You've probably heard it all before. Be your own boss. Control your schedule. Own your time. As attractive as it sounds, it's a lie. Many people believe that working for yourself means unlimited…

A few days ago, I was watching a video without doing anything else on the side. My attention moved towards a distant glimmering light. It felt warm and oddly familiar, like those idle moments from…

Sometimes the bad guys come out on top Sometimes the good guys lose We try not to lose our hearts, not to lose our minds Sometimes the bad days maintain their grip Sometimes the good days fade But…

Something I wonder about: since all my bills are now automatically deducted so I don’t have to pay attention…what would it be like to remove clocks, remove calendars, and just live…

Here's a way of looking at life that I've wanted to write about for quite a while. If you envision your life as a long walk on a path (perhaps with a friend or two), six directions provide you with…

why does someone have to leave first? to me, it’s like asking the question of who came first, the chicken or the egg? it truly comes down to semantics and the recipients point of view, and well ……

How we turn survival instincts into success instincts, and how conscious choice prevents those instincts from running the show.

It’s hard for people to know this until they get there, but money has such diminishing returns. Once you can buy dinner and not worry about it, everything beyond that is just marginal square footage…

On the fantasy of masculinity without accountability.

Don't justify a bad move with an imagined future result.

Recently I’ve been met with paired astonishment, me at them and them at me, when I under-indicated my skills in conversation. It doesn’t matter what skill in question. Taijiquan, writing…

A reader pointed out that in my second assignment, I sort of waved off the question of “What does validation look like?” My protagonist was, to be fair, quite snarky in telling the professor what…

the small facts that remain after someone leaves

Creative limits are good, necessary even. And I find limits in form to be very useful when writing and designing adventures. A story or adventure can take several different forms. Our current…

Part of me hesitates to write and share these thoughts because they sound silly. Naïve, even. A mix of too much and too little confidence. And in the end, everything in my head was all abstract, so…

( Link a la versión en Español. Inspired by the <a...

"Good enough" no longer feels good enough

This site is a long-running collection of notes, essays, and small software projects. These articles are good introductions to some recurring concerns: clear thought, making things in the real world,…

Identity beyond job titles, productivity, ministry platforms, outcomes, and comparison, grounded in John the Baptist's clear "I am not."

If you&apos;ve ever been reorg&apos;d and thought &quot;this is bullshit,&quot; guess what? You were probably right.The &quot;Planning to Plan&quot; thing always kills meIn a 2013 McKinsey survey of…

In February 1949, Harper&#8217;s published the essay &#8220;Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow&#8221; by its managing editor, Russell Lynes. There, he observed a new structure determining prestige in the…

My mom has this saying that she attributes to her dad: “Anything worth doing is worth doing right.” I fucking hate this saying. “Right” according to who or what?! What I feel the person who says this…

I actually wasn’t going to write tonight. Mostly because I’ve written about this feeling before. And somewhere along the way, I think I created this strange little rule for myself that once I’ve…

There is no god but money, and Peter Thiel is his prophet.

They must stand on their own merits.

So, there is the &ldquo;biological&rdquo; and &ldquo;evolutionary&rdquo; convergence. What does it mean to &ldquo;know&rdquo; something, and what is worth knowing? I have seen very nice guys who know…

People increasingly want radical remedy, and need a radical vision. Pearls before swine, and disrupting the dominant scripts.

As a race, humans are really bad at doing cost benefit analysis. We might try and weigh up the pros and cons but we all have a tendency to exaggerate the pros if they are beneficial to us and…

Humans have dreamed of flight for as long as we know, even though the aircraft has been invented, we hold in our dreams a different kind of flight. A weightless kind, no roaring engines, no air…

i had a discussion about this yesterday. i think some of the types of intelect are; memorisers, pattern matchers, problem solvers, logical processors,and intuition? a lot of these overlap but no they…

The Minto Pyramid Principle: stop making your reader wait for the point. You can steal for your legal writing before you've even qualified.

In yesterday&#8217;s post &#8211; On global warming and AI for profit &#8211; I cited a meme often attributed to Slavoj Žižek; viz, that it’s easier for us to imagine the end of the world than that…

A room can lose oxygen when authority asks for deference before it has accepted burden, but the allergy to counterfeit authority can become its own vanity.

Everyone seems to be looking into their own niche and isolating more and more. They go into the deepest rabbit holes trying to diagnose why the thing they love the most is not in its prime anymore.

the other day, i was watching a video essay on the dangers of too much self-awareness. some things the vid pointed out: self-awareness can lead to over-researching in favor of actually doing the…

Compromise is a good word, but compromised isn&#8217;t? Stripping the sheets off the bed. The bowl has to be washed first, but it&#8217;s too big on the rack. Shadows in my brain like shrapnel. They…

Jonathan Swift

I want my world to be bigger. Or maybe less that I want it to be ‘bigger’ but I want it to feel more real. I think I have had a trouble with the world feeling real since I was very little. I…

It’s quite distressing to realize, later in life, how many things I may have been fundamentally wrong about. So many fondly held notions can turn out to be the hallucinations of a younger and more…

Every showing is full of secrets. –Julian of Norwich, 1373

I've also always been drawn to the relationship between the self and world around us. We influence, and are influenced. It is critical that we are able to choose whose influence we allow in.…

I know what to do but I can't bring myself to do it. I keep coming back to my thoughts on how the value of creativity for the creator is in the work itself and despite that, I find myself frozen with…

It's an irony of my life that while I wanted as much or more than anything to belong to some kind of larger institution that shared my values, I have instead become more of an intellectual lone wolf…

one trigger, two options, and then it branches. why starting a fight takes one line and ending one takes an hour, why explaining makes it bigger, and how to cut from the bottom until you're back at…

but i made it up to this point so why not shit will happen and you can't prepare for it that is exactly why it is called shit but you can find life in some things for example in writing or creating…

Do you ever ask yourself, what is the point? Why do we work hard to earn money to buy things we don’t need? I’ve been asking myself that question for years, and I still don’t know the answer. Lately,…

We All Have Regrets We all have regrets. We’re only human. We make mistakes, we say things we wish we hadn&#8217;t, and we make choices that, in hindsight, we might have made differently. And then…

Two essays argued there's a tradeoff GDP can't see: a society's power to take up the new against the debt that freezes it. I measured debt as the amount owed; it pointed the wrong way. The tax isn't…