I just took a nice long shower, as I often do, especially when I’m overwhelmed and stuck in some way (I’m both, as of this moment). There is too many things going on. Too much noise, too much doomerism, too much AI, and of course—how could I forget—too much LLM slop.

I used to write long thinkboi pieces. People liked them, so I tried to write more of them. It was a form of audience capture, without me realizing it. And I’m still kinda stuck in it, green suit and all. (Nevermind that I didn’t wear the suit for 5 years now. Maybe even 6?)

Anyway. That was it. That was the shower thought. Or should I say: realization.

I still have them from time to time, these realizations. Realizations that led to me writing Bitcoin is Time, or Bitcoin is Digital Scarcity, and so on and so forth. But now they are often outside of Bitcoin, and thus I don’t write about them, since I assume that my audience (what a pretentious thing to say: “my audience” - ugh) isn’t interested in any of it.

Well, that’s the conundrum, isn’t it. Once you start writing for an audience you stop writing for yourself. And that’s what I always did, and what I always loved: writing for myself. Writing for the sake of it. Writing to think, because, as all writers know, writing is thinking.

And it really does help me think. If I don’t write, I go in circles. Round and round I go, in my head, ruminating on the same thing, for hours, days, weeks, months. Like a madman. And I don’t want to be a madman. I want to be someone who writes, just like a dancer dances. Not for an ultimate end goal, not for other people, and definitely not for a paycheck.

Thinking in public.

That’s how I’m going to call it.

It’s going to be different, it’s going to be imperfect, and it’s going to be without rules, structures, or schedule. I’ll write when I feel like it, and I won’t write when I don’t feel like it. Simple.

The one thing I can promise you (and by “you” I mean me, since this is a promise to myself) is that it’s going to be free of LLM slop. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

Clankers are useful, no doubt about it. But they can’t do the writing for you, because they can’t do the thinking for you. And as I’ve mentioned before, they can’t do the expressing that is part of the human condition, the bleeding on the page, the squeezing of the soul that makes a song come out, or a poem, or a love letter, or a work of art. How could anyone or anything produce something that touches you, if that thing is neither in touch with the world nor in touch with itself?

That’s in part why I want to return to writing: to get in touch with myself again. And maybe, God willing, also with the world.

I saw a post yesterday (or was it today? the days have been blurring together for almost two weeks now, so who knows) that speculated that humans will start to emulate the writing of Claude, which is to say that humans will produce, in addition to human slop, stuff that sounds and reads like LLM slop.

Even if you don’t use LLMs to write your prose, you’re eventually going to start talking like Claude anyway just because that style will be so universally employed

hodlbod

I completely disagree.

As someone who is increasingly allergic to slop I hope (and thus also predict, to some degree) that the opposite will happen. A counter-movement will form. A counter-movement that will reject slop. A counter-movement that will embrace the imperfect writing of humans, that will develop a taste for style, and tone, and curation, and so on and so forth. Just like regenerative agriculture, organic farming, and the slow food movement represents a counter-culture to fast-food, home-grown content (or whatever we will call it) will spring forth as the LLM pendulum swings back to the other side.

I’m glad to see that I’m not alone in this. Even in my tiny corner of the internet there’s voices that express a similar view, one of which I saw just now:

sick and tired of the uniform, vacuous, distasteful, unoriginal prose all over the place. like Anor Londo it appears grandiose, beautiful and polished but it’s a lie, a dead and hollow façade.

language evolves through people using it and interacting with each other. new words are invented, old rules are changed or subverted, we amplify our conceptual repertoire and update our model of the world by speaking and writing. the word virus affects how we perceive reality and shapes it to some extent.

now an LLM writes your poasts, which is fucking obvious and lame. an LLM writes the software and the documentation, which is now unbearable to read for a human. people communicate via LLM produced text, they generate slop and others use their LLMs to transform that slop into something inteligible (a slop they are comfortable reading).

if language is sterile, human creativity and thinking can stall and degrade. the highly improbable and ground breaking thinking barely gets explored.

fuck this dystopia, i prefer an imperfect and genuine human “voice” over a perfect and hollow LLM garrulous slop. we must not delegate our writing and thinking to a cold, alien, probabilistic engine. writing IS thinking.

verbiricha

Yes.

Writing is thinking.

Fuck this dystopia.

Unfiltered thoughts are a beautiful thing. I think that’s in part why people enjoy long-form conversations, or the unhinged stuff that kids will say from time to time. You can’t self-censor for three hours straight, and kids haven’t developed the ability to self-censor in the first place.

The current world is a filtered world. There are certain things that are kosher when it comes to evening news, and other things that are kosher when it comes to what’s being discussed on X (what used to be twitter), and YouTube, and all these other platforms.

On the one hand it’s the Overton window and various political agendas, on the other hand it’s “the algorithm” (and again, various political agendas. Mixed in with business interests and other stuff, but hey, there’s hardly any difference between business and politics these days, so: potato, potahto.)

The algorithm.

Everyone is catering to “the algorithm.”

Algorithms are useful, no doubt about it. What they are not is an end-all and be-all thing that can tell you what to think about, what to care about.

The hyper-optimized algo feeds we find ourselves in are pretending to show us what is relevant, but they are not optimized for us, they are optimized against us. Our nervous system is the training data, our ego and our vices are the knobs to tweak and levers to pull.

Even worse: “the algorithm” creates audience capture without much of an audience. It creates self-censorship and a chilling effect of ungodly proportions, since everyone is trying to satisfy “the algorithm” instead of satisfying their soul.

What a soulless world we’ve created. And to what end? Reach? Influence? Daily active users, which, of course, is just a different word for addiction?

