Writing for an audience

I, like a lot of us these days, have a fear of what the future may bring. The fear ultimately stems from a lack of knowledge. The ambiguity is what keeps me up at night. It's easy to reside in a sort of soft nihilism where you have just accepted doom so it justifies forgoing moral and ethical decision-making. That's a lifestyle I just cannot accept. I worry that this need for purpose that I have will destroy me someday. If I keep on this path of naive gravitas about my own life, I will have nothing left. I have taken great strides in mourning the change, I used to have really debilitating spirals when seeing how the world feels so different now than it did when I was a kid. I now know that that feeling of change is somewhat inevitable, but being able to come to terms with a changing world is the most powerful tool we have against this soft nihilism, it maintains our ability to not fall into hopelessness. The way people cope with this unknown that we are all feeling is very inte...

In my heart of hearts, I am a deeply lazy person. I sometimes think that talking smart and smooth can give off the perception that I'm well-read and therefore not a lazy motherfucker who stares at my phone rotting my brain for hours every day. When I get confronted with having to address my laziness it frequently causes existential crises. Just recently I told my professor about my first blog post and he asked me to send it to him so he could read it. So I took out the part of elderly Jewish men liking the sound of their own voice and I sent it to him. I prefaced the email saying "please don't take this too seriously, I just wrote this for fun". It didn't go well. At the start of the next class he said in front of everyone "Gabe I read what you wrote. I think that if we disagree on this fundamental level of seeing skepticism as the ultimate form of understanding reality, then maybe you should drop this class". I just looked back at him with stunned Pikac...

I saw a TikTok of a teacher talking about how far behind Gen Alpha students are in school. I usually react by writing it off as alarmist anxiety. One of the comments on the post said “Well why should they care, the illusion of working hard in school, and going to college, guaranteeing to lead to a better life, is gone”. I think this person is right in some ways. When I was younger, in middle and high school I was never inundated with cynical ideas of my economic future and I was allowed optimism. I think the absence of optimism could go two ways with the development of Gen Alpha. It could go the way of radicalism, where these kids never feed into the propaganda of the capitalist system and are actually able to change the system and the world we live in. They have the capability to not be inhibited by the shackles of familiarity that the majority of us have with the current system. Or, it could go the other way. This absence could lead to an apathetic immorality; these kids have the pot...

Just let that be known. The need for skepticism is fueled by skepticism. Skepticism is a parasite eating away at our peace of mind. Just because something brings up more internal questions of reason and understanding of God and/or the world around us, does not make it more fruitful. I don’t want to lead my life with a constant feeling of never understanding, of unending angst. Why have we accepted persistent skepticism as the only way to truly see reality for what it is? I refuse to accept that this self-flagellation of believing that “you’ll never understand, but you can never stop trying to understand” is the only way to pursue a spiritual well-being adequately. Do I need to feel a neverending, punishing, sense of pursuit towards understanding God and what he expects of us in order to be a good Jew? I don’t think so. I reject it, actually. The Nuer people in the Sudan have a, according to E. E. Evans Prichard, cut-and-dry view of the divine, what they can expect from the supernatural...