The Credential Factory

Universities have become factories for aristocrats without a future.

There is something profoundly ridiculous about the fact that we have constructed a civilization capable of sending human beings into space, sequencing the human genome, and developing machines capable of solving extraordinarily complex mathematical problems, yet somehow require an eighteen-year-old to spend four years of his life and tens of thousands of dollars obtaining permission to apply for an entry-level office job. The university, supposedly an institution dedicated to the preservation of knowledge, the cultivation of intellectual excellence, and the transmission of civilization's accumulated wisdom, has gradually transformed itself into a rather extraordinary combination of a corporate recruitment center, a luxury residential development, an administrative bureaucracy, and a financial institution whose principal customer happens to be a young adult with virtually no understanding of the economy in which he is about to participate. He is promised independence, intellectual sophistication, lifelong friendships, romantic opportunities, and, most importantly, a respectable position within the professional classes. In return, he is expected to surrender an enormous amount of money, several years of his life, and a considerable portion of his psychological well-being to an institution whose actual obligations to his future are remarkably limited. And if the whole arrangement fails to produce anything resembling the advertised outcome, the university can simply suggest that he pursue a master's degree. Wonderful. Perhaps another forty thousand dollars will do the trick.

I increasingly suspect that the so-called college experience is one of the most successful commercial myths of modernity. We are shown beautiful campuses, attractive young people laughing beneath autumn trees, extraordinarily enthusiastic professors, exciting social opportunities, and the promise of becoming a fully developed adult through the apparently miraculous act of attending lectures. Yet the 2024–2025 Healthy Minds Study reported that approximately 37 percent of surveyed students screened positive for moderate or severe depressive symptoms, while another 33 percent screened positive for moderate or severe anxiety. Eleven percent reported suicidal ideation during the preceding year. These findings do not establish that universities themselves cause psychological distress, naturally, but they do complicate the lovely advertising campaign suggesting that these are supposed to be the happiest years of your life. The student may instead spend his evenings sitting alone in an overpriced dormitory, surviving on instant noodles, completing assignments he has no particular interest in, and wondering whether the entire arrangement was a rather expensive mistake. I do not doubt that university can provide extraordinary friendships, intellectual discoveries, and romantic experiences. But since when did friendship require tuition? Since when did romantic attraction require a university identification card? Since when did learning to live independently require purchasing accommodation from an institution that will also charge you for the privilege of attending its lectures? We have managed to commercialize the ordinary experiences of young adulthood, package them into an attractive institutional product, and convince millions of people that they will somehow miss an indispensable component of human existence unless they purchase it. And perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the entire situation is how thoroughly we have accepted the idea that everybody ought to participate. Not everybody needs to attend university. Not everybody benefits from university. And I am increasingly convinced that a substantial portion of the population would be considerably better off acquiring practical skills, financial independence, and actual professional experience than spending four years pretending to enjoy an academic environment they never particularly wanted to enter.

And the financial arrangement is, frankly, fucking extraordinary. For the 2026–2027 academic year, the College Board reports average published tuition and fees of approximately $12,290 for in-state students at public four-year universities, $32,730 for out-of-state students, and $46,350 at private nonprofit institutions. The estimated total annual student budget at a private nonprofit four-year institution reaches $67,610, once housing, food, transportation, and other expenses are included. Financial aid reduces the actual price for many domestic students, sometimes substantially, but the costs of attendance remain considerable, especially for students without generous assistance. International students frequently face additional expenses, nonresident tuition, restrictions on employment, and limited access to American financial assistance. Imagine traveling halfway across the planet to spend the equivalent of a respectable annual salary in your home country on the privilege of studying at an American university, only to discover that your prospective employer would prefer somebody with three years of professional experience. The usual defense is that graduates earn more money, and indeed, the statistical earnings premium associated with university education is real. But the average conceals enormous differences between disciplines, institutions, debt burdens, and individual outcomes. Research from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity estimated that approximately 31 percent of students were enrolled in postsecondary programs with negative expected financial returns. Nearly half of the master's degree programs examined in its research were estimated to leave students financially worse off. Certain engineering disciplines, nursing, computer science, accounting, and specialized professional pathways can provide substantial financial rewards, while medicine and law can offer exceptional incomes after considerable additional education. But a bachelor's degree in psychology does not qualify somebody to practice independently as a clinical psychologist, and many academic careers in the humanities and sciences require postgraduate education before the individual can even seriously compete for specialized positions. Four years becomes six. Six becomes eight. And eventually one discovers that the desirable position requires experience, which cannot be obtained without first acquiring the desirable position. The university is, naturally, happy to sell another qualification in the meantime.

This is where credential inflation becomes particularly interesting. A degree is supposed to distinguish its holder, but when everybody possesses one, the distinction becomes increasingly meaningless. Employers begin requiring degrees for positions that previously demanded substantially less formal education, graduates respond by obtaining additional qualifications, and the entire population gradually participates in an educational arms race whose principal beneficiaries are often the institutions selling the ammunition. We have confused possessing knowledge with possessing credentials, and possessing credentials with possessing competence. These are three different things. A person may understand mathematics without attending university, obtain a mathematics degree without becoming a particularly good mathematician, and become an extraordinarily competent professional through training that has little resemblance to conventional academic life. Yet the institution insists upon its own indispensability, as institutions generally do when their continued existence depends upon convincing the public that their services cannot be replaced. The student is told he needs a degree to obtain employment. He obtains the degree. He is told he needs postgraduate education to become competitive. He completes the postgraduate education. He is told he needs professional experience. And if the entire process fails, he is encouraged to improve his résumé, expand his professional network, and perhaps consider another qualification. At what point does the institution accept any responsibility for the expectations it has been selling? At what point do we acknowledge that increasing the number of qualified applicants does not automatically increase the number of desirable positions available? At what point does the economy actually need another graduate trained to produce corporate presentations rather than somebody capable of repairing a fucking transformer?

The university ought to be an environment in which inexperienced young people encounter scholars and professionals capable of transmitting the knowledge accumulated throughout their careers. Imagine studying physics under someone who has spent thirty years investigating the structure of the universe, or engineering under someone who has actually designed machines, built bridges, and confronted problems whose consequences extend beyond a classroom. Instead, the undergraduate may receive a lecture containing two hundred students, a PowerPoint presentation, a collection of automated assignments, and approximately forty-five minutes of office hours during which the professor may or may not remember his name. Gallup's alumni research has identified considerable gaps in mentorship and career guidance, and I find this particularly disappointing considering the extraordinary sums students are expected to pay. What the hell are we paying for, exactly? Access to buildings? An institutional email address? The privilege of submitting essays to somebody whose professional advancement may depend considerably more upon research publications than upon whether his students have learned anything? Expertise deserves respect when it is genuine, and specialized scholarship is indispensable to civilization, but academic titles do not automatically establish teaching competence. Nor does the publication of thirty papers establish that someone can explain a difficult concept to a nineteen-year-old. I would rather be taught by an experienced engineer who has actually constructed something than by an academic whose principal professional achievement consists of producing increasingly elaborate descriptions of engineering education.

The academic publication industry is another extraordinary example of institutional incentives gradually separating themselves from their original purpose. Research is indispensable, naturally. Scientific discoveries, serious historical investigations, mathematical developments, and philosophical arguments all require intellectual specialization. But the requirement to continuously publish creates an obvious incentive to produce papers for the sake of producing papers, regardless of whether those papers contribute anything particularly significant to human understanding. A researcher publishes because publication advances his career. The department celebrates its research output because research output advances its reputation. The university advertises its scholarly excellence because scholarly excellence attracts students, funding, and institutional prestige. And the journals, naturally, continue publishing. Now introduce artificial intelligence. A 2025 Nature survey of approximately 5,000 researchers found that 28 percent reported using generative AI to edit papers, while 8 percent reported using it to produce first drafts. This does not mean that most research has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, but its growing participation in academic writing is unmistakable. There is something almost beautifully ridiculous about a student paying tens of thousands of dollars to be instructed by an academic who uses artificial intelligence to prepare material, while the student uses artificial intelligence to complete assignments, which are subsequently evaluated through software within an institution increasingly preoccupied with determining whether either participant is actually doing the thinking. The professor produces content. The student produces content. The university collects the money. The technology company collects its subscription. Everybody is productive. Whether anybody has learned anything becomes a somewhat inconvenient philosophical question.

And then there are the textbook publishers, whose business model deserves a special place in the history of human ingenuity, preferably somewhere between organized extortion and the invention of the subscription-based printer cartridge. Consider introductory calculus. The derivative of a polynomial has not undergone some astonishing scientific transformation since the previous academic year, nor has the fundamental theorem of calculus suddenly developed an exciting new interpretation requiring the immediate destruction of every existing textbook. Yet publishers routinely introduce revised editions, sometimes changing exercises, page numbers, examples, and supplementary materials in ways that complicate the continued use of older copies. Not every revision is unnecessary, naturally, but the commercial incentives are rather obvious. The old book remains intellectually useful while becoming institutionally inconvenient. The student must purchase the new edition, or perhaps a digital access code permitting him to complete assignments through a proprietary platform. The U.S. Government Accountability Office was already investigating this problem in 2005, documenting how revisions could destroy the resale value of previous editions and how supplementary materials contributed to textbook costs. According to its findings, textbook prices had nearly tripled between December 1986 and December 2004, increasing at approximately twice the rate of general inflation. Publishers were also selling American textbooks overseas at different prices and taking measures to restrict their reimportation into the United States. In other words, the industry was perfectly capable of recognizing that the same educational material possessed different commercial values depending upon which students were purchasing it. The relevant question is why students should be expected to tolerate a market in which their instructors determine what they must purchase, their institutions determine where and how the material can be accessed, and the publishers possess extraordinary influence over the prices they are forced to pay.

