Choose or Lose

To bring you behind the curtain a bit, I actually got the general idea for this article while walking around an outlet mall. On my less busy days, I often like to drive out of the city, and on this day found myself at an enormous shopping center with dozens of designer stores in the middle of rural New York.

While walking around, I felt overwhelmed and slightly disgusted at the sheer amount of “stuff” that one could acquire. Seeing people walking by with bags upon bags of things that would just take up space in their homes made me feel uncomfortable. A while back, I stumbled across an essay arguing that consumerism serves as a replacement for religion in our society today. As that thought (and its development, which is contained in the rest of this article) occurred to me, I immediately felt more empathy and compassion for the shoppers. 

As humans, we are incredibly predisposed to be a part of a tradition (note that, throughout this piece, I use “tradition” in a very broad way to describe a pattern of thoughts or actions that serves to explain some deeper truth about the human condition). Consumerism is a tradition just as much as religion is a tradition – both claim to lead you to a state of elevated meaning, whether it’s Nike telling you that you will be faster in our shoes or Jesus telling you that you will be saved if you take up the cross and confess your sins.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (an Orthodox Christian) includes a scathing parable about the Catholic church, in which Jesus comes to visit humanity at the height of the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested by an Inquisitor, whereupon the Inquisitor informs Jesus that modernity has no need for him – the Church has removed the freedom of thought from the practice of religion, in an effort to cater to the masses who lack the mental fortitude to pursue Christ in the face of worldly temptations. (I would strongly recommend reading the full section, which offers far more nuance and thoughtful insight than my paraphrase). Midway through his diatribe, the Inquisitor makes this provoking point: “There is for man no preoccupation more constant or more nagging than, while in a condition of freedom, quickly to find someone to bow down before.”

The western world in 2026 offers much more freedom than the Spanish Inquisition, of course. Whether or not you yourself have chosen or whether someone else has for you, the odds are that you’re bowing down to something — or more realistically, a number of things. For some, that thing is consumerism, or social media, or the pursuit of money, or any one of the near-infinite ways you can give your very being to something without even knowing you’re doing it. For many, that thing is religion, and my hope is that the religion you bow down to is one that prioritizes love, respect, and humility. For others, it may involve a different tradition that resonates with you and offers the most coherent explanation of life. I have often found Nietzsche’s philosophy to resonate in recent years, and I include this example, though there are many such secular examples, to emphasize that my central argument does not require religion specifically.

I’ve appreciated the thoughts of Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre recently, who argues for a type of Aristotelian Thomism that I find very compelling. His thoughts, which I will again be unable to do justice by paraphrasing, are that a person seeking coherence should enter deeply into a living moral-intellectual tradition, participating in its practices and forms of reasoning. Central to his thinking is the idea that a practice, in his framework, has internal goods – things you can only access by actually doing the thing. Playing chess well, making music, pursuing a craft. A tradition built on genuine practices offers rewards that are intrinsic to participation. Consumerism doesn't have that; its goods are entirely external (status, novelty, comfort).

To conclude the anecdote of the mall trip, I left shortly after the aforementioned revelation, and drove 15 miles further north to West Point, NY, home of the United States Military Academy. At a level rarely seen in our modern society, tradition is known, and tradition is loved. Cadets subordinate themselves to a mission much larger than their own comfort or desire, and in doing so develop the moral foundation that only comes through years of practice within a demanding community. I left USMA feeling inspired and grateful to be connected (even if only tangentially through the Department of War) to such a tradition.

It’s eye-opening to apply MacIntyre’s lens to each of the traditions I’ve touched on: religion, secular philosophy, and even (if not especially) modern stand-ins such as consumerism. If I’m going to observe a tradition regardless, I might as well pick one that offers a lasting and resounding meaning for my entire life – not just until the next sale.

NOTE: I’m not sure how many people still check this site since it’s been so long since my last piece. I hope to start writing again more frequently, and I really appreciate any of you who have reached out about any of my previous pieces as well. It really means a lot to me. Thanks! - Carter

The Temporality of Cargo Pants

"A time to be born, a time to die

A time to plant, a time to reap

A time to kill, a time to heal

A time to laugh, a time to weep"

–The Byrds, Turn! Turn! Turn!, 1965

On a recent warm September day, I was sitting on a concrete stoop outside the student union at Columbia when I encountered one of the more “first-world” problems of my day: There was no smooth surface upon which to set my phone while I ate my lunch!

For the last few years, I’ve found myself without a phone case, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is stubbornness). This necessitates extreme care in determining where to set my phone down to avoid scratches and cracks to the screen. With my front and rear pockets already full of the typical wallet/key/pen accoutrements, I was left with that curious vestige of mid-2000’s fashion, the cargo pocket.

This piece is not intended to be a discussion of cargo pants. Whether you like them or not, your main takeaway should just be that I happened to be wearing them at this moment. I attempted to stuff my phone in length-wise, as one would typically use a pants pocket, but it didn’t quite fit through the opening. I thought for a few seconds, and then ended up turning my phone 90 degrees and placing it like so:

Figure 1. The author’s phone in his pocket.

“Wow,” you think, “this is so fascinating and I’m definitely not navigating off of this page in about 2 more seconds.” Look–I get it. This story is very much not interesting in and of itself. However, as I was sitting there eating my lunch, I was thinking about why I didn’t immediately put my phone in my pocket in the horizontal manner shown–after all, this did end up being an objectively better way to use the pocket, as the phone sat comfortably and securely while simultaneously being easy to access. 

