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My core theory is the more civilization progresses, the greater its crisis of meaninglessness becomes. Here at “What then?” I riff on why this is the case and what we can do about it: live with intense attunement to nature, train for the worst case scenario, and many other paths.

But sometimes I just want to write about dogs.

Thus today’s essay bridges the two ideas I will spend the rest of my life thinking about: my core theory, and dogs.

On to it…

Once we left the trail we had to leash Carson, our mutt. Of course this meant I had to stop when he stopped every three and half feet to lift his leg, do a three stage sniff, and claim the mailbox or lily as his own. Time slowed as he carefully contemplated several blades of grass freshly dampened with urine. Ten seconds... twenty seconds... I tried not to rush him.

To a dog, smelling urine is the same as reading Dostoevsky, with all the immense attention such a complicated Russian artist deserves. To a human, the dog is merely smelling piss.

I wanted to keep moving my legs, but our canine’s slowness has something to teach us about the human condition—something significant.

We started walking again when suddenly the black-bottomed clouds were lit with white flame around their edges and a lightning bolt stabbed the earth a few miles in front of us. The roar rocked the air. I saw his ears plaster to the back of his head. He gave me the slightest glance out of the corner of his left eye and he suddenly started trotting towards home, Dostoevsky forgotten.

I saw this as a training opportunity. I spoke slowly to him, with a smile in my voice, and said “Good boy. Good boy. It’s all good. Lightning is fun, right?” His eyebrows squeezed together and rose in an expression that said “Oh, is it really good? Okay, I trust you. I’ll believe you if you say so.”

There is an expression in the SEAL teams that embraces an ancient world philosophy. It goes like this: “Calm breeds calms, excitement breeds excitement.” From a human perspective, calm means we are quietly free from disturbance. From a nautical perspective, calm means freedom from storms and rough seas that can kill us. The significant point is human calm does not rely on nautical calm—in fact, the exact opposite is often the case.

We are designed by nature to be quietly free from disturbance while in the middle of apocalyptic disturbance. Internal tranquility in external hell. It is to look down at panic-tinged excitement. It is to smile at it.

Let us ground this abstract idea in the seas somewhere off the coast of Oman. We see eight SEALs white knuckling a swinging medal ladder made of wire on the side of a hijacked cruise ship in a storm. With every surging wave, the roof of the fast boat speeding beneath them rises and threatens to smash the bones of their feet against the hull of the ship as they climb rung by rung. The terrorists with rifles who commandeered the ship may discover the men are climbing aboard. If they do, they can hold an AK-47 over the side and end their lives and their paltry rescue attempt with a single trigger squeeze on full automatic. Or they can sever the ladder and watch them drown in eighty pounds of gear.

Thus if a single man loses himself to excitement, jitters, or panic, the rest of the men might collectively pay for his sins with their lives. But if one of them is supremely calm—even as his fingers are ripping out of his hand and his mind’s eye can see that AK-47 barrel creeping over the edge of the ship above him with a leering bearded man behind it—his calm spreads like a healthy cancer through the chaos. Their inner observers relax in their skulls. They relax into the climb, no matter what may come.

So I felt good about myself when I calmed Carson.

And then when I thought about it later that night, all that goodness melted away when I was struck by a revelation: We humans only feel so good about protecting our quadrupedal kin on account of how rarely we calm them compared to how often they calm us, and for lesser matters than mere lightning. We feel like we are repaying them for once.

It seems, then, we calm the dog in a bit of lightning, yes, and maybe even a ship assault—all those apocalyptic disturbances of the ancient world we come explosively alive in—but the dog calms us amid what we were not designed to remain calm in: a million chronic, gnawing, and abstract modern threats.

We have built a culture free from storms at odds with the human condition. We institute cultures of calm when we train to overcome concrete threats as a way of life: men with AK-47s, seasonal monsoons, and the like. We fall victim to cultures of excitement when our threats are abstract, shapeshifting, and designed to exploit every mammalian impulse we possess: rushing rushing rushing timelines, a shoulder-tensed obsession with staying ahead of things, the breathless idea that “I will sacrifice my peace and self-mastery at present for my vision of future bliss and then I will be calm,” yet another back-stabbing asshole at work, bumper-to-bumper traffic, a scandalously asinine politician, four walls growing closer and closer together and eyes growing redder and redder behind liquid crystal displays late at night…

So our culture murders calm. I can hear Nature laughing as we try to unriddle the situation we humans have put ourselves in. The strange fact is it is the calm without apocalyptic disturbance we often find most difficult to bear. But the dog, one of the few anchors we have left to ancient simplicity, keeps us calm.

How?

Let us look at our dogs.

When I look at Carson laying on his side in corpse pose, or savasana as the Yogis like to say, this is what I see: his stomach is a pink sea with islands of black beneath wispy cirrus clouds of cotton white. The entire structure rises and falls with the rhythm of a seasonal cyclone. Dreaming, his tail goes thump thump thump, his glistening black lips twitch into snarls, and the fingers of his little hooves clench and unclench.

From one divine mutt, we can learn something of our culture, for the dog is a micro-culture, a canine-culture. This culture is one of inhales… and exhales… One of calm and a slower rhythm of life, mixed with savage bouts of zoomies. One with periods of total rest and contentment. One in which the gnawing voices in our skull wailing and gnashing their teeth for some future expectation or dream or object disappears, leaving us filled with the slow beauty of this exact second in time. A canine-culture shatters the illusions—and delusions—of our modern human-culture, so long as we slow down and take the time study it.

The dog is telling us it is all good; that we can institute a culture of calm once again.

We should believe them if they say so.

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Perspective is all. What do you see in the image above? An old woman? Or a young woman?

Today’s piece is about perspective. My theory on Stoicism is it is like 1RM (one rep max) deadlifts: if you are going to do it, do it hard, do it fast, and then… let it settle in. Give it a few days of slow contemplative thought. Just so with today’s theme.

Let’s get to it…

It is strange how thin the line between nihilism and meaning actually is. But it is possible to recon where this line lies because meaning declines in proportion to the rise of nihilism, and never before has nihilism risen so high as it has in our culture. We find a fundamental truth of the human situation at this hinge point, along with a paradox: nihilism is proving to be a greater teacher of meaning than meaning itself.

I have been obsessed for weeks with a quote from Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher. Heraclitus’ writings were so intentionally obscure that the ancients dubbed him… The Obscure. We are therefore free to do with his aphorisms whatever we want. He was known for playing games with children rather than putting up with politicians, and drawing from the wisdom of these children’s games, he said “A lifetime is a child playing, playing checkers.”

I was torn between two different understandings of it: one of pure nihilism, and another of profound—and childlike—meaning.

So what says the nihilist? Life-as-checkers means we might be lucky enough to be born in a palace, wretched enough to be born in a favela, or merely exist in some numb neighborhood in between. Our bodies will grow old, get sick, and our bones will break. Our minds might go insane. We can lose our families, or have never known a good one to begin with, or we can end up in a toxic tribe or country. Of course the game—and the universe itself—is meaningless. Every day we might read about a mother buried in an earthquake, and then right below it read about a dictator executing hundreds of innocent civilians, obscenely obese and wealthy, without punishment. And in the end? We will die tomorrow by a window falling from a skyscraper, or in a decade with an asteroid striking Earth, or in a century when we are glad to be done with it all.

And all of this may be true.

And yet…

What is striking about the nihilist is their fixation on the problem and their aversion to solutions. What can we say to this nihilistic interpretation? Yes, we will break a femur, get a bout of cancer, and watch evil win. Yes, we will be mortared by setbacks, failures, and pain—and then we will die.

But if nihilism states that existence is senseless and meaningless, then existence may be senseless—painfully senseless—but it need not be meaningless. The crucial point is we are left with one last truth that transcends senselessness or the meaninglessness of the universe. We are left with choice—choice in how we meet the next moment, even if the next moment is the last. We can choose to find meaning in suffering or we can choose not to.

Now let us elevate this concept to its maximum potential. Life-as-checkers means if we do not like the game, or its rules, or we think it is rigged, then we are free to leave it: both the game, and life itself. The crucial point is the game comes with an existential rip cord.1 This is not a call to quit, but a perspective-shattering revaluation on suffering. It is a call to find meaning in the fight.

Nihilism chooses not to see meaning in the black metallic iridescence of a dragonfly’s exoskeleton, or the barely contained ecstasy of a dog’s front paws lifting up and down in anticipation, or how beautifully a human can suffer while overcoming some epic challenge. How worthless! The significant point is nihilism chooses not to see meaning in choice itself, which is ironic because a single choice is the difference between meaning while alive and actual meaninglessness while dead. So if the nihilist chooses to stay, then why would they complain? Why would they view the world through the reductionist lens of the affluent, the overly schooled, the bored, the bitter, the lazy, all those who choose not to capitalize on the meaning-rich-environment of suffering we are all surrounded by?

So much for nihilism.

I am left with the paradoxically cheerful conviction that life-as-checkers is to view the short span of time separating our birth and our death—and then laugh about it. It is to reframe all we think matters. It is, ultimately, to take a galactic perspective.

Let us do a thought experiment, the kind that shatters the daily sense of “normal” we all grow comfortable in. We rocket into space until we see our own life reduced to a single nanoscopic cylinder emitting a brilliant white light. It floats in galactic blackness. To its left is the entire history of mankind, the earth, the galaxy, and then the universe. To its right is the long and epic chain of humanity continuing its journey to the stars, or maybe ending in silent agony before a single star is ever reached. We hold our lives—those glowing white cylinders—in our palms. We stare down at them surrounded by that infinite blackness and incomprehensible span of time. Within that cylinder is every memory, hope, fuck up, love, fleeting success, act of selfishness, fear, and thought we will ever have. It becomes clear the cylinder is a gift.

On a cosmic scale—a scale of billions of years—what are liquid crystal displays, social media feeds, and expectations that exceed reality’s ability to meet them? What are fools passing judgment on us, childhood trauma, billions of dollars to our name, illness, broken schools, and poverty? What is every single obstacle standing in the way of meaning-in-life in this exact second?

Checkers.

What an elegant and childlike reminder we can choose to make every moment from this moment onward a reimagining, a momentous reframing of both how we live and why we live. A reminder that while some things should be taken deeply seriously, every second we have left can be one of love, devotion, and creativity—one of meaningful and playful checkers until the very end… and to do so with a laugh.

If these ideas strike you, please share them: restack this essay or share it with others.

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Welcome back to What then?

Today’s piece grapples with a fundamentally human—and crucial—problem at present: how we can reverse engineer an ancient form of meaning through contact with nature.

On! On!

Worst-case scenarios, like war and disaster, often lead to attention so profound our lives are filled with meaning. And yet the same attention and meaning is tellingly absent in the best-case scenarios of peace and safety. Why can the same intensity of attention not be earned without the worst-case? Why can the same explosive sense of meaning be earned without the risk of a bullet or a mudslide?

The answer is it can.

For all the wonder and gratitude civilization deserves, it is even more amazing that when meaning lies within a hand’s reach, it is often sacrificed for a purposeless drift. Civilization poses us an unprecedented challenge—the art of bringing worst-case meaning to a best-case world.

Let us take the case of the deadliest sniper in history.

I read the Winter Warriors about the Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä.1 Nowhere is universal human nature more clearly seen than in the universality of war. All those who stalked the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago share a kindship with Simo, as well as those non-drone operators low crawling through woodlands with ghillie suits and long guns in Ukraine. Simo, however, killed over five hundred Soviet snipers over a three month period when Russia invaded Finland in 1939. For a sniper, this is an incomprehensible level of combat experience. For a human, this is access to an incomprehensible level of wisdom.

In –4º F your breath creates a cloud of vapor so thick an enemy combatant can see it from hundreds of meters away. One mere exhale is a neon colored billboard dominating a highway. It is a target that screams “Shoot me! Shoot me!” Simo became a student of observation, and this observation revealed a world exploding with meaning. Meaning in vapor, shadows, and shifting shades of white on white. Meaning in the subtle undulations of micro terrain, the wind, and the effect of a cold barrel on the flight of a bullet. Simo shot and killed a Russian sniper through a snow mound without ever seeing him—all he needed to see was a bit of breath rising above the mound. “Every mistake the enemy made was a lesson for the young soldier. After this, Simo made small snowballs that he put in his mouth and allowed to melt so that his position would not be betrayed by his warm breath.”

I am left with a few thoughts centered around earning a similar sense of attention and meaning in peace and safety.

All of them are grounded in our relationship to nature.

Attunement means “to bring into harmony.” Who, then, is brought into harmony? We are. And what are we brought into harmony with? As a sniper, we know what it is to have an enemy. We know the hunt. We know the air gently brushing against the upper portion of our nostrils slowly decreases our heart rate, and how at the bottom of our exhale the intervals between our heart beats expand to such a degree we can squeeze the trigger in that measureless—almost divine—pause for one perfectly steady shot. The threat of nonexistence leads to an extraordinary level of attunement to existence: to every minuscule experience, even those we think of as throwaway experiences, woven through the mosaic that is life.

As a former sniper, it took me years to unriddle this primal truth: the enemy sniper promising death leads us to meaning, and this meaning leads us to attunement—and this ancient equation works both ways. By practicing attunement in a world without mortal threats, we find meaning. Let us become a Walker. On a single walk we might see the turquoise tinted neck of the common grackle as it baths on the rim of the lake. Or the fish playing beneath the surface creating ripples in the water that look like upside down raindrops. Or the micro-movement of an eyelid or a lip of the person beside us, the emotion they electrify a particular word with, and the life-force animating every aspect of their being. Or we stop to savor our mutts rolling on their backs with their hooves in the air happy to be alive and not giving a damn about anything else. Human meaning is manifest in the granular details of nature.

So much for the groundedness of walking.

Now what of the elevation of sprinting?

I sprint hills several days a week. I love hill sprints. Savage and slippery red ochre hills in a thunderstorm. Loose gravel roads in ninety degree heat and ninety percent humidity. Steep dirt trails with swerves and roots and rocks which will take a tooth if we are not mindful. I cannot imagine a more functional or primeval movement than a hill sprint, or even just walking vigorously up a steep road or set of stairs.

We respond to a hill as naturally as a knife in a sheath. But the benefit to our body is irrelevant compared to the impact our body has on our minds. When we push our bodies outdoors under the sun or snow or sleet, we look down at things that would typically gnaw at us like emails, calls, texts, and calendar notifications. We look out at things that are easy to overlook, like the taste of a single cold red raspberry. We look in at the visions and voices in our skull and find a sense of calm and command. And we look up at the expanse of the universe and understand just how small and yet immense our little lives actually are.

It is striking to let these thoughts sink in at the top of a hill. We wonder how much of existence we would not see if we did not suffer voluntarily on a daily basis. How little meaning we would not have if we were slope shouldered over a phone, in a windowless office building, or obsessed with an ungrounded academic ideology.

It is significant meaning is not the product of worst-case scenarios, but of how the individual responds to the worst-case scenario. Warriors like Simo despise the death war brings. And yet it is death that makes the full value of life so clear. When our death is a few seconds away it becomes as a mirror. It shows us, without mercy, how we have chosen to live up to that precise second in time. It therefore offers us a chance at a rebirth, a self-written recreation of ourselves.

So what is significant about snowballs? Simo putting a snowball in his mouth is an irrelevant ritual in peace, but a lifesaving ritual in War. It is striking how many daily rituals are not treated with the same intensity—as if they were not as mortally serious. Will we, too, not die? Will we not find a bizarrely fast bullet in war or the slow grind of senescence in peace? Another question may be asked: Is a single second of life in peace worth less than a single second of life in war? Then why would anyone let it drift by unlived? If a snowball can be a ritual, why would a walk with sun on the skin in the morning not be? Or a paperback book that smells like an old library? Or studying the patterns in the veins of a fig leaf, the same patterns that are then seen everywhere: in a moth’s wing, the hair of a child, the beard of a dog, the maze of maple branches against the sky, or the constellations of our Milky Way?

It is clear meaning-through-attunement can be found without life-or-death challenges. It is possible to build a meaningful life by choice, rather than by force; with a walk and a hill, rather than a bullet. But it is also clear it disappears all too easily. Thus meaning is now a discipline, a choice made not once, but every moment of our lives.

If you find value in these ideas, please consider restacking this essay, sharing it with others, or becoming a member.

