All Observations
Quiet reflections on life, growth, and the moments that shape us
An article blames consumers for keeping devices too long and dragging down productivity. But when people can't afford new phones, the problem isn't 'hoarding.' It's an economy that's left them behind.
The Mormon church just lowered the mission age for women from 19 to 18, calling it revelation. But when you look at the timing, the pattern, and the outcomes, it looks less like divine guidance and more like institutional optimization.
Religious leaders claim to know your 'true' identity better than you do, defining you as God's child with eternal spiritual roots. But who you really are is something you get to determine for yourself, based on your lived experience, not unprovable claims about pre-existence.
The Mormon church promises deliverance from problems, but the real deliverance came when I stepped away from the framework that created most of those problems in the first place.
Reflecting on the No Kings protests reveals not just concerns about Trump's authoritarian actions, but deeper questions about systemic erosion, the limits of reform, and the absence of good options when working within a broken system fails but violent change promises catastrophe.
Contemplating the incomprehensible scale of the cosmos, both spatial and temporal, reveals humanity as simultaneously insignificant and extraordinary: a brief arrangement of matter that became the universe's way of knowing itself.
Religious institutions maintain prophetic credibility through unfalsifiable frameworks that absorb all outcomes, a pattern revealed clearly in Russell M. Nelson's presidency, and my decade-long journey from silence to speaking.
Religious institutions maintain prophetic credibility by counting hits, discounting misses, and retroactively drawing targets around wherever their predictions happened to land.
The real threat to American democracy isn't coming from the left or the right—it's coming from the normalization of political violence itself and the leaders who exploit tragedy to deepen divisions rather than heal them.
From clear answers to honest uncertainty - why I'm writing again.