We’ve all been there. In bed, trying to sleep, but instead your mind replays something you’d rather forget. The shape of it will vary from person to person, but it torments each of us. The ache of a scar from a wound long thought to be healed.

For me it’s a memory of my father punishing me for “lying” because I told him my sister checked the mail, when in fact she hadn’t, and told him that I had.

Eventually we push it aside and get to sleep. But the life altering harms, the injuries no one can see, those stay with us. Like a latent illness, with the potential to expand and corrupt.

For some of us, the harms we endured were formative… and structural. Like a broken leg improperly set. Eventually it heals, but it aches with every step, and our limp forever is a reminder of how someone broke us.

The lingering effects will continue to shape who we are. When we are betrayed by a loved one, the impulse is to withhold intimacy lest we suffer again. When we are dealt with unfairly, we are likely to become less fair with others. When our efforts are ignored, we give less effort.

If left unchecked, the harms done to us in the past will continue to harm us, and we suffer. But what should be done? After all, victims of harm owe nothing, they themselves are owed.

Buddhism says that to eliminate our suffering we must let go of the harm. Stoicism tells us that we cannot control the actions of others but only our own, and we should let go because our anger and resentment is corrosive.

These are all true. I’ve felt the burning corrosive resentment towards a father long dead, unable to answer for his abuse. My eventual forgiveness was freeing, and holding on to the harm done to me compounded my suffering.

But my heart still races when I hear raised voices. My natural inclination is to shut down conflict. These are subconscious impulses, hardwired into a psyche that knew where those paths led.

Bruises and terror.

Forgiveness does not erase a nervous system conditioned by being constantly under threat. The amygdala predates the Eightfold Path by several million years.

We are shaped by millions of years of avoiding what would kill us before we can reproduce. The functional result of that evolution is a human mind that unconsciously focuses on threats. We place outsized importance on harm done to us, and we are wired more for the avoidance of future harm informed by those experiences. So many people carry so much harm and cannot simply let go of it, no matter the depth of the effort to get there. We are biologically wired to hold on to it.

We can let go of the story of how the leg broke. We cannot let go of the limp.

If we don’t owe anyone forgiveness, and even giving it may not change how we exist in the world, then what do the harmed owe anyone in how they carry their harm?

The angry, bitter person with a past full of misery isn’t just familiar, it’s a cliché. Hurt people hurt people. Whether the old pains are ignored or indulged they still inform, even below intention.

What we can do is understand the harm, understand what it does to us, that it creates a warped lens to see ourselves and the world through, and build ourselves thoughtfully with these structural flaws in mind.

We are all working in the continuous process of constructing ourselves; we can’t always control the materials we build with. Sometimes we only have cracked parts to build with, because that’s all we got; sometimes the foundation itself is fundamentally broken through no fault of our own.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get past the trauma in my past. I’ll always have some element of anger, fear, and anxiety growing from those deeply rooted emotions. But I know that my understanding of them can help me to temper the harm I may commit through their influence, and help give me agency apart from the wounded person who lashes out in an animalistic fear of being hurt again.

We don’t ask the person who recovered from the badly broken leg to walk normally again. What we can ask is that they are aware of the limp, its origin, its mechanics, the vulnerabilities it creates.

We ask this so that they navigate the world without causing further damage to themselves.

We ask this so they can navigate the world without knocking others down.

The Trolley Problem

It’s probably the most famous thought experiment in moral philosophy. So famous that I’ll simply link to its Wikipedia page for the explanation.

Or direct you to go stream Season 2, Episode 6 of The Good Place, which is, you guessed it, The Trolley Problem.

While the Trolley Problem is a good entry point for evaluating the complexity of moral choices, it is hypothetical in a way that life rarely is. It has clear consequences on both sides of the choice.

Action will create X outcome. Inaction will allow Y result. Whether a person decides to hypothetically pull that hypothetical lever or not, they know the exact hypothetical outcomes.

We don’t get into challenging philosophical territory deciding whether or not to hypothetically kill hypothetical people. The challenging moral choices are found navigating systems where all outcomes can’t be known, where the evil is part of the foundation, and we create harms simply by operating within them.

Let’s ease into this understanding of flawed moral choices by leaving the realm of thought experiment, but staying within the world of fiction.

No Good Choices

The following will have spoilers for the film and book Project Hail Mary. I’ll be referencing the film version below, but the scenario described was translated intact from the book.

In Project Hail Mary, impossibly handsome and winsome star Ryan Gosling plays Dr Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist who looks like Ryan Gosling with messy hair and glasses. The earth is slowly getting less energy from the sun because of an extraterrestrial microorganism called astrophage, and he is the lead scientist in studying bacteria and looking for a solution.

(Many plot descriptions say, “the sun is dying”. This isn’t true, the sun is fine. The astrophage are eating the sun light before it can get to earth. That is the actual problem, and I’m pedantic enough to waste an entire paragraph calling out the distinction.)

For reasons, the only potential solution is sending a mission to another star 11 light years away. The clock is ticking, every day the earth gets a little less energy from the sun, and eventually the planet will freeze, and everything will die. And before that humanity will destroy itself fighting over ever dwindling food as crops fail.

The team arrives, finds what they need, sends that back in smaller and faster ships. This is a one-way trip; there isn’t enough time or resources to prepare them to get there and back.

Make no mistake, a lot of people will die. Even if the mission is a success, it will take over twenty years to get the results, and those only help if the findings are something people have the capacity to implement. During the intervening decades the planet’s ability to support over eight billion people will falter and society will break down. And every delay in the mission increases the number of people who will die and the chance of total extinction.

Those are the stakes. As the story progresses the scientist for the mission, and their back up, are lost. Training new ones will take weeks, if not months, and missing the fast-approaching launch window will also cost the project months of time.

Time that will directly lead to millions, if not billions, of deaths.

Grace is the only replacement available; he’s worked on the science since the beginning, and they can send him with two other astronauts who can provide on the job astronaut training; they can’t train another astronaut to do the science in the same way.

And knowing all of that, Grace refuses to go. He’s pretty, but he ain’t perfect. It doesn’t matter, as he never had a choice. With the stakes being so high, he’s drugged and sent against his will. He is screaming as he is injected with a sedative, and wakes up to find himself alone eleven light years from home (the other two astronauts died en route).

Was that the right decision, to force Grace into a suicide mission? Send one man unwillingly to his death to save millions of people?

Isn’t this just Trolley Problem: The Movie?

Well, no, it’s not. For one thing, there is not one decision to be made, there are two. And the stakes are not as clear as they first appear. Let’s look at it through the lens of Ledger Ethics.

Let’s start with the stakes. Even if the mission goes off without a hitch, that does not guarantee the saving of lives.

They may arrive at the destination and not find anything that can help the earth, or what they do find is beyond what humans can do to save themselves.

They may find a solution, one that can be implemented, but send it back to a world that has long since descended into war and destruction, killing everyone before the answer could be received.

And there are two decisions. The first is for Grace. Will he pull the lever, run himself over with the trolley so that it might save the people on the other track? It’s a little different when you are filling both those roles. When he, not unreasonably, says “no”, he then triggers the decision for the project lead.

Will she pull the lever, sending Grace to his death to maybe save the people on the other track?

Wait, hang on, go back. His “no” is reasonable? Who wouldn’t sacrifice themselves to save all of humanity?

Let’s look at it from his perspective. As he says repeatedly, he is not an astronaut. This is no small point. Space travel is difficult and dangerous. Maybe he’s done the calculation in head, and his lack of training reduces the mission’s chances of success so much that the time to train a proper replacement astronaut in the science justifies the delay. After all, if he gets himself killed the mission fails.

Not to mention the death that forces on him. At best, he dies in the cold remoteness of another star. But when things go wrong in space, they go really wrong. He’s risking suffocation, decompression, starvation, conflagration. None of those are noted to be pleasant.

That said, can his logic be trusted? No matter how cold he may think his calculus is, it doesn’t change the fact that at a gut level, Grace doesn’t want to die. Or at least he doesn’t want to go willingly to his certain death. That is an emotional thumb on the scale whether he acknowledges it or not.

What does Ledger Ethics say he should do? Going back to first principles, Ledger Ethics posits that if you can help someone and do not that is an evil of indifference, whether that choice is active or not. Grace can help millions of people. He chooses not to. He is making an evil choice.

“Okay, I read your other essays,” someone might say, “and ignoring a homeless person you walk by on the street is vastly different from choosing to go on a suicide mission.”

To that I’d agree. Cost matters. And Grace isn’t being asked to pay the cost of merely acknowledging another human or putting money in their hand or voting for better housing policy. He’s being asked to die in service to humanity. The cost to him is everything.

But deciding that cost is too high has consequences. Millions die who otherwise may not have. Causing that harm is an evil, no matter how you square it.

Does Grace making an evil choice mean that the decision to force him on the mission is justifiable? After all, those making the choice are doing so to save lives. Actively helping preserve life is definitely good.

But harm isn’t limited to life and death. Grace is still a person. He has a right to have his personal dignity and autonomy respected. And by sending him on this mission, there is no illusion about the outcome for him. He will die in space, successful or not. Forcing someone to their death, no matter the justification, is also an act of evil.

Neither Grace nor those who force him on the mission are responsible for the situation they find themselves in. They didn’t create the scenario. They are still forced into choices that invariably lead to evil outcomes.

The success of the mission (it’s a $248 million blockbuster; did you think they did that with a downer ending?) doesn’t absolve anyone of the harm they chose. The harm remains on their ledgers. It contributes to the people they are.

Making a choice to force Grace on the mission is understandable, considering the stakes. But it also makes it easier to do that should the choice arise again.

What if it’s not for the fate of all humanity?

That is fiction. What about real life?

Most moral choices happen within systems that are built by people.

Systems like nations. Systems like politics. Systems like war.

War

“War is a continuation of politics by other means” – Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.

“I said, war, huh (good God, y’all). What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” – the guy who sings that song War.

From the first act of violence, war is a choice. A choice that will send people to their deaths. That will destroy and make the material reality of people worse, leading to more suffering and harm.

As the conflict escalates, it forces more choices on people, and the evil of the situation colonizes the available choices.

Even the so called “Good War”, WWII, caused harm for every person involved. The narrative we like, that imperial aggression of the Axis powers, the industrial scale genocide of the Holocaust, these were things that justified the violence used to stop them.

The harms caused by the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and their allies were evil, and they needed to be stopped. But that didn’t change the fact that farm boys from Iowa, housewives from Marseille, and factory workers from Nizhny Novgorod were forced to kill, deceive, and deny the humanity of their foes.

A generation of humanity with permanent evil in their ledgers. A necessary evil perhaps; there was no path to stop what the Axis were doing without harm. But it was evil none the less.

Ledger Ethics tells us these harms committed, even to stop greater evil, are not redeemed by stopping that evil. Architectural Humanism tells us that the harm in the ledger shape the people we are. Evil may have been stopped, but the war wasn’t won.

Winning a war implies a net positive was gained. But nothing is gained in war. At best worse harm is stopped. And in the process people kill, thus lowering the bar to kill in the future. People destroy, lowering the friction for future destruction. Damaged people come home and raise children, build institutions and do so with the influence of the trauma they bring home.

But the people who fought WWII are now nearly all gone. What about the conflicts of today? As I write this millions of people around the Persian Gulf watch the skies in fear of sudden incoming death. Americans, Iranians, Israelis, Saudis, Qataris, and more being forced to endure and commit violence.

Evil is everywhere. Evil that was chosen.

I’m not here to argue that Iranian government was innocent. They deny the right of their people to choose their faith and live in accordance with their own beliefs. They enforce this denial with state sanctioned violence. They fund violence across the region.

But none of that represents the same existential threat that inflamed the world in the 1930’s and 40’s. There were diplomatic options available. This is a war of choice. It is the continuation of politics by other means.

It is a choice to kill. It is a choice to make people kill. For those who survive, they will need to make a life in a harder world, a world with greater scarcity and cruelty.

The people making those choices, the ones launching strikes, the ones funding proxies, the ones who looked at a diplomatic solution coming within reach and decided that was the wrong outcome, they are writing permanent entries in their ledgers.

And in the people they are building.

And in the world those people will build after them.

That is Architectural Humanism’s most sobering verdict. The harm doesn’t stay contained to the moment of the choice. It distributes forward. Into the soldiers who come home harder. Into the children raised by harder people. Into the institutions built by people who have normalized what they had to do to survive. The evil propagates, and it does so through the very people who were damaged by it.

This is why “winning” is the wrong frame for any of it.

Nobody won World War II. They survived it. The distinction matters because winning licenses celebration and closure. Surviving demands reckoning. And most of the suffering that followed, the Cold War, a traumatized generation, was the reckoning that never fully happened, showing up anyway in the architecture of the post war world.

Nobody will win whatever emerges from the Persian Gulf. They will survive it, or they won’t, and either way the ledgers of the people involved will carry what was done there permanently. The Iranian regime’s genuine evil does not absorb those entries. The strategic justifications do not erase them. The outcome, whatever it is, will not travel backward in time and redeem the choices that were made.

Ledger Ethics asks one thing of us that most moral frameworks work very hard to avoid: carry the full weight of what was done, by whom, to whom, regardless of what came after.

That’s a harder way to live than a philosophy that lets outcomes settle the books. It means Grace and the people who forced him across the stars are all marked, even though the mission succeeded. It means the soldiers who stopped the Holocaust carry something permanent, even though stopping the Holocaust was necessary and right. It means the people ordering strikes on Tehran are writing on their ledgers in ink that doesn’t fade, regardless of what they believe they’re preventing.

A moral framework that promises clean hands is selling something.

The trolley problem gives you a lever and clear tracks and the luxury of knowing exactly what each choice costs. Real moral life gives you a field of options that someone else’s choices already contaminated, imperfect information, fear that calls itself calculation, and a ledger that keeps running long after the moment of decision passes.

Nobody wins. The ledger just records what happened.

That’s not pessimism. It’s the most honest accounting available.

The hazy memory of learning about Edgar Allen Poe in eighth grade is a pleasant place to visit in my mind. The sheen of wax on the hard wood floor. The early afternoon spring sun flooding in from overly large windows. The quasi chaos of a classroom of Gifted students. Macintosh IIe’s with Oregon Trail on floppy disk.

