This explores the idea of survival as cost rather than victory—a theme that runs through much of my speculative fiction. In particular, it reflects questions central to my current work-in-progress, which examines debt, conditional freedom, and the price of endurance in hostile systems.

What does it mean to survive?

Is the cost worth living?

I ask these questions because I write about survival at any cost. Not the heroic version. Not the triumphant one. The version where the price is self-worth, identity, or the quiet erosion of who we thought we were.

Survival isn’t victory.

It’s persistence. It’s the will to keep going when everything else has been stripped away, when all that remains is another day, one more breath. It is the refusal to accept defeat.

However, death doesn’t always mean dying.

For instance, it could mean the death of the ego. Of pride. Of the person we believed ourselves to be. Survival changes us. It demands adaptation, compromise, and loss. The question isn’t whether we survive unchanged. We don’t. The question is what we’re willing to leave behind.

At what point do we no longer recognize the person staring back at us?

Violence should never be glorified. It is not noble or clean. Oppression does not become justified simply because it is endured, nor does resistance become righteous simply because it is desperate.

And yet history shows that survival is rarely gentle.

Sometimes violence becomes the final language available when every other voice has been silenced. This is not morality. It is costly. It is the pacifist standing before a tyrant and saying no more, knowing they will not walk away unchanged.

This is the price of survival.

And sometimes, the sacrifice of one is what allows others to live.