How to preserve your agency when institutions fail, history turns, and the world refuses to accommodate your preferences.
In 1965, Admiral James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. A high-profile prisoner of war, he spent seven years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. His captors kept the prisoners’ hopes alive with promises of imminent release, despite having no intention whatsoever of delivering on them. Many men were broken by this calculated cruelty. Stockdale refused to cling to hope. He accepted his circumstances, accepted that he might die in that room, and found inner peace in one of the least promising places imaginable. That acceptance gave him the strength not merely to survive, but to organize clandestine prisoner communications and maintain morale among his fellow captives.
The Lethal Fact
My father used to say: “Life is lethal.”
There is a brutal, unadorned elegance to that sentence. It slices through centuries of theological posturing and self-help sentimentality to deliver the only unconditional certainty you will ever receive: life ends. Every one of us will die. The only guaranteed method of avoiding physical destruction is never to have drawn breath in the first place. A somewhat drastic solution, admittedly, but a remarkably reliable one.
That is not cynicism. It is the baseline of reality.
We can dress it up in euphemisms. We can compile an endless catalogue of grievances explaining why our mortality, or our particular misfortunes, constitute some uniquely outrageous injustice. We can scan the horizon for a villain, a negligence suit, or a cosmic clerical error to explain why this specific catastrophe had the audacity to arrive at our doorstep.
None of it alters the ledger. We die. And between the cradle and the grave, things break.
Yet contemporary man possesses a pathological genius for confusing explanation with responsibility. When misfortune strikes, the modern reflex is not to assess the damage and reinforce the structure, but to convene an immediate emotional inquiry into the identity of the external culprit. The priority is not survival or repair. It is the allocation of blame.
If it is hot outside, we declare an unprecedented climatic crisis. If our waistline expands, the fast-food conglomerate is summoned to the dock. If our lungs deteriorate after forty years of smoking, we announce that tobacco advertising robbed us of our faculties. If someone purchases a cut-rate parcel of land in a designated river basin because the price looked irresistible, and the river subsequently reclaims its bed, the municipal zoning board is accused of ruining a life. Apparently, the river should have consulted the conveyancing documents first.
There may well be truth in these external factors. Corporations manipulate; zoning boards make corrupt compromises; governments fail; nature is merciless. But the existence of an external cause does not automatically cancel personal responsibility.
Explanation describes how an event occurred; responsibility determines who must carry the consequences.
We have built an entire civilization around blurring that distinction. We crave a consequence-free existence, demanding that reality accommodate our aesthetic, moral, and emotional preferences. But the physical universe does not negotiate. It operates according to the laws of thermodynamics, biological decay, and unforgiving cause and effect. It owes us neither a refund nor an apology.
The first step toward genuine freedom is abandoning the petulant question: “Whose fault is this?”
The sovereign question is colder, harder, and infinitely more liberating: “What did I choose, what did I fail to see, what risks did I accept—and what must I now endure without complaint?”
The Hard, Honest Path
It is easy to preach Stoic principles in an academic lecture hall or over a comfortable dinner. It is an entirely different proposition when life delivers a blow that cannot be reasoned away, outsourced, or delegated to an underling.
Not long ago, I found myself in my local supermarket, helping an elderly woman reach an item on a high shelf. We fell into a quiet, unhurried conversation in the aisle. She was approaching eighty, sharp-eyed, and possessed the composed bearing of someone who had spent decades in the vicinity of genuine suffering. She had worked most of her life as a nurse in institutional care for the severely mentally impaired before moving into home care, which she considered considerably more humane.
During our conversation, I mentioned my son.
She listened intently, nodding with the grave, clinical recognition of someone who understood the territory without requiring a dramatic briefing. She asked whether he lived in a specialized institution or at home with us. When I told her he lived under our roof, she quietly confirmed something I had long understood: in many institutional facilities, the most severe and volatile cases are not cured or gently guided. They are managed. Chemically flattened. When the violent tantrums and terrifying storms arrive, the system takes the path of least resistance: heavy medication dulls the senses, numbing the soul in the name of maintaining order on the ward.
This sounds evil until you understand what living with such circumstances actually entails. We are not talking about an ordinary child throwing a tantrum. My son is 1.96 metres tall, built like a rugby forward because he dissipates tension by constantly jumping, and when he slaps you, the bells start chiming. He also bites—not the friendly sort of nibble one might recount with an indulgent smile. The kind that can cost you body parts.
If you run a professional care facility, you cannot indefinitely risk having your employees injured. Eventually, you solve the problem by the only means available to you. It takes something vital away from the person in your care, but what alternative do you have?
Hearing her confirm this reality did not shock me. It merely clarified the perimeter of my duty.
My wife and I must guide our son through the fire until he reaches his early thirties. By then, the biological storms should begin to recede, the violent peaks soften, and some measure of internalized control emerge. Only then can others step in.
Until that day arrives, those scars belong to me. I will not hand my flesh and blood over to an administrative conveyor belt, nor will I consent to having his mind erased with pharmaceuticals simply because the daily burden is crushing.
There are well-meaning people who encounter situations like this and immediately search for soft exits, counseling institutional offloading or chemical relief. I appreciate their intentions, but they do not understand the arithmetic. Some paths in this life cannot be smoothed over. There is no detour, no hack, no therapeutic shortcut—only the hard, honest road.
I walk it willingly. I am a Stoic not because the philosophy sounds noble on paper, but because it is the only operating system I have found durable enough to survive a collision with unyielding reality. Life is no Disney parade. But once you stop demanding that it be soft, it reveals an austere, haunting beauty that comfortable men will never know.
