Yes, But Not Today and Not Me: The Lie Beneath the Virtue

I. Introduction — The Pitchfork Paradox

Many years ago, back when the streets of Bucharest still howled at night with packs of stray dogs, a friend of mine said something that never left me.

“Look, I’m all against euthanizing the stray dogs. But if one of them bites my son, I’m going to get a pitchfork and kill them all myself.”

I remember the silence after he said it. Not awkward. Not judgmental. Just… quiet. Something had shifted in the room. Not because I disagreed. I didn't. But because I recognized something in him, in me, in everyone — something ancient, primitive, and true.

Something that smelled like blood under the perfume of our polished beliefs.

His words weren’t about dogs, not really. They were about the line between principle and pain. About how close we all stand to that line and how fast we’ll cross it when it’s our child, our comfort, our little pocket of peace that’s threatened.

And once I saw that line, I started seeing it everywhere.

• “We must save the planet!” — but don’t ask me to give up my pool or separate my trash.
• “We must eat better!” — but not if it means cooking, or god forbid, feeling hunger.
• “We must speak the truth!” — unless that truth offends me, then shut it down.
• “We must change the system!” — but not if I lose anything in the process.

We live in a time of ideals. But we practice comfort.

It’s not even hypocrisy. It’s something else, a clash between belief and inconvenience. Between ideals and instincts.

This essay is about that contradiction. About the lie we wrap in slogans and hashtags — the lie that says, “Yes, this is important. But not important enough to actually make me change my life.”

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II. The Illusion of Virtue Without Cost

Most people aren’t monsters. They’re not villains in some grand drama of hypocrisy. They believe in justice, kindness, sustainability, fairness. They mean well.

But meaning well isn’t the same as doing good.

And what I’ve come to believe is this:

People want the virtue of caring, without the cost of caring.

This isn’t just laziness. It’s deeper than that. It’s psychological, it’s evolutionary, it’s structural.

We’re built to say “yes” to ideas and “no” to inconvenience, and then rationalize the hell out of it.

We say:

• “I care about recycling, but sorting my trash is confusing and annoying.”
• “I believe in reducing waste, but paper straws suck.”
• “Of course I want clean oceans, but I’m not giving up my shampoo bottles.”

We don’t even realize how often we’re doing it. Because we’ve become masters at decoupling belief from behavior. And the modern world helps us do it with social media likes, symbolic gestures, and performance politics that let us feel good without doing good.

As Slavoj Žižek once said:

“We feel guilty for participating in consumerist excess, so we buy organic coffee or donate to a charity — and continue shopping like before. It’s ideology at its purest: a ritual that masks the reality beneath.”

We don't change. We just perform caring. And in that performance, we lie. Not just to others. But to ourselves.

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III. The Psychology of Comfortable Contradiction

To understand this phenomenon, we have to go into the basement of the human psyche — the ancient wiring that predates morality, hashtags, or compost bins. Here are the culprits behind the contradiction:

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1. Loss Aversion

According to behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman, humans are far more sensitive to losses than to gains. Giving up the convenience of bottled water feels like a loss, even if the gain (cleaner oceans) is abstract and long-term.

We’ll fight harder to avoid losing a luxury than to obtain a moral victory.

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2. Hyperbolic Discounting

We discount future benefits compared to immediate gratification.

I’ll cool down in my pool now. Let future generations deal with the drought.

We know better, but the present feels louder.

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3. Moral Licensing

After doing something “good,” we subconsciously give ourselves permission to do something bad.

“I voted green, so I can take long showers.”

“I went vegetarian for a week, so I can indulge now.”

It’s a psychological trade, as if virtue were a currency to spend.

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4. Cognitive Dissonance Avoidance

When our actions don’t match our beliefs, it creates inner tension. Rather than change the action (which is hard), we adjust the narrative.

• “It’s just one plastic bag.”
• “I recycle most of the time.”
• “Nothing I do matters anyway.”

The truth hurts, so we reshape it until it doesn’t.

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5. Tribal Morality

We don’t always care about what’s right. We care about who’s right.

We align with causes not to make change, but to signal belonging.

