Category: Life & Human Nature
-
The Slow Drift from Idealism to Blame
There is a common stereotype that old age brings wisdom. But there is another pattern—less flattering and often whispered rather than spoken aloud—that suggests something else sometimes arrives with age: bitterness, and occasionally bigotry. Consider a simple hypothesis. When people are young, their future exists mostly as imagination. Youth is full of narrative. We picture…
-
Don’t Know, Don’t Care: The Case for Living Beyond the News
By any measure, we live in an era of unrelenting noise. Twenty-four hours a day, the media pours headlines into our feeds, our phones, and our living rooms. The churn is endless, the urgency constant, the outrage addictive. Yet, for the vast majority of people, 99.999% of it makes no difference whatsoever to their actual…
-
Normal
If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why? If I could permanently ban a word from general usage, I might choose “normal.” Not because it is offensive.Not because it is crude.But because I suspect it is a fossil — a placeholder word left behind after better words…
-
Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth was once a bridge between faith and reason—an audacious attempt to reconcile the new natural philosophy with old scripture. But in hindsight, it also stands as a warning of how easily theology can drown inquiry when belief demands obedience and reason is made to serve it. And disturbingly, that old temptation is returning.
The World Burnet Imagined Burnet believed Earth began as a perfect, divine sphere—a smooth creation unmarred by mountains, seas, or scars. He taught that the Great Flood, not slow geology, carved the features we see today, and that one day fire would purify the world again. His goal wasn’t deception but devotion: to defend faith…
-
The Case for Apathy: Why Caring Less May Be the Healthiest Choice
By The Author We live in a culture that treats caring as a moral duty. We are told to care about our jobs, our reputations, our relationships, our politics, our social media feeds. Self-help gurus urge us to “lean in.” Motivational speakers tell us to “find our passion.” Corporations urge us to “bring our whole…
-
The Hard Truth About Human Nature: Self-Interest and the Choice of Evil
Every society likes to flatter itself with the idea that humans are naturally good. We teach children that kindness is instinctive, that cooperation comes easily, that cruelty is an aberration. But history, psychology, and even biology tell a darker story. Humans are not naturally good. We are naturally self-interested—and when goodness stands in the way…
-
Title: When a Problem Has No Solution: Learning to Manage the Unsolvable
By definition, a problem is something with a solution—a puzzle to be cracked, an error to be fixed, a task to be completed. This mindset dominates modern thinking: everything is a problem, and therefore everything must have a solution. If only we think hard enough, spend enough money, build enough technology, or legislate enough rules,…
-
Writing is the missing civic discipline of our age.
There is a quiet assumption in modern life that having an opinion is enough. You feel strongly. You speak passionately. You post frequently. You debate energetically. You vote accordingly. And that is supposed to count as thought. It does not. If you have an opinion—and you do—then you have a responsibility that goes beyond conversation,…
-
The Memory You’ll Need When It’s Gone
Antivaxxers love to talk about freedom. They wrap themselves in a flag they don’t understand, quoting science they’ve never studied, while treating modern medicine as though it were a conspiracy hatched in a basement by Bill Gates and the lizard people. And yet, beneath all their bluster, the only thing their freedom guarantees is loss.…
-
I’m not dead yet
The most important invention in your lifetime is… “The most important invention in your lifetime is…” —I can’t tell you. I’m not dead yet. Anything I name now is just a midpoint dressed up as a conclusion. The printing press looked finished until electricity showed up. Electricity looked finished until computation arrived. Computation looked finished…
