The Fulcrum and Axis: The Seen and Unseen- A Diatribe on Trying to Figure Out Life, the Universe, and Everything

Today we are going way up our own butts.

I just want to establish that immediately so nobody thinks this is about to become a grounded and practical discussion about taxes or lawn care or whatever emotionally healthy people spend their Sundays doing.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about threshold moments in stories. Those moments where reality suddenly cracks open and reveals another layer underneath it.

In The Matrix, it’s the moment Neo — who, fittingly enough, used to be Mr. Anderson — wakes up in the machine pod and realizes the world he understood was only a surface stretched over something stranger and far more unsettling. In Harry Potter, it’s Harry stepping through the barrier into a hidden world that had existed beside ordinary life the entire time. Alice in Wonderland, The Truman Show, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings — over and over again stories return to this same idea. A person crosses a line and can no longer see reality the same way they did before.

And I don’t think those stories resonate because people secretly believe they’re going to discover wizard schools or robot farms. I think they resonate because human beings experience quieter versions of that feeling all the time.

There are moments in life where the world suddenly feels less stable, less complete, or less honest than it did before. The first time you realize adults are improvising. The first time you understand how power actually works. The first heartbreak that rearranges your understanding of yourself. The first panic attack. The first time you recognize your parents as human beings carrying wounds instead of permanent authority figures. The first time you understand that your city, your culture, even your own identity are not neutral things but systems layered with history, performance, contradiction, and invisible pressure.

Those moments aren’t magical in the cinematic sense, but they are transformative. Something shifts. You can’t fully go back to the simpler version of reality you inhabited before.

I think that’s part of why I keep circling this “Seen and Unseen” idea in my writing. Whether I’m talking about Greenville, relationships, cities, mental health, or creativity, I keep ending up in the same place: the visible world and the structures quietly operating underneath it.

A road stops being just a road and becomes a story about growth, priorities, economics, and human movement. A coffee shop becomes a story about systems, fear, flexibility, and what kinds of ideas a city allows space for. A downtown becomes a performance of identity. A person becomes a collection of visible behaviors resting on top of memory, longing, shame, grief, biology, survival instincts, and stories they tell themselves to keep moving.

And I want to be very clear here because this is where people start disappearing into the woods and starting YouTube channels about lizard people.

I do not think I possess secret truth.

Honestly, I distrust people who think they do.

What I think I possess — for better or worse — is a kind of openness. Maybe attunement is the better word. A tendency to notice patterns, contradictions, emotional undercurrents, and trajectories that some people naturally filter out because fully engaging with all of it at once can become overwhelming very quickly.

That doesn’t make me enlightened. It doesn’t make me more evolved. It doesn’t make me Neo.

It just means my brain tends to leave more tabs open than is probably medically advisable.

And the modern world is not especially designed for that kind of openness. We are increasingly rewarded for certainty, branding, speed, tribalism, and simplified narratives. We are encouraged to become concrete because concrete people are easier to organize, easier to market to, easier to sort into categories, and honestly easier to reassure.

But I think most people feel, at least quietly, that something is slightly off. Not in an apocalyptic sense. More in the sense that modern life often feels disconnected from human scale. Too optimized. Too performative. Too mediated. Too fast. Too detached from meaning while constantly pretending meaning can be purchased, branded, or algorithmically delivered.

And I say that as somebody fully inside the machine. I’m not standing above any of this. I am not Morpheus. I’m a guy in Greenville writing essays about old restaurants, city planning, consciousness, and why The Matrix still emotionally devastates people thirty years later.

But maybe that’s exactly the point.

Maybe the goal isn’t escaping reality. Maybe the goal is learning how to see it more honestly without losing your ability to participate in it. To remain open without becoming consumed. To notice systems without becoming cynical. To recognize performance without forgetting sincerity still exists. To understand the world is complicated without retreating into hopelessness or smug certainty.

That’s where I think I’ve slowly drifted over the years.

When I was younger, I think part of me genuinely wanted to solve reality. To untangle everything. To finally discover the hidden structure that would make suffering, society, identity, and consciousness all click neatly into place. “Frank and the AI solve the world’s problems” was funny, but it also contained a very real impulse underneath it. The belief that if I could just think hard enough, connect enough dots, and stay awake long enough, maybe I could finally arrive at some grand understanding.

