ol>
Doing these things is difficult and isn't a simple escape hatch for the fear of the unknown. Faith isn't in opposition to fear, but acts as a transformation of it. The doubt that we feel about everything is part of faith itself. We feel unsure because there is no certainty, no thing that can be truly known. It's okay for us to be wrong and to be evil and to be afraid because through these tribulations we will become transformed into something far more graceful.
It's easier said than done, surely, but the narrow path is still in front of us.
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Writing Outside

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today has been a nice enough day so far that I have decided to spend my time writing today outside. We finally are over the long hump of the late spring, summer, and early fall heat. Now we are in the half of the year that is actually pleasant, which is always a blessing. I returned my suit rental today and I was a day late, but was fortunate enough to get the late fee waived by the woman checking the suit back in. I wish I could appreciate those nice little things more in the moment. I'll probably forget about that small bit of mercy in a week—what a nice guy I am, right?
Right now it's not super hot, but I still am a bit hot and sweaty. I have always been a sweaty guy and if the place that I'm in isn't cold, I'll sweat. That's just how it is. Especially in the aforementioned long hump season, I always have to be near a fan when sitting or laying still in a single place; otherwise I will sweat and get disgusting rather quickly. I have to always make sure that I'm changing my clothes regularly and oftentimes I'll wear two shirts in a day because of how sweaty I get. Putting on a fresh clean shirt after wiping off your sweaty torso with a towel is always a pleasant sensation, so maybe being sweaty is more of a blessing than I care to admit to myself.

Like I've mentioned in previous entries</a>, I still want to start my own internet radio station and now that I have a few weeks of free time coming up, I'm hoping to get that off the ground this month. I still have to curate and download a music collection. Whoops. I could've been doing that earlier, but I have just been putting the whole thing off because I have a vision for it in my head that I want to pull off, but there's just been a lot that I want to still think through I guess. Well, there's also all the coding and other stuff I'll have to do to set it up and that's always a pain in the ass. Oh well, such is life.
I really need to find something for my anxiety. I used to take 30 mg of buspirone and that didn't really help too much. More than likely I'll start taking CBD since I know that helps a lot of people and I've had good results with it before. I've always tried taking CBD on and off, but never got consistent with it. I'm not too sure why. I'll probably just start including a capsule dosage with my morning supplement routine. I already take a bunch of stuff, but it's fine. It's not horribly expensive and I'd much rather take a bunch of supplements than psychiatric medications.
Today is just another day. Another day, and maybe even another one after that.
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Spiritually Hungover

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently in the airport waiting on my flight back home to start boarding. I feel spiritually hungover since yesterday was such a long day. Once all of the reception stuff was finished, I went straight back to the hotel so that I could decompress and go to bed. There was a lot of socializing, a lot of talking with people, and a lot of tension preceding the ceremony. That makes sense though—it's a wedding. I'm very happy for my friends and their marriage, and I feel very privileged to have been part of it. Now that it's over though, I feel immensely relieved.
There was a certain weight to the whole trip, though. My closest friends are all getting married this year. There was one in June, the one I just attended, and another one next month. Of course, my friends are very dear to me and I feel fortunate to be part of their lives as they take those next big steps forward. I look at my own life and I don't feel jealousy, but I do feel a certain fear that I'm going to get left behind. As my friends keep moving on with their careers and their families and everything else, there won't be any time for our friendships and we'll grow apart. It wouldn't be out of anything malicious, but just something that feels natural, I suppose.

I don't know if I'm still feeling or perceived as somewhat juvenile as a single guy with not a lot of career or romantic prospects. I don't know if I'm stuck or behind or whatever. I think I'm just afraid of a future where I am completely alone, that I didn't do what I had to do to keep people in my life. I fear for a day where I am bound to solitude. Once my parents die, there won't be a whole lot for me to hold onto. I fear that I might drift and keep drifting and riding through life trapped in a dearth of connection.
I don't know what I have to do to cultivate more strength in this regard. Taking care of just myself is a monumental task, let alone others. Many times I feel as if there's not enough I can do to have people love me. I fear that I just don't have what it takes to dutifully protect, provide, and support other people. It might be that I'm too selfish and absorbed in my thoughts that there's not much left for others to take from me. The feelings of inadequacy are overwhelming. I know that in the depths of these perceptions, they're lies being told to me because my brain is constantly overclocked.

There's too much going on in my head all the time. It is taxing to have a constant sense of coherence while staring into the infinite expanses of experience. I see things that others don't, but it's hard to communicate those things to them. Because of that, it makes me perceived as some kind of alien presence. I constantly feel as if I have to boil myself down and even censor myself for others. This lack of unbridled self-expression is taxing. It makes me want to be selfish.
Going to the weddings has made me feel lonely. It's a tough thing to talk about, especially in public like this, but I think it's important to let these things out. I have high expectations of myself, but I seem to not even be able to meet a typical level of expectations. It's just that so much of what people think they want out of life is such bullshit. Most things in life are boring, evil, or both. I don't want to be the kind of person that people expect me to be, and the fact that I am met with a degree of resentment towards this notion makes me just want to quit altogether.
But I know better than that. I have to keep pushing forward. I have to keep seeking because if I don't, then that's what will ultimately kill me.
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Wedding Day

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Man, yesterday was such a long day. After dealing with the long delayed flight, taking the delayed bus to the hotel, and having the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner all after doing an all-nighter the night before, I crashed into bed at around 9 PM after taking a well-deserved shower (I was so sweaty the whole day, man) and was asleep for a nice 11 hours. After getting ready this morning, I felt that now would be a good time to get today's entry in before I have to start doing stuff for the wedding. I have a good chunk of my morning free, so I'm going to spend it here in the comfort of my hotel room so that I can continue to decompress from everything.
Last night at the rehearsal dinner, I was expected to make a speech for the bride and groom. I had been told that I was going to make this speech months in advance, yet I couldn't think of a single thing to say in all that preparation time. So instead of freaking out about it, I resolved to just go off the cuff and say it from the heart. I have some public speaking experience, well, not a ton. But I felt comfortable enough in front of everyone to just say what was on my mind. I had one or two anecdotes lined up in my head that I knew would land well, and then the rest was just a matter of divine inspiration. Seriously, I just turned my brain off and let my mouth do all the work.

So today is the wedding and it's going to be an all-day affair, of course. I have my suit ready and now it's just a matter of not letting it get destroyed between now and the ceremony—should be easy enough. I feel a lot more comfortable about it today than I did last night because I now actually have gotten some sleep, but it's just going to be a busy day with a lot of socializing and doing stuff.
I've gotten a lot less tolerant of socializing. Perhaps I could say that my social battery has gotten weaker, but I think that more than anything it's just gotten less tolerant of meandering. For me, I want to socialize the best way I know how: all killer, no filler. I don't like to mince words or pretend about anything, so I try to avoid niceties and pleasantries and other things that obfuscate the direct line of communication. Most communication is non-verbal anyway, so speech is really just icing on the cake, so to speak. People have always been good at talking not at each other, but past each other. There's always subtext to read in a social situation, things to notice, that kind of thing.
But I have a feeling that a lot of people spend a lot of time in their heads when socializing, reading all that subtext and so on. I don't really want to get deep into any kind of social psychology because I really don't like that kind of stuff. I also don't really like meta-socializing either. Like, when people talk about the social situation directly instead of just being in the social situation is a bit of an annoying thing for me.
Today won't involve any of that, though. It'll be a good day.
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Improvisation

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It's Halloween, but today is not about corporate-laden holiday mumbo-jumbo. No, today is a day just like any other, except it isn't. I am currently writing this entry at 4 AM, freshly pulling through an all-nighter because I have to leave in about an hour to catch a flight so that I can attend a friend's wedding. I'm caffeinated right now, still dosing up as I write this entry. All-nighters are a gamble with a brain disorder like mine: they have a tendency to trigger mania and psychosis.
But still, straddling this line is something I've done before. It's easy to let it consume me and take me through an effervescent journey through meatspace, but I'm hoping that after dealing with this beast for a number years that I can tame it better than when I was a slightly younger man. In the past, I've let it take me on insane journeys where interesting things happen. But despite these interesting happenings, I was ultimately rattled by paranoia and deeply disturbing delusions and ideas. It's something I hope to never endure again. It was also a major reason why I found my faith in Christ again. I've stared hell in the face and I don't want to look back.

For me, life has been a constant battle of control. When I wake up in the morning, it's always a gamble on how I feel. The day could be normal. The day could lead to something that triggers an episode. I have to keep my environment controlled, otherwise I risk letting it induce an episode. Unpredictability is poison for someone like me, but in a contradictory sort of way, I find solace in the unknown. I straddle between craving structure and getting taken away by the lulls of improvisation.
In jazz, they define improvisation as spontaneous composition. There's a beauty to that phrasing, something that can be applied not just towards music, but life in general. There's a certain je ne sais quoi to it, the idea that I can live life like it's a jazz solo. I think it's something that's allured many for quite some time, but I've had to learn the hard way that those moments where it feels like a jazz solo have to be self-contained—they have to exist just in that moment and let go. In a bittersweet way, the show must end.
But I don't let that make me sad or want for anything more. There's a certain perfection in a dull moment, something that doesn't ask or want for more. It just is, and that's what's perfect about it. In the same way that it's easy for me to dwell on chasing thrills, it's just as easy to forget the power of a quiet moment.

I used to hate quiet moments. They scared me because I was afraid of confronting the deepest parts of myself. I drowned them out with noise. I tried to anesthetize myself, dull my senses, whatever it would take to keep myself from stepping outside of the proverbial cave. But this thing, this essence, this...
It's like a fire. It mesmerizes just as much as it can burn. It feels like something 99% of sentient life has yet to experience. It's a smothering sort of thing, but in a way that slowly puts me in a deep and eternal sleep.
Death comes and sneaks closer to us every day. We have yet to see the insides of the flames.
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Controlling Time

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've gotten to a point now where I feel weird when I don't make a Cogito post for the day. It makes my life feel incomplete, which is strange considering the nature of this body of work. The ideas expressed here are meant to feel ephemeral, but there's still that very human feeling I have to 'keep score' or 'track my progress' or whatever else. I don't like that I feel that way about it, but here we are yet again, another day with another entry.
I've gotten some kind messages from people, but a common thread I've seen from them is that they often express compassion towards my suffering. On the one hand, it feels reassuring to see the compassion in others but simultaneously, it makes me feel very selfish to receive that compassion just because I am fancily complaining about things. To that end, I feel like it's more important now than ever to espouse a positive message. I might hate life and I might feel like there's not many redeemable qualities about it, but as someone who writes in public like this, there's a certain duty I feel towards people to not be some whiny piece of shit.

I seem to constantly have these meta-cognitive discussions with myself, wondering why I write these vignettes every day. I wonder what good they do for people and what they could possibly inspire. The history of this kind of medium is shrouded in ephemera because many of the old school 'blogs' of yesteryear were hosted on centralized platforms like LiveJournal and the like. Those centralized platforms, now dead, have taken with them the art of the diarist. It's a sad thing and through this hypertext of mine, I hope to bring some kind of new light to it. The main difference between me and some schmuck on Substack is that my writing is in my control—my site, coded by me; it dies when I say it dies, not if it fails to make a profit.
My life is so mundane, yet my inner world is constantly circling about and giving me all kinds of ideas and things to say. It makes me sad that I can't condense all of it into a single sentence and I yearn for the day when I might have enough tears to cry about it. Making art is a tough task because there's a desire to document and curate the lived experience into something for others to enjoy, yet there's a different desire for that lived experience to stay in my head and to have its moment and die as time ticks on. It's a weird sort of weight to carry, deciding what there is that has to be put on the page and what should live in its private domicile where it will inevitably die alone and go back into the ether of lost vibrations.
I don't want that kind of control, but it seems that this moment was not something that I curated.
It was something that came into the page all on its own.
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A Brief Moment

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My anxiety attacks have been getting worse and more frequent lately. I'm not sure why. My body is getting more and more exhausted from the constant heart racing and sweating and tension. After an attack, the level of exhaustion is unsustainable because the attack is such an intense experience that my nervous system doesn't have a good way to respond to it. All I've been thinking about over the last few days is how much I want to anesthetize myself. Going through all of this feels strange, especially given that there doesn't seem to be a clear impetus.
There's been a lot I've gone through. Minor inconveniences stack up into major turmoil. I'll take a single misstep or drop something—a small thing—and it'll escalate to the point where I'm pacing around my room for an hour trying to deal with the overload. It's an unbearable pain. When it gets really bad and I don't have any kind of immediate relief, I lay down in my bed and try to sleep it off. Sometimes that works, but many times I'll just get back up and get caught back in another nervous cycle.

Writing these entries has been harder recently because I don't want to be so negative, but I feel that it's important to show these kinds of things in this day-to-day sort of light. People want so much for life to be this simple thing, a simple background for the types of experiences they craft in their minds: an adventure in some exotic part of the world or a triumphant display of opulence and splendor. But they don't want to show the drudgery of the normal life. They don't want to show how everyday life is a far cry from anything remarkable. Most days it's more of the same, but even worse than that the mundanity is mostly seasoned with stress. Something has to get done, but it's hard. Maybe it doesn't get done. A horrible thing could happen and make the mundanity shift into danger. It's all so tiresome.
At this juncture, it seems that I'd rather complain and find a silver lining, but what if there just wasn't? The worst thing I deal with that people hate to admit the most is that all of this crying and bullshit is less than bad. It's nothing. There's no substance to any of this thing that we like to call 'experience.' The hardest truth is that suffering is simply just a distraction, a way for us to forget that there is nothing here. Life is a vapor. It's something we can go up and immerse ourselves in, let it surround us. But it evaporates, goes away, and doles out the harsh reality that it never really was even there.
So even in this vast and empty sea of mist, what is the reason why I feel so anxious? What is this harsh and malignant desire to live? Maybe I'll never see it here in this life of mine, but there's still an inkling that my words will let the sands of time sit still for just a brief moment. In that brief moment, I hope to find peace.
For a moment, I'm here. Maybe I'll call for help, but what if I let myself feel the tension instead?
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Getting Pissed at God

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It's Sunday afternoon and as the clouds drift in the sky and the weather cools down for the season, I can't help but still feel like every day is more of the same. My family who was visiting left for the airport a few hours ago, and I'm glad I got to see them despite letting my anxieties get the better of me for the most part. Every day I feel like the little bomb inside of me is ticking closer and closer to zero. I don't really have an outlet for it because every stimulus makes it tick faster and faster. Even when I work out or take care of myself, it still ticks on and on.
The lack of peace in my day-to-day life feels remarkably unfair. What's worse is that externally, things appear very peaceful. I think this is the case for many Americans, especially the ones lucky enough to be considered a part of the upper middle class. But the bits of anxiety that plague me minute by minute feel like little termites in my body that are slowly eating away at my insides until soon enough, there will only be a hollow shell—a semblance of a human being who once occupied it—until that too will eventually wither away.

I don't know exactly why I'm like this. There are aspects of my life that aren't peaceful. They're things that I'd rather not express publicly, but nonetheless still exist in their own way, still antagonizing me and acting as the impetus for a lot of this shit. I worry that this entry will read as if I'm doing some kind of fancy or performative whining, and that's more than likely what's going on here despite my splintered self-perceptions. But even then, I want to try and cultivate some kind of good thing out of these entries—something that resonates with my readers and that will help them through whatever anxieties or fears they have.
A thought I have that's lingered for a while: God tells us that it's okay to be angry at Him and to doubt His perfection and goodness. This doubt and anger isn't in opposition to faith, but instead acts as its seemingly paradoxical cornerstone. Why would God want us to be mad at Him? What good does that do for Him or anyone? God never gives us a straightforward answer, but I do know that it's best to not delude ourselves into thinking that we have the right perspective on it.
It's easy for us to think that we have the ultimate front seat to the ontological essence of the universe. But just because we have eyes doesn't mean that we can see. Experience isn't something that exists solely through the senses. The space in between our senses and the environment—that's where the true essence of being lives. It's something that we'll never be able to experience in its full granularity and detail, at least not in the confines of our skin.
No one on this planet who has ever lived aside from Christ has experienced the eternal. No one truly knows what infinity means, so how can we expect to understand what eternal life is at all? All we can do is sit in this bubble and flail around until something happens. Something will happen, right?
Be pissed at God. Maybe something will happen, maybe it won't.
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High Strung Long Days

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today's been a long day. I have some family visiting over the weekend and once they arrived in the afternoon, we spent some time hanging out, grabbing dinner, walking around, and eating ice cream. They've been up since very early in the day, so they decided to go to bed early at the hotel. Now that they're going to bed, I have some time to write a post for today. There's still some stuff swimming around in here.
It's an odd thing for me because externally, everything seems like it's okay. My environment is clean and welcoming. I get up in the morning and I make sure to do my routine to get the day started. My writing output has been productive. But despite all of these seemingly good things going on in my life, I still feel like my internal world is a constantly besieged place of turmoil. Every day is a constant battle despite my best efforts. It doesn't feel good to say that, especially considering all of the things I have to be grateful for. No matter what I do, I can't seem to let loose. I'm too high strung.

There's not really much I can do about it, I don't think. In a twisted way, I think it's okay that I'm a bit high strung. It seems to be a sort of protective layer, one that helps me deal with things. But I don't know, I feel so stressed out all the time despite the fact that I don't really have a lot going on. My stress is deeply ingrained in me, existential and tumultuous. I hate going out most of the time because of how much even little things stress me out. It's only gotten worse with age.
I'm tired from such a long day, so I'm going to cut things short today.
Maybe if I loosen up, I'll have a bit more fun.
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Chronicle's Chronicles

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last several years, I have come to dislike and distrust most film media. New or old, hot or trash, so much of it is garbage to me. My experience with this has come mostly as a trauma response from psychotic episodes. It's hard to enjoy a good film or show whenever you think that there are secret messages being implanted in your head from an ominous and indescribable third party.
Moreover, the kayfabe one needs to indulge in most film media doesn't exist for me anymore. I think this also has to do with the fact that years of social media indulgence have blurred the line between the real and the manufactured to the point that no moving picture on a screen can elicit my trust. It's a sad thing, particularly because watching a lot of film media induces a soft bubbling of anxiety in my body. With how much of our lives now being consumed by the black mirror, it's a tough thing to get away from. I've tried reducing it as much as I can, but ultimately I am not in a position to completely eliminate it at this time. As such, I have to grin and bear for the most part.

But then a movie popped on TV today while my mom was flipping through the channels: Chronicle. For those who aren't familiar, it is a found footage drama film released in 2012 about a group of high school boys who enter a mysterious cave and come out of it with super powers like telekinesis and flight. The movie follows these boys as they come to grips with their powers and the interpersonal struggles that follow. I told my mom to put it on, and she had never seen it, so of course I had to mouth on and on about how great the movie was. I was around the same age as the movie's main characters when I watched it, and so it struck a lot of emotional chords for me back then. When it came on today, I felt those same chords get struck again.
Thematically, the movie is deeply resonant for me given my struggles with bipolar disorder. When I get manic, it truly does feel like I have super powers and access to sights unseen by the average mortal. But like Icarus, I have flown too close to the sun and was struck down by those same illustrious powers. I relate deeply with all three characters of the movie. I've struggled with feeling alienated, popular, disillusioned, powerful, and out of control. Watching a bit of it and talking with my mom about it put a fire in me to write about it here today. It's so important for me to have these moments.
When I was younger, I was absolutely in love with storytelling. As a small child, I used to have my mom read me multiple stories before bed. I also would have her make them up on the spot. Then I'd make up mine. As I grew older, I voraciously read books and watched movies and always approached them with an sharp analytical eye; for me, it was all about dissecting a story into its most essential components. I wanted emotions to be my clay.

As an older child, I made several brickfilms</a> and was constantly animating, editing, writing scripts, curating soundtracks, and voice acting. Then I started playing the saxophone and left my directorial dreams behind for a new love, but my desire to tell and dissect stories never went away. I've been told that I have a gift for writing, but always let doubt and insecurity plague me. I thought that I couldn't have the inspiration to tell great stories because I wasn't blessed with inspiration. But then I heard a famous quip that put me into shape:

I write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes at nine every morning </blockquote>
That was when I realized that just as much as the inspiration to write is divine, it is cultivated through habits and tenacity. So with that, I hope to keep the light alive in every way I can.
God, please give me mercy. Let me be the salt and the light so that I can keep telling the story you put me on this earth to tell.
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Incoherent Grumbling

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like a pot of boiling water that has just a bit too much water in it. If I don't turn the heat down a bit, I'll start leaking out the pot and make the fire heating me blow up. But there is no turning down the heat, unless I go out into the wilderness and do absolutely nothing for exactly 62.8 hours. Maybe I should do that. The campsites are probably getting full with reservations now that the weather's starting to get nicer. From what I've heard, they charge an arm and a leg just for a little patch of concrete and a fire pit and no other amenities. Maybe they have bathrooms, I don't know. But even with a campsite, that's not really going out into the wilderness and doing nothing. I don't think that kind of thing exists where I live.
More than anything, I just want to be alone. When I was younger, I used to think that it was important to be surrounded by people. I had a lot of friends I'd see on a regular basis back in the pre-COVID days, but now I don't really see many people at all anymore. I think it's an odd stereotype for people in their twenties—that they're supposed to be wild and free and socializing a lot. For some reason, people think that we're supposed to do this before we "settle down", whatever that means. I don't want to live it up or settle down. All I want is peace and quiet and for shit to stop happening all the time. I don't consume news or social media, so that's not the kind of happening I'm talking about. I just mean life—every second of every day, the constant spinning of the proverbial tape.

It feels like such a divine punishment, being alive. I don't know what pleasures there are to take part in that don't feel guilty. Everything has an exorbitant price, monetarily and spiritually. Every day is a needless excuse for hedonism, yet we all seem too held back by shame to hold ourselves accountable for the evils we commit every day. Why is it that everything seems like it's hedonistic and wrong? We take all of our advancement for granted and think that it's always been this way and will always be this way now until the end of forever. It seems that we are constantly distracting ourselves with modernity so that we can forget that it'll all be taken away one day.
Every day lived is one day closer to death. I just hope mine isn't a painful one. I pray that it'll be the release I'm predicting it will be. I'll have to let my body deteriorate and give up, just as God intended. I hope that I don't become a very old man. The world doesn't need that, and I most certainly don't need that. People seem to do everything they can to prolong their inevitable deaths, but why? Do people really, like, enjoy life that much? Are they that afraid? Of what? I see all of these industries that do everything to convince people that their lives can be prolonged if they just add this one extra thing to their routines or eat this thing or don't drink that thing or whatever. It's all so stupid.
I'm going to run myself to the ground. I want all the mileage I can get.
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On Hyperliteracy

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent most of today sleeping. I feel as if I've been crashing and burning a bit, so I decided to sleep for most of today so that I could try and restore myself as much as I could. Yet the urge to keep the streak persisted and here I am, writing another entry. I'm happy to be here, though.
To those who reached out to me after yesterday's entry and cheered me up, I appreciate it very much. You are all loved immensely. I feel as if there's not enough love I can give and I lament the fact that I feel so selfish about it all. But today has been an okay day as I've let myself lull around in bed with my dreams and half-dreams. Rest still feels intangible—being locked inside my head is a torturous thing, but still I persist.

Still, I persist in coming here and checking my sensors and seeing what divine intervention may come in making these entries. Some days it feels prescient—like it's been there all along—but for many it feels like it's just me in here clacking away at my keyboard until something comes out. It's been an odd affair recently because I'll think of an interesting idea to write on and tell myself that when the time comes to write today's Cogito entry that I'll be able to rat off about the Thing On My Mind For That Day. But many times it doesn't come because I lose it in the tempest of my thoughts, so instead I resign myself to write something off the top of my head instead.
I think it's a good practice to do this kind of writing in this space and in this way. It's a form I've only seen a few others do, but for me this writing exists not as a form of documentation, but as one of ephemera. A few hundred words worth of thought for the reader to sample on in a few short minutes whatever time of day it is, but then it fades into the obscurity of the corpus as the reader looks forward to the next sample to indulge on. It's a cool way of doing things.

I think that the age of the book is dying despite the best efforts of publishers large and small. People still read books, of course. I still read them and many of my friends still read them, but I think of people younger than me and wonder how they'll be able to absorb the infinite hose of information that floods them. We talk incessantly about drifting attention spans and how kids these days can only consume information in small bits and pieces. Many of us adults see this as a weakness of the younger generation: "Oh, these kids can't read full books, they're illiterate!" No you silly academic reject, the kids aren't illiterate. They're hyperliterate.
Kids these days read more than any of us ever did in our youth. Even if it's subtitles in videos, they still read and write more than we ever could have back then. Sure, they might be sending swaths of messages on Discord or writing fan fictions, but as old people, it's not cool of us to stand there and yell at the clouds for drifting. The world is extremely different than it was even six or seven years ago, but I'm sick of people telling the same lies we tell every generation—that the kids are getting worse and that our glory days are fading.
To quote Louis Armstrong from What a Wonderful World:

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow </blockquote>

They'll learn much more than I'll ever know </blockquote>
The kids are gonna be alright.
We're all gonna be alright.
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Tech Stress

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

CW: Contains references to suicidal thoughts and self-harm
I had another meltdown today, my third one in about two weeks. This time it was caused by a technological kerfuffle: my sister (she has an intellectual disability and autism) shares an Apple account with my mom. This happened out of convenience and negligence to technological illiteracy. Anyways, my sister has been downloading AI image generator apps that, of course, have predatory in-app purchases and charge out the wazoo for image generation. My mom had her credit card information connected to her Apple account, so my sister started charging hundreds of dollars worth of in-app purchases on my mom's card. I had to take the information off of my mom's account and hide the credit card from my sister, but she found a hack. She found that if she factory reset her phone and used an iCloud backup, it would restore the credit card information on her device. Then she factory reset her device dozens of times. Then she erased my mom's iPhone data—all of it—and basically bricked her phone. This has brought me a metric ton of stress. We still have to go to the phone store and get her eSIM restored. I am beyond upset about it.

So after having my meltdown, I feel completely and utterly drained and exhausted. I don't want to do fucking anything today. I don't want to go to the phone store, or figure out all the other shit this incident started, or fucking anything at all. But here I am, still alive and still having to sit here with all of this shit swirling around in my head. This has been my third meltdown in two weeks and I have no idea what's going on with me. I feel so fucked up. Nothing I do takes all of this extra baggage off my head. I am so weighed down by the constant stress of it all. I don't know what to do about it. No matter how much I breathe, pray, work out, take care of myself, or whatever the fuck else I do to keep myself from cutting my throat open, it doesn't do fuck all to help me.
I am constantly, constantly, in a state of complete drainage and misery. Life sucks so bad. It really does. It is as if I am in a constant waking hell, every single day. I never want to get out of bed in the morning—I can't face the day. I can't face any day. I look forward to nothing. Everything feels like it's a black hole. Nothing is cool anymore. Nothing is good anymore. Life is nothing but a series of stressful thing after stressful thing and the only true reprieve would come from shooting myself in the fucking mouth.
I'm sorry if this causes stress to my readers. I really am. This diary is my only sense of reprieve from this. I write not because I want to, but because if I don't, I would actually be driven to suicide or murder. Unfortunately, that's not hyperbole. If I didn't have this space to just let it all out, I don't know what the hell I'd do. It just keeps coming out and out and out and I can't seem to make it stop.
When I write, I feel the pressure valve release just a little bit—just for a few minutes. It all is too much for me to take. I don't know why I can't handle this shit. I am truly the weakest of the weak. God is making me suffer for reasons that I can't understand. I want to just bash my brains out against the wall. It's beyond my control. It's beyond my sense of anything at all. I'm hurting too much.
There is no rest.
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More Radio Thoughts

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm starting off today's entry a little bit later than normal (for me, anyway) because I had some family come by and visit (hey to y'all if you're reading!) and before that was answering some messages. But here I am again, ready to write about all of the things that have been on my mind.
I thought that I was getting depressed again, but somehow it decided to not rear its head this time. Strangely enough, I rarely get those kinds of reprieves. It seems that my lifestyle changes have been helping to a certain degree, so that's good. I'm thankful that the systems I've cultivated are returning some kind of dividends. Maybe if things stay on this course, I can really begin to grow into the person God wants me to be. This'll take a bit more time to truly feel substantiated though, and historically I haven't been that lucky, but life can be funny in that way. All of this suffering I've been through can one day be channeled into something beautiful, but I have to be patient and let the proverbial iron heat up a bit more, I think.