That’s why people scream about injustice online but stay silent when it happens at their dinner table.

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6. Effort Minimization

Evolution trained us to conserve energy. To avoid unnecessary risk. To seek safety, not revolution.

So we support change as long as it doesn’t change us.

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As Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind:

“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant. The rider is our reason, but the elephant is our intuition and instinct. And the rider’s job is usually to come up with excuses for where the elephant wanted to go in the first place.”

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IV. The Hydra’s Many Heads: Examples From the Everyday

You’ll see this contradiction everywhere. Not just in others — in yourself. In me. It’s the universal human blind spot.

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A. Environmentalism

• “I support wind energy!”
  — Until a turbine is built near my house.
• “We must protect biodiversity!”
  — But don’t stop me from spraying my lawn or driving my SUV.

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B. Health and Fitness

• “I want to be healthy.”
  — But I don’t want to cook, walk, lift, or sweat.
• “I want to lose weight.”
  — But I’m not willing to be hungry, to be bored without snacks, to sit with discomfort.

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C. Parenting and Education

• “Kids need discipline.”
  — But not mine. He’s just misunderstood.
• “Schools should be reformed.”
  — But don’t remove the system that benefited my child.

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D. Freedom of Speech

• “Everyone should have a voice.”
  — Except that guy. He’s offensive and dangerous.
• “I support open dialogue.”
  — But only for views I already agree with.

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E. Justice and Fairness

• “We must tax the rich fairly.”
  — But I’ll still deduct everything I can. I’m not rich, just smart.
• “No one is above the law.”
  — Unless it’s someone I voted for.

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F. Empathy and Animal Rights

• “I love animals!”
  — While eating factory-farmed chicken that never saw daylight.
• “Ban fur!”
  — But leather’s fine. That’s different.

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These aren’t just hypocrisies. They’re fragments of the human condition. And once you notice them, they’re everywhere.

This hydra doesn’t live in palaces. She lives in your shopping cart.

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V. Conclusion — When Principles Meet Pain

I’ve thought about my friend’s words many times.

“I’m all against killing the dogs. But if one bites my son…”

He wasn’t being dramatic, he was being honest. More honest than most people who hide their pitchforks behind social media filters and recycled hashtags. And I'll be the first to admit I'd do the same.

That quote is a confession from the edge — the moment where a belief is tested and instinct reclaims the throne.

And that, right there, is the core of it:

We say we want a better world. But not if it means less comfort, less control, less convenience for us.

We say, “Yes, but not today and not me.”

We want to believe we’re virtuous — but we don’t want to pay for it. We don’t want to sweat, or sacrifice, or be afraid. We want to keep drinking from the poisoned well while claiming to support clean water.

And so we lie.

We lie with good intentions.

We lie while wearing the right colors, saying the right slogans, clicking the right petitions.

We lie with the gentlest smile and the best excuses in the world.

And the world burns politely, quietly, while we sleep soundly in our comfort.

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The Crux: Belief Without Cost

The most chilling realization?

People don’t want change. They want to feel good about supporting change.

They want to say, “I’m one of the good ones.”

But not, “I’ll pay the price to make it happen.”

This is what my friend’s quote reveals.

The moral stance collapses the second it meets personal pain.

And it’s not just him. It’s all of us.

That’s why it haunted me.

When principle meets threat, instinct wins.

 

Grave of the Fireflies

  

The last time I saw fireflies was forty-six years ago, on another continent. Africa, south of the Equator.

I was but a boy standing in the tall grass as the stars came down to play among us. Fireflies lit up the night like little spells. I didn’t know the word “ephemeral” then, but I knew how it felt.

And now, decades later, I realize I haven’t seen a single firefly ever since.

At first, I thought it was just geography. Different latitudes, different climate, different fauna. But slowly, the sadness settled in: maybe they weren’t just somewhere else. Maybe they were… gone. Dimming. Dying. And the thought that we might outlive magic is more frightening than death itself.

So I did what I always do with unresolved sadness: I asked questions. And what I found only deepened the ache.

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I. The Disappearance We Don’t Talk About

It turns out I’m not alone in noticing the silence. People from North America to Japan, from rural France to urban Thailand, are reporting the same thing: fireflies are vanishing.

