Writing as shadow work. I write because I believe it has the power to transform. I write because it lets me love, or at least accept, what may otherwise feel unlovable. — Why I Write (An Invitation)

Advice for online writers. Above all, write honestly. Write about what feels important to you. Write from the heart. Write to enrich the world of your readers for a short moment. Life is too short for anything else. — Three Years Of Writing Online

Writing as alchemy. At the intersection of our talents and our wounds is our chance to practice alchemy — to turn what is buried in darkest depths into gold. The reward is not to be released from suffering but to find meaning in it, not a happy ending, but the a life profoundly experienced and generously shared. —David Milch and the Alchemy of Story

Can writing change our perspective on ourselves? We must also learn to meet ourselves the way a writer would: with curiosity, love, and and the right questions. A writer does not care about a character’s success but about its truth. The richness of your character rests in its contradictions. It is your complexity that uniquely breaks the light and lets you shine. — Dying Without Regrets (How to See Yourself Like a Writer)

Writing can be a struggle. Keep going. The answer to contraction is expansion — reaching out, hanging out, working out, walking out, praying, chanting, even crying out loud. — Reflections on Writing, Grinding, and Money

Writing as a mission. Following curiosity wherever it leads is an unreasonable idea in an age that glorifies efficiency, grinding, grifting, and wealth. Allow yourself to aim for the unreasonable. The world needs your best effort and highest ambition. — The Writing Mission (is to be curious)

Writing and singing are intertwined. It’s valuable to be proficient, but invaluable to be resonant. — How to Find Your Voice

My journey.

The dark night is that rare time when your soul is being forged — if you let it. Sadly, we have been conditioned to do the exact opposite. We have been taught to avoid our depths. — Night Season

Spiritual awakening. A complicated thing. — My Greatest Fear

No fortune can create a bond between your heart and the soil. Maybe home is just where the heart burns. — The Struggle for Home

The reward for tears of grief, I’ve found, are tears of joy and gratitude. — Until the Heart Catches

That time I joined a startup hedge fund. Are you building a business or practicing a craft? — Attempting the Impossible

When I got divorced, I was in a bad state of denial. I pretended it didn’t hurt. … I pulled back into a shell. Unable to find a happy path myself, I had a hard time watching others succeed. Their achievements seemed like an indictment of my own failures. — Divorce, Denial, Dissonance Reduction

• The Beauty of Vulnerability

• Gratitude, Desire, and a Money Paradox

Life.

The good life is not a destination but a process, not a having but a being and doing. — The Paradox of Happiness

You need to train two muscles: the one leading to a prosperous future and the one appreciating the already abundant present. — Marshmallow Mind

Do you read to signal or to learn? — Crank The Learning Machine Up To 11

• On Ambition

• The Clean Slate (Mindful De-Cluttering)

Other essays.

What is the price we pay for our illusions? — The Prophecy of Rust Cohle

We don’t get to choose when the world changes. Sometimes we barely get time to react. — Herald of the Change

Would your ego allow you to step into the role of junior partner in the service of doing great work? — Could You Bear Being the Sidekick?

Musings on a new year:

To plan or to surrender? The New Year’s Conundrum.

What did I not do because of fear? What, or who, drained energy? How am I complicit in my situation? Sitting With Uncomfortable Questions: A Different Kind of Year-End Review

I like to think I have many wonderful decades left. It’s a comforting thought. But of course, I have no idea.

Ernest Becker believed the ‘terror of death’ was so depressing, so crushing, that we humans would do anything to avoid it. We escape it through distraction: doom-scrolling and “drinking and drugging’. Or we dedicate ourselves to creating ‘immortality projects,’ dreams that outlast us like culture or the next Amazon.

When I bumped into spirituality, my fear of time became crippling. Oh my god, life matters and I’ve already wasted so much of it. I felt behind, too slow, and late for a destiny I could barely sense, like a distant shape in the fog. And yet, I wasted time.

You would think this anxiety would have propelled me forward with great urgency.

You would think the uncertainty of time would make us savor every moment, treasure it like the last glimpse of a rainbow.

But the opposite can be true.

In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky wrote about his years in a Siberian prison camp. One little passage always stuck with me. How strange it was, he observed, for the prisoners to “labor in the harshest conditions for a month,” and then spend their money “to the last kopeck” on a night of drunken debauchery.

To be sure, it would have been difficult for the inmates to save their money. But Dostoevsky sensed something deeper, a longing for “one moment’s forgetfulness” and the “freedom of action.” His fellow inmates wasted their money because the future was too uncertain, the present too depressing, and because they could.

It was a tiny act of free will, one of the few remaining choices.

You and I are free to save our money, but we remain imprisoned in life’s relentless march toward death. What we waste in rebellion is time.

Wasting time devalues it. If I squander this day, I must be confident I can make up for it tomorrow. It is a self-defeating act of spite, a tiny fuck you to the universe and its impenetrable timeline. Procrastination is our way of spending our last coin on cheap prison moonshine knowing the hangover will be awful. Because we can.

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My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires. It has been heartbreaking to see so many homes lost overnight.

While I watched footage of the devastation, my thoughts returned to a piece that had been sitting in my drafts for some time. I’ve long struggled with that word, home, and what it means. Do we get to choose where home is?

I grew up in Germany, but for a decade or so, New York clearly was home. It was not just the marriage, the job, and the apartment with my stuff (my books, really). When I stepped off the plane, I felt lighter, as if I had been unshackled of a great weight. I wanted to touch the walls and floors, make sure it was real. I would skip through the airport toward that vast and strange country. America felt like the future — like my future. I didn’t wonder what I felt unburdened of.

Visits to Germany felt like walking into a minefield of emotional triggers, like long exercises in shadow work. At first, my heart would jump. I would cherish the sight of lush hills and forests. My mouth would water at the smell of fresh bread. But with every hour I would breathe in more of its psychosphere, its Weltschmerz. My Heimat seemed stuck: anxious about the future, haunted by a poisoned past, condemned to a gloomy present.

I experienced a kind of claustrophobia: the state was less powerful but more encroaching, the people more distant but also more concerned with whether I followed the rules. The German character with its pedantry, obedience, and self-righteousness felt suffocating.1

I would wait for examples of this unbearable German-ness. Like that time Frankfurt’s airport security found drops of water in my Hydro Flask and called armed reinforcements. Or when neighbors noticed a plastic yogurt container in the wrong trash bag. More recently, I read about politicians suing their citizens over memes. How petty and insecure do you have to be?

For some time, this was my life. I did not understand America (it really is a strange place), but I could accept it. Germany I understood but could not accept. But things have become more complicated.

Last summer, I had to escape New York whose relentless energy was wearing me down. I was walking circles in my underworld and hoped for clarity and direction. But we only get to choose where we go, not what matters once we get there.

Ever since becoming spiritual, I have been paying more attention to the energy of a place, weird as that might sound. I regularly visit my grandparents’ grave when I am in the country. When I visit a new town, I try to spend a few minutes of meditation and prayer in the local church. I try to check in, for lack of a better word.

That summer I was most touched by a place that seemed utterly unremarkable: a small lake near my mother’s birthplace. My mother and I followed a wooden footbridge to the middle of the lake. It was a serenely sunny and quiet day, nothing but a breeze, birds in the distance, occasionally a fish popping to the surface. What happened was strange: not only did I feel at peace, but the world’s texture seemed to change at the edge of my eyes, in subtle ways, the more I surrendered to it. I could no longer tell if I was reacting to the place or it to me.

And I noticed that a part of me resisted. It’s so boring here, my inner American objected. We’re far away from where things happen, from the things that matter. But to me, the perfection of that afternoon seemed to contain everything that mattered.

At the end of my trip, I took a two-day detour to the town of Eschweiler near Aachen. I had experienced a strange synchronicity in New York when I bumped into the grave of an American soldier who may have shared the Eschweiler battlefield with my grandfather. I visited two military cemeteries. I sat and prayed and watched the rows of silent graves. Nothing happened.

What I remember instead are the difficult conversations with the woman running the bed and breakfast. This was shortly after a jihadist knife attack in not-too-distant Solingen. What do you say to someone who is angry, afraid, and feels like a stranger in the town they grew up in? I didn’t say much, I listened. I had a plane to catch the next day. This time, it felt like I was running away.

New York teaches its residents to have their guard up. It’s too dense and noisy and filled with too many unpredictable people. You learn to mind your own business, to put on armor against the chaotic energy. Germany was different. Germany allowed no such numbness and indifference. It slipped right underneath my skin.

I returned in December for grandma’s funeral and stuck around for Christmas. Two weeks total, a lot of family time in my book. We broke up the schedule for some alone time just so, you know, we wouldn’t accidentally stab each other or have another screaming match. On the afternoon of the 24th, I went for a long walk. I needed to be alone with the fading light.

I passed the old houses, paced along the river, out of town, toward the distant sun that clawed its way through the clouds. My hands greeted moss-covered trees. I felt the soil and the wet grass. Somehow just being there, among rocks and water, somehow that was enough. Between heaven and earth, there was a sliver of silence that held me, nourished me. It was an ancient, perfect quiet, like a silence between wars.

For a moment, I resisted. I did not want to like it that much. I walked with my fist raised toward the sky, shaking it at God like a crazy person. What do you want from me? But there was no denying that I truly felt of this place, one with it. There was a love in the wind that no words could erase.