Our teacher wasn’t just going over the works of Poe but discussing the man that wrote them. Brilliant. Ruinous. Dead at forty. In her lesson she dropped a line that has stayed with me ever since.

My life has proven her insight to be true. In the throes of grief, I abandoned my Army post and went AWOL for a month, driving aimlessly around the country.

Not a great move.

In the depths of depression I made life altering decisions that made my life worse. I directed the anger I felt toward myself at the people I cared about most, I hurt them and scarred them in ways that may be dulled by time, but present nonetheless.

Many of the harms I have committed can be examined through the lens of mental health that has slid towards the less sane part of the scale. Would a rational young man destroy a promising military career and throw away the benefits that come with that for a five thousand mile road trip to nowhere? Probably not. Would a sensible person lash out at their most supportive friend when that friend was trying to help them? And don’t get me started on the mistakes I made searching for romantic validation… I already wrote that post.

You might think you know where this post is going. “Understanding why you failed is just a sophisticated way of letting yourself off the hook… especially if you can blame it on something like brain chemistry.” And admittedly, I have thought that way to justify to myself the harms I have done.

The saying goes “fatigue makes cowards of all men.” And this is true of mental as well as physical fatigue. But living with influences, internal or external, that could not bear the weight of the “better” choices we could have made does not erase the harms we have done.

What it does is teach us about the conditions that made the harm possible. Understanding your own mental state and the way that impacts your choices is the first step in preparing to make better choices and consciously building resiliency for the future.

Being clear-eyed about the harm we have done is not about seeking punishment. A person self-flagellating never made the world better. No, but it does help us determine what needs to be repaired. And seeing our failure points, show us where we need help from others.

After all, if I know that when I am suffering in the throes of depression I make poor choices, shouldn’t that tell me I should engage help?

If I know the brakes on my car are compromised, I wouldn’t drive it. It needs repair. If it’s my car, that repair is my responsibility, but it can’t be done alone. Even if I can make the fix myself I need parts. But if I’ve let them go long enough to be a danger, then I probably need more help.

Not to mention what happens if I drive it. I don’t just put myself at risk, but others too.

Repair is a relational act. It involves the people harmed, the communities that held you while you were breaking, the help you should have asked for before the brakes failed in the first place.

The lesson about Poe sticks with me today. I know I can always slide towards insanity. But the other part of the lesson is that we are anchored on the sliding scale. We have a core self we can return to.

The work of repair is the work of finding our way back to it, which means being honest about how far we’ve traveled, asking for help with the distance, and extending to ourselves the same patience we’d offer anyone we loved who was trying to find their way home.

I’ve said before that you can always be better tomorrow. I keep saying it because I keep needing to hear it.

Not absolved.

Not unchanged.

Better.

That’s the only direction available to us.

It’s a tale as old as time. A woman caught between two men vying for her affection. The classic love triangle. For me it has not been done better than the chaotic, anachronistic, and ultimately tragic Moulin Rouge. Both in its 2001 film incarnation as well as its Broadway musical version.

Having recently seen the traveling version of the stage show, I could not help but think of the moral and ethical dilemmas it raises.

What is the right thing to do when you fall in love with a woman who is pledged to another man? Pursuing her forces deception and lies and the violation of the other suitor’s dignity. But what if she loves you too? Then if you do not pursue her does that violate her agency and dignity too?

And how to deal with the emotion of it all? Humans rarely make decisions of the heart with their heads. Did Aristotle ever experience the ache of unrequited love? Kant never married and as far as we know was celibate, making it hard to listen to him when inflamed with passion.

In both the film and stage versions of Moulin Rouge we are meant to cheer for Christian, the penniless artist who truly loves Satine, the tragic waif starlet, and root against The Duke, the man who wants to possess Satine like any number of other beautiful objects he owns.

The Duke wants Satine as an adornment for himself, while Christian is the one who truly loves her. This we know because he says so in verse.

Funny thing… neither seem to know she is dying from tuberculosis.

The hero we are meant to root for, the one who really loves the woman in the center of this love triangle, he thinks he really loves her. But despite them stealing moments of passion wherever they can find them, he doesn’t know about the pressure her family is putting on her to choose the other suitor?

Wait… that’s not in Moulin Rouge.

I meant that he doesn’t know about her bloodied handkerchiefs and gasping for breath?

He doesn’t care about what people at the gym whisper about her behind their backs…

Gym? I meant in the theater…

Maybe he thinks… no, he believes he loves her… but truthfully he is in love with an idealized version of her, and what being with that version informs him about himself…

And belief is a powerful force to push back against.

I know, because I believed I loved her. Not the brilliant sparkling diamond at the heart of the Moulin Rouge. But a beautiful fitness instructor at my gym. A married fitness instructor.

We’d been friends for years. I’d never thought of her as a romantic partner, she’d been married as long as I’d known her. But she’d separated from her husband. And was dating.

I was dating a friend of hers. She was jealous. And I was jealous that she was dating someone else. And in a moment that felt scripted in a romcom, we got into an argument about our mutual jealousies, an argument that ended in A Big Damn Kiss™ on her front doorstep.

We had a whirlwind romance. But she wasn’t just my friend. She wasn’t just a beautiful fitness instructor. She was also a mother of two. And still someone’s wife.

He had a better job than me. He was well liked by her family. So much so that they told her he was too good for her. He provided. And from the opinion of her family, he provided more than she had any right to expect.

Under pressure from her estranged husband and her family, she broke things off with me and gave him another chance. For the kids. For the house. For her family.

But not for love. At least, that’s what I told myself. The rejection was devastating for me. Not only was she my friend, and my lover, but she’d also helped me get into better health. With her professional guidance I’d lost 70 pounds and whipped myself into the best shape of my life. Losing her, for me, was evidence that despite all of that, I wasn’t good enough.

I consoled myself with repeated viewings of Moulin Rouge. I saw myself as Christian. She was my Satine, and her husband was The Duke.

I knew it would be wrong to pursue her. But I also knew I loved her, that she loved me, and that love conquered all, right?

After all…

And like Christian, I ignored her sensible objections. The power of love would overcome all else, right?

Right?

Like it overcame Satine’s tuberculosis…

We are all the heroes in our own story. And hero centric morality is very appealing. Some deception, some violation some vows, that’s ok in the face of true love, right?

Ethically speaking, asking her to deny her own desire for me would be a denial of her agency and dignity, and therefore that was bad. And if that was bad, some bad things done in opposition would be ok, right?

I know now from the vantage point of time that no matter how I tried to justify our affair, she and I were firmly doing harm. It worked out as well as these things tend to. Not well at all.

Not quite so dramatic as the woman dying of tuberculosis on the stage in the arms of the man who loved her. But it ended poorly all the same.

The husband found out. They got divorced. Our relationship was no longer one of stolen kisses and secret rendezvous, but one of mundane everyday life.

I still saw her as the sparkling ideal woman who validated my sense of self-worth. She was just a person trying to juggle the life I’d helped to wreck. Few relationships would survive that. Ours included.

It ended bitterly.

I stewed in my sorrow and grief. Only later did I see the harm I’d done.

The lesson here is not that life is messier than the stories we tell. The lesson is not that seeing morals through the lens of our own desires allows us to do harm. And it’s not a confession for absolution.

The harms I committed were real and cannot be undone. So too were the harms done by the woman I loved, and by her now ex-husband.

The victims were real too. For me it was a torrid affair and a failed relationship. For her children it was the thing that broke their family. For the husband it was a romantic failure despite providing a home, fathering two children, and winning the approval of her family. Many were harmed.

In the process I made it easier to justify doing harm. I made myself a person who is slightly more likely to do further harm.

The harm I did remains. The debt remains in my ledger.

The debit remains, but the person I am and will continue to become need not remain identical to the one who incurred it.

People who have done harms they recognize can then lose themselves to that harm. Why bother being better when you’ve proven you’re not? But despite the irreversible nature of the harms we cause, we can always be better tomorrow.

Christian never had to live with what he built. The show ends. The curtain falls. The myth is sealed in amber by Satine’s death, preserved and perfect and consequence-free.

I had to keep building. With the wreckage, with the debt, with the person I had actually become rather than the one I believed I was. That’s the difference between myth and life. In life the curtain doesn’t fall. Tomorrow arrives whether you’re ready for it or not.

The project is never finished. We are always building. And that is not a consolation. It’s a demand.

The weight and force of my father’s hand swing through the air, a heavy ring magnifying the damage on my nine-year-old cheek. Blood vessels burst across the right half of my face as I tumble into a pile on the hard linoleum of kitchen floor. From this new vantage point my father’s stature and fury are amplified.

Behind my wailing sobs a single comfort sits in the back of my mind.

With a heavy step I feel a blister burst in my boot. It is mile 23 of a road march, and the new pain mixes with the ache in my shoulders from my ruck sack and the exhaustion throughout my body. I look at the men in a line marching before me and dare not fall behind them.

With a grim determination I remind myself.

Unable to get warm, I shiver to the point of cramping, sweat pouring all over my body. Thrashing in an emergency room bed, teeth chattering so hard I am sure they will shatter in my mouth.

Under four blankets I have only one coherent thought.

Confronting Impermanence

When I was in fifth grade, I learned the sun would eventually expand and consume the Earth. This was my first real existential fear. I was taught this would not happen for billions of years. But I lived on Earth and did not want it to be destroyed.

Should anyone survive long enough, they will learn about the fleeting nature of all things, not just people. Whether through gaining knowledge of death or entropy, we learn nothing will remain as is.

This knowledge unlocked fear in me when I acquired it. But as the truth of our nature sat in my mind, I learned that it was to be embraced, not avoided. Because it was something I’d known for a long time, learned from suffering I’d already endured in my brief life.

No matter how angry my father was, that anger would end. He’d tire, or he’d kill me. I knew this in moments drenched in terror. No cruel punishment, no abuse, could last forever. And that fact was a flotation to cling to in a sea of torment.

But my life has not been all about suffering. I have seen good. I have been given good. I have lived in the good.

I know the good will not last any more than the bad. But as I read the doom in my phone, as I momentarily feel myself succumbing to the dread, I remember the truth.

Nothing terrible in this world will last. This too shall pass.

It can seem impossible to make the world a better place. It feels like there is always something, someone, making it worse. But that too is subject to the impermanence of everything.

Even by doing nothing, all that ails the world will end. But what happens when we decide to act?

That boy crying on the floor persisted.

That soldier trudging along kept moving.

That patient endured and healed.

All of them led to the person I am today. Their ills fell to the forces of time and entropy.

Persisting, trudging, healing, these are evolutionary responses to stimuli, wired into us by billions of years of life finding a way to just one more generation. And they are as meaningless and absurd as everything else.

Everything is meaningless and everything is absurd. Even in that void we have some small agency. Give in to the cruelty of existence, or push back and make other’s existence suck just a little less. It’s all going to end in stillness, but we don’t have to allow the worst to persist while we exist.

It’s absurd to make effort to make the world better. Be absurd in the face of absurdity. Suffer and pay it forward with kindness. Why not? Nothing matters, true. All marks we make are written in pencil. But we, for a little while, we get to hold that pencil. Write something better than what’s around you.

Or don’t. I’m not your boss. But I want this absurd world to suck a little less, so in the face of absurdity I’m still scrawling in pencil.

As of the writing of this essay, there have been 3 murders in Minneapolis so far in 2026. Two of these were committed by government agents acting in their official capacity as part of an ICE “immigration crackdown”.

The anger felt in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, in the US, and across the world is valid.

The anger is righteous.

The anger is justified.

And though it is all of those things, let us not forget that anger is something else.

It is dangerous.

I do not condone the actions of ICE. I do not condone the immigration decisions of the Trump administration. I would vote immediately for the defunding and dissolution of ICE and the greater “Homeland Security” apparatus that it is a part of.

That said, the growing backlash against ICE should be handled with caution.

At its core, the resistance to ICE and its tactics is a result of the belief in the American concepts of justice and freedom. Not that justice and freedom are American concepts. What I mean is the American ideals of those concepts.

We hold as a nation that everyone is “created equal” and endowed with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Watching masked agents of the government grab people, ship them off to prisons or other countries with seemingly little to no due process or recourse, violates these ideas.

The empathy we share tells us we would not want to be treated like ICE is treating people.

Based on these ideas, the anger so many of us feel is what I said it was.

Valid.

Righteous.

Justified.

It can be other things too.

Corrosive.

Empowering.

A replacement for morality.

The fuel of revenge.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is signposted with righteousness.

In this moment we stand at a precipice of potential change. An opportunity to push back against the growing fascism eroding America as a nation of enlightenment ideals. But backlash can lead to overreach if not handled with care.

Let us not forget, the current actions of ICE are not the result of an outside evil come to attack our nation. They were spelled out in advance and chosen by people. Your neighbors. Your friends. And statistically speaking, possibly even you.

Plenty of people did not consider the effect of the cruelty of this choice on other people. They did not see them as people. They were portrayed as an “invasion of illegals”. Terrifying language designed to play upon all too real fears.

The fear that America is changing. That fear is real in a way that the “invasion of illegals” is not.

Change is the only constant in life. Despite that, people have an inborn aversion to it. We feel most at ease in a world that we understand and can make logical predictions about.

In the past fifty years though, America has changed rapidly. Within the span of a human life, the roles of women have changed. Women have fought for and attained nearly equal social standing with men. While the gender pay gap and workforce metrics in certain industries show that there is still ground to gain, few can deny that there has been sweeping change.

Economics have changed too. In that same lifetime a college degree went from affordable and a near guarantee of a comfortable single-income middle-class life that could support a family to the source of crushing debt with little promise of the rewards enjoyed by prior generations. Americans have never been more productive or educated, yet the slice of the pie going to working Americans has shrunk over the same period, breeding anxiety and blame.

A blame that will be directed somewhere. It is no secret that those empowered by the state of the nation today want to maintain the status quo that gave them power and wealth. Yet the anxiety and fear produced in that system must be directed somewhere.

Complicated solutions that curb the wealth and power of those most responsible for the erosion of the American dream are difficult to communicate.

“Build The Wall” and “Mass Deportations” fit easily on signs and within chants.

The blame has been directed at the most vulnerable, those who can affect the status quo the least.

The blame has been sold to those who believed in a status quo that afforded them certain privileges and benefits, even if they do not consciously admit that. And those who appear different from the “promised” status quo are the easiest to blame when people feel their status, even unadmitted, slipping away.

