When I was younger, you would always hear the saying “there’s two sides to every story.” But as I got older, I started hearing a different version: “there’s three sides to every story; your side, their side, and the truth.” And that got me thinking. Ironically, how could that even be true? So I did what I usually do whenever one of these ideas catches me; I started writing, working through it with myself.

What I realized is that the truth, most times, is not going to be comfortable. You may not like it. But it is reality. And yet somehow, there will always be people who seem to live in something else entirely.

I’m going to give you some numbers and I’m not going to tell you what to think. I’ll leave that to your own lived experience. But I want you to sit with them.

Across ten major pollsters, Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen from roughly 47-49% at the start of his term to approximately 38-39% by May 2026. Among women, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, college-educated voters across racial lines, and younger voters, the movement has been consistently negative. The one group where his numbers have held is white men without a college degree, and even there, they have not grown. The consensus across the data is not close. And yet, if you walked outside right now and talked to enough people, you would find someone ready to tell you the polls are rigged, the methodology is flawed, the media is lying. That person is not engaging with the data. They are protecting a conclusion they already reached.

There will always be people who find a way to say things are better than they appear. That the foreign policy is strong. That immigration is handled. That safety has improved. That the sacrifices are worth it. But the numbers say something different. Nothing he has done has made reality better for most people, and the data bears that out consistently.

The harder question is why. It would be easy to write people off as uninformed or willfully ignorant, but that is not the full picture. The truth is that belief and identity are tied together in ways most of us do not even recognize. When data challenges what someone believes, it is not just an intellectual disagreement. It feels like an attack on who they are, where they come from, what they have invested in. So the defense mechanism kicks in. You do not reject the data because you examined it and found it lacking. You reject it because accepting it would require you to become someone different. That is not a character flaw unique to one side of anything. That is a human problem. And understanding that is actually the first step toward having a real conversation with someone who sees the world differently than you do.

I say all of this because there have been moments throughout my life, in middle school, high school, undergrad, where something would happen and my version of events would not match someone else’s. A third person would come along with what they saw. Suddenly you have three accounts of the same moment and you have to figure out what actually happened. Did that ball hit the line? Did your foot step outside the box? We were asking those questions at recess playing foursquare and we are still asking versions of them now.

We are living in a moment where finding the actual truth has never been harder. One of the first essays I wrote on this Substack was about anti-intellectualism, and coming back to this topic now feels like a full circle moment. The trend away from knowledge has become the foundation some people build their entire reality on. They are not willing to look at raw data and let it say what it says. Instead they work backward, starting from a conclusion and searching for anything that confirms it. But that is not how knowledge works. The scientific method does not ask you to prove yourself right. It asks you to test every possible way you could be wrong, and if your hypothesis survives that, then you have something.

The reason this matters is not abstract. A society that cannot agree on a shared foundation of truth cannot solve anything. You cannot fix a problem you will not acknowledge exists. You cannot build policy around data nobody trusts. You cannot have a real conversation with someone who has decided in advance that any evidence against their position is a conspiracy. We have watched what that produces. Delayed responses to crises. Erosion of institutions. A political culture where the loudest voice wins regardless of whether it is telling the truth. At some point the cost of living in a false reality stops being a personal choice and starts becoming everyone’s problem.

I believe if we started applying a different standard to how we engage with our politics, our relationships, our everyday lives, we might find more common ground. Not because we will always agree, but because we will be standing on the same foundation. Personal experience will always vary from person to person. But something is always true. And I would encourage you to keep searching for it.

Talk Soon,

Tyreke

Per usual, if I share quantitative facts or analysis I will try my best to provide you with sources and context. it is not only important that you know what you are reading, but who it is coming from as well.

Sources & Methodology Notes

The polling data referenced in this piece is drawn from the following organizations. All are nonpartisan or jointly directed by Democratic and Republican firms, and all publish their methodology and sample sizes publicly.

Fox News Poll -- National survey conducted May 15-18, 2026, among 1,002 registered voters under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R). Full demographic and intersectional crosstabs available.
https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2026/05/fox_may-15-18-2026_national_cross-tabs_may-28-release.pdf

Pew Research Center -- National survey of 5,103 U.S. adults conducted April 20-26, 2026, via the American Trends Panel. Margin of error ±1.6 points. Includes oversamples of Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian adults for more precise subgroup estimates.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/05/01/trump-loses-ground-on-several-personal-traits-as-approval-rating-slips/

Pew Research Center -- National survey of 8,512 U.S. adults conducted January 20-26, 2026. One-year-in review of second term approval and confidence measures.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/01/29/confidence-in-trump-dips-and-fewer-now-say-they-support-his-policies-and-plans/

Reuters/Ipsos -- National survey of 4,531 adults conducted June 3-8, 2026, using the probability-based KnowledgePanel. Data weighted by gender, age, race, education, income, 2024 vote choice, and party identification.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/reutersipsos-june-2026-poll

Gallup -- National telephone survey of 1,321 adults conducted November 3-25, 2025. Margin of error ±3 points. Final presidential approval tracking before Gallup discontinued the series in February 2026.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-drops-new-second-term-low.aspx

Economist/YouGov -- National survey of 1,604 U.S. adult citizens conducted May 29-June 1, 2026. Margin of error ±3.5 points. Includes weekly gender subgroup tracking.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-all-time-low-with-men-12034011

Aggregated Polling Tracker -- Monthly averages compiled from Gallup, Reuters/Ipsos, YouGov, Quinnipiac, and Morning Consult rolling averages. Partisan breakdown sourced from Gallup monthly crosstabs.
https://uspollingdata.com/polls/trump-approval/

Disclaimers

On methodology: Individual poll results vary based on sample size, fielding dates, question wording, and whether the sample is registered voters or all adults. Figures cited in my writing reflect the consistent directional trend across pollsters, not any single survey in isolation.

On intersectional data: Three-way demographic crosstabs; breaking respondents down simultaneously by race, gender, and education; are only published in limited form due to sample size constraints. The most complete intersectional data available publicly comes from Fox News Poll releases. Most pollsters publish single-variable or two-variable breakdowns only.

On Gallup: Gallup, which had tracked presidential approval continuously since Franklin Roosevelt, announced in February 2026 that it would discontinue presidential approval polling. The organization cited an evolution in research focus. Gallup’s last recorded approval rating for President Trump was 36% approve, 59% disapprove, measured December 1-15, 2025. The decision to end the series came after the Trump administration had publicly pressured or threatened legal action against several polling organizations it deemed unfavorable. You should weigh that context as you see fit.

