A Grammar Mistake Mistaken for Metaphysics

You are given life. You are not given purpose.

This is a hard pill for many of us to swallow. We struggle to digest it.

Purpose, at best, is something people assemble after the fact. For some, it is personal and idiosyncratic—a loose mixture of desires, experiences, temperament, and luck. For others, purpose is said to preexist: assigned rather than discovered.

In this latter view, purpose comes from God, embedded in some vaguely defined “Divine Plan.” Any purpose not derived from it is considered inferior or mistaken. Failure to accept this purpose is framed as a moral defect; acceptance, as virtue. Everything that happens—joy, suffering, success, catastrophe—is declared “meant.”

A divine purpose must be absolute. If it comes from the creator, deviation is impossible. Such a purpose is important enough to justify killing and dying, which is why it also requires an afterlife. Without eternal compensation, the arithmetic fails.

I enjoy talking to religious people. I have several ultra-orthodox tenants, and every Friday a group of Lubavitch boys comes to my office to bring me closer to my faith. Our conversations usually end the same way, with the question that matters most:

“You really believe this is all there is—and then we die?” They mean it rhetorically.

I always feel strange answering yes. It sounds incomplete, almost arbitrary.

But I have no other honest answer.

The purpose of life is to live. This is not inspirational; it is tautological. Life does not require justification beyond itself.

We often describe life as a journey—birth, progression, death. But a journey implies a destination. That implication may be nothing more than a habit of thought: a grammar mistake mistaken for metaphysics.

Life may not be linear at all. It may be self-contained. The organism that is born and the organism that dies are not moving toward a goal; they are undergoing a process—growth, maturity, decline. No different in principle from plants, insects, or any other living system.

Life engenders process, not purpose. Minds invent purposes.

Hence the familiar substitutes: an afterlife for the righteous, spiritual missions, the Kingdom of God, tikkun olam—the repair of an imperfect world designed by a perfect creator. Or their secular equivalents: wealth, status, credentials, legacy, family. All serve the same function. They place life at a distance, something to be earned or completed, rather than something already happening.

But the only purpose that does not collapse under scrutiny is the one that does not need to be pursued. It is not ahead of you. It is not earned. It is already occurring. It is part of your very nature: the fullness of being alive.

Life persists even in cracks in pavement. It does not wait for meaning, permission, or explanation. Psychological structures—expectation, obligation, grand narratives of purpose—often interfere more than they help.

Reduce the distance between mind and body. Reduce the demand that life justify itself. As the barrier drops, so does anxiety about purpose.

What remains is not meaning in the grand sense, but something simpler and harder to refute: being alive, fully, and without judgment.

A Rat In My Garbage Can

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Lifted the lid as I do

every Friday to drop in

the week’s sack

for the truck’s prehistoric jaws

to devour and disappear.

There it was 

at the empty bottom,

lifeless, lying on its side

like a deflated football.

Not like looking down

a cavernous wishing well—more like

a jack-in-the-box ambush.

I reeled,

my labyrinthine mind scurrying

for an answer:

it tumbled in while

sniffing for scraps

and couldn’t climb back out.

Small furry survivor

of the T-Rex-killing asteroid,

done in by a dumb

plastic bin

from Home Hardware; thump.

I imagined the frantic,

futile claw-scratch scratching

against the bin’s

smooth cylindrical walls.

Had to smirk.

Next thought: 

where there’s one,

there are many.

I peered through the fence

at my neighbour’s yard,

rows of containers

behind his shiny,

brand-new black Porsche.

It wasn’t the first time

I’d surveyed his trash

like a detective scrounging

for clues of ill-gotten gains.

While I stuck conscientiously

to a one-bag-a-week quota,

he always had two,

sometimes even three and four—evidence

he was an uncaring waster,

always a bit of a jerk, really.

And a menace.

My empty bin trapped the rat,

but it was my neighbour

who invited it

with his extravagant

consumption.

That’s when I heard

the inevitable truck’s roar,

rusty brakes screaming.

Darkness crossed

my sunny soul

like an omen eclipse.

We’re all doomed.

To Be Free

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I didn't choose my identity,

it chose me, 

like eye colour and hair,

length and shape of nose,

height and brains;

a common refrain.

The many choices life offers

are more or less lies.

If you don't believe me,

just look at any photo; 

all the smiles. 

I was given money,

and didn't care about money.

I was given love, 

and didn't care about love.

I was given life

and didn't care about life;

Still I tried and tried.

