What I Was

4th installment to my philosophical system

Me after writing this. Jerome in the wilderness.

Having now gone over my reasons for writing and repeating everything I write, I now seek to stand before myself, so to say, and offer to the world what I feel about my own being. Like Christ, I feel my being is tripartite—three in one; in this, of course, I mean temporally. The man who thinks himself the same throughout his life merely because he feels himself as one consciousness is a fool. What being is, rather, is a continuous progression of successive changes occurring without our awareness; and what we do in order to make sense of this infinite multiplicity with respect to time and action is divide it all up into personal epochs: a century, a decade, a year, a day, an hour, a minute, a second. One revolution around the sun, one passing birthday, one milestone, one goal, one achievement, one misery, one life.

What we fear most of all is the unknown, and so long as we view time as the edge which we cannot go over—a dreadful unknown indeed—we shall always stand in fear of just how deep that drop goes. It is not that we die, but that we know we die that destroys us; and worse still, it is that time is blind, while we are clear-sighted, and know in time we live, and through it we decay and pass away. Subject to no feeling but indifference, time laughs at our attempts of comfort, which it already knows are false consolations. There is nothing more consoling to an intellectual than death, but for the common man, there is scarce any room in his heart for his inevitable demise. The common man views life as a burden, in which he spends his every waking hour in toil after his own subsistence, and finds this the greatest inequality because he cannot emulate those who live without working—as if the rich were invulnerable to mental anguish or disease. The common man thinks life is a burden merely because he must work to live, and thinks those who don’t are somehow superior to him, or somehow have it better than him. This man has surely the weakest of all minds, for he views his life purely through the lens of his will, his desire, his need of comfort and relaxation at all times; it is a narrative he has told himself to ease the pain of his real existence, and hides his hurt pride in his own vanity and boisterous attitude—he is so fond of making everything about himself, for he only views life through what he has worked to achieve, rather than what others have allowed him to exercise, or what good he has done for others even in his selfishness. He’s a lackadaisical man ultimately, because he’s convinced himself that his life is nothing without achievements to show for all his labor. His mind is concerned solely with his belly, his appetites, his wishes, and false imaginations of some idyllic dream life which he shall never have in this life. His heart rebels against this, and finds, either, that his life must be some kind of mistake—from which depression and suicide are the end result—or he finds a narrative so convincing that he restructures his entire life around that idea—regardless of its absurdity or not.

Man’s life is nine-tenths compromise, and does everything with the time he has to somehow construct a purpose for all his meaningless drudgery. Life is a dream, and like a shadow vanishes as quickly as light can shine upon it. In all this, it is abundantly clear that time has, in my view, ultimate significance. If the basis of life were happiness, whence does all this misery come? And to what purpose would be all our striving to become something within all this time—this precious abstraction, which we do not feel and yet see the effects of every waking second. Man cannot place himself in the world properly until he has thoroughly grasped his being in relation to time; and with that, I return to the beginning.

I feel the only way to comprehend myself is to view my life in relation to these three criteria: what I was, what I am, and what I will be. It has always struck me with particular joy to see throughout history how men have understood things, almost always, in threes: three ages, cycles, stages, aspects, etc. The tetractys was considered sacred among the Pythagoreans for a reason; Aristotle based his virtue ethics on the idea of finding a mean between two extremes; the lever requires two objects and a fulcrum; Ibn Khaldun’s theory of civilization has three stages—as does Giambattista Vico’s, and every other one since; Hegel based his absolute idealism on the unity of opposites between two opposing ideas; Nikola Tesla famously said: “If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6, and 9, then you would have the key to the universe,” referring to his obsession with vortex math; and every language known to man has divided time into past, present, and future. From all this, the most general assertion that can be affirmed without fear of contradiction is that man loves to categorize in threes. It is from this natural affinity for three, therefore, that I decided it was best to chronicle my life. Going in chronological order, I will thus start with what I was.

I know how absurd it is for a man of twenty-three to attempt to speak so authoritatively on his life, as if he had already lived the majority of it, but I feel as if I have already lived the majority of my life—if I may speak honestly. Already aware of all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune man may encounter in his life, as well as being all-too-aware of the shortness of life—combined with a strong desire to rid myself of every burdensome piece of knowledge I carry within myself—I find no better time than now to write about myself in the full bloom of my youth, with all my wits about me, and every faculty of mind in its strongest and purest form; all this I do not only for posterity, but for the sake of completeness with regards to my own development as a human being—for nothing is more sacred than man’s essence, and nothing more divine than to know all with regards to man’s self; and if there be people in the future who read these words in the same manner men today read the autobiographies of Augustine, Cardano, Cellini, Rousseau, Franklin, and J.S. Mill, then I have succeeded in representing myself to the world, for all humanity to judge and learn from.

So who am I? I am Joseph Diaz! son of Joseph and Camellia Diaz. I was born on Saturday, June 29, 2002, at 12:56 PM, in Brooklyn, New York. At the time of writing this (12/5/2025), I am twenty-three years, five months, and six days old.

Before my birth, my father had already decided that he would name his first son after himself, and so I bear his name, and shall always until the end. At my birth, my father—so he relates—acted as an assistant of sorts to the midwives and doctors. He told me many years afterwards, with great relish and amusement bordering on pride, how he assisted my mother while in labor by pulling on my little shoulders (apparently I was quite stubborn, and had no intention of leaving my mother’s womb without a fight); thus, like every child before me, I came into this world in a violent fashion. My mother, after shedding tears of agony and letting out a few understandable screeches, held me in her arms, proud of having delivered a healthy baby boy. I was five pounds three ounces at birth. I was swaddled in a white-blue blanket, and have breathed the air of life ever since.

Naturally, I do not recall much from my infant or toddler years, but I do recall a few early moments. My earliest memory comes from when I was three years old. My family and I at the time were living in Queens, on Jamaica Ave & 96th St. I remember, as if yesterday, playing with a toy car on the floor near the front door; next thing I know, I’m standing up, somehow managing to balance myself, and waddling my way towards the living room where my mother was; I then popped my head through the doorway to see what was going on; my mother was lying on the couch watching TV; when she saw me, she gave me a smile, and I smiled back at her; I then waddled some more until I was at the edge of the couch, and hugged my mother’s leg. I don’t know what came over me to stop playing with that toy car. I don’t know how I managed to balance myself when I was still learning how to walk. I don’t know why I decided to check on my mother. All I know is that my first memory is of me hugging my mother’s leg—I suppose it’s only fitting that that first memory is one of love, for love has been the sustaining passion of my life.

My second earliest memory is when I was four, although I had yet to gain self-consciousness at this time. I remember being sad and a little angry because I had to get a haircut, which was then a novel idea for me. “You’re telling me a man is gonna cut my hair with a razor, and I’m supposed to sit there without a problem? Why do I have to get a haircut anyway? Why should I care if my hair grows long?” All these thoughts swirled in my mind, but I had little say then, and was forced to go anyway. Afterwards, I actually liked how the cut came out, and from that day forth, I never had a problem with barbers.

There are a few other memories I recall from that time when we lived on 96th St—like when a friend of my mom’s tried to teach me a little Spanish some time around December 2005, or when I saw my older brother (14 at the time) leave for school, or the time I was watching SpongeBob while playing with a kitchen tong as my father got home from work—but these are rather innocuous events that didn’t play a deeper role in my development.

Sometime in August of 2006 (I think—my memory is shaky on this), we moved from 96th St to another part of Queens—Bellerose. It is at this point that my life emerges from that deep fog of adolescence and begins to show signs of maturity and firmness. This is when I became self-conscious as a person, a being, with my own will, passions, and wants. We moved into what I can only describe as the most idyllic paradise imaginable; granted, this is now all seen through rose-colored glasses—for the passing of years tethered with a fondness for childhood would do that to you—but I do not proclaim to give a completely accurate account of what I was, but rather what I felt I was, in the most ideal fashion possible. We moved into the house of one of my uncle’s mothers. It was a fine little home for a single child at the time: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a basement, and an attic. It fell into disuse not long after the death of my uncle’s mother; when that was, I don’t know, but it had to have been a few years prior to ’06, for the house, I vividly remember, was covered in dust, had peeling paint everywhere, and smelled stale—as if the windows had been closed for years on end. My father and mother did what they could to refurbish what was still good, and replace what was bad. I remember helping my grandmother (from my mother’s side) paint the chain-link fence—we decided on silver ultimately. For a few weeks, everything was in motion. We cleaned out and painted the main floor, gutted and sheetrocked the old walls while replacing old insulation in the attic, and did what we could to salvage the basement—which had a boiler leak for some time, causing mildew to spread to a decent portion of it. The first rooms to be completed, unsurprisingly, were the main-floor bedrooms and bathroom. The first night sleeping there was a trip. I remember closing my eyes and seeing large apparitions appear before me, fading in and out of existence, changing between yellow and pitch black, probably from all the excitement.

The next thing I know, I’m starting elementary school. It couldn’t have been more than a few weeks from the time we initially moved in—which is why I said it was around August when we moved, for school in New York starts at the start of September. I was enrolled in P.S. 133 Q. P.S. 133 Q couldn’t have been a more perfect elementary school for someone to start their education in. Again, I know full well I romanticize it, but I cannot shake this passionate love I have towards it. It’s where my most formative memories were had, and is where I grew dear to life itself. You could not have found a happier human being than I between the years of 2006–2007, when I began kindergarten. I’m filled with utter delight when I think back to that day, that bright, sunny September day, when I walked into my first ever classroom. My teacher was a delight, my classmates were a delight, home life was a delight, everything possible for a happy childhood was provided me, and I was fortunate enough to enjoy each and every bit of it.

When I first walked through that large wooden door, I was greeted to a massive room about fifteen feet wide, twenty feet long, and twelve feet high. There were about thirty kids in there, surrounded by their parents. I was nervous. I was told a few days before that by my mother that school was a place to learn and make friends at, but I had never done those things before. “What are friends, and what is learning,” I thought to myself when hearing that—those were the first philosophical questions I’d ever encountered. I remember being told to find a chair to sit in, and I picked the closest one to my parents. Out on the long white table were sprawled puzzles, books, coloring books, crayons, and pencils. The first thing I ever remember in school was looking at one of those “match the image with the outline” puzzles; I was looking at a purple octopus wearing a red tie—the teacher asked me, “What is that?” I responded in my shy, nonchalant manner, “A purple octopus.” I found it very amusing actually. How crazy do these people think I am, not knowing what that is? I said to myself, “If this is school, this is easy.” How wrong I was.

The first day of elementary school was great, for my parents were still with me. The second day, when my mom dropped me off and told me I had to go to the classroom myself, I broke down in tears and ran to her. I was terrified of not being near my mother. I, very embarrassed, had my mom walk me to my classroom, and from that point on I had the front-desk lady walk me for the next week. After the first week, however, I got used to everything, and could finally enjoy myself in that atmosphere. From that point forward, it could not have been smoother. It was the greatest period of my life actually.

What I remember most clearly from that time was the sheer joy of existence. At such an age, when everything is new, bliss is to be had in every experience. Even the sad moments were joyful to me afterwards, for I learned more about life than I ever had before in those moments. Whenever I got in trouble, or did something wrong on an assignment, I was schooled, and felt embarrassed, but learned to overcome—indeed, my first lessons in self-overcoming were in those blissful moments of ignorance. Thinking back on everything now, my joy is nearly incomprehensible. In elementary school, in that paradise of fun and pleasure, I had my first encounters with all the subjects that I would later dedicate a large portion of my life to studying and mastering.

It was there that I had my first introduction to mathematics: in adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing; in using a scale and ruler; in comprehending magnitudes; in appreciating numbers; in measuring the distance of the Earth to the Moon, in finding the circumference of Jupiter, in understanding shapes and figures, in finding areas and perimeters, etc.

It was there I first encountered science: the world of atoms and galaxies, of distant planets and chemical processes; of biology and ecology, of geology and oceanography; of the great heavens above us and the small divinities beneath us; the whole Earth is like a magnet which attracts love from every heavenly thing under the Sun.

It was there I first learned how to write—the very thing I do now, and the very thing which has, without doubt, become the greatest boon to my entire existence. I still remember struggling to hold the pencil correctly, and complaining how my hands hurt from the way I was holding it—even now, my pointer and thumb hurt when I write for too long, for I really never learned how to hold a pencil correctly. I also remember struggling immensely with tracing out each letter, for I had never written before that—I didn’t even know what writing was, the concept was completely foreign to me, but I did like the idea of being able to sign my name, and so from that point on I was determined to master the letter—oh, glorious letter, how much I worship and cherish you now at my present age.

Lastly, greatest of all, it was there, in school—in that little paradise as I called it—where I first learned how to read and speak. I quite literally acquired my mother tongue in school: naturally, holistically, without any pretense or prejudice—I merely did what every child does, imitate what they hear and see, until my proficiency was such that I could express myself (although not eloquently yet) on nearly every topic conceivable. The first thing I ever learned to read was Humpty Dumpty, which even now remains one of my favorite poems of all time; the first book I ever read was The Cat in the Hat, again another classic. The intonation of my voice is a combination of how I internalized my inner voice along with my best attempts to copy how my parents spoke; in that sense, my own voice is a reflection of what I read and heard around me. My voice is deep, and does not match my face whatsoever; it’s a mix of a Queens and Brooklyn dialect that harmonizes both so perfectly you can’t tell where I’m from originally by the sound of my voice alone. I always had a slight stutter, not because I couldn’t say the words, but because I would try to say them too quickly, as if my mind was working faster than my lips; which is something I have since overcome through deliberate reading aloud and through a consistent effort to pause before I say anything. In those moments of listening and speaking, I would hear and say things I thought made sense, but a child very rarely makes sense unless they are speaking of things drawn from their own experience, and even then, it is a very scattered and confused sort of fluency.

That, more or less, was my kindergarten experience: one blissful moment to the next, learning and speaking, playing and doing, reading and writing—in short, learning the basics which a man needs in order to do anything confidently in the world today. The world today moves so rapidly, a man who does not take learning seriously is likely to end up like those obsolete machines which are only used out of convenience rather than efficiency. Never become replaceable merely because you were too lazy to keep up with the times. Education is the only equalizing force people have in the world; without it, the masses would be so stupid they would have the leaders, kings, oligarchs, or princes play them like fiddles, and find themselves in misery after misery, which would inevitably end in violence and revolution. Without education nothing can be done; with it, nearly everything.

The rest of my school education is more or less the same, and so I will only go over in brief what in kindergarten I went in depth.

