Who I am
My name is Sam Alaimo. I’m a former US Navy SEAL with a Masters from Columbia University.
I call this platform What then? after a question Epictetus asked with faintly maniacal repetition: “τί οὖν”. This translates to “So what?” or “What then?” He did this because it forced the individual he was interrogating—or, if there was no one to interrogate, when he interrogated himself—to dig one layer deeper, to keep asking questions until ignorance was stripped away and some fundamental truth was revealed.
But unlike Epictetus, these essays are neither self-help nor instructional. There are many writers who excel in that domain and I am not one of them. Instead of how, my loves are the why and the what. Why self-help, self-destruction, civilizational atrophy, and meaninglessness define our age. What the most awake and alive expression of human experience once looked like—and could look like once again.
I explore the lessons written in blood and wisdom written in ink of our warriors, our hunter-gatherers, and our philosophers, and I apply them as a practice and to every subject possible. A major theme is my focus on our experience in what I call “primal hardship,” a thread woven through most of my essays, and how this experience compares to the experience of modern life.
This is a highly enjoyable and brutal process. The more flawed we are—and as ancient humans living in a modern world we are not built for, we are heavily flawed—the more profound the benefit.
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