August 2026

August 1

Before watching the movie Once, and afterward listening to The Swell Season, I had never heard of Glen Hansard or The Frames. Once was amazing; it's easily one of my favorite music-centric movies, and for a while, Marketa Irglova was a celebrity crush. I learned about The Frames and liked them; their album "Set List" is lying around here somewhere. However, I never listened to the album or them consistently enough for The Frames to be a staple in my catalog. And I haven't listened to his solo albums yet. I have a feeling once I do, Glen Hansard's death is going to hit me a little harder than it already has.

 

August 2

"I watch the woman ahead of me in line at the grocery store, her cart containing only a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread, while mine overflows with the week’s necessities. Something flickers across my consciousness—the impulse to let her go first, simple as breathing. But then the calculus begins: I’m already late, she’s probably fine waiting, maybe she’s one of those people who would be offended by the gesture. The moment passes. The impulse dies. And I’m left standing there, complicit in the small erosion of human decency that happens a thousand times a day, in a thousand checkout lines, across a thousand cities where people like me choose convenience over connection.

This is how kindness dies. It’s not in dramatic acts of cruelty, but in the accumulation of rationalized indifference. We want to be good. The desire lives so close to the surface of our consciousness that we can feel it stirring whenever opportunity presents itself. We want to hold doors open with genuine warmth, to chat with waiters in the same way we do friends we haven’t seen in years, to offer help to strangers struggling with heavy bags or confusing directions. Compassion is our factory setting, the default program running beneath the layers of learned cynicism and protective detachment." ~ Excerpt from my essay On Navigating Our Social Abyss. 

 

August 3

I’ve been thinking about how strange it is that the world people keep building doesn’t seem designed for people at all. Not the real kind: the organic, constantly developing, emotional, unpredictable beings we actually are. The world we’ve assembled over generations feels better suited for something standardized, something consistent, something that doesn’t change its mind or its direction or its heart. Something that isn’t us.

It’s no wonder people feel overwhelmed, alienated, or quietly resentful. We’re trying to live inside structures that weren’t designed for beings who change, who feel, who evolve, who break down and rebuild themselves over and over again. We’re trying to fit into systems that treat unpredictability as inefficiency and treat emotional depth as an inconvenience.

We learn to suppress the parts of ourselves that don’t fit neatly into the expectations around us. We learn to hide our confusion, our curiosity, our shifting identities. We learn to perform stability even when we’re in the middle of becoming someone new. And slowly, without noticing, we begin to shape ourselves into versions that are easier for the world to manage: quieter, flatter, more consistent, less alive.

The world we’ve built reflects what we’ve prioritized: order over nuance, efficiency over exploration, standardization over individuality. It’s a mirror showing us how uncomfortable we’ve become with the unpredictable nature of being human. It reveals how deeply we’ve internalized the belief that life should be optimized, streamlined, and controlled.

We didn’t build a world that accommodates human beings. We built a world that expects human beings to accommodate it.

And maybe that’s the real tension; not that the world is hostile, but that it’s indifferent to the organic reality of who we are. It wasn’t designed for people who grow unevenly, who feel deeply, who change direction without warning, who need time to fall apart and time to rebuild. It wasn’t designed for people who are still becoming.

But the fact that the world isn’t built for us doesn’t mean we have to keep building it this way. We can create systems that honor nuance instead of erasing it. We can build environments that make room for emotional complexity, for curiosity, for reinvention. We can stop treating unpredictability as a flaw and start seeing it as evidence of life—a world designed for beings who are always becoming.

 

August 4

Every morning, the world announces what’s trending, as if these topics are talking points expected to mandate the day's conversations. Today it’s the U.S.–Iran standoff, the Reflecting Pool, the Michigan Primary, fashion cycles, and a handful of product rollouts. A lineup so eclectic it feels like someone spun a wheel and said, “Sure, that’ll do.” I Googled what’s trending, by the way; I didn’t just know that.

And I can’t bring myself to care about any of it.

Not because I’m apathetic. It’s more that none of these things have anything to do with the interior life or aesthetic world that actually matters. My inner world is over here trying to figure out why certain thoughts keep returning, why certain ideas won’t leave me alone, and why I care about the shape of my senses more than the shape of the news cycle.

Meanwhile, the trending list is shouting, “Look over here!” And I’m thinking, “I really don’t want to.”

These topics feel like someone knocking loudly on a door opposite a brick wall. They demand attention but don’t offer anything meaningful in return. They pull people into a constant state of reaction, as if staying informed were the same thing as staying alive. It’s impressive, really; the world has managed to turn distraction into a civic duty. What I’m interested in moves differently.

I’m interested in the slow work of becoming someone who can sit with his own thoughts without needing the world to declare what matters. I’m interested in curiosity that grows from stillness, not from whatever happens to be flashing across a screen. I’m interested in the kind of noticing that doesn’t trend because it exists now only as a mirage between fingers. And honestly, I keep wondering what life would look like if more people focused on their inner worlds before reacting to whatever the world deems urgent.

Trending topics feel significant because they’re built for speed, for reaction, for the churn of attention. They’re built for people who want to feel plugged into something external, something engineered, even when that “something” is mostly static disguised as significance. It’s like being handed a megaphone and told it’s a meaningful conversation. They’re just soundbites between clichés.