KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE

People Are Irreplaceable: Why Meaningful Relationships Require Commitment

People are irreplaceable. This is why all meaningful relationships require commitment as a baseline. We are not fungible like numbers or ice cream flavors, despite the effect modern life and online abstractions and rapid pacing may have on our sense of reality. Human beings are utterly unique. Thus,…
Esse Quam Videre: Living Authentically in Modern Life

“Living authentically” has been a theme for some time, expressed online in a million ways and changing the landscape of self-help culture and its attendant books promising transformation. Usually, the phrase seems to just be shorthand for license to relieve oneself of responsibility and agency, rather than in…
The Kind of Tired That Sleep Doesn’t Fix: Acedia, Burnout, and the Loss of Meaning in Modern Life

There is a weariness of soul that we can all have—the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. It’s often called burnout or, more formally, acedia. And it’s incredibly common in modern life: a repetitive condition of emotional and spiritual exhaustion. In our modern experience, this state is…
Motherhood Is Beautiful and Demanding: Why Motherhood Can Feel Both Overwhelming and Deeply Meaningful

Motherhood is a perennially important subject. Some people glamorize its beauty and joys. Others emphasize its demands and costs to the detriment of its fullness and mystery. For many women, motherhood can feel both overwhelming and deeply meaningful at the same time. I remember being in the back…
Modern Digital Life: You’re Surrounded but Still Not Connected

Modern digital life gives us the impression we are connected. But instead of real, human connection, it’s simply that we are digitally surrounded by what only appears to be connection. I’ve been haunted by an experiment my friend told me about the other day, related to this growing…
Why It Matters That You Exist

It’s an ache of a question for too many people: does it even matter that I exist? Why? It breaks my heart, truly, that any precious, unique, beautiful human being can ever feel this way. But let me answer it definitively: It does matter. It matters profoundly. It…
Real Love is Presence: Attention is the Foundation for Healthy Relationships

Presence is a necessity in all healthy relationships; it’s what makes it real love, and it becomes the true foundation. Very little can be built on less than this real presence. Many years ago, in the middle of the night, I wrote a song from an intuition, and…
Your Nervous System Wasn’t Meant for This: Anxiety, Burnout, and the Stress of Modern Life

So many people in modern life are finding their lives filled with chronic stress and a general sense of being overwhelmed. We are constantly overstimulated, and this often leads to anxiety, nervous system dysregulation, and even full burnout—of all kinds, it seems: physical, mental, emotional, relational, and even…