At 7:42 a.m. the city is already negotiating with itself.
A man in a suit sips espresso like it’s a contract. A woman in gym clothes scrolls her feed with the solemnity of prayer. A delivery rider glides past the glass doors, face calm, eyes tired, carrying someone else’s breakfast like a minor offering to a major god.
Inside the subway, the advertisements are all variations of one promise: become the person you deserve to be. They sell skin, status, serenity, dominance, charisma—always charisma. Nobody sells character. Nobody sells shame. Those don’t convert.
I watch a teenager rehearse a smile in the dark window. Not vanity—strategy. A smile, today, is a credential. It says: I am safe to hire. I am safe to date. I am safe to follow. It doesn’t say: I am true. Truth is not a product; truth is a cost.
And the cost is rising.
We live in a time when everyone is trained to be visible but few are trained to be present. The world has turned attention into currency, and most people—without noticing—have become spendthrifts with their own minds. That’s why outrage feels so common. Outrage is cheap focus. It narrows the world, gives you a target, and hands you the warm illusion of clarity.
You can almost see the mechanism: the emotion arrives first, fast and crude, and only later the brain writes the press release to justify it. The body gets hijacked, the story arrives after. It looks like conviction, but often it’s just chemistry wearing a tie.
At the next stop, a manager types on two phones at once. He is sending “quick thoughts” to his team and “quick love” to someone he calls babe. He will later tell himself he is efficient. But what he really is, is fragmented. There’s a difference. Efficiency is the mastery of means. Fragmentation is the loss of ends.
He reminds me of something old that never stops being new: power is rarely held by the strongest person in the room. Power is held by the person most capable of managing appearances without being captured by them. The person who can look calm while calculating. The person who can promise without sounding like a promise is being made.
We tend to moralize that. We call it cynicism. But it’s more primitive than that. It’s survival in a crowded arena.
Machiavelli understood the arena with brutal precision: people don’t judge you by your inner life; they judge you by what they think you will do to them. They forgive many things if their fear is stable and their hope is fed. And if you want to remain standing, you must avoid the one outcome that turns a crowd into a jury: being hated. Not disliked—hated. Dislike is opinion. Hate is mobilization.
This is why our public life is full of performers who are not exactly loved but are carefully not hated—at least not by the right people. Their statements are shaped like umbrellas. Their ethics are designed like insurance.
And then we pretend we don’t know what’s happening.
We say, “How did we get here?” as if we woke up in this era by accident. But we made it, day by day, with small decisions that felt harmless. We rewarded the loud. We punished the nuanced. We treated humiliation as entertainment. We confused sincerity with oversharing, and integrity with branding.
The train jolts. A man’s briefcase bumps my knee. He doesn’t apologize, but he smiles. The smile is perfect. It carries no warmth. It is diplomacy, not kindness.
And this is where the problem deepens: diplomacy can be a virtue, but it can also be a way of never telling the truth—not even to yourself.
Dostoevsky would recognize this city instantly. He would walk these streets and notice what we try not to notice: the way people create philosophies to cover their cravings. The way they turn a hunger into an ideology, so they can call it principle. The way guilt doesn’t disappear; it simply changes costumes.
Some people carry guilt like a stone. Others carry it like perfume.
The stone makes you heavy but honest. The perfume makes you tolerable but dangerous.
Because when guilt is perfumed, it stops guiding. It starts seducing. You can do almost anything if you can convince yourself it is for the greater good or, in modern terms, for my mental health.
I’ve met people who weaponize therapy language the way earlier generations weaponized scripture. They can explain their cruelty in fluent self-care. They can dodge responsibility with the elegance of a trained dancer. “I’m protecting my energy,” they say, after lying. “I’m setting boundaries,” they say, after abandoning someone. Sometimes they are. Often they’re not. Often it’s just a new grammar for the oldest selfishness.
