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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.

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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.

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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.

These three essays are completely unrelated in subject, and yet I was struck to find a common theme connecting all three. I write a great deal for myself in the form of short essays to flesh out ideas. I usually take one of these ideas and turn it into a longer essay. I’m going to experiment with dropping my smaller aphoristic essays here every now and then. Hopefully these are as striking as the longer pieces. Enjoy. —Sam

Where is all the good news?—My hunch is good news networks fail because they suck the life out of us. They are deenergizing. In the words of psychologist Rollo May, good news is like “putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out into the Atlantic towards England with the cheery comment, ‘The sky’s the limit.’” We are energized by bad news. Life-threatening events and promises of dystopia destabilize us, put our back against the wall, and brighten our eyes. We enter myth-making territory.

All this evil-mongering on the media is a rupture, a rebellion against lives too far removed from tasks of consequence. The subconscious motive is the unworded hope that democracy is really about to end; that Judgment Day is at last coming unto earth. We see non-events turned into apocalyptic horrors. We see a love of zombie movies and we can see ourselves with shotguns and a tribe: every step we take, every decision we make, and every battle by moonlight is met with ingenuity, a sense of usefulness, and clarity of purpose. I believe this is healthy. It becomes unhealthy when the sufferer does not know how to reconcile a lack of fights with a deep-seated love of fights—and they invent new fights.

Apocalypticizing is when we secretly wish bad news will turn into bad events for therapeutic reasons. Alas for the rest of us—a hundredth of 28 Days Later made real is enough to set civilization back 30,000 years. What if our sufferers no longer allowed themselves to be shaped by the intellectual degenerates who write our cultural discourse? What if they decided to define their own fight—one that did not require the death but the rebirth of civilization? What if our non-sufferers saw this ironic self-destruction as what it is—yet another epic fight to train for? It is no more than a means to sprint hills, build a tribe, study the past, and above all, enjoy the spectacle.

Gandalf is my spirit animal—I have read the Lord of the Rings every year since I was fourteen. It only gets better as I get older and my respect for Tolkien’s genius grows. I memorized the dialogue below. I believe it is a contender for the greatest quote in the history of literature.

Denethor, the steward of Gondor, said to Gandalf: “… there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor; and the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.” And Gandalf replied with these immortal words: ‘Unless the king should come again?’ said Gandalf. ‘Well, my lord Steward, it is your task to keep some kingdom still against that event, which few now look to see. In that task you shall have all the aid you are pleased to ask for. But I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?’”

For I also am a steward.

We have two types of steward here. The Denethor-steward looks after his city walls, his duty, his people. His is a micro view and a micro task. His staggering love of this micro task is his weakness: the moment his task is no more, he can be broken and never again add value where it is needed. He cannot see the good in all things that live and breathe. The Gandalf-steward does not look after a city but the Good. His is a macro view. He is willing to fight up to the end, even if the last thing on earth is a single blade of grass or his capacity to say No in the face of a blood-red sky and demonic fallen angels like Sauron bearing down upon him. His intensely vulnerable love for Hobbit and Elf, horse and eagle, simbelmynë and pipe-weed, is his strength. Everything is infused with vital energy and life-force. His last act in life can be one of pivotal meaning, whether beneath the glorious gates of Gondor or alone in a ditch in a desolate field.

Denethor-steward walks around Gondor and says “Gondor! Gondor! Gondor!” Gandalf-steward walks around Middle Earth and says “Elves, Men, Balrogs, Hobbits, mountains, fireworks, an inn with ale after many weary miles—a good fight!”

We can read the unwritten in human eyes—On a recent trip I ran into a friend I had not seen for almost twenty years. His eyes were radically alive, the sort of eyes that rarely exist outside of small tribes engaged in tasks of mortal consequence. The wrinkles round the edges only enhance the sense of penetrating perceptiveness. You can see the calculations grinding behind the irises. Through these many-hued windows and within the self-contained borders of the skull can be seen a galaxy of autonomous human judgement and vitality. Eyes reveal the boundaries of the spectrum we choose to inhabit: love and hate versus apathy; thought versus indifference; passion versus numbness; meaning versus nihilism. They show the choice between our awareness of the stunning gift that is life or our loathing of life because we loath ourselves.

Van Gogh had a great sentence on eyes: “I prefer painting people’s eyes to cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral, however solemn and imposing the latter may be—a human soul, be it that of a poor beggar or of a streetwalker, is most interesting to me.”

Our eyes are as much for seeing the world as they are for showing others what we choose to see.

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The lone road—“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events are profitable, all days holy, all men divine.” Many would read Emerson’s quote as proof enlightenment is a condition that lies beyond evil and suffering.

I argue the exact opposite.

This quote only mentions their enlightened condition. It does not mention the labor that went into becoming enlightened. The poet, philosopher, and saint share kinship with the warfighter, and this warfighter perspective reveals the depth of this labor: “Things” like guns can kill them and sharks can eat them. “Events” can lead to a leg shot off at the knee by a fifty caliber machine gun. “Days” can be so wretched you wish you could become an ascetic in a cave and live in silent contemplation unto the end of time. “Men” execute women and others torture children—some “men” do both.

If we did not know what suffering and evil were we would have nothing to be enlightened about.

It follows that these two statements are non-contradictory: 1) Evil and suffering are wretched. 2) The lone road leading to enlightenment runs through the valleys of evil and suffering.

Putting utopia to the test—Imagine landing the dream house, the dream spouse, the dream job, or perhaps no job at all, and you are able to enjoy endless leisure. Every wish has been granted and every possession is now yours. Nothing goes wrong here. The threats of nuclear war, pandemics, and illness are no more. You have no need to help those in pain for they can feel no pain. You and your loved one will live forever in this utopia. Not even death can poison the bliss.

In the beginning, it may feel as satisfying as the first few days of a vacation at the beach, the salt-air a tonic for the nerves, skin glowing from the sun. But after a few weeks you might begin to feel an itch… a gnawing tug of discontent. You might find yourself imagining a thief breaking in while you valiantly fight him off, saving yourself and your loved ones. Or you fantasize about a stray dog swept away by a rip tide and rescuing her amid the boulders and crashing waves to the cheering of onlookers. Or you might look to the horizon beyond the sea and wonder what forests and deserts you may find, even if you already know. After years or decades or millennia, you might axe a few trees, weave palm fiber around them, and sail this savage canoe unto the edge of the earth just to feel something.

Without death, evil, suffering, and uncertainty of outcome, only one question remains: what is the point?

Those with fame, wealth, mansions, yachts, cocaine, many-lettered credentials after their names, jets, longevity doctors, power—these are the most miserable sons of bitches ever to walk the earth.

Good thinking material for a walk—Adam and Eve were given paradise in Eden. Wet black soil, purple-tinged figs, rose-red pomegranates glistening in the golden sunrise, innocence and peace and plenty. They could not handle paradise—not even God could handle man living in paradise.

Enlightenment of suffering—If suffering were not essential to human life, why is it to be found in war and peace, wealth and poverty, in pre-state and state, in health and when stabbed, shot, or sick? Why has suffering not been eliminated with drugs or sobriety, mansions or caves, love or hate, communes or solitary confinement?

Those poets, philosophers, and saints who sought to transcend suffering through enlightenment must have suffered beyond comprehension. Only those who sought enlightenment through their suffering saw their time on this earth as sacred, profitable, holy, and divine.

Tahitian youths were taught a song in the house of horrors that was pre-state island life:

This club is red,

Become subduers,

Become fast runners;

That darkness be out,

That the light be let in.1

The warfighter free-falling fifteen thousand feet above the sea on a moonless night to assault a ship of zealots is letting a light in. A poet can feel ten times the pain of a mere mortal within her soul, and yet she inks a haiku on the black and golden wings of a butterfly and it gives her and those who read it a reason to live. A philosopher traces every demonic thread of humanity down to its most bloody and sadistic roots—and only then can put words to the thread of love and self-sacrifice that runs back up to the surface. Long and many are the roads to Golgotha, and the saint has learned to find enlightenment in every weary step.

Spreading our arms to the full spectrum of human experience—To have known the fullest suffering life can bring, to have witnessed evil at its blackest root, and then to grind and bring a bit of light to the darkness—that is enlightenment.

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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 a 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. Thank you for being part of it.

The question of chaos—I was thinking about Dostoevsky’s novel Demons while walking Carson, my four-legged monster of a best friend. Dostoevsky’s meditation on nihilism turned my mind to the question of chaos. I realized that chaos demands the maximum a human being is capable of; non-chaos, the absolute minimum.

So it is not surprising cultures like our own usually forbid failure—they stigmatize it—and this creates a demand for humans who are willing to become obedient. We can see obedience everywhere.

On the other end of the spectrum, chaotic cultures demand humans with a pro-failure mode of mind. It is here we find a different existential posture towards one’s life, and one’s self: an immense aliveness and self-reliance bordering on omnipotence. It feels like a savage thrill to breathe and visualize and overcome. I have been fortunate to know this condition. Its astronomical downsides and its undreamed of upsides.

Let us lean into it.

