On the car ride from our house to the high school football game, I was subjected to another one of my sister’s mad ramblings about her future husband.

From age six to sixteen, Josie had a knack for turning any conversation into a verbal storyboard of her life alongside her groom-to-be. She would oscillate between minute details. She would debate whether the rose bouquets at the reception dinner should be red or purple, whether his eyes would be brown or blue, or whether their house would be painted white or pink. The one detail she never questioned was her diamond ring. Sure, she would agonize over where the proposal would happen or how she’d react when he dropped to one knee, but what sat inside that little velvet box remained the same: a simple gold band with a single, flawless diamond.

Being a good little sister, rather than getting annoyed, I always sat and listened. I would treat her monologues as puzzles to solve. At first, I tried to interject whenever questions came to mind. Josie hated that. My inquiries were met with snappy dismissals, as if I should have known the answers even when they were matters of personal taste.

Once, when she was debating whether to spend her honeymoon in Paris or Rome, I simply asked, “Why Paris or Rome?”

She snapped: “Because they are the most romantic places in the world, obviously!”

I learned to keep my questions to myself.

I didn’t like football. But Josie was the cheer captain, which meant I had to go. I didn’t care for the players, or any boys who played team sports; my reaction to them was roughly the same as my reaction to large, untrained dogs.

Instead, I watched the cheer team. Today, they looked particularly uncanny. After a few minutes of study, I realized their makeup was drawn to exaggerate sharp features their round faces didn’t possess, while their uniforms exaggerated rounded curves their sharp frames didn’t possess.

I pulled out my notebook and scribbled: Tell Josie to tailor the makeup to her own features… without upsetting her.

The routines didn’t hold my interest either. The cheers seemed simple, the movements little more than glorified jumping jacks. My gaze drifted away from the squad and settled on the vibrant green of the field below. Having never seen grass this saturated or immaculate, I immediately thought: How did someone make this grass so beautiful?

I envisioned the groundskeeper out there at dawn. I imagined them seeding, watering, and trimming the grass with meticulous care. Moments like that brought me a very particular kind of joy. I loved seeing people care deeply about something. It was precisely the reason I tolerated my sister’s ceaseless monologues about her future husband.

Yet with Josie, I could never quite decipher why she wanted those things. It seemed as though she couldn’t feel fulfilled until the exact future she had prophesied unfolded before her. I admired her passion, but I couldn’t understand it. More than anything, I wanted to care about something with that kind of singular intensity. But I didn’t. Instead, I seemed to care about everything, which left me feeling like I cared about nothing at all.

I read a different book on a new subject almost every week, and Josie constantly mocked me for it.

“It’s like you assign yourself more homework than school does,” she’d tease. “You know a good husband will support you. You don’t need to learn like your life depends on it.”

But my life does depend on it, I thought.

I noticed that the ground fringing the field was nothing but barren dirt. Curious, I stepped down from the bleachers, walked out onto the sidelines, and immediately knelt on the green; my jeans already had permanent grass stains embedded in the knees anyway.

I reached out to pluck a single blade, but I couldn’t pull it free.

It wasn’t real.

For a brief moment, I was disappointed. Then I looked closer, brushed my fingers over the synthetic fibers, and smiled as a new question took hold:

How was this grass made?

I came to, choking.

My body oscillated between horrid gasps for air and hideous coughs tearing the saltwater from my lungs. In those first moments, pure bodily panic moved me. I wheezed desperately and wide-eyed. I slithered up the beach on my belly toward nowhere in particular but, hopefully, away from death.

After a few seconds, I halted and pushed up onto my hands and knees. My fists gripped the wet sand as if I was trying to hold onto the earth itself—convinced that if I grasped it hard enough, my soul might stay tethered to it.

I set my face, forcing my coughs louder and drawing breath in measured, controlled intervals. The blind terror began to subside as I coughed up the last drops of brine. Rolling onto my side, I propped myself on an elbow and looked back. Behind me lay a churned, iron-gray sea littered with shattered oak planks, and a rain-drenched shore strewn with small bodies.

My memory strained to surface, but nothing came. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know who those bodies belonged to. I only knew I was alive—and for the moment, that was enough.

Then one of the bodies stood up: a black silhouette against the leaden sky. It took two faltering, limping steps toward me, paused, and broke into an unnatural, jagged run.

Terror seized me. I fell back, drove my heels into the wet sand, and scrambled desperately away from death once more.

Icarus sat, leaning lazily against one of the cold chamber walls. Using a sharpened pig’s bone, he carved yet another line into one of its large limestone blocks. “Thirty,” he sighed under his breath.