When you think you are safely above others, that safety feels like protection. I disagree with the idea that others standing below instead of equal is actually safe. But I understand why people feel that way. And the insecurity it creates can curdle into what looks the same as hate.

And whether it is hate, or simply hate shaped, does it matter? It creates the same outcomes. But accepting this as a hate merely born of some moral defect is self-defeating.

Be angry at the crimes of ICE. You have every right to be. But when that anger needs to be aimed, be cautious with aiming it at those who support ICE and its agenda. Sure, some are people who harbor hate within for anyone they deem to be “other”.

But the vast majority are not driven by inherent malice. They are driven by fear. And that fear has been manipulated.

A reckoning will come. Will it be driven by vengeance and malice? Or reason and empathy?

To get to a world where the atrocities of ICE are not only stopped, but where the environment does not allow them to happen at all, we cannot rely on anger, righteous though it may be.

The wrongs of ICE, and the wrongs that enabled it, cannot be erased. Nor can the fear and anxiety that enabled them. Anger tells us that we should visit retribution on those responsible. It feels good. It feels proper.

Those who committed crimes should be held accountable. Not only the ones who pulled triggers. But those who gave them the impunity to do so, those who decided that cruelty towards others was valid even when it was against the laws of our nation.

More importantly, the support that enabled the crimes of ICE feels like it should be punished as well. But that feeling only entrenches those that supported the “immigration crackdown”. It will make them feel their own righteous anger. It will plant the seeds more firmly, grow the roots deeper. The growth may not be visible on the surface, but it will remain strong beneath, and when conditions are right it will burst forth in this violent growth again.

To create a more moral society we must meet people where they are. People did not support the actions of ICE because they are hateful monsters. They did it because they are fearful of a rapidly changing world that feels worse off than what they were promised, because they are right that the world has changed. The world is changing. Where they are wrong is that the change is “taking” from them. Where we can do better is show them the changing world can be better if we work together with the changing world instead of fighting change that cannot be stopped.

Change is like a river. A stone thrown in a river does nothing. A levee built of many stones together can stop it… until the levee breaks and the flood is even more destructive.

We cannot stop the river. But we can stop building walls against it and start building mills to harness its power.

We must meet this fear and anxiety where it is. Because we all feel it. We can overcome it not by punching back at those we disagree with and getting a “win”, but by working together to build the mills that will power the world we thought we were promised.

I am not a good person.

As I write this, next to me in a drawer lies a bottle of Oxycodone. I had surgery last month, a fusion of three vertebrae in my neck. The opioid was prescribed as part of my post-surgery pain management regimen.

This isn’t a piece about addiction. Thankfully I have whatever combination of genetics, brain chemistry, and substance abuse driven trauma that makes me very apprehensive about drugs.

What this essay is about are the impulses I do have for that bottle of pills. I’m not using them… but why should they go to waste? Surely someone would pay for them.

I recoil as I type the words, but I cannot dispute that the thoughts were mine. I have no excuse for having these thoughts. I am not destitute.

I can say that I once was very poor, that whatever this medication could fetch me if sold illicitly would make a material improvement in my life. But I am not poor, and such a sale would make little difference.

I can say that I was raised by a man who did this very thing. I remember sitting awkwardly on a couch, twelve years old, with people that everyone pretended were some friends over for a visit. But they weren’t friends of anyone in our family. They were waiting for my father to bring them back to his bedroom, where he’d sell them his pills.

I can say that was something I experienced in my formative years. But I knew then it was wrong and cannot argue that I do not know that now.

The Honest Truth

I have long feared becoming the man my father was. For much of my life I pretended I was not the same person he was, that I chose to be someone different, someone better.

But when I manipulated someone in a way similar to him, well, you see… that was different…

When I have thoughts about doing things I saw him do, things I knew were wrong, I convince myself that because I didn’t put the idea into action that made me somehow better than him.

But I’m not. I live with the same monster he was, inside me now and not down the hall in a smoke-filled bedroom. My rap sheet is shorter, but it isn’t empty. No matter how much I try to pretend otherwise, the monster I always feared lives inside me all along.

I don’t write about morals and ethics because I’m some paragon. I’m not. Far from it. Our choices, our actions, and our thoughts are the architecture of who we are. I am cut from the same cloth as the man I grew up despising.

What is different is that I am not willing to pretend I am otherwise. I look at the monster within and accept that it is part of who I am. Knowing what foundation you are working on is crucial to building something that lasts.

While that monster resides within, the sum of who I am are both the thoughts it inspires, and the choices I make in response to those thoughts. I admit to thinking of the terrible. But I also admit I have agency in what to do with those thoughts. I can pursue them to their logical conclusion, making an addict’s life a little worse in exchange for my greed. Or I can choose to honestly admit to myself that the monster is within but not give it power over me.

I think to myself that the Oxycodone in my drawer is probably valuable. But then I push back against that thought. I think about who would buy them, and how it would harm them. I think about what it would cost to my integrity to circumvent the law and protections against something like this. I think about how it subtly changes me if I find a way to justify such a course of action to myself.

The pills remain safely put away in my drawer. Should I need them for pain I will cautiously make use of them. I have a monster within, but that doesn’t mean I need to accept that as all I am.

I am not a good person, because I do not think there are good people. Or evil people. There are only people and the good we do or choose not to do. There are only people, and the evil we choose to do, or choose to resist.

I say, “you can always be better tomorrow,” not as some soothing mantra. I say it because I need that to be true.

Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.

If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.

Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.

I am writing about the moral philosophical framework I’ve developed through years of processing my grief and trauma. Something that codifies the way I’ve learned to think and interact with the world.

A process to see people. Act on what you see. Take responsibility for the person you are building. And in the process, maybe together we’ll change the world.

Not charity. An insurrection against a system that wants us isolated and processed as units of production.

Punk kindness. Empathy as rebellion.

My goal? Just increase the net good in the world. Make ripples in the water until they become a wave of change.

But if any like… real philosophy people read my moral framework here, I’m sure they are going to tear it to shreds.

“You talk about interpersonal good, but what about systemic problems?”

“Wait, you haven’t read all of Emmanuel Levinas and his Infinite Responsibility to the Other? Well then you haven’t done the required reading to be able to pronounce a moral framework!”

“Who are you? How’d you get in my office?! No, I won’t read your Substack! I’m calling campus security!”

Ethics for the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

But here’s the thing. I’m not trying to evaluate the western philosophy canon and add a brick to it that says “Anthony Curtis”.

What I am working on is something the guy in the utility truck can use to inspire him to be a bit more kind. Something the call center employee can use to counter the barrage of angry people she hears every day, shouting at her but really angry at capitalist enshitification¹.

Sure, there is a plethora of modern philosophers today tackling modern problems with academic rigor. Scanlon asked the question I wrestle with daily, “What do we owe each other?” He only set the minimum that no reasonable person would disagree with.

I’ve dealt with my share of unreasonable people. So have you. They’re everywhere.

Peter Singer built a philosophy that lets the wealthy assuage their complicity in the exploitative effects of late-stage capitalism with spreadsheets and mosquito nets.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up effective altruism. Also - fuck effective altruism. More on that in a later post)

But for all the papers, and the heuristics, and discussions that you need a PhD to begin to understand, is any of it making the world we live in better?

“These philosophers these days…”

- Plato, probably. I don’t know, he’s dead and doesn’t know what an iPad is.

Whatever comes from academic philosophy, it’s not making life better for us peons in the trenches. But I can use words like “contractualism” in a sentence, and I can write to an audience more concerned with just being decent in a world on fire than they are interested in Kant.

If I start talking like Socrates people are going to zone me out. It is super annoying to respond to everything with another question. Especially when you are holding up the line at the understaffed fast-food place.

“A hemlock Frosty to go!”

“Yes, that is my Frosty. But what is virtue?”

“Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”

Solidarity Not Charity

So let’s start small. Something we can wrap our hands around. Today I went for a run.

I went for a run. It was 93°. It wasn’t a long run. I finished a few blocks from my house to allow myself a cool down walk. Didn’t really take. I was hot.

Halfway home I saw a mailman. Not my mailman… the dividing line for the mail carriers is apparently a block from my house. I assume he was fairly acclimated, but the heat index read 107°.

I’ve been a delivery driver in the Florida August heat. It is an energy sapping slog. I had cold Gatorade at home. I was planning to have one. It was going to be refreshing. I bet he’d like one too.

I could see him. I could help him.

He wasn’t asking. He probably didn’t even notice me, checking the addresses on the mail in his hands. No one would say that I was obligated to help him. That’s Scanlon’s Contractualism.

I could, if I wanted to do good, find a way to do more by funding electrolyte fluids for premature babies at St Jude’s. Or investing in crypto and taking the returns to fund malaria treatments in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s Singer’s Effective Altruism.

But fuck both of those. I see a person in front of me. That person is sweating in the same oppressive heat I am. Difference is I’m about to go home to my air conditioning. And he has hours of walking ahead of him.

It would take me an extra five minutes to get home, grab him a cold drink, and get back before he finishes the street.

I hustled home, grabbed the Gatorade, and caught him at the end of the block.

“Hey, it’s hot out here. This might help.”

A quick thank you. A cold drink. And it was over.

Mutual Aid

Did I change the world? No.

Did I leave an impression? Probably. The sweaty stranger with a Gatorade, yeah, he’ll probably tell someone about it. And that’ll be it. Faded from memory.

It might not make a difference. But it was a tiny bit of good I chose to create. Because I saw a person, and chose a kindness.

That alone isn’t much. But I’m making myself accustomed to seeing people. To witnessing them.

And doing something.

If I walked on by, doing nothing, that would be the normal thing. No one would bat an eye. But I would know I could have done him a kindness.

I could choose that small kindness, or choose indifference.

Dark Things Grow in Shadows

Indifference is a shadow. A shadow where dust accumulates. And sometimes something fouler.

In the shadow of indifference we can accept people working two jobs with no health insurance because both only schedule enough hours to be just short of full time.

In the shadow of indifference we can scroll past the article about our neighbors being taken off the street because they look “illegal”.

And philosophers worry about “publish or perish” and offer us nothing.

Why I Write

Am I doing something revolutionary? No. Am I going to get an honorary PhD from an Ivy and make people call me Doctor Curtis? Also no.

No on the honorary degree. If I got a PhD, I’d make everyone call me Doctor.

What I am putting into a framework has existed as long as people have. It just wasn’t the formal idea that you can slap a name on and reorient one’s thinking.

It was what people did for me. They saw me when I suffered. They chose kindness over indifference. Without which I’d live a much more meager life. Or none at all.

Every thought, choice, and action carries weight. We can see the weight in the moral credits and moral debits we generate. That’s my ledger.

When I see something I can help and choose not to? That’s a debit. An evil of indifference.

When we see a person, but consider them as anything else, anything not like ourselves, that blinds us. We can’t witness them as they are, see their needs and hopes and fears.

What Do We Do?

So here is my philosophy.

• See people. Witness them for what they are, not what you assign them to be.

• Use that witness for empathy. Use that witness to guide reason. What can I do?

• Act.

• Accept moral responsibility. Everything you do or choose not to do makes the world a little better, or a little worse. Acknowledge your impact.

• Witness yourself. Understand your impact on the world around you. See yourself as part of it, not separate.

Rinse and repeat.

Be clear eyed on the truth of you. Don’t like what you see?

Be better tomorrow.

Fail someone you could have helped?

Be better tomorrow.

Anarcho-Kindness

How does that scale to the real problems? Like climate change? And income inequality?

Starting with the small, you are choosing to be intentional. No man steps in the same river twice.

Starting small, you are changing yourself. The way you see the world. The way you think and act.

You are the architect of yourself. You are building something better.

You start with giving a stranger a cold drink on a hot day. Eventually you’re researching your carbon footprint. One day you find yourself standing at a podium giving your coworkers an impassioned speech about forming a union.

Even the pyramids started with drawing the line in the sand to mark the first block.

Do I want the academic philosophers of our day and age to witness me? Yeah, sure, that’d be nice.

But I ain’t writing for them.

I want to inspire you. Big things start small.

If we all build more kindness into ourselves, more empathy, more moral responsibility for our impact on each other, what do we get?

A better world.

Start by being better tomorrow. Change yourself. Change the world.

Fight. Let’s go.

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I am still recovering from my multilevel neck fusion surgery, but I wanted to drop in with a brief update. My capacity is returning slowly, and it feels good to crack open a Word doc, even if just for a moment.

Since I have been doing little more than resting, I have had time to think. I’ve been examining the ideas I share here, the frameworks of kindness and empathy, and interrogating where they actually come from.

My focus on ethics isn’t academic. It comes from the trauma of my early life. I score a perfect 10 on the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire. But more important than the score was the man who caused it. My father was a man who viewed people as raw materials. He manipulated, abused, and consumed them. To him, others were means to his ends, never ends in themselves.

From an early age, I knew two things:

First, my father was a monster.

Second, I did not want to be him.

But the hard truth, the one I have ignored for much of my life, is that I am far more like him than I want to admit.

I didn’t develop “Ledger Ethics” because I am a choir boy who has never done wrong. I developed it because my natural settings are broken. My initial instincts are often to sate my own desires, to dominate, and to consume, regardless of the cost to others.

There is a trope in zombie media where one survivor appears to have escaped the horde unharmed. They pull their sleeves down and tell the group they are fine. They may even delude themselves. But deep down, they know the truth. They know they have been bitten. They know the infection is spreading, and that the hunger is starting to uncoil in their gut.

That is what this newsletter is. It is not a sermon from a saint. It is the survival manual of a man fighting an infection. “Ledger Ethics” is the prosthetic conscience I built to replace the one I was born without. It is the manual override I have to hit every day to keep from becoming the thing I hate.

I will explore these rougher edges and this inner darkness when I resume full-time writing in a few weeks. The “nice guy” mask is coming off. It’s time to talk about the machine underneath.

Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.

If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.

Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.

As of the writing of this sentence, I have been in pain for 87 consecutive days.

I began seriously pursuing my writing nine months ago.

These two stats are not unrelated.

(What, you don’t constantly quantify everything in your life? No, just me?)

I am going to state upfront, this is not going to be my most eloquent prose, for reasons that will soon become obvious.

One day I was fine. Then the pain began. It started as an ache in my left shoulder, slowly building while I sat in a movie theater watching the latest MCU offering.

