2025-12-01

I am back after a brief hiatus. I was getting burned out on writing every single day and decided to use the holiday as an excuse to take a break. I feel that I had lost some momentum because I wanted to get started again earlier, but decided to let distractions and procrastination win. But at least now I’m here again, writing down my thoughts and trying to make sense of things.

There has been a bit of a detour in my diet over the course of the holiday. That’s a typical thing, but it was also difficult to keep up with what I was doing. I was hungry all the time and constantly frustrated. I have spent so much of my adult life doing whatever I could to anesthetize myself from the pain that I feel so frequently. It’s as if all I want to do is this or that unhealthy thing. Doing healthy things doesn’t give the same rush as the unhealthy ones. It’s less intense and feels less fulfilling. But I’m at a weird spot: does the "delayed gratification" even work if there’s no feeling of gratification at the end? I see no gratification coming from working hard, at least not one that’s guaranteed. All I can do is work for the mere chance of gratification.

It makes me question the point of doing anything that people consider "worthwhile." We love to showcase the times where it works out, but usually ignore the multitudes of times where it doesn’t. Real failure does come in giving up, yes, but there’s only so much "delay" in the gratification one can stomach until all there is to do is accept failure. To me, it feels like holding my breath underwater and then having to come up for air just to be told that I failed because I couldn’t stay underwater forever. It’s an impossible standard, metrics that aren’t designed to be met.

So many of us feel this way, constrained by the walls we build for ourselves. We are the prisoners and the guards simultaneously, crabs in the bucket. It makes me wonder what there is I can do to refute the world and do better for those that have turned their backs from God.

It makes me think of that movie A Bronx Tale, where Robert De Niro plays a 1960s bus driver whose son is getting groomed by a prominent neighborhood mobster. The mobster tells the boy that "the working man’s a sucker" because he doesn’t do what it takes to get ahead. The mobster is smarter, stronger, and better because he can go up to the world, grab it, and put it in his pocket. The boy tells his father, a working man, that the working man’s a sucker. His response:

He’s wrong, it don’t take much strength to pull a trigger but try getting up every morning day after day and work for a living, let’s see him try that, then we’ll see who the real tough guy is, the working man is the tough guy, your father’s the tough guy!

So many of us glamorize pulling that trigger. We glamorize that carnal instinct to take the shortcut. We think that if we’re not selfish and opportunistic, someone else will be and put us even further behind. But the truth is that opportunistic behavior is what will actually put us behind. It takes more strength to accept one’s position and do the right thing anyways. We don’t do so because it yields a greater material reward, but so that it inspires others to see the face of God in their fellow man.

There might not be much leverage in my words, but the truth doesn’t shout—it whispers.

Reply by email