How damage, stupidity, and fate conspire to produce adults
Among my readers there exists, demonstrably, a non-trivial population of people who approach these writings the way livestock approaches a mirror: with curiosity, confusion, and no lasting insight. I wish them well. Sincerely. They do not read me for the reasons I write, and some of them undoubtedly experience a mild allergic reaction—perhaps even rejection—when exposed to ideas that do not flatter their self-image. That is not my concern. I harbor no desire to return the favor by rejecting them in kind.
Not because I expect comprehension. I do not. That would be optimism bordering on negligence. Nor because I wish them to change. I don’t. Change would require interior motion, and motion presupposes friction, resistance, effort—concepts to which they are philosophically opposed.
They are primordial creatures. Cognitive algae. They cannot generate meaning independently. They cannot arrive at contentment, because contentment requires an internal ordering principle, and theirs is outsourced entirely to consensus and convenience. They cannot even properly contemplate the ruin they have helped usher in—its scale too vast, its terror too sublime, its beauty too offensive to their stunted perceptual range.
And yet.
They are real. Persistent. Inescapable. A force of nature, like erosion or mold. They are part of the cycle that produced us—those few capable of snapping the mental manacles most people spend a lifetime polishing. The idiot is the base state of humanity: unrefined, unevolved, and—ironically—the most honest specimen of the species. He advertises his ignorance openly. No disguises. No pretense. No self-awareness theater.
There is something almost refreshing about such candor.
I also appreciate the pain they inflict on the rest of us. Not masochistically—let’s be clear—but strategically. Pain inflicted by others, not self-manufactured and fetishized, is the only force potent enough to catalyze real transformation. It is the hammer that breaks weak forms and tempers stronger ones. It allows a minority of us to evolve into something sharper, more resilient, more internally coherent—something capable of walking among idiots without despair, without hatred, and occasionally even with amusement.
Because let us be honest: this is the environment. This is the terrain. There will be no mass awakening, no cognitive renaissance, no sudden flowering of discernment. This is all we have. Possibly all we will ever have. So one might as well learn to enjoy the climate during one’s brief tenancy.
The idiot, then, is a gift. One that never stops giving. He provides the necessary resistance against which a certain kind of person may become something else entirely.
Allow me to elaborate.
Adversity as a Development Tool
I assume most of you have seen at least fragments of the HBO series Game of Thrones. A production that began with promise—complexity, moral ambiguity, actual consequences—and ended, as so many things now do, in narrative fast food. Predictable. Sanitized. Forgettable. I am told the books are better. I remain undecided as to whether I will ever test that claim.
Still, even the final season managed a few moments of accidental truth. One such moment involved Jaime Lannister—the man who attempted to murder a child by defenestration—standing beneath a tree, years later, facing that same child, now a young man confined to a wheelchair.
Jaime apologizes. He claims he is no longer the man who did that terrible thing. He insists he has evolved—grown stronger, wiser, better. That his present self would not commit the sins of his former incarnation.
And he is probably right.
But the boy—Bran—has transformed as well. He has become something otherworldly: a seer, a witness to time, a creature unmoored from ordinary causality. And he could never have become that thing had he not been thrown from that window. Two lives mangled by pain, reshaped by catastrophe, each arriving at a different but undeniable becoming.
This is the part modern sensibilities find intolerable.
The things we do to others shape us. The things others do to us shape us just as violently. And if—if—you can absorb the pain without letting it metastasize into bitterness or nihilism, if you can let it carve you without hollowing you out, you may evolve into something singular. Something earned.
You become.
Becoming Is Not Optional—Only the Outcome Is
Becoming, incidentally, is not rare. It happens to everyone. The difference lies in what one becomes.
When I was in my early teens, I lived with my family in the far north of Austria, in a small village that embodied the national interpretation of “the sticks.” It was distant from Vienna, distant even from the regional capital of St. Pölten. Trips to the district capital—Waidhofen, a picturesque town embalmed in postcard charm—were events, not errands.
And Waidhofen had a feature.
There was exactly one open-air sausage stand in the entire town. These places are designed for transience: you stand, you eat, you drink, you move on. Except there was a man who never did. Every time we passed that stand, regardless of season, weather, or hour, he was there. Beer can in hand. Stationary. As if welded to the pavement.
It became a family joke.
At eighteen, I left Austria. I stayed away for fifteen years. When I finally returned and made my first pilgrimage back to Waidhofen, I joked—half-sincerely—that I expected to see the man still standing there.
And there he was.
Older. Weathered. Still clutching his beer. Still not talking to anyone. A human landmark. Is it possible, I wondered, to spend an entire life standing in one place, holding a can, becoming a punchline? Apparently yes.
He, too, became something. Not something enviable, but something precise. He did not arrive there through external catastrophe, at least not initially. But over time, the inertia hardened. The longer he stood, the harder movement must have felt. His environment shaped him, yes—but only because he surrendered agency long before.