First grade was a watershed moment in my life. I didn’t have the same feeling going to school as I did when I was in kindergarten. Maybe it was just me, but the entire atmosphere felt off. In fact, that entire year felt off. The end of 2007 marked the last period of true joy in my life, and would begin a long, laborious decade of repeated failure, self-loathing, and utter despair which, at times, I thought I would never see an end to. The only good thing about 2008 was that my sister was born. Aside from that, there wasn’t anything to love about that year—and if you’re American, you know exactly what I’m referring to. I had, in retrospect, a good first grade teacher, but at the time, I had a strong animosity towards her which at times developed into a kind of passionate hatred. The simple truth was, I was a dunce. While most would not expect that of me today—considering how scholarly, well-written, knowledgeable, and industrious I am—after kindergarten, I really struggled immensely in school up until about the tenth grade. Now why that was I never could figure out fully, but my hunch then, as it still is now, was simply that I couldn’t bring myself to focus on any of my school work; whatever the lesson was for that day went in one ear and out the other. I was completely lost in a world of my own, so much so that I scarcely remember any significant event in my life for nearly the next two years—my life from the start of 2008 to about the middle of 2010 was one jumbled mass of confused experiences; I remember almost nothing from 2009. Everything at that time could not have turned more sour, more hateful, more full of misery and suffering. It was here, in this storm of misfortune, that I withstood the slashes of time, and made the best effort I could to endure; yes, endure and endure alone, for happy survival seemed out of the question. I struggled in reading, struggled in math, struggled in making friends, and everything else that could be considered necessary for a happy school experience. My childhood shyness slowly morphed into a serious introversion which I would hold onto, and still do to some extent.

My first grade teacher was a kind woman, and was very patient with me, even though I thought she was only there to torture me. I cannot stress enough how woefully unprepared I was for first grade material. I hadn’t yet mastered the basics of reading and writing during kindergarten. I could barely spell words that were more than five letters long, and I had no concept of prose style or elegant writing. I was a shipwreck out on the sea of knowledge, and had no life raft to save me. Even the basic lessons—such as reading longer books, or adding and subtracting numbers in the hundreds place—far outpaced me, and thus, I convinced myself I was stupid. I ended up failing the first grade, and had to go to summer school in order to make up for it.

This kind of thing doesn’t occur today, and to the detriment of the American education system; passing through kids that can barely write their names, let alone understand the more complex themes in literature, or comprehend the higher levels of mathematics. What we have today in education is an industrial assembly line made to manufacture morons—it is, quite literally, a business whose sole commodity is stupidity. The government at present is actively against education, and indeed wants nothing more than the average American to be unable to comprehend the complexities of the system they are shoved through and dominated by. They want the playing field as unfair as possible—which education helps bridge—and want you too ignorant to see precisely why it’s unfair. It could not be a more perfect system made for a deliberate manufacturing of consent primarily through ignorance and non-inquisitiveness. It’s not only that they want you ignorant, however—they actively want you to be subservient, to be docile, uninterested, checked out, and most of all unconcerned for your future or your kids’ futures. These people are too caught up in the present, too much into maintaining their power and in control of the reins, to actually see the inevitable collapse that this kind of selfishness and depravity leads to. History already disproves them, but they’re not having it; they want the world to bend to their will only—their collective will, in which they already agree on how the world should be: with them in charge while the masses below, the masses responsible for their wealth and influence to begin with, left just enough to fight over and survive on—and anything that is a threat to that dream is shot down from the start. Perhaps it is too simple to say this is all downstream of education, for education is but one part of a civilization, but, in my view, the basis of a Representative Democracy is founded on education—in an intelligent populace who can agree on what the issues are collectively, and who can collectively stand together, shoulder to shoulder, and hash out the best possible solutions for a given problem. The backbone of Democracy (as we have it today) is education, and its essence should be pragmatic, at least in the way of coming to solutions—but more on this later.

After a very dreadful summer, I entered second grade, having all the deficiencies necessary to make for a terrible year. Like I said earlier, I recall almost nothing from that school year, not even what the lessons were—aside from learning how to read a clock; I only remember that lesson, however, because I was caught cheating (though not punished) on the test we were given on it; it was the first time and only time I was ever caught, and I was very ashamed, so much so I vowed never to be caught again—I succeeded in that. Somehow, and to this day I don’t know how, I managed to pass second grade without going to summer school, and was thus left to reflect on what had occurred to me the past two school years. Something happened to me over the summer of 2010 (from early May to late August) which I cannot describe, but which was undoubtedly the single most important event that has ever occurred to me. I was seven going on eight, and I suspect, after two terrible school years, I had finally awoken to the fact that life is suffering: that life, as a phenomenon, is difficult, and has aspects of it which are boring, redundant, mundane, miserable, and utterly at odds with your goals and wishes. This brush with the true nature of reality awakened in me my inner philosopher, and this awakening corresponded with a new cognitive faculty which, up until that point, I was completely ignorant of: the faculty of reflection, of introspection in particular; in essence, the idea that I could reflect on past experiences in such a way either to learn from them, or to immiserate myself from them. Neurologically, everything I just described is associated with the expanded development of my Frontal Lobe (the area in the brain responsible for Executive Functions like thinking, speaking, memory, and movement) which allowed me to “become smarter” in the crude, colloquial sense of that word. I was simply more aware of my existence, and had finally developed the cognitive architecture necessary to philosophize and take initiative with respect to my own goals. It was here that the first seed was planted, which would eventually sprout into the man, the what I am (Mein Wesen), today. To reiterate, this was profound, but I wasn’t yet fully aware of this newfound development within me until I entered my third grade year, when I would have to actively use it.

Third grade was a school year I could look back on with pride and love. With my newly developed brain, and my newfound understanding of what life was at its core—along with my new approaches to dealing with this esoteric knowledge—I was ready to place myself in front of any challenge in order that I may overcome it deliberately. I had developed a thirst for knowledge. My eight-year-old self was thoroughly interested in all the facts of the world, and I wanted to grow my brain so that maybe, one day, I could fit it all in my head. This kind of thinking was only possible for an eight-year-old who knows nothing about how deep the well of knowledge really goes; nor was I taking into account my woeful deficiencies in education to make something like that seem even possible—but I didn’t care, I wanted to know about things for their own sake, and no lack of knowledge was going to prevent me from trying. All these ambitions, thanks to God, were also fostered and grown beautifully by my teacher. My third grade teacher was really a saint, and even now, I have a deep admiration for her, for all she did. I could not have had a more perfect person in charge of my education.

The lessons were more or less a continuation of everything that came before, but this time, I was thoroughly prepared to comprehend them, and I could actually appreciate what was being taught to me, even if I wasn’t able to fully master them. It was in 2010, too, that I also developed a love for video games. In fact, everything I formerly loved was now amplified and made more pleasurable; an increase in knowledge, it seems, also results in an increase in joy—at least for me. The lessons I remember in particular were in mathematics and art, surprisingly. One of my best friends at the time was really good at addition; I took this as a challenge and wanted to be able to add faster than he; I was never able to, but this friendly competition gave me an appreciation for other peoples’ aptitudes and skills, and allowed me to understand what was wrong with my own approaches to learning which they seemed to be free from. From this, I also learned the idea of humility; being able to accept the fact that some people simply are better than you at certain things, and why that isn’t a problem but actually a glorious thing for the world at large—even then, I was able to discover independently the concept of the division of labor.

As for art, I had a great art teacher; a curly haired woman, Italian, who herself looked like a piece of art. She taught me how to approach nature so as to appreciate all the beauty within it; she introduced me to the history of art, as well as all the various art movements that developed in it; and she encouraged everyone to find an art that we are passionate about, so as to cultivate it. From her I learned about watercolor, color theory, shade, collages, pastels, finger art, finger-painting, free art, expressivist art, and, my favorite art of all—line art! An art I still do every now and then, for it’s so easy yet so fun. She herself was a modernist artist at heart, inspired most by the later Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, and Basquiat. It was a thoroughly fun class, and I loved every minute of it.

Fourth grade started and ended very much like third grade. I had a great teacher who taught everything she had to, and was punctual in all her duties; although I have to say, in retrospect, she terrified me, partly because of her attitude with everyone: loud, sarcastic, at times rude, and had no qualms giving out punishments—she enjoyed it rather. Everyone was still and upright when she spoke, and the whole class followed her like their lives depended on it. She was the first person who taught me what anxiety was, how it develops, how to give it, and only much later, how to overcome it. There were no lessons in particular that I recall. In fact, there were no serious changes or developments during my fourth grade year, not even personally.

Fifth grade was the same story more or less; nothing new under the sun in terms of what I was being taught, but personally a very big change did occur. It was October 2012, and all the world seemed still. Me and my family were in the middle of packing our stuff to move to a new apartment when we got the news, a state of emergency: Hurricane Sandy was coming right for New York. Instantly was there pandemonium. People were stocking up on all the goods possible, in hopes of weathering this terrible beast. But all was for naught. On October 29, there was nothing but destruction and miserable rain. The entire electrical grid shut down; trees were uprooted, neighborhoods were flooded, cars were turned over, and the entire state was practically shut down for a week. As one would expect, that was a very depressing Halloween. Sometime in November, we moved from my most beloved Bellerose village to Copiague, a hamlet on Long Island in the Town of Babylon, in Suffolk County, New York.

Now Copiague was very interesting, because it allowed me to see a new aspect of life from an older, much more mature perspective—although, to be fair, a ten-year-old rarely has any mature perspectives on anything in life. I was now placed into a new environment, around new people, going to a new school, which, I should add, was—unfortunately for me—of lower quality and standing than my former school in Bellerose. When I was younger, I often considered this move the worst thing that ever happened to me, not only because it was a downgrade in our living standard but because that new environment changed me for the worst—or so I thought; I now think it the greatest thing to have ever happened to me: it gave me, in full view, the trueness of life, the lived realities of many working-class people, living in an urban environment suffering from inequality and stagnation, processing the fact of its own slow decay. It’s something only someone who has moved from an upper- to working-class town can appreciate. Here, I received more of real life, the true working-class life—life of labor, decay, and little hope—than I bargained for. I saw with my own eyes the potholes, the flooded sewers, the destruction of whole neighborhoods (from Hurricane Sandy), the meager existence of those living on welfare, the struggle of those living paycheck to paycheck—hand to mouth on minimum wage, if they were lucky—the brashness and anger within people’s attitudes who were forced to exist there, etc. It was there I first became aware of the concept of class, of real struggle, of toil with no end or possible social mobility: I saw it all. It was in this new environment that I would pick up where I left off in the fifth grade.

At this point, I hadn’t been to school in over a month—I missed the entire November month of school that year. The first thing I remember about this new school, Susan E. Wiley Elementary, was its size. Unlike my old P.S. 133Q, which was five stories high, Susan E. Wiley was roughly two, and it was much more spread out; it looked more like an office building than an actual school, I thought. I remember the Christmas decorations being out, and the day being very windy. It was the 3rd of December, 2012, when I first walked through those doors. I was ten, and not certain of anything. My initial thoughts were that the school was nice, but probably not as good as my old school. As I found out later, it was actually equivalent in terms of funding, but had worse results overall. I remember sitting in the office for what seemed like hours while they processed me into the system. I was then led to my classroom, and very awkwardly introduced myself to everyone. It was bizarre, but not unlike how things were back in my old school. Everyone seemed nice enough, but I thought them all less concerned about schoolwork than they should be—I was still a goody two-shoes, but this was quickly to change. The friends I made within that first day seemed to me troublemakers; not that they were bad people per se, but that they had their minds elsewhere, and clearly thought school more of a chore than a place to learn; this unfortunate attitude towards education I quickly adopted in order to fit in, and for the next five years cared little for school at all. The rest of the school year, I did whatever work I had to and found my graduation ceremony very nice. Nothing much really happened afterwards, however.

After elementary school comes middle school, and so, naturally, I was now going to a different school—Copiague Middle School—with new rules and customs which I had to adjust to. The first and most annoying were lockers, which for the first week I struggled even opening; I did, however, eventually master the “one turn left, two turns right” nonsense, and over time saw them as a bearable nuisance. The next thing was moving between classes. In elementary school, one teacher teaches everything, and you always return to the same room. In middle school, on the other hand, you are given a schedule at the start of the year with all the classes you are to attend, with their corresponding room number; by the end of the first week, you have them memorized, and the only time you go to your locker is to leave your bookbag behind at the start of the day—or at least that’s the only time I used it; and as a quick aside, in high school, we were actually able to carry everything in our bookbag—why the need to leave the bookbag in the locker in middle school but not in high school I have never been able to understand (it may have been something unique to the districts I attended).

Anyway, it’s September of 2013. I’m eleven and starting my sixth grade year. It was alright. I wish I had more to say, but nothing really major occurred to me. I kept up with my friends from elementary school as best I could, but since we were all assigned different classes, it made that nigh impossible. What everyone did, and still does, is make friends within their class for that specific period. It creates an entirely different social dynamic that one doesn’t experience in elementary school, since everyone there sees each other the whole day. I took the standard four required classes—English, Math, Science, and History—as well as a few electives, gym, and one foreign language (I chose Spanish), but overall the entirety of my sixth grade year was more or less mundane monotony, and seventh and eighth grade were more or less identical.

In seventh grade, I felt worse about life than I had perhaps ever felt before that. I suspect puberty is to blame, for I was suddenly self-conscious about myself. Prior to that, I had never considered such a thing, for it never entered my consciousness, but now, with noticeable changes in my body—most of all the appearance of acne—that aspect of me awakened, and I was very self-loathing about it. With the exception of Algebra, which I struggled with immensely—and which made me develop a strong hatred for math as a subject—all my classes went smoothly. It was around this time I felt life to be a burden, and I threw myself more and more into video games to escape the negative thoughts that surrounded me constantly. It was a slow existence. Every day seemed to drag on, and I saw no sight of it getting better.

Eighth grade, again, more or less the same. New teachers, same subjects, me one year older—nothing new. Then, alas, I graduated. I felt like a slave released from his chains. All of middle school felt to me like an excuse to torture me mentally. I was happy with having endured that hell, and for the first time in a long time, I started to think optimistically, not about life—for I wouldn’t dare think anything positive about life then—but about the innate capacity within me to survive struggle, to endure depression, to withstand the absurdities and cosmic misfortunes I had no say in, but which I was forced to endure nonetheless. I realized at the end of eighth grade that I could, in fact, endure every conceivable misfortune, even those I hadn’t experienced yet, so long as I viewed them as necessary. Determinism gripped me, and I at once took to it like a duck to water, for I finally found an idea that perfectly explained what I felt, and gave me justification to view all of life in a detached, nonchalant manner. It’s an idea I think about every day. After graduation, I got into anime thanks to one of my cousins, and ended up spending my entire summer break watching all of Naruto—one of my better decisions in life.

