It’s wild, but we often get out of the habit of directly asking our Lord to speak to us. And what He says will very often surprise us. I was feeling down and distracted during Eucharistic Adoration when I decided to try something I had heard before. I said: “Speak, Lord; Your servant is listening” (Samuel 3:10). All He said in response was: “I LOVE YOU.”

I was hoping for more of a conversation, but God knew better than to give me what I wanted. He gave me instead what I needed. As written by the Prophet Isaiah, God never does anything in half-measures: He always accomplishes perfectly everything He sets out to do.

“So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it” — Isaiah 55:11

That simple “I LOVE YOU” not only consoled me deeply, but it also got me thinking about His Love in an entirely new way.

What, after all, does it actually mean for the infinite, all-powerful Essence and Source of All Being to “love”? What does it mean for Him not only to love at all, but to love me specifically — and to love each of us? What wondrous love is this, which both pardons the penitent and punishes the wicked? Which appoints us to great sufferings only to crown us with triumphant glory? Which desires us so fervently that He will grant us forgiveness as many times as we can beg it? Which loves us despite our brokenness, our unfaithfulness, our filthiness, and our weakness?

I considered the immensity of that Love, which none living or dead has ever fully understood. I considered its strangeness to a world so convinced it can explain and understand everything. I considered how small and feeble the words of our languages were before the indescribable breadth of the Intellect that could have conceived of each of us, unique as we are, since before even the beginning of time. I nearly wept with joy to know that this Love, this One, this Only, had not only made me, not only watched me and led me, not only understood me — but heard me, and answered me, and most of all, loved me.

In my own small and dim way, I faintly sensed the difficulty I would have in articulating this experience, and the struggles of the saints who through the ages have written of God. The task is impossible save through the intercession of the Holy Spirit, because words are merely earthly, and it is the mind itself which must choose to look beyond the symbols of dust to the sky and Heaven beyond, and only by the Spirit can fallen man scratch into language words that point upward rather than downward.

The task of writing about God has become, if it can be said, more impossible in the last hundred years than it has since the Fall. Materialism reigns nigh-triumphant in the blackened hearts of every nation. It is unlikely these words will reach one percent of their intended audience, because the entire apparatus of global capital is bent to the task of engrossing the other ninety-nine in an unceasing carnival of distraction and entertainment. When playtime is inevitably over, we are embattled with bureaucratic tasks, checkbox lists, licenses, fees, meaningless “obligations”, and chores to complete. With the dying twitches of our fingers we caress the same glassy screens for another crumb of comfort or diversion, our eyes glassing dully, until we tire of the world and sleep to escape it. This arrangement of affairs did not come about by accident.

Materialism, sometimes called naturalism, warped the world in this way; it sounded its opulent, sensual horn, and the moaning of its pleasures aroused the curiosity of fragile hearts across the globe. It drew us into its circus tent of sensory delights and compassed us about with darkness, so that we fear to escape, fear to question where the outside has gone, and most of all fear to refuse the softly-lit temptations paraded shamelessly around its interior. Who is satisfied needs no subjugation, for he has subjugated himself.

And yet — one thing sticks out, through the smoke-clouds, the billowing food-steam, the cooing dancers, and the shining, flashing screens. Eye contact. We see others, they see us; we lock our phone and just briefly see ourselves reflected in the black mirror; we are ashamed, and look away, and hope to forget. We acknowledge ourselves. We stir fitfully at night, kept up: Is this all I was meant to do? Is this all that was meant by “I”? A seat in a theatre? A hole in a punch-card? Do I not have more to accomplish than simply to feel?

“I think, therefore I am,” Descartes wrote in Discourse on the Method in 1637, and suddenly the philosopher no longer bothered to examine the external world: all that mattered was what he, himself, thought; and that little. Since then, the subjective experience has been prized above all other goods in the pantheon of godless philosophy, and its apotheosis is the Frankensteinian mutant of ideology that now rules entertainment, education, government, news, and soon all else. But still, the circus-goers seek. They meditate desperately on nothingness, hoping to escape in their waking hours what they can only flee in sleep. They begin and contribute to organisations and initiatives, praying with their money that the small tokens of their loyalty will absolve them of the doubt that their lives have not been wasted. And yet. They examine themselves and they see a spark that is not matched by any pleasure, any accomplishment, any renown. They see, but they do not understand, their eternal soul, the image of God, and they fear, because they know, perhaps not consciously, that it is going to waste.