As I sat and pondered, the ramifications of this decision came together in my mind. I realized that my original attempt to pocket the phone length-wise was an attempt to solve the problem in a durable way, to leave the phone in my pocket in a way that I could feel confident in its security until the next time I wanted to use it. Putting the phone in my pocket horizontally was much less stable (in a metaphysical sense). I couldn’t rely on it to be there if I stood up. It was in a much more fragile state of being. Yet, despite its fragility, it was a perfect solution for the position I was in at the time.

The more I thought about it, the more I recognized that this temporality underscores many of life’s most meaningful phenomena. For example, I recently read an incredible Substack article titled “An Existential Guide to Making Friends,” which I would highly recommend to anyone, but one quote in particular stuck out to me:

"Each particular friend is an emissary. A courier for the Infinite Friend. You’ve met them. You keep meeting them. They arrive disguised as a barista who treats you like a Victorian convalescent. As the flatmate who wordlessly slides a plate of eggs under your door when your brain has become a wasp factory. As the stranger in the smoking area who tells you, in a voice like a kettle unplugging itself, the one sentence you needed to remain alive for another week. That’s not them. That’s the Infinite Friend poking a paw through the membrane of history."

The thought of the “Infinite Friend” is really quite beautiful, but I would argue that the concept can apply far beyond the arena of friendship. Consider (though admittedly more abstract than the Friend) the Infinite Relaxation, the Infinite Physical Fitness, and even the Infinite Life Satisfaction. Every time you believe you’ve come face-to-face with the final form of one of these horsemen, you find that they vanish just as quickly as they arrive. Thus, I find my prerogative to greet and host these emissaries as they arrive. Sometimes, I can take action to make their stay more hospitable, but more often, nothing I can do will impact their overall itinerary. 

Finding comfort in this way of being is often easier said than done. Try telling a person who has recently gone through a breakup, a broken bone, or a layoff that this, like all good things in life, was always bound to end and they shouldn’t have taken their current happiness for granted. I concede that this framework isn’t necessarily one that you can impose on someone else, unless that person happens to be either very open-minded or a Zen Buddhist. However, I wanted to take a minute to put words to screen to, at the very least, convey a paradigm in which I’ve found a lot of comfort and courage to persist beyond life’s less infinitely convivial times. As for the cargo pants, well… those are here to stay.

P.S. As thankful as I am to the two previous quotees of this piece, there’s one more I can’t help but include. Virginia Woolf was no stranger to life’s great ups and downs, and masterfully conveys the feeling of stumbling upon one of life’s infinitudes in her To The Lighthouse:

"And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all--a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one."

Building Culture that Matters

When I was growing up, I lived in Hastings, Nebraska, a town of approximately 25,000 with three separate high schools – two relatively large public schools, and one smaller Catholic school. Though I wasn’t Catholic and had no connections to the school itself, I always loved to watch the St. Cecilia Bluehawks play basketball. I can still vividly picture them taking the court for warmups in their all-black sweatsuits, sprinting out into a highly coordinated layup line that involved complicated weaving and passing–and this was all in the first 30 seconds of warmups! The Bluehawks carried their impressive brand of discipline into the game as well–in the heyday of my childhood from 2008 to 2018, St. Cecilia went 233-55, with five state championships across those 11 seasons.

Because Hastings was a small town, I know this next piece of information through direct conversation, but even if I didn’t, it could easily and reasonably be intuited: I was not the only young person the Bluehawks made an impression on. Even though I didn’t go to school there, watching them dominate their opponents inspired me to work harder and try my best. This is why the extended streak of success, particularly impressive in a high school environment where personnel were not recruited, was able to continue for over a decade – the culture that was built early on was received and built upon by each successive class.

This semester, I’m billeted within my NROTC battalion to lead PT at Columbia University, as well as assist with PT at our unit’s primary location, SUNY Maritime (located in the Bronx). I’m particularly responsible for improving upon a “PT Mentorship Program,” wherein students who struggle with their physical fitness are assigned extra workouts with PT-proficient sailors–a program that has thus far seen a markedly low success rate. In our unit, almost a quarter of our midshipmen and sailors were unable to pass their basic physical fitness test earlier this month.

I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about how this program can be successful, meaningful, and momentum-building. I transitioned mentor sign-ups from mandatory to voluntary, and increased the agency of mentees by allowing them to select the type of workout they’d like to participate in. It’s early in the semester, so I’m not sure how much my adjustments will matter in the grand scheme of things, but I’m optimistic that these tweaks will move things in the right direction. 

In the end, though, culture can’t change in one semester, and it can’t change at the behest of one person. In order to really start to build a culture that’s built on excellence (and not just PT), it will take buy-in from personnel across all walks of life within the command. It will take a strong sense of pride in one’s work, and in one’s ability to excel in that work. The military is fortunate in that most of the tasks expected of its personnel are easy to track success, and fitness is perhaps the easiest one. My hope is that, by building the fitness level of sailors, they’ll have a clear metric that proves they can improve aspects of their lives, and extrapolate that into all facets of their military career. My hope is that we can begin to build, at the New York City NROTC Consortium, the same kind of abiding culture of excellence I revered growing up at St. Cecilia, a culture that won championships and inspired kids like me. It’s a big task, but for an organization with a mission as critical as the United States Navy, it’s undoubtedly worth the effort.