November 4, 2022
Vitality Theory
Markets value price. What if we valued vitality instead?
August 29, 2022
Progress and Phenomenology: Value Is Vitality
A theory of value beyond prices: value is vitality.
December 15, 2021
We Should Get Better at Consciousness
A formal-ish framework for a 'consciousness ethics'
July 20, 2021
Acid Capitalism
Drawing on the cognitive science of psychedelics to show how capitalism is a psychedelic system that sculpts consciousness
April 5, 2021
The Treadmill Tendency
The treadmill effect may help explain why life in post-industrial economies feels like an endless cycle of meaningless activity. But is capitalism to blame, or does something else drive the treadmill?
March 5, 2021
To Annie Dillard's Astonishment
An essay about Annie Dillard's writing, life, and uncommon devotion to the naked and astonishing facts of this bizarre, bewildering world.
November 9, 2020
Civilization, Capitalism, & Kindness
Whether repression is inherent to civilization (Freud), or just capitalist society (Marx, Marcuse), the fact remains: we presently live in a repressive construct. The question is thus the same no matter what side you talk: how to live on, considering?
August 10, 2020
A Syringe of Possibility (Consider the Basic Income)
Basic income could be like injecting a syringe of vitality into our weary veins, from which a rush of economic possibilities would re-color our perception of the world.
August 2, 2020
Against Time Inequality: A Framework for Progress
Time inequality is pervasive, corrosive, and largely ignored. Like an invisible toxic gas filling the air. A renewed, policy-driven commitment to time ownership could revitalize the suffocated dream of progress.
May 19, 2020
A Negative Income Tax for the 21st Century
A progressive policy proposal for a basic income, complete with funding model and all
May 9, 2020
A Guide to Universal Basic Income: A Policy Long
A 'policy long' that offers in-depth explorations of perspectives on the UBI debate, both positive and critical. I include everything from UBI as a mechanism for 'post-scarcity', to the different ways we might pay for it.
May 1, 2020
The Capitalist Production of Consciousness
In which I explore universal basic income as a corrective intervention in the interwoven relationship between economics, consciousness, and human development.
February 5, 2020
What is the Point of Universal Basic Income?
Along with the economy, the psychology of capitalist realism collapsed in 2008. Now, amidst resurgent utopian energies, UBI is one policy framework among money to guide that zest back into mainstream economic discourse.
December 3, 2019
Of Paradigms & Policies
What changes first, paradigms or policies? Complexity economics suggests we might use policies as tools to design the evolutionary context of paradigms.
October 24, 2019
Some Economics of Abundance
What if, for the first time in the history of sentient life on earth, humans in the 21st century have enough accumulated cultural technologies, ingenuity, and wealth to discard the condition and dynamics of scarcity as life's organizing principle?
October 4, 2019
The Commodification Problem: Writing, Markets, & Individuation
As the internet offers a potentially global audience to writers, for free, I worry that taste itself is being commodified, and writing is just the latest bastion of individuation to give way.
August 20, 2019
A Post-Capitalist Philosophy of Networks
The philosophy of networks helps make sense of our transition from scarcity based capitalism into a post-capitalist culture of abundance, pursuing the networkological imperative of the sustainable emergence of complexity.
July 3, 2019
What's After Neoliberal Meditation?
From the clash between the individualism of neoliberal capitalism and the interdependence of contemplative ethics, might we imagine an evolved cultural framework suitable to both the magnitude of the dharma and the realities of 7.4 billion hungry humans inhabiting the same floating rock, with democratic & equitable access to innovations and possibilities of the digitized 21st century?
June 20, 2019
Cultural Critique as Self-Inquiry
The distinction between subjectivity & objectivity is bogus, and the hierarchy it creates is harmful to our shared experience of what it's like to exist.
May 23, 2019
Vending Machines of Desire
What is needed are methods of making knowledge visceral. Practices of feeling the transiency of sugary delights, feeling the plight of whales stuffed with plastic as they wash upon the beach to die, or feeling the loss of biodiversity as the loss of our own limbs.
April 27, 2019
Kinks in Consciousness
Life is a brief moment of consciousness bookended on both ends by complete oblivion. If sentience devolves into tedium, we're doing it wrong.
April 15, 2019
What If We Already Know How to Live?
What is philosophy after the internet? On the ecology of consciousness.
March 19, 2019
Containers, Physical & Mental
With time, most lives become containers themselves, holding our bandwidth of experience and attention into particular patterns, particular sets of routine activities, particular habits of daydreaming, posture, and breathing.
March 16, 2019
Is the Universe Infinite, or Just Really Big?
Is the universe infinite, or just really big? Either way, it doesn't make any sense, and we're just confused, sentient skin-bags.