The myth of the No Fail Mission—There are those who prop up the myth of the No Fail Mission. They tell us it is possible not to fail. That failure is, in fact, an aberration. An Evil Thing. Operations need to run smoothly, a Cause can be perfectly rational, progress cannot be halted, three point five percent growth is critical, risk is unacceptable, feelings cannot be hurt, optimal physical functioning and one hundred year lifespans are within our grasp.

This myth is born of marketing, academia, business, media, how-to influencers, and the like. My hunch is their mission is to render people inert, or at least confused. Their business models would cease to exist in chaos—and if people start asking questions that are a bit too inquisitive.

Those who prop up the myth of the No Fail Mission care more about organizational efficiency than about human flourishing. My hunch is this is why Socrates was sentenced to death by hemlock.

But what about Hollywood? What about impossible missions made possible? What about hundreds of enemy corpses, magazines with infinite bullets, and unbelievably attractive protagonists hanging from cliffs by the tips of their fingers? My sense is this too is a masterful way to perpetuate the No Fail Mission: it makes people think the joy in overcoming failure is either a myth or reserved for mysterious military units.

So we have an anti-failure minority who want people who can be made soulless putty in their hands; those in the middle who know something is wrong and cannot quite put their finger on it; and a pro-failure minority who live lives beyond convention (some in a good way, some in not so good ways) but who do so in the shadows.

Apes studying apes—Academics who study SEALs are like primatologists who study chimpanzees in the jungle. Their faces are diligent and yet wrinkled with puzzled expressions. They write in their notebooks: “…the SEALs studied exhibited a paradoxical mix of attitudes and behaviors. For instance, they confided, reflected, and self-analyzed, candidly expressing strong opinions while also unabashedly sharing stories full of ambiguity and inconsistencies. Untroubled by these contradictions, informants were comfortable discussing chaotic, confusing, and complex situations with little need for tidy closure or rational conclusion.”1

The real myth is that perfect rationality is possible. I believe in my bones perfect rationality is only possible for those who do not bleed when they are wrong. The momentous life is spent striving for perfect rationality while at the same time embracing mayhem for aliveness and awakeness.

The beautiful hell of the Front—When we apply the question of chaos to the health hacking and longevity movements, we are bombarded with questions. Are we designed to sleep eight perfect hours a night, count our calories, take a tab of creatine, track our HRV, and get just the right amount of muscle mass in a perfectly controlled and air-conditioned bubble? Or are we designed to be expendable in some risky endeavor in service to something larger than ourselves—to break things and earn some scar tissue on our bodies and our brains?

A twenty year old living like a seventy year old is missing out on something fundamentally human. My sense is health hacking is too often another form of obedience disguised as optimization.

Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit, Catholic priest, polymath, and the sort of WWI veteran people do not like to talk about because he does not fit the traumatized narrative. He laid his soul bare in a beautiful essay where he confessed “I need the Front.” He set off for the front line trenches “like a curious man, a jealous man, who wanted to see everything, and see more of it than anyone else.” He wrote “the personnel dug in behind the front… are a living problem for my eyes—how can they spend weeks so near the lines and not thirst with a desire to go and see what is happening.”

On the one hand, we have those who seek physical and psychological perfection. On the other hand, we have those who want to know what it is to exist in their short tenure on this earth.

But is the former actually possible without the latter?

The reality of the No Fail Mission —Actually, everything goes wrong on No Fail Missions. Chardin knew this and wanted it. So did I.

The No Fail Mission usually looks more like this: the batteries of your night vision goggles die as you step off the helicopter during an insertion; the helicopter crashes trying to take off from the landing zone; your radio cannot reach over the mountains and you cannot talk to the gunships; there are more bright eyed men with machine guns than intelligence said there would be; a member of your team somehow snapped a scapula; it was supposed to be a four hour mission and you are thirty six hours into it, in the freezing rain when it was supposed to be ninety and sunny, and with no food and chronic diarrhea when you felt like a god the day prior.

And yet despite all of this—or rather because of it—the pro-failure crowd feels a grim and quiet purpose. Every single action, decision, and risk they take is exploding with aliveness and significance.

And thus the chaotic life inverts the non-chaotic life: internal ruminations, anxieties, and uncertainties are replaced by external tasks of consequence.

Chaos creation is crucial—It is significant that pro-failure tribes are not obsessed with failure itself, but with failure as a means for self-perfection.

It starts in training. In this case, BUD/S. The body is pushed to failure: Soft sand running, swimming, trembling in cold water, and lunging with telephone poles until muscular collapse—and then beyond. The mind is pushed to failure: “you should not be here,” “you are weak,” “you are not allowed to sleep,” “you are done for the day—now line up on the beach for three more hours of pain,” “you should listen to the voices complaining in your skull and quit.” And the existential posture is pushed to failure: Will the prospect of pain, suffering, and uncertainty make you crawl into a hole and wish you were dead, or will you turn that hell into fuel to dial your mind, body, and soul up to their maximum intensity? Will you merely hate it, or will you learn to love it and want it to be exactly as it is for all eternity?

In chaos we either love failure or we quit (or die). In non-chaos we can to drift.

But it also gives us the option to create chaos.

Rig for pain—The value of a pro-failure mindset is not limited to war since it is not a place but an existential posture. It can be brought to bear anywhere: work, play, reading, school, sitting with family, walking down the street. Take ill health. Navigating life and relationships with illness or autoimmunity is like steering a ship at night, in the fog, in a hurricane, near a rock studded coast. Eventually, you come to accept both the risk and actuality of crashing, as well as the blind and savage faith in yourself to endure the shattered ship, the pitiless waves, and the grunting crawl ashore. Eventually, you learn to love it.

Eventually, you learn to rig for pain. This is a SEAL expression. It means we ought to prepare ourselves for heavy seas, hypothermia, voices wailing and gnashing their teeth in our skulls, fear, illness, disease, silky snaps of bullets, stepping outside of the groupthink of a culture, putting values to the test, and asking questions no matter how uncomfortable they may be.

In a word, to rig for pain is to train for failure.

A life of failure—It is a paradox that a life of failure can be proof of a love of life.

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Before we start, my brother is coming out with a book. If you have the slightest interest in what it means to be warrior in any domain of your life, this book is for you. A bit of his bio from his website where you can order his book: “Cory’s twenty years’ experience as a SEAL, thirteen at SEAL Team SIX, taught him that the right attitudes are critical to realizing dreams and achieving success.” I cannot recommend it enough.

Second, some wisdom from Thoreau: “Better a monosyllabic life than a ragged and muttered one; let its report be short and round like a rifle, so that it may hear its own echo in the surrounding silence.”

On to today’s piece…

The war against losing—Our world is built on a few axioms. One is “Losing is unfair,” which is an attempt to mold competitive animals into an equitable and utopian vision, never mind the sports, war, gambling, and entrepreneurship which continues regardless. Another is “No one is allowed to lose.” This presumes losing could, ironically, be beaten out of our instinctual scripts. Yet another is “Losing is a fiction—everyone is a winner in the end” which robs losing of its epic profit. As a result of these axioms, life can lose its luster.

On the other hand, an axiom of the primeval world was this: do not lose.

It was not a gentle philosophy, for we were made for ungentle times. The Comanches—men, women, and children—could march from sun down to sun up beneath hail the size of baseballs in times of need, the flatness of the Llano Estacado mocking them in its lack of tree and cave for cover. The Bedouins would spend lifetimes slow walking through thousands of miles of sand dunes with a few skins of water and dried dates. The Yiwara of the Gibson Desert stalked Emu for hours. Often they would end with no more to show for their lost calories than a bit of lizard meat to split among an entire family. Losing to ice, dehydration, and famine was a reality.

Now, this did not mean we could not lose. Far from it.

In 1642, the ubiquitous Jesuits were with the Iroquois when they captured a few Algonkins. The Iroquois did not like them very much. A Jesuit observer wrote what he saw: “One of the prisoners not showing any sign of pain at the height of his torments and agonies, the Iroquois, infuriated to see his constancy… asked why he was not screaming: he responded, I am doing what you would not do, if you were treated with the same fury with which you treat me: the iron and the fire that you apply to my body would make you scream out loud and cry like children, and I do not flinch. To these words the tigers throw themselves on the half-burned victim; they skin his testicles, and throw sand that is all red and burning with fire onto his bloody skull; they rush him to the bottom of the scaffold, and drag him around the huts.”

The real purpose of losing—When I started studying our shared lineage years ago, I wondered why captives throughout the pre-state world rarely tried to escape. If a man does not want to have his testicles skinned, I feel like I can get behind this. But as it turns out, their own people would not accept them back if they escaped, testicles or no testicles. They were as likely to be a laughingstock as they were to be exiled in disgrace. Now why might this be?

Because you can lose, yes, and your enemy will break your body as a means to test your soul, but you must never lose yourself. The human condition reveals itself in an elegant and elemental reality. When calories, knives, tribes, flesh, and breath have been taken away from us—by man or by nature—we are still able to utter a single and savage word until the end: No.

