Psithurism

Sent from: 11/7/2026 (33 years old)
To: 5/15/2008 (15 years old)

Dear Cody,

Your favorite sound in the whole world is the soft murmur of wind through pine trees. It’s lonely and beautiful and evokes a cosmic sadness, a yearning for something you can’t put your finger on. It’s the feeling of a major seven chord. The feeling of the ending of a movie. Of late night conversation with friends and looking up at the stars. It’s the feeling of the reflections of headlights in wet streets at night and somehow knowing that was the last time you’ll ever see her. The familiar smell of your hometown on your last day of high school as you contemplate a thousand possible futures, remembered from one in particular, ten years later, far away. Of sacred promises and solemn oaths and other things that can only be whispered. That this life is not for us and we’re meant for something more. That there’s a tremendous purpose and beauty somewhere, but we’re alienated from it, maybe, hopefully, to one day be reunited.

This feeling has always been with you. You don’t know what it means, you just know it’s the most profound thing there is. It’s too perfect to talk about, too fragile to look at for very long without crying. So you keep it tucked away, a little secret in the back of your mind.

That hidden place is the source of your boundless inspiration. Ideas, bits, jokes, stories, lyrics all come in an endless stream, like a breeze blowing steadily from the cavemouth of your unconscious, like angels whispering to you, and they mean that you never have to be alone, not really. When you’re standing in line at the grocery store, you reach out your mind, and the angels answer.

Growing up, you tried to be a Christian. You wore a little gingham button-down to church every Sunday and looked inside yourself and tried to fold the things you found there into the right shape. But they were not pliant. When you were six years old, you lied on your parents’ bed next to Dad in the stillness of the late morning that you must have somehow known would become a memory even then and told him you thought heaven and hell were just metaphors for how people talked about you after you died. And you decided that you had no religion.

If you want to live a meaningful life, one where your deathbed regret is minimized, you must live in accordance with your sacred values. So what are your sacred values?

You don’t have a clear answer yet.

And no one would be surprised. This is supposed to be a hard question. Modern people are spiritually lost. We are told this over and over. It’s implied by every cynically ironic sitcom and every post-truth political speech and every scientism influencer who reassures us that the beauty will come back if we just finish unweaving the rainbow and every technocrat who says what a shame it is that no one gave you a god but don’t worry we’re working as fast as we can.

The progression and cause of this is a seminal thread of philosophical thought. The steam engine and binomial nomenclature put the faeries and the jhin to death. Christian ethics produced a fact-based truthseeking which debased the meaning-granting institutions of the old world. Consensus narratives have dissolved, shared social scripts have broken down, and the individual no longer has a sense of belonging. Everything is fake and gay or maybe nothing is gay enough.

Growing up today means coming online to this howling fucking cacophony. To loudspeakers announcing at Guantanamo Bay volumes how sad it is that silence is impossible. Modernity insists you are sick, assures you there’s no need to investigate the matter because the big boys have talked and decided there’s no cure, and then sells you palliative treatment at every turn. The Great Conversation is over and its conclusion is that every 12 year old must go on Zoloft.

And now here you are. Fifteen. Approaching the end of your freshman year of high school. And the meaning crisis has come for you, right on schedule. You’re lonely and depressed. And finding your way in life does feel hard. And you do feel lost.

And I don’t believe you.

You, who when he was five years old, found an empty beehive during a walk to the park with Mom and smiled and laughed and held it up like it was the most perfect treasure bestowed by the greatest luck. Who stashed it away to give to Dad for his birthday, and then fell to pieces when a stranger crushed it like it was nothing.

You, who couldn’t explain why he cried uncontrollably the first time he heard Neil Young’s Like a Hurricane at eight years old.

You, who has kept every idea the angels have ever whispered to him. Piles of notebooks, scraps of paper, hundreds of scribble-covered sticky notes, all bundled and locked in his childhood desk. Like he’s stockpiling seeds for a nuclear winter.

There was no meaning crisis for you as a kid. No depression, no need to discover truth. The things inside of you were beautiful. They did not need to be folded.

There’s an infamous book by Julian Jaynes which claims that when early humans were supposedly communicating with deities, they were actually just hearing their own thoughts, born from their own creative unconscious. And when this collapsed into the “unified” modern mind, it enabled instrumental rationality at the price of locking us out of the Garden of Eden forever. How true was this historically? Who knows. Probably not very.

But it’s true for you.

Nearly everything about the world. The school systems, the media, the economy of rational actors. All of it is designed to strip you of your intrinsic light, to inject wrinkles of doubt into your soul, to practice in through repetitive labor a beholdenness to reason and a deference to science and institutions and technocrats and norms and arbitrary rules and taboos.