So they taught me

about God,

but it wasn't enough -

I needed something hot 

like the burning sun,

something cold  

like the icy moon -

I could not believe

in words,

and yet repeated words;

how absurd

to be free.

Heartfelt

So today was the last day of one of my co-workers with our company after nine years. It’s a bittersweet departure. She was an excellent employee—hard-working, super smart, diligent, even-tempered, modest, respectful, and a true team player. I’m not sure of the reasons she decided to leave the company, but it was somewhat unexpected. She was being groomed to become our comptroller.

She is still quite young and unmarried, and I believe she has decided to take some time off for personal reasons before returning to China, where there is a successful family business that she will likely take over. She will be successful in whatever she chooses to pursue in life—there’s little doubt about that.

But this post isn’t really about her.

It’s about the messages sent to her through the company email system to express appreciation and wish her well. We all got to see them. They were beautifully written tributes—accurate in their description of our beloved co-worker, her talents, and her importance to the company. My conservative guess is that 90% of them were either fully written by ChatGPT or, at the very least, heavily edited by it. I made sure mine wasn’t processed through the AI meat grinder.

I know—we can’t all be Shakespeare. And forgive me for sounding like a curmudgeon, but doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose if you use AI to express something that’s supposed to be heartfelt and personal?

It’s one thing to use AI for marketing, to edit a sales report, or even to help shape a short blog post. I’m guilty of that myself. But this need for perfection—the refined expression, the polished image, the flawless impression—is slowly killing everything.

I miss the sometimes ham-handed expression of genuine feeling. In fact, the one or two messages that clearly weren’t AI-generated were refreshingly obvious by comparison. They were loose and searching, cobbled together and ungrammatical. In other words, they were real.

This small end-of-week episode dovetails with something I heard earlier in the week: Noah Yuval Harari’s talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He spoke about what it means to be human. If it’s reason that defines us, then we’re in trouble. "Cogito, ergo sum"—I think, therefore I am—is how René Descartes reasoned the Western human being into existence in the 17th century. Since then, our capacity to think has largely defined our existence.

Harari argues that AI has rendered that definition obsolete. When we build machines that can outthink us in nearly every domain—science, philosophy, academics, mathematics, finance—either humanity has reached a dead end in terms of purpose and meaning, or a new self-definition must emerge.

The alternative seems obvious. It is not thinking that truly defines us. Machines will do that better than we ever could. What truly defines us is feeling: suffering and joy, love and grief, and the expression of those feelings. Machines will undoubtedly learn to fake that—and do it convincingly. But the essential ingredient is still missing. It does not originate from human experience. And without that, any machine-made product is disqualified from being called art.

The advent of AI has suddenly put emotion—and the expression of emotion in art—back at the center of the question of what it means to be human.

Many AI prognosticators may be right that AI could mean our doom. Not because it will send armies to destroy us, but because we may allow ourselves to be infected by it—letting it mutate inside us and quietly alter our sense of what it means to be alive. The only inoculation is to redefine and re-valorize feeling as the essence of humanity.

That sounds like a monumental task in a world where AI is taking over so much of our daily existence. And yet it could begin with something as small as rediscovering the beauty, simplicity, and significance of writing a heartfelt note of appreciation—to a friend, a relative, or a colleague who will be missed.

Down To Florida Blues

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I ain’t goin down to Florida
Don’t care how cold it gets (x 2)
I said I ain’t goin down to Florida
No matter how my baby begs.

They got snakes down in Florida
Thick as your two legs (x 2)
I said I ain’t goin down to Florida
No matter how my baby begs.

They got alligators down in Florida
In their rivers and their lakes (x 2)
I said I ain’t goin down to Florida
No matter how my baby begs.

They got hurricanes down in Florida
Make the house walls shake (x 2)
I said I ain’t goin down to Florida
No matter how my baby begs.

They got big sharks down in Florida
Want to tear your flesh (x 2)
I said I ain’t goin down to Florida
No matter how my baby begs.

They got sunshine down in Florida
Make your skin burn red (x 2)
I say I ain’t goin down to Florida
No matter how my baby begs.

I had a girl down in Florida
The kind you don't forget (x 2)
I say I ain’t goin down to Florida
No matter how my baby begs.

I ain’t goin down to Florida
Don’t care how cold it gets (x 2)
I say I ain’t goin down to Florida
Cause one time I did say yes.

Another's Eyes

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You've played many roles,

Most of your life.

Daughter, sister, friend, 

A mother and a wife.

In every hurricane,

There's an eye serene.

And you can hear a voice, 

Saying who you should be.  

Cause the script you had,

Since you took the stage.   