To escape—or so much as groan—would be a sin not only against yourself, but your tribe. You would be seen as unserious. They knew in their marrow there was an exact line at which “Better luck next time” no longer came into play. They worked backwards from the worst their enemy could do to them and took the task of training for life seriously. With this seriousness, existence took on a different texture. It became meaningful.

An enemy anchors us—The individual with an enemy is anchored. I have seen what happens to men and women with an enemy: their skin takes on a bronze-like hue; their eyes brighten and harden; their shoulders unclench; their restless legs are stilled; contemplation replaces rumination.

An enemy teaches us what we are inside. Not “Know thyself” in an academic sense, but in building a meaningful identity for hard times. Maybe as one whose every action signals, “I will never quit.” Or “I will give the shirt off my back to someone else.” Or “I do not need fuck you money because I have a fuck you soul.”

An enemy is what brought countless tribes together for millennia. It led to the Bedouin saying, “Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the world.”

An enemy makes every moment rich with failure—and with a challenge: can I show myself, my allies, and my enemies, just how beautifully and savagely I can suffer?

Without an enemy, we find an anti-Algonkin mentality. It is possible for the individual in civilization to become unanchored, usually in one of three ways. One, they may blame their parents, their country, or their God, and find the latest Cause to lose themselves in. Two, they blame everyone and sink into nihilism. Or three, and this is the most painful to witness in its innocent nobility, they blame themselves and self-destruct. In either outcome they lose themselves.

The progressiveness of civilization becomes the perfect inversion of primeval meaning.

The void speaks—Thus the absence of an enemy has more to teach us about the human condition than an enemy ever did. Is this why the damage done to the soul in civilization is often worse than the damage done to the body in pre-civilization? Is this why the progressive elements of civilization liberating us from winning and losing set the stage for the greatest loss of all—the loss of meaning?

One way forward (among many)—One way to fill the void is with torture. But that would be a bit hasty. Those who work power lines, hustle about emergency rooms, wrap themselves in deep-sea diving suits, fast-rope out of helicopters, stalk in the woods, work in a hospice—all those who choose to live life as if every task were an act of consequence—they understand this primeval axiom in their bones.

For those who have never felt it, the truth is our enemies have not vanished. They have simply changed forms. Deadly hail is now a misleading narrative by a crooked journalist or politician; waterless deserts are now unhappy and aspiring two bit tyrants at the helm of social media companies; an ice age is now an education system designed to murder the human capacity for critical thinking; a tomahawk is now apathy and a spear is now meaninglessness—these are enemies redefined.

And they are far greater enemies in that we were not built for them, nor the void they crawled out of.

It is therefore a good fight.

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Blinded by ease—We are told that progress, science, enlightenment, and justice define our age, and that we must fight to keep them. The problem, we are told, is that we do not have the right leaders to accomplish this mission.

But my hunch is it may be impossible to find the right leaders because of these virtues. It is a striking paradox: most of our politicians can be tribalistic voodoo artists immune to suffering the consequences of their decisions because we live in the age of progress, science, enlightenment, and justice.

I study pre-state peoples not because I think we ought to live in mud huts and become polygamous. I do so because comparing their modes of life to our own is remarkably useful in diagnosing our times.

We have much to learn from their leaders in particular.

The Warriors, the Wise, and the Witch Doctors—The warrior held a place of esteem in every culture across the globe. They had a reputation for the large number of enemies they killed and their mastery in building coalitions for war parties. We might say about a warrior, “I would follow him in hard times.” What is said of the Dani of New Guinea applies to nearly all pre-state peoples: “No man becomes a leader who has not proven himself in war: on the front lines, facing the spears and arrows of the enemy; or on the flanks where the dirty war is fought around bushes; or in raids.”1 Warriors were (and are) necessary but insufficient: if they were the only leaders we had, our species would have ended in a sweaty skirmish in the savannah.

It is significant the warrior was usually offset by one of the wise. They formed an elegant balance: aggression and restraint, killing and healing. The wise old man or woman was not listened to simply because of their age, but because of their boots on the ground life experience and the transferable lessons they carefully culled from it. The Kayapo of Brazil had a “haranguer,” a sort of pre-state Socrates: “Almost every night about 9:00, or just before dawn, an older man saunters about the central plaza… preaching to the people. Wandering from one subject to the next, he recounts myths, tells stories of the ancestors, acts out past war episodes, harangues the people about their misbehavior, and occasionally gives advice or asks for opinions from his audience (both male and female). Only certain… elders may preach in this manner.”2

But this ancient balance always included a third type of leader—a parasite.

The witch doctor preys on the meaning seeking capacity of the human mind. They offer unverifiable and yet seemingly unlimited benefits in return for perfectly quantifiable material goods or status. If you give them your favorite hunting bow, they will tell you how to cure that little cough of yours. If you sleep with them, they will ask the spirits where the best patch of cassava is hidden.

There was a witch doctor among the Comanche Indians named Isa-tai. He said he could make medicine that would render his warriors immune to bullets, even if they stood right in front of the white man’s rifles. So they went on a raid to a trading camp. Quanah Parker led the raid as the warrior and Isa-tai as the witch doctor. Sure enough, over fifteen Comanche warriors were shot dead and many more wounded in what became known as the Second Battle of Adobe Walls. When the warriors regrouped for a breather, the father of a young warrior killed in the battle asked Isa-tai why he did not walk into the firefight and save his sons corpse since he could not be killed. Isa-tai’s horse was then shot out from underneath him.

Unlike Isa-tai, Quanah actually fought—and was shot.

The modern witch doctors—They are now a class unto themselves. We find few warriors, few Quanah’s, in the political arena, and we find all too many Isa-tais. The modern warrior, if lucky enough not to be mauled in mind and body by VA hospitals handing out pills like skittles, might be allowed into the halls of power so long as they play the game right. And we find few of the wise who break into cold sweats and develop strange flu-like symptoms at the thought of running for office.

But the witch doctors are here for it. Ours is the Age of the Witch Doctor. Take Bill Clinton: I will not raise taxes on the middle class. And George W Bush: We do not nation-build. And Barrak Obama: We will close Guantanamo Bay. And Donald Trump: We will build a great wall along the southern border and Mexico will pay for it. And Joe Biden: You will not see people lifted off the roof of the United States embassy in Afghanistan, it is not at all like Saigon. It is telling that Clinton, Trump, and Biden each had more than one draft deferment to get out of fighting in Vietnam. Trump and Biden each had five.

They never knew war, and yet they could send the greatest war fighting force the world has ever seen into combat. They had no flesh and blood experience, and yet they could forever alter the lives of millions of the born and billions of the unborn with the flourish of a pen. They will never suffer the consequences of their actions, and yet they could… the list is too long to go on.

And so the least worthy are given the greatest power.

Easy times and the witching hours—So why are there so many witch doctors at present? Maybe the better question is why would there not be? We no longer live in mortal environments that weed out the witch doctor. Our leaders have nothing to prove physically, for muscle, skill, and courage are irrelevant in the industrial age and mocked in the digital age. They can also be narcissists; in fact, they must be, for no one else can handle being called Hitler or Mao or some other mass-murderer with a shrug and a wink as if it were all a good old fashioned game.

From another angle, our day to day life is now so abstract that we can no longer know everything that happens like the Dani or Comanche did. It is therefore harder to call bullshit when bullets can, in fact, break the skin. Many people are numbed by entertainment, technology, and drugs. They can only be reached with fantastic promises of free things given by flamboyant personalities. Not the flamboyancy of an Agamemnon who actually fought in his own wars, but of a Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, or Trump who—like the medicine man Isa-tai—would never.

When we ended hard times, we ended the conditions that forged the strong and the wise. And so progress, science, enlightenment, and justice gave birth to the supremacy of the witch doctor.

The witch doctor is the captain now—That the witch doctor exists is irrelevant; that there are always those who will follow them is significant. For how many people just want to be left alone? How many want to discover their physical, emotional, and intellectual limits, and savor every single second of their lives on this beautiful blue orb to the maximum?

It is hard to tell, but it may not be that many. It is no wonder he who promises the world is believed with blind faith. The witch doctor obeys the laws of supply and demand like everything else. My point is they only exist because enough people want them to exist.

What then are we to do? Are we condemned to wait for a World War or a Civil War to weed out the mystics and make way for war leaders? Are we fated to watch opposing political parties demonize each other until our countries burn to the ground, and out of the ashes come wise Socratic matriarchs?

We may be.

To bring this hammer of nonpartisan sacrilege fully home, my sense is the greatest danger is not merely a blind faith in a political tribe. It is a blind faith in any government whatsoever. A different path may be walked. One that transcends the leadership of the warriors, the wise, and the witch doctors altogether.

Coriolanus points out a path—

‘To brag unto them “Thus I did, and thus!”

Show them th’ unaching scars, which I should hide,

As if I had received them for the hire

Of their breath only!’

I have admired Coriolanus, flaws and all, since I first read Shakespeare’s tragedy in a one-man tent during a winter warfare training trip in Alaska. I had a beaten paperback and I read it by the light of my headlamp. I committed violence to it with ink and dog-eared pages. Plutarch’s biography which Shakespeare based his play on is even better.

