Notes of Gratitude from the Wilderness

Reflections on Thanksgiving

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

This Thanksgiving finds me grateful for losses I never wanted and friendships that revealed themselves to be transactions.

A year ago, as the shape of our political crisis became undeniable, I watched people I’d trusted choose access over integrity. Friends who’d shared dinners and ideas suddenly found my analysis “too divisive” for their professional positioning. The tech executives, the venture capitalists, the comfortable intellectuals—they were busy calculating how to maintain relationships with power rather than how to resist its abuse.

The recruiters stopped calling. The dinner invitations dried up. The professional networks that had sustained my career decided I’d become radioactive. I discovered that what I’d mistaken for friendship was often just mutual advancement dressed in warmer clothes.

It was clarifying. And brutal. And, as it turns out, exactly what I needed.

Because in the space that abandonment created, something else became possible. This community. These conversations. The intellectual freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose except your commitment to thinking clearly.

You—the readers who subscribe not because it advances your careers but because the ideas matter—you’ve taught me what genuine community actually looks like. People willing to engage with philosophical complexity not because it’s professionally useful but because understanding what’s happening requires more than comfortable platitudes and focus-grouped responses.

When friends chose positioning over principle, they gave me an unintended gift: the clarity to see that integrity isn’t just personal virtue but political necessity. That thinking clearly in dark times isn’t individual indulgence but collective resistance. That the networks built on access and accommodation were always going to collapse when tested—and that what survives the collapse is what was real all along.

I’m grateful for the wilderness, because it taught me the difference between community and networking. Between intellectual honesty and sophisticated rationalization. Between friends and people who found your friendship convenient until it wasn’t.

I’m grateful for the loneliness, because it created space for the kind of thinking that’s only possible when you’re not calculating how every idea might affect your professional positioning. When you can say what needs saying without wondering who you might offend in the process.

Most of all, I’m grateful for you. For choosing substance over spectacle, depth over heat, meaning over metrics. For proving that authentic intellectual community is still possible, that people still hunger for frameworks that help them navigate reality rather than accommodate power.

What we’ve built here—these Notes from the Circus, this space where philosophy meets politics and clarity emerges from complexity—this is what survives when everything built on convenience collapses. This is what remains when the comfortable abandon ship and only the committed stay aboard.

So thank you. For reading. For thinking. For staying. For proving that the most important communities aren’t the ones that advance your career but the ones that advance your understanding. That the most meaningful relationships aren’t built on mutual benefit but on shared commitment to truth, however inconvenient that truth becomes.

The circus continues. But we’re no longer watching alone. And for that—for you—I am genuinely, deeply grateful.

The wire still holds. Because we choose to hold it. Together.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And authentic community emerges not from comfort but from shared commitment to remaining conscious when everything conspires to make you close your eyes.

Happy Thanksgiving from the wilderness. The view is clearer from here than I ever imagined possible.

—Mike