I can’t help but think of the letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to the kids of Xavier High School a mere 20 years ago:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Kurt Vonnegut

Whatever “the algorithm” does, there is one thing it does not: make your soul grow. Whether you’re a “creator” or a “consumer,” you are a cog in a machine, catering to interests that you barely understand—that anyone barely understands. Feeding the machine, with your work, your time, your attention, and yes, even your soul.

Creating for “the algorithm” instead of creating for the sake of creation itself is hardly creation at all. It is a soul-shrinking activity, as is consumption for consumption’s sake. We’ve built a world that glorifies consumption, and are now living in a world that is hyper-optimized towards one singular metric: the consumption of information. Whether this information is properly ingested, digested, and transformed into a body of knowledge doesn’t matter. And why stop at knowledge? Why can’t we build a world that produces, grows, encourages, incubates, or otherwise brings about lovers of wisdom?

Filtering can be useful, no doubt about it. There is hardly any difference between censorship (no information) and overload (all the information, all the time). We’re drowning in information, but starving for wisdom.

Algorithms won’t help us with that. We need art, and music, and singing, as Vonnegut wrote so beautifully. Express what’s inside of us, to experience becoming, to make our souls grow.

The world is splitting in two, or at least my world, which is the internet. It might be hard to resist the pull of the soul-sucking machinery some days. But when it comes to building a home for my work (and my soul), the choice of which side to inhabit is an easy one: the one that is unfiltered.

Typing at midnight, just for the sake of it.

I got a new keyboard recently. It’s something I don’t do often: buying stuff for myself. I never spend money because I never had any, and I’m still terrible at spending money. But a couple of weeks ago I was like “fuck it,” and I pulled the trigger, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent months.

For the first time in what feels like forever I actually have fun typing. Just typing. Not writing, not working, not trying to create anything of substance, but just typing. Clickedy-clickedy-clack. It’s so satisfying.

I always wanted to write more, and I always failed. I tried many things: voice notes, taking my laptop with me, scheduling time to sit down and write, taking notebooks with me (and taking lots of notes). Nothing ever resulted in as much typing as this little keyboard that I got.¹

Why do I go on and on about typing? Because it’s one of the ways I like to express myself, that’s why.

Human expression is what made the internet great, even wonderful. There are still corners of the internet where this is the case, and we must cherish those corners. Geohot’s blog is one such corner that I rediscovered recently. Oh, what a joy to read something human from an actual human. His stuff makes me cry, laugh, and everything in between. Sometimes I have to shake my head in disbelief, sometimes it resonates so deeply I have to step outside and smoke a cigarette.²

This one, for example:

Inside of every person there is the citizen and the serf. Ask yourself which side of this you are on and what you are spending your days building towards. Technology that makes people more sovereign, or technology that lures them further into dependence?

geohot

Yes. Fuck yes. It’s what Aaron used to say. It’s what orients my life, my work, and my being. I still have his quote on my office wall:

Aaron was an idealist, and they killed him for it.³ An idealist like Michael Enger, who wrote the following not too long ago:

The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity.

Michael Enger

Yes. Time and attention. Terrible currencies, for reasons I’ve outlined in this talk. “You wouldn’t zap a car crash” and all that.

I’ve also re-read A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace today. It talks about “the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies” imposed on us. It talks about culture, and ethics, and transactions, and marketplaces. Unwritten codes. Thought itself.

A new world, a seamless whole.

A world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

John Perry Barlow

A global conversation of bits.

Another tear. Another cigarette.

No LLM slop ever did anything close to this to me, nor will it any time soon. No matter how “refined” it supposedly is. The late-stage industrial slop that is served to us as “content” right now is an insult to our human nature; an insult to free expression; to Truth, and Beauty, and Goodness. To being itself.

Give me human expression.
Serve it without a filter.
Give it to me raw.

I’m not sure what’s left of the internet, but I vow to focus my time and energy on creating the new, opting out of the old. No algorithmic feeds. No doom scrolling. No auto-play, endless ads, rage bait discussions, short-form video brain rot, dark patterns, and walled gardens.

No accounts. No asking for permission. Just me and my keyboard, typing away, pushing signed notes into cyberspace. Written by me, as imperfect as my writing may be. But 100% organic.

Fuck the clankers. They might be able to produce some code, but they can’t bleed on the page to express their soul.

Less prompting, more typing.

Sayings. My mother loved sayings. She got most of them from her mother, who loved sayings too. “Who knows what it’s good for” was one of her favorites. When I was younger I didn’t understand most of them. Now that I’m older, I’m slowly but surely turning into an idiom connoisseur, just like my grandmother used to be.

“Who knows what it’s good for.”

I understand it now. I know what it means, or at least I believe that I do. It encapsulates the story of the Chinese farmer,¹ that Alan Watts loved to tell. He told it many times, but in the one recording I just listened to it goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse.
Ran away.

And all the neighbors came around that evening and said:
“That’s too bad.”

And he said: “Maybe.”

The next day the horse came back and brought seven wild horses with it.

And all the neighbors came around and said:
“Why, that’s great! Isn’t it?”

And he said: “Maybe.”

The next day his son was attempting to tame one of these horses and was riding it and was thrown, and broke his leg.

And all the neighbors came round in the evening and said:
“Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it…”

And the farmer said: “Maybe.”

The next day the conscription officers came around looking for people for the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg.

And all the neighbors came round that evening and said:
“Isn’t that wonderful!”

And he said: “Maybe.”

After the laughter subsides, Alan goes on to distill the essence of the story:

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad—because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

Alan Watts

You never know. That’s the essence.

You never know what it’s good for.

I picked up a book at the train station today. I picked it up because it had oranges on the cover, and orange things stand out to me. It’s a good book. A small book. A book about insights. Those little moments where something *clicks* in your head. Those little moments where you go “a-haaa” or “ooooh” and the world is suddenly different in one way or another, large or small.