Fast-forward to September of 2016, and I’m starting my freshman year at the Walter G. O’Connell Copiague High School. I was extremely pessimistic at the time, and hated every second of my first day. My first class, thank God, was a study hall, and I remember distinctly just sitting there with the most morose, spiteful, angered, embittered face imaginable. I was not in the best of states mentally, and actively thought about death, nay more, actively sought the miserable and horrible in life, ruminating upon reality in all its negative, foreboding aspects: my own death was merely one piece of this much larger conception of doom. I yearned for the universe’s end, and wanted nothing more than to see everything we care about fade like a puddle in the sun. I even outdid myself by applying this pessimism to existence as a whole, creating at that time my own little philosophy of misery. I took as my basic premise the inevitable sadness and death that everything leads to, and generalized it to every concept of society, science, and existence I was familiar with: my life, societies, education, progress, buildings, people, and even the world itself; I saw everywhere the inescapable fact that all is doomed to decay and death, and so deduced from that, as every good pessimist does, that existence is ultimately without meaning, and the end of every life is like that of an idea, forever gone the moment it is no longer thought by anyone. All these philosophical questions came rushing to me in that moment, and I handled them in the only manner I knew how, from the basis of my own experience, and on that alone, for it was the only authority I thought mattered—I had yet to be indoctrinated with the idea that experts alone are who we should go to in matters of existence. After first period, however, when I actually encountered people who were going to their next class, and got to see a lot of my friends as a result, I warmed up to life a bit, and quickly dispelled those ideas for a time. I found in that moment that while my philosophy may be true ultimately, it was something I could never personally follow; for me, being around enjoyable people was always enough to endear me to life, even in my worst spells of depression, self-doubt, and inner hatred. People are hell, but the right people are heaven, and that heaven is far stronger than any misery that presses down on you from above.

By the third day, I became completely acclimated to all the goings and inner workings of high school generally. I was told all throughout my eighth grade year that high school is where things get serious, where schoolwork becomes more laborious, where things become harder, and where you have to work a lot more to get by—it was all nonsense. In truth, ninth grade is really no different than eighth grade, and more generally, freshman year is really no different than senior year. I found that my classes were, again, not unlike the ones I did in my previous year. Algebra still dominated me, and I still dominated history, but everything else was without notice in my view. It was around this time, in my ‘deep’ reflections on existence, that I took a greater liking to literature. I enjoyed every minute of English class if I may be completely honest; the first thing we read was Romeo and Juliet, and I found in Romeo’s laments my own struggles with life, with finding something by which to rest my meaning on—an idea which to live and die by. In the words of authors I’d never heard of before, some very great ones indeed, I found my salvation, my rock, my little humble abode by which I may turn to so as to forget life for a while; this cottage was my own, and I’d be damned if I’d let someone take that joy away from me.

Literature, or rather the ideas expressed within literature, became a way for me to process my reality, and gave me a more firm footing on the world’s stage. Never in a million years would I have thought that I would actually resonate with something taught me in school. Prior to that encounter with Shakespeare, I had assumed school was only a place to go to for the sake of preparing you for college; it was merely a means to an end, a process one went through for the sake of a future career, but never did it strike me as a place where one actually develops as an individual; for me, school was always an abstraction, a simulation, a false preparation for the “real world”; unfortunately, however, I had no idea the “real world” as such merely reflected the reality of a wretched social organization, made to perpetuate misery and repress the spirits of all its inhabitants for the sake of a corrupted elite at the top; what literature exposed me to, however, was that this spirit within me was something sacred, powerful, and worth cultivating in spite of its seeming lack of application to the real world; I now see it as all-too-applicable, and as the unsung hero of every great soul that ever lived, for in it, all is expressed in the purest embodiment of the idea of existence; at once did hope exist in me again, and from that point forward that idea would never leave my mind (but more on this later).

Another thing which I’m very grateful for were my friends my freshman year. Seemingly all my friends from eighth grade shared the same lunch period as I, and I enjoyed their company fully that whole year—although I should say that I drifted further and further away from them as the year went on, for I found very few of them had matured in the slightest, and were still into joking around and having fun, while I—boring brute philosopher that I thought myself as—concerned myself mostly with my own thoughts and ideas about the world.

About halfway through my freshman year, I found myself talking less and less with others, even my ‘close’ friends; I deliberately went into isolation, and wanted to be nothing more than a ghost, an empty shell, as if I merely existed to take up space but have that space recognized by no one. I succeeded to some extent, but it’s hard for man to exist strictly in isolation; the human need to interact is seemingly paramount in all people—even for those, like myself, who can go without speaking to anyone: situations arise in which you are forced into conversation with another; no matter how hard I tried, no amount of avoidance can truly curb that desire within man to make his thoughts known to another; as if perpetually in need of some affirmation of his ideas, man deliberately goes out of his way to conjure up some idea which he feels is necessary to express to another. It’s amazing to me that anyone feels this desire, for I have always viewed “the real world” in the same manner Kafka did: a spiral of arbitrariness designed specifically to confuse, annoy, and humiliate you. In such a spirit as that one, I made my way through the rest of my freshman year; like Thoreau before me (though at this time I did not know who Thoreau was) I viewed school as a trysting place not for love but for redundancy.

It was as if I was living inside the universe of Josef K.; everything about school, which I generalized to life as a whole (for what child doesn’t relate the whole of their existence to the place they spend the most amount of their time), seemed to me an utter absurdity. This idea was really influential on me! I just remember thinking of each day as the same; my favorite days were the cloudy ones, after long rainstorms, for that atmosphere really reflected the inner nature of my soul, of my thought, of what I thought about existence as a whole. The grey and white color scheme of the exterior of my school beautifully complemented my own existing reality. At this point, I knew, perhaps, too much with regards to what school was; freshman year of high school was really my first encounter with the thing that shall not be named: the bureaucracy of modernity, the whole structure of everything being specifically designed to numb you to your own heart, your own thoughts, your inner being. My everyday reality was something which I felt but could not put my finger on; it was as if I was brushing up against something which I knew to be there but which I was not allowed to see; my life was my own and yet not my own, rather something manufactured outside of my own being; I, along with everyone I knew, was being told from this up-top structure how to feel and think, but which I knew to be wrong, and which I did not want to listen to, but, since I was already in the system, forced to contend with against my will; everything was from without and never from within; I have literature alone to thank for awakening me to this other aspect of reality—the “real world” is that which we understand but which we cannot comprehend fully; everything remains outside us, and yet we feel, inside, as if we control it, and yet we don’t: and this here was my greatest realization—that freshman year was really an allegory for my own future existence, should I follow it down to its furthest depths.

The end of ninth grade for me was rather mundane. I remember the last day of school being extremely hot, too hot in fact for what I was wearing—a grey sweater, cargo pants, all-black Vans, and a grey-white boonie hat. I took my biology final and, while walking home from school (for I didn’t wait for the bus), thought to myself how much everything is deliberately propped up to seem more important than it really is. The walk home that day was like a Damascus Road experience. It was as if I was seeing for the first time the beauty of everything around me. The broken streets, the twisted trees, the dead-end road signs, the grass growing out of the street, the metal factory, etc.—it was as if I was seeing everything for the first time. Free from the burdens of school life for a moment, I could really allow my mind to process the whole world before me which, prior to that, seemed only a blur, a phantom, not truly there. On that walk, which was about two miles from my house, I considered how the year went, and if I had actually learned anything from it; I looked deeply into my heart, and said to myself, “This year was nothing to me. I saw plenty, but did not feel truly in my soul. I made friends, but did not appreciate them. I considered existence, but found no lasting answer by which to rest my feet on.” Oh, how miserable I thought everything to be, and yet, before me, this whole world lay open, as if begging for me to answer its calling; I saw, despite my determinism and deep pessimism, a ray of light shine directly into my heart, and from there, as if in a dream, I was momentarily lost in the whole of reality—in my surroundings and inner thoughts, I was able to turn my miserable life into something tremendous; I knew then that life is not simply a little bundle of depression, but an experience to cherish, and to find within it something more powerful than ourselves; I didn’t know it then, but what I was getting at was essentially the idea of existentialism; of coming outside of myself for the sake of reentering into myself in a more appreciative and honest manner, a more pleasant and happy form; all this was merely the inkling of an idea which I knew to be true, but which I had not yet discovered why.

Tenth grade was really a sort of Camelot era in my life. It essentially had all the good aspects of ninth grade without any of the bad. I was also in a much better place mentally, and had, over that summer break, formed in my mind a way to endure every adversity with more nobility and grace. What I loved most about it was simply the fact that everything seemed more tolerable. When you’re fifteen, you tend to easily assume everything is for the worse, and rightfully so, but the world is more beholden to you than you are to it—this was a fact I discovered independently that year. I found that everything really did come down to me ultimately; whether the experience was good or bad really only reflected itself as such by how I viewed it in the end. Nothing was good or bad objectively, only subjectively, and in that there is all the power in the world to turn it into something beyond mere good or bad—rather something tremendous and outside your initial conceptions of it as an experience alone.

I loved all my classes, except algebra of course, and had great teachers all around; especially my history teacher, who really brought the best out of me and showed me I had a peculiar faculty with historical facts and a great command of all the material. Tenth grade was also the year I started to take school seriously again. I said earlier how from fifth grade onwards I cared little for my education; well, sophomore year, I turned that notion on its head, and really excelled in all my classes—I was practically the top student in every class I took that year with the exception of algebra, which I still hated with a passion. I later compared that period to how I felt before moving from Bellerose; I really could have been an exceptional student in school had I really wanted to, for I had the memory and the work ethic to really outdo everyone.

I’ve been an indefatigable worker all my life—a workaholic almost—and I could have easily brought this to bear on my schoolwork had I really wished, but I had no desire to put more effort into school than was necessary for me to pass. I wasn’t one of those kids who could effortlessly pass everything, for I’m not a natural scholar in that sense, but I do possess a memory strong enough and have an industriousness capable enough to have easily been a valedictorian had I so wished; thankfully, these kinds of childish, stupid scholastic achievements have no sway or influence over me anymore; in fact, they don’t impress me in the slightest, for talent in school is not talent in thinking, and performing well on exams is not the slightest indication at all that that individual is intelligent beyond the material tested. It’s for that reason that I’ve always considered grades a stupid concept, for they primarily test how good a student is at recalling some procedure or method—in the case of mathematics and the hard sciences (like chemistry or physics)—or mere facts and concepts, in the case of history, literature, languages, or the social sciences; for, it should be remembered, the majority of a grade is predicated on how well you can perform on the exams: ABSURD!

I endured, however, and bit my tongue wherever I could—wherever I thought wholly mistaken; although I should say, I always hated the injustice of school in that manner, how, just like in real life, a person’s worth is dependent on how well they’ve been able to succeed financially, in school, a person’s worth is made tied to their grade—and those who care little for their grade are looked upon as either a fool, troublemaker, or misanthrope: this is totally dishonest, and many kids more often than not have justifiable reasons for doing poorly in school, whether it be sheer lack of motivation (which I find to be the main reason), responsibilities outside of school, a troubled home life, or actual learning difficulties. It has always struck me as unfair how much school accurately represents the real world at large; with such being the case, it surprises me how there has never been a school riot in the history of the world: how teenagers have never gotten together and overtaken an entire school system as such, and organized it around their demands—much like how unions have done in the workplace. In that sense, you could argue school is a good thing, but I have always considered that aspect of it its greatest drawback, for who would want to learn in a place that doesn’t ultimately care about your success in the real world—yet again another reason why I find the idea of education as a deciding factor in the job market complete hogwash; more than people would like to admit, it is unquestionably true that grades carry little weight in the “real world,” and yet they’re made the benchmark within academia itself: and who would’ve discovered otherwise? Academia proclaims loudly its own self-importance, just like how the robber argues he stole a thing because he thought it didn’t belong to its rightful owner, and so he was within his right to take it for himself; the system propagates its own false reality (self-importance) out into the world in order to eventually make it become reality—it is the power of positive thinking turned in on itself, and thus made a negative, a power of negative thinking, which makes a rod for its own back so that when it purposefully breaks its back, it has a use for its foolish creation. But this is all an aside.

What I loved most about tenth grade was simply the fact that I no longer felt like the world was pressing down on me; I truly did feel something that school year which I hadn’t felt since kindergarten—and that was merely being able to enjoy the present moment simply for what it was, and not feel as if under a constant assault, either from my own mind or from the external world; there’s a great freedom that comes with not worrying about grades or learning in general that really makes school a great place to be. I also liked the fact that school got me out of the house—a notion I never really considered the importance of until that time. Even an introvert can like being around people, so long as they assist him in forgetting about his present worries, which I found I was able to leverage by losing myself in the concerns of others; I’ve always been sympathetic to people’s plights, even if externally I showed a cold nonchalance. I was never without humbleness, and I always saw someone’s life from their perspective before I passed judgement on them—that always came natural to me. I’m grateful for all my school experiences that year, for I really came out of it all thinking that maybe it wasn’t all for the worse as I initially thought during my freshmen year. What I remember most about tenth grade was being able to enjoy the repetitiveness of it; there’s a kind of Zen-like quality to it—in finding something new that is clearly very old and boring. It was in that school year that I was able to truly appreciate life, not merely from my good experiences but also from my mundane and normal experiences; I was able to experiment with life at that point, and how to turn all my past muck into gold, to make what was every day seem extraordinary. I still remember coming home from school, tired and bored, finding great enjoyment in staring at my blue wall in my room; in seeing myself in the mirror and being very happy with who I was. There’s a certain charm that that part of my life had, and which I learned a lot from, even from the bad experiences; I was really able to make something out of nothing, and that something was material from which I later drew from in my life.

Eleventh grade now came, and at the start it was even greater than my tenth. By this time, I was fully committed to school, and I did extremely well in all my classes, even math; I also made a few new friends which, at this point in my life, I thought I was long past—for I’ve never been one to go out of my way to talk to anyone except those who I was already friends with at this point; I also didn’t see, at this time, that kind of thing as necessary, and rather thought it a distraction, which it really was; friends do nothing for you except give you a person to talk to in times when there’s nothing else to do; relationships are for the rabble: man can only further his being when he acquires a greater grasp of himself; friends merely reaffirm what you already think—for very few people warm up to those who actively challenge them—which is why friends are likely people you already agree with on many things, either in temperament or outlook on life; no one should ever actively seek out friends unless you feel it necessary or they come to you—this has always been my procedure, however, for most people bore me and are completely uninteresting; friends also waste your time mostly, for they say things expecting you to say something back, when in truth the content of what they say is so devoid of anything meaningful that it’s like reading a legal contract—lifeless, without sense, utterly dreadful, nosey, and inelegant.