The Countryside and the Carnival
Choosing this posture requires a deliberate departure from the values of modern urban culture.
I was raised among countryside folk, out in the quiet margins where the horizons are wide and the night sky still remembers what stars look like. In my youth, I abandoned that world, seduced by the glittering arrogance of the cities. I convinced myself that density, sophistication, and relentless intellectual stimulation were the distinguishing marks of an elevated existence.
Urban life is unquestionably entertaining. Then again, carnivals usually are.
With the passing of decades, the glitter has worn thin. I find myself looking back toward the margins with a deep, almost clinical respect. Rural communities, rooted in physical soil and biological cycles, retain a quality that metropolitan centres systematically grind out of their inhabitants.
There is an unforced warmth in people who work with their hands—a willingness to greet a stranger on a country lane rather than audit them for ideological compliance. They possess a capacity for patience and forgiveness that requires an inner sturdiness most urban dwellers have traded away for speed, convenience, and performative status. They are untidy, frequently blunt, and largely immune to fashionable jargon. But they remain fundamentally intact.
Of course, modern life has penetrated even the remotest corners of Austria. There is no place entirely untouched by internet access, endless entertainment, or Amazon Prime. Yet people still know one another, and the social fabric feels markedly different from what I experience every day in the city.
I am no longer one of them. The city has left its heavy fingerprints on my habits, my language, and my mind. But from this vantage point, one thing has become obvious: societies anchored in villages, soil, and hard physical realities remain healthier. Their people breathe deeper, stand firmer, and are less susceptible to the phantom anxieties that feast on the souls of metropolitan apartment dwellers just as readily as their urban counterparts.
Some ecosystems produce resilient creatures; others produce domesticated dependents who shiver at every draft. The countryside has always understood the distinction. The cities merely charge an exorbitant subscription fee to pretend it does not exist.
Leaving the Theater
If you wish to preserve your agency, the most urgent task of your mature years is learning what to ignore.
A few years ago, my closest friend died at the age of seventy-six. Looking back, the trajectory of his decline was obvious, although hindsight is always punctual once the coffin has been lowered.
For years, he justified his media consumption by repeating the same argument one hears from modern observers everywhere: the political spectacle entertained him. He insisted he was merely a spectator, watching the circus from a comfortable seat—fascinated by the corruption, the institutional absurdity, the endless carousel of geopolitical scandal.
He believed himself detached. He was wrong.
Somewhere along the way, observation curdled into immersion. The spectacle stopped entertaining him and began devouring him alive. He spent his final years marinating in a toxic bath of outrage over global forces, crooked politicians, and institutional decay he possessed precisely zero power to influence. He died bitter, furious, and exhausted, hollowing out the remaining currency of his life to finance an obsession with a script written by people who did not know he existed.
Watching his end cemented an absolute resolution in me: I have left the theater.
The performance on that public stage never changes; only the costumes and lighting rotate. I still vote in Austrian elections—a matter of basic civic hygiene, like washing one’s hands or clearing the front walk—but I invest precisely zero emotional equity in the accompanying melodrama.
I do not track the manufactured hysterias of the ruling class. I do not follow the private debaucheries of the elite, whether the latest island scandal or the newest political cabal. I know what our elites are—not some of them, but all of them. Power at that elevation is not acquired through virtue; it is conferred selectively, conditionally, and at the price of total compromise. Why waste precious hours pretending to be astonished when wolves behave like wolves?
My attention has narrowed to what leaves real residue: my family, my son, my writing, my physical strength, my code, and the small circle of friends who can sit around a table without checking their devices for institutional approval.
If others still have the appetite to marinate in the media abattoir, let them feast. I wish them well. But I will not spend the afternoon of my life watching puppets dance on strings pulled by an invisible hand.
Riding the Current
We are living in the long, grey shadow of more than fifty years of accumulated societal nonsense. The last twenty years, in particular, have been nonsense on a grand scale: operatic, decadent, and recklessly extravagant.
There is an enormous bill coming due. Many people stare at the horizon in mounting panic, praying for a miraculous rescue, an economic saviour, or the triumphant return of some imagined golden era.
They will wait in vain. That ship sailed long before we were born, and it will not dock in our lifetimes—or those of our grandchildren. History has never specialized in tidy, Disney-style resolutions.
The word crisis carries two distinct meanings. To the dependent man, it is a catastrophe that leaves him trembling and paralyzed because his external caretaker has disappeared. To the sovereign man, it is the clearing of rubble, exposing the raw foundation on which real work can finally begin.
The pendulum of history has already begun its slow, heavy swing away from comfort and back toward necessity. We are not waiting for the correction to arrive. We are standing in the middle of it.
You and I do not possess the power to halt the macroeconomic tides, reverse institutional collapse, or persuade a panicked herd to act with courage. We are caught in a historic current far stronger than our individual preferences or political protests. The current will take this civilization wherever it must go. That part is non-negotiable.
Our only meaningful choice is how we navigate the water.
We can exhaust our lungs screaming at the rapids, flailing our arms in outrage until our strength gives out. Or we can trim our sails, keep our hands firmly on the rudder, and use the river’s sheer momentum to carry us somewhere worth landing.
Freedom is not the ability to command the river to stop. Freedom is having the physical resilience to take the cold spray in your face, the domestic competence to keep your own boat afloat, the mental detachment to ignore the sirens on the bank, and the moral courage to bear whatever consequences await downstream without dropping the oars.
Life is lethal. Meet it on its own terms.