One of the “a-ha” moments described in the book is that you might think that whatever you’re caught up with is very important right now—whether it be work, sport, a hobby, a project, a tournament, whatever—but then you get a call from the hospital that something terrible happened to a friend, or one of your loved ones is seriously ill. And suddenly the world is different, and the things that were terribly important a minute ago are not anymore.

There’s a saying that goes something like this: “We don’t perceive things as they are, we perceive them as we are.” I like that one. It is deeply (and in hindsight: obviously) true, but I’m pretty sure I’ve dismissed it the first time I’ve heard it (or the first time I’ve read it).

Before I was whatever I am now, I was a skateboarder. If you would’ve shown me a picture of some stairs with a handrail to hold on to, all I would see is something to slide or grind down on. My perception of the city—any city—was very different from what a regular person might perceive. All I saw was ledges, drops, ramps, quarters, and wheelie tables. Later I got into photography, and my perception of the world changed again. And later still the world—my world—started to turn orange, and my perspective (and thus perception) changed again.

Many “a-ha” moments.

Many ways to view the world.

I had another one of these “a-ha” moments a couple days ago. Maybe a week ago or so; but most definitely before I heard the news about my mother. I was reading another book that I really like. Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh. I came to a passage on the Last Supper, containing information that I’ve known about since I was a child. I must’ve heard the following hundreds, maybe even thousands of times:

So when Jesus broke the bread and poured the wine, he said, This is My body. This is My blood. Drink it, eat it, and you will have life eternal.

It never did anything for me. But on this day, for whatever reason, I had the sudden insight that it’s literally true. And to add insult to injury, I have agreed with and chuckled at a similar saying—similar in spirit—many, many years ago. “You are last week’s potatoes,” which is something Richard Feynman used to say.²

You might object to or even take offense at my crude comparison. My intention is not to equate Christ to Feynman, a move that would probably trigger religious folk and science nerds alike. My intention is to lead into another age-old saying; two, even: “When the student is ready the teacher will appear,” and the one that goes something like “only those who have ears to hear it will hear it, and only those who have eyes to see will see it.” I probably butchered that. And I just remembered that it’s a Bible verse. Apologies.³

Here is what I wrote down in my notebook when I had the body / blood / last week’s potatoes “a-ha” moment: “Words are like keys; ears are like locks. Both morph and change over time, and if you’re lucky, one day you’ll hear a word or a phrase and it will hit just right. It will resonate. You will understand.”

Feynman wasn’t religious. He was allergic to authority; skeptical about top-down truths.⁴ He got it from his father, just like my mom got her one-liners from hers. I share Feynman’s skepticism, as well as his dislike for authority. I wouldn’t call myself religious either. That said, I stopped labeling myself as an “atheist” a couple of years ago.

Too many strange things have happened to me. Things that I can’t explain—or more accurately: things that I can’t explain away. Things that I can’t put into words, no matter how hard I try. “Ineffable,” as Vervaeke would call it.

The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao.

Lao Tzu

…the eternal Tao.

Life eternal.

The fact that there are things that can’t be spoken of should give us pause. The words we use might shape our reality, but they are not equal to reality. They are one step removed from reality, which in turn means that the “artificial intelligence” that everyone and their dog are talking about these days is twice removed from reality.

Clouds of words are molded into statistical patterns, and these statistical patterns are supposed to tell us whether it’s going to rain or not. But will it? And will it teach us anything about the nature of rain? “Explain the nature of reality. Make no mistakes.”

David Foster Wallace had a way with words, and he wrote about this disconnect beautifully: “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

To you it’s just words.

“Who knows what it’s good for.”

To you—to most people—it’s just words.

To me it is everything.

Just one of these sayings.

Cancer.

Fuck cancer.

Fuck cancer sideways.

With a rake.

I was sitting on the same bouncy ball that I’m sitting on right now when my mum called me, telling me that my dad killed himself. He had cancer too, by the way. I’m not sure if I ever mentioned it. Lymphocytic leukemia. Cancer of the blood and bone marrow. I don’t think that he killed himself because of it, since he was surprisingly stable in terms of health. Cancer didn’t kill my dad, but it didn’t help him either.

I was sitting on the same bouncy ball when my sister notified me that she has cancer. Yes, my sister has cancer too. She’s a bit older than me, but not so much that it matters. Two kids, just like me. Lost her dad shortly before; just like me, obviously. She’s bound to lose her female body parts, if she’s lucky enough to make it that far.

My cousin had cancer too. She’s still alive, thank God. Her dad wasn’t as lucky. He died incredibly quickly, within weeks of the diagnosis. You guessed it: cancer. Cancer of the brain. They found out, and at the same time realized that there’s nothing they can do. I was still young when my uncle died—maybe 10 years old—maybe even younger than that—but even at that age I understood one thing deeply: cancer sucks. Massively.

A couple years later my uncle’s sister (my mum) got cancer, too. Breast cancer. I was maybe 12 or so, not sure, and it doesn’t matter. I was too young to spell the word “chemotherapy” without mistakes; but old enough to understand what it means when mum can’t get up from the couch for two days, barely able to hit the bucket when throwing up; old enough to understand that the red stuff that’s coming out isn’t just vomit, but blood.

My dad wasn’t home for most of it. He had to work and stuff. My sisters weren’t home for it either. One lived abroad at the time, the other had moved out already. It was just me, trying to comfort my mother as best as I could, bringing her glasses of water and some sort of menthol or sugar drops, which supposedly brought a little relief, if only for a moment, overriding the blood-and-stomach-acid flavor that was a constant companion at the time. Just me, and my mum of course, who was throwing up the water-and-drops mixture as soon as she was done drinking it. (And stomach fluid and blood and other horrible things after that. For two days straight. Sometimes three. Week after week.)

