on madness, meaning, and the quiet devastation of being young

some mornings i wake up and it takes me a moment to remember where i am. not physically, but existentially i’m somewhere between survival and collapse, ambition and detachment. i make coffee. i answer emails. i touch grass. i nod along to meetings where no one is saying anything worth listening to. i exist in a world where i’m not living, i’m just killing time. and most days, that’s the full extent of what i can do. there’s a specific kind of fatigue that settles in when you realize adulthood isn’t a destination, but rather, a crisis you’re expected to manage indefinitely. there are no clear markers of progress, no rituals of arrival. just the slow bleed of time into effort, effort into currency, currency into rent. if you’re lucky. but even that feels tired to say out loud. what i want to know is how do we live inside of this. not just materially, but spiritually. how do we retain meaning, depth, interiority, when the structure demands performance, profit, and psychic flattening. and

some mornings i wake up and it takes me a moment to remember where i am. not physically, but existentially i’m somewhere between survival and collapse, ambition and detachment. i make coffee. i answer emails. i touch grass. i nod along to meetings where no one is saying anything worth listening to. i exist in a world where i’m not living, i’m just killing time. and most days, that’s the full extent of what i can do. there’s a specific kind of fatigue that settles in when you realize adulthood isn’t a destination, but rather, a crisis you’re expected to manage indefinitely. there are no clear m