The Endless Story

Snowy Ambush, John Philip Falter (1959)

I don't like abrupt and haphazard endings. By "ending," I mean the conclusion of anything artistic, literary or even geopolitically in current global perspectives. If real life rarely offers absolute resolutions, why do writers, philosophers, and artists force artificial resolutions on their works, which sometimes makes their works look dishonest? Why must they pick an arbitrary boundary or a point where they announce, “This thing is finished”? Isn't an open ending - most of the times - also an ending? It’s incomplete but still an ending, just like many things in life. 

Oscar Wilde described the psychological wear and tear of realizing that his written work has hit its limit, saying: "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back again."

Paul Cezanne believed that a painting was not complete just because the canvas was fully painted. To him, a painting was truly finished when the spatial relationship between the color panes was in perfect unison. In his late works, he famously used to intentionally leave patches of canvas unpainted. According to him, merely completing the canvas by covering those empty spaces would disrupt the visual flow and balance of the piece.

Despite working on the Mona Lisa for sixteen years and continuously tweaking it, Leonardo da Vinci couldn’t finish it until his death. Similarly, Karl Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital was almost entirely unfinished at the time of his death, leaving Friedrich Engels to work on the final volumes based on fragmented notes left by Marx.

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Jasmyn Arnold, I Just Wanna be Me (2023) 

If every narrative is spun from the threads of time, then isn’t each day we live also an unspoken act of authorship? Waking up is like starting a blank page, while sleeping brings that chaos to an end. The paragraphs and chapters in between are filled with our choices, actions, regrets and resolutions.

  

When my daughter was four and a half, or maybe five, I made up a story about a young frog named Emily and her little brother, Owen. I would tell it to her in chapters whenever she demanded, "Tonight, story time with Daddy." The story, which was supposed to end in fifteen minutes at her bedtime on a fall evening two years ago, dragged on as we added her friends as characters. 

Some characters came from daycare, some from preschool, and some from kindergarten. We also made up some funny new names and added a variety of pets to play parts. Despite the number of characters now approaching a few dozen, I sometimes feel like I never want this story to end. I cannot even remember their names or which pets belonged to which kids.

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Summer 2026

There’s nothing special about turning seven. It’s not a milestone or anything particularly symbolic. I mean most people would say that turning one, five, ten, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty, and every decade you stack afterwards serves as a milestone in their lives. There is nothing special about turning seven, yet there is everything special about it for a parent. 

A self-proclaimed - and perceived - early success as a dad to me came in helping her maintain a healthy distance from being a kid raised by Barbie and video games and instead encouraging her to indulge with me in things, hobbies and activities that are “more fun” and have real-life functionalities. And the accolades I received in return, aside from cuddles, kisses, and giggles, were often her saying, “Daddy, you’re so much fun! Most dads are boring; they just work and don’t do anything fun or take their kids outside. But we do so many fun things.” 

A year close to the end of her formative years, the leap to seven from four or even five appeared to be immense. A denser emotional landscape soaked with care and affection - whether whether for the dogs, other animals, wildlife, nature, her friends and parents - and an understanding of her own feelings and how to try to regulate them became hallmarks of the age. 

***

It’s been weeks, and this wiggly tooth seems to have become a slow-motion comedy and at the same time a deep philosophical crisis for her. Almost every other day, she comes to me saying, while dangling that tooth all the way down and then up with her tongue, “Daddy, see this? I think it might fall off today.” She has been saying this for two weeks, and the tooth is still there, almost about to fall today just like every other day over the past two weeks. One of her close friends and classmates, S*, even said to her, “M*, you should just pull it out.” She herself has lost six teeth by now, giving my girl all the reasons to feel competitive. Probably it’s the only time in our life we are so excited and desperately eager to see a skeleton or bone, or whatever they’re, fall off our body.