I was not sitting on the bouncy ball when my wife called me, telling me that she has cancer. Yes, my wife too. I was at a bitcoin event, scheduled to have a fireside chat. I decided to have the chat, not wanting to cancel things last minute. Not the best idea, since my mind was obviously elsewhere, resulting in me wasting everyone’s time and most everyone thinking that I was on drugs. I wasn’t. I was trying to process the fact that my wife might die, and what this cancer diagnosis might mean for us. For her, mostly. But also for me, and for our two little kids. Would they have to witness the same things that I witnessed? Mum dying on the couch, week after week? Blood, sugar drops, vomit? The agony that only a staring contest with death can bring?

My wife called me 12 months ago, give or take.

Reflecting back on the last 12 months. Wasn’t the easiest year for me and my family, but we’re stronger for it. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Count your blessings.

I wrote the above three days ago. Three days.

I wrote it because I remembered the thing I wrote at the time, when my wife was admitted to the hospital, to start her own journey of months and months (and months) of chemotherapy. I sat down in the corner of the cancer ward, watching mere shells of people walk by, some of them half my age—or younger still. I sat down and I started to write. I wrote about adoption (and other nonsense), not because I had something serious to say, but because I wanted to focus on something non-serious for a second. “Everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death.”

I wrote it because I was reflecting back on 12 months of hell. Explaining to a 5-year-old that mum might die? Hell. Falling asleep while the 2-year-old can’t stop crying because mummy isn’t here to cuddle and read bedtime stories? Hell. Going back-and-forth between two countries because treatment isn’t available in the place you just moved to? Hell. Providing emotional support for the in-laws who had nervous breakdowns on the regular? Hell. Sitting in the corner of the cancer ward, staring into the laptop, making sure that the machinery I’m responsible for doesn’t fall apart? Hell. Watching your better half deteriorate, lose weight, turn pale, lose any and all hair, even lose the will to live? Hell. Pretending that you’re fine in a conference call even though you just cried for an hour because your wife (and your life) is literally falling apart? Hell. Dealing with the logistics of it all? Hell.

One of the worst days for me was a regular day. Not the day of the diagnosis; not the day she lost her hair; not the days of her going through multiple operations; not the days the kids cried, or asked impossible-to-answer questions. A regular day. I got up early, trying my best to help with the kids. I got an hour or two of work done. I drove my wife to the hospital, or to some doctor or some other treatment facility. I prepared lunch, made sure that the kitchen is in order, and drove to get groceries. When I came back I learned that I got the wrong groceries. Not only wrong, but inadequate. My wife made a comment, and I’m sure she didn’t intend it, but it absolutely obliterated me. Devastated doesn’t even begin to describe it. I failed to take care of her. It almost killed me.

That’s what cancer does. It kills people. Emotionally, socially, and literally. It kills relationships. It kills normal life. Even if you survive it, against all odds, a part of you still dies.

My wife is through most of it, or so it seems. Cancer is in remission. Her hair is growing back. Her breasts will not, however. Neither will her fallopian tubes, or any of the other reproductive body parts they had to remove. No more kids for us, unfortunately.

“Reflecting back on the last 12 months.”

I wrote that three days ago.

Three days.

A lot can happen in three days.

Three days ago I thought that things would return to normal, whatever that means. I thought that I’d take my daughter on a trip this fall, to visit the family, visit my mum—her grandma—and spend some quality time with her. Visit the family of my dad, get some closure, process his death; or at least try to. The fact that my dad never met his granddaughter still pains me to this day.

You always think there’s more time.
Then all of a sudden, there’s no time left.

Three days ago I thought that I’d finally have some room to breathe.
Two days ago I learned that my mum got another cancer diagnosis.
Today I learned that she’s dying.

Right now.

As I am typing this sentence.

I was sitting on the same bouncy ball when my sister called me today. I answered. Bad news. Things are way worse than we thought. Tears. A short time later I was sitting on the floor, crying.

Déjà vu.

I like the bouncy ball because it reminds me to sit upright, to find the right balance. It takes a little effort to sit on it. You can’t fall asleep on it. It’s the only “chair” I have in my office, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But it’s a terrible chair to receive bad news on. Part of your world got destroyed, and you can’t even slouch on it to deal with the devastation. When every fiber of your being is obliterated, when there’s no strength left to sit upright, when the only reasonable position is a collapsed heap of agony, when you just learned that time is running out, that your mum is dying way sooner than you thought she would… then the bouncy ball sucks.

Massively.

Just like cancer.

Forgetting is a gift. We don’t like to forget, but it’s a gift nonetheless. If you’d ask random people on the street whether they’d like to have perfect memory, most of them would probably say yes without giving the question another thought. But imagine for a moment, if you may, the absolute curse of perfect, eternal memory. All your mistakes, all your regrets, all the terrible things you did in the past, every time you failed, every time you made a fool of yourself, every missed opportunity, every loss, every heartbreak; in short: every bad thing that ever happened to you or happened because of you. All recorded perfectly, in high fidelity, ready to be recalled at a moment’s notice.

Hell.

Forgetting to write is something I’m excellent at. Forgetting to write my friends, my mum, the people I care for. A simple hello. A short I’m thinking of you. I’m terrible at it. I think the reason is exhaustion, mostly. I wake up most days with a couple dozen DMs waiting for me. Some days it’s hundreds. It’s a side-effect of the internet. Instant communication. Always-on availability. My inboxes have been rekt for years, and by extension so have I.

Forgetting to write in general is something I’m excellent at too. Essays, articles, books. I’m supposed to be writing, and I’d love to write more. But I had to leave all writing behind because … well, I don’t think I would’ve managed to survive if I had to write “on the side” in addition to all the other stuff.

As I was starting to write these paragraphs I had the title “Switching Gears” in mind. Followed immediately by the intrusive thoughts of “I’m not sure if I’ll manage” and “I’m not even sure if I’m capable of it.” But I’m at a point now where I have to make a choice: continue to “function” as I have in the past, or switch gears and maybe, hopefully, God-willingly, create again?

