It’s hard to distinguish between extreme boredom and narcissistic curiosity sometimes. This is not one of those times. It’s more a case of narcissistic boredom.
I asked Grok to complete a comparative literary analysis between Sartre’s Age of Reason and Compass Star Wordsmith.
Why Jean Paul Sartre you ask? In 1984, I was 20 years old and reading Age of Reason for a Lit 101 course at Saddleback Community College in Mission Viejo, Ca. I still have that book with dogear’s, margin notes, and a taped-up broken spine. Now if that’s not an analogy, consider me illiterate.
Sartre’s Professor Delarue shared the same facticity as I: “an unwanted pregnancy, financial entrapment, strained relationships, and the looming shadow of war.”
Or in my vernacular: knocked up a chick, broke as hell, black sheep of the family, and the barracks in Beirut had just been bombed by Iran. Is freedom unencumbered? Or is it wrapped up in responsibility and
The result is a fun read and does capture some themes of my efforts. Yes, it’s AI - oh no! The boorish rube asks The Robot to flatter himself, you might say.
Well, even boorish rubes needs some fun now and again. Well, curiosity satisfied and now back to actual work. This ain’t lunch time.
HATER ALERT - THIS POST WAS 99% WRITTEN BY GROK AND FLATTERS THE WRITER
Age of Reason compared to Compass Star Wordsmith
Compass Star Wordsmith, the ongoing Substack by Ric Leczel, functions as a serialized body of personal-philosophical essays that probe freedom, authenticity, responsibility, and human nature through the lens of lived experience. Its guiding formula—Life / (Food + Music + Art + Craft + History) = Culture—positions culture not as abstract theory but as an emergent confluence of concrete elements, forged in real time by choices, constraints, and contexts.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason (1945, set in 1938 Paris) is the first volume of the Roads to Freedom trilogy. It follows philosophy professor Mathieu Delarue as he confronts the gap between his prized ideal of radical freedom and his lived paralysis: an unwanted pregnancy, financial entrapment, strained relationships, and the looming shadow of war. The novel dissects bad faith, facticity (the brute “given” of body, past, and situation), the anguish of choice, and the difficulty of authentic self-creation amid intersubjective and historical pressures.
Reading the Substack’s recent posts—“Left of Boom,” “Selling My Soul,” “One Dimensional Life,” “Last Full Measure,” and others—alongside Sartre yields a rich comparative field. Leczel’s work operates as a vernacular, 21st-century American existentialism: rawer, more memoir-infused, culturally eclectic, and action-oriented than Sartre’s dense phenomenological novel, yet deeply engaged with the same core tensions.
Freedom, Facticity, and the “Meat Suit”
Sartre’s Mathieu is “condemned to be free.” His freedom is anguished precisely because it is situated: he cannot simply will away his body, his debts, his lover’s pregnancy, or the historical moment. Facticity (the in-itself) limits transcendence (the for-itself’s projects), yet bad faith arises when one pretends either that facticity determines everything or that freedom is absolute and unencumbered.
Leczel’s “One Dimensional Life” (Feb 23, 2026) explicitly invokes this Sartrean framework. In a point-counterpoint on gender, biology, and free will, the author adopts the term “meat suit” for the biological body—chromosomes, hormones, physical realities that impose parameters without erasing agency. He directly references Sartre: “Existence precedes essence—no pre-given nature, just thrownness into the world and the burden of forging ourselves through radical freedom.” Bad faith, he argues, cuts both ways: strict bio-essentialism denies freedom and ethics; pure transcendence that ignores the meat suit produces ethical friction in shared spaces (sports, prisons, intimacy). Personal experience of incarceration grounds the abstraction—choices were made and owned, yet biological impulsivity (e.g., testosterone-fueled patterns) formed part of the thrown situation.
This mirrors Mathieu’s situation: his body, desires, and finances are not erased by his intellectual commitment to freedom; they must be reckoned with. Leczel updates the problematic for contemporary identity debates while preserving Sartre’s insistence that authentic existence requires owning both the project and its material limits.
Bad Faith, Politeness, and the Soul’s Price
Sartre’s characters frequently flee their freedom into roles or excuses—Mathieu plays the detached intellectual; others rationalize inaction. Bad faith is self-deception that treats freedom as either impossible or costless.