Sadly, whatever community existed between me and my old friends died our eleventh grade year, for all our schedules were completely different, even our lunches. I got along with everyone that year, and nothing really perturbed me in the slightest—in fact, it was looking a lot like my tenth, where I would top all my classes and find greater and greater joy in the mundanity of it all. This was not to occur, however (unfortunately for me), for I was informed by my parents on the 8th of November that we would be moving by the end of that month to Georgia. I was shocked when I first got the news, even saddened by the fact. I was actually looking forward to graduating high school in New York, and had no real desire to change so suddenly and so abruptly, especially in the middle of a relatively productive year. My last day in a New York school was the 21st of November, 2018. I turned in whatever textbooks I had to that day and told I was moving to only my closest friends; nearly no one from my old friend group knew, and I barely even wanted my closest friends to know, for I truly am a private, reticent man who hated the facts of my life being known by those I knew personally.

That year, we ended up eating Boston Market for Thanksgiving, with the apartment looking as if a bomb went off inside it—there were bags everywhere, boxes to the ceiling, belongings not seen in years, and everything in chaos; I distinctly remember looking at the old wooden table we all sat at that year, and just thinking to myself, this is fucking crazy—that really was the thought I had; reality itself seemed like a cruel joke, and every aspect of life seemed more surreal than it should have. The moving truck came on the 28th, and by the 30th (the day we ultimately moved) we had everything inside it. On the 30th, I said goodbye to my closest friend—Eric (who lived right up the block from me)—and made peace with the fact that I would no longer live my life in the state I called home for the first sixteen years of it. The day itself was rainy, and utterly grey, which I thought captured my own soul at that moment perfectly. I really was sad, but had no other option; I would have preferred to stay, but had no say in my future at that moment. There I was, leaving New York for what I assumed to be for good. As time would have it, I would not step foot in New York for another six years.

The move itself was the single worst experience in my life. Anyone who has moved knows how much of a hassle it is; but to move across several states is an entirely different monster, which I do not wish upon anyone. It was an eighteen-hour haul altogether, but we stopped to sleep for a few hours in North Carolina. Again, I cannot reiterate how much I hate being in a car for long periods of time. When we actually got to Georgia, my back was in agony, and I really wished for nothing short of death. We officially moved into the house I currently reside in on the 7th of December, 2018. (Funnily enough, I’m writing this on the 7th of December, 2025, which makes today the 7th anniversary of our moving into this house.) It took me about a week to really appreciate the fact that I was no longer living in a rather cramped apartment, but in a house with enough space for everyone. I picked my room as the one furthest from the front door, and situated myself as best I could. On the first day of moving in, I helped unload the truck with my dad, and also helped him build the bedframes. The first night sleeping was utterly surreal, almost false, I thought; I had this whole room to myself, and a large bathroom of my own to go along with it. I was exceedingly happy. The next day, I took all my boxes from the garage and put all my clothes in my closet. I was satisfied with how everything fit, and thought it couldn’t get any better. The following week, I went with my mother to register me into my new school—West Forsyth High School—which I was thoroughly impressed by; it was far and away the best school I ever went to, and found it an excellent place to finish my education, even though I was still a bit bitter by the fact that I could not do so in New York, where I learned all my life. I ended up starting school in the new year, on the 7th of January, 2019.

As someone from New York, my first day of school in Georgia was a real trip. I awoke that day at 6:45 AM and was extremely tired, having barely slept that whole night. I limped my way to the bathroom half dead, and turned on the lights without looking away, which nearly blinded me; I splashed cold water on my face to wake myself up, and began to brush my teeth. I put on a red and black lumberjack North Face sweater with green jogger pants, and was out the door by 6:55. I dreaded the fact that I had to return to school after so long an absence, but, like so many other things in my life, I endured and held out for the best. It was extremely cold, the sun had yet to break, and I was the only one by the bus stop; I remember looking out onto the horizon and seeing trees for miles on end; I thought it all very beautiful, and it put my racing heart at ease for a bit—that was until the bus arrived. It was seven o’clock on the dot when the bus got to my stop. I was relieved to know I was in the right spot, but also knew that this was to be the start of a long haul till the end of the year. Every fiber of my being was in revolt when the bus door opened, but I had no other choice—I got in. The bus driver was sympathetic enough to my situation, and with a strong southern accent said, “Are you the new kid?” I replied with as much confidence as I could muster, “Yes, just moved in a month ago. I’m Joe.” With complete southern hospitality she said, “Welcome to Georgia. I’ll be driving you to school for the rest of the year. Do you have your schedule and everything?” “Yes,” I replied, and found the seat nearest to her. There was no acknowledgement of my presence by anyone on the bus even though I was new; this I thought quite fortunate, and I happily sat down knowing my anonymity was secure.

Everyone, much like myself, was very tired, and I suspect probably annoyed that they had to get up so early, all to return to a place that showed them no love. After four other stops, we finally arrived at school. When she pulled into the parking space, she turned to me and said, “At the end of the day you must return here to this spot (the place where all the buses gather) and look for bus number 840. That’s my bus number—your route—which takes you to and from school.” I nodded understandingly, gently got off the bus—still utterly tired—and made my way into the school. I had already been shown around the place near the start of December, but was now seeing it populated with students as they went to their lockers, homerooms, and friend groups all throughout the place. The first thing I noticed as I entered, aside from the long hallway, was the collection of instruments to my right; as it turned out, where the buses let people in is also where the music room and auditorium were. I held my schedule firm in hand and tried my best to follow the floor and room numbers. Alas, after some contorting and asking around, I made it to my first class: U.S. History. My teacher was cool and welcomed me; like myself, he was not native to Georgia, but Texas. I was put at ease by this familiarity, and felt my spirit strengthen as a result; in such stressful times, one latches onto anything in order to preserve hope and strength. I was the first one in class, and one by one, everyone who walked in got their fill of me, all the while I tried my best to see past their curious gazes, even ignore them if possible, and focus on whatever the lesson was for that day; as it turned out, they had just finished going over the Gilded Age, and the first lesson to start the new year was World War One; I was just in my element, for I had already learned everything about that period during tenth grade—“this is gonna be a breeze,” I said to myself; and so it was, for the remainder of that year I passed everything with flying colors, and thoroughly enjoyed my teacher.

Second period was Drivers Ed., which I enjoyed, since I treated it as study hall more or less. I had an old codger for a teacher who suffered from a litany of physical ailments—nearly blind, could hardly walk, hard of hearing, and wasn’t afraid to yell at people; he was, in fact, the only teacher I ever got into an argument with: it wasn’t serious or anything, but we did raise our voices at each other, and I ended up leaving his class five minutes early, which he didn’t hold against me. He was quick to anger but quick to please, and, I’m sorry to say, easily duped by anyone with half a brain, for he was too accepting and forgiving; all this should not detract, however, from his utter brilliance; he was a great storyteller, and was an accomplished student and athlete when in high school; he was smart enough to have easily done anything he wanted, but chose the humble career of teacher—a really great man overall in my regards.

My next class was Geometry, which, while in New York, I was doing very well in, which surprised me; I don’t know what it was about my sixteen-year-old self and math, but something clicked between us—whether it was in my approach to studying it, or maybe my brain had further developed over the summer that allowed me to comprehend it, but either way, I was able to wrestle with math concepts and not feel overwhelmed by them anymore, it was great. Again, my teacher was real cool, nonchalant even, and he took that with him into his teaching, which I really appreciated. The first lesson of that year was geometric constructions with compass and straightedge. I liked it well enough, and thought it was a good lesson to start with. For the rest of that year, I felt as if I was fighting an uphill battle against Geometry, for I was technically two months behind in lessons. I pushed through, however, and ended that class with an A.

To my surprise, my fourth period teacher was also my first period one—in the same room! It was Sociology, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. It was, in fact, the only class that entire year which I made friends in. I would have been just as fine with going the whole year without speaking to a soul, but my life has often presented me with absurd situations in which the only way is through; and if that meant I had to use my voice—and in doing so become likable to others—then so be it. I’ve always been a magnet for quiet souls like myself, and have inevitably befriended many people I would’ve never spoken to in a million years—I’m very lucky in that sense. Very much like History, Sociology was a breeze for me, and I ended up finishing all the work in the class a week early. It was a good time.

Fifth period was study hall. Nothing major to relate. I mostly studied or finished whatever work I was given in the previous class for that day.

Sixth period was lunch, in which I spent the entire time in the library instead, again either studying or working. In fact, I never once entered the cafeteria the whole time I was at West, for it wasn’t mandatory to be in, and I found the noise way too distracting for anyone trying to get work done. Lunch was actually my favorite time of the day.

Seventh period was Earth Science. Completely boring and mind-numbingly easy. I would’ve rather watched paint dry than sit through that class.

Eighth period was literature, which I really liked. My teacher actually had a PhD, which I didn’t even think was possible (to teach at high school with a doctorate) but so it was. She was a really kind woman, and generally liked what I wrote, though at times she took a stand against my prolixity, which in retrospect I really appreciate. Looking back on all my assignments during that year—for I kept them all—I was disturbed by my prose style; it didn’t help that most of the writings were, I thought, on uninspiring themes, or were in no way related to writing as such, but rather to the content of the book alone, which I always abhorred, for that to me was the single worst aspect about writing: that it stripped out the subjectivity of everything, and fashioned everyone’s pen in the same stupid mold, to follow some stale criteria, and base everything off some sample essay which was itself robotic, uninteresting, and completely contrary to the true spirit of writing—anathema to all that is holy to literature as such. I did well enough in that class, however, and had immense respect for my teacher, for I thought she was brilliant, and now, looking back at everything all these years later, I think her even greater than I initially bargained for.

Lastly, my final period was Gym. I found the locker room much bigger than the one in my old school, and all my teachers extremely friendly. Since it was the winter season, we stood inside rather than go out on the track, and I played ping-pong the entire time pretty much—in fact, that’s where I learned to play it, and I made many friends as a result of that. I was actually very happy Gym was my final class, for it allowed me to workout without carrying around all my sweat the rest of the day.

The end of my first day was identical to my last day. I went straight from the Gym locker room right to my bus each and every day for five months straight, like clockwork. My last day of junior year was the 23rd of May, 2019. I got to school early, and spent an hour near the library studying for my Geometry final. The time came and I took it. I ended up getting a 94 on it, and as a result finished with an overall grade of 91. I was exceedingly proud of that moment, for it proved to me that I could in fact learn math; little did I know, this one innocuous event would change my life for the better. That same day, I went out to dinner with my family and had a great day overall.

During the summer break that year, I mostly played video games with my cousin, Rich, but it was around this time—I wanna say near the start of July—that I became fed up with gaming, and swore off playing them from that point onwards. I was more or less successful in this, for after that time, I never really played consistently ever again, for a new, mature passion struck my heart: mathematics; but where did this sudden love come from? About a week after swearing off video games, I came across a TF2 community post on Steam written by a guy named Fakeman, who did a mathematical analysis on the “minimum distance possible a Scout can dodge a rocket fired from a regular rocket launcher so he takes 0 damage.” From which he came to the conclusion that it takes roughly 532 hammer units (33.25 feet) for a Scout to be able to do that. What left me awe-struck wasn’t the result itself—although I did think it was cool—but rather the way in which he reached it: using trigonometry, which I had just learned about in school, and some basic physics to get such a result. Prior to that, I had never seen mathematics actually applied to something I cared about; I was told all my life that math was important, that it had applications, that everything runs on it, but never was I moved by these mere platitudes—for words alone do not move a man even if they’re true unless that man sees for himself the significance behind them, that is, sees himself personally affected by them. I had, at once, comprehended the true significance of the subject, and, being naïve and very ambitious, sought to understand all of mathematics; for, I thought with certainty, if it could be applied to TF2, it must apply to everything else in the world—for TF2 was my world at the time; and if its application is so broad, surely one who understands everything in it can generalize from there and solve every problem in the world, no? Ah, these were to be the ambitious musings of a teenager yet to grasp the wider truths this world contains. It’s always fun to look back at how childish your conceptions of the world were in light of maturity, experience, and more knowledge about how things really work. I truly thought mathematics alone could subjugate the world: so long as one had a total knowledge of it, there were no problems which it could not solve: oh, the naivety, oh, the vanity.

A child only thinks of the world after the manner of their most ardent passion; that is why children tend to view everything through the lens of what currently occupies their hearts. Adults are no different; in fact, mentally, they are like children, only able to justify reality more assuredly because they have their life experience and memory to rely on; but give an adult a problem or confront them with a situation they are unfamiliar with, and, like a child, they will pout and seek help from others well before thinking of a solution for themselves. It really is shocking how little the average individual actually grows out of their own methodus vitae (way of living); it’s as if the common man would die before placing before his mind an uncommon or counterintuitive idea. It is precisely for that reason why one should never be impressed by credentials alone, for credentials merely represent a person’s ability to think about a singular thing for a long time, but very rarely are they able to entertain or understand ideas outside of their specialty, again, not unlike the common man when confronted by something that lay outside his experience or interest; therefore, I think it is incumbent upon everyone to study philosophy if they wish to truly be at home in the variety of the world’s ideas. Mankind must rise above its self-induced ignorance and grasp something awesome in the world—something that moves its spirit, enlightens its collective brain, and quickens the heart of every soul to joy and compassion.

In a sense, what I was thinking with so childish a conception was ultimately the ability to leave the world a better place after I’m gone. I’ve always viewed knowledge as a tool to improve humanity, and it just so happened that at that point in my life I viewed mathematics as the one area I could devote myself to which has the highest probability of furthering that end goal. It’s a utopian vision at its core, something one could only arrive at through a rational process they think unimpeachable, which is precisely why I reject such notions of improving the world today. Today, omniscience itself would not impress me, for all that knowledge is useless without two things: judgement and (more importantly) power! The world does not conform to is (factual) statements alone, for every decision and action based off knowledge ultimately rests on an irrational basis: a caprice, a desire, a want, a purposefully ambivalent and questionable ground which, to question, would end either paradoxically or circularly. The only thing that matters is the individual with respect to their own capacity to expend power, to further their goal, to create beauty out of chaos and disorder: that is what lies at the heart of every noble ideal—a man who had a dream, and who was not shaken by the detractors yelling at him to wake up from it.