On interpretation: The numbers cited reflect job approval, not vote intention, favorability, or issue-specific ratings, which can differ. Approval ratings measure how respondents evaluate a president’s performance, not whether they would vote for or against them

My friend drove my car behind the U-Haul while I led the way. On the road I found myself calling friends, laughing, sharing the moment with people I wanted alongside me for it even if they weren’t physically there. The music I played was the kind you scream and smile to at the same time. I was driving toward something and I knew it.

When I arrived in Washington, it became very apparent that America is also celebrating its own version of independence. Two hundred and fifty years of the nation we call home. It wasn’t subtle either. Vendors on the street were selling 250th anniversary merch. Walmart wasn’t stocking the usual Fourth of July section, it was something bigger. Museums had special exhibits, special events, all centered on this milestone. And somewhere in the middle of taking all of that in, it clicked. We were both doing the same thing right now. America and me. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of people decided they wanted to separate from a king they had outgrown, because they knew they could not continue to grow the way they needed to under his rule. I had just packed my whole life into a truck and driven it somewhere new for the exact same reason.

That framing stuck with me.

Because I think what I’ve learned from moving post-grad is that true independence is not about being on your own financially or geographically. It’s about becoming autonomous enough that you can actually choose who is in your life, rather than keeping people simply because you always have. It’s the freedom to let go.

During my last semester, I found myself constantly reaching out, trying to schedule a lunch or a coffee before we scattered. There was something desperate in it, looking back. I was holding on to proximity as a substitute for intention.

Now I’m somewhere new and the proximity is gone. What’s left is choice.

That clarity hit me suddenly, not gradually. I started thinking about where I am in life, how ambitious I am, what I’m actually chasing, and I looked around at some of the people from undergrad and realized the energy didn’t match. I don’t say that with any anger. But I’ve learned that if you want to keep your drive, you have to be around people who have it too. You have to be around people who are at least trying to face their fears, who are brave enough to move toward something even when they’re uncertain. And beyond that, you have to be around people who have some sense of purpose. I know people say you don’t have to have it all figured out, and maybe that’s true, but I think you have to have something. A direction. A plan to get started. Because without that you’re just wandering, and I can’t wander with you anymore.

And honestly? When I realized that, I wasn’t sad. I was relieved. Excited even. I don’t have to drag people along anymore, trying to spark interest in life and what’s out there to explore. Some people are meant to be in your life for a season, and for a long time I was trying to force people into a season they didn’t belong in, holding onto an idea of a friendship rather than the reality of it.

I’ve been thinking about it like cleaning up your Instagram follows. You sit there and ask yourself: do I actually want this person in my feed, or am I following them out of habit? There are people where the honest answer is that was a good season, and it’s over. No anger. No resentment. Just honesty.

America did not leave the United Kingdom because the relationship was evil. It left because it had grown into something the old arrangement could no longer hold. That’s not a betrayal. That’s just what growth looks like.

So I sit here, during the 250th anniversary of this country’s independence, in a city I just moved to, asking myself who gets to come with me into this next season. Who do I want to actively engage with. Who deserves access to me, and who do I want access to in return. These are questions I now have the space and the independence to actually answer honestly.

I’m glad to say the people I’ve reached out to are people I genuinely want in my life. And the ones I haven’t? That’s okay. They have the same choice I do.

That’s the thing about independence. It goes both ways.

And you don’t have to wait for a graduation or a cross-country move to claim yours. It just happened that way for me. But the question I’ve been sitting with, who actually belongs in this next season of my life, that’s a question you can ask yourself today, wherever you are. If you already know the answer, maybe it’s time to act on it.

Talk soon,

Tyreke

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P.S.

I took a couple of weeks from writing while going through graduation and the move/settling in, and I have received so many messages from people asking when the next article was coming out. And that means so much more to me than you guys could ever know. Thank you for the encouragement to keep writing, engaging and reading. Much love.

Some people’s discipline only works in one direction.

There is a difference between someone who has developed drive and someone who has found a single domain where discipline feels natural, then let that domain represent their entire character. The swimmer who is in the pool before sunrise every morning but shuts down when networking feels uncomfortable. The student with a 3.9 who cannot engage in a conversation about anything outside their major. The person who is deeply committed to their craft but falls apart when life asks them to do something they did not sign up for.

That is not drive. That is a crutch that looks like drive from a distance.

Real drive is transferable. It shows up in contexts you did not choose, problems you did not want, and situations where there is no finish line and no one tracking your splits. It is the difference between discipline that travels and discipline that only works when the conditions are right. And the gap between those two things is wider than most people want to admit.

Here is what single-domain discipline often looks like in practice. Someone finds the thing they are good at, or even just something that not many other people do, and they pour themselves into it. Over time it becomes their identity. Their sense of self-worth gets tied to that one area of competency. And because they are genuinely disciplined within that domain, they start to treat it as evidence of a broader character trait. The swimming, the art, the niche skill becomes a stand-in for grit itself. They are not lying to themselves exactly. They are just making an assumption that has never been tested.

The problem shows up when life asks for something different.

I have been part of seven organizations over four years. Led in three. Helped build systems in others. None of that was the same skill. Some of it was uncomfortable in ways I did not expect. There were nights I wanted to give up positions I had worked for, not because the work was hard but because it stopped feeling worth it. There were early mornings that had nothing to do with ambition and everything to do with obligation. Getting through that had nothing to do with any single thing I was good at. It required the ability to redirect, to find motivation in a context that was not giving me much back, to show up for something even when the version of me that signed up for it felt like a stranger.

That is what I mean by transferable drive. It is not about doing more. It is about being able to bring the same underlying discipline to something unfamiliar, something harder, something that offers no immediate reward and no community of people doing it alongside you.

The test I would offer is simple: take away the one thing someone is known for being disciplined about. Does the drive survive, or does it go with it?

If you removed the pool, would the swimmer still find a way to show up for something hard and unglamorous? If you removed the GPA, would the student still engage seriously with ideas that made them uncomfortable? If you took away the thing that earns them praise and recognition, would they still do the work?

For some people the answer is yes. Their drive is the underlying engine, not the specific thing it is pointed at. Change the context and they adapt. Give them a problem they have never seen and they lean in rather than retreat.

For others, the channel is everything. And when you talk to them long enough, or watch them closely enough, you start to see the ceiling. The conversation changes when it moves outside their area. The energy drops when the task is not one they chose. They are not lazy, they are just operating on a kind of discipline that was never built to generalize.