In war, Coriolanus was unbreakable—not by the sweet smell of days old sweat under armor, the fire-lit faces of his enemy with their backs against the wall, the ego boost of awards and victories, the strangely satisfying feeling when societal norms are thrown out of the window, the scars of swords and spears, and the never to be forgotten sight of human eyes transitioning from life to death.

In politics, he was just as unbreakable. Unwilling to say whatever it took to gain power, and unwilling to kneel, bow, or bend to those who were. He held his leaders to task as aggressively as he held himself to task. He was a Roman who fought the enemy Volscians with blood-visioned boldness, and when Rome was no longer what he fought for, he fought the Romans with the same ruthlessness.

He rejected the terms of both. We all obey a law, whether cosmic or terrestrial. When the only law left was that of witch doctors, Coriolanus made his own law. He was sovereign. (Except, apparently, when it came to his mother, but that is a different matter that adds credibility to my point rather than negating it.)

What, then, is the revolutionary act in our Age of the Witch Doctor? I believe it is to walk our own path—to become a law unto ourselves. For if we do not govern our own souls, the witch doctors are tripping over themselves to govern them for us.

We can ask: “What would Coriolanus do?” Would he live by his law whether crucified or deified? Would he learn to live among the witch doctors without falling under their spell? Would he script his own code within the walls of his skull no matter the apocalyptic insanity taking place around him? Would he dance between the spectacle of this outer madness and his inner solitude and fight with passion and joy all the same?

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Primal Hardship with Sam Alaimo

Sam Alaimo is my favorite living writer. His exploration of the human condition through stories of extraordinary individuals in extreme conditions throughout time encourage deep and uncomfortable reflection…

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3 months ago · 20 likes · 20 comments · Kyle Shepard and Sam Alaimo

We talked about healthy forms of catastrophizing, primal hardship, perspective (the theme of this essay), and much more.

Now let’s lean into today’s piece…

Falsely content—Most of us are addicted to comparing ourselves to others. I have learned through failure we can walk a different path: we should not be addicted to comparing ourselves to others, but to assaulting the comparison itself.

All things that live and breathe—fig, dog, human—grow content once they think they won or lost the immediate game. This is to its ruin, as we will see. For if the living thing does not lose its life, it does not live a full life either.

But humans are distinct. We hold within us a creative potential that I do not think we have begun to understand. It is less important to me what we as a species have done, and more for what we as a species are—only then can we do something truly original and creative.

Let us start with penguins.

I am not so great after all—The Arctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott put words to penguins as only an Englishman can. He and his dogs were the first new living things these penguins had seen from across the seas.

He wrote: “From the moment of landing on their feet their whole attitude expressed devouring curiosity and a pig-headed disregard for their own safety. They waddle forward, poking their heads to and fro in their usually absurd way, in spite of a string of howling dogs straining to get at them. ‘Hulloa!’ they seem to say, ‘here’s a game—what do all you ridiculous things want?’ And they come a few steps nearer. The dogs make a rush as far as their harness or leashes allow. The penguins are not daunted in the least, but their ruffs go up and they squawk with semblance of anger, for all the world as though they were rebutting a rude stranger—their attitude might be imagined to convey, ‘Oh, that’s the sort of animal you are; well, you’ve come to the wrong place—we aren’t going to be bluffed and bounced by you,’ and then the final fatal steps forward are taken and they come within reach. There is a spring, a squawk, a horrid red patch on the snow, and the incident is closed.”

Woe to the vanquished! Woe to the penguin whose attempt to “know thyself” was capped by its tiny little ice world!

As with penguins, so with humans.

I am not so great after all REDUX—The Mesopotamians had achieved in 2,500 BC what the Aztecs achieved in 1,500 AD—a full 4,000 years prior. So is it surprising that when Spanish conquistadors set foot on the shores of the American continent the natives did not stand a chance?

The significant point is our natives—like our penguins—did not know the Old World existed. The pinnacle of their culture and technology allowed the Aztecs to enslave and cut the hearts out of the primitive hunter-gatherers around their cities with bright eyes and grins. And yet their pinnacle was primitive compared to the Western invaders. Their people were wiped off the face of the earth by a handful of weird diseases, some steel blades, a bit of gun powder, and swarms of tens of millions of people from over the horizon.

Their dominance was their weakness. They did not train for what might exist on the other side of the ocean—for what they could have imagined.

Did they learn from their lesson?

Did we?

Guilty even at the apex of optimization—One striking feature of the CrossFit community is how many people smile. There is a breathless vitality in the air around them that rubs off. I love what CrossFit has done for giving people fitness and tribe.

I was a spectator at a CrossFit competition the other week and my eyes were drawn to the details: bags of dried mango, canisters of creatine, IV drips packed with vitamins and minerals, neon colored pants and shoes and headbands, statuesque muscles, positive affirmations, bass-heavy music that makes you want to grunt and sweat and spit and lift. The environment speaks of motivation, excellence, optimization, thriving, overcoming.

My mind turned to this question of perspective while I walked among these über-athletes. They are the pinnacle of physical fitness, yes, but their fatal flaw is that they are comparative in their physicality. They can crush a metabolic conditioning workout and yet be crushed by an insignificant variable: an unusually cold metal barbell, a judge who miscounts a repetition, a bad night of sleep, an indentation in the dirt floor that makes an Olympic lift awkward.

At the same time, on the other side of the seas, you can watch a ninety-five-pound Afghan man fail to deadlift a ninety-five-pound barbell. But sure enough he can sprint forty-pounds of machine guns and bullets up and down cliffs on a few Otis Spunkmeyer cookies and a mouthful of river water to wrap up the day, before sleeping a few hours on a mud and feces covered floor to do it all over again. This is not an exaggeration. No foam rollers, HRV trackers, bougie clothes, cash prizes, or sports psychology needed.

It is a contradiction to say “I am ready for anything” and then not be ready for anything outside of a gym. Old-school CrossFit inevitably gave way to New-school CrossFit. Just so with athletes in football, tennis, golf, bobsledding, and (nearly) everything else. But a perfectly controlled environment is actually a fiction layered on top of a more fascinating world. And a stunningly muscled body can be blind to just how exceptionally we can grind when the lights of civilization are shut off and the fiction meets reality.

Goethe said “Experience is only half of experience.” He meant that what we do is worthless unless we do something with it—something epic, introspective, and creative.

The human problem—This is not merely a physical problem. It is a professional, intellectual, societal, existential, and human problem. Is it due to a lack of über-comparisons? That would be strange. We have mythology, history, and imaginations. What then is the limiting factor? My hunch is many people do not think it can happen because they cannot see it, and because they cannot see it, they do not take their creative capacity seriously.

It would seem our species is the height of the penguin mentality, but it is not.

This refusal to take creativity seriously makes the human inferior to the penguin: the penguin cannot see beyond, whereas the human chooses not to.

Beyond mere human competition—A completely isolated individual will never tap into a fraction of human potential; the comparative individual will win and be vulnerable or lose and never stand a chance; but the creative individual gazes into others, self, and cosmos—and then goes beyond.

So what are we missing? How do we break this cycle?

Captain Cook wrote that he “… had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go.” He not only looked left and right and said “I must beat these men.” He not only read history and said “I can do better.” He not only looked at himself and said “What is the maximum I can be?” Instead he transcended precedent and made of himself a one-man laboratory of the human condition.

The tendency of all breathing things is to grow comfortable—and then stop growing. This is the posture that breaks that.

My hunch is this creative posture is made of something like this: it is to think so independently that our competition is not what is seen with our eyes, but what can be seen with our imaginations; it is a delight in assaulting assumptions and precedents and how-to guides and any half-digested opinions; it is an unquenchable curiosity for what our unseen enemy is doing at this very second; it is to suffer and by doing so lift the curtain of normality and gaze beyond it into reality; it is to take ourselves by the shoulders, and shake ourselves, and scream Wake up.

It is to always wonder what lies on the other side of the seas.

And yet… I have never seen this embodied in a single human.

Almost all of my thinking and writing is dedicated to reconning this existential posture, this revolutionarily uncapped form of existence. Glimpses of it can be seen on the walls of Chauvet Cave, in the fluid mithril-like movements of SEALs flowing through rooms in Close Quarters Combat, in the words of Sophocles, Jünger, and Tolkien, in an athlete whose body walks up to a barbell but whose mind is on a hunt 20,000 years ago, in the contemplation of ascetics like Siddhartha or Epictetus, and in the rockets filled with über-apes shot into space.

Mouse-holing the walls of a conventional life—It is possible that the most fulfilling life is one in which we ask questions we may never answer, imagine comparisons that may never exist, and train for trials that may never come.

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I had the pleasure of being hosted by on her podcast. You can listen to the podcast here. We covered meaning, suffering, transhumanism, LLMs, and a host of other light topics. She is one of the best interviewers I’ve ever spoken with.

For today’s essay, the painting above is more fitting than usual. A belief in the valkyries was a belief in an extreme view of existence. Not in the present sense of “extreme” which has been corrupted by political connotations, but extreme in the sense of being unapologetically and immensely alive. This piece explores the idea of extreme examples to attain this state.

