Kaleb Horton
~ Shared from a post I made on Substack from September of 2025 ~
I didn’t know Kaleb Horton. In fact, I had never heard his name before hearing of his passing. But what followed can only be described as discovery of a kindred spirit. Someone that I would have liked to have known. Someone whose writing I wish I had been aware of earlier.
Seeing the way those that knew him or read him reacted is what made me want to dig further. A lot of times, when someone of note passes, it’s an outpouring of celebration of life and fond memories. But this was different. More grief, sorrow, a void in a once whole world.
My intent with this isn’t to make it about me. There is plenty of that in the world. I want to share some of Kaleb’s work, and also to highlight the reality of creators in this time. Because there is no reason that today is the day that I learn of someone of this magnitude, in a space that I care very much about. I know it’s very much partially on me, because so many knew his work, but in a different time, he would have been a household name.
From what I can tell, we don’t know how he died. According to his friend, Luke O’Neil, he struggled with drinking and not drinking. He was looking for work, which is asinine that someone of his talent would need to. In a post from February 1st, he stressed the need for himself, and everyone, to get offline.
You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.
And he wrote about life and death. In a post from late October of last year, he wrote something that will stick with me until my own time comes.
I don’t know anything, and nobody does. Life is a problem that can’t be solved. A question with no answer. Drill down to the core and that’s all there is. It’s all we have. Ex nihilo. How?
We could easily destroy the unsolvable problem, but that’s the ultimate sin. We shouldn’t do that. If we have any imperative, it’s to keep life going, to stop it from being destroyed. Something turns to nothing constantly. Something came from nothing only once.
It feels like I’m on fire if I don’t try to live, keep facing the problem that can’t be solved. I guess that’s true of everybody, or we wouldn’t have invented drugs.
And I’ve been feeling aflame. I’ve been giving up because it all feels so…much. I’ve tried to remember that nothing matters, and then I remember that nothing matters. As much as I loathe nihilism, I’m struggling more and more every day to find an argument for it. Everything feels inevitable because we aren’t a strong society, and have put the weakest amongst us in positions of power.
Despite all of this, discovering Kaleb at this untimely juncture, has lit a spark in me. And not one of creative inspiration, or effort to keep going. But to find myself. I’ve overvalued comfort and stability in a time where nearly everything is uncomfortable and unstable. And that’s not to say that I’m quitting my job and moving abroad tomorrow, but I am in a very real state of evaluation now. Of cutting the bullshit and living with intention. I’ve been slowly starting to do this in the last year, but it’s time to put it to full throttle. Because nothing, none of this, is promised tomorrow. So I might as well try to enjoy myself while I can.
I want to close with another post from Kaleb. If I wanted to, I could post the article verbatim and it would suffice, because it’s that seminal to me. But I’ll stick with a few sections. It’s from March, and he is talking about his inability to find work, and how that’s manifesting in his life.
I’m going full nomad lately; while I still have a place to sleep in Los Angeles, I should see more interesting sights than the same few chunks of Burbank I turned into a routine through complacency. I’ll just point the car somewhere, go to a new town, and walk. I walk a lot. There’s an immense therapeutic benefit to it. You’re taking in and processing new visual stimuli, you’re a stranger, and when you’re walking you’re not doing nothing. And doing nothing will kill you.
One consistent thing this time of year is that there are crows everywhere. I spend a lot of time thinking about crows. They have the most obnoxious vocalizations of maybe any animal, they’re aesthetically unpleasant and feel like a harbinger of death, and they know when they’re bothering you and they enjoy doing it. Drives me crazy how well they’ve adapted to LA. I saw one just this week going through a garbage can, methodically picking items out of it one by one and tossing them on the ground, looking for foodstuffs. It was making a horrible mess, a mess you’d normally associate with humans. They’re such a pest, and the worst part is you have to respect it. They’re fat and happy and they thrive. They’re annoying in a way that suggests profound intelligence. If they could get around to inventing money, they should get tickets for littering. Treated like equals. I have met crows that should be in jail. There’s one in my neighborhood that seems to have a problem with me personally. They’re my favorite bird.
This all felt so relatable to me. The resonance of a shared perspective, in a different space and time. But the thing that hit the hardest and made me simultaneously wallow in grief and shift my perspective was this - a paragraph in the middle of a random post on a random day, by someone who I hadn’t heard of yet.
The job search continues to be a source of constant despair, which is part of why I walk so much. There are so many dangerous lunatics in this town with full-blown jobs, and here I am walking around Whittier all damn day thinking about crows. The tough part is there’s so much more to life than this, and I used to have it, I have personal experience with it. I’ve had a taste. What an annoyance to have known.