Essays

Markets value price. What if we valued vitality instead?

A theory of value beyond prices: value is vitality.

A formal-ish framework for a 'consciousness ethics'

Drawing on the cognitive science of psychedelics to show how capitalism is a psychedelic system that sculpts consciousness

The treadmill effect may help explain why life in post-industrial economies feels like an endless cycle of meaningless activity. But is capitalism to blame, or does something else drive the treadmill?

An essay about Annie Dillard’s writing, life, and uncommon devotion to the naked and astonishing facts of this bizarre, bewildering world.

Whether repression is inherent to civilization (Freud), or just capitalist society (Marx, Marcuse), the fact remains: we presently live in a repressive construct. The question is thus the same no matter what side you talk: how to live on, considering?

Basic income could be like injecting a syringe of vitality into our weary veins, from which a rush of economic possibilities would re-color our perception of the world.

Time inequality is pervasive, corrosive, and largely ignored. Like an invisible toxic gas filling the air. A renewed, policy-driven commitment to time ownership could revitalize the suffocated dream of progress.

A progressive policy proposal for a basic income, complete with funding model and all

A “policy long” that offers in-depth explorations of perspectives on the UBI debate, both positive and critical. I include everything from UBI as a mechanism for “post-scarcity”, to the different ways we might pay for it.

In which I explore universal basic income as a corrective intervention in the interwoven relationship between economics, consciousness, and human development.

Along with the economy, the psychology of capitalist realism collapsed in 2008. Now, amidst resurgent utopian energies, UBI is one policy framework among money to guide that zest back into mainstream economic discourse.

What changes first, paradigms or policies? Complexity economics suggests we might use policies as tools to design the evolutionary context of paradigms.

What if, for the first time in the history of sentient life on earth, humans in the 21st century have enough accumulated cultural technologies, ingenuity, and wealth to discard the condition and dynamics of scarcity as life’s organizing principle?

As the internet offers a potentially global audience to writers, for free, I worry that taste itself is being commodified, and writing is just the latest bastion of individuation to give way.

The philosophy of networks helps make sense of our transition from scarcity based capitalism into a post-capitalist culture of abundance, pursuing the networkological imperative of the sustainable emergence of complexity.

From the clash between the individualism of neoliberal capitalism and the interdependence of contemplative ethics, might we imagine an evolved cultural framework suitable to both the magnitude of the dharma and the realities of 7.4 billion hungry humans inhabiting the same floating rock, with democratic & equitable access to innovations and possibilities of the digitized 21st century?

The distinction between subjectivity & objectivity is bogus, and the hierarchy it creates is harmful to our shared experience of what it’s like to exist.

What is needed are methods of making knowledge visceral. Practices of feeling the transiency of sugary delights, feeling the plight of whales stuffed with plastic as they wash upon the beach to die, or feeling the loss of biodiversity as the loss of our own limbs.

Life is a brief moment of consciousness bookended on both ends by complete oblivion. If sentience devolves into tedium, we’re doing it wrong.

What is philosophy after the internet? On the ecology of consciousness.

With time, most lives become containers themselves, holding our bandwidth of experience and attention into particular patterns, particular sets of routine activities, particular habits of daydreaming, posture, and breathing.

Is the universe infinite, or just really big? Either way, it doesn’t make any sense, and we're just confused, sentient skin-bags.

Modernity is eroding our capacity for leisure, intangibly impoverishing our livelihood. A leisurely revolution might help reclaim freedom from compulsion.

What more could awakening be than an ever-present gratitude for the startling fact that we’re here at all, awake to life rather than asleep in nothingness?

The shrimp's mystery is chilled oxygen coursing through my veins, reinvigorating my nervous system; my sense of being alive reopens to impossible horizons

I suspect we’ve learned to savor the fragmentary surges and jolts of experiences, rather than the neutral, ever-present, miraculous fact of experience itself...

Truth without practice is impotent, and practice without truth is blind - an essay on discerning what 'works' to enrich our lives...

On the philosopher's exit from ordinary reality, and the pursuit of existential creativity. Reimagining how we 'should' live as how we 'might' live.

Our journey from prokaryote to humans sacrificed clarity for complexity. With self-consciousness among the many bestowments of complexity, might we reimagine ways of harnessing complexity to re-generate a felt sense of clarity?

"Those who chafe at the tameness an sameness of office life, who pine for a little excitement to diversify the quotidian routine, should experiment with this little recipe of mine…"

What I propose here is a living inventory of time-tested technologies of the self that cultivate both enriched ways of seeing and nourished modes of being...Methods that carry our existential aspirations into the flesh...

