Inconclusive
If I were ever going to get a tramp stamp, I know what it would say. Inconclusive.
Not agnostic. Not skeptical. Inconclusive—like a lab result, like a verdict the jury couldn’t reach. And I think it’s the single most accurate word for how I move through the parts of the world I can’t see, can’t test, and can’t disprove. Which, it turns out, is most of it.
I can’t go online for ten minutes without running into someone’s certainty about something unfalsifiable. Flat earth. The firmament from Genesis, the dome over a flat plate of a world. Hollow earth, with ice walls and a terrarium underneath. Simulation theory. Young earth creationism, six thousand years instead of however many million. Descartes’ evil genius, the one mocking you with a fake world piped directly into your skull. Aliens. Reptilians. The Illuminati running things from behind a curtain. A shadow government. A Draconian conspiracy. People go to war over these on Threads like the stakes are personal.
I entertain all of them. Every single one. Not because I’m a credulous person—I’d argue the opposite—but because none of them are provable by me, none of them are disprovable by me, and none of them have ever once had any effect on my actual life. I live in an apartment in a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. I’ve never met an Illuminatus. I’ve never seen a cryptid, a UFO, a ghost, a vision. I don’t know if we went to the moon and I genuinely don’t know how I’d go about finding out for myself rather than just trusting institutions I have no special reason to trust. Honestly, I think the moon money would’ve been better spent on widows and orphans. I don’t know that Russia is my adversary. I don’t know that China is. I have a very 1984 mindset about all of it—wars happening somewhere I’m not standing could be Wag the Dog for all I can verify, and unless I’m in the field watching the mortars land myself, I genuinely don’t rule out green screen. None of that is paranoia. It’s just an honest accounting of what I actually know firsthand, which is almost nothing about anything outside the radius of my own life.
I can hold contradictory versions of the same object at once and feel no friction about it. The moon could be a dead rock we definitely walked on. It could be a hollow alien ship. It could be clockwork fixed in a firmament we’ll never breach. It could have a hidden base on its far side. I don’t need these to resolve into one truth, because resolving them wouldn’t change anything about my Tuesday.
Solar flares are the one cosmological thing that would actually activate me, and only because they’re the one thing with a direct line to my grid, my hamburger, my V8. If you’re a ham operator or a pilot, a coronal mass ejection is your business. For everyone else it’s the same as the moon—interesting, unverifiable, irrelevant.
Climate change gets a different treatment than flat earth, and the difference matters. I believe in pollution. I believe in resource mismanagement, in waste, in cycles—weather’s been worse and better my whole life, there are patterns the Farmer’s Almanac tracked long before anyone needed a crisis to fund. But I don’t believe in climate change the way it gets sold to me, and unlike flat earth, I’m not content to just hold it loosely—I’ll actually try to debunk it. Show me the shoreline photos. The reason for the difference isn’t that one claim is sillier than the other. It’s that nobody asking me to believe in flat earth wants anything from me. The climate framework, as it’s packaged and sold, is aimed at getting populations to comply—taxes, mandates, behavioral nudges—while the entire world, myself included, keeps buying hypercars and second houses and trips to Aruba and has no actual intention of stopping. That’s not a personal belief sitting quietly in someone’s head. That’s a strategy wearing belief’s clothes, and strategies aimed at moving me get the trust-but-verify treatment, not the hospitality.
That’s the real taxonomy underneath everything in this essay. A personal belief with no design on me—a friend’s cosmology, a stranger’s vision, a dead religion’s gods—gets total hospitality, no verification required. A personal belief that starts asking something of me directly—move to Central America, restructure my life—and the boats untie, though I’m still not trying to debunk the person. But a claim functioning as command-and-control infrastructure, aimed at populations including me, isn’t entitled to hospitality at all. Letting that sit unchallenged isn’t neutrality. It’s just compliance with someone else’s nudge.
Here’s the thing people misread as cowardice, and it’s the opposite of cowardice.
It’s a one-way street with God too—except God isn’t on the unresolved side of the ledger. I’ll explain that part last, because it’s the whole point.