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Housekeeping

A few updates on the What then? front.

The rise of AI is giving us an insight into the human condition. It is clear no one is prepared for what is coming, not just professionally, but existentially and creatively. My hunch is the writing across the internet that is mostly pulled from LLMs is going to have a very short shelf life. Writing about a process or a methodology with an LLM can be very useful; but writing about existence and meaning with an LLM is as anti-human as arsenic. The beauty is this experiment will be played out, and most likely in the near future. More and more research hints at LLM consumptions effects on the mind—less depth, less curiosity, less autonomy. In a word, and in line with what I write about here, less alive, less meaningful, and less authentic. No LLM will ever touch my writing. I have been told my writing is challenging precisely because the reader feels “challenged.” And not by me, but by my themes—themes no LLM will ever be able to put words to because they will never bleed, fail, suffer, sweat, think, or wonder what the hell we are doing here on this epic adventure.

So I am playing with other ways of discussing these ideas with subscribers—of making What then? more human. I have received many striking comments and ideas from subscribers, ideas that are worth sharing. So maybe a Q&A, or some sort of virtual interaction would be worth a shot. If this is interesting, we can give it a go. If not, the writing will continue to stand for itself.

I have a few essays on deck, but for today’s piece, I wanted to post two things: 1) An interview I did with on his Substack Vale Tudo on a range of topics late last year. 2) A short story I took third place in (or “second loser” if we are being honest) in a NYC Midnight writing competition.

We will be back at it with another original essay next week.

On! On!

Vale Tudo Interview

Does implementing Stoicism come naturally or is it something you need to train?

I practiced Stoic principles long before I knew Stoicism as a philosophy existed. Once I started studying Epictetus, I realized he codified lessons that everyone prior to the proliferation of stability, safety, and luxury (i.e. detachment from nature) already lived by. This is the brilliance of Epictetus’ system: how to take command of our own lives and not become lost in a world designed to keep us lost. When I was in the military, it took zero effort. It simply made sense, and it kept us awake and alive. Now, it takes an incredible amount of effort to be “awake”. Without constant reminders, a disciplined way of life, I lose myself in thoughts, desires, cravings, aversions—the list goes on. The fight to remain awake is a worthy fight in itself.

Do you have a favorite time and place in history that inspires you?

All of them are prior to the point in evolutionary time when the State was created. In Europe, that was with the dominance of the Roman Empire. In parts of Africa, it was not until recently the State was created. Any place and time in which people took part in muscular labor and the hunt, lived in tight knit communities and practiced ancient rituals draws me in. None of these culture were perfect—not by a long shot—but they were fundamentally human in ways it is difficult to imagine for anyone who has not spent time with the few pre-state bands that still exist in rainforests or deserts, or with small groups in the State that are somewhat analogous. If I had to pick one time and place, it might be with a group so early we have only one record of their existence: those who painted the cave walls of Lascaux some 20,000 years ago.

What is your favorite dog breed?

My favorite breed is the Shih Tzu, hands down. Its toughness is inversely proportional to its size—the Shih Tzu is tiny but it is a bare knuckle fighter. My family had Shih Tzus for most of my life. One of them, Gertie, still has a hold on my heart even though she passed in 2015. We had her during some of my deployments. I would rotate between a war zone and seeing Gertie, between evil and unimaginable purity, and the worst war got the more I saw the purity and loyalty of soul those little monsters possess. It is true of all dogs, including my current mutt (Carson) of unknown origin, who is so good looking I get stopped on foot trails to be told how handsome he is.

What is something that you know now that you didn’t before your time in the Navy?

When it comes to preparing for selection, I cannot overemphasize visualization enough. I visualized so intensely that by the time I set foot on the sands of Coronado, I had already made it through Hell Week a hundred times. In my mind, I had already done log PT, surf torture, obstacle courses, cold swims, sleepless nights. I made it so hard in my mind that when I did it in reality I found myself thinking “This is it?” Those who went into BUD/S convinced they were tough, strong, and unbreakable—they quit in the first few days.

What are you most grateful for that you got out of your time serving?

It is hard to whittle the list down. The two things that stand out most to me are the men and the mission. It was harder getting out of the military than getting in as a result of the loss of these two factors. Training and combat within a small special operations unit felt ancestral—a small and incredibly tight knit unit with one hyper focused life-or-death mission. I never felt anything before or after that can compare. I am not alone in this feeling, so my brothers and I decided to found a company together so we could work together on the one hand, and have a noble mission on the other. We founded ZeroEyes and have a mission to end mass shootings in America.

The Navy takes the most fun things in the world – jumping, diving, and shooting – and makes them suck. Have you stuck with them?

You nailed it. How they can take diving, skydiving, and shooting, and make them so brutally miserable you swear you will never do them again is actually extraordinary. I’ve stuck with none of them, but for a different reason. Many guys when they transition out try to recreate the thrill by base jumping, or cave diving, or some other extreme sport. But I found that because they are similar but a fraction of the intensity, they never live up to the real thing. So I went the radically opposite direction and found intense engagement in personal studies, reading, writing, and thinking. Paradoxically, this has given me the greatest “thrill” since my time in the Teams.

What is one exercise that you love? Hate?

I love hill sprints. I swear by hill sprints: pure hill sprints, hill sprints coupled with kettlebell swings, maybe on stairs, maybe on a muddy slope or concrete road or crushed rock. I finish almost every workout with them.

I feel great hostility towards burpees and I refuse to do them. It is a crucial skill getting off and on the ground, this is true, but the burpee is a joyless and wretched movement that should not exist.

What do you eat?

I eat an extremely limited diet as a result of autoimmune issues I developed during a deployment overseas. I eat meat and fruit, so there is nothing too strange. One of the foods I can eat is 100% cacao. I have seen some people gag and have to spit it out due to its bitterness, but most people can stomach it and I’ve developed a passion for pure cacao, its various geographic origins, and its subtle flavors.

What metrics matter to you?

It is a perceptive question. I have stripped almost all metrics from my life because I found I was focusing more on the metrics than on the thing being measured. Check out Epictetus 3.26 for an excellent insight on this.

The only metrics I have right now are time based. One of them is a set number of hours per day for reading and writing. Everything else is allowed to ebb and flow as the day evolves. The mission is to focus more on the process of each moment than on an eventual outcome since the process is within our control while the outcome is not.

How do you recover?

I love recovery now as much as I despised it when I was younger. I use the barrel sauna almost every day, walk at least five miles per day, use short breathing exercises at intervals throughout the day, and have tried to maximize my sleep-to-bed ratio. For example, I restrict sleep until my body adapts to the sleep schedule I want. So if the goal is 7 hours of sleep per night, it is ideal to sleep 6.5-7 hours out of the 7 hours spent actually lying in bed. If you sleep 6 hours but spend 9 hours in bed, the ratio is out of whack.

What’s the best fitness advice you’ve ever received?

There is no such thing as over training, only under recovery.

Do you have a mentor?

My mom is the best mentor I have ever had. All my other mentors were thinkers who left us their wisdom in books, and most are not alive. Eric Hoffer, Epictetus, Ernst Jünger, the list goes on—all of these men have influenced the course of my life in profound ways. Even fictional characters, like Gandalf the Grey, have shaped me since I first read LOTR when I was fourteen and have read it every year of my life since then.

Short Story

For this short story, I had a 1,000 word limit. It had to be a mystery, include a nightlight, and take place in a scrapyard. I called it “A Stegosaurus Nightlight” and the one sentence subtitle was “A detective solves the mysterious murder of his son in a scrapyard.” Enjoy.

I needed to see Dan. The grey polyurethane armrest in my Volvo needed to be replaced, and if any scrapyard in Pennsylvania had a 99’ Volvo S40 rotting in cinnamon colored rust, it was Dan’s. But I didn’t just need an armrest.

I needed a brother.

I drove by a billboard for a kindergarten—that was all it took. I felt like I took a fist to my kidney. Time slowed. My mind’s eye took in my son’s room the morning after. I saw his crumbled little body… Murder. I still couldn’t believe it. I was a cop. I had put a dozen killers behind bars. And my son was murdered. I failed him. Later, a string of boys and girls were murdered in our town, and the sadistic killer’s trademark was unusual. He took one memento from each scene: one of the kids toys. My son had a nightlight. A ridiculous paper mâché Stegosaurus painted green and purple with tiny stars cut into it, casting golden beams of light on the glow-in-the-dark galaxies stickered to his ceiling. Gone, along with the other toys. I remember the pictures. I would stare at them in the precinct: green rubber snake, Little Mermaid with cherry red hair, tiger striped GI Joe, a lavender bunny.

The road came back into focus. Strange how we can be lost in memory and still function. A zombie. I was like one of those ants hijacked by the zombie fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, that drives the ant’s corpse around black soiled paths in lush rainforests. Dan helped me try to find my boy for the last five years. He stood by me when so many just… didn’t know how to deal with me after that. My son was taken from me, and then my friends left me. Like a fuckin’ zombie. Not Dan. That scrapyard owner was a pillar of the community. Who would have thought? The man all the grieving parents appreciated.

I drove my patrol car over the potholed dirt road into the scrapyard and parked. Dan sat in one of the two Adirondacks outside his office, a case of beer between them. I sat down and opened a beer without a word. None needed. The best listener is the one you never feel the need to talk to.

Little plastic pink flamingoes dotted the lawn in front of the mangled masses of steel in the yard. Demonic looking garden gnomes with carrot colored hats peered out at me from behind bald tractor tires and coils of barbed wire. I found rubber duckies like a Where’s Waldo poster; one impaled on the top of a wire fence, brown and heroically weathered, another on his pickup truck dashboard, a nice clean daffodil yellow. I never understood his fetish, but I admired eccentric characters. They’re not boring. There’re enough boring schmucks in the world. We could use a little eccentricity.

“Yup,” Dan said, apropos of nothing.

I stood up to find the Volvo, savoring the prospect of a silent walk. The kaleidoscopic maze of ancient steel cars was a great way to get tetanus, and thus a great way to pull my mind’s eye off the image of that crumpled body in that dark corner and out onto the world around me.

There it was. An S40. I stuck my head in the shattered window and saw a pristine armrest ripe for the picking. I felt a warm sense of pleasure that at least this went right, at least the gods, this one time, were smiling down upon me before I turned to dust. I remember thinking “For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” What a line. And what freedom—dust can’t think, dust can’t feel pain, dust can’t remember what a failure it used to be, what a failed protector, what a failed man…

Glancing up I saw Dan’s old 1987 Corvette. Chipped red paint. Flat tires. That thing made him the talk of the town. Good memories flooded out the bad as I remembered driving with him, roof down, under orange and auburn autumn leaves. Simpler times.

Then I saw a lavender colored stuffed animal laying on the ground near the Corvettes trunk. I walked over. A bunny. I wondered how the hell that got there. It didn’t feel right leaving something so vulnerable lying in the mud, something loved by some little girl. I wondered who she was. How old was she now? Did she have kids and think about this bunny? I bent down to pick it up. When I stood back up, I saw a flash of cherry red fuzz sticking out from under the trunk lid, and instinctively I lifted it. Every hair on my body stood on end. I felt like my skin was crawling with a million black widows. A snake. A Little Mermaid. A GI Joe.

A Stegosaurus nightlight.

I vomited.

A fetish for toys.

A brother.

I walked slowly back. Wiped my mouth. Saw Dan in the Adirondack. All I could say was, “Hey, Dan.”

I remember drawing my pistol.

I remember taking aim at the center of his forehead.

I remember the calm words in my head: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Front sight focus. Trigger squeeze.

My memory stopped there.

When I regained consciousness, the slide of my pistol was locked to the rear. Empty. I had fourteen bullets in the magazine, one in the chamber. All fifteen were in Dan’s skull. I had somehow shot each one into his cranium as he folded forward onto his lap.

So, in the spirit of a cop who devoted his entire adult life to solving mysteries, I am writing this letter from somewhere in South America. I don’t want my agency wasting their time on this when they could focus on unsolved crimes. I want them to know what happened to me, to Dan, and to all those children whose toys lie in the trunk of a Corvette in a scrapyard.

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Welcome to What then? These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are essays in the ancient sense of the word, meaning an “attempt”.

Those looking for artificially neat answers will not find value here. Rather this is a forward operating base for those who savor the hunt for the ideas, paradoxes, and postures that lead to vibrant aliveness and deeper understanding of the human situation in our rapidly changing modern world.

Let’s get to it…

A TE Lawrence quote has had an immense influence on my life since I first read it as a kid. “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

Some may see Dreamers of the Day as dangerous because their dreams can be dangerous to others. This has certainly been true—but it is only part of the story. My experience is the Dreamers of the Day are dangerous not because they pose harm to others, but because they expose themselves to the pains and failures of life. They do so out of immense passion for life itself. Strangely enough, it is the Dreamers of the Night who are actually more dangerous. Not only to themselves, but to others.

The Dreamers of the Night see images of happiness, striving victoriously against impossible odds, and glorious futures of fame and wealth. They see these dreams while staring into glowing screens in the evening or lying half-awake in bed. But the images die on the vine in the sunrise… and then the residue of the dream hooks in the brain like an unpleasant reminder of what life might have been. What takes its place? Maybe a creeping sense of depression in which every effort seems futile. Maybe a defeatism in which there is no point in even trying since the game is rigged. Maybe a desperate search for a guru, strong man, or some toxic tribe to tell us how to live, to remove the terrible burden of choice and free will from our shoulders. And what follows if not a slow atrophy of the self, or a violent outburst against others? The murder of one’s own future, or the murder of civilization’s future?

Two axioms of our modern world are undeniable: It is easier to deny ourselves than it is to realize ourselves. From another angle, it is easier to burn civilization to ashes than to quietly own our own individual existence.

So much for the Dreamers of the Night.

What then is it to be a Dreamer of the Day? What is it to own our existence?

The Mbuti pre-state peoples live in the Ituri Forest of the Congo. They bathe in silty brown rivers, silently stalk in soft soil of red ochre, and whittle wooden spears to hunt wild pigs and fight off wild humans. Trees soar seventeen stories like the pillars of cathedrals. Atop these pillars sits a canopy of leaves so thick only a few golden rays of sun penetrate the blackness of the forest floor. At night, the rainforest is blacker than the black singularity of a black hole.

The Mbuti believe “There is darkness all around us; but if darkness is, and the darkness is of the forest, then the darkness must be good.”1 The important fact is this is no mere academic logic—it is savage logic. It has become a highly profitable industry to write about evolutionary psychology or how to be primal once again. But even if we choose to restrict calories, sit in lotus position in a cold plunge, or moralize endlessly about changing norms, this will never hold a candle to the reality of the ancestral world. It completely misses the point. It ignores what motivated every human endeavor until the modern world buried the ancient under asphalt: a threat. An enemy. And the threats, as we learn from the Mbuti perspective, need not be viewed as originating in hell, a punishment by a creator, a consequence of a malicious universe, bad luck, an oppressor, or anything else.

Actually, threats can be seen as good.

The human situation is unique in that the darkness does not actually exist in the forest—it exists within us. It is the unworded feeling of “Oh-my-God-what-am-I-doing-here? Why do people act the way they do? Why do I act the way I do? What is the point of my life and why was I put on this earth?” So speak the Dreamers of the Night, and we are all Dreamers of the Night by nature. The self-inflicted coup de grâce, however, is not when we ask these questions, but when we stop there. Drowning the voices of the skull in doom scrolls, blaring music, television shows, seething political news, not daring to slow down long enough to soak in the silence—this is to terminate the mind before the real work, the ancient human work begins.

The Dreamers of the Day, on the other hand, sit quietly with these questions. They look at them for what they are. They want to feel them as intensely as humanly possible, and then—they reveal the good in the darkness. They stoke it, ruck it, sprint it, lift it, grow it, write it, read it, riff it, talk it, or scream it with that satisfyingly savage scream we feel we must do when we stand in wide open valleys under immense black storm clouds and we feel utterly alive.

The significant point is Dreamers of the Night expect meaning to magically appear outside of themselves like an Amazon delivery, whereas Dreamers of the Day reveal the meaning in their interaction with the world. They engage with each ink covered page, crescent moon, striking thought, fellow featherless biped, and faithful furry quadruped as if each moment were their last—or their first.