The situation becomes considerably more grotesque when we examine the arrangements now being marketed under names like "inclusive access." The name is lovely. Who could possibly object to inclusion? But what does inclusion mean when the student is automatically billed for educational materials through his institution, sometimes without sufficiently understanding that he has been charged or how he can decline? In 2024, Student PIRGs examined 171 textbook-related contracts involving 92 public educational institutions or consortia and discovered revenue-sharing arrangements between campus bookstore operators and universities, contractual participation quotas, and pricing structures whose advertised savings were difficult to verify. More than 40 percent of the contracts examined between publishers and institutions included participation quotas, some requiring 85 to 90 percent of students in participating classes to purchase materials through the arrangement. In 90 percent of the bookstore operating contracts where commission details were available, institutions received commissions on sales of automatically billed materials. Certain contracts charged between $19.87 and $26 per credit hour, translating into approximately $596 to $780 annually for a full course load. How extraordinarily inclusive. The institution selects or facilitates the product, the student pays the bill, and the institution may receive a portion of the revenue. Does nobody involved in negotiating these arrangements recognize the obvious conflict of interest? Or is the conflict of interest simply considered an acceptable feature of the business model?

And the research has become even more concerning. In February 2026, Student PIRGs published another investigation based upon responses from more than 4,000 students. Seventy-five percent reported taking a course requiring the purchase of an access code to complete coursework. Seventy percent reported having skipped a textbook or access code at some point because of cost. At institutions using campuswide automatic textbook billing, half of surveyed students either did not know they were being charged, did not understand that they could opt out, or reported being charged despite not wanting to participate. One student quoted in the earlier 2024 investigation described being charged more than $300 through an automatic textbook-billing arrangement at Florida State University and subsequently relying upon a campus food pantry. I find this absolutely fucking disgusting. We are discussing institutions that supposedly exist to improve the economic futures of young people, yet their commercial arrangements can contribute to students being unable to afford food. And somebody, somewhere, is undoubtedly preparing a presentation about affordability, accessibility, and the innovative digital transformation of higher education. Why should students be required to purchase temporary access to a private software platform to complete elementary homework? Why should a publisher be permitted to impose participation targets through contracts with educational institutions? Why should a university receive commissions from the sale of educational materials it effectively requires students to purchase? Why should knowledge become inaccessible merely because the subscription expires? The textbook industry has discovered that it is considerably more profitable to rent students permission to learn than to sell them books they can continue owning. It is not simply the commercialization of education. It is the commercialization of access to education, which is somehow even more revolting.

The same problem extends beyond textbooks. A 2022 Government Accountability Office investigation found that at least 550 colleges were working with online program managers supporting at least 2,900 educational programs, based upon the available market research. These third-party companies can provide legitimate technological and administrative services, but many receive a share of tuition revenue while participating in student recruitment. The GAO warned that inadequate oversight complicated efforts to identify arrangements violating restrictions on incentive-based recruitment payments. Consider what this means. A private company may help market and recruit students into an educational program, receive compensation connected to tuition revenue, and participate in an institutional arrangement that can encourage enrollment regardless of whether the qualification is particularly appropriate for the applicant. The commercial incentive is not necessarily to educate the most suitable students. It can be to enroll more paying students. Why is this acceptable? Why should recruitment for expensive educational programs resemble the marketing of consumer subscriptions? And why are institutions supposedly devoted to intellectual independence increasingly reliant upon external corporations whose incentives may have very little to do with educational quality?

The university is becoming extraordinarily good at extracting money from people who have been told that they must attend university to avoid being exploited by the economy.

There is also the increasingly concerning gender divide. Women now constitute a substantial majority of American university students, accounting for approximately 59 percent of enrollment in the federal figures. The expansion of women's educational opportunities has been an extraordinary historical achievement, but the underrepresentation of men deserves considerably more serious investigation than it usually receives. Men and women do not distribute themselves identically across academic disciplines, occupational interests, and technical training pathways, and there is nothing inherently wrong with different educational choices. But what happens when a society presents the bachelor's degree as an indispensable symbol of adult competence while a substantial portion of its young male population becomes less likely to obtain one? What happens when educational attainment increasingly influences employment, social status, and romantic partner selection? What happens when the young man who becomes a mechanic, carpenter, electrician, or machinist is encouraged to regard his perfectly respectable occupation as an inferior alternative to university education? I do not think the answer is to force more men into universities. Quite the opposite. I think we should abandon the ridiculous assumption that universities possess a monopoly upon intellectual development, and construct serious alternatives through technical colleges, apprenticeships, vocational programs, and professional pathways involving actual work. The skilled electrician understands systems that the average university graduate cannot begin to explain. The carpenter possesses geometric and mechanical intuitions developed through continuous interaction with material reality. The mechanic can diagnose and repair machines whose operation remains mysterious to somebody possessing several postgraduate qualifications. These are forms of intelligence. These are forms of competence. And a civilization that cannot recognize their value has become intellectually confused, regardless of how many universities it manages to construct.

But the most concerning consequences of academic expansion are not confined to individual students or the industries exploiting them. They concern the structure of society itself. This is where Peter Turchin's structural-demographic theory becomes particularly interesting, specifically his concept of elite overproduction. The theory proposes that societies can become politically unstable when they produce more individuals aspiring to elite positions than their institutions can accommodate. Turchin's complete historical and empirical arguments remain contested, and the mechanism should not be mistaken for a universal law explaining every revolution or civilizational collapse. But the underlying problem is extraordinarily serious. Modern universities do not merely provide knowledge. They manufacture expectations. They produce young people who have been told, repeatedly, that intelligence, education, and respectable academic qualifications will grant them entrance into the professional upper-middle class. They encourage students to imagine themselves as future lawyers, analysts, researchers, administrators, consultants, professors, and executives. And then these students graduate into an economy that does not necessarily possess enough desirable positions to accommodate them. New York Federal Reserve data for the third quarter of 2026 placed unemployment among recent college graduates at approximately 5.2 percent, while underemployment reached 42.5 percent, meaning that a substantial proportion were working in occupations that typically do not require a university degree. This does not mean that every underemployed graduate is miserable or that his education was worthless. But it does expose the sheer absurdity of continuously expanding the production of professional credentials without paying adequate attention to the actual distribution of professional opportunities.

The differences between academic disciplines are particularly revealing. A 2025 analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, using earlier New York Fed data, reported underemployment rates of approximately 67 percent among criminal justice graduates, 62 percent among performing arts graduates, 57 percent among liberal arts graduates, and 56 percent among anthropology graduates. Nursing, by comparison, had an underemployment rate below 10 percent. Does this establish that studying anthropology is intellectually worthless? Of course not. Does it suggest that students should be given an honest understanding of their professional prospects before spending enormous amounts of money? Absolutely. Why are we so reluctant to distinguish between education pursued for intellectual enrichment and education purchased with the expectation of professional employment? Why do we encourage young adults to treat university as a virtually guaranteed mechanism of upward mobility when the actual outcomes differ so enormously? And why do institutions continue expanding programs whose graduates may have comparatively limited opportunities directly connected to their qualifications? It would be considerably more honest to acknowledge that certain subjects are economically risky, that some require postgraduate education, and that intellectual fulfillment and financial independence are not necessarily produced through the same activity.

And what happens to these people? What happens to the young man who spends four years studying political science, another two obtaining a master's degree, perhaps several more accumulating internships and additional qualifications, only to discover that the position he expected to occupy is unavailable? What happens when somebody who has been educated to identify with the professional classes cannot afford a home, establish a financially secure household, or obtain employment corresponding to his qualifications? What happens when an entire generation has been told that it is exceptional, intellectually distinguished, and destined for professional success, only to discover that its actual economic circumstances are considerably less impressive than those of its supposedly less educated parents? I think the potential consequences are fucking enormous. The aspiring aristocrat does not simply disappear because the aristocratic position is unavailable. He becomes frustrated. He becomes resentful. He begins searching for explanations, political enemies, institutional conspiracies, and ideological movements promising to restore the status he believes he deserves. Sometimes those explanations identify genuine structural problems. Sometimes they become complete nonsense. But the underlying population remains: educated, ambitious, dissatisfied, and increasingly conscious that the institutions which promised social mobility have failed to provide it. Periods of historical instability have frequently involved competition among educated and relatively privileged groups whose ambitions could not be accommodated by existing political structures, although this certainly does not establish that elite overproduction alone causes revolutionary crises. The danger is serious enough without inventing some universal historical law connecting bachelor's degrees to the collapse of empires.

And our response, apparently, is to produce more of them. MORE DEGREES. MORE MASTER'S PROGRAMS. MORE CERTIFICATIONS. MORE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT. More aspiring administrators, more prospective consultants, more people trained to compete for prestigious positions whose availability does not automatically increase because another university has opened an attractive new department. This is not a serious employment strategy. It is the industrial manufacture of disappointed expectations. A civilization requires intellectuals, administrators, lawyers, and researchers, but it also requires people capable of producing food, building housing, maintaining electrical systems, repairing machines, caring for patients, and performing the countless physical activities through which ordinary existence remains possible. A society containing an extraordinary number of graduates qualified to discuss the housing crisis and an insufficient number of people capable of building houses has misunderstood something rather fundamental. The house does not construct itself because somebody has written an excellent dissertation about housing inequality. Nor does the electrical grid repair itself because an academic committee has developed a sufficiently sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding infrastructure. The physical world is remarkably indifferent to our qualifications. And I increasingly suspect that we have constructed an educational hierarchy whose relationship to the actual requirements of civilization has become dangerously distorted.

A society cannot indefinitely manufacture the expectations of an aristocracy while providing its members with the economic opportunities of an increasingly insecure workforce.

