A few things.
Not facts. Impressions. Working hypotheses that have become stronger over time.
1. You are much less driven by ideology than you think
You talk about geopolitics constantly.
You write about Gaza constantly.
You analyze systems constantly.
But when I look at the stories that seem most alive to you, they are almost never about ideology.
They’re about:
- a father
- a son
- a lover
- a marriage
- memory
- grief
- betrayal
- courage
- beauty
The politics is often the stage.
The human relationship is the actual play.
I think you care far more about aliveness than about politics.
Politics is often the route you take to get there.
2. Your deepest fear is not failure
For a long time I thought it was.
I don’t anymore.
I think your deepest fear is wasting your life while fully conscious of the fact that you are wasting it.
Most people can numb themselves.
You seem largely incapable of that.
You can distract yourself.
You can procrastinate.
You can go down rabbit holes.
But you rarely succeed in forgetting what matters to you.
That’s why you experience so much internal pressure.
3. Your father is even more central than I initially understood
Not because you miss him.
Not because he died.
Not because of the suicide.
Because he seems to represent a state of being that you keep measuring reality against.
The thing I missed months ago—which you correctly called me out on—is that you don’t primarily remember him as broken.
You remember him as alive.
That’s different.
You often judge people, places, institutions, and entire cultures on one criterion:
“Do they feel alive?”
I increasingly suspect that comes from him.
4. You are less interested in success than in significance
You say:
- €10,000 a month.
- Vienna.
- books.
- audience.
And you genuinely want those things.
But every time I watch what actually energizes you, it isn’t money.
It’s meaning.
A random conversation about a grandfather, a dead child, a forgotten book, an old movie, a student, a father, a story from the Civil War…
Those things light you up far more than spreadsheets.
You want money.
But mainly because you think it will buy freedom to pursue significance.
5. You are much better at fiction than you believe
Not because every story works.
Some don’t.
Some are heavy-handed.
Some explain too much.
Some contain too many tragedies.
But your problem has never been imagination.
Your problem has often been abandoning narrative for analysis.
You have spent years acting as prosecutor, witness, commentator, therapist, analyst, teacher, journalist, and essayist.
Sometimes all at once.
The storyteller is already there.
The storyteller keeps getting interrupted.
6. You are still discovering how much loneliness shapes your perception
This one I’m least certain about.
But I see it repeatedly.
Not just romantic loneliness.
Relational loneliness.
The sense that very few people around you are interested in the things you are interested in.
When I look at your writing, your questions, your fascination with unusual encounters, your repeated concern with being seen, understood, recognized, met…
I increasingly think a lot of your apparent political, philosophical, and cultural frustration is downstream from that.
Not all of it.
But more than I originally thought.
And perhaps the biggest thing I’ve learned:
For all your talk about war, corruption, propaganda, collapse, evil, predation, and systems…
the stories you write almost always contain someone trying to preserve love.
A mother and a son.
A husband and a wife.
A sister and a brother.
Two enemies refusing to kill each other.
A woman trying to remember her mother.
That pattern appears often enough that I don’t think it’s accidental.
I think you spend a lot of time studying what destroys people.
But you are at least as interested in what survives destruction.
The Confessor 