The usefulness of scouting the extremes—I love Epictetus. I admire his passion. I admire the masculine undertones of his philosophy and the elegance with which he puts it to words. I admire his unerring focus on the goodness within each of us and his equal contempt in how often we fail to live up to this goodness.

I also admire how he uses extreme examples to make his points. My hunch is he uses such extremes so that if his students take in merely two percent of his teaching, they will be better humans. I do the same in almost all of my writing, for these examples have a way of making our day to day ordeals not only easier in comparison, but explosive opportunities for growth. Extreme examples also give us something to aspire to, something concrete. Something real.

The invincible as an ideal—One of the Old Man’s quotes is particularly striking: “Who, then, is the invincible man? He whom nothing that is outside the sphere of his moral purpose can dismay.”

Epictetus was offering a solution to a problem he saw in the souls of those around him: thinking oneself ready for hardship—in fact, invincible—when one has not the slightest idea what actual hardship is. As in his time, so in ours. Where Epictetus spoke of beheadings, slavery, and drowning at sea, we can speak of infrastructure, supply chains, and geopolitical disaster. So when the power grid is sabotaged, what happens to these invincible individuals? Or when they lose our jobs, what then? Or when their grocery shelves are empty? Or when water no longer flows in their pipes? Or when enemy landing craft drop their doors on the coasts of their countries?

The problem is then compounded: without knowledge of how ungentle fate can be, they are left utterly unprepared for it. And then it is tripled: when they are unprepared, they are liabilities as opposed to assets. Not only to themselves, but to everyone else.

But the problem at present is even worse. There are many who read Epictetus and take refuge in the passive meaning of his philosophy. They do not see, or choose not to see, a more offensive interpretation. This means the problems Epictetus was trying to solve may never actually be solved, much less diagnosed. Epictetus himself has been made useless, detached from the cosmic whole and a mere prop for self-delusion.

The passive interpretation of the Invincible Man is that we should not be dismayed when terrible things happen. But what is the point in training to be undismayed if we do not understand how bad things can be? And if by some miracle we are truly undismayed, is it enough to remain calm when we have bills and no income? When the lights go out for good? When the war for water begins? Or is it to remain calm, and then act masterfully under duress for the good of others?

What would Epictetus say?

An offensive interpretation—My point is the philosophy of Epictetus can be as offensive as it is defensive, as savage as it is intellectual. I do not think Epictetus would have been tyrannical about me personalizing his philosophy, given his hatred of tyrants. An offensive interpretation of Epictetus demands agency, sweat, risk, cold, fiercely independent thought, and a savage pleasure in learning what we are inside through incremental difficulties. It is to accept the world of safety, stability, comfort, and peace is a sliver of calm in the lull between the storms that make up the entirety of our species history—and future.

But this offensive interpretation is ignored. Probably for no other reason than that it is uncomfortable. It would not let us sit contentedly in a chair or a classroom patting ourselves on the head as if we have “done the work,” or convince ourselves we are fully awake when in truth we have never woken up.

The invincible are not merely unmoved by externals. They have so thoroughly mastered what is up to them in advance—when no one was watching—that they act with superhuman clarity when reality reasserts itself. They are masters of self-flagellation, and judge themselves far more ruthlessly than they would ever judge anyone else. They do not train for academic problems, but primal problems. And they do this for the good of the whole.

Extreme examples exist—There are many concrete examples of this version of the invincible man.

Here is one about a Medal of Honor winner. He was a member of a Studies and Observations (SOG) recon team in the Vietnam War, men who rank among the finest warriors ever to walk the face of the earth.1

These men were extreme, and exceptional.

John Kedenburg was a 23 year-old One-Zero, or leader of a SOG recon team in the Vietnam War. He and his 9-man team made of both Americans and Montagnard (or Yard) indigenous partner forces, got into a firefight during a mission.

A 9-man recon team stood against a 500-man NVA battalion.

The battalion pinned them down, only for the SOG team to shoot their way out with the 500 on their tail. Every time the team paused, the NVA hammered them with AK-47s, rockets, and grenades. During a hasty evasion, one of their Yards disappeared into the forest. The SOG team had to leave him behind. Kedenburg stayed behind as a one man rear guard to buy his team time again and again. At last, Kedenburg radioed for a string extraction through a hole in the jungle canopy. A string extraction is a long rope hanging from the bottom of a helicopter on which up to four men can clip themselves. The men then dangle beneath the helicopter thousands of feet above the jungle, their lives dependent on a thin metal carabiner.

One Huey hovered above the jungle canopy. Four of Kedenburg’s men clipped in and were flown out. Then the second Huey came in. Kedenburg and his three remaining men clipped in just as the NVA were breaking through the ring of fire reigning down on them from helicopter gunships circling overhead. At this exact moment the missing Yard showed up. Kedenburg could have given a thumbs up to the helicopter crew chief and ascended to safety out of the sweltering jungle and snapping bullets. He could have said it was too late, or that it was just a Yard, or that he did not see him. But he did not. He unclipped himself, clipped in the Yard, waved off the Huey, and turned to face the forest. He shot six NVA point blank before being gunned down by the swarm of hundreds of enemy fighters.

They sent the last air strike directly on his position.

Invincible.

A Way, not The Way—Whether Epictetus would agree with my interpretation of his ideas or not, I do not believe this can be argued: the Old Man would have us be killable, yes; but breakable—never.

Undismayed, and yet devoutly offensive for the good of the whole.

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Welcome back to What then?

I am making a few changes. My personal writing is usually fleshed out in the form of mini-ideas, and when one of these strikes me, I riff an essay off of it. Strangely enough, this is not natural for me. So I am going to start writing a bit more like I do in my journals, but modified so I am writing for a reader as opposed to myself. My hunch is this will make them more striking, more intuitive, and more personal, though I may be wrong… it is up to you, the reader, to decide.

Enjoy, and if this gets you thinking, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Kitting up as an existential posture—On a typical mission we would board the helicopters around 0200. My body’s clock was eerily attuned to plus or minus three minutes at any moment of the night, and I would intuitively roll out of my sleeping bag sixty minutes prior. I would grab my gear and quietly make my way out of the tent to let the day crew sleep. The freezing air would sting my nostrils and wake my mind. When I lifted my body armor I could see the Milky Way through the shoulder straps above me. I would place it over my head, carefully seal the velcro in front, and give it a shake to settle its weight on my shoulders. Med kit, knife, pistol, grenades, bullets, rifle, helmet, gummy bears, radios, night vision goggles, batteries, maps, compass, GPS, wax pen, coconut paste, water—each was in its habitual location. Each pocket was one of many in my mind that I could reach for and find in the pitch black. I would pause, and breathe, and feel centered as I took in the mountains beneath the stars with the mission on my mind.

It is significant that as my body slid into my armor, my mind slid into the zone. The unlimited possibilities outside of my control shifted from ungovernable anxieties to stimulating problems because my kit reminded me of the small number of primitive powers that are within my control.

It might seem like kitting up is merely smearing paint and grabbing arrows in the stone age. Or donning a purple plumed helmet in the bronze age. Or wrapping body armor in whatever age we live in now. Actually, kitting up is to ground ourselves in an ancient world in which we can be killed—killed by ice, pain, orca, and enemy. The primeval world sits in silence as we learn what we are inside. We are left with a clear and binary choice: are you really willing to fight and rage to live, or will you merely lie down and die?

Kitting up is to decisively own our individual existence on this earth. It is to consciously live as if our back is against the wall; or rather it is to remember it already is and always has been.

There is a reason why poets took this quiet, ancient, and elemental ritual and made of it poetry that will exist as long as our species. Take Homer, who is too good not to share in Alexander Pope’s epic translation:

Now issued from the ships the warrior-train,

And like a deluge pour’d upon the plain…

Full in the midst, high-towering o’er the rest,

His limbs in arms divine Achilles dress’d;

Grief and revenge his furious heart inspire,

His glowing eyeballs roll with living fire;

He grinds his teeth, and furious with delay

O’erlooks the embattled host, and hopes the bloody day.

The silver cuishes first his thighs infold;

Then o’er his breast was braced the hollow gold;

The brazen sword a various baldric tied,

That, starr’d with gems, hung glittering at his side;

And, like the moon, the broad refulgent shield

Blazed with long rays, and gleam’d athwart the field.

Next, his high head the helmet graced; behind

The sweepy crest hung floating in the wind…

The chief beholds himself with wondering eyes;

His arms he poises, and his motions tries…

Peace is the harder war—We live in a far more dangerous world than a river valley or the beaches of Troy. Peace is the most ungrounding condition known to man because it does not require us to kit up. Peace does not force us to remember we only own that which lies within the borders of our skull. It also does not remind us we and only we are responsible for the course of our lives.

It turns out too little war can be as unhealthy as too much. For where is the playful sense of fatalistic seriousness that makes each moment explode with opportunity and color? Where is the ancient and ritualistic practice of grounding ourselves each and every morning? Is it any wonder we find so much dread, anxiety, or worst of all, nihilism?

The Maduro raid as a mirror—The most striking thing about the Maduro raid was not the fear of war. It was the reaction to fear of war in the context of all the other fears that define our era. Media and public discourse is dominated by fentanyl deaths, low birth rates, the mental anguish of girls, the suffering of boys.