I am no stranger to achy muscles. I’m in my mid 40’s and have logged something on the order of 10,000 miles running in the past nine years. I would tell you that I say this not as a brag, but who are we kidding?

Anyway, I’m used to dealing with nagging aches and pains. A sore shoulder was nothing I couldn’t take care of with some stretching or my massage gun.

Or so I thought.

The next day the pain was worse. And it didn’t respond to my typical remedies. Actually, it did. It got worse.

After a few days I booked a massage. Maybe someone else could solve this problem?

No. Saw my doctor, got multiple pain killers. No effect.

Steroids. Acupuncture. Physical therapy.

Nope. Nada. Nunca.

About a year ago I was also dealing with constant pain. That was caused by a four-ish month long migraine. A cervical arthroplasty to relieve pressure on nerves in my neck from a herniated disc.

I don’t know if it was a brush with mortality or simply the building pressure of decades of too much to say suddenly being uncorked once my head cleared, but once I’d mentally recovered from months of a headache fog, I started writing.

And I haven’t stopped.

I wrote my memoir, a 137,000-word ode to my late twin and my history of trauma and the impact of the people who wouldn’t turn away.

I had a fun idea on a sleepy Sunday, what if a corporate space freighter crashed into a stereotypical lich’s dark tower? Six weeks later I was wrapping up an adventure of undead dragons, tentacle aliens, pedantic wizards, and a… *checks notes*… Mormon missionary.

But I wasn’t done. I needed to share what I’d learned over the winding path through that memoir. The power of kindness. The freedom in forgiveness. And how to find goodness in a world that seems filled with filled with malice.

And thus… this Substack. It wasn’t started on a whim. I have a lot more to say. Ideas that I truly believe could improve people’s lives.

But the Substack launch coincided with this new bout of pain. Pain I was hoping was going to be resolved soon. But my visit to the neurologist today proved that they still have no diagnosis, much less a resolution. Despite thousands of dollars in artistically black and white glamour shots of my spine.

So, what’s the point of this post? Honestly, it’s my scream into the void. Its Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill, depressed and defeated. I just need to get this out. Get it out of my system like leeching out a poison, so I can get back to things I want to write about.

While I haven’t committed to a posting schedule, I am still pushing through the pain. From the moment I open my laptop I know I have a ticking clock, a countdown until the pain overwhelms me and I have to lay down in the only position where the pain ebbs.

It might be an unpredictable posting schedule. But I am not resigned to defeat. Today I am overwhelmed by pain and the uncertainty. But I’m still writing. I have a lot left to say. The theme of this whole project is failure.

Failure. And in the face of that failure a fact that is absurd in a difficult universe in which we are insignificant in time and space.

I can still be better tomorrow.

I hope you keep reading.

This kind of vulnerable exploration of pain, growth, and meaning-making is what I share every week with subscribers to Radical Kindness: Empathy as Rebellion. If you’re on your own journey of healing and ethical living, I’d love to have you join our community.

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Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.

If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.

Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.

Today is my birthday. It’s the day I dread the most on every calendar. Not because I am upset about my lost youth and vigor. I’ve long since made peace with that.

No, it is because I am a twin. And my other half, my twin sister Angel, doesn’t get to dread her birthday. She hasn’t been able to celebrate her birthday since she turned 19. Because a few months after a blood vessel burst in her brain and extinguished the warmest light I knew.

The following essay is adapted from my memoir, Half Life. I wrote it as a breather chapter after my recounting of the first time our father, Leo, molested my twin sister as I listened in the next room, paralyzed with fear. It was written as much to help me distance myself from difficult memories as it was to demonstrate a point.

A point about the corrosive bitterness of entitlement.

As a lead in to my next essay about “you owe me nothing” it also seems thematically relevant as well.

As unpleasant as the prior memory was to read, I can assure you it was unpleasant to write. Dredging the memory back up, putting my mind back into that space, reliving the emotions again, and lingering there to get the details right, trying to bring forth as much of the truth of that moment as I can conjure, it was heavy. An act of endurance. When I finished the last of it I had to walk away from my computer, go into another room, and collapse into a heap.

I’ve made several attempts at writing my story over the years. And here is always where I’d always fail. From that first incident with Angel or reliving the memory of Leo introducing us to pornography at the age of six. Remembering being lifted by my neck and thrown across my bedroom. Angel being forced to lie about having been in a fight to explain the bruises on her face. Being kicked out of where we lived in the middle of the night because Leo had beaten his girlfriend in a drunken rage. The early years of our lives are full of so many of these stories, story after story after story, and they grow longer and more dense with the terrible details and heightened emotions. So much pain.

And when I start to share the tales, how do I choose which awful thing needs to be brought to light, and what sits hidden in the dark of my memory? How do I respect the suffering Angel and I endured if I don’t lay bare all of Leo’s sins to the world? How do I get the world to recognize the strength I had to summon just to survive this? How do I show everyone the armor I earned for completing these trials?!

HOW AM I TO BE REWARDED FOR MY PAIN!?!?

And therein lies the trap. The stories begin to pour out of me. Because don’t you understand? I was hurt. I was harmed. I was abused and beaten and violated and broken, again and again. And I have to show you how much, because it was so much, and I am owed for my suffering.

Every time I try to write about this, I get lost. Lost back in these memories, lost back in the mind of a scared little boy who wished someone would protect him from the monster that lived inside the house. And I have to show the receipts, because for the cost of my childhood, my innocence, my happiness, my wholeness, I am owed a debt.

Who exactly owes me for what I went through? Leo? While he was the direct cause of a lot of bad things, how do I collect from him? He’s been dead since 1997, and even if he were still alive, what, exactly, do I think he owes me? What can repay such a debt?

“Sorry kid, your family and society at large failed you. Please accept this ‘The-Rest-Of-Your-Life-Will-Be-Easy’ certificate as recompense. Blackout dates apply. See terms and conditions. Not valid in Tennessee.”[1]

This was how I thought for a long time. At least as far back as middle school. It drove my angst in high school. And once Angel died it basically became my default mode. Don’t you understand? My life was hard. I was owed.

But that is not the way the world works. No one is lining up to make my life better or easier because I suffered. And for every indignity I endured, there are so many people who went through so much worse. Even amongst my own siblings, my oldest sister Angel (the other one) never knew our dad at all. They may not have been good, but I had relationships with both of my parents.

The truth of the matter is that I want that suffering to have meant something, anything. For years I used it as my angry shield to the world. As time went on I attempted this memoir, thinking that if I put all the stories out into the world it would somehow create the meaning that I wanted. But all I did was write some childhood abuse trauma porn and get stuck in some of the worst moments of my life.

It is not a naturally occurring resource to be mined and exploited. It does not coalesce around a narrative on its own. We have to create our own meaning and bring it forth into the world.

Trauma and tragedy aren’t things that happen to provide meaning. Trust me, the saying “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” is utter bullshit. If my arms were torn off by a wheat thresher I could survive, but I wouldn’t be stronger after. Sure, I might find resilience or something intangible, but the amount of weight I can lift, an object measure of strength, would have gone from *something* to *nothing*. And resilience doesn’t carry in all the groceries in one go.

If I want to find meaning in what I went through, it’s not going to come by trying to share as many terrible stories with the widest audience possible. That only plays into my own narcissism. For my meaning, I have to make it myself.

Humans, as a species, have an evolutionary knack for pattern recognition. It’s why we were successful hunters and foragers, why we have music and probably key to how we developed language[2]. It’s also why we have conspiracy theories and gamblers think are definitely going to win the next hand[3]. It also means that we fall easily into the “everything happens for a reason” line of thought. That is not what I am doing here.

I didn’t get beaten and molested and suffer grief and loss in order to impart upon the world some great lesson that it didn’t already know. As much as I’d like it to be otherwise, I am certain there is no grand revelation in these pages that no one has made before. And that is ok.

But one important lesson to take away is how easy it is to feel owed when you’ve been wronged. I say that not to diminish any harm that has befallen anyone; in a just world we would all be made whole when broken. But holding on to that debt, the anger, the pain, it feels good, it feels righteous. After all, if I had to go through so much, why shouldn’t I wield my pain at the world?

By reliving these stories, I’m not extracting what I’m owed from the world. I’m not hurting Leo. I’m not protecting Angel. I’m only punishing myself. I can’t change these things that happened to me. I can’t control the past.

What I can control is my position in relation to the world, and the expectations I place upon it. Few could argue my anger wasn’t justified. But that justification doesn’t make it any less acidic and harmful. When I argue that the world owes me nothing, it isn’t some plea to be a martyr, or a license to wallow in my woe caused by a callous world.

It is a recalibration of expectation, that while grounded in a bleak fact, offers freedom from bitterness, from envy, from vitriol. And once freed, that liberty gives us the flexibility to pivot into a better world. Not because it has changed. But because we have.

This kind of vulnerable exploration of grief, growth, and meaning-making is what I share every week with subscribers to Radical Kindness: Empathy as Rebellion. If you’re on your own journey of healing and ethical living, I’d love to have you join our community.

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This chapter is from my complete but unpublished memoir, Half Life. To get it published, I need to prove that this story matters to people. Sharing this post with others is the single most effective way you can help me do that.

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[1] I have no idea who is presenting this compensation to me. I guess in my imagination there is a Department of Bad Childhood where an official would process my application, like student loan forgiveness or something

[2] Citation needed, I’m not an anthropologist

[3] Source – trust me bro

Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.

If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.

Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.

Not everyone agrees that systemic inequality is a problem in America. But even the most ‘MERICA!-pilled among us could see that certain challenges can make achieving the American Dream™ a bit more difficult.

Challenges in childhood like housing instability and lack of access to education resources due to poverty. No one would say that attending seven schools in grades K-6 is a better start than having some stability. Nor would anyone likely say that growing up subjected to PTSD inducing abuse is a rock-solid foundation.

Further, one would likely not be advised to AWOL themselves out of the military, throwing away the GI Bill and VA benefits in the process. Or recommend quitting and starting a new job every six months or so for several years.

All of this and more is part of my background. Yet I sit here typing this in a house I own, one that includes both a bedroom converted to a Peloton studio and a private office where I can work my six-figure salary job in fintech from home. Parked outside are two cars I own outright. Measured by net assets I sit here at midlife having done what I was told could be done starting poor in America.

These are my burdens, but they aren’t unique to me. And so many struggle with so much I did not have to face, like different treatment because of the color of my skin or presentation of my gender. But how did I overcome it all? I worked hard, but lots of people work hard with little affluence to show for it. I know I’m not as tired at the end of the day as someone barely getting by working construction and hustling on an app based side gig.

It certainly wasn’t by pulling on any bootstraps.

And I don’t tell you about what I have today to brag that I “made it”. Consumer culture affluence is fleeting, and should some ill fate befall me I wouldn’t be the first one in line at a food bank reminiscing about the life I used to have.

No telling you about what I have puts some context into what I owe.

I did not arrive where I am today born on the wings of self-reliance and a can-do attitude. Often enough I exemplified the opposite of those traits. But for every wall in my way, there was a ladder to climb over it. For every fall into a pit of despair, there was a hand reaching down to pull me out.

The friend whose family welcomed me into their home and treated me as one of their own. The coach who picked me up before dawn to give me time to workout before school. The church leaders who told me and showed me that I was valuable. The mentor who drove 30 miles each way twice a week to invest in my growth.

None of these people owed any obligation to me. Yet without these impactful contributions I would not be the person I am today. In any measure, time, money, or the intangible, I cannot repay them for helping me build this life I enjoy so much.

Behind every person’s success is a crowd of people like this. For some it is their family, nurturing and providing. Or maybe their pastor. Or a work spouse. Or friends who were always just “there”. We are the amalgamations of so many small investments made by so many. Successful Kickstarter campaigns in human form.

“You might have needed all of that,” you might say, “but I didn’t. And if I got it, I didn’t ask for it. I owe nobody nothing. I made me.”

I agree. You are the architect of you. That’s a foundational idea of this whole thing, Architectural Humanism, thank you for giving me the set up for the plug. But the materials you built with? They weren’t all supplied by you.

Allow me a quick anthropological aside, if you would. When we find the remains of humans from thousands of years ago, one of the markers that they were in a “society”, as opposed to just being a group of foragers, is the evidence of healed bones.

To allow a bone to heal, a person must be cared for by others. Allowed to consume and not need to contribute, until they are whole. From this simple foundation, humanity has developed a complex society that constantly enriches the lives of those within it.

You benefit from the ingenuity of people long passed, the ones who figured out how to grow more food with less work, who eradicated diseases, people who tricked slabs of silicon into thinking. Especially if you live in an advanced economy, you are the beneficiary of generations and millennia of the contributions of people you’ll never know.

That’s the human project. We didn’t ask for it, but we are all the recipients of the personal investment of the people in our lives, the infrastructure we take for granted in the background, and the fruits of the struggles for individual dignity and agency.

Alone a person can survive. Being lifted by others a person can thrive.

So what do we do with this? How do we face a debt owed to so many? It’s overwhelming! Do I need to go give everything I own to Goodwill? Or to… “human civilization”? How do you even do that?!

First, we acknowledge the debt. You don’t need to list out every person who contributed to your life. That would be a good practice for orienting towards gratitude, but not the point of this essay. You don’t need a spreadsheet of each person and what they did. Understanding that the debt exists is enough.

Second, we need to understand that the debt cannot be repaid. How do you repay John Snow? No, not the Game of Thrones guy, the 19^th century doctor who figured out disease was being spread by contaminated water and not “bad air”, leading to modern germ theory? Or Marie Curie for essentially sacrificing herself so that we can understand the dangers and applications of radiation? Do I need to tip the radiologist when I get an X-ray? What do I owe to the Ethiopian shepherd who apocryphally discovered the coffee bean?

Simple. You can’t repay them. You may be able to repay kindness in kind to a friend. But not repay the teacher who gave extra attention, or the coworker who mentored you. And if you had loving and nurturing parents? Anything you do to repay them is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.

And thus, we are left with this truth. “I owe everything.”

And we cannot know or even comprehend all of the things people have contributed to us in our life. We are each the return on investment of so, so many people. The abstract mass of humanity that is defined as not being me.

The all-encompassing other outside of oneself. “You”. All of you.

But we don’t deal with an “amorphous mass of the collective of all humans who are not me through time and space”. We interact with people. So we can only address repayment to individuals. Not the whole world. But that guy across the street mowing his yard. Or the lady you happen to ride in the elevator with every morning at work.