I suppose that with enough money, you can call pretty much any place home. Cities like New York make it easy because so many people are in flux, always arriving or departing, rarely settled. And it’s so large and diverse that even the oddballs can find their alien tribe. Maybe L.A. is like that too, I’ve only seen it as a tourist.

But New York’s problems, and those of the US as a whole, seemed so great and chronic, that I could keep them at a distance. I could shrug at the madness. Sorry, above my paygrade. Hope someone will fix it.

By comparison, what ailed the Germans felt intimate and inescapable. Somehow, those impossibly rigid people still felt like family. When I despair at their nature, it is because I find it in myself. My heart beats faster on the soil of my birth and my blood runs with its waters. I don’t know yet what to do with that, I just pay attention when the wind whispers.

I’ve never lost my home to catastrophe and I can’t imagine what it must feel like. But I am learning that home is worth fighting for. Also, that home contains a polarity. I used to think of it as a castle, a place of protection and safety. But maybe home is not just a place of comfort but of challenge. What if home is not only what we need but where we feel needed?

Perhaps home is where even the biggest problems feel intimate, where you can’t keep your distance.

I think home is where we sense beauty underneath the ugliness, perfection underneath the flaws. It is what we want to tear down and rebuild because it tears us to pieces.

No fortune can create a bond between your heart and the soil. Money can’t lift your spirit into the clouds or merge you into the mist. If life is suffering, perhaps home is where that suffering feels worth it. Home may be our place of love, but nobody said love would be easy. Maybe home is just where the heart burns.

— Frederik

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If that sounds too ‘woo’ or abstract, take a look at writer, director, and producer Taylor Sheridan. At age 38, his life looked like an episode of ‘Follow your bliss gone wrong’.

The Texan had dropped out of college and moved to LA to become an actor but struggled to get roles. Sheridan was repeatedly broke. Sometimes he camped with friends on a nearby reservation. His big break — drum roll — was a minor role on the show Sons of Anarchy.

Then his son was born and Sheridan realized he wasn’t earning enough money to support his new family. When he asked for a raise, he was told to take a hike. “They were like, buddy, you're never going to be a star,” he recalled. “This is what you're worth.”

This is what you are worth. Ouch.

But in his heart, Sheridan agreed. He no longer believed in himself as an actor. After nearly two decades of struggle, he had hit a wall. “10th on the call sheet” was the best he would ever be.

And then the “Sheridan light bulb” gets screwed into a different socket. The left column is his life as an actor. The right one is a decade of Sheridan the writer, director, producer, and dad. What? Are we sure this is the same person?

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,” Bill Gates said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Point taken. But how, Bill? How? How do I wildly underestimate my next ten years and go full-on Taylor Sheridan?

Some energy you can buy off the shelf, like a battery. Make a new year’s resolution, set a big goal, hit the gym, crush a Celsius or drop some Adderall, put on your favorite music… You can fly for a while until you crash like a cannonball. On-off bursts of energy, of optimism and despair can feel like hell, like you’re stuck wandering in Dante’s infinite loops.

Sheridan gained and sustained tremendous momentum. Trung Phan pointed out the magic of massive commitments and tight deadlines. Sheridan created a structure that forced him to succeed at speed, like a pressure cooker. There’s some truth to that. Sheridan had to support his family. But it does not explain the outpouring of creative energy — which seemed to accelerate rather than burn out.

“True behavior change is identity change,” wrote James Clear. Sheridan didn’t change his identity as much as he re-discovered it, re-committed to it. He stopped pretending and took off his mask. Change rippled through his life like a tsunami from the core.

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Witalij promotes his events with intense clips on Instagram that show participants moving that energy — screaming, laughing, crying, and convulsing. I had done lots of breathwork before but never seen someone go on tour with it. Witalij and his team traveled from city to city to facilitate and he told us he had worked with “more than 80,000 people.” Breath has become a respectable business.

His style was ‘spiritual bro’ — sneakers, baseball cap, prayer beads, a loose-knit kaftan, an influencer at home at both the DJ deck and drone flute. He talked about his own journey of trying to heal a basketball injury. Once he talked about traveling to Latin America and his new mission to share the tools, my inner ‘ayahuasca’ bell began to ring.

Our journey began with sharp in-breaths. An hour or two later, I was roaring.

I had done intense breathwork before, but never this long, never in such a large group, never this loud. It was a masterfully orchestrated rollercoaster that took the room through waves of energy — anger and sorrow, laughter and love, yearning and bliss. I had never been this loud in my life, ever. And then it was over.

We had run over time and the blissful peace began to fray. Some people began to pack their stuff while Witalij and his team asked people to share. The group was far too big for a sharing circle. Instead, the crew walked around with cameras and microphones. Content for future ads.

My breathwork journeys tend to be highly emotional and this one was no exception. I often ‘meet’ the energy or memory of people I’ve lost — grandparents, women I’ve loved. But this felt like the opposite of my moment in the forest. I had no interest in bearing my heart for a viral clip. Because I had been noticeably loud during the session, the mic still found me. I uttered a thank you and something about the intensity of the experience — a string of words forgotten as soon as they left my mouth.

That’s what stuck with me as I lay awake hours later. I thought about all the people dispersing into New York’s noisy neon night, about moments of catharsis that didn’t lead to connection, about going deep in a space that didn’t offer intimacy. A highly effective practice lacking a strong container. (My friend Tom Morgan discussed the issue of ‘leaky’ containers in his excellent piece Where's all the Money in Personal Transformation?)

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“Everything is a room,” a friend once told me. What she meant was that the world appeared to her as a fractal series of spaces. (We may or may not have been staring at the sky high on acid.)

There are physical rooms: the universe, the sky, the country, city, and finally the ‘room’ we are in. But relationships too are rooms: being a lover, friend, child, or parent means sharing a space with someone. Also, media: in a way, this piece is a room you enter, a space of experience and relationship.

You always either offer a room or enter one, you create or participate in space (or perhaps co-create).

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Back in October, I spent a weekend solving puzzles and fighting with foam swords in the forest of Connecticut (role-play that was not a LARP but kind of LARP-y). On the second day, we sat in a clearing with a group of elders when one of them asked: “What is your greatest fear?”

That hit me like a train. I felt an electric shiver across the back of my skull, my signal to be still and listen to my intuition. If I could let myself relax, if I could drop the urge to look smart in front of everyone, there would be space for a deeper truth to emerge. I focused on my breath while the question made its way around the circle.

“My greatest fear is that I don’t do what I am here to do,” I heard myself say. Surprise.

I used to think very differently about life.

There seemed to be nothing “to do” in the sense of destiny or purpose. We are born, we do things, we die. We’re here to have children, amuse ourselves, and suffer. Humanity, as Rust Cohle put it, looked like a tragically self-aware species trapped in a “giant gutter in outer space.” The point of life then, I reasoned with my college roommate on a drunk night, must be to experience more pleasure than pain. But those were hollow words stitched together like a tablecloth to cover my deep unease.

Some six years ago, my then-girlfriend accidentally exposed the void underneath the cover. “How would you feel if you died tomorrow?” she asked.

“I think I’d be okay with it,” she said. I understood why. That woman was a badass. She had escaped the bonds of a strict religious community and arranged marriage, moved to another country, and was building two businesses. Her life was neither easy nor perfect, but she was the main character of her story.

I on the other hand felt paralyzed by the question, like a rabbit staring at a snake. I had reached my early thirties, but it felt as if my real life had not even begun. If life was like going to the movies, I was still watching trailers. I was moving from job to job (and, if I’m being honest, from relationship to relationship) looking for an answer to the gravitational pull of inner emptiness.

Søren Kierkegaard called this ‘unconscious despair’, the despair of a self unaware of its spiritual nature. But spirituality meant nothing to me and neither did Kierkegaard. All I knew was that I had no answers and didn’t know what questions to ask. Then I stumbled right into it.

During COVID, I bumped into a muse, the living embodiment of my secret creative yearning (and a future tragicomic love story). In our brief time together, she opened a tiny crack in the door to the other realm. And once you know there even is a door, it’s hard not to keep going.

In the last few years, I went deeper — with psychedelics, meditation, sound, breathwork, and other practices. I cried, shook, roared, and floated in blissful silence. The deepest moments were selfless and timeless, yet also deeply alive. I felt centered and in harmony, congruent as if all shapes of me had collapsed into one. I had been worried about being swallowed by the void, but now I fell into it, through it, beyond it. I realized the void was just as much ‘home’ as the rest of my life.

One night, I took off my mask to the sound of distant rain and singing bowls and bumped into something. It took me a while to realize that I returned as a believer.

At first, it felt like an intrusion, an embarrassment even. I couldn’t explain what had happened or what I believed. Everything felt beyond the reach of words. But sometimes, especially around trees and water, I could still feel the subtle tapestry connecting me with all things. If God is real, what do they want, I asked a friend.

“Things are more integrated than they seem, they are better than they seem, and they are more mysterious than they seem,” Huston Smith wrote about the shared ideas across religious traditions in The World’s Religions. That matched my experience. The world had become more mysterious, more alive, and more connected.

But as the world took on a gentle holy glow, my life came unglued. Everything felt misaligned and out of place. I fell out of life. The city seemed absurdly noisy, and I became sensitive to people’s moods in ways I had never experienced. I spent even more time alone, pondering and wandering.

Work was bad. Ideas that had interested me died in my hands. The only thing holding my fascination seemed to be the inner journey. I had blown the doors of perception wide open and walked right into a dark night of the soul.