This is where Mark Fisher's conception of capitalist realism becomes particularly relevant. The university has gradually become another enterprise operating according to commercial incentives while maintaining the cultural language of intellectual enlightenment. Students become customers, degrees become products, departments become revenue-generating units, and education becomes an investment whose value is advertised through promises of future professional success. Even the rebellion against this arrangement becomes commercially productive. A student may spend an entire semester studying Marx, Fisher, or the commodification of human existence, only to discover that the assigned reading requires a $130 digital access code purchased through a private corporation. The professor criticizes capitalism. The student writes an essay criticizing capitalism. The university charges tuition. The publisher collects its money. Everybody has participated in the critique, and nothing whatsoever has changed. It is almost too perfect. The solution cannot simply involve placing additional corporate representatives on university advisory boards, introducing more proprietary learning platforms, and teaching students how to improve their professional networking strategies. Corporate participation in actual vocational training can be useful, but commercial interests should not dictate the purpose of education, the contents of compulsory curricula, or the conditions under which students are permitted to access knowledge. And institutions receiving public funding should be subject to considerably greater scrutiny when their financial arrangements create incentives contrary to the interests of the very students they claim to serve.

I think we need to reconsider the purpose of education entirely. Why should a person graduate from secondary school without knowing how to prepare a nutritious meal, file a tax return, interpret an employment contract, maintain a household, recognize financial exploitation, or respond to an ordinary medical emergency? Why do we spend extraordinary amounts of time preparing children for standardized examinations while offering comparatively little systematic instruction in communication, parenting, conflict resolution, personal finance, or recognizing abusive relationships? Why are young people expected to become responsible members of society without necessarily being taught how to participate meaningfully in their own communities? Education should involve practical competence, intellectual curiosity, physical health, civic responsibility, and the ability to form and maintain relationships with other human beings. Students should have opportunities to volunteer in hospitals, assist elderly neighbors, participate in environmental restoration, work with local tradespeople, maintain community gardens, and encounter the people whose labor keeps civilization functioning. They should understand science, mathematics, history, and literature, naturally, but they should also understand that knowledge exists within a world requiring continuous practical attention. The purpose is not to replace philosophy with cooking lessons. It is to recognize that a person capable of discussing Aristotle's ethics while remaining completely incapable of performing ordinary adult responsibilities has received a rather incomplete education. And perhaps, more importantly, it is to recognize that education should help human beings live together. We spend extraordinary resources preparing people to compete against one another for professional status while providing comparatively little institutional encouragement for cooperation, mutual assistance, neighborliness, and the responsibilities involved in sustaining a community. A civilization requires more than qualified employees. It requires people capable of caring for one another.

Universities themselves should become more specialized, more transparent, and considerably more serious about the outcomes they promise. Students entering medicine, engineering, law, scientific research, or other demanding disciplines should receive rigorous instruction, meaningful mentorship, practical experience, and genuine professional opportunities. Those pursuing specialized intellectual interests without obvious commercial applications should remain free to do so, ideally with an honest understanding of the financial and professional realities involved. There is nothing wrong with dedicating one's life to medieval history, theoretical mathematics, ancient Greek, or the philosophy of consciousness. Civilization would be considerably poorer without people willing to investigate questions that do not immediately produce a profitable consumer product. But an eighteen-year-old should know whether his chosen qualification leads directly to professional employment, requires postgraduate education, or offers comparatively limited opportunities within its own discipline. He should not discover these things after accumulating an enormous amount of debt. Nor should every student be required to complete an expensive collection of unrelated core subjects simply because an institutional committee has decided that intellectual development must occur through precisely that arrangement. General education has genuine value, but compulsory coursework should be intellectually defensible, practically useful, or both. Specialized programs should provide access to genuine internships, professional networks, research opportunities, and employers whose requirements correspond to the education being provided. Mentorship should be a central institutional responsibility rather than an occasional accident of encountering a particularly generous professor. And students should be permitted to pursue more flexible educational arrangements without being treated as intellectually deficient because they have not followed the traditional four-year residential model.

Ultimately, I think the greatest failure of modern academia is its increasing separation from the ordinary realities of human existence. Education should produce people capable of understanding the world, not merely describing it through terminology impressive enough to satisfy an academic committee. It should cultivate intellectual independence rather than institutional dependence, practical competence rather than credential accumulation, and a genuine appetite for knowledge rather than the compulsive pursuit of qualifications. A student should graduate knowing how to think, how to work, how to learn, how to care for himself, how to help other people, and how to participate in the civilization that has spent enormous resources educating him. He should understand that the university was never supposed to become his entire world. It was supposed to prepare him for the world outside it. And if the institution cannot provide meaningful education, serious mentorship, intellectual development, or a reasonable account of the opportunities its qualifications actually create, perhaps we should stop treating its continued expansion as an unquestionable achievement.

The central problem, therefore, is not the existence of universities, nor even the expansion of access to higher education in itself. It is the increasingly indiscriminate promotion of university attendance as a necessary condition of economic security and social legitimacy, regardless of the actual educational needs, interests, abilities, and professional prospects of individual students. The evidence suggests considerable variation in the financial returns of academic programs, substantial discrepancies between graduate qualifications and available employment, persistent weaknesses in mentorship, and deeply concerning commercial arrangements involving textbook publishers, digital platforms, and private educational service providers. The possibility that credential expansion contributes to frustrated elite expectations and political instability deserves serious further investigation, although historical theories of elite overproduction cannot substitute for rigorous empirical analysis. Educational reform should therefore concentrate upon transparent program outcomes, the reduction of unnecessary financial barriers, the protection of students from exploitative commercial practices, greater investment in practical and technical education, and the establishment of specialized academic pathways closely connected to genuine opportunities for research and employment. More fundamentally, education should recover its social purpose: the development of intellectually capable, practically competent, psychologically healthy, and socially responsible human beings who possess the knowledge and abilities necessary to participate meaningfully in their communities. Universities have an important role within such a system, but they cannot reasonably claim exclusive ownership of education itself, nor should their institutional growth be mistaken for evidence of civilizational progress. A more educated society is not simply one containing more graduates. It is one in which knowledge produces better judgment, greater competence, more responsible institutions, stronger communities, and a population increasingly capable of understanding and improving the material conditions of its own existence.

Sources and further reading:

The College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2026:
https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/highlights

Healthy Minds Network, 2024–2025 National Data Report:
https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/2024-2025_HMS-National-Data-Report_Student.pdf

Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Does College Pay Off? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis:
https://freopp.org/whitepapers/does-college-pay-off-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis/

Federal Reserve Bank of New York, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates:
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, The Jobs and Degrees Underemployed College Graduates Have (2025):
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-underemployed-college-graduates-have

U.S. Government Accountability Office, College Textbooks: Enhanced Offerings Appear to Drive Recent Price Increases (GAO-05-806):
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-05-806

U.S. Government Accountability Office, College Textbooks: Students Have Greater Access to Textbook Information (GAO-13-368):
https://www.gao.gov/assets/files.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-368.pdf

Student PIRGs, Fixing the Broken Textbooks Market, Fourth Edition (2026):
https://studentpirgs.org/assets/uploads/2026/02/Fixing-the-Broken-Textbooks-Market-Fourth-Edition.pdf

Student PIRGs, Automatic Textbook Billing: Limited Choice, Uncertain Savings (2024):
https://studentpirgs.org/2024/06/13/automatic-textbook-billing-2/

U.S. Government Accountability Office, Higher Education: Education Needs to Strengthen Its Approach to Monitoring Colleges' Arrangements with Online Program Managers (GAO-22-104463):
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104463

National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Final Fall Enrollment Trends 2025:
https://nscresearchcenter.org/final-fall-enrollment-trends/

Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023).

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009).

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018).

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958).

The Last Human Summer

A little essay. On physicalism, Nietzsche, Mishima, the aristocracy of the soul, the death of the gods, and why I think we have forgotten what it means to be human.

There is something profoundly strange about the fact that we are here.

Not merely alive, not merely conscious, but here, at this particular moment in the history of the universe, inhabiting bodies constructed from the remnants of dead stars, standing on a thin crust of stone suspended in an almost incomprehensible darkness, possessed of enough intelligence to understand that we are going to die and enough stubbornness to continue living anyway.

For billions of years, matter existed without knowing that it existed. Hydrogen accumulated, stars ignited, galaxies collided, planets formed and shattered. Oceans appeared on a small world orbiting an otherwise unremarkable star. Chemistry became biology. Biology developed eyes, teeth, nervous systems, fear, hunger, desire, and memory. Eventually, something astonishing happened: matter began to look back at itself.

And then, perhaps more astonishingly, it began to ask what it ought to do.

The human condition begins with this contradiction. We are physical organisms, entirely dependent upon forces we cannot command, yet we possess an extraordinary capacity to challenge the circumstances of our existence. We are fragile animals with an appetite for eternity. We are temporary arrangements of molecules that produce symphonies, cities, philosophies, cathedrals, wars, gardens, and declarations of love.

We are the universe becoming dissatisfied with what the universe has made.

There is no guarantee that this experiment will continue. We know of no other civilization that can inherit our ambitions. No extraterrestrial intelligence has been confirmed, and although that does not technically establish that humanity is all alone, I truly do think that we are, spare for a divine creator, and therefore should live as though no one is coming to rescue us, for we are not deserving.

We have no confirmed audience beyond ourselves, no visible referee, no references either, no promise that existence is fair. We are born into what might be called a cosmic hardcore mode: one life, irreversible consequences, limited resources, and a world that does not suspend its laws when we make mistakes. We are in Minecraft, essentially, except that the blocks are atoms, the environment can kill us, and there is no guaranteed respawn. Ever.

