On Seeing Clearly Without Losing Your Mind

Because some people are numb.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

I put out a meditation yesterday, and it elicited concern from some people who know me. I am both surprised and existentially amused by this. But the discussions the piece caused have made me want to dig deeper here into the philosophical question that hides behind the mythopoetry. Why it’s not empty sentiment. Why it attaches to any reasonable accounting of the human condition.

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

The piece wasn’t written from despair. It came from joy—the kind that only emerges on the other side of seriousness. The joy of seeing clearly, of being fully present, of recognizing finitude as the source of meaning rather than a threat to it.

Some people seem to read any honest encounter with the tragic dimension as sadness. But there’s a profound difference between depression and revelation. Between collapse and clarity. Between surrender that gives up and surrender that lets go.

The confusion is understandable. We’ve been culturally trained to see limitation, loss, and death as problems to be solved rather than as conditions to be accepted. We’re supposed to “stay positive,” to treat finitude as mechanical failure rather than existential foundation. The entire technocratic project—the immortality-seekers, the optimization addicts, the system-builders who see human messiness as bug rather than feature—rests on the assumption that the tragic dimension is something to escape.

But what if it’s not? What if the tragic dimension isn’t prison but the only place where meaning actually lives?

The Analytical Case

I think we should take some time, for the less poetically inclined, and those who insist on only understanding things in dry, analytical terms—believing wrongly in my view—that analytical frame-thinking is more serious.

Let’s do this the driest way possible.

Thomas Sowell has a famous observation that’s directly relevant here: there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

This isn’t pessimism. It’s recognition of a fundamental constraint on existence. Every choice forecloses other choices. Every path taken is every other path not taken. Resources—time, attention, energy, money, love—are finite, and allocating them to one purpose means not allocating them to another.

The technocratic impulse treats this as a problem to be solved through better optimization. If we could just be smart enough, efficient enough, comprehensive enough in our analysis, we could find the solution that eliminates the trade-off. We could have everything, optimize for all values simultaneously, satisfy all preferences at once.

But this is confused at a fundamental level. The trade-off isn’t a failure of technique. It’s a feature of reality.

Value requires scarcity. This is basic economics, but it’s also just true about how meaning works. Things that exist in infinite supply have no value. You don’t think about air until you’re drowning. Time becomes precious precisely because you don’t have unlimited amounts of it. If you had infinite time, no moment would be more important than any other. The decision to do something today instead of tomorrow would be meaningless because you could always do it later—infinitely later.

Choice requires constraint. For a choice to actually mean something, alternatives have to be mutually exclusive. When you choose A, you actually don’t get B. If you can have everything, you’re not making choices—you’re just expressing preferences in sequence. Real choice means real sacrifice. The loss isn’t incidental to the choice; it’s what makes it a choice at all.

Commitment requires irreversibility. Love, loyalty, devotion—all the things we consider essential to meaningful relationships—require that we bind ourselves to particular people and particular paths. But binding only means something if unbinding is costly or impossible. If relationships were infinitely malleable, infinitely reversible, without consequence for abandonment, they’d be recreational preferences, not commitments. The weight of commitment comes from foreclosing other options.

So here’s the conclusion: finitude isn’t a bug in human existence. It’s the feature that makes meaning possible at all.

Remove finitude and you don’t get paradise. You get meaningless infinity—options that never need to be chosen because there’s always more time, relationships that never deepen because there’s no cost to abandonment, experiences that never matter because they can be endlessly repeated. You get a world without trade-offs, which means a world without choices, which means a world without meaning.

Now apply this to immortality, since several people have asked me about that.

If you lived forever, what would “important” mean? Why would today matter more than ten thousand years from now? Why would this relationship deserve your attention more than the billions of relationships you could form over infinite time?

The answer immortality-seekers usually give is something like: “I could learn everything, experience everything, become everything.” But this misunderstands the nature of meaning. You can’t learn everything because learning requires focus, and focus requires choosing what not to study. You can’t experience everything because experience requires presence, and presence requires being here and not somewhere else. You can’t become everything because identity requires continuity, and continuity requires remaining something rather than dissolving into everything.

What immortality actually offers is the dissolution of identity into an infinite succession of temporary states, none of which matter more than any other because all are replaceable across infinite time.

This is why I said evil wants to live forever. Because evil refuses the sacrifice that finitude demands. Evil wants to consume without giving, to take without losing, to exist without participating in the reciprocal vulnerability that relationship requires. If you can’t sacrifice, you close in on yourself. You become a sealed room.

The technocratic version of this is softer but it’s the same impulse. It doesn’t promise literal eternal life, but it promises escape from the tragic dimension through superior system design. Make everything efficient enough, predictable enough, controlled enough, and we can eliminate the need for real choice. We can have our values optimized for us by algorithms that process more variables than human judgment can handle.

