Nostalgia, Nihilism, and the Need for a North Star

We live in a state of perpetual performance. Not just for others, but for ourselves. It’s cosplay with consequences—playful on the surface, deadly serious underneath. We obsess over how our performance lands. We evaluate our worth by the reactions we elicit. At stake is not just our reputation, but our very sense of moral character.

This obsession isn’t new. The philosopher Blaise Pascal put it bluntly: we’d rather appear virtuous than actually be virtuous. It’s easier to sculpt the image than to develop the core. In this way, we’ve become artisans of curation, not content—architects of persona, not people.

We live, as Shakespeare warned, on a stage. But our thirst for applause is bottomless. The more we receive, the more we crave. We become validation addicts, forever chasing the next fix of approval. And when applause falters or vanishes, anxiety rushes in. To soothe this anxiety, we self-medicate. Not just with likes and follows—but with food, consumption, workouts, and delusion.

Some of us drown that dread in comfort food. Others sprint in the opposite direction—discipline, clean eating, high-performance regimens. But often, that stoicism is just cosplay too: hunger in a different mask. When that fails, we drift into nostalgia. We reimagine the past—not as it was, but as it flatters us to believe it was. We cast ourselves as the hero, the lover, the misunderstood genius. The story becomes so good, we forget it isn’t true. We live in the fiction and lose our grip on reality.

This disconnect—between who we pretend to be and who we are—makes us brittle. Maladapted. And so the cycle deepens: more consumption, more self-distraction, more illusion. Consumerism becomes therapy. Hedonism becomes self-care. Nihilism becomes a badge of honor. All of it is cosplay. And all of it is corrosive.

Philosophy, religion, and therapy exist to confront this masquerade. They offer a language for our delusions, a history of our dysfunction, and a spiritual direction out of the maze. They remind us that cosplay is not identity, and performance is not presence.

I don’t pretend to have it figured out. But I’ve found insight in thinkers like Phil Stutz, who warns against the seductive ease of instant gratification, and Steven Pressfield, who speaks of resisting the lure of comfort in favor of a purposeful life. I’ve also been challenged—and strangely comforted—by Paul’s doctrine of kenosis: the radical idea that we’re not here to inflate ourselves but to empty ourselves in service of others. In a world obsessed with power and “respect,” that message lands like a thunderclap.

What unsettles me most is not our ignorance—it’s our awareness. Many of us know the truth. We even live it for a while. But we drift. We relapse. We trade the hard-earned clarity for the cheap thrill of our old scripts. That’s what demoralizes me: not just the fall, but the speed and ease with which it happens.

Yet I still believe in the power of a North Star. Call it purpose, vision, a calling—whatever name it takes, it’s the gravitational pull that keeps us from floating off into the void of our appetites. I think of Ann Kim, the Korean immigrant told to stay in her lane. She didn’t. She found her voice, expressed it through food, and became a James Beard Award-winning chef.

The path to a good life, I suspect, doesn’t begin with fear of failure. It begins with a compelling vision of who we are meant to be. And the discipline to never look away from it.