The honest truth is that life will eventually ask you to operate outside the channel you are comfortable in. Job markets do not care about your niche. Relationships do not reward you for the thing you are already good at. Leadership does not wait for you to feel ready or for the problem to fit your skill set. The uncomfortable moments, the ones where you have no existing competency to fall back on, are where drive either proves itself or does not.

This is not an argument against depth or specialization. Building serious discipline in even one domain is hard and most people never do it. There is real value in mastery and anyone who has developed it deserves credit. But there is a ceiling on what single-domain discipline gets you, and the people who break through that ceiling are usually the ones who figured out that their drive was never really about the specific thing they were doing. It was about how they approached difficulty itself.

That realization is not automatic. For some people it takes a crisis, a failure, a moment where the thing they built their identity around gets taken away or stops working. For others it comes from deliberately putting themselves in situations where their existing strengths do not apply, where they have to figure it out from scratch.

If you are still in school, that is the move. Find something that your current competencies do not prepare you for and do it anyway. Not to add a line to your resume but to find out whether your drive travels.

Because eventually, it will have to.

Congrats to the class of 2026. We made it.

Talk soon,

Tyreke

The Strait of Hormuz has been opened, closed, partially opened, and closed again. The leadership of Iran has been killed. A ceasefire is in place, though it flared again this morning, and its footing feels anything but certain. Gas prices have reached some of the highest of my lifetime.

Meanwhile: Vladimir Putin continues his “special military operation” in Ukraine. Israel, lead by Benjamin Netanyahu continues what he calls the eradication of Hamas in Gaza, while he eliminates a population. And China has spent as long as I have been alive preparing to move on Taiwan, and the preparations, lately, look less like preparation and more like posture.

War is everywhere. It has been since the biblical ages. But what concerns me more than the wars we see on the news is how deeply war has embedded itself into the language of everyday life, into the way we talk to each other, about each other, and about ourselves.

If you know me, you know I love Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve watched the whole series three times and I’m working through my fourth right now. One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever doctors are discussing how to overcome a medical challenge, the language is military. We are “battling” cancer. We “fight” disease. We “lose” someone, as though they surrendered. The body becomes a battlefield. And it’s not just medicine, it’s everything. Our mental health becomes a “battle.” Our careers become a “grind.” Even our relationships become something we have to “work at” and “fight for.” I tried to write this paragraph without any of that language and found myself reaching for a thesaurus just to describe sitting at a desk.

This is not accidental. It reflects something real about how we relate to difficulty: we reach for the vocabulary of conflict because it makes things feel appropriately large. It makes us feel heard. For anyone born after September 11, 2001, this is the only world we have ever known. Conflict is the water we swim in.

And I think it is hurting us in ways we don’t fully see yet.

Here is the part I want to be honest about. In the past year, I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and PTSD. I’ve seen what carrying heavy things does, not just to the mind, but to the body. That isn’t just personal experience. The research bears it out. People living with PTSD face significantly increased rates of heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity; conditions we typically associate with lifestyle, not with what we carry inside us. Depression and anxiety together increase the risk of heart disease by nearly three times compared to those without either condition. The body keeps the score, as they say, and the score is written in cardiovascular disease and chronic pain and a shorter life.

Now scale that up.

In populations living in active conflict zones, studies estimate that roughly one in four people develops clinical depression and nearly one in three develops PTSD. The World Health Organization has found that in emergencies, rates of severe mental disorder rise above baseline, and that rates of mood and anxiety disorders may climb by five to ten percentage points above where they started. Research also suggests this is not just a first-generation problem: trauma transmits. Through maternal stress, through parenting, through the culture we build inside crisis, the weight gets handed down.

We are not a nation at war in the way Beirut is at war. But we have not known a moment of collective peace in a generation. We experienced the psychic rupture of September 11th, then two decades of military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq, then a global pandemic, then an economy that felt like a fight to survive, and now, new wars, new fronts, and the same exhaustion.

I would argue that what we are experiencing collectively is not entirely unlike what soldiers come home carrying. A chronic low-grade state of alarm. An inability to locate the center. A tendency to frame every disagreement as a battle to be won rather than a problem to be solved. We have built a society that cannot self-correct because it cannot stop long enough to self-reflect.

Sixty days is up. The president says the war is over. But the language stays. The posture stays. The ask for a $1.5 trillion defense budget stays. And within ourselves, the wars we declare on our bodies, our minds, and each other stay too.

I don’t have a clean answer to why humanity returns to conflict again and again. But I think the first step is noticing it, in the headlines, yes, but also in how we talk about a cancer diagnosis, a hard semester, a bad week. Notice where you have internalized war. And then ask yourself what it might feel like to put it down.

Talk soon,

Tyreke

https://www.nytimes.com/article/iran-war-trump-us-oil-hormuz-key-dates-events.html

Pacella, M. L., Hruska, B., & Delahanty, D. L. (2013). The physical health consequences of PTSD and PTSD symptoms. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 27(1), 33–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2012.08.004

Gaspersz, R. et al. (2014). Excess risk of chronic physical conditions associated with depression and anxiety. BMC Psychiatry. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3902063/

Hoppen, T. H. et al. (2022). Prevalence of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress in war- and conflict-afflicted areas. Frontiers in Psychiatry. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9524230/

Aukst-Margetić, B. et al. (2025). War and mental health: Croatian experience. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11860831/

For a group of college dudes on a Saturday afternoon, that’s a big question. There was a pause. And then, one by one, the answer was pretty much the same across the board; never. Unless it got physical. Never.

That answer has stayed with me.

What does it mean to sacrifice? I’ve been asking myself this a lot lately, and asking variations of it to the people around me. Because everywhere I look, someone is sacrificing something.

I am a Christian, and at the center of my faith is the belief that God sacrificed His one and only son for the absolution of our sins. The ultimate sacrifice. Not for personal gain. Not for recognition. For love, and for a purpose far greater than anything any of us will ever be called to give. Nothing we could ever sacrifice will come close to that. And maybe that’s part of why some people choose not to sacrifice at all. If it can’t be ultimate, why bother?

But sacrifice doesn’t wear a cape most of the time. Most of the time it looks a lot smaller than dying on a cross or taking a bullet, which, just this past weekend, we watched Secret Service agents do quite literally at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, putting themselves between an armed man and the people they were sworn to protect. That kind of sacrifice is visible. Honored. Easy to name.