Thirty days he’d been locked in that tower. Thirty days of starvation rations. Thirty days of unbathed stench. Thirty days of lying on a freezing stone floor. But worst of all for Icarus, thirty days of boredom—horrible, miserable boredom.

The top of the tower housed two chambers: an upper and a lower. Immediately after they were thrown in there by King Minos, Icarus’ father, Daedalus, conducted a quick inspection and claimed the upper chamber for himself—and only himself. Despite Icarus’ prying, his father never allowed him to even glimpse into the upper chamber, and the only time his father left it was when he scurried down the ladder to snatch his portion of the rations—which he did once at dawn and once at dusk.

Daedalus seemed so busy. Each day and each night, Icarus would hear a symphony of thumps, and bangs, and thuds. But he could not understand what his father was up to. After all, when they arrived, the tower was empty, save a handful of mounted torches—so what could he possibly be doing up there?

The hatch in the ceiling of the lower chamber opened. Startled, Icarus dropped the pig’s bone. It was midday; his father never came down midday. He saw Daedalus shuffle down the ladder while holding some bizarre contraption.

“Your wings, boy! Your wings! They are finished! Try them on, boy!” cried Daedalus.

“My wings?” Icarus asked, utterly confused.

“Yes!” Daedalus dashed over, spun Icarus around, and started strapping the contraption to his back. “Here, boy, put your arms through here… and your wrists through here… and let me fasten this around your chest… there you go!”

“Father, what is this?” Icarus still hadn’t gotten over the shock of seeing his father in the lower chamber.

“Up, my boy! Up, up, up!” Daedalus grabbed Icarus and lifted him hurriedly. “Now raise your arms, my boy!”

Icarus hesitated, then raised his arms. As he did, feathers spread in a brilliant succession, and he stood, staring at the floor, watching his silhouette grow a pair of large and glorious wings. He felt a wave of bewildered excitement come over him.

“Father… how did you… why did you—”

“I can’t talk now, son; I must get working on my own pair,” Daedalus said as he retreated up the ladder and into the upper chamber. “I will tell you what we will use them for later.”

The hatch slammed closed. Icarus stood there disoriented. Then he raised his arms again, looked at his wings, and smiled. At least I won’t be as bored, he thought.

Eston lived in a shotgun apartment above a small theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Despite being amid the beauty and bustle, the theater’s profits were dwindling by the time he moved in. As a consequence, they only put on the same handful of shows each week. Friday was Richard Strauss’s opera Salome. Eston never missed a Friday. The seats grew emptier as the year went on, as did the stage. In the last show he attended, five men played 14 different roles. Baritones were forced to sing tenor, sopranos were forced to sing bass, and basses were forced to sing everything. But he never heard the increasingly chaotic mixture of their voices. He only ever heard her—Salome.

Her voice was both seductive and saintly, like a siren call leading one away from danger. The other performers, in light of the theater’s size and vacancy, lowered their voices. She did not. She belted beautiful notes as if she were singing to an auditorium of thousands. Her sharp jaw pivoted up and down with exacting precision. The delicate muscles of her neck moved systematically to control her breath. Her bright cherry lips expanded and contracted into concentric red circles, making her voice resonate across the theater. Every movement and every note was a display of confident, calculated beauty.

Eston would sit in the orchestra left of center so he could see her fair white skin glow against the crimson curtains. When she approached the front of the stage, he envisioned Winged Victory, the sculpture of Nike stepping out to the bow of a ship. He envisioned her gorgeous face and slender arms completing that sculpture.

Eston did not covet her. He revered her. He never approached the singer or learned of her name. It would ruin the illusion, he thought. Instead, he placed her on a lofty pedestal in his mind, so lofty that even he could not reach it.

One afternoon, upon returning from the Caller, he looked up at the small theater’s marquee, and it read: BANKRUPTCY: EVERYTHING MUST GO. In one moment, he looked ready to cry; in the next, like he would kill the person responsible. But no one person was. Times and tastes had both changed, as they always had. A fact he came to despise. After his anger gave way to despair, his numb body shuffled reluctantly into the theater. He walked down the center aisle toward the stage, as one would walk toward an open casket at a funeral.

Every item in the theater was tagged with a bright yellow sticker displaying some absurdly low number, including the crimson curtains. As Eston limply handed his money to the theater attendant, he asked in a tone of fading hope, “Do you know what will be made of this place?”

“A record store… a pop-record store.”