The children’s science books tell you that’s not a magical beast that straddles the heavens and earth. It is a bird. In fact, it’s precisely a eugenes fulgens. Now memorize it. Speak the words. Make yourself legible. Write it on the line. Get a grade. Your neural pathways as a KPI. Remember, we’re not teaching you what to think, we’re teaching you how to think. We only want to parameterize your soul. Now question yourself. Second guess everything. Perform maximal alienation from your own intuition. Good boy. You get a gold star. You get a job. You get a cute little girlfriend.

You know this. Guitar taught you that you become what you practice. Famously, the Chinese brainwashing process was nonviolent. They simply had prisoners write long passages lauding the virtues of communist China, and new grooves were gradually carved in their brains. In America, we raise kids by having them spend eight hours a day for twelve years writing long passages about the perspectival provincialism of every attempt in history to construct something meaningful. If the purpose of a system is what it does, then modernity is a machine designed to make you forget who you are. And so you’ve experienced your own little axial age.

Of course, you’re already becoming aware of all of this, and in an attempt to protect yourself, you’re beginning to cultivate a reflexive contrarianism. But this will only shield you from the simplest form of the spell, the pressure to conform. In truth, the world is fractally sophisticated, and it always finds a way to personalize the prison. For you, it will use the siren song of ambition and instrumentality. Fold the things inside yourself into the right shape and you’ll have something better than god. Competitive advantage.

In fairness, it’s mostly not power or status per se that are compelling to you. The two things you want most in life are to spend your days creating things that conjure the feeling, and a partner who loves you. But the world, by all appearances, has locked them behind conventional success. You’ve subtly internalized this, and begun allowing the pursuit of instrumental power to unconsciously guide your thoughts and behavior. In this way, you’ve already started the process of betraying yourself.

You are not a victim. You’re complicit. I remember the day you sat by the poolside and realized that growing up would mean having to adapt to the world. Having to let go of your love of Star Wars and your hope that life contained something beyond the mundane. And now you’re reading the God Delusion and watching the Daily Show and arguing with people online. And it feels seductive. It feels like you’re maturing and becoming sophisticated. You’re a serious intellectual.

But you’re not figuring it out. You’re accumulating justifications for allowing yourself to forget. Allowing yourself to take the easy road. Of course, it doesn't feel like the easy road. People spend their entire lives clawing their way up the social hierarchy, thinking their struggle is evidence of character or virtue. Hard work is the easiest way to disguise a cowardly choice.

If meaning comes from story arcs completing, then the greatest risk is not that your story arcs don’t complete, it’s that the wrong ones do. At the end of a long life enslaved to them, no less. Hell is being on your deathbed, knowing that you exhausted your life force bringing about values that weren’t yours. That your true sacred values were stillborn, never having been given the chance to grow into anything more than the faintest gnawing in your marrow.

So no, I don’t believe you.

You know what you believe in. What is true is what makes you cry. Everything else is a lie.

Values don’t feel like you. This is intrinsic to the feeling of sacredness. To have them is to be in communion with something. A man on a cross. Or a political philosophy. Or, perhaps, Jaynesian angels. When you were young, you looked around and saw that there were no worthy gods. There are no worthy gods in heaven or on Earth, sure. But there are worthy gods within.

So what do you believe in?

You believe in that beauty is ultimately subordinate to meaning. You believe in self-sufficiency and independence. You believe in being a force for good. You believe in loving with all your heart. Attachment is the source of everything worthwhile and Buddhism is morally bankrupt. You believe in the irreducible divinity of the human soul. Every individual is the center of the universe, and ethically relating to people necessarily grows out of this fact. You also believe in hating people and things with all your heart, because to love something is necessarily to hate its opposite. Violence to destroy your enemies is righteous and beautiful if it’s conducted in an honorable way. You believe in loyalty, taken to a fault. Friends are family you get to choose. You believe that when you get the call in the middle of the night, you say yes, of course. Absolutely. And you believe in telling the truth to your friends even when it might make them hate you forever. In fact, you believe in telling the radical truth, always, no matter the cost. Negative emotions are okay and healthy and expressing them is a service to truth. And you believe in never surrendering, never bending the knee, to anyone or anything, not even the universe.

But above all else you believe in the wind blowing through the trees. In the undeniable beauty and importance of the whispers of the angels, and the importance of writing down what they say.

The world will attempt to make you forget and you must not. It’s not enough to discover your values. You must remember them. And you must do it over and over and over and over.

Sincerely,
Cody