I started writing late today. I needed to sleep in a bit. I love that the creek is running and that I can wake up to the sounds of water. Water is healing.

I’ve decided I have to finally sell my 2008 Saturn Aura. I think I’ve officially gotten the most miles I can out of it. I liked driving a beater, but the seat belt broke, and I think that’s the final straw.

Objective truth

If you’ve grown up in the last 30 years in the United States, you’ve been a part of a culture that has not, and in a lot of ways still cannot, agree on objective reality. This is one of philosophy’s oldest and most enduring questions. And it remains the greatest barrier, in my opinion, to any semblance of a united culture. It is the greatest design against reason and clarity.

The Greeks were some of the first to obsess over this. Plato said truth was like the sun: an eternal reality we only glimpse as shadows on the cave wall. Aristotle grounded it more practically: to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not—that’s truth. Already, you see the split: truth as derivative vs. truth as observable.

In Judaism and Christianity, truth wasn’t just an idea; it was a person: God is Truth. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” For centuries, “objective truth” wasn’t just about facts; it was about divine order, something that existed outside us but also demanded allegiance. Truth here is more about faith.

But, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas tried to bridge faith and reason: truth was both what you could prove by reason (Aristotle’s legacy) and what God had revealed (theology). He argued that reason and faith aren’t opposed, but reason lets us glimpse the created order and faith anchors us in its source. The medieval period held this tension: truth as eternal and divine, yet also something you could argue about in a university courtyard.

Then came the Enlightenment. Descartes, Kant, Locke, Hume—they turned truth into something about human reason and perception. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” starting with the self as the anchor. Kant complicated things: we never know the “thing-in-itself,” only how it appears to us. That cracked open doubt: maybe we can’t actually touch objective truth, only our experience of it.

By the 19th and 20th centuries, Nietzsche declared, “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Postmodernism doubled down. Truth became relative, contextual, a construct of power. Suddenly, the very idea of objective truth seemed suspicious, even oppressive. Postmodernism could be summarized by: skepticism of grand narratives, suspicion of “objective truth,” celebration of pluralism, irony, and deconstruction. The vibe was: there is no single truth, only perspectives; all authority hides power. Feed the VOID.

The current mood: just… confused

We live in the aftermath of that. Scrolling timelines where “your truth” and “my truth” often feel more real than the truth. Everyone in their own bubble of perception. Postmodern thinkers took Nietzsche to mean: truth is perspectival, constructed, contingent.

You could say philosophy since Nietzsche is a tug-of-war.

Scholars argue we’ve shifted into a “post-postmodern” space, often called metamodernism. The core idea: people are tired of endless irony and nihilism. We want sincerity again—but we can’t unlearn the irony. So we oscillate. Hope and cynicism, earnestness and irony, faith and doubt, all at once.

It’s both an expansion of our consciousness (I think it can only and must be, i.e, Spiral Dynamics), and also a place where we have an active choice to decide the framework, the world, and the mechanisms that we want to live with and by.

Metamodernism (Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker, 2010) describes this pendulum swing: sincere but self-aware, hopeful but knowing better. Think of how culture loves memes (ironic) but also wellness, spirituality, and purpose (earnest).

Digimodernism / Postdigital (Alan Kirby) points to how the internet, social media, and algorithmic life have reshaped culture. Truth and meaning are fragmented across feeds, not handed down from institutions.

Others say we’re simply in the Age of Crisis: ecological, political, spiritual. A time where people are searching for grounding again after postmodernism left us with nothing solid. That’s disorienting. I’m totally fine with the idea that we’ve just been sort of thrown up in the air and are trying to land back down again. We’re looking at the ground like, wait, how do I use my legs?

And today, your subjective reality is allowed to be as real as you exclaim it to be. Sometimes even, the louder you yell for that reality, the more likely you are to get it. The bigger the victim (power and victimhood), the greater the cookie. That person’s also up in the air like, my legs don’t work, you have to catch me (they do work and everyone can see it).

And yet, we keep circling back to the old question. Because without some ground, we’re just spinning, and then we truly can’t find any commonality. Which is why people still look to science, or God, or shared human experience, not because any of those give us the full picture (the purpose is not to have the full picture), but because they offer us a place to land, a place to make sense of the world in the best way that works for the most people (if you’ve picked up that this is an ethics question, I’ll save it for another day).

So what’s next

Objective truth is what’s real, whether we see it or not. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t care about my feelings or your opinions. Your legs do work, just touch the ground. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t need your algorithm to show you to be real. The creek runs because the ranchers open the gate, the earth spins whether we acknowledge it, gravity pulls on us even if we’d rather float away. That’s objective truth. It exists outside of us, and it holds steady.

We come to it by noticing, by paying attention, by testing what keeps showing up. It’s the process of observation. Contemplation. Deep reflection and looking. It’s coming back to trusting your eyes and your God given gut. Science has its way of doing this, but so do you and I when we stop to ask: what’s here?

I don’t think we ever see it perfectly—that’s always on our own ability to see something, which can be sharper or duller than another—but turning towards it is the practice. I can think back to grade school, to one of the earliest assignments I can remember. Where the teacher just had us go look at stuff and write that down. How many things can you see, feel, and observe? What is the picture you can paint?

Even if we don’t see it perfectly, that practice alone gets us closer to what is. The process of being with objective reality.

It helps us be observant and embodied.

And it matters. Because if we let go of truth, we lose common ground. Without common ground, this is where we get the issues of how our world works. When we can’t agree, there’s no justice, no trust, no way of knowing whether we’re moving forward or just circling ourselves. Truth is what holds us accountable. What keeps us from getting swallowed up by illusion.

In the strangest way, it’s also what sets us free. When I know what is, I can stop pretending, stop needing to have it all answered myself. I can stop being manipulated. I can actually live. Objective truth is the ground beneath our feet. It doesn’t need us to notice it. But when we do, when we live from it, it becomes the foundation on which a real, grounded, and embodied life can be built.

Love,
Val

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