“Choosing is not optional,” says one of the books I’m currently reading. “All outcomes, including doing nothing, are choices. At its core, moment-to-moment living is a problem of investment and returns.” And of course, as the book goes on to elaborate, we all want to invest as little as we can get away with while maximizing our returns. I love the next part: “These problems seem straightforward until we consider the stakes involved for real creatures in the real world: life or death.”

Life or death. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it. I think that’s what’s at the core of the issue that I’m facing. Each day that I spend functioning, or perhaps “grinding” as the kids might say these days, is a day I don’t spend creating. It’s a day I die a little death. And I don’t mean it in the French orgasm sense of “la petite mort.” I mean it in the sense of I wasn’t put on this earth to write another email, or review another spreadsheet.

The last 6 years have been years of instability. I barely had room to breathe, let alone to think. Hence my hiatus from thinkboyism.

I’m not even sure if I want to expand on the root causes of said instability. Maybe one day. Maybe it’s something I should do. Maybe it’s something I have to do. Who knows.

Someone came up to me recently and out of all the things I ever wrote they thanked me for writing about my father, which is strange, since it’s a personal piece I wrote to process his death. I wrote it for myself. I’m not even sure why I published it, but I did. I guess most decisions are like that: we barely understand why we do something, but we do it anyway. And we try to rationalize it after the fact.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” to quote the late Steve Jobs. “Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Memento mori. We all have to die. You, me, your dog, your loved ones. Everyone you ever saw, everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved.

My mom got diagnosed with cancer yesterday. Pancreatic. Liver metastases to boot. It’s the fourth time she’s been diagnosed with cancer, and I have the feeling that it’s going to be the last time.

“Death is nature’s way of forgetting,” is what I wrote about a week ago. And now death is knocking at the door. Again. “The single best invention of life,” to quote Jobs once more. “It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

He died of pancreatic cancer too. I keep forgetting.

We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.

Virginia Woolf

My dad killed himself today. He hanged himself in the morning. I’m not sure what to say, what to feel, what to write, or if writing anything is appropriate or useful in the first place. In any case, he is gone now. And what is left are questions and memories, but mostly questions.

When I first heard the news I wasn’t even surprised. And yet I broke down. And cried, and was angry. And sad. And everything in between. I cried for two hours straight, and many hours after that. I’m still crying most days, and I doubt that the sadness will ever go away. I was and am devastated. Not because of him dying, but because of him killing himself.

He was a good man. Imperfect, like all of us are, but with a good heart. He had a good mind too, and I’m afraid said mind is what killed him.

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.

David Foster Wallace¹

I’m trying my best not to judge or blame my father. I am well aware of the terrible master that is the mind, and am all too familiar with the bottomless pit that is despair and depression. Losing all hope, losing all sense of meaning. Losing the ability to feel or experience joy, or any positive emotion for that matter. A week of this will turn anyone suicidal; a year or two and it’s a miracle if you’re still alive.

And yet it is hard not to judge. Borderline impossible to accept his decision; to accept things as they are now.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

David Foster Wallace

Invisible Agony

I guess we’ll never know what went through his head on the day of his death. What invisible agony tormented him. What kind of terror made him jump, what kind of flames were scorching his flesh. He left no suicide note; no last words; no explanation. No paragraphs that might provide insight or closure. What we do know is that it wasn’t a snap decision, as he went through the trouble of driving to another city to leave the family dog at a safe place. And after this small act of kindness, he drove back to put his neck through the noose.

It’s hard to put into words what kind of devastation lies in the wake of a suicide. Psychologically speaking we can deal with natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, or straight-up accidents that can and do happen, especially if there is no one to blame. That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it: blame.

We want to blame someone, and we’re unsure whom to blame. We might want to blame the hand that killed the person—until we realize that we can’t blame killer and victim at the same time; and blaming the dead is futile anyway. Thus what is left but to blame ourselves?

So we start the agonizing process of asking ourselves the question of what if… What if our relationship would’ve been better? What if I had called more often? What if I would’ve known about his financial troubles? What if I would’ve talked to him about my own guilt and existential angst, and what helped me through my darkest times? What if?

I’m sure that everyone close to him is asking themselves these and similar questions, along with the eternal one that is: Why?

Why kill yourself when you have so many things to live for? Why leave five kids without a father, especially if two of them aren’t adults yet? Why kill the grandfather of your 6 grandkids, one of which you haven’t even met? Why, why, why? And here it is again: the passing of blame.

I understand people who kill themselves, strangely enough. I think anyone who has personally been trapped and felt the flames does, as David Foster Wallace so beautifully put it. But it’s hard to fully accept suicide if it’s that close to home.

That’s the issue, I think. The suicide of my father cuts very close to the bone. My father is part of me and I am partly him. I’m not too different from him, in fact. He was extreme in his approaches; I am too. He didn’t care much for material wealth or money; just like me. He was no stranger to depression; just like me. He was a perfectionist, and I am too. He was fearless and often times reckless, and I guess I can be all of that as well.

I have my father’s mind and temperament, and I fight with it every day. I fight the monster that is the terrible master as best as I know how, trying to keep things at bay with sheer discipline and willpower.² I know that he managed to do the same for many decades, but in the end the monster won. Or did it?

Did my father struggle with depression, or did depression struggle with him? Did the monster kill my father, or did he kill it? Norm Macdonald once quipped that people don’t lose their battle with cancer; if anything, it’s a draw, because if the person dies the cancer dies too.³ It’s all the more poignant because it was cancer that killed him, the very cancer that he was already aware of when he made said quip.