Real emotional intelligence isnt the ability to name emotions. That’s vocabulary. Real emotional intelligence is the ability to not be governed by every emotion you can name. It’s the ability to pause before the reaction becomes a destiny.
But pausing is expensive now. The world punishes the pause. The pause doesn’t go viral. The pause doesn’t win elections. The pause doesn’t fit in a fifteen-second clip.
So most people don’t pause. They react. They perform. They join the nearest tribe and borrow its certainty like a rented suit.
And that’s how the city stays loud, even when it’s empty inside.
Across from me, two young men talk about success. They speak in numbers. Followers. Revenue. Reach. They speak as if the world is a scoreboard and they are tired of losing.
One of them says, “I’m thinking bigger now. I’m done with small stuff.”
He says it like a vow, but I can tell—because this is what the city teaches you to see—that he still feeds daily on tiny victories: cheap likes, petty rivalries, quick dopamine, miniature enemies.
And I want to lean in and tell him a sentence that is both cruel and compassionate, the way truth often is:
A cat that dreams of becoming a lion must lose its appetite for rats.
Not because rats are evil. Because rats are distracting. Because you can spend your life hunting what is easy and still call yourself ambitious. Because the appetite for small triumphs is the strongest chain on the ankles of anyone who claims to want something great.
That phrase isn’t only advice for ambition. It’s a rule for writing, too. If you want to write something that cuts, you can’t snack on easy targets. You can’t farm applause from obvious villains and predictable jokes. You have to go after the deeper prey: the polite lies everyone participates in.
Here’s one of them: we pretend our society is driven by ideas.
It isn’t. It’s driven by incentives.
Ideas are often just the clothing incentives wear when they enter polite conversation.
That’s why you can’t fix public life only with better arguments. The crowd doesn’t run on arguments; it runs on emotion, identity, and fear of losing status. It runs on belonging. It runs on the quiet terror of being irrelevant.
And when that terror rises, people will hire mercenaries—intellectual mercenaries, moral mercenaries, media mercenaries—to fight their battles for them. Mercenaries are useful, until they aren’t. They don’t love your cause. They love the paycheck, the attention, the access. The moment the wind turns, they turn faster.
Our era is mercenary-rich.
Even intimacy has become a battlefield where people outsource courage. They send texts instead of speaking. They ghost instead of concluding. They “keep options open” as if love were a portfolio. They want the benefits of loyalty without the vulnerability of commitment.
In this climate, the pure-hearted person becomes a spectacle. The honest person becomes suspicious. The decent person is treated like someone selling something.
But here’s the part that matters—and it’s the part almost nobody says out loud:
Despite all this, the human soul still hates being lied to.
Not in theory. In the body. In the bones.
You can build a life on posturing. You can win rooms. You can gather followers. You can collect money. But if you cannot live with yourself when the lights go out—if, in that private hour, you need noise to avoid your own mind, then you are not powerful. You are merely busy.
And the city is full of busy people mistaking motion for meaning.
I get off at my stop. The morning has fully arrived, bright and indifferent. On the sidewalk, a politician’s face smiles from a billboard, promising “change.” A luxury brand promises “freedom.” A bank promises “trust.” Everybody is selling the same invisible thing: relief from the fear of being nothing.
I walk past them and think: the world doesn’t need more slogans. It needs more adults.
Adults, not in age, but in capacity. The capacity to hold discomfort without outsourcing it as cruelty. The capacity to be strategic without becoming hollow. The capacity to see the game without being owned by the game.
That kind of person is rare. Not because it’s complicated. Because it’s costly.
It costs you the rats.
It costs you the small appetites that keep you entertained while you avoid your own standards.
And that’s the hard truth beneath all the noise: most people aren’t failing because they lack talent. They’re failing because they keep negotiating with their lowest cravings, then calling that negotiation “realism.”
Realism isn’t cynicism. Realism is seeing the world clearly and still choosing a disciplined soul.
The city will not reward that quickly. Sometimes it won’t reward it at all.
But it will do something better.
It will stop making you cheap.