Sacrilege, Eston thought, but he had no energy left for outrage.

Like a soldier carrying a fallen friend off the battlefield, he gathered the curtains, threw them over one shoulder, and trudged up the stairs to his apartment. When he reached the landing, he threw them down at his side, unhurriedly rummaged through his trousers for the keys, and opened the door. When he turned back, he saw his shadow cast over the pool of red curtains; he saw his silhouette, lifeless, bleeding out on the floor.

He gathered them again, dragged them into the living space, and with dead eyes surveyed his apartment for a place to hang them. To his right, a window framing a distant view of the Hollywood sign; to his left, a window looking right out at the humming of Hollywood Blvd. Having made his decision, he grabbed five nails and a hammer from beneath his kitchen sink. He hung the heavy curtains just below the ceiling, and they shrouded the entire wall. Then he drew them, closing his view of Hollywood Boulevard. He had kept them drawn ever since.

Eston strolled regally to the office building’s entrance, then begrudgingly opened the front door, as if irritated that it hadn’t opened on its own. Right by the door, in the lobby, he saw a simple metal stand brimming with freshly printed newspapers. He rolled his eyes dismissively after seeing they were from the Los Angeles Times, then began scanning one of the papers in search of the date. He already knew the date. He checked it twice that morning using his preferred newspaper, the Los Angeles Caller. Once, immediately after waking up, and once more after rereading “Crawling Into The Concrete Cavern,” his most recent addition to his column, Critique Esthétique. Out of fear of missing the reservation, he was compelled to check one last time, in case the date had changed on the 30-minute drive from his apartment. A sigh of relief crept from his mouth as his eyes settled, yet again, on August 17, 1962. But for some unknown reason, his anxiety returned when he caught a glimpse of one of the headlines that read: “Through your most grievous fault.” He could have sworn he had heard that phrase before, but there was something different in the wording that made him feel a bizarre sense of dread.

“Eston Thornwall?” An angelic voice seemed to sing from behind the front desk. The pit in his stomach went away as he gazed up at a beautiful young woman with a golden blonde bob. Her straight curtain bangs accentuated her round, youthful face, and her large eyes sat atop her rosy cheeks like two blue suns rising over two pink hills. But Eston was not taken by her beauty; he didn’t seem to prefer the company of women, nor men for that matter, and neither preferred his. What had taken him was hearing his name uttered with so much enthusiasm. In an instant, his dreadful expression had been replaced with the look of a curious child.

“Why, yes…” he began with surprise before standing upright and strutting toward the desk. He straightened his tailor-made suit, adjusted his cufflinks, and looked down at the secretary through the thick round rims of his glasses, which rested at the bottom of his long, sharp nose. With a face overflowing with fraudulent confidence, he asked rhetorically, “You recognize me?”

“No, sir,” said the secretary in a tone as benevolent as it was oblivious. “You are the only person picking up keys today. You are staying the night at the Drako House, correct?” she asked, smiling ear to ear.

His smirk melted back into his permanent scowl. “Oh… yes,” he grumbled.

The secretary’s genuine excitement kept her unaware of Eston’s unpleasant demeanor. “I just know you are going to love this house! I must admit, I’m jealous of you, being able to spend a night in Nora Drako’s newly finished house. You know only a handful of people will get to see it until she moves in herself and I’m sure you know how reclusive Ms. Drako is. Gee, I took this job just so I could meet her and I still haven’t been able to see her in person! Can you believe it? No press, no interviews, nothing, even though she is the greatest modern architect to-”

“The keys,” said Eston, sharply.

“Oh, yes. Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. I just really admire Ms. Dra—”

“A fraud,” Eston stated plainly.

“What?” asked the secretary, in genuine astonishment.

“Ms. Drako is nothing more than an abstract artist who dares to take up the third dimension with her monstrosities…”

The sentence felt like a slap in the face to the secretary, which is exactly what Eston intended.

“In an attempt to create something new in this world of half-baked copies, she has built homes shaped like copy machines; concrete boxes upon concrete boxes…”

As he went on, the secretary’s smile and Eston’s scowl slowly traded places.

“And now, in the humbly named ‘Drako House,’ she has built the greatest monstrosity yet — I’m sure of it.” Eston’s long-toothed grin slowly revealed itself as he reveled in the defeated look on the secretary’s face. These were the last lines of his most recent article. He recited them word for word.

