Is my generation, the ones born during a time of relative abundance, destined to be less resilient than those that precede us? My answer is no, yet the young still fall through the cracks, the elderly try to hold on until the bitter end, all the while asking for something moreover. In either case the iron pulls us through the fire all the same. The question remains. Are we lazy? Or are we dreamers? Snowflake is an interesting analogy. Something you love, but the naivete of the idea is slow. We’ve inherited ease for sure, but we’ve also inherited confusion, division, and a weight of stories we didn’t ask for but still have to live with. Sometimes fragmentation, and the quiet burden of histories we didn’t write, still defines how we are seen and how others see us. This is bias, and we do it to ourselves.
We have all been told in some way or another that the world was already mapped, the roads paved, and many questions answered, yet as we walk these roads we realize shortly that they were never as straight as we thought. We find they twist around exclusions, that maps often erase people without notice or news coverage, that roads were built atop the bones of displaced people. But the world never slows, and in the neon glow of cities the ground shifts beneath us. Our politics are split, our climate unstable, and the idea of a shared truth feels like it’s slowly slipping away. Not because we don’t know where we’re going, but because we’ve been handed a map that leaves too much out. What does it mean to come of age in a world that feels increasingly unreal? A world where a few decide who matters and the many are dismissed as irrelevant, or at least not worth asking.
My question is why is it this way? How is it changing? And is it changing for the better or worse? So much of what we inherit is just a carefully crafted illusion. Maybe the world is directionless and our decision to choose our futures isn’t even real, rather an illusion itself. An illusion built on our ignorance, allowing places and people to be left out because they don’t fit into the story we choose to accept.
Joan Didion wrote of self-respect not as a political shield, but as a severe personal discipline. The willingness to accept total responsibility for one's own life without the comfort of an approving audience. She showed us that it’s not enough to just go along with the status quo. The real danger isn’t an external dominant narrative, rather our own desperate habit of telling ourselves our story matters in order to live. In reality it takes time and constant effort to create a story that’s worth remembering. And even then was it the story, or the self-respect that made it worth it? True resistance, in her eyes, was not a collective movement, but a solitary act of becoming. The stubborn, clear-eyed refusal to buy into the prevailing rhetoric, keeping watch precisely where the script begins to fray. In a world where entire groups are pushed to the side, where some lives are treated as less valuable than others, Didion’s insistence on truth is ever more pertinent to the individual and collective as a whole. You are not promised anything at all. Not safety, not fairness, and certainly not the success of your own efforts. The only thing you actually possess is the discipline to live in the world as it is, and the self-respect required to accept the consequences of your own choices without whining. If you wish to make the world better, seek to teach discipline and self-resilience. To stay grounded in our own perspectives we must not fall into the trap which is the dominant story which seeks to erase us.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously insisted, “Existence precedes essence.”
My interpretation of this is that we are not born with purpose but must create it ourselves. I like to think of my best friend’s words of wisdom when I think of his famous quote. Imagine that someone trapped you in a box with only a brick. You will never die of starvation or thirst. What would you do? An adult’s reaction is to say insanity or suicide, but my friend’s famous words were, “I’d throw the brick at the wall to have fun.” Call it stupidity or ignorance if you will, but it is an answer that creates a smile, which I appreciate. Sartre warned of bad faith, of the temptation to escape freedom by pretending to follow a pre-written script. To do what is expected is just that, expected. History is written in order to keep us from making the same mistakes, but they do not cause us to be bound by the roles, titles, and traditions of our forebears. This temptation is everywhere now, especially when algorithms and businesses dictate the tools and resources at our disposal. We curate identities, defend inherited ideas, cling to the performance of being certain, but certainty is no virtue. Especially when it blinds us to the mess and majesty of a world that thrives on our mutual understanding.
This pressure is everywhere now. Culture is sold back to us as something we should consume, something that gives depth and identity, when usually it is stolen and plastique. I believe Sartre’s message is simple. To live authentically, we need to stop letting others decide for us. Why do you produce, consume and save one thing over another? How much harm have you caused, and how much can you actually stand to know? All the while the lie persists that some cultures are inferior, that some voices don’t deserve to be heard. It’s a centuries-old ghost wearing new clothes, cloaked in policy language, in “security” rhetoric, in social media vitriol. I hope my generation and future ones can see through it. I argue we weren’t raised in innocence, rather through its contradictions. We feel it in the way our friends are profiled at borders, in the way their family members edit their accents at job interviews. I try to understand what I should do in a world where so many are told they don’t belong, or that they’re just “too much.” By this logic many are treated as expendable. Our identities, whether rooted in culture, heritage, or personal experience, become both refuge and battleground. Flags to be protected, and banners to rally behind. We are constantly told who we should be, but the truth is, the world isn’t that simple. I would argue the majority has yet to come to grips with a fundamental truth that many try to ignore. The myth that equality doesn’t fracture the moment people flee war or famine and arrive at your gate.