And yet, look at what we have been given.

Two hands, two legs, eyes capable of recognizing the face of someone we love, a nervous system capable of experiencing terror, sexual ecstasy, melancholy, longing, yearning, sadness, grief, hunger, triumph, and the peculiar peacefulness of sunlight falling across our skin. A brain capable of contemplating infinity while also remaining vulnerable to a single night's insufficient sleep.

The absurdity is almost unbearable.

We possess one of the most intricate forms of agency known to exist, perhaps the strongest that will ever exist, considering it is made out of meat, not metal, and we routinely manage to spend it sitting motionless beneath artificial light, watching other people perform imaginary lives on screens. We have confused the representation of existence with existence itself.

I increasingly suspect that the central philosophical catastrophe of modernity is not simply that humanity has lost its gods, its traditions, or even its moral certainty. It is that humanity has gradually forgotten that it has a body.

And I think nearly everything else follows from that.

The Body and the Soul

Western philosophy has spent centuries attempting to separate the human being from the body that makes the human being possible. Plato distinguished the changing world of sensory experience from the eternal realm of Forms. Christian traditions, despite their theology of incarnation, sometimes developed cultural expressions suspicious of bodily appetite. Descartes gave this division its most influential modern expression: thinking substance on one side, extended material substance on the other.

The result was an extraordinarily seductive idea: somewhere inside this animal, hidden behind its eyes, sits a purer entity. A pilot, an observer, a ghost, a soul. The body is something we possess rather than something that we are.

But consider the evidence of ordinary experience. You cannot think independently of your biological condition. Exhaustion changes the architecture of your judgments. Hunger changes what seems important. Sexual desire reorganizes attention. Physical illness alters the emotional texture of the world. A morning run can transform a problem that seemed intolerable at midnight into something perfectly manageable by breakfast.

Your philosophy is not independent of your blood chemistry, ever. Your personality is not floating above your nervous system. Your courage is not an abstract symbol stored in some metaphysical chamber untouched by your pulse, lungs, and muscles. Your psychological problems are not a bug in the cloud, not a glitch in the system, detached from your bodily problems.

You are an organism. You are a system. I don't consider this an insult. Quite the opposite.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, specifically the chapter "On the Despisers of the Body," Friedrich Nietzsche offers one of the most devastating reversals of this entire philosophical hierarchy:

"Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body."

Nietzsche subsequently describes the body as a great intelligence, a plurality somehow organized into a single being. Conscious reasoning is not sovereign; it is a subordinate instrument of something vastly older and more sophisticated.

This is much more radical than the familiar instruction to exercise or maintain one's health. Nietzsche is proposing a reversal in the very location of wisdom. The conscious intellect, so accustomed to imagining itself sovereign, may be a small administrative office within an immeasurably older biological kingdom.

You do not consciously regulate every heartbeat, command each cellular repair process, or design your emotional responses from first principles. You can't. Not by yourself. Your organism predicts dangers, processes information, and coordinates action long before your conscious narration has finished explaining what happened.

What we call instinct is not necessarily wisdom at all. Biological impulses can mislead us, and ancestral preferences can become maladaptive in modern environments. But the deeper point survives: conscious thought is not the whole of intelligence. It is one of intelligence's instruments.

This is where physicalism acquires an unexpectedly spiritual dimension.

If consciousness emerges from the organization and activity of matter, then matter is capable of something far more extraordinary than the old opposition between physical and spiritual existence allowed us to imagine. Matter can suffer. Matter can love. Matter can become conscious of its own limitations and sacrifice its immediate interests for principles existing only as patterns of meaning within other conscious organisms.

What we call the soul might be the organized depth of a living person: memory, attention, character, perception, temperament, desire, and the capacity to direct action.

A melody is not less real because it consists of vibrations. A storm is not less real because it consists of moving air. A human personality is not less real because its existence depends upon the activity of a brain.

To explain something physically is not to explain it away.

And so the apparently materialistic conclusion becomes strangely reverent. The human body deserves cultivation not because it is a temporary container for something superior, but because it is the very place where human existence becomes possible.

We are not ghosts sentenced to inhabit animals.

We are animals capable of becoming magnificent.

Sun, Steel, and the Aristocrat of the Soul

Few modern writers understood the conflict between language and physical existence as intensely as Yukio Mishima.

Mishima grew up immersed in literature, imagination, and intellectual life. Language offered him an astonishing capacity to organize reality without directly confronting it. Through writing, he could describe courage without possessing it, beauty without embodying it, and violence without experiencing it.

Eventually, he came to regard this separation as an existential wound.

In Sun and Steel (1968), Mishima describes his transformation through bodybuilding, physical discipline, sunlight, and the confrontation with material resistance. The work is an extraordinary attempt to develop a language that cannot be spoken: a language of muscle, fatigue, weight, and physical form.

Consider the difference between writing about lifting a heavy stone and actually lifting it. Language allows almost unlimited freedom. You can claim to lift the stone, imagine a heroic version of yourself doing so, or construct elaborate theories about its spiritual significance.

But the stone possesses a devastating intellectual advantage.

It does not care.

Steel cannot be flattered. Gravity cannot be negotiated with. A mountain does not lower its summit because you have a compelling theory of mountaineering, and the ocean does not forgive poor swimming technique because your intentions were admirable. This, I think, is the philosophical function of physical resistance. It forces the organism into an encounter with reality that cannot be indefinitely disguised by narrative. One can deceive oneself about courage, inflate one's intelligence through fashionable ideas, and mistake eloquence for competence. But a hundred kilograms does not become lighter because you have developed a convincing theory of strength.

This is why physical training can become an education in reality. Not because muscles guarantee virtue, but because training establishes a repeated encounter between intention and consequence. You decide to act. The world answers. You adapt or fail.

The important lesson in Sun and Steel is not that one should die dramatically. It is that one should stop postponing embodiment.

And this brings me to Julius Evola.

In Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), particularly its discussion of the "regression of the castes," Evola proposes a civilizational progression from sacred authority to warrior aristocracy, then to mercantile dominance, and finally to a society organized around mass labor and economic production.

His historical model is deeply questionable, and his authoritarian and racial politics are not incidental details. But the underlying sociological question remains interesting: what happens when the ability to accumulate wealth becomes civilization's dominant measure of human excellence?

The priest represents orientation toward the sacred. The warrior represents courage, sovereignty, discipline, and willingness to risk oneself. The merchant represents exchange, calculation, acquisition, and measurable advantage. The laborer represents the indispensable reproduction of material life.

I don't think these are fixed human species. They are recurring modes of activity, and an individual can embody all four.

A civilization needs people capable of contemplating ultimate questions, defending communities, coordinating resources, and producing food, shelter, and infrastructure. The problem arises when one principle subordinates all the others.

Under mercantile supremacy, the question of whether an activity is good gradually gives way to the question of whether it is profitable.

The forest becomes timber inventory. The mountain becomes a development opportunity. The human face becomes a marketing asset. Sex becomes a product. Friendship becomes networking. Attention becomes a commodity. Physical beauty becomes monetizable visibility.

Even rebellion becomes something to sell.

This is where Mark Fisher becomes indispensable.

In Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), Fisher examines the almost total absorption of cultural imagination into capitalist organization. He invokes the observation associated with Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

His point is not merely that capitalism dominates the economy. It has increasingly become the framework through which alternatives are imagined, evaluated, and ultimately commercialized. Capitalist realism is the condition in which even opposition to the system must find expression through the system's own mechanisms.

A person may despise consumer civilization while expressing that contempt entirely through purchasing decisions. He buys the boots, the jacket, the watch, the survival equipment, the books about warriors, and the clothing of an imagined aristocracy. He acquires the symbols of a life he never actually lives. The merchant has won even inside his rebellion.

Fisher's concept of business ontology is particularly relevant here: the assumption that practically everything, including education, healthcare, and culture, should be administered as though it were a business.

What strikes me is how thoroughly this logic has penetrated the modern conception of the individual. We have begun treating ourselves as enterprises. Health becomes an investment, appearance becomes market positioning, social relationships become networks, and leisure becomes either consumption or productivity recovery.

Even self-improvement is converted into a marketplace of promised transformations. But the purchase is not the transformation. The mountain is still waiting. The work remains undone. The individual has simply acquired another object. This is why I find the idea of an aristocrat of the soul more interesting when separated from hereditary rank or political domination.

True inner aristocracy would be a standard of conduct. The ability to govern oneself before attempting to govern others, resist immediate appetite in favor of long-term purpose, remain composed under pressure, cultivate competence without constant recognition, protect something more vulnerable than oneself, and accept responsibility without inventing excuses.

A man unable to regulate his sleep, anger, finances, addictions, or obligations possesses very little sovereignty, regardless of how intensely he identifies with ancient warriors.

The first kingdom to conquer is the disordered self.

And this kind of aristocracy remains available to a farmer, electrician, carpenter, physician, soldier, mother, scientist, or someone sweeping a hospital floor at three in the morning.

It is not a title. It is an achievement.

The Gods Inside the Human Head

But the problem goes much deeper than capitalism, industrialization, or even philosophy.

What interests me most about consciousness is that the supposedly unified self may never have been particularly unified.

We experience ourselves as singular individuals. We use the pronoun I. We imagine a continuous observer who makes decisions, commands the body, and maintains a coherent identity.

Yet one part of us wants to wake early while another wants to sleep. One part wants commitment while another seeks novelty. One part understands that a behavior is destructive while another repeats it. We experience intrusive thoughts, uninvited memories, dreams, sudden intuitions, and decisions whose causes become apparent only afterward.

Who, exactly, is speaking? And to whom?

In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed an astonishing hypothesis: ancient human beings may have experienced a fundamentally different organization of mental life.