For each person we interact with, the truth is always “I owe you everything”.

But how do we repay all the people we interact with? I’m only one person… I only have so much to give. And if I give too much, my future capacity to give is compromised. How do we measure? When is enough enough?

And what happens when I choose not to give? Because that is going to happen. A lot.

The debt is infinite. But you are not. What is important is what you can give. But what you cannot give is also infinite. Infinite and overwhelming.

What you can give is good. Good is what affirms a person’s dignity. Good is what provides benefit to another. There is certainly a lot of harm and evil in the world. But on the net, we are here with a complex and interwoven society because there is more good. And any act of good is a contribution to the net good of all.

We have more to give than money. Or stuff. That woman on the elevator you see every morning? She’s wearing earrings modeled on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. They go remarkably well with the glasses she’s wearing today. So what can you give?

You can give your attention. You notice her. She is not simply a part of the blurred background of your daily journey to your desk. She is a person. She has chosen her accessories, her earrings, the glasses, to express who she is.

You have 30 seconds together in the elevator. She gets off on 4, you get off on 5.

“I like your earrings, those are neat… and they go well with your glasses.”

The door opens on 4. She mumbles an awkward “Thank you,” and steps out.

You go on with your day. What you didn’t know was that she was self-conscious about the glasses. She wasn’t sure they were the right choice, but she is now more certain. She has a presentation to give today on camera. She delivers with an almost imperceptible increase in confidence. She nails the presentation. It’s going to be a good day.

Its small. Its not going to be written about in the history books, or even in her Instagram “New glasses, who dis?” selfie post that evening out with her friends. She wasn’t sure if she was going to go. But her day went well, and she is in the mood to be social.

And whether you realize it or not, you’ve recorded a small credit in your ledger.

That’s how we contribute to what we owe. We are present. We recognize the humanity of others. We understand a situation’s context, and if possible, contribute what we can. Even the small contributions add up to a kinder world.

And its not just with the individual interaction. After all, we are all components of vast, interconnected systems of people. Families. Neighborhoods. Faith groups. Corporations. Nations. Swifties.

You can’t solve climate change alone. But you can make sure you are aware of what’s happening. You can measure your carbon footprint. You can understand that corporations are responsible for the vast majority of CO2 emissions and vote with your dollars. You can share what you know with who you know. You can fund a nonprofit that is working toward the changes we need.

But sometimes, you just can’t. You can only afford the cheap laundry soap, even though you know that the more expensive one is more sustainably produced. You have to drive your carbon emitting car because you cannot afford electric, and you live in a municipality built for cars, not people.

I owe you everything. What I can give is my attention, my empathy, and my will to act when I can. And my understanding that the stamina of my attention is, my empathy, and my will are not infinite.

If you step into the elevator the morning after your partner lost their job, you don’t have anything to give in those 30 seconds. Your mind is still reeling, how will we pay the bills? Can they find work before the severance is done? Do we have enough savings?

You do not have the capacity to give. This doesn’t mean you can absent yourself from the world; after all you are there in body if not present in mind. But you understand that choosing to not give when you can’t isn’t a failing, its responsible accounting.

A fire can only burn with the fuel it has. If it burns brighter and hotter than it can be replenished, it goes out. A burned out flame gives no light, no heat.

You must manage what you can give. Record your good. Record your harms. Sometimes you just want to go for a drive. You know it will be an unnecessary carbon output. But you just… want to. That’s ok.

We don’t live in a perfect world. And we aren’t perfect moral beings. We can’t be. But we can be aware of what we are. And we can use that awareness to tip our contributions to the positive.

Be aware.

Be present.

Act when you can. Think about your actions.

It can be hard to have this focus. Like any skill or muscle, it needs practice to hone and grow. But each time you are mindful and see a way to contribute a good, the next time is easier. Every time you reckon with a harm, you become more responsible.

It is your ledger. It is written whether you are intentional about it or not. Your actions influence so much more than you can ever know. Be intentional. Extend good to others.

Be aware of how you impact the world. You can’t control anyone else, you can only control yourself. If you want more good in the world for you, the only thing you can do is increase the good in the world.

I owe you everything. It’s not a burden of debt. It’s a contribution to all, including yourself.

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Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.

If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.

Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.

If I needed to boil Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism down to a single aphorism, it would be this:

“You Owe Me Nothing, I Owe You Everything”

I can already hear the critiques.

· That is an unreasonable burden!

· It sets people up for failure

· It’s a directive for sainthood… or martyrdom

And that’s why we shouldn’t boil any philosophy down to a pithy saying. “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger” is a banger of a Kelly Clarkson song. But stripped from the context of Nietzsche’s full philosophy, it’s a pretty flimsy moral foundation. I could survive having my arms shredded in a wheat thresher, but I wouldn’t come out pick-things-up stronger.

So, let’s expand on what “You Owe Me Nothing, I Owe You Everything” means. Let’s begin by breaking it apart.

I Owe You Everything

What it does not mean

· That others may take from you without limit.

· That you must give until you break.

· That the moral weight of the world rests solely on your shoulders.

What it does mean

· That you recognize the moral asymmetry of the world.

· That you are aware of the world around you and how you affect it.

· That you choose to sow good regardless of what others do.

You Owe Me Nothing

What it does not mean

· That you must release all others from accountability.

· That you must tolerate mistreatment or deprivation.

· That you can’t accept or appreciate the good others choose to offer.

What it does mean

· That you recognize the power of expectation.

· That you can more fully delight yourself in the good that comes your way.

· That you have grace for others, which creates the conditions for virtuous cycles.

None of this, philosophically speaking, is new. Siddhartha taught how desire leads to suffering around the same time the golden age Greek philosophers in Athens were discussing what we owe to others. It is well trod ground.

But I don’t need to illustrate these ideas by discussing the famous names and their cherished teachings. They are all available in your local library, filed in the Dewey Decimal System under 101.

That stuff is literally Philosophy 101.

Application in the real world.

Let’s set the scene. It’s 2006. American Idol is dominating TV and pop music, from the ratings to the minting of new pop stars all the way down to pushing Daniel Powter’s song “Bad Day” to the top of the charts by using it in every montage of an eliminated contestant. The country was realizing that Vietnam 2: Iraqi Boogaloo was shaping up to be as bad as the original. MySpace was teaching Millennials how to code HTML.

Also, the vice president shot a guy.

As for me, I was 27, working at a pawnshop, and the holder of a freshly minted associate’s degree from Western International University. To complete my bachelor’s degree I was moving up to the big leagues.

That’s right, the University of Phoenix. Who needs ivy when you have a flaming bird?

What I did not know then was the difference in tuition between the two schools. Even though they both fell under the same umbrella of the Apollo Education Group, they were not the same price. Long story short, my student loans previously covered my tuition plus some extra to pay for books and help with living expenses. Now they weren’t even enough to cover the full tuition. I would be about $1,000 short each semester.

I had just two weeks to come up with the shortfall. I had a plan; I’d get a second job solely to save that income towards tuition. But that wasn’t going to solve my immediate funding gap.

So I turned to social media. I had nearly 400 “friends” on MySpace. Surely I could get 100 of them to give me $10 each, bing, bang, boom, crowd funded tuition. I set up a PayPal donation button, dropped the code and my please onto my page, and waited.

I got a few people to donate. But with the deadline looming a day away, I only had $100, well short of what I needed. I had no savings, I was living paycheck to paycheck. No family to help.

I was strategizing my next steps. I had my second job lined up, loading and unloading trucks at UPS every night immediately after I finished my shift at the pawn shop. But it looked like I would miss the upcoming semester. And once you miss one… do you ever go back?

Then I got a message on MySpace. From someone who’d set up a burner account, they were reaching out anonymously. They knew not me, but of me through mutual friends. To this day I have no idea who she was.

We swapped messages back and forth for a bit. I think she wanted to get an idea of who I was. I explained how I’d gotten into the situation, as well as my plan to address it.

She explained that she would give me the $1,000 I needed, only on the condition that she remained anonymous. I agreed.

I navigated to PayPal. There was $1,000 sitting in the account. I transferred it to my bank and made my tuition payment the day of the deadline.

The Multiplier of Kindness

From this stranger’s act of kindness, I was able to stay in school. I completed my bachelor’s degree in November of 2008. All online with a for profit university, but not bad for a kid born to a pair of high school dropouts.

Five years later I left the pawn shop, where using my business degree to help grow revenues 10% annually for that period, and started my career at Merrill Lynch. Two years later I was running my own team of traders. And today I am a digital project manager for the firm, working on our website and app.

My professional career has allowed me to build wealth and buy a house. I don’t live in opulence, but my home is a far cry from the ten different places I lived growing up, always knowing that we could lose our home at any time. I’ve been able to travel, to see and experience things I’d only read about. I was able to move from poverty to the middle class.

I know it would have been possible to do everything I’ve done if I missed that semester. Maybe I’d have gotten the money saved and reenrolled. Or decided that an associate’s degree was enough.

The kindness and generosity of a stranger helped to keep me on the path that led to the life I have today. And she likely has no idea.

How a Ripple Becomes a Wave

She has no idea that with my increased income from a career enabled by my degree, I have been able to be generous. I can’t pay back the $1,000. But I have paid it forward many times over, from helping a friend cover a month’s rent or buying Christmas gifts for a family in need.

And maybe a child in one of those families will recognize the good in the world. Or remember the generosity and pass it on. Or not. But the important thing is that like the good done for me, the good I have done may inspire more of it.

The world is hard. You may do everything right and still lose everything you have. Or never get it to begin with. Cancer comes to the fit. Natural disasters take from the wealthy and the poor, the kind and the heartless. The vicious are rewarded and the virtuous are denied.

Every human being has their struggle in such a world. We can’t control much of anything. But we can control our responses to the world.

You Owe Me Nothing, I Owe You Everything

I Owe You Everything

My example is dramatic, no doubt, but not uncommon. Not the giving of $1,000 with no strings attached on the internet; as far as I know that doesn’t happen often. But the kindness is more common than we think. And more powerful than we can measure.

From that act of kindness comes a chain of further acts of kindness. None of which required reciprocity. But that is the bargain we strike dealing with the world as it is. We cannot depend upon the kindness of others. We can only control ourselves, so all we can do is put more kindness into the world and live with the reckless optimism that you will benefit from the compounding effects of a society’s net goodness.

You Owe Me Nothing

Expectation can be a corrosive element in our lives. Paris syndrome is a documented psychological condition where a tourist suffers mental and even physical symptoms, up to and including vomiting, because Paris does not live up to the idealized version they were expecting.

Eli Lilly reported record revenues in the first quarter of 2025 and double the earnings per share year over year. But it missed the expected earnings by 2.5%, and a month later was trading nearly 10% lower.

Expectations color the way we inhabit the world. Expect terrible things, and they are easy to find. Expect things that you cannot have and live a life of disappointment. Expect nothing from the world, and the smallest good you receive can elicit joy.

While I used money in my example, it is certainly not limited to that. Holding a door, complimenting a stranger, acknowledging the dignity of others. Taking time to learn. Being humble enough to know that you can be better tomorrow, no matter how much good you’ve recorded today.

That is the bargain. You keep track of your credits in the ledger. Even the smallest acts can have big impacts. And not just acts, even the way we think. Choosing to learn about people you don’t understand. Taking a hard look at your worldview, and question why you believe what you believe. Strive to be more tolerant, more open, and to practice more empathy.

You keep track of your debits. They are there, the ills and small evils of the world. When you let frustration get the best of you and flip off someone in traffic. When you judge someone without knowing them. When you choose to be selfish over being generous.

The ledger does not demand that you never have debits. What it demands is that you face them and learn.

From the moment you become aware of yourself, until your final breath, you are building something. You are building YOU. Much of your building materials, the genetics you are born with, the culture that surrounds you, that you cannot control.

But the shape of what you build with those materials, the structure, of that, you are the architect. You are deciding on the architecture of You. And as you lay out the blueprints, and evaluate the options, you have a tool that guides you.

You have a ledger. Contributing to the credit side in ways big and small, knowing what you have to build on. Taking an open and honest look at the debit side, understanding the limitations and areas for improvement.

I Owe You Everything

You cannot control much of the world. But you do control yourself. Everything you do contributes to the ledger. Want a better life? Live in a better world. Look at the ledger every day.

You are building whether you mean to or not.

Brick by brick. Choice by choice.

The only difference is whether you build with intention.

Did you make a net positive today? Do more of that. It makes a better world.

Did you create a net debit today? You can’t change what’s been done. But you can learn. Be accountable to those you’ve wronged. Own your mistakes.

You can always be better tomorrow.

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Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.

If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.

Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.

To a casual observer, I’m a fairly typical middle-aged, Xennial, middle-class, cis, hetero, gender-conforming white guy living in the middle of suburbia. I work in a large corporate structure as a digital project manager. My hobbies include running, listening to podcasts while I run, and going to trivia night at the local brewery where I start anecdotes with, “I was listening to a podcast…”

See me out on a run in a sleeveless shirt, however, and you might notice the tattoo that reads “Angel 1979-1998”. Walk through my home and you might be aware that among the photos of my siblings, my wife’s family, and our pets, you won’t find any of my parents. And if that trivia night conversation turns to a common childhood experience, I’ll either not be able to relate or share some twisted version from my own past that no one quite knows how to respond to.

More Than Meets the Eye

And that’s when the real questions begin. Not just who I am, but what gives a person with that kind of history the right to talk about building a moral life?

I had to live it. I had to earn it.

And my ledger? It’s got debts. But here’s the thing. No one accrues debts in isolation. After all, if you owe nothing if there is no one to owe.

I started out being owed. Bog standard bad childhood. Parents had a bad divorce. Dad got me and my twin sister. Told us that mom “left you”.

Cue the rest. Poverty, instability, domestic violence. Trauma. My father, committing active harms. A world that didn’t intervene, committing the evil of indifference.

Nineteen years of that. But along the way there were those that were not indifferent. Those earning their credits, making investments with no idea what the return would be. Neighbors. coaches. Mentors. People who chose to witness.

But the only thing I chose to witness were those harms done to me. By nineteen I was angry. Angry at the now dead father who left so many scars. Angry at the mother who left. Angry at the systems that prevented me from taking the future I knew I had. The future I was owed for the cost of my childhood, my innocence, my happiness, my wholeness, I was owed a debt.