When it comes to cancer, especially late-stage cancer so advanced in its progression that all hope for betterment and remission is surely lost, most of us agree that prolonged and unnecessary suffering is inhumane. We allow people to die. In some cases we even allow them to actively kill themselves, even assist them in doing so. We call anxiety and depression the “cancer of the mind,” and rightfully pose comparative questions to try to make sense of it all. Questions such as: “If I had cancer, would you force me to live out the rest of my days in pain or would you help me find rest?”⁴

But depression isn’t cancer, which is why we don’t consider suicide a natural death. We don’t help people to kill themselves when they are depressed—we try to help them get better. We try to help them get rid of the monster that is the terrible master, by any other means but death. And sometimes we fail. Often, really.

I keep asking myself this question: When it comes to suicide, does the terrible master shoot the person, or does the person shoot the terrible master? Does one win over the other, or is it a draw?

Whatever the case may be, the monster that killed my father is alive in me. It lives on in me; in my mind, in my conscious and subconscious. I don’t intend to feed it, but it is there nonetheless. And I’m afraid it will always be there.

There are two things we know for sure about suicide: it is neither rare nor simple. More people die of suicide than of homicide and natural disaster combined.⁵ There are no simple answers, no simple explanations, no simple way of making sense of it. Reasoning stops, and with it, the heart stops too. That’s the whole point of killing oneself, and the conundrum of it all. The suicidal person tries to stop her mind from tormenting her being, and in the process stops her heart. But who exactly killed whom?

It’s precisely this paradoxical nature of suicide why we often speak of depression as a disease, as something that can and must be cured, like the flu or a headache or a viral infection—or cancer, as alluded to before. It’s easier that way; because it allows us to say that depression is the killer. An external agent, a disease that we don’t have much control over. We move the killer from a “who” to a “what.” But where does it stop? And where does the person end and the monster start? What is circumstance, and what is agency? How much say do we have over what we think, what we do, and what we feel? How much agency can we exert when it comes to constructing meaning from experience, to say it in David Foster Wallace’s words? How much control do we have over our thoughts?

How frail the human heart must be—a mirrored pool of thought.

Sylvia Plath

During the financial crisis of 2008, suicide rates increased by roughly 5% in Europe and America.⁶ More men killed themselves than women, as they always do.⁷ Who killed those men? What killed those men? Are they responsible for their suicide? Did they truly kill themselves, or did the financial crisis kill them? Was it depression? And if it was depression, was it the psychological one or the economic one? Is there even a difference?

Questions over questions… The reason why we assign blame in the first place is because of our steadfast conviction that it could’ve been different. We believe that there is a scenario where the person could still be alive—if only this or that would’ve happened instead. If only we would’ve known. We would’ve helped; we would’ve intervened. If only…

Blame

Blame and agency are intimately intertwined, of course. That’s why we differentiate between premeditated assassination, manslaughter, the death penalty, and murder in the heat of the moment. We lack such differentiation for suicide. The person is dead, and some other, bigger force, won.

That’s precisely it, isn’t it. We aren’t a uniform blob; we aren’t even one person. There are forces at play, most of which we don’t understand very well. Some of them live inside of us, some shape us from the outside. We have stories about these forces; we call them Love and Hate; God and the Devil; Happiness and Depression; Good and Evil. “These forces,” to quote David Mitchell, “begin long before we are born, and continue after we perish.”

The paradoxical nature of suicide makes this abundantly clear. There’s a part of you that doesn’t want to live anymore; there’s a part of you that is suffering. But there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to die, that is afraid of death; a part that is contemplating, that is afraid to jump, that wants to get better. A part that is glad that someone stopped you, that someone talked you off the ledge. A part of you that is open to being talked off the ledge in the first place. There are forces inside you that pull you in one direction and others that pull you away from it; away from the abyss. The suicidal mind is possessed by the angel of death, a force that goes against life itself. But your heart is immune to this possessive force; the heart can’t make the heart stop beating. The heart can’t stop itself. Only the mind can stop itself.

Our hearts and minds are shaped by forces, internal and external—visible and invisible. The story of history is the story of the mind trying to understand these forces. And one might say that the story art is the story of the heart trying to understand these forces.⁸

We used to call them spirits. And we still use this word today, i.e. when talking about the spirit of a team, the elusive force that makes the members of a group want said group to succeed. Life itself has such an elusive force. We call it “Lebensfreude.” Joie de vivre, a zest for life. An inherent willingness to live.

Life is life-affirming, and it has to be. If it wouldn’t be, it would self-destruct. Is it any wonder then, that most religious thought came to the conclusion that suicide is against the spirit of God, the creator, the eternal life force itself?

Most religious thought answers the fundamental question of life, “to be or not to be,” in the affirmative. God created the heavens and the earth, and all creatures, and light and darkness, and women and men. And it was good. Very good, even.

Every day above earth is a good day.

Ernest Hemingway

Suffering

Angel on the left shoulder, devil on the right. “Jump!” shouts the devil. “Please, reconsider,” whispers the angel. “It might not feel like it right now, but you will be deeply missed—and you will get better.” Who do you listen to? Do you even have a choice? Can you decide to pay attention to the one, but not the other?

Again, the religious answer is a definitive yes. Yes, you have a say in the matter. Yes, you can decide to orient towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Yes, you have Free Will. Not your mind, not your heart, but you yourself, the True Self that is behind it all; the higher self. The eternal self.

I never was a religious person, and I’m not sure if my father was either. He grew up in a religious household and went to church from time to time, but I doubt that he took religious teachings seriously. I do now.

I do now because religious thought is not optional, and neither is religious orientation. An orientation towards the Goodness of Life; towards the Beauty of Being itself. In his commencement speech, David Foster Wallace mentions that “the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.” I now believe that this is true for suffering as well. You can decide to see it as suffering, or you can decide to see it as Grace.