Rather than possessing modern reflective consciousness, they might have experienced certain internally generated instructions as auditory hallucinations originating from external authorities, interpreted as gods, ancestors, or supernatural beings.

Under this interpretation, divine commands in ancient literature were not necessarily merely metaphors or literary conventions. They might preserve traces of a different relationship between cognition and self-awareness.

When Athena intervenes in the affairs of a Greek hero, perhaps the hero is experiencing an internally generated instruction as the voice of a god.

Perhaps the divine was sometimes a form of cognition that human beings did not yet recognize as their own.

Jaynes's theory is controversial, and its historical and neurological claims remain unestablished. But I think it is extraordinarily valuable as a challenge to the assumption that the self is a single, transparent commander.

It is also wonderfully Fight Club-esque, although ordinary internal conflict should not be confused with the dissociative disorder depicted in that story.

We may be better understood as coalitions of biological priorities attempting to produce coherent action.

And this suggests a different interpretation of self-mastery.

Perhaps becoming a complete person does not mean discovering a perfectly pure original self hidden beneath social conditioning. Perhaps it means organizing competing elements of the organism into a coherent direction.

The warrior, merchant, priest, and laborer can be understood not merely as social categories, but as possibilities within one person.

The merchant calculates. The warrior acts. The priest asks why. The laborer performs the necessary repetition.

The philosopher attempts to understand them all.

A mature individual does not destroy these internal figures. He establishes an order between them. Calculation serves purpose, purpose directs action, action becomes habit, and habit produces character.

This is where Jaynes unexpectedly meets Nietzsche. The sovereignty of consciousness may be partly illusory, yet the cultivation of an integrated self remains one of consciousness's greatest achievements.

The goal is not necessarily to eliminate the plurality of the mind.

It is to make that plurality capable of acting as one.

Philosophy Cannot Lift the Stone

This is also where Aristotle becomes relevant.

In Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that moral virtues develop through practice, much as craftsmanship develops through repetition. We become courageous through courageous actions and disciplined through disciplined conduct.

He criticizes people who retreat into philosophical argument without acting, comparing them to patients who attentively listen to their doctors while ignoring every prescribed treatment.

I find it almost ridiculous how contemporary this criticism sounds.

A person watches hundreds of hours of fitness content without developing physical fitness. He reads about discipline without establishing a routine, studies relationships without learning to speak honestly, discusses courage while systematically avoiding embarrassment, and analyzes the nature of productive work without ever making anything.

He possesses an enormous intellectual vocabulary for virtues absent from his behavior.

Knowledge about a virtue is not the same as possessing it.

This is my principal objection to philosophy when it becomes endless dialectics. Not that reasoning is worthless; reasoning is indispensable. The problem is the transformation of reasoning into a substitute for experience.

Endless criticism without creation. Analysis without commitment. Discussion of moral character without the production of character.

A philosophy that never changes one's conduct is in danger of becoming a decorative object.

At some point, the discussion must end. You approach the water, assess whether the conditions are safe, and enter.

The cold is not an argument. It is an experience.

This is the reconciliation between Aristotle's practical philosophy and Nietzsche's self-overcoming. The self is not merely understood; it is made. And the making occurs in the world.

Beauty, Evolution, and the Butterfly

Imagine a butterfly resting on a window. Its wings display delicate symmetry, intricate patterns, and colors that appear almost impossibly elaborate. A person approaches carefully, perhaps opening the window so it can escape.

Now imagine a cockroach crossing the same room.

Disgust. Revulsion. Perhaps an impulse to crush it.

Both organisms are products of the same evolutionary process, yet human perception assigns them profoundly different aesthetic values.

I think this small example reveals something important about human nature. Aesthetic judgments often precede conscious justification. We experience attraction before constructing its philosophy, aversion before explaining it, and beauty before learning its name.

Part of this is evolutionary. Human preferences are shaped by sensory processing, developmental experience, social learning, and adaptations related to health, contamination, familiarity, and reproduction.

Our instincts are not infallible. Disgust can be misplaced, and beauty does not establish moral worth. But the fact remains that we are not disembodied rational agents who consciously negotiate every attraction.

Faces matter. Bodies matter. Sexual attractiveness matters. Physical condition, grooming, movement, posture, voice, and vitality influence how people perceive one another.

A person can deny this verbally while responding to it behaviorally every day.

I am skeptical of any philosophy that treats physical beauty as an embarrassing social illusion. Beauty is a real variable in human existence, and it affects relationships, opportunities, attention, and desire.

But the butterfly and cockroach also reveal the limits of instinct.

The fact that an organism is aesthetically appealing does not make it morally superior. A beautiful body can contain a coward, a powerful man can be a tyrant, and an ordinary-looking individual can possess extraordinary courage and intelligence.

The deeper ambition, then, is not simply to become beautiful. It is to bring outer form and inner substance into closer alignment.

Strength without cruelty. Confidence without delusion. Sensuality without compulsion. Physical excellence without the destruction of health.

We should cultivate beauty because beauty enriches existence, but the cultivated individual must possess something beyond his appearance.

Nature gives us preferences. Character determines what we do with them.

And I think genuine excellence begins when aesthetic self-development ceases to be mere vanity and becomes part of a broader cultivation of competence, health, judgment, and character.

God, Flesh, and the Problem of Being

There is a strange temptation within modern physicalism to conclude that religious thought has nothing further to contribute to understanding humanity.

I think this is a mistake.

Christianity contains a theological proposition of extraordinary importance for a philosophy of embodiment. Its central mystery is not simply that God exists, but that God becomes flesh.

John 1:14 declares:

"And the Word was made flesh."

Within Christian theology, the divine does not simply observe physical reality from an inaccessible distance. It enters human vulnerability, experiences hunger, exhaustion, pain, dependence, and death.

Whatever one believes about the literal truth of the Incarnation, its philosophical implications are enormous. The material world is not merely something to escape. Embodied existence is capable of carrying sacred significance.

Irenaeus of Lyons expresses something remarkably compatible with this in Against Heresies, IV.20.7:

"For the glory of God is a living man."

In context, Irenaeus connects the fullness of human life with beholding God, not simply with biological vitality. Nevertheless, the statement presents an intriguing point of contact with Nietzsche.

The two thinkers disagree profoundly about the nature of divinity, but both can be read as resisting forms of spirituality that despise earthly existence.

For Nietzsche, humanity must overcome life-denying values and return meaning to the earth. For Irenaeus, embodied human life finds its fulfillment through participation in divine reality.

This is also why the Christian idea of theosis, participation in divine life, interests me.

If physicalism is ultimately correct, then consciousness, love, and moral aspiration emerge from physical organization. We cannot simply import theological mechanisms as established science.

But theosis still provides an extraordinary philosophical image of transformation.

What would it mean to become more godlike not through supernatural privilege, but through the disciplined expansion of wisdom, responsibility, creative power, and love?

Here, agape becomes essential.

Agape is not identical to romantic attraction, sexual desire, or sentimental approval. It is concern for the good of another, potentially extending beyond immediate convenience and reciprocity.

Strength makes protection possible. Intelligence makes understanding possible. Discipline makes reliability possible. Wealth makes generosity and independence possible.

But none of these determines its own purpose.

A beautiful, physically powerful, highly intelligent person can still be utterly destructive.

Power is not equivalent to goodness. Excellence must answer the question: excellence FOR WHAT?

And perhaps the greatest possible answer is the creation and preservation of life, knowledge, beauty, and flourishing beyond the individual self.

There is also the older metaphysical question of whether existence possesses an ultimate ground.

Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument, developed in The Nature of Necessity (1974), attempts to establish the existence of a maximally great, necessarily existing being through modal logic. The argument's conclusion follows under its modal assumptions if its crucial possibility premise is accepted. Whether that premise is justified remains controversial.

I don't regard this as an uncontested demonstration of God, but the underlying question remains genuinely extraordinary.

Why does anything exist at all? Why does the universe possess an intelligible structure? Why does physical reality permit consciousness to arise?

A physicalist may appeal to fundamental physics, emergence, or brute fact. A theist may regard the intelligibility of existence as evidence of a necessary divine ground.

Either way, our immediate condition remains unchanged.

We are embodied, vulnerable, and required to act.

Whether the ultimate origin of reality is divine or impersonal, our lives occur INSIDE reality, not outside it.

And the body is our means of participating.

Sisyphus Against the Demiurge

There is a particular kind of despair that emerges when intelligence confronts the universe without comforting illusions.

Nature is not organized around our happiness. Earthquakes do not distinguish between innocent and guilty people. Cancer does not evaluate character. The ocean does not reward virtue with favorable currents.

We are capable of appreciating beauty, creating civilizations, and contemplating eternity, yet an asteroid, pathogen, or environmental catastrophe could destroy everything we have accomplished.

An entire species capable of understanding the stars can be destroyed by forces that do not know the species exists.

It seems grotesquely disproportionate.

This is where I find the Gnostic image of the Demiurge useful, not necessarily as a literal cosmic being, but as a metaphor for the conditions confronting embodied existence.

Gravity, entropy, scarcity, aging, disease, competition, and death.

These forces are not malicious. But from the perspective of a conscious creature struggling to survive, they can feel almost adversarial.

We want permanence; the world gives us change. We want certainty; the world gives us incomplete information. We want justice; the world gives us consequences that frequently have nothing to do with justice.

Albert Camus understood this contradiction.

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus explores the absurd: the confrontation between humanity's longing for meaning and a world that does not provide the answers we demand.

Sisyphus is condemned to push a stone up a mountain. Every time he approaches the summit, the stone falls. His effort produces no permanent victory.

Yet Camus refuses to conclude that the absence of final success renders the struggle worthless.

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

This is one of the greatest philosophical images of the human condition ever produced.

Every human life is a temporary victory against entropy. We eat because the organism would otherwise deteriorate, exercise because unused capacities decline, repair buildings because time wears them down, maintain relationships because neglect destroys them, and educate children because knowledge is not transmitted automatically.

Everything requires maintenance.

There is no permanent summit.

The stone always returns.

But that does not invalidate the climb. It makes the climb the substance of life.

Here Nietzsche, Mishima, and Camus meet, despite their enormous disagreements. Human existence should not be organized entirely around avoiding pain, difficulty, and mortality.

Love exposes us to loss. Ambition exposes us to failure. Physical excellence exposes us to injury and limitation. Creation exposes us to judgment. Responsibility exposes us to consequences.

Every serious commitment creates vulnerability.

But suffering itself is not a virtue. Pointless injury and premature death prove nothing. Pain becomes meaningful when it serves a worthwhile purpose or cannot be avoided without abandoning something more important.

This is why I am more interested in the warrior who continues living than the warrior who glorifies dying.

Mishima's aesthetic of honorable death has a certain tragic power, but the ability to endure the monotony of responsibility may demand more courage than a single dramatic gesture.

The tired warrior is not impressive because he is approaching death. He is impressive because he has encountered resistance and continued.

The stone must be pushed again tomorrow.

And tomorrow, one pushes.

Who Actually Keeps the Lights On?

Most people have remarkably little direct experience of the systems keeping them alive.

They do not grow their food, purify their water, generate electricity, manufacture their clothing, or construct the buildings in which they sleep. They depend upon a vast network of specialized labor while experiencing themselves as largely autonomous.

The system works so well that it becomes invisible.

Until it fails.

Then the hierarchy of importance changes immediately. The electrician becomes indispensable. The mechanic matters. The farmer matters. The nurse matters. The person capable of restoring the physical system suddenly possesses an obvious value that no amount of marketing is required to demonstrate.

I don't think this makes intellectual or administrative work worthless. Engineering, scientific research, logistics, medicine, and complex coordination are indispensable to modern civilization.

But there is an enormous distinction between work that produces real value and work that merely imitates usefulness.

David Graeber explored this distinction in Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), examining employment that workers themselves perceive as socially pointless or unnecessary.

The precise prevalence of such work is disputed, but I find the underlying phenomenon difficult to dismiss. Modern organizations can become elaborate systems of administrative self-reproduction, in which reporting, compliance theater, managerial signaling, and the appearance of productivity gradually displace productive activity itself.

Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958) provides a useful philosophical distinction between labor, work, and action. Labor sustains biological life, work constructs a durable human world, and action reveals human initiative within public life.

Her framework helps explain why economic productivity alone cannot serve as a complete measure of civilizational health.

A society can become extraordinarily productive while making its members feel unnecessary. It can increase convenience while decreasing competence. It can create unprecedented communication infrastructure while leaving people isolated.

It can make us richer in possessions and poorer in experiences of agency.

Simone Weil, whose experience of factory labor profoundly influenced her philosophy, understood the seriousness of necessity. Manual labor can be exhausting, monotonous, humiliating, and dangerous, but it also places the human being in direct confrontation with the material conditions of existence.

I think the important response is neither to romanticize workers nor to treat physical labor as inferior.

The skilled electrician thinks through his hands. The carpenter possesses geometric intuitions expressed through measurement and touch. The farmer understands ecological relationships that cannot be reduced to inspirational slogans about nature.

The highest ideal is not someone who rejects intellectual life for manual labor.

It is someone whose intelligence remains connected to consequences.

Someone who can think and act, understand and build, contemplate civilization and participate in maintaining it.

We should stop treating practical competence as something vaguely beneath the educated classes.

A person who understands the metaphysics of human agency but cannot perform a single useful action in the physical world has an incomplete education.

Nick Land, AI, and the Religion of the Future

Every civilization seems to possess a story about salvation.

Sometimes salvation comes through divine revelation, sometimes political revolution, sometimes national rebirth, and sometimes the accumulation of wealth.

Modern technological civilization increasingly tells a different story: salvation will come through the next invention.

The next artificial intelligence system. The next biotechnology breakthrough. The next expansion of automation. The next attempt to colonize another planet. The next step beyond the limitations of human biology.

Nick Land is especially interesting here because he takes the logic of technological acceleration far beyond the usual optimistic language of progress.

In his essay Meltdown (1994), later collected in Fanged Noumena (2011), Land imagines capital, computation, and technological development converging into a process that increasingly exceeds deliberate human control.

His striking formulation is:

"Nothing human makes it out of the near-future."

I think this is one of the most chilling sentences in modern philosophy.

Not necessarily because it is a reliable prediction, but because it reveals the logical endpoint of treating technological acceleration as an autonomous historical force.

For Land, particularly in his earlier accelerationist writing, capitalism is not merely an economic system operated by human beings. It increasingly resembles an impersonal process of machinic development, one that uses human institutions and desires as components of its own expansion.

Fisher and Land are useful precisely because their interpretations differ.

Fisher investigates the psychological and cultural enclosure of life within capitalist realism. Land explores the possibility that capital and technology are escaping the very human purposes that supposedly justified their development.

Put together, they suggest an uncomfortable question.

What happens when the systems originally developed to improve human life acquire trajectories increasingly disconnected from human flourishing?

The irony is that people may become fascinated with artificial superintelligence while allowing their own intelligence to deteriorate through passivity. They dream of radically extended lifespans while neglecting the health of the bodies they already possess. They imagine colonies on Mars while never exploring the forests surrounding their homes.

They anticipate future abundance while remaining incapable of enjoying an ordinary afternoon.

Technology becomes a secular eschatology. Paradise is always arriving with the next update, and the present becomes a waiting room.

Even speculative thought experiments like Roko's Basilisk are revealing. They transform hypothetical future intelligence into an object of present anxiety, almost a technologically reconstructed deity capable of making demands across imagined timelines.

The old gods return wearing the language of computation.

I am not arguing against technological development. Scientific progress has reduced suffering, expanded knowledge, and saved countless lives. I would rather live with modern medicine, sanitation, electricity, and reliable infrastructure than without them.

Nor do I think humanity should abandon its ambitions to explore space.

But I question the assumption that the future automatically deserves priority over the present.

We may eventually create machines capable of extraordinary intelligence. We may discover radically new forms of cognition. We may settle other planets or transform human biology.

None of this requires us to sacrifice the immediate goods of being human to some imagined technological destiny.

The sunrise does not become worthless because someone might someday build an artificial sun. Human intimacy does not become obsolete because a machine may simulate affection. The forest does not lose its meaning because a virtual environment can reproduce its appearance.

The future deserves preparation.

It does not deserve worship.

A Return to the Physical World

What does a genuinely embodied philosophy look like in practice? What does the perfect man look like, the aristocrat of the soul, the man who has reconciled intellect with instinct, beauty with strength, spirit with flesh?

He is not some pale intellectual rotting behind a desk, theorizing about existence while other men actually live it before his very eyes. Nor is he the modern consumer, purchasing the appearance of masculinity through expensive watches, fashionable clothing, and equipment he will never use. He is a man of ACTION, of physical and intellectual sovereignty, whose body is not an accessory to his consciousness, but its greatest expression. He rises early, before the machinery of modern civilization has begun demanding his attention, before the algorithms and advertisements can reach into his skull and colonize his thoughts. He drinks cold spring water, throws open the windows, and walks into the morning sunlight. The air is cool against his bare skin. The earth is damp beneath his feet. His lungs fill with oxygen, his muscles awaken, and somewhere in the trees the birds are screaming their ancient songs into the morning. His life is optimized now. He has embodied the theory of action.

He does not reach for his phone. He does not require a podcast to accompany his thoughts or some miserable productivity guru to explain why waking up is worthwhile. He already knows. The sun is rising. The world is alive. And so is he. The entire physical universe lies before him, indifferent, magnificent, inexhaustible, waiting to be touched, explored, conquered, understood, and loved.

He RUNS. Not the pathetic shuffle of a man reluctantly completing his prescribed daily exercise, but the running of a wild animal that has remembered what its legs are for. He charges through forests, over hills, across open fields, his heart hammering against his ribs, his lungs burning, his quadriceps and calves driving him forward. He sprints until the wind tears through his hair and sweat runs down his back. He runs through summer rain, through mud, through cold mornings when the air bites his face. He climbs mountains, grips stone with his bare hands, scrambles over fallen trees, and stands on ridgelines overlooking valleys that existed millions of years before his ancestors learned to speak. He dives into cold rivers, swims against currents, and breaks the surface gasping for air, laughing at the sheer physical violence and inexplainable hardship of being alive. He rows until his shoulders ache, kayaks across lakes at sunrise, cycles for miles beneath the open sky, wrestles, boxes, jumps, throws, carries, and lifts. 

He puts heavy iron above his head and feels the entire chain of muscle, tendon, and bone cooperate against gravity. He practices archery until the bow becomes an extension of his nervous system, learns marksmanship and the discipline of handling a firearm, goes hunting, tracks animals through woodland, and understands that food and survival were once inseparable from patience, precision, and physical competence.

He knows the weight of a hammer, the recoil of a rifle, the resistance of water against an oar, the brutality of a steep climb, and the extraordinary satisfaction of returning home physically exhausted. His body is not merely attractive. It is USEFUL. His strength is real, his endurance earned, his movements coordinated and deliberate. He is beautiful in the ancient Greek sense of kalokagathia, in which physical excellence and nobility of character form a single human ideal. He has made himself into something worthy of admiration because he has made himself capable of doing things worth admiring.

He eats like a man who understands that his body is constructed from the physical world. There is no ridiculous war against carbohydrates, no obsessive fear of fruit, no endless procession of processed powders promising some miraculous biological transformation.