And then there was the greatest harm of all of them. My twin sister died when we were nineteen. That was hard. It’s still hard. But that wasn’t the harm. Her brain aneurysm wasn’t anyone’s fault.

The harm was committed by me.

My twin sister… her name was Angel. Her name is Angel. A bit on the nose, I know. She suffered all of those harms I suffered as a kid. All those, and a few more. But she wasn’t meeting the world with anger, with a sense of what she was owed. She met it with joy, and strength, and a joie de vivre that makes people smile today, decades later. And she paid that forward to no one more than me.

She never stopped investing in me her love. I took her for granted. After all, what was more important than me? What else was there to witness?

The day after she died, our stepmother pulled me aside. “When I talked to Angel this week,” she said, “she was upset because you never asked her about what was happening in her life, you never gave her time to tell you anything. She said that she was worried you didn’t love her.”

I have been told for years that what my stepmother said wasn’t true, that my twin did not die wondering if I truly loved her. But that idea didn’t come from thin air. Of course I loved her. I had the intent covered. But actions matter, and words matter. And I gave her neither of those.

Even if there was only a fleeting moment when she thought that I didn’t love her, it was a result of my actions and words, harms I could no longer seek to atone for. The guilt I felt in that moment, the harm I had to then with for the rest of my life, that was the moment where my search for how to live a good life began.

Born from that search were questions.

“If there is an all-powerful, all seeing, all knowing god, how does evil exist?”

“What even are good and evil?”

“What do we owe each other in a world filled with harm?”

None of these popped fully formed into my head in that moment. But they began to take shape.

And for those of you picking up on the particular question, “What do we owe each other?” good. I am getting to that.

Do We Owe Anyone Anything?

But first, let’s consider the idea that we do owe each other, or anyone, anything. Do we? I know plenty of people who would argue that they don’t. You know, they pulled their All-American Bootstraps™ and got everything on their own and nobody gave ‘em nuthin’.

Now you might be smirking at the strawman I’ve built here wearing red, white, and blue. But the truth of the American experience in 2025 is that there are things that a society could do for one another that we deny based on things like a “they don’t deserve it” and “I didn’t get anything, why should they.” The “they” here in question being some “other” that seems to not rise to the level of being human.

A closer to steelman argument I’ve been presented is not that we don’t owe anyone anything, but that what is owed is conditional. “Immediate Family” is the condition some draw. Others, “American Citizen”, or “Public Servant”. After all, one person cannot owe everybody everything. Limitations need to be set, reasonable limitations, but limitations nonetheless, on a single person’s capacity to care.

This is not unreasonable. No one can care about the eight billion people in the world in a meaningful way and concrete way. But we do live amongst one another and are deeply intertwined whether we choose to accept that fact or not.

Even if you have chosen to live as solitary a life as possible, have no family, and exist “off the grid” somewhere without another human for miles, you have been impacted by the decisions of other people. The location of isolation could only be chosen from the areas that other’s have chosen not to develop, or more actively have chosen to preserve. Every crumb of survivalist knowhow was derived from at least one source, be it a book or another human, and that knowledge was developed through the efforts of countless people. In a cost that was paid for in blood for many.

Using a generator for your electricity? It was built in a factory, designed to meet commercial specifications and minimum regulatory requirements, and unless it is powered by wood you chopped it is fueled by resources no single individual could acquire on their own from extraction to refinement to distribution.

Hunting for your food? Even if you made the bow yourself you did so based on a design that was iterated on for millennia before the first crop was planted. If you are growing your food it is more likely than not that every seed has come from a long line of human intervention to produce better and more resilient yields.

Ok, ok, point made. No man is an island. You may respond that can all be true, but none of it was asked for, none of it was done for you specifically, you didn’t choose to be in this world, and you can choose to take no more than what is required to exist. Your decisions impact no one.

But they do. In ways large and small, intentional and unintentional, every action we take, nay every thought we have, creates a ripple, no matter how small. And given a long enough time scale, even a ripple can become a tsunami.

Even if you live and die in absolute isolation, the resources you depend on for your life impact the world around you. Changing a local ecosystem, increasing carbon in the atmosphere. Your decisions, the story of yourself that you author, may be discovered by others and affect the way they interact with the world. We cannot extract ourselves until we draw our last and exist within the memory of others or the physical memory of the world we touch.

And since our actions, words, choices, and thoughts all have consequences, they carry with them responsibility. Whether we accept that or not, everything we do affects something. Or someone.

Building on that, we can then take a concept from a reasonably famous moral philosopher. He may have been known as Yeshua bar Yosef in his day (or not, we don’t have firsthand written records), but we know him in the as Jesus Christ. While he did have a more expansive message, his dictum for living in a world with others is encapsulated by the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

So here is what we have so far. A painstakingly pedantic examination of the possibility of an isolated life, and Jesus. But also, Buddha. And countless others, the golden rule is a consistent human maxim. Taking from these precepts, we have:

· No one lives in isolation

· What we do affects others, therefore,

· What other do affects us

· The golden rule, or law of reciprocity informs how we can live in this situation

o In the same way we would not want what others do to us things we don’t want

o In reciprocity it follows that we should not do to them what we wouldn’t want done for us.

o And we can hold the positive application as well, we should do for others what we would want done for us

· Coming all the way back to the question, at a minimum we owe each other not committing harms we wouldn’t want done to us, and it would be nice if people did things for us that we want, so maybe we should do things that they want, “Don’tcha know,” like a Midwestern mom might say.

What a “Real Philosopher” Says

Phew. Seems basic, but I think it needed to be addressed. We owe each other. So what do we owe?

This question has been tackled by philosophers for centuries. I’m not tilling new dirt here. T. M. Scanlon famously (well, famously for a moral philosopher) addressed this very question in his landmark essay titled,

Feel free to shout it from the back,

“What We Owe Each Other.”

He tackled this idea through a rigorous and academic framework, trying to establish the moral obligations we recognize as binding between people. And thus, Scanlonian contractualism.

What did he come up with? I’m going to preface this by saying you should read What We Owe Each Other, or at least watch all four seasons of The Good Place, a sitcom in which his ideas feature. Also, I make no claim to be any authority on contractualism. That said, I think it can summed up as the following.

· Core Thesis: An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement. This defines moral wrongness not by outcomes, but by whether the action can be justified to others based on principles they could not reasonably* reject. (*stick a pin in reasonably)

· A rejection is typically considered ‘unreasonable’ if the principle in question places an excessive or unfair burden on someone for the sake of a minor benefit to others. The entire system hinges on finding this balance.

Not pithy, but pithiness isn’t a virtue when dealing with morality. How about

· Morality is about living with others in ways that no one could reasonably reject, grounded in respect, justifiability, and the recognition of each person as a separate center of value.

Ok… better. Not a t-shirt slogan, but at least it could fit on the back. Digging a little bit deeper, I am fully in agreement with him on certain principles. Grounding morality in respect and the recognition of all people as valuable because they are valuable, spot on.

He also rejects utilitarianism, or “the ends justify the means” when attempting to maximize net good. Agreed. You cannot justify harming one person a lot just because it benefits many others a little.

Scanlon also clarifies what this moral framework is not. It is not what is legal. It is not what is best for you in isolation. It is not what is mandated by religion. It is only the principles cannot be reasonably rejected.

To sum up, Scanlon tells us that what we owe each other is what cannot be reasonably rejected. Again, it’s far more complex than that, but that is one sentence executive summary.

What Could I Possibly Add to That?

Awesome, Scanlon answered the question, he’s defined what we owe each other, and I seem to be in alignment with him. Why do I even need to find anything else? Just print it up on a business card for reference when I need to determine the moral principle that governs any ethically unclear interaction. Easy peasy.

An Ethical Test Case

Let’s test this. It’s early, I’ve stopped by Starbucks to pick up a coffee and breakfast sandwich on the way to work. I see a homeless man sitting outside. I have $100 in cash available in my pocket. Should I give it all to him?

He hasn’t asked me for money. He hasn’t engaged me at all. But I’ve seen him there before and sleeping in the park across the street. Let’s tackle this from Scanlon’s perspective.

The man has asked me for nothing. There is no personal interaction between us unless I initiate it. Can I justify walking by him and going about my day?

Let’s define this as a moral principle. I can pass a person in without offering him the money in my pocket and keep going about my day, I am not obligated to give this man anything. I don’t think a reasonable person would disagree.

But the question is, what do we owe each other? Or to put a finer point on it, what do I owe this man?

I can do nothing. No one would say that I am required, morally, to follow a principle of “Give the man all the money in your pocket”.

But looking at it from the perspective of my moral ledger, walking past the man does cause a harm. It is a harm of indifference. I see him. I cannot pretend that I don’t, even if I am the only who witnesses my indifference.

But I’m not the only one. He too is a witness. He witnesses me, pretending not to see him. He sees me, ignoring his dilemma. He doesn’t know what I could do. But he knows what I did do. Nothing.

But I know what I could do. I know I could easily part with the $100 in my pocket. I have a secure, well-paying job. I’ll earn that $100 back in less than 2 hours of “work” that is just as likely to be me playing on my phone as it is doing what is listed in my job description. In even the tiniest of ways, by ignoring this man and his plight, I have eroded a small, but not inconsequential, amount of his dignity as a person. And I know that.

What do I owe this man?

The ledger records my indifference. I may have felt uncomfortable walking by. But choosing indifference this time makes it easier to ignore my discomfort next time. And there will be a next time.

Another person may be going into the Starbucks, like me, stopping on their way into the office for a quick bite and coffee. We don’t acknowledge each other either. But my act of kindness could have provoked that person. Prompted them to ask what they could do. Nudged them in a small way to a different path.

That’s Too Much

“That’s overwhelming!” I hear you saying. “No one is going to consider all of that, all of the time. People have enough on their plates just trying to live their lives! Scanlon has it right, I have no obligation, I can keep walking so I don’t miss the 9:00am all hands. This is ridiculous.”

When I was 19, I was in the army. I graduated from basic training a few months before Angel passed. I called her every week from my new duty station. In a twenty-minute conversation I would tell her all of the things I was doing.

I bought a car. I made new friends. I shot guns and threw grenades. I marched and I ran. And I talked on and on about everything. Everything I was doing. And never asked about what was happening in Angel’s life.

I think a rational person could reasonably reject a moral principle of, “you must ask your sibling about their life when you speak with them.” They might say that I should do so, but it is not a moral obligation. After all, I had so many new things happening in my life. And I was calling her every week. I could have been better about asking about her, but that’s a not a moral flaw.

What she wasn’t telling me, because I wasn’t asking, was that she was experiencing headaches. And blackouts. And had gone to have an MRI.

And in the final week of her life, as she anxiously awaited the results, she questioned if I even cared. She questioned if she was loved by the one person she’d been with from birth. From before birth. And before she died, I’d done nothing to remove her uncertainty. And after she died… I could never change it.

What does keeping a moral ledger require of us?

How does it answer the question, “What do we owe each other?”

We owe each other witnessing. To see each other as people, to see how what we do, and what we don’t, affects one another. To remember, and to learn.

Ok, remember. Every little thing? Every slight, real or perceived? Exhausting. How does the ledger tell us how to do that? And what does it matter to the homeless guy at Starbucks?

In every choice we make, we make ripples. The ledger asks that we witness the ripples. And when those choices come, we apply what we’ve learned. We understand what we can do. But importantly we also know what we can’t.

We use empathy to understand how our choices impact others. We use reason to understand what we can and can’t do.

What have I witnessed? To the good, I’ve witnessed others, well, witnessing me. In my need as a teenager dealing with trauma and anger. There were those who helped. Who went out of their way to do so. Who opened their wallets, and homes, and lives to me. Unprompted. And even the smallest acts had then, and continue to have now, tremendous impact.

For the man at Starbucks, Scanlon’s Contractualism tells me someone could reasonably reject a principle that requires that I give him the money in my pocket. The ledger agrees that I am not obligated to do anything either, but logs that a harm has been committed.

Using empathy, I know what a random act of kindness can do. I know that I can confer on him human dignity. I can tell him he is seen. That he is not forgotten.

Using reason, I know that the $100 means little to me but could mean a disproportionate amount to him. I know that I have no obligation, but I also know the potential good I could do far outweighs the small harm I would record.

What does he owe me? Nothing. Not gratitude. Not an obligation to spend the money wisely. He doesn’t even need accept it.

What do I owe this man? I owe him everything.

This is not atonement for Angel. This is not sainthood, or virtue signaling. This is a lifetime of learning, of choosing to understand how my ripples affect the world. And building a moral framework. Not by studying the canon, but by having to answer these questions every day, in the world at large. Not by dealing with a world how I think it should be but by taking the world as it is. This is reckoning with the only thing I can control. Myself. This is Architectural Humanism.

What Did I Do?

I walk by the man, towards the door to the Starbucks. It’s quiet, there’s no one else around but the workers inside, and they are busy doing their jobs, I don’t attract their interest before I cross the threshold.

The bell on the Starbucks door is just a few feet away. But the ledger is open in my mind, the harm of my indifference already recorded. I stop.

A dozen rationalizations offer themselves up. The risks are obvious, he might spend it in ways that harm him. Local business owners would call it enabling. Scanlon’s framework assures me I have no binding obligation.

But the ledger demands a different accounting. I know the profound impact of an unexpected kindness. I know that this man is a person, not a problem. And I know that for me, this money is trivial, while for him, it might be transformative. The potential good vastly outweighs the certain harm of my indifference.

I turn back. He watches me, and I pull out my wallet, the soft bills feeling insignificant in my hand. I hold them out. I give him the money. $100. I smile and walk away.

He looks at it, counts it, jumps to his feet, his eyes widening as he understands. He scrambles to his feet, protesting, “No, man, I can’t take this.”

“It’s yours,” I say.

He’s stammering his thanks, already asking what he can do for me in return.

“You don’t need to worry about it. You don’t need to do anything,” I tell him. “But if you can, remember this and do a kindness for someone else when he can.”

There is no debt. Only a credit to good. The ledger witnesses and records.

Note from the author:
I’m going to be away from regular writing for a bit while I go through surgery and recovery. To keep this space alive (and your inbox from forgetting me entirely), I’m resurfacing a few earlier essays that resonated strongly with readers the first time around.

