“Moral relativism can easily be a trick of an egotistical mind to silence the voice of conscience” –Theodore Dalrymple
Self-disclosure: I was depressed recently. Like, big time. An arresting ghoul that one has turned out a failure in life, by way of an extreme self-consciousness to live virtuously.
Sure, I looked successful on the outside: By 25, I had a masters degree, a full-time job doing fun work for big-name clients, and I took pride in my health and the rich inner life I’d carved for myself — but I felt like a walking contradiction because I had failed to make many friends or establish a sense of community outside of my work life, which I had clung to in my collegiate pursuit of success.
It was the approach of the Midwest-monk: Work, study, and take care of yourself. Not out of any dislike for college culture or greek life, but our of sheer disposition. Over time, in learning about and explaining the world in this way, I found myself without a strong group of friends, or really any sense that I could relate to anyone besides people online or on podcasts who I had never actually spoken with.
During this time, if I were to divulge these truths about myself through writing, it would seem clear to all those reading my story that I lacked some serious foundational progress in my moral character — that if I really cared about the issues I claimed to earlier in my career, I was a ticking time bomb: a dissociate too tortured by his own internal conflicts, endlessly questing to solve the paradoxes of modern life, too lost in thought to own up to the false reality he deluded himself into believing so long ago. Realizing you might exist in such a state is terrifying. It makes one incredibly vulnerable, and the impulse is to hide from fear. But then again some will tell you it’s all about faking it until you make it.
The following year, I too tried faking it until I made it — and the result was that my outer life caught up with my inner disorientation. My internal fragility gave way to the fervor of technological progress: I quit my job to embark on a startup idea on the other side of the country, gave away many of my material possessions, effectively exiled myself from a burgeoning group of friends, and found myself way over my head in something that would appear, to any rational outside observer, like a quarter-life crisis.
Crazy what a difference a year makes: By 26, I had pulled my savings to pay the bills after a failed startup left me unemployed in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. I tried and failed at embarking on two different career pivots. I had been laid off from my personal training job in Chicago, living at home with my parents in the age of COVID, lacking any real plan for how to advance in life save an ambition to become a real developer. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, because without my professional identity, I didn’t know who I was.
For a few months, I marinated in this failure, which seemed to align nicely with the extreme failure of our civil society in summer 2020 (George Floyd protests, etc.). I didn’t workout. I didn’t plan for anything, really. It was all-too-tempting to feel like giving up in the worst way possible — but of course I could not because despite all this, I had still succeeded in some major ways. I succeeded in learning some deep and profound truths about myself and what I believe, the ancient wisdom I’d needed all long: I needed leadership, but the leader I really needed was inside myself.
Corny but true. This leader was the voice inside me — the voice that I didn’t trust when making decisions, because it seemed too simplistic. Too easy. Too honest. I had mistaken moral relativism for inner fortitude, and I unwittingly applied this contrarian energy toward silencing my own conscious. My conscious had so much to say, but I long-denied it the tools because I lacked reverence for the written word.
It was at this point that I remembered my impetus for enrolling in journalism school in the first place was to write, that our collective failure to write may be a reflection of the decay of modern communication, a determining factor in the paucity of our leaders.
I had arrived at a new mission: Building a leadership culture from within, listening to my conscious to pursue gnosis and arete, and using writing as a tool to teach and learn with honesty, to communicate with reverence.