Mankind has been obsessed with consciousness since the dawn of materialism, because it is the one phenomenon that a materialist cannot explain. Oceans of ink have been spilled on reams of paper declaring nothing more than “we do not know why this happens, but” — and here is the lie — “it is probably going to be discovered soon.” Nothing, according to a world composed of only matter and energy, should have the transcendent capacity to imagine, to reflect, to think — at best, a sophisticated behavioural conditioning should be possible, but consciousness as we know it is “too far” in the wrong direction. This kind of intellectual wields all his intelligence against the problem of dissecting consciousness, attempting to connect it to other limitations of creation, like Godel’s incompleteness theorem and the halting problem, and avails to nothing. The summary of his insight is this: Consciousness cannot be understood.

But he is wrong. Consciousness can be understood. It always has been.

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” — Gandalf the Grey

We possess consciousness because God exists, and He wishes to be loved and to love us. He gave us consciousness, that is, intelligence and willpower, for the exceptional purpose of loving Him and being loved by Him. Because only a thinking being can truly love. In summary: I think, therefore “I AM” [Exodus 3:14]. And the proof of this is hidden in the fact that human beings are conscious. Ed Feser gave an excellent talk on this that I recommend you listen to.

God is THE most conscious Being — all-self-knowing, to the degree that His Wisdom is the Second Person, and His Love — for others and for His splendid Self — the Third Person. But God wants us to use our lives to choose Him every day and to help Him help others choose Him as well; to enjoy the unfathomable bliss of His love and mysteries into uncountenanceable eternities; and for that, free-choice consciousness is necessary. God is love, and only thinking beings can love. He made us to love us, and for us to love Him. This is the highest task of our entire existence. We refer to ourselves as “earthen vessels” because not only did God literally fashion our bodies out of clay, but He did so for the purpose of filling our souls with the waters of His love.

Consciousness is what gives meaning to our attention. We choose what to think about, and those choices have consequences. To choose to think about God is to give Him a gift. To pay attention to God with the consciousness He gave you is to pray.

Love, similarly, is a conscious act of goodwill. It is not an emotion. Love requires intentionality, whereas emotions do not. God did not die for us on the Cross because we gave Him warm fuzzies. He died for us because there was no greater way to demonstrate that He, who created all things, loves us so much that He would choose to die rather than send us to damnation. When we love our neighbour in this life we are also choosing to will their good, but goodwill alone will not feed the hungry or clothe the naked. Hence true love, the love of God, manifests in charity towards neighbour.

Finally, faith, first among the virtues, is only possible via a conscious act of will: “I freely choose to believe.” Without freedom, there is no choice. Without self-awareness, there is no freedom. God loves us so much that He wants us to choose for ourselves to love Him, rather than to force or trick us into it, because the truest Love desires to be loved willingly and fully. Desiring to see us succeed, He permits us to choose to fail.

In these days of madness, it is too easy to forget that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God (1 Corinthians 3:19). We must remain hungry by fasting, when the world would have us eat. We must remain zealous for truth when the world would have us contented with lies. We must remain detached from all the pleasures of the world when the world would have us dependent on created things. We must labor tirelessly for God when the world would placate us with promises of rest.

The truth of God is hidden in all things, including you and I, but especially in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord is waiting to abide with you in the Eucharist. I would not have written this article nor been given the grace to know what it contains if it were not for Our Lord’s burning love to see you, Dear Reader, “watch for an hour with [Him]” (Matthew 26:38–40) in Eucharistic adoration.

He will give you the ability to understand Himself far better than I or these failing words ever could. If you take anything from this article, take this — go and see Him!

If you enjoyed my article, do consider subscribing to Catholicism Coffee for more upcoming Catholicism based articles! Thank you and God bless!

I Think, Therefore I Love was originally published in Catholicism Coffee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the next 10 articles, I will be responding to ten supposedly “unanswerable” questions that, although the title may seem as if they are posed to “theists” as a group, are actually targeted directly towards not only Christians, but Catholics specifically.