Also, my fear changed shape. Gone was the despair over a meaningless universe. But what if, I wondered, what if I have a fate but fail to meet it? This fear felt a lot more intense. “The more consciousness, the more the despair,” as Kierkegaard put it.

I obsessed over time. Had I discovered the secret of life too late? “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” Shakespeare’s deposed King Richard II laments his fate. I rushed from one experience to the next, desperate for more knowledge and guidance, determined to catch up. I jumped into the void until I destabilized myself enough, I couldn’t tell a bad dream from a vision or ‘visitation.’ I was stumbling through a newly fluid and porous reality.

When I stopped chasing experiences, I was left with a pile of clues but no map, no further guidance, no comforting visions. What if I never found my path South? What if I forgot my precious fragments of truth and fell back asleep? What if I lost myself in the maze of entertaining distractions? The trailers were over, the movie was running — and I still could not figure out what role I was supposed to play?

The many faces of fear converged into one: a fear of failing to act, of remaining still like the rabbit. My greatest fear was falling prey to fear itself.

Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is a tough read and I am grateful that David Milch guided me to its key idea. The answer to despair, Kierkegaard wrote, was for the self to rest in faith, to “rest transparently in the power that established it.” To rest — not to strain or complain, not to argue, fight, and gripe.

This echoed my deepest experiences, moments of stillness, timelessness, and selflessness. But I found it almost impossible to follow.

Resting in faith means dropping all expectations, all ideas of what life should be like. It’s a goodbye to old desires and designs, a kind of tiny death. I don’t know how things are supposed to unfold. Thy will be done.

I anchor my days with meditation and prayer. I wait for a glimpse of timeless connection and wholeness. I express gratitude and ask for guidance. “I don’t know how things are supposed to unfold.” All I get is this moment and the choice of how I show up.

I try to listen, to be present, to share, to be of service. When I struggle to get it right, as inevitably happens, I hope for another chance to do better.

“Man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time,” C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters, “it all comes to him by pure gift.”

Every day is a chance — the only chance — to receive and share the gift.

Every day offers a chance to experience that “our sense of separateness in every fundamental way is an illusion” as David Milch put it.

Every day presents a choice of acting from a place of fear or faith, of letting the mind create a world of despair or glory.

“The human opportunity, the religions tell us,” Smith wrote, “is to transform our flashes of insight into abiding light.” Once life turns from a meaningless slog into a mysterious (and miraculous) journey of utmost importance, the real work begins.

Destiny is not a place to reach but a path to walk. Destiny is a direction, not a destination.

— Frederik

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A better question to reflect on.

Instead of “How would you feel if you died tomorrow?” ask yourself: “What would I do if I had two to five years left?”

Pick a time frame long enough to do something difficult, ambitious, and meaningful, but too short to avoid making a choice. No multi-tasking. What one thing would you focus on?

If you could leave the world with one more meaningful contribution, what would be the scariest thing to attempt?

Related:

• The Path of Fear (plus my favorite year-end exercise)

• What is at the center of your maze and in the South of your desert?

• What are you afraid to say?

• Tim Ferriss’s fear-setting exercise

Until a few years ago, this would have sounded completely alien to me. Make yourself cry? Like, on purpose? As a guy? I’m sorry, what?

I used to hate it when a movie, song, or moment caught my heart. I preferred pushing emotions away to expressing them (let alone talking about them). Tears felt particularly icky. They seemed weak and embarrassing. There’s a German term for getting teary-eyed quickly: nahe am Wasser gebaut — to be built close to water. I did not want the house of my life anywhere near the volatile waters of emotion, no thank you. My house would stand on solid and dry rock.

My nightmare was to feel overwhelmed and lose control in public. Think of Roman Roy breaking down next to his father’s coffin during Succession’s funeral.

It’s a powerful scene because it captures our ambivalence. Roman shows us his heart. His reward? He is mocked. It is a career-ending moment. If tears have consequences, is it not rational to fear them?

Today, I feel very differently about tears, at least in private. In fact, I see them as a litmus test. Does what, or who, I face have the potential to move me to tears? And can I let myself be moved, or do I shy away from the intensity of the experience?

This change dates back to the years after my divorce. I realized that, well, it actually was a big deal, that I was spiraling into depression, and that I needed help. My default answer was to look for talk therapy.

For about a year, I left work once a week to sit in a bland office and stare at tired carpet flooring. Every week, I told a story. Something about my boss, my parents, dates, friends, money, whatever occupied my mind. Then I held my breath and waited for the dreaded question. “How does that make you feel?”

That drove me nuts. I was not feeling anything. If anything, my body felt kind of empty? Every week I went through the same excruciating and expensive experience. I wanted to be fixed without having to feel things. My therapist refused. When I returned to my thoughts, he gently prodded me back to my body.

Eventually, I did notice short and subtle flickers of feelings. They seemed to disappear as quickly as I caught them. Then I bumped into something new, something I had avoided for a long time: anger. Anger at my annoying therapist for starters. Turns out there was a lot more where that came from.

Today, my heart can catch quickly. My deepest experiences lead me to tears with remarkable consistency.

I journal to unlock emotions. Often I get angry first. Sometimes the page suffers. In rare cases, a pen breaks. But eventually, I cross the chasm to my heart.

Intense breathwork? I roar, weep, and laugh. Two hours of 5 Rhythms dance? I sweat, shake, and sob. Psychedelics? Tears and smiles, smiles and tears. Kambo frog poison? People around me purge and puke. I nearly pass out, then I wail. A beautiful church choir? Music? Great movie? Heck, even being dragged to Frozen the Musical can be enough…

This week, I traveled to Germany for my grandmother’s funeral. When Grandma was on her deathbed, and I was still in New York, I felt a flash of her presence during meditation. I knew it was time. And yet I felt nothing at first. When my father called, I was calm and collected. But I could tell that I was holding back. Over the following days, I created space to let the grief spill out.

It was different when my mother’s parents passed away. I was stoic and controlled from start to finish. I would be no Roman Roy. As a result, grief showed up many years later during moments of doing inner work. I think of it like an underground reservoir or a cavern filled with containers, an emotional debt accumulating since childhood. But I no longer want to be a carrier of ancient dark, cold water.

“As with Freud’s patients, I found that my patients’ physical symptoms were the direct result of strong feelings repressed in the unconscious,” Dr. John Sarno wrote about the connection between chronic ailments and emotions. For me, it wasn’t back pain but clenched jaws, depression, an inability to feel when I wanted to, avoidance of intimacy, stomach tension, and an unhealthy relationship with pornography.

Today, I try to catch myself when I get tense, distracted, or irritated. I pay attention when I slip into dissociation. I try to find out what is “working” inside me and release it. I know I feel more alive and conscious afterward.

The most dramatic change — this may sound completely trivial — has been that tears feel normal rather than dangerous. I am not worried about being overwhelmed or that a situation is “too much.” Letting things flow through my body reduces the pressure and teaches me about the experience itself. Whatever comes up, I can be more confident I won’t drown. I float.

Still, judgment can come up. A part of me felt disgusted when I began to write this post. What are you going on about? What do you experience that is so terrible? This is life! Toughen up. Be a man!

I am learning to reframe this and meet it with love.

First, noticing that life could be worse creates an opportunity to be grateful.

Second, if others have it worse, that is an opportunity to send love and be of service — to others and to myself.

Third, the more I witness feelings arise and disappear, the more I recognize them as “a happening” as Alan Watts would have said. They don’t need to meet a benchmark to be valid; neither should they be mindlessly followed or elevated.

Finally, we don’t know all that lurks in our shadows. The source of some anger and sadness may be impossible to understand — or not even be ours (remember the psychosphere).

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience,” as Frank Herbert put it in Dune. I am learning to move with the inner process, to let it unfold, and to leave it behind.

If I allow myself the grief, I get to experience the full memory of my grandmother’s loving presence. If I allow myself to listen to my heart, I also get to hear her voice. The reward for tears of grief, I’ve found, are tears of joy and gratitude.

— Frederik

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Journaling Prompt.

One of the simplest tools I’ve found is “Journalspeak” by Dr. Sarno and his student Nicole Sachs.

Write your way through: through grief and sadness, loneliness and failure, judgment and self-loathing. Write until you feel your heart catch. Keep writing until you notice your mechanisms of avoidance. Then keep going and pour it all out. Don’t write to dwell on it but to let it go. Write for yourself, to acknowledge what is, to admit the difficult truths of life — and to leave them on the page.

Nicole explains the method in the first episodes of her podcast and YouTube channel. It’s very simple.

• I recommend you pick a new journal. Use a pen that allows you to write quickly.

• Make a list of stressors (Sarno: “List all the pressures in your life, since they all contribute to your inner rage.”). Nicole recommends three lists: past stressors, current stressors, and personality tests.

• Every day pick one and write for at least 20 minutes (especially in the beginning it can take time to transition from thinking to flow).

  • Sarno: “Write an essay, the longer the better, about each item on your list. This will force you to focus in depth on the emotional things of importance in your life.”

  • Sachs: “Tell the radical truth and don’t be afraid to go deep. Invite your feelings to rise. They won’t always do so right away, and that’s okay! True readiness is everything. Just stay the course and you will be surprised what comes out. The key is to stay focused on your emotional response.”

• Sachs recommends “a self-soothing meditation for 10 minutes” afterward. I definitely need a break after an intense session. I swear by this Yoga Nidra channel (lie down, cover your eyes, listen, float…).

• Challenge yourself to do this daily for 28 days.