A fun thing: I found another internet radio station, asahidenpa</a> and these guys are the exact vibe I want to cultivate. Also, their tech stack looks extremely reasonable and I will most likely take inspiration from that once my own radio station comes about. The main thing that I've been needing to do: I need to get a huge set list of songs before I start. The thing with it, though, is that I don't want to play typical music one has typically heard. I want the deepest of the deepest cuts, stuff that gets barely any traction of any kind.
There are two reasons for this. First, those artists deserve the recognition, full stop. Second, that kind of music wouldn't have any legal tape around it, so I wouldn't have to worry about paying any kind of royalty or anything like that. I feel that for my situation, this is in line with my ethos. My work here is under a Creative Commons license, so my hope is to spread that ethos with artists I may find when searching for music.
If you're a reader and have some music that you'd want on the radio, send me an email

Something that I've seen other internet radio stations do is they try to have tons of different DJs take on different time segments for different shows, but I think that I'd prefer to be a one-man show. The idea would be this: have a 24/7 auto DJ playing different songs from a massive playlist, put in different bumpers that I make every few songs, and during times when I find most appropriate, I can hop in and have shows of my own. I'd love to not only have the auto-DJ, but also live mixing and talk segments as well.
One of my friends showed me Redbar</a> and the idea of having streams last over multiple hours sounds like it would be fun, except I'd like to have them over my own radio station. I don't feel the most comfortable having video streams like how Redbar does it, but having an audio-only one with music and talking in between sounds like it would be super engaging and fun.
I have no idea where any of this would even go or even if it would go anywhere at all, but I'm not afraid to try.
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How Bad It Gets

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I started feeling depressed and felt that way this morning too. When I woke up, I didn't even want to take on the day and decided to fall back asleep. A few hours later I wake up again and I feel less horrible, but I still sense the depression creeping back into my body. I had some tense moments over the course of last night and this morning as well. In these tense moments, the only thing I want to do is hurt myself.
I'm afraid of what I'd do if I set out to hurt other people, always have been. So in those moments I set out to cause pain, I make myself the primary target. For a long time, the main outlet I had for these moments was cycling and doing drugs. If something horrible was happening in my life, I could go out late at night and ride as hard as I could to let out all the stress. I'd take LSD and ride my bike all day, looking for release through the uptake in serotonin and adrenaline.

But now, I am not as physically fit as I used to be. I let my bipolar take over. The meds made me gain weight and I'd still get depressed, so my fitness tanked over the course of a year. Since then, it's been an uphill battle getting back to a healthier state, but I know that I'm against the clock with my diabetes. I've recently been getting more bouts of nerve pain, and that's been scaring me.
Even though I've been making efforts to better my health, I believe that these efforts won't amount to a whole lot because of just how much is on my plate. The bipolar has made me turn to drugs for a lot of things and the benders I've been on have made things worse. I'll die in my fifties most likely due to the horrible combination of preexisting conditions and poor choices I've made.
When I get depressed, I always pray for God to have mercy on me and kill me. I pray for this because the pain is often so hard to carry. Nothing ever matters when I get depressed. All I want is to die so that I can stop experiencing this torture my brain puts me through. Ambition gets thrown out the window; there's no point in wanting for more because of how much pain I'm in. There's no reward or good fortune that can reverse this feeling—it's all internal. It makes life so hard to live when I feel like this. The barrier between me and God is like an iron door. It's hard to think that He can hear me. I don't feel His love, or anyone else's for that matter.

I think about how my death wouldn't really change the world that much. And that's not an egocentric thing—it doesn't matter how famous or how much impact one has on the world because once we die, all of that quantity reduces to zero. For the famous ones, it fades out a lot slower, but even they will be forgotten.
I know that if I were to die today, most of the people in my life would be able to get over it and forget about me. That's not because they didn't care about me, but because that's what they would have to do. And for me, my impact isn't all that great. I'm just a little guy who runs around in circles all day.
God is making me feel this way for reasons I can't fully explain. One thing I've said to make myself feel better: you can't know how good it'll be until you understand how bad it can get.
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Scarcity and Greed

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This morning I find myself thinking yet again about the illusion of scarcity. It's difficult to dispel to others what exactly this means. How is scarcity an illusion? Isn't it clear that there's not enough to go around? Many see scarcity as reality due to historical and personal factors. Whether it's the fact that humanity has gone through many bouts of pestilence and famine or the constant reminder that there are only two dozen hours in a day, we have a strong notion to treat every aspect of life as though it were in limited supply. This notion breeds selfishness, greed, and pride.
But the truth is that there's always been enough to go around; we've lacked only the faith to accept it. Now, it's easy to conflate that declaration with new-age-eastern-adjacent-law-of-attraction-but-still-secular thinking, but this knowledge runs deeper than rudimentary manifestation and solipsism. There are forces at play that want us to forget the abundance that surrounds every aspect of our lives. These forces aim to distort our thinking and force the false belief of scarcity so that we see generosity as weakness and greed as strength.

Now, our current pro-rationalist dialectic paradigm would expect me to carry the burden of bringing in some kind of empirical basis for these assertions, but there really is no need for me to do that. I have the dogma of the church to back me up.
People have grown fearful of dogma, and this is for a good reason: we've seen the rise of authoritarianism in our globalized society and moreover, we've seen how these incumbent regimes misuse their influence to promote the selfishness, greed, and pride that I am trying to admonish. Another truth: people are far more accepting of dogma than they'd wish to admit. Herd mentality exists for a reason; people like being told what to do. Uncertainty establishes the inability to ascertain any kind of future.
This reality is the root of anxiety. Because of this anxiety, people find themselves turning to dogma. This dogma can be found in religious and secular institutions alike. The unfortunate reality I see, however, is that people would rather worship the Federal Reserve than the Lord their God. And here's the kicker: the Fed warns of scarcity and liquidity, but Christ tells us that there will always be a cup to drink from.
I'll leave you with this: don't let the myopia of humanity's institutions keep you from indulging in God's generous gifts. There's more for you in store than we could ever dream of.
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Building Immaterial Wealth

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

this is a rewrite of a piece originally posted on my Substack on January 15th, 2025.
The Lie of Wealth</h2>
It's good to have material things. The more we have, the happier we are—or so the narrative goes. New technologies generate diminishing returns when seeking fulfillment through acquiring more things. The world, materially speaking, is the most prosperous it has ever been. Despite this supposed prosperity, people still yearn for more. This signals that true wealth, despite what we’ve been told en masse from media outlets and influencers alike, comes not from the material aspects of the world, but the immaterial ones.
The true measure of one’s wealth is not their means to access the material, but the immaterial. People rarely discuss this because immaterial things resist measurement; what can’t be measured can’t be compared. But this difference is why it is more important to gauge one’s true sense of wealth with the immaterial. With immaterial things, there is no scarcity. There is always enough to go around and because of this, people are less concerned with what they have to offer. Most people would rather spend their time chasing possessions.
The world we live in is conditioned towards material thinking. People guard their possessions and make sure that they’re protected. We are also always thinking of ways to create more material so that there’s more to go around, but prevailing power structures manufacture a shortage. There’s more than enough food for us to eat, yet people go hungry. There’s more than enough homes for people to live in, yet people sleep on the streets. The lie that we’ve been told is that if we simply work to gather enough material wealth, these problems will go away. But this is simply not true.

Defining Immaterial Wealth</h2>
Immaterial wealth is the value in what can't be touched. It is the relationships and affiliations we build our lives on. Someone with it has strong values and a full support system. This person is someone who is the opposite of isolated; they are surrounded by a series of interactions and ideas that work together to create value. What this person often finds as a result of their works is that materially, they do not want for more. They are satisfied with whatever material conditions may exist, no matter how grand or meager they may be.
Today, our economic conditions put many people into materially precarious situations. Many people are struggling to make ends meet financially, often accruing massive amounts of debt just to stay afloat or even worse, becoming displaced and going hungry. This material poverty also deepens immaterial poverty. People feel more isolated than ever before, and many of the social institutions that help people build immaterial wealth (churches, schools, community centers) have become ideologically dysregulated and have seen either a lack in participation or a mass exodus altogether.
When people in positions of power (big corporations, governments) offer solutions to these problems, their solutions often lie in the material. These solutions are often pitched in the form of products for people to consume. The pitch is that it just takes one more purchase for all of it to make sense, for everything to come together just the way it’s supposed to. Unfortunately, this line of consumerist thinking has created a set of consequences that are slowly decomposing our morale and psyches year after year.
Despite these obstacles, we still have the opportunity to create immaterial wealth.
How to Create Immaterial Wealth</h2>
Building immaterial wealth boils down to two practices:
Deny the self
Help others
Immaterial wealth is built through the establishment and development of strong and cohesive social relationships. These relationships give the individual access to a network that complements their own abilities. Denying the self and helping others is what creates community.

Denying the Self</h4>
Denying the self is an odd practice, especially given the Western hegemony of ego-centrism and individualism. It is something that doesn’t get a lot of attention and as such, most people either don’t know or aren’t comfortable with the idea. However, the practice of denying the self is something that has been around for a very long time. It leads to more favorable outcomes not just for the society, but the individual as well.
Denying the self as an action is relatively simple. It is a refusal to act by means of desire. It’s not about whether or not you deserve the thing, but rather the act of saying “no” in and of itself. Denying the self deflates the ego and soothes the rift between the ego and the spirit. One can do things that constantly feed the ego, such as fulfilling desires of the self, but the spirit will still hunger because it can’t feed on the ego.
But what exactly feeds the spirit?
Helping Others</h4>
These days, people are so caught up with themselves that they often can't see the forest for the trees. The world is so much bigger than what’s between the ears. It is up to us to see it and nurture it so that it can grow into something that can feed the spirit. Instead of being selfish, that energy can be invested into helping others. It doesn’t have to be anything beyond one’s own means. Any act of service, no matter how small, makes a significant impact on the world. This is because one act of service isn’t isolated in itself. It snowballs into other acts of service.
The best part about helping others is that it always comes back to those that help. This is the food that feeds the spirit. Think of it like this: what tastes better, a meal that you cooked for yourself, or a meal that someone else cooks for you? The meal cooked for others always tastes better because acts of service are what truly nourish the spirit—when the spirit is fed, we are truly satisfied.
Immaterial wealth is a community of people who serve you because you serve them. The bigger the community, the wealthier you are.
Deny the Ego, Feed the Spirit</h2>
It’s clear that immaterial poverty is a crucial problem. We forget how to nourish our spirits because our egos consume them. Every day, ask yourself this question: how can I help someone? Then once you find an answer, do it. One small act of selflessness—each and every day—builds the foundation for a lifetime of immaterial wealth.
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Alone Yet Together

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I woke up late today after a long night, so getting into the groove of my day has been rather slow. But here I am, writing to my ephemeral audience yet again. I've appreciated the messages I've been getting on my guestbook and I hope that more readers will send me kind messages. It's been a good feeling. I've still been enthralled with live mixing and have been listening to basically everything from the hot DJ guys right now like Yousuke Yukimatsu and Fred Again.
Seriously y'all, my internet radio dreams</a> will come true. I need to get the fuck off my ass and start making it happen, though. I seriously don't do a lot during the day, so it really is just a matter of getting over my horrendous sloth and task inertia. There's also some stylistic decisions I'm unsure of and I still want to put some thought into it, but at the same time I'm anxious to just get it started and put something out there. Build it and they will come or something like that, right?

I sit here writing and still constantly wrestle with the uncertainty surrounding life. Whether it be my own trajectory or the proverbial house of cards we've built, all of it still makes my heart flutter. It's so hard to think about what all of this will culminate to. It's hard to think that there's anything worthwhile about writing my thoughts on the internet. Whether it be for posterity or notoriety or respect or whatever, it still feels strange that I decided to take on this project in lieu of searching for jobs and the like. I've been thankful to be doing well over the last month or so, but I still deal with the fear of not knowing how I'm going to feel when I wake up in the morning—the lack of stability is still horribly prescient for me.
More than a lack of stability, there's an immense lack of focus in my life. Well, the middle part of my twenties has been stamped with that at least. But the thing is that for me, writing is the thing I want to do. For me, it seems that I can't align myself with the world no matter how much I want it or how hard I try, so the instability of being a writer seems like an ironic best choice. Sometimes I think that I have a good shot at it, especially when I feel like the iron's hot and I can pound out some real state-of-the-art prose. Even on days where it doesn't feel like it makes the most sense to have this blog, I still enjoy the fact that I have it.
More than virility or anything that compels people to give me a lot of money, I just want the presence and freedom. I wonder every day why I'm in such an auspicious position to write. Many days, it feels like I absolutely don't deserve it—and I don't. But God lets me have this time anyways. For whatever reason, He found it in His perfect plan to let me write in this space for whoever wishes to read it. There's an immense feeling of pride I feel in that honor, so there's no reason to lament opportunity costs here.
If you're reading this, thank you.
I want you to know that whatever is going on, we'll get through it together, no matter how lonely we may feel.
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DJs and Musical Forays

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've recently been listening to a bunch of really awesome DJ sets. I listened to that new Skrillex album and not a single track misses. For my workouts, I find that I can put on a new DJ set and listen to it the whole way through while on the treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike. It takes me to a whole different world. These DJ sets in conjunction with the Internet radio aspirations really have my gears turning. As a saxophone player, I think it would be the greatest thing ever if I could learn how to be a DJ and instead of having a keyboard like most DJs, I have an EWI instead. That shit would be insane. I haven't seen many musicians incorporate EWI into their repertoire. The only one I saw who really did it at the highest level was Michael Brecker and that was decades ago. If there were a DJ who could play EWI, that would be peak music, full stop.
These sets I've been listening to have filled a huge pool of emotion and inspiration for me. The command that these DJs have over a room is as intoxicating as it is enticing. It's a space I would love to take if I worked towards it. All I'd need is an EWI and a laptop—everything else would fall right into place. I haven't been able to attend many live EDM shows because they have a lot of flashing lights and those give me seizures, but seeing sets like Fred Again on the rooftops gives me confidence that there's so much more to that world than I know.

While I'd love to jump head first into something like that, I still have other things on my plate. I want to write as much as I can. I want to work out as much as I can. It truly does feel like there's not enough time in the day for all of the things I'd like to do. At the same time, though, I know that I spend too much time reading blogs and books and all that, so maybe if I switched my focus over from that to music aspirations, I wouldn't feel as crunched for time. Man, the writer/musician combo truly is the hardest one of all time. I want to let my art shine so badly. It seems that given the course of events in my life, the path of the artist is the only one that has illuminated for me. Everything else feels like too much of a struggle; anything else would most likely end in an early death for me.
Writer.
I am a writer.
But I better write fast, 'cause my paper's on fire.
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Deep Pockets and Shallow Hearts

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I come before you again, asking not for alms or recognition, but presence and grace. It's been a good time so far, but today I feel rather tired and somewhat, uh, loopy I would say. Something that's been pissing me off: I type on my laptop and while I'm typing, part of my hand will accidentally make contact with the track pad and stop me in the middle of writing something down because it accidentally makes the cursor click on something. It's insane. I have a separate keyboard I probably should use and I do like typing on it, but my desk is rather small, so it would be a bit difficult to fit. I might have just enough room for it, but I also hate having too many peripherals. I like the uniformity of the laptop because everything one would need for basic computing is all in one place.
My energy is dipped and all I want to do is sleep, but my body wouldn't allow that during the day so now I am consigned to just drinking a bunch of caffeine and thugging that shit out, my body be damned. At this point I've come to be absolutely resigned to it. I am sick of letting fatigue get in the way and I am going to do what I have to do regardless of where I'm at. People push through much harder obstacles every day, so I have to stop being such a wimp and push through my problems.
I think of how people in the past contended with their problems and find a sense of solidarity.

People were enthralled with the 'Protestant work ethic' of the Great Reformation. There was a certain level of pride in pushing one's self to their breaking point to get that work in so they could please God and make themselves humble before Him and feel worthy to see His mercy. In today's culture, we've lost that sense of humility. We've replaced it with menial self-worship and entitlement. People here in America still work hard. Work culture here is quite maximal, but the trade-off has been to sustain that hard work with decadent rewards because we feel entitled to them. I personally prefer the older Protestant notion that even if one works hard, they still aren't entitled to shit.
We like to forget that there are so many gifts that God gives us every day. The world makes it so easy to shape these gifts as entitlements, as though we deserve them regardless of what we do. People tell themselves that they have a 'right' to do or think a certain way and that these 'rights' are universal. We have forgotten that everything in life—even down to its smallest moments—is a privilege and a gift. We don't have to wake up in the morning, we get to.
The greatest lie told by civilization is the one of scarcity. We have been told that there's never enough to go around and so that's why we have to ration our lives and put price tags on every conceivable thing. It's been told ad nauseam that the world runs on scarcity, that there's not enough land or water or food or even time. But the truth is that there's more of it than we could ever dream of. We have become blinded by our selfishness and greed.
One day, we'll realize just how deep our pockets run. Until then, we'll just have to contend with our shallow hearts.
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Work and Life in Total Depravity

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last night was a weird one. I was having a hard time falling asleep as usual, so I decided to take a little cocktail of prescription medications that have historically calmed me down in the past. The cocktail worked after two hours of failed sleep. And of course, it was another night of fractured and liminal sleep. It's always difficult oscillating between dream-space and reality so often. To me, it feels like it's all the same place now—classic derealization.
But here I am, writing another entry yet again. I've gotten into an established rhythm with posting entries here. The workflow feels solid and I think I'm finally over that hurdle of performance versus personal expression. To me, this space is more confessional than it is sentimental. I grapple with my feelings so that there's always something to get off my chest, but still attempt to glean some sort of value from it. Every entry here is like a mini essay, but under the guise of personal confession.

So what would today's thesis be? Perhaps the best thesis I can think of is this: I want to be good, but have come to accept the true nature of total depravity. To me, humans are evil but still capable of doing good things. People love to obfuscate truth and justice for personal gain and will do whatever mental contortions they must in order to soundly sleep at night. Many people who do so will often feel good about their lives, blissfully unaware of the horrible and torturous realities that lie beneath their glass houses.
In these sleepless nights, these justifications tend to ring even louder.
I watched a piece of a Jeff Bezos interview yesterday just to get mad. Bezos likes to insulate himself with believing that his work produces some kind of harmony. He'll say that he disagrees with the notion of 'work/life balance' because he believes that if one thrives at the office, they'll do so at home and vice versa. He believes that these things feed on each other. But here's the thing: tell that to anyone who works in customer service and they'll laugh at your face. Tell that to someone who works for pennies on the dollar and breaks their back to build the things that keep the world spinning. It's easy to be a bourgeois person, possessed by assets, and say that work and personal life are complementary. The system is built for them, so of course they would promote that kind of insidious ideology.
I've seen what it's like for proletariat people after living as one for a few years. I've seen what it takes to keep going in spite of a political and economic system that doesn't give a shit about you and only sees you as a number on a balance sheet. My coworkers and I used to destroy our bodies at work—breaking bones and risking our lives—for fucking peanuts. The petit bourgeois will use the services provided by the proletariat and spit at their faces while they do so. I remember working in customer service with those types who would try to abuse me and my coworkers; it was commonplace to keep our heads down and take it for risk of getting fired. I grew resentful of this and got into many altercations with customers.
Resentments are something that fuel the evil in me, but I know that despite my black heart, I still have the opportunity to do something good. If total depravity is the rule, then I'll live in the exceptions.
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Pseudonymity is Cowardice

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've recently been enthralled by the growing trend of pseudonymous writers. These pseudonymous writers give lofty justifications for their pseudonymity, such as the fact that they have the 'freedom' to say what's truly on their mind or that it's increasingly good OPSEC due to 'bad actors' out in the world. Many of these pseudonymous writers I look up to, like ARX-Han or Gwern, but I also feel that there is a level of cowardice in pseudonymity. These guys act on it like it's the 'smart play' or whatever, but to me, I believe that if you feel too afraid to say what you truly believe due to some level of unintended consequences, then maybe you shouldn't be saying it at all.
Now, this is easy for me to say because I haven't (yet) experienced any negative outcomes from a lack of pseudonymity. No one has sent me a death threat or cyber-attacked me or whatever, mostly just because I am still an obscure figure—no one really gives a shit about what I say anyways. I could be shouting slurs or horrible hot takes on these posts, and I'd still probably not really get any negative kind of outcome from it because, well, no one really gives a shit about me. But also, I don't really care about anyone else either, at least not in some extremely emotional sense. I absolutely loathe 'discourse' and I believe that most people are wrong about most things, whether it's a Xitter thread or a NYT best-selling piece of nonfiction. It's all retarded to me. But no, I'm not implying that I'm any kind of intellectual either.

It's quite clear that my writing here is amateur at best, but I don't care. No one except academics reads true scholarly work, so having it bleed into the culture is practically impossible. It's clear that academia is a recursive circle-jerk machine funded by the marketing surrounding the undergraduate 'experience' that many young upper-class people get caught into. It is unfortunately the key to the gate that is access to the petit bourgeouis, the professional managerial class. They get to use gay spyware on their stupid little work laptops and become little Slack/email divas who incessantly harp on minutiae because they can't cope with the fact that their jobs are not only fake, but perpetuate harmful ideas about the meaning of work and productivity itself. It's more than a cope. It's more than a lack of perspective. Learning Excel macros does nothing for anyone, seriously. Oh, Excel has had Python integration for like three years now? THEY WON'T USE IT ANYWAY!
So look, being a pseudonymous writer is the same thing as being a coward to me. Even though I haven't experienced any real negative outcomes from a lack of it (YET), I still don't care what anyone would do because I can always just, I don't know, turn my computer off? Even then, I still would keep saying what I want to say because even though people would eventually come to hate me, I'd still want to try my best to endure the weight of the unadulterated and pure Truth.
It doesn't matter who is listening. I have the comfort of knowing that I will always be truly alone.
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The Growing Ball

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today has been a tiring day. The reason? It was a lack of caffeine all day. I took a long nap and had another one of my strange lucid dreams. I remember being in a neighborhood at night. There was some kind of chasing thing going on. My dream characters seem to have gotten used to the fact that I am a hyper-aware mega lucid dreamer because I remember that while I was chasing them, they seemed to have a fun time getting chased. I remember there was a group of women that I sneaked up on and I wrapped my arms around her from behind to, I guess, kidnap her? I don't really know the exact reason for the chasing, but once my arms were wrapped around her, she began to laugh and said that she was "having so much fun now."
I wasn't feeling a lot of energy throughout today to write something and I almost convinced myself that I wasn't going to write anything today, but the itch kept itching at me all day until eventually I am now caving in and writing my thoughts down. But now that I'm here, I feel somewhat reticent to share exactly what was on my mind today.

For me, there's been a lot of feelings of vitriol lately. I feel an immense blackness in my heart, but it's odd because I haven't been depressed. I see so much of what goes on around me, mostly through screens, of all the things that apparently are happening in the world. All the communication, discourse, opinions, and whatever else strike me like dissonant chords in a horrendous symphony of evil and displeasure. It's all too much to take a lot of the time. I find myself constantly anxious at the happenings of the world, as if the house of cards is going to crash down any second now.
I've gotten over any sort of egotistical attachment to it. This anxiety I feel projects itself onto everything my senses intake, but it feels less like fear and more like an intensely radiating ball of pure unsubstantiated unabashed feeling that bolsters itself further and further out of my body and all I want to do is scream and cry about it. But here I am instead, writing it down for the hopes that someone else out there understands what I'm feeling too and perhaps can find some kind of relief in seeing something in their own head get expressed by someone else outside of it.
Going to the gym has been a good way to get all of this out, but I'm still at a point where my level of fitness doesn't correspond with the sensations in my body. I'd love to just go all out and sprint really hard or punch something repeatedly or life something really heavy, but my body is still in a place where it's feeble and prone to injury. The last thing I'd want to do is injure myself and deprive myself of the luxury of jacking up my heart rate and letting some of this shit go. Unfortunately, though, it seems that this ball of feeling only gets larger and larger by the day and no matter how much I thrash and cry and bite myself and hit myself, it does nothing to stop this constant all-consuming force of being.
It's not a fun life, but it's mine. One day the pressure valve will release itself, somehow anyway.
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High on The Gaze

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is FRIDAY morning as of writing this post. I've got KNON Now</a> playing as the background music for today, and after having one of those Reign energy drinks, I'm feeling good and ready to shoot some shit off the top of the proverbial dome.
You know where the best place to get dope is? At an NA meeting. Seriously, the last person a dope fiend needs to hang out with is another dope fiend. Thankfully, most people aren't dope fiends in that kind of connotation, so a dope fiend can reasonably not hang out with other dope fiends if they so choose. But here's something I find interesting: everyone has that inner dope fiend in them. Everyone is fiending for something at some time; at the core of it, I think that the main drug people vie for is attention, or even more bluntly, the urge to be seen.
I recently read up a little bit more on The Gaze. Apparently there's this phenomenon where people feel that they are being gazed upon as some kind of obscure Other or object instead of the complex and vivid person they see themselves as, and well, that makes them mad. There was some prominent feminist writer who talked about the Male Gaze and how women seem to universally feel a sense of objectification when men do a double take at them or something. I can't really speak on that because I am a man and have no perceptions of any kind regarding the female experience, but I do find myself doing double takes when I see an attractive woman. Does this make me a bad person? Well, that doesn't make me a bad person; the fact that I'm a bad person makes me a bad person.

Even I, a man at the bottom of the patriarchy, have a desire to be seen. It's funny though because bottom-tier dudes get the least amount of the desired drug that is attention. For men at this tier, we are constantly told that we are only worthy of love depending on our value to society. If we are uniquely capable of deep commerce or statecraft or talented at a specific and necessary thing, we are deserving of attention, desire, and affection. But if we're just replaceable cogs in the machine? Then it truly doesn't matter whether or not we live or die—some other undesirable will take our place.
For me, I feel an ever-growing resentment at that. I refuse to play that game, though, and even if the world wants to spit at my face and make me feel no better than the dirt off of someone's boot, then so be it. I have no desire for status anyway. Well, at least status in the traditionally 'masculine' sense. Power, yes, that's what I'm looking for. I have no desire for power. For me, I have no desire for it because worldly power breeds woeful ignorance of powers that are greater than any man could ever willfully possess. Instead of tapping into shitty worldly power by being concerned with money and owning property and all that other stuff, I want to tap into the greater power that exists deep in the recesses of what's beyond anyone's sight.
I want to feel the power of the Most High course through my veins. In this power, I will find something greater than any drug we can willingly conceive of.
Call it peace, call it grace; here in my corporeal tomb, I will find what I'm looking for, no matter how long it takes.
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Consulting is a Fake Job

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had a super late night last night and slept in until about 1 PM today. I was at trivia with a few friends. We go to this same bar every Wednesday because my friend is old pals with the MC. My friend who set it up for all of us has it set as his main ritual and shows up every Wednesday, almost monastically. His entire network of friends and acquaintances have the opportunity to show up to trivia because he holds it down as the singular constant. It's quite nice of him to do it. But anyways, we played trivia and I had some liquor and beer and ate a burger and almost an entire pizza. After trivia I got into some other shenanigans and didn't get home until about 4:30 in the morning, hence why I woke up so late today. My body is tired, a little hungover, and aching from last night's joyous punishments.
Today has, of course, been a very slow day. I just got out of a relaxing bath, which helped with the aches and pains immensely. I feel like a new man.