Meaning and suffering are intertwined, and both are axiomatic for existence. “Can’t derive an ought from an is” and all that jazz, with some “cogito, ergo sum” mixed in. There is no experiencing without meaning; no acting without suffering. To exist as a self-conscious, experiencing, acting agent in this world you have to believe that your existence and existence itself is meaningful, that existence is preferable to non-existence. If you do not believe that, you will unavoidably kill yourself and others. That’s the cold-hearted logic of it all.

But the universe isn’t cold-hearted, because we are part of it. And we care. About the living, and the dead. About our own lives and the lives of others. About life itself. About what it means to experience it, good and bad.

To be positive at all times is to ignore all that is important, sacred or valuable. To be negative at all times is to be threatened by ridiculousness and instant discredibility.

Kurt Cobain

Positive and negative. Yin and Yang. The sacred and the profane. That’s what life is, an amalgamation of seemingly paradoxical opposites. We push the boulder up the hill so it might roll down again. Rinse and repeat, for all eternity.

Albert Camus understood that the question of “why” is THE fundamental question. Shakespeare did too, obviously. Why do anything at all? Why keep on living? Why be, if you could also not be?

According to Camus, there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” I think that Viktor Frankl would agree.

I was always bothered by the English translation of Viktor Frankl’s book. The German title is not “Man’s search for meaning”—far from it. It’s “Say Yes to Life Anyway” (“… trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen”). It’s an ode to the right psychological stance to life, which is the religious stance: say YES to Life, despite of your suffering. Say YES to existence, despite of the injustices and horrors and the malevolence of this world. Say YES to it all, even if you think it’s moot and meaningless and stupid and terrible. Say Yes, no matter the situation. Even if you’re imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Say yes to Life. Say yes to being. Say yes, and be.

“To be or not to be” is so obviously the fundamental question to be asked, and I believe that is why suicide is so brutal, so destructive to the living, so devastating to those that still are. Because suicide is an answer to this question. The act itself is an affront to being itself, and an attack on the axiomatic worldview that is shared by the living. It is a deliberate assault on the one thing we all share: conscious experience, the qualia of what it means to be.

Courage

If someone throws themselves on a hand grenade to save others from the impending doom of the inevitable explosion, we applaud them and give them the highest honors, even though they technically killed themselves. Why don’t we do the same for someone who takes action to save himself from impending doom?

I believe the answer lies in our intuitive analysis of who killed whom. In the case of the hand grenade, the Higher Self decides to sacrifice the body to save others. The man who throws himself on a hand grenade doesn’t kill anyone else. His spirit is very much intact. In the case of suicide, the tormented mind chooses to kill mind and Self alike, to end the suffering of both. The man who kills himself, kills his Self. His spirit is broken. “It is murder and a corpse is left behind, no matter who has killed whom,” is what Jung had to say on the matter. “The man who kills a man, kills a man,” wrote Chesterton. “The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” That’s why dealing with suicide is so hurtful. Desperation, hopelessness, homicide, and genocide—all mixed into one.

Paul Tillich tells us that “all things are rooted in a yes and a no,” including being itself. That’s why faith and hope are paramount—and faith and hope are indistinguishable from courage. The Courage To Be, in other words, is the courage to say YES to the fundamental question of being, and with it open up to the process of becoming—suffering and all.

Suicide ends the process of becoming, and while it kills the tormented mind that is the terrible master of the suicidal, it kills the heart too, with all its openness, and Love, and potential. Suicide kills the future. And with it the hope that things could be better. It is an absolutist act, implicitly claiming final knowledge of what is yet to come. I know what’s ahead—I know what Life / God / the universe has in store for me—and I know that it’s not worth the trouble. Suicide claims that striving towards betterment is not worth it; the struggle is not worth it; life itself is not worth it, which leaves those who are still living in a conundrum: What if they’re right?

What if they’re right?

What if those who kill themselves are right? Maybe life isn’t worth living after all. Maybe the struggle isn’t worth it. Maybe it is all meaningless, senseless, and—in the final analysis—futile. Maybe the whole Spiel is not worth the trouble. Maybe it’s better to end it all; to end the suffering.

Suffering. That’s what the question of suicide boils down to; and the question of life and being and existence for that matter, which are the questions of the religious domain.

The essence of religious thought is that you can’t escape it, only transcend it. You can not and must not escape into Nirvana. The Western tradition teaches you to embrace it fully and with an open heart. And by embracing your suffering, and by carrying your cross wilfully and with grace, your burden will lose its weight.

The Eastern tradition encourages you to detach from your desires so completely, and live in the eternal now so fully, that the gap between what is and what you think should be closes, and with that your suffering fades. After all, it is this gap—the gap between ought and is—that creates our suffering. And paradoxically, or maybe obviously, this gap needs to exist for any acting agent. This is why Life is suffering, and suffering is unavoidable.

Religions figured all this out a long time ago, and they all came to the same conclusion: don’t try to escape it. Every attempt to escape it is misguided. Being is intrinsically good. Life is intrinsically good. God is great, and trying to escape the suffering that is being is wrong. It is intrinsically wrong. Even if the suffering is unbearable; even if it is maximally painful. Spiritual growth is learning how to bear the unbearable; and do so sincerely, from the heart.

If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.

Vincent van Gogh

Love

Love is the answer. Not reason, not logic, but Love. Love for yourself, love for others, and love for being itself. True, unconditional Love. If you love someone unconditionally you accept them as they are; if you love the underlying ground of being unconditionally, you accept things as they are—including yourself. Loving fully implies forgiving fully, and that’s the hardest thing of them all. Forgiving others. Forgiving God. Forgiving yourself.

The thing that matters are others.

