On Saturday afternoon, Dr. Lionel Schrink climbed to a small café near the top of the mountain. He ordered black coffee and decided to sit outside on the terrace overlooking the city of Emberpolis.
From that altitude, the city’s towers, rooftops and winding streets appeared almost orderly. The air was thinner there, and so, Schrink claimed, were his thoughts.
“The higher I go,” he once explained, “the less authority they seem to have.”
He removed a worn notebook from his coat, opened it to a blank page and began to write.
Yeah, yeah. It’s me. Writing. Again.
As if that clears anything up.
I don’t even know myself. That’s the irritating part. I’m supposed to be good at noticing, at circling things slowly, at not lying. And still, here I am, scribbling like it might suddenly click. As if the pen knows something I don’t.
This isn’t despair. Right?
It doesn’t feel like despair. It feels… allergic. That’s the word that keeps coming back. Allergic to false authority. Especially the therapeutic kind. The kind that sounds calm and confident and utterly unburdened by consequence. I don’t know why that sets my teeth on edge so much, but it does.
When I say “no one can give real advice,” I’m not saying nothing matters. God, that would be lazy. I’m saying interpretation without embodiment is theater. Dress rehearsal with no opening night. Words that don’t come from inside the same bind are structurally hollow. They don’t carry weight. They don’t bruise.
Yeah. I hear you.
Whoever “you” is in my head right now.
And you’re not wrong.
No one really knows what anything means in a final, transferable way. Meaning doesn’t ship well. Advice is always second-hand. It’s filtered through someone else’s nervous system, someone else’s history, blind spots, survival tricks. Even the best advice is still a translation error. At worst, it’s noise dressed up as wisdom. Comfort food with no nutrients.
So why bother talking at all?
Here’s the part people skip because it doesn’t sound helpful:
Most talk is empty when it pretends to be authoritative. When it claims certainty. When it offers prescriptions instead of presence. When it rushes to be useful so no one has to sit in the discomfort of not knowing.
But talk isn’t always meant to advise.
Sometimes it’s just a check.
Am I alone in this?
Does this thought echo anywhere outside my skull?
Can I hear myself more clearly if it passes through another mouth?
So if what I’m rejecting is platitudes, motivational slogans, confident strangers telling you what you should do, good. That rejection is sane. It’s one of the few reflexes I trust.
This is the nerve I keep pressing, even on myself.
People love to talk. They love the posture of knowing. It gives them a temporary spine. For a moment, they don’t have to feel the confusion underneath their own motives if they’re busy diagnosing someone else’s. It’s a neat trick. I understand the appeal. I’ve done it too.
Most people don’t know the real motivations behind their own actions. Not really. They narrate after the fact. They rationalize. They retrofit meaning the way lawyers retrofit innocence. Introspection is mostly storytelling with better lighting and fewer objections.
That’s why the “expert in your life” stance feels so absurd to me. It skips the hardest part entirely: not knowing, and staying with that not knowing long enough for something honest to surface. It replaces contact with commentary.
Humans confuse explanation with access.
Explaining behavior feels like touching it, but it’s just circling it with words. Orbit mistaken for landing.
The silly little creatures. That’s not contempt. It’s tragicomic. We’re meaning-making animals with almost no direct access to our own drives, running around giving TED Talks about other people’s souls. Confident. Polished. Wrong in interesting ways.
Real work doesn’t sound confident.
It hesitates.
It contradicts itself.
It notices when it’s lying.
And it does not rush to be useful.
If all this talk feels empty sometimes, it’s because too much of it is performative mastery instead of shared bewilderment. Too many answers, not enough staying.
You know what it really is? I’ll just say it plainly, since this is only me reading.
It’s colonization. The impulse to occupy another person’s interior with borrowed maps and call it help.
I’ll stop here.
The coffee’s cold.
That feels appropriate.
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