Spring 2026

Aside from the two real dogs, at home she has her own army of loyal, silent, soft friends: stuffed toy animals. Tiger, cheetah, snow leopard, sloth, giraffe, kangaroo, bunny, dog, cat, and, of course, unicorns - a major American cultural phenomenon. They are so many that it’s not possible to name them all, but some of her favorite ones have name given. There is one - a chosen one every other week - that she sleeps with every night and the rest guards her all night, just like Royal, our actual dog, a German Shepherd, who’d sleep all night down the stairs, close to her room, keeping vigil all night, but mostly desperately waiting for me to wake up.

Over the years, alliances and friends have come and gone from her life. Sometimes they bonded quickly with the speed of a lightening strike, exactly like how we adults do at times, sometimes the friendships lasted as long as the situation allowed it to flourish, with some lasting the duration of a school year and others lasting a few hours from the start to the end of her birthday parties.

Friendships during formative years are not like geopolitical alliances that have to be formed through mutual respect, shared values, open dialogues, and long-term stability.

With this cycle of friendships beginning and ending via spells of rejection, acceptance, and situational changes providing a real-life encounter with the the volatility and transience of human relationships, this whole saga of connections and disconnections at the end of formative years seems like an important rehearsal for adult life. It’s not until when we are fully grown up mentally we understand that every breakup and heartbreak is not the end of the world.

***

We sometimes happen to walk by the moments in life that tell us that the past often remains indelibly etched. Sometimes they hide and wait, their wings curled up. The older we get, the bigger the volume of those moments we have in our lives.

What were events of the past, memories cherished long ago, became a thing of the present this summer when she went to summer camp at the same daycare she attended as an infant. Most of the staff were the same, the inside of the building had the same smell, the same sort of dim lightings (to help younger kids take naps), the same narrow corridors, and the same playground in the backyard where she played every day for a few years and had her early socialization. 

One afternoon when I went to pick her up from the summer camp, her teacher, Miss K*, the same teacher who had looked after her when she was one, said to me how big she had become. She said how it feels like just a few years ago when she was a tiny baby, and that now she tells her stories from her life - about doing workouts with daddy and that she could do single-hand pushups, going for early morning walks and that once she walked nine miles in a week, going to trails and forests where she saw snakes twice.

***

Spring 2026

As Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In so many ways, we are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Ending a story, a piece of art, a scientific discovery, or a philosophical idea indicates a totality and fullness that often doesn’t exist in life. In this way, a single ending is only possible by forcing the creator to pick a single truth and disregard infinite other possibilities. However, in the end, that ending is the optic through which the entire journey is judged.

Nothing would really matter if things lasted forever. According to the second law of thermodynamics, it’s natural for things to transition from a stable equilibrium to a state of chaos. When we drop a glass cup, it shatters and never puts itself back together again.

Being human necessitates that we think in narratives. We are bound to look for a structure of a conclusion and completeness in order to make sense of things. Without the boundary of an ending, how can we appreciate the present or recognize our own growth?

Sartre’s Seductive Trap

The Lovers (1928), Rene Magritte 

Sartre, talking about his writing style, once said: “Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.” 

Sartre’s writing, just like what he said about his style, offers readers an arduous, philosophical obstacle course. Just when you think you’ve understood a concept, he flips the script and leaves you staring at the page. In the process, he gently chokes you emotionally. His sentences, like the thought processes of his characters, twist and turn like a Parisian alley at night: dark, eerie, confusing and smelling like Gauloises.


***

Insomnia (2026), Jing Zhiyong

Nausea, my most favorite work of Sartre, plunges readers into Antoine Roquentin’s stifling realization that existence does not have intrinsic meaning. Sartre’s striking prose captures the misery and liberation of this revelation as Roquentin confronts with the emptiness of people, objects, and his own life. “Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize this, your heart turns over and everything begins to float….” Roquentin’s growing disgust, or nausea, stems from this realization that existence precedes essence, and that there is nothing that justifies the world’s presence. The novel provides readers with an experience of existential dread, leaving them unsettled yet moved by its unsparing honesty.