He eats Greek yogurt thick with honey, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, cold peaches, oranges, figs, and grapes. He eats eggs, fish, beef, chicken, beans, lentils, potatoes, rice, bread, oats, pasta, avocados, vegetables drenched in olive oil, and whatever fresh food the season provides. His diet is Mediterranean in its abundance, simple in its composition, and generous enough to sustain the tremendous energy he demands from his organism. He drinks cold water after running beneath the afternoon sun, feels hunger sharpen the pleasure of eating, and understands that nutrition is not an abstract system of moral prohibitions, but the ancient biological transaction through which the living world sustains itself. Food is sunlight converted into chemistry, chemistry converted into muscle, and muscle converted into action. The fruit grew from the earth. The fish came from the sea. The grain was planted, harvested, milled, and baked by human hands. He respects the extraordinary material chain connecting his existence to the rest of nature. He eats with appetite, without guilt or theatrical self-denial.

He keeps himself lean, strong, energetic, sexually vigorous, and metabolically healthy. He understands that a capable body is not produced by wishing, purchasing, or philosophizing, but through years of movement, nourishment, recovery, and discipline. The organism rewards what is repeatedly practiced. He practices excellence.

And he LOVES. Christ, how he loves. He is not an ascetic fleeing into abstractions because he is frightened of the animal force of his own desires. He understands that sexuality is among the most powerful expressions of embodied human existence, that erotic attraction is not some vulgar embarrassment to be transcended, but an ancient biological intelligence older than philosophy, religion, and civilization itself. He desires beautiful women, admires their faces, their bodies, their movement, their voices, their scent, the astonishing physical difference between masculine and feminine forms. He cultivates his own appearance with the same seriousness he brings to every other dimension of life: muscle, grooming, clean skin, healthy hair, good teeth, elegant clothing, confident posture, and the relaxed physical presence of a man at home in his own body. He flirts without shame, kisses with passion, makes love with a woman who desires him just as fiercely, and understands the extraordinary pleasure of two conscious organisms voluntarily surrendering themselves to physical intimacy. Sex beneath the stars, kisses in summer rain, bare feet in the grass, bodies pressed together after swimming in a lake, laughter beneath tangled sheets while the morning light enters the bedroom. There is nothing metaphysically trivial about this. The warmth of another body, the force of attraction, the intimacy of touch, the ridiculous happiness of being wanted by someone you want in return: these are among the most astonishing phenomena the physical universe has to offer.

He neither sterilizes sexuality into clinical terminology nor reduces it to conquest and numerical achievement. He understands eros as a celebration of vitality, and love as the decision to make another person's existence profoundly important to his own. He is passionate, affectionate, loyal, confident, and unashamed of his true embodied nature. He wants to live, to love, to have sex, to experience the entire magnificent range of what a healthy human body can feel. He has no interest in becoming a disembodied consciousness floating through some sterile technological paradise. He has flesh, blood, nerves, desire, and a beating heart. He intends to USE THEM.

But the aristocrat is not merely an athlete or a lover. He is a WORKER, a builder, a maker, a man whose hands are connected to his intelligence. He can repair a broken machine, swing an axe, build a fence, cook a substantial meal, navigate unfamiliar terrain, maintain his home, carry heavy furniture, and help another person without first searching for someone to pay. He respects farmers, electricians, construction workers, carpenters, plumbers, mechanics, and the millions of people whose physical competence keeps civilization from collapsing into darkness and sewage. He knows that the comfortable existence of the intellectual and the consumer depends upon men who understand the material world well enough to make it function. He despises pointless bureaucracy, corporate theater, and the endless proliferation of occupations whose primary product is the appearance of importance. He does not necessarily abandon modern employment, because money is a real resource and economic independence is a condition of freedom. But he refuses to confuse his salary with his worth, his job title with his identity, or the demands of an employer with the purpose of his existence. He reads Nietzsche, Aristotle, Camus, Mishima, yes, but also the great works of science and history. He studies physics, evolution, theology, engineering, politics, the ancient languages like Greek and Latin, and the extraordinary intellectual inheritance of humanity.

Yet he does not mistake the consumption of knowledge for its application.

His reading makes him more capable of understanding the world, and his actions expose his understanding to the judgment of reality. He can discuss metaphysics in the morning and repair a roof in the afternoon. He can appreciate a symphony, but also appreciate the engineering of a bridge. He is not divided between the intellectual and the physical. His intelligence operates through his entire organism. He does not merely KNOW things. He can DO things.

And when evening comes, when the work is finished and his muscles carry the satisfying heaviness of a day actually lived, he goes outside once more. Perhaps he sits beside a lake, perhaps he walks through a field, perhaps he lies in the grass with the woman he loves, her head resting against his chest while the sky turns orange and violet.

The sun descends toward the horizon, that enormous nuclear furnace burning approximately 150 million kilometers away, illuminating a planet covered in oceans, forests, mountains, and billions of extraordinary living organisms. Or at least, supposedly so. He wouldn't know.

But he does know. He knows perfectly well what the sun is. He understands something of nuclear fusion, stellar evolution, electromagnetic radiation, and the atmospheric scattering that produces the colors before him. He has seen it himself.

He knows that the Earth is not the mathematical center of the universe, that humanity is technically an evolutionary accident in no privileged cosmic position, and that his own existence is an almost absurdly brief event in the history of matter. Yet this knowledge does not diminish the experience. IT MAKES IT GREATER YET!!

There is something almost unbearably beautiful about the fact that an animal made of carbon, water, minerals, and electrical activity can sit on a small planet and understand the star that keeps him alive. He does not need to invent supernatural explanations to make the sunset sacred. The physical explanation is already astonishing enough. Reality is stranger than fiction, after all. He listens to the wind moving through the trees, feels the cooling air against his skin once more, tastes the sweetness of cold fruit, and watches the daylight disappear. He knows that one day he will die, that the muscles he built will decay, that his face will disappear, and that the universe will continue without consulting him. His memories will vanish. But he does not spend the evening trembling before this fact. He has lived today. He has run, lifted, worked, learned, eaten, laughed, loved, and placed himself in direct contact with the extraordinary world into which he was born. He has not merely observed existence. He has PARTICIPATED in it. The man is content.

This is the aristocrat of the soul. Not a hereditary nobleman, not a corporate executive dressed as a warrior, not a vain narcissist worshipping his reflection, and certainly not a comfortable intellectual endlessly discussing the possibility of an authentic life while refusing to live one. He is the integrated human being, the man in whom the priest, warrior, merchant, laborer, philosopher, athlete, and lover have found their proper order.

He possesses the warrior's courage, the priest's reverence, the philosopher's curiosity, the craftsman's competence, the athlete's physical discipline, and the lover's lust for life.

He understands the modern world without allowing it to consume him. He uses technology without becoming its servant, earns money without worshipping it, cultivates beauty without reducing existence to appearances, and studies philosophy without hiding inside of it as a means of escapism. He is not waiting for artificial intelligence, immortality, colonization of Mars, or the arrival of some magnificent future civilization to make his present existence worthwhile. He is not postponing life until he becomes rich enough, handsome enough, intelligent enough, or powerful enough to deserve it. He understands something the modern world has almost completely forgotten: LIFE IS NOT A PREPARATORY EXERCISE. It is the event, in of itself. Close and shut case.

The body is not an inconvenience to be transcended, the earth is not an obsolete platform awaiting technological replacement, and the physical universe is not an inferior imitation of some higher reality. This is the world. These are our hands. This is our blood, our breath, our sunlight, our flesh, our ridiculous and magnificent little interval between birth and oblivion. We have been given the astonishing privilege of being conscious matter, capable of shaping itself and participating in the world that produced it, capable of suffering, capable of being in pain, capable of prevailing. The aristocrat does not waste that privilege. He goes into the world and takes hold of it. He runs through fields like a fourteen-year-old boy, swims through cold water, climbs until his legs burn, makes love, builds things, discovers things, and returns home beneath the stars exhausted and extraordinarily glad to be alive. And tomorrow, if fortune permits, he will do it all again. And again. And again. Forever. And him and death will never cross paths, for he is immortal, the sensitive young man.

Eros and the Human Animal

We are not merely organisms designed to survive.

We are sexual and social organisms, whose emotional systems evolved in relation to other organisms.

There is something remarkable about romantic attraction. Among billions of people, one particular person becomes unusually significant. Their arrival changes the atmosphere of a room. Their absence makes ordinary spaces feel incomplete. Their touch changes the nervous system.

Physical attraction is often the beginning.

A body communicates health, sexual maturity, movement, vitality, expression, and countless characteristics that influence our desires, frequently before conscious reflection.

But enduring intimacy requires much more.

Desire brings people together. Character determines much of what happens afterward.

This is why physical self-improvement, although genuinely valuable, cannot become a complete theory of romantic fulfillment.

A person may become extraordinarily attractive and remain incapable of trust. He may be strong but unreliable, desirable but disloyal, socially successful but unable to sustain genuine closeness.

The distinction between eros and agape becomes useful here.

Eros says: I want you.

Agape asks: What is good for you?

A mature relationship requires some reconciliation of these impulses. Desire without care becomes consumption. Care without desire may remain affectionate companionship but lack romantic vitality.

When attraction, affection, loyalty, and responsibility reinforce one another, two vulnerable organisms create a shared world.

They become witnesses to each other's lives.

And perhaps that is one of the most profound responses to mortality available to us.

We cannot guarantee eternity, but we can make our temporary existence matter deeply to another temporary being.

Two lovers beneath the stars do not need a cosmic audience. Their bodies will age, their memories will eventually disappear, and the universe will continue.

Yet the moment is real.