The kind I’m thinking about is harder to name. It goes by a simpler phrase: be the bigger person.

I’ve been told to be the bigger person more times than I can count over the past year and a half. And every single time I heard it, it felt like a little stab in the chest.

Not because the advice was wrong. But because of what it was asking me to absorb.

I won’t give you every detail of what I’ve been through. But I’ll say this: I’ve been lied about, humiliated, and made to feel like a problem for simply existing in spaces I had every right to be in. I’ve been on the receiving end of things that left marks. And through all of it, all of it, I was told to be the bigger person.

So I took that road. I kept my head down. I chose restraint over reaction, again and again. And I want to be honest with you: it was exhausting. There were moments where I did not want to be the bigger person. I wanted to crash out. To say exactly what I felt, do exactly what felt justified, and let the chips fall.

I didn’t. But I wanted to.

Which is why I asked my friends that question. When is it appropriate to stop?

And when they all said never, I didn’t push back. But I didn’t fully accept it either. Because “never” doesn’t account for the weight of it. It doesn’t account for what it costs to keep going, keep swallowing, keep choosing the high road when the high road has potholes and no guardrails and nobody watching.

I’ve sat with this for a while now. And the word I keep landing on is integrity.

I’m not sure I can fully articulate the connection yet; and I want to be honest about that, because it matters to say when you don’t have a clean answer. But when I ask myself why I kept being the bigger person, why I didn’t let myself crash out, the answer that surfaces isn’t because it was the right strategy or because it would pay off eventually. It’s something simpler and harder than that. It’s: I couldn’t do otherwise and still be who I’m trying to be.

That’s integrity, I think. Not as a performance. Not as a reputation management tool. But as a kind of private accountability to yourself, the question of whether you can move through the world in a way that, when you’re alone and the noise dies down, you can live with.

Being the bigger person, at its hardest, is a sacrifice of what feels justified. You give up the equal reaction. You give up what you believe you’re owed. You hand over something real, with no guarantee of return, because of who you want to be on the other side of it.

That is not a small thing. It is not nothing. It costs something.

But here’s where I want to leave you, and I mean this with love, because this piece isn’t just about me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my own exhaustion in this. About what it took to hold the line. And somewhere in that reflection, a question started forming that made me uncomfortable.

What about the people who have had to be the bigger person because of me?

Not in this situation, but in others. The friend I was cold to without explanation. The person I dismissed without really hearing. The moment I chose my pride over the relationship. Somewhere out there, someone absorbed something I did and made the decision to let it go. To hold their tongue. To take the high road. And they carried that weight without me ever knowing the cost.

We talk about sacrifice like it’s something noble people choose to do. But sometimes sacrifice is something we force other people into.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with, not as an accusation, but as an invitation:

Is there someone in your life right now who is exhausted from being the bigger person with you?

And if so, what are you going to do about it?

Talk Soon,
Tyreke

That applies to your personality, your politics, your life. You could spend your entire career in finance and decide tomorrow that you want to be a DJ. Would you be good at it? Would you make the most money? Probably not. But you can do it. Because you are under no obligation to remain the same person you were five minutes ago.

Our lives are a sum of patterns. What we eat, what we say, our daily schedules. And sometimes those patterns get so ingrained in our minds that we forget it is okay to deviate from them. For some people the need for pattern is so strong that it becomes clinical. But for others it is as simple as: I have done it this way my entire life, so why would I change now?

So that is the question I have. Why not change?

Being in a place where you are uncomfortable means being in a place where you are forced to change. That is where growth occurs.

Let me bring it down to a real example. Every single week, for as long as you can remember, you go to the grocery store and buy the same things. You are used to it. You are familiar with it. It takes the guessing out of it. Now imagine the next time you went, you decided to grab something different. Cook something different. And you found a new meal, a new style of food, a food from a new culture, and all of a sudden your entire palette changes. Nothing dramatic happened. You just decided not to default. And that small decision opened a door you did not even know was there.

That is how change usually works. It rarely announces itself. It starts small, and then one day you look up and realize you are not who you were.

Now look at it through the lens of politics. Just because your parents and grandparents always voted one way does not mean that you have to. Just because YOU voted one way does not mean that you have to again. With new evidence, you are allowed to change. And I think people get scared of that. There is something about changing your political mind that feels like a betrayal. Of your family, your community, your past self. But that is not what it is. Updating your beliefs when you encounter new information is not weakness. It is exactly what an honest, thinking person is supposed to do. The alternative is holding a position not because you believe in it, but because you once did. And that is not conviction. That is just stubbornness dressed up as loyalty.

Over the past year I have been in so many situations where I was forced to adapt. Where things did not go as planned. Where I was thrown into uncertainty. Where people I trusted did not show up the way I expected, and situations I had prepared for fell apart in ways I could not have anticipated. And because of those moments my perspective shifted. On a lot of things. On a lot of people. On life itself. It changed, and that was scary. There is a specific kind of discomfort that comes with realizing the version of yourself you have been operating as no longer fits. Like a coat you have worn for years that suddenly feels wrong on your shoulders. You can keep wearing it. A lot of people do. But I chose to put it down.

And I am glad I did.

I am able to look back now and realize I grew because of it. And I can look at the people who stayed in the same places and see that they have not. Same conversations. Same complaints. Same patterns, same reactions, same ceiling. And the hardest part about watching that is that you cannot say anything. You cannot tell someone they are stuck. People do not receive that. They have to feel it themselves, and some people never do. Some people will spend their entire lives orbiting the same version of themselves and call it consistency. And maybe for them it is. But there is a difference between being consistent and being stagnant, and that line is worth knowing.

That is not a judgment. It is just an observation. Growth requires friction. And not everyone is ready to sit in that friction long enough to come out different on the other side. Some people avoid discomfort so well that they have built an entire life designed around never feeling it. And it works, until it does not. Until something forces their hand. Until the world changes around them and they have no idea who they are outside of the version of themselves they never questioned..

Have they changed? Have they grown? If not, why? If so, how?

When you look at your life through this lens, when you force yourself to be uncomfortable, you have the chance to learn something about yourself that you may have never seen before. You find out what you actually believe when the structure around those beliefs is gone. You find out who you actually are when the patterns that defined you are disrupted. And sometimes what you find surprises you. Sometimes it does not. But either way, you are more honest with yourself than you were before.

So where does this leave us? Be willing to accept change. Be willing to see something different. Stay open. And if you are not, maybe ask yourself why.