This is not to say the dreams of night are useless. Far from it. It is striking how useful the dreams of our sleep can be for the dreams of our day. This was an axiom of my life in the military while preparing for a training event or an actual mission. I was hit by an excellent example last week.

In a dream I was climbing a white-snowed mountain interspersed with boulders beneath black clouds and the echoing roars of thunder. For a reason I do not know, I had to climb down the mountain and leave the group I was with near the pinnacle crowned with a ring of lightning bolts. Halfway down, I turned and saw an avalanche. In dream-like fashion, it was biblical in size and power. I ran to my right where I saw a rectangular cutting in a cliff face. I ran to its innermost corner, squatted down, pulled my hood over my head to create a pocket of air for my inevitable burial, and waited. The shockwave of the avalanche shattered the space of my sanctuary before the snow and stone even arrived. The concussion shook my entire body and knocked the wind out of my lungs. And then the snow whipped and piled into my cutting.

I remember thinking, while still dreaming and being buried alive, how quickly and calmly we often rise to the occasion in matters of life-and-death. Things become simple: panic and die, or remain calm and maybe live. It is as if the ancient programming of five million years of hardship is operative whether we are hunter-gatherers a millennia ago or hammering smart phones with our thumbs in the present day.

I wrote the dream down and forgot about it. That same morning I did a training session with four hundred meter sprints and cleans. By the fifth interval and nearing my maximum heart rate, it hit me how wretched it was. At that moment my mind suddenly entered the reality I had just endured in my dream. The clouds had cleared within my skull even as I tried to see through the tunnel my vision had been reduced to.

Our dreams at night prime us for the worst that can happen during our day, whether an avalanche or a mere training session—they are a form of training for the calamities of our future. Our dreams are an ancient alarm clock, a gift from millions of years of waking and sleeping dreams slowly merging into a single flowing whole amid extraordinary hardship. Our dreams, in the modern world, are reduced to a language we have forgotten to speak. But once we begin to tap them, they allow us to see the storm clouds from the mountaintop and spread our arms to them with wide open eyes—and then choose how we will meet that storm.

The dreams of our night can walk us to the absolute edge of existence with none of the danger of reality. But it is only the dreams of our day that can take the lessons seriously and do fucking something with them.

My sense is there are two types of problems humans have faced in all our history. Those that are faced for the first time, such as surviving an ice age or landing a space ship on the moon. And those faced again and again, day after day: the mundane everyday tasks, which over time can come to feel like a pervasive sense of apathy, or like an inevitable slide into meaninglessness. The delta between how the first are met with bright-eyed excellence and the latter are unthinkingly endured is remarkable.

It would be too simplistic to finish this essay by saying the Dreamers of the Day tackle the momentous events and the Dreamers of the Night wallow in the everyday. The crucial point is the Dreamers of the Day both tackle the momentous tasks and reveal the momentous in the everyday tasks.

There is something momentous in a hazel iris striated with azure, the black-soiled taste of raw Filipino cacao, stopping for five minutes to wrestle a mutt, sprint a hill, or savor a single good sentence pulled from a bit of reading. There is something extraordinary in leaving footmarks on the moon, or in watching the yellow lights of fireflies flit in front of the ancient white lights of the stars trillions of miles away.

These too are Dreams of the Day.

A potentially useless, but poetic thought: volcanoes can produce lightning around their rims when they erupt. This is not a bad analogy for those who are awake enough to dream.

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Much of my writing is spent critiquing modern civilization. This comes with the risk of seeming as though I do not think much of America. Nothing could be further from the truth. I see no other path to merge the best of the ancient world with the wonders of the modern without America. The reason is simple: only traditional American values give us the freedom to walk the “third path” I am circling with these essays. This piece is an ode to that freedom, and to America.

In the words of the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer “Often, that which strikes us as the defeat of hope is actually its fulfillment.”

His words ring true at present.

Freddie the frog was the symbol of the Underwater Demolition Teams, which were the precursors of the Navy SEAL Teams.

It is striking how our symbols are a reflection of our culture’s values. Take Freddie. He does not give a damn. He is not wearing his dixie cup hat according to Navy regulations. He does not appear to care if he gets gum cancer. He is holding a stick of dynamite with a burning fuse in his right hand. On top of all of that, he is grinning. Every fiber of Freddie’s being is devoted to a single noble, life-affirming mission. Freddie is so devoted to this mission he is willing to slip on a pair of flippers, strap a knife to his calf, paint his face blue, grab a few limpet mines, and swim through a steel storm of enemy bullets and whistling mortars to blow their beach obstacles to hell, risking a lonely, watery death.

During World War II, Frogmen who survived their missions in the surf zone were picked up in an ingenious way. They would swim back out to sea, spread out, and tread water in a line parallel to the beach. Black boats would get a running start, then drive at full speed along this line, often under immense enemy rifle and mortar fire. Someone in the boat would hold a rubber tire tube over the side. One Frogman at a time would hook his arm into the tire, get torn from the water, and land with a crash on the floor. It is not a comfortable feeling.

One man who was responsible for slinging Frogmen into his boat recalled a standard mission: “We got them back aboard, and they would be out on the mission for 72 hours without sleep. That was a group of men that I had a healthy respect for; just the way they carried themselves, and their ability—everything about them, they were having fun… You are not alive, unless you are living on the edge. Living on the edge like these swimmers and the rest of those men, you are alive. I mean, you are alive.”1

My sense is this “aliveness” cuts close to the core of America’s problem at present. Freddie had a chaotic and violent war; this war led to tribe, purpose, and immense aliveness; and all of this let him see the good in his country, his countrymen, and the values they stood for. Freddie was simply a reflection of an America with its back against the wall—an America filled with purpose and identity.

It is significant Freddies are born of hard times. They crawl out of the metal carnage of World Wars. Freddies are less likely to be found in easy times. But what is unique about America is how many Freddies exist at any given time—how alive many Americans are. They exist in working class neighborhoods, farms in the middle of nowhere, or as individuals who simply like to hold their own counsel. In a more warlike form, they exist in tiny pockets in the military, operating on the margins, training… waiting to be called on.

But America is a land of extremes, and its pendulum therefore swings with greater force. It is worth asking what Freddie would look like if he were drawn today? Depending on which segment of our culture we are talking about, Freddie might wear that vacant smile and disturbingly detached expression of those who look down at their social media feeds while walking, driving down the highway, or standing in the middle of a parking lot. Or he might have perfectly chiseled muscles and six percent body fat in his attempt to live to 120, and yet like so many in his generation, have zero sex (one of the best essays I have read on this subject is Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny). Or he might look like a Call of Duty video game version of an Operator with a rainbow-colored AK-47 and Master Wizard status. Or he might be made middle aged and wear a face mask, rubber gloves, and a Hello Kitty back pack while walking into Whole Foods.

On a less satirical note, he might have an anxiety disorder when he has never taken a risk in his life. Or he might suffer from loneliness because safety does not demand we build a tribe to survive till sunrise. Or above all, he might feel a profound sense of meaninglessness because he is told his country is evil, his culture is toxic, he is a fool, and none of it is worth fighting for.

The problems are becoming clear to everyone: an unprecedented amount of thought-terminating short-form entertainment, free time, safety, ease, boredom, and affluence. Said negatively, it is an unprecedented lack of exposure to just how wretched life can actually be. It is, ultimately, due to a lack of mortal necessity.

The intention of all those Freddies in the past was to end the existential threats to America. This they did. But in an astounding reversal, they created an existential crisis of meaning and identity under the burden of freedom—freedom from necessity, meaning, and having to do something that matters in one’s life. The ancient question of “How do I live?” has slowly been replaced by a more haunting question: “Why do I live?”

This does not bode well for our age, for true trials lie in the near future.

America in her 250^th year is at risk.

I am not referring to Chinese propaganda, terror cells, blacked-out boats filled with fentanyl or illegal immigrants, greedy corporations, tech companies, or even politicians. The only threat that can destroy America is from within, on an individual basis: those broken by ease, privilege, boredom, unearned guilt, lack of tribe, radicalized social movements, social media, or reckless hatred. In sum, those who allow themselves to be swayed ideologically by others, chain themselves to whatever random faction they can cling to like a life raft, who choose not to stoke their own “aliveness,” and instead hope to find it by undermining the aliveness of those who have learned to make the most of freedom.

Of course, all this assumes America is actually worth saving. What, then, is America? What else, if not the place where we can Make Politics Boring Again? Where we can live alone in a cabin in Michigan to paint, live amid millions in New York City to do stand-up comedy, or live anywhere and make spoons and forks out of old railway ties and sell them on Etsy? The place where we can make a fortune? Where we can make a fortune and die of a heart attack? Where we can make a fortune and give it all away? Where we can spend days walking on conserved land in National Parks? Start a yoga retreat? Laugh at a long series of unserious politicians? It is all of these things. It is where we are free to make of our own individual lives a heaven or a hell.

In an earlier war, WWI, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit preacher, paleontologist, and soldier who observed the Americans sent to help. He wrote, “We had the Americans as neighbors, and I had a close-up view of them. Everyone says the same: they’re first-rate troops, fighting with intense individual passion… and with wonderful courage. The only complaint one would make about them is that they don’t take sufficient care; they’re too apt to get themselves killed. When they’re wounded, they make their way back holding themselves upright, almost stiff, impassive, and uncomplaining. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such pride and dignity in suffering.”2

This is probably not what a random observer would write about Americans living in their own country today.

What then can we do about all of this on America’s 250th?

I see three different paths.

On the first path, we find American pride and dignity—America at her best—when the innocent are suffering, our back is against the wall, and young American men with cigars and sticks of dynamite lie dead in the surf zone of foreign beaches. But this requires war and tremendous suffering.

On the second path, we find American misery and meaninglessness when the rhythm of life is governed not by one’s self, but by social media feeds, intellectuals, politicians, and apocalyptic levels of free time and self-rumination. This, too, if it continues long enough, will probably end with war and tremendous suffering.

But the third path is what makes America an anomaly in the history of civilization. It is to remember that America is not a place but an idea, an idea that can come to an end before midnight; that our back is still against the wall; that America is still exceptional and worth fighting for precisely because it gives us the option of defining our own mortal necessity in life, and stoking our own profound love of life.

The danger of the third path is, of course, that we can also choose not to make the most of this freedom. The life-negating cannot tolerate the life-affirming precisely because they remind them of the burden of choice America places on their shoulders—the simple choice of either self-realization or self-destruction. It follows that, like the Greeks, we can burn our own bridges in front of the Persians; that, like Cortez, we can burn our own ships in front of the Aztecs. We can double down on American love of life and American values with a renaissance of sorts. We can elevate, on an individual basis, above the collective voices eating away at the idea of America, and show what it is we can be and do in this novel experiment of freedom within the state: build a community, start a family, conserve land, write a haiku, invent a reusable spaceship, plant a peach orchard, fail, dream, live—the list is long for those who love life.

What follows? Let us make a prophecy. If the American experiment is to last another 250 years, it will only do so if we manage to bring back what Teilhard saw in the burning vineyards of France, and do so not by force, but by choice—create pride and dignity in suffering once again.

Like Freddie.

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I write these essays to slow down, enjoy an ancient rhythm, and think deeply in a world increasingly designed and monetarily incentivized for us not to think at all. These essays are not meant to capture your attention and then hammer it with bite sized content, copy-and-paste text from an LLM, angry political rants, or a list of bullet points telling you how to live your life. There is enough of that elsewhere. Rather the intent is a sustained meditation on what it means to be here, a rough sketch at an existential posture, and questions that may never be answered but are fascinating to ask.

Like life, it is a good fight.

We are given many rules on how we ought to live our lives. There are a stunning number of people who know exactly what you and I need to do so that we may, at last, live a perfect life.

My hunch, however, is one rule rules them all, a rule learned in combat: Do. Fucking. Something.

Doing something may not always work out well. But on the whole, it works out better than doing nothing at all. It is also better than doing something half way. We will fail, thank the gods, for failure is to the soul what water is to the desert traveler dying of dehydration. Why, then, wait for the bullet-pointed how-to list? The scientific study? The mystical revelation?

The problem is the human situation is defined by an uncomfortable awareness: unlike a humming bird or a fig tree, we know we possess unlimited opportunities. It is strange to see a human built to endure a handful of life-and-death trials crippled by the luxury of a million choices. Do we choose one job among a dozen, or none at all? Do we choose one spouse from among forty, or none at all? Do we choose one book among a million, or mute our minds and scroll social media? And if we do have a job, a spouse, or a book, do we savor them, or do we merely live with them because we do not know what else to do with ourselves? It is becoming clear these opportunities are a burden for many.

Thus some choose to latch onto any option as if it were a life raft. This is to live a life of empty busyness. Others choose to depend on others to take care of them, providing them with shelter and food, such that they can live no life at all and drift unto death. And there is another, darker path. Let us do a bit of apocalyptic prophesizing. Some may choose to burn it all down in the subconscious and primordial hope they will be freed from burden of endless choices. And what then? It is reasonable to assume they will not find moon stories and warm caves. Instead they will find the smoking post-apocalyptic wasteland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or yet another attempt at a socially engineered utopia that “will be different this time.”

It seems, then, that unless we live at the very edge of life-and-death in hard times—which has its own problems—unlimited opportunities in easy times is overwhelming for the individual and cataclysmic for civilization

The cure is actually simple: analog and ancient forms of engagement by doing fucking something, even if it means sitting in silent contemplation, but with a conscious and decisive mode of mind. It elevates limiting our own opportunities into to a higher human art.

Let us turn to the Arawete of Brazil. For the Arawete, “death is the event that literally puts society and the person into movement.” Death was a constant topic. “They spoke about what the dead said, what they did, their appearance and gestures, their qualities and quirks. And the dead spoke plenty as well. The songs of dead shamans and warriors were always remembered.”1

The Arawete do not worship death. They felt sorry for the dead, not the living. The crucial point is that when we compare the unlimited opportunities when we are alive to the zero opportunities when we are dead, the solution is stunningly clear: define what matters, and then dedicate every cell in our mind and body to it.

We are not at our best when the enemy burns the boats at our back. Rather we are at our best when we burn the boats at our back, stare into the fire, spread our arms, and smile into it—and then continue the mission with a single-minded devotion.

We can also approach this theme from a galactic angle.

I have had a recurring day dream for as long as I can remember. When I close my eyes I see myself standing on an asteroid on the edge of the universe. The sky is black. In front of me is the infinite black Void. There are no stars, and no lights. Behind me are trillions of white and yellow galaxies and sweeping swaths of nebulae in hues of violet and blue. Stars are being born. Civilizations are rising and falling. Life is exploding into being and disappearing with a silent sigh. This is my Forward Operating Base. It is the last outpost at the edge of the universe.

When I open my eyes and come back to earth this sense of life stays with me. This is a galactic perspective, this galactic perspective is an existential perspective, and this existential perspective is defined by the most fundamental choice we all possess in each and every moment of our lives: to live or not to live. Life is a choice. If we choose to exist, we therefore choose to endure every illness, pain, and doubt, and we choose to see them as either a miserable misfortune or a momentous gift.

Suddenly, all our endless options do not weigh as much as they did a few minutes ago. Suddenly, each next decision, no matter how small, feels like an explosion of discovery. A raw and playful seriousness for all that may come.

We witness this playful seriousness in our early history. A chimpanzee named Congo left behind over four hundred drawings and paintings, some of which were sold at auction.2 His distinctive “radiating fan pattern” was admired by Picasso. In his passion he would throw a fit if he were not allowed to finish a painting once he had begun, and only he could decide if it were actually “finished.” Just so with pre-civilizational humans. It is hypothesized every blank surface an early human wandered across—boulder, cliff, cave, even their own skin—was covered with handprints, animals, and geometric symbols. They would use charcoal, paint, blood, mud, literally anything that could attune them more closely to nature, the same nature that gave them the gift of consciousness and reflection.

What a paradox we in the modern world are faced with. On the one hand, we have a “lower” primate who will stop what he is doing, dip his fingers in some paint, and capture the beauty of his unique existence in the short time he has been given. On the other hand, many of us “higher” primates with our phones, entertainment, and abstract civilizational and apocalyptic concerns, are too busy, tired, or apathetic to capture the epic essence of our own brief time here on earth with a haiku or finger paint. We might even think such time wasting forms of play are merely for monkeys… and children.

Which, then, is low? Which is high?

And what can we do about it?

Nature is a Way.

