Suffering Fools

The trouble is that every path winds through a carnival of fools. Not because the world is malicious, but because the coordinates of sense are infinite, and what maps cleanly in one quadrant looks deranged in another. Language and habit do the dirty work—each person carrying their own system of signals, every encounter a clash of mismatched codes. To some, you are the lunatic; to others, the prophet. The distinction is arbitrary, and it never sticks for long.

What grinds the gears isn’t their existence—it’s the way life rewards the loud, the combative, the ones who pound the table for the sake of noise. They get traction not because they’re right, but because aggression registers more clearly than subtlety on the dull sonar of social exchange. The rest of us, less inclined to swing blunt instruments, spend years navigating, restraining, refusing to play that game. But the truth is: there is no winning. Every course is difficult, each riddled with collisions and blind turns. You can’t opt out of fools; they’re part of the landscape, woven into the very fabric of social gravity. What remains is the work of walking anyway, building your own trajectory, knowing that in someone else’s story, you’re the fool too.