The way we orient and conduct ourselves towards others in the world matters immensely toward the change we seek to make.
Unconditional Love
Posted on Saturday, February 18, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
Love can only make sense contextually. When there are seemingly infinite ways that it’s represented, we consign love—one of the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human—to a delicate game of presentation and interpretation. We do not accept love fairly, nor as it is. We do not give away love fairly, nor as it is. We perform all manner of mental calculus to determine what type of love we give out, what type of love we receive, if someone is worthy of our love, and if someone is capable of loving us back.
What is the premise of our relationship with this person? A stranger? An acquaintance? A classmate? A coworker? A teacher? A family member? A friend of a friend? A potential romantic partner? What kind of person do they seem like? How do they dress? How do they carry themselves? Am I proud or ashamed to be around this person? How much time do we spend with this person? How often do we spend time? How do we spend that time? What do we have to gain from this other person? How do they make us feel? What form of love do we express? Do we love with emotional distance and reverence? Or do we love with intimacy and connection? What constitutes the nature of these interactions? A sporadic text exchange every three months? Playful joking and lively conversations? The silent comfort of one another’s presence?
Burdened by the weight of circumstances, tainted by subconscious desire, and perverted by conscious rationalization, it can seem as if our love for one another is selfishly selective, lined with ulterior motives, and temperamental—far from anything we might define as unconditional.
In some way it is discouraging, but perhaps we just have to recognize that our yearning for a pure, unconditional love is all a delusion. Perhaps this kind of love is reserved for the divine and the incomprehensible. Perhaps, as mere humans, we cannot even begin to fully comprehend a concept of love in a vacuum, of a completely pure love unchained by the sins of human consciousness, of a love infinitely. After all, if we could momentarily perceive just a modicum of the profundity of Jesus’ love for humanity—if all at once, we caught a glimpse of all the sacrifice and emotional burden, all the tears shed and every palpitation of the heart, every agonizing moment when he perished on the cross, the boundless thoughtfulness and concern for each and every one of us—I’m fully convinced there would not be a single nonbeliever on Earth thereafter.
But if humanity was touched by such a divine truth, truly converted by the potency of an irrefutable unconditional love, the entire narrative begins to fall apart. There would be no more stories to tell. There would exist no such impetus for us to discover, to learn, to understand, and to overcome if we already were given the answer. Indeed, love may only make sense contextually, but, perhaps, that is the point of it all. Perhaps the essence of human love is constituted by—not abstracted from—the social dynamics that surround the expression and interpretation of it. The very notion of love between human beings is fundamentally about an internalization of our shared journeys; it is about each and every step along the way, the context by which we can familiarize ourselves with one another by disentangling the mystery of human identity—the webs of our foibles and idiosyncrasies, the abyssal caverns of our past trauma and present fear, the vast, seemingly limitless expanse of our hopes and dreams, and the confounding space of everything in between. We can only love or be loved if we have a story to tell—if we can recall those moments, in spite of the fleeting nature and whim of our circumstances, of lamentation and celebration, of ambivalence and determination, of regret and reminiscence, of unity and discordance, of indignation and justice, of shame and confidence, of anger and forgiveness, of conflict and resolution, of frustration and catharsis, of life and death.
Unlike Jesus, we do not have infinite time and energy; our commitment to one another is finite and thus our capacity to form the deep emotional attachment to engender true love is finite. Yet some still attempt to emulate this unconditional love. While I wouldn’t necessarily define it as a futile endeavor, because it can bring about positive change in the world, I would assert that it’s a grave misjudgment of our capabilities as human beings. No one can claim to love literally everyone and everything equally, with just the right amount of thought, consideration, concern, and degree of interaction to constitute a perfect relationship between two entities. It’s simply not in congruence with how our brains are wired and certainly unfeasible while fighting the perpetual uphill battle against time, space, and ourselves. We have to recognize that divine love and human love are completely disparate concepts, and that there’s nothing wrong with this distinction.
This is not to say that there is no value in the belief in a divine form of love; in fact, quite the opposite. It seems to me that those more inclined to apply this concept of unconditional love to strangers already have an implicit understanding of this compulsion to write stories; it’s not that there is already a story before interaction, but they are able to connect and extend the stories of a perfect divine love or of those shared with existing friends or family, conjoining the elements of these stories with the desire to create new stories. And this desire is not insignificant; it has proven itself to be one of the most powerful forces of change in our world. Despite the compelling nature of these stories, we have to remember that extending the story of love does not mean that it replicates it, and that it might look nothing like we idealize it to be in our minds.
We must avoid the trap of confusing the intimate love we share with our loved ones with the kind of blind compassion, generosity, or admiration one would share with strangers, and covering it with the blanket term of unconditional love, when it isn’t in any way. It could be that we could extricate the conditions and the context from love to produce something we might define as unconditional love, but this version of love is so far-fetched from our standard mode of fostering intimacy and affection with our close friends or family. Perhaps, due to the constraints of the human psyche, to extend this kind of intimate love unconditionally, in a manner that defiantly supersedes context and narrative, is nearly impossible to do with consistency and universality, so much so that we might avoid assigning it at all to any form of human action.
It may be that all that is left for us to do is present and interpret. It may be that the only way we can inch ever closer to this concept of unconditional love is to practice conditional love—to hone our ability to discern context, circumstance, need, and desire imbued in the acts of love we give and receive. In the end—for everyone that will be a part of our lives, for all the reasons that brought us together in this very time and place, for all that we seek to derive from this fateful existence—these will be the stories that we write, and the journeys that we will take.
For there is no story without conditions,
no journey worth taking without a story,
and no love without a journey.
Posted on Saturday, February 18, 2023
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Posted on Saturday, February 18, 2023
Ad Hominem
Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
A while back, I came across a YouTube short. At first, I thought there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about it. She is speaking—not even anything I would regard as complaining—about the disadvantages of the upper middle class compared to those in the highest echelons of society. The main lesson of the video was simply that money grants you ever-increasing freedom to take risks, but it can also change our perception and shield us from facing the daunting realities of life and the lessons learned from suffering. Nothing unreasonable or controversial, I thought. Honestly, it’s good advice for those that come from a background not constrained by a lack of money.
But after watching her subsequent apology, as well as witnessing the deluge of outraged comments attacking her character, I realized what was going on. People were absolutely incensed with the fact that as a member of an already highly privileged class of people—someone who had purportedly regularly taken business flights around the world, graduated from an Ivy League school, and has several million subscribers on YouTube—she had no qualifications to speak about a lack of privilege.
Let’s take a step back and imagine this. Let’s merely change the premise of the video—no changes to the content, tone, or phrasing of the voiceover whatsoever. Imagine that instead of a Korean woman cooking a luxurious Japanese curry in an upscale apartment in Seoul, the video portrayed a black woman cooking a burger in a dilapidated house on the fringes of Chicago. Suddenly, the video doesn’t seem so controversial. But all we did was change the apparent identity of the person speaking. The argument is exactly the same, except now instead of the top 1% of society discussing the privileges of the top 0.1%, we have the top 10% discussing the privileges of the top 1%.
It is clear we are obsessed with questioning who is speaking, and not the ideas themselves. But we forget that in order to advance ideas and make progress as a society and as humanity, we have to learn to avoid the trap of the ad hominem—the inability to extricate the idea from the person speaking about the idea. Whether it’s the asinine presidential debates we’ve had in the past or the average job interview, it’s evident that far too many of us are guilty of weighing our personal impressions of someone over their actual merit. We constantly fall into this trap, but we’ve done a terrible job at calling each other out for it.
To what extent and through what method should those more privileged help the underprivileged without being supposedly “tone deaf”?
Is it required for anyone speaking from a position of higher privilege to a person of lower privilege to demonstrate their humility before discussing anything remotely related to hardship?
At what point can we define someone to be “qualified” to complain or even speak generally about a particular struggle?