If you’re new here, these may be brand-new to you. If you’ve been with me for a while, consider this a chance to revisit some of the core pieces behind Ledger Ethics and Architectural Humanism with a bit more distance and a slightly different version of yourself.

Fresh work will resume once my body and brain are back on speaking terms. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, for reading, and for sticking around while I do the unglamorous work of healing.

The Good Place and a Better You

One could do worse to develop a philosophical foundation than watching The Good Place, a sitcom that dealt with the afterlife and the bureaucracy around it that determined how you spent your eternity post death. Through the evaluation of points accumulated in life, one could be sent to the frictionless paradise of the titular Good Place, or to the eternal torment of the Bad Place.

Eleanor Shellstrop, our protagonist, awakens in the Good Place and soon becomes keenly aware that she is not supposed to there. With the help of her assign soulmate, Chidi Anagonye, a professor of moral philosophy, Eleanor and the audience begin a four-season examination of what qualifies a person as good. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be exposed to Kant.

I won’t spoil the twists and turns, but the show does hinge on a key question; how can one be a good person in modern society, with all of the knock-on effects and ripples of each action?

How do we be decent in an indecent world?

For example, maybe you decide to show solidarity with a trans coworker by putting “Trans Lives Matter” sticker on your laptop. You order the sticker from an online retailer, unaware that the CEO uses the profits to promote anti-trans laws in several states. The pack of stickers is delivered free the day after ordering by a fulfillment company that actively fights against the wellbeing of its employees by lobbying for more lax safety and workers rights legislation. Not to mention the carbon impact of facilitating the delivery cheaply and quickly.

How does one do good when such a small act can have so many harms? How do we live ethically in a capitalist system designed for maximizing profits, not human progress? How much responsibility do we bear for the harms of systems entrenched long before we were born and powerfully incentivized to maintain the status quo?

I Needed Answers

It was these questions, and the further questions their answers generated, that led me to the creation of Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics.

So… what are Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics? They are the two parts of the moral philosophy I’ve developed as an answer to the question of being a good person in a bad world.

Building a Better You

Architectural Humanism asks what we are building as we construct ourselves? Make no mistake, every decision, every action, every thought contributes to the amalgamation of who we are. Whether we are being deliberate about it or not. The good news is that so long as there is air in our lungs and a spark in our minds the person we are is not final and fixed. This is a central precept: you can always be better tomorrow.

Knowing Where to Start

And Ledger Ethics? That is how we can manage our moral accountability. Imagine a ledger, one side with credits, the good we have done, and the other with debits, the harm we have caused. Each list of credits and debits grows over time. The point of the ledger is not to balance the two. Nor is it to provide a means to cancel out the harms with the benefits. No good can ever erase a bad. Likewise, no bad can erase a good. Within the ledger both are witnessed… and reckoned with.

Who the f**k am I?

But who am I? And what gives me any authority to say, “This is how people should live morally?”

To the first question, I’m nobody of special consequence. I’m not a philosopher or academic. Not a theologian or a moral authority. I am merely a person who has lived, and suffered the slings and arrows of a cruel and indifferent world. And a person who has caused my own slings and arrows for others. But I am also the beneficiary of the goodness of others.

To the second question, I can’t tell anyone how to live their lives.

What to Expect

Over the course of subsequent essays, I will explain the concepts of Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics in greater detail and hopefully inspire introspection and personal reckoning. But that is up to each person, I have no power to compel any sense of ethics or morality.

I guess the final question is if I am no philosopher or moral authority, why do I even have a personal moral philosophy? Couldn’t I simply live according to a religious creed or some other philosopher’s code? Aristotle was opining on virtue over two millennia ago; Buddha, Jesus, and Muhamed all shared teachings on how to live. Even Peter Singer and other modern moral philosophers have provided answers to the questions I raise.

To that I answer this. Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics are not religious, but aim to fill in where religion falls short, primarily with deference to an unknowable authority to justify actions or the promise of some intangible benefit to enduring suffering.

And as for the philosophers, both ancient and modern, unlike them, I have not had the benefit of discussing and debating moral principles. I’ve had to live them across a life that’s been filled with poverty, trauma, and grief. The reason why I am so engaged with a structure of moral philosophy is because I’ve had to compromise myself in this world and seen the consequences of my compromises… and failings.

I have faith in humanity. I believe that the ideas I have, while not new or novel, but put together in a new way, can benefit us all. We can always be better tomorrow.

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I have learned a lot about dementia in the last four years. Particularly the importance of routine.

My wife and I bought a larger house in March 2021 to give us the room for her mother to live with us. When she first moved in, she still had some measure of independence. She couldn’t remember the month or day of the week, but she could pick out her clothes and do small chores around the house.

Routines helped. In the morning, she woke up, showered and dressed, made herself a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal, and took her morning medication. At bedtime she took her evening medication, changed into PJ’s, and inquired about what was happening the next day.

“Anything tomorrow?” she’d ask.

One of us would let her know if she had a doctor’s appointment, or if we had plans like a movie or activity for her.

Slowly, those routines began to erode.

Now one of us makes sure she is up in the morning. We give her clean clothes and make sure she doesn’t have the dirty ones from the day before. Once she has dressed, we check to make sure everything is on correctly. One of us makes her tea and breakfast.

At night we give her the evening meds and make sure she actually changes into PJ’s. Before she goes to bed, she still asks, “Anything tomorrow?”

The answer is mostly irrelevant. If there is something tomorrow, she won’t do anything to prep for it. She doesn’t need to; we’ll have it all taken care of. By the time she goes to sleep it will be gone from her mind.

There is a complicating factor. Unlike most people who suffer from Alzheimer’s, she is aware of her condition. And that awareness makes her very anxious about any situation outside of her comfortable routine.

When she asks, “Anything tomorrow?” telling her that there is something induces only stress. No matter what the actual answer is, I have taken to always to answering, “No.”

When she has an appointment, or her watercolor class, or a day scheduled at a senior center, my “No” is a lie.

The question for me is this. Is telling her “No” in these scenarios wrong?

Immanuel Kant would say that lying to my mother-in-law is wrong. Because lying is always wrong. According to Kant, the consequences of an action do not determine their morality. A lie is a lie. If a, lie is ever wrong, it is always wrong.

Honestly, I agree. My lies to my mother-in-law are wrong. I know that. And I still tell those lies.

As a person, it is not possible to never do wrong. The world doesn’t work that way. It is this basic fact that forms a pillar of Ledger Ethics.

When I lie to my mother-in-law, I recognize that I have chosen to do something wrong. I have chosen to not treat her with her full human dignity and respect. Because that is what we all do when we lie to someone. It is an evil I have committed.

I have my reasons. Telling her we are going to the doctor tomorrow will cause her stress and generate nothing good for her. Allowing her to remain unaware may slightly benefit her by allowing her to avoid the anxiety, but any good does not wipe out the bad.

Recording a good in my moral ledger does not erase the evil I did. They are both there forever.

But it’s more than just the occasional lie. Every choice we make changes us, in ways that may not be obvious, but each is a part of the ongoing construction of who we are.

By giving myself permission to do a small evil, how does that change me? It may mean that in a future situation where the choice is murkier, I may choose a lie over the truth. After all, the neural paths in my brain that allow for a lie have been made a little stronger.

Changes often aren’t made at once. When my mother-in-law moved in with us, she still had a lot of capability despite her condition. Four years later, she has lost most of that capability. It wasn’t a sudden change. It was the culmination of many small changes.

The little lies I tell her matter to the person I am constructing. What happens if I don’t face them for what they are? If I explain them away as justified because the truth will only hurt and not help?

I will probably continue to lie about plans tomorrow. I love my mother-in-law and I don’t want any hurt to come to her. Seeing her anxious about the smallest things breaks my heart.

This is part 3 in a series.

Part 1 - Revenge Isn’t Justice, Even When We Cover It with the Sheen of Law

Part 2 - What Do I Know About Crime? My Moment on The Knife’s Edge

Once Upon a Time…

Let’s take a moment to travel to a different place and time. It’s January 5^th, 1970, near midnight. Carlsbad, New Mexico. There we see a gas station on US 62, just a couple of blocks from the intersection with Highway 285. Gas pumps sit under a yellow halo of light, ready for customers who aren’t coming.

A small store keeps vigil over the pumps, staffed with one employee. He rubs his hands together for warmth. The desert was cold, and despite a childhood spent near Lake Erie, this cold was different than what the clerk was accustomed to.

The clerk is a scruffy twenty-four-year-old man. A tinny radio jangles out cowboy crooners singing about love and loss. But this is not enough to interrupt the thoughts in the man’s mind.

He was frustrated. Anyone who met him came away with the same impression; he was whip smart, and charming to a fault. But despite that he found himself stuck in a minimum wage job that barely provided for him and his young wife.

He deserved better. Better than just scraping by. But despite his intelligence he hadn’t finished high school, escaping his foster home at the earliest opportunity, abandoning Ohio for the promise of the American West. Given up for adoption at 3, he’d known no real family, only survival in a system not designed to help a kid grow or feel safe.

He’d literally run off with the circus, taking a job with a traveling carnival at 18, and bringing along his sweetheart. They made it together as far as Phoenix, where he became a father. But his sweetheart couldn’t take their life as tumbleweeds and raise a daughter. She went back to Ohio. He moved on without them.

Meeting another woman, getting married, this did not give him the life he felt he deserved. What he needed was some money. Just something to help him begin to get ahead. Something like the $200 sitting in the till.

He only had a handful of customers each night at the gas station. Mostly he was there alone with his thoughts. Thoughts that began to work out a plan. Like what he could do with that $200.

But how could he take it and get away? He needed a story. A robbery. A man with a gun. Not just a gun, a .32 caliber pistol. The devil was in the details.

The man was blonde… in his early thirties… wearing a sheep skin collar jacket and Levis. Guys like that were a dime a dozen around here.

But drama would really sell it. After taking the money from the register and putting it somewhere safe, he tied his hands behind his back. That’s why he couldn’t call the police for hours. He was tied up, and eventually wormed his way to the door, kicking out the glass to get the attention of a passing patrolman.

It was perfect. He knew he was smarter than any dumb cop, and the owner could afford the loss. It was the perfect crime.

But not as perfect as he thought. Two days after he found himself being arraigned, pleading with the judge for leniency.

The judge didn’t buy the story. Neither did the detectives.

Another Time, A Similar Place…

Thirty-four years later, that man’s son found himself in a similar position. He hadn’t grown up in foster care, but he grew up with that man as his father, and he often wished he’d been an orphan. Anywhere else would have been better than being subject to the abuse.

He too was smart. And he found himself living in a small western town after having grown up back east. Left home at eighteen with nothing to his name, now twenty-four years old. Working in a small store alone. Struggling with the unaccustomed cold. $2,000 in the till.

That son was me. I was dirt poor, barely making enough to make rent on my small studio apartment with the fold-down bed. No money for college, no opportunity for advancement. But I never considered taking the till.

What made me different?

It wasn’t some strong moral core that I had, and my father didn’t. After all, he raised me. This was a man who, when I was eight, explained his arrest for shoplifting as him needing to “steal cigarettes so he could afford to buy milk for me and my sister.” As a kid, I’d stolen candy bars I couldn’t afford. There was certainly a path where I became the same scheming criminal my father was.

So it wasn’t me that was all that different. It was the people around me that made the difference. As a teenager I had mentors who recognized my intelligence and potential, and encouraged them. They also saw the pain of my home and family, and responded with kindness and care.

My job didn’t provide me great material wealth, but the people I worked with, my friends, gave me a sense of belonging, gave generously of themselves, and made me feel welcome and valued.

My father and I have more similarity than I am comfortable admitting. He did terrible things throughout his life, and by the time he was my age we found himself unemployed and in and out of jail. Meanwhile I own a home, have a college degree and am a VP at a large corporation, where I’ve been for over a decade. Our divergence was not due to some quality I had that he did not. It was the result of the decisions of the people around us.

I’m not saying that neither of us are responsible for our circumstances. He chose to commit his crimes. I worked hard to complete my degree while holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet.

But he grew up with no support, and bounced around the country with no one looking out for him, no one affirming his worth, no one encouraging him. He was always scraping by, seemingly with no opportunity, so he tried to make opportunity for himself. For him his lack justified getting ahead through any means.

I had people in my life who did affirm my value. They welcomed me into their homes and families. I didn’t feel alone and adrift. They helped me even when I was not able to ask for help. When I made mistakes, I got second chances.

Where People Fall

If you begin to look at those who are in constant contact with the police, with courts, with jail and prison, you will see a lot of similarities to my father. Lack of opportunity, whether due to broken families, broken communities, broken systems, fosters desperation.

Desperation that is numbed with drugs and alcohol. Desperation that tempts you to take what you don’t have the chance to earn.

People can come from humble beginnings and accomplish great things. But it is a lot more difficult to do so when you start so far behind and everything around you feels like it is designed to keep you there.

When people make mistakes, we have a system designed to punish them, and it is effective. It is even harder to escape the bottom after going through the state retribution system we call justice.

People Are As Good As The World Lets Them Be

I could bury you in statistics about poverty, education, and crime. They’re real. But I write about empathy, which begins with putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

My father went through many of the same things I did. It wasn’t a stretch to put myself in his shoes. In my youth I called him a monster and a criminal. It gave me the distance to judge him and pronounce myself as “better”.

But I’m not. I haven’t done what he has done. But it’s not impossible to imagine that I would.

Next, I want to look at what we do to people in the name of justice, and what it would take to build systems that create less harm instead of more.

I am well acquainted with pain.

As I sit writing this a ball of molten pain sits in the middle of my left arm sandwiched between my bicep and triceps. Another band of pain wraps around the same arm just below my elbow. Yet another ball of pain sits inside my left scapula. None of that pain is from injuries to those body parts, but instead just an inflamed nerve being agitated by bone spurs in my neck.

For twenty-seven years I have felt the ache of grief. A twin losing their other half is a grief that cannot be understood by anyone who is not a twin. It is a pain that surges and recedes but is never gone. Always the pain is there, only changing in intensity.

For my entire conscious life I have maintained a state of mental hypervigilance. A childhood under the tyranny of a father who would beat, mentally torment, and stab through the boundaries that makes one feel whole and safe taught me to always be on guard. Even the most innocuous of scenarios makes my psychological scars glow hot with pain, leaving me achingly in a tense crouch of defense against all possible harms at all times.

My constant lifelong interactions with suffering generated the question constantly in my mind.