Not everywhere, not all at once. But steadily, quietly, without protest.

And it’s not just nostalgia making the world feel emptier, science confirms it. Studies from the last two decades have documented major declines in firefly populations worldwide. Some species are already believed extinct. Others are listed as “vulnerable” or “near threatened.”

But the tragedy is: most countries don’t even monitor fireflies. We lose them in the dark, without even knowing their names.

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II. A Fragile Lifecycle, Built on Silence and Shadows

Fireflies — or lightning bugs, if you prefer the older, softer name — are not just pretty. They’re complex creatures with a delicate life cycle and unique needs.

Most fireflies spend the majority of their lives as larvae: crawling through leaf litter and moist soil for up to two years, preying on snails and worms. Only the final few weeks are spent as adults — flashing, dancing, searching for mates. Then they die.

During that brief adult phase, their light is their voice.

They don’t chirp, they don’t sing. They shine.

But their calls go unheard now, because:

• Light pollution blinds them. Streetlights, porch lights, car beams — all of it washes out their coded flashes. Imagine trying to whisper across the crowd at a Sabaton concert.
• Pesticides poison their larvae in the soil, long before the adults ever get the chance to glow.
• Habitat loss destroys the damp, quiet places they need to survive. We drain wetlands. We pave gardens. We tidy up the wild.
• Climate change alters rainfall patterns, breeding cycles, and food availability. Even the small stars are out of sync now.

They’re not just dying. They’re being unwritten.

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III. The Pain Beneath the Light

Why does this matter so much?

Because fireflies belong to a part of us that modern life has no use for.

They’re not useful, not productive, not monetizable. They don’t sting, don’t bite, don’t warn us of danger.

They exist to flicker. To remind us that beauty doesn’t need a reason.

When fireflies disappear, they take something bigger with them.

• They take memory: Of simpler nights, of damp grass and soft breezes, of being a child in a world not yet mapped.
• They take awe: The kind that doesn’t need explanation, just presence.
• They take silence: That rare, sacred quiet that settles when the world breathes out and the stars lean in.

Losing them is not like losing wolves or whales or bees. Losing fireflies feels like losing permission to wonder.

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IV. Can We Fix It?

Maybe. In patches. In places. In spirit, if not at scale.

Fireflies don’t need much from us, just a bit of the world left alone.

• Turn off the lights: Let the night be dark again. Let their voices shine.
• Skip the sprays: Every pesticide kills more than it claims to.
• Let the wild be wild: A damp pile of leaves, a mossy log, a forgotten garden corner — these are firefly nurseries.
• Teach the children: Not just that fireflies existed, but that they can return.

There are whole communities now planting “firefly gardens” and “dark sky parks,” fighting for a flicker in the dusk. And maybe it’s not too late.

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V. A Stick, a Child, and a Ghost

Tonight, I watched a child chase fireflies with a stick.

Only there were none. He chased nothing, laughing anyway, because that’s what children do. And I smiled, and ached.

Because in that moment, I saw myself.

And I saw something else too: absence.

Not a violent, dramatic extinction. Just the soft, sad kind. The one that happens when no one’s looking. The one that happens when we forget how to notice.

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VI. Grave of the Fireflies

I named this essay after the 1988 Japanese animated film — one of the most devastating depictions of loss I’ve ever seen. In that story, the fireflies become a symbol of fleeting life, of innocence destroyed by a world that’s forgotten how to protect the fragile.

We may not be waging war in the same way.

But we are destroying innocence. We are burying beauty.

Not in bombs and ash — but in convenience, in apathy, in light that never goes out.

And so we are building a new grave of the fireflies.

One field, one lawn, one glowing screen at a time.

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VII. But Not Yet. Not All.

There are still places — hidden meadows, untouched wetlands, mountain forests — where the fireflies rise.

And maybe, if we listen hard enough, love deep enough, and fight gently enough, we can keep some corners of the world lit by flickers of unreasoned beauty.

Maybe they’re not gone. Maybe they’re just waiting.

So tonight, I’ll leave a patch of garden wild.

