Journal – Page 129 – 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

While We’re Still Here

04 September 2026 ~ 8 minute read

Perhaps the first thing worth questioning is not what we have been told about the world, but why we have been taught to fear it in the first place. So much of what passes for certainty seems to depend upon our willingness to accept the premise before we ever examine it, and so much of what follows becomes inevitable only because we have agreed, consciously or otherwise, that it must be. Somewhere beneath all of it remains a simpler possibility: that we have far more agency than we’ve been led to believe, and that the story is not yet finished.

Causation

03 September 2026 ~ 8 minute read

At some point, we have to stop asking what the world expects of us and start asking what we are actually here to do. Not in some grand or abstract sense, but right here, in the middle of whatever is presently unfolding. Beneath the noise, beneath the accumulated assumptions and inherited stories, there remains a quieter position from which we can see, choose, and move differently. Perhaps that is where causation begins.

The Body Only Heals: Removing the Blindfolds of Modern Medicine

23 August 2026 ~ 3 minute read

What if much of what we’ve been taught about health, illness, and the human body is not merely incomplete, but built upon assumptions we’ve rarely been encouraged to question? At some point, outsourcing our understanding of ourselves becomes its own kind of dependency. There is another possibility: becoming curious again, investigating what we think we know, and learning to trust the extraordinary intelligence of the organism we inhabit.

The Spectator and the Builder

22 August 2026 ~ 3 minute read

There are moments when another person’s choices expose something in us that we would rather not examine. Their willingness to risk, commit, uproot, rebuild, and begin again can become an uncomfortable mirror — not because we should imitate them, but because their movement reminds us of where we have remained still.

Conditionality

22 August 2026 ~ 4 minute read

How much of what we believe must happen before we can move forward was ever truly ours to begin with? We inherit assumptions, expectations, fears, priorities, and definitions of success, then quietly build conditions around them. When this, then that. When I have enough. When I’m ready. When circumstances change. When someone approves. Eventually, these conditions cease to look like conditions at all. They begin to look like identity.

Backwash

21 August 2026 ~ 3 minute read

There is always a point when the wave begins to recede. The spectacle loses some of its glamour, the promises become harder to sustain, and what was presented as inevitable begins to look merely excessive. What remains afterward is often more useful than the frenzy that carried it in, but the retreat also exposes what the flood obscured: the interests behind it, the costs absorbed along the way, and how readily we can be persuaded to surrender our attention, judgment, and agency to whatever arrives next.