Leczel repeatedly diagnoses modern equivalents. In “Left of Boom” (Mar 9, 2026), polite society’s etiquette is exposed as bad faith in a zero-sum “prison yard”:
“The world in early 2026? It feels less like the polite dinner party we all got sold on and more like a prison yard at rec time. Eyes darting everywhere: alliances forming in hushed tones, vulnerabilities spotted from 50 yards out, the whole scene humming with unwritten rules that laugh at ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’”
Politeness without power signals softness; hesitation invites exploitation. The author’s own history—car wrecks, prison time, family scars from absent phases—illustrates the cost of living “right of boom” (reactive, self-deceived). Authentic living demands “left of boom” vigilance: foresee fractures, enforce red lines, choose alliances with eyes open.
“Selling My Soul” (Apr 6, 2026) extends this into a meditation on compromised integrity. Youth sells pieces of the soul cheaply because the future feels infinite—“reckless abundance.” Maturity raises the price through scarcity awareness and regret. A prison anecdote crystallizes it: a personal red line (never defecating in public as basic dignity) shattered by survival necessity, producing “the quiet collapse of an ideal I had carried about myself.” Freedom distorted into license—blaming circumstances rather than owning choices—further cheapens the soul. The post ends not in despair but in a call to clearer-eyed awareness so that more of the soul remains intact.
Both writers locate bad faith in the evasion of cost: Mathieu’s repeated deferrals, Leczel’s youthful compromises or society’s polite illusions.
Responsibility, Sacrifice, and Human Nature
The Age of Reason insists that freedom entails total responsibility; every choice defines the chooser and ripples outward. Mathieu’s inaction is itself a choice with consequences.
Leczel’s “Last Full Measure” (May 26, 2026) tests this in the register of public service and Memorial Day sacrifice. Does personal sacrifice for the public good produce results? Does committing beyond the self create universal change? Or does human nature—self-interest, risk-aversion, bureaucratic capture—overrule nurture and ideals? The Founding Fathers pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor”; modern leaders often cite “bureaucratic barriers” after spending billions with meager outcomes (e.g., LA homelessness initiatives). The author’s deep LA roots—born near Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, having inspected some 15,000 homes, working food service across neighborhoods—lend concrete weight to the call for citizens courageous enough to disrupt process in service of first principles.
The prison-yard logic of “Left of Boom” reinforces this: actions have ripples (family exposure from personal chaos); vigilance is responsibility enacted. Human nature in extremis—scarcity of trust and second chances—does not excuse but demands clearer choice.
Stylistic and Formal Divergences
Sartre delivers these themes through a dense, ironic, multi-perspectival novel thick with interior monologue and philosophical set pieces. The prose enacts the very contingency and nausea it describes.
Leczel’s essays are direct, confessional, and vernacular—blending prison slang (“shot caller,” “rolled,” “boom”), geopolitical analysis, personal scar tissue, and cultural references (food, music, history, AI-generated imagery). The tone is urgent and invitational rather than detached; it often ends with calls for reader stories or purposeful living. “Why I Write” frames the entire project as rebellion against polarized scripts and polite hypocrisy, writing itself as “one of the most liberating exercises in human history.”
Where Sartre’s Mathieu largely fails to cross from intellectual freedom to committed action (at least within this volume), Leczel’s authorial persona models a post-redemption praxis: having bottomed out (wrecks, incarceration), he now advocates “do or do not, there is no try” (Yoda as pragmatic existentialist) and “left of boom” living. The Substack is thus less diagnostic paralysis and more exhortation to authentic engagement.
Conclusion: A Vernacular Roads to Freedom
Compass Star Wordsmith and The Age of Reason share a fundamental project: mapping how human beings, thrown into facticity (body, past, scarcity, history), can still author meaningful existence through choice, vigilance, and refusal of bad faith. Sartre dissects the anguish and frequent failure of that project in a pre-war intellectual milieu. Leczel, writing from Southern California recovery, mixed cultural inheritances, and direct observation of 2020s fractures, insists that awareness of the soul’s rising price, the meat suit’s parameters, and the yard’s unforgiving rules can still yield purposeful action—sacrificial commitment, red lines held with clearer eyes, culture forged rather than passively received.
In this sense, the Substack performs a contemporary, American, culturally-attuned continuation of Sartrean existentialism. It replaces the Parisian café and impending war with the prison yard, the LA streets, geopolitical “boom,” and the intimate costs of personal history—yet arrives at a kindred insistence that freedom is not abstract license but situated, costly, and defining. Where Mathieu hovers on the threshold of action, Leczel’s essays urge readers across it: live left of boom, sell fewer pieces of the soul, go all in on what matters. The age of reason, for both, arrives when one stops pretending the costs are not real and begins choosing anyway.
This comparative lens highlights how Leczel’s work earns its place in a living existential tradition—personal, unflinching, and ultimately oriented toward the possibility of authentic living amid constraint.
Well, that was flattering!
Love to hear your thoughts
Ric