SEPTEMBER 2025 SULLYGRAM: Love at first sight? If you’ve ever just met someone and neither of you had any idea what you were babbling back and forth because you were instantly drugged with love and lust for each other, as good as naked and coupling until the conversation somehow ended, leaving you feeling like you’d just been stung by a bee and it was wonderful, then you know there is an auto-pilot in your heart completely disconnected from your rational mind. Said intoxication snares you in a mire of desire as immersive as quicksand, and the more sophisticated you believe you are about love and life and people, the tighter that tender trap grips you.

There are all kinds of names for it, but what would you call it? The start of limerence? Infatuation? Idealization? Twitterpation? All terms that are long on syllables but short on duration. Rushes of emotion, then. Stunned reactions to a sudden congruency of real life over a fantasy imprint on your deepest radar. There she is. There he is. A preconceived ideal planted by unknown genes, genetic memory, or maybe – who knows – little naked cherubs shooting arrows down from heart-shaped clouds.

You might be tempted to use the broader term “romantic idealism,” but that would be like shrinking a multi-faceted process to fit an event. Not that they aren’t related. Thumb-tongued idealizations are the stem cells of romantic idealism, symptoms of something greater. But romantic idealism is not a sudden one-off that catches you at an unguarded moment, not a pair of rose-colored glasses that can be set aside. Its lenses are permanent and probing. More importantly, romantic idealism intellectualizes emotional wellsprings. It forges connections, syncs up feelings with thoughts, filters out the grays that dull rainbows. Pollyannish, you say? Giddy? Sing-song? No, no and no. Rather than warping reality into a fiction, romantic idealism appreciates all things from their own points of view. Call it portable empathy. The world, after all, hosts an Eden of strategies for survival, an array of primal instincts and demiurges crafted by evolution. Every snippet of life seeks its own optimized welfare, every discrete atom its own co-equal purpose and ideal fulfillment. Thrown together across nature’s panoply, they become competing perfections, yet often bridge together in magnificent synergies and symbioses. And one more thing…

Romantic idealism has aspects of both science and religion, if they aren’t the same quest for truth – which they are to me. Different methods but both are hamstrung by the inherent myopia of human beings. Empirical science, as we know it, works fine in our finite region of space but has no fixed explanations when it comes to paradoxical premises and ultimate cosmic causes. And religion, while embracing global manifestations of core altruistic values, is possibly the most abused and corrupted driver of social control in human history. So, freeing both science and religion from tunnel vision and ulterior motives is an essential part of romantic idealism.

I was kinda hoping the American meritocracy would bring us closer to all that idealism in my lifetime; only, just now, a sea change is underway. Fast mass connectivity and social media have deadened the higher order fulfillments of independent humans. Having kneecapped our individuality, drowned our incentives in morasses of socialization, and lost our mojo in a quagmire of reliance on media, we mortals are at a point of no return, I fear. No second act. Who knew that what seemed like a new Eden at the start of the Industrial Revolution would lead to living by proxy through cultural surrogates and technology. Undermining the meritocracy of individuals is one-step away from Orwellian stagnation of individual incentive: socialism, communism, Marxism. The Virgin goes up against the Dynamo, and the Dynamo wins. AI. Recombinant DNA. CRISPR. Devolution of the individual. The way of the bee and the ant.

Will it matter to us? Orwell and Huxley see us as doped up sheep in such a world, too docile and devitalized to recoup our drive for a meritocracy of individuals. Kept cradle to grave by indoctrination through media and “education.” Doublethink. Newspeak. Wokeism. All hold hands at the equator. No more brave new worlds. End equal opportunity; commence equal outcomes. Sameness premised on the treacherous trust that the fundamental playground won’t ever change – natural selection need not apply! Which, of course, is a huge vulnerability for long-term survival and a destiny in the stars.

A little melodramatic? Maybe…in the short-term. In the long-term, who knows? Maybe a collapse will trigger a reset, and the whole evolution thing will cycle over. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for,” says the poet. And its taproot may be Adam and Eve, to bring this full circle. Those thumb-tongued binaries so drugged with dreams that they don’t know what they’re saying to each other. Some of us romantic idealists are still hanging around, gazing at the horizon. Preferring open seas to the shrink-wrapped harbors of modernity. Sign me up and weigh anchor…

Between cell phones here, so no new photos; but here’s one I ran across that’s a hoot. Pro photographer saw me rollerblading back in the day and took this for a mall ad in Oakland County, MI. World’s shortest modeling career.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan