Last Tuesday I'm scrolling through news and there's the Bondi attack. Sixteen dead. My hand just clicks before my brain catches up. I live couple of kilometers from there.

Sitting there reading it, something hits me hard enough I grab a pen: We're not meant to feel safe all the time. Like maybe fear isn't the system breaking down—it's just showing us that feeling secure isn't the same as having meaning.

Then the real question: Where the hell am I actually safe?

Think about our ancestors. They knew exactly what scared them. Dark forests. Strangers showing up. Whatever was out past the firelight where the village stopped. Fear had an address back then. Inside meant safe. Outside meant danger. Your front door wasn't just a piece of wood—it was the actual line between the world that could kill you and the world that held you.

Greeks had this word, oikos. The household. Where you could just live without all the chaos of public life. Aristotle figured humans needed both—home for safety, the city for everything else. Makes sense until you realize home is getting invaded by all the stuff it was supposed to keep out.

I can't stop thinking about Cast Away. Tom Hanks beats everything—ocean, starvation, loneliness so bad he's talking to a volleyball. Somehow gets home.

Then he can't actually be home. Sits in his clean house and it makes no sense to him. Sleeps in a real bed and wakes up confused. He's basically a stranger in his own life. Not haunted by what he survived—haunted by what it cost him to survive. Marcus Aurelius has this line about how the quietest place is your own mind. But what if even that's compromised? What's the point of any home if you're scared there?

Reading about those sixteen people, my breathing goes weird. I actually catch myself thinking: Where would I even run?

That's the thing now. It's not big dramatic fear. It's this constant background static. Follows you to the pharmacy. Parking lots. Your kid's classroom. And it's not paranoia because violence really can happen anywhere. Being vigilant is just part of living now.

Japanese architecture has this thing called ma—the space between outside and inside. The threshold. It's supposed to be sacred because it's transitional. Except there's no threshold anymore. No clean line. The violence is already in here with us.

So now I notice exits. Every café, I'm clocking the back door. Movies, always aisle seats. I watch people's hands. Listen for voices getting loud. Won't take middle seats on planes. Five years ago this wasn't me. Now it just is. Some jumpy middle-aged guy always looking for the way out.

All my friends do it. We don't really talk about it because saying it makes it realer and we're already fried from how real it is. But get some wine in us late at night and someone goes, "I'm scared to take my kids to the mall." Everyone just nods. We've all run those numbers. Risk versus living like a normal person. There's no good math.

Here's the weird part: we're safer now than basically any humans ever. Our ancestors dealt with starvation, disease, animals trying to eat them, wars constantly. Really brutal existence. We've got heat, food everywhere, modern medicine. And we're absolutely terrified.

Maybe it's because the threat's different now. Stoics said focus on what you control. Great advice until the threat is completely random. Can't control if some guy walks into the grocery store with a gun. Can't control if a school gets hit. Only thing I control is how I respond, and that feels like nothing.

So we just live with this constant anxiety hum. Keep going because what else? Kids go to school. We go to work. Buy food. Go to concerts. Refuse to let fear completely win even though it's right there following us around.

But it costs something. That part of you always scanning, always doing threat math, always ready to bolt. The innocence you can't have anymore. The trust you can't give. Living like home is just another place you might get killed.

Kids do lockdown drills now. Same as fire drills used to be. They learn to hide, stack desks against doors, stay quiet. Learn that the world's not safe, that grownups can't always protect them, that violence is just something that happens. We're telling them everything's fine while literally training them for active shooters.

I don't have my kid here but I see my friends' faces at school dropoff. Always this split second where fear crosses over. Then they smile, wave, drive off. Fear stays though. Back seat of the car. Parking lot. Follows them home.

Tom Hanks comes back from the island but not really. Can't come back to who he was. Survival changes you. Fear changes you. Once you know safety's just temporary, that protection can collapse, that familiar doesn't mean safe—you can't unknow it. Buddhists talk about this. Not learning new stuff but losing innocence. Once you see how nothing's permanent, you can't unsee it.

We're all kind of castaways now. Not on some island. Just stuck in all these places we built to protect us that don't actually protect us.

There's this old Chinese story about a useless tree. I need to tell you now, anyway. So twisted up that no carpenter wants it, so it lives forever. Maybe that's the point. Stop trying to engineer perfect safety. Just accept that fear's not fixable—it's just the condition we're living in. The question I can't shake: If home's not where you feel safe, then what? Which home is the safe one? Who's supposed to fix this?

I don't know. I'm not a politician or security person. Just someone near Bondi who watches the news with his stomach tight, who checks exits, who wonders if this is just life now.

Because here's what keeps circling back: our ancestors feared the forest at night. They knew where danger lived. We've made a world where danger doesn't have an address. It's nowhere and everywhere. The threshold's gone. We're always outside even when we're inside. The real loss isn't safety. It's believing safety was ever really a thing. We built all this stuff—buildings, systems, locks, security, rules—thinking we could engineer protection. Believed in the door. But doors were always kind of bullshit. A story we told ourselves. The Greeks knew their households could get invaded. Buddhists knew nothing lasts. Our ancestors understood shelter was just borrowed time.

We're remembering what they knew.

That fire Prometheus stole—same fire the dad and kid carry in The Road—it makes us human. But it also lights us up. Makes us targets. The thing keeping us alive is the thing that puts us in danger. So what then? Put out the fire? Sit in the dark? Let fear win completely? Or just accept that meaning and being vulnerable are the same thing? That being human means being afraid, and being afraid means knowing you can lose what you love? I don't know. I'm just tired of checking exits. Tired of that look on my friends' faces. Tired of headlines that make my chest tight. But I'll keep reading them. Keep checking exits. Keep living like home's just another place I might die.

Because what else?

We're all washed up on shores that should feel like home but don't. The island's not behind us. We're still on it. Never left.

And the question just sits there: Where do we even go from here? Where is our ‘safest home’?