Druckenmiller is worth an estimated $7 billion. Clearly, he no longer plays for money. The market is his passion, his sport. He thinks being “overly competitive” is the hallmark of great money managers. His advice to youngsters? Only enter the game if you love it. “If they're going in it for the money, they should go elsewhere,” he said. “There's too many people in the business like me that just love the game.”

But he also called his competitive streak “a sickness, a disease.” His mentor George Soros once compared his fund to a parasite sucking his blood and draining his energy. Was the fund a vehicle of his success, he wondered, or had he become the fund’s slave?

What is the point of passionately outworking everyone if you end up hating what you once loved? Some investors refuse to retire, but others seem to get consumed by the game. Legends like Soros, Peter Lynch, and Julian Robertson burned out. Even Druckenmiller nearly quit after blowing up during the dot-com bubble. Only a half-year sabbatical gave him the perspective for a comeback trade. What is the price of this passion?

I was reminded of an anecdote that had long confused me. In 2022, the Washington Post profiled retired hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman. The self-made billionaire was worried about the backlash against capitalism and the rich. This article was his soapbox. “I could buy a Picasso for a hundred million,” he told a group of college students, “but it doesn’t turn me on, so then what?”

His answer was philanthropy. “It’s been my pledge, and my wife’s pledge, to give it all away,” he said. “Other than my family, writing checks is the most meaningful thing I do,” he wrote in his memoir From The Bronx To Wall Street. “We live a very rational lifestyle. What better use is there for our money?”

Fair enough. But I was baffled by some of his “very rational” lifestyle choices. First, he moved to Florida to lower his tax rate. Then the “retired” money manager spent his days “anchored to the chair in his office, monitoring the market and calling in to his trading desk again and again.” Not only was he working, but he seemed miserable.

“Does it make any sense?” he asked himself, watching the numbers change on his screen. “To sit inside all day in front of a machine, making money I don’t need so I can give it to someone I don’t know?” — The moral calculations of a billionaire

Well, does it? Does this man look happy?

But who am I to judge? I may sit at my desk with the same where the fuck did it all go wrong? kind of face.

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One reader reminded me of the time when Louis C.K. shared his story at the funeral of his hero, George Carlin. C.K. talked about the darkest point of his career. I had watched it years ago but it’s so honest and raw, that it immediately sent chills down my spine again (I shared the clip on Twitter).

I remembered the technique C.K. used to unlock his creativity. But just like the message of True Detective completely changed when I re-watched it this year, I realized that I had missed the change in C.K.’s mindset which unlocked his career.

C.K. began doing stand-up right out of high school. Even though he initially bombed on stage, he kept going and learned how to write decent jokes. “I wanted it so badly that I kept trying,” he said. But where did persistence lead him? He spent fifteen years perfecting his hour-long routine. Then he realized that he had gone in circles. He hated the act he had crafted so carefully.

Also, he was not successful. “I was working places like Chinese restaurants,” he recalled. “I’d do a show in a Chinese restaurant where they don't even know there's a show gonna happen. They're there to eat.”

But fifteen years is a lot of sunk cost. What else was he going to do? “Stopping now is like getting out of prison. What do you do after 15 years of stand-up comedy?” Oof. Needless to say, C.K. was in “a dark place.” But fear kept him going.

Carlin on the other hand released a special every year and “each one was deeper than the next.” C.K. admired it but it also made him despair. “I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that.” How could he do that?

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I don’t watch much TV these days, but I used to. The couch, pizza, a beer, Netflix, or HBO — that was my escape after work. If I had to be awake, I wanted to be comfortably numb. Let a story carry me away into pleasant unconsciousness. I wanted to avoid feeling the yawning void inside. Work hard, dissociate hard.

That was more than a decade ago and the first season of True Detective was a favorite of mine. I loved Rust Cohle’s edgy nihilism delivered by Matthew McConaughey in sparkling monologues. Rust saw humanity trapped in an endless loop of suffering, the infamous flat circle. He smelled the world’s corruption and verbally carpet-bombed his fellow humans “laboring under the illusion of having a self.” I loved the show because it echoed how I felt.

Or rather, I loved it until the finale.

During the showdown, Rust nearly dies. He has a vision of, or encounters, a ‘cosmic spiral’ and feels the presence of his dead daughter’s soul. His partner Marty picks him up at the hospital and meets a man who was changed, if not healed, from his visit to the underworld. When Marty points out the vast darkness of the night sky, Rust responds that he has it wrong — “once there was only dark. You ask me, the light's winning.” Nihilism turns to hope.

That ending killed me.

I felt betrayed as if Rust had left my camp and switched sides. I wanted back Rust the cynic, the pessimist who saw life like the eternal loops of Dante’s hell. I needed that because I was still walking in circles.

It’s ten years later and this time, I found a deeper layer, a story within the story.

Rust: It's just one story

Marty: What’s that?

Rust: The oldest. Light and dark.

It is indeed the oldest story, but it is not “good versus evil.” Two detectives uncovering a conspiracy and chasing a killer? That’s surface-level stuff.

That’s like being stuck in Marty’s mind, gazing indifferently at the bayou, thoughts drifting to the prospect of a cold beer.

No, this is about the oldest story — the most important of stories as the world is caught in a strange and messy (re-)awakening of spirit.

To understand True Detective — to understand what is happening — we must turn to Rust. What is he looking at? Or better: what is looking at him?

Nothing about the show was more controversial than its subtle hints at supernatural phenomena. Those moments must be interpreted as metaphors, projections of the psyche, people insisted. There were parts of the dream inside the “locked room of the mind,” as Rust would put it. But if you open that locked room just for a moment and ask what those moments could have meant, True Detective reveals itself as an infinitely richer and more interesting experience (the same is true for life).

Rust Cohle is more than a lonely warrior-monk detective. He is, for lack of a better word, a kind of intuitive or psychic.

Rust didn’t choose his shift in consciousness. Unlike a lot of people experimenting with substances and modalities like psychedelics, meditation, or breathwork, Rust’s path was accidental. He bumped into his awakening during a near-death experience, but not the one at the end of the show.

No, to look behind the veil of True Detective, we must take a step back. By the time the story begins, Rust has already been through the depths of a hero’s journey, albeit one that never properly concluded.

Rust loses his daughter in a car accident (or accidentally caused the accident? I was never clear about that). His marriage and life collapse. He joins narcotics, goes undercover, and enters the dragon’s cave. Rust faces manifest evil in the form of drug traffickers who torture, murder, and poison for pleasure and profit.1

His hero’s journey concludes with a shootout during which he gets hit three times. Rust recovers and declines to retire. He asks to join a homicide squad (which means to act on behalf of the dead) and is transferred to Louisiana. True Detective begins.

This is the near-death experience that matters. It is Rust’s involuntary initiation. He returns from the underworld with a perception of the subtle realm, speaking for the dead, taking confession, and communing with the mystery. But upon his return to the village, he finds the place destitute, like “somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading.”

Rust finds himself fully awake to the human condition yet utterly alone and unhealed. Like a shaman with a badge, he carries his cross through a “giant gutter in outer space.”

Throughout the case, Rust receives guidance — birds fly in spirals, lights trace the sky, and a glow leads him to the backyard shed with the ‘devil trap.’ He dismisses these signs as hallucinations, as flashbacks from his drug use while being undercover. “Most of the time I was convinced I'd lost it,” he says. “But there were other times... I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe.” Plot twist: What if he was?

After visiting the first crime scene, Rust comments on smelling the psychosphere, an imaginary subtle layer of reality reflecting our collective thoughts and emotions (which Marty mishears and later hilariously references as “smelling a psycho’s fear”). To Rust, it tastes like “aluminum, ash.” It’s polluted and corrupted (there’s an excellent post exploring this idea). This subtle perception reasserts itself at the very end of the show when the two detectives arrive at the suspect’s property for the showdown. “This is the place,” Rust tells Marty.

Rust also enters detention cells, speaks to the suspects of grace and forgiveness, mentions the “weight” that has its “fishhooks” in the heart and soul, and then, like a priest, takes their confession. How come?

He rejects the “language virus” of religion and denounces both preachers and therapists for selling false hope. People project their “fear and self-loathing” to the “authoritative vessel” of the priest. Is he just cynically using this and putting himself in the position of the “vessel” to do his job as a cop? I think there’s more to it. Rust is the one character who truly knows his nature.

Marty: You wonder ever if you're a bad man?

Rust: No. I don't wonder, Marty. The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.

Because Rust does not project his inner world onto others (in stark contrast to Marty) he can truly see others.2 He can read people like they’re open books. “Everybody wears their hunger and their haunt,” as he puts it.

Everybody knows there’s something wrong with them. They just don’t know what it is. Everybody wants confession, everybody wants some cathartic narrative for it. The guilty especially. And everybody’s guilty.

I believe the guilty recognize that he is different. For a precious moment, they feel seen. The weight of conscience feels a little lighter. Rust exchanges a glimpse at real connection for a confession.

Consider that there are other characters who recognize that Rust is no ordinary cop. Like Rust, they know their nature. Unlike him, they are the bad bad people, dark priests of violence and suffering — murderers, meth cooks, pedophiles.

Reggie Ledoux recognizes Rust from a dream, sees a “shadow” on him, and shares with him the metaphor that “time is a flat circle.” Dewall Ledoux claims he can see Rust’s “corrosive soul” at the edges of his eyes and immediately senses the detective’s trap. Errol Childress calls Rust a “little priest” and invites him into his labyrinth to die together. These are the twisted minds who immediately sense that Rust is awake inside the dream. Unlike Rust, they relish the poisoned psychosphere’s fumes.