Has lines you forgot,  

And is missing a page. 

The rules can change,

The stars re-align. 

When you don't see yourself, 

Through another's eyes.

Strike a yoga pose,

To locate your breath.

So you can recite,

A psalm of loneliness.

There’s a moment between,

Inhale and release.

Where the tumult recedes,

And the poses all cease.

The rules can change,

The stars re-align. 

When you don't see yourself, 

Through another's eyes.

I won't be your mirror,

And you won't be mine.

A map isn't space,

And a clock isn't time.

The rules can change,

The stars re-align. 

When you don't see yourself, 

Through another's eyes.

What Are Words For

“My lips are moving and the sound’s coming out,

The words are audible, but I have my doubts.”

So begins Words, the 1982 synth-pop lament by Missing Persons. The chorus lands harder: What are words for when no one listens anymore? It’s a song about failed communication, framed from the side of the receiver—someone straining to be heard and wondering why meaning never arrives.

But what if the failure runs the other way? What if the receiver is listening too closely, desperately trying to extract meaning from communication that is fundamentally meaningless?

That question sits at the center of our so-called post-truth era—a condition in which objective facts matter less than emotion, identity, and belief. Post-truth politics tends to travel with populism and grows out of collapsing trust in institutions, expertise, and media. Add informational overload to the mix, and the result is not ignorance, but exhaustion. We are drowning in words.

Trump exploits this environment instinctively. He uses language like buckshot—wild, imprecise, and scattershot. The damage isn’t concentrated; it’s diffuse. Part of the problem is not that we don’t listen to him, but that we listen far too carefully.

Trump’s words are not arguments. They are not even lies in the conventional sense. To lie, words must first mean something. For trump, words are sounds emitted to satisfy a fleeting emotional impulse—anger, grievance, envy, dominance. Once uttered, they evaporate. It’s as if they never existed, because to him, in any substantive sense, they didn’t.

This is why contradiction doesn’t bother him. Why yesterday’s threat doesn’t bind today’s denial. Why promises carry no weight. There is no internal ledger of consistency, because there is no internal commitment to meaning.

Seen through this lens, Greenland becomes instructive.

Greenland does not exist to trump as a real place with people, language, culture, or history. It exists as a shape on a map—a large white mass, a jagged outline. Something you might draw with a Sharpie, like the cone of impact he improvised on the weather map to show the hurricane path he desired. Or something you might want simply because someone else has it. His understanding of its past—“a boat landed there”—has the depth of a children’s picture book.

So when trump threatened that the United States needed to “own” Greenland, those words were mostly sound effect in order to get some response. Distraction. Concern. Fear. 

The problem, of course, is that when the President of the United States speaks, words must be taken seriously regardless of intent. The office may have lost its moral authority under trump, but it still wields real power. And if the goal is simply to be taken seriously, as it is for trump, then any words will do—especially alarming ones. Exaggeration has more impact, which is why trump exaggerates constantly. Being feared or obeyed feels good to him precisely because, at some level, he knows he is not a serious person.

This creates the central paradox of the trump era: how do you take an unserious man seriously because he occupies a serious position?

The media’s solution has been to invent meaning where none exists. Pundits and analysts “interpret” his statements, construct plausible strategic rationales, and translate incoherent ranting into policy signals. This process—often called sane-washing—is not only misleading, it is counterproductive. It treats nonsense as strategy and impulse as intention.

Trump’s words should be understood by their effects, not their meanings. And effects are determined not by the speaker’s intention, but by the audience’s response. That shifts agency back to us.

Predictably, trump then trapped himself. By declaring he would get Greenland “one way or another,” he destroyed any chance of negotiated cooperation. If you were Denmark, would you agree to increased U.S. military presence knowing the Commander in Chief openly questioned your sovereignty? Having dismissed Denmark’s ownership outright, trump made trust impossible. Any concession would be reckless.

Did he mean any of it? Almost certainly not. But meaninglessness cuts both ways. Words without meaning also produce agreements without meaning. Negotiation with a bad-faith actor like trump is futile, or worse, dangerous.

There is no Greenland deal. There is no framework. There is only face-saving language and a gradual dissipation of an “urgent security concern” that never existed beyond the moment it was uttered. Trump will forget it entirely and move on to the next impulse, the next public distraction.

The rest of us will not. Because unlike him, we still believe words matter. And when words are emptied of meaning by those in power, the damage does not vanish with them. It accumulates—quietly, corrosively—until communication itself begins to fail.

And then we are left, like the song asks, wondering what words are for anymore.