A thought that occurred to me while in the bath: I hate 'consultants.' It seems that becoming a consultant is this highly sought-after position. It makes sense because all you get to do is tell other people what to do and take no responsibility for their actions—the perfect non-job. I've heard of what it's like to be a consultant for a big consulting company. They travel a lot, have long hours, build, uh, 'pitch decks' or whatever the fuck they're called. It's a lot of presenting, showboating, and making appearances. I've also heard of what it's like to be an 'independent' consultant. Whether it's the 'fractional CMOs' on LinkedIn or famous bloggers who somehow convinced executives from big gay companies to have 'sparring sessions' with them for hundreds of dollars an hour—it all feels so overwhelmingly fake, dishonest, stupid, and harmful.
It's odd because there are some famous bloggers who I somewhat look up to like Gwern or the ribbonfarm guy because they took the great craft of writing and figured out how to make a living from it in the great Silicon Age. Well, aside from their luck hitting it big as early Bitcoin investors, they were able to show that their writing could bring in big audiences and incite lively discussions through original ideas and opinions.
For me, though, it's a bit of a cautionary tale. I see those guys and on the one hand, I look up to them, but also I see that they built their careers on being professional 'smart guys', people who, like I said, promote work that is fake, dishonest, stupid, and harmful. I would never ever in a thousand million years have some stupid rich person pay me so that I could debate them or whatever. That sounds so extremely ludicrous to me. I'd rather be some kind of sage homeless person who makes no money with their thoughts than some kind of Idea Dragon sitting on a pile of ideas only willing to share them with the highest bidder.
It saddens me that these smart people are so willing to compromise themselves in that kind of way. I hate that kind of weird 'consulting' like I hate podcasts. Why the fuck do people think it's so cool to monetize regular conversations? I would never pay to hear a bunch of jerk-offs just shooting the shit. If I wanted to have a good conversation, I would just call a friend and have it for free. It is an insane world we live in, truly.
I don't write for rich people. I write for people, baby.
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Mass Culture Dialectics

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After sleeping in this morning, my day has been rather slow. I decided to skip the gym today and just chill with some radio, a cup of coffee, some cinnamon toast, and vibes. I slept in because I had some edibles last night and they were very nice, but I always get super groggy the next morning after taking them. Still though, the extra sleep is nice and will help me more than hurt me, so I'll take it.
I was having a conversation with some friends earlier this morning about mass culture. This was the dialectic: my friend's thesis was that mass culture is something that the general populace has scaled into effect, and that any disappointments we have about mass culture is the fault of the modal consumer. I had the antithesis, which was that mass culture is something that is manufactured and that the modal consumer exists as a product of the same six or so companies that promulgate most of the media we consume. Of course, it's easy for most to see me as the tin-foiled nut when issuing takes such as that, but it's just how I see things, I guess.

Nonetheless, it was a good back and forth with my friend, and I value having people in my life whom I can have those lively discussions with. But I still feel kind of like a crazy person, well, at least in the sense that perceptions that feel second nature to me can be seen as ludicrous and insane ramblings. I think that there's something to be said about that, though—the notion that people are so unconsciously open to suggestion, yet aren't aware of this dynamic.
With the sharp increase in media consumption this period in time, it makes sense that there is also more propaganda than ever. But the connotations of the word 'propaganda' always fester some kind of conversation about political economy or whatever. Here's the thing: propaganda really isn't just a political thing, but can be used to perpetuate any kind of agenda. Most writing today is persuasive writing. The agenda being promulgated isn't usually inherently political—the agenda more often than not is something as simple as buying a new consumer gizmo or to go check out that new coffee shop across the street. But the fact of the matter is still that the volume of propaganda is many orders of magnitude more than in any other period of history.
See, we celebrate things like increased global literacy, but the people who helped make the world so literate only want us to be literate enough to consume more commercials. If we get any more literate than that, the people in power would have a much harder time keeping their power. Apathy is something that people in power treasure; apathy is the ultimate precursor to obedience.
I think I need to go read Dostoevsky and cry or something.
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(not) Relaxing in the Sauna

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I got thrown off a bit this morning after having a good conversation with an acquaintance/reader (hey salty), but after having the conversation and going to the gym, I feel like I had a bunch of things I was thinking about, but need to get into my rhythm of curating those thoughts in my head and having them enter my stream of consciousness as I write.
I constantly find myself disappointed in American people these days, particularly those here in my small conservative-leaning suburb (don't worry, I'm not going to harp on conservatives). When I go to the gym, I do my workout and after the workout, I treat myself to the spa area which has a hot tub, sauna, and cold shower. The amenities are excellent for the price (around $30 per month), but this cheap price also brings a large number of people. I've been a regular at the gym for months now and I see new faces literally every time I go. There must be thousands of people paying for memberships. Now, crowding wouldn't be an excessive problem if people actually knew how the fuck to behave themselves.

Like I was saying, I like to enjoy the spa area after my workouts. But here's the thing: most people at this gym are grossly unaware of the fact that it is a place to relax. I go into the sauna and people are in there with their workout clothes and many of them are listening to music or on their phones. Some of them are stupid enough to treat the sauna as a nice little additional 'challenge' to their workout and do calisthenics IN THE FUCKING SAUNA and they take up the whole room doing it and ruining the vibe for everyone. I go into the sauna as a futile attempt to relax, but am constantly finding myself irritated at the distractions fueled by needless American entitlement.
So yeah, I try to relax after my workouts, but American culture shouts at my face and tells me that there's never a moment to relax because there's always time to grind. It pisses me the fuck off. People here are so concerned nowadays with optimization and making every facet of life into some kind of demonstration or competition. I seriously wish that it weren't like this here, but for better or worse it's home and all I know.
It's currently the afternoon as of writing this post, and the afternoons always put me in an anxious slump for some reason. Afternoons are a slump time for almost everyone, but for me I also get an added dose of anxiety. Lovely. But I can take the edge off with a prescription hydroxizyne if needed. I also get tired in the afternoons too. Anxiety and exhaustion are a horrible combo, truly. But coffee can fix that, at least.
Still though, today is another day and if I'm lucky, I'll get to have another one tomorrow.
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Advertising Irony and Internet Radio

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few things that have happened: first, I decided to buy some ad space on 4chan's /lit/, /mu/, and /g/ boards so if you're coming from there, then hello. I've seen a few other people market their work through 4chan advertisements. I don't think it's an extremely good place to advertise considering that most people on 4chan are most likely privy to ad blockers, but according to Danbo (the advertising platform) I'm getting thousands of impressions. Despite the absolutely abysmal click-through-rate (0.01%), it still feels nice to put your name out there and feel recognized. Advertisements are something that necessitate an unfortunate reality—without marketing there would be no economy; and with no economy, there would be no world. Sad, truly.
I feel an immense irony with buying an ad because I use ad blockers myself, yet am promulgating the same system that makes me want to use ad blockers. I will say this though: 4chan's ad placements are very unobtrusive and don't put a ton of bloat on the site. They use a CDN for their ads, unfortunately, but other than that the ads are alright. I also actually enjoy a lot of the content people promote with the ads. The guy who wrote Mixtape Hyperborea</a> is really cool. I bought his book and truly enjoyed reading it very much. Also Asher Dakota</a> is great—I used to watch his Cumtown Animated</a> clips back in the day and am glad to see him getting in his bag with video production and book-writing.
But yeah, 4chan ads are an interesting space. Since I bought ad space for the less popular boards (God forbid I advertise on /b/, /pol/, or /r9k/), my cash should stretch out pretty well. We'll see how it goes, anyway.

Another thing that's been in my head lately is the desire to start an internet radio station. I started one last year with some Discord friends and it was actually a really cool project, but it petered out in a very unsatisfactory way. I want to revive it because I am a huge fan of internet radio. I endlessly listen to Soma FM</a> and Bad Radio</a> and am a huge fan of internet radio myself. It feels so much better than listening to Spotify or YouTube Music playlists. I used to be super into YouTube streams like Lofi Girl and stuff, but YouTube sucks so bad now that I essentially refuse to use the platform. I used to watch hours of videos a day from YouTube, but now I watch barely anything at all. I need to get more into PeerTube because that's way better, but unfortunately good content is sparse because of YouTube's monopolistic reach. We'll see, maybe one day video sharing will become truly federated. Until then, I'll just have to contend with pirating books and listening to internet radio.
One day, friends, we will have true federation and freedom with our digital socialization. I mean, those underwater sea cables have to serve some kind of purpose, right?
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This Diet is Killing Me

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was over at a friend's house last night. He was having a kickback and I had a good time. The booze of choice was the great Dominican Brugal, a wonderfully spiced rum. Rum has always been my favorite liquor because unlike other liquors that are distilled from disgusting grains, rum is distilled with sugar cane, which makes it actually delicious. As a type II diabetic, a lot of sugar is really bad for me, yes, but I want to keep the sweetness in my life because there are very few things in life that I actually enjoy. Sweets are one of those things.
I've been trying to get more healthy over the last several months and it's been working out okay. I quit smoking (three month mark coming up tomorrow), have been making much needed progress in the gym, and taking supplements that should help with my diabetes (citrulline, multivitamin, etc.). But there's still the main beast that I have yet to fight: my diet. See, as a fat and disgusting American, my palate is extremely desensitized; high levels of sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats take up most of what I eat. The thing with that, though, is that this type of diet is utterly systemic. Our grocery stores are filled pretty much exclusively with slop—even the high end 'health conscious' ones. So with that, maintaining a healthy diet is harder than normal, which is unfortunately just a fact of life here. Moreover, it would be difficult to get my parents and sister to opt into a 'truly healthy' diet because we all have the same desensitized palates. It would be a challenge to ween ourselves off of the shitty foods we eat because of how addicted we are to them. The worst part is that we know it's a problem, but feel trapped by a lack of better options that are more readily available.

I'd like to have a healthier diet, but the 'system' doesn't seem to benefit from that, and so instead I have to contend with slop. I don't know, Chipotle is pretty good. I've eaten at Chipotle literally hundreds of times. I'm not even kidding. I am a die hard Chipotle guy. But I don't think it's healthy at all, really. The problem with being healthy is that there's billions of dollars to be made on the back of misinformation, so it's difficult to discern what is actually true on that front. There's always dissonant signals as well—fitness companies will portray a 'healthy' solution, yet our infrastructure is compelled to do the exact opposite. I mean, fast food restaurants and grocery stores employ subtle psychological tricks to get us to buy and eat more slop. It's ridiculous.
That whole meme of "make them sick so we can sell them our medicine" or whatever is completely real. I feel myself struggling through that same pipeline. I don't really see what I can do to get out of it, though. At this point, I have to realize that it's not something that can be solved in a single day. I also understand that many people will do whatever it takes to stay healthy, yet illness will destroy them too. It's just an unfortunate fact of life at this point.
However, those in antiquity used to think that we had masters and slaves the same we have wind and rain. I have to hope that those who will live tomorrow become better than we who live today.
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Failing Again and Again

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So far, this morning has been relatively normal. I have done my morning routine, had some caffeine, and overall don't feel horrible. But one thing that's been messing with me: nicotine cravings. It has been almost three months since my last cigarette and cravings are not as bad as they used to be, but for some reason today they are particularly strong. The urges to go to the convenience store and buy a pack of cigarettes are getting even worse as I'm writing this entry. I've done everything to stop cravings; chew toys, hard candies, and silly putty only go so far, I guess. Well, I don't really know what else to do about it, but if I keep talking about it, the cravings will only get stronger.
There isn't really much else on my mind, though. The mundanity of my life is something I feel good about. No news is good news, so it goes. I don't really know what I'm going to do with my day. It makes me feel bad that I don't really have plans most days. It seems as if most days are comprised of figuring things out on the fly. I hate that. I don't technically have much of a game plan for anything. All I have are my habits, which is fine I guess. I'm not sure what else I'd be doing. The main thing holding me back is fear. I'm always afraid that I won't be able to stick with something, so I just don't even try anymore. I don't really have a lot of gumption, stick-to-it-ness, or whatever you want to call it. If I'm not good at something immediately, I don't stick to it.

I feel that given my upbringing and the era I grew up in, it's harder for me to keep up with things. For me, there's been so much latent failure in my life. Every time I want to show up and get good at something, failure of some kind happens and makes me stop doing it altogether.
When I was in high school, playing the saxophone was my life. I practiced all the time and dedicated most of my extra time towards improving that craft. All I wanted to do was get those hours of practice vindicated by making the all-state jazz band. We had to audition against dozens of other students in the state and only the top four saxophone players made it for my instrument (tenor saxophone). I auditioned every year of high school, and the closest I got was ninth place. After senior year's all-state audition, I realized that I wasn't going to get any other chances at making the band, and I didn't really play saxophone much after that. We had auditions in the fall and for the rest of my senior year, I just coasted.
A hard lesson I've had to learn: no matter how much you work towards something, there is still a chance you will fail. People always espouse the value of hard work, talent, and luck, but even if you have all of those things, you can still fail. People will also say that in every failure there's a lesson. That's wrong. Most failures don't carry any lesson. They just hurt and that's it. There's not really anything else involved in that. All failure does is build callouses for pain. Unfortunately, life is full of pain, failure, and whatever else.
Thankfully though, it's also full of the overcoming of it.
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Paying to Get Paid

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I crashed and burned like crazy yesterday. I think I ended up going to bed at around 6:30 PM or so. I came home from Starbucks and immediately wanted to fall asleep. On the short drive home, I was extremely frustrated at how tired I was. I have been meaning to get back on the CPAP, but still resisting it despite adjusting the settings and keeping it next to my bed. Last night, though, I was so tired and cranky that all I wanted to do was lay down and not have to worry about it. But my sleep last night was so horrible. I woke up several times in the middle of the night. My dreams were shit. The whole thing was extremely frustrating. But I woke up at about 8:30 AM this morning, which landed me almost 10 hours of sleep last night. I feel decently well-rested, but still massively frustrated with the state of my health.
Today is a new day, though, and there's still plenty of potential to keep moving the dial forward, as it were. I've been doing well with maintaining regular output here and working on IOKTIKN pieces in tandem. At this point I can average about 700 words per day with my writing, which is a good amount for me. This average is always changing, but it has been steadily going up. That's good news for me, especially considering how much I've been working on building my endurance. Being prolific is extremely important to me because after a certain point, the progress becomes undeniable—regardless of the words written. But still, I feel that I am at the beginning stages of taking writing seriously. I started taking it seriously around late 2023 and there were many setbacks, bumps in the road, you name it.
Freelance writing as an industry is essentially in shambles. Most people who did SEO-based content don't do that anymore. Copywriters are essentially gone—there was this one copywriter I spoke with last year who expressly told me to get out of freelance writing as soon as I could because he lost basically all of his clients and had to switch over to professional resume editing. I had some decent one-offs when I was 'freelancing', mostly just idiots who responded to my Craigslist ads—yeah, it was that bad. I realized around the middle of last year that I didn't want to write for other people; I wanted to write for myself. Unfortunately, writing for one's self doesn't pay any bills of any kind, though.

I have come to realize that writing full-time isn't something that comes immediately but takes an extremely long time. It's agonizing, thankless, and seems to bear little weight on the world that keeps on spinning regardless of whether or not you got your word-count in that day. While it would be nice to get money for writing, that's something that I have absolutely no control over. I've had to keep coping with the fact that I am essentially an unemployed leech. I can rationalize it all I want—talk about the 'Bullshit Jobs' phenomenon, say that the economy is fake (it is), tell myself that most people with jobs are leeches too—but it still doesn't change the fact that my value proposition is questionable at best.
This medium is mostly for me. Even professional artists know that even though they get paid, the work is ultimately for them and not for us. Frank Ocean said it best in Futura Free:

Play these songs, it's therapy, mama </blockquote>

They payin' me, mama </blockquote>

I should be payin' them </blockquote>

I should be payin' y'all, honest to God </blockquote>
Frank is absolutely right. I should be paying you, my dear reader. But alas, that's not the way we made this system, did we?
I hope that there's some form of reciprocity here. One day, anyway.
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Fighting Actual Demons

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I woke up this morning feeling rested, thank God, but last night's sleep was horrible. For whatever reason, I have more nightmares than the average person. Typically, the nightmares involve some sort of demonic entity trying to kill me. Usually after a nightmare, I jolt awake with my heart palpitating and the fear still coursing through my veins. It's gotten to the point where the experience is just odd rather than terrifying. But a funny thing has been happening recently: I've been going lucid and stopping the demons in their tracks. Since I was a child, I have always been a strong dreamer. I have dozens of dreams that I still remember to this day dating all the way back to 2003 (age 5). The demons have always been there, lurking in dream-space waiting to attack me.
This is my ontology on dreams: that shit is fucking real. See, I've described the world we see and the world we don't see. Dreams occupy that latter world. Like I've said before as well, this world is much larger and much older than the regular world we occupy. Spirits from that world work to influence this world for reasons that we either can't know or aren't allowed to know (yet).

For me, though, I have always dealt with the presence of what I believe to be demons from this world. Sometimes it makes me feel like a (((targeted individual))) of the demons, but I can't really call it for sure. In a weird way, it feels as if there's something I possess that they readily feed on. I can't say what that thing is, but all I know is that they come after me all the time. In the waking world, I've experienced what I believe to be demonic powers as well.
Back in 2020 during my first true psychotic episode, I started hearing a voice in my head that claimed to be named Azazel, a well-known figure in Abrahamic religions. I hadn't known of this demon's existence before I heard its voice in my head. The demon attempted to make a Faustian bargain with me and I declined. Once I declined, it got mad and attempted to possess me. Well, it's tough to say because I was having numerous delusions at this time, but I still feel the pure fear that came with that whole experience.
So yeah, these demonic entities have recurred much more over the last five years or so. From about 2017-20, I barely remembered any of my dreams because I was smoking too much pot. But by around 2021-22, I stopped smoking as much pot and started taking antipsychotics, which took my already strong dreaming potential and amplified it drastically. Over the last few years, I have been inundated with nightmare after nightmare. It's been a weird spot to occupy. My first therapist told me that she believed that the demons come to attack most strongly when we are most amply ready for growth, and I agree with that sentiment completely.
I hope that over the course of time, I can figure out how to defeat these demons and keep them out of my life for good. This is why I rely so heavily on God: He's the only one who can protect me from the dangers hidden in the deepest recesses of the universe. I just hope that I can do my part to receive the mercy I know that I don't deserve.
God gave me a two-million watt noggin, but they can take it away because He's too pure and I'm too honest.
Stay loved, friends.
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The Irony-Industrial-Complex

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I took an extra dose of an as-needed sleeping pill last night with the intention of going to bed early and waking up well-rested. I fell asleep easily, but woke up this morning feeling rather tired. I still feel tired this afternoon, but I am solving this problem the way millions of Americans do: caffeine. Yes, I drink about 300 mg of caffeine first thing in the morning and then about another 150 in smaller spurts over the course of the day. The FDA says 400 mg is the reasonable limit, but reason? Limits? My God, how about you guys get a GRIP?
Anyways, I finished reading this excellent essay from a guy named Lewis Hyde</a> called Alcohol and Poetry, where he analyzes poems from John Berryman's Dream Songs collection. To briefly summarize, John Berryman was a poet, but also an alcoholic. Hyde introduces his essay by describing a prevailing opinion: that Berryman's alcoholism was the vehicle for his poetry. He then dissents this opinion by referencing Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and their take on alcoholism as a disease, something that would actually hinder Berryman's poetic ability. Hyde's main thesis is essentially that addiction is opposed to creativity, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

I originally heard of this essay from watching a David Foster Wallace interview that I like where DFW mentions it in passing. DFW paraphrased this blurb:

"Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage. This is why it is so tiresome. People who have found a route to power based on their misery—who don't want to give it up though it would free them—they become ironic. This sustained complaint is the tone of active alcoholism." </blockquote>
As a younger man, I hid so much of my complaints through irony. I distinctly remember classmates in high school telling me "I'm not sure if you're being serious or not" after saying some pithy thing. For me, this was a space I loved to occupy. I was inspired by comedians, internet meme culture, and the general aesthetic of 'edginess' found in young men at the time. I was 18 during the 2016 election, a pawn of memetic warfare. In return, I got chewed up and spit out by the irony-industrial-complex.
I ended up suffering from a similar flavor of the disease that Berryman faced. I drowned my sorrows in marijuana and attempted to 'find myself' through dozens of psychedelic experiences. All I found was a void—a shallow emptiness of the soul. I believed in nothing. I stood for nothing. I was nothing. But then I started actually trying to figure out my relationship with drugs by going to treatment centers.
There I found that same voice of the 12-step program. I finally realized that I am nothing but a by-product of a higher power. For me, it was a matter of not just believing things, but believing in them. I realized that the prison I found myself in was entirely self-constructed and that I had every opportunity to put the key in the door, unlock it, and step out with the rest of my human compatriots.
So with that, I am happy to consider myself freer than I was and closer to God. Maybe one day I can help someone else see that freedom.
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Blender, Blender

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I went over to a friend's house today and played around with his new 3D printer. We mostly perused directories with free design files. But we did get to print a few designs that looked pretty cool. I got to walk away with a few souvenirs, too. My friend printed a stand for his headphones but they didn't fit. I put mine on the stand to see if they'd fit and they fit like a glove, so he let me take it home and it looks awesome on my desk. It was a fun day. We both looked a bit more into the 3D modeling program Blender and it's a rather extensive program with a steep learning curve, but nonetheless it was fun dipping my toes into it.

Doing the 3D printer stuff got me thinking more about career options with CAD and things like that. I mentioned previously that I was considering figuring out what it would take to become a CNC machinist, and hanging out with my friend today is making that itch come back. It seems like it would be a cool, practical, and fun job. I don't know a whole lot about it, but I'll just have to figure it out sooner or later.
For me, the big thing that worries me about considering a new career is the fear of starting, hitting a bump in the road, and quitting. I can do that a lot.
I'm super tired after a long day, so I'll cut things short today.
Thank you, lovely reader. Have a great day.
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Chew Toys and Man Purses

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am back at the Starbucks, big chilling and feeling good after trying that new protein foam stuff. I don't shill for Starbucks (or anyone else) but having the extra protein in my little drink helps me with staving off pre-dinner hunger. Anyways, I am off to my sprint and in the sprint spirit, I am trying to keep things directly off the top of my head here. I got a chew toy like the dog I am. No, seriously, I got one of those chew toys that are marketed towards little kids with autism. Here's the thing: I got it because I used Jolly Ranchers to quit my nicotine addiction, but then I got addicted to Jolly Ranchers. So to limit my Jolly Rancher consumption (they are very bad for your teeth), I decided to get a little chew toy so that I could stave off the Jolly Ranchers now that the nicotine is more or less functionally out of my body.
It feels pretty nice to use it. I got it as a little necklace and keep it in my mouth whenever the bad thoughts come into my head (they do it a lot), so it's a nice little grounding tool in that respect as well.

Oh, I also got a man purse. I'm not even kidding; I got an actual man purse. Well, the non-gay term is cross-body bag, but it is functionally and aesthetically a man purse. Let me tell you, formless and shapeless reader: it is the ultimate move, seriously. See, I hate pockets because I have too much stuff. Women complain needlessly about their pants not having pockets. Sis, let me tell you that you do not need them, okay? The purse is the essential. See, the cynical marketing teams of times past marketed different things for men like backpacks or briefcases or whatever, but a BAG with a STRAP is the peak form and function for carrying personal items when out and about. Listen, if you're not PURSED UP, get the hell out of my house.

So yeah, that's what I got recently that's been helping me stave through the coprophagic tempest we like to call life. At this point, I still feel like I am in a "building" sort of phase. There has been a lot of, I guess, 'fundamental' things that I've had to work through over the last few years, but I feel that I have sufficiently reached a new culmination of this work. Let me tell you, it was long, dirty, and wretched work. But thankfully, I believe that I've put myself in a position where I have gone through the hardest parts of that—dealing with mental illness is tough for anyone, but I think that with all of the different cultural shifts that global society had to face—that made it all the more exacerbated for me.
But today is not a day of lamentation or crying or whining or grieving or some other sad thing. Today is a good day; it is a normal day. And because of that, I'd like to take the time to stop and actually give those roses a smell. By the way, I have this little spray bottle of cologne I keep in my man purse and I sprayed it before coming to the Starbucks. It has a rather strong smell. I don't know how people perceive that—well, in the sense of its strength. Is it too strong? I like colognes or perfumes when they're subtle but this doesn't feel subtle. Oh well, it doesn't matter.
Okay partners, we are done for today. Stay loved.
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On Early Rising

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We've got a relaxing Sunday morning on our hands. I woke up rather late this morning after a long night and while I did technically wake up with my 8 AM alarm, I absolutely fell back asleep so that I could sleep in. I've been having a tough time with getting up early because I've been having a major preference for staying up later at night because the house is quiet and I have less distractions so I can read and write more freely. But at the same time, I'm rather unemployed and have no major obligations that require me to get up at a certain time, so there's not really much of a reason to other than to keep my ancestral puritan work ethic from gnawing at me.
I don't feel particularly emboldened to wake up super early these days. It seems that I don't have the level of self-control to go to bed early and wake up early solely on my own. I mean, if I had a job I'd be able to wake up early—well, most likely I don't know. I've found that people are motivated mostly by two major ideas: obligation and passion. So for me, I don't have any obligations making me get up early and I have no passion for waking up early because I'd rather be more of a night owl, so there it is. But again, the puritan spirit still gnaws at me. Ancient wisdom gnaws at me too. It is just healthier for us to wake up early in the morning.