Meanwhile, True Detective has no mercy to the self-proclaimed men of God. Reverend Tuttle is an incarnation of evil, the tent preacher deluded and clueless. There’s “always a buck to be had,” Rust says, in encouraging people’s “capacity for illusion.” The tent preacher is interesting because Rust later finds him despondent and in the numbing embrace of alcohol. “All my life I wanted to be nearer to God,” he says. But “the only nearness is silence.”

Rust however is comfortable in that silence. Organized religion may appear to him as a grift, a front for evil, or a simple delusion, yet he remains otherworldly. He maintains an odd meditation practice, staring at a tiny mirror and contemplating “the moment in the garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.”

In the show’s supreme irony, Rust walks with the sacred — or it with him — yet he denies its existence at every step.

His story is the tragedy of an awakened soul trapped in the mind of a rational modern man. The only signs of the sacred he encounters are totems of sacrifice and suffering. Rust is left with half the Tao: all suffering, no joy. He could have been a Bodhicitta but instead turns into a Bodhicynic: awake to the suffering of the world and participating in it, but not joyfully.

Interestingly enough, a deep spiritual connection was required to venture deep into the maze of Rust’s experience.

“I was as strong, spiritually, [in] my relationship with God, when I did True Detective, as I've ever been,” Matthew McConaughey recounted. This allowed him to “jump in the pool” and go “further away, deeper into the torture” with the confidence he would emerge on the other side.

Rust, he points out, “was not an evil man. I don’t even know if you can call him a non-believer. But he was always going after the truth. And the truth burns. And he would take the scar and get burned for it. He’d die for it.” Rust was ready to pay the ultimate price but there is a price to be paid for remaining asleep as well.

The show’s creator Nic Pizzolatto explained that True Detective was about storytelling and supernatural thought only “to the degree that it was concerned with storytelling.” “As human beings,” he noted, “we are nothing but the stories we live and die by. So you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.”

The oldest story is not good against evil but mankind staring at the night sky, wondering what it all means. If we decide there is no meaning, the world we create will reflect that. It will be filled with what Rust calls our “desperate sense of entitlement.”

Surely this is all for me? Me, I’m so fuckin important. Right? There are broader ideas at work. Mainly, what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions.

The price to be paid for this illusion is a life spent asleep and in denial. It is the price of escapism, of numbing ourselves with entertainment, alcohol, sex, drugs, and whatever else we can get our hands on.

True Detective explores what happens when a culture loses the plot. It finds that there is a void and that the void begins to swallow the souls of the innocent. What do we owe, collectively, for failing to notice what the Rust Cohle’s of this world see and feel so clearly? What is the price to be paid for poisoning the psychosphere?

What does it mean to feel the presence of a deeper intelligence behind the veil of the visible? What is it like to sense subtle forces at work in the form of signs and synchronicities? I found it deeply disorienting and isolating. This is why today I see True Detective as a cautionary tale about waking up in a world stuck to screens and self-centered dreams.

Rust returns with gifts he can’t explain (or accept) and with truths nobody wants to hear. He is a kind of shaman with a badge, a stellar investigator but utterly alone with his experience. His nihilism is the anguished cry of someone stuck in a nightmare. He walks his flat circles through the wasteland with alcohol as his companion.

Rust enters the labyrinth a second time and confronts the child-devouring minotaur in the form of Errol Childress. But what concludes his arc is his return to the liminal world of near-death and the chance to reconnect with the force of love in the form of the soul of his daughter. What shows his evolution as a character is that he shares this experience with Marty. He chooses a different story and the price he pays changes from isolation to vulnerability.

Only by sharing can we find like-minded souls. Only by opening up about our disorienting journey and the price we have been paying can we connect. Only by connecting can we create new communities. If only Rust had used the internet to connect with a tribe of fellow weirdos…

For that is the message of the night sky: that there is as much hope today as there was when the first humans looked at it.

One can see in it a cold and distant universe or eternal beauty. One can feel lost in its vastness or sense a subtle yet pervasive force of consciousness or love. This is not about “reality” but about the story we tell ourselves in the “locked room of the mind.” Choose carefully. There is a price to be paid either way. And remember that it may be too much to bear for any one soul on its own — even one as tough as Rust Cohle.

I don’t watch Mr. Beast’s content but I inhaled much of those 36 pages, skipping only the YouTube minutiae. The document lays out goals, expectations, principles, and lessons for new team members of Donaldson’s production company. I suspect he leaked it to inspire young ambitious outliers to apply and if you run a team with ambitious goals — hedge fund, startup, anything creative — I highly recommend you analyze the booklet for its clarity and structure (also, The Goal is the one book he recommends).

At first glance, Caro and Donaldson couldn’t seem more different: thousand-page biographies vs. a YouTube channel whose most popular video is “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!”

However, both owe their success to an intense passion and awe-inspiring obsession with mastering their craft. Where they differ is not just their medium but their goal — and this is where I found a foundational lesson about creative work.

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“This channel is my baby and I've given up my life for it,” Donaldson writes. “I’m so emotionally connected to it that it’s sad lol.” Caro likewise has given his life to his work. Or you could say that his work has given him life. “As you get into a chapter, you get wound up,” he explained in Working. “You wake up excited—I don’t mean “thrilled” excited but “I want to get in there,” so I get up earlier and earlier.”

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I want to revisit the Alps but put off picking a spot for months. A master stroke of procrastination. For the first time, I am driving without having booked a place to stay. It’s alright though because moving towards the unknown — and even driving in the rain — is part of the answer.

Sometimes you’re playing catch-up with yourself and by the time you’re leaving, your self is way ahead already. Sometimes, where you’re going only reveals itself once you overcome inertia.

For a while, I drive in absolute silence. Then I open the windows and listen to the patter of rain and the gentle whoosh of tires on the wet road.

“There is nothing more alone than being in the car at night in the rain,” Robert Penn Warren wrote. “They say,” he added, “you are not you except in terms of relation to other people,” which turns the lonesome car into a place to “lie back and get some rest” from the self, a “vacation from being you.” This strikes me as half-right.

As an introvert, I love a leisurely road trip because, yes, you get to leave behind all versions of yourself created to relate to others. But it’s only a vacation from your social self, not from what is resting beneath the surface. The masks drop and you get a glimpse at what remains. Rather, it is a place for things to move and emerge and be expressed in their raw form and without fear of judgment. Where do people find the courage to sing? In the shower and the car.

I stop the car and stare at the drops hitting the windshield. I realize I’m on a pilgrimage of sorts, one that started by accident and lacks a destination.

Some things you can’t unsee — or unhear. Sometimes you know you are living through a turning point in your life. You can feel the page turn, a new chapter being opened. In extreme cases, you can feel the weight of an entire book closing and a new one being pulled from the shelf. That’s what it felt like the first time I disappeared to the sound of a gong.

I was lying comfortably on a mat, eyes covered with a mask, and had taken a dose of psilocybin (which thankfully has been decriminalized in parts of the world). Listening to music and live instruments, I had sunk deeply into that inner outer-space of colorful fractal geometry when I heard a deep and gentle rumble. It was like the surf of a cosmic ocean rising and roaring, like nothing I’d ever heard. Oh, I thought, this is different. And it was.

At first, my mind tried to decode the mysterious sound like an auditory Rubik’s Cube. There seemed to be no end to the waves and no limit to their layers. While my intellect was busy, the vibrations kept rolling through my body and began to gently carry off every thought into the ether. Then I simply let go.

Thinking seemed unnecessary. My body turned into a vessel of resonance and lost its weight. The self started to fade. Then something detached deep inside of me and I felt myself floating off, like a balloon whose string was cut. I let myself be carried away by the low droning sound, let myself fall into the nothingness until I wasn’t any longer. There was not even darkness or silence, everything that had filled — or defined — my sense of awareness disappeared and left a void that defied description.

I reappeared as my own breath. Not as a person breathing but as nothing but breath. It felt like I was drawing my breath in from a great distance and with every inhale, my awareness returned and took on shape. I’d never breathed this deeply, slowly, steadily.

And with that, I realized, I was again. My thoughts had returned. My awareness had shifted back to a sense of self that was experiencing all else. I had returned to a deep and delicious darkness, but I no longer was that darkness, let alone its absence.

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.” ― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

I expected to find clarity, but instead emerged, as Huxley put it, humbler and more aware of my own ignorance. A couple of years later, I am sure of little except that there is a mystery on the other side of the veil — that there even is a veil.

I probably wouldn’t be writing about any of this if it had not created such a disconnect in my life between inner and outer movement. My infinite ladder was straining under tension and any move seemed better than staying in place.

By mid-afternoon, I arrive in Austria. It’s cloudy but the rain stopped. Perfect. I switch into my boots and head for the forest, ready to walk until I find my inner stillness again.

I don’t know where this pilgrimage will take me or what is waiting at its end. I don’t even know if there is such a thing as arriving. There is no point wondering who we will turn out to be. The only way to find out is to take the next step.

Frederik

It also means saying goodbye to air conditioning. Instead, one gets up early to open the windows and lower the shades. Inevitably, animals find their way from the garden into the house.

I was working on a piece when I heard a bee buzzing. It made its way across the window, all the way to the top, left and right, before tumbling back down. It was exhausting to watch and the buzzing kept pulling my attention away from the laptop. So I got up and opened the window further.