But first: where does “I don’t need to resolve any of this” actually come from? Two places, and they reinforce each other.
The first is Miriam’s Kitchen, and before that, my mother’s house, and before that, watching people I loved closely enough to know they weren’t performing. My mom prayed to saints to find her car keys and also kept a Ouija board in the house—Irish Catholic and a little bit witch, simultaneously, no contradiction felt. She told me she drowned once, heard music she described as genuinely heavenly, and came back. She told me about a man who appeared out of nowhere to walk her, lost and turned around, all the way to a diner, carrying her bags, and then was simply gone when she looked back. My dad saw aliens over a condo balcony across the bay from El Conquistador in Fajardo. He saw ghosts in Hawaii. I grew up surrounded by people who had the experiences I have never once had, and loved them too much to file their stories under delusion.
I have aphantasia and SDAM—no mind’s eye, no episodic memory I can replay like film. I’ve never hallucinated anything. Never had a vision, a trip, a glitch in the matrix, a dream visitation. I wouldn’t know what an internal hallucination even felt like if you handed me a script for one. Which means I have no comparative instrument. I’m not weighing other people’s mystical claims against my own rich inner catalog of altered states and finding theirs implausible—I have no catalog at all. I can’t even be sure my own eyes are trustworthy narrators, let alone qualified to judge anyone else’s.
A girlfriend of mine used to rent the same Paris neighborhood for one week a year and call it hers the other fifty-one. Those were her neighbors. That was her café, her library, her city—sustained entirely on imagination between visits. I can’t do that with a café I sit in every single day. Her hyperfantasia could build and hold an entire life I’d have to actually be standing in to feel anything for. Mine can’t reach across a room.
But the same expansiveness that let her own Paris from three thousand miles away is the same expansiveness that makes Gaza, or Ukraine, land on other people as if it were happening next door—full body, full grief, full panic. I used to feel something close to contempt when people called themselves empaths. I’ve stopped. If your imagination is wired to absorb the whole planet’s pain as your own, that’s not a performance, that’s a real cost, and it’s not something I get to roll my eyes at just because my own wiring can’t generate it. I genuinely don’t know if people calling me intense, a lot, too much, are clocking ordinary assertiveness or something closer to what the energetics people would call a big presence—I can’t tell, and I’ve stopped trying to resolve that one either. But I’d say the same Serenity Prayer applies to them with much higher stakes than it does to me: if your empathy is your superpower, you’d better also learn what reiki people already know, how to ground yourself, clean your energy, build a boundary between what you can fix and what’s just going to use you as a conduit for its grief. Even if it’s only placebo, letting go of what you can’t touch is still letting go.
That’s also why none of my Threads arguments about Ukraine are arguments against anyone’s grief. I’ll argue all day that the West used Ukraine to provoke Russia for its own balance-of-power reasons. I will never tell someone to stop calling the other side orcs when their friends and family are the ones bleeding into that ground. Othering the people killing your people is just what humans do, and I don’t think it needs my permission or my correction. The geopolitical argument and the human cost are two separate ledgers. Slavic men and boys are salting that ground with blood and bone either way, regardless of who wins my argument about why the war started.
So when somebody tells me about remote viewing, astral projection, DMT, witnessing demons, channeling Seth or Abraham or Mary, the trickster energy of Esu from the Yoruba tradition, the thinness of the veil on the Day of the Dead—I believe them. Not “I believe what you’re describing is objectively true.” I believe that you experienced it. There’s a difference, and it’s not condescending, even though it sounds like it should be. It’s the same posture I learned sitting with people in dementia—you don’t shake someone out of their reality to defend your own. You live inside their truth with them for as long as you’re in the room, gently, without flinching and without correcting. I just never stopped doing that once I left that work. I do it with everyone. The man at the place that used to be Roy Rogers in DC in 1989, telling me for two hours that he was the Second Coming—was he lying, performing, delusional, manic, or completely earnest? I don’t know. I never will. I blew off a date to keep listening anyway. I believed him. I didn’t believe him. Both, at once, no contradiction.
