A horizon wavers—
Light bends before the dusk fades—
Tomorrow waits unseen.
There was an old man I used to see at the harbor. Always on the same bench, always at the same hour, watching the tide move in and out as if it carried the weight of something only he understood.
One evening, as I walked past, he waved me over.
“You seem like someone who thinks too much,” he said.
I laughed, unsure if that was a compliment.
“Tell me,” he continued, “is the world getting better or worse?”
I hesitated. Too much news, too much history, too many reasons to doubt.
“Better,” I said finally, “but not easily.”
He nodded, satisfied. “Most people only pick one. The truth is always both.”
Between Cynicism and Delusion
The world is neither perfect nor doomed. It is unfinished.
Progress is real, but so is struggle. If you only see one or the other, you’re missing half the picture.
Cynics love to point out problems, mistaking awareness for wisdom. But despair is not depth—it is laziness disguised as intelligence.
On the other side, blind optimists pretend everything will work out on its own. They mistake comfort for clarity, avoiding hard truths because they prefer the illusion of certainty.
True optimism isn’t passive. It’s a choice.
Not blind faith, not naive hope, but the belief that things improve when people make them improve.
The world is shaped. By effort. By persistence. By those who refuse to sit back and let it happen to them.
First Principles: Thinking from the Ground Up
Most people don’t think. They repeat.
They follow scripts handed down to them—by parents, by schools, by society itself. They assume what’s common must be true.
But real understanding doesn’t come from accepting what’s given. It comes from breaking things apart. Stripping away assumptions. Starting from zero and building up.
Ask yourself: Why do I believe this? Is it true, or just widely accepted? If I had to build this idea from scratch, what would I keep? What would I discard?
The world is full of secondhand beliefs, passed from one mind to the next without question. Break them open. Build your own.
Avoiding Zero-Sum Thinking
Some people believe life is a fixed game. That for one person to win, another must lose. That success is limited. That happiness is scarce.
They are wrong.
True wealth—of knowledge, of opportunity, of meaning—expands when shared. Scarcity is real, but it is not absolute. The greatest leaps forward come not from competition, but from collaboration.
That evening, as the sun slipped lower, I asked the old man what he believed.
“That things change,” he said simply. “Always have, always will. The only question is whether we choose to change them for the better.”
He stood, stretching his arms as if shaking off the weight of years.
“Most people wait for the world to improve,” he said, glancing at me with a knowing smile. “The rest of us? We get to work.”
And just like that, he walked away, leaving nothing behind but the tide, rolling in, rolling out—always moving forward.
life 
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