There is virtue signaling in naked striving, but no virtue if it ends at acquisitive stacking and storing of more and more means. And the alternative presents as its own ambivalent path. Ascetism is calcium-hard, bleached, sun-bitten, and it doesn’t want to be handled—it wants to be endured. No longer a builder of wealth but a vector of astringency, a blunt instrument grinding its way through bedrock and a scalpel to flense the fine layers of ambition as it unmoors from purpose.

We want progress-as-purpose to be something that resolves into clarity. But clarity is the enemy of grace is the arbiter of revaluations in sticky equilibria. In the dark of night—because of course this happens at 2:46 a.m., barefoot, tile floor, lukewarm coffee thick as crude and going bitter in the cup—you look around and realize the scaffolding is still there. But the climb, it doesn’t build anything. It excavates, hollows, makes miming and parroting a productive function unto themselves.

Go ahead, rehydrate the husk. Journal. Monitor the vitals and the empirically constituted self. Push down the valve that connects to a hose and a coupler that makes room inside for more. Have another go. Without being able to shatter the doubt that this regenerative cycle, this newly raised instantiation of intentionality, will leave you fucked sideways till next Tuesday with no recourse but to strip naked and walk into the mist of the woods. As though there were any woods left. It isn’t just the comic books sheathed in plastic that will stand as metonyms for the impossibility of changing a system that has preemptively captured every avenue of transformation.