I saw a seven sisters rose on a long ruck with my mutt. It had apple-tinted branches with hooked pickers, wrinkled and luminescent white petals, and in the center of each flower sat twenty or thirty brown-tipped stamen. When I stepped back from the colossal wall of ferns and underbrush to soak in the scene, something about these exceptionally white flowers checkered across this shock-green wall struck me as violent. It was an elegant violence. It was as if each tiny black stamen were an individual crack of sniper fire and the green wall were erupting in white hot muzzle flashes.

Nature reminds us our tenure on this earth is finite when we go for a long enough walk in the woods. A walk is soothing not because we walk in our bare feet and fairies fly in the dell. It is soothing because it places us before the sublime: three parts awe and one part terror. A staggeringly beautiful forest speaks to us through the ancient and unseen umbilical cord connecting us to her.

What, then, does she say? I have given you all you need: breath, flesh, paint, reason, mutts, muscle, monkeys, children. You can enjoy my house for a little while. But then you will need to claw and logic your path to survival. What happens next is up to you. Do you choose to innovate, or die? Calm your heart with your breath, or die? Walk at night, stare at the moon, and find awe in the fact of your existence, or live a life of living-death? Do fucking something, or you will wake up and find it is too late to do anything ever again.

We no longer have to live at the mercy of nature’s brutal binary. A clear, contemplative, and invigorating life according to nature is now a simple choice.

One of my favorite thinkers made this truth the foundation of his life. When Socrates was asked what the best occupation any of us could ever pursue was, he replied, “Effective action.”3

Yes. Socrates adds a crucial caveat to our definition—effective. If it is not effective in making us expendable and useful to our kith and kin, and if it is not in service of our profound pleasure in asserting our existence in this vast, violent, unknowable, and exceptionally beautiful universe, then what the fuck is the point?

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2

One of Congo’s epic paintings:

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Welcome back to What then?

Today’s theme: sovereignty in the face of tyranny.

Let’s get to it…

Our individual sovereignty has always been under attack. But the line of attack originating in the academy is the most stimulating, mostly because of how deceptive it is. An entire intellectual class who trades in ideas and nothing but ideas has a striking capacity to manipulate bad ideas into sounding like good ideas.

There is an academic worldview that is at war with the word “anthropocene.” Their fear is this word, which refers to the age in which human activity is the dominant influence in the world, emphasizes the value of humans over the value of the planet. The idea is that humans have caused too much harm to Mother Earth and ought to be reined in. There is tremendous merit to this idea.

The solution offered by one academic sect, however, makes it hard to believe they are innocently passionate about the earth. They feel that humans should no longer be considered “global agents,” but “planetary subjects.”1

I had a hunch this seemingly altruistic semantic shift to describe nine billion human beings was actually an ontological assault on what it means to be a human being. It struck me we are seeing this ideology gain momentum not only in academia, but media, Hollywood, private enterprise, and everywhere else. It is an ill omen.

What, then, are the consequences for the human animal of this slight semantic shift? For me and you? Our ancestors and our offspring?

As a knuckle-dragger I am suspicious of abstract ideas and books written by academics. So let us pressure test their idea against a concrete. Two Leggings was a Crow warrior. He gives this bit of academic sophistry the nuance—and human complexity—it deserves. He wrote about the first scalp he ever took in a fight with an enemy tribe, the Piegan. It is a revealing tale:2

We are left with a fascinating impression. If we offered this man the chance to relive this savage fight an infinite number of times, he would say Yes Yes Yes. What, then, is it to be Two Leggings? It is to be momentously alive dancing over the body of an enemy that wanted every last Crow wiped off the face of earth; it is to sit beneath the moon later that night and tell his tale to boys and girls with eyes reflecting firelight.

We are done with the scalping and murderous midnight raids of the primal world. This is to our benefit. And yet it is a paradox this exact benefit has created a crisis of misanthropy and meaninglessness our primal ancestors could never have imagined—until its members woke up in the post-primal world one day and said No. This is to our detriment.

This is the paradox of the primal world, of the human living in accordance with nature, of the global agent—so wretched, and yet so alive.

This is our common heritage.

We can now redefine “global agent” and “planetary subject” in terms of sovereignty.

Global agents care more for humans than for the planet. Sure enough, this makes them madly in love with the planet for it is she who gives humans the privilege of existence. Her black streams, mahogany eagles, appaloosa horses, nutrient dense buffalo meat, god-infused mountains, lakes, evergreens, stars, and lightning. When they stalk an elk, skin it, and feel its blood on their fingers, they thank this elk for sacrificing its life-force to sustain their own. They fight for land with such zeal we realize they not only do so because they must but because they want to.

Nearly all pre-state peoples do not refer to themselves by the names we give them. Rather they call themselves “We” or “The People” or “Human Beings.” They refer to themselves with pride rather than disdain. They savagely proclaim—and fight with tooth and knuckle—for their right to say Yes, and No, and the freedom to maintain these primal and unalienable rights given us by Nature in her wisdom. In the end, both the earth and the enemy want them dead. It is by virtue of this test, this grind, this endless pressure to fight and rage for their freedom and thus earn their right to live on this earth, that they love both the earth and their people.

What, then, is a planetary subject? It is darkly amusing to look up just about any definition of the word “subject” as either a noun or a verb. When we do so, the gig is up: “To bring under one’s control, typically by using force.” It also means “A person or thing that is being discussed, described, or dealt with.” Finally, it could mean “A citizen of a state other than its supreme ruler.” It seems, then, the human is a sack of skin and bone that ought to be “dealt with” by “force” and placed under a “supreme ruler.” It staggers the mind no other academic raised their hand and said “Maybe we should be a bit more subtle and pick a different word.”

The crucial point is the enemies of the Anthropocene do not love the earth so much as they hate mankind. It is clear the supreme ruler they have in mind is not Mother Earth, but an academic Philosopher King with a “utopia” in mind. It is clear if we waved a magic wand and academicized human existence on a global scale we would sever the last primeval thread binding us to our ancestors. A dehumanization beyond even the greediest dreams of the totalitarians of old.

It seems, then, the downstream impact of this academic agenda is either mistaken or malicious. If it is mistaken, we should probably never take them seriously again. And if it is malicious, well… we can thank the gods we still share a strong kinship with Two Leggings.

To be human is to be an unfinished and imperfect animal. We are born with the explosive burden of perpetual self-creation. We are born free to fuck things up, fail, build a tribe worth fighting for, find the passion projects that brighten our eyes and infuse our lives with meaning. We are born to discover how to remain authentically and savagely human in this modern world we have inherited no matter how much scar tissue we accumulate on our hands and our brains along the way.

We should care more for the earth which we have treated terribly. We should be stewards of nature as our primal forebears once were. At the same time, the solution is neither ideological extremism disguised as environmental altruism any more than it is to bring back scalping raids with midnight fire dances.

I do not know the answer. Still, this much is clear to me: we are not born to be submissive, content to drop to our knees before a Supreme Ruler. Rather we are born to dance freely below the Great Above Person. Fighting for this freedom is, in itself, a profound source of meaning in life.

What says Epictetus? This is a man whose aversion to academics and tyrants echoes across two thousand years: “The man over whom pleasure has no power, nor evil, nor fame, nor wealth, and who whenever it seems good to him can spit his entire wretched body into some tyrants face and die—whose slave can he any longer be? Whose subject?”

I italicized the Old Man’s last word. My feeling is he would agree.

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Welcome back to What then? I am continuing to experiment with how to use this platform to most effectively communicate ideas. My mission is twofold. From a writers perspective, I want to mold this medium to my mind rather than my mind to the medium. From a readers perspective, I hope these micro essays will spark more powerful thoughts than one large macro essay. We will see.

On!

1. Unquenchable curiosity as a way of life

The intensity of our existential satisfaction is directly determined by the intensity of our curiosity. For example, it is striking how quickly we can turn misfortune into our advantage when we treat curiosity as a craft.

A strange but hopefully useful story sparked the idea for this essay. I have been experimenting with this idea of curiosity-as-a-craft. So it was I found myself eating cacao when I bit the tip of my tongue and it started to bleed. The surprise was instantly overridden by an intense curiosity to know how the taste of copper would complement the soil and honey hints of the Venezuelan cacao.

How fundamentally human is this? It was delicious in a paleolithic stone-ringed fire sort of way.

If curiosity is the desire to know, then the fast pace and digital technologies of the present create a hyper-curiosity. The crucial point is it is so hyper that it inevitably turns into passive-curiosity. We are capped in how much knowledge we can fit in our skull, and there is a war to capture our curiosity at present. Thus if our skull is filled to the brim with irrelevant knowledge that turns life into breathless blur, then it is not filled with the crucial and ancient knowledge that makes life explode with vibrancy and aliveness.

What, then, are these different types of curiosity? Can we define a new form of curiosity? One that is neither ancient nor modern, but which unites the best of both?

2. SOG-mind

The SOG, or Studies and Observation Group, were a select group of Special Operations combatants who earned themselves a seat at the wooden tables of Valhalla beside the warriors of old. A One-Zero is a SOG team leader, and he had a crucial role in combat. SOG veteran John L. Plaster wrote “A competent One-Zero anticipated enemy contact and mentally rehearsed his reactions, continually revising his thoughts to fit shifting circumstances. If we’re hit right now, where’s the nearest LZ? What do I do if we take fire from uphill versus downhill, or at our same elevation? Should we fight through or flee? If there’s a trail atop this hill, are we far enough below the crest that a passing NVA won’t hear us? Where’s the nearest defensible terrain? Where’s our next rally point in case we’re split? Upon contact the team would be executing their One-Zeros plan while the enemy was only reacting.”

Behold: curiosity.

Our SOG, like our pre-state ancestors, had an unquenchable curiosity to know because their lives depended on knowing. This ancient-curiosity offered a brutal and simple binary: know the right things and live, or do not and die. So we witness a life-loving curiosity—curiosity attuned to enemy, muscle, soil, cloud, leaf, logic, love, and most importantly, to life itself.

The problem is we are no longer forced into this mode of mind. We are faced with a paradox, the test of the modern world: the greater lover of life is not the man or woman in a pre-state camp or combat zone but the one who is not and lives just as intensely as if they were.

3. Drawing nose rings on tyrants

Ernst Jünger in his exceptional WWII war journal wrote about a subtle form of rebellion against Nazi propaganda in occupied France. When he walked through the streets of Paris he saw posters showing Frenchmen happily working in German factories to support the war effort. But the French in the resistance disagreed with this daylight propaganda. They therefore resorted to nocturnal propaganda. This “… nocturnal counterpropaganda was limited to a single nose ring drawn in chalk on the poster figure.”

What an elegant form of rebellion. Who, then, are the daytime propogandists at present? Those who want to exploit the modern, passive form of curiosity with misleading and crooked intentions?

Let us do our own nocturnal counterpropaganda and draw some nose rings. We can draw nose rings on political leaders who say the government should be involved in every aspect of our lives, influencers enslaved to the same people they claim to influence, social crusaders seeking to change human nature into an anti-human monstrosity, and transhumanists who want to shed their paltry bodies—and their selves—in order to upload their consciousness into the cloud. We can draw nose rings on smart phones, social media platforms, televisions, and calendar apps. We can draw them on the nail-biting anxiety to live to one hundred twenty, the war against eating meat, the effort to silence free thinkers who question the zeitgeist, the Nazification and Extremification of everything which will only create Nazis and Extremists in places where there were none before, the intense tribalism over tribes that no sane person would ever join, the dirt trails disappearing under pavement… the list goes on.

Drawing a few nose rings throughout the day is freedom. It is rebellion. It is to command our own curiosity in a world designed to turn both barrels of our evolutionary love of curiosity against us and fill our skulls with bullshit.

4. Meditating with Heronimus Bosch

I debated including this story here. It is even stranger than the one about coppery cacao. But it takes a sniper shot at our theme from another angle, a deeper angle.

I have been meditating since I was fourteen and wanted to be a SEAL, but my forms were limited to visualization and breathwork. I recently began experimenting with a new form of meditation specifically for my health. It is designed to reunite mind and body by breaking through the unconscious. This it did. Thirty minutes into it, I laughed as I watched every calcified construct in my mind melt into a puddle, evaporate into the ether, and then exit my body through my breath. It left nothing in its wake but a pure white light of being. I saw a jellified butterfly at the bottom of the ocean with pulsing blue eyespots on its wings. I stood on top of Ered Nimrais and looked down on the white walls of Minas Tirith.

Suddenly, my vision went black. I stopped laughing. My unconscious rewarded this dialogue with the gods with an equal and opposite reaction. Behind my closed eyelids arose a series of images. Each image would have fit in the Hieronymus Bosch painting at the top of this essay, a painting I went back to after this session with renewed admiration for Bosch’s willingness to bend his gaze inward and “go there.” Each image in my mind rose from the blackness. Each paused in the liminal space between eyelid and eye. Each was testing me.

I read about this fascinating breakthrough after the fact. It has been spoken of with reverence by thinkers and meditators for millennia. Some meditations are designed to help us endure pain through mental toughness; others are to unlock the door to the crypt of our unconscious. It is like graduating from midnight raids with stone-tipped spears to dog fights with jets, and doing so in thirty minutes rather than twenty thousand years. The unconscious wants to bury our painful memories, thoughts, and fears, in order to protect us from ourselves. It does this to save us pain. As with physical growth, so with spiritual—the path to healing is the path of pain. Knowing thyself is a painful process.

The guru, YouTube, and Claude do not earn revenue when we smile into this pain, but when we bury it—and thus ourselves. What would Seneca say? “Men do not allow anyone to take possession of their estates, and, if there is the slightest dispute about the limit of their property, they rush to pick up stones and weapons: but they allow others to make inroads into their life, even extending personal invitations to those who will one day possess it.”

Ascetics and wise men retreat to caves and monasteries for self-knowledge and self-rule. But it is possible to achieve the same outcome without retreating and giving up a single inch. A No here, a Yes there. I only had the one Boschian session last week. But oddly enough, I find myself looking forward to another, and with immense curiosity.

5. Sketching nature for freedom

In the course of the day there are times when I merely see a flower because I am so focused on getting something done. It feels urgent and critical. But if I stop, forcefully, and reclaim my time with a bit of rebellion, I see six vanilla-white petals rimmed with pink, six lemon-yellow anthers with nearly translucent filaments, and a center pillar tipped with manilla. It is an eruption of awe and stillness in a world dedicated to destroying both. The urgent abstract constructs in my mind are replaced by the calming concretes of nature.

When I turn my mind back to the urgent tasks I can see them with the same granular clarity as the flower. It is even possible to see some beauty in them. Unworded impulses, churning desires, creeping concerns, irritating technologies—play things we can turn into meaning.

6. A rough sketch of an answer

What, then, is left but to turn curiosity into a craft? A discipline? Neither the passive-curiosity of modernity nor the forced-curiosity of the past, but a choice—a sovereign, rebellious, and explosively alive form of curiosity.

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Welcome back to What then? This essay touches on the core theme of my book which is in editing at the moment.

In the words of Goethe, a motto to live by: “Without haste, but without rest!”

On! On!

1. “Son of man, can these bones live?”—Ezekiel

One of the hopes of our age is that meaning can arise from within, as if it were fated, as if we were born to be x, whether x is an actor, accountant, astronaut, or anything except what we are in this exact moment in time. Or that meaning follows the law of consumerism, and if we want to be x, then we can wish it, buy it, snort it, pop it, steal it, LLM it, or find it at the bottom of a never-ending doom scroll with red-rimmed eyes. Or even that x ought to be handed to us by Big Brother or a glorious Cause.

This is the inevitable result of our modern environment, the traits that make it both exceptional and challenging: unancestral, undangerous, undeadly, and unengaging. In a word, domesticated.

I explore a contrast in this piece: meaning in life is more likely to be found by perceptually engaging with a “wild” environment, and meaninglessness is more likely when mentally constructing a relationship to a “domesticated” environment.

I am aware this sounds uselessly abstract. So let us ground it in sand and sweat, which is where I first woke up to the idea.

