What to Do About Being Alive

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  • Why Modern Camouflage Sucks

    Why Modern Camouflage Sucks

    Military camouflage has the strange affliction of being utter dogshit at least half the time it’s implemented–even in our richest and most scientific military in human history. The last time the US military properly invaded a country, it was with uniforms that had the whole world asking: “What the fuck is that?”  

    (image source: https://www.milspecmonkey.com/articles-page/63-articles/52-ucp-sucks-universal-camo-pattern-rant)

    UCP, or the “Universal Camouflage Pattern,” was THE example of military ignorance. It was universally unsuited to all environments except a gravel pit. It’s too bright in woodland, too green in desert, and pixelated in a perfect, 2000s-era tack. All of the marketing from its universal coloration to its digital pattern, has since been admitted to be bullshit.

    But UCP’s physical problems pale in comparison to the ignorance that brought it about. There were decorated engineers in charge of military acquisition. Someone just deciding on a pattern, based on personal preference and futuristic woo-woo, was not supposed to happen–but it did… and it will again.

    After quietly dropping UCP, the Army rushed to pick up MultiCam–something closer resembling the U.S. Woodland pattern of the 80s. Going back in this case, was going forward. 

    (image source: https://www.pewpewtactical.com/best-camo-patterns/)

    Why? Well, for the principles of camouflage.

    The first recognizable feature of military camouflage is its pattern, specifically the Macro-Pattern: a word describing the largest portion of the pattern before it repeats.

    MultiCam uses the tried and tested squiggly shape pattern. The pixelated design of UCP was sold as a step into the future, but it turns out pixelization probably does nothing better than squiggly splotches. What really matters is the color and size of them.

    Up close, the pixels are clear and distinct, but far away they blur. (This is how the screen you are using works too.) “Cool future tech,” a fat general might think. But consider that the colors also blur together. Now the pattern isn’t individual colors but a throwup mix of all of them–or what’s called “Partitive Mixing.”

    Since the pixels are so small, someone wearing UCP at a distance of more than fifty meters is just going to look like the average of the colors used; in this case, pale gray.

    MultiCam fixes this problem by using a larger pattern and better colors. It still blends together at a distance, but that blended color is brown–which happens to be the color of the ground.

    Fans of MultiCam will be quick to point out that it boasts a bunch of other features: the splotches are more varied than older patterns; there are vertical “twiglet” splotches within the traditional horizontal ones; within the splotches are color gradients instead of solid colors. That all breaks up a user more than standard patterns–so they say.

    (image source: https://www.multicamvinyl.com/store/p/original)

    But what will that become when one backs up to fifty-meters?

    The same shit as always, one color.

    Now that’s not a problem as long as the environment you are in is also a single throwup color. But in most of the world–I would argue–that is unfortunately not the case.

    Look across the horizon anywhere in the world and what do you see? Maybe some green grass, some deader grass, a lot of dirt, maybe bushes, maybe trees. These features often span whole yards across. But a soldier is not multiple yards wide and one cannot fit this whole pattern onto one uniform. So what is to be done? 

    In modern doctrine, we vary the pattern in increasingly complex ways. Add highlights, shadows, gradients, more colors. When you put all these against the horizon, you can see the patches of dry grass, the dirt, the bushline. Job done right?

    Well no. This only works when we hold it up close to us. 

    Are we expecting enemies to be ten feet away from our soldiers, mistaking the green splotches on their jacket for a bush 200 yards away? The current focus of disruptive patterns seems to be camouflaging the soldier against what is far behind them–like Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel onto a boulder, expecting the Roadrunner to smash right into it. 

    Instead, camouflage should reflect what the user will be immediately ON, when they need it.

    But when, and on what, do they need it?

    When bullets fly, soldiers hit the -what-? Hit the bush? Hit the grass? Hit the leaves? 

    Dirt. Soldiers “hit the dirt.” They dig positions in the dirt. They fight from the dirt. And underneath everything everywhere is DIRT.

    There is no point in coloring yourself like a tree if you are going to lay in the dirt while the enemy shoots at you. A tree-colored target is easier to shoot against dirt than a dirt-colored target.

    Unless you’re in Scotland, you will be naturally camouflaged in vegetation if you are the color of the dirt underneath. Green does not need to be printed and mixed in, or matched to the average of every season. Get rid of it and save ink, time, and money. And if–for some reason–you really need to look like a bush, just cut down a bush and wear it.

