Essays
The Life Trajectory
Every human life follows an arc. We emerge into the world dependent and undeveloped, rise into increasing capacity and responsibility, reach a period of peak strength and influence, and eventually decline toward limitation and mortality.
Reciprocal Radicalization
Reciprocal radicalization is the process by which opposing groups, individuals, or ideologies progressively drive one another toward greater extremes through cycles of fear, contempt, misinterpretation, and retaliation.
The Thief
“The thief comes only to kill and steal and destroy.” This is not only a warning about some external enemy. It is a description of any force that robs you of peace, clarity, and love. The thief is whatever pulls your attention away from what actually matters. Your inner life. Your relationships. Your responsibility to act well within the small and real sphere of influence you have been given. The thief does not need to break down your door. It only needs to distract you, fragment your attention, and keep your heart agitated and divided.
Idealism vs Wisdom
At its best, idealism is the love of what could be better. At its worst, it becomes an intoxicating escape from reality. The idealist is not addicted to drugs or alcohol, but to a perfect vision of the world that never has to survive contact with human nature, tradeoffs, or consequences. That vision delivers a powerful emotional high: moral clarity, superiority, and the feeling of being on the “right side of history.”
Real Loss
The Drama Triangle is a simple model with far-reaching explanatory power. Developed by Stephen Karpman within the tradition of Transactional Analysis pioneered by Eric Berne, it describes a recurring pattern of conflict in which people rotate among three roles: Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer. These roles are not fixed identities but shifting positions people adopt, often unconsciously, in response to stress and relational tension. The model’s strength is that it explains not just individual behavior, but the way entire systems of interaction sustain themselves over time.
Human beings are storytelling creatures. Long before movies, people gathered around fires listening to myths, legends, and heroic tales. Stories shape desire. They shape identity. They shape what people believe life is supposed to be. In the modern world, Hollywood has become one of the most powerful storytelling machines in human history, projecting idealized visions of love, beauty, heroism, success, and meaning into the minds of billions of people.
The Spectrum Series
One factor that the Science of Psychology has made crystal clear is that our early emotional experiences are hyper predictive of our adult lives. Beneath our thoughts, decisions, and relationships, there is an underlying orientation that shapes how we interpret everything around us. At its most fundamental level, this orientation can be understood as a spectrum between survival and connection. It is not something we consciously choose in early life. It is something that is formed through experience, especially in our earliest relationships, and it becomes the lens through which we perceive reality.
In this spectrum series we look at some fundamental psychological spectrums that are vital for self-awareness. Intensity vs Intimacy is one of the most profound insights available. While it is normal for younger people, especially boys, to engage in risky behavior and seek out intense experiences, females often do the same. What does intensity look like? It is more than just driving fast or theme park rides. Intensity can be viewing pornography, intense sexual experiences, using drugs, seeking out fairy tale “falling-in-love” experiences, crime, theft, fighting, anger, protesting, being an “outlaw”, chasing or running away, being a rebel or revolutionary, workaholics, high-pressure high-intensity jobs, and add a long list of emotional experiences that are considered intense. What looks like a preference for excitement, risk, or stimulation is often an adaptation to an absence of safe, meaningful connection. This is the spectrum of intensity versus intimacy, and it shapes how people regulate emotion, pursue experience, and relate to others.
Read Here
There is a quiet spectrum that shapes how a person sees the world and their place within it. On one end is humility, a grounded, reality-oriented posture that allows a person to engage life without needing to constantly defend or elevate themselves. On the other end is superiority, a comparative stance that organizes identity through being above others in some way, whether intellectually, morally, or socially. Most people move along this spectrum depending on context, but over time, a dominant posture tends to emerge. That posture becomes the lens through which relationships, conflict, and even self-understanding are filtered.
Discipline is often misunderstood as force, effort, or the ability to push through resistance. In reality, the deeper issue most people face is not a lack of effort, but a lack of internal alignment. Beneath inconsistency, procrastination, and broken follow-through lies something more fundamental: self fragmentation. This is the experience of being internally divided, where different parts of the self compete for control, each pulling toward a different outcome. The spectrum of Discipline versus Self Fragmentation is not about how hard a person works, but about whether they are operating as a unified whole or a divided system.
The Biblical narrative mirrors real human patterns. One that is most central to both is that human life operates on a moral economy. Not in the shallow sense of reward and punishment, but in the deeper sense of investment versus consumption. Scripture consistently frames our choices as either planting seeds that grow over time or spending something that cannot be recovered. It is less about restriction and more about trajectory.
Modern culture has become deeply suspicious of ordinary life. To be ordinary is often framed as failure. Average means invisible. Stable means boring. Routine means lifeless. Quiet faithfulness is interpreted as a lack of ambition. Many people now grow up absorbing the belief that significance only exists through exceptionalism, influence, wealth, beauty, fame, intensity, or constant self reinvention. But perhaps this entire framework is backwards. Perhaps being ordinary is not evidence of insignificance at all. Perhaps it is one of the deepest expressions of divinity available to human beings.
Read Here