Talk Soon,

Tyreke

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending an award ceremony celebrating members of my senior class who were recognized as distinguished in service and scholarship. We sat together, waited for names to be called, and at one point the Men’s Glee Club led us in “Old Miami.” Something about singing your alma mater in a room full of people you’ve grown alongside hits differently when you know it’s one of the last times.

But what struck me most wasn’t the awards. It was the room itself.

Almost everyone receiving recognition that afternoon had a personal relationship with someone else who was also being called up. It felt less like a formal ceremony and more like a reunion, a gathering of people who had, over four years, quietly found each other. People who understood the value of showing up. People who, when they heard a call to serve, didn’t pause to weigh the inconvenience. They just went.

I sat there looking around and felt something I can only describe as gratitude. Not just for the friendships, but for what those friendships had required of me.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the people you surround yourself with are not just companions. They are a standard. Whether you realize it or not, the people closest to you set the bar for what feels normal. If the people around you are complacent, complacency starts to feel comfortable. If they’re restless in the best way, always asking what more can be done, always looking for the gap to fill, that restlessness becomes your baseline too.

The people in that room yesterday are the kind who look at their community and ask what can we do to make this better? Not because someone told them to. Not because there was a grade attached. But because they genuinely believe that someone has to, and they’d rather it be them.

Some people might call that overachieving. I call it a choice.

And it is a choice, one that gets made quietly, repeatedly, often without applause. It’s the choice to put down the controller, get off the couch, and do something that matters beyond your own comfort. That’s not a judgment on anyone’s downtime. Rest is real and rest is necessary. But there is a difference between rest and retreat. Between recharging and simply disappearing into distraction because the world outside your door asks something of you.

The world does ask something of you. It always has.

This week is National Volunteer Week. And I’d be willing to bet that many of the people in that ceremony hall yesterday will spend some part of this week in the community, looking for somewhere to show up, finding a way to be useful. Not because of the week on the calendar. Because that’s just who they are.

I want to be honest about something: I didn’t always understand why intentional community-building mattered. Early in college, I thought the people you ended up around were mostly circumstantial: your roommate, your classmates, whoever sat near you at orientation. But over time I’ve seen how much agency we actually have in this. You can drift into your circle, or you can build it with intention. You can stay in the rooms that are easy and comfortable, or you can find your way into rooms where people are doing something, building something, trying to leave a place better than they found it.

The latter changes you. Not overnight, but steadily. You start measuring yourself differently. You start asking different questions. You get around people who serve and suddenly service stops feeling extraordinary. It just starts feeling like what you do.

So here’s what I want to leave you with, and I mean this genuinely:

Look around at the people closest to you. Not to judge them, but to ask yourself honestly what standard they set for your life. Are they calling you upward? Are you calling them upward? Is there a shared sense that there’s work to be done and you’re all here to do it?

And if you’ve been on the sidelines, if you’ve been meaning to get involved, to volunteer, to show up somewhere and offer what you have, this is a good week to start. Not because it’s a designated week on the calendar, but because there is genuinely no better time than right now to decide what kind of person you want to be and who you want to be surrounded by.

You are who you hang around. Choose accordingly.

Talk soon,

Tyreke

I was watching Nuremberg this week, the film about the trials of the Nazi officers after World War II, when someone on screen said: “Just because a man is your ally, doesn’t mean he’s on your side.”

I paused it. Sat with it. And I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since.

Part of why it landed is because of the week we’re having. NATO has been all over the news. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said plainly that the allies “were tested, and they failed the test.” President Trump posted on Truth Social that “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them, and they won’t be there if we need them again.” You can agree or disagree with the politics. That’s not what caught me. What caught me is the feeling underneath it, the specific disappointment of counting on someone and watching them offer words instead of weight. Housing troops wasn’t enough. Letting missions take off from their runways wasn’t enough. Taking in the wounded wasn’t enough. At some point support that never costs the supporter anything stops feeling like support at all.

And imagine how that sits. Imagine Trump finding out Macron was having tea with the Ayatollah every night. Would you still call that an ally? The word starts to bend under the weight of the question.

Because allies are everywhere. Workplaces, organizations, friend groups, families. And once you start paying attention, you notice they’re not all the same kind.

Some people are what I’d call all-in allies. When you move, they move. When it costs them something, they pay it. They don’t disappear when the room gets harder.

And then there’s the other kind, permeable allies. Warm when you’re in front of them. Quiet when you’re not. Supportive in private, strategically sympathetic in public. They’re not lying, exactly. They just want to keep their options open. They’d rather be liked by everyone in the room than stand next to you when standing next to you has a price. Even if it means cozying up to people who consider you their “enemy” .

Most people, if I’m honest, are the second kind. And most of them don’t know it about themselves.

Which brings me to the part I’ve been avoiding writing.

I have those people in my life. Not hypothetically. Right now. People I work with, people I care about, people who have been genuinely good to me — and who I also know, somewhere underneath, would go quiet if I ever became inconvenient to be associated with. It’s the adult version of that high school question that never really goes away: is this person actually my friend?

I don’t have a clean answer for what to do with that. I’ve gone back and forth. Cut them off? That feels dramatic, and it punishes people for being human. Accept the terms and stop expecting more? That works until the day you need more and remember why you were hoping. What I’ve landed on, at least for now, is something smaller: stop calling them the wrong thing. A permeable ally isn’t an enemy. But he isn’t on your side either. And mistaking one for the other is how you end up hurt in a way you didn’t see coming.

That’s the warning in the Nuremberg line, I think. Not that allies betray you. That the word ally is doing more work than it should. It describes a posture, not a loyalty. And the gap between those two things is where most of the real disappointments in a life get made.

So this isn’t an argument. It’s a note to myself, mostly. Be grateful for the all-in ones, they are rarer than the word suggests. Be clear-eyed about the rest. And stop being surprised when someone who called themselves an ally turns out to have only ever been standing near you, not with you.

Choose wisely isn’t quite right.

See clearly.

Talk soon,

Tyreke

“What a privilege it is to feel pressure to do better.”

I saw that on Instagram the other day.

“I can’t complain about having too much on my plate when the goal was to eat.”

Something else I saw on social media, same day.

Both of them stopped me. Because together they raised a question I haven’t been able to put down: why do some people work so hard, and why do others seem unable to shake the spirit of laziness?

There are so many factors that shape what drives a person. What motivates them. What makes you get up in the morning and decide to do. And on the flip side, why do some people seem content to just sit, scroll, play video games, and coast?