    That’s the end of my rant on color, but now what pattern is best?

    Take a look at the patterns of the animals in these slides:

    How big are the macro-patterns? How often does their pattern repeat?

    That’s a trick question, because they don’t repeat. The macro-pattern stretches across the entire body. This is universal across the animal kingdom.

    A cheetah may have spots, but its whole back is one shade, and its stomach is another. That is the macro pattern, not the spots.

    Military camouflage, in contrast, can hardly go six inches without repeating.

    Our patterns must grow in size, because if the pattern doesn’t contrast at a distance, it doesn’t work at a distance. Our splotches must dramatically grow. This will push the usefulness of camouflage from spitting distance, to gun-fighting distance. This was tried in 1973 under the MASSTER trials, where they inflated the ERDL pattern up to 400%, to increase its effective distance. The 400% increase was not chosen, but the 60% increase was, and created the US Woodland pattern that we used for decades. I personally believe the 400% was not chosen for subjective reasons, the primary of which being that it looked weird up close. And if the camouflage didn’t work up close (in photos) then the American people (or top army brass) might not think it actually works.

    (image source: https://omegamilitaria.com/blogs/reference-guides/us-leaf-woodland-camouflage-patterns-1948-1981)


    To those who will argue that close-range effectiveness is paramount, consider that everyone whose job it is to get close enough to the enemy to piss on them, isn’t wearing a standard uniform in the first place. Testing uniforms at close range has been outdated since we put down bows and arrows. Standard uniforms are for evading binoculars, rifle sights, and aerial photography. 

    Furthermore, if the pattern sizes on infantry uniforms were optimal, then tanks could be camouflaged with the same patterns. Strangely, they aren’t. Tanks are camouflaged with tank-sized patterns. So why aren’t humans using human-sized patterns?

    The camouflage of the future does not need increased complexity, micropatterns, or fancy gradients. It needs to countershade. It needs to disrupt a human shape at three-hundred meters and up. 

    The camouflage of the future will first be big and simple, like Swedish M90K. It will have darkened and lightened panels to countershade against sunlight. Boots and pants will be lighter, helmets and shirts darker. Then humans may finally catch up to beasts.

    (capture source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JguoUr2LpMY
    editing by me)

    But it is unlikely our military will realize this. In our age of rapidly changing warfare, the simple science of individual camouflage will likely fall the wayside, where sort of always was. Though, if someone wanted to field the most effective uniform ever made, the door is sitting wide open.

  • Excerpt from Mission 1

    Excerpt from Mission 1

    Our line spaced out with me at the rear, behind Ale. At every intersection I looked both ways. The moon lit everything in blue-gray and I imagined how I’d look through the scope of an enemy sniper. Before each crossing, I slowed and spaced out to run through the intersections without hitting Alejandro’s back. We stopped at an ISIS berm stretching across the street–this one still intact. There was a footpath over it and along the left, that we trekked quiet and slow. Once over, a wide highway crossed in front of us. A tall building on our left was the last piece of cover. 

    Everyone sat, crouched, or otherwise made themselves small. Our faces were gray with moonlight but I could recognize my boys. They were all alert–a stark contrast to their usual laying around and bickering. In the silent city every noise was amplified. Dry dirt crunched under our steps, or even just shifting weight. The LED on top of Sason’s radio flashed for every transmission. The volume also felt too high. 

    I reckoned that if ISIS was nearby, they could hear and see us by now. I flipped up my night-sights but a comrade behind me wagged his finger and flipped them back. 

    “Not yet,” he told me, though I didn’t understand the words. 

    Sason stood at the corner with the thermal, scanning the highway and the open stretch of sand past it. I could see tall buildings again behind that, and a slope to go up before them.

    Sason commanded us up while leading from the front. We moved swiftly across the highway, but a low, stone wall–acting as a guardrail–bunched up our line. I broke formation for an empty patch of stone wall. There was the risk of it being mined, but I chose that over standing in the open and waiting to be shot. I spun on my ass over the smooth ledge and landed my boots in sand. My backpack and carrier jolted, but this was bearable. I put my back to the barrier, taller on this side, and pointed my rifle out while the rest of the boys crossed. Rusted hulls of cars littered the sandlot.

    I rejoined the line as we moved up the slope, which I could now see became a shear wall with a six-meter crater hollowing it. We hiked single-file along the right edge of the crater. Once over, I saw we were inside a curving wall of mudbrick, two or three meters thick. Only then did I realize this must have been the old city wall–the Rubicon. 