March 12, 2019
A Leisurely Revolution
Modernity is eroding our capacity for leisure, intangibly impoverishing our livelihood. A leisurely revolution might help reclaim freedom from compulsion.
February 25, 2019
Literature of Awakening
What more could awakening be than an ever-present gratitude for the startling fact that we're here at all, awake to life rather than asleep in nothingness?
February 10, 2019
On Shrimp & Mystery
The shrimp's mystery is chilled oxygen coursing through my veins, reinvigorating my nervous system; my sense of being alive reopens to impossible horizons
January 28, 2019
On Some Terrors of Nothingness
I suspect we've learned to savor the fragmentary surges and jolts of experiences, rather than the neutral, ever-present, miraculous fact of experience itself...
January 1, 2019
When Truth Doesn't Work
Truth without practice is impotent, and practice without truth is blind - an essay on discerning what 'works' to enrich our lives...
December 17, 2018
Existential Creativity
On the philosopher's exit from ordinary reality, and the pursuit of existential creativity. Reimagining how we 'should' live as how we 'might' live.
December 13, 2018
The Purchasing Power of Complexity
Our journey from prokaryote to humans sacrificed clarity for complexity. With self-consciousness among the many bestowments of complexity, might we reimagine ways of harnessing complexity to re-generate a felt sense of clarity?
December 5, 2018
Aldous Huxley's Trolley Car into the Abyss
'Those who chafe at the tameness an sameness of office life, who pine for a little excitement to diversify the quotidian routine, should experiment with this little recipe of mine…'
December 4, 2018
The "Technologies of the Self" I Wanted to Read
What I propose here is a living inventory of time-tested technologies of the self that cultivate both enriched ways of seeing and nourished modes of being...Methods that carry our existential aspirations into the flesh...
November 21, 2018
The Soil of History: Will & Ariel Durant's Old Case for New Education
History is the decomposed soil of human lives, enriched by each cycle of growth and decay that fertilizes the soil of human experience...
November 7, 2018
Practice: Spirituality for the 21st Century
Our lives are compartmentalized landscapes of practice that all function in subsurface harmony, like trees spread across a vast forest whose roots commingle in the deep soil, to make us who we are.
October 7, 2018
The Reformation of Attention
I think of attention on the whole as how the sensory landscape of this present moment appears to — or though — my 'self'. Attention is the presentation of consciousness to itself. The prism through which the world is both constructed and encountered.
September 16, 2018
Why I Meditate
What kind of anticlimactically meek response to philosophy's old question — how to live — is plopping down on a cushion and breathing? Just as Albert Camus asked what he called philosophy's first question — why should I keep living? — we might ask, why keep sitting?
August 27, 2018
Vagaries of Satisfaction
'Many aspire to a higher or more fulfilling life, but the seeking is usually only an impulse of the moment, unrealized and not sustained. A vague sense of dissatisfaction arises in many people about the quality and nature of their present lives, but from that dissatisfaction no real sense or specific goal emerges.'
July 9, 2018
A Safe-Word Theory of Social Liberation
If social liberation is the target of economic ascent, we're in a slump. Why do we accept a world that drives so many of us into debt, depression, and despair? This project of returning a healthier balance to our economic, psychological, even spiritual landscapes can learn from the BDSM safe-word model - Basic Income could serve as the safe-word in a safe-word theory of social liberation.
June 19, 2018
What Pants Might Ayahuasca Wear?
The taboo on psychedelic experience is derivative of a larger secret – that consciousness is a vast, unexplored labyrinth with rooms whose dimly lit contents may threaten how we organize our lives, our societies, and even our-selves.
June 4, 2018
The Philosophy of Consciousness
If the art of philosophy is fading, can we reanimate it? Turning to the heart of philosophy's question - how to live - inevitably delivers us into the labyrinth of consciousness. Various practices guide us through these passageways, some new, some ancient. Philosophy can marshal them to chart our course.
May 30, 2018
Psychedelics and the End, or Beginning, of Me
At 24 years old, my father stood on the banks of India's Ganges river, passport in hand. With trembling grip, he nearly threw it in, his identity along with it, to live out his days nameless and broke, meditating and seeking God.
May 29, 2018
Ego and Its Discontents: Michael Pollan & Thomas Metzinger on Consciousness and Society's Problems
Two of our time's great voices identify the same root cause to society's largest issues, speaking to the vital relationship between introspection and activism
May 23, 2018
A Eulogy to my Dead Cat and Immortality
My naivety towards death died along with Newman. Not that I'd never considered death, nor that I lived in its denial. But we'd never met over such a dear friend, face to face. I'd never watched death enter a room, rummage around, and depart, leaving the vacant eyes of a loved one behind. It was disorienting.
