Fred went mad at 44. Al died in a car at 46. Neither made it to 50.

Friedrich Nietzsche looked at humanity and decided it could do better. He questioned God, dismantled morality, and documented everything he saw in the abyss. The work cost him his sanity. Albert Camus arrived a generation later and built something different on the same ground. One cleared the site while the other designed what went on it.

Society will often tell you what you can or cannot do. Who you can or cannot be. Reject that script. Build your own morals and your own meaning. There is a price for being different and we’re hardwired to try and fit in. Yet we must pay that price without flinching. The examples below are some that history remembers but there are countless others that it does not. That changes nothing. You stay unrelenting.

I first sat in a room full of Rothkos at MoMA in late 2006 or early 2007. I had come to New York with my family and somehow ended up in that room full of giant rectangles of color. I had no idea what I was looking at or who Mark Rothko was at the time. I sat there for what felt like eternity, staring at life-size fields of color that evoked a strong feeling, drawing me in for reasons I could not name. I just know it mattered because I have never stopped chasing that feeling since.