“Can’t you see that it’s open,” I said. No, the bee could not. It kept crisscrossing the glass.

I watched it struggle mindlessly. If only it went a little further to the left. Stupid bee. What was I supposed to do, carry it to the garden?

If I had shrunk down to the bee’s size and asked it how things were going, how would it have responded?

“I’m tired. I can see all the flowers and I’m trying so hard to get back there. I am working nonstop, but some invisible force keeps me away.”

It must have seemed to the bee that the world was conspiring against it.

From my point of view, it was about an arm’s length away from destiny. If only it had stopped pushing against the glass that would never yield. If only it had shifted its attention from seeing the garden to sensing the flow of air carrying the scent of flowers.

Its only hope is luck or divine intervention — a friendly human trapping it in a glass and releasing it outside.

I often feel like that bee.

I can see the colorful garden. In myself and the people I meet, I can see the vast gap between what is and what could blossom. And yet it often feels like I am getting no closer, that invisible forces are preventing me from reaching that valley of infinite flowers.

What if the window was open? What if whoever opened it shakes their head at the silly humans bumping their heads against invisible walls? What do we expect — to be trapped in a cup and carried to the garden?

The invisible force keeping us from our potential is both real and not. It is no conspiracy, just us bumbling around and getting in our way. It’s the result of being out of tune, not in flow. But how do we find a better way?

How do we become, as David Foster Wallace put it in This is Water, “just a little less arrogant”? Wallace strained against “the total wrongness” of experiencing oneself as “the absolute centre of the universe.” But how? How do we gain perspective? How do we tell air from glass?

I’ve spent the past week around family — mom, dad, sister, aunt and uncle, my ailing grandparents. As much as I love them, there are moments when I would love, love, love to wave a magic wand and change their lives. Better yet, change them.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” Jung said and I believe this is most true for the people we love who contain aspects of ourselves. Where Wallace emphasized control over thinking and attention, I believe emotional reactions can offer us breadcrumbs to shift from thinking to feeling and to the observer’s perspective. Because it is painfully obvious to us when the people we love bump into the window. And the smudges they leave on the glass can help us find our way.

Triggers can be avoidance, refusal to let go, refusal to change or take action, missing low-hanging fruit, not using obvious talents and strengths, choosing short-term over long-term opportunities; also when people are harsh and critical about themselves. All of these trigger me because I carry them as well.

I did an exercise similar to John Sarno’s/Nicole Sachs’ Journalspeak, a practice I’ve started to experiment with. I picked one person and wrote down every emotional reaction. At first, it was a lot of “How is X still doing Y, this is driving me nuts.” I tried to focus on how it made me feel and why (the next level would be ‘where in my body do I feel this’).

Once it was all on the page, questions showed up. Were they ever going to change? Could they? What if they didn’t? Could I accept them regardless? Could I accept that they chose not to change? Could I release the feeling entirely? Is it possible that I don’t want to change this person but rather the same behavior in my own life?

Finally, I reviewed the list and replaced their name with mine. “How am I still doing this…” Can I accept them turned into can I accept myself?

People are like mirrors in that what we notice about them is a reflection of ourselves. They can be similar or opposite, but always they carry the potential to teach us more about the contour of who we are, more about what is glass and what is not.

I am about to leave for the Alps and it is time for the bee to leave the apartment. I trap it under the glass and a sheet of paper. A final moment of confusion and straining, and pushing against invisible forces. Once released, the bee resumes an easy, joyful flight.

The path to the garden is flow. If life feels like pushing against glass, look for ways to make it visible. Look for perspective. In my experience, nobody does it better than the people we love, whose buzzing and bumping we can recognize as our own.

Have a great weekend,

Frederik

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.

… The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. — This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Until last summer, I had not spent much time in Berlin and I have to admit that I feel a little silly to “discover” the city now — as a German and in my late thirties no less. But here I am, walking from one neighborhood to the next, unable to keep my mind from spinning or my hands off the keyboard. I will share my observations in a future post. Today, I want to explore one inner conflict I wrestled with.

How does one end up in a new city? Leaving family ties aside, I thought it boiled down to economics (career and education), eros (relationship), ecstasy (entertainment, culture), and environment (weather, architecture, geography).

That’s how things worked out for me. I had moved to New York for a relationship and, after the divorce, stuck around for work and culture (and perhaps out of a sense of stubbornness). But reflecting on my return after COVID, I think it was the city’s energy that pulled me back.

I remember stepping out of the subway in New York for the first time in 2008. Herald Square in midtown, near Macy’s of all places. I could feel the city’s energy wash over me like the swell of the ocean. This was different, I thought, and it was. There was a wave of subtle intensity, one that I could learn how to ride. Surfing New York meant walking faster, thinking faster, working later, wanting more, and wanting it sooner. The city’s groundswell compresses time and blurs the days into a haze of activity, an experience that I suspect is shared among inhabitants of the high-energy places.

I used to think I needed that boost. I felt behind in life and New York’s pace seemed like an opportunity to catch up, to finally move on the left lane and hit the gas pedal hard. Turns out, I drove loops in a parking lot with a great sense of urgency. But that’s another matter. The energy was real.

There was no such wave in Kreuzberg. Kreuzberg, as the waitress from Guadalupe put it, was tranquilo. The first day it felt so quiet, I wondered if I had stepped into one of those hidden camera comedy shows, “push the mute button on Berlin and see how he reacts.” Granted, it’s summer and everyone’s on vacation. Still, it freaked me out just how chill everything was.

A couple of days later, I walked past a gas station. Not much more than a neon sign and a store for late-night snacks. Two people were sitting there, leaning against the sign, drinking. It was like eleven in the morning and their eyes already had that distant watery gaze.

A little jar fell over in my mind and its lid came off and a bunch of memories and feelings spilled out and unspooled. There it was, the Deutschland I had long left behind, a land of welfare and cheap booze, a land of Suff. I looked at Kreuzberg with different eyes. All I could see were people day drinking, all I could hear was the cough of lifelong smokers, all I could feel was rejection.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung

The part of me that loves New York’s high-strung ambitious energy can’t stand laziness, least of all in me. I think that part started to worry. Would I, if I stayed in Berlin for too long, let my life meander into pleasant nothingness? Did I have the capacity to turn into an aimless drunk?

“To the extent that I’m an unreliable person, I’m hypersensitive to acting like a reliable one,” wrote David Milch. “My deepest belief about myself is that given half a chance, I’ll steal your dope and help you look for it, so I try to be rigorous going against that.”

It was that kind of hypersensitivity, a fear that I just pretended to be ambitious and hardworking, that fear surfaced and violently rejected my desire to relax and lie blissfully in the park. It’s like I had to prove that I was not as chill as the people of Kreuzberg. So I walked a lot, every day. Which was great. But I carried that image of the two drunks at the gas station with me.

Having said all of this, energy is real and places, people, and activities affect it. I think of the energy level as looking like a stock chart: it ebbs and flows with highs and lows. And your energy capacity, your vessel so to speak, can expand and contract, which looks like upward or downward momentum.

This makes “How did this affect my energy” such a simple yet effective prompt for journaling. After meeting someone, ask if you feel encouraged and energized or drained and doubtful. It’s particularly valuable when there is a disconnect between thinking and feeling, in dating for example. Sometimes you want a relationship to work, yet the time together drains energy. That’s a big red flag.

People treat high-energy places like a fridge full of Red Bulls. Instead, they should think of intensity as something that can wear down and break. They should handle it with care, like a flask full of acid. If you don’t take a break and disengage, you turn into Nassim Taleb’s Thanksgiving Turkey. Every time the vessel is empty, you crush a red bull until one day the flask breaks and there’s acid all over your life (and not the fun kind). You feel the urge to drop out and open a surf shop in Bali when all you needed was a lazy summer in Berlin, far away from emails and social media, and the need to judge people who don’t rush.

I’m leaving Berlin early tomorrow morning for some family time. I will miss the food (got some amazing recommendations from local subscribers, thank you!), the bakery that offers nothing but different kinds of fresh Baklava (!), and the streets filled with cafes, laughter, and the chill people of Kreuzberg.

I will visit again, but I am unsure whether I would like to move here. The thing is, I do like places that boost my energy, that inspire me. I like being around passionate and driven people, dreamers who take action. There’s nothing wrong with a lazy day in the park. But a lazy life in the park is not for me.

Then again, maybe where I end up is not up to me. Perhaps I will just move wherever I fall in love again.

Have a beautiful weekend,

Frederik

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A few things I’ve enjoyed reading and listening to

I’ve been avoiding social media and podcasts but sometimes I can’t resist. Ti Morse interviewed Chris Power of manufacturing and defense startup Hadrian. Around minute 21, Power said something that stuck out to me: “Hadrian is an effort basically to Fourth Turning cycle, primarily so that the CCP doesn’t end up owning the world government, that is the entire purpose of this company.”

His argument is to prolong Pax Americana, wait out the global demographic collapse, win the space race, and thus ensure that human space colonies will be liberal and democratic rather than authoritarian.

It struck me that it would be completely uncouth for a German to think, let alone say, something like that, to display such a sense of agency and historical significance. Now, you can think he’s wrong about China and the Fourth Turning, you can believe his effort is doomed or that it’s all hyperbole, you can even argue that there never will be human colonization of space. But you can’t deny the striking sense of purpose and urgency. Irrespective of what happens, sustaining that kind of vision requires a place with the right energy.