But this is the same category error. You can optimize means—the technical questions of how to achieve predetermined ends. But you cannot optimize ends themselves without evacuating choice of its meaning. When expertise decides what matters, when algorithms determine what’s valuable, when systems replace judgment with calculation—you haven’t eliminated the tragic dimension. You’ve eliminated the human.

What remains is optimized, but it’s no longer choosing. It’s processing. And processing isn’t living.

So when I say “I love my pain,” I’m not being poetic for its own sake. I’m recognizing something that’s just analytically true: pain is the signal that I have something to lose. That I’m attached to something beyond myself. That I’ve made choices that matter enough to hurt when they’re threatened.

The alternative—painless existence—would require either invulnerability, where nothing can be lost, or detachment, where nothing matters enough to lose. Both are forms of death.

Gratitude isn’t a feeling I’m supposed to cultivate through positive thinking. It’s the rational response to recognizing that I didn’t have to exist at all, that consciousness wasn’t owed to me, that every moment of meaning I’ve experienced has been borrowed from the void and will eventually return there.

The fact that it ends is what makes it matter. The fact that I can lose is what makes it mine. The fact that it hurts is what proves I’m alive.

Why do people read this as despair? Because we’ve systematically trained ourselves to see any acknowledgment of limitation as defeatism. The entire cultural apparatus—from toxic positivity to techno-utopianism to the self-help industrial complex—insists that accepting constraints is giving up.

But there’s a world of difference between “this is hard, therefore I quit” and “this is hard, and it’s supposed to be, and I’m doing it anyway.” The first abandons meaning because meaning is difficult. The second accepts difficulty as the condition of meaning.

When I write about embracing finitude, about loving pain, about gratitude for the tragic dimension—I’m not expressing hopelessness. I’m expressing the opposite. The recognition that meaning is possible precisely because it’s finite, that choice matters precisely because it costs something, that love is real precisely because loss is inevitable.

The joy isn’t despite the tragedy. It’s because of it. Because the alternative—the infinite, the optimized, the perfectly managed existence—isn’t paradise. It’s erasure.

On Staying Grounded

Also. “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

I’m not jumping on the Epstein bandwagon to do the play-by-plays. Not sure there’s much I can add there that isn’t already being said, and said well, by others. The mask is coming off in real time. Let them remove it themselves.

So let’s do a little pastoral care on ourselves instead. Let’s gain some perspective. And for those of us who are waking up—let’s talk about what it actually means to see clearly without losing your mind.

Here’s what happens when you start seeing the pattern: everything starts looking like the pattern. Every news story becomes confirmation. Every scandal reveals the deeper conspiracy. Every denial proves the cover-up. The coherentist epistemology I’ve been advocating—where you evaluate new information by how it fits with everything else you know—can become a trap if you’re not careful.

Because once you recognize that powerful people protect each other, that institutions are captured, that what you’re told and what’s true are often different things—it becomes very easy to see everything through that lens. And sometimes that lens is exactly right. And sometimes it makes you miss what’s actually happening because you’re so convinced you already know the script.

So how do you maintain the capacity to see patterns without becoming the guy with the string-covered bulletin board?

First, you have to stay falsifiable. Can you articulate what would prove you wrong? Not about everything—you don’t need to doubt that powerful people sometimes do terrible things. But about specific claims, specific patterns, specific predictions. If everything confirms your theory and nothing could possibly disconfirm it, you’re not tracking truth anymore. You’re maintaining coherence at the expense of accuracy.

Second, you have to maintain proportion. Yes, corruption exists. Yes, power protects itself. Yes, official narratives often obscure more than they reveal. But not every bureaucratic failure is a conspiracy. Not every coincidence is evidence. Not every person who disagrees with you is captured or stupid. The world is full of genuine incompetence, honest mistakes, and people acting on different information than you have. Sometimes the simple explanation is actually correct.

Third, you have to keep living. This is crucial and often overlooked. If your entire existence becomes about tracking the corruption, documenting the decline, preparing for the collapse—you’ve already lost. Not because those things aren’t real or important, but because you’ve let them consume the very life you’re supposedly trying to protect. The resistance isn’t sustainable if it devours everything else that makes existence meaningful.

What Waking Up Actually Feels Like

For those just starting to see it—and I’m getting messages from people going through this—it’s destabilizing in ways that are hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it.

You thought you understood how power worked. You thought institutions were basically functional, even if flawed. You thought the people at the top were mostly trying to do the right thing, even if you disagreed with their methods.

And then something happens—maybe it’s COVID response, maybe it’s the 2024 election, maybe it’s watching obvious corruption get treated as normal politics—and suddenly you can’t unsee it. The pattern becomes visible. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.