If ever there were a sign of our times, it would be the problem of boys. Boys are addicted to porn and video games. Many are lonely, suicidal, and dropping out of school. And yet at the same time… they recoil from war. Something novel is at work here. Evolution would go insane. Many young men across the West say they would never fight for their country if it were to go war. This is probably due to a sense of meaninglessness, uselessness, and alienation. But the crucial irony is that war has been the cure to all three ills for as long as we have been human.

We see the perfect inversion of groundedness. An absolutely indecisive ownership of existence, a willing and surreal drift that is neither life nor death.

And now we come back to the Maduro raid. These same news anchors, public intellectuals, evolutionary theorists, and all who lament the crisis of meaninglessness—I have not heard a single one ask what it must have been like to be the Delta Force operator on those helicopters.

How many of these anchors, influencers, and aspiring anthropologists are themselves on antidepressants? How many cling to climate change, a social cause, or a political tribe, not because they actually care about these things, but because they are running away from a self they are terrified of? How many are terrified of war as a potential problem, while dealing with an actual existential crisis?

They do not see the truth lying at the bottom of this contradiction. So let us ask a few more questions: How many operators training for the Maduro mission could not wait to get home so they could inject Fentanyl? How many of the helo pilots who flew them in a few dozen feet above the sea at night were ruminating on the meaninglessness of their wretched lives over their radios? Zero.

I do not advocate for war.

And yet…

And yet I think of the men on the helicopter. I think of their kitting up at midnight. I think of their stance towards a clear and deadly enemy. I think of their grounding—the very same meaning and self-governance they may miss when they retire, and never again kit up before sitting in a black bird beneath the stars.

“I think they had

never found you,

Peace, more diffi-

cult to endure!”

Sappho is probably right. What is called “peace” is considered normal when it is actually an evolutionary aberration. Woe to the civilization that does not see the human situation as clearly as Sappho.

We have a duty not to bring back war. Which means we have a duty to replace its virtues in peace. Because if we do not, the ungrounded will seek to ground themselves by any means necessary. In an epic irony, they may even do so through war. Maybe the seams splitting across Western Civilization is the beginning of this return to the horrific paradox of war: horrifying, and yet so satisfyingly grounding.

A culture of contradictions—What is the desire to live a meaningful life and a reluctance to change? A contradiction. What is an animal designed to sprint and swim and crawl and sing around a fire who clings to luxury? A contradiction. What is a human whose every neuron and muscle is designed for a good fight and who instead of fighting chooses to drift unto death? A contradiction.

Creativity as a cure—I believe the cure comes down to a simple question: what are we willing to kit up for as if our boats were burning at our backs ? As if the stand were life and death? My hunch is the answer lies in tension, conflict, discomfort, controlled rage, hunting down contradictions, and revealing the meaning these contradictions camouflage under their complexity.

In a word, it is to create.

I do not mean a flight from a self we are terrified of, some escape into a grand Cause. Creativity, for my part, is how we strip ourselves down to the singular task we choose to make the theme of our short tenure on this earth. A task chosen not out of fear, but out of passion.

Creativity is to say No to those who shape our discourse but who do not know what it is to be human; it is to put earthlings on Mars; to put ink to paper; to resurrect dead languages; to plant saplings where the rainforests are burned to ash; to hold a unapologetically uncensored conversation on what it means to live a good life; to take a savage pleasure in fighting to the last.

The creative individual lives life as if it were a poem forever in mid-creation, written in their own hand.

What then? is a labor of love.

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Welcome back to What then? As I wrote in a past essay, these essays are neither self-help nor instructional. Instead of the How, my loves are the Why and the What. Why self-help, self-destruction, civilizational atrophy, and meaninglessness define our age. What the most awake and alive expression of human experience once looked like—and could look like once again.

But sometimes between essays on the human situation I like to write a piece on the human-dog situation.

Thanks for being here.

Let’s lean into it.

I was re-reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground when I felt eyes on me. Looking over the book, I saw Carson, my mutt, staring at me from across the room with a fanatically intense expression. I was midway through my favorite passage when I put the book down to play with him. At that moment Carson cast the meaning of the passage in a different light.

It struck me there exists a difference between human-time and dog-time.

Dostoevsky understood the dark underbelly of the modern world better than anyone. The nihilistic antihero of this novel is the unnamed Underground Man. Our antihero explains the mentality of the modern man who constantly strives for a single goal in life: “…incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.” And if the road is complete, he will destroy it. Why? So that he can make it again. And if he is placed in a utopia where he can “…sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species” and where no roads need to be built, what then? He will burn it to the ground—and make more roads.

The point is that human-time means staying busy. More specifically, it means avoiding idleness. Because when we are idle, we have to gaze into the void.

Human-time is designed to shield us from a few questions: Why am I building this road in the first place? Why do I need this road at work, that road in my smart phone, and yet another road in my laptop? Why am I so obsessed with treating my life as a container I must manically fill rather than a script I may poetically write? Why if I stopped building roads long enough to answer these questions, and then built a road I actually gave a damn about?

But Dostoevsky lived one hundred fifty years ago, and he did not know the half of it.

What happens now?

The body is maxed out on human-time. It is now possible to use a pot of caffeine, a bit of nicotine, a sniff of Adderall, a line of blow, a can of Monster, and a never-ending blood-sugar high of feel-good and nutritionally toxic food. For roads are no longer macadam but pixels, and we need a little boost to really keep up with these new roads. A road is 55 miles an hour, but the internet is 186,000 miles per second.

The mind is maxed out on human-time. It is now possible to have thirty tabs up on multiple screens: spreadsheets, slack, search windows, LLMs, news, social media. There are some who thrive on this multi-tasking, but most are left with their attention and capacity for deep work torn to shreds. Gone is a singular stretch of cement to obsess about and drown out the void, for in its place are infinite roads, digital roads that can be disappeared with the click of a mouse and built anew with the spastic twitching of fingers.

The soul too is maxed out on human-time. It is now possible for modern humans to live a fiction each waking hour of the day without a single unwanted glimpse behind the curtain. In Dostoevsky’s time, the void would open at night. The luckless road-builder would have to resort to a book, a conversation, or maybe a few shots of vodka to quiet the voices rising from the depths within: Why am I doing this? Did I actually author my own life? No more. Not with laptops, smart phones, and televisions with inviting colors and pleasing sounds to vaporize hours of unpleasant introspection.

Human-time is maximum time. Podcasts at 2x speed. Hustling, hacking, producing.

But Carson, my mutt with eyes so copper-colored they cut to the core of my soul—he has no patience for human-time. Why do our dogs stare at us as if today were Judgement Day and they are sadly condemning our woeful condition? It may be because the modern world offers us a choice in how we spend our time.

I believe the dog is our ancient anchor in this modern war for meaning. A cure to the evasion of the void.

If ours dogs could speak, what would they say? You are not immortal. You will die, I will die, we all will die. Your pills, tabs, emails, phones, and hacks will only delay your inevitable wake up. Wake up now while you have time to make amends. Wake up now so you do not wake up in terror when your time has run out. Do you not realize this void is not an enemy but an ally? It is an invitation to think on what actually matters in your time here. Look within, for the void will not bite you. Sit still, for the void will not sting you. This life of ours is a gift, every second of it, even the pain of loneliness and uncertainty and doubt, for they are reminders to make a change. Do you not realize the only legitimate response to every ache, breath, failure, joy, and fight in your life is to make of it something beautiful and lasting? To flow with it? To make a poem of it? That all of this is entirely within your control?

Samuel Butler said “The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.” Only a fool would live by dog-time. Only a fool would stop building roads to nowhere and set aside time to explore the void and what it says about us and the world we live in. The fanatical eyes of our dogs say this: Be a fool.

Our dogs, who have not forgotten the ancient laws, are willing to follow us in our foolishness. A fool would power off the phone for a few hours. Or walk in the woods with mutts and kith and kin. A fool would trade a laptop for an old a book, some slow and psychological novel, and smell that old paper smell.

A fool would not keep up with the “future” or “progress” or with those who say “you will be left behind.” But is this really a loss? If it is, at least a fool will still be human, for human-time has become something all too inhuman. It is still possible to max out a life—every second of it—with our quadrupedal kin at our sides, for they remind us of the true meaning of time.

Not long ago I travelled across the country for an event in California. I could feel the suits and the schedules getting to me when halfway through the night I saw an inch long white hair on my suit. It was Carson’s hair. My shoulders instantly unclenched, my talking slowed, and my mind re-centered. My furry savage of a mutt reminded me to live on dog-time and he was 2,600 miles away. Just so when I flew back and saw clumps of white fur in the cupholders of my truck. And again when I got home and heard the thump thump thump his tail makes on the wood floor every time I walk within five feet of him, and yet again when we wake up in the morning and look at each other as if it has been ten years since we saw each other last.

This is what it means to live on dog-time.

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At times in our species past, things were FUBAR—fucked up beyond all recognition. At other times, they were TARFU—things are really fucked up. But most of the time, things were merely SNAFU—situation normal, all fucked up.