But back to the point, it was from that first brush with applied mathematics that I decided to toss aside video games and devote all my leisure time, from that point forward, to study of the language which the universe is written in. A few weeks later, I started my senior year of high school. As if it were yesterday, I remember the rush of adrenaline that coursed through me as I awoke that morning. It was hot, and I was rather annoyed at the fact that my summer break had gone by so quickly. After washing up, I put on my black Vans, cargo pants, a white T, and an unbuttoned grey-blue flannel. I left the house early and was delighted to see people at the bus stop already—one of whom would go on to become my close friend: Ben. I greeted everyone and waited. There was something in the air that day: the fresh scent of pine and burnt wood hung heavy while the sun glistened on, and everyone at the stop wore a serious countenance; I suppose it was to be expected, for everyone there was either a junior or senior—we seniors were the most grave, for this was our final year. We had anticipated this day our whole life, and here it was now before us in all its staggering glory. Could we handle it? I suspect we all acted more bravely than our hearts really allowed for; it was a show of confidence, but deep down we were just as nervous as everyone else. Alas, the anticipation was palpable, which the approach of the bus cut like a scissor. “Who’s this,” I thought to myself. “A new bus driver? Not the same lady as last year? What a shame.” By this time, I already knew all the ins and outs of everything and found myself, unlike last year, completely prepared for whatever this school year would throw my way. My schedule was full compared to all the other seniors, who left an hour early, because I had to make up for a credit which did not carry over from my school in New York. I wasn’t annoyed in the slightest by this; I actually liked the fact that I stayed the whole day, for it gave me more of an opportunity to cherish whatever time I had left as a student.

I looked at my schedule and saw that my first class was British Literature, and so I made my way there.

That first day specifically, I remember getting off the bus and entering through the same doors I went through last year, seeing the same hallway, but this time with my head held high, with a lot more confidence, with much more assurance in my step; everything I did revealed my inner confidence, and I was not afraid to feel self-assured about anything. The building was the same, but my perception of it was completely different; it helped somewhat that I was a senior and knew my time was nigh—one always appears more confident when they have nothing to lose or when they know where the road ends with respect to their actions. It’s tremendous how a change in attitude results in a change in atmosphere. I quickly glanced at my schedule once more and found that my Literature class was on the opposite side of the building, on the same floor, however. I liked this, for it allowed me to traverse the whole of the first floor and see everyone shuffling in through the front and side entrances, tired yet energetic. This class was not far from the bathroom, and so, as if it were a ritual, I went there first thing every morning to rinse my hands with water and use the dryer to warm myself—the heat from it put me in a calm state of mind, and it allowed me to prepare myself for the day before me. Invariably my teacher was already in the room, but if not we waited outside for her.

I really liked my British Literature teacher; she was a short, plump woman with fine, thin blonde hair, and was always very fashionable in her dress; her voice was high-pitched and she spoke with an almost motherly tone; her cadence was regular and she had a simple way of presenting all the material. I was also happy to see that my friend Ben shared this class with me; without him everything would have been a bore. Our first lesson, if I remember correctly, was to read a famous essay by George Orwell entitled Shooting an Elephant; for this to be an introduction to British Literature, in retrospect, seemed to imply that we would focus primarily on post-colonial literature, and in fact, we did—but only for the first month. I find the choice of Orwell particularly apt now reconsidering it, and was not entirely shocked when our second unit would be a thorough reading of 1984. It was a great book, which I read extremely closely, but which I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until much later. The themes in that work are various, but they all turn around a common axis: totalitarianism leads to absurdities which profoundly affect the people that live within such a society. I almost wish at times I could return to that period with all I know now, just to fully appreciate such a masterpiece among others, rather than on my own in my dusty bedroom.

If I hadn’t made it obvious already, by this point literature had become my favorite subject; I wasn’t a fan of the assignments or exams per se—for I think those kinds of things destroy a true engagement with the material—but I did enjoy what we were reading, and how, in words, one can reflect on their own personal struggles and benign experiences: how all this could be turned into something great, something powerful, abundantly so even. My favorite lesson was the one right after Christmas break: the Romantic period; we started with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias and ended with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was my first introduction to Romantic-era poetry, and I was in raptures with it; the beauty, grace, elegance, power—never before had I seen English written in such a way; I felt everything there on a spiritual level, though I did not show it outwardly. My favorite of all was a selection from the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge; there, I thought at the time, was English brought to its highest power: not rhymed or even metered, but merely sung from the heart, which represents the purest form of experience that can be put to words, bordering on the sublime indeed. We followed up on this with an older and more difficult text, but in no way less important: The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. This was, unfortunately, the last unit we would complete in person, for not two weeks after finishing it, COVID-19 struck, but more on this later.

My next class after British Literature was Advanced Mathematical Decision Making (AMDM). It was the alternative to taking precalculus, which I felt at the time (I now think incorrectly) I wasn’t ready for. This class was the easiest one for me, and also the most fun, since in it I made many friends—most notable being my friends Jack, Evan, and Austin; three people who enriched my life and made second period a thoroughly enjoyable one, one to remember for the rest of my days. The class was effectively the application of various topics from math to real-world problems. I now think it one of the better classes I took, since a lot of the concepts were really pertinent to me, and it was taught in a really simple manner, which made it all the better. What I remember most was the sense of freedom walking in that class always gave me; I never felt behind or out of touch with any lesson, I merely showed up and learned what I had to, and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. Everything was light, so much so it didn’t even feel like class at times, but rather a place to show up to in order to enjoy myself in.

Third period was Algebra 2 which, like AMDM, was very easy and enjoyable for me. It helps I had a fantastic teacher to go along with the material—one of my best teachers, in fact. She was always encouraging everyone to be their best, and always made an effort to explain everything in as simple a manner as possible; her years of experience really shone through all throughout the year, and it became obvious to everyone that it would be impossible to fail her class so long as you showed up and paid attention. There’s really nothing else to say. I took an interest in every unit and went above and beyond in my enthusiasm for everything. I really wish I could relive some of the moments I felt while in that class.

Next came AP Government, the only AP class I ever took, thankfully. At the time I was really interested in politics and thought about majoring in political science after high school—foolish cogitations die in obscurity, for you’d rather forget they ever took place than acknowledge you were the proud owner of them. I found all the hype that surrounds AP classes, like everything else considered difficult by the masses, a complete and utter farce; I didn’t find in it a class that respected my intellect, but rather gave me more work than necessary, and examined every unit to the point of redundancy—in fact, it was all ‘preparation’ for the AP exam at the end of the year, which I ended up not even taking. I also found that the stereotypes around AP classes, to my dismay, totally true: dominated either by Asians (Chinese or Indian primarily), Jews, or pompous, almost certainly well-off Caucasians. It was a culture shock if I’m being honest.

AP classes are a breeding ground for shallow-minded people; almost every one of them is self-conscious of their ‘genius’, their own greatness, their own ‘staggering’ intellect, very proud of their high GPA and SAT scores—as if any of those things actually mattered, as if they alone were what gave a person value; it’s a completely revolting atmosphere to be in if you don’t have within you the capacity to look down on people, to think yourself above people, to place on a pedestal high grades and uncompromising labor for worthless ends. Most people who take them don’t actually enjoy them, but only do so to improve their college admissions. They’re all pampered, privileged nobodies who still believe in the myth that hard work alone will see them to the American dream; it’s as if every ambition in America lay under a curse which cannot be broken out of—a sacred myth that’s too big to fail; it surprises me too how these morons don’t realize they’re competing for a lie, a future that doesn’t exist, and yet they must believe in it nonetheless, lest their whole narrative come crashing down. They all ‘work’ hard but without meaning; they’re wretched creatures living like intellectual beasts of burden—academic oxen treading out pointless intellectual corn, which they throw up once the exams come, and which they must rechew like cud before putting it back down again, in order to regurgitate it once more come the final exam, and lastly to throw it all up in one final triumph after it is all over with.

I can’t express enough my contempt for these people: not only for their snobbery, insecurities, egos, and false senses of self-importance, but because they actually believe it; if their erroneous sense of superiority were merely a myth like Christianity, I could bear their stupidity and their need to believe in it for themselves; but they do everything in their power to make you dislike them—most of all in how they carry themselves: always conniving, scheming, malicious, mendacious, vindictive, envious, and grandiose in the extreme—and to disprove on first encounters with them everything they think regarding themselves; these people, these holier-than-thou devils and pseudointellectuals, are like the plague, which spreads and ravishes any honest attempt to enter into the temple of truth, for to them, truth is merely a concept meant to scourge and jeer at—they condemn what they do not understand, and it is precisely why they are so insufferable to be around, for every second they exist, they constantly think about how they could overthrow the person next to them, or attempt to justify why they’re superior to all who stand before them; again, it cannot be said enough, these mongoloids premise their self-worth on how well they can perform in school, and how industrious they are with their time, and how prepared they are to ace the exams, and then use their own achievements as a sort of self-evident mirror to hang in front of everyone but themselves, and proclaim themselves superior to all who are not them, unless another comes along who can top their ‘achievements’; a very childish conception of what self-worth is, what greatness is, what existence is—an utterly disturbing state of things, when the supposed smartest around are so stupid as to need the validation of others to feel comfortable in their own skin.

Another depressing fact is that there’s no arguing with them, for any attempt to get them to see the light simply ends with them reaffirming their own criteria of success, and then crying victory when they compare their (assumed to be superior) standards to your own. To them, life is merely a Gordian knot to be cut in one fell swoop, rather than actively and deliberately untied, slowly and painfully over many years. There’s no sense of rest or self-contentedness within them, no desire to see things from another perspective, no wish to see life from any other point of view than from their own narrow, stupid, self-important considerations; to them, everything is a battleground to compete in, and the one with the most accolades at the end wins; and, unfortunately, in America today, this conception is perfectly valid, even viewed as the consensus sapientium (agreement of the wise)—a more nauseating fact could not be conceived, especially when considered from the perspective of culture. It’s very interesting to see the world from that dog-eat-dog perspective; because what it represents, to me at least, is a dialectic of violence:—every social interaction is engaged from the standpoint of alternative perspectives, in which one is assumed to be objective, or more correct, or generally better in light of everything than the other; and implicit within each engagement and every said statement is an implicit superiority assumed between both parties that ends either in one party conceding, or both ending in mutual disagreement and disparagement. It is rhetoric in the modern world as such. Therefore, every narrative that is taken wholesale can automatically be assumed a lie, and everyone who buys it can safely be ruled a dunce or imbecile. In short, the type of atmosphere that is imbibed by everyone within an AP class—the snobbery and elevated sense of superiority and self-importance—could just as easily be analogized with the failings of the Democratic Party in the U.S. today: a group of pompous, pampered, privileged halfwits who are only concerned with maintaining their monopoly of power, and playing ingroup-outgroup identity politics, while the people they’re elected to serve continue to suffer.

Nothing gets done precisely because they are too far removed from the daily struggles of their constituents; and worse of all, they actively want to perpetuate that, not only because it fuels their vanity, but because they like the sense of power it gives them; they love being able to judge people by some supposed “objective” metric, and pointing out how much higher up along it they are compared to you; it’s a sick game—even evil in my view—and they deserve every defeat they’ve received this past decade by the hands of the populist Republicans; this is not to say Republicans are any better—in fact, in many ways they’re worse: but what I respect about Republicans more than Democrats (and is personally why I think they’ve dominated politics these last ten years) is that they’re very open with their intentions; they don’t try to hide their depravity—they’re fine with openly supporting policies that will destroy the lives of their constituents, but that honesty is precisely what makes them endearing to a lot of people; their lies are much more obvious than those of the Democrats, in fact they blatantly do so, in a way that only an infant could not see—but they speak to the problems that actually face many Americans, and they win because of it, and rightfully so. It’s a shame our system has become so openly corrupt, and so without consequences, that nearly anything goes, but it’s the reality we face today, and it must be addressed in a manner only a realist (or populist) could understand, rather than whatever bullshit the Democrats today are trying to manifest through the power of cultural appropriation. I see politics ending in two ways today: either in complete dissolution or in total Democratic victory—assuming the Democrats could return to their roots as a party for the betterment of every working-class person. Until then, the populist Republicans will continue to run roughshod over every norm, and more and more Americans will become accustomed to the increasingly totalitarian power grabs of our current president. Politics today is made more complicated than it has to be, but all this is for a later period.

I apologize for the long aside, but I’ve had that thought stored up inside me since I left high school. AP classes are bunk, and the students who inhabit them are nothing more than glorified OMR scanners (the machines that grade scantrons); perfect test takers and rule-abiders, but incapable independent thinkers and incomparably rude, arrogant, selfish, self-indulgent, intellectus megalomania personās (persons of intellectual megalomania).

After AP Government came lunch, my favorite period; not only because all my friends were there, but because it allowed me the peace and quiet necessary to get some work done, which I was constantly bombarded with. I should also like to reiterate the fact that I never once ate lunch while in school; throughout my whole time there, I did not consume a single morsel, nor drink the smallest draught of anything. I was very thankful for the friends I made during that lunch period too, three great individuals whom I’ve not spoken to in many years, but who still retain a firm place in my heart and mind.

My next period was Environmental Science. I enjoyed it for the most part, for the work was easy, and I took a liking to the teacher, even if she was rude, abrupt, and annoying at times; she had fire in her, which I couldn’t say the same for my other teachers, and she was very fast-paced, which made it that much easier to follow. I’ve always found teachers who teach quickly more comprehensible when the subject is one I’ve already studied myself, than when they draw everything out and waste time by repeating nothing for nothing’s sake.

Seventh period was Gym for the first half (up until after Christmas break) of my senior year, while Economics was the other. Gym was enjoyable, and I was happy to make a few friends in it. Economics was equally good; I had a stupendous teacher who showed an immense facility with all the material, and had a way of explaining everything in a manner that was as simple as possible, yet never brushing over the more complex aspects behind a concept. That seems to be the one commonality all good teachers have: the capacity to explain complexity without diminishing the true depth of the idea; in other words, to reveal the true essence behind every concept without changing the concept into something it’s not by simplifying it. As it turned out, Economics would become my favorite class, not only because of the material itself, but because, as a subject, it seemed to have touched on every issue I thought important in the world, and I liked the fact that it incorporated various other disciplines under its purview—mathematics, sociology, philosophy, politics, history, and even psychology. Economics is a discipline within a discipline, and it analyzes the dynamics of social interactions not only through the lens of scarce resources, but through game theory, consumer preference, the market, advertisement, public policy—in short, through the bureaucratization of modern civil society. I find within all this an endless sea of introspection and psychoanalysis to be had, for truly there is no subject closer to the problems of modernity than a serious engagement with Economics; even Economics itself is not without controversy, considering all the various schools of thought that have sprung up from it, and all the philosophical underpinnings behind every supposedly wise economist’s conclusions about things. I find it a subject where philosophy and reality collide: where the is of the external world is brought under control by a person’s oughts about how that external world should be organized. It is endlessly fascinating.