This is disorienting not because you’re going crazy but because your model of reality was wrong and now you’re rebuilding it in real time while still having to function in the world the old model described.

It feels like betrayal because it is betrayal. Not necessarily personal betrayal—though sometimes that too—but betrayal of the implicit contract you thought existed. The one where institutions basically work, where expertise is mostly genuine, where power is generally exercised in good faith even when you disagree with specific decisions.

Recognizing that contract was partly fictional doesn’t make you paranoid. It makes you realistic. But the transition from the old model to the new one is genuinely painful. You’re not just updating beliefs—you’re restructuring how you understand the world and your place in it.

So if you’re going through this: what you’re feeling is real, it’s valid, and it’s necessary. You’re not losing your mind. You’re finding it. The discomfort is the sound of your epistemology cracking open to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you were told it should be.

But here’s what you need to watch for: the temptation to replace one closed system with another. To go from “institutions basically work” to “everything is controlled” without passing through the harder truth that reality is messier than either model suggests.

The Difference Between Waking Up and Going Insane

There’s a fine line between “I’ve recognized systematic patterns of corruption and deception” and “everything is connected and nothing is what it seems.” The difference isn’t in the facts you’re observing but in how you’re relating to them.

Waking up means: you’ve updated your priors based on evidence. You’ve recognized that your previous model was too trusting, too naive about how power operates, too willing to take official narratives at face value. You’re rebuilding your framework to account for patterns you previously dismissed.

Going insane means: you’ve lost the ability to falsify your theory. Everything confirms it. Contradictory evidence is just proof of how deep it goes. People who disagree are either stupid or complicit. You’ve stopped asking “what would prove me wrong?” because you already know you’re right.

The test is simple: can you still be surprised? Can you still update based on new evidence? Can you still say “I was wrong about that specific thing” without it threatening your entire worldview?

If yes—you’re waking up. If no—you’ve replaced one closed system with another.

The people who maintain their sanity through this process are the ones who can hold two things simultaneously: deep suspicion of official narratives and power structures, alongside genuine openness to being wrong about specific claims. They can see the pattern without losing the ability to be surprised when reality deviates from it.

This is hard. It requires more cognitive work than either naive trust or paranoid certainty. But it’s the only sustainable position. Because the alternative—collapsing into either “everything is fine” or “everything is controlled”—leaves you unable to act effectively in the actual world as it exists.

Why They Want You Fragmented

Here’s what the people doing this understand: if they can keep you oscillating between “everything is fine” and “everything is controlled by shadowy forces,” they win either way.

If you think everything is fine, you don’t resist. If you think everything is controlled by forces too powerful to oppose, you don’t resist. Both positions—naive trust and paranoid despair—serve the same function. They prevent you from seeing clearly enough to act effectively.

What they fear is something else entirely: people who see the pattern without losing their minds. People who recognize corruption without becoming conspiracy theorists. People who understand power operates through networks of mutual interest without believing in omnipotent puppet masters.

People who are awake but still functional. Suspicious but still engaged. Angry but still capable of joy.

That’s what scares them. Because those people can’t be managed.

And this brings us back to where we started—back to the tragic dimension, back to finitude, back to the recognition that meaning lives precisely in the space where loss is possible.

Because here’s the thing: if you’re going to stay in this fight, if you’re going to maintain the capacity to resist without burning out or going insane, you need to stay anchored to what’s real and present and finite.

You need to hug your kids. You need to have dinner with friends. You need to notice beauty when it appears. You need to laugh at stupid jokes. You need to love people even though you’ll lose them. You need to commit to things even though they’re temporary. You need to care about your ordinary life even though the world might be falling apart.

Not because those things will save you from what’s coming. But because those things are what you’re defending. Those finite, temporary, vulnerable moments of meaning—that’s what makes consciousness worth having in the first place.

The resistance isn’t sustainable if it devours everything it’s trying to protect. You can’t fight for humanity by abandoning your own. You can’t defend meaning by letting your own life become meaningless. You can’t protect beauty by becoming unable to see it.

This is why I wrote about loving pain, about gratitude for finitude, about recognizing the tragic dimension as sacred rather than something to escape. Not as abstract philosophy but as practical epistemology for staying human when forces conspire to make you something else.

Stay awake. Stay grounded. Stay capable of surprise. And stay alive to the world in the way that only comes when you stop running from it.

The circus continues. The wire still holds. And we hold it not by eliminating the tension but by accepting it as the condition of everything worth defending.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And consciousness choosing to remain conscious is more powerful than all the systems designed to replace it with something more manageable.

May love carry us home.

And that’s what taking the (real) red pill feels like.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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