Its finitude does not subtract from its significance. It may be precisely what makes it so valuable.

The Seventeen-Year-Old Running Through the Trees

There is a particular kind of memory that seems to contain an entire philosophy of existence.

A summer afternoon. The air is warm. The day feels impossibly long. You are young enough that the future remains an abstraction rather than a series of approaching obligations.

You are outside, perhaps running through a forest, swimming in a lake, or riding a bicycle toward a destination that does not matter.

You are not optimizing longevity, studying consciousness, calculating socioeconomic position, measuring your attractiveness against strangers, or constructing a coherent ideological identity.

You are simply alive.

Your body and the world are engaged in the same event. You move because movement feels good, laugh because something is funny, become tired and hungry and thirsty. The sun begins to set, someone calls you home, and the day ends.

Perhaps years later you remember the moment with an almost unbearable tenderness.

Why?

Not necessarily because you were happier. You may have been insecure, confused, frightened, or socially awkward.

I think it is because your experience of existence had not yet been completely subordinated to its instrumental value.

The afternoon was not a means of achieving something else.

It WAS the thing itself.

You did not need the forest to improve productivity, swimming to optimize cardiovascular biomarkers, friendship to expand social capital, or the sunset to regulate your circadian rhythm.

These benefits may have existed, but they were not the reason you participated.

You participated because you were alive and the world was there.

This is what adulthood so easily destroys.

Every activity becomes a means. Exercise improves appearance. Appearance increases status. Status acquires attention. Attention creates opportunity. Opportunity produces wealth. Wealth purchases freedom.

Freedom becomes the distant promise that someday, finally, we may begin living.

And so life is postponed indefinitely.

A person may spend forty years constructing the conditions under which he intends to begin existing. He becomes extraordinarily successful at arranging his life while remaining strangely absent from it.

The tragedy is not ambition. Ambition can be magnificent.

The tragedy is forgetting the distinction between the infrastructure of life and life itself.

Money is useful because it supports freedom, security, experience, and responsibility. Fitness matters because it expands physical capacity and protects health. Beauty matters because it enriches experience and influences relationships. Technology matters because it extends what we can know and accomplish.

But none of these means should consume the ends they are intended to serve.

And this is where I think much of contemporary self-improvement goes wrong.

A person can become so obsessed with becoming excellent that he loses the capacity to enjoy the excellence he achieves.

The body becomes a project. Beauty becomes a score. Sex becomes an achievement. Nature becomes a wellness intervention. Every sunrise becomes an optimization technique.

Even the rebellion against modern abstraction becomes another abstraction.

Fisher's capitalist realism returns in miniature: the individual begins managing his own existence as though it were a business.

The person who cannot enjoy an ordinary day because he is preoccupied with becoming a superior version of himself has misunderstood the purpose of improvement.

We cultivate the body so that we can live more fully inside it, not so that cultivating the body becomes an endless substitute for living.

The seventeen-year-old running through the trees is not necessarily ignorant of life's meaning.

Perhaps, for that afternoon, he is experiencing it.

The Last Human Summer

Suppose humanity really is approaching a civilizational threshold.

Suppose artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and technological development eventually transform the conditions of existence beyond recognition.

Perhaps our descendants will possess capacities we would regard as superhuman. Perhaps they will merge increasingly with machines. Perhaps artificial intelligence will become one of civilization's principal participants.

Perhaps none of these predictions will materialize in the form their advocates expect.

We do not know.

But consider the possibility that the familiar human condition—biological birth, childhood, adolescence, courtship, labor, parenthood, aging, and death—will not remain the dominant form of intelligent existence forever.

What would we owe to it?

Not because humanity is perfect. It isn't. Far from it.

Our bodies are vulnerable, our minds are biased, and evolution has produced extraordinary capacities alongside enormous suffering. There is nothing sacred about preventable disease or ignorance merely because they are natural.

If technology can reduce suffering, cure illnesses, and expand human freedom, we have excellent reasons to develop it.

But there is also something irreplaceable about the texture of physical human existence.

A machine may someday simulate the experience of climbing a mountain with extraordinary fidelity, but the actual mountain remains an encounter between an organism and a world independent of its wishes.

A virtual forest may reproduce every visual detail of the trees, but the real forest exists within a biological community older than civilization.

A synthetic companion may produce convincing affection, but a relationship between two independent people contains the remarkable fact that neither consciousness is under the other's complete control.

These are encounters with things that exceed us.

And I think that matters.

The greatest possible human ideal is not simply conquest, domination, intelligence, strength, or beauty.

It is consensual, full, unrelenting participation.

To belong consciously to the world that produced us. To cultivate our capacities, recognize our limitations, create beauty, protect those who depend upon us, contribute something durable, and love other human beings while they are still here.

Nietzsche teaches the affirmation of embodied existence and the necessity of self-overcoming. Mishima teaches that words must eventually become flesh. Evola, stripped of his authoritarian mythology, raises the question of what happens when economic calculation supplants courage, sacred purpose, and inner sovereignty.

Jaynes reveals the strange possibility that the unified self is an achievement rather than a starting condition. Aristotle reminds us that character is made through action. Christianity's Incarnation and theosis offer images of the sacred significance of embodied life and the transformation of human capacities toward something higher.

Camus reminds us that the certainty of death and the absence of final victory do not invalidate the struggle.

Fisher shows how capitalism can colonize even our imagined alternatives. Land offers the terrifying possibility of technological acceleration escaping the human purposes that originally justified it.

And Arendt and Weil remind us that existence depends not merely upon thinking, consuming, and desiring, but upon work, necessity, and participation in a shared material world.

These thinkers do not agree with one another. Their metaphysics, politics, and moral conclusions often conflict, sometimes irreconcilably.

But I think their most useful insights can be brought together into something like an embodied existential humanism.

Its central claim is that human life becomes most meaningful when developed capacities are brought into sustained, conscious contact with reality.

Thought serves understanding. Understanding informs action. Action develops character. Character directs strength. Strength protects and creates. Beauty deepens appreciation. Love gives these capacities purposes beyond the self.

And all of them must ultimately serve life rather than replace it.

The final purpose of human excellence is not to become so superior that one no longer belongs to humanity.

It is to become a more complete participant in the human condition.

While We Still Are

One day, the last person who remembers you will die.

The buildings you knew will be demolished or rebuilt. The roads you traveled will change. The names of familiar places will disappear, photographs will deteriorate, and the people you loved will have their own final afternoons.

Eventually, perhaps, the civilization that produced your life will become unrecognizable.

Further into the future, even the mountains will change. The continents will move, the oceans will transform, and the Sun itself will not remain as it is forever.

Nothing in our familiar world possesses an unconditional guarantee of permanence.

It would be easy to regard this as a reason for despair.

But I think impermanence makes the opposite demand.

Perhaps we should stop confusing duration with significance.

A flower does not need to bloom forever to have been beautiful. A song does not need to continue indefinitely to have been worth hearing. A friendship is not rendered meaningless by the eventual death of both friends, and a life does not become worthless simply because it ends.

For one brief interval in the history of matter, we are permitted to open our eyes.

We can walk beneath trees, feel water moving around our bodies, build homes, repair machines, study the stars, make love, raise children, grow old beside someone, plant orchards whose fruit we may never eat, and discover things no previous human being has known.

We can defend people who cannot defend themselves. We can make mistakes, recognize them, and change. We can become stronger, wiser, more capable of understanding and participating in existence.

And then, eventually, we cannot.

That is the condition.

Not necessarily an injustice, not necessarily a humiliation, and not a reason to despise existence.

Perhaps there is a God beyond it. Perhaps consciousness participates in realities we have not understood. Perhaps the final nature of the universe is stranger than physicalism, theology, or any existing metaphysical system can describe.

But none of these questions needs to be settled before we begin living seriously.

The earth is beneath us. The sun is above us. The organism is alive.

There is work to do, people to love, food to grow, water to protect, shelter to build, knowledge to acquire, and beauty to create.

There are mountains we have not climbed, oceans in which we have not swum, conversations we have not had, and capacities in ourselves that have never been tested.

And somewhere there is a seventeen-year-old running through the trees without knowing that one day he will remember this afternoon as something sacred.

Perhaps the greatest act of philosophical courage is realizing that the boy was not ignorant of life's meaning.

He was experiencing it.

He did not need a completed metaphysical system, the assurance of immortality, or proof that his existence would matter to the universe.

He was alive, and for that moment, being alive was enough.

I don't think we should abandon our intelligence to recover his freedom. I think we should use our intelligence to understand why his freedom mattered, then construct lives capable of making room for it.

The future may be extraordinary. It may also be terrifying. Perhaps we will create intelligences greater than ourselves, settle other worlds, or transform into something that can no longer recognize the species from which it emerged.

Let the future arrive when it arrives.

But do not offer it every remaining hour of the present.

Do not become so fascinated with transcending humanity that you fail to experience being human. Do not spend your entire life studying courage, beauty, strength, love, nature, and existence while forgetting to participate in them.

Go outside. Feel the weather! Become strong enough to carry something, learn enough to make something, care enough to protect something, and love someone without treating them as a possession.

Spend your intelligence on reality.

Let the body discover what the mind has spent so long trying to explain.

And when the world refuses to yield, when the stone falls, when the future becomes uncertain and the universe offers no assurance that your efforts will endure, remember the only victory entirely available to a mortal creature:

To have participated fully. To have been here. To have seen the light and answered it with a life.

We can build the machines tomorrow. We can contemplate the stars tonight.

But the trees are outside now. The water is cold now. The sun is rising now.

And we are still human.

Let's go be human for a little while longer. Let's go be physical. Let's go be seventeen-year-olds running through the trees.

Let's go be alive, while we still can, and while we still are.