Throughout my college experience, I’ve been in enough rooms to see the full range, I mean I’ve lived with 9 different people in the past 4 years. I’ve spent time with the overachiever: honors student, five orgs, exec board in three of them. And I’ve spent time with the guy who smokes weed and plays video games all day, yet genuinely believes he’s going to be the next Jordan Belfort working at a Big 4. Here we are, all in the same institution of higher education, all walking across the same stage at graduation, but two completely different experiences. Why?

Pressure.

It does one of two things. It motivates you, or it paralyzes you.

I can almost guarantee that both of them felt pressure to come to college. For our would-be financial analyst, maybe it was simple: mom and dad went, it’s just what you do. You’re going to college, that’s how you get a good job. For our overachiever, maybe the pressure came from the opposite direction. No one in the family had gone before, and their parents needed them to change the trajectory. Same source. Completely different outcomes.

For one, the pressure was just to get there. For the other, the pressure was to get there and do more.

Here’s why: once they arrived, the pressure shifted. For the first, the original pressure was satisfied. He did what was expected. Now he coasts. C’s get degrees, he says. The pressure is gone, and so is the drive.

For the other, arriving only raised the stakes. The pressure didn’t disappear, it evolved. Now it’s peers, society, culture, family legacy. The weight of being the first. The need to be excellent, to be more. But how long can anyone sustain that?

You end up in one of two places. A person full of potential, burnt out, unable to use it. Or a person full of potential who never had to, because no one pushed them to.

A motivator. A paralyzer. Two faces of the same thing.

So how do we balance it? What does that actually look like?

The burnt-out person wanted to eat. Now there’s too much on their plate. The other wanted food but never moved toward it.

I’ve lived this firsthand.

There was a point in my college career where I was holding three significant positions at the same time. I was on the executive board of my fraternity chapter, serving on the IFC board, and holding a position in student government. On top of all of that, there was an expectation, one I shared, that I was going to run for a bigger position, that historically, I wouldn’t have won.. That was the plan. That was the pressure.

And it was a lot.

At some point I had to make a decision. I stepped back from student senate. Not because I was forced to, but because I was self-aware enough to know that spreading myself across everything meant showing up fully for nothing. Something had to give, and I chose what to give.

That decision cost me something. But what I gained in the spaces I stayed, the leadership, the relationships, the hard lessons, changed my life in ways I’m still unpacking. Some of it was painful. Some of it I wouldn’t trade for anything. I came out of that season a better man, a better leader, and a clearer version of myself.

That is what pressure, used correctly, can do. It doesn’t just push you forward. It teaches you where your limits are, and then it moves those limits further than you thought possible.

How do we use pressure in a way that’s healthy? That doesn’t consume us?

I want to be clear: I’m not a thought leader. I’m not a self-help coach. I’m drawing from the one thing we all share, the human experience, which in itself holds more wisdom than most of us give it credit for.

A few places to start.

1. Know where your pressure is coming from, and whether that source is even valid.

Not all pressure is created equal. There is a difference between a parent who wants you to be better in the way you want to be, who sees you, who is rooting for the version of you that you’re trying to build, and a parent who is living vicariously, projecting their own unfinished story onto yours. One is love. The other is weight disguised as love.

And then there’s social media. A highlight reel of curated ambition, people performing pressure for views. That is not a valid source. That is noise. Before you let something drive you, ask yourself if it’s even real, or if someone just needed content.

2. Examine how you’re interacting with it.

Here’s a simple way to know if your pressure is working for you: it pushes you forward without making you feel like you’re falling behind. There’s a difference between being driven and being chased. One feels like momentum. The other feels like panic. If every step forward still feels like you’re losing ground, the pressure isn’t motivating you, it’s consuming you. That’s worth paying attention to.

3. Ask yourself: is this pressure a privilege?

Sometimes the answer is yes. If you feel pressure because someone is genuinely rooting for you, a parent, a mentor, a community, that is a gift. Not everyone has that. Some people are out here with no one watching, no one expecting anything, no one who would notice either way. If someone cares enough about your life to put weight behind it, that pressure is a form of love. Receive it that way.

And so.

Pressure is not the enemy. It never was. The question has always been where it comes from, how you carry it, and whether you’re lucky enough to recognize it as something given to you by people who believe in what you can become.

The goal was to eat. Don’t let the plate overwhelm you. But don’t walk away from the table either.

Talk Soon,

Tyreke

I had good news. Real news. The kind you work years toward. And my first instinct was not to sit with it, not to call my mom, not even to exhale. It was to locate myself on a scoreboard that nobody had officially created but everyone in my friend group was definitely keeping.

We have a word for this. We call it comparison. But I think that word is too gentle for what it actually does to us.

Comparison is the oldest social technology humans have. Before language was sophisticated enough for philosophy or storytelling, we were watching the person next to us to calibrate our own standing. Psychologists call it social comparison theory, first named by Leon Festinger in 1954: we determine our own value not in absolute terms, but relative to others. It is wired into us at a level that predates civilization.

The problem is that civilization, and especially the internet, gave this ancient instinct a sterile, infinite, always-on arena to operate in.

Take Strava. On its surface, it is a fitness app. You track your runs. You log your miles. But anyone who has used it honestly knows what it actually is: a leaderboard disguised as a wellness tool. You finish a five-mile run feeling genuinely proud of yourself, and then the app shows you that your friend ran seven. At 6 AM. With a faster pace. And suddenly the run you were proud of becomes evidence of something you lack.

The app did not change what you did. You ran five miles. That is real. But Strava changed what that meant to you, because meaning, increasingly, is something we outsource to comparison.

It would be easy to stop at fitness apps, because they are an obvious target. But the same engine is running in places we talk about much less honestly.

Consider what comparison has done to political identity. We have moved from people who hold political beliefs to people who hold political identities, and the difference matters enormously. A belief can be updated when confronted with new evidence. An identity can’t, because the identity is not about what is true, it is about who you are relative to them. The other side is not wrong; they are worse. Less informed. Less moral. Less American. The comparison is no longer between ideas. It is between people. And once that happens, politics stops being a project of governance and becomes a tournament of belonging.

Your team winning is only satisfying if their team is losing. This is comparison as a way of life, and it is making us incapable of the kind of honest reckoning that good governance requires.

I want to come back to where I started, because I think what happens among college seniors in the spring is one of the purest, most honest displays of what comparison does to people.

