Clueless Twenties

  There is a particular comfort in believing that people are either good or bad. It simplifies things. It allows for quick judgments, clean conclusions, and a sense that the world is, at its core, understandable. But that clarity rarely survives proximity. The closer you get to people, to systems, and to yourself, the more unstable those categories become. What looked like principle begins to resemble convenience. What felt like integrity starts to shift under pressure. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, “right” becomes less about what is true and more about what works. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity , resists the idea that morality is fixed or easily resolved. That human beings exist in contradiction, capable of both freedom and harm, intention and compromise. Not in dramatic, philosophical ways alone, but in the quiet, everyday decisions that rarely feel like moral choices at all. Because most of the time, they aren’t framed that way. They look like survival. In a ...

  I don’t think empires end the way we imagine them to. Not with collapse or spectacle, but with a kind of quiet confusion. It is not one event but a series of them, moments that feel important on their own but indistinct when placed side by side. An election that does not feel like an outlier but a signal. Wars that do not conclude only extend. Invasions were justified, then complicated, then forgotten. Laws passed, rolled back, rewritten, a constant state of internal negotiation. Nothing definitive. Just enough to make you pause. America was not just a country; it was a reference point. For culture, for success, for power. It was the center of things, or at least, it felt that way. The music, the films, and the language of the internet all carried a certain authority. To participate globally was, in some way, to pass through it. Economically, it offered a story. That there was a place where effort translated, where ambition had structure, and where “making it” was not abstract. P...