And I’ll turn the lights off. Just in case.

The Mirage of Happiness: Chasing What We’re Not Built to Keep

 

I. Introduction: The Broken Compass

We live in a world obsessed with happiness.

It’s everywhere — in slogans, in songs, in social media bios.

“Do what makes you happy.”

“Choose happiness.”

“Happiness is a journey, not a destination.”

We nod along, post pictures of sunsets, smile when asked how we are, and quietly wonder what’s wrong with us when the feeling doesn’t last. Or doesn’t come at all.

Because here’s the quiet truth most of us sense but rarely say aloud:

We are not adapted for happiness. We are adapted for adversity.

That isn’t poetry, it’s biology. It’s psychology. It’s the raw, scraped truth of evolution.

Happiness, true, lasting, all-encompassing happiness, is not the default state of the human mind. If it were, we wouldn’t be this restless. This nostalgic. This addicted to motion and dreams and future plans.

Instead, we are creatures of longing.

Of projection. Of “almost there.”

We want happiness. Desperately. We search for it in love, in success, in food, in meaning, in memory, in sex, in children, in religion, in silence.

But we don’t stay there when we find it. We can’t.

Something in us always resets the bar.

Something always whispers: What’s next?

And that’s what this is — not a call to action, not an exploration of solutions. Just a quiet contemplation of the status quo. A walk around the idea. A hand gently brushing the surface of something we all feel, and almost none of us understand.

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II. The Illusion in the Mirror

a. The Rearview Lie: Nostalgia

We look back and call it “happiness.”

Childhood. First love. Home-cooked meals. Lazy summers. Mother’s voice. A bicycle ride. A Christmas morning.

But that wasn’t happiness. Not in the way we remember it.

We forget the boredom, the tantrums, the punishments, the shame, the loneliness, the sick days. The monsters in the closet.

Memory edits.

It compresses years into seconds, sharpening the colors and blurring the pain.

It puts soft lighting over the past and sells it back to us as proof that we once had what we now lack.

But nostalgia isn’t happiness.

It’s longing, disguised as proof.

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b. The “Other People” Trap

We think they have it.

The neighbors, the influencers, the smiling coworker, the couple at the next table holding hands over coffee.

But we only see what they let us see.

Even when we know that — especially when we know that — we fall for it anyway.

Social media is a happiness theatre.

Highlight reels with curated lighting and selective captions.

Vacation smiles, anniversary kisses, filtered skin and motivational quotes.

Nobody posts the silence between fights.

Or the shame of failing as a parent.

Or the grief of wanting more and not knowing why.

So we compare our own raw, anxious, unfiltered existence to a lie, and we lose. Every time.

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c. The “One Day” Delusion

Happiness, we are told, is just around the corner.

When we get that raise.

When we retire.

When the kids grow up.

When we finally move.

When the schedule clears.

When we lose the weight.

When everything aligns.

But it never does.

Or it does, and we still feel the same, only older, more confused, and less willing to admit it.

So we shift the goalpost. Again. And again.

Because the only way to keep the illusion alive is to keep it in the future.

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III. What We Call ‘Happiness’ Isn’t Really Happiness

We use the word all the time.

But we rarely mean what we say.

A bride says she’s happy on her wedding day — but more often, she’s overwhelmed. Nervous. Hopeful. Buzzing on adrenaline and champagne and expectations.

A father says he’s happy watching his son catch his first fish — but what he really feels is pride. Maybe relief. Maybe the weight of a memory he can’t quite share.

A little girl says she’s happy opening a Christmas gift — but that’s joy. Excitement. The sugar rush of desire momentarily fulfilled.

And an hour later, she’s upset because there are no more cookies and bedtime comes too soon.

We bundle all of these feelings, excitement, joy, anticipation, relief, love, peace, into one word: happy.

And then we wonder why we can’t find it, or hold it, or explain it.

Because the problem may not be that we lack happiness

but that our language is too poor to see it when it’s there.

The Poverty of Words

In English, and in many languages, we use “happy” for everything.

You finish a task = “I’m happy it’s done.”

You fall in love = “I’m so happy I found you.”

You eat a perfect meal = “That made me really happy.”

