Ideas

Essays on meaning, dialogue, connection, and the philosophical ground beneath everyday life — drawing on Buber, Merton, and the psychologists and others who have influenced this project.

3 stories

Latest Stories

Michael Sobocinski

The 2,500-Year-Old Argument About What's Real

Two ancient Greek philosophers disagreed about whether reality is fundamentally one thing or many — and the argument never actually got resolved. Here's why it still matters.

Photo by Klemen Vrankar on Unsplash

Michael Sobocinski

The Buffer

Independent research traditions — psychology, philosophy, attachment science, and neuroscience — converge on a single claim: death anxiety is isolation in disguise.

Michael Sobocinski

Death Anxiety Is Not About Death

There's a counterintuitive truth buried in existential psychology: when we say someone suffers from death anxiety, we're often naming the wrong problem. The anxiety isn't primarily about dying. It's about what mortality reveals—and what we fear we lack when we face it. This distinction matters because if we misname the problem, we miss the solution. For decades, therapists assumed death anxiety worked like other fears: if you think about death too much, you get anxious. The fix seemed obviou