A Stalled American Dream by Chris Arnade. Chris went on another walk and things didn’t turn out as expected. A raw account of pre-election America where things haven’t changed much.

Chris Bryant on the perpetual Twitter hot button: “Rich US Tourists Will Make Europeans Feel Poor.”

What’s keeping me busy on the road: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (David Milch’s mentor). I’m only a third into the book but so far it’s a spectacular read. Occasionally, Warren unleashes bits of mind-bending prose. Highly recommended.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

Also, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary which I picked up randomly as an old paperback without a cover. It’s a slow book in terms of story but richly rewarding in style. Flaubert’s metaphors are breathtakingly elegant.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

If writing feels like banging against an old kettle, as it often does for me, read some Flaubert and pay attention to the imagery he uses.

I’ve been procrastinating on making plans; instead, I went for long walks and explored new corners of New York. My favorite was Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. It’s perhaps the most peaceful spot I’ve visited in the city, sheltered from traffic noise by plenty of trees. Something odd happened that day, something that made me reconsider my plans.

I walked randomly among the stones and trees, following the cemetery’s path by feeling. A few times I stopped to investigate stones and plaques; the latter commemorated the Battle of Brooklyn which took place on the cemetery’s hill.

Towards the end of my walk, one spot drew my attention. It was a group of headstones, the Lickel Family. Behind them was a large slab in memory of William Lickel who died in action in World War 2 in Eschweiler, a small town near Aachen, Germany.

Something stirred in me that I couldn’t explain. I was far from home, yet was vividly connected to what it meant to be German, to be tied to a most ugly chapter of history. I felt overcome with sadness and prayed.

I’ve never been to Eschweiler. But someone in my family has.

About a decade ago, a man in my mother’s hometown cleared out an attic and discovered a box of old letters. It was Feldpost, letters sent home by my maternal grandfather, Opa Alois, and his brother during WW2. The man scanned the letters and turned them into a self-published book.

I didn’t know my grandfather well. He was born in 1916, and I in 1986. He had survived the war and stomach cancer. His hearing was bad. I remember visiting his Werkstatt, a cavern-like workshop in the basement filled with every wrench and file imaginable. But usually, we spent more time chatting with my grandmother while he took a nap after lunch or listened to music.

He passed away in 2005. When I was handed a copy of the Feldpost book during COVID, I gained a glimpse at a chapter of his life we’d never talked about. Somehow these letters felt significant, but I could never figure out why.

Last week, I pulled the book off the shelf again. Turns out that after years on the Eastern Front, my grandfather was around Eschweiler and Aachen in October and November 1944.

I have no idea what this means, whether it means anything at all. I’m not even sure why I’m writing this. I just can’t get it out of my head. Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never been to a cemetery in New York. Then, somehow it felt important. So I went. My upcoming trip will take me from Berlin to Bremen, then all the way south to Tübingen (followed by the Alps, probably). I have a train ticket almost straight past Aachen and Eschweiler.

Should I cancel the ticket and spend a day in Aachen instead? Should I try to visit Eschweiler? I don’t know. But the thought keeps returning and when that happens, when subtle feelings persist, I try to pay attention. Anything could be a step on the way south.

I plan on traveling a lot more and will try to regularly share what I’m up to and things I read that sparked curiosity or joy.

• Make time for Tom Morgan’s Accelerating Wisdom Series filled with potentially life-changing ideas — like attractors.

  • “The world is “combinatorially explosive”, which means there are too many options to test with trial and error. Attractors are the way evolution narrows our options to good choices. … we literally experience attractors as what we are curious about, drawn to, love or simply find interesting.”

• Also be sure to check out Ted Gioia’s new project: 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities.

The following observation on the nature of the writer is from novelist Frederick Forsyth’s memoir/collection of anecdotes Outsider (only recommended if you’re a Forsyth fan or spy novel enthusiast):

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The youngster is struggling. He’s trying to maintain confidence in his career. “How much longer can I take it,” he asks. While he is grinding and getting older, his friends “are all married, they're having kids. They all have houses…” Did Seinfeld compare his life, he wonders. Did Seinfeld ever doubt his choices?

I felt a mixed reaction. On the one hand, I could relate to the man’s anxiety, to the doubts assaulting his mind. I know what it feels like to walk a lonely road. You have to trust it will lead you where you’re supposed to go — and you try not to ruminate on the opportunity cost. The guy says he’s already 29. I’m older than that! I start to resent him and his ridiculous fears. What does he know? I fight off the feeling that it is I who should be worried.

Anyway. Seinfeld tells him his “favorite story about show business.” It’s about the Glenn Miller Orchestra on tour and what it means to walk the artist’s path. But that’s not what stuck with me.

I was struck by Seinfeld’s reaction. He is incredulous. “This has nothing to do with your friends,” he says. “This,” meaning standup comedy, “this is a special thing.”

But the man is too wrapped up in his experience to listen. He’s too eager to make the most of the moment to realize that he’s already there, backstage, doing comedy, talking to Jerry Seinfeld.

In 1993, Seinfeld sat down for an interview with Playboy magazine. By then, Seinfeld the show had become a runaway success and the comedian was “just hanging on to this thing.” Seinfeld shares his career philosophy and the metaphor I wish he’d shared with the young comedian.

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I’ve been writing a lot lately, but I’ve published nothing. Zero. Not a comfortable spot if you write for a living. At first, you want to publish anything to fix the situation. Then, like a rabbit staring at a snake, you stop moving. The silence grows. Nothing feels good enough to break it.

The days become circular. New morning, same you. You’d rather jump out of your own skin than revisit the ruins of your work. You stare at the page and slowly realize there’s something else going on. It’s not about two thousand words of truth, it’s a big loop coming to a close, a chapter ending. You have no idea what’s next. No wonder why you haven’t finished a goddamn thing.

Dante imagined hell as a sequence of circles, one for each kind of sin. I read his Divine Comedy in small bites, my eyes glazing over the medieval trivia. But maybe because it requires effort, the book’s metaphors stick. I don’t need to believe in medieval metaphysics to agree that hell is being stuck in the same loop forever, meeting yourself and your failings over and over again. Hell is thinking you want to change but avoiding the uncomfortable truths of your condition, the ones keeping you chained. In that sense, being in hell is a choice.

I’ve not been sleeping well either. Late at night, when my mind refuses to shut off and my place feels stuffy, I step onto the roof. Beer in hand I feel the breeze and listen to the city’s steady hum. Looking down on 14th Street’s pizza-munching drunks, I wonder why I’m here. I cling to this place as if letting go meant drifting away into infinite nothingness. Yet it no longer feels like I belong.

Joseph Campbell warned that those who refuse their call to adventure live in a “wasteland of dry stones.” Their houses become labyrinths where they hide from the Minotaur behind “cyclopean walls” of “boredom, hard work, or ‘culture.’” I could feel those cyclopean walls all around me. Right in front of me, blocking my sight. Behind my forehead, crushing my thoughts. But I could hear no call.

The Divine Comedy starts with Dante being stuck, lost in the woods of midlife. The poet Virgil is sent to be his guide and together they venture into the underworld. I was hoping for something like that — a guide, a vision, a sign. That’s how all of this started, with my longing for the vivid clarity of Paul Atreides in this year’s Dune 2:

The visions are clear now. I see possible futures, all at once. Our enemies are all around us, and in so many futures they prevail. But I do see a way, there is a narrow way through.

All possible futures at once? Where could I sign up? It sounded like he was talking about my favorite waitbutwhy image.

“We think a lot about those black lines,” Tim Urban wrote about his creation, “forgetting that it’s all still in our hands.” True, but you only get to live one. To me, those infinite paths felt like a burden, an impossible paradox of choice. If Campbell was right, most were cobwebbed hallways of avoiding life’s calling.

There’s a twist to Paul’s story. In the south of Arrakis, the fundamentalist Fremen tribes wait for their Messiah. Paul refuses to go. His dreams are filled with death and destruction, a galaxy laid to waste. “All my visions lead to horror,” he says and treats the prophecy as a dangerous Bene Gesserit psyop. Paul refuses his call until the Harkonnen launch a devastating attack and leave him no choice.

His resistance reminded me of a piece I wrote earlier this year. I had wondered if fear was the guide to our potential. What if the unconscious excitement of facing one’s destiny manifested as resistance and anxiety? It sounded good on paper but instead of facing my resistance, I fled from fear of failure into frantic activity. I stayed in my circle and tended to the symptoms.

I tried all kinds of remedies for my writing and sleep. Walks and workouts. Meditation, stimulants, and supplements. Journaling, breathwork, prayer, you name it. I worked with a writing coach. Sharp guy, a reader recommended him. After a few sessions, even the coach threw up his hands and asked for more time. There was nothing to be done. I had glanced into the mirror of my soul, now I was avoiding what I had seen.

At the bottom of hell’s pit, Dante and Virgil find a frozen lake with the fallen angel Lucifer stuck at the center. The two poets approach the devil and climb downward on his furry side. Then, suddenly, they climb upward.

When we had reached the point at which the thigh
revolves, just at the swelling of the hip,
my guide, with heavy strain and rugged work,
reversed his head to where his legs had been
and grappled on the hair, as one who climbs —
I thought that we were going back to Hell. — Canto 34

Inversion happens there, at the center “to which all weight is drawn,” furthest from the light.

Inversion happens after Dante visits all circles, after he meets all shadow aspects.