Now I think I’m more interested in observation than conquest.

Documentation instead of certainty.

Participation instead of escape.

And honestly, I think curiosity is what carried me there. Curiosity kept interrupting collapse. There were periods of my life where I could have emotionally shut the door and stopped leaning toward the world altogether. But curiosity kept reaching back in. A conversation. A city. A book. A memory. A relationship. A story. A strange idea at two in the morning. Some tiny thread of fascination would keep pulling me back toward engagement with life.

Not answers.

Engagement.

Maybe that’s what art really is at its core. Not the presentation of truth, but the attempt to hold the visible and invisible parts of existence in the same frame for a moment before they slip apart again.

Or maybe I’m just incredibly high on hazelnut coffee creamer and talking nonsense.

Hard to say.

Sidebar: Fulcrum & Axis, The Seen & Unseen, and Other Things I Apparently Accidentally Built My Entire Identity Around

One of the strangest parts of getting older is realizing you were sometimes telling yourself the truth long before you consciously understood what you were saying.

When I first came up with “Fulcrum & Axis,” I wish I could tell you it emerged from some deep philosophical revelation after years of studying metaphysics, systems theory, and symbolic structures.

It did not.

It mostly started because my initials are F.A. and “Fulcrum & Axis” sounded cool.

That is the deeply intellectual origin story.

But even then, it felt weirdly right in a way I couldn’t fully explain. Not because I thought I had discovered hidden truth, but because the phrase itself carried a feeling I instinctively recognized before I had language for it.

And now years later, I keep accidentally building work around the exact ideas those words imply.

A fulcrum is the point where pressure shifts. An axis is the invisible line something rotates around.

And honestly, that’s basically every single thing I write about.

Cities rotating around economics, memory, and image.

People rotating around trauma, desire, fear, identity, and hope.

Relationships rotating around unspoken emotional structures.

Society rotating around systems most people barely notice until they begin failing.

Even consciousness itself feels like this strange balancing act between the visible self and the invisible machinery underneath it.

Which brings me to “Seen and Unseen.”

At first, that phrase felt like a good way to frame Greenville. The visible city versus the hidden city. The polished version and the underlying structures. Downtown versus the neighborhoods pushed out of the postcard version. Roads versus the systems creating them. Development versus displacement. Surface versus history.

But then I realized the framework was expanding into basically everything.

The seen and unseen exists in people too.

The visible self is what we perform:
the body,
the voice,
the opinions,
the social media posts,
the routines,
the roles we play.

The unseen self is harder to articulate:
memory,
fear,
grief,
longing,
subconscious patterning,
private contradictions,
the stories we tell ourselves to survive,
the emotional residue we carry from places and people long after they are gone.

Even cities themselves seem to possess subconscious minds. Places remember things. Roads preserve old priorities. Neighborhoods preserve old wounds. Buildings preserve old ambitions. Entire communities organize themselves around histories most residents no longer consciously think about but still emotionally inhabit.

And that’s where all of this starts becoming dangerously close to me standing in a bookstore wearing a scarf explaining consciousness to exhausted strangers who were just trying to buy a coffee table cookbook.

But I do think there’s something real here.

Not mystical in the “I possess hidden wisdom” sense.

More in the sense that human beings are constantly living on top of structures they only partially perceive. Psychological structures. Historical structures. Economic structures. Narrative structures. Systems nested inside systems.

Most of life is invisible until something breaks.

That’s when the unseen suddenly becomes visible.

A panic attack reveals emotional structures that were already there.

A city controversy reveals power structures people ignored.

A relationship collapse reveals communication failures that existed for years.

A death reveals emotional architecture underneath ordinary life.

The fulcrum is the moment pressure shifts enough for hidden structure to reveal itself.

The axis is the thing everything was quietly rotating around the entire time.

And honestly, I think art often exists to make those invisible rotations briefly visible.

Not to solve them.

Not to conquer them.

Just to notice them.

To hold them in language for a moment.

To point and say:
“There. Do you see it too?”

And maybe that’s all I’ve really been doing this whole time without fully realizing it.