But here's the thing, I have spent so much time digging myself and crawling into a deep dopaminergic hole. I developed a harsh sense of egoism in my late teens and early twenties, and this egoism fostered an equally damaging hedonism. I was into Max Stirner at the time and didn't have much of any kind of spiritual sense. A quote from Stirner that describes me at twenty years old:

“When the world gets in my way—and it gets in my way everywhere—then I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. You are nothing for me but—my food, just as I am also fed upon and consumed by you. We have only one relationship to each other, that of usefulness, usability, advantage. We owe each other nothing, because what I seem to owe to you, I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheerful expression in order to likewise cheer you up, then your cheerfulness matters to me, and my expression serves my wish; I do not show it to thousands of others, whom I have no intention of cheering up.” </blockquote>
Yes reader, I really did think of people as food to consume. I was an asshole, but did a lot of mental gymnastics to not convince myself otherwise. It was a time of true spiritual carelessness, but I've grown a bit wiser since then. Well, at least that's what my feeble and corrupt mind would like me to think.
My aim now is to release myself from my dopaminergic traps, but I have enough sense to understand that I have to do so one vice at a time. Thankfully I've figured out life without nicotine (probably need to write about this in depth), got myself back in the gym, quit drugs (well, the really bad ones), drink plenty of water, etc. But I still need to figure out my diet since I have an intense sugar addiction thanks to quitting nicotine. I'd also like to do more to cultivate discipline. I've been figuring it out slowly, but I'm hoping to keep making progress.
One day at a time, y'all.
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The Right Now

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short story previously posted on the Substack. Enjoy!
My eyes snapped open.
My head was throbbing as I lay on the ground. Beneath me was coarse grass and soil. My vision was blurry at first, but began to clear as I got my senses and the pain in my head diminished. I seemed to be in some kind of forest adjacent to a trail of sorts. The pathway was clear but there was still a moderate amount of growth surrounding it. It was mostly bushes and grass, not too difficult to traverse.
The trees were tall and wide with leaves that radiated a classic forest green. I couldn’t tell what kind they were though, just trees really. It was nighttime and the moon shone brightly alongside the stars. The air was still, no breeze to be felt. Everything felt spacey, but all the while still vivid and real.
I got to my feet and took a better look at my surroundings. There wasn’t much besides the forest and the trail and it didn’t seem like there was much else in the distance, just a sea of trees. I was having a hard time remembering where I was or what I was doing before waking up there. The memory was too distant and clouded.
I looked at the trail and didn’t see much ahead, so I decided to move along it to see where it would take me. I walked for a while, but don’t remember for how long. It was a bit of a challenge traversing through the growth, but I managed to do so just fine. As I was walking along the trail, the growth dissipated and it got easier to walk through it. In the distance I saw a small ember and some other figures that suggested a camp of some kind.
I could see the camp, which contained a single tent, some stands and equipment propped up, and a man sitting by the makeshift campfire. He was an older man, perhaps in his seventies. He was wearing a denim jacket with a flannel underneath it and jeans and brown leather boots. On his head was a white felt cowboy hat. He had a long white beard that went down to his chest. As I approached the campsite, he noticed me and waved his hand.
—Well there you are, partner.
I was confused. How could he be expecting me? I most certainly wasn’t expecting him. I was a bit perturbed by that, but his demeanor seemed friendly and trusting. He had a jubilant countenance, so I assumed that he was hopefully well-intentioned. I spoke back up.
—Were you expecting me?
He adjusted himself in his seat, a tree stump. He considered his response as I saw him turn his head and stare into the distance. He turned his head back to me.
—The last person I saw said to be expecting you, or at least someone who looks like you.
—And how long ago was this?
—Ah, some time ago. I don’t remember how long it’s been. All I remember is what happened.
It’s strange that both of our memories seem to have trouble showing themselves, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. I decided to prod him for different details.
—Where are we, exactly?
—Well that one does have a simple answer. We’re in the Right Now.
I was caught off guard. What kind of an answer was that? I was expecting the name of an actual place, not some kind of riddle. Then I started trying to think of names of actual places, ones that I’ve been to or heard about. But then I realized that I couldn’t recall a single one of them. I could think of them and see them in my mind, but the names felt almost erased like some kind of editor was in my head redacting certain details. I then realized that the only name I know of a place is the one I’m currently in.
—That’s strange. I can’t think of any place other than here. There are other ones, right?
—You know, I have a strange feeling you’re right, but I can’t think of any other places that aren’t here.
—But this is just a forest. There’s nothing else here besides you, me, and foliage. Why can’t we remember these things?
—I wouldn’t concern yourself too much with those kinds of details, partner. I did that a long time ago and it worked wonders for me.
Details? I usually don’t have to wrestle with details, they’re just there. I couldn’t seem to figure out what happened. Perhaps some kind of amnesia, maybe even a virus could have done this. As I thought about it more, things around me began to fracture. The fire started to change colors and the trees began to bend and twist in strange formations and the ground beneath me began to shake violently. The cowboy called to me.
—Quit thinking about it! You’ll lose the whole damn thing if you do. Just think about the fire, it’ll stop all the racket.
I redirected my thoughts towards the fire and tried to think about nothing else but the fire. Its hue began to solidify back to orange and then everything else around me began to restabilize. I kept gazing into it, almost going into a sort of trance. Eventually the cowboy spoke back up to me, snapping me out of it.
—Sorry partner, those kinds of thoughts aren’t allowed here.
—What kind of thoughts?
—The ones where you try to go into the past or the future. You were thinking about old places, and that makes everything here fall apart. You don’t want to know what happens after that.
—Say it does happen. What happens then?
—You get lost in memories, some yours, others that aren’t. You forget more and more. Eventually you get lost in them and never come back. Believe me, you don’t want to be anywhere else but here.
—And what exactly is here?
—Well, it’s the Right Now. That’s about it. There’s not much else to be said.
—And what if I want to go somewhere else?
—Like I said, you don't want to be anywhere else but here.
The cowboy’s statements sounded completely preposterous to me. I don’t even know how I got here, yet I can’t leave? I wasn’t sure if I was dead and this was some kind of torturous afterlife, but it seemed odd that some kind of judgemental god wouldn’t even give me memories of my transgressions. This seemed like something else entirely, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. It seemed that the cowboy knew more than me, so I tried getting some answers.
—How long have you been here?
There was a pause as the cowboy gathered his thoughts.
—Oh, I’m not sure. Could be weeks, months, years, but I don’t think I could give you a surefire answer. This is all I know, really. Sometimes I’ll be in a forest, other times a desert, and on occasion there won’t be anything at all.
—Nothing at all? Like a black void?
—You could call it that. I don’t sleep either, really. I’m always moving, trying to get to that next place. But I always end up right back where I started, usually with more questions than answers.
—That sounds awful.
—Oh don’t worry partner, it’s not all bad. Interesting things always happen here. You just have to make sure not to get trapped by your thinking. Your thoughts are what matter most here. No need to worry about certain trappings like money or, uh, pleasures of the flesh I guess. It’s purer living here, plain and simple.
As I considered the cowboy’s words, I began to hear a whirring from high up in the sky. It sounded like some kind of aircraft, but when I looked up I couldn’t see anything. The whirring grew louder and then bright fluorescent lights began to shine onto the camp. I looked up, but still nothing in sight except for the light. A rope ladder dropped down from the light right in front of the campfire. The cowboy and I put our hands over our eyes to block the brightness of the light and we looked at the rope ladder. The cowboy shouted at me through the whirring.
—I think this one’s for you, partner!
I stared at the ladder and wasn't sure what to think of it. The confusion kept piling on and at this point, I had no idea what climbing that ladder would mean for me. As I stared, the whirring got louder and louder to the point where I wouldn't be able to hear the cowboy anymore if he spoke up again. The light coming from the sky kept spreading and getting brighter. It almost blinded me and I had to keep my eyes completely closed to keep the rays of light from damaging my eyes. From there, I knew it was too late.
My eyes snapped open.
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Social Depth and Breadth

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I ended up going out last night, which was quite fun. My pals and I hit a few local dives, had some laughs, shot some pool, and had a good time. It definitely depleted my social battery, but it was still fun to deplete it—kind of like how using a laptop depletes its battery, but still gives you a good time, you know? I'm thinking about it now and this has been a continuous thread for a little while: my own spectrum of extroversion. It's funny because for a long time I thought that I was rather extroverted. I've taken quizzes like the Big 5 or MBTI and those quizzes always declare me as a definitive extrovert. But I recently put my website in this</a> thing and it clocked me as a decided introvert (INTJ btw lmao) and I was rather surprised by that notion.
I always had this pretty solid idea that I am extroverted, but I've had people call me introverted before. Both my parents believe that I'm introverted based on how I grew up. When I was a kid, I think I was much quieter than I am now, but looking back on my life in this thread has made me realize that I am actually quite introverted. I think the problem with introversion is that people mistaken it for shyness or being reserved or not talking a lot. I am not shy, not reserved, and I can talk a lot when I feel like I have the floor. For me, though, my introversion shines through in the social battery. I have some extrovert friends who can go days and days straight doing high-octane social activities but for me, one day of high-octane sociability is enough to sustain my desire to go out for months at a time.

I like parties, concerts, bars, and whatever things adults do to socialize, but only in short concentrated doses. For me, I feel much more comfortable in a low-key and relaxed setting with a few friends I know really well so that conversation can be deep and engaging. From what I've seen, a key difference between introverts and extroverts is social breadth versus depth. Extroverts are more prone to social breadth whereas introverts are more prone to depth. Extroverts can have a large social network of people that they know slightly below surface level whereas the introvert has a smaller social network but the connections run extremely deep. Of course, this isn't a one-to-one observation and everyone is different, but it is a general trend. For me, I think I crave depth more than breadth and can be capable of breadth, but prefer depth. I find myself trying to keep up with people who I would like to keep up with, but unfortunately don't have the social capacity to maintain multitudes of genuine in-depth relationships. So because of that, I have to force myself to be selective with my friendships because I don't want to sacrifice my desire for true relationship depth.
Among other things, I genuinely do have sensory issues. Loud music genuinely hurts my ears so I keep ear plugs on when I go to a bar or concert. I have to wear sunglasses at some concerts because the flashing lights can actually give me seizures. So the high-octane stuff is seldom done. Thankfully though, I don't suffer from too much social anxiety and generally have good social skills, so it's not like it's a major challenge for me to go out and do that stuff. But man, it sure can be tiring.
And hey, even after being so tired, I still showed up to write today. Good stuff. I hope I can keep it going.
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Past Depressions

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I had a tough time sleeping and couldn't get to bed until about 4 AM. I still managed to wake up at 8 AM though and I started my day without feeling tired. I managed to workout and all that as well. Then my afternoon slump came and now I'm back at the Starbucks here to write yet another entry for today. Unfortunately, I don't feel like I have any sharp insights today and just feel rather measly and dull. I don't feel bad, but I wouldn't say I feel excellent either. I think that I'm in a default mode: not elated but happy enough to not be driven to murder or suicide. Lovely.
I can't really share anything super interesting either. Well, I was looking a little bit into CNC machining earlier today and that looks like a really fun job. I've come to enjoy computer programming and I think that CNC machines are really cool. Funnily enough, I never really thought about pursuing it as a career until just today. I don't know too much about it, but I do remember learning how to use one in an elective engineering class I did in middle school. I remember having a fun time making the designs and learning how to properly use the software to make curves and other precise cuts. It was a good experience and I think back then I was too mesmerized with playing saxophone to really consider it as a career or anything like that. Back then, I didn't care about jobs or making money or anything like that—well, I still don't, but it feels a lot less cool to say that at 27 versus 13. Ah well, life happens the way it does for reasons I can't explain.
Still though, this line of thought does make me feel reflective about the past. I feel a strong desire to think on my motivations back in the day and see where I was going with it all. Thinking about the past is a tough thing for me. I still remember when things started to feel 'off' mentally. My freshman year of college, I flunked a calculus test. It wasn't the end of the world, though. I had failed tests before and still been able to come back from them. But when I flunked this test, it set something off that I now know far too intimately. The depression hit me as if a noxious gas began to flow through my body. I remembered thinking to myself that it was just shock from seeing the bad test grade and that I'd feel better if I blew off some steam or forgot about it. It lasted for about 3 months and it made everything so much worse. I still don't know how I managed to take all of my finals that semester and get a good GPA.

All I can say now though is that it was far from the last time my mind would go back to that place. Every time, it got harder and harder to keep it at bay and it made me do things I didn't think I would do. I had become so much more avoidant—depression episodes made my social battery's capacity go down to near-zero. It wasn't that social interactions weren't enjoyable anymore, but that they would cause me immense pain, frustration, and exhaustion. I can normally get along with others just fine, but when I'm depressed, I usually have a hard time hiding it. Because it's hard to hide it, that's why I isolate myself. Most people don't understand chronic depression, and so it's hard to make them see what it's like from that point of view. These days, you can tell someone you're depressed and they'll generally be understanding and sympathetic. But the problem is when you have to tell someone that a dozen times a year; it puts strain on most relationships because it's hard for someone to garner an extended level of empathy like that. Most people aren't wired for that kind of empathy and that makes sense—the diminishing returns don't make it feasible.
At this point in my life, I don't expect people to have the patience for long stints of depression, so I try not to make them feel bad for not being able to do anything about it. This is why I write: the best person I can talk to about these kinds of things is myself.
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Distractions, Distractions

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm sitting at the Starbucks while typing and there are a few teenage girls sitting across from me talking about whatever teenage girls talk about. I'm curious to eavesdrop a bit on their conversation and I had to pull away from that temptation so that I could write today's entry. I'm glad that I did because I'd rather write my own thoughts than listen to whatever they have to say. Not that teenage girls are stupid or whatever (some of them are pretty smart), but I just wanted to build the discipline of writing and not getting distracted. I think that this temptation of getting distracted is a powerful one, and one that plagues many people aspiring for any kind of big thing in their lives. The narrative of "it's so easy to be great today" is still obviously untrue and lathered into so much propaganda, but it's still important to cultivate discipline and do things that are hard. The important thing about this, though, is that it's not good to do hard things because they result in better outcomes; it's good to do hard things because the act of doing hard things is good in and of itself. There's no need to get caught in any kind of existentialist motive. Doing hard things increases one's will to live.
I'm not here to report any kind of news (I hate the news) but one thing did happen today that hits close to home: the shooting at the ICE facility in Dallas. There are some friends of mine who had a personal connection to the shooter (childhood friends) and the whole experience for them was rather trippy. I don't really want to get bogged down in any discourse on the event because discourse about anything that's on the news is always going to be latent with some kind of propagandizing bullshit, so I don't want to fuel any part of that fire whatsoever. I'd rather try to focus on speaking my truths without having to let those truths be defined by any kind of exterior narrative. I don't want to let any intrusion of my thoughts from almost mythological actors (CIA, MI5, Mossad, whatever) come into my head.

For me, it's a difficult experience dealing with the paranoia that comes from media exposure. In psychotic episodes in the past, I've had delusions of being spied on and receiving "personal messages" from shit on TV. So weirdly enough, watching TV or anything like that actually creates a trauma response for me. My mom likes to always watch TV in the living room and it sucks because I can barely spend time with her sometimes because of certain things that come on the television. I don't want to get in the way of her enjoyment of it, though, so I limit my exposure to it when I can.
Among other things, I am thankful to have a good period in life right now, mood episodes notwithstanding. I hope that my mind/body complex will let me keep it up.
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Seaming Ideas

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today has been a rather slow day. Unfortunately, I had trouble falling asleep last night and couldn't fall asleep until around 4 AM. I woke up at my desired time (around 8 AM) but have found myself sleeping most of the day to compensate for last night's abysmal attempt to fall asleep. It was tough dealing with it, but I decided to make a better decision: I decided to not let it get to me. Moreover, I took it as an opportunity to just chill out and rest. I put on some binaural beats and took a long nap this afternoon and it was honestly quite nice. And still, I decided to show up and write because I didn't want it to feel like this nagging obligation and want it to feel more like the privilege that it actually is. I'm still a bit tired as I'm writing this entry in the late afternoon, but I know I'll catch my stride this evening. I still have my IOKTIKN piece that I'm working on and progress with that has been smooth. I love being able to write in what I interpret as a higher register thanks to fierce outlining and refinement. The workflow with these entries is pretty solid and I have a good grasp on how I approach them, but now the goal is to get IOKTIKN in that same state.
I'm still rather sold on the content bank idea and at this point, I see the importance of keeping a repository of pieces in the back pocket at all times as opposed to immediately publishing once I finish something. I've found that if I want to have any kind of success as a "writer", then I need to get comfortable with deadlines and working through them. Writing pieces on a whim, while fun, is not the true essence of the vocation. The idea is to cultivate discipline slowly. Discipline itself is a fleeting thing and not something that should be consistently relied upon. Instead, it's better to load one's writing progressively. A few hundred words every day for a year beats five thousand in a single day every time. It's all about the cathedral mindset: understanding that each day is a smaller piece of the larger whole that one might not see come to completion. But instead of approaching that idea with despair, it's better to approach it with reverence. The future is uncertain, but building day by day, one thing at a time—that's the essence of what it is I'm trying to do here.

I don't have a full idea of what these projects will look like in the future. I would like to look back and be proud of all the work I put into the craft, regardless of who reads it or whatever kind of reception it gets. More than anything, I want to not only become more productive with my writing, but I want to feel a sense of improvement with my prose. I want to feel like I am getting closer and closer to the pure essence of my voice. It's something that most people never find, but I feel implored to accept the challenges that lie ahead. Ultimately, I understand that writing isn't for the writer, but for the reader. I don't write these words to only enjoy the act of writing them, but I write them because it is the single most efficient and true way to convey the essence of my humanity to others and create the common threads that bind us together. In that way, I am a sewer of ideas, working each day to tighten the thread that is the perceived human experience. Even if it's just one person who feels a sense of connection to what I'm writing, its purpose will be fulfilled.
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The Eye of the Storm

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I feel that it's important to give this update: my sprints here are now 20 minutes instead of 15. I felt like 15 minutes was really easy and so now I'm trying to progressively make them longer and increase the strength of my writing muscles. Like I've been saying, the whole goal here is to reduce the friction between my thoughts and my fingertips as much as I can. I'm thankful that I've been getting better at this and feel that I have finally adjusted to the reality of this diary being a public-facing corpus. I think I have a better understanding of the boundaries I want to put in place with this medium, so my writing flows much more easily now. I would say that making the diary public-facing has improved my writing quite a bit because the pressure of performing has helped inspire me to stay on top of curating and presenting meaningful ideas. This diary has served as a nice garden full of idea seeds and I feel that I can always have a good repository of ideas as I keep up the habit of writing here.
In other news, I started trying to get CPAP compliant again after a long time without using it due to frustration. I found out that the best thing for me to do was increase the humidity on the machine. My nose was getting plugged up while using the CPAP because the air in the mask was too dry. Now that I increased the humidity, I actually feel a lot more comfortable falling asleep with it. I fell asleep with the mask on last night (it felt like a miracle) and I was really happy when I woke up in the morning—except for the fact that my mask was off my face and on the floor. I looked at the statistics the machine's software gives me and saw that once I had my first apnea, it seemed that I unconsciously flung the mask off my face. I don't really know how to fix that since I can't really control what I do in my sleep, but it should be a matter of keeping the habit up. Fingers crossed.

One thing that has been really exciting for me lately is how well I've been doing regarding chores. I used to struggle quite a bit with them because of the overwhelm and not really knowing what to do for certain ones, but recently I've gotten a lot better at keeping my areas clean and tidy. I think that I have become much more mentally fragile compared to when I was younger, but this fragility hasn't always been a bad thing. I think that it's fundamentally true that one's environment is a reflection of their mental state and so for me, I wanted to improve my mental state by improving my environment and hey, it worked.
I think a big thing that I am wanting to improve on is figuring out how to operate during my depressive episodes so that I don't take as big of a step back in life. Depression is like a natural disaster for me: it comes in and wrecks a bunch of things and forces me to start over and get back to baseline. I understand now after dealing with it for so long that I can't stop the storm, so I have to do what it takes to build a shelter. The main way that I've been doing that is by anchoring my days with good habits and getting to a point where they feel second nature so that I can lean on those habits and do them even when I'm depressed so that I don't feel like I'm completely slipping off base. I'd say that this year so far has been a major improvement compared to previous ones. I have decided to stop waiting for the day that the depression will go away—it will never come. Instead, I just need to work with it rather than against it and build the scaffolding when I'm not depressed so that when I do get depressed, I can survive the storm.
So yeah, I'm trying my best to live with my malady and not let it consume my identity and self-esteem. I know that there will be many days that I won't do well, but I know that I have to keep trying and living with it instead of seeing it as this unmanageable force. People with bipolar disorder can live their lives just fine as long as they focus on treating it. The main catch with that statement is this: the treatment is entirely up to me. There's not a pill or a doctor or a therapist that is going to fix it. There's no 'magic combination' that will make it go away. No, it will always be there. I have to figure out what life looks like with bipolar, not without it.
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Welcome Back, Autumn

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today has been a good day. I finally started writing a new essay today and I feel good about the progress I've made on that so far. It's a much different workflow that writing in here because with any kind of longer piece I want to write, I always prefer having some kind of outline so that I don't get lost in any kind of needless tangents and to make sure that there is a consistent logic in the piece. Even for pieces that are more "artistic" like fiction, I still prefer an outline so that I don't have to ask any questions about where the piece is going to head. Of course, if I decide while I'm writing something that it should deviate from the outline, I'm not afraid to do that. For me though, going in with a plan is always better than just winging it. Like I was saying, if it's a longer piece, I'm for sure going to write an outline. I feel that over the course of my life with writing, I've felt implored to build up to certain lengths of pieces because I have somewhat high standards, so I want to make sure that I'm writing in a way that I'm proud of and not fumbling around with the consistency and quality of whatever ideas I wish to write about. I don't like writing wasted words.
Also, today is officially the first day of fall here in America. The weather is still a bit humid and disgusting here, but better weather is getting closer and I'm excited for it. Going outside during the summer is a torturous affair, so being able to enjoy the outside again is always a welcome part of this time of year. But yeah, I don't really have much else to say on the matter.

Again, I seem not to feel any sort of creative spark like I've been feeling lately. I'm struggling to come up with words to type and it doesn't feel as if there's any new or interesting ideas I've thought of throughout the day. I think most people drastically overestimate the creativity of their thoughts. I know that for me, I've gotten into a habit of recording most of my thoughts throughout the day and I've seen that creativity is like a constantly clogged faucet: when it's running, it's great but when it's not, it feels like an absolute chore to get anything out that feels worthy of being written. Writing can sometimes be a very rewarding activity, especially when the thoughts come out in what feels like an unadulterated way. But there are times where writing feels like an absolute slog and getting anything out feels almost painful.
I feel as if I'm at some sort of inflection point here, but I don't really know how to feel about it. I would say writing today's entry doesn't feel good, but I am reaping the benefits of maintaining a consistent practice, so I can still keep churning out the words even when I can feel the pains of the clogged thought pipes.
I don't want to push myself any further than I have to, so I think I'll end things here. Welcome back, autumn.
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Stammering Through

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today has been a good day so far. I've spent it mostly just responding to messages and also finishing up the outline for an IOKTIKN essay. I haven't done one in several months at this point and it's crazy to me how much time went by. My last essay</a> was one that I was proud of because I felt like I was able to say a lot of good and important stuff in a way that I felt was strongly communicated. My workflow for Cogito is always a stream-of-consciousness one; I write what's on my mind at the moment, in the moment, and publish it as is with little to no revision. IOKTIKN's workflow is a bit more involved because I want my ideas to be more thorough in concept and execution, so I always try to write outlines and make sure that those are sufficiently structured before proceeding with the actual writing. In the past, I've also been less inclined to do sprints for those pieces, but I think I want to try it for them because I want to try and get out as much as I can in a short amount of time. I don't want to agonize over figuring out just the right way to put something—like I've mentioned before, I want the least amount of friction between my thoughts and my fingers as possible.
I've considered dictation in the past and have recommended it to others who don't like typing because they're not that fast or not the best spellers, but for me dictation is not the best strategy because I feel that I don't speak in the same way that I write. It's weird for me because I feel like I write much better than I speak. When I speak, I constantly stammer and stutter. I speak really slowly. But when I write, I feel just so much more efficient in my communication. I know just what I want to say and how to say it and I don't have to worry about the flow of ideas coming out of my mouth. For some reason, writing is just more efficient for me.

I don't have any anxiety about speaking, though. I can converse with people just fine and public speaking isn't that big of a deal for me as long as I can plan out my speech beforehand. But yeah, I'm also struggling to come up with stuff to write about here. I remember back when I was in high school, I had a teacher who used to call out students who said filler words such as "um" and "like" when answering a question or generally just speaking. I found it hard to not use those words and so I built up this habit of slowing down my speech so that I wouldn't say those filler words, but it was hard and now I feel like I just talk slowly without any real improvement. I don't like how slowly I speak, but I don't really know how I would train myself to speak faster—not like I'd want to anyway.
Yeah, I'm struggling to come up with any good stuff to write about here and I hate that, but I don't want to give up on writing. I want to see through it like I would a long-distance run or something. I want to push through the block and find myself on the other side of it. Even if it's not a glorious "aha!" type moment every time I write, it doesn't matter because I have to let myself just push through and keep finding something to say so that when I do have more inspiration, I can put it to good use. I don't want to stop writing just because I feel tired or blocked in some kind of way. I want to feel the flow of my words as I say them in my mind and put them through the keyboard. I want to keep going. I have to.
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Energy and Habits

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I woke up this morning feeling a lot more rested, which is nice. It seems that I was actually able to get decent rest last night, so I feel much more able to get stuff done today. I want to build more onto this blog like I've been planning on doing. I have the code built for giving my posts tags, so I'll probably work on going back into this corpus and adding tags to each of my different posts. I'll also try to do some backlinking to give more of that jump-around feel I'm hoping to achieve. Funny enough, I don't really consider myself too much of a non-linear thinker when it comes to organization of information and organization in general. I really enjoy the tree system when it comes to organizing directories. I remember when I tried Obsidian for a while, I was unconvinced of the linking system that it provided. I couldn't find any demonstrable sort of purpose for me to make those links and have that graph or whatever. For me, I found that the file system already built-in to my computer was good enough for me.
I still enjoy a good Wikipedia deep dive though, so I feel it would be best to give my site that kind of feel because I think that kind of way of reading is something that resonates most with me and I want my work to reflect my own enjoyment of that kind of reading process. I enjoy reading quite a bit and find it much better than film media. I don't really enjoy watching TV shows or movies. I don't even watch YouTube videos hardly at all anymore. I think that as I've aged and gone through life, I've come to see that film media is genuinely a sensory overload for me now. I think also for my own personal sense of mental stability, it's probably best for me not to engage in it because I've felt the hyperreality of film media creep into my psyche and it's gotten harder for me to keep a solid basis of reality when watching too much film media. Overall, the less I watch any kind of video, the better. I can still read and listen to music without this kind of problem, so I lean onto those mediums more. Fuck audio books, though.
I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can work on and get done today now that I don't feel as fatigued as I have the rest of this week. I also love writing when I feel well-rested. It feels like the brain pipes are less clogged, which is nice. I don't really have any big ideas I've been thinking on since the last entry, so at this point I'm writing just the exact thoughts on my mind with no prior curating or planning. I think that if I keep writing, something will come up. No judgments here, just writing. I feel compelled to type and type until my timer goes off and fill in this space with the present moment. In that way, it is a meditation of sorts, and I think that's pretty cool. I think it's nice to have the space for this, and maybe something good will come out of it.

I can write for an uninterrupted 20 minutes at a time, full send, with a decent amount of ease. I think that with writing, it's best to work in these short bursts and get better at producing work over time because short consistent bursts are more efficient and sustainable than a few long and substantiated bursts over a long period of time. The consistency, the "grind," is what helps us improve at skills and other endeavors. There's an adage that's gone around saying that it takes three weeks of doing something every day to make it a habit, but truthfully three weeks is nowhere near enough time. I'd say it's more like six months, given my personal experience. I'm two months nicotine-free, but I know that smoking as a habit is still wired in me. I still get cravings, but over time they've gotten easier to manage. It'll take a lot longer for my body to forget the sensation of nicotine, but I know that once it does, I'll hardly think about smoking at all.
So with my writing, I just need to keep building and working so that I can do these uninterrupted bursts for longer periods over more days and soon enough, I'll build exactly what I've been intending to build this whole time.
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Fatigue and the World We Don't See

noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The fatigue has been creeping up at me all week. I really need to figure out a program with getting CPAP compliant, but sleep has always been such a struggle for me as it is. Ever since I was young, I've always hated going to sleep. I hate trying to fall asleep and I hate dreaming. For whatever reason, I'm pretty sure I've had way more nightmares than the average person. I'm also generally a rather vivid dreamer; I can remember many dreams from years and years ago and I usually can keep a decent catalog of dreams in my head. I can also lucid dream pretty easily and have gotten to the point in my life now where I can typically get at least a few lucid dreams a month. But anyways, strong dreams and general problems with falling asleep have dissuaded me from CPAP compliance. I've tried dozens of times at this point to get compliant, but always end up taking the mask off at some point in the night due to frustration. As I'm writing today's entry, I am almost writhing from the fatigue. It's one of those kinds of fatigue where I can't fall asleep because my brain feels too wired, but my body is too catatonic from exhaustion to do a whole lot. It sucks.
I've recently taken to going to a Starbucks most days of the week so I can get out of the house and not go stir crazy. I don't want to really do any socializing or anything too intensive because of fatigue and general introversion, so coming to a coffee shop to do stuff on my pooter works out fine for me. I'm really feeling the exhaustion as I'm typing right now, but I told myself I was going to do a sprint so I'm not going to back down from it even though I just want my brain to turn itself off.