Another favorite of mine, The Wall, set during the Spanish Civil War, is a psychological exploration of existentialism. It follows Pablo Ibbieta, a revolutionary captured during the war and sentenced to death. Spending his last night in a prison cell before the impending execution and going through an introspective struggle, Pablo’s first-person narrative allows Sartre to reveal the two main themes of the story: the indifference of the universe and the meaninglessness of existence.

Before moving on to the main theme of this post, I’ll quickly sum up my third favorite, No Exit, which is notably set in hell, in a locked and windowless room with three people in it. The three characters - a journalist executed for treason, a wealthy woman who killed her illegitimate child, and a postal clerk who forced her lover to commit suicide - are condemned to torment each other forever. The play’s most famous line, "Hell is other people," highlights that the suffering of the three characters comes not from physical torture, but from the unavoidable gaze and judgment of each another.


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The Scream (1893), Edvard Munch

Intensive and exhausting - and infuriating at times, reading Sartre’s magnum opus Being and Nothingness (1943), a 700-page essay on phenomenological ontology, is less about understanding and more about surviving. You’ll flip to a random page and read sentences such as, “Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being, and for which there is no being except through the consciousness of being” and “Nothingness is not the mere absence of being; it is the negation of being, and as such, it is supported by being and can only be conceived in relation to being.” These sentences force the readers to stretch their brain in ways it’s not used to.

Why he writes like this is because it’s his rhetorical and philosophical strategy. Existentialism is messy, and the phenomenological precision he intends to achieve cannot be done in simpler words. Existentialism is more about the search rather than finding answers. Also, he doesn't do hand-holding, assuming his readers are willing to go the extra mile to do the work and accept that the complexity and confusions surrounding his sentences are an absolute necessity.


*** 

Some Day My Prince Will Come (1996), Andrew Valko 

"Bad Faith" (Mauvaise Foi) is one of Sartre’s most famous ideas from Being and Nothingness. Bad faith is a type of self-deception where people avoid the pain of freedom and responsibility. To elaborate it, Sartre breaks existence into two parts: Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself. The first is the mode of lifeless and motionless objects without consciousness. A furniture or statue simply is what it is and has no potential to be otherwise. Meanwhile, Being-for-itself symbolises human consciousness, defined by freedom and nothingness. A person exists as possibilities and choices. He is radically free but condemned to this freedom.

According to Sartre, human reality is a constant battle between the situation we have been given, such as body, social roles, past, circumstances, and our ability to surpass that situation by making choices. Bad faith primarily occurs in two ways. First, we act like a fixed object, treating ourselves as if we are our assigned role. Second, we ignore our reality to avoid responsibilities.

Sartre provides three examples of bad faith, in which characters refuse their freedom by either holding onto fixed roles or avoiding responsibility: the café waiter over-identifying with his role and reducing himself to a fixed object; the young woman on a date who oscillates between seeing herself as a free person and seeing herself as an object of desire; and the homosexual who acknowledges same-sex desires but avoids the uneasiness of defining himself.


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Kleo

To further explain and simplify Sartre’s bad faith in modern cultural contexts, I also offer five examples of bad faith, all from contemporary television.

There is a certain bad faith on display in the Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul TV series, embodied by Walter White, Mike Ehrmantraut and Jimmy McGill in their refusal to be answerable for their actions. Jimmy uses his “Saul Goodman” persona and points the finger at others for his lies and manipulations rather than admit he has made a choice to be morally compromised. Mike holds fast to an image of himself as a disciplined and moral man, but he will not concede that he is accountable, preferring to see the violence and criminality as simply part of the job. And Walter is always at pains to make it clear to everyone, including himself, that this life of crime is for his family’s sake, a convenient way to sidestep the fact that he chooses power, pride, and ambition.

In Babylon Berlin, Gereon Rath is shown as a passive victim of the corrupt system around him. He uses alcohol to numb his sense of involvement and pretends helplessness to avoid confronting his role, effectively denying his own agency.

In Kleo, Kleo Strauss, the female protagonist of another German TV show, attaches herself to the identity of a victim of the Stasi. She resorts to her trauma as an excuse for her vengeful actions and rejecting her freedom to respond differently.