Everyone is waiting for something. A job offer. A graduate school decision. An internship. And in that waiting period, everyone’s outcome is public, because we are young and we have not yet learned to hold good news quietly. So you hear things. Someone got into the school you were rejected from. Someone’s starting salary is a number you did not know was possible at 22. And you are happy for them, genuinely, because you like them and they worked hard. But underneath the “Congratulations!” you typed in thirty seconds is a quieter voice doing math you did not ask it to do.

You are not comparing because you are a bad person. You are comparing because you are terrified, because this moment actually matters, because the next few months feel like they are going to define something important about who you are. And in the absence of certainty about your own worth, you reach for a relative measure. You reach for the person next to you.

This is what makes comparison so hard to put down. It is not always vanity. Sometimes it is just fear wearing a measuring stick.

I do not think the solution is to stop paying attention to other people. That is not human, and advice that requires you to stop being human is not useful advice. We are social creatures. We are going to look around.

But there is a difference between using other people as information and using other people as the definition of your own worth. Seeing that a colleague earns more than you is information. It might tell you something about your market value, about a conversation you need to have, about a skill you want to build. But the moment that information becomes the measure of whether you are enough, something has gone wrong.

Comparison is natural. It is comparison as a metric of self-worth that becomes the problem. And when it crosses that line, it stops being information and starts being a prison. One where the walls are always shifting, because there will always be someone with a better offer letter.

Better title. Better city. Better number at the bottom of the page.

The offer letter does not end. Neither does the scoreboard attached to it. That is by design. The only move that actually works is deciding, deliberately, that what you built is real, that what you earned means something, and that its value does not change the moment someone else opens a different envelope.

Talk Soon,

Tyreke

Referenced Work:
Festinger, L. (1954). A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140.

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I am writing this from the beautiful island of Puerto Rico. I came here knowing what I know, and honestly, that awareness alone sits heavy. You walk around this island and see American infrastructure, American businesses, and American flags. And then you remember that the people here cannot vote for the president of the country whose flag flies above them. That is not a distant political fact when you are standing in the middle of it. It is frustrating in a way that is hard to put into words.

Puerto Rico has existed in this in-between space since 1898, when the United States acquired it from Spain through a treaty negotiated between two foreign powers. The island was transferred like property. The Supreme Court later formalized this through the Insular Cases, which invented the legal category of “unincorporated territory,” describing Puerto Rico as “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” That phrase, written in 1901, is still the legal foundation of Puerto Rico’s political reality today. More than 400,000 Puerto Ricans have served in the U.S. Armed Forces since 1917. Five have received the Medal of Honor. And still, if you live on this island, you cannot vote for the Commander in Chief you may be asked to serve under. The people here have voted on their status multiple times. Congress has never acted on the results. Unresolved status is a governance strategy.

But Puerto Rico is not alone in this condition.

On January 3rd, 2026, the United States military entered Caracas, Venezuela, bombed its capital, and extracted its sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, who was transferred to federal custody in Brooklyn, New York. President Trump stated afterward that the U.S. is “going to run the country” until a transition of power could be arranged.

Let me be honest about how I feel about this. Maduro is an authoritarian. He rigged elections, brutalized his opposition, and oversaw the collapse of a country. I am not interested in defending him. But watching this unfold, I found myself somewhere between conflicted and deeply disturbed. Not because of Maduro, but because of the precedent. The United States entered a sovereign nation without its consent, without a UN mandate, and without a declaration of war, and then the president said we are going to run the country now. Run it how? With what plan? A transition to what, exactly? As an American, I have to ask what this actually does for me, for us. Because it does not feel like justice. It feels like a demonstration of power with no clear road out. The operation was conducted entirely under a U.S. federal indictment, making it unilateral by design. At the UN Security Council emergency session that followed, Russia’s representative argued that the U.S. was proclaiming itself a supreme judge with the right to invade any country, label culprits, and enforce punishments irrespective of international law.

You do not have to be a defender of Maduro to ask the obvious question: if sovereignty is a right, who decides when it can be suspended?

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible, or more painful, than in the question of Palestine.

I will be direct here because I think the moment calls for it. I have watched videos of children being killed. Not as statistics. As children. On my phone, on my timeline, in my face. And I keep asking the same question: for what? Both Israel and Hamas need to find a way to stop the killing. That part feels clear to me. But so does this: the United States needs to support an independent Palestine.

Palestine has a population, a defined territory, a governmental structure, and declared statehood in 1988. The UN General Assembly recognized its right to self-determination in 1974. As of 2025, 157 of the 193 UN member nations recognize it as a sovereign state. By any democratic logic, that represents consensus. And yet Palestine is not a full UN member. In April 2024, twelve of fifteen Security Council members voted in favor of Palestinian membership. The United States cast the lone veto. One country overruled the expressed will of most of the world. The U.S. has now done this 19 times on matters related to Palestine since 1972. Each time, the message is the same: Palestinian statehood is not for Palestinians or international law to decide. It is subject to American approval. And American approval has not come.

What is happening there is the systematic elimination of a population, and the country that lectures the world about sovereignty and human rights keeps standing in the way.

I study power and institutions. And what I see here is not a contradiction in the accidental sense. It is the system working exactly as it was built to work.

The same country that entered Venezuela uninvited in the name of justice has blocked Palestinian statehood nearly two dozen times in the name of negotiation. The same country that calls sovereignty sacred when it applies to American interests calls it conditional everywhere else. The same country that grants citizenship to Puerto Ricans and then denies them a vote has appointed itself the sole arbiter of which peoples deserve to exist as nations.

Sovereignty, at its core, means something simple: the right of a people to determine the conditions of their own lives. Not to be transferred between empires. Not to be invaded when inconvenient. Not to need the approval of a more powerful nation just to exist.

By that standard, there are a lot of places in the world, including one island I am currently standing on, where that right is still waiting to be honored.

The question is not whether these people deserve it. They do. The question is who decided they could not have it? And whether we are willing to be uncomfortable enough with that answer to actually do something about it?

Talk soon,

Tyreke

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Because I cite specific stats, quotes, rulings and resolutions I am providing sources so if you would like to you can dive deeper. Thanks for reading.