History is the decomposed soil of human lives, enriched by each cycle of growth and decay that fertilizes the soil of human experience...

Our lives are compartmentalized landscapes of practice that all function in subsurface harmony, like trees spread across a vast forest whose roots commingle in the deep soil, to make us who we are.

I think of attention on the whole as how the sensory landscape of this present moment appears to — or though — my ‘self’. Attention is the presentation of consciousness to itself. The prism through which the world is both constructed and encountered.

What kind of anticlimactically meek response to philosophy’s old question — how to live — is plopping down on a cushion and breathing? Just as Albert Camus asked what he called philosophy’s first question — why should I keep living? — we might ask, why keep sitting?

“Many aspire to a higher or more fulfilling life, but the seeking is usually only an impulse of the moment, unrealized and not sustained. A vague sense of dissatisfaction arises in many people about the quality and nature of their present lives, but from that dissatisfaction no real sense or specific goal emerges."

If social liberation is the target of economic ascent, we're in a slump. Why do we accept a world that drives so many of us into debt, depression, and despair? This project of returning a healthier balance to our economic, psychological, even spiritual landscapes can learn from the BDSM safe-word model - Basic Income could serve as the safe-word in a safe-word theory of social liberation.

The taboo on psychedelic experience is derivative of a larger secret – that consciousness is a vast, unexplored labyrinth with rooms whose dimly lit contents may threaten how we organize our lives, our societies, and even our-selves.

If the art of philosophy is fading, can we reanimate it? Turning to the heart of philosophy's question - how to live - inevitably delivers us into the labyrinth of consciousness. Various practices guide us through these passageways, some new, some ancient. Philosophy can marshal them to chart our course.

At 24 years old, my father stood on the banks of India’s Ganges river, passport in hand. With trembling grip, he nearly threw it in, his identity along with it, to live out his days nameless and broke, meditating and seeking God.

Two of our time's great voices identify the same root cause to society's largest issues, speaking to the vital relationship between introspection and activism

The phenomenon popularly known as a ‘mid-life crisis’ (henceforth, MLC) can, in fact, occur at any age, place, or time. Mine began the day after college graduation, sitting on my small, familiar collegiate porch, watching the rising sun carry a new day, as it’s prone to doing...

My naivety towards death died along with Newman. Not that I’d never considered death, nor that I lived in its denial. But we’d never met over such a dear friend, face to face. I’d never watched death enter a room, rummage around, and depart, leaving the vacant eyes of a loved one behind. It was disorienting.

Now, in thinking of my own home, I aspire more towards a tortoise, who carries home always on his back. I seek to be as ensconced in myself as the tortoise is in his shell. I am the shell, because ‘I’ am home. That is to say, I live in my self.

Who am I? Am I the ongoing story of my life? Or a nerve ending through which the Universe experiences itself? Does biography disclose identity, or do we, as VS Pritchett writes, “live beyond any tale that we happen to enact”?

“Be more present”, goes today’s banal, omnipresent suggestion on how we ought to live better. But what might this mean, physiologically? What does ‘presence’ look like? Thoreau provides an example…

Life is too astonishing to reconcile rapture, its transcendental shine, with children being gored by toppling trees in a minor windstorm that might’ve been otherwise unremarkable (this happened today).

what-does-meaning-mean

The collision of these two surfaces of life, subjective centrality and objective insignificance, are among the great wars of the human psyche, and we may do well to pull this conflict out into the open...

We don’t know when suicide began, but we’re rather sure it began with humans. This begs the question: when? At what point along the evolutionary journey of Homo Sapiens did we, for reasons absent from any other prior species, begin killing ourselves?

Each of us are set down here at some point or another, bewildered, greeted by the eerie feeling that things are already sorted out, that sense has already been made of life, and it’s us who aren’t yet acclimated...and yet nonsense prevails

In a digital age that's diluted the essay's reputation, the craft's function is best given by a description of the essay's originator, Michel De Montaigne: “Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence...” The essay is an attempt at fleshing out this astonishment.

Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Poetry envisions a philosophy concerned with human progress — rather than metaphysical unknowables — driven by imagination...

Meditation is like a new set of glasses, or rather, it’s like removing your eyeballs altogether and relearning how to navigate a dark world...This is how I feel reading Annie Dillard, happening upon unexpected fragments of the sublime...

