Lev Shestov spent his entire life at war with the most dangerous idea in human history. Not God. Not death. Not the void. Reason itself. The belief that things must be as they are. That necessity is real. That if something can be explained, it’s been understood.
He was wrong about a lot of things. But he was right about this: every system that makes your suffering make sense is also making your suffering permanent.
We live in Athens now. The algorithm predicts your behaviour. The data explains your choices. The metrics measure your worth. And somewhere underneath all that optimisation, all that rational efficiency, all that smooth frictionless life, something is dying. Something that can’t be quantified. Something that refuses to be predicted.
Shestov called it faith. Not the kind you find in churches. The kind that says no to necessity. The kind that refuses explanation when explanation is the cage. The kind that insists the impossible is possible even when every system designed to run your life says otherwise.
This week we go deep into the war between Athens and Jerusalem. Between reason and faith. Between the world as it must be and the world as it could be if you’re brave enough to refuse the first one.
The algorithm already knows what you’re going to do next. The question is whether you’re going to let it.
Much love, David x