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With institutions and individuals alike abdicating their freedom and responsibility by regarding their roles or identities as some kind of fixed essence, modern society is rife with collective bad faith. A blazing example is social media. These performative spaces are an obvious source of bad faith, offering the temptation to become a brand, an aesthetic, or a curated identity that often diverges from reality.

Sartre contended that there is no lasting remedy for bad faith because it is ingrained in human consciousness. Yet he proposed that authenticity can serve as a cure. To be authentic is to engage in a measure of self-consciousness and analysis to identify and put up resistance to bad faith. It is not without its cost, however: one must be willing to accept the anguish that comes with radical freedom.

This means accepting the idea that one is "condemned to be free" and taking full responsibility for one’s choices. This responsibility also includes the choice to avoid responsibility and at least recognizing that "I am in bad faith right now," which demands clarity and courage.

Sartre’s concept of bad faith remains powerful because of its emphasis on radical responsibility. It challenges us to embrace our freedom instead of hiding behind fixed roles, identities, and excuses. In a world of fluid identities and pressures to conform to gender, religious, sexual, political, and social norms, the concept of bad faith is as relevant in 2026 as it was in 1943 - perhaps even more so.

On Long Reads

The Social Network (2017), Bernardo Siciliano

A common perception, while referring to digital consumption, is that short-form content owns the feed, while long-form content owns the mind.

But does this perception even hold any truth when algorithmic incentives typically dominate what and how we consume content in rapid-scrolling digital environments? Most people increasingly prefer quick, skimmable content to complex, intellectually stimulating writing offering deep analysis in the form of long reads.

Long-form journalistic and literary pieces are resource-heavy. Despite undergoing weeks or months of research, fact-checking, and editing, these pieces almost never reach the threshold of what can be termed a success or “hit” in the viral economy controlled by algorithms. Over the last decade, many publishers have either downsized to produce cheaper, faster content to meet that “hit” threshold or closed, citing economic reasons as their advertising revenue sank long before the emergence and popularity of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).

Broader cultural shifts also drove people away from immersive reading. And there are large-scale studies and robust research to support the evidence that leisure reading itself in the US – and elsewhere – has drastically declined.

With doomscrolling, streaming, and short-form videos notably decreasing patience and the time needed for sustained focus, almost forty percent of Americans now read no books, according to a report by Smithsonian and the Guardian. Separately, a study jointly conducted by University College London and the University of Florida analyzed more than a quarter million Americans between 2003 and 2023 and concluded that daily reading for pleasure declined by about three percent per year during that period.

Then came 2025. Google's integration of AI Overviews into its search engine, which was immediately followed by other search engines, wrecked referral web traffic and pushed publishers to experience dramatic drops in expected clicks on their websites. In several cases, news and tech publications have experienced a decline in organic search traffic of between fifty and eighty-five percent between 2024 and 2026, with answers from GenAI tools appearing above traditional web links in search engines.

The trend does not just portray various aspects of journalism, including long-form literary narratives, it has now become part of a broader withdrawal from long-form anything – long-form magazine articles, essays, books, in-depth editorial columns etc. – that requires time, patience, and attention to immerse oneself in.

Woman Reading Book with Orange (2009), Georgy Kurasov

Despite the influence of algorithms, cultural shifts shaping readers’ habits, and the attention economy aimed at benefiting from the cognitive shallowing of minds soaked with social media and short-form content, long reads are neither "dying" nor “dead.” The format is far from extinct. It is, however, transforming itself into a powerhouse that directly reaches readers and audiences inclined to pay for and commit to intellectual engagement and depth. 

With the GenAI rapidly attempting to replace our thinking by significantly minimizing the time and steps it takes to find their answers, surface mastery and intellectual passivity risk disparaging our ability to develop deep understanding and perform intelligence to find answers to our questions.

Books, essays, and long investigative pieces are not about elitism and should matter to more than just intellectually engaged minds. Now more than ever, we need human brains to build depth, judgement, and meaning, and to become analytical and reflective.