I don't really have anything super insightful or whatever on my mind right now and haven't really had too much on my mind since my last entry. Lots of people are still talking about AI or whatever, but that discourse has gotten too stale for me at this point. Those LessWrong rationalists have made it kind of boring and stupid to talk about at this point. Still, I find myself somewhat envious of people like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Gwern. They got to find themselves at the earliest point in the adoption curve and now get to be successful consultants and freelance writers and never worry about money again thanks to their Bitcoin investments. Blegh. Sucks for me being a stupid kid when all that stuff was getting figured out. I kind of feel like Tony Soprano in a way, where he reflects on the glory days of the Italian Mafia—I also came in at the end. Shit sucks, man.
But I don't know. I know it's going to be tough to find my way through all this shit. It's been tough already. I wish I could figure out what to do about shit, but I can't. Most of the time, I have no idea what I'm doing or what to do or anything like that. My thoughts never feel like my own, but not in some MK Ultra brainwashing kind of way. I know that they're coming from somewhere else, but I can't pin on exactly where.
A lot of my friends and family don't really seem to have any kind of spiritual beliefs at all. Most people have been infected with that post-Enlightenment nonsense way of thinking. But here's the way I see it: there's the world we see, and the world we don't see. The world we see is self-explanatory. The world we don't see, however, has been around much longer than the one we do see. There's been happenings there that control much of what goes on in the world that we do see, but since it's the world we don't see, there's a harder time putting it to words or boxing it into any kind of ideology or logos or whatever. But in this world we don't see, that's where all the big stuff happens. Like I said, it's harder to put it into words, but it's there. I just hope that one day, we can figure out more about what that world is like.
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Another Day, Another Sprint

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week so far has been a tired one. It feels so weird to be in such a constant state of flux regarding energy levels. But still, I'm here and I decided to make today's entry a timed sprint, which historically has been very helpful with my writing process. When the timer comes on, it makes me just write without having to think as much about the thoughts in my head and just focus on what's being put on the page. I think that with writing, it's not the same as speech. In writing, there is generally more friction than with speech. With speech, there's less distance between your thoughts and your lips as there is between your thoughts and your fingers. So with that, an important discipline that I think would benefit any writer is figuring out every way to reduce that friction and make writing feel as close to speaking as possible. Once it feels more like speaking, that's when a writer's unique voice will reveal itself and once that happens, quality will skyrocket.
So yeah, I'm trying to reduce that friction as much as I can today. I don't want to have any space between my thoughts and my typing because when it comes to that flow of thought, I want to do everything I can to keep that pure. I think that with recent entries, I've had an easier time making the writing in them feel more planned and deliberate. They read more like essays than they do diary entries, and I think that I feel stronger in my quickness and quality when I sit down to write something I want to publish. However, I know that I still have quite a bit of work to do in terms of getting up to professional levels of output. Cogito has been a good training ground for me so far, but I need to focus on running the marathon instead of doing sprints.
The main thing that I want to accomplish by the end of this year is that I want to build a "content bank" so that I can take formats like IOKTIKN and others and publish there more regularly. The idea is simple: write enough pieces in advance so that there's always a "bank" of them in reserves so that I don't have to worry as much about deadlines. I'll always have pieces ahead of time and can publish them on a more consistent schedule. I know that this is a favored strategy by lots of professionals, especially those who publish serially like I intend to. I hope one day to really get more into publishing, whether it be zines or other kinds of writing. I think that if I do, I'd have a lot of fun doing it and it would give me a greater sense of purpose in life. I don't necessarily have a complete vision of what my publishing endeavors would look like and it's been weird looking for inspiration.

A lot of people end up falling flat on self-publishing and most works hardly sell at all. I know that for me, I'd probably take whatever works I publish and give them out for free and put them under the same license as the site and then ask for donations instead of payment. As much as I'd love to write as a "pure" vocation, it's really hard to get one's foot in the door and making money with writing is a lot harder now than it has ever been thanks to LLMs and technology in general. I always get pissed whenever I see these ultra-work-ethic successful type guys like Alex Hormozi or David Goggins say stupid shit like "it's easier than ever to be great." Maybe in some fields that could be true, but for writing, it's harder than ever because the barrier to entry has gotten so much lower. The market is saturated with content and creators, so getting noticed is harder than ever. Not to mention, the competition for getting traditionally published is harder than ever. Even established writers have been saying that getting published has gotten much harder.
On one hand, I feel a sense of resignation with the whole thing. It feels like a mountain too high to climb and it makes me want to give up before I even start. On the other hand, I also understand that for me, there's not really many better options. I'll have to simply contend with not being known or seen for a while. I'll have to contend with constant rejection, being ignored, and the internal battles that come with those situations. On top of that, I have to do what I can to keep working hard and not get lost in my own troubles and doubts. Working hard doesn't have to be this constant toil though. I can find joy in this process, and for me that involves the joy in figuring it all out. How can I write the best pieces? What can I do to get them out there? How can I get recognition from publishers? There's so much unexplored territory for me and I want to do whatever I can to make the best of it.
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On Personal Responsibility

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm sitting here at my desk in my bedroom as the clock veers towards midnight, anxious to get another day's worth of writing in before I lose my self-imposed streak. It's really not even a daily streak, but it's more of an individually aligned sense of consistency that makes me feel, I don't know, productive? Well, at least I'm here and not putting it off and putting it off until it fades into obscurity. No, I'm here, doing this and doing it until I feel happy about what I've written down here in my cute little text editor.
I feel like one thing that's important for me to admit to myself is that I am, unfortunately, allergic to responsibility. This isn't something unique to me, but it is an ailment that I suffer from and its symptoms have turned me into a spineless chud. I've had this bad habit over the last several years that has developed into a false sense of nobility from my suffering. At first, I thought that I was doing a good thing by putting all of my pain in writing. It was cathartic at first, sure, but I realize now that it was a defense mechanism against a dwindling sense of personal responsibility. Now, this doesn't discount my pain in any way, but I think that for a long time I couldn't see the forest for the trees. It became easy for me to use my pain as a crutch and to tell myself that I didn't have to push through it. I still get frustrated by episodes of depression when they happen and it's still hard to fight through them, but I know that I can get just a little bit better each time I go through it and because of that, I can learn to live with it and not try to force a life that doesn't accept it for what it is. Unfortunately, humanity hasn't culturally or medically figured out how to deal with people with my condition, but I am far from the first person who has had to deal with being on the outside of the conventions of society. I could look to that with embitterment and resentment, but instead I choose to take my part in doing what I can to make the world better, not worse.

I know that writing these little blogs and essays and short stories doesn't seem like it does a lot for people and hey, maybe it doesn't. But I am not of the persuasion that a vocation is something that necessitates some kind of income to be seen as valuable. I gave all of the content on this site a specific Creative Commons license so that today or in any kind of distant future, the writing presented here will not be used to make any kind of money for anybody, including myself. I've been fortunate enough to be born into a life that doesn't necessitate a constant kind of gainful employment and I've also been fortunate enough to see the profound impact of good writing on myself and others. So with that, I don't want any kind of capitalistic perversions to get in the way of the potential for my writing to make an impact on other people. I don't want to be some kind of fake fucking phony.
If I write and write and it barely gets read, I don't care. I know that I have something to say and I will do whatever it takes to get it out there.
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Our Lots in Life

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week so far has been good. I feel stable, productive, and like I actually kind of have my shit together. I always think to myself when I have these kind of weeks "man if I got to have this every week, I'd be in great shape" but I know that's not realistic. Even though I could whine like I have so many times about how unfair life is, I won't. There's always going to be regrets, uncertainty, and bad decisions to be made, so there's no use in letting it get to me anymore. I just thank God that He has released me from the depression chambers for a little while. It feels like life is a constant scuba diving excursion—a constant cycling between descent into depression and madness paired with brief ascents to come back for air. I don't know why God tests me the way He does, but it's not something I should worry about. I don't want to be like those post-Enlightenment rationalist dipshits who think that if they just think about everything super hard, it'll all work out. The truth that those kinds of people don't wish to accept is that an individual's destiny is mostly not in their hands.

I think that people in the pre-Enlightenment world were much more respectful of the greater forces at play. In today's world, people discredit ancient cultures as superstitious and primitive, that they didn't "have things figured out" like we do. Now, I'm not necessarily promoting any kind of neo-conservatism here; ontologically speaking, there's nothing to really "conserve", anyway. But instead I think that when it comes to one's lot in life, pre-Enlightenment people had one thing right: there's not a whole lot the individual can do about it. It's funny because people love to live in the illusion that we have control over our lives. The constant inundation of self-worship narratives I see disgusts me. People would prefer a world of solipsism than to reach out to someone in need and tell them it's going to be okay. It makes me sad to see it.
I pray that God give me the peace and the strength to keep going. One day I hope to look back and say that it all made sense.
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Calculated Effortlessness

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today while I was at the gym, I saw a cute girl while working out. I usually see cute girls working out at the gym because it's the perfect environment for them—an excellent breeding ground for vanity. Typically, there's not many unique thoughts that come across my mind when I see a cute girl working out.
"Damn, she's hot." "Why is she trying to instigate the Male Gaze?" "Shit shit shit quit looking at her butt." "Oh great, she caught you looking at her butt. Good job, pervert."
This is a rather ordinary internal dialogue while doing cardio, but then I thought about something else: these types of girls who wear the trending workout clothes (otherwise known as gym hoe attire) want to give off a vibe I see a lot of women striving for—calculated effortlessness. The desired effect is to come off like perfection is second nature or perhaps just a side effect of radiated coolness, but truthfully it is a massively choreographed effort. Every detail gets obsessed over and rehearsed ad nauseam. Does it work? The sad part is that we can never really know. We can't know our true standing among friends, acquaintances, and especially strangers. How is it possible to know what people are saying about someone when they're not there?

Many people think that gossip is a bad thing, but it's ultimately the engine for maintaining social order. The best way to make an assessment about someone is when they aren't there so as not to change the trajectory of the group's judgments. It's where a person's impact is most readily assessed. Without gossip, we wouldn't be able to truly know the most desired social outcomes. Of course there's a difference between productive and unproductive gossip. For me personally, I hate it when people needlessly yap about someone's cringe behavior because I don't even find it entertaining—it just makes me feel gross. Many of my good friends like to do it so I understand the appeal and there will be times where I participate just to keep for fun conversation, but ultimately it isn't something I'd seek out to do myself. Also, I don't really think unproductive gossip is morally wrong in principle. Too much of it is the spiritual equivalent of going to Taco Bell at 2 AM, but hey we all have our moments.
But anyways, calculated effortlessness is something that people should stop trying to go for. I used to try that vibe and it's unsustainable and exhausting.
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The Individually Sovereign NPC

noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Something I've thought about a few times before: I'm not sure how people perceive others' perceptions of reality (or realities for all we know). In other words, I am skeptical of a universal theory of mind concept. I think it's seldom understood that in an individual's mind, it is more than likely true that others are also living the same real and vivid experience. I'm inclined to believe this because of the popularization of the NPC cultural phenomenon.

For whatever reason, people seem to treat individual sovereignty as a status game—they'll believe whatever it takes to distance themselves from the herd. Most people seem to do this via petty consumerism. They'll believe that if they have the best or newest or most distinguished version of "The Product", then this gives them a license to elevate themselves above their fellow human. The mistake we make, though, is that many of us have this same line of thinking and as such, fall into a loss of individual sovereignty in pursuit of the status game. Unfortunately, we've also reached a point where ideology itself is consumerized. People wear causes like clothes and it feels as if Nothing Ever Happens.

David Foster Wallace pinned it down back in 2005:

"Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. </blockquote>
Unfortunately, many do not yield this warning and get totally hosed. People ask themselves constantly: "Why is the world so fucked up?" The question should be: "How am I the one who fucked it up?" To make it a JFK-ism: Ask not why the world is fucked up, but what you did to fuck it up in the first place.
I reflect on this and try my best to understand the constraints of making the right meaning out of my experience. I know that I don't always have it in the front of my mind that I have more in common with others than I might always know, but I'll try to do my best to work within that constraint and remind myself when it matters that I am not the center of my own universe.
For me, the worst way I ineffectually distinguish myself from others is in the act of self-flagellation—a devastating case of poor-me-itis. More often than not I seem to think that suffering is a prerequisite of joy, but I'm trying to get better about that. But one thing I am curious about: is it normal for other people to beat themselves up as hard as I do?
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Who I Was and Who I Could Have Been

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been dealing with feelings of despair yet again. For me, it's been hard to distinguish between what outcomes of my life were a result of poor decision-making and what outcomes were a result of my mental illness. I look at my life and see how much I've truly fucked up—all the benders, missed opportunities, failed ventures. It makes me wonder why it all went down the way it did. One thing that I get upset about is that I know that I'm a smart person. Basically everyone I've ever met has called me smart at some point, so at the very least I can safely say that I am perceived as smart. When I was younger, it was a source of pride for me and I tied my intelligence deeply to my identity. But now that I'm in this position in life—not gainfully employed, in a bunch of debt, bad credit, living with my parents, no "successful" ventures, still (kind of) a drug addict, pushing thirty—I feel a lot less pride about my intelligence and see it more as a curse than a gift.

I feel like there was this big expectation of me, as is the case with a lot of smart people, that I would become this super industrious and successful person. People might have thought that I'd become a successful business owner, have some hot shot job, be a widely published and cited academic, or something like that. Instead, I became a disillusioned rebel after graduating high school. My first two years of college showed me just how much bullshit there was in the world. I began to figure out slowly that most of society was a racket. I could go on diatribe after diatribe about what's wrong with x, y, or z thing but essentially, I found out that all of the things that people expected someone like me to be were not what I wanted to be at all. I don't want to live in that kind of world. So I dropped out of school and decided to work more in dangerous fields. I was more risky in making deliveries as a bike messenger. I sold drugs because I wanted easy cash and to never run out for myself. I had my psychotic episodes happen and I kept getting sicker and sicker. Nowadays people don't see any kind of potential—they just feel pity.
I think of what's supposed to happen with me. I think of good and successful things I could do for myself and for others, but I don't really see anything that could happen that I'd feel good about. Most vocations are a joke and truth be told, I don't think I can muster the strength to do anything that's considered "real work". I thought about becoming an electrician with the union and was really set on it for a little while. I started the application process and did my research. I tried getting myself to get up early in the mornings (5 AM rise) and only kept it up for maybe two weeks before I messed up my sleep schedule yet again. That's when I knew it wasn't going to be in the cards for me and that I shouldn't try, so I canceled the application and am trying to find out what the fuck I'm supposed to do. I've been lost for so long and I don't know when I'm going to figure it out. I don't know if I will, and that scares the shit out of me.
My mom was telling me the other day: "If you didn't get sick, you could've become anything you wanted to be." Truthfully, I don't think I would've stacked up to be much at all regardless.
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New Project Ideas

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been doing well lately. I mean, I'm not doing anything extremely major. But I feel better because I've been having a better experience with getting basic chores done and staying clean and taking care of myself. I've also been writing more, which I deeply appreciate. I've been thinking a lot more about how I want to approach my body of writing and I have become more and more convinced that doing it on my own through this website is the best medium for my skills and creative potential. I've seen many others have great results with it and it's been a pleasure reading different people's blogs and other digitized writings. I think it says a good thing about the world: people have an ample opportunity to express themselves with technology. I've definitely been in a bit of a doomerist mood regarding my attitudes on technology, so having something positive to say about it is good.

But yeah, I've been thinking more about what I want this website to look like and part of that involves producing more writing projects. One thing I've been thinking of is making a section of the blog called "Orthodox Hermeneutics" (working title) where I write devotionals, which could be quite rewarding. I'm reminded of Griffin Gooch's Reality Theology</a> as a decent inspiration for a kind of personal Christian writing I'd like to do. I'm no theologian by any means (except maybe in spirit haha) but I think it would be a great outlet for me to explore the mysteries of faith, salvation, grace, and all that. God expects us to wrestle with faith because of how little we can comprehend the sheer scope and complexity of the universe, so I expect myself to do a lot of that when writing devotionals. I don't really see any good devotionals in their own right. Many popular devotional publications feel too close to self-help than expressing any kind of applications of church doctrines and wisdom. No one really talks about the parts that suck about being a Christian and how hard it is to really come to terms with the exact nature of salvation. To me, it always feels like I'm being pandered or sold to and I hate that.
I had a few other trains of thought I wanted to follow (because this entry and yesterday's broke my rule of 15-minute meditations—holy funk I'm evoooooolving) in between writing today's entry, but I guess I'll just have to let them go. I have a lot of things I want to say, but I also know that I need to keep my catalog of thoughts and ideas as fresh as possible. Ideas are kind of like cooked meals or fresh produce: they go bad if you leave them for too long. So with that, I have to try my best to balance the cognitive load of unprocessed thoughts and doing the basics as aforementioned.
Regular readers can also tell that I'm getting more hip to putting pictures in these entries, which has been quite liberating for me. When IOKTIKN was on Substack, it felt important for me to put pictures in my pieces that felt relevant to the text. Typically this process was done by going on Cara</a> and finding some sort of image that I felt encapsulated the overall disposition of the piece. While publishing on Substack, I was pretty into an oil painting aesthetic. Yeah, thanks Cara.
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Normie Discourse

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One thing that's been on my mind recently is the term "normie." I started thinking about it because a few friends would talk about their grievances in work or school, saying that they were constantly surrounded by normies. This is interesting to me because my suspicion is that everyone has a similar disposition towards others who they don't know intimately but have to engage with them in common societal contexts such as work or school. It reminds me of a Japanese cultural concept: honne and tatemae. Honne 「本音」 essentially means "true sound" and is used to convey a type of disposition that is reflects a person's true feelings and attitudes towards a situation. Tatemae 「建前」 essentially means "public posture" and generally refers to feelings a person shows in order to maintain social harmony, or Wa</a>. In the West, we think of society as something that needs order, not harmony. Our individualist disposition makes us see civic structures as a "necessary evil" (at least according to Thomas Paine</a>) and not something that is harmonious with nature. According to Rousseau</a>, humanity's natural state is something that doesn't prescribe to any kind of civic structure, but instead prefers humble solitude to conglomeration. But still, it's interesting that universally, it seems that there is a balancing act when it comes to socializing that people seem to fundamentally dislike.

Logically, predication collapses when it becomes universal. When everyone's a normie, then no one's a normie. So with that, I think it's important to not be afraid of saying something that might make us feel like an outsider because truthfully, being an outsider is a universal fear. So for me, I hope that I can remember this:

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” </blockquote>

—Romans 12:22 (ESV) </blockquote>
I can ponder on social order and how it affects the psyche forever and go down endless rabbit holes with it, but the wiser thing to do is to understand that I am closer to a person than I might think (even if I don't know them) and that no matter whether or not I believe someone is better or worse than me, the truth is that we all share a Common Thread and because of that, I resolve to do my best to treat them with love and patience.
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Ideas and Ideals

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So things have been coming back up the back half of this week. I feel fortunate that I have more energy and don't have the same cloud as usual looming over me. An interesting thing happened yesterday: I was at a Starbucks when I saw a homeless man come in. I didn't pay him much mind at the time. Based on how he looked, he kept himself together pretty well, but his main tell for being homeless was that he had a backpack stuffed with belongings and a blanket clipped on the outside of it. But anyway, I was walking out of the store when he decided to approach me and ask me for some money. I typically always give homeless people money or if I'm outside of a store (like a convenience store) I will offer to buy them food, drink, cigarettes, or other items they might need. They're always genuinely quite thankful when I do this for them, and this homeless guy at the Starbucks decided that to pay me back, he'd turn me on to some cool bands I hadn't heard of. One of them was called "Death in June" and I still need to check it out. He also told me to look up the S&M Metallica concert because apparently it's super iconic. I haven't done it yet, but I will soon. He also called me the "eye of the storm", which I took as a nice compliment. I can also understand the metaphor of his life being chaotic and unstable, so his interaction with me signaled a moment of calm for him. I felt like it was important for me to listen to him as he discussed cool things he'd seen (he was into Alistair Crowley and that kind of Gnostic stuff) and stories from his life and his collections of records and musician memorabilia. I felt fortunate to be able to do something nice for someone and I hope to get more opportunities in the future.
I also received an email from a really nice reader (shout out h0p3</a>) who inspired me to get behind the personal wiki concept. I know that apps like Notion or Obsidian really popularized this kind of concept through the lens of productivity and optimization (a 'get a second brain' marketing ploy) and for a while I thought the idea of a personal wiki was stupid. But now that I've seen the true power of a really good personal wiki, I feel empowered to start one. It's a good thing for me because I already have a somewhat modular structure to this blog, but having it be a sort of wiki-blog sounds really cool and interesting. It seems like it would be a good way to wrap it all together. I need to figure out the proper tooling to pull it off because I want to keep Zola in it, but still have the power of the wiki structure. The idea of having someone get lost in a deep dive of writing sounds extremely awesome and I think that it's such a novel and interesting concept. I would love to look at the wiki-blog down the line and see how much progress there is and know that it could be explored for a long time. I'd like to maybe revolve around some kind of theme or story so that it gives the project more shape, but I can't think of any good ones right now. I'm sure it'll come to me sooner rather than later.
I still struggle with the performative aspect of writing in here, but I also understand that I want my writing to connect with people, so performance is a crucial element to that. There's a lot of predicaments behind industrialization as a movement, but I think that it's still important to acknowledge the positive impacts of it. I hope that we can find a way to achieve a post-scarcity society someday soon. I understand that I am a privileged person, but I also understand that trouble comes for us all. I can't do everything to help those less fortunate than me because I have my own troubles too—everyone does. I also realize that the great institutions of the world can't play fair because it's too much for even them to control. So all of the unfairness and injustice that I see in the world is something that can't be stopped immediately or easily, and for that I have to try and figure out how to make sense of it the best way I can. I know I can't help everyone. Truthfully, I can only really help just a few people. If God wants to bless me with an opportunity to help a lot of people, I'll do my best to pursue it but as things stand right now with my condition, temperament, and knowledge, there's only a small amount I can do relative to what's been done by other individuals.
I know that there's a lot more life left for me to live. God's going to take His time.
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Regulating the Mental Cache

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and there a few reasons for that. First, I got depressed again. I thought I had gotten over my last episode but was only okay for like a few days but then I spiraled again into another episode. At this point I think I'm depressed more than I'm not, which sucks ass. The second thing that made me not write in here for a while was that as a consequence of my depression and other events, I found it hard to write something that was personal and publishable (to my standards anyway) and couldn't muster up the strength to write anything. I wasn't even jotting down notes or anything. But that's also a consequence of the fact that I spent most of my time asleep, which is usually how depression goes for me. If I didn't have support from my family, I'd probably be homeless and more severely mentally ill than I already am. It makes me sad to think about that. I've also become more fed up with the world in general. Most aspects of society disgust me and I despise going out and doing basically anything. I only go out to the gym and to restaurants to get something to eat and I'll maybe socialize once every month or two. What's sad about that is that my situation isn't unique and actually much more normalized than one would like to think, particularly for those under 30 years old. Young people in general are way more risk averse than older people were when they were younger. Not to mention they're also way poorer.
I know I had other ideas I wanted to share here, but nothing really comes to mind immediately. I have a pocket notebook I keep at my desk for the purpose of jotting down quick thoughts, but I haven't found myself using it at all, really. It's mostly because I don't have a habit of writing down quick ideas like that and also because I feel like I think too quickly to write certain things down. I don't say that to brag, because thinking too fast too often isn't useful. Capturing brief thoughts in a notebook throughout the day would most certainly slow my thinking down and I feel like it would be easier to write through ideas instead of thinking through them super quickly and then forgetting them. I don't want to run into the problem I see from "second brains" or "personal knowledge bases" though because from what I've seen, most people write a bunch of stuff down, but then never really go back and read it. Anyone who uses those platforms seems to suffer from an intellectual vanity: they would rather use the platforms to give the appearance of being a deep thinker rather than actually thinking deeply. They become too focused on the medium and not on any substantive thought. Now, I can't say for sure that most people who use things like Obsidian or Notion don't read through their personal wikis or whatever, but I feel like that has to be the case because those people have more fun adding stuff than actually reading through it. Wikis are great for sharing a base of knowledge on a certain topic, but a personal wiki just doesn't seem that useful. If you're not going to remember the stuff that you wrote down anyway, is there really any use for even remembering it?
I think it's cool and important for the brain to regularly clear its cache, so to speak. To me, it's a good thing that not everything stays remembered. Most of the things that were useful to someone 5 or 10 years ago are no longer useful to keep in the mind. Whether it's personal memories or knowledge, a lot of that stuff isn't really important. I know many people who are adamant in documenting their lives through photos or posting on social media or whatever, but to me that seems really stupid. Looking back on the past like that is not useful in any way and feels more self-centered and masturbatory than anything else. I don't remember most of my past and quite frankly, I don't want to. People I've known for years will tell me stories of things I've done in the past and I don't remember most of those events. I don't want my past influencing me because there's nothing useful it can provide. Usually when I think about the past, it always degrades itself into some kind of mental self-flagellation. To me, the present is the most important thing to think about. I want to know how I can operate now because that's all that matters to me. It's important to embrace change, and I always strive to grow wiser so that I can tackle whatever happens next.
Weirdly enough though, I still get anxious about the future. I don't think there's any way to avoid that completely and quite frankly, it's much easier to live in potential than in action. I know it's a common thing for people to daydream about hypothetical situations and I do that a lot too, but I also know that it's not really a productive way of thinking. If anything, daydreaming is just a way to regulate one's self emotionally. However, it's also an easy way to spiral into certain patterns of thought. I don't want to do that anymore. I want equanimity in my life, but the desire for that equanimity is what creates the anxiety about my future and getting out of that paradoxical loop is difficult. Understanding it is a big reason why I write here. I hope that more patterns of thought will reveal themselves soon and I can observe them and use them to grow. Until then, I will have to sit with my current self and do my best to keep going.
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Reflections on Psychiatric History

