A Course Correction For What Then?

The Barque of Charon. 1919. José Benlliure

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.

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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 Kit Perez 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.

If you find these essays striking, please consider restacking it and sharing it with others.

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.

How to Find Meaning Through Failure