There’s one place this collapses, and it’s a hard line, not a fuzzy one: the moment a belief stops being content and starts demanding behavior.
I have a friend who believes, with real intensity, in the Anunnaki returning—every ten or twenty thousand years, the math is fuzzy but her conviction isn’t—and she wants me to leave the city, leave the country, move to rural Central America with her before the devastation hits. I love sitting in that bubble with her. I am not moving to Central America. The line isn’t about whether her belief is true or false—I genuinely don’t know and don’t need to know. The line is about whose life it’s trying to organize. Hospitality toward what someone believes is unlimited. Compliance with what someone needs you to do about it is not. My boat doesn’t get tied to your boat just because I enjoyed the conversation.
And there’s a second piece to this I almost left out, because it cuts against everything I just said: the second something does cross into my actual life—not lore anymore, but consequence—I drop the hospitality completely. Trust but verify, always, the instant it’s my sphere. I will go behind someone’s back to check a story once it’s no longer just content I’m being generous toward. That might look like betrayal, like a violation of the very open-mindedness I just described. It isn’t a contradiction. It’s the same rule running in both directions: no verification required for things that don’t touch me, total verification required for things that do.
I extend the exact same logic to writers and filmmakers, and it’s not a coincidence that I got hooked on Derrida around the same time I figured this out about people. There is nothing outside the text. I don’t care what Hemingway’s inseam was or who he slept with. I don’t care about the backstory of the man who wrote that devil movie, or whether Woody Allen did the things people say he did. I’m not a court. I’m not assembling a case file on anyone’s soul. I’m responding to the thing in front of me—the work, the behavior, the sentence—not the lore behind it. Lore is somebody else’s hobby. I don’t research it. I’m decidedly not interested in your inseam, your backstory, your verified biography. Hand me the text. That’s the whole interface.
This is also, weirdly, where I land on spiritual warfare. When someone tells me they’re locked in literal combat with demons over DEI, or queerness, or whatever their front line is this week—I believe them. Not that the demons are real in some way I could verify, but that the war is real to them, and that a real war produces real behavior, and the behavior is the only part I actually have to deal with. I don’t need to know how the sausage was made to know I’m holding sausage. Witches hexing Donald Trump are, ironically, invoking a sevenfold backlash against themselves in both karmic and Christian frameworks—and whether that’s metaphysics or just nocebo, the dread of having done something you believe is genuinely dangerous curdling back on you, the math comes out the same either way. I don’t need the universe to be enchanted for the warning to be sound.
None of this is moral relativism, and I want to be clear about that before I get to the one belief that isn’t inconclusive at all. Suspending judgment about cosmology and metaphysics is not the same as suspending judgment about evil. When you read the Epstein files and find people apparently engaged in actual blood magic and sex magic and ritual sacrifice, I can be agnostic about what they thought they were doing—old gods worship, literal Baal, or just decadent people taking the piss out of anyone credulous enough to believe Illuminati lore—without being agnostic for one second about whether what they did was monstrous. The inconclusive stance covers belief. It doesn’t cover behavior. I have a pretty traditional, pretty Christian sense of what’s moral and what isn’t, and that doesn’t get fuzzy just because the metaphysics behind it does.
But even that has a radius, and the radius is the Serenity Prayer—the wisdom to know the difference. Children trafficked on the other side of the world is unambiguously evil and there is also, for me personally, sitting in Arlington, no horsepower behind my outrage about it. It’s just heat. Friction with nothing turning. I think part of what manipulation and hearts-and-minds campaigns are actually built to do is make you the least efficient engine possible—burn all your fuel on outrage you can’t apply anywhere, so you’ve got nothing left for the radius where your hands actually reach. That’s not numbness. The verdict on evil doesn’t soften with distance. But my obligation to spend myself on it does, and getting baited into wasting myself on things I can’t touch is just somebody else’s nudge succeeding on me, wearing a compassion mask instead of a policy mask.