The sixth question:

Many theists believe that our moral sensibilities are essences or qualities that were given to us by a supernatural source (“God”). There is no evidence to support this claim. There is, however, evidence to support the idea that morality is based on agreed-upon subjective preferences. Broadly understood, morality is a human construct built on four things: reciprocity, altruism, principles of fairness, and empathy. Do you like being burgled? Probably not. Nobody else does either. And so we take this realization — that stealing from people is wrong and that we don’t feel so good when we are the victim of a theft — and then codify our dislike of burglary, accompanied by a requisite punishment, into law. As for altruism, it’s a mechanism that helps ensure survival of the group (remember, humans are social animals). But you want to believe the opposite, that God is “commanding” us to be nice and neighborly. No. Morality is an “emergent property” of evolution, a system, so to speak, in which we evaluate intentions and consequences, and become aware of the effects of behavior on other sentient beings. People come to shared conclusions about subjective experience, and from this conclusion compassion and empathy emerge. As Franz de Waal once put it, “Without empathy, you can’t get human morality. It makes us interested in others. It makes us have an emotional stake in them.” It should also be noted that rudimentary forms of morality can be found with other animals. Think of the number of videos you’ve seen of animals helping other animals. You’ll even find a video of acorn woodpeckers cooperatively protecting a food supply. In light of the many shared behaviors we have with other animals (including the sharing of food) — why do you think morality is something handed to us from On High when there is no evidence to support this belief?

The author makes two claims about what the faithful believe, and provides two arguments to support his position that morality is not of God. (It is difficult to determine exactly what his arguments are, because he writes somewhat imprecisely. But we get the gist.)

Our Responses

Claim: The “moral sensibilities” of man are “essences, or qualities”.

On the contrary, St. Thomas Aquinas says:

Conscience is not a power, but an act. … For conscience, according to the very nature of the word, implies the relation of knowledge to something: for conscience may be resolved into “cum alio scientia,” i.e. knowledge applied to an individual case. … Now all the habits by which conscience is formed, although many, nevertheless have their efficacy from one first habit, the habit of first principles, which is called “synderesis.” And for this special reason, this habit is sometimes called conscience, as we have said above. — Summa Theologica I, Q. 79, Art. 13

Therefore to say that the faithful believe conscience, or as the atheist puts it, moral sensibility, is false. He attempts to build up the atheist case for morality by asserting that since conscience is developed rather than imparted directly to the soul, then it cannot possibly be from God. However, such a position is facile. First, it accords with reason that to better understand humankind is to inform one’s conscience, since we believe that all men possess a divine soul and were created by God out of a pure act of love:

And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul. And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein he placed man whom he had formed — Genesis 2:7–8 DRE.

Anyone who apprehends this goodness in their fellow man, whether they acknowledge it is from God or not, will be inclined to act morally. This fact is evidence in our favor, because if life were a war of all against all, would it not be moral to kill, maim, and take what you can? But we see the opposite: the meek, the humble, and the loving are celebrated as virtuous.

And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain, and when he was set down, his disciples came unto him. And opening his mouth, he taught them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted — Matthew 5:1–4 DRE.

This is an unmistakable sign of the goodness of God manifesting in the righteous acts of men.

Claim: God “commands” man to act morally.

The author then claims that God “commands” man to act morally, but as we have just established, morality is not an arbitrary imputation given by God’s capricious will. Catholics know rather that morality is rather the synthesis of all considered and virtuous action in the divine and natural orders. Put simply, morality is the best way to act in the world, given how God made it.

Argument: Morality is actually just empathy plus “emergent properties”.

“Empathy” here means love for another, and a godless man has no reason to love anyone else. For him, goodness is of the world and in the world, and is measured by worldly things: success, money, power, reproduction, strength. He takes what he believes should be his when he believes he can get away with it, but when another man is caught doing the same, the godless man is the first to accuse his brother. Until a man is the most powerful in his community and able to conduct matters as he wills, he is at war with all, and all are at war with him. This arrangement is commonly known as the Will to Power.