The truth is, if we draw this absurd conclusion—the dangerous notion that if you haven’t experienced something yourself firsthand, you are not qualified to talk about it—then we play an equally absurd game. In this game, you can endlessly go down the rungs of the privilege ladder in human society; if the top 1% of society are not qualified to speak about how life is harder for them than the top 0.1%, but if I’m in the top 10%, am I now qualified to complain about the privileges of the hyper-rich? If I am living just barely past the poverty level in the United States, am I qualified to speak about the struggles of being poor when simultaneously there are many people in Africa that live in flimsy shacks with dirt floors, barely muster enough food for one or two meals for them and their family, have no access to clean drinking water or any healthcare whatsoever, and have a life expectancy of less than forty? If we’re continuing with this inane train of thought, all those berating her in the comments section—those claiming they “have it hard” when the fact that they possess the time and the capacity to watch videos and comment on YouTube automatically puts them among the most privileged of human beings to ever exist—can seem equally as tone deaf.
We cannot demand that someone should have experienced hardship firsthand or sympathize with it before speaking about that hardship. This is an incredibly dangerous path for us to take. If it doesn’t directly undermine free speech, it sabotages our ability to connect with people of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds than our own. Out of impulse, we try so hard to make a point; we want to ridicule someone for being entitled, tone deaf, and insensitive, and make it absolutely clear to everyone else. But making a point doesn’t do anything.
Change comes about when the story the other person tells themselves begins to change. If all you do is make a point, you’ve handed them a story about yourself. When you make a change, you’ve helped them embrace a new story about themselves.
This is the fundamental pitfall of a great deal of identity politics and precisely what is wrong with our political climate today. As Jonathan Haidt argues, instead of focusing on what we have in common as humans to unite us towards a communal cause, we fabricate a common enemy to rally an angry mob.
It’s the rich people that are the root cause of all problems. It’s the white privilege and an oppressive patriarchy that perpetuates all societal ills. It’s the liberals. It’s the conservatives. It’s the corporations. It’s the clueless and out of touch baby boomers. It’s the lazy and entitled millennials and Gen-Zers.
If we choose to play this game, it never ends. But we can choose not to play it.
I wholeheartedly agree that many of those in the upper strata of society can often speak with a sense of entitlement, and they could probably do a much better job at giving back to those less fortunate. But this is a symptom—not the issue. The more mental energy we expend trying to denigrate and rip apart the dignity of those more privileged than us, the farther and farther we get from uniting us as humanity and discerning the nuances that are necessary to understand how to fix our fragmented society.
The truth is that our only common enemy is our ignorance.
It is our arrogance to ignore the fact that complex problems require complex thinking.
It is our failure to acknowledge that in order to solve these problems, we must humble ourselves to do the intellectual heavy lifting through diligent study and civil discourse.
It is our tendency to oversimplify because yes—it’s very easy to point our fingers at the rich and say, “everything would be so much better if they just shared some of their billions of dollars with the rest of us.”
It is our inability to empathize—to look at another human being and have the patience to recognize that, if we can understand them for who they are and help them “embrace a new story about themselves,” they can equally be part of the change that we want to make in the world.
Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2023
Appears in
Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2023
Veneration
Posted on Sunday, March 12, 2023
Last updated on Wednesday, August 5, 2026 at 11:00 PM
There are people we look up to in life—perhaps our parents or grandparents, perhaps an older sibling or a successful friend, perhaps our favorite athletes, artists, or authors, perhaps a pastor or a priest, perhaps a venerated guru or sage.
We go to them for direction when lost, for solace when distraught, for motivation when unmotivated, for inspiration when uninspired, for love when unloved.
We so desperately want them to give us something,*
we so desperately want them to make us feel better,
we so desperately want them to be right,
so much so, that we forget that they are human.
