Journal – Trance Blackman

Here you’ll find my philosophical meanderings in the form of articles, essays, and occasional poetry. My interests and curiosities are broad, but the central focus remains the pursuit of what is authentic, real, and true.

Lux et veritas

Journal Entries / social systems (18 Posts)

Showing posts tagged “social systems”. Clear filter

The Reality We Inherited

15 August 2026 ~ 8 minute read

There is a peculiar exhaustion that comes from maintaining a reality some deeper part of you no longer believes. You can learn to live with the contradictions, explain away the inconsistencies, and keep moving through the machinery of everyday life, but the questions remain. Perhaps the greater discomfort isn’t discovering that something you believed was untrue. Perhaps it’s realizing how much of yourself you invested in believing it.

Cancer: The Story Beneath the Disease

15 August 2026 ~ 5 minute read

Perhaps the most difficult thing to reconcile when confronting illness, especially cancer, is the possibility that we have misunderstood not only disease, but ourselves. We have inherited countless ideas about what the body is, what it is capable of, what threatens it, and where its authority ultimately resides. Yet beneath those accumulated narratives is something quieter and considerably older: an intelligence that has accompanied us from the beginning, asking very little except that we stop long enough to remember it.

Living Systems, Extractive Systems: Beyond the Next Promise

01 August 2026 ~ 24 minute read

There comes a point, after enough observation and enough inward wrestling, when the appetite for grand explanations begins to soften. Not because the questions no longer matter, but because life has a way of revealing that many of our most pressing troubles do not yield to scale, speed, or certainty. They ask something quieter of us. They ask us to look more closely at the conditions we are creating, the assumptions we’ve inherited, and the kinds of systems — inwardly and outwardly — to which we’ve given our allegiance.

The Industrial Devolution

07 July 2026 (rev. 09 July 2026) ~ 9 minute read

Every era tells itself a story about progress. We inherit those stories long before we possess the discernment to question them, and, more often than not, spend much of our lives defending assumptions we never consciously chose. But every so often, something begins to unravel. A contradiction becomes too obvious to ignore, and the narratives that once seemed self-evident begin to reveal themselves as carefully maintained illusions.

Creating Meaningful Art

11 June 2026 ~ 7 minute read

Some creations seem to arrive through us rather than from us. We labor over them, shape them, refine them, and eventually release them into the world, yet their true significance remains unknown. A story, a song, a film, a conversation — each may carry something far greater than its creator intended. Meaning, after all, is not manufactured. It is discovered in the meeting place between what is offered and what is received.

Grand Visions, Ungrounded

06 June 2026 (rev. 12 June 2026) ~ 11 minute read

Most people never stop to consider how much energy, attention, labor, and capital disappear into ideas that never become reality. We celebrate ambition, scale, and grand visions, yet rarely ask what is sacrificed along the way, or what might have been built instead. Somewhere between the promise and the outcome, countless resources are consumed, while simpler, more immediate, and more human solutions remain largely overlooked.