God, on the other hand, is love: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. John 4:7–8 NABRE. To love another is to see the goodness of God in them, and even if they harm us to wish them well. In this way, holy love surpasses all earthly “empathy” because whereas a worldly person can hardly be expected to tolerate horrific abuses with zeal, rather to retaliate with proportionate force, the child of God, when appropriate, will suffer even the death of a martyr rather than fail to love their neighbor. The children of God are indeed more, not less, loving than even the most virtuous man of the world, since we are united in spirit to Love Himself.

Argument: Animals exhibit basic altruism, therefore human morality is not of God.

Indeed, even beasts exhibit a natural love for their brethren, such as making sacrifices for their families. But they love one another for the sake of the species, because animals that cooperate harmoniously succeed in surviving. How much greater, then, is the capacity of man for love, if he can love not only his brethren, but his enemies also, as our Lord instructs us in Scripture:

You have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other: And if a man will contend with thee in judgment, and take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him — Matthew 5:38–40 DRE.

If man can suffer to turn the other cheek for the sake of God, is this not proof of a love impossible without Him? For who among the worldly, acts in this way?

Further, if in animals we find a capacity for a natural love, in men that capacity exceeds that of all the beasts, it follows that only in man is divine love possible. Here as well is evident the fingerprint of the Lord, for he made Adam on the sixth day of Creation as its crown, and Eve its crowning jewel. Creation was made greater each successive day, and the best God saved for last.

But the life of man, as being the most perfect grade, is not said to be produced, like the life of other animals, by earth or water, but immediately by God — Summa Theologica I, Q. 72

We already expect to find not only all the animal faculties in man, such as eating and locomotion, but also exclusive and transcendent powers of the mind: the intellect and will. The presence of lower faculties in the animal kingdom is far from a proof of the absence of higher faculties in man. Rather again, it is a hallmark of the two having been made by the same Creator, one more perfect than the other.

… our soul differs from an animal soul by the mind alone. — Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 5, Art. 4

A special thank you to Saint Thomas Aquinas, and all the saints, for your assistance in the creation of this article. JMJ JHS.

Sixth Question — Answered

If you enjoyed my article, do consider subscribing to Catholicism Coffee for more upcoming Catholicism based articles! Thank you and God bless!

The Moral God and Mankind was originally published in Catholicism Coffee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the most reliable ways to discern whether a corporation has begun to rot is to gauge the derivative of the utility its products provide over time. A company like Apple witnessed a huge spike in average product utility when they released the iPhone, which increased for some time, but eventually plateaued when they started removing vital phone functions like the 3.5mm jack. Generally speaking, most companies experience either an S-curve or a parabolic curve of this kind of utility: the former types generally find their niche, fill it, and operate in comfortable profit without innovating much more; the latter types manage to muck things up and crash and burn having failed to understand their product.

Angular. Its mere name is a hostile form on the tongue. Pronounce it slowly. /’eŋgjəlɚ/. The throat itself contorts around the hideous alien shape of this word, which means ugly, sharp, and artificial.

Here, I will illustrate the various ways in which my psyche was irreversibly traumatized by this pandemonium of demon-droppings, Google’s brainchild: the ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK.

The Documentation

Have you ever had a brilliant idea for a weekend project, started it Saturday afternoon, and then steadily come to realize the project would take at least six months to fully implement? Google had a moment like that when they set out to document the inner workings of the ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK. They then drip-fed an intern nothing but espresso for weeks until she had a Hello World code-along project that they were able to pass off as a complete documentation of their entire stack.

None of the errors you will encounter while building a WEB APPLICATION on the ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK will be listed in this documentation. Indeed, very few of the design patterns or core concepts you will require will be present here, either. If you want to learn how to actually build a dangerous tool with ANGULAR, you will need to purchase an online course (I can recommend Maximillian Schwarzmueller’s comprehensive Complete Guide, which saved my job) that will reveal to you all of the Gotcha! moments and snare traps that await the naȉf who believes they can simply start writing Javascript like a React or Vue developer.

Angular’s actual documentation is more of a function, which I will pseudocode below.

Notice anything? Yes, that’s right: when bugfixing in ANGULAR, you need to specifically exclude the phrase `angularjs` from every one of your searches. You can’t append a 2, or a 7, or hope that Just `“ANGULAR”` will suffice to exclude the ill-fated first edition of this comprehensive software development stack. Needless to say this alone starts to grate after a while.

