Orientation Under Pressure: Notes on a Life Lived

1. Living Without Native Habitat Some people move through the world as if tuned to a slightly different frequency. Not higher, not superior—simply out of phase with the prevailing rhythm. Most systems are built for throughput and predictability; they reward completion more reliably than emergence. Rough novelty is expensive to process because it forces context-switching and interpretive effort in lives already over-scheduled.

This isn't malice. It's attention economics. Recognition requires bandwidth, and bandwidth is scarce. What looks like indifference is often cognitive triage.

Recognizing this keeps orientation free of resentment and focuses attention on the real task: shaping signals that can actually be received—or at least archived for later discovery.

Example: You present a rough but original idea and get polite silence; a polished incremental piece draws nods.
Counterweight: People are overloaded—novel frames demand scarce time they may not have.

1. Entropy, Illness, and the Shape of Time Systems decay by default. In thermodynamics, this is the second law. In human life, suffering functions as entropy: illness, poverty, grief, political instability, financial strain, bureaucracy, exhaustion—catastrophe or attrition, the effect is similar: direction dissolves if unattended.

Viktor Frankl, writing from Auschwitz, identified meaning-making as the ultimate human freedom under constraint. What he didn't say—what camp survivors rarely had luxury to say—is that meaning-making requires margin. Time. Cognitive space. The ability to think past tomorrow.

In my case, that pressure has taken the form of chronic illness and recurring chemo cycles. A year and a half ago I was given roughly a year to live. That deadline has already passed.

Chemo—like any condition that fractures time—turns productivity into a punctuated rhythm: windows of clarity, then enforced repair. The disability justice community calls this "crip time"—time that refuses the fiction of continuity, time that bends around bodies instead of demanding bodies bend around it. Calendars assume continuity; bodies impose cycles.

The practical question becomes: Can orientation survive interruption?

I continue—not as performance, but as a simple choice to maintain a vector when the horizon collapses. Some days that vector is a single paragraph. Other days, a proof sketch or a cleaned-up function. The metric isn't volume. It's non-collapse.

Example: On low days, reading a paragraph feels uphill; on clear days, the mind lunges for the unfinished proof, tool, or paragraph.
Counterweight: From the outside, oscillation is invisible—shared calendars flatten cycles into checkboxes.