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Happiness Is for Idiots

October 28, 2025

happiness, ignorance, philosophy, society

Herodotus has Solon deliver the famous adage, Call no man happy until he is dead – and if you are a perceptive reader, you could even make a pivot to Giacomo Leopardi’s “Everything is evil”. Happiness is elusive, happiness is difficult to define, and ultimately, happiness is for idiots.

I’m not the one who has made this observation, to which I subscribe. Slavoj Žižek has mentioned it on several occasions, and here’s a fairly recent one:

I will briefly refer to Žižek’s take, but in this post I’m basically using it as a starting point. Yes, happiness is for idiots, but my main thesis is that happiness – much like love or success – is a concept people don’t really understand.

Crucially, they don’t even bother to understand and that’s the main problem.

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Nested Temporality in Writing: The Future Pasts

July 26, 2025

Fiction Writing Tips, Philosophy, Writing

literature, philosophy, time, writing

“The future ain’t what it used to be” is an oft-quoted sentence. It’s supposed to be funny, but few realize it contains a concept that is important to writing and philosophy alike. This sentence contains what I refer to as a nested temporality.

People usually think of the past, the present, and the future as easily defined, separate entities. They also don’t see much ambiguity and in-betweenness in them: there’s one kind of past, one kind of present, one kind of future.

However, this is not true. There are pasts contained in the past (indeed an infinite number of them), and pasts contained in the future. Perhaps it’s more self-evident that there is an infinite number of futures, too, if we went about defining the future as probabilities.

Oh, and if you’re interested in defining the present, good luck with that!

In this post I’m examining the concept of nested temporality – and I will begin with defining it more precisely – in the context of writing fiction. What does a nested temporality bring to a narrative, and how can we use nested temporalities for creative purposes?

Nested Time. Image of clock. — For purely practical reasons, humans tend to think of time as both linear and well-defined. Nothing could be further from the truth…

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Do Female Vampires Menstruate?

November 18, 2024

Criticism, Literature, Philosophy

genre, Gothic, literature, philosophy, reality

“Of course not, you idiot”, I hear the pedant telling me, “female vampires don’t menstruate because vampires don’t exist”. Well, not so fast. Remember my post on whether narrative worlds are real. Yes, vampires are fictional. But reality is another point altogether.

Nonetheless, let’s not get caught in semantics. Most of us agree that vampires aren’t “real” in the sense that we might bump into one in the supermarket – buying tampons?

And yet, as a Gothic scholar and overall someone interested in vampires, the question has intrigued me: Would female vampires menstruate? What would it mean in terms of their ontology? After all, blood is directly connected with a vampire’s existence. The absence of any reference in literature and art in general is deafening. So, since there are no answers that I have found, I decided to write this post and give them myself.

Do Female Vampires Menstruate? Image of goth woman. — A vampire’s existence is directly connected with blood: They consume it and must be careful not to have theirs spilled carelessly. So, in this context, whether female vampires menstruate or not seems to be a crucial question with important repercussions about their ontology; what they really are…

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