Alas, I reach the final class from my senior year schedule: Physical Science. It was a subject for freshmen, but they put me in it in order to make up for a science credit I was lacking. It was a small class, but that made it that much more enjoyable. Every concept I was already familiar with, and rightfully finished with a 100 as my final grade. My teacher was awesome—very lively, kind, understanding, interesting, and, I thought, beautiful. Luckily for me, I could admire her as much as I wished, for nothing she taught was foreign to me, and nothing held my attention but her. Her classroom was situated not far from the buses, and so I ended each day with a nice stroll through the halls before exiting from where I came in a few hours prior.

My senior year (barring COVID) was the definition of regular. Nothing came up which stopped my regularity, which prevented me from completing my business, which in any way made me falter or seem unsure. The totality of my senior experience was serene and idyllic. All throughout my primary and secondary education, I was told that senior year of high school would be the best year of your school experience: how right those people were. Never before or since have I enjoyed any systematic habit of being which brought forth such great fruits of pleasure and mirth. I think I can look back on those seven months (from August 2019 to March 2020) as perhaps the happiest period in all my life, particularly between the months of November and December. It was as if I was living a dream, truly. I felt above the world, merely looking down from my noble vantage point. Everything felt as if it was meant to be, as if all was for the good, as if my happiness were written into the fabric of reality itself. Oh, all those moments, those little innocuous moments, which even while living them I was appreciative of—of walking the halls, of listening to music while I walked, of not having a care in the world or concern for my future, doing well in all my classes, having a great social life, laughing with all my friends, meeting many new faces, being kind to everyone, liking all my teachers, enjoying every lesson… even exam season, and all the stress that comes associated with that, had a certain charm to it now thinking back on it. It was the grand finale which was actually grand. All seemed well, and it was looking like I would end the year walking home from my bus stop in great triumph. This was not to be had, however, for fate had other plans with the world.

I still remember the 12th of March like it was yesterday—the last day I would ever step foot in school (or any educational building for that matter). Everyone around me was in a better mood than usual, for we had off the 13th, and so everyone treated it like a Friday. I myself was in a particularly jovial mood, and I distinctly remember laughing at something—which I can’t remember what—with my friends Ben and Matt at the end of first period. The day was chalking up to be a better-than-average Thursday, and I was really looking forward to the three-day weekend. Before this date, COVID to me was just another viral infection, something akin to the flu season, and nothing particular to worry about. I had already heard of its virality in China, and how quickly it had spread across all of Europe—especially in Italy—but it never struck me that it would become something to worry about in America.

I first became aware of it sometime in early January, but I paid it no mind seriously until the 31st of January. All throughout February, there were rumbles and rumors about someone coming to school infected with it, but nothing proved conclusive. It didn’t strike me as something serious until the 3rd of March, when my mom (who worked in a hospital) told me she saw one too many old people sick with COVID-like symptoms to continue working there. Going to school in that first week of March felt surreal; again, I wasn’t worried, but something in the back of my mind told me there would be a lockdown soon—I knew it in my gut, but didn’t reflect that idea outwardly; I assumed things would continue as normal. As it happened, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID a pandemic on the 11th of March, and Trump declared it a nationwide emergency two days later; from that point on, all schools nationwide were shut down, and everyone would have to continue via online learning. I was informed of this by an email my school had sent to everyone sometime around 2 PM on the 13th. I was distraught, annoyed, angry even. There I was, enjoying life with my friends, loving every aspect of school, and never wanting it to end—all to be shot down by some stupid virus.

Online learning was the worst. At this time, I was already teaching myself a variety of subjects via YouTube (mainly math), and now found myself forced to do assignments and exams, in that same manner, that did not pertain to my interest: it really showed me the futility of traditional education, because it revealed to me the fact that self-directed learning and independent approaches to information far excel any pedagogical nonsense conjured up by the school board or used by teachers. Everyone effectively cheated, and in that sense no learning was done, and no lasting positive impression was had on anyone by it. All online learning did was effectively force people to learn from home on their own, without the guidance and necessary human connection that a teacher provides. It’s the best system for an autodidact like myself—a man who thoroughly enjoys learning new things at his own pace—but it’s destructive and utterly worthless to someone who already views school as a burden, a waste of time, and pointless to their future success or development. If school was already easy for me at the time, bringing it online turned it into a complete joke—at that point, why bother learning at all.

COVID took from me all the social interactions, all the pleasant experiences with friends, I had while in school—experiences which made me love school as a result—and replaced it with nothing: I had only myself, a mode of being I was quite accustomed to, but which I dreaded going back to, for I preferred my laughter with friends, and my walking to and from classes, instead of waking and doing everything in my bedroom. Going to school felt fun for me; it was enjoyable to get out of the house, to see my friends, to rejoice in their presence, to share my thoughts with them, to hear their plans for the day—all that which I cherished was now no more, and I was left with a void instead. For two months I slogged through, growing more and more annoyed as the days passed by. Finally came the day when all was finished. My last day of senior year was technically the 29th of May (for that was the day grades had to be finalized), but having taken all my finals and finishing whatever assignments were left a week early, my last day of actual schoolwork was the 23rd of May, 2020. After that, I was officially finished with high school, and was now left to confront the world after school: the real world, the world of responsibilities and difficult decisions that no amount of schooling could have prepared me for. I was now, in both respects, the freest and non-freest man alive—for I had the world before me, and could do anything in it I so pleased, but was paralyzed by the thought of actually doing something within it, of making something of myself in it, of creating my own life, my own self, from all I’ve experienced up to that point. It was here at once that I seriously considered life from an existentialist’s perspective; and has been, more or less, the mountain I’ve been climbing these past five years—of which this work before you is the end result of all that searching.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life after high school. I never considered that question with the seriousness and maturity that it really deserved. I knew, at this point in my life, that college was out of the question. Not only was it too expensive, even after financial aid, but it didn’t strike me as interesting or important. I also knew that there was nothing I could major in which I couldn’t teach myself had I so wished—literally nothing intellectually was beyond me; in fact, I am beyond most of it, beyond the world of academia in fact! I knew, ever since I was a child, that I didn’t want to live life merely for the sake of building a good career for myself. I never wanted what most people were selling me. I never wanted a career. I never wanted children. I never wanted a big house. And I never wanted to be free from adversity or worry. I always viewed existence as a one-time miracle, and that any experience within it (existence as such) that does not further the goal of the individual was ultimately worthless and not worth pursuing. I even go as far as to reject outright every common, so-called practical, reason that one would offer in objection to this reckless way of conceiving existence. Who is to be judge? And who is to be critic? Why do you consider reckless that which you’ve never tried yourself? What is there to fear in all that society deems tragic—poverty, homelessness, starvation, privation, misery, sickness, anxiety, and even death itself? Why does the herd consider these things bad, but consider praiseworthy and good: wealth, status, extravagance, decadence, and freedom from want and penury? All these things signify is simply the inability of the common man to think outside of his material substructure. Man worships money for no other reason than he believes money will free him from all his other worries—in that sense, the common man echoes Schopenhauer’s dictum that:

Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete sets his whole heart on money. —Psychological Observations.

And elsewhere said,

When we consider how full of needs the human race is, how its whole existence is based upon them, it is not a matter for surprise that wealth is held in more sincere esteem, nay, in greater honor, than anything else in the world; nor ought we to wonder that gain is made the only good of life, and everything that does not lead to it pushed aside or thrown overboard—philosophy, for instance, by those who profess it. People are often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or manifold desires may for the moment fix upon. Everything else can satisfy only one wish, one need: food is good only if you are hungry; wine, if you are able to enjoy it; drugs, if you are sick; fur for the winter; love for youth, and so on. These are all only relatively good, ἀγαθὰ πρὸς τί (agathà pròs tí) [good things relative to something]. Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all. —The Wisdom of Life, Chapter III: Property, or What a Man Has.

I could not have put it better myself even if I spent my whole lifetime thinking upon it. What Schopenhauer identifies was and still is the modus operandi of every wretched person walking today: they cannot see or think outside of their immediate demands, demands which capture their whole existence, and which make them subject to the whims of their times; everyone sets upon their existence with the main objective of being free from the need to labor for their own subsistence; if it meant destroying the lives of other people across the world, so long as by the end of it they were rich, they wouldn’t hesitate to immiserate millions upon millions for it. Everyone lives life with the hope that one day they no longer have to put aside eight hours merely to continue to exist; today this exact kind of life is the lived reality for the majority of mankind, and yet how few consider their cries and miseries, how deaf are those at the top to everyone else’s needless misery. This, however, touches on a much broader systemic, historical, sociopolitical issue, which I will go into a bit later.

To reiterate, I never wanted to exist merely to have a successful portfolio, a happy family, and a handful of kids. Again, these are abstractions, goods which are considered so without question thanks to socialization and downstream effects of our broader culture; they’re historical accidents, if anything, and woe to the man (like myself) who does not adopt these foolish ideals wholesale, because he’s constructed (mentally) in a way to see past the lie which seemingly everyone else has bought that is implicit within them. It’s too simple to assume that everything America pushes on a person to pursue will ultimately work in the end. We live in a society that promotes the impossible, and gets people to believe in it anyway by rising to the top all the outliers—most of whom were already born into immense privilege, and had every opportunity available to them to ‘succeed’ in the American sense of that term; such a foolish definition we Americans give success: a know-nothing who’s managed to make a lot of money but who contributes nothing to society overall; we even go as far as to assume that billionaires are the smartest people in our society—what ignorance, what audacity, what disrespect to everything good and true. You couldn’t picture a more idiotic country, obsessed with wealth and power, more than America: we’re conscious of it too, in fact, and take it as a compliment to be called headstrong, steadfast, industrious, and constantly working—as if work itself were the greatest virtue conceivable. None of this has been true for me. Never has been. Never will be.

Knowing all this and then some by the time I graduated, I really found myself in a pickle. I knew whatever was on offer by society at large was bankrupt and without true meaning, and therefore not worth pursuing. I also knew I had to do something, though, for I found the game of life too interesting to cut it short. I didn’t wish to give up right there, still with a large portion of my life ahead of me: “Who knows what’s out there to experience,” I said to myself not a week after finishing school. The world at present is organized in a way contrary to our wellbeing, but that is not reason to assume reality has to be viewed as hopeless as a result. I wanted to embrace life nonetheless, in spite of all the vanity I saw within every typical narrative for existence. I wanted to live, but not feel enslaved to my existence as such. I had to overcome and devise for myself a method to deal with reality’s madness, but how would I do this? This singular question became, without me realizing it at the time, the sole focus which my entire life would go around from that point to the very present.

Again, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with all this freedom I suddenly had available to me, and so, I did what every child does when confronted by a situation they must get through, but which they have not encountered before: I pursued my immediate interest. I did whatever my mind was focused on in the moment. I studied endlessly. I wanted to have a total knowledge of everything in the world because I assumed, I now think stupidly, that to have a full knowledge of all would make anxiety and worry impossible, for you already know everything that is to result. I once said, “I want to learn all that is in the world before entering into it.” Oh, how foolish I was, how materialistic I was, how enslaved I was to my then present conditions, unable to see any other path but through as the one answer I needed; my life was action, and action towards a goal was the objective—the goal of knowing all, of mastering every discipline, of being capable in all fields, and conversant with all complexities of reality. The problem I later found was none of these ideals served my life; they merely allowed me a justification to avoid analyzing the deeper existential problem that lay at the heart of my existence.

It was all intellectual window-dressing; it wasn’t a serious attempt to approach existence as it really is; rather, it was a way to continue existing while feeling like I was actually doing something with my life, when I really wasn’t. That something, however, is beyond deep, and defies all attempts to categorize it—in fact, you cannot categorize it, for, at its core, is the infinite aspect of conceptualization as such; every movement, idea, desire, and action stems from the individual will, and is inherently subjective, undefinable, and never to be captured in language. The best one can muster is a half-truth, a lie even, a narrative that offers the mind enough satiety to no longer worry about it; but this too is a lie: the essence of existence is precisely the ungraspable; the reasons we tell ourselves are merely the stories of justification after the fact. We can never know ourselves as such—as things-in-themselves, beings whose totality is comprised in our being as experienced. That is why the only affirmation of existence is that which says being as such is being as experienced. No occupation, career, family, or pleasant sensation could ever outweigh the immense and glorious whole that is our existence as we live it every second; being is our reality, and reality is our being—what we experience is the whole objective truth as such: to think otherwise is to affirm a lie, a false narrative, a false existence—a very weak and mawkish essence that is not worthy of the title human! You are human and superhuman! From cell to spirit, you are an immense force with uncountable divinities within you; relegate life not to a few spheres, but rather to the whole of it, as lived in life as such and through such. Think for yourself, and come to your own conclusions about everything in the world; that is all one can do, especially when the supposed “necessities” of life appear to you like feeble choices, as they have to me.

At the end of high school, I chose a path of deliberate self-examination. What I wanted to do was explore and examine, think and consider, reflect and object—wherever I saw life in any way denied or denigrated! I wanted my own path to see where this ambition would take me, and not feel any fear that would arise should the situation appear dire or desperate. Nothing but yes-saying was, from that point forward, to be what I would follow for my life. Everything else I considered vain, a distraction, not really important, and ultimately meaningless. God bless myself for that, for I never wavered from it, and conquered existence because of it.

From the first day I was free from the burden of schoolwork, I ventured deep into the study of mathematics (for reasons stated earlier) while at the same time playing video games whenever I felt myself becoming bored or overworked. It was a beautiful cycle of crop rotation I was following—busying myself one moment, in complete leisure the next. The days were passing along in the most pleasant fashion imaginable, and I think with envy how free I was during that period of my life, but also very grateful I’m no longer as ignorant as I was then.

About a month after graduating, my cousin asked me for help; the end of his senior year was rapidly approaching, and he found himself in a hole with regard to his work. It was 10 AM on June 18th when he texted me. I had nothing else to do, and I considered it a good opportunity to help him out, especially since he needed it. We worked nonstop for thirteen hours, from 10 AM to 11 PM. Luckily, none of it was tests or quizzes but rather scut work, busy work, nonsense writing assignments in Biology, Economics, History, and, I think, English. I was so relieved at the end of it, and you could imagine his joy having completed nearly a month of late work in a day. He ended up passing as a result, and I felt extremely proud to be a part of that. I remember telling my mom before getting the mail that day how much we worked, and her eyes bulged out of her head almost. I laughed so hard seeing the shock on her face. “He better be thankful!” she said in a loud voice. “Oh, he is, trust me,” I replied, knowing how close he came to failing. It was a lot more dramatic than it should have been, but that’s how it played out anyway. It wasn’t a good time per se, but it was really interesting, and certainly a moment I will remember as long as I live.

