The Book Exists Now We’re all tired. But tired isn’t the end of caring. After years of tracing what happens after outrage fades, the work finally became a book. It’s called Ethicism: The Practice of Care — and it’s out now. → Buy on Amazon Paperback Hardcover Kindle This isn’t a sermon. It’s a record of how to stay human when humanity becomes inconvenient. How to repair instead of perform. How to keep tending the light even when no one’s watching. Across its pages you’ll wa

When empathy begins to fray, boundaries become the loom. After the flood of feeling, after the exhaustion of trying to care for everything and everyone, what remains is the quiet need for form. The previous chapter ended in that silence —the moment after the storm, when conscience finally breathes and asks, How do I keep caring without coming apart? That question is where this begins. Because empathy alone is not enough. It must learn its edges. Mercy without limits turns int

When you stop believing in the myth of deserving , something shifts. The moral arithmetic you were taught to trust — the idea that pain has a purpose, that goodness guarantees safety — collapses. And in the wreckage, what you’re left with is exposure. You see suffering everywhere now, stripped of its supposed lessons, scattered without logic or fairness. You see how much of the world’s pain was never earned — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. At first, that clarity fee

We were taught that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to those who failed some invisible test. It’s a convenient lie — tidy, moral, profitable. But the truth is harder: cruelty often wins. Exploitation is scalable. Virtue is slow. And still, we cling to the myth of deserving, because it makes the chaos feel earned. But beneath every economy is a theology — a belief about who deserves care and who doesn’t. Suffering Becomes Currency showed how empathy w

In short:  I wrote a book—one that’s been years in the making—and it’s about to find its way into the world. I didn’t set out to write a philosophy originally. I set out to answer a smaller, messier question: how do you keep caring when the world keeps asking you not to? If you’ve been here a while, you know the terrain—posts that begin with a headline and end somewhere quieter, more stubborn. You know the rhythm of my essays: the way a sentence will start like a match and en

Pain has become content. It circulates like currency—mined, packaged, and sold back to us as empathy. The same systems that manufacture cruelty have learned to monetize its aftermath. Every tragedy becomes a trending topic, every wound a headline, every scream an opportunity. Someone profits. Someone disappears. And the rest of us scroll on, exhausted and complicit. This was the warning in The Machine Keeps Turning : that grief itself has become political currency. That power

There’s a loneliness that comes with doing the right thing. Not the cinematic kind — the quiet kind that settles in after everyone else has stopped pretending to care. The world rewards performance, not integrity; efficiency, not empathy. You learn to carry your conscience like contraband, aware that kindness has stopped being profitable. But goodness was never meant to make anyone rich. It was meant to make us real. You notice it first in the silence that follows a principle

The world does not change because someone writes a list of rules. It changes when enough people decide that kindness no longer needs permission. I used to think ethics was a philosophy. Something you debated, defined, then filed away under “theory.” But theory doesn’t stop a hand from shaking when it has to choose whether to help or to look away. Theory doesn’t reach across a counter, or stand between a cruelty and its next excuse. Living with conscience isn’t an idea; it’

After disaster and outrage, there is a period of quiet. The statements end, the coverage repeats, and people stop speaking. The silence can feel disloyal in a culture that expects constant anger. From the start, the pattern has been consistent: harm occurs, then a narrative is issued. A life is lost, then an explanation is produced. The first part of this project described that sequence in detail: what follows violence, how time is manipulated to excuse it, and how institutio

The ruins are always quieter than you expect. After the sirens, after the statements, after the footage has been looped until meaning bleeds out of it, there’s a hush no one knows what to do with. Broken glass has its own kind of silence. Smoke drifts like a thought that refuses to finish itself. You can hear your breath again, and that can feel like treason when the world is calibrated for rage. From the beginning, the story moved like this: a shot, then a script. A body, th

Everything began with anger—anger at cruelty, at injustice, at the realization that the people we call monsters are still human. That realization forces you to face an uncomfortable truth: if they are human, then so are we, even when we cause harm. In Those We Call Monsters , we confronted that truth. We saw how cruelty often disguises itself as righteousness, how every generation repeats the same justification for violence. We learned that evil isn’t only “out there.” It app

It began with rage. With the mirror cracking. With the moment you realized that the monsters you condemned were human—and that meant you were, too. In Those We Call Monsters , we named what we feared. We stared into the fire and saw our reflection moving inside it. We traced the lineage of cruelty, how it feeds on righteousness, how every generation swears their violence is holy. We followed that wheel of vengeance and found ourselves standing in its center. The revelation wa

After hope returns, there’s still the work of keeping it alive. Once you’ve helped rebuild something or tried to make things better, you eventually face the fatigue that comes afterward. The excitement fades, and what’s left is the ongoing, repetitive effort of maintaining compassion over time. This is the part no one warns you about—not the crisis itself, but what happens after you survive it. You keep going even when you’re not sure what difference it makes. You’ve seen too

The light always feels brightest right before the fatigue sets in. After the rebuilding, after the hope, after the long nights of believing the world might actually hold—there comes the weight of continuation. The high of hope fades, and what remains is the quiet, repetitive labor of keeping it alive. That’s the test no one warns you about: not the cruelty itself, but the grind that follows survival. The long stretch of days when you’ve seen too much to be naive, but not enou

This entry is a simplified summary of Ethicism, written in plain language. No metaphor, no poetry, no idiom; direct words for simplicity. Click the button below this paragraph to read the full post, to get a better and more full idea of what Ethicism is about. Core Idea Ethicism is a way of thinking about what it means to be good. It says that we must act with conscience, care, and responsibility, even when the world does not. It rejects ideas that say “nothing matters” or

Every belief system, no matter how good it sounds, has to survive moments of doubt. You can have clear plans and good intentions, but eventually you’ll feel worn down. You’ll wonder if being kind or doing the right thing actually changes anything. That’s when despair appears—not during disaster, but after you’ve done your best and the world still feels the same. When your efforts seem invisible. When you care deeply and still watch people act cruelly or indifferent. It’s the

Every architecture, no matter how noble, must stand the test of night. After the blueprints are drawn, after the scaffolding of compassion begins to rise, there always comes a moment when the world feels too heavy to lift. The plans are sound, the vision true, but the light falters. You start to wonder if any of it matters—if kindness can really hold against the wind. That’s where despair waits. Not in catastrophe, but in the quiet days after you’ve tried your hardest and the

If cruelty can be organized, then compassion can be organized too. We already know how harm sustains itself: through laws, profits, and repetition. People have built entire systems around neglect. That means care can be structured the same way—it just hasn’t been made a priority. In The Hands That Mend, we talked about repair on a personal level: the small, quiet actions that rebuild trust and connection. But individual healing can only go so far when the systems we live in k

If cruelty can be organized, so can compassion. We’ve seen how systems of harm sustain themselves: through policy, through profit, through repetition. Entire empires have been built on the architecture of neglect. But if that’s possible—if indifference can be scaled and funded and codified into law—then mercy can be too. We just never built it that way. The Hands That Mend taught us what healing looks like up close: hands trembling, slow mending, no applause. But personal rep

This post will take you one minute and twenty seconds to read. That’s the average time people spend on my work. So I wrote this for you — for exactly that long. You will finish this in the time it takes for a video to buffer, for an ad to end, for you to decide whether to keep scrolling. You will finish this before your attention wanders. But if you stop here, if you close the tab early, you’ll prove the point better than I ever could. Every second you shave off reflection is