2. A stalk in an orchard

I was on a stalk through a string of remote Afghan villages on a moonless night. We were walking along a twelve inch wide irrigation canal of packed dirt. I could smell the soil. I could see the cloudy whiteness of the stars through the thick pomegranate branches woven overhead. I could feel the micro rivets in the footpath. I knew enemy were sleeping nearby, at times within a few dozen meters, though they were not the target on this night. This has a way of making the air feel alive, as if it were charged with an invisible current of electricity, as if I were more closely conscious of soil, bark, wind, and cloud. I remember pausing the team and taking a moment to look out at the woods beneath my night vision goggles. The grainy green glow was replaced by inky black until my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Before me, I could make out the knotty lines in the bark of the tree nearest me. I saw deep, amber eyes slowly blink open in its trunk, its arms reaching out to me with wooden palms held upward in a sign of supplication, its cello-like voice singing in the night.

I saw an Ent.1

And not for the first time.

Allow me to elaborate.

3. The virtue of an enemy

In a wild environment, every single thing on earth is rich with meaning. Every single thing. I was so attuned that the world around me came alive, and on that stalk I was reminded of the sensation I got when I read of Merry and Pippin meeting Treebeard in Fanghorn. This truth struck me harder each time I returned home from a combat zone and found things flat and one dimensional. Walking through a grocery store, or the halls of Columbia, or even the epic gorges of Ithaca did not provide the same stimulus—the domesticated environment simply felt meaningless. I looked around and asked myself “Where are the Ents?”

I missed those who hunted me. They made me better. They made the Ents come true. Maybe the burned and bloody trenches of France were what made the Ents come true for Tolkien.

4. Wildness in domestication

It was then I realized I had an insight into the human condition: I had one foot in the wild world and another in the domesticated. I walked a bridge between the ancient and the modern worlds. I have personally felt what so many ethnographers have written so eloquently about when they lived with pre-state savages in the wild.

There are, not surprisingly, no studies on the impacts of stalking in the wild on the soul. So I did my own. It forms the basis of almost every essay I have written here at What then? and it is the subject of my book, which is being edited at the moment.

What, then, is the “wild” and why does it lead to engagement and meaning? The wild is sand, wood, snow, and sea, which means we feel acid flooded legs and hammering hearts. We earn a strangely attuned sense of smell for flowers, feces, and the sweaty feathers or fatigues of the enemy. We see snakes and snipers and savages. And where the flesh goes, the mind follows. We want to be more attuned and we want to read the wind in the slim swirling columns of smoke from wood fires in case we need to take a long shot. No longer do we experience what existential philosophers call the “absurd,” in which humans who need meaning tremble in terror of a meaningless universe. It becomes clear that if we do not engage deeply and perceptually with the world around us, then we will not live long. Suddenly, in the face of immediate and deadly consequences, we perceive meaning all around us.

Now let us turn to the “domesticated” environment. It is useless to elaborate on the technologies that are allowing us to become so safe and soft: escalators, phones, computers, trains, planes, and automobiles. It is useful, however, to focus on what this does to our minds. The world becomes abstract. And why would it not? When does a paved walking trail drag us out of our skulls and channel our attention into our next foot step so that we do not take a little stumble off a thousand foot cliff? When does it remind us that each and every second may be our last? That we are sons and daughters of Mother Nature? We therefore rarely perceptually engage with our environment—we may now construct it. Just like we build Whole Foods, snug homes, noble sounding institutions, and grand theories, we now try—and fail—to “build” meaning in life, as if it could be quickly cobbled together in the same way we build our weekly schedules.

And all the while, there are those who have resisted domestication through some unworded and primeval intuition. These are those who suffer more deeply in life. They feel more deeply. They hear a question lingering in the back of their minds: “I have all of these possessions. I have attained luxury and stability and no longer crawl and stalk for berry and meat. I have my smart phone, my job, my investments. So what am I missing?”

The difference between the wild and the domestic is the difference between a free flying butterfly of purple, black, and red, and a butterfly gilded gold lying dead on a desk.

This is the difference between revealing meaning within our interactions with the world and trying to construct meaning on top of our world.

What then?

What can we do about it?

5. Ezekial saw the center of the situation

“Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not, and have ears to hear, and hear not.”

The significant point is we may not be able to bring the wild world to our domesticated world, nor should we—but we can bring a wild mode of mind to it. The environment is one thing; how we perceive it is another.

Let us demolish this rebellious house-of-the-mind. Let us listen to our prophet and dwell in our world with our senses cranked up to the maximum, for we are not merely brains floating six feet above the earth: we are eyes, ears, hands, feet, blood, and flesh. We are sparks of wakefulness built to suffer, sweat, bleed, crawl, sprint, risk, sing, and sit in silence.

There are many ways to do this: spaceflight, skydiving, Muay Thai, traveling to the Third World, growing a garden, taking a long slow walk in the woods.

For my part, this is one of the reasons I love journaling and writing. I can plant my knuckles in the soil and use my eyes and ears to put words to the subtle intonation in a voice; the impact of an abstract idea on millions of human lives; the sinuous veins in a fig leaf; the scent of a mutts musky fur; and the flicker in a pupil in the midst of irises like galaxies of copper, azure, sea grey, and emerald green. Every observation we make accumulates and sinks down to the subterranean chambers of our subconscious. The pen is a shovel and the paper a sift.

This is merely one of many ways to perceptually engage with the domesticated world.

One of many way to make a poem of life.

One of many ways to see the Ents in the woods.

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SEAL. Writer. Dispatches on figs, dogs, and the human role in the cosmos.

Welcome to all the new subscribers. Today’s theme is on dreams—particularly waking-dreams—and how they can reveal extraordinary meaning in everyday events.

But first, an update on my mutt, Carson.

We took Carson to the park when we noticed his right lip was sagging. We assumed it was the ninety degree heat, appropriately teased him about it, and then went home. On our second walk his right eye started sagging. And suddenly it stopped blinking—the entire right side of his face went completely slack. We ran back to the house. We observed with surreal detachment how our minds visualized each worst case scenario as a protective mechanism and yet our bodies gave way to our emotions anyway. We got in the truck and drove to the emergency room.

We paced the chemical smelling floor for hours waiting to hear what was wrong. We asked ourselves what more could we have done for him? How could we have valued every second we had with him any more than already we did? Finally, we were told in solemn tones he had to spend the night to ensure he could get an MRI and see the neurologist in the morning. We opted not to say goodbye because it might have stressed him too severely to see us and leave us once again. Twenty-four hours later, we got the call it was not a stroke. It was idiopathic, meaning they had no idea what caused it, and he should be alright—and despite the drooping black lip and eyelid, he is still fucking handsome.

What is this if not a reminder we can think about death and devote ourselves more intensely to those we care for, but it is never enough if they go before their time? In fact, it may hurt even more when they are gone, but it leads to a different sort of suffering: not guilt we did not do enough, but pain—unbearably divine pain—that the one we loved so intensely is no more. We decided every second we have left with him would be, if possible, even more attuned to his existence in the space of our lives.

So it was that I found myself sitting on the edge of his tempur-pedic mattress hand-feeding him cold bits of ground beef. His one operative black lip slowly maneuvered to consume each piece carefully, slowly, with an innocent purity that felt like actual pain in my stomach. I took a staggering amount of pleasure in this small act of devotion. There was nowhere else on earth I would have rather been in that moment.

On! On!

1. Either we choose our dreams or they are chosen for us

Aristotle said “Hope is a waking dream.” My sense is everything else in the realm of human experience is also a waking dream: kitting up for the worst case scenario, a gratitude practice, misery, love, boredom, craving, disgust for the world, desire, the list goes on.

The significant point is we get to choose our waking-dreams. If we do not consciously choose them and instead unthinkingly adopt whatever everyone around us tells us to adopt, what is life but a numb and passive drift? If we choose poorly and fail, what else do we find but the savage pleasure of staring that failure full in the face, studying ourselves, and iterating our way to a better life? And if at last we choose well after a lifetime of failures, what is left but a quiet sense of serenity we authored our own lives from acorn to oak, and had the courage to choose our waking-dreams?

2. Time-traveling sauna session with a brother

A brother I did several tours with recently spent a few nights with me. As is our custom, we used my barrel sauna near midnight. The evolution within my furnace of enlightenment follows a standard progression: a calm entrance, an escalating intensity of conversation as the blood heats and the brain fires on all cylinders, until finally the cessation of all conversation as the heart hunts for oxygen. Not a word can be spoken. The only sounds that remain are the deep inhalations and controlled exhalations of two humans reduced to the primality of mere survival—to the sacred act of breathing. At last, after each of us watched two pounds of sweat drain from our pores from the detached observation post within our skulls, we opened the sauna door and walked slowly out of the garage. It was pouring rain and unusually cold. The billowy contours of the coal black clouds above were lit with white lightning bolts, turning the sky into a demonic black honeycomb. Cracks of thunder shook the firmament. We inhaled the cold wet air as we walked between the columns of my fig trees. Each of their massive malachite leaves cupped upwards to the heavens to capture every drop of rain. In my delusion state, I felt as though we stepped back in time; as if we entered a primeval pocket of the past, and then carried this pocket back through time to the present, plugging this savage way-of-being into the non-savage civility of the modern world.

Our discussion, before it was cut off, was about the nature of awe: what is it, how to stoke it, and how to keep it. I believe in my bones if our goal is to find awe in everything, then we must find awe in everything—including our professed inability to find awe. This means finding awe no matter where are: desert heat, freezing rain, muscular pain; an inability to think, ideate, or create; fear, dread, or anxiety. Awe is found in war and peace, danger and safety, ancient and modern, the woods or a windowless room. Above all, awe is found when we tap into the primeval substrate flowing through each of us like an ancient and archaic human chain that grounds us and binds us in pain and beauty.

It is so easy to institute awe in our lives that this truth is, itself, worthy of awe.

3. Silk webs

I am dedicating 2026 to learning the language of nature. I am studying entomology and several other natural science subjects. Every step outdoors is now an almost crippling explosion of observations. I feel as though I am “seeing” our world for the first time, and I walk as if drunk on reverence.

I emerged from the woods and stepped out into a field early in the morning during a ruck. I saw hundreds of spider webs wet with the morning dew, suspended three feet above the earth. Each was about the size of my fist. In the gland, a spiders silk is a liquid protein soup. When it is spun, it passes through an acid bath and hardens, giving it an extraordinary tensile strength, about half that of steel. Each web stood out like moon-white galaxies held aloft by the upper canopy of tall grass and picker bushes. The droplets were chaotic, and yet as a whole they struck me as geometrically perfect, unequalled in their conscious design. I was certain there was a rationality in the pattern of the thousands of tiny droplets that adorned each spiders sanctum. I was almost overwhelmed with the feeling, while watching one of these noble grass spiders spin its web of woven silk, that I was witnessing an ancient law at work. I felt as if I were standing before a colossal fern forest seventy million years ago.

I felt both ancient and young—ancient in that I was transcending the perceived boundaries of my brief blink on this earth and our technologies and our politics, all of which are growing less and less stimulating as time goes by; and young in that I was alive, pumped not silk but blood, and could savor every single day of fig trees, mutts, paper books, cacao with hints of cherry and leather, and other beings sharing their brief bit of time with me.

4. A useful sleeping-dream

I was buckled in a rocket ship in space making reentry into earth. We were aiming for a landing in a cobalt blue bay and knew, to the inch, exactly where we would make impact. I could see the striations of this body of water glittering in the sunlight from outer space. We were going so fast I felt the hyper-clear sensory awareness that follows recognition of imminent and potentially deadly events. In that bizarre dream state in which the fantastical seems reasonable, I knew our plan was to fly full speed through the atmosphere and crash into the sea, and that our ship was built to handle this impact. In a fraction of a second I saw the liquid red fire outside our window replaced by jet black seawater. We hit the sea so hard we instantly plunged hundreds of feet deep. I felt the suffocating weight of multiple atmospheres. I felt trapped inside a metal canister, and my subconscious played several vivid scenarios of death, even as we began the rapid ascent back to the surface surrounded by massive inflatable air cushions. We breached the sea and were tossed dozens of feet into the air and I saw millions of droplets of rainbow colored water cast into the sky, each glistening like crystals in the sun.

I woke up at that moment. It struck me how I had zero control whether the ship would implode in the blackness or not. Mine would be a death in black water wearing a claustrophobic space suit while strapped into a seat. It felt good. It felt good because in that moment of potential black-water-death I was in total command of myself. I was reminded life is always reducible to one thing and one thing only—our control over the contents in our skull. I knew as I woke up that this would be a good day, that I had been given a wise dream, a sleeping-dream inviting me to make of it a waking-dream.

5. Disciplined and elegant reminders to dream wisely

I heard an anecdote recently that hooked in my mind. Xerxes, after failing to defeat the Greeks in 480 BC, ordered Attic figs served for him at every meal to remind him of the land where these figs grew—the land he failed to conquer. We may not agree with his objective, but it is an elegant way to instill within ourselves reminders of our own objectives in life.

We can set reminders for ourselves to define—and choose—our waking-dreams wisely: maybe by studying our sleeping-dreams while our head is still on the pillow and our eyes unopened, pausing to savor in silence the ancient fruits of fig, pomegranate, and cacao, taking walks in the sun or the rain with those we are willing to fight tooth and knuckle for, or merely by luxuriating in the sacred act of breathing.

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invited me onto his excellent podcast to talk about a subject we are both passionate about: the dog. We covered our own mutts, the history of the dog, and dog-related anecdotes all those who find themselves smiling against their will whenever they see a mutt will love. You can check it out here: What Dogs Know That We Forgot. I can’t recommend Michaels Substack, Two Percent, enough.

Now on to today’s theme: I believe there is a certain rhythm inherent to existence. If we live according to this rhythm, rarely do we find despair and misery. Instead, we find reverence for our planet and our role on it.

1. A winters training as a test of self

Fighting seasons flow with an ancient rhythm. Spring comes with the cracks of bullets, the summer with campaigns, the fall with a few frenetic fights as if both sides just want to fit a few more in before the snow falls—then in winter a pause, a silence… a sabbath.

There is a deeply primal satisfaction in knowing your enemy is a kilometer away. A mutual understanding. But even in war a winters training is exceptionally difficult. The temptation is to think no enemy would attack in four foot snow drifts and five degree wind chills. It is to lose ourselves to the fact the enemy, though near, cannot be seen. Questions rise: Who will settle into comfort more quickly: us or the enemy? Who will give into the belief that all that exists is what we see with our waking eyes? Who will see further—and then take their vision seriously? To undertake a winters training is to merge the mind with an ancient reality flowing like a raging white water river beneath the apparently stable and solid world paved above it we see in our waking hours.

Exceptional fighters train in winter. They visualize attacks with an if, shoot at the range with an if, sprint hills with an if, stand sub-freezing watches alone with the howls of jackals with the almighty if. Seasonal depression, a belief we can take it easy, prioritizing the passions over reason—none of this has the chance to take root when we flow with the ancestral rhythm of the fighting season. It is here we find a vital sense of purpose no matter how black and silent the night.

Core to the theme of all my writing is that civilization is neither free from war nor hardship—it is merely in an extended winter. Where an enemy once stood all too many see a void. We can see two ever-present reactions fill this void: a sense of meaninglessness, and a practical problem with profound consequences—a lack of preparedness for the trials of the summer.

The crucial point is a winters training not only prepares us for the future fighting season, but it is also a cure to the present crisis of meaninglessness. A winters training is notoriously difficult, even more so outside of war. Civilization leaves it up to us to create our own rhythm or not; to undertake our own winters training in the absence of a flesh and blood enemy or not; to do a bit of water fasting, a long walk with the flute-like song of the mourning dove in the red maple overhead, treading water in a cold mountain lake, visualizing and preparing for worst case scenarios, or not. Each is a voluntary suffering. A refusal to wait for spring. A willful gaze into the future of what may come and a simple, ascetic, contemplative devotion to training for it.

2. Misery is a self-inflicted wound

Brilliance, courage, and ability are no match for ego in those with no center. Imagine being depressed about being the second man to walk on the moon. Not the first, but the second. Imagine becoming severely depressed about being second and enduring decades of alcoholism, gnawing self-doubt, jealousy, and existential tunnel vision. Imagine being an extraordinary air-warrior shooting down MiG-15’s in the Korean War. Imagine the demonic dialectic within this skull, the skull of a man fortunate enough to have walked in moondust on a rock in space some five million years of proto-humans and modern-humans have gazed at in awe, suspicion, as a God, as a mystery—five million years of pain, dreams, painting, hunting, singing, dying.