So most of the time, in one way or another, our situation was pretty fucked up.

Not so much anymore.

We are witnessing a unprecedented form of suffering at present. We stand witness to the suffering of domestication, the suffering in which things are fucked up, yes, but not at all fucked up in the old-school life-threatening way we were designed for.

Clearly, this is a problem, for it is a problem of meaning. No longer are we compelled to define meaning in response to life-or-death situations. It is now possible to drift; to withdraw from the world into an inner world of meaninglessness. But this inner world can be completely at odds with the outer world that is in fact rich with untapped meaning.

Let us further define our problem with a concrete example.

In the Battle of Midway on June 4th 1942, outnumbered U.S. torpedo-bomber and dive-bomber squadrons decimated over half the entire Japanese carrier strike force. Most of the damage was done during a five minute attack.

While the Japanese were front site focused on shooting down the U.S. torpedo-bombers flying low to slip their water missiles in the sea, the U.S. dive-bombers flew in high, swooped down fast, and dropped their bombs on the decks of the Japanese carriers.

The initial torpedo-bomber missions were suicidal, and the U.S. pilots knew it. Of the fourteen torpedo-bombers from the Enterprise, ten were shot down. Of the twelve from the Yorktown, two pilots survived. And of the fifteen from the Hornet, one pilot survived, only by hanging onto a rubber cushion when his plane crashed. “No Japanese kamikaze pilot later in the war ever went to his death more open-eyed or with more certain foreknowledge than these men.”

We can only speculate what went through our pilots minds.

WWII veteran and author James Jones thinks the reason they flew unto their deaths is that they felt, beneath all the reasons commonly given for heroic actions, one feeling above all: “The ultimate luxury of just not giving a damn anymore.”

I thought about this quote for hours. And then days. It put words to some of my own un-worded thoughts, and it reveals a differential between two modes of life—our torpedo-bombers and a safer, more domesticated mode of life. My sense is it offers us a lesson when it comes to meaning.

What, then, does the torpedo-bomber form of not giving a damn mean in comparison to the not giving a damn at present? What lesson does it leave us with?

It is clear the torpedo-bomber meaning of not giving a damn is not nihilistic though it sounds as if it were. The nihilist does not give a damn in a different way. If we wire-tap a nihilists skull, we might hear: Why fly unto death? For what and for whom? This does not concern me. War is a waste. Values are a waste. Humanity is a waste. Why should I lift a finger when other men and women—fools—are willing to do the fighting and dying? Why, when I have been dealt a bad hand in life? Why, when civilization is so ignorant, so corrupt, so resembling some rotten cosmic joke? It becomes clear that to a nihilist—a free rider in evolutionary terms—not giving a damn is simply choosing to live as a victim. They choose limbo. Neither wanting to own and improve upon their lives nor to be rid of them altogether.

Not giving a damn has another meaning at present. This form looks like a calm acceptance, a voluntary renunciation of everything outside of ourselves and the making of our inner selves a safe haven from an uncontrollable and all too upsetting world. The voice living in this skull might go like this: If externals do not matter, then why should I care for them? And if internals are all that matter, then why should I seek a fiery death in some violent conflict? Besides, I disagree with violence, and with all ideas that cannot be settled with calm discourse. It is reasonable to assume the detached are those who do not fly torpedo-bombers on suicide missions for a higher cause. They are more likely to sit in equanimity on the side lines of life, or anxiously do their best to appear calm and serene. This form of not giving a damn means a withdrawal from the titanic ebbs and flows, successes and failures, lives saved and lives lost in this grand human experiment.

Nor is it a casual form of not giving a damn. The casual individual has not suffered much and yet are convinced they are really something special. They look down with half-lidded eyes and a semi-bored expression on those who to take a task as seriously as if their lives depend upon it, as if their days are in the single digits. But what would a casual torpedo-bomber do the moment he realizes this moment is suddenly real, and he never made peace with his God, and he never wrote a last letter home for real or for practice, and he never savored a fig as if it were the last thing he would ever eat on this good green earth, and he never actually stopped to wonder about his kinship with millions of years of savages and hunters and legends and thinkers? What then? Would he rise to the occasion? Or would he be broken? To the casual, not giving a damn means drifting through life in a blurry haze. No grind. No misery. No deep dark silent contemplation of self and humanity and stars and meaning.

It seems, then, we are not born for a life that is not fucked up in a life-threatening way. Maybe so many at present can no longer give a damn and truly mean it since they do not face mortal consequences every now and then. They have not felt the cold bone hand gently squeeze their shoulder, freeze time, and leave them with the feeling of O God, I have been sleep walking my entire life.

So much for what giving a damn is not.

And now we come back to our torpedo-bombers and an irony. The potentially life-ending form of not giving a damn is actually the most life-affirming, and the life-elongating form is all too often life-negating. This is no accident. Our sinews and our neurons, our hearts and our souls were spun from the stuff of star matter to come alive when things are really fucked up.

The crucial lesson from our torpedo-bombers is this: not giving a damn is actually giving the greatest damn we can give, and to do so for one singular reason, one singular task of consequence. Our torpedo-bombers knew they were going to die, and they committed themselves to one last noble deed before they punched out. It is not to be argued they punched out on their own terms with a biblical middle finger to nihilism, detachment, and a casual view of existence.

I say “our” torpedo-pilots because they are representatives of a noble heritage we all share. It lies latent within us. We do not need war to live this way. When we confront or contemplate classically fucked up situations, our lives are reduced to a single need, a clear enemy, a reminder we are mortal, and a realization that meaning exists right in front of us, and always has.

The task does not need to be an epic battle in a World War. It can be the task of absolute presence and nowness while looking into the eyes of a child, a dog, or ourselves in a mirror when we ask ourselves, as our torpedo bombers surely did, what the fuck is the point of life without a good fight?

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Welcome back to What then? and the epic beginning of 2026.

This piece digs into one aspect of the human situation I find fascinating. It lends truth to the words of Chesterton, “There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.”

Thank you for giving some perspective on this essay.

Pre-state peoples use drugs to commune with nature, talk to their ancestors, and see God. On the other hand, State peoples use drugs to escape from the burden of living.

Leaving aside the matter of health, let us look at drugs from an existential perspective.

My hunch is the drugs that define a culture serve as a diagnostic indicator of that cultures vitality and the well-being of its members.

The Mbuti of the Congo used a root bark called iboga that contains the psychedelic alkaloid ibogaine. The Yanomami of Venezuela used epená, a hallucinogenic snuff containing DMT. The Mazatec tribes of Mexico used Salvia divinorum, a leaf that can be smoked, chewed, or made into tea.

I have done all three. Ibogaine launched me into the ancestral past: I sprinted through valleys with a spear and a band of hunter-gatherers, danced and circled breathlessly around a fire beneath the raw moon and stars, and communed with my ancestors—both living and dead—in a warm cave painted with red deer and rhinoceros. When I smoked salvia, I watched my torso turn into the trunk of a mahogany tree hundreds of feet tall in a matter of seconds. My arms and legs extended into thick green boughs above the canopy of the rainforest and my fingers and toes burst into thousands of leaves and vines, until ruinous old age knocked me down and I collapsed into the black soil, disintegrated, and was reborn as tiny green shoots hungrily seeking the nutrients of the sun.

Many of the drugs of the pre-state are called entheogens. In the original Greek, the meaning of the word says it all: ἐν means in or within, θεός means God, and γενέσθαι means to generate. So entheogen means something like “generating the god within.” These are not so much drugs as they medicines, intended for contemplation, introspection, and a means to investigate our role in the cosmos.

And we find a certain environment gives rise to this mode of being. Nature is a brutal mother. A mudslide can wipe out an entire tribe in minutes. A monsoon can blow away huts of leaf and branch. A jaguar can turn a walk for berries into a war of blade and fang.

Theirs was a culture of survival. Intense engagement with the hunt, song, loss, ritual, pain, awe, and death. It is a culture of wanting to live against all odds, and then wanting to understand the unlikely miracle of their existence.

Now let us turn to the State.

I have no experience with modern drugs except alcohol, and avoid just about anything that numbs either my body or my mind. I refused to take lidocaine, for example, when I needed to get a filling at the dentist. My skin burst into little beads of sweat. To my everlasting regret, I let out a groan of pain as the drill scraped its way to the root of my molar. My dentist heard this groan, and for the rest of the filling she said over and over again “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” We had a good laugh when she was done and the pain was worth that alone.

Lidocaine is one thing, but the drugs that truly define the State are another thing entirely. These are SSRIs, alcohol, and opioids, all too many of which are prescribed. What, then, are these drugs designed to do? SSRIs reduce sadness, blunt emotions, and help the user cope with feelings of alienation. Alcohol blurs the mind, dulls the senses, and convinces us our circumstances are actually epic, at least until the next morning. Opioids numb the body and the mind—they sedate.

The fact these outcomes are intentional says it all.