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last 24 to 36 hours or so, I've had a major uptick in mood. I remember I had a healing sort of dream where I got my feelings out to some characters from my dreams and weirdly enough, I woke up the next morning feeling better. It was as if I could feel the chemical reactions permeating through my brain. I feel like I've been more in tune with that recently, but I also know that it's been something I've been channeling for a number of years. It's gotten a bit easier to manage, but I still don't understand the exact nature of the biological shifts I can feel happening. I think my supplement regimen that I started about 4 or 5 months ago has so far been much more successful than any psychiatric medications I've taken, which really says a lot. There's a part of me that feels it could be a placebo because the taking all of the pills is a cornerstone task of my morning routine and is symbolic of my self-care in general, so the improvement could come from that mechanism alone. My guess is that it's a contributing factor to my overall improvement, but not the full scope. I think that there is a substantial difference between the supplements and the prescribed medications. With my psychiatric medications, side effects were rampant and their efficacy was dubious at best. Sometimes I had certain combinations that worked well, but that relief was short-lived due mostly to environmental factors outside of the biochemical aspects of the drugs themselves.
For instance, I was at a long-term residential psychiatric treatment facility for a period of six months. I was actively taking about 5 different drugs. If I remember correctly, I was taking an antipsychotic, a mood stabilizer, an anxiolytic, and two antidepressants. This was the typical stack of medications I was prescribed by different providers. The facility itself was an impactful experience because I was receiving regular and frequent psychiatric consultations, it was my first time going to therapy, all of my meals were cooked for me, and the sole focus of the experience was on learning different techniques for psychological regulation and understanding how to best implement them. Many of the things I learned while in treatment still help me today. Unfortunately though, this extremely stable environment is much different than regular every-day independent living and certain triggers and obstacles have been essentially unavoidable. As a result, my mood episodes became worse and I struggled to maintain many of the techniques I learned during treatment.
Additionally, the flaws of the American healthcare system became more apparent as I continued life after treatment. The company that ran the long-term facility was best-in-class regarding treatment, but subsequent providers were not as helpful in navigating my evolving needs. I had situations where insurance wouldn't cover certain medications and I'd often have delays in getting them because if I didn't have coverage, the medications would cost thousands of dollars. One provider I had decided to switch one of my medications because my insurance company decided to stop covering it. So because of the unreliability and all of the red tape, I decided that conventional pharmaceutical treatment wasn't a long-term option.
So with that, I decided to pursue over-the-counter supplements since those had less red tape surrounding them and they were about the same price as my pharmaceuticals. Currently, I take lion's mane, ashwagandha, bacopa monnieri, fish oils, and a multivitamin. I was used to taking a bunch of different pharmaceuticals simultaneously, so to me this stack feels pretty tame. Like I mentioned earlier, I have been seeing a noticeable improvement with overall mood and motivation and things of that nature. I still have episodes of mostly depression, but I've figured out how to make them less frequent and less intense over time. Anxiety is also a chronic thing to manage and I have to do a lot of different exercises during the day to manage it.
Overall, I think I'm doing okay. Things might not be super grand or optimal or whatever, but I feel that my suffering has given me a more holistic worldview. I also feel more humbled and grateful for the little things. At this moment, I am not experiencing a lot of pain and I will do my best to hold onto this for as long as I can. There's so much that I can't control or understand, but I know that God will guide me through it and put it all into perspective eventually. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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Drowned in Fatigue

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I haven't come here to write in a while because I've been extremely tired and depressed. Over the last week or so, I've spent most of my time asleep. As I am writing this entry, my fatigue persists. It's been rather frustrating dealing with this, and it makes life nearly impossible to enjoy. I know that if I use a CPAP, I probably wouldn't be this tired all the time, but I can't seem to use it because it's too uncomfortable on my face. I have made dozens of attempts with several different masks, but none of them seem to help. I have a hard time falling asleep as it is, so adding the element of the mask makes falling asleep practically impossible. It sucks because I literally cannot function as a basic human being without it. Not only do I have to deal with the fatigue from sleep apnea, but I also have to deal with depressive symptoms still. I dread waking up every day because I know that I will have to face the day with constant pain, which makes it difficult to do basically anything. Thankfully I've gotten better at taking care of myself in certain regards such as hygiene and doing basic chores to keep my environment clean, but I still have to deal with the constant pain that comes with depression. It's unlike any other kind of pain one can experience. The hardest part about my depression is its chronic nature. Episodes used to last months at a time, but now they usually only last a few weeks after figuring out ways to manage it. Still though, I face several episodes of depression a year and when they happen, I have to put anything I'm pursuing on hold. As such, it's made it practically impossible to maintain any kind of gainful employment or any kind of long-term project. It makes me feel incapable of keeping up with the world and I constantly feel like an embittered loser.
One thing that has made life harder due to my depression is the fact that I can't enjoy any kind of media anymore. I remember I used to enjoy experiences all different kinds of stories and aesthetics, but nowadays it all feels hollow and pointless. Now, I find it hard to sit down and watch anything because I always end up getting upset about something in it. It's hard to concentrate when I get depressed, so reading is a much more laborious activity than it used to be. Finding good books to read is usually a challenge. It's unfortunate, but there's a lot of slop out there and combing through it is exhausting. Moreover, it just feels like everything is slop these days. I know that's not actually true, but my perception is clouded by the pain I have constantly been feeling. It's difficult to even get my thoughts out because it feels like there's a buffer of some kind in my head that makes it harder to process things. I feel so much slower and dumber than usual.
Thankfully I haven't had any perceivable mania happen in a while. Mania generally feels more preventable because the main thing I have to attend to is my sleep. As long as I get consistent sleep, mania generally doesn't rear its head. I'm thankful that I haven't had any mania and have only been dealing with depression. Mania always ends up in me making a multitude of stupid decisions that I end up regretting later. I hate how I can never trust my own judgment because of how many stupid decisions I make. I also hate the paranoia that I have. I always feel as if there's some kind of imminent danger at every corner. I hope I can get past the traumas I've faced. I struggle so much with feeling like a real person in a real world. Everything feels so manufactured to me, or like I'm always in some kind of dream. I don't know how to deal with it every single day, so I usually just end up staying inside and isolating myself because of how much I fear being alive. At this point, I don't see things getting better. I only see them getting worse.
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Pocket Knife

noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a rewrite of an old story I wrote back in 2020 and was initially published on Substack. This isn't a major rewrite—just some revisions to make it flow better and have a bit more logic to it. I hope you enjoy!
“Go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau
This walk home from work is a drag.
Sometimes I ask myself whether or not this job is worth it, but it pays six bucks an hour more than the old one so I’m fine with it for now. The walk isn’t too terrible. Hell, at least I always see something interesting. I guess that’s what happens when you walk through the part of the city that's been siphoned off for the homeless.
Homeless folks usually aren’t that bad. The worst thing they’ll do is ask you for some money but if I gave some to every homeless person I saw, then I wouldn’t have any for myself. I know—I worked for it and they didn’t—but I don’t think anyone becomes homeless just because they stopped working. Either way, as long as I mind my business and don’t cause trouble I always get home just fine. I usually try to be as nice as I can. I’ve also learned that you can be nice, but you have to be firm too. Certain parts of town always feel like they’re a lawless prison yard. I’m fine with that just because sometimes their prison yard rules feel simpler.
The commute from work is usually at night. Night time can feel a bit scarier just because it’s quiet and you can’t see as much, but the homeless folks don’t act differently. A lot of them are awake because they’re high on speed, but they usually keep to themselves.
The street feels a bit more anxious tonight. It's probably because of some big sports game or something. Folks down here can get antsy because of all the activity from the bars and whatnot.
"Ey, yah got sumthin fer meh?"
I turn around to see an older fella. He looks crusty and smells like pure dog shit. His voice sounded like a pirate gone redneck. He was walking towards me, but he wasn't walking right; it was something between a limp and having his underwear stuck up his ass. He was holding something but it was too dark to see.
"I know yah heer me motherfucker what have yah got?"
He picks up his pace and I see he’s got some kind of metal thing in his hand. I can’t tell what it is but he’s got it pointed my way. He grabs me by the collar and sticks what looks to be an old box cutter in my face.
"I want all the money in yer wallet you fuck," he snarls.
"Well I can’t grab my wallet if you keep holding on to my collar like that. Let go and I’ll see what I can do," I reply.
He lets go and keeps it pointed at me.
I reach into my pocket to grab my wallet and then it dawns on me. If we went toe to toe right now, even with that thing in his hand, I’d probably beat the fuck out of him. He’s small, old and frail while I’m young and strong.
"So what? Are you gonna give me yer wallet? I’ll fuckin’ stab ya!"
"Alright then, go ahead, but just know that if you try you’ll probably be the one needing to go to the emergency room, not me. So go ahead, try me," I say to him while staring into his eyes.
His look loses its intensity. He shrinks into himself and realizes that he can’t beat me. He walks away.
"Aw well fuck ya then."
My heart is still beating in my chest. I feel like I succeeded, but I don’t feel like I won. I genuinely do feel bad for that guy. He probably just wanted my money so he could buy more speed to rob people. Should I call the police? Maybe, but what would that do?
I go about my business and finish my walk home. Just around the corner from my apartment I see a homeless fella sleeping under a stop sign. He has a cap laying next to him flipped upwards. I reach for my wallet and put twenty bucks in there for him.
Finally I pull up to my apartment and head inside. I think from now on I’ll need something to defend myself but I can’t think of what. Guns are pretty frowned upon. Tasers are a bit inhumane. I don’t know, I guess I’ll just have to look around.
I take off my work clothes, get a shower going, and think about the incident. Should I tell people? I don’t know. I just hope there’s a day when this shit will stop.
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The Collective Choice of Oppression

noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So I've been going back to the gym lately and I think I hit a wall today. I was just too tired to go, and I don't enjoy how I don't seem to have the capacity for many things in life anymore. My body is also really sore and honestly I don't think I'm doing a whole lot when I am at the gym. I have such a long ways to go when it comes to my physicality. I regret falling into such a level of despair that rendered me immobile, feeble, and fragile. I'm getting older, but I'm not that old yet. I still have a lot of time left to experience the fervor of youth, so I want to do whatever it takes to make sure that I don't waste it away. But at the same time, my fragility makes itself readily apparent any time I try to push myself beyond the little box I've put myself in. Trauma overload has made it hard to get outside of myself, but I don't know how to get back to who I used to be. These days I am much more despondent and don't see much of a point in doing basically anything. This lack of purpose isn't something that I've rationally bound myself to—instead it comes from a deeper part of my brain and body. It's a spiritual sickness, no doubt about it.
I can point fingers at the world all I want. I can say that it's immoral and oppressive for those in power to hoard resources and stand on the dead bodies of the innocent, but calling it out on its own doesn't do anything for anyone. At one point or another, we all have seen the injustices of institutions and their negative outcomes for everyone. Despite this awareness, we choose not to do anything about it. We choose to stay in our own bubbles, blissfully tuning out anything that upsets our sensibilities. Even if something does upset these sensibilities, we will just briefly acknowledge it and move on without taking any action. So many horrible things in this world happen because it is simply our collective choice to let them happen. It's so easy for us to point our fingers at those in power and blame them for anything we wish. High gas prices? It's the administration's fault! Horrible stand-still traffic? Oh man, the city planner really did it this time. Tom from accounting didn't find my ironic t-shirt funny? Clearly the establishment has brainwashed Tom with their dogmatic agenda to make him not think that I'm hilarious. Pointing fingers gets us nowhere. If we don't want to make the world a better place, that's our choice.
The part that depresses me about this realization though is that we make this choice every day. Completely preventable problems end up not being prevented simply because we collectively chose not to. Now, why exactly would that happen? Well, to me the answer is simple: people by nature are evil.
I'll explain why later.
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On Irreligious Christianity

noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been feeling better today. I was able to go to the gym and do my laundry. Overall, I feel like I'm out of depression once again. Now I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm happy, but I at least don't have any of the destructive looming side effects that come with depression like suicidal tendencies and fatigue and anhedonia and all that other classic stuff. I guess it's fair to say that I am more in a state of relief than anything else. I know it won't last, but at least I can relish in it for the time being.
I was reading this essay by David Bentley Hart earlier today about his secular nature despite being a theological scholar (yet refusing to call himself a theologian for some reason?) and overall deep entrenchment in the Christian church itself. Now, he made the point that he doesn't necessarily want to feel this way and doesn't promote other Christians to feel this way, but his perspective and experience really interested me. Also, his writing style is loquacious to the point where it feels like he's the final boss in my personal reading journey. But loquacious can be cool when it's done right and I think Hart does it well. Every word, even if it's baroque in nature, serves a purpose in a given sentence that expands the idea rather than fluffing it with nonsense. That's always a relief to read, especially considering how many thesaurus bros exist. But anyways, I was touched by the idea that I've seen before of long-standing Christians getting disillusioned by the faith and not feeling as attached to it as they used to. I remember reading about famous YouTube creators Rhett and Link announcing their deconstruction and saying that they would be in service and not "feeling it". In Hart's essay, he even makes the point that his two brothers still regularly engage in prayer and other church traditions while he remains unconvinced of its efficacy on his own spiritual well-being. He even states further that he feels a greater connection to more secular writers like Voltaire and Thomas Payne than he does with church fathers and saints.
Now, I don't think that there's anything wrong with appreciating any kind of great writing, whether it come from Voltaire or Saint Gregory Palamas. It's clear that writing itself is the single greatest invention of humanity and is an important part of being human, regardless of whether or not the reader agrees with whatever the author is trying to (or not to) espouse. But appreciating great writing is a different thing entirely from living in faith. Living in faith isn't about being in a constant state of theosis or always feeling connected to God—it's about having faith in spite of how one feels. In the same way that it's virtuous to work hard on secular pursuits, the same is generally true of faithful ones as well. Prayer gets us closer to God not as a means of changing our fate (doing so would challenge His sovereignty, which is heretical), but by changing ourselves and our hearts. Just like how it is with any skill, there's not a linear progression of improvement. Like life in general, prayer is a constant traversal of hills and valleys. Some days, we really do feel God's love in our hearts and will have the motivation to pray so that we can praise Him and be grateful. But there are many days where that love may not feel present in our hearts and prayer feels more like a chore than something restorative. But when prayer feels like a chore, that's when it becomes the highest and greatest form of prayer. It's also when it has the greatest chance to truly change our hearts and deliver repentance.
I'm no theologian or academic or any other kind of professional smart person, but through these reflections I hope to attain a greater understanding of what it means to really walk the path that God has set for me.
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Escaping the Escapism

noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been having a greater desire to escape my head lately. I've done better at cutting out addictions and other escapist tendencies in my life as of late because I know that it's not good for me, but the urge to go back to those things feels strong today. I want writing to be my escape and for the most part it is, but I haven't isolated it as my core escape. Right now I still constantly inundate myself with media I don't wish to consume, but I've been getting better with that. I also still struggle with lustful tendencies and sexual immorality and the like, but that's a whole can of worms in and of itself. Intimacy is generally something that I'm not good at across the board. Whether it be with sexual or romantic partners or friends and family, I generally don't like being intimate with people. I struggle with being touched in basically any capacity. This has created a lot of struggles with romantic and sexual partners in the past because I don't like to cuddle and sex is difficult for me because of the anxiety surrounding physical contact. With friends and family, I hate being hugged or patted on the back or anything like that. Suffice to say, my aversion to physical contact with people often forces me to turn my base desires inward. Masturbation not only acts as a self-soothing mechanism, but it also helps me feel more in control of my sexuality. But unfortunately, it's become a form of escapism in itself. I unfortunately find it very difficult to abstain from it for more than a week, usually. Unlike other addictions, it's much easier to relapse because of the constant accessibility (it's not like I can or would want to remove my genitalia from my body) and for me, isolation comes second nature. So with those two factors together, it's been the most difficult escapist habit to quit. But hopefully I can figure something out soon.
There's a lot of shame for me when talking about sexual or romantic affairs because of how inadequate I feel in those matters. Past trauma in those things makes it difficult for me to desire and seek physical intimacy. I always fear that I'll go through that same pain again if I have a new partner. At this point, I haven't had a romantic relationship in about five years and I haven't had sex in about a year and a half, I think. I don't care to seek it out at all and even though I've had people interested in romantic and/or sexual relationships with me in the past five years, I've denied just about all of them out of the fear of getting hurt. I used to want a family with a wife and children and all of that, but I think at this point I am actually incapable of fostering or maintaining any of those relationships. My wife would probably leave me, my kids would hate me, and overall I feel like I would lose so much more than what I could gain. I wouldn't want to put my children through any needless suffering. I don't appreciate having been born myself, so I wouldn't want to place that burden on a child of my own. Now, don't mistaken me for an anti-natalist or anything like that. I think it's important and good for people to have children, but I don't see myself as genetically or socially fit for that task. I do feel bad, though, that many people in my age group share similar sentiments about having children. It seems that about half of the people I know that are my age will most likely not have children. Among that group, about half of them actually want children and for that I feel bad. I think there's been a large amount of factors contributing to that, but I don't care to write about them right now because it would require too much thinking and analysis and also because there are so many troglodyte grifters who make a living through giving such horrible and tepid takes on the matter. If anyone is reading this, make your own conclusions. I honestly don't care.
This has probably been my hardest entry to write because of how sensitive this kind of subject is for me. Not to mention, the fact that I'm actively deciding to put this on the internet scares the shit out of me, but I'm pretty sure there's a group of people out here who understand what I'm going through, so hopefully I can at least make them feel seen somehow.
Also, I looked up the term "blogging" and I was so sad to find just how inundated it is with monetization and LLM-generated crap. Like seriously, people are out here trying to automate the whole blogging process with AI, and that to me is extremely sad. Not to mention, many people see blogging solely as this capitalist regime. These people who want to monetize blogs say that the main types of posts are "informational" and "transactional", which doesn't make sense to me. Sure, people do use the internet largely to find information, but it's become readily apparent that the quality of that information has drastically declined due to this mindset of monetization behind blogging. Instead of people writing about something that interests them for the sake of the interest itself, there's this large movement to monetize it and turn it into gooey slop. Of course, this has been going on for a long time now and so I'm not really being innovative in saying this kind of thing, but I do feel the need to show my disgust in this whole thing because of how much it's poisoned me and people I know and care about. Maybe one day we'll have a better way to use technology, but right now this just ain't it.
That last paragraph didn't really have anything to do with the theme of the rest of the entry, but it was something I was thinking about too and felt the need to discuss it. But it doesn't matter. There's no rules here.
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Pain in the Brain

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don't know what's been going on, but I've been on a self-deprecation kick over the last 24 to 36 hours. I haven't really done much externally to show this, but internally it's been quite the war. I seem to have this bad habit of ruminating on the past and re-framing its events in a more negative way. I'm not sure why I do this, especially now. I'm not sure what exactly has happened in my life to make me do this horrendous combination of rumination and negative re-framing, but I just know that it's been quite hard on me cognitively and emotionally. I just look at a lot of the things that have happened in my life and can't help but feel a great sense of failure and hopelessness regarding them. It's given me an extremely negative self-concept and I know that it's not sustainable to think this way. But also, I can't really figure out how to not do any of that stuff. It seems like it all stems from this deeper uncontrollable feeling that I can't get away from. I feel it in my head almost all the time. It's like this constant pain that I can feel just behind my eyes and it radiates throughout my whole body. It's a pain I started to feel when I was about 16 or 17, and I remember I first started feeling it when my first girlfriend broke up with me. Not to say that this feeling stems entirely from that experience, but I think it's safer to say that it was my first trigger for it and that it's something that comes from a much deeper place than getting dumped. But ever since then, I haven't been able to escape this feeling. It goes away for a while, but always finds a way to come back. Daniel Johnston used to talk about a "pain in the brain" and that's exactly how I feel about it. It seems like it's just something that will always be a part of me, but I hate the fact that I have to learn to live with it. It's been so hard living with it. I feel like I'm missing out on so much in life because of it. It makes me feel like someone who had a limb amputated in an accident or something. I remember what it was like to not feel this way, but every day that goes by I forget that feeling more and more. It's starting to come to a point where this is all I know, and that scares me.
I have this feeling that I'm going to become some bitter and angry and rude and overall toxic person to be around because of this pain I feel. Everyone else can go around and be happy and productive and all those other things while I just sit around, alone and angry with no recourse but to swim around in my own thoughts for the rest of my days. I've thought about how nice it would be to have a regular job and regular things in my life, but I fear that I no longer have the wiring to sustain that kind of lifestyle. No matter how well I get, things will always come to a head and crash and burn. I can have everything "figured out" but still not be able to sustain anything meaningful. Employers don't understand that I have to take these sabbaticals for what seems to be no reason at all, and they simply can't excuse that because of how drastically it affects their bottom line. It doesn't matter how productive, useful, or necessary I am. I will always have to deal with the burnout and society isn't made for people like me. I also don't have the talent or the luck to be someone who lives off their creativity or anything like that. I recently saw those famous blog posts from Hyperbole and a Half about being depressed and I feel that way exactly, but fortunately someone like Allie Brosh gets to live a lifestyle that works well with her depression. As for me, I have to just try and figure it out somehow. I don't think I will, though. I feel a great tragedy coming for my life. I hate to sound so negative, but I can't see it any other way right now.
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The Void in Peace