Robin Williams

Erlich Fromm tells us that “the right self-love and the love of others are interdependent”. I believe that this is true for the right love of being itself as well. Maybe that’s what the Trinity represents. A loving relationship to yourself as the son, to your father that brought you into this world, and to the transcendental that is between all things. The holy ghost, the spirit of existence itself. My heart tells me that all of that is true; my oh-so-skeptical and oh-so-reasonable mind has trouble accepting such lofty propositions.

“Man shall not live on bread alone,” according to Jesus, “but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” One could even argue that man can not live on bread alone, because man would starve spiritually due to the lack of a transcendental guiding principle, and thus eventually kill himself. I think that’s what Nietzsche meant when he said that life without music would be a mistake. We need to be reminded of the transcendental beauty of things—no, of existence itself—and music is the most powerful and penetrating reminder we have.

That’s why music isn’t optional; and art isn’t optional; and beauty itself isn’t optional. That’s why “beauty shall save the world,” as Solzhenitsyn so boldly claimed. I understand that now.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

Virginia Woolf

But understanding all that might not be enough. Picking up a pen, paintbrush, violin, guitar—or whatever you use to create something beautiful—might not be enough. The just quoted Virginia Woolf wrote many beautiful things, and yet she eventually killed herself.⁹ As did Sylvia Plath, and Vincent Van Gogh. Kurt Cobain and Robin Williams killed themselves too, most famously. And Hemingway as well, by shooting himself in—you guessed it—the head. Even David Foster Wallace, who so poignantly talked about the old cliché of “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master,” the same David Foster Wallace who so vividly painted the picture of a burning high-rise with you being trapped at the window—that very David Foster Wallace who gave one of the greatest commencement speeches of all time—killed himself. He hanged himself, just like my father did.

Reasons

It’s easy to reason yourself into suicide, especially if you are depressed. The world is terrible, your life is terrible, other people are terrible, and to top it all off you yourself are terrible too. Why keep on living? The problem with this line of reasoning is that it comes from the mind, not the heart. In Jung’s words, if you are ever suicidal you should “be sure first, whether it is really the will of God to kill yourself or merely your reason.” Because “the latter is positively not good enough.”

There is a reason why we say “follow your heart” and not “follow your mind” when we are having a hard time making a big decision. Even in today’s day and age—an age dominated by reason and logic; an age that is drowning in mind and starving for heart—we encourage others to listen to their gut feeling, to do the thing that they know in their heart is right, even if “objectively” and “rationally” one can find a million reasons why it might be “wrong” by any rational measure. Why do we do this?

We do this because we intuitively know what David Foster Wallace so beautifully explicated. We deeply understand the old cliché, that the mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master. I think that’s why religions put so much emphasis on grace, forgiveness, humility, and Love. All these things put heart first, mind second. Our society has this backward, which is at least partly responsible for the suicide epidemic, I believe. We over-emphasize mind and under-emphasize heart, creating terrible masters and monsters alike. “Almost nobody shoots themselves in the heart,” to rephrase David’s remark. After all, the monsters we fight are usually in our heads, and not elsewhere. A heart might be longing or cold or confused or broken, but it isn’t a house for demons and monsters. It is obvious to me that those who decide to kill themselves don’t follow their heart; they do the opposite. They follow the terrible master to the ultimate conclusion, are convinced that he is right, and he is convinced that ending it all is the right thing to do.

The suicidally depressed don’t think of it this way, of course. All they want to do is put an end to their suffering. They believe that their suicide is justified, and maybe in some cases, it is.

But who can decide such a thing with any resemblance of authority? Who but that which we call God? What mortal soul has the audacity to define the threshold that puts a person into the “category of people that have permission to kill themselves?”¹⁰ How much suffering is too much suffering?

Maybe that’s why religions are so absolutist when it comes to suicide. It’s a threshold problem, just like the problem of free speech. What pain is unbearable, and by what measure? And what if the thing that is responsible for said measurement is faulty? What if your “suffering sensor” is broken?

Pain

“It’s beautiful when the pain subsides,” is something my father used to say a lot. Every time he was doing sports or something else that would bring him to his physical limits—bones hurting, muscles cramping—that one line was his go-to rationalization to keep going, to push even harder. It doesn’t matter if you’re hurting now; just imagine how amazing it will feel once the pain goes away. I hope it did, Dad. I hope your pain went away in the end. I hope you’re feeling the bliss that you were always after.

My father killed himself on October 15, 2024. He hanged himself in the morning. He left behind his wife, my mother, five children, six grandchildren, two brothers, and a dog. I’m not sure what to say, what to feel, what to do, or what to think. I’m not sure if it was the terrible master that ended him, or if it was my father ending the terrible master, forcing a draw. There was a battle, and it’s hard to say who won and who lost. In any case, he is gone now. I’m left with sadness, questions, and wishes.

I wish he could’ve met my daughter. I wish he could’ve known how much I loved him. I wish I could’ve had the chance to talk to him one last time. I wish I could’ve told him that he was a good dad. No, a great one. I wish we could’ve had a proper conversation. Not only son to father, but father to father, soul to soul, and tormented mind to tormented mind. I think I could’ve helped him. I wish he could’ve known that I was there too, in the burning building up top, about to leap out of the window. I wish I could’ve told him that the flames might be an illusion; that there is a chance they eventually subside.¹¹ I wish I could’ve told him that there is hope; that there’s a path to feeling better.

It pains me to know that my father was in such torment that he decided to end it all. I didn’t know. Not really.

Peterson once said, “If there are people around you that love you, it’s pretty likely that they will never really recover [from your suicide].”¹² I loved my father, imperfect as he was. I wouldn’t be here without him, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today without his guidance, teachings, and love.

Call your parents. Even if your relationship is complicated. Even if you haven’t spoken for a long time. Even if they are far away. Call them, and tell them that you love them. They might need to hear it. More than you can imagine.

I love you dad. I miss you dearly. May you rest in peace.

If you are considering suicide or self harm, please get help now.