May 23, 2018
The Crisis of Identity at Rest
The phenomenon popularly known as a 'mid-life crisis' (henceforth, MLC) can, in fact, occur at any age, place, or time. Mine began the day after college graduation, sitting on my small, familiar collegiate porch, watching the rising sun carry a new day, as it's prone to doing...
May 22, 2018
Towards a Habitable Consciousness
Now, in thinking of my own home, I aspire more towards a tortoise, who carries home always on his back. I seek to be as ensconced in myself as the tortoise is in his shell. I am the shell, because 'I' am home. That is to say, I live in my self.
April 18, 2018
Galen Strawson on the Unstoried Life
Who am I? Am I the ongoing story of my life? Or a nerve ending through which the Universe experiences itself? Does biography disclose identity, or do we, as VS Pritchett writes, 'live beyond any tale that we happen to enact'?
April 11, 2018
The Anatomy of Presence: Thoreau's Perpetual Ecstasy
'Be more present', goes today's banal, omnipresent suggestion on how we ought to live better. But what might this mean, physiologically? What does 'presence' look like? Thoreau provides an example…
April 10, 2018
Attention, Autonomy, & the Hijacking of Evolution: A Culture of Consciousness
April 6, 2018
A Church Bell That Recalls Salvation
Life is too astonishing to reconcile rapture, its transcendental shine, with children being gored by toppling trees in a minor windstorm that might've been otherwise unremarkable (this happened today).
April 2, 2018
Inconclusive Notes on Thinking About the Meaning of Life
March 27, 2018
The Management of Insignificance: David Foster Wallace and the Reconciliation of Selfhood
The collision of these two surfaces of life, subjective centrality and objective insignificance, are among the great wars of the human psyche, and we may do well to pull this conflict out into the open...
March 3, 2018
Did Suicide Exist Before Society?
We don't know when suicide began, but we're rather sure it began with humans. This begs the question: when? At what point along the evolutionary journey of Homo Sapiens did we, for reasons absent from any other prior species, begin killing ourselves?
February 20, 2018
In Defense of the Essay: Writing as Introspection
In a digital age that's diluted the essay's reputation, the craft's function is best given by a description of the essay's originator, Michel De Montaigne: 'Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence...' The essay is an attempt at fleshing out this astonishment.
February 20, 2018
Making Sense of Things: The Irresolution of Existing
Each of us are set down here at some point or another, bewildered, greeted by the eerie feeling that things are already sorted out, that sense has already been made of life, and it's us who aren't yet acclimated...and yet nonsense prevails
February 8, 2018
Imaginative Philosophy: Richard Rorty on Philosophy as Poetry
Richard Rorty's Philosophy as Poetry envisions a philosophy concerned with human progress — rather than metaphysical unknowables — driven by imagination...
February 5, 2018
An Encounter with Annie Dillard's Meditation
Meditation is like a new set of glasses, or rather, it's like removing your eyeballs altogether and relearning how to navigate a dark world...This is how I feel reading Annie Dillard, happening upon unexpected fragments of the sublime...
January 22, 2018
Would Camus' Sisyphus want Basic Income?
An essay exploring Albert Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus' to make a philosophical case for Basic Income, and ultimately for the 'impulse to consciousness'...
January 3, 2018
Making a Living as Making a Life: Thoreau on Work & Life's Real Business
A lot has changed over 200 years. But perhaps even more remarkable is what's stayed the same: we work a lot. Thoreau, Russell, Keynes, even Joe Biden weigh in on the evolving role of making a living in making our lives...
October 17, 2017
Rediscovering Progress: The Fading Philosophy of Economics
It's the ability to choose one's own vision, as opposed to one of necessity, that the American idea can aspire towards. The purpose of economics is to render itself irrelevant. That economic concerns will progressively cease to usurp the existential stage, making way for the creative, imaginative, or even quaintly mundane modes of existence chosen by each individual seems the backbone of any collective truly interested in liberty...
September 10, 2017
Contemplative Economics: Towards a New Model of 'Self'-Interest
Contemplative insights are threatening to disrupt a deep tenet of economic mentalities: self-interest. If the self does not exist as a real entity in the world, but is a bundle of cognitive processes, then is acting in our own self-interest to act on illusory grounds? If all things are interconnected, then self-interest is necessarily interdependent...
September 4, 2017
The Forms They Are a-Changin', but It's the Same Old Unknown
In humankind's perennial quest for wisdom, truth, and reality, we've employed myriad methods - forms - of inquisition into what lies beyond conditioned experience – experience in the raw, or the murky depths of human subjectivity in which we hope to find some redemptive experience of the unknown...