noahie@fastmail.com — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been feeling rather prolific this last week or so, but that's clearly due to the continued novelty of my new workflow. I had to switch from nano to micro today because I couldn't do proper text wrapping in nano, which is completely asinine to me. Nano would do soft-wrapping, but it would only do so by character and not by word. So when I would type in nano, I'd have to press enter</code> every time I had to start a new line. That to me was just so stupid and I put up with it for a few days just because I still felt super cool putting my writing in the text editor. But now that I don't feel the novelty as much as I did a few days ago, I knew I needed to make the change. I also knew that configuring micro to my liking would take a little while, so that was something I wasn't looking forward to. I had to edit the configuration so that it would do the text wrapping by word, which I was grateful to see that I could do so. I also had to use a plugin for spell checking, but thankfully I already had aspell</code> installed so that wasn't too big of an issue. But yeah, now I have micro configured in a way that's comfortable and I might add more plugins later based on new ideas or problems that I run into, but for now things feel fine.
I guess I also feel more prolific because of the "pain in the brain" I'm still dealing with, and writing is one of the only things that gives me any kind of true solace. I forget who said it, but some writer said that not writing and writing are both terrible states to be in and that the only good state to be in is having just written. To me, the writing itself is a good state to be in so I don't know what he was on about there, but the state of having just written is a very nice state to be in as well. So with that, I try my best to chase both states because for most of the day, I am completely void of any joy or comfort in my position. Going out sucks. Being inside all the time sucks too, but it's a devil I know so I'd rather deal with that than deal with the shitty world and the shitty people that are in it. I hate to be so cynical, but these days it's just been too difficult to find any silver lining in the world. I also know that there's definitely a good bit of confirmation bias involved in that judgment. If I'm being honest, the world is actually dull and boring. I think I was making it sound like the world is on fire on something, but that's not what I was going for. Where I am geographically, things are peaceful and that's a good thing. Unfortunately, the boredom surrounding that peace makes me go insane. That's true for a lot of other people as well, so that's why many people will make the conjecture that the world is getting worse. Unfortunately, that's just an illusion from the truth which is that things are actually going really well, but that lack of conflict drives a further existential fear—the fear that there is no purpose to any of this. See, in times of war and strife, it's very easy for people to define their purpose. But in times of peace, this is much harder. Because of this, the void becomes easier to see. This is why so many people in the Western world are so obsessed with things like optimization and self-help. We see the void, but deny our ... [truncated]
For me, I know that I'll never truly be happy. Brain disease aside, there's always going to be a search for more. But here's the hard truth about happiness: it's only supposed to last a little while. For pretty much all of us, less than 1% of our lives will be spent in moments of happiness. We do everything we can to get there, but that's just how it works. Maybe that moment will come for me soon. I haven't felt it in a long time. It's been so long, in fact, that I don't remember it. I don't think I remember being actually truly happy. All I can think of are distractions, but nothing of the real thing. I think I'm beginning to doubt if it even exists. Hopefully one day I'll find it again. I just have to keep trying.
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Beyond the Fish Bowl noahie@fastmail.com — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I felt a brief pause before starting this entry today. I have this desire to try and maintain novelty with my thoughts, so I don't want to harp on the same thoughts over and over again in sequence between entries. Unfortunately, though, I don't have a whole bunch of new thoughts to think about. It's funny because I have this desire to constantly get my thoughts out in some form, whether it be in these free-writing sessions or in more planned out pieces or even small blurbs in a notebook. I feel like it's important for me to do this because of how much the world today tries to do the thinking for you. Whether it's politicians or marketing professionals or your mom or your lawyer or whatever, there's always someone trying to get in your head and take your precious cognitive resources. This is also why I try to limit certain media I consume. Every new piece of media that comes out feels like a new wrapping of the same propaganda piece over and over again. Obviously this is true in basically every non-fiction media. Whether it's the news or some academic paper or Wikipedia or whatever, there's always someone trying to sway me in believing in the agenda of the deep state. It's even gotten to the point where I feel the meta-contrarian viewpoints as conducive to deep state hyper-capitalism and authoritarianism. Like, I enjoy seeing other people get into the ideology behind dumb phones or deleting social media or anti-consumer tech, but seeing this as a trend makes me believe that there is some greater manipulation at play. It's something I see myself falling into as well, as if my appeals towards digital sovereignty are all completely in vain because the ecosystem has laid itself out like a fish bowl and within the fish bowl is a labyrinthine house of mirrors. I feel like instead of getting out, I just found a new comfy place within the fish bowl. The worst part is that I feel like it's always going to be this way. The hard part about this line of thinking is that the fish bowl metaphor extends just beyond ideology or society. The earth itself is the fish bowl. No matter where I go or what I do, there's no escape, no true solace. Even beyond the earth itself, my brain is trapped inside the fish bowl that is my skull. The place where all my thoughts live, supposedly, is a tiny little claustrophobic dome that has little room for movement. I don't know, it seems that all I can see is the walls of the prison that is existence. It's funny because within certain new age movements like idiots who believe in the Law of Attraction and that kind of thing, there exists this notion that there is power within the individual to change their environment. "If I think it, I can achieve it," they'll espouse in their echo chambers. The problem, however, is that they don't realize that they're trapped in the fish bowl and that everything they dream of is simply just a reflection. We can't reach into our reflections. We can't achieve beyond the reflection. All we can do is sit in the cage, move around the cage, talk about being in the cage, but that's about it. We can't even begin to conceptualize anything else outside of it. There is no exit outside of Plato's proverbial cave (I like the fish bowl with mirrors metaphor better though, what can I say?). Well, I guess it felt good to spit all of that out. Do I really feel like hot shit? No, because no one actually reads this shit. I sit here in a void, devoid of any SEO or luscious backlinking or any discoverability whatsoever. I stand here as lord of my own little digital landfill, talking to myself over and over again, day in and day out until the fire that is my thoughts eventually fades and falls beyond obscurity into the depths of nothingness, like it never even existed. In one of Shakespeare's sonnets, 151 I think (you know, the summer's day one, the most famous one), he talks about how he immortalizes the girl he's writing the sonnet about because he's writing this piece about her. To me, that's not really accurate. The girl is no one. The girl is simply a placeholder because she can be anyone (like the girl reading this) and so because of that, Shakespeare wasn't the one who immortalized her. She was immortal to begin with. So within me and this digital landfill, there's some immortal being that lives within these words. Hopefully they're happy seeing them being written. Reply by email</a> Logical Derealization noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Well probably the most exciting thing that's happened today is that I got a new desk. It's a much needed replacement from my old one that was this stupid L-shaped thing that I had to build myself and I did a really poor job, so it was extremely unstable and at one point even fell apart. It was also unnesecarily large and I ended up putting a bunch of stuff on it that had no business being there. It essentially became a trinket graveyard and I hate how I seem to always be amassing them. But anyways, the new desk I have is a small 3-foot long folding desk, so I didn't have to assemble anything. I just unfolded the legs and it was good to go. The stability that I have now compared to that old desk is life-changing. Also, it's small enough to sit comfortably in the corner of my room, so it looks really nice compared to the old one. Also, the smaller size means that I now have to be more intentional regarding what I want to have laying on here, so that's really helpful. I prefer to keep things minimal despite my tendency to accrue garbage. Whenever I have a bunch of garbage piled up, it's always a great activity to throw it all away en masse. I try to take what I can that's still useable and donate it, of course, but believe me when I say that most of it is trash. Ergonomics and decluttering aside, I have been pulling teeth just to come here and write today. I enjoy coming here and spewing out whatever garbage I'm thinking about, but it felt like a total chore to come here, open up my text editor, and just write. It's as if I forget that this is what helps keep me sane. I really do enjoy being able to just say whatever comes to mind here, especially considering how many stupid thoughts come into my head during the day. But I've always had trouble with starting tasks. Once I do get started, it's usually not too difficult to follow through and finish when I'm feeling generally normal. But I still deal with a lot of inertia in that regard. I tell myself I'm going to do something, and then I do everything in my power to distract myself until the pain of not starting wells up to the point where my head feels like it's going to explode if I don't start. But like I said, I do okay once I get started. Well, that's true most of the time anyway. Still, I'm not sure why I have a tendency to do that and why there's so much inertia. I can't really consider any reasoning as to why that is at the moment, but maybe I'll figure it out eventually. Still though, a lot of the "tasks" that I try to do are things that I feel actually don't really matter. I have a hard time switching between ambition and disillusionment. Some days I feel inspired to do a bunch of things that I think might be really impactful or fulfilling, but most days I just don't see the point. I think a big part of that has to do with the experiences that I've had in the past with regard to self-discovery and "spiritual awakening" or whatever. After many psychedelic and non-psychedelic "spiritual" experiences, I came to a stark and painful realization: the deepest part of self-discovery is the void, that at the absolute core of the self-concept, there is literally nothing there. People spend so much of their time occupying their lives with trying to discover their "true selves" or foster a general sense of identity. People will try to tell everyone attributes about themselves that aren't really appendages of their identity. Just about every statement that starts with "I am x" is not really even true. This isn't because x isn't there, but because "I am" isn't there. People try to use material things to give themselves a self-concept, usually. People love to identify themselves with what they have. But people also use immaterial things to bolster that self-concept as well. This usually comes in the form of a belief like "I'm a democrat" or something of that nature. And while those immaterial things can more credulously assert their ontological relevance, the individual can't really do that in the same way. Sure, cults of personality can exist, but there's not really anything that can describe that individual that is specifically unique to it. Really, individual uniqueness only results out of a combination of traits. There's not a single one thing that displays a marker of uniqueness for an individual. All of the combinations of traits that exist to describe a certain individual are based on those false attributes of identity, like material possessions or beliefs or whatever. So with that, there's no such thing as "you" or "me" or "I" or whatever other individualized pronouns there are. Because I am literally nothing, I don't feel a need to care or worry about ambitions these days. Sure, there are things I'd like to aspire to like being closer to God or gaining more independence, but the truth is that there's no real reason to give a shit about any of that stuff. Now, this is just something that feels more applicable to me because I have fostered my life to the point where I don't really have any external responsibilities. My mileage on this kind of thing is way different for someone who actually has people to be responsible for. An unemployed, single, childless, mentally ill guy is not really going to have the same realities as someone who is a parent or a boss or whatever. People who exist in collectives most likely have a more actualized self-concept because of the collective, but unfortunately for me I don't really have any collectives to be a part of, so I'll just have to deal with being a formless stream of thoughts and perceptions until they eventually stop. Dust unto dust, or something like that. Reply by email</a> Reflections on the Silicon Age noahie@fastmail.com — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I decided to do another entry today because I'm feeling the novelty of my new desk setup and writing almost exclusively in nano (my text editor). I also have a new tool called proselint</code> which is a python tool that scans my prose and gives suggestions based on some old timey writing style guide. Some of the suggestions are nice, but some of them don't really fit into my paradigm of what I would call "bad writing". Even though I have my disagreements, I do think it's generally a useful tool. I still need to figure out a spell checker here, though. I was browsing some programs that could work, but haven't found my right fit yet. Doing spell checking for prose in a text editor is a bit more complicated work, so I get it. Either way, I just enjoy clicking away in my nice little text editor. I was using LibreOffice for a long time and LibreOffice is cool because it's super robust and has lots of really nice features for formatting documents, but there were a lot of those features that felt superfluous to me. Because of this, the UI felt super clunky and I always had to switch fonts from Arial because I couldn't figure out how to make a preset for it. It was really annoying when the font would just switch back to Arial for no reason. Here in nano, though, things are a lot more streamlined and easy to deal with. Not to mention, I love editing text in markdown. Markdown is the superior text editing format for me. It's just so nice and easy and robust at the same time. It rocks. The guy who made it is pretty cool too, even though I don't remember his name. I checked out his socials though and he seemed like he was doing alright. But anyway, I'm just excited to click and clack and feel like an actual writer. I may not have a whole lot of writing under my belt and considering the fact that I'm not really published anywhere, I am still quite the amateur. I tried submitting some short stories to some journals or whatever but they all said no, which didn't surprise me. With the way the world is nowadays, everyone and their mother is a fucking writer. Whether it's posting stupid shit on social media or send long emails and text messages, practically everyone on the planet expresses themselves via the written word. Sure, there's a near infinite variety of mediums that can fit basically any niche, but so much of it feels like noise. I can't begin to communicate just how much slop there is to read on the internet. Not even AI slop, but real human-grade shit piles that stink in a way the LLMs could never truly replicate. It's a miracle that most people even read and write in the first place, and this is especially apparent from the absolute horrendous defilement of language that fills so many screens and finds its way into peoples' heads. It's beyond brainrot—it's a full-blown disintegration of thought itself. The rise in global literacy rates, historically speaking, would make one think that societies are becoming more educated, discerning, and intelligent. But the reality of this rise is far from that. If anything, the stereotypically Darwinian nature of humans comes out. Now, I'm not really a Darwinist in the traditional sense, but I do see the differences between those who are strong and those who are weak. And with the rise of global literacy, we have seen a true exhibition in humanity's love of exploitation and greed. With that, I mean to say that sure, people can read and write, but this ability has been used to actually make people think less and not more. With the state of the world today, we see that a select few companies have taken human thought and discourse and have held it hostage. Nowadays, everything has to happen in one of our few "town squares" that are the Metaverse, Twitterland, Google-topia, and blah blah blah. I don't know, man, I just can't seem to see the real thought behind most of the shit I read on the internet. Obviously the stupid people are stupid, but I see smart people falling into the same traps, too. Sure, the smart people might be more eloquent or creative in their discourse, but the same brain corruption is still happening. Now, I might be biased because I am clinically depressed and psychotic, but I don't think my estimations here are completely off base. The main thing that gives me solace is that while we do have these social and metaphysical problems, we still have a better situation as a species or whatever than we ever have in our short and ephemeral history. Sure, oligarchy and tyranny suck and are real and happening, but it could be way worse. Slavery could still be seen as a fact of life. We could still be engaging in pauperism. But no, we are in a different age—the Silicon Age, baby. And whether we like it or not, this is life. I just hope I can keep my mind sharp despite its fragile corners. Reply by email</a> Computing and Oppression noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Today is just another day, really. I don't have a whole lot on my mind at this present moment, but I feel compelled to write to not only keep up my habit and get all of my metaphysical gunk out, but also because I still want to feel the novelty of my new workflow. Now that I have Cogtio hosted here on my site, I have a new workflow. When I was keeping the diary private, I just had a large document in LibreOffice Writer, but now that I'm pushing everything to the site, I decided to use my text editor of choice, nano. To me, nano is like the more normal cousin compared to guys like emacs or vim. It's a lot simpler, too. For a while, it was a bit of a learning curve to get more used to the keyboard-centric controls, but now that I'm used to them, there's no going back. At this point, I try to limit the use of my mouse as much as possible because of how much more efficient and painless keyboard use is. Constantly switching between keyboard and mouse is a pain, but with my adoption of new software, I feel more efficient in how I use my computer. It's a world I had never explored before, and I'm surprised I didn't come into contact with it sooner. I remember the days where most of my technology use was with my iPhone and I remember actively thinking thoughts like "why would I need a computer? I can do everything I need on my phone." But now I realize just how ignorant that thinking was. I also remember from about 2016 to 2023, I didn't even own a computer. I just did everything on my phone. At that time I was in college, and if I ever really needed a computer, I'd just go to the library and borrow one of theirs. Even that was seldom done, though. For what I was doing with my life at the time, I just didn't need a computer. But now that life is different for me, I understand just how much better a computer is for me with regards to my technology use. Most computing these days is done on the web browser, and the web browsing experience is way better on a computer. I also just detest how much everyone constantly wants an app on their phone for everything. The irony though is that most of the major apps that people use are just web apps anyway, so there's not really much of a difference compared to just using a web browser. I remember back when I used to use Facebook, I had the app on my phone but it was a total drain on my battery. Then I figured out that if I just used my phone's web browser and used Facebook there, it saved a lot more battery. It's just crazy to me that Javascript will end up replacing everything one day. It seems that the whole fucking world runs on Javascript. But anyways, I appreciate the fact that I have options and can figure things out my way. For as much as people like to complain about America or the Western world or whatever, I feel that people take certain degrees of their peace and freedom for granted. At least here in America, most people don't understand just how much better off they are than the rest of the world. This is why I always hate it when rich people in Hollywood or whatever try to complain about the political system or whatever. The irony is just rich to me. First of all, they are the single biggest benefactors of that system, so their complaints are completely unjustified. And second, their complaints aren't even valid. To me, it just feels like a fruitless and pitiful attempt to try and humanize or moralize people who spend their whole lives and careers banking on elevating themselves about humanity and morality. It's very much giving "Let them eat cake." One thing I constantly reflect on is the nature of power with regards to how I feel about it compared to the right way to act about it. I just mean that on the one hand, I see oppressive and stupid forces at play constantly and my gut instinct has always been to try and resist or attempt to dismantle those forces in some way. However, I also understand that Christian teaching opposes that attitude and offers a different perspective. Instead of trying to rebel against these forces that govern us, it's important instead to try and be apart of them and to not get in their way because whether we like it or not, God put those forces and people in charge for a reason. It's never a good idea to question God's sovereignty, so it's better to be faithful and understand that there's a bigger plan in action that we as individuals might not readily see. I mean, Paul was saying that in the epistle to the Romans during the time of Caesar so if he can say that during one of the most oppressive and tyrannical regimes in history, then I can say that today. I might not like how the shitty governments and corporations do things, but I also know that it's more important to have faith in God's timing and actions and to not rely on my own limited judgment. In this instance, it's more practical and comforting to take a step back and say "I don't know" and to just let the chips fall as they may. Even if it brings a lot more pain in the moment to do that, the reasoning will be revealed in due time. Reply by email</a> Yellow Roses noahie@fastmail.com — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 It’s a hot one today, perfect weather for summer drinking at the watering hole two blocks away from campus. The bar is nice, but it’s old. I’ve been working here for about six months now and even though I have to deal with broken taps and drunk frat boys all day, it’s comfortable. There are a few people here this afternoon. Their chatter hums under the loud country music playing on the jukebox. People aren’t drinking to party or perform, just to loosen up. I stand behind the bar and cut some limes. No one’s sitting at the bar. They’re all grouped up at the tables inside and on the outside patio. The front door creaks open. I see a friend from class come in. She struts her way to the bar and I give her a wave. Her face brightens up with a smile. “Hey Harry,” she says. “Didn’t expect to see you here.” “I thought you knew I worked here,” I say. She shakes her head. “Nope, I like, never really thought you’d be the guy to work at a bar.” I shrug. “Well, here I am. You want anything to drink?” She eyes the taps laid out on the wall and rubs her chin for a bit. Her eyes sweep the back of the bar. “You guys need any help around here? I worked at a restaurant back in high school.” I’m not surprised she wants to work here. There’s a lot of clout that comes with working here, not to mention the free drinks. “I’m sure we could find a spot for you,” I respond. I sift through some papers from behind the bar and hand her an application and a pen. “Fill this out. I’ll be your referral.” She sits and fills out the application. We gossip for a little while. “Wait, Slater, uh, actually thought that was a good idea,” she says. “Like, what was he thinking?” “I don’t know, I guess he thought he could just shoot his shot like that. Some guys are stupidly brave sometimes,” I say. She finishes the application and hands it to me. “How would you know?” she asks. “Just seen how a lot of guys act when they like someone.” “Well how do you act when you like someone?” I walk out from behind the bar and get ready to take her application to the office upstairs. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I say, flashing a cheap grin. She runs up to me and gives me a light shove. “You’re such an ass,” she says. I regret saying that. It came out before I could stop it. It takes only about a week for her to get hired. Her first shift starts with barbacking on a busy Friday night. There’s some big baseball game playing, but I couldn’t pay attention to it. I show her the ropes: registers, changing kegs, cleaning around—everything. She catches on pretty quickly. While we’re in the weeds, she spills a pitcher of beer behind the bar. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she says. I walk up to her and try to keep her spirits up. “Don’t worry, we’ll clean it up once it simmers down a bit,” I say. “We’ve all dropped something before.” She looks at me and her eyes go soft. I turn away and get back to serving customers. There’s a certain way she moves. I could almost see a ghost moving with her. Maybe it’s a ghost that moves with me too. I couldn’t know for sure. Things start to quiet down towards the end of the night. I’m cleaning up behind the bar and I see her bussing a table. A guy walks up to her, slurring his words. “Hey Kora, how come you’re so beautiful?” he says. She chuckles. “You’re, like, too sweet.” Not a hint of embarrassment. We finish out the night. Outside, Kora and I share cigarettes. “You’re a life saver. I felt, like, a total idiot once I figured out I left my pack at home,” she says. “Don’t sweat it. So how’d your first shift feel?” I ask. She lights up her cigarette. The lighter flicks twice before catching. She takes a drag. “Better than my last job. My manager was, just, a total creep. He’d always hit on me. When I told him I wasn’t interested, he cut my hours. Asshole. I’ve been struggling with rent and stuff too since I cut my dad off. I keep hoping I’ll meet a guy who isn’t trash, and then, like, boom. Another day at the dump.” “Hopefully things here go alright for you. Our manager’s a bit of a horny bastard, too, but he knows how to be classy. Thank God I don’t have to deal with that kind of thing.” “Yeah, you should be thankful. It totally sucks.” “At least people see you and give you compliments all the time. That’s got to be worth something.” “It’s old.” “Alright then, no compliments it is,” I chuckle. She laughs. I feel her eyes linger on me for a bit. I pretend not to notice. I toss my cigarette and start walking to my car. “I’ll see you next week, Kora.” Seems like all I can do these days is pretend. Time flies by over the next few months. Kora and I work together frequently. She gets promoted to bartender. We both come in outside of work for drinks sometimes. We never see each other outside of work on purpose. It always happens on accident. I feel happy when I’m with her. It’s a nice rhythm. We know each other’s cues well. Passing drinks and splitting tasks runs without a hitch. I’m by myself working the bar. It’s a quiet night. Only a few people are here. They sit in different parts of the bar alone. A country song I don’t like sings through the jukebox. Kora bursts in through the front door. She’s drunk. Her black pencil skirt clings to her body as her heels pound the floor. “Harry, I’m, like, so glad it’s you here tonight,” she says. She goes behind the bar and makes herself a drink. Tequila soda and lime juice. She puts her drink on the bar and hugs me. I stand there, limp. I don’t hug her back. “Harry, I love you. I love you, Harry,” she says. My heart pounds in my chest. Her breath reeks of lime juice and menthols. I wait for her to let go. She sits at the bar and we talk for a while. Her phone rings. “Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there,” she says. She leaves her drink half-finished on the bar, lime still floating in it. I don’t bother to ask her where she’s going. A few more weeks pass. It’s another slow night at the bar. I come back inside after changing a keg and overhear my coworker Sal talking to some guy I don’t know. “Nah, man, Kora’s a total slut. Trust me,” Sal says. “Oh, you hit that?” the other guy asks. “Yeah, she wanted it bad, too, bro.” “Shit, I might have to slide in there next time she’s working, get me some of that fat ass.” Sal’s always on the prowl, so I’m not surprised. My stomach starts to ache. The air behind the bar gets hotter. Sal looks my way. “Sorry for getting on your girl, Harry. You know how it is,” he says. “I don’t get with coworkers. Hard rule of mine,” I say. “Don’t like to shit where I eat.” “Smart man. Smarter than me. For sure,” he says. “Class act like always, Harry. But, hey, if you didn’t work with her, you’d still smash, right?” “Nope. Rather not get caught up in crazy.” The other guy chimes in. “Yo, Sal, this pendejo gay or something?” “Who, Harry? Nah, he’s got ladies lining out the door. He just don’t kiss and tell,” Sal says. A customer comes up to the bar. I walk away and get back to work. Kora knows she can do better. But it’s none of my business. Classes start back up—another busy weekend at the bar. Things can get crazy at the beginning of the school year, but we still keep a tight ship. Kora and I are behind the bar tonight. We deal with a blitz of customers, but things get less intense towards the end of the night. While I’m closing a tab, I see Kora at the other side of the bar chatting with some guy. He doesn’t look that attractive, but Kora hangs on every word coming out of this guy’s mouth. He whispers something in her ear. She laughs and leans in and puts her hand on his chest. The music blares, but her laugh cuts through it. I keep thinking I’m different from other guys. They don’t know Kora like I do. Maybe none of us really know her like that. I don’t think I’ll get to see her for what she truly is. Not like it matters. The bar closes and Kora and I clean up. I take the trash out to the dumpster and catch Kora outside breaking down some boxes. “Harry, you should’ve seen this total dork I was talking to earlier,” she says. “He told me he loved me and shit and tipped me, like, a hundred dollars.” “Yeah, right,” I say. I force a smile. She puts her hand on my shoulder when I try to walk back inside. I turn around and she lets go. “Hey, what’s up? You’ve been quiet tonight,” she says. “Not a whole lot on my mind, I guess,” I say. We finish cleaning and balance the registers. Kora goes behind the bar and makes herself a drink. “You want one?” she asks. I put my hand up and walk out to my car. It’s quieter out tonight than usual. Even the cicadas are tired. It’s the middle of the morning. I unlock the back door and go into the bar and start to open. After taking all the caps off the taps and laying down the bar mats, I go upstairs to flip the chairs off the tables and get the area ready. When I get upstairs, I see the office door cracked open. I walk inside and find Kora asleep on the floor. The office smells of old receipts and faint perfume. Her shoes are off, makeup still smeared on her face from the night before. I know Kora had been scheduled to close last night. She looks hungover. I go downstairs and fill up a glass with ice and water. I get back to the office. She hasn’t moved an inch. I put the water next to her, but not too close. I finish opening downstairs. I see Kora come down with the glass of water in hand, three quarters full. She looks slow, tired, not fully processed. She approaches me and comes behind the bar. She lets out a yawn and a deep stretch. Her voice is a bit deeper. “Harry, last night was so horrible,” she says. “These guys tried coming in after close, and like, I had already locked the doors. And they were so drunk. They kept, just, pounding on the glass and yelling at me.” “Oh man,” I say. “I’m so pissed I didn’t get scheduled with someone. I wish it would’ve been you.” “Yeah.” “You’re just... different, Harry.” She leans in closer. We stand there for just a moment. There’s no sound. No music from the jukebox, no humming chatter, no cars passing by. She looks at me and we lock eyes. It’s just a second, but everything slows down. Her face goes soft and her lips part slightly. Her head tilts. “You can go home. Get some rest,” I say, pulling back. She stands there. I finish stocking glasses. She leaves. The door clicks behind her. The bar opens. I stand still. Winter break comes around. A few folks are lingering in the bar tonight fending off the holidays. Kora quit a while back. Something about having to move back in with her dad. I’m half-watching the TV and see Sal come in through the door. He’s alone, which is unusual for him. He goes behind the bar and grabs a beer. “Hey Dirty Harry,” he says. “You holding off going back home, too?” “Something like that,” I say. “Pretty boring these days.” “Always is this time of year. Not much to do,” he points at his glass. “She’s the only one who wants to keep my company. How you holding up, anyway?” “Not much going on.” “Yeah. You hear about Kora?” “No.” “You know where she ended up? Cocktail waitress at some titty bar. Crazy, right?” My face stays flat. “No, not really.” “Crazy is as crazy does, something like that,” he takes another drink. “What was your deal with her, anyway? Guys who get a girl a job don’t do it just for shits and giggles.” I pick up a glass and clean it with a rag. “Maybe that’s all I wanted to do.” “Well, you definitely got what you wanted then. That girl was a trip. Craziest one I know.” “Yeah, same here.” We watch the television for a while. Some sitcom with too much laugh track noise. There’s never anything good on. Sal leaves and the bar gets empty way before close. I stand behind the bar alone. One of the country songs I always hear plays. You were sweet as pie I wish I could’ve closed in But all I got was just some yellow roses I take out my phone and look up Kora in my contacts. I start drafting a message. I never send it. yellow roses Reply by email</a> New Diary Workflows noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Setting up this blog has been a complete pain in my ass, man. Apparently the Zola + Neocities stack is just not intuitive at all despite Zola claiming triviality with regards to deployment. Fucking trivial my ass, straight up. I spent multiple hours pulling my hair out because I couldn't get the config or the templates right. Zola's build command sucks complete donkey dick. I had to change the output like six times because it kept fucking up. I mean, I don't really give a shit now that I've got a somewhat working product, but man setting that shit up sucked. I'm not throwing shade on Zola or Neocities as frameworks, though. The pain of setup was pretty much entirely my fault because with programming, the whole idea is revolved around stepping on your dick a bunch of times until you figure it out. Trial and error is the only way to true understanding. I also refused to entirely vibe code or any of that stuff either. I'd like to know what I'm doing before having an LLM spew out a bunch of code and pushing it. I think the fact that people with basically no development experience pushing out products that are grossly flawed is a huge problem, especially considering how ubiquitous software and technology is in general. I mean, people don't even read the code before pushing it anymore. It fucking sucks. But I will say, the rise of AI, LLMs, neural networks, and all the other machine learning jargon has been a great way to introduce me to technologies that I otherwise wouldn't have known about or been able to use quickly. Having ChatGPT walk me through setting up my Linux machines and learning basic scripting has been really cool and way more accessible than it was just a few years ago. It's crazy because I remember being glued to my iPhone and racking up dozens of screentime hours per week. I also was glued to mainstream platforms that pride themselves in spying on their userbase. I realized slowly that I was literally being brainwashed. The mass amounts of data collection that Big Tech had on me helped them facilitate so many of my thoughts and actions. Soon enough, it started to feel like every thought I had was algorithmically generated. I felt like I was getting dumber with each swipe of my thumb. But my digital liberation has been a very gradual process. I remember deleting my Facebook account in the middle of 2023 and feeling a lot more liberated. Then in the middle of 2024, I got a dumb phone because I hated how much my iPhone was sending me notifications and trying to keep me on it as much as it could. I could feel the predatory programming more and more each day. It was too much to deal with. But once I had the dumb phone, I felt so much better. I started to understand that I didn't really need my phone for most things and how wasteful having one can be. Nowadays, I use my phone to make calls and send texts, as an alarm, and sometimes as an offline ereader, but that's about it. I had a very simple TTY phone with the tactile number pad for a while and it was a phone primarily marketed to old people, but the performance of the basics was still pretty bad. So with that, I opted to switch over to a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS and that has been a much better choice. I was reticent to go back to a smartphone at first, but after setting up GrapheneOS, it's been a much needed upgrade, especially in the domains of calling and texting. I disabled my internet connection and web browser and whole bunch of other things, too, and I feel fortunate to have the freedom to do that. It's crazy because a big motivator for these digital paradigm shifts has been motivated by a growing fragility of my mind, especially in the realm of consuming media. After going through episodes of psychosis, I feel so much more sensitive to consuming media in general, particularly film media. I don't really like watching anything anymore because it's just too much of a sensory and cognitive overload for me. These days I pretty much just exclusively use