Person or product? Subject or object?
The same question keeps finding me in different rooms. In AI-conversations: if a machine can do what you do, what’s left that’s actually you? In courtrooms: is this a person, or a number the defense is trying to discount? In congregations: what really makes a human being irreplaceable?
I believe the answer––that you are a subject, not an object; a someone, not a something––matters more than anything I could tell you about myself. Hence, this website is about finding yourself in a world trying to reduce you to something else.
Latest Essay
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Ten years of marriage
I proposed to Chelsea when I was seventeen. She said yes. A month later, my head went through a windshield. Despite the coma, despite the brain injury, despite the re-learning—despite everything—Chelsea and I got married the day we had planned:…
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My Five O’clock Wage
We instinctively evaluate life by outcomes—the wages, the blessings, the portions. But Jesus’ vineyard parable challenges us to stop staring at the…
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Three Birds with a Stone I Didn’t Throw
There are moments in life when you see the hands of someone else at work. Take today, for example. I received an…
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Engineers, Evangelicals, and Texas Roadhouse
My wife’s birthday is exactly one week after mine (i.e., January 27, February 3). We celebrated our birthdays a couple weekends ago…
About
From a hospital bed to the bar exam
At 17, a car accident took a third of my skull and every plan I had. I was three months from seminary. I woke up unable to walk, unable to talk, unable to remember the name of the girl I’d proposed to a month earlier.
Her name is Chelsea. She married me six months later.
Over the next decade I finished college, graduated law school, and became a licensed attorney by twenty-four. Today I practice personal injury law in Indiana and Kentucky, and I write about identity, dependence, and what it means to be a person in the AI age.
Everything I’ve learned since 17 comes down to this one sentence:
“No one can be themselves by themselves.”
Law Practice
Personal Injury Law
Practicing law with the same attorney who fought for me after my injury. I’d be grateful to serve you too. E-mail cfathauer@schadlaw.com for legal inquiries, or visit the law firm website at this link.
The Book
Saving the Subject
How I Found You When I Almost Lost Me · 2024
A first-person philosophical argument for why you exist, written by someone who almost didn’t. It makes the case that we are subjects (whos made for relationship), not objects (whats measured by use). An identity that stays intact even when the objective world is crumbling.
Get a free chapter
Subscribe and I’ll send you a free chapter from Saving the Subject to start. After that, only new essays & articles. I promise not to blow up your inbox!