What You Practice, You Become:
There’s a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle says something that sounds almost too obvious to be worth saying: we become just by doing just acts, courageous by doing courageous acts, temperate by doing temperate acts. Of course we do. It’s the corollary that actually bites as we also become unjust by doing unjust acts, cowardly by avoiding situations that require courage, intemperate by repeatedly giving in to impulse. Character isn’t what you are, it’s what you keep doing.
May 21, 2026
The Authenticity Trap
There’s a particular kind of discomfort that happens when someone compliments you on something you didn’t really do. Maybe it’s a cover letter that landed you an interview, one you fed your notes into ChatGPT and let it assemble into something polished and confident. Or a message to someone you were nervous to approach, where you asked the AI to “make it sound natural.” You got the response you wanted but somewhere in the back of your mind, a small uncomfortable question formed: did they just fall for a version of me I didn’t actually make?
May 19, 2026
The Fat Relentless Ego
There’s a particular kind of flattery we do to the philosophers we love. We soften them, sand down their edges, take the parts that sting and quietly set them aside. Iris Murdoch is not easy to flatter because she won’t let you. She was a novelist and a philosopher who spent her career asking the same uncomfortable question from two directions at once: What if most of what we call love is something else entirely? The novels revealed the answer in human detail, the philosophy explained why you may find yourself resisting accepting it.
May 11, 2026
Loving the Longing
There’s a pattern so common it’s basically a cliché of modern dating: you want someone, they’re unavailable or uninterested, and that very unavailability makes you want them more. Then something shifts. They reciprocate. Suddenly you’re less sure. The texts feel like obligations. You catch yourself fantasizing about someone new. Most people chalk this up to commitment issues, or immaturity, or some vague fear of intimacy. Maybe. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who spent his career being deliberately difficult, had a different explanation, and it goes somewhere much more uncomfortable. His claim, more or less: you never actually wanted that person. You wanted the wanting.
May 7, 2026
The Fever and the Phantom
There’s a passage in Lucretius that reads like something written last week by someone who just had their heart broken. He’s describing a lover reaching for the body of the beloved and finding that they can’t actually get what they came for. The physical possession doesn’t dissolve the craving. The hands close around something real and the ache just repositions itself. Lucretius calls this amor, and he doesn’t mean it as a compliment.
May 3, 2026