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.
