Soon to Be and Never to Be

Hello and welcome to 2026 family and friends!

A little Life update: I had a rough time getting set up in Canada. There was lots of admin to be done, lots of stress (financial, health, a quarter-life-crisis), unrelenting coursework and marking, and the usual ceaseless ennui. But now I am through my first semester of a PhD I am grateful to be doing, and from here it will get easier. I miss everyone back home, and I hope you’re all in good health.

If anyone would like advice about immigrating to a new country and starting a PhD simultaneously, feel free to send me a message—I made many mistakes that were only obvious to me with the benefit of hindsight.

Now I reveal that this substack is something of a Trojan horse. I probably won’t be using it for life updates or to blog my experience as a study permit holder in Canada. I’m mainly going to use it to write essays on whatever I find interesting; I realize I need a creative outlet entirely divorced from my mathematical pursuits. The essays will probably have a strong autobiographical flavor and so might still provide hints of how life is going for me, but ultimately I intend to write over-intellectualized rants on whatever peculiar obscura steals my attention.

Here’s a video that outlines what this will entail at the outset:

The video summarized:

I will soon post an essay here about what 2025 was for me. The focus will be my experience managing mysterious chronic medical problems and trying to discover what is wrong with me. It will also be a bit of meditation on suffering.

I’ll follow this up with an essay on suffering which draws on sources external to my own experience and explicates my version of a philosophical stance that holds suffering to be fundamental. By which I mean that suffering grounds metaphysics, normative ethics, theology, and so on.

I also talk in this video about an abandoned idea of something I dub a “canonical absence”. Consider this a taster of what an essay from me might look like, and the sort of things that might interest me. In lieu of a definition, I give examples of canonical absences. These are:

Absences which are almost normative in their ought-begging, i.e., things that really ought to be (given a time, place, object, situation, etc.) but aren’t.

Deliberate omissions in art which may be alluded to. The example I give is explicit violence in The Zone of Interest. I claim the omission of explicit violence results in the viewer continually considering the horrors not being shown.

Absences that our mind has a tendency to “fill in” in a predictable way. For example, the combination of screaming and dog barks may trigger images of a person being attacked by a dog in most of our minds, even though the stimuli is under-determined.

The absence of god in the everyday. Faith requires effort. Religion and spirituality are made profound by the absence of conventional evidence for god. God doesn’t join us for breakfast every morning, can’t be viewed under the microscope or measured by a temperature gauge etc. The absence here is canonical with respect to spirituality and faith.

Is the sense that allows us to detect a canonical absence (if indeed such a sense exists) actually the Boolean instantiation of a more general sense allowing us to detect if something “weighs” the right amount? A sense of “off-ness” rather than of complete absence. For example, the light level seems wrong for the time of day I believe it is, or there doesn’t seem to be enough people on the street right now. Perhaps something more abstract or ineffable: Something about the way they said that didn’t have “enough” sincerity. Or possibly: This song had a more powerful emotional effect on me than I was expecting. Or even something as slippery as: I don’t know why but something feels generally lacking in this situation.

This is probably something that has already been written about extensively, but perhaps there is an observation or connection in the above that is novel. If so, maybe someone should flesh that out—though it certainly won’t be me. Sometimes it’s fun to throw out a half-formed interesting idea into the world.

I’ll be back soon, this time bearing an idea fully formed!

Feel free to subscribe on the way out if you haven’t already.