This is the story of Buzz Aldrin. And yet it is no mystery that being the second man to walk on the moon can make the miracle of walking on the earth a misery, for misery does not exist in reality but in our skull.

Misery is a self-inflicted wound. How many of us invent our own misery even when it costs us greatly to do so, perfecting the art of self-sabotage? How often do we choose to fill our own skulls not with the pantheistic perfection of nature, but with the unrealistic expectations of wealth, fame, love, happiness, identity, arrival? How often do we stop, and step outside at night, solely to see the beauty of the second-hand light of the sun as it sets the moon on fire, a soothing, ancient white fire?

Epictetus was a man with no patience for self-inflicted wounds. He said “Poor man, are you not satisfied with what you are seeing every day? Have you nothing finer or greater to look at than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea? If you really understand Him who governs the universe, and bear Him about with you, do you yet yearn for bits of stone and a pretty rock?”

It becomes clear that more joy can be found in walking in our backyard or a local park than can be had by walking on the moon. No more is needed than a clay path with a bit of give beneath the foot, an eye to the moon, and an ear to the gentle vibrational drone of a hummingbirds wings.

It becomes clear meaning and awe are merely a choice in how we see our world and our role on it in the short time we have been given.

3. First experiences

I was fortunate to experience an entirely new physical sensation for the first time in my life. It was small, but exceptional. My frog brother turned me on to microfiction challenges as I ramp up my fiction skills.1 I had to construct a thousand word story within a short time spam, and it had to be a mystery, take place in a scrapyard, and revolve around a physical object: a nightlight. I racked my brains and could not unriddle the plot, even though it hovered on the edge of my mind like a tangled black spider web. I was standing in the shower, playing through a few scenarios, when suddenly I captured the evil blood curdling plot twist in words. At the exact moment it dawned on me, every single micro hair on my body from my ankle to my scalp stood on end in one continuous wave despite the weight of the water holding them down. I jerked my head around to look behind me because it felt as though a million spiders jumped on my back and were sprinting across my skin while spinning silken webs. I had never felt this before in all my life. It was fantastically new. It was a first.

It is probably true there are two kinds of death. One, when our heart stops beating. Two, when we stop having firsts. If growing old is defined by the dwindling of firsts, then maybe the art of living is defined by how well we learn to cultivate more firsts the older we get, as if patiently growing figs on a branch.

Creation, stories, novels with deep interiority, visualizing the extremes of human experience—we can feel these extremes in our bones, our physical bodies, and we can therefore broaden existence far beyond the merely surface level. This, too, is a form of winters training.

4. Proof of a life of training for winter

A moment that feels like a gift is when I witness an old man or woman who is gnarled and bent with age, and yet whose eyes are lit with a living white fire. The delicateness of their withered body is inversely proportional to the explosive aliveness of their soul. It is as if they did not age with their body but instead grew younger, stronger, and more unapologetically alive. I always have the surreal sensation I am looking at an ancient cherry tree with not a single green leaf on its branches, and yet covered with pink and merlot-colored flowers in full bloom.

I do not think there is any greater proof of a lifetime of training in the winter, for they are in the summer fighting season until the end of their days, and are in the process of meeting it with such vibrancy due to a lifetime of passion—a entire life devoted to the love of the fight.

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The modern world offers us a gift: a war for self, agency, groundedness, and meaning. It is also a gift to fight this war with others of like mind. I have gained a great deal of wisdom from over the past two decades. We were direct messaging about a topic we both share a passion for, and he wrote a stellar essay on it. I am still thinking about it and I highly recommend it. You can find it here: Physical Experience Matters

On! On!

1. Laughing at the unhuman

I was reminded recently of how much I love walking on New York City subway platforms. There are a handful of platforms that offer the chance to experience the perfect confluence of factors. To the front and rear of me are ascending concrete stairs with no view of what lies above. Above me is a grey concrete ceiling with digital screens dangling and displaying timelines. If the moment is just right, to the left and right of me are two metal and glass trains barreling down the tracks in opposite directions. The sound is of a thousand hammers and anvils in a narrow iron mine. The sight is of a blur of silver and flashes of light illuminating immobile humans who are themselves reduced to blurs, stripped of individual humanity. I smell concrete, urine, steel, and paint with my nose, and cordite, sand, and sweat with my mind. I walk in the middle of it all.

I feel as though I am a futuristic gladiator on a stage in front of an unseen stadium filled with virtual spectators here to witness a fight to the death. It has a Homeric flavor to it, and comes with a divine, godlike feeling. I become aware of my lungs cycling air, my veins pumping blood, and the sparks within the cerebral matter within my skull—but above all, in response to the unliving structure all around me, my head leans back and I laugh. A satisfying, abdomen convulsing laugh. Every slab of stone and metal, every speeding minute, every pixel—none of it compares to that rebellious little human spark that can laugh and say No in the face of manmade inhumanity. All I can do is laugh on that narrow platform.

What, then, is left but to laugh at all that stands in our way in our short time here?

2. Optimizing ourselves to (living) death

Influencers have existed for as long as we have been human. But never before have they been so ever-present on account of the internet, and never before have they been filled with so many scientific truths and half-truths, on account of progress, and a perhaps too little exposure to life-and-death situations. It is becoming clear we are witnessing an inflection point: the profit is increasingly outweighed by the loss of a crucial—and primeval—element of the human experience.

Basic recommendations can come across as gospel. For example: Thou shalt get eight perfect hours of sleep each night or thou shalt surely increase your risk of cancer. Thou shalt complete twenty minutes of zone five heart rate training per week or thou shalt surely develop dementia. Thou shalt buy this mattress woven through with electrical cables that will keep your body the perfect 65º for only $8,000 (remember to use my discount) or thou shalt surely become another statistic in all-cause mortality.

Many of the practical recommendations are gold; the impractical, on the other hand, are suicidal. For if we listened to every recommendation proclaimed on our airwaves in the infectious and practiced optimism of salesmen, we may be left with a dilemma: either we stress ourselves out to the point we, ironically, die early in our nail-biting efforts to live longer, or we actually do make it to one hundred without ever having lived a single day.

A question: at what point does the fact we can die tomorrow supersede the commandments to sacrifice guaranteed life today for potential life when we are a hundred years old? If we can die tomorrow—and we can die tomorrow—why would we spend two seconds unnerved that we only slept four hours when we can focus on making that day the best day of our lives regardless?

3. Physical training as primeval practice

Physical training offers us two ways of viewing negative energy: a primeval way, and a modern way. I was doing Skierg intervals with kettlebell snatches. Every muscle from my neck, to my fingers, to my calves was flooded with liquid fire. Purple hued blisters formed at base of both my index fingers. But my mind was more complicated. As my body moved through the movements, my mind split itself into two radically worlds.

The first world was this exact moment in time and the will to overcome the discomfort. This world is alive, problem-solving, grounded in the sweat and pain of here-and-now. The second world was the mental image of my day before and after that session in my gym. My mind latched onto what was irritating me from earlier that day, what I was worried would happen later that day, and what I was craving to achieve several years in the future. It is this second world that got my attention because adding the weight of negative energy to an already difficult task is, arguably, insane.

At first glance this struggle within my skull always seems to add zero value to my effort. And yet on deeper reflection the benefit physical pain offers us is what makes strenuous physical activity a human nonnegotiable in the modern world.

Let us do a thought experiment and say the maximum weight of water and wood a man can carry up the side of a mountain is one hundred pounds. If he does not have wood and water on his back, and the weight of his negative energy weights thirty pounds, he can carry that negative energy uphill all day. He can be anxious, angry, and complain every day until he dies. But if he is carrying one hundred pounds of water and wood up the side of that mountain, it is impossible to carry the extra thirty pounds of negative energy. It is a stunningly clear binary. The primal positivity that follows verges on the divine.

As with every session, I skied until the effort was so great I faced the choice: I watched the second world vanish, and with it, every last ounce of negativity. Physical training is to voluntarily implement a primeval way of life into a non-primeval world; to voluntarily decide, via discipline and choice, not to carry the burden of negativity the modern world allows us to carry in its benevolence; it is, in a word, to cure the disease of ease.

4. A dead man’s library

I mostly read and buy old books, the average age of which is over fifty years. My favorites are those with handwritten notes in the margins. I see images in my mind of home libraries full of books stacked floor to ceiling because the shelves are too full, each one dog eared by the dedicated lifelong reader, each inked up like a sailors drunken tattoos or a prisoners desperate etchings on a cell wall, and whose owners are probably dead. I can see the family packing up the books and selling them, maybe keeping one or two as a memento.

A question inevitably rises: what was the point of all that reading and note taking during a life? All those hours, burnt out lightbulbs in a favorite lamp, pens emptied of ink, brains stretched so far to the conceptual limit they physically hurt and the thinker cannot sleep for hours after? In a few hundred years those books will be dust. Their former owners may not even be a memory. It is really a question that circles back on us, because our books will also end up in someone else’s hands when we no longer exist, our ink side by side with even older ink.

My hunch is it is a discourse with the ages; a shared unquenchable curiosity to recon the most extreme conceptual edges of human understanding; to talk to Homer, Sophocles, Epictetus, Boethius, Hugo, and Jünger; to satisfy that ancient human need to know; in a word, to savor this brief bit of life we are blessed with—and to laugh at the hell and the heaven found in each and every day we are given.

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Welcome back.

The theme today…

dogs.

Let us travel back in time—“I am in tears, while carrying you to your last rest place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands fifteen years ago.”

We can see the Roman who spoke these words thousands of years ago. He is standing before the tomb of stone he built for his mutt. We can stand beside him in his skull and watch his memory of fifteen years prior: he is walking home on a dusty road wearing leather sandals. A bright-eyed puppy is pawing at his shoulder in uncontrollable happiness at being alive. The contrast between the tears streaming down his actual face and the smile on his memory’s face is as striking as the contrast between the flailing puppy in his arms and the grey-bearded corpse lying still and silent in its tomb of stone.

There exists a difference between when the dog is at our side and when the dog is not at our side. Every single day I am reminded this difference—and thus the dog—can teach us what it means to be better humans.

Primeval kin—Carson’s fur is milk-white and interspersed with small black and cashew-colored freckles. And yet his superhero mask of caramel and jet black means when he faces me in the woods he is nearly invisible while wearing his genetic camouflage. A truly tactical specimen. But when he turns and runs away from me his furry white ass assaults the space of the forest like a rupture, a disorder—a rebellious assertion of life. He sprints through the pickers and the ferns with an ear to ear grin. He is a friendly moon orbiting my position, emitting an incandescent light that obliterates the shadows, a furry and flashing white tube low crawling and jumping and juking. Trees and ferns are alive, yes, but nothing alive compares to the life force of a human with a dog. He is a reminder of the fight we and our mutts have endured, side by side, for millennia in a cosmos that gives us life and then constantly tries to take it away.

On the one hand, the primeval world is inhuman and wants to kill us. The woods without a dog at our side are beautiful. And yet after long enough time, they can become chillingly empty. Even walking with other humans in the wild has a different texture than walking with a dog. On the other hand, the primeval world is the antidote to the speed and sterility of modernity. It adds much needed simplicity by bringing meaning closer to the surface, so close we can feel it in our bones and our lungs. It feels like a warm ball of gratitude in my gut. My sense is the dog is a bridge between us and the primeval world. The dog, then, is an oracle whose wisdom is from an era whose language we no longer speak.

This emptiness is even more pronounced in modern environments without moss, hawks, rivers, stars, and fig trees. What is a metal car without a mutt’s head sticking out of the window and whose black lips are flapping in the wind? What is a silent kitchen without the click click click of nails on oak floor boards? What is a quiet room at night without the snoring of a dog dreaming savage dreams whose lips and eyelids are twitching, whose little hooves are clenching, and whose whimpers make us want to bear their pain?

Our dogs remind us civilization is a thin coating on top of a deeper and more ancient reality, a more ancient truth as to what it means to be human. In this way they are stewards of our humanity.

Conversation with a dog—Sometimes the best conversationalists are those who know how not to say a single word. My best thinking is done while walking or with Carson—and walking with Carson is to witness an explosion of ideas and connections within my skull, and awe for every oak leaf and cirrus cloud that lies outside of it.

He does not knit his brow and look to the left or right, waiting to get his word in to prove how intellectually superior he is. He does not indicate with raised eyebrows he is on a tight timeline and has more important matters to attend to. I can play with new ideas. Ask questions. Make an absolute fool of myself. Admit when I feel like the world’s greatest fuck up. We can talk about current events, highly charged political issues, the most tortured dreams and fears from the chambers of my subconscious—literally anything. I can sense his patient acceptance, and without any effort on my part, I can feel myself giving in to full freedom of thought and expression.

Conversations with a human can change our lives forever. At the same time, I sometimes feel like I would rather be water-boarded by Al Qaeda than deal with one more person who only knows how to speak in monologues.

With a dog, dialogues and monologues are no longer displays of knowledge but paths to wisdom. With a dog, we learn how to listen. With a dog, conversation can only ever be one thing—a reminder our life is an adventure, an experiment, a poem forever only halfway written.

Why reduce when we can reveal?—I always find it striking the universe, phones, places, events, children, dogs, eyes, ourselves—each can be reduced to mere atoms and cells if all we do is look at them. Meaninglessness is easy to find in a world without the constant threat of death. And yet each of these gatherings of atoms and cells is an explosive source of meaning, if we consciously choose to see them.

Yes, the dog is a mass of meat and fur. But if I stop what I am doing, reach out my hand, and hold Carson’s snout so we are eye to eye, I sense a detonation of compassion arise between us—I sense meaning. The pink skin of his armpits—meaning. The logarithmic spirals in his coat that obey the law of the shell of a snail or the arms of a galaxy—meaning. When I scream there is meat in his bowl and he trots out of the bedroom with the “All of this… for me?” look on his face—meaning.

One of the strangest aspects of modernity is the belief we must “create” meaning as if it were an app. Close inspection of both our bipedal ancestors and our quadrupedal mutts is that meaning is not created but revealed. It simply waits to be seen—and the dog can teach us how to see.

The Voice of Dog—Our Roman looked fifteen years into his past and mourned the loss of his dog. What then? We can look at our Roman and his pain thousands of years in the past—and what then? The dogs teaching is so profound because it reminds us time is a law we do not get to write. The dog reintroduces us to the value of time. Our dogs will be memories soon enough, and they remind us with their short life spans we too will be memories—us and everyone we care for.

If I stop and stare in Carson’s copper-colored eyes, I hear his voice inside of my skull with his pure, primeval, simple ultimatums:

Do you choose to learn what it means to be human from a dog, or not?

Do you choose to remember accomplishment is useless unless it makes you useful to others, or not?

Do you choose to learn the compassion of silence, or not?

Do you choose to scream every now and then, for the sheer thrill of it, as a form of play and to make of life an adventure, or not?

Do you choose to walk in the woods and celebrate the spectacle, the simplicity, and the fight of every epic day you get to live, or do you not?

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Fig wisdom—Growth is not defined as the absence of pain. And yet we do not find the word “pain” in official dictionaries. Instead, we see “progressive development.” It is a paradox that progressive development for both figs and humans demands both pain and loss: undertaken by choice, as a discipline.

My fig trees grow like man-eating Jurassic plants during the summer months. Malachite green leaves stretch for the sun and soak up its radiant energy, only to turn into leafless steel-gray skeletons in the fall. The actual fruit of the fig only grows on current years new branch growth—not last year’s branches. New fruit sites require new nodes. So, when winter comes, I have to saw several feet of branches off of each tree until I am left with a mangled stump. I feel like I am going backwards, as if I am causing the tree pain. But it is only through this loss and this pain—this cutting away—that growth happens.

Thus the fruit of the fig is born.

It struck me as I was sawing off the branches this is in fact a crucial human problem. What, then, is the significance of this “cutting away” versus its opposite tendency, “holding on,” when it comes to our growth?

The healthiness of illness—Autoimmunity is a good example of ill health as a whole. This is when our immune system attacks itself in a confused attempt to save us, threatening our lives in order to save them. It is madness. My immune system decided to go insane after my last tour overseas and it began to believe normal foods were infectious diseases. At the time I was obsessed with espresso. I loved the sharp Arabian twang assaulting my nostrils every time I boiled a pot over a fire or, when home, opening the door of a cafe in the morning. Until suddenly not only the espresso itself but even the scent could cause an immune reaction. I could not believe my body was no longer under the command of my mind. I issued orders but it no longer obeyed. When it came down to the choice between a pill and a path I knew no one to have walked, I decided to walk the latter: I cut out coffee, and then I cut out every other liquid, solid, and vapor my body reacted to.

