The Freaks Are the Last to Go
There’s a kind of magic when you read something that feels almost nonsensical and yet - by the time you’ve read the last word - you know exactly what it means and you’ve been unwittingly forced to unlock new ways of seeing and feeling the world.
That is what the brilliant freaks among us offer.
Their minds generate near-nonsensical brilliance like it's on tap. The freak's gift is folding meaning into shapes so dense that unpacking them requires work. And it is fun. To engage a freak's mind is to submit to a series of enjoyable puzzles. Their brilliance is in writing code just hard enough to decipher.
Compression is a hallmark of creative intelligence.
It is novelty and soul folded into form.
And it is a wager.
The window is impossibly narrow. Too obscure and it’s utter nonsense; too legible and it’s just information. There is compression that simply makes things easier to get. This is not what freaks do. Freaks refuse to trade depth for clarity.
There’s magic in timing too - in understanding that arrives a half-beat after intuition. Great comedians land jokes precisely in this gap between stimulus and cognition. You laugh before you can articulate why it’s funny (if you had to articulate it first, you wouldn’t laugh). The same is true of movie scenes where there’s little talking yet everything is said. Meaning encoded in silence.
Freak is a term of admiration. Brilliant alone doesn’t capture it. To call them weird is weak, genius is flat, visionary is corporate.
Freaks have texture. They’re permeable to context but impermeable to noise. Their references are strange, their conclusions stranger still. They’re rare without ever seeking to sit atop a hierarchy.
A freak with a secret is who you want to bet on, and early.
You’ll find them on stages and in basements. They build companies and make art and run kitchens. They do it all sideways. The truest freaks are hardest to name - so I won’t. By the time you’ve heard of them, they’ve often been sanded down. Success sanitizes.
You had to be there.
We label freaks aesthetically different, but they’re cognitively different first. Their insides and outputs remain largely illegible. Yet they do not explain, because the freak’s instinct is knowing when explanation would ruin it.
That instinct is a kind of taste.
Most of the garbage we consume doesn’t trust us at all. It hypes itself, explains itself, narrates its own subtext. We accept that the literal is sedative and still keep ourselves busy with one-step deductions. Algorithms route what we’ll love or lash out against. AI pre-chews. Frictionlessness wins.
Modernity optimizes legibility. The most interesting people don't.
That’s why we love freaks.
They trust themselves.
And they trust us.
Freaks safeguard friction. You know when you’ve stumbled upon one because you feel annoyed or stupid or stupefied for a while - and then suddenly smarter for it. They insult and flatter us all at once. Joyous frustration.
Their breakthrough is finding the compression ratio that grants others the gift of a momentary visit into their world. The gift is both their work itself and the temporary elevation of everyone who comes to understand it.
Culture flattens. The literal goes first. Then the competent. Then the good. Who's left? The ones whose gift is calibration of the gap - the liminal space between what they see and what you’ll feel — with a taste for exactly how close to nonsense we must tread to unlock the magic.
The freaks are the last to go.