    Enemy contact became, suddenly, very concerning. I imagined ISIS in high positions around, devious and invisible. The world became only good places to step and bad places to step. Which was which I couldn’t tell, so I stepped only where those ahead of me did.

    We followed the road left–south–before turning right again–west. Shemas checked on me. 

    “Dijwar. Shlonak? Tû başî?”

    “Erê.” I kept my trigger-hand high on my grip, and my left hand poised for raising. I flicked down my safety quietly so that no overbearing comrade would hear, and tried carving a mark in my mind that I had done so. 

    An order to halt came down. An exchange went on in the gate to another compound–a small residence to our right. The exchange was quick and they called us in. Our line climbed over a bent door and a washing machine jamming a hallway. Safety back on. 

    We were led to a garden where there were men dressed like us, but with slight differences. Some had sandals instead of sneakers; some magazine racks weren’t standard; some had mismatched or different camouflage entirely. We rested under open sky as Sason worked the radio. He seemed frustrated, restless. From what I could gather, we were waiting for another group to get in position. In much of Rommel’s Infantry Attacks, he explains suffering the same thing. I remarked how easy it had been to come this far. Could it be just as easy to put ourselves behind enemy lines?

    We were called back up. I worried about snagging my bag on the ragged metal door, so I held my left arm over to keep it tight. It worked in protecting my bag, but a piece of twisted metal cut my knuckle on the way out. I felt blood running down my thumb. It didn’t hurt yet. Using my tongue, I found the cut just beneath where I chopped the fingers off my gloves. I felt like an idiot for that, but I had to wonder if my hands wouldn’t be pruning in sweat otherwise. 

    At the end of the block, we stopped at another compound on our left. This one was spacious and breezy, but I could see signs of intense fire. A room smoldered and radiated heat across the courtyard. I took the time to rinse and wrap my thumb. 

    I hadn’t gotten a tetanus shot before my journey, and couldn’t remember my last one. I considered if I might die sooner from a rusty door than from ISIS. Was the world that tragic?… Yes. 

    Before I finished mourning my death, Sason asked to see my medical tape. He was fiddling with the battery pack they had jury-rigged for the radio. I didn’t exactly want my medical tape being used for that, but I gave it up so that I wouldn’t appear stingy. I had seen the boys make the packs during the day. They took massive D batteries and linked them together like Legos with copious amounts of packing tape. Then with a couple wires, they connected them to the contacts on the bottom of the radio. Of course none of them had thought to bring a roll of that same cheap tape. And the only local boy with a bag was the bisfîngjî, and his was purpose-built to carry only rockets. Fortunately for me, Sason only needed to reconnect a wire.

    He then designated a scouting party of everyone but Ale, myself, and him. They soon left and we stayed with the garrison. I remember over the course of our conversation with these men, one of them said these two things: “I am QSD (Qe-Se-De),” and “Fuck you ISIS.”

    Shots could be heard intermittently along with the occasional boom, but seemingly no closer than what we had been hearing the whole night. West from our noqta was a six story building towering over the neighborhood, with a minaret just beside that.

    “Alî. Dijwar,” Sason called, “were-were.” We followed him out of the compound, past the minaret, and into the six story building. The first floor was in shambles. I could see from end to end due to it missing all of its walls on our side. At the center of the building was a stairwell that Sason went up. Of course, more stairs. My gear was still heavy, but I was strong enough not to slow down yet.

    …

    …

    …

    “Ohh shit…” I had forgotten. I pulled my phone from my pocket and hit record, aiming a small flashlight at him. “Ale.”

    “Yo?” 

    “How old are you today?”

    “Twenty-two now.” He looked over his shoulder at the camera, his face shining with sweat.

    “And where are you?” 

    “I’m in the middle of Raqqa.” 

    “And what are you doing?”

    “I’m drinking Pepsi!” He held up the can and we filled the stairwell with laughter. 

    Sason called me from the roof, imitating a camera. I got my NVGs and prepared to be useful. A PKM had been set up and they fired before I had the camera running. I was able to capture one shot, but out of focus. They didn’t risk firing much more. 

    Breaking the quiet, a singing voice played over a far off loudspeaker. I recognized the prayer, and knew it wasn’t our side. The voice stretched across the cubic gray landscape. Half a dozen more voices rose across the city. The eerie harmony coaxed bumps across my skin. I didn’t wish for it to stop. I hoped it would bring the enemy out.