I learned many of the modern world’s luxuries, in many cases, are actually poisonous: alcohol, sugar, emulsifiers, flavorings, antibiotic infused meat, chemicals, seed oils, household cleaners, the list goes on. I ate less a dozen foods for several years until I finally stabilized. I still eat a spartan diet and I would have it no other way. Like my fig trees, I reclaimed my life not with addition, but with the pain of subtraction, of cutting away.

Life is pain. To live is to choose that pain. Therefore each day becomes an arena of introspection and adventure. Each is to view the body of flesh and blood as an array of forward operating bases, each, in the end, expendable in the war effort, and the mind as the command center. When the war is brought to our doorstep we see the inversion of the belief the body is primary—the mind becomes all.

I have found that by cutting away it is easier to get lost in the taste of the cold juice filled vesicles of a sumo citrus and the sight of its cottony veins of pith, a glass of ice water after a humid walk in the woods, a strawberry gently twisted off the vine. The harmful patterns of a life are revealed with this way of seeing, and with it the divinity within the patterns of our own construction is made possible.

Healthy catastrophizing is an art form—The most important possessions to pre-state peoples were related to weapons and art. A mobile life made it so that they could only own as much as they could carry on their backs. For war and hunting they carried a spear, an atlatl, a sling, a bow, and a blade. For art and mythology they carried charcoal, paint, songs, stories, and an awareness of god-in-everything.

The necessities of modernity are only necessary in modernity. Remove modernity, and suddenly a bone-handled blade, a bit of finger paint for drawing on cave walls, a djembe drum—suddenly these simple concretes are worth far more than a BMW or a trip to Mykonos or a 401K. For what are these modern necessities worth if the electric grid is sabotaged and the food chain comes to a halt? It is a fateful irony that if modernity crumbles the human is rendered essentially un-human without an intimate knowledge of our analog heritage—unprepared for the worst case scenario, which is actually the normal scenario.

Aeschylus said “Wealth is useless to the dead.” It becomes clear that cutting away is a mortal practice. It is too live as if it were 30,000 years ago. It is to catastrophize the worst case scenario and thus find meaning in a far more simple mode of life, in the raw power of hand and mind to build, create, and prepare. Healthy catastrophizing leads to a minimization of the luxuries of the present and a maximization of the necessities of the past. With this mode of mind, the wonders of the present are suddenly worthy of profound gratitude as opposed to stepping stones to unattainable expectations.

Inner temple—The root of the word “temple” means “to cut” or “to divide”. Put together, it means to create a structure and close it off to everything else in life: farms, labor, house, forests, technology, work, entertainment, fame, craving, aversion. On the one hand, it is an irony that in cutting off a sacred place from all else we concretize the separation between worship and the rest of our lives. Worship happens over there, and miserable daily grind happens right here.The split becomes normalized. On the other hand, we now have access to a space which provides a counterpoint to everything thought of as miserable.

The temple comes in many forms: the church, gym, orchard, dojo, shooting range, copse of woods, steep gravel hill with a kettlebell, garden, pond, writing desk, stone ringed fire. Each is a space all its own, and yet its meaning can be carried within like body armor for the soul, a mobile sacred space of the mind, a conscious kitting up for all the major and minor trials in a day. The contrast is crucial because it makes it possible to concretize the temple within.

A mode of mind worth habitualizing—Cutting away can hurt. But sure enough, there are many ways of stepping outside of this pain, holding it in our hands, and taking the ontological high ground. This is one example.

A striking part of SEAL selection is the dive phase. In it, a candidate must demonstrate his ability to remain calm fifteen feet underwater as several instructors tie his breathing hoses in a knot, flip him around, rip his mask off—and then drift back a few feet and silently watch him. How will he react? If he fails to untie the knot and shoots for the surface, he fails the test. If he blacks out, he earns a bit of respect for his self-discipline, but he still fails, and either does it again without losing consciousness or he leaves the program. It is quite stressful.

And yet the second he breeches the surface with barely enough oxygen to remain conscious, he can still fail even if he does everything else right, unless he remembers to say three words: “I feel fine.”

Of course he does not feel fine. He feels like he is dying. His ancient body made of cells and neurons adapted to five million years of life-and-death scenarios naturally panics at the prospect of death-by-drowning. It hijacks his inner discourse. It makes him hyperventilate. It turns him into an animal. And in this way he has the chance to become a bit more human—by cutting away.

What, then, is cutting away? What is pain? What is loss? What else but an opportunity to say “I feel fine?”

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Welcome back. I am going to start this piece with a short story on one of the reasons I got into writing in the first place.

On Speed—Self-control also means avoiding that over which we have no self-control.

Take speed. Ever since I was a kid I wanted a Ducati. It was a dream—a dream come true.

At 60 miles per hour the Ducati told me I had not yet begun to move. I felt like I was slowly walking down the sidewalk. At 90, it begged me with its teasing whine to see what 110 felt like. At 110 I watched the text messages, emails, and tasks dominating my mind’s eye evaporate as my eyes focused on the micro rivets in the road in front of me. I would see a car swerving left over the dotted white lines and I would see the drivers eyes look down at his phone in his rear view mirror. I would lean a fraction to the left and speed by in a blink of an eyelid. I would muse mildly on how often this happens now, wondering if he would say I made a smear of myself all on my own. My eyes would look low and left at my side view mirror and he would already be reduced to two yellow headlights half a mile behind me. Nine times out of ten he would still be swerving.

At 115 the begging is gone and replaced by a sultry whisper… what, then, does 120 feel like? An infinitesimal rotation of my wrist and the Ducati is doing 120. In my skull there is one voice left, or more of a visceral feeling than a voice—a gnawing hunger to throttle that Italian-made twist grip just a little bit more… to inch my way to 130 on those wet and cracked Pennsylvania roads, through those swerving, texting, and fatal frames of metal. I felt the air against every hair in my nostrils. I felt the air warping around the airless pocket I occupied in a crouch.

At 130 I was reminded I like speed because I like knowing how calm I can remain on the unseeable line separating life and death. I knew if I sought to see the limit beyond this point I would cease to exist. The vibration of my soul matched the eight thousand revolutions per minute of my engine, and the world moved so fast I became a monumental pocket of stillness. Nothing else existed. The delta between the beads of sweat soaking my gloves and the elevated calm of my mind was a drug and standing on this edge was sublime. It is here a four millimeter wide pebble could set off the subtle doom swerving of my front tire that would end with me flying over the handle bars and skidding across the concrete until jeans give way to skin, skin to muscle, and muscle to bone. My mind processed this visual. And then my unworded and strangely detached inner observer wanted to get closer to the limit and I could not help but smile.

So I sold my Ducati.

The discovery of words—This was a while ago but it was a crucial part of my development. I was reconning the limit. I sought a similar sort of understanding with a sniper tiger team in war. But riding fast was meaningless, reckless, and I realized I was trying to make up for what I lost. Every time I laid eyes on that almost sexually attractive machine I realized the road ended at the River Styx. I could see Charon standing there with his oar and a smirk, mocking me, knowing it was an embarrassing way to die, no more. And yet I love it and I miss it. It is my demon.

So, when I lifted my knuckles from the sand and asphalt, I leaned into the world of words and discovered there a speed I had never known. The extraordinary aliveness I knew and missed was available to me in the form of ideas, and yet it was so much greater now, for this world is uncapped. There is no “arrival.” There is thus no need to slow down, unless it is time for a sabbath. I started writing with the same vigor as a young fig tree soaking up the saffron sun at dawn.

I wrote on my own for years until I started What then?, and up this point in my What then? journey, my essays were sniper shots to flesh out the intellectual core of my book. This is the theory that will probably be the One Idea I spend the rest of my life expounding on, and most likely in the form of novels. I reconned extreme aliveness with extreme ordeals using the extreme experiences of extreme humans. I wrote about war and the positives that could be culled from it despite the terrible negatives. This was a means to gain perspective on non-war life, and thus make non-war life better than anything war ever could have offered.

For a good summary of my overarching philosophy, this podcast hosted by was one of the deepest on the topic I have done.

Now a course change is due.

What, then, does What then? mean?

It is easy to pull meaning from extraordinary events in the past. It is difficult—and far more meaningful—to pull extraordinary meaning from everyday events in the present: physical training, growing fig trees, dreams, the world of books, human interactions, canine interactions, nature, striking ideas, the divine act of eating. This is what I am going to write more about. It still staggers the mind that this effort is far deeper, and far faster, than anything else I have ever done. No less than war, ideas can shift our perspective and deepen the lilac hues of stratocumulus clouds at sunrise and make us acutely aware of our lungs during our next inhale; they can therefore reveal meaning in the geometric shapes of a butterfly wing or the pages of a book—if we learn to see the primeval and mythical law flowing at all times beneath surface level reality.

I have been fortunate in establishing relationships with many my readers, several of which have been become deeply meaningful. They have confirmed the clouds do indeed appear more lilac after confronting challenging ideas. And yet a few weeks ago I got a DM from one reader with a perceptive observation. He said my writing could be seen as amoral, even immoral, since I almost never offer a clear summary or path forward at the end of my more challenging essays. I instantly knew he was correct because I go out of my way to avoid any posturing as a moral authority. I do not want to preach. I do not want to be a guru or an influencer. There are a lot of people trying to make a lot of money who very much want to tell us how to live our lives. I do not read their work. I will never write anything like it. I deliberately focus on the “why” and the “what” so a reader can decide “how,” if at all, they want to use the ideas I write about here. But to the readers point, this model comes with a risk: readers unfamiliar with my work may not understand my desired outcome and assume the worst.

It is all good, because the problem solves itself with this new direction.

These are essentially dispatches, or maybe a series of defensive outposts I am building in a ring around myself and those I care for. It strikes me this analogy is apt. I am fascinated by the creeping sense of nihilism and meaninglessness casting a shadow over our civilization in the shape of the Chicxulub asteroid that rendered our dinosaur brethren extinct. We are in a war for meaning, and even if we as individuals live meaningful lives, we will suffer the consequences of those who do not. This is unlimited and stimulating thinking material. I have also found this style of writing to be an effective antidote to the poisons of short form content, AI, and LLMs we hear so much about. We have all seen people gradually drift away from long-form content for the easy thought-terminating void of social media scrolling; we are witnessing the civilizational shrug about the supremacy of LLMs, and the passive acceptance that we all need to resign ourselves and get on the LLM-train whether we want to or not, otherwise we will be “left behind.”

This is a space to explore what it means to be “left behind,” authentically human, and for those who care, I will never use an LLM for a single word in these essays. I intend to “slow down to speed up” which is to use the law of pistol shooting to introduce calm, awe, and intention into the rush of the modern world, merging the best of both the primeval and civilized worlds I have written so much about, and to do so with words—slowing down to live at full speed.

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Welcome to the new subscribers. These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are hypotheses and experiments—they are a hunt for ideas that lead to vibrant aliveness. This involves the risk of being wrong which I gladly accept. If we do not push the boundaries and follow any thread wherever it may lead, right or wrong, then what is the point? This is why I am here and it is why I write.

Bad vibes and humans hating humans—We can see misanthropy everywhere at present, a negative view of humanity as a whole. The vibes are bad. As if earth is littered with men and women who are irredeemably stupid and corrupt. Mere abstractions on the news or in photographs online. This is the fallacy of the middle ground.

It is strange but true that combat reveals both the worst and the best within us. This is a truth rarely seen the safer life becomes because reality often lives at the extremes. This truth can be accessed with a Sabbath but of a different sort—a Combat Sabbath. Crucially, my experience is this Sabbath that can be accessed without the Combat.

Take this striking story—Pork Chop Hill—called Hill 255 by those who prioritize precision over imagination—got its name because it was shaped like a pork chop on the map. It was defended by Thai, Colombian, South Korean, and American forces. Politicians solemnly held peace talks publicly, while privately directing military engagements to show the enemy they would back their words with blood.

Unintentionally, this leads us to a stunning revelation of the human situation.

Pork Chop hill was overrun again and again. And it was recaptured again and again. An enemy battalion would silently stalk narrow valleys under black skies. They would sit and wait for their heavy artillery to set Hill 255 on fire, then scream and sprint up and over the hill with courage verging on insanity. The besieged allied unit would be massacred and a few survivors would tumble down the hill. Later, the allies would recapture it with bunker-to-bunker fighting: flamethrowers, rifles, and grenades; bayonets, knives, and hands. Over 360 allied fighters died on that hill, over 1,000 were wounded, and over 100 were never seen again. Well over 2,000 enemy combatants were killed and several times as many were wounded.

On one hill.

And on this hill there was one moment that stuck in my skull and I had to write about it. The Thai soldiers were dubbed the Little Tigers because their little frames were inversely proportional to the enormity of their souls in combat.

When the Thai’s time was up and they turned over the hill to their American brethren, the Americans found this written on the wall: “Take good care of our Pork Chop.” [421]

Take good care of our Pork Chop.

There is love in this command.

Now take this striking paradox—Now how could they have loved this blackened bit of earth? They were pawns in the hands of politicians, many of whom would never have the balls to place their boots on that hill. Why, then, did they care for Pork Chop when they stared at thousands of rotting corpses and wondered if their own corpse would be laid out for the crows far from mom and home?

My hunch is they cared for Pork Chop not despite these miseries, but because of them.

A Sabbath of a different sort—A Sabbath is a day with no work and a lot praying. Combat too is a Sabbath of sorts. Instead of abstinence from work, it is abstinence from superfluities and unlimited opportunities. Rather than the addition of prayer (or rather in addition to prayer) it is the addition of concrete enemies who very much want us dead.

Pascal said “Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.” It is a paradox that war can be more tolerable than sitting in an office, a silent living room, or traffic. My sense is one out of a thousand who have been in a gunfight feel more alive in a cubicle than in a bullet punctured tent.

The men of Hill 255 had enemies. They knew the Chinese and North Koreans wanted to kill them. They also suspected—not without reason—their own political leaders who had zero skin in the game could not have cared less if they died, were it not for the public image and those pesky, grieving parents. It is not impossible, a soldier may have thought, that these leaders secretly enjoyed the tit for tat game they played with their suit wearing Commie counterparts. Who knows, maybe they got a little hit of power every time they sacrificed a human life for a hill that was worth less than the dining room chandeliers they ate under every night.

It is in this state our warfighters experienced one half of their Sabbath: enemies.

What about the other half?

Life is stripped to its skeletal necessities as it inches towards eternal rest: we have no driver’s license, no college, no childhood drama, no parental expectation, no money, no ads, no news, no houses, no windowless office, no 9-5s, no skin color, no ethnicity, no politics, no endless distractions to fragment attention and murder contemplation.

The middle ground is reduced to a single extreme: the task of survival. The fighters came to know, as if placed before them by God Himself for some special purpose, the lilac colored striations of cirrus clouds on the horizon, the taste of clean cold water in a metal canteen after hours of cotton mouthed combat, the crude, sarcastic, and infantile jokes heard suddenly out of nowhere and laughter so hard their face muscles hurt.

What then is the significance of the Combat Sabbath?—When life is reduced to breathe, blood, bright eyes, and slightly shaking hands, and all we have left is our ability to scratch meaning out of dirt, bronze shell casings, and moonless skies whistling and cracking with invisible rockets, mortars, and bullets—it is here we see the universe stare down at us from the stars, colossal and mighty and silent, and ask us a question that is felt rather than heard: What sort of human are you inside?

The men of Pork Chop hill answered with a simple and yet profoundly human action: they stood their ground. They owned their slab of earth when they wanted to run away, quit, beg for mercy, and crawl into a hole and cry and never wake up again. They stood in the face of an infinite cosmos and fought for their little sparks of life with a No. They stood with each other, because all that mattered were their own little sparks and the little sparks around them.

Maybe our Thai who wrote those words on the wall was not referring to Hill 255, but to the concrete evidence of what each man and woman on this earth is capable of. Maybe he never wanted to forget it.

These two statements are non-contradictory—One: war, injustice, and suffering are wretched. Two: without war, injustice, and suffering, humans devolve into fragmented, alienated, and radically unwanted selves.