technology to read things and listen to music. I've cut out film media almost completely from my life. I barely even watch YouTube anymore. Most days I'd prefer to either sleep, read, listen to music, or write. That's it. Anything else makes me start to feel overwhelmed, anxious, and paranoid. I am just so much more mentally fragile in general. I mean, if something goes even a little wrong for me, I have a complete meltdown. Not to mention, I hardly ever feel pleasure or joy anymore and I really only seem to feel negative emotions or nothing. On top of that, I am constantly fatigued. I wake up most mornings and just want the day to be over immediately because of how tired and frustrated I am when I wake up. It seems that the only respite for me is sleeping during the day. I feel like I spend more time sleeping than just about anything. There's just a lot of stuff I'm dissatisfied with in my life. But I also understand that there's always going to be something about my life that I don't like, even if it feels like things are going right for me. I'll always have this feeling of emptiness in me, even if I do become the person I want to be or feel like I should be. I don't know why humans have that emptiness. It doesn't seem fair. It just feels like life has been rigged from the start. Even though I lament a lot in my entries, it gives me a sense of peace to try and get through it. One day God will make sense of all this for us. We just have to be patient and faithful. Stay faithful. Don't let it get to you. It'll all be over soon. Reply by email</a> Addiction Isn't a Bug noahie@fastmail.com — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 The Machine</h1> By the time you finish reading this article, someone in the United States will have died due to an addiction. It’s widely known that addiction ends and ruins lives. Its effects on almost every aspect of life are profound, but we still haven’t fully addressed its root cause. The paradigm that most often stands out in the aftermath of the United States’ War on Drugs is the disease model: addiction is a disease that needs to be treated. This has given way to a greater tolerance for addictive behavior with the rise of open air drug markets in many major American cities. Additionally, we’ve seen a rise in harm reduction education and a treatment industry worth billions of dollars. To understand the root cause of addiction, we must come to the understanding that addiction itself is not a disease—it’s an engineered feature of an oppressive society. Blatant Exploitations</h1> In many aspects, addiction is something that is widely recognized and even celebrated. Many industries have it baked into their business models; their key revenue generators are a small section of their market that turn addicts into customers that will fund them perpetually. More industries are seeing the long-term profitability of addiction-based models. Every year, more and more aspects of the human experience are becoming vessels for addictive behavior. To begin, let’s discuss the most obvious offenders. Sports Betting</h2> Back in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the federal law that forbid states to legalize sports betting and ever since, the floodgates for legalized gambling have opened. Nowadays, advertisements for sports betting sites and applications are unavoidable when watching any sporting event. Sports betting companies have racked up billions of dollars within just a few short years of legalization, and many individuals have developed fierce gambling addictions as a result. Dual sovereignty has given many state governments the opportunity to create yet another revenue stream for their administrations—held on the vulnerabilities of its own constituents. These vulnerabilities are far from insignificant. Since 2018, search queries such as “am I addicted to gambling” have gone up twenty-three percent (source: trust me bro). Clearly, the people governed by their states have issues with legalized sports betting, but their governments seem to welcome the free short-term revenue boost. Addiction is built-in to every aspect of the sports betting experience and it’s not only accepted, but lauded by every player in the sports industry. Sports betting applications wear a mask of financial literacy, telling customers that they aren’t gambling, but investing. With that false sense of security, customers are roped into manipulative nudging from the applications with “risk-free” betting promos to get them hooked and subtle yet deliberate push notifications to keep them playing. Moreover, the customers are constantly bombarded with dopamine spikes from wins and near-wins, urged to bet live on every play to keep their fingers on the pulse. Social proof is embedded into this system to keep customers from seeing the problem; celebrity endorsements and advertising build further upon the customers’ false sense of trust. Their friends push the product to them further, inducing primal fears of missing out and not belonging to their social groups. Narratives for sports betting switched from conserving the integrity of the game to investing in partnership opportunities with predatory forces. The days of old PSAs urging to protect the public are dead and gone. In their place stand ad blitzes that urge patrons to get in on the action. Unfortunately, many that do face themselves with ruined finances; college and emergency funds evaporate and families are torn to pieces. All the while, profits from sports betting companies go up exponentially year after year with no signs of stopping. Alcohol</h2> Alcohol hardly needs an introduction. It is one of the world’s oldest and most potent vices. The litany of alcohol-related deaths has been spoken of ad nauseam, so there’s no need for me to repeat any of those narratives. Despite this, people still seem to put alcohol on a pedestal; most bars and parties are nothing without it. Drinking alcohol isn’t something to be feared, but celebrated. In fact, no celebration is truly celebratory without the presence of alcohol in the eyes of many. Alcohol doesn’t just lubricate celebration—it soothes despair. That’s why it sells best where hope is scarce. This paradigm on alcohol is not accidental; it’s calculated. Brewers and distillers alike spend billions on marketing and advertising to perpetuate the message of alcohol as something that is best enjoyed responsibly. The only problem is that this responsibility has no metrics when it’s coming from alcohol companies. Governments don’t seem to mind either since every bottle sold is a chunk of change put in their pockets. There is no exact way to drink alcohol responsibly, and that’s the entire point. The idea of responsible alcohol usage is placed onto the consumer instead of the distributor so that the addiction model can reign under the guise of a consumption ethos that doesn’t really exist. Moreover, alcohol companies utilize unique branding strategies to entice people to drink. They mark specific aesthetics onto their products that tantalize consumers to see unrealistic versions of themselves within whatever it is they choose to drink. If someone drinks, they can become attractive, interesting, and affluent. Alcohol companies want consumers to believe that drinking will make their fantasies come true and that all their problems will vanish in the buzz. Of course, we all know that it’s not true, yet we use the manipulation as defense mechanisms to concerned friends and family. This is exactly what alcohol companies want; they want people to think that alcohol doesn’t take from life—it gives us everything we lack. Prescription Pharmaceuticals</h2> This is the one where the deception is most difficult to fight through. Whether the offense is as blatant as Oxycontin or as subtle as antidepressants, the same lies get told over and over again—take the pill and it will make your life better in a healthy and controlled way. People don’t see pharmaceuticals as drugs, but medications. The unfortunate part is that for many of those pharmaceuticals, this is actually true. Many horrendous diseases and maladies have become much easier to deal with because of pharmaceuticals, but many drastically underestimate the trade-off. The addiction model still persists in pharmaceuticals as it does with its more elicit counterparts like alcohol and gambling: get the consumer to foster dependence to keep them coming back. The deception is deftly masked with legitimate solutions; diseases that can kill are fought well with many drugs that actually save lives. But unfortunately, this same narrative is told with every drug, which leads consumers to a false sense of security. This gives many pharmaceutical companies a license to obfuscate the truth or outright lie about the intensive purposes and effects of their drugs, leaving those who are most vulnerable at the most risk. Governments aren’t complicit, but active participants. Every pill is tax revenue, so they do whatever it takes to increase their circulation. The profit model is inseparable from every aspect of the establishment, with every aspect of pain as a billing code and suffering as a subscription. Doctors write prescriptions like checks, sales reps seduce them with ideas like “off-label use”, and the profiteering accelerates despite the millions that die. Lobbyists make the loopholes and the price for millions of innocent lives are meager settlement checks. It’s become so ingrained in every facet of life that every uncomfortable feeling is a new diagnosis, with each one becoming a new script to add to the multiplying revenue stream. Life is no longer about sitting with suffering, but falling into the Faustian bargain of letting it stop for a while until Mephistopheles comes back to collect. The addict overdoses time and time again until their battle ends with their souls stolen. When it’s all said and done, medical complicity doesn’t want to heal, but keep us hooked—one refill at a time. Subtle Executions</h1> Not every addiction is a blatant one—the most egregious offenders are the ones that force the functional. If you’re not seen as taking part, you are seen as an outsider to be ostracized. These addictions don’t have warning labels or PSAs, but instead portray a sense of essentiality, an everyday aspect of modern living. To escape these addictions is to escape society, the panopticon that sees every prisoner who wants to break free. It doesn’t crush them brashly, but slowly and deliberately. The potential escapees are shown the walls harshly and slowly manipulated back to their cells to give them the illusion of choice. To understand these walls, we need to understand what they do and why they’re built. Digital Space</h2> We all know the trappings of the digital world intimately. The infinite scroll and attention economy need hardly any introduction. Everyone knows how algorithms work as an abstraction, but do nothing to stop their infiltration into every aspect of our world. This is because of mass consent and the ill-perceived wisdom of the crowd. We know that indulgent use of technology is harmful, yet we all collectively lie to ourselves and ignore our screen-time reduction apps in a blissful display of irony as the infinite scrolling and clicking continues. We know that too much time is wasted on smartphones and computers and televisions, yet there’s no way to avoid them. Those who reject the technologies of industrialized society are seen as weirdos or even criminals, fighting every day to constantly balance the tightrope of attention and inclusion. Everyone is trying to fight to stay ahead of the exponential curve, only to always feel left in the dust and unable to keep up. Humanity is being replaced with procedural computations, and no one can ever keep up with the speed of light. Yet here we are, resisting the nature built-in and opting for faster and tighter ways to live life. Every task is a potential automation and every automation is a new layer of abstraction to suppress user control of the systems that keep us swiping, scrolling, and clicking. It all becomes so overwhelmingly impossible to track that the only option is to drown in the noise and hit autopilot, letting the algorithms direct decision-making and giving personal agency a backseat. If time is the new resource, attention is the new currency—and the house always wins. Money: The Greatest Addiction of All</h2> It reigns as the undisputed king of exchange. It facilitates every transaction down to the smallest of things. It’s the means for the machine as the mechanism for constant and everlasting consumption. Money is the heart of the beast that is addiction and grows more and more powerful with every dollar that circulates. Every facet of every decision holds it in mind as it controls the causes and effects of culture, connection, and conflict. Without it, the walls of any society erode and any semblance of structure rots until there is seemingly nothing left. Money is the world’s greatest addiction, and it feels like we’ll never get clean. Every habit, hobby, or fleeting moment of attention is now an opportunity for monetization—apps, subscriptions, micro-transactions, and side hustles hail as the imperial zeitgeist. It doesn’t just function as a necessity, but dominates as the central path for security, meaning, and spiritual fulfillment. Even those who control the banks and the treasuries don’t seem to have enough; it produces a void it can never fill. In the eyes of many, it is the absolute measure of value and output. Money isn’t printed, but harvested from the time and energy of its users. It presents the illusion that to attract the intangible things that give life meaning, we must succumb to its material pressures and postulations. If you’re not earning, you’re dying. We’re told money is a tool, but in the end, it’s the master. Everything we dream of, love, or strive for is filtered through its logic. To question it is to risk exile from the very society it built. The machine keeps running because it keeps us running: after more, after enough, after something that will finally make us whole. But in the end, the chase leaves us emptier than before, trapped in an addiction so total it’s mistaken for life itself. If addiction is a feature and not a bug, then what does it take to break free? Where do we find antidotes worth more than what’s for sale? Real Antidotes</h1> The battle against addiction isn’t fought drastically, but just as slowly as it tries to keep us within the walls. If the addiction machine bites at even the smallest micro-decisions, then it makes the most sense to start there. Every day is a series of tasks, so the battle is one of discernment—is this task something that can slow the machine down? The idea isn’t to bust the walls down, but to expose the cracks and carve at them meticulously until the outside becomes more and more exposed. Civil Disobedience</h2> Despite the crowd’s wisdom, there are always ways to opt out. Every addiction is an embedded system; the worst ones should get opted out of first, but slowly. Whether it’s deleting a compulsively checked app or refusing to join yet another loyalty program, the most important thing to understand is that the best way to opt out is to introduce friction by doing things the hard way just because it’s still possible. Many times, most people prefer the path of least resistance. But this isn’t about personal discipline; it’s about refusing to manufacture consent. The point isn’t to suffer for suffering’s sake. Too much of that happens already. This is about reclaiming agency and converting users and consumers back into people who can finally give themselves space for their own thoughts. These aren’t grand gestures, but they’re seeds of a new reality—one where the individual shapes the boundary and not the system that oppresses them. To do something the slow way in a world obsessed with speed is an act of spiritual rebellion; every deliberate inconvenience puts another tiny crack in the machine’s perfect wall. Boycotts and Localism</h2> The best way to kill a business is to stop feeding it. This means that any business that models itself on addiction must be avoided and ignored. If the money doesn’t touch their hands, they cease to exist. But it’s not just important to opt out—we need to cultivate communities that aren’t manufactured on dependence. The addiction model thrives most in isolation, so the best way to curtail its advances is to develop and sustain local businesses over conglomerates and encourage people to pursue what’s in their backyard and not the enshittified crap in digital space. If we promote community engagement, people will be more incentivized to seek out things they can make themselves as opposed to a cheap plastic solution—they’ll have help. It doesn’t have to evolve necessarily into farmer communes, but if there’s something a person likes, they should have the option to seek it out locally in some capacity. It could be as simple as buying coffee from an independent shop instead of a chain, or spending a Saturday at the farmers market instead of scrolling delivery apps. When something breaks, fix it—or find someone who can—instead of clicking ‘Buy Again.’ Many major cities across the world have expansive resources in this regard, spanning from ubiquitous to niche, but even smaller communities can cultivate a DIY spirit. Slowness as Sacred Rebellion</h2> In a culture that equates speed with value and distraction with happiness, slowness is not laziness—it’s rebellion. And rebellion is spiritual; it’s a refusal to surrender the soul to the compulsory. The machine is designed to promote restlessness and wanting, so the simple act of being still—just for even a moment—is a revolt. Every minute given to silence, contemplation, or real connection is an act of faith. It’s faith that life is more than consumption, addiction, and control. The idea isn’t to take it easy or manage stress, but to take back stolen energy and use it for something good and worth doing. In moments of slowness, a vacuum emerges and allows for presence and meaning to re-enter. It gives us the opportunity to think, question, and create. Some of the greatest ideas in human history have been forged in the fires of small, private moments. To preserve greatness, these moments must be held close. If we unplug from digital space for a while, do something for someone out of kindness and not for money, and take the time to listen to the silence, then we will get closer each day to seeing what lies beyond the panopticon’s walls. When we reclaim our time and attention, we become unpredictable again. Presence can never be automated. Finding Solace</h1> The cost of addiction is more than attention or even money—it’s sovereignty. Regimes all over the world fight to control the independence of the individual, but the way to overcome them isn’t to lash out with violence or terror. The greatest weapons are irrelevance and decay; let the power erode by refusing to acknowledge it. Our greatest assets are our time and attention, so we must put practices in place that keep them sacred and not for sale. The machine did not rise overnight. Its fall will not be swift. Every act of presence, every minute reclaimed, is a blow against the system that profits from our emptiness. To honor the ones we’ve lost, don’t let their suffering be in vain. Honor them not with silence, but with revolt—quiet, daily, sacred. Show clear evidence that addiction is not destiny; a feature can be refused, and a soul is not engineered. Every small refusal is a seed to plant a world where addiction serves no master—and the machine is left to rust. Reply by email</a> Riding Into Caskets noahie@fastmail.com — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 The autumn sun’s brilliance washes over campus as it reaches midday. Walkways are buzzing with hurried steps as students rush to their next class. Within the noise, my tires fly as my bike weaves through the static. Every twist and turn beats through the pulse of foot traffic scraping the concrete beneath it. I don’t think—just ride. In the rhythm of my awareness, I see her again. I blow through an intersection and see her strolling through the crosswalk. Miranda. Her strawberry blonde hair radiates around her face, and I catch a glimpse of her stony brown eyes as they lock with mine. A split second passes as I veer into her, but I lock back into the road and keep moving forward. A near miss. It’s the third week of freshman year, and I thought I was rid of her, but I guess it turns out we decided to start our next chapters in the same place despite being in completely different worlds. I continue riding as my stomach churns and the memories tear through me. I pedal harder so I can leave that lying mirage behind in the dust where she belongs, but the thought of her mesmerizing beauty catches up anyway. Fuck. It’s playing in my mind all over again. She’s still with him. That much I know. They got married at a shotgun wedding in Vegas right when we graduated. The thought of them fucking makes me want to puke. The thought of them truly being in love makes me want to erase the world and start a second draft. I couldn’t understand why she wanted him over me. He’s fitter and taller, sure, but there was no way he loved her more than I did. I thought that’s what was supposed to matter. I know better now. I get back home and try to cool down but end up pacing in circles. I didn’t think just a look at her would make me feel that kind of pain again, but it continues to grow with each stomp on the floor. Back in the day, the pain was so overwhelming that all I could do was freeze and take it in. If she wants to keep invading my mind, I have to fight back. I can’t outrun her. Not with the wheels that skid, blood that boils. I need something sharper. That’s when it hit me: I could give her a letter. Let her hope that I finally forgave her—but it’s a Trojan Horse. She’ll open it thinking I’m being desperate or sad, the way she always thought of me. But that’s when I’ll cut her and make her bleed. It won’t be a letter. It’ll be a wound, worn and washed in scarlet. I rush for a piece of paper and a pen and shove everything off my desk. I slam the paper down and start writing. The words come through, but they’re all so stupid and hollow. “I loved you, but…” No, that’s cliché. “You ruined me…” I sound like a loser. I’m a snake with no venom. I couldn’t hurt her even if my life depended on it. It’s all too much to take. I use over a dozen different pages to draft, and every last one of them gets torn to pieces. I grab my pen so hard it bends and becomes useless. I need to get out of here. I look at the torn pages on the floor spread out like leaves and make a break for the outside. I see my bike locked on the rack. It’s a beautiful specimen—an old Peugeot from the 70s. The hardened steel and the chipped white paint complement the brand-new drivetrain I put on it. She’s ready, begging me to go all out. I hop on the saddle and push the pedals as the golden-hour sun lets me bask in its warm hues. Traffic’s deep, but that doesn’t stop me from gliding through it. I feel a monster bubbling within me. He’s brash, wild, and lets nothing stop him. I skid between pedestrians, sprint through yellow lights, even skitch a few cars. I start to get tired, but it does nothing to stop me. At first, thoughts of Miranda float around me, but the more I ride, the less they dominate me. Then, after a while, they vanish from the road altogether. Bliss drowned in sweat. The streets become a cathedral of motion. The semester goes by, and every day becomes a deeper excursion. Not a single alley goes without feeling my tires grind through it. I get home later and later at night as the rides get longer and my senses grow sharper. I can see every gap in traffic now as I grow into the city’s shadows. Everything that semester that isn’t riding flies out the window. Meals become optional. Studying grows pointless. The more my legs burn and cramp, the better I feel. I lose twenty pounds and my legs get jacked. I’m a beast, always hungry. One afternoon, I rest up at a coffee shop and fuel up for another half-century. I look out the window and see a courier flying down the street. He’s not just fast. He’s electric. He closes gaps I didn’t think anyone could close. Everything on him is sleek and dirty. His clothes are weathered and his bike scratched and scathing. Then he hits a corner and vanishes like a ghost never to be seen again. The next day, I rush to the closest courier office. I walk into a cramped and smelly old house that’s as disgusting as it is dilapidated. Old flyers peel off the walls, and rules that people obviously don’t read are haphazardly stapled. I see a single desk and an old fat guy with a bald head and bushy mustache. The desk is flayed with dispatch notes and walkie-talkies. He takes a quick glance up at me and puts his head back down. “Yeah, what?” he says dryly. “Looking for a job. You guys hiring me?” I ask. Without taking another glance, he digs into a filing cabinet, pulls out some paperwork, and hands it over. “Fill this out. You start tomorrow,” he huffs. I take it and don’t say another word. I fill out the paperwork and leave the office swiftly. It was as effortless as it was exhilarating. I show up the next day and see the other couriers, but they pay no attention to me. The old fat guy invites me inside and hands me a cheap jersey, a basic satchel, and a worn-down walkie. “Good luck, kid. Don’t die and give me extra shit to do,” he says, shooing me away. That first day is a baptism by concrete. The double rushes don’t stop, and I’m sprinting just to barely keep up. There are constant near misses with cars and pedestrians. Customers berate me, wondering why I’m late. I thought I knew the city, but clearly there’s a lot more to it than I thought. Still, I finish the day piss-tired and thanking God that He didn’t kill me. I wasn’t just entrenched—I was in love. I was going to put everything into becoming the best, even if it killed me. After barely passing last semester’s finals, I start the spring with no intent to let school become an excuse to shred my tires on the road. I pick up double shifts and the city becomes my soul. One rainy morning, I come outside to the bike rack during a dry patch with the streets still slick. I start taking my usual route, but this time I notice something: dullness. I feel it crack through slowly, but then it hits me all at once. Despite the constant motion, I’m relentlessly bored. The thrill that once shot through my veins now trickles like a dying faucet. I move fast, but I feel nothing. I turn away from the dining hall and skip breakfast to give the city a test. I want to make new routes for myself, so I jam up the one-ways and weave in between the oncoming cars to get to the office. The more I see traffic laws as suggestions, the faster I get. I get to the office for my walkie and see some of the other couriers getting ready. They took a liking to me once they figured out I’m in it for the long haul. One of the older guys approaches me. “Yo, you’re working again? Been seeing your ass here every single day. You got a life or are you just poor?” “Poor, but still faster than your dusty muff.” I reply quickly. “Kid, keep riding like that and you’ll end up dead. Fast don’t mean shit if you don’t make it home.” I shrug and get on the road. My test with the city continues as I start cutting red lights and getting in the pedestrians’ way just to feel something. The old saying still goes: no cops, no stops. I’m blazing down the road and catching a nice tailwind and I see a guy about to hit a crosswalk before the signal. He starts walking as I’m riding through and I put my hand out to him and shove him to the ground. “What the fuck, asshole?!” He shrieks as I burn past him. I pitch up a middle finger, keep my head forward, and laugh harder than I ever had. Everyone else feels like an ant compared to my invincible power. Twilight comes through as I head home for the day. I’m cruising through the business district, seeing my reflection in the glass skyscrapers surrounding me. I keep seeing her in them. She always smiles and looks at me eagerly when I see her in the chrome and puddles. No matter how much I ride now, she always visits me in the reflections. Inescapable. Inseparable. Every street I go down, I hear people who sound just like her. They share her cadence, her laugh. Every turn is a double take. It’s never her. I forgot to give my walkie back, so I detour to the office. I see some of the other couriers heading there on the way and I blitz past them. I turn in my walkie and as I’m leaving the office, one of the couriers sandbags me and pushes me up against a wall and grabs me by the collar. “So, you think you’re hot shit? You ain’t got a bit of respect,” he sneers at me. I headbutt him and break his grip. I get around him and go for my bike. He starts to charge, but the older guys hold him back because they know a fight always leads to someone getting fired. “Save it, man. Keep your damn job,” one of them reassures him. I dismiss everyone and get on my bike and ride. If some of the other couriers want to build up resentment for me being better than them and taking their money, let them. I fall asleep that night, tired but not sore. I don’t get sore anymore. I begin to dream. I find myself in a glowing white void, seeing everything almost in sepia. I look around for a while, feeling lost. Nothing seems to be in sight except for pure distilled brightness. When I turn around to keep looking, I see Miranda, naked and smiling. A light grows around her and when I peer into her brown eyes, she speaks up. “I’m so sorry about everything, Jonah. Will you come back to me?” I walk towards her slowly. I clutch her waist and say nothing. Her eyes melt something in me I thought was dead as I see her face go soft. I kiss her passionately and we make love in the white void. When we finish, we lay down in the middle of it as if it were made of clouds. I stroke her hair and caress her face. She whispers to me sweet nothings. I wake up in unspeakable sadness, soaked in sweat, my chest tight like I’ve been holding my breath for hours. No matter how much I try to let her go, she clings to me even in my dreams. There’s no recourse for this. My only respite? The shadows. The alleys. The city that built me. If I die, then so be it. It’s the middle of the night and I jolt out of bed. I head to my bike and kick it into overdrive. The streets are nearly empty. There’s no moon outside, just a few dimming stars. I see nothing but concrete. I sprint through red lights like they don’t exist. The heat in my body builds and my legs blur. I fly through another red light and look into my reflection on a passing window. A large shadow forms. Before I can even see it, I hear screeching. I try to evade, but everything slows and flashes. The honking is almost deafening, but there’s nothing I can do. Glass explodes. Metal sings. The wind rips from my lungs. Then an impact. My body cracks. Before the black swallows me whole, I wish it would’ve flung me farther. I find myself outside of a chapel. I’m wearing a black suit. I’ve never owned one. It fits anyway. The chapel looks stunning, but inside I see other men in black suits and women in black dresses. Their faces are a blur, but I hear them crying. I look towards the front and see an ornate wooden casket open and adorned with flowers. It almost pulls me towards it as I walk forward past all of the crying people. Someone reaches for my shoulder. I slap it away. I get to the casket and see Miranda inside of it, peaceful and dead. I caress her face with my hand. Everything begins to fade back to black. I sit in it for a moment and try to accept it all. I want to scream, but the chapel steals my breath. My eyes open. It wasn’t Miranda who died. It was the kid who thought love was salvation. This was always where it ended. Bright fluorescent lights burn into me. Beeping noises from machines I can’t see drone softly. Pain barges in and then settles into a steady crawl. I see a middle-aged woman in scrubs checking my vitals with a finger clip. I try to shift in my bed, but she stops me. “Don’t move, dear. This will take just a second,” she says calmly. She removes the clip. I shift. The pain sets back in. My arm is contained inside of a sling. I can’t move my shoulder at all. I groan painfully. The clock says that it’s four in the morning. “You broke your collar bone pretty good,” the nurse says. “That’s probably where you hit the ground after that car got you.” I nod weakly and look away. Let the pain crawl further in. At least I feel real. Several days pass. The clock ticks slowly. All I can do is sit in stillness. I spent so much time in constant movement I forgot how this sensation felt. My nurse delivers my lunch. A turkey sandwich with some yogurt. I try lifting the spoon. It drops onto the tray and falls to the floor. The day continues and all I can do is look back. I feel myself back on my bike. The tires skid across the pavement as the wind rushes across the back of my neck. I hear Miranda’s voice in there, laughing softly. There was no betrayal, just loss. It was always mine to carry. She was just an excuse. Night falls. The hospital is quiet. A small voice calls out to me. “You’re ready. Write the letter.” I look around for a moment, confused. It sounded like someone calling out from outside my room, but it was a whisper. The letter feels like an old dream, but the voice was right. I didn’t want Miranda to bleed anymore. This was for me. I ring for the nurse and ask her for a pen and paper. She brings me a black pen and a small notepad. I write. The words don’t scream out of me like I thought they would. “You didn’t ruin anything. You’re just gone.” The scars write for me. “It’s like you were a cathedral and I was searching for God.” I don’t want to hurt anymore. Just to understand. A few weeks pass by. It’s a hot summer day and the air is thick and humid. My sling feels tight as I walk down that same crosswalk I saw Miranda at. Out of the corner of my eye, a courier dashes through the intersection. I want to look back. I don’t. After crossing the intersection, I spot a blue mailbox. I pull a folded envelope from my pocket and drop it in. It gets quiet. The ghost is still there. But it walks beside me now. The streets don’t miss me. But I remember them. Reply by email</a> Sleeping Through Divine Liturgy noahie@fastmail.com — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I neglected to attend divine liturgy today and I’m feeling bad about it, but I need to talk through my thought process a bit. So, I woke up late this morning. I usually wake up around 5 AM but today my alarm didn’t go off (or I slept through it) and I woke up at 6:45 AM instead. I went through my morning routine but skipped prayer because I was too tired and I ended up falling back asleep until about 8:45 AM. I usually like to arrive at the cathedral at about 9 AM and it takes a bit over 30 minutes to get there, so I knew I was going to be late and I hadn’t even gotten ready yet, so I felt inclined to just skip. I skipped prayer and I’m skipping all of the Sunday activities today even though I was feeling more invigorated in my faith like two days ago. I don’t want to get down on myself, because I know that demons are constantly trying to sabotage my life via despair, but it’s so hard to resist the temptation of it. It’s so weird to me that despair feels like a temptation. I just hate how clearly I can see the demonic influence on my life and it feels like such an uphill battle to be in ceaseless prayer to get it away from me. I also know that when I pray, the demonic influences have to try harder to affect me, so they do everything they can to keep me from prayer. I’ve felt them all around me for most of my life. My mom said I cried a lot as a baby and I remember my first dream, which was a gray dragon with red eyes flying in my face. All of the dreams I’ve had and all of the vivid spiritual experiences of struggle I’ve faced in my life due to ignorance and carelessness have shaped me into someone with true and deep fear. I am afraid of sleeping because I know the demons will almost always come and visit me in my dreams. Moreover, I don’t know why they attack me more than most people. I think they do it because they think I have a better ability at perceiving them. At least that’s what I think. Most people I’ve known or encountered in my life haven’t had the same frequency or gravity of experiences like I have. I don’t know how much of it is confirmation bias versus how much of it is true experience. It’s tough to say because a lot of it is invisible, imperceptible and easy to ignore. It’s extremely good at camouflaging itself within the world and making us forget that it’s there. But I remember. Unfortunately, this makes me sound like a schizo to most people if I were to talk to them about this kind of thing. A lot of people would rather deny its presence or refuse to believe in it altogether. I think they’ve been attacked like I have, too, but don’t see the inner workings of those attacks. They’ll prescribe it to other things, explain it in different ways, or deny the attacks altogether. Some will even say that those experiences helped them, but that’s just not how I see it. It makes me feel like a weird schizo person even thinking about it from that perspective. Why does it have to be this way? I don’t want to be washed with uncertainty. Sometimes it feels like I’m telling people that the room is on fire, but they just don’t see the fire at all. They tell me that I’m crazy. They tell me that I’m wrong. They tell me that it’s all in my head and that I just need to get over it. It makes me angry when they say that. I guess I’m really feeling the weight of the spiritual struggle this morning. I don’t know how I can get back on track. I hate that I keep getting off track. I hate that praying feels like a chore. It should be restorative. I should feel good about doing it. I should want it do it all the time. But unfortunately, my sinful and nature just keeps getting in the way. I feel a certain demonic possession. I shouldn’t want to do things that I know are bad for myself and others, yet I do them anyway. I think Saint Paul might have lamented about this same thing in an epistle, but I’m not sure which one. I know that I’m not the first to feel these things and see them and fight these battles. I also know I won’t be the last one either. I know that there’s been millennia of wisdom passed down to me to help me fight these battles, but I haven’t asked God to give it to me. Scripture has helped and I know that if I read more of the saints’ writing, that would help too. Still though, every day is a crucible of my mind. Having to deal with the constant sensations of everything all time and a brain and body that doesn’t stop is something that tires me to no end. Seeking rest is something that feels impossible. Finding the oasis in the desert that is my life feels like something that will never happen. I just hope that God answers my prayers and has mercy on me because of how wretched and awful I am. I hope that I can have the faith to believe in the fact that despite my unworthiness of grace that I can still receive salvation. My works show for nothing in regards to that salvation, but hopefully my faith can suffice. It’s funny because I believe it was Saint John Chrysostom who said a prayer that similar. I read it in my prayer book. I guess that’s why the protestants are so persistent with the idea of sola fide. It’s almost impossible for any of my works to be sufficient for salvation and yet we can still have faith to help us along. I guess my hope is that through my faith, I can move the oak tree into the ocean and God will give me the opportunity to do the good works necessary for salvation. I’ll try to get some prayers in today. I skipped the morning ones but I will try my best to do the Jesus Prayer as much as I can, say enough Hail Mary prayers, pray to the Archangel Michael, and ask God for healing from my infirmities and grant me healing from my demonic possessions. I hope that even though I might be a wretched and horrible sinner that God will help me through my faults and give me an opportunity to do right by Him. Reply by email</a>