Especially with the advent of the internet and social media that allows us to be exposed to a virtually endless marketplace of personalities, there is a very strong tendency among us to idolize and excessively revere these people we look up to. When we subscribe to a specific political ideology or religion, we predispose ourselves to blindly accepting the preordained, established truths because we’ve already declared membership of that particular group. It is this thought process by which individuals form preconceptions of the world not in any way based on rational, intentional thought and critical thinking, but merely based on group identity. If I declare myself a Christian, I must also not believe in gay marriage. If I declare myself a conservative, I must also be against abortion.
In much the same way, many of us are led to believe that we have to subscribe to a particular person and their ideology. We convince ourselves that they must be infallible, that their wisdom and knowledge has the capacity to stretch to any possible facet of life even beyond their expertise and experience. And when they are criticized or attacked for being wrong about something, we personally feel attacked and feel the need to retaliate ourselves to defend the truth that we have worked so hard to establish. And when we feel as though we can’t defend that truth, we feel inclined to lose faith and stop believing in the merit of that person entirely.
But lest we forget that all the people that we venerate are human. Very few of them claim to be perfect. Very few of them claim to be completely infallible. As we might exhort all the rest of us, we should hold them to the same standard. We can make mistakes. We can be wrong. We can talk about things even though we have no qualification or expertise in the relevant fields, and not be chastised or lambasted for even the slightest misstep or misunderstanding. And faltering in that way does not directly translate to a diminishment of one’s value as a human being and the rest of their contributions to the world we live in. I wrote about this more extensively in my Internet Drama reflection: just because someone is wrong about one thing or several things does not devalue or invalidate the rest of their work. Just because someone did something dishonorable, e.g. spreading misinformation or displaying insensitivity to another person or a group, does not mean they are a terrible human being unworthy of our attention.
I am a huge fan of Jordan Peterson’s work. But I am extremely appalled at the extent to which some individuals have taken this unwavering ideological loyalty, whether as a means of defending him or criticizing him. Recently, made the mistake of wandering into the comments sections of some rather polemical videos breaking down some of his arguments, a very familiar wasteland widespread across the internet, predictably infested with ignorance, myopia, prejudice, self-righteousness, ad hominem, and dishonesty. The truth is, we can all play the same game. For anyone participating in these vile, toxic hubs of ignorance, whether on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, or any discussion board or forum, I would like to ask some questions: where is your work? Where is your generosity to the world? Where are the blog posts, essays, or books that you’ve written? Where are the lectures, speeches, or debates that you’ve participated in? What have you shared that is contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way? How have you positively affected and influenced the people around you? Can you openly and publicly tell me about all your personal mistakes in the past? Can you tell me about your perfect streak of never being wrong in any difficult life event or a problem that confounded you in the past? If we so have the temerity to ridicule or spurn individuals on a whim, let us at least do so not as blatant hypocrites.
But we don’t have to play this game in the first place. Instead of making it a futile battle of righteousness, qualification, or apparent merit, or a senseless, inane cyclical contest of humiliation, justification, and redemption, we can make it about truth. We can realize that, in the end, past all of our pretensions and superficial identities, we all just want to understand. We want to understand the truth because it is the only means by which we can act in a way that helps us all get to where we actually want to go. And the only truth-seeking process I know of is one of patience and intent, one of listening, thinking, and discussing. Nothing else.
Posted on Sunday, March 12, 2023
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Posted on Sunday, March 12, 2023
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back against him: these are obstructions.
Added in 2026
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- And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!Marcus Aurelius
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- The best revenge is not to be like that.Marcus Aurelius
- Gamesan essay
Added in 2026
What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad—as terrible a blindness as the kind that can’t tell white from black.
Added in 2026
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Added in 2026
The best revenge is not to be like that.
Added in 2026
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- Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.Neil Strauss
Added in 2026
The human soul degrades itself above all, when it does its best to become an abscess, a kind of detached growth on the world. To be disgruntled at anything that happens is a kind of secession from Nature, which comprises the nature of all things.
Added in 2026
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Added in 2026
The foundation of all real skills is this one: the confidence and permission to talk to one another. Not to manage, belittle, intimidate, or control. Simply to seek to be understood, and to do the work to understand.
Added in 2026
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Added in 2026