Most of what crosses my feed simply doesn’t reach me, and I’ve come to think that’s not a flaw in my character, it’s just accurate accounting. I studied literature for most of my education, which means I spent years immersed in stuff that was openly fiction, and what I found out afterward, reading actual biographies and lives, is that real experience is stranger than the fiction ever was. I’ve had things happen to me that are coincidence-adjacent, magic-adjacent, completely unrepeatable and completely unprovable. Once, hiking through the lowlands outside Kathmandu toward a monastery, I had an International Herald Tribune folded in my back pocket, under a thick sweater, where nobody could’ve seen it. A Buddhist monk came up the trail behind me—I hadn’t noticed him approaching—and asked if he could borrow the newspaper once I was finished with it. There’s no ordinary way he could’ve known I had it. Maybe he’d seen it earlier somewhere I don’t remember. Maybe he didn’t. I can’t verify any of it and I don’t have full context and it isn’t science. It’s lore, my own lore, the same category I extend to everyone else’s channeling and remote viewing and visitations. I’m not telling you I met Buddha on the road. I’m telling you it occurred to me that I might have, and I never needed to resolve which one it was.
None of this makes me a guru, and I’d actively push back on that reading. I’m the opposite of a guru—a base-model human, feral, solitary, bovine-adjacent, degree and all. Losing the long-term episodic reel and the visual cortex that most people run on doesn’t make me enlightened, it just means I’m working off a stripped chassis, like one of those new bare-bones trucks with nothing loaded onto it that doesn’t have to be there. Not less than human. Not transcending anything. Just the basic model—half Irish, half Hungarian, exactly the kind of stock the old taxonomies would’ve filed under Untermensch and exactly as unbothered by their right to file me anywhere.
I keep a private ledger I’m not proud of, but I’d rather name it than hide it: coincidences get counted as God. Disappointments never get counted against him. I call the good ones godwinks, and I never built the matching word for the bad ones. It’s a rigged scoring system and I know it’s rigged while I’m running it.
Which brings me to the one place none of this—the curiosity, the suspended judgment, the inconclusiveness—actually applies.
Jesus doesn’t need to have existed at all for me to believe in him. He could be a campfire story stitched out of older virgin-birth myths. He could’ve been a man and nothing more. He could be a Nephilim, which is funny, because that would make him technically a fallen angel, which would make the whole thing Annunaki by another name. None of that moves me, and the harder anyone pushes to disprove it, the more it actually convinces me—because that much effort spent trying to talk me out of something looks exactly like someone trying to fool me, and that’s the one signal I do trust. I don’t want the holes Doubting Thomas wanted. I don’t need a vision, and I’m constitutionally incapable of having one anyway. I just believe, the way I believe nothing else in this entire essay.
I pray for the Holy Spirit. I pray for calm. I ask Mary to intercede. I’ve carried a St. Christopher medal on my keys my whole life. There’s a Mexico City black Christ in a red tunic over my front door. I’m a 32nd-degree Mason, which means I hold something like intention-based magic as plausible even though I’ve never witnessed a flicker of it firsthand—same inconclusive shrug I give everything else, except parked right next to the one belief that isn’t inconclusive at all.
I think sin is missing the mark, not a kill shot—a disappointment lobbed at God, not a crime that ends you. I think the world is energetic, probabilistic, more flexible the further you get from a crowd, because consensus reality might be a collaboration that gets thinner out past where anyone’s agreeing on it together. I think that’s probably my truest belief, if I had to bet: that we’re in a simulation, and that I’ll never be able to confirm it, and that this doesn’t bother me, because I don’t feel like an enhanced animal anyway. Not animal-plus. Not animal-plus-plus. Just a human animal, running the same unfalsifiable curiosities as every other animal that ever looked at the sky and made something up to explain it.
Trust falls aren’t really my move. I’ve spent my whole life trusting but verifying the second anything touches my actual sphere. The Church says you owe God an infinite series of them—let go, let God, all the way down, no verification, no holding back a piece of yourself to check the story later. That’s the one trust fall I’ve never done. Maybe 2026 is the year I do some 12-step meetings, which I’ve always quietly thought might be the truest church there is, and finally stop treating even him like everything else on this list.
Inconclusive about all of it. Just not about him.