But then you get around to reading enough of these Stack Overflow “solutions” to people’s problems, and it begins to dawn on you that between the code you write and the code that runs in the browser, there isn’t just a compiler that will handily break all of your CSS for you, there’s a bona fide black box that demands you format your application in exactly such a way or else the entire thing will fail silently or worse, spit out an incorrect error message. You literally cannot trust anything that the ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK tells you about what you have done wrong because not even it knows how its own system works. Did you declare an `EntryComponent` in the `Module` it’s intended to lazy-load into rather than the root `Module` where it loses all benefits of lazy-loading? Nein! Did you try to use Two-Way Data Binding™ rather than an arcane daisy-chain of `EventEmitter`s and `Subscription`s and `Service`s? Verboten!

The entire ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT experience is like this. You run at full speed into a brick wall enough times, and eventually you learn to creep around at a snail’s pace, groping pathetically for any arbitrary obstacles that the FRAMEWORK might throw in your way. There is little in the world more frustrating than attempting to operate this monstrous and moody contraption that the allegedly smartest corporation in the world managed to excrete.

Imagine a car whose hood never opens, and whose dashboard says only DASHBOARD in blinding lights that don’t switch off. The car cannot be repaired once broken; it can only be replaced or modified from the outside in. It guzzles gas even when it’s not turned on. No service manual exists. If you want to know how it works, here’s the 5,280-page assembly guide. Good luck.

The “Architecture”

ANGULAR is slow. Writing apps takes a long time and the apps you create function very sluggishly once your app gets more complicated than `Hello World`. This would be acceptable if the ANGULAR FRAMEWORK conferred any benefits to the user or the programmer, such as failing gracefully in the event of a runtime error, or compiling quickly, or providing an increase to app security. But ANGULAR possesses none of these. In fact, it collapses into a wailing heap at the mere mention of an `Uncaught TypeError`.

Basically the only way to understand what Angular is actually doing is to read the millions of lines of source code the devs happily provide on GitHub. Since nobody actually does that, ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPERS typically settle for learning one or two design patterns that they know will not explode, and building an entire application out of them. Like a submarine built out of increasingly large doctor’s office inflatable gloves. It could probably work, given an endless supply of gloves and toddlers. Your only other option is to immerse yourself in the nonsensical, arbitrary madness that awaits the developer who attempts to learn how ANGULAR “works”.

I’ll tell you how it works. Your Components talk to your Services which relay data to your other Injectables via the Modules that your app Imports. What’s unclear about that? If you need clarification, go review the Material Design guidelines. They’ve got Components for everything you need to build. And keep your designs pixel perfect, please. It ought to be easy to do, since Material and Angular are designed by Google to supposedly work together nicely. And it will look and feel great when the padding on each list item eats up a third of the webpage, and opening a dropdown menu takes all of sixteen seconds. Don’t you feel freed from the constraints of an arbitrary and underdeveloped Internet?

Not a single part of ANGULAR’s design makes your code run faster. It increases only three things: complexity bloat, the time it takes to complete a simple feature, and — if you can somehow avoid driving yourself insane writing this spaghetti day in and day out — job security for you and your team. But be warned: the ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK won’t do you any favors when a deadline is approaching.

The ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT Experience

Open up your IDE of choice, coder! Enter your IntelliJ IDEA License Key to begin. A License Key is required to continue. Thank you for entering your License Key. Please select the Type Script “Linter” you would like to use to “Lint” your Type Script Code. The ANGULAR WEB DFGHSDFG FGSGDFSFDS runs Type Script, which is Java Script with Types. That makes it Good. You must use an IDE that is compatible with Type Script. Type Script will occasionally update. This will break your code and the code in your dependencies. This is expected. Rejoice in the time you are paid to pick through worming function calls! This is living!

Do not be alarmed if your dependency libraries occasionally issue breaking changes after altering a single property on a class you never use. You can just add a manual file editing step to every build process. Or you could freeze the library at a compatible version and lose all future improvements. Thank you for choosing Type Script and ANGULAR.