    A sharp, air-cutting howl interrupted, followed by a thunderous explosion. To the north, the small light came under a barrage of mortars, raining down like fireworks in reverse. They punched bright explosions into the building. Maybe nine shells came down. This summoned a dust cloud many times larger than the building. I still hadn’t seen any enemy, but the area felt more like a frontline. 

    Sason spoke of an airstrike to come. I understood “airplane,” “bomb,” and “north.” Tayara. Bomba. Bakurê. There was a Mosque in that direction, just left of the dust. It looked to be the largest and most obvious target, but I wondered if it was a crime or not to bomb one. With my night vision and phone, I began recording.

    In the video, I pan to a heval on my right. He knocks a shoot-hole through the cinder-block wall. There’s a streaking noise and I swing back to the mosque just in time as an explosion as tall as the minaret splashes in a green flash through the goggles. 

    I never imagined seeing such a thing up close, let alone through night-vision. 

    “Ok, again,” said Sason. Tamam, dubarê.

    The mosque’s upper floor lit and stayed on fire. Surrounded by the all-consuming dark, it appeared closer, as if pulling in my vision. An airstrike within 400 meters, I thought. That’s a first. (I would realize later this was likely just artillery.) Soon, smaller explosions popped in the flames like little fireworks–until they grew to be not so little. I reflected on how religious materials do not cook off and explode. I wondered if that meant it was a well-researched strike, or just simple probability. 

    There was almost no return-fire. I remember one or two red tracers headed the wrong way, all too high to be effective. 

    When I returned from a piss downstairs, I found Ale and a young heval from another group watching the flames through a break in the wall. I sat next to them and cracked open a fresh Pepsi. The mosque was still a torch, and it lit our faces from all the way over. We reclined, but I didn’t dare hang my legs over. I wished Ale a happy birthday and we laughed again, but it was cut short by the roar of a jet. 

    “Tooom!” A bomb splashed even larger than before. The three of us could do nothing but wince as pressure, light, and heat washed over us. 

    “Oh fuck!” I tried to slide back. Ale tucked behind the wall as pieces returned to Earth. Our heval ducked over with his mouth still hung open. 

    “Oh-fuck,” he imitated, and laughed. 

    Dawn came quickly, and thankfully a cool breeze with it. We walked back through the rubble-filled streets. At the crater I pulled out my phone to take a selfie.

  • How I Write for 8 Hours

    I have severe ADHD, and a pool of willpower probably lower than anyone you associate with. Yet somehow, I’ve learned over the years how to sit down and do 8 hours of focused work. 

    Here’s how:

    Step 1. Block off the time.

    You need a free day. If you don’t have sufficient time, I can’t really help you. Cramming weekend errands between focused work is not going to happen. Or maybe you’re built different–then I have no clue why you’d click on this title.

    Step 2. Get out of the house. 

    Your house–and worse, your bedroom–are not good places to focus. The spot where you hang out, eat Cheetos, or jerk-off, is not where you’re going to suddenly break into long stints of focus.

    I’ve discovered a great secret called cafes. At a cafe, I don’t want other people seeing me veg-out watching YouTube videos. So, I don’t do it. I use my fear of judgment to keep my bad behavior in check. 

    When you find a good cafe (or library, or new-age third-space commune) stick to it. It is easier to find your rhythm when you are comfortable with the space, the people, or even which seat you like best. Most cafe’s close at 2pm, which sucks. I don’t go to those. My ideal cafe is open late, and isn’t a chain. Even if you have to pay 7$ for a drink, isn’t that worth an hour or two of working for yourself?

    Step 3. Address your physical discomforts. 

    If you have ADHD, or you’re just bored, a good trick to get your brain to stop complaining is to drink something sweet. I heard this once in a video of Dr. Russel Barkley. He warns against anything too sweet, like soda. The mocha lattes I get are probably also too sweet, but they work.

    Next is auditory comfort–music. I use wired headphones playing something strong but not too lyrical. Shoegaze, house, grunge, drum and bass. I have multiple playlists for when one gets dull, and pay the ten dollars a month to not have ads. 

    That with caffeine activates a Pavlovian response. Whatever is in front of me then is getting focused on. 

    After 20 minutes, you’re gonna run out of coffee to sip on, and your brain is going to start bitching again. Here’s a little tip: hit it with soda water. It’s often free at cafes, and it stimulates the senses enough to keep your brain quiet–and doesn’t add to your sugar or caffeine intake. Also, try gum. Buy big packs from the grocery store so you don’t go broke. (Or get unflavored Greek or Turkish gum online. It doesn’t taste like anything but it also doesn’t start tasting worse, or give you the alcohol-sugar farts.) 

    If you need lunch, get one. A silver lining to cafes is that they are usually too expensive to pig out and get lethargic. 

    Step 4. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. 

    With these guidelines, you’re going to see a measurable difference in your studying, or writing, or whatever you’re doing. But it’s not magic. You’re not going to hit 8 hours your first try. 

    When I started my book, I could hardly get myself to work for one straight hour–despite it being non-fiction and me knowing exactly what happened next. But after a year of finding out these habits, I could lose the entire day to it. I went from struggling to put 2000 words down a day, to hitting 9000 with ease. Like in long-distance running, your twelfth session is pleasant compared to your second or third. 

    Inevitably you will have to modify these methods. Maybe you hate cafes, or soda water, or you have no social anxiety and are happy to watch Netflix in public. What’s important is that you find out how to game your brain, which requires data. You need to know where you’re starting. Measure your time and output, then try another method and see if it’s better. When you have an exceptional day, think about why it was exceptional, and if you can recreate the same environment next time. 

    Step 5. Repeat step 4. 


    When you break your habits or lose progress, the only fix is repetition. A muscle that was once large and powerful, but has atrophied, is easier to make big again than one that has never been big. Habits work similarly.

    Beating yourself up will not get you where you want. Forgive yourself but keep sight of your long-term goals.

  • So You Want to See Combat?

    So You Want to See Combat?

    “War may be the only way in which most men touch the mythic domains in our soul. It is, for men, at some terrible level, the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death. It is like lifting off the corner of the universe and looking at what’s underneath.”

    -William D. Broyles, Jr. (1988). Why Men Love War. Esquire.

    Droves of our young men (and women) are curious about war. They watch Russians and Ukrainians kill each other on YouTube™, or Kurds and Turks on Gerilla TV, or worse on anonymous dump sites and messaging apps. For many of these voyeurs, maybe the largest portion, these videos are a stand-in for their real desire: to see combat for real. But our youth have all been taught that war is destructive, evil, a relic of our savage past. Their desire to go to war is the compulsion of a twisted mind, so they’re told.

    I was one of those boys. I wanted to know that hidden part of the world. That part of myself. The boys and girls I fought alongside all wished for tremendous combat–to witness it, to put our bodies in it.

    When the jets screeched, or a bullet-crack rang my ear, it was more than exhilarating; it was what I had been waiting for. We ran to it, set alarms, became more diligent than we were in our old lives, just to partake in as much as possible. We all had our surface reasons: political ideology, heroism, revenge. But behind all that, what we wanted was an answer to a question: 

    What is war?

    War is the sole manifestation of truth. It is reality–unadulterated, purified, and intravenously injected. It’s where all the could’ve-would’ve-should’ve turns into did or did-not. It’s THE canon. The ultimate non-fiction. It is the die roll of fate, coming to a distinct and undeniable stop. 

    What you believe war is, is some second, separate thing. You can read, watch, and talk all about it–but you will only have that second thing.

    There is wisdom gained only through war. You will see the real world there, and see men as they really are, and meet your real self. And I can tell you what I’ve seen, but that’s not the same as seeing it. Someone could tell me what heroin feels like–but that’s not feeling it. 

    Many think war is a test–a Darwinian measure of aptitude–while another half think that war is fruitless, meaningless. I’ll address the latter first.

    The self-righteous believe war is all bad. They believe they know war by their looking at footage, or reading, or hearing the stories, or their tour in the sandbox driving roads with bombs on them. “War. Huh! What is it good for?” But central to this view is the belief that our species is not naturally warlike but is naturally civilized. This is incorrect.

    Without straying too far from my own purview, the simple truth is that we humans have been brutally killing each other for much longer than we have not. Our prehistoric human ancestors practiced war. Our primate ancestors before them practiced war. Our current primate relatives practice terrible, savage war.

    For every human that existed before civilization, life was war. Our species was born into war because nature is war. 