Why are pain and suffering allowed to exist, but to endure?

Why must pain be present at birth, likely present at death, and sown so intricately into the experience of life?

Why do people who suffer pain inflict pain on other people? Why do those who have suffered not fight to reduce the suffering of others, even for a moment?

If pain and suffering are so much a part of existing, then why do we exist at all?

What is the point of it all?

I wish this introduction was the start of a towering polemic explaining that I had the answers to these questions. But I don’t. And I likely never will.

From the best I can tell, there is no answer to them. There is no “why” to pain and suffering. There is no purpose to exist.

Here many will point to their chosen faith or creed to say there lie the answers. And it’s true. There are answers in the myriad religions and beliefs found across the time and space of human sapience. A cornucopia overflowing with infinite answers to these questions.

But if a question has seemingly infinite answers, does it have an answer at all? No.

There is no “why” to anything. There is no point to existence.

But there is something wonderful about searching for something and finding nothing in its place. In the gap, there is room for creation.

Humans, whether through quirk of evolution, divine gifting, or some explanation in between, possess a talent for recognizing patterns, and creating them.

Where we find no meaning, no answer to why, no purpose, we can create them.

“All I know is pain, all I feel is rain

How can I maintain with that shit on my brain?” – Earl Simmons

How can I maintain? By creating my purpose where there is none.

I am well acquainted with pain. I don’t know why. But I know it has no purpose, unless I make one for it.

I choose to limit others’ pain, in any way I have agency to do so.

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What do I know about crime?

I’ve done juvenile detention center outreach, sat with kids already unlikely to pull free from the gravity of our system for crime and punishment.

I’ve spent a night illegally detained in jail.

But I have had a more intimate experience than either of those. I’m not simply aware of crime and its consequences, I’ve smelled its breath. For me the struggle was literally real.

I have worn many hats throughout my life. Soldier. Delivery Driver. Credit Analyst. Stockbroker. But none of my jobs were as foundational to me as the ten years I spent as a Pawnbroker in central Montana.

If you read that last sentence, connected “pawnbroker” to “lawbreaker” and think you understand where I am going with this, let me stop you right there.

Down Here at The Pawnshop

Pawnshops in media are often, if not exclusively, portrayed in one of two ways. At best as craven opportunists preying on people at their most desperate, at worst as fences for stolen goods, criminal fronts parading as legit businesses.

Neither of these could have been further from my experience. I’ll not paint with a broad brush, but the shop I worked for was a crucial financial institution in a community that operated largely outside the traditional banking and credit infrastructure.

Work in a small Montana city could be seasonal, and income spread unevenly. Where a middle-class family may leverage a credit card to help cover an unforeseen expense, our customers did not have such options.

Didn’t get enough hours this week? The PlayStation can cover the gap. Car broke down? Your guitar can help you to afford the bill. Need a tool but can’t swing the new price? We probably have it for less. Upgraded to a new TV? We’ll find a home for your old one and put some change in your pocket to boot.

It was a business knit into the community, including an active partnership with the local police department to report suspicious activity, which was rare. Friday evenings would see crowds in the store. People who got paid redeeming their stuff, someone looking to buy a DVD for the cost of renting one, parents with kids looking at video games. Handymen coming in to find a great deal on a torque wrench.

We knew them all by name, and if we didn’t, we’d know them the next time we saw them.

Up Close and Personal

When someone I didn’t know came in on a quiet Tuesday morning, I said hello and asked him what he may be looking for.

His response was short. “Just looking.”

I didn’t know him, but I knew the drawn, gaunt face, the jittery affect. I recognized the air of someone recently released from prison, looking for a few creature comforts for the halfway house. A small TV, or an iPod perhaps.

I shrugged and went back to pricing new inventory. “Let me know if something catches your eye.”

He wandered, looking over the shelves, and was also approached by another member of our staff, Andre. Another curt response, but in the brief exchange, Andre noticed a metallic glint under the man’s tattered long coat. Wary, Andre walked away but kept an eye on him.

Another customer came in, making small talk with me and our general manager, Corey.

Until it wasn’t.

Our conversation was interrupted by a shout from Andre. Looking up, I saw the man trying to inconspicuously tuck a guitar into his coat. He looked up at Andre’s shout too and bolted for the door.

Policy regarding shoplifters in a large corporate retail store is to avoid physical confrontation. They bake theft into their projections, take out insurance against it, use surveillance and professional loss prevention to tally multiple thefts and pursue charges against those who cross the felony threshold.

We had none of that. That guitar the man was trying to run off with? It was a loan negotiated between a customer and one of our employees. When forfeited it was thoroughly researched, probably by me, to establish a fair price, carefully cleaned and restored to as close to new as possible.

It had been strummed by local musicians who knew what they were doing and neophytes stumbling through the familiar opening chords of Smoke on the Water. Someone certainly had their eye on it as their first guitar, or as a new one for their collection. Just needed to save a little more.

It wasn’t a loss accounted for on a spreadsheet. It was personal.

I sprinted around the counter and gave chase, followed by Corey. I caught the guy as he made it to the parking lot, grabbing the guitar by its neck and the man by his collar.

“You don’t get to steal from us and get away with it,” I said in my best tough guy voice, as I slammed him against a wall. Corey took the guitar from me and called the police; I dragged the man back into the store to await arrest.

“I’m going back to jail…” he muttered as we walked through the store, but was otherwise passive, shoulders slumped, resigned to his fate. Until he wasn’t.

In a flash he spun around, trying to push through me in the central aisle of the store. I blocked him, and we began to wrestle.

As we grappled, him trying to shoulder past, me not giving up ground, he started to reach into his coat.

“Yo, he’s got a knife!” Andre shouted from behind me.

I grabbed his wrists, now determined to not get stabbed. As we tussled a six-inch knife fell from his coat and clattered to the ground. I kept driving him back, now wanting to put as much space between him and that blade as possible.

There was desperation in his fight, but I easily had 50 pounds on him and pushed him to the counter at the back. As we exited the aisle, he finally broke free.

But Andre had come up the next aisle and together we had the man boxed in. And if he did evade us, Corey was blocking the door.

His eyes were filled not with malice… but with terror. He finally reached into his coat.

Andre and I immediately stepped back, hands up. Corey moved away from the door, telling the 911 operator about the new threat. We could hear the sirens approaching, but it was unclear if they’d arrive in time to prevent tragedy.

To the relief of all, the gun was a bluff. As soon as he’d said he had one he realized he’d crossed a line.

“I don’t got a gun… I lied… I don’t got a gun… I’m going back to jail,” he muttered over and over, like a mantra. The sirens grew louder. He began to take everything from his pockets, lining it up on the counter. As the first police car skidded to a halt outside the door, he lit a cigarette, and placed the pack and his lighter with the rest of his stuff.

“You can’t smoke in here!” Andre yelled.

“Doesn’t matter, I’m going to jail anyway,” he replied. He now paced back and forth along the counter, awaiting the inevitable.

And off to jail he went. The police gave me some background. The man had a history of drug use and petty crime and had recently gotten out of prison. I never saw him again.

What do I know about crime?

I know desperate people do desperate things. I know it taps into the darker parts of us.

I felt harmed by his theft. Even though he took nothing from me. I responded with harm. He responded in kind. Each escalation made the world a little worse. It nearly spiraled into a knife in my gut.

Or my heart.

Was that worth a guitar?

His attempt was a harm; my chase was a counter-harm with its own risks; and the system that funneled both of us to that aisle carries debits we prefer not to acknowledge, but they are still recorded.

No one is accountable for what happened in the shop except the person who broke the law. I’m not arguing otherwise. He owns his choices. But our situation didn’t happen in a vacuum. I didn’t know his particulars, but I knew the pattern.

Overwhelmed parents with no support.

Schools pushing kids through to meet minimums.

Thin prospects.

Drugs to numb the scrape of life at the bottom.

Small crimes to fund the drugs.

I’ve known people in every part of that cycle.

Should a few key moments have gone differently in my life, I could have been stuck in that cycle of harms.

My life isn’t over; I could still end up there. It is arrogance to believe otherwise.

“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” – Ronald Reagan

Hate is not a strong enough word for how I feel about this quote.

Reagan’s line swings at a strawman. Society isn’t “guilty” when someone breaks a law; individuals still own their choices. But society designs the conditions that make some choices likelier and decides what happens after. If we pretend the ledger only records at the moment of arrest, we fail to reckon with our own debits.

Society is a group project. Whether we contribute a lot or a little, we all share the grade. Accountability isn’t erased by context. But context determines whether tomorrow brings more harm or less.

Labels don’t nullify the failures that led to an aisle with a knife on the floor. “Criminal” shouldn’t be the whole noun. People can be better tomorrow. I can’t choose that for them; neither can you.

But the choices we can make either help or hinder. Next time, we’ll explore them both.

At 27, I became a vegetarian because of a spider in my bathroom. It was going about its best spider life. A life I didn’t want to end. And if I wouldn’t hurt a spider, how could I contribute to the suffering of animals in factory farms?

I lasted 18 months. Then I gave it up for someone I loved.

A few weeks ago, scrolling my Substack feed, I felt that old guilt return.

I felt a pang as I clicked… I was sure I had a pretty good idea of the arguments the author was going to make. I wasn’t wrong.

Suffice it to say that the post laid out arguments I already knew: environmental destruction, worker exploitation, animal cruelty.1

Why Vegan?

Industrial livestock is incredibly inefficient. We first grow a huge amount of food to feed to animals. This alone has tremendous impacts on water supplies, carbon emissions, and degradation of the natural world as we take more and more of it for farmland. Then we use that food not to feed people, but to feed animals, losing a huge amount of calories and nutrition in the process while further negatively impacting the environment.

Working conditions in the industry are notoriously terrible. Not only that, but it is an industry that relies on the labor of marginalized and vulnerable people, undocumented migrants who cannot advocate for better conditions for fear of facing further harm from authorities. A trap we put so many people in for the sake of a steak.

The beef, chicken, and pork we consume did not come from the idyllic farm of American myth. They came from factory conditions that subject living beings to the cruelest conditions imaginable in the name of greater yields and bigger profits.

Arguments I’d once cared about enough to change my life.

My Time as a Vegetarian

I managed to be vegetarian for a year and a half. Individually I didn’t find it particularly challenging. I was a gym freak at the time and not only was I able to maintain my six day a week weightlifting routine but also reduced my body fat without losing strength. I was being more intentional about the protein I was eating and managing to eat leaner.

What ended it was… society.

Ok, not that dramatic, but definitely social pressure. I began dating the woman who would become my first wife. She loved to cook for me but made it no secret that it would be easier for her if I ate meat.

I pushed back for a while, but eventually I relented. I gave in and gave the green light for my ex to begin to cook chicken parmesan versus the eggplant parmesan she couldn’t quite master.

But since I’d become a vegetarian out of moral motivation, I was fully aware of the harm I was again contributing to for the sake of convenience.

I have long since moved on from that marriage, that church, and that faith. But I have not turned a blind eye to arguments against consuming animal products.

Abandoning my vegetarianism didn’t change the world. One person won’t shut down factory farms. But over a long enough period, a non-zero number of animals would need to suffer for my consumption, and non-existence certainly is better than the hell of factory farm existence.

Tuesday Morning Scrolling

When I saw that headline, I read it and felt compelled to comment.

The post author was understanding, and we had a particularly good back and forth in the comments. If only all internet conversations were so respectful.

The moral argument for being vegan is unassailable. I finished our exchange by telling the author that I would have a conversation with my wife about changes to our grocery shopping and other consumer choices.

I thought about it for several days, and had the conversation, as promised. Have we become vegan in the last month?

No.

Are we making changes?

Yes.

First Steps

It is difficult to make the changes overnight. Like it or not, we are individuals who operate within systems. And the capitalist farm industrial complex exerts constant pressure to consume.

That doesn’t give moral license to eat cheeseburgers and wear leather. Those are harms, and they support and perpetuate the cruelty that is the factory farm system.

But purity is brittle. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

Accepting a harm when we can do something to mitigate it is an evil of indifference. Making the choice to minimize the destruction of life, that is an active good. Evils accumulate, as does good. They don’t net one another out.

Being more thoughtful about our habits we can begin to reduce the demand for animals we create. My wife and I aren’t going vegan now, but we are reducing our meat consumption. Switching to a mostly vegetarian meal plan. Plant based milk rather than dairy. Choosing to buy clothes that do not have animal products.

And as we adjust to changes, more changes can come.

But being told that holding progressive ideals makes veganism a must is the type of idea that puts people further from making the small changes that over a large enough period can be helpful.

The mom who is too tired to cook and grabs McDonalds could read this and feel vilified for existing. A bowl of ice cream is a respite from the world. A steak is a reward for working overtime and ignoring your family.

Being exploited constantly leaves you exhausted. You are mentally and physically taxed. For people who are worried about making next month’s rent, who are actively ignoring that growing pain in their side because they can’t afford a day off, telling them that they shouldn’t have something they find a moment’s pleasure in is often just one more burden they have no capacity to carry.

The headwinds against change are strong and we don’t get past them by ignoring their power.

I have empathy, and I’ve lived in that world long enough to know what those lives are like. People were angry with me when I was a vegetarian, as if I were hurting them somehow.

It’s because it challenges one of their few pleasures, and it called out the evil in it. We have a lot to do before we can make a real change.

A united working class with unions and strong worker protections, a social safety net that doesn’t turn every trip to the doctor into medical bankruptcy roulette, subsidized childcare and education, these need to happen before a paradigm shifting amount of people can willingly choose to be vegan.

But those changes aren’t needed before I can begin to make minor changes.

When I stopped eating meat it was to reduce net cruelty in the world. And reading this post has me considering going back to that to live a slightly less hypocritical life. But we have so much to do before we can meaningfully begin to end the destructive use of animals.

My personal ethics say that evil is any harm inflicted on one who can feel that harm.

The industry contributes to the destruction of local ecosystems and the global climate. The harm from that damage is evil.

Animals confined in spaces where they can’t move, can’t turn around, can’t be comfortable or live as animals, this is harm. This is evil.

The industry harms animals and people. It contributes to the exploitation of vulnerable populations and pushes back against worker rights. This causes harm. This is evil.

That definitely includes animals. It’s not fair to the animals suffering now, and the future ones who will continue to suffer are ongoing moral debits on me as an individual and on all of us as a society.