August 23, 2017
Solipsism's Younger Brother: Schopenhauer's Prism of Consciousness
Schopenhauer writes, 'every man is pent up within the limits of his own consciousness, and cannot directly get beyond those limits any more than he can get beyond his own skin.' But is this the case? Or are there moments that rip us right out of that skin, into the fields of Socratic Wonder...
July 20, 2017
The Fading Art of Philosophy
Before we ostracized philosophy to University departments and bookworms, it connoted the shared, universal venture of exploring, experientially, how to live.
June 11, 2017
Alan Watts on the Hubris of Formal Spiritual Practice
Alan Watts displayed a healthy skepticism towards the utilitarian approach to spiritual practice, an approach rampant in Western culture. To meditate 'for' something is to miss the point. Watts explores alternate 'disciplines of nonverbal perception', including the 'bearing-in-mind' approach...
March 30, 2017
Iterations of Paradox: Reality's Nonsensical Nature
Paradox points to both the end of logic, and the ineffability of reality. Of paradox's many embodiments spread across human endeavors, a look at three: Sanskrit's Sandhyabasha, Keats' negative capability, and Jung's inherent polarity of the psyche.
March 25, 2017
Spiritual But Not Religious: An American Ideal
Institutional religion is fading into obscurity as the rise of science and individualism presents us with a difficult question: what's next? Reclaiming spirituality as an American ideal, in the spirit of Emerson, offers hope.
March 21, 2017
Hannah Arendt on Thinking as the Quintessence of Being Alive
Thought is a human potential that Hannah Arendt writes can carry us from the trivial to the transcendent; a sort of highway leading from the finite into the eternal. Bertrand Russell's own experience with contemplation ratifies this idea, as he wrote in a letter to his friend...
March 19, 2017
Bertrand Russell's Evolution from Utilitarian to Contemplative; Captured in a Letter
March 15, 2017
Kerouac & Camus: Odious Comparisons & Absurd Humans
February 24, 2017
E.F. Schumacher & Friends on What Makes Us Human: The Consciousness Recoil
The question 'what makes us human?' is central to the human experience. To many, the answer lies within the depths of self-awareness, a tool E.F. Schumacher writes is capable of causing consciousness to recoil upon itself. And perhaps it is precisely through this unique trait that defines us as humans that we may most enrich our humanity.
December 19, 2016
America's Elusive Quest for Fulfillment
Today's rampant liberation from the singularity of survival motives charges us with the daunting task of seeking to provide for our inner selves in the way that food, shelter, and security provide for our base needs; from this enigmatic task comes the term, fulfillment.
September 7, 2016
(In Search of) A Fugacious Release from Narratives: Why Travel?
Stories, myths, and narratives contextualize our lives; against these substratal dramas we justify everything we do, define all we are. Travel aids in enriching and broadening the inventories from which we construct these stories, but the most pressing work is to remind ourselves that whatever narrative we exist within, it's nothing but fiction.
September 3, 2016
The Writer's Submarine: Enabling an Inward Dive
The deconstructive process of an inquiring life often demolishes the floors of reasoning supporting our contrived world views, with 'writing-as-introspection' offering a sort of inbent, journalistic record of self-discovery...
July 15, 2016
The Brain on Meditation
Advents in neuroscience are forging what has remained an elusive window into the meditative brain. The findings are exciting, though the real excitement from all this neuroscience lies in the potentialities gaining ground beyond science's constrained imagination...
July 1, 2016
A Quantum Physicist's View of the World: Schrödinger's Ant
From that ever-fascinating mutuality between physics and philosophy, Erwin looks to the ego-less civilizations of ants as a blueprint for long-term species-survival...
June 6, 2016
The Altruism of Introspection: Sri Ramana Maharshi's Self-Enquiry
The fallacy that being a positive force in the lives of others corresponds only to external action, and that inner-work's sphere of influence reaches no farther than oneself is an ultimately backwards creed. Oddly enough, introspection may be the most sane & potent form of altruism.
April 27, 2016
Diving into the Existential Abyss: Leo Tolstoy and Thich Nhat Hanh on Emptiness
The existentialist notion that life is fundamentally empty of all meaning has been affirmed by a dauntingly broad array of revered minds. But amidst the darkness wrought by the tendencies of rational inquiry into the meaningful life, Buddhist philosophy may illuminate a path forward.
April 18, 2016
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The Church of Reason
Cultures are built upon patterns of thought. Every now and then, someone like Robert Pirsig comes about with such a penetrating mind that he cuts straight through the prevailing ingrained habits, into the unseen core of the system itself.
December 11, 2015
Capitalism's Metaphysical Erosion: A Contemplative Solution
Two great economic minds echo each other on capitalism's tendencies towards moral erosion, and Schumacher offers introspection as the prudent course of action.