After that rather dramatic day, I continued on as I was before: studying math, playing video games when I got bored, watching YouTube videos while I ate dinner, texting my friends occasionally (for I still kept in touch with them then), and just living life after the manner I thought best. My objective each day was to get out of life as much as I possibly could; every minute, I sought the answer to some mathematical question; I occupied my time wholly with math, for that was the subject that applies to everything, or so I thought. It was really enjoyable to wake up each day and study what was dearest to my heart. That was my life—one of solitary study and complete absorption in ideas and the world about them.

I was under the assumption that my diploma would be mailed to me, but as it turned out, my school ended up hosting a graduation ceremony in spite of COVID restrictions, on the 30th of July, 2020, nearly two months late (the initial ceremony was supposed to be on the 8th of June). I went there half dead, for I was up the whole night before studying and talking to my cousin Rich; in fact, I didn’t even want to go, but my parents insisted that I get on stage and receive that worthless piece of paper. When I got to the place with my parents, it was jam-packed. I was shocked to see so many people disregard their health for the sake of seeing something so trivial. I spent about fifteen minutes walking aimlessly trying to find the entrance to the large auditorium. I felt so out of place, surrounded by so many morons—pompous, vain, fun-seeking, self-indulgent children; most human beings are like that, in fact: wanting only immediate pleasure, doing things they perceive as a good time without recourse to the consequences, rather than acting their age and viewing the world with a more mature, honest, pessimistic lens; that’s why I’ve always found crowds insufferable: the fact enough people exist in a single place for that to be even an occurrence has always been proof enough for me that mankind is wickedly stupid, and every individual deserves, in some real sense, every misery life inflicts upon them for thinking such a thing is good—congregating in public like that among other selfish people, utterly disgusting.

When I finally entered that redundantly large room, a teacher of mine, who was one of the organizers, got up and told me my seat number: I sat in section 18A3, that is, the 18th row, third seat from the center walking lane from the left. I just remember sitting there and thinking this was all for show—stupid show—to make us all feel proud. Proud of what, though… what accomplishments have I, (at this time) an eighteen-year-old with a 3.5 GPA, done that’s so worthy of celebration; what have I done to really be proud of? While I enjoyed my senior year immensely, and did extremely well, I never looked upon it as a great achievement or something to celebrate; in fact, all my life I hated celebrations, because I saw them as a deliberate excuse to be vain and pompous, to be self-indulgent in your own vanity, to have fun when no fun is to be had in life. I don’t want a fun life—I don’t want anything in life to be fun or enjoyable, in fact: all I ever wanted was a quiet existence outside of the crowds, away from everybody that wasn’t myself; even then, I saw all these celebrations for what they really were—vain attempts to forget the true miseries that lay behind every preparation for them. I’ve always been able to see through bullshit, through narratives that were false, not my own, not in line with my own goals or objectives—all is folly except that which empowers the individual soul: let all else crumble and decay into a billion pieces!

As I sat there hearing my valedictorian give her sesquipedalian (wordy, overly long, prolix, redundant) speech—speaking about what she would be doing afterwards with her life, and what school she hoped to attend (she said Georgia Tech—as I expected, status-seeking and in desire for a good career afterwards)—I just remember grinning, grinning as if possessed by a demon, utterly lost in the humor and irony of the entire situation; like a true manic nihilistic pessimist, I had to physically restrain myself from laughing and bursting out into tears of utter contempt: for someone so ‘smart’, you would think she of all people would know how little these trivial events really play in the grand scheme of things. How humble you should be before existence, instead of proud that you accomplished something anyone else could have done had they so wished but chose not to.

That’s always what I hated most about my fellow intellectuals—nay, to call them such is an insult to the word; they’re rather hardworking scholastic sympathizers, good in school, deficient everywhere else—they always found their ‘success’ reasonable enough justification to look down on everyone else, everyone who didn’t live up to their arbitrary standards of success; they have such contempt for everyone that isn’t their own person. My contempt comes from a place of my own self-worth—out of my own heart and mind, where I constructed for myself my own principles of existence, my own wisdom for life—while these people (if they could even be called that), who I speak of with such venom, do so because they judge everyone by their standards; their hatred for others is not real, it’s artificial: it’s not out of a sense of their own worth, but out of the need to gratify their desire for being worth anything at all; they want the validation of others more than their own self-validation, and so, when people rightfully ignore them, because they’re such insufferable people, they place themselves above everyone else through a show of how much better they are than you academically. I’ve seen it again and again, and it is the most asinine and immature thing you could possibly witness; to think children today are so taken up with the concept of competition that they think themselves worthy of comparison with those cretins, those false scholars, those academic cosplayers, those vacuous philosophasters, those total ultracrepidarians—in fact they are far above them, so far in fact that everyone else is beneath notice, like a worm in the dirt compared to a marble statue in the clouds. I despise them all passionately, for I understand them completely—I was once one! No more. Now, I view them in the same way I view a bug: with admiration at a distance, and if they get too close, I smash them (figuratively speaking) to bits.

After I received my diploma, I turned my tassel along with everyone else. I was just happy the event was over, and that I no longer had to be surrounded by so many aimless, mindless creatures. As soon as I got home, I remember taking off my gown and falling into a deep sleep. The next thing I know, it’s 8 PM, and my dad is texting me; he just brought home Chinese food—that’s what I wanted after all. I ate it with pleasure, took a shower, and returned to my peaceful slumber. I slept like a baby, and I wished I almost never woke up after that; it would’ve been a perfect end to my life, I think. Sadly, my perfect ending would be thwarted by my vitality, and I thus labored on afterwards to my dismay.

High school was officially over for me, and I still had no intention of doing anything educationally afterwards. Thus, from that July day onwards I more or less lived the same day every day—wake up, study math, play games, talk with cousin, sleep, repeat; it was a good life, but unfortunately I knew it was one I couldn’t keep up indefinitely. This realization saddened me immensely, so much so that on the 8th of August, 2020—feeling I’d exhausted my love for math, and wanting to try something new in life—I took up exercise as an alternative to gaming, specifically jogging, and found it immensely beneficial. I hated it at first, and even fainted on the first day, but about three months in, I became accustomed to all the strain, and have worked out consistently every week ever since.

Fast forward to December, and my mom is pressuring me nearly every day to register for college. I kept telling her I had no desire, but she was insistent. By this point, I had applied to various state colleges and was accepted by all of them, but I hated with every fiber of my being the thought of paying for a worthless education—an education I could’ve given myself for no cost at all. Colleges today are credential mills, where people pay beyond what their education is truly worth for the sake of obtaining a piece of paper they hope will give them a competitive advantage when looking for a job afterwards—as if education was merely done for the sake of a career; again, completely and utterly absurd, and is a direct affront to everything I personally value about education. Colleges should not cost money; they’re not a business and should not be run as one; to extract student loan payments for a service which is meant to be a public good, and which is already publicly subsidized at the primary and secondary levels, should be proof enough that the way the system is currently set up needs a complete overhaul.

Education is not about money, or a job, or a career—it’s about developing an individual by introducing them to great ideas which they can then use in formulating their own happy existence; let it be about providing the means for a person to fulfill their particular end in mind, whatever it may be, rather than make the entry into that potential good life too high for them to afford. It’s always shocked me that the people who are quick to say we need to improve education in America are the same ones who actively oppose every measure that could bring that about, for reasons they could never specify with detail, but always end up saying it either costs too much or the state simply lacks the funds to bring it about—same old song and dance, nothing but pure bullshit. They don’t want change, and are not interested in rhetoric that argues for change. It’s a big club, and the public at large ain’t in it. Such is why these problems will remain perennial until we change American culture at large, until we change the incentives and ideas around the role government is to play within the lives of its citizens. It’s an uphill battle, however, for America is not a collectivist country—we’re primarily egoistic—and the idea that the government would help those in need, if the majority don’t actually use or benefit from that service (yet they pay for it), is completely anathema to everyone; even if that generosity was scientifically proven to benefit society as a whole, Americans would rise up before having their taxes put to the public good. That’s actually another really sad fact, however: Americans are so disunited on political ideals, and so distracted, and so used to an existence of quiet desperation, that any idea of real revolution—true and lasting change—is practically unthinkable. There will never be another civil war in America, let alone a revolution. Why? Just turn on Netflix, just go on Amazon, just doom-scroll TikTok, just find a video on YouTube. Distraction is endless and relentless, and our culture is fractured and scattered between differing sects of influence and objectives, none of which are focused on the common good overall. It is a very sad state of existence indeed, but more on this later.

Eventually, I started looking around for the cheapest college closest to me, and found that Lanier Technical College fit the bill. And so I applied, was accepted, and had my mom register me for financial aid. And so it was. I registered for classes on the 29th of December, 2020, and would begin the summer semester five months later on Monday, May 24th, 2021—exactly one year and one day after finishing high school. Within those five months, I studied math relentlessly, and worked out all the while, half dreading and half welcoming this new chapter of my life. My first day was nerve-racking as one would expect, but after a few hours, I calmed myself at the prospect of completing an associate’s degree in applied science (majoring in accounting), and by the end of the first week, I knew I had it in me to go all the way. If one would like more detail of my college experience (for I skip over most of it here for the sake of time), I urge them to read my essay titled The Taxonomy of Intellect, where I go into extreme detail on every semester I took, along with a few other ancillary, autobiographical details. To make a very long story short, I acquired all the sixty-four credits I needed to obtain my associate’s in exactly 709 days—I started May 24th, 2021, and finished May 3rd, 2023. I received my certificate via mail on my 21st birthday, June 29th, 2023—which I took as an ironic synchronicity: as if the universe was mocking me, telling me I’m now officially without excuse, and now must really enter the active sphere of life. But, like the good scholar I am, I chose to ignore this feeling, and gave myself back up to study: not unlike what I did after finishing high school, but this time instead of studying math intensely, I studied literature and philosophy with a deep passion and contemplation never before seen in the history of the world.

Not knowing what I really wanted to do with my life was coming back to haunt me. Again was this devilish phantom returning to torment me once more. Throughout all those years, I was seemingly always living in its shadow, for, in a sense, its shadow overlapped perfectly with my own. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but it’s absolutely true: between finishing high school and college, I still hadn’t figured out a good path by which to choose in life, for, again, I didn’t know where to start with respect to it—where is existence to begin, and where is it to end; for reasons already mentioned, the traditional approach was something I had no desire for, and every other option seemed more work than it was worth the bother for. Like Herbert Spencer before me, I think I can say along with him, “I don’t mean to get on. I don’t think getting on is worth the bother.” I don’t find poverty, like everyone else in America, a thing to be ashamed of or to worry about; in fact, I welcome every financial and material hardship conceivable, so long as, in the process of enduring it, I can keep hold of my principles, values, and things I cherish most in life: I would rather die a beggar while holding onto my values, than adopt a different set of values contrary to my own if that new adoption meant I could live a more comfortable life. I couldn’t care less about comfort, and I don’t care about making a living, because I don’t see life as worth continuing if it means the majority of it is spent in sacrificing what I find worth living for. That is precisely why I find work fundamentally—metaphysically even—evil, for it’s the complete antithesis to what I value in existence, and like an evangelical Christian, I’d rather die than not believe in Jesus Christ.

Why do you think I sympathize so much with irrationalism, and why I despise those who reason ‘rightly’ on life? Because I live in a world in which my very existence is seen by others as worthless, all because I refuse to adopt what they (the herd) have taken wholesale for their primary value: money! and all who refuse to think through the lens of money are materially doomed. Well, if that’s the case, I think I can say without hesitation, fuck your money. I’m too principled, too headstrong, too willfully arrogant, to have what society thinks as good change my perspective regarding what I hold sacred for my existence! My values are too robust, ample, malleable, adaptable, strong—omnipotent even—to falter in the presence of eight billion contrary opinions. There aren’t enough people on Earth to sway my fundamental values: like Zeus, I control the golden chain of being, and if I so wish, I’ll pull all of creation up to Olympus, and if needs be toss it all down to Hades; it makes no difference to me either way.

I almost feel like Spinoza when he claimed that all is one fundamental substance, and from that necessarily follows an inevitable determinism; there’s a certain freedom in thinking what you think only for yourself, without the need to justify it to others, that stands far above all else; I truly feel determined to be this way, and to say, “you must change,” is fundamentally impossible; relief washes over me as I reflect on that—my nature is determined, and thank God I have no other way to be, for I wouldn’t wish to be any other way than I am. It’s a life not for the faint of heart. Indeed, it is impossible for most, but I am not most; I am not part of the herd, with their weak, emasculating, life-denying values; I am beyond them, though not yet an Übermensch; I only wish to be a progression of sorts towards the Übermensch, for it will surely come, though it tarries. Nietzsche rightly said that men of today must make way for the Übermensch: the Übermensch is not an ideal to achieve in reality, but an impossible ideal to work towards nonetheless, only possible through suffering and overcoming—immense overcoming, in fact, Gesamt-Selbstüberwindung (Total Self-Overcoming). That is really my main ideal, to be one with my essence enough to overcome all that opposes my other ideals, my goals, my desires—in short, my POWER! Everything short of this is folly!!! and to be considered worthless and beneath notice, as if it were a parasite. But this is all self-talk, not germane to the topic at hand.

From July to December of 2023, I mainly studied philosophy, read literature, and investigated various religions (primarily Christianity and Islam) very closely. At this time, I probably would have described myself as a mystic, one seeking esoteric knowledge—one who believed that in the ancient mysteries (perennial philosophies) there contains a sort of hidden wisdom for life which, once comprehended, would give you all the answers you would need to finally live life. Alas, all my searching was without success, for it wasn’t ancient wisdom that I needed, but the capacity to create my own—a way of manufacturing confidence in the abstract so that it may be used in the concrete, external world, where the herd survives and thrives, all on deceit and foolish competition. I needed a way to rid myself of this horrible burden: the burden of not feeling ready to venture into the world due to anxiety about what is contained within the world. As an intellectual, it’s tempting to sit in place and meditate until a solution finally hits you, but life is so vast and multifaceted that you can consider it all your life and never actually make a decision or take action within it. The sad truth is you cannot intellectualize life completely, and no man, no matter how genius he is, could ever capture the totality of existence, for its very essence is bound in the incomprehensible as such. To think you’ve grasped life is to simplify it to the point of mockery, and yet everyone alive today seemingly does exactly that—not wanting to actually question the values they are inculcated with, but rather accept them because everyone else has. What modernity wants out of man is a kind of debasing mundanity, which strips the life out of life, and makes him less human and more instinctual beast—with no concept of the universals: time, space, causality, beauty, love, passion, etc., but rather only concerning himself with whatever is in his immediate experience. This is the sword of Damocles which hangs over every human today, and it will never be overcome until man changes his conception of what values are and should be: in a sense, Nietzsche was right all along, mutatio valōrum necesse est (A change of values is necessary). A transvaluation of all values is here needed, lest humanity as a whole succumb to a slow, wretched, painful self-decay.