An essay exploring Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" to make a philosophical case for Basic Income, and ultimately for the "impulse to consciousness"...

A lot has changed over 200 years. But perhaps even more remarkable is what’s stayed the same: we work a lot. Thoreau, Russell, Keynes, even Joe Biden weigh in on the evolving role of making a living in making our lives...

It’s the ability to choose one’s own vision, as opposed to one of necessity, that the American idea can aspire towards. The purpose of economics is to render itself irrelevant. That economic concerns will progressively cease to usurp the existential stage, making way for the creative, imaginative, or even quaintly mundane modes of existence chosen by each individual seems the backbone of any collective truly interested in liberty...

Contemplative insights are threatening to disrupt a deep tenet of economic mentalities: self-interest. If the self does not exist as a real entity in the world, but is a bundle of cognitive processes, then is acting in our own self-interest to act on illusory grounds? If all things are interconnected, then self-interest is necessarily interdependent...

In humankind’s perennial quest for wisdom, truth, and reality, we’ve employed myriad methods - forms - of inquisition into what lies beyond conditioned experience – experience in the raw, or the murky depths of human subjectivity in which we hope to find some redemptive experience of the unknown...

Schopenhauer writes, "every man is pent up within the limits of his own consciousness, and cannot directly get beyond those limits any more than he can get beyond his own skin.” But is this the case? Or are there moments that rip us right out of that skin, into the fields of Socratic Wonder...

Before we ostracized philosophy to University departments and bookworms, it connoted the shared, universal venture of exploring, experientially, how to live.

Alan Watts displayed a healthy skepticism towards the utilitarian approach to spiritual practice, an approach rampant in Western culture. To meditate "for" something is to miss the point. Watts explores alternate "disciplines of nonverbal perception", including the "bearing-in-mind" approach...

Paradox points to both the end of logic, and the ineffability of reality. Of paradox's many embodiments spread across human endeavors, a look at three: Sanskrit's Sandhyabasha, Keats' negative capability, and Jung's inherent polarity of the psyche.

Institutional religion is fading into obscurity as the rise of science and individualism presents us with a difficult question: what’s next? Reclaiming spirituality as an American ideal, in the spirit of Emerson, offers hope.

Thought is a human potential that Hannah Arendt writes can carry us from the trivial to the transcendent; a sort of highway leading from the finite into the eternal. Bertrand Russell's own experience with contemplation ratifies this idea, as he wrote in a letter to his friend...

The question "what makes us human?" is central to the human experience. To many, the answer lies within the depths of self-awareness, a tool E.F. Schumacher writes is capable of causing consciousness to recoil upon itself. And perhaps it is precisely through this unique trait that defines us as humans that we may most enrich our humanity.

Today’s rampant liberation from the singularity of survival motives charges us with the daunting task of seeking to provide for our inner selves in the way that food, shelter, and security provide for our base needs; from this enigmatic task comes the term, fulfillment.

Stories, myths, and narratives contextualize our lives; against these substratal dramas we justify everything we do, define all we are. Travel aids in enriching and broadening the inventories from which we construct these stories, but the most pressing work is to remind ourselves that whatever narrative we exist within, it's nothing but fiction.

The deconstructive process of an inquiring life often demolishes the floors of reasoning supporting our contrived world views, with "writing-as-introspection" offering a sort of inbent, journalistic record of self-discovery...

Advents in neuroscience are forging what has remained an elusive window into the meditative brain. The findings are exciting, though the real excitement from all this neuroscience lies in the potentialities gaining ground beyond science’s constrained imagination...​

From that ever-fascinating mutuality between physics and philosophy, Erwin looks to the ego-less civilizations of ants as a blueprint for long-term species-survival... ​

The fallacy that being a positive force in the lives of others corresponds only to external action, and that inner-work’s sphere of influence reaches no farther than oneself is an ultimately backwards creed. Oddly enough, introspection may be the most sane & potent form of altruism.

​The existentialist notion that life is fundamentally empty of all meaning has been affirmed by a dauntingly broad array of revered minds. But amidst the darkness wrought by the tendencies of rational inquiry into the meaningful life, Buddhist philosophy may illuminate a path forward.

​Cultures are built upon patterns of thought. Every now and then, someone like Robert Pirsig comes about with such a penetrating mind that he cuts straight through the prevailing ingrained habits, into the unseen core of the system itself.

Two great economic minds echo each other on capitalism's tendencies towards moral erosion, and Schumacher offers introspection as the prudent course of action.