This world is beautiful. The symphony of cicadas and frogs at night should not be disturbed with the cracks of gunfire and grenades in some revolution or genocide. But few will ever listen to the cicadas and frogs without a bit of suffering to wake them up. Without this suffering, those who do not listen to the noises of the night may bring on the next revolution, genocide, or war in order to be done with the bad vibes and worthless men and women they share this earth with.

“There are boxes in the mind with labels on them”1—Let us name a few: Things I know are a waste of my time and I choose to do anyway. The virtues of suffering beautifully. Aspects of humanity I hate and refuse to see in myself. What would Gandalf do? Questions the universe asks me when the silence grows a little too loud. Reasons to thank my enemies. What I can accomplish and see with a Sabbath if I strip life to its skeletal necessities by choice rather than by force.

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Welcome to the new subscribers. These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are hypotheses and experiments—they are a hunt for ideas that lead to vibrant aliveness. This involves the risk of being wrong which I gladly accept. If we do not push the boundaries and follow any thread wherever it may lead, right or wrong, then what is the point? This is why I am here and it is why I write.

A primal truth—The knife is to man what the antler is to the elk and the fang to the wolf.

Animals are more physically robust than us because their bodies are their weapons: their antlers, canines, and claws are on them and constantly ready to be used. But if humans are caught unarmed with our soft hands and short teeth—alas for the featherless biped!

The better we became at crafting tools from wood and stone, the more these fundamentally human artifacts replaced what we now think of as non-human features. As tools made us more lethal, our muscles, bones, and teeth became more slender. We became lighter than both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus, who in turn were much lighter than the great apes.

Our unprecedented tool making ability was not only for hunting quadrupeds, but fighting off bipeds. We thus became “first-strike” creatures. The knife, spear, and rifle are weapons, it is true, but my sense is our first-strike tools are not limited to weapons. They are also wrenches, compasses, crimpers, stethoscopes, and tourniquets. Going even further, while these tools merely protect our bodies from breaking, artistic tools protect our freedom, our passion, and our souls. These can be paint brushes, ink pens, djembe drums, or sticks of charcoal taken from a fire.

We are unfinished animals—The knife is not just an inert slab of steel, nor is the pen a meaningless mass of plastic and ink. They are the ability to fashion rafts to ford rivers, save our loved ones from the stalkers in the night, and fight our governments for freedom.

The significant point is we are unfinished animals without our analog tools. They are what finish us. They equip us to own our existence in a hostile and stunningly beautiful world. If we do not have analog tools, we do not have self-reliance. It is now possible for the first time in human history to live without having to own our own lives.

Digital tools and self-enslavement—Modern luxury meant to free us from ancient necessity. This it did. And we were thus freed from the necessity of self-reliance. Knives and finger paint are ancient. They have not changed. This means they show us how much the world around us has changed in the last 20,000 years.

My feeling holding a bone-handled blade is soothing in a savage sense. I am aware of scents of fern and fur; my mind’s eye sees waterfalls and searches for silhouettes of cannibals and tigers in the woods. I feel this can be handled—all of it—with this little tool in my palm that took hours of devotion and attention to create. It is deeply invigorating. Even when I carried a rifle for a living I always carried a knife, for a rifle can jam but a knife cannot. The pistol is one of my favorite things on earth, but it cannot cut a tree or open an Amazon box without making a mess. The blade incites a bit of seriousness and roots us in metal, time, space, and the here-and-now.

My feeling holding a smart phone is a different sort of stimulation. A hyper-stimulation that does not keep my feet on the ground but sucks my scattered brain into a glowing void. This is not the primal centering of waterfalls. Rather it is the empty and sneaky sensation of infinite scrolls, of endless opportunities that are in fact endless ways to die without having lived.

With our digital tools, we are no longer strike first. We are now the ones being struck. These tools are designed to turn us into passive receptacles, empty skulls that may never give birth to a striking thought of its own. It is a false sense of finishedness.

The analog tool demands we unplug from convention and understand the world exactly as it is—defending it with a weapon when necessary, and making of it a poem from our first breath to our last. On the other hand, the smart phone wants us to join a collective and digital fiction; it wants make sure we cannot see beyond the pixelated void created by those who want... what? Power? Money? Nihilistic fulfillment?

Riffing with Archilochus—

“In my spear is my kneaded bread;

In my spear is my Ismaric wine.

And I lean on my spear while I drink it.”

Yes. Archilochus is the man who invented the concept of the “warrior-poet.” He may not have seen what was coming when he was alive 2,600 years ago, but his theory is remarkably sound. Our ancient tools are a reminder that we own only that which lies within the span of our arms, within the confines of our skull, and within the power of our choice.

And without them, what then? Who among us can carve a spear, start a fire with a stick, or draw a dogs face and do it justice? When it comes to digital tools, who can make a smart phone, a laptop, a television? Even going beyond the digital, who can build a house, a car, an electrical system, an airplane, or a grocery store filled with figs from Turkey and cacao from Venezuela?

When our eyes no longer concentrate on the ivory goddess in our palm we spent weeks whittling with love, we find the latest social cause to be enraged about, the terror of the apocalyptic rising of the seas, of nuclear winters, of deadly diseases, of every wretched and abstract event that can plague our lives but which is completely outside of our control.

How many take productive action when they can just stare at a screen?

Now how many lean on their spear and enjoy the spectacle?

What would a time traveling savage say?—When I close my eyes I see a lush forest and, on the other side of a roiling pool, a Stone Age man standing with a knife at the foot of a waterfall. What, then, if he had somehow seen both the ancient world and the modern? The words I hear are these: Why remove yourself from the modern world when you can remove the modern world from yourself? Do you not realize the knife set you free but that you no longer need it? Do you not realize you are born to fight those who profit from you sleepwalking to death with your capacity to strike first with ideas, words, paint, and poetry?

A conviction—I believe in my bones the line between the creative individual and the madman is thin. But a madman need not be creative, while the creative must at times be madmen.

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Welcome to the new subscribers. These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are hypotheses and experiments—they are a hunt for ideas that lead to vibrant aliveness. This involves the risk of being wrong which I gladly accept. If we do not push the boundaries and follow any thread wherever it may lead, right or wrong, then what is the point? This is why I am here and it is why I write.

Nihilism and meaninglessness—There exists a difference between myth-making strength and fact-making strength.1

For the most part, we find fact-making strength in easy times, and myth-making strength in hard times. The vibe at present is that myths are only to be found in old books or digitally enhanced superhero movies. But not in the real world. Here, we see an obsession with facts.

My feeling is this fact-making strength has led to advances in science, productivity, and longevity. Counter-intuitively, it has also led to reductionism, numbness, and nihilism. The defining illness of our age is the anxiety that life may be irrelevant—and meaningless. A sense that some cosmic injustice has been done and something lost which will never be reclaimed.

It ignores the truth that myth is all around us if we choose to see it.

He deserves more subscribers—I am a fan of Xenophon. He deserves more pom-pom waving than he gets. During one of the blackest moments of his legendary ruck leading 10,000 mercenaries through the godawful mountains and frost-bitten winters of Persia, Xenophon gazed at his enemy, the Kolchoi. They held the only pass for hundreds of miles. They were all that stood between his men and their salvation in the Black Sea. This enemy was famed for cutting their prisoners to pieces joint by joint. Sometimes they would roast them alive or even gouge out their eyes to mix things up.

It is here our warrior stood his ground. I can see him stop and stare at his enemies swords glinting in the sun. I can see him turn to his men and say one of the most epic displays of the human soul cranked up to its maximum intensity: “We must eat them raw.”

I sat with this for a while.

This is myth-making strength. It struck me that if Xenophon were in those mountains with fact-making strength, he would have faced the facts and stopped there. Unpassable cliffs, enemy who climb like mountain goats, the burden of command, maybe some savage screeching—it would be too much for a man who lost his faith in myth. He would have gone numb. He would have said “This is not possible,” or “My men are not worth it,” or “This was not what I expected.” And then he and his men would have been eaten.

And if we dropped Xenophon in the age of Whole Foods, would he have motivated 2,400 years of those with pom-poms to inject a bit of mythical significance into their lives? Would he have died as an old man and be able to say to himself he had, at least for a second, lived a mythical life? Probably not, unless he went out of his way, a point we will come back to.

The Great Void—Fact-making strength looks at the Milky Way and does not see advanced civilizations flying planet to planet around their suns. Instead, it reduces that great white swath to hydrogen and helium, or does not even bother to look up from a phone in the first place. It reduces a potentially fascinating profession to a checklist for efficiency or into a pension for a secure future. It holds a novel and does not see into the souls of a dozen human beings—it sees an unstimulating mass of ink, paper, and too much time. It looks at a fire and does not see waves of blue and yellow silk, or feel a proto-human’s profound gratitude for its warmth, but sees only carbon and ash that must be cleaned. It takes a man, woman, child, or dog and sees a voter, a consumer, a dollar sign, a low white blood cell count—or perhaps a disappointing sack of cells and neurons, or someone who must be kept busy and productive, or a useful connection for personal advancement, or a meaningless cancer of the earth

This is what happens in easy times. On one hand, we see longevity, productivity, science, and progress. On the other hand, we see every last ounce of myth sucked out of the wonders of existence.

If we were sentenced to live thirty thousand lives and all we could see was ash, cells, dollars, bullet-points, and wasted time—would those thirty thousand lives be a heaven or a hell? Would we seek to break that sentence? Or the world? Or ourselves?

So why would a single life be spent this way?

Putting a finger on the scale—It is possible for myth-making to ride the pendulum to the other extreme. Fact-makers stop at mere concretes and delusion-makers wait for Apollo to save them or destroy them. Myth-makers walk a different path and take Apollo’s role and powers upon themselves.

It seems that what we need is three parts myth-making, one part fact-making, and bit of delusion-making for no other reason than that it makes for good thinking material.

The enemy and the self—An enemies message is written in blood. An enemy stimulates us in a way a calorie, a hydrogen molecule, or a pixel never will.

Myth-making strength is not reduction, but construction. It is to elevate ourselves above the concrete. More specifically it is to overcome an enemy. Which means it is also to overcome the enemies of easy times: reductionism, apathy, numbness, and nihilism.

But this ultimately means it is to overcome the self: self-limitation, self-destruction, self-demythologizing. Xenophon did not only overcome the Kolchoi in epic fashion. He overcame his fear, his desire to live at any cost, his mind spinning webs of lies to convince him these eye-gougers will show him mercy. His self-overcoming was more mythical than anything else he did that day.

We must eat them raw.

When someone says these words in the face of mortal uncertainty they are making history. They say “Behold: I submit to no mere concrete. Behold: I will make a myth of my suffering.” In overcoming self, myth-makers overcome their environment, convention, and their time. Myth-makers choose to leave a piece of their soul on the earth long after their bones are turned to dust.

Stock the mind—It is possible to see the world through the eyes of our myth-makers because their souls are still here. When we are driving, waiting in line, or sitting at a red light, we can talk to Aeschylus, Nietzsche, or Tolkien:

“The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with weary feet,

Until it joins some larger way,

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.”

Fact-making is the door. Fact-making is the road. Myth-making is what lies beyond that door, what happens along that road, and what fight will remind us that a bit of myth exists in every second we are still breathing.

Stalk the mind—I love Whole Foods. It is a paradise undreamed of when I walk in deserts and rainforests. When I am in the Third World and smell poverty and danger I dream of Whole Foods soaring out of the desert sands. When I am home I find myself pulling into the parking lot and thinking more about the warriors who once stalked each other with tomahawks where the Whole Foods now stands than about the Whole Foods itself. Or I part the clouds and peer into the future at its smoldering walls in some dystopian catastrophe. When we visualize an enemy we become vitally engaged. We may out-do, out-perform, out-think, and out-prepare them—and ourselves—for the good of the whole.

Know thyself—It is a contradiction to only see facts and refuse to see the fact that myth is within our control.

If you find these essays striking, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing.

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Welcome to the new subscribers. These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are hypotheses and experiments—they are a hunt for ideas that lead to vibrant aliveness. This involves the risk of being wrong which I gladly accept. If we do not push the boundaries and follow any thread wherever it may lead, right or wrong, then what is the point? This is why I am here and it is why I write.

Which world do we live in?—Caesar was fond of his centurions. Take this battle in 57 BC: “All the centurions of the fourth cohort had been cut down, the standard-bearer killed, and the standard lost. The centurions of the other cohorts had almost all been either wounded or killed; among them, the senior centurion of the legion, Publius Sextus Baculus, an extremely brave man, had been weakened so much by his many deep wounds that he could no longer stand.”

When I read these words I smell cordite and taste copper. I become aware of the veins in my arms. Caesar’s awe of this centurion can be read in the three passages that reference his transcendent self-command throughout the Gallic War. Even when Baculus is not mentioned we can feel his presence on the pages like some unseen mover behind momentous events.

Baculus fought with steel blades in unmapped Gallic forests. He marched, sweat, sparred, bled, drank, laughed, and lived with brothers for years who lay dead and dying. He was surrounded by a long-haired enemy who fought heroically and savagely for their sovereignty. He had a reputation to uphold and men whose lives depended on his self-control. It was not one or two wounds that at last put him down—and the sword strokes broke his body but not his fight. Baculus penetrated the surface level irrelevancies that too often blind us and demonstrated the primeval core that unites us all.

It strikes me there are three ways of seeing death. One is when we look down at death from a very great height. It is to feel brutally and unapologetically alive. Another is when we look up at death, trying to slow time in terror as if it can be bottled up and lived at some future date. Yet another is when we close our eyes and feel nothing at all. As I wrote these last two views of death my mind turned to Babel: “And they had bricks for stone, and slime had they for mortar.”

The lesson of Baculus is the primeval substrate runs like a current through us all. So, too, does the immensely downward gaze at death this substrate offers us. It can be tapped via combat, hand-work, ill-health, and contemplation.

Death gives us the gift—but not the obligation—of overcoming it.

Happiness—The Declaration of independence states we are born with the right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is significant these rights were written in that order. Happiness without life would not get us very far. We are told by academic evolutionary theorists that happiness is not our default condition, that are wired by nature to seek happiness in a few ways: reproducing with sexually optimal mates, building coalitions, earning reputations, acquiring special skills that make us irreplaceable, avoiding social groups where our remarkable (stunning, exceptional… to be found nowhere else on earth!) abilities are not valued… the list goes on.

If we hinge our happiness on social acceptance, safety, or stability, we hinge our happiness on an if.

My hunch is the boots in the mud logic of the Founding Fathers is more enlightened than the prison in the air logic of our academics. The Founding Fathers realized the pursuit itself can bring happiness; that happiness itself is impossible without a good fight; that happiness means nothing without its opposite: misery, cold, ego-shattering failure and the astounding calm command we find when we can sink no lower in life, and have nowhere to go but up, and the only voice left in our skull says: On! On!

Live or be lived—Every morning with symmetrical perfection the Earth spins counter clockwise and the sun rises in the east. Few see it. It is true we created speed and technology to live more fully only to find speed and technology warping the quality of our lives.

After his journey to the moon on Apollo 11, Michael Collins said this about the earth: “The thing that really surprised me was that it projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.” It is easy to be awake on the moon. Take time. On the earth, time is what stands between who we are now and who we want to become in the future. On the moon, we can smell time—we can hold it in our palms, gaze into its depths, and hear it tell us how unaware we are of our fleeting tenure on this earth.

We cannot see the earth from the moon every morning. The view does not force us awake. I believe in my bones this inevitable metaphysical ignorance is an obstacle we must overcome in order to fully realize ourselves. Ignorance is a worthy enemy. The cosmos has given us the gift of life but has left it up to us to choose to live that life—or to let life live us.

Thus says the moon to its skull-confined neighbors: Let us redefine earthrise. It is not to stand on the moon and see the earth rise above the horizon. It is to stand on the earth and conjure the same stunning consciousness within the confines of your skull as a campaign of overcoming.

If you find these essays striking, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing.

Support What then?

Subscribe now

Welcome to the new subscribers. These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are hypotheses and experiments—they are a hunt for ideas that lead to vibrant aliveness. This involves the risk of being wrong which I gladly accept. If we do not push the boundaries and follow any thread wherever it may lead, right or wrong, then what is the point? This is why I am here and it is why I write.