Walsh, Colleen. "Reexamining the Insular Cases. Again." Harvard Law Today, Harvard Law School, May 3, 2024. https://hls.harvard.edu/today/reexamining-the-insular-cases-again/

CBS News. “Venezuela: US Military Strikes, Maduro Capture.” January 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/venezuela-us-military-strikes-maduro-trump/

CNN. “US Vetoes UN Resolution on Palestinian Membership.” April 18, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/middleeast/us-united-nations-resolution-palestine-membership-intl/index.html

NPR. “Venezuela Strikes and Maduro Capture: What We Know.” January 3, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/03/nx-s1-5665659/venezuela-us-strikes-maduro

PR51st. “Puerto Rican Participation in the U.S. Military.” February 2021. https://www.pr51st.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Fact-Sheet-Puerto-Rican-Participation-in-the-U.S.-Military-February-2021.pdf

United Nations. “Security Council Fails to Adopt Resolution on Full UN Membership for Palestine.” April 18, 2024. https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15670.doc.htm

United Nations General Assembly. Resolution 3236 (XXIX), “Question of Palestine.” November 22, 1974. https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ARES3236XXIX.pdf

Anti-intellectualism is the distrust, rejection, or hostility toward intellectuals, experts and the value of critical thinking and academic knowledge. “You think you know so much because you went to college??” a comment you may hear from someone holding anti-intellectual tendencies.

In practice, it shows up when people dismiss those who spent years, sometimes decades, researching, examining, testing, experiencing certain subjects. Those who think scholars, scientists, journalists, or educators are out of touch, elitist, or unnecessary. Instead of engaging with peer-reviewed research, evidence or expertise, those with anti-intellectual attitudes tend to favor intuition, tradition, political loyalty or what is increasingly framed nowadays as “common sense”. The idea is not simply disagreement with experts, it is a deeper suspicion that intellectual work itself has little value or that educated people are somehow dangerous to ordinary society.

But what does this mean for our society? And the real question worth asking yourself is this: when we stop valuing expertise, who ends up making the decisions instead?

Recently, we have seen the dismissal of scientists, career civil servants, and even the weakening of entire institutions whose sole purpose is the expansion of our understanding of the world and the way it operates. And what does this leave us with? I believe that we are left in a world that is much more dangerous than it was before. One of the most valuable things we have is time. When individuals or institutions dedicate decades to studying a single issue, that expertise deserves to be respected and heard. I am not saying they are the end all and be all, but they deserve a seat at the table.

When we go down a path that follows so called “common sense” we miss things that are important. If you think about the things that are common sense today, they started from a place of intellectual pursuit. Washing our hands regularly feels like common sense today, but it only became common because scientific research proved its role in decreasing the spread of disease. We don’t have a world without intellectuals.

This is also where the value of a college education is often misunderstood. Critics of higher education frequently frame college as a place where people go to become “indoctrinated” or disconnected from ordinary life. But at its best, college is not about memorizing facts or collecting credentials. It is about learning how to ask better questions, how to evaluate evidence, and how to think critically about the world around us.

A college classroom forces people to confront ideas they may disagree with. It asks students to defend arguments with evidence rather than instinct. It teaches them how to read sources carefully, identify weak reasoning, and understand complexity instead of reducing everything to slogans. Those skills matter far beyond the classroom. They shape how people interpret news, how they evaluate political claims, and how they participate in democratic life.

This does not mean that someone without a college degree cannot be intelligent or thoughtful. Intellectual curiosity exists everywhere. But institutions of higher education serve an important role in cultivating that curiosity and sharpening it into disciplined thinking. When we dismiss the value of those institutions entirely, we risk discarding one of the few places in society designed specifically for the pursuit of knowledge.

And that pursuit matters more than we sometimes realize. going back to my handwashing example, many of the things we now call “common sense” were once controversial discoveries. Germ theory, modern medicine, civil rights scholarship, and even basic economic policy all began as ideas that required careful research and debate before they became widely accepted. What feels obvious today was once the product of serious intellectual work.

If we lose respect for that process, we do not return to a simpler or more authentic form of knowledge. Instead, we create a vacuum where evidence matters less and authority shifts to whoever speaks the loudest. A society that stops valuing intellectual work does not become more practical or grounded. It simply becomes easier to mislead and misinform.

The question is not whether intellectuals should run society. They shouldn’t. A healthy society needs farmers, mechanics, teachers, builders, entrepreneurs and yes, scholars. But a healthy society also recognizes the value of people who dedicate their lives to understanding complicated problems.

The real danger is not disagreement with experts. Disagreement is healthy. The danger is deciding that expertise itself no longer matters.

Because when knowledge loses its value, decisions and people don’t become more practical or more grounded. They simply become easier to manipulate.

Talk Soon,

Tyreke

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My name is Tyreke Farquharson, and thanks for taking a moment to read my thoughts. I’m not exactly sure what led me here, but here we are.

I’m currently a senior studying Diplomacy & Global Politics and Spanish at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio (go RedHawks). This fall, I’ll be moving to Washington, D.C. to pursue a master’s in Government with a concentration in Democracy Studies and Governance at Johns Hopkins. As you might imagine, I have plenty of thoughts about the current state of our nation and the world. While what I write will ultimately be opinion, I promise it will remain grounded in fact, nuance, and good faith.

But that is only part of my background. The other part is one we all share: being human.

The human experience is strange. Sometimes depressing, sometimes exhilarating, and often everything in between. One year ago today began the most tumultuous and transformative year of my life, both for better and for worse (more on that in the future). And while this past year has been a personal rollercoaster, it has also felt like one for the world around us.

Our norms and traditions feel as if they are shifting beneath our feet. People say things today that sound like echoes from darker chapters of history. Americans are being killed in the street. The world is at war. We watch a genocide unfold in real time while being told conflicting stories about what we are seeing. Living grows more unaffordable, and everyone seems overwhelmed. At the same time, people are searching for community in a world that often pushes us further apart.

Maybe that is why spaces like this exist.

People are searching for something real. Unfiltered, independent thought. A place to wrestle with ideas rather than shout past one another.

That is what I hope this space becomes.

Here you will find honest reflections on a range of topics: government, politics, mental health, education, college life, advocacy, intellectualism, and occasionally maybe something lighter like food or culture. The essays and articles in this publication will follow a simple format: “On: …”

Think of them as Tyreke Farquharson on: democracy.

Tyreke Farquharson on: integrity.

Tyreke Farquharson on: mental health.

My goal is simple. I want to think honestly, write clearly, and invite you to do the same. I want to hold integrity close, encourage intellectual curiosity, and challenge us both to see the world with a little more empathy.

I am not sure what the first essay will be yet. But the world is constantly changing, and I have a feeling there will be no shortage of things to write about.

Until then.

Talk soon,

Tyreke

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