But those aren’t the same thing. At all.

Other cultures do better.

The ancient Greeks had eudaimonia (a deep, flourishing life), hedone (pleasure), agape (selfless love), philia (deep friendship), ludus (playful love), and more.

The Japanese speak of wabi-sabi, the quiet beauty of imperfection.

The Danish have hygge, the comfort of warmth, friends, and candlelight on a cold night.

The Portuguese speak of saudade, the bittersweet ache for something you once had, or never did.

These aren’t just words. They’re emotional tools, fine brushes where we use a paint roller.

Maybe happiness isn’t as rare as we think.

Maybe we just don’t have the right names for the pieces of it.

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IV. Built to Survive, Not to Be Satisfied

Let’s go deeper, into the bone marrow of the human condition.

We evolved in danger.

In hunger, in cold, in tribes, in violence, in fear.

The people who were complacent, who felt “happy enough” to stop moving, got eaten, infected, or outcompeted.

Happiness brings complacency, dulls alertness, makes you soft.

And soft things get eaten.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s Nature (with a capital N).

So evolution did not reward those who were content.

It rewarded those who were restless, vigilant, anxious, hungry.

It rewarded the overthinkers. The planners. The ones who saw problems even when things were fine.

You are the descendant of people who could never fully relax.

This means your brain — your reward system — is wired to give you tiny bursts of joy, just enough to keep you going, never enough to make you stop.

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V. The Hedonic Reset Button

Even when we do get what we want, it fades.

The house. The car. The degree. The partner. The child. The body. The fame.

They thrill us for a moment. A month. A season.

And then they become the new baseline.

This is called the adaptation-level phenomenon, or, more cynically, the hedonic treadmill.

You always adjust. You always want more.

This is not a failure of character.

It’s a feature of the system.

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VI. The Real Function: Chasing, Not Catching

So maybe the question isn’t “Why can’t we be happy?”

Maybe it’s “Why do we expect to stay happy in the first place?”

Because when you look closely, happiness doesn’t act like a state. It acts like a spark.

It flashes. It flickers. It gives warmth, then it fades.

But that spark keeps you moving. It keeps you trying. It gets you out of bed, writing songs, falling in love, walking through grief, picking up broken pieces.

We are not adapted to remain happy.

We are adapted to chase happiness, because the chase keeps us alive.

And maybe, ironically, the moments when we feel closest to “happiness” are not when we’re sitting in it, but when we’re reaching for it.

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VII. Meaning vs. Happiness

Some of the most fulfilled people in history — and in your neighborhood — are not happy.

They are tired. Burdened. Awake.

But they know why they’re suffering.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, wrote that humans don’t seek pleasure, they seek meaning. Not comfort, but a reason to endure.

That’s why people raise children, care for dying parents, write books nobody may read, build homes, love flawed partners, survive illness, start again.

Because sometimes, meaning hurts more, but lasts longer than happiness.

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VIII. A Different Kind of Peace

What if we’re chasing the wrong thing?

What if “happiness” isn’t fireworks and laughter and euphoria?

What if it’s just the absence of dread,

a moment without guilt,

a soft morning with warm socks and no e-mails?

What if it’s a quiet conversation,

a shared meal,

a tired body after work well done?

We overlook these.

Because they’re not spectacular.

Because nobody claps.

Because there’s no Instagram filter for “Nothing hurts right now.”

But maybe that’s the only kind of happiness we’re built to hold —

and even then, only briefly.

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IX. Conclusion: The Sisyphus Smile

So here we are, creatures of fire and memory,

wired for war but dreaming of peace,

never quite satisfied, always almost happy.

We carry a word too heavy for what it holds.

We long for a state we were never designed to keep.

We look around and think others have it.

We look ahead and think we’ll find it.

And we look back and believe we lost it.

But maybe the tragedy isn’t that we can’t hold happiness.

Maybe the beauty is that we keep reaching anyway.

We wake up. We try again.

We laugh at the wrong moment.

We kiss someone’s shoulder.

We light a candle and call it enough, for a moment.

And maybe, just maybe, that moment is the only kind of happiness that was ever real.