In the State, nature has been defanged for the most part. Few of us will feel the teeth of a shark or the blackened toes of frostbite. But the State is a confusing father: bureaucracy, courts, laws, jobs, salaries, rules, chemical smelling school rooms, bills, televisions, social media, smart phones, plastic chairs built for sitting at 90º, outsourced security, a lack of muscular labor with escalators, elevators, cars, trains, planes, and subways. Are these things good? Are they bad? My sense is they are neither good nor bad—they merely elicit a certain response.

They unfailingly lead to a culture of drift, a sense of being unanchored: of merely existing. When measured against our ancestral backdrop, the unspoken purpose of modern drugs, whether intentional or not, is to be rid of the weight of existence. Though those in the State are free from the burden of nature, they suffer a far greater burden—the burden of freedom from nature. Who would have thought that trading the acute and extreme levels of danger and stress of our past for the moderate and yet chronic stress of the present would cause so much misery?

The fascinating fact is that so many in the State think this is normal. They believe our ancient cerebral matter, nervous systems, and souls are malfunctioning. They do not ask why we are molding humans to the State and not molding the State to humans.

Bitter is the irony. Ancestral medicines are illegal in the State. But entheogens not only show us God and tighten our bond with our ancestors, many also end addiction to the deadly and numbing drugs of the State—which are legal.

Now the State either did this out of ignorance or on purpose. If out of ignorance, the State is inept. If on purpose, a dark possibility presents itself: maybe the State realized the individual who is no longer defined by their grind against nature is faced with an anchorless self in an environment of drift—and therefore must be made numb.

It is worth asking what would happen if we brought SSRIs to the Mbuti or the Yanomami. They would probably be rendered inert in a deadly environment and their doom decided: death by teeth, water, spear, or mud. But what if we brought Salvia divinorum to the State? Those who feel alienation and a blind desire to numb themselves might actually discover a sense of awe for their ancestors, nature, and existence itself.

A culture divorced from nature is explosive. It might slip into the drug induced stupor of Huxley’s Brave New World, erupt into Orwell’s Communist utopia in 1984, or vanish into something even worse: some transhumanistic merging of the mind with the internet to finally be rid of the burden of flesh and blood and brains and souls and the responsibility to make something of ourselves.

I am not saying all pills and liquor bottles should be replaced by ayahuasca ceremonies. Far from it. Entheogens are powerful tools, but from what I have seen, they show us nothing that cannot be seen through our own efforts. Even more crucially, the ends derived from discipline are often longer lasting and more profound than those gotten from smoking a bit of toad venom or swallowing powdered bark.

More to the point, drugs are merely the reflection of a culture. The cure is not to do drugs—it is to fix the culture.

The State stripped away ancestral stressors and left open a gaping void all too many seek an escape from. Why not fill this void?

Creativity is a path. To create is to re-imagine our immediate present; it is a refusal to wait for nature or the State to give orders. Creativity is a No to the thought-killing phrase “This is just the way it is.” The creative mind was the mind that broke a blind obedience to what lay right in front of it, grabbed a bit of charcoal, and started scraping it on a cave wall. This is the sort of mind that cultivates its own talents and defines a singular purpose worth living for. Little more is needed than ink and paper and an unquenchable curiosity. Little more than reading deep rich literature and thick old books with that musky paper smell, and then looking up at the world with a childlike wonder for the novelty of existence.

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Why “What then” in the first place?

There have been quite a few new subscribers recently, so this 2025 recap is timely.

I call this platform What then? after a question Epictetus asked with faintly maniacal repetition: “τί οὖν”. This translates to “So what?” or “What then?” He did this because it forced the individual he was interrogating—or, if there was no one to interrogate, when he interrogated himself—to dig one layer deeper, to keep asking questions until ignorance was stripped away and some fundamental truth was revealed.

But unlike Epictetus, these essays are neither self-help nor instructional. There are many writers who excel in that domain and I am not one of them. Instead of how, my loves are the why and the what. Why self-help, self-destruction, civilizational atrophy, and meaninglessness define our age. What the most awake and alive expression of human experience once looked like—and could look like once again.

Favorite books of 2025

I read 86 books this year. The four most striking were Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer, South by Sir Ernest Shackleton, and Existence by Rollo May.

I am in love with literature once again. All I read as a kid was fiction. I had a book with me every second of the day, and would grab whatever random tome on the library shelves I could reach. As an adult, I grew away from fiction believing it was irrelevant to getting things done—that it detracted from the actual act of living. I was horribly wrong. Once I started reading literature again, entire worlds of the human condition opened themselves up before me. With my eyes open once more, I can now look back and realize how profoundly all that fiction reading in my youth revealed layer after layer of depth both within myself and everyone I have ever met. It will forever be part of my reading regimen going forward. I usually balance two books at once: history or philosophy in the morning, and literature at night.

Favorite thing watched in 2025

Rarely is a philosopher caught on film. Not an academic. Not an influencer. But a truly original thinker. We do not know what Aristotle, Epictetus, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer would have been like on film. But I found an interview series from the 1960’s with Eric Hoffer and it is simply remarkable. My sense is this is what Epictetus would have been like on film: we see a philosopher’s brilliance, passion for ideas, and authenticity on camera.

Eric Hoffer was homeless, did not have a high school diploma, hitched rides as a migrant worker, and then settled down as a longshoreman. He was self-taught at public libraries, a genuine autodidact, a devotee of “books and brothels,” and lived the poverty-stricken life of an original thinker.

This is the video of Eric Hoffer.

The video is 30 minutes and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Top essays of 2025

This was the most “liked” essay, I can only assume because it assaulted the ever so assaultable concept of self-care.

This was the most engaged essay. This is hopeful because it edges up against one of the core themes of my upcoming book. I plan on doing at least 2-3 more major rewrites of this short book before letting it breathe the free air, as it is a labor of love, and I may even enjoy the act of rewriting it more than the eventual act of publishing it.

This was my favorite essay to write. I felt myself completely letting go. It is also part of my exploration of how Stoicism fits into actual human affairs. Not Stoicism as an academic study, not as a tribe with influencers to follow, and not as a strict discipline that demands us to obey every nuance of its logic, ethics, and physics. But Stoicism as a means to codify anthropological truths.

But this was the most personally impactful essay I wrote. I believe in my bones the dog is an existential anchor. Lifetimes could be lovingly spent doing no more than contemplating the virtues of a dog and their positive impact on the human situation. This essay—to this day—still shapes the way I look at my four-legged furry beast of a best friend.

Excellent Substacks

One of the surprising benefits of writing on Substack is not the writing, but the reading. Check out the “recommendations” on my home page for some excellent writers.

Path Forward to 2026

My essays are evolving. The more I write, the more I love it. I still write with ink and paper. I do not use AI in my writing nor will I ever because I savor the slow time; I savor having some striking idea and using it for thinking material day and night; I rejoice in hurriedly writing some spontaneously articulated sentence in mind in my notebook before it vanishes and leaves me wide eyed, trying vainly to put words to the emotional residue left in its wake.

My point is this is only the beginning.

2026 is going to be epic, for the human situation only gets more interesting with time.

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday’s from What then?

In The Christmas Carol, the word “humbug” is not so much a quaint sounding word as it is a psychological defense mechanism.

Ebeneezer Scrooge, speaking to his ruddy and breathlessly alive nephew, said the following:

“Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug!”

To those who say money does not matter, he says humbug! To those who say misery is a choice, he says humbug! To those who say everyone we come into contact with are “fellow passengers to the grave,” he says humbug!

Humbug, in the way Scrooge meant it, means accusing someone of spinning a web of deception to conceal what they truly think and feel. But he did not catch his nephew committing a random act of humbug. Actually, Scrooge’s accusation was proof he was deceiving himself—but not deliberately. As a reader, we realize we are looking at a man who has made it to old age and yet kept a locked door deep in the bowels of his own skull.

At either end of the human spectrum exists two radically different views of life: what life is on the one hand, and that life is on the other. The what-humans see snow as an annoyance that threatens order, while that-humans see snow as a raw white miracle bestowed upon them by Earth’s 23º tilt away from the sun. The one sees flesh as material for labor, a sack of skin and bones, a waste of resources; the other sees them as fellow travelers on the strange journey that is life. The one sees society as a mob, a mass, an opportunity to stand on a balcony above a sea of upturned faces waiting for orders; the other sees society as a grand spectacle it is a privilege to be a part of.

The irony of the what-humans is they never contemplate the human situation. Death gnaws at their subconscious as it does for all of us, but they refuse to wrap it in their hands and smile into it—that is, until they realize death is smiling back at them.

The cure to this ignorance is the mission of the Ghosts. The Ghost of Christmas Past asks them this: have you learned from your failures, sorrows, and regrets in your dealings with others in the past, or have you not? The Ghost of Christmas Present asks them this: will you fulfill the momentous potential of this moment right in front of you, or will you not? The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come asks them this: have you carved time out of your busyness to contemplate your legacy in the minds of those you will leave behind when you are soil and bones, or have you not?

Death is the end; there is therefore no better reminder that right now is a new beginning.

And thus the wisdom of Dickens’ is this: no matter what miseries we think we are condemned to endure this Christmas, it is worth infinite gratitude that we are alive to experience them.

For it is true “The task is life, but the adventure is poetry.”1

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