KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE

Heavenly Botox: Physical & Spiritual Beauty in Modern Life & Eternity

Why We Struggle to Accept Aging & Imperfection I haven’t gotten botox. There are lots of reasons for this. I’m still pretty young; I discovered good skincare early; I’m afraid of needles and injecting toxins into my face by instinct; and I discovered Frownies a little while back…
Civilization Starts at Home: Order, Beauty, and Human Flourishing in a Digital Age

One of the great tensions of modern life is how to rebuild a genuinely human culture in a digital age. Civilization Begins in the Ordinary modern life beauty digital age embodiment civilization I walked down the stairs today of my home today, past the drying rack where my…
Our Whole Lives Are Owed to Tech

The modern world is not only a curse It’s the easiest thing in the world these days to complain, from behind our screens, about our screens. Writers often become fashionable lamenters in this regard rather than insightfully engaged with reality as it comes to us, and I am…
Agency as the Antidote to Modern Suffering: How Habit, Attention, and Will Shape Human Flourishing

A Passive Age I’ve long been an advocate of agency—namely, digging deep despite challenges and suffering and choosing, as much as is in our power, the things that can make our life better. Or, in the wise perspective of Jordan Peterson, at least make it less bad. This…
We Have Mistaken Distraction for Rest

Why modern life leaves us exhausted instead of restored One of the worst swaps we’ve made in our modern context is mistaking distraction for rest. And then we wonder why we are so tired, overwhelmed, and stressed. So let me start by just saying it plainly: staring at…
Why We’re So Tired All the Time

Modern exhaustion, overstimulation, and the loss of rest Why are we so tired all of the time? Honestly, it’s because we don’t sleep enough. The end. Just joking, but seriously: we don’t. But why don’t we sleep enough? That’s the mystery to unfold a little in this piece.…
Friendship May Be More Important Than Romance

Why modern life undervalues friendship We are deep into the accepted cultural narrative that romance is the apex experience of human life and relationships. But, properly understood in its appropriate context, friendship may in fact be more important. For context, I am not married. It just didn’t happen…
Vacuums of Malaise: The Loss of Attention and the Crisis of Meaning in Modern Life

The deeper crisis beneath modern distraction I’ve spoken extensively in other pieces about the loss of attention in modern life, and how this leads to both a physical experience of being constantly overwhelmed, as well as a collapse of inner life and the solid self, leading to behaviors…
The Modern Fear of Ordinary Life

Why modern life teaches us to fear obscurity There seems to be a distinctly modern fear of an ordinary life, likely driven by the fantasies that have come to us throughout our lives via film, TV, and now a fully-steeped online experience that risks becoming more real than…
In a Cynical Age, Beauty Still Matters—and Maybe More Than Ever

Beauty still matters, perhaps more now than ever in a time of a lot of chronic, habitual cynicism. In fact, the cynicism itself may be symptom of the lack of beauty we either have or have made ourselves numb to through our choices and conditioning to an increasingly…
Why So Many People Feel Spiritually & Emotionally Homeless

The loss of belonging in modern life We seem to live in an age of metaphorical homelessness, which is perhaps reflected most deeply in its non-metaphorical, physical homelessness which is ballooning in our cities. I am not an expert in the field of the real-world tragic phenomenon of…
Childhood Splintering: The Strange Grief of Watching a Place Change

The places that shape who we become There is a truly odd grief in being an observer over time as a place changes, especially when that place is where our childhood happened. I have spent a lot of time in recent years reflecting on the significance of where…
Why Love Cannot Survive Infinite Options

Love cannot grow in a disposable culture Love cannot survive infinite options, at least not in the way it is currently being asked to. But the problem isn’t really the endless options themselves via a burgeoning, glittering online world where every next person becomes more intriguing than the…
Why Nothing Feels Quite Real Anymore

Why does nothing feel quite real anymore? Because, to a large degree, it isn’t—at least not in the fullest sense. Yes, real life is happening online (which is precisely what makes it so difficult to extricate from), and bleeding out into tangible results, for good or ill. But…
Are We All Becoming Narcissists?

The modern crisis of the self Researching and diagnosing all kinds of people in our lives as “narcissists” is all the rage now, with search queries hitting a major inflection point, especially within the video education ecosystem online. I don’t doubt some of the validity here, but while…
The Loss of Focus is a Loss of Our Central Selves

Why modern life keeps pulling apart our attention Why can’t we focus? Increasingly more, we are all finding ourselves constantly distracted—as C. S. Lewis said, long before the iPhone snapping at us with color and sound and novelty every moment of the day and night: “distracted from distraction…
A Loneliness Epidemic of Our Own Doing: Why So Many People Feel Lonely Right Now

The foundation of loneliness in modern life People are often speaking about the loneliness epidemic—especially the male loneliness epidemic. It’s a real and tragic phenomenon, due to the foundation of disconnection so common to modern life. It’s even been baked right into our city planning, as well as…
Why Everything Feels Like Too Much in Modern Life

The slow numbing of the human person Everything feels like too much in modern life to so many people, and this is largely due to the chronic overstimulation so many of us are experiencing. But it’s not just reducible to a sterile nervous system issue that can easily…
Why We Scroll So Much

A search for something that never quite satisfies Why do we scroll so much? Many will say it’s anxiety, burnout, a sense of being overwhelmed—or, in more classical terms, acedia. Others rightly point to the treacherous design of our favorite online portals, created to capture as much attention…
The Frenetic Pace of the Cyborg Age: Why What’s Precious Is Finite

On being overwhelmed, creative burnout, and the limits of human attention in a world that asks too much Originally published July 2022. Too many projects, too little of us I have too many projects on the go—far too many. I believe, God willing, I will do them all,…
When Life is Harder Than You Expected

When life becomes overwhelming We’ve all reached what we believed was our maximum capacity—when life becomes harder than we ever expected or imagined. Life can be full of merciless, subsequent losses, griefs, disappointments, stresses, bewilderments. The cumulative experience is difficult to express to those around us, and can…
Chappell Roan, Saskatchewan, and Why Small Places Matter

Photo: Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0) In summer of 2025, Saskatchewan made its way into Chappell Roan’s song “The Subway,” apparently not because of its inherent poetry but because of practical necessity: the singer needed something to rhyme with a lyric, and said she had already…