    Before industrialization, the child mortality rate was fifty percent. Half of all children born would die, either at birth, or in early childhood. Those that did survive contended with predators, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, famine, fire and frost. When we built walls against those, the problems didn’t stop but worsened: plague, populism, human sacrifice, witch trials, assassination, conquest, insurrection, sectarianism, holocausts. 

    We humans built civilization very recently in our total history, and it has not spared us from war but refined it, industrialized and digitized it.

    Hatred of war is an equal–if not worse–naivety than optimism. It is an ignorance toward nature and a refusal to look at one’s own animalness. It is a quiet surrender to those that still torture, chop off heads, or blow themselves up for their goat-herder religions. The question “what should we do about being alive?” will be argued for in blood by those who are most concerned about it. Refusing to answer in blood reassures the head-chopper that you cannot handle the decision making process. To them, speaking and killing are a single form of communicating differing only in severity. To a degree, they are correct. (How does a lion argue? A dog? How would primates argue before we had words? Physical communication is communication.)

    The optimist, on the other hand, thinks of war as a test; a measure of their skill and competence–their specialness. That is only half true, and of the part that is half true, the optimist doesn’t understand. 

    See, war doesn’t measure how fast you run, or how well you shoot, or how good-hearted you are. It tests how long you can sit in the dirt like an insect, watching for hours with nothing to occupy your mind but the slim chance that an enemy may suddenly emerge and–for a split second–be killable. It tests how well you can ignore your evolved sense of danger; to fight equally whether behind the next corner is only one enemy or fifty. 

    It tests your manners: how well you can live in a group so intimate as to shit shoulder-to-shoulder. There are no hot-shot, Tom Cruise characters in war–just assholes whose comrades want to smoke them more than the enemy does. No matter how physically capable you are, you can’t be rude and a good soldier.

    The other half of war is watching good people, people better than yourself, get obliterated for no good reason.

    I saw war was a fickle bitch, killing without regard to virtue, justice, or beauty. It is the cruel darkness of nature. Back home you can look away–look away from the slightly-rotting human animals lining our streets. In war there’s nothing else to look at, and you wouldn’t want to.

    “Part of the love of war stems from its being an experience of great intensity; its lure is the fundamental human passion to witness, to see things–what the Bible calls the lust of the eye and the Marines in Vietnam called eye fucking.”

    -William D. Broyles, Jr.

    I saw that combat was a sport–a game that usually rewarded the better team.

    In combat you see the animalness of men–their brains damaged, pieces missing. In those animals you will see yourself. You will see nothing and everything; the black streak of missiles you didn’t think you could spot with your eye; supersonic detonation–an instantaneous expansion of matter that your animal brain wasn’t evolved to comprehend–the demon that took Nobel’s brother but made him as rich as a king.

    What you thought war was will smash against what war is. You will see your ignorance laid out–possibly at the expense of your life or the lives of those next to you. 

    The hopeful soldier is looking for proof of their worthiness, the same way he looks for validation from young women. It’s naive, but still a noble desire. You might just find what you are looking for. People may need you. You could join an exceptional group and find belonging that the modern world cannot give you. 

    But when the war is over, or you decide to leave before you die, what can you take back with you to civilization?

    Nothing. No belonging. No group. No standing. All the signs in the world will once again read: you’re dog-shit. “Thank you for your service,” is a sick joke and even more so if the person means it. I didn’t go to war to save others, I went to war to save myself from others. Being out of war is like losing a great love.

    Life in war is meaning, purpose and belonging. You see it every single day in the love and admiration of those around you–whom you also love and admire. I have met great soldiers and wonderful people who come back home, after years of surviving just fine in combat, to immediately kill themselves.

    What the war-seeker truly desires is meaning. They are starving for it. But war is transient relief–sugar to your hunger. So unless you want to die early, you must find meaning in life and not war.

    But meaning is not the standard course of modern life. It is absent from our social model. Civilization has expunged war and survival from our lives, and threw out with them meaning and belonging. This is why you feel the hunger. Why do you think our most popular books and movies are all about catastrophe, or apocalypse–the current hegemony conveniently burning to the ground?

    There are good people all over the world unfairly afflicted by war. There are still good causes to join. But if you do go to war and survive, when the rifles are put down and you’ve carried your friends to the grave, you will return to a more terrible battleground: our meaningless civilization.

    And who will be left to fight that battle? Politicians? Cops? Your parents? The work-from-home, vote-by-mail, DoorDash™ revolutionaries?

    Who’s going to fight the war of our wasted civilization? And who could be more motivated for the job than you?