ANGULAR will helpfully mix fake HTML ELEMENTS into your real HTML ELEMENTS because the entire app is getting shredded to pieces by their AHEAD OF TIME COMPILER anyway, so what does it matter if they pollute a correct specification with a capricious impostor? When composing an HTML FILE, please remember to use the ANGULAR-specific markup language, which includes DIRECTIVES for making your code even more interesting to debug. You can even write your own ANGULAR DIRECTIVES if you’d like to further obfuscate the purpose of the characters you type. The most toothsome feature of all this advanced ANGULAR-flavored HTML is that tracing errors to their source is exponentially more difficult than it is in almost any other library, framework, or coding environment in living memory. They will literally feed you the wrong error message. You can search for a missing closing tag for days before you realize that the actual error was buried somewhere deep in the conditionals and mysterious imported directives, and to attempt to explain it to an outsider would inspire either a look of horror, or one of pity. Oh, also you can’t write same-page anchor links anymore because that functionality was too helpful. Enjoy trying to manually scroll with The Java Script!

It’s alright though, you will have plenty of time to contemplate your ill-advised decision to continue programming with this beautiful FRAMEWORK because every time you edit any minor piece of HTML you need to recompile the entire application. Hot reloading works on the baby stuff, but once your app develops any degree of complexity, you need to wait 60 to 300 seconds while the processor crunches through your entire codebase to add a single HTML class to a single element in a popup. Hours of your life soon disappear into the void. Hours spent staring at the console message: `92% chunk asset optimization`. I hope you like podcasts!

“But wait, you can avoid all that compilation if you use this technique!! [Stack Overflow link*]” Can’t use that technique because the ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK manages to compile apps without errors in development mode that throw errors in production mode. So you need to build production, every single time, to catch every bug.

* Again: why isn’t this technique in the documentation to begin with?!

Do you hate writing legible CSS? ANGULAR provides all sorts of confusing ways to convert explicit styling rules to pseudo-HTML that needs to recompile every time you change an element’s class. You don’t even need to learn FLEXBOX… until, of course, the manager demands to know why your layout isn’t “up to standard” — MATERIAL DESIGN standard — and then suddenly, you realize you’ve been incanting nonsense words at a black box, and the entire application rests on a precarious assembly of assumptions that are about to collapse, but you can’t fix them without undoing weeks of work, but the deadline, the deadline!

Takeaways from One Year as a Slave to Google’s Sadistic Programming Hivemind

ANGULAR made me a better programmer because it taught me how to write a functional application while standing in a volcano, hopping across a lava pool on islands of solid rock. Anything I did that was not the most efficient way of doing it immediately resulted in an unbearable slowdown. Anything I attempted to do that was more complex than the most bare-bones solution of adhering Data Object A to Display Element B was liable to send the entire place up in flames. Yes — any error anywhere in your ANGULAR APPLICATION will cause the rest of the ANGULAR APPLICATION to behave unexpectedly. We ended up implementing a system where the app would just reload the page every time it noticed an uncaught error because it was simpler than attempting to filter through support tickets to determine whether a bug was its own error or the result of some other error that had quietly disappeared after leaving a crater in the functionality. Then they removed that fix: “Just don’t write errors. I thought you were using Test Driven Development?”

I will carry the knowledge of the ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK with me for the rest of my life. There is no way to rid myself of it; it adheres to me more powerfully than any slime, and it clogs the wrinkles of my brain more thoroughly than any natural fluid could. I have no choice but to offer my services as an ANGULAR DEVELOPER if I am to feed my family. But there is hope. One day I may obtain a contract using another framework like React or Redux, or God willing a library that is unopinionated about the rest of your web stack like Vue. But for now I soldier on, clutching to the memories that I know are mine, fending off the invading hordes of Google-cepts that threaten to overtake the very essence of my identity. We live to fight another day.

Today I am working at Whiteboard Dynamics, where my time is less often spent Ctrl-C’ing the ANGULAR COMMAND LINE TOOL and more often spent writing clean, efficient, and functional code for products that don’t need to be rewritten every three months. All in all, I find the change to have restored several years to my life expectancy. We will write something in ANGULAR if you request — as I said, I will bear this cursed ability forever — but trust me: you’re better off going with a library people will enjoy working on. It’ll cost you less time and money, and you’ll get to keep your immortal soul.

Why Angular Made Me Quit Web Dev was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.