At the start of 2024, I asked myself what is to be done yet again. I decided upon literature: reading, reading, and more reading—for maybe in the words of great authors I would find something which, upon reading, would cause me to toss aside the book, and all books afterwards, and start finally living life in a traditional manner, rather than this bohemian, intellectual megalomania. This decision, fortunately for me, coincided with a suggestion by my cousin, Jonathan, which consumed me for the next eight months; he thought it would be great if I were to write a dialogue between us two after the manner of Dante’s Divine Comedy; I liked the idea so much I prepared for it by reading over three hundred books within the span of about seven months. From January 24th (when he first suggested the idea to me) till the 17th of August, I did nothing else but read and exercise. I read everything in every genre. Studied everything in every discipline. Became as one with everything as someone in my position could have. I may not have read, or become as erudite as Grotius, Leibniz, or Emerson, but I read more than enough to feel prepared to undertake this writing. I began writing it on the 18th of August. In the interim of writing it—I think most would find this interesting—I actually flew to New York to attend the wedding of my cousin Jonathan’s brother, Patrick. It was the first time I stepped foot in New York since moving six years prior. I finished writing the dialogue on the 2nd of September, at 7:20 AM, in the house of my cousin Rich. It could not have been more perfect. I fell asleep right after that and awoke some five hours later to prepare for the final wedding party; with those five hours of sleep in me, I managed to dance a good bit and enjoyed myself as much as I could. After coming back to Georgia from all that fun on the 3rd of September, I edited the entire piece and typed out the manuscript. It was officially completed on the 8th of October. That great work of mine, to which I dedicated two-thirds of the entire year, was now done.

The same vexing question, however, came back to me: what are you to do now? You see, dear reader, how this question always returns no matter what intellectual labor I undertook to avoid thinking about it. I hope by now you understand what I meant when I said at the very beginning that my life is seemingly one preoccupation after another, all for the sake of ignoring the true questions of existence. In a sense, this work is just another example of that, but, unfortunately for me, it truly is the last intellectual labor—the truly last valid excuse—I have to avoid existence: for after this work, there is nothing left in existence for me to avoid or think about… the rest is merely supplementary, a commentary on a commentary on a commentary.

So what did I do after finishing the dialogue? I started a work I would later abandon titled An Anthology of Adages, which is exactly what it sounds like—a compilation of the great quotes I collected from all my reading from the previous eight months, organized after the manner of Samuel Johnson’s English Dictionary. I found such a task too demanding, however, and the concept made moot by the ease with which people today could look up any quote they want on the internet; it was, however, very interesting going through all that material, and very beneficial, I found afterwards, for my writing as a whole. By the 20th of October, I was so fed up with reading—finally! I had become disgusted at the sight of words which were not my own—that I decided to start my Substack on the 21st, and uploaded my first post on the 23rd. If you want more detail on this particular phase, again, I refer to my essay The Taxonomy of Intellect, but to avoid rehashing all that tedium, I’ll only say this: starting my Substack was one of the best decisions of my life. From my first post till the end of 2024, all I did was write for my publication. My 2024 New Year’s Eve was the most mundane and innocuous of all my previous ones, which is precisely why I loved it so much: both my parents were sound asleep as the ball dropped, and I was on Substack uploading my collected poems and aphorisms from the year. I couldn’t have asked for a better New Year’s.

And now, dear reader, we have finally reached the start of the year which I write all this in, 2025. The start of 2025 was rather depressing. I was in a somber, contemplative mood and fell into a deep obsession with the philosopher Schopenhauer, probably because his ideas resonated with me most at the time. For the first three weeks of January, I read nothing but Schopenhauer and Plato. I wanted my prose to resemble theirs as much as possible: I wanted their clarity, conciseness, elegance, power, and immense readability even when prolix. That, undoubtedly, was the most formative and important experience for myself as a writer—for, pretty much ever since then, I have maintained my consistently clear expositional style and have never second-guessed myself with regards to anything I wrote—every word I now write, wallahi, is chosen deliberately and is not to be touched by future editors of my works even if they want to. During the month of February, I was honing my craft as a writer, becoming more concise, brief, elegant, to the point, and very simple (which is never a bad thing per se).

Feeling I’ve taken my writing prowess in English as far as I could, I decided on the 6th of March to take up the study of Latin; not only because Schopenhauer recommended it (specifically if you wish to be a better writer), but I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to study a language—learning a language is really the last intellectual summit I have yet to reach the top of. For three months nearly every day, I studied it as best I could and became familiar with all the complexities of its grammar, syntax, and parts of speech. If you studied Latin seriously, there’s almost no language on Earth you cannot master the grammar of within a short amount of time afterwards, for Latin grammar is beyond the pale, and anyone who has actually managed to pierce that impenetrable veil is rewarded with the capacity to appreciate any lexical complexity thrown at you. The chief difficulty in studying a new language is being able to recall the word for which, in your native language, you already have a concept, but which, in the new language, you fail to recollect, which makes everything in that new tongue seem foggy and obscure, not because it’s an inherently different concept, but that it’s signified by a different sound and is placed within (depending on the language) a very similar or different grammatical substructure. There’s nothing inherently difficult about a language aside from its grammar, for grammar, like bookkeeping, is essentially a compilation of rules that are fundamentally arbitrary, but which are given authority by the fact that that’s simply how they’re used—languages are very pragmatic in that sense; notice how no one bats an eye at their native tongue’s complexities, for they’re already used to every situation that shows up and every exception to the rule—so much so that they even think in it: what a perplexity to anyone who is not a native to that language. It shocks me whenever I hear my mom, whose native tongue is Spanish, speak with her mother; the speed by which she can switch between both linguistic modalities is mesmerizing for a lowly monolingual like myself. I know, however, that one day I will speak with as much fluency as she in Spanish; it is my destiny. As one could probably see, I have a great interest in languages and all the culture that stems from them. I wish I could learn them all, but for now, I think I’ll limit myself to only the Romance and Germanic language families.

It was around my 23rd birthday that I found studying Latin to be more of a burden than a joy, and so I stopped abruptly. On my birthday, I wrote an eight-thousand-word confession to a dear friend of mine; they asked me what it was like to be a year older, and I ended up giving them a retrospective rundown of what had been my entire life up to that point, not unlike what I’m doing now. I told them how I wished to enter into the ‘real’ world, but felt hesitant because of my love for the intellectual, contemplative sphere of life:—in short, I was still attached to a life I no longer wanted to make my entire existence as such; not only because I knew its impracticality, but because I had grown tired of everything associated with it—study, reading, writing, reflecting on the world but taking no action within it: all these things and then some had spoiled for me, and I wanted nothing to do with them any longer—or, at least until I actually became something within the world of the herd. It was a very hard pill for me to swallow, but I suppose every twentysomething goes through this exact doubt; I only felt my own pain more severely because I had intellectualized it beyond what it really was, and in that sense made it a greater monster than it really showed itself to be.

Every great existentialist knows how to describe what is wrong with life in general, but is seemingly never able to identify what is wrong with their own lives in particular; isn’t it ironic? to be cognizant of your own deficiencies but completely unable to overcome them? It’s as if every genius of the soul must have another genius of the soul to tell them what’s wrong with themselves in order that they may finally be able to do something productive. Oh, how we weary-minded intellectuals, we hopeless nihilists, we free-spirits and far-wanderers, confuse life for everything that it’s not, and do everything that we want but which we wish we hadn’t. How we always call to a muse who will comfort us rather than encourage us, empower us, even make us carve out a little life of our own in this ‘real’ illusory world—the world of the herd.

It was there, in writing that message to my dearest friend, that I decided the only path was through; I had to write an intellectual work in which I would, more or less, leave nothing else to be said on life, and in that way no longer feel wedded to the intellectual sphere of life which has been my whole preoccupation these past five years—it was the beginning of the end: and so I devised a plan to achieve just that. Inspired by Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Cioran, Samuel Johnson, and Montaigne primarily, I wanted to write a systematic philosophy that contained every necessary facet of existence, while at the same time leaving a very clear and obvious authorial voice—my own voice, as author and existentialist, as critic and existing being in the world. But, like all major intellectual tasks I undertook, I thought preparatory reading was necessary, and so, channeling the same kind of energy I had at the start of 2024, I read and read and read. Three authors in particular were my main focus: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Hegel. As I said elsewhere: Schopenhauer for his prose style, Kierkegaard for his existential analysis in the context of the dialectic, and Hegel for the dialectical process as such. If anything in the future could be said with any certainty about my philosophy, it is that I came to all my main ideas about existence through my interpretations of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Hegel; without these men, my ideas would not exist at all; and it should also be said that I would not have discovered this path to begin with if it were not for Nietzsche and Emerson—who I’m arguably more indebted to than Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or Hegel combined, for they were really the first ones to awaken me from my dogmatic nihilism; which, had it not awakened, I would still be reading, thinking the answers I sought for life lay not in life itself but in the words of other men who already lived life. That was the biggest fault in my thinking: to think that I could discover myself in the lives of others, rather than in my own.

Oh, dear reader, make not the same mistake as I. Your own genius and experience are enough to take a stand against the entire world! With you on one end and with the totality of existence on the other, your experience is the fulcrum by which everything shall move before you. Rise above yourself and grasp your essence, your very existence as such, lived every second, but not considered actively, dialectically, seriously, passionately. I say again! become who you were meant to be, not who the world thinks you should be. Everyone today lives after their culture, rather than creating their own culture—adopting their own values, constructing their own reality, expending their own POWER!!! Are all these things not necessary for a true, vibrant existence? I say without them you have the kind of world we inhabit today: full of life-deniers, afraid of suffering, turning away at every difficulty, wanting only a life of comfort and leisure; these are the weakest of all weaklings, and they must be shunned and ostracized to the dark side of the moon on pain of DEATH! It is my present objective, and the point of my entire philosophy more or less, to take to task the whole of modernity, and finish what Nietzsche started—the transvaluation of ALL values.

My ultimate end goal with all this philosophizing—which I should have said earlier, I started on the 5th of July—is to provide a new lens, a new way of thinking, a new way of conceptualizing, what life could be (considered from an individualistic-existentialistic perspective): not what life is, for the is-ness of life does not impinge itself on what we as individuals ought to do—for never forget that POWER is the ultimate decider—the ought of all oughts—, not wretched MORAL considerations—the “pious” fraud of frauds, the is of all is’s: blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy all wrapped into one. In short, no more life denial, only life affirmation—the WILL TO AFFIRMATION (my oldest and most noble idea); that is the totality of all totalities, the Archimedean point by which everything else in my philosophy moves! In closing this idea, I hope at the end of all this philosophical speculation I can say, along with Schopenhauer, Meine ganze Philosophie läßt sich zusammenfassen in dem einen Ausdruck: die Welt ist die Selbsterkenntnis des Willens [My whole philosophy can be summed up in the one expression: the world is the self-knowledge of the Will.] It would be my biggest accomplishment to reformulate what the will means for life in modernity, not as a thing to be suppressed as Schopenhauer thought, but as a tool for the sake of affirmation, which is itself an objectification of power. That is my goal.

And so, at last, my dear reader, we have reached the end of what I was; what I was really meaning who I was in the past, what all my experiences have been to me, and in what way they have shaped me into the person I am today—the what I am, which is to come next. After looking over my entire life retrospectively, I think I can say it’s not a surprise I ended up where I am today, doing exactly what I’m doing; all my past interests, and all my recent scholarship, have conspired into making me a scholar for the ages—a misunderstood individual who feels he must write not for his contemporaries, not even for his compatriots, but to mankind.

I know at times this rather rushed autobiography seemed prolix and even a bit redundant, but I saw no other way to express my life than in giving the facts as they were experienced; any great writer of biographies would attest to the fact that there is a strict trade-off between veracity and readability, for it’s very easy to embellish and make interesting rumors and matters which are not verified by all accounts, and extremely difficult to write about matters that are set in stone. Writing an autobiography is like carving into stone something that has already been written over by experience ten times over.

In general, the more abstract the idea, that is, the less concrete, the more you’re able to wander and dally with it, for it isn’t subject to the actual events which occurred and thus can be stretched without being labeled an outright lie; but for actual events that have taken place in the past, if you wish to write honestly on them, you must consign yourself either to prolixity and tedium, or asides which are philosophical in nature but which break away from the flow of the narrative. Maybe there are writers more talented who can walk that fine line, as I think Carlyle did when writing his history on The French Revolution, or as Gibbon did with his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or even as Macaulay in some parts of his The History of England, but for every good history, two-thirds of it are worth only reading once, and for every fact that is supplied, an avalanche of redundiania is added in support, which is precisely where enjoyment in reading goes to die. It cannot be helped, however, for what honest author doesn’t feel crushed between both impossibilities when writing about his own life? I, for one, thought it best to make the most commodious and homely compromise possible—to strike the golden mean as such, and do whatever I could with the facts of my life in order to make them enjoyable to read, as well as practically useful to the reader, while maintaining their facticity.

In writing this, I found immense catharsis and relief, now having given my whole story thus far for the world to see in the best manner I could conceive it. I have, with all my power, striven to make myself the sole object of investigation—as all true existentialists should—and in doing so hoped not to appear as an abstract man with many weighty ideas, but as a living, breathing, relatable human being, who can stand out among the crowd like all characters in Shakespeare’s plays, or better yet, like Don Quixote himself—fighting windmills and chasing chivalric shadows from my own mind. If anything appears lacking in this narrative of what I was, I’m almost certain that the rest will be filled in the upcoming section: What I am—in which I hope to go more in-depth not on the factual aspects of my life as I did here, but into a more introspective, philosophical reflection on how my experiences as such has made me, molded me, and encouraged me to pursue everything I have, as well as the why behind all my pursuits. If what I was looked at my past, what I am looks at what I presently feel about myself in the most extemporal manner possible.

I hope all this was not too much to take in, dear reader; but I totally understand if you found my story too tedious to get through in its entirety; how do you think I felt writing it!

It was my immense privilege to provide you with the story of my life. Thank you.