The pink hills on the secretary’s face flattened and the once bright pair of blue suns now sat extinguished, as her eyes pooled with water. Paying no mind to the distress he had caused, Eston added, “But it will make for a good column, won’t it, darling?” He let out an aristocratic chuckle and reached out the pale open palm of his right hand. The secretary said nothing. All of the joy that animated her was gone. She grabbed the keys off the rack mechanically and her hand held them as if they were already infected by his touch. She dropped the keys into his palm as one would drop a used tissue into a trash can. His long bony fingers snatched them like a beartrap. “Thanks, darling,” he said victoriously while giving a shallow bow.

The secretary remained silent. The bells on the office door rang as Eston exited, giving a single tear permission to stream down her beautiful face.

While lying there, wide-eyed, in bed.

He hugs his teddy bear so hard that it looks wide-eyed, too.

“I close my eyes—they go away.”

A phrase that he is quick to say.

Despite the many times it’s said, he’s never thought it true.

​

He fears that under where he sleeps

Some amorphous goblin creeps

With fangs and teeth and claws and well… the rest he can’t explain.

His mom and dad have long since quit

Responding to his every fit,

So he is left to face alone the beasts made by his brain.

​

His fear will never let him rest.

His heart keeps pounding in his chest.

His onesie’s Batman symbol makes apparent every beat.

And though his gaze he could unsheathe

To take a moment’s look beneath

He lies eyes-clenched and murmurs petty words of self-deceit.

As I approach my 25th revolution around the sun, I have found myself in what’s been termed a “quarter-life crisis.” An admittedly silly phrase that gets at the real existential dread I seem to share with many other 20- and 30-somethings as our lives officially become our own. As we go from our family homes to places of our own, from higher education to the workforce, and from odds-and-ends jobs to careers, most of us find ourselves asking something like, “What is the purpose of life, and how can I find it?”

For me, this spiral began after my last internship ended. While I enjoyed the position, by the time it concluded, I didn’t see how that pursuit fit into the rest of my life and had even forgotten the reason I had taken the position in the first place. I caught myself in a state of “going through the motions,” and I panicked. My mind flooded with questions that were rapidly devolving: “Wait, why did I do this internship again? Shouldn’t I know what I want to do with my life already?! Is my life amounting to anything?!?”

Thankfully, I saved enough money to take a month off from hunting for jobs to hunt for answers to life’s deepest questions. And after a month of reading and researching philosophy, psychology, and self-help literature, I can tell you with full certainty: I don’t have the answers to those questions. But I do think I have better questions now. Especially after reading the work of psychologist Dr. Gena Gorlin, who coined the term “builder’s mindset,” wherein…

“You approach your life as the ultimate project you are in charge of shaping and overseeing (i.e., building), by your own efforts and according to your own chosen vision and values, with yourself as its ultimate owner and beneficiary.”

This mindset, which I have come to fully embrace, has altered the way I ask myself that age-old question that I mentioned at the start. Rather than asking, “How do I find the purpose of life?” I’ve started asking, “How do I build the purpose of my life?” This has allowed me to sidestep all of the antiquated “moral” teachings that have inundated my studies. As someone living through the most prosperous age in human history, built on the mutually beneficial interactions of billions of people across the world—I cannot bring myself to take seriously the preachings of “otherworldliness” and “self-sacrifice.”

So how do each of us answer the question, “How do I build the purpose of my life?” As Gorlin says, it is “by your own efforts and according to your own chosen vision and values.” But while “efforts” and “vision” seem straightforward, what are “values,” exactly? Religionists, economists, and business people all seem to use the word in different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, ways. The term “value,” as Gorlin uses it and as I will use it, is the intellectual contribution of the philosopher Ayn Rand. In her best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand defined a value as “that which one acts to gain and keep.” In other words, it is what you really want and what you really care for—not what you desire but don’t act on and not what you admire but fail to maintain.

A value is something you rationally act toward that is integral to you living as you.

We have all had this experience before: whether you were gazing at your partner, listening to your favorite song, or deep in focus on your work, you feel something akin to “this is a part of me.” Not “it’s great, but I could do without it,” but “if I didn’t have this, I wouldn’t be the same person anymore.” This is what it feels like to truly value something. To love something as if you have woven it into the very fabric of your being.

What things in your life make you feel this way? I have my list.

This substack, as an honest reflection of my thoughts and values, will look like the inside of my brain. And like the inside of my brain, it is bound to be all over the place—a smorgasbord of seemingly unrelated notes, essays, poems, and short stories about a wide range of different topics. But they will all be unified by one central purpose: to uncover what it looks like to love your life and to take seriously the task of living it to the fullest.

Let’s get valuing.