I often wonder whether he ever grasped the mental machinery that locked him into that fate. Or whether understanding was simply not part of the program.
Words Are Empty Until You Wire Them
In The Matrix Revolutions, Neo becomes trapped in a liminal subway station—a program serving as an interface between the Matrix and the Machine City. While waiting, he speaks with a family of programs. At one point, he expresses surprise that a computer program speaks of love as though it were an emotion.
The father corrects him. Love, he explains, is just a word. What matters is the connection one builds to it.
Fill it with care, protection, curiosity, patience—and an acceptance of inevitable loss—and it becomes something close to miraculous. Fill it with entitlement, expectation, performance, and social theater, and it becomes the hell most people mistake for intimacy.
This applies to all the words we pretend to cherish.
Love. Knowledge. Exploration. Creation. Community. Legacy.
What did you pour into those containers? What associations did you wire into them? Did you make them tools—or idols?
Time as the Only Real Currency
For the past three years, death has been my most consistent companion. My father. One of my closest friends. A friend of the family. Several others. I had a front-row seat to the final act. I watched dreams end. I watched embarrassment evaporate. I watched meaning detach from words entirely.
At the end, there are no concepts. No narratives. No identities.
Just nothing.
I do not flatter myself with fantasies of exemption. There will be no clerical error in my favor. All I possess is the span between now and that final absence. And I intend to fill it with whatever produces genuine contentment—quietly, without apology.
My life has been a journey, yes—but not a scenic one. I have seen ugly things. I have lost. I have been an idiot myself. I have been the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time more often than I care to admit. These things happen.
They shaped me. Irreversibly.
What remains adjustable is not the past, but my stance toward its outcome—and what I choose to build atop the creature life has already forged.
Damage That Clarifies
In Yellowstone, Beth Dutton apologizes to Rip Wheeler for the damage she inflicted, the years she squandered, the cruelty she normalized. Rip responds with brutal simplicity: he does not need what was. Only what is—and what comes next.
Beth could not exist without the wreckage. Her scars are structural. They stripped away illusions, trivial wants, useless mental clutter. What remained was terrifyingly focused.
Much like Sansa Stark toward the end of Game of Thrones. She looks the Hound in the eye and admits that without the cruelty, the humiliation, the slow grinding violence of her education, she would have remained a decorative little bird forever—chirping, obedient, harmless. The pain didn’t ennoble her. It sharpened her. It burned away illusion, sentimentality, and the luxury of innocence. What was left was someone fit to survive Winterfell.
Pain—whether received or inflicted—changes you. Most of the time it deforms. Occasionally, it distills.
When the Path You Chose Is Burned Behind You
My eldest son’s handicap obliterated my career. The path I thought I wanted collapsed completely. I fought it. I resisted. I tried to preserve a life that was already dead. The effort nearly destroyed me.
It took years—years—of psychological descent before acceptance arrived. Not peace. Acceptance.
That level of pain looks obscene from the outside. But from within, it is a furnace. It burns away ornamentation. It exposes the core operating system. No illusions survive those temperatures.
Clarity follows. And clarity, paradoxically, is freedom.
The Hidden Mercy of Total Ruin
In Mission: Impossible, analyst William Donloe’s life is ruined by a single event. Years later, he reappears—older, altered—and confesses that the catastrophe forced him into choices that made him infinitely happier than the life he lost.
Sometimes the path you are on must be destroyed. Not gently redirected—ended. It may break you. It may erase you. But if you endure, it will shape you into something more congruent than comfort ever could.
You cannot manufacture this ordeal. The helplessness, the forced decisions, the absence of alternatives—these are essential ingredients. Fate is erratic and stingy. It delivers such trials only after extracting full payment.
Choosing One’s Interior Weather
My own crawl through mental hell lasted over a decade. It left me with a small collection of principles, one of which I find especially liberating:
When I encounter something beyond my capacity to alter, I acknowledge it—and release it. I do not wrestle with immovable objects. I do not sacrifice sleep to fantasies of control. Obsession is only useful when it feeds you.
Imagine—purely as an exercise—that you are condemned to die. No appeals. No miracles. The date is fixed.
How do you spend your time?
Do you rot in anticipation? Or do you curate your inner world—the only territory still yours?
Despair achieves nothing. It delays no execution. One must choose one’s interior climate with intention.
This is not heroism. It is hygiene.
Agency Without Grand Illusions
I chose deliberately extreme imagery because the principle is banal: change what you can. Release what you cannot. Grand crusades against the inertia of the masses are indulgences for fools. I invest only where my actions matter.
Others have found meaning in far worse conditions than ours. The difference was internal.
In the end, it is always a choice.
I made mine.
I became.
And I wish you a 2026 that forces the same confrontation. One that strips you of comforting lies, reflects you back to yourself without mercy, and demands decisions aligned with contentment—not approval.
May your days be long. And may they be filled with things that actually matter.