In the world we live in now, George Orwell’s warnings about the manipulation of language hit harder now more than ever. Words like “illegal” are used to dehumanize people, to strip away their humanity in favor of a neat narrative that fits the status quo. Orwell reminded us that the words we use can shape the truth we see beyond our conversations. It’s of utmost importance today to understand how language can be twisted to control a story as well as your opinion outside of the conversation. We need to ask ourselves whose truth are we really hearing? Who is deciding what’s real? And is it you?
Susan Sontag warned us about the numbness that comes with scrolling past suffering on our screens, where images of injustice are consumed like entertainment. We can’t afford to become numb. We need to re-engage with the world around us and ask what it means to be human in a time when we’re more connected than ever but still so divided. It’s easy to scroll past the struggles of others and tell ourselves we’re powerless, but Sontag’s point is that by allowing ourselves to feel, to engage and have an opinion, we can start to break the walls that separate us through avoidance.
Hunter Thompson, known for his wild style, turned truth into exaggeration to make it impossible to ignore. He showed us that sometimes you have to amplify the absurdity of the world to make people listen. Edward Abbey, who fought for wild spaces and the freedom that comes with them, reminded us that we need to fight for what can’t be tamed or controlled, that civilization without conscience becomes a cage. These thinkers understood that the wild parts of life, the messy, complicated bits, are the ones we should pay attention to. Maybe it’s time we stop pretending everything can be made neat and simple.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote that dread is the price of freedom. That to be human is to feel the vertigo of limitless choice. When everything around us feels overwhelming, the temptation is to pick a path that feels easiest. Instead he spoke of a “leap of faith,” not as a surrender to the absurd, rather as a leap into the unknown where meaning is found in that very uncertainty. Maybe that leap is embracing all the things society tells you to hide, and instead seeing them as strengths and facets in the stained glass window that is you. But, when you’re told your culture is a threat, when your language is mocked, when your parents’ sacrifice is reduced to a statistic, you learn fast that existing authentically in and of itself is an act of faith. Faith that your story matters, even if it isn’t written down. Still, finding your authentic self isn’t easy. It is an act of creation every day, every minute, every breath, and one that takes patience both in yourself and with those around you.
So maybe we’re not lazy. Maybe we’re not lost. Maybe we’re learning what it means to exist in a world where the comfort we were promised is fading. We’re not just searching for the answers handed down to us, we’re learning to create our own truths. Truth that doesn’t rely on erasing parts of ourselves to fit into someone else’s box.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead.” It wasn’t to dismiss faith, rather it was to acknowledge that the structures we once relied on to give our lives meaning have crumbled. In the silence left behind, it’s up to us to create something new. Nietzsche challenges us to be the artists of our own lives, to forge meaning from experience, culture, survival, and solidarity. It’s a reminder that the power to shape our world is in our hands.
But there is a limit to that will alone. When creation falters, when solitude feels unbearable, when reason cracks under the weight of uncertainty, Kierkegaard enters. Not to rescue us with clarity, but to say: leap. Leap not away from doubt, but through it. The absurd is real, and so is the freedom to respond with faith, not in dogma, but in becoming.
The leap of faith is not surrender. It is defiance at the edge of despair. It is Nietzsche’s abyss, stared into fully, and then stepped across. Not because we know what’s on the other side, but because we choose to go together, eyes open, hearts aflame. To leap now, in our time, is to reach out across differences, not as saviors or critics, but as fellow humans. It’s not about proving we’re right, or strong, or perfect. It’s about helping each other become whole again, about finding resilience not by mimicking the past, but by creating something new, something honest within the cracks of this broken world we find ourselves in.
To leap is to affirm our lot in life, not just once, but again and again.
And maybe that’s what we were put here for. Not to rebuild a crumbling old world, but to scatter seeds in its ruins, trusting they’ll grow where the cracks let the light in. Like a flower growing through the pavement. Small, quiet, and persistent, yet beautiful enough to remind us that even in the toughest conditions, life finds a way to bloom.
Yours Truly,
Aecurus Dione