To break a circle, to leave hell, we must face our truths rotting in the dark, the ones that keep us frozen.

In the summer of 2020, I was fresh out of a job and staring at the cyclopean walls of New York during the COVID lockdown. I decided to return to Germany and leave finance behind. But also, I went on a last-minute date. We had wine in the darkness of Bryant Park and celebrated two months like they were our last on earth. I fell in love right before I left, only I couldn’t admit that to myself or her.

A few weeks later, I explored a little forest on the edge of my hometown. I was on the phone with her and, inspired by the trees, explained that I wanted to keep traveling. Somehow that felt important, to walk more and get a sense of the world and who I was. At that moment, I could feel something shift. I wasn’t coming back — time for her to cut the strings connecting our hearts.

But I did return. And I never walked until I found myself. I had to go for another loop first.

I walked a lot that fall. I cleared my head one hike at a time. One day, I sat on a lonely bench, just me and one thought. Writing. There seemed to be a path forward in that. That winter, it dawned on me that I missed New York, my friends, and, well, her. So, I returned.

Four years later, during a dark night of the soul, I thought I’d left that loop behind. Pustekuchen. I was still desperately clinging to a patchwork of labels that, stitched together, made the straightjacket of my identity.

For example, I quickly replaced “investor” with “writer.” Who would I be if I wasn’t writing? I don’t know. When I was in doubt, I tried to write more. At least it affirmed my sense of self.

Who would I be if I wasn’t a New Yorker? I don’t know. But I let this city dictate how much I needed to earn. I created the conditions that made it difficult to experiment, then complained about being stuck. Silly me.

Finance was a world I knew quite well. Who would I be if I explored other stories? I don’t know. Out of my depth, for starters.

The more desperately I held on to what I knew, the more I walked in old familiar loops of perfectionism and isolation. I closed the door and chose books over connection. I felt more comfortable being a student. There’s no risk in that. The teacher is the one who has to expose themselves and conversation, not reading, demands vulnerability.

“What can be immobilizingly difficult,” Gabor Maté wrote about ADHD in Scattered Minds, “is to arouse the brain’s motivational apparatus in the absence of personal interest.” My work was born in a wave of curiosity about the outsiders who made a fortune in markets. Unfortunately, curiosity does not come with an instruction manual. And I could feel that I had ventured too far from its essence. I was starting to hide what made me feel alive because it didn’t fit the paradigm of identity. I found myself at the intersection of money, creativity, spirituality, and inner work and I am still not quite sure what the mission is. I have some ideas but no certainty.

“We start by being made by others,” Sartre once said, “and then we remake ourselves.” He felt we are “condemned to” this freedom, that it was “not a cheerful thing.” Life can feel that way, as if freedom was a burden. You walk the wasteland, trying to figure it out one day at a time, only to wake up and realize you’re not getting anywhere.

But if the future is a big pile of “I don’t know,” that is the good kind of discomfort, the one to walk toward. That uncertainty is filled with potential if we face what holds us and allow ourselves to let go.

Campbell’s call to adventure, Paul’s journey south, Dante’s circles, it’s all the same idea. It has nothing to do with vision or clarity — I had been distracted by Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic genius. It is an inner sense of direction pointing to the place that demands our attention yet creates resistance. These are metaphors for the path leading lower, then higher.

I believe we all have such a place, a ‘south’. It is the whispered thought, the dream we can’t bury, yet don’t dare to face. It lives in the emotional echo of stories, songs, and images that refuse to fade. It is the seemingly inhospitable destination that haunts our imagination. Where others see a barren deathtrap, we sense the water of life. There, the old is sacrificed and we are remade.

“Tell me, my dear Baron, have you investigated the southern polar regions of Arrakis?”

The Baron stared up at the Emperor, shocked by the change of subject. “But … well, you know, Your Majesty, the entire region is uninhabitable, open to wind and worm. There's not even any spice in those latitudes. … It's a place where men cannot survive for long.” — Dune, Frank Herbert

“We have two lives; the second begins when we realise we only have one.” — Confucius

I believe Campbell was right about the consequences of refusing the call. However, I don’t think the call is a singular event. To worry about the paths not taken is to build a mental maze of regret and perish in it.

If you ask me, the second life begins when we face our south, when we allow the idea that there is a meaningful path we can walk right now.

Success is not about the destination but the beginning. If walking seemed impossible yesterday, taking the first step is a victory already. Failure is not to get lost in the desert, but to meet ourselves when the circle of life closes and to realize we’re still stuck in the frozen lake.

Our second life begins when we stop waiting for clarity, put faith in our hearts to guide us, feel the sun on our faces, and walk.

“The ancients lived their symbols. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert. There they found the abundance of visions, the fruits of the desert, the wondrous flowers of the soul.” — The Red Book, Carl Jung

After learning about Ted Gioia’s Lifetime Reading Plan, I started tracking books and writers I was curious about. At first, I felt like a kid in a candy store and carried home stacks of books from the library. But slowly, book by book, I realized how much I had been shivering in the shadow of my own ignorance. I saw the outline of a mountain range of great works, so vast and tall I could never climb them all.

“The Canon's true question remains,” literary critic Howard Bloom wrote in The Western Canon, “What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read, this late in history?” Life is not long enough “to read more than a selection of the great writers” and he concludes that “who reads must choose.” I love to read, but having to choose is depressing.

Gioia recently discussed his daily commitment to reading (and listening) to great books and music. Over the decades, he mastered the canon and developed a unique voice as a writer and cultural commentator. I now appreciate how important it is to have the right “fuel” for writing, as Gioia put it. At the same time, I had to be reminded that reading FOMO is a trap.

Earlier this week, I sat at JFK waiting for my flight to visit friends on Martha's Vineyard. My backpack was stuffed with two paper books, my Kindle, a journal, two notebooks, and a laptop bursting with PDFs. By the evening, after a day of hiking and walking the beach, we were sitting around the fire, talking, laughing, and watching the embers glow in the darkness. The books were a distant memory. And that’s okay.

Books that have stood the test of time are an antidote to the noisy and fleeting present. They can serve as guides through life and become rich soil for the seeds of our creativity. But a frantic attempt to catch up would lead away from life’s other sparks — conversation, travel, and direct experiences. Sitting with the canon is a solitary journey and it should not turn into an escape from direct engagement with life.

Among all the excitement about Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare, I forgot my north star: read to nourish your soul. Read to be curious, read for the splendor of great prose, read to challenge yourself, but, above all, read for joy.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people -whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations. They are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. — Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

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Five things I enjoyed recently that felt worth sharing.

Three perspectives on the canon:

Podcast: Ted Gioia with David Perell

A thought-provoking conversation about writing, creativity, culture, and a commitment to deep reading in the age of infinite distraction (Highlights via David Perell). Ted immersed himself in the ‘canon’ of writing and music and built a unique lattice of cultural knowledge. Ted also explains how he uses models across domains (biology to business to music!) and dreams as the last refuge of out-of-body experience (aka the night shift). Dig deeper: Ted’s Lifetime Reading Plan on his substack.

Ted’s writing prompt: (1) buy a blank journal that you keep private, and (2) write about something that happened at the end of every day with complete honesty. Do this for thirty days then revisit what you’ve observed.

Substack: Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley

An exploration of literature, the desire to be original, and the weight of the past in the world of tech.1

The strongest minds in modern technology might best be understood, surprisingly, by reading literary criticism.

The piece is a follow-up to Luke Burgis’s excellent essay The Three City Problem which contrasts Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley as incarnations of three cultural camps: faith, reason, and techno-materialism.

The extent to which people begin clustering in one of the three cities—the extent to which they isolate, fortify the walls, and close the gates—is the extent to which our culture suffers.

Substack: Don’t read the canon

A different perspective offered by River Kenna which speaks to the seasonality of life. After a phase of obsession, healthy distance and discernment emerge.

Reading ‘The Canon’ is a lot like traveling to see ‘The Wonders of the World.’ A couple of them will undoubtedly impress you, but on the whole, you’re going to spend a lot of time either a) disappointed in yet another overcrowded overpriced tourist trap … or b) so caught up in your knowledge about this Wonder … that you barely even see the thing itself; you spend the whole time in your head.

Book: William Zinsser: On Writing Well

My new favorite book on how to write nonfiction. If you’re drawn to write more, get this one. Read for clear advice, crisp prose, and countless recommendations of who to read next.

Quote: The product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. … What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field.

This is the personal transaction that’s at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks to “personalize” the author. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.

Substack: Why Everything is Becoming a Game

A deep investigation of the gamification of our culture, which Gurwinder believes is “no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society.”

Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were trapped in a cage — they had nothing else to do. But you are still free. Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide open world to create your own.

We talked about Jerry Seinfeld’s commitment to consistency to support the path to mastery. Every day after finishing his writing practice, Seinfeld marked the calendar with an X. Once you have a calendar sheet filled with X’s, “you don’t want to break the streak.” I’ve used this to get consistent with meditation, logging 400+ days on the Insight Timer app.

This year, I’ve been looking for other practices to bring rhythm, motion, and ritual to my days and help me gain focus, move through darkness, and find clarity. My favorite practices are dead simple, don’t get boring, and don’t build tolerance. On the contrary, they seem to work better over time: walks, meditation, working out, time in nature, naps, stimulating conversation. When in doubt, the answer always seems to be ‘more’ (well, perhaps not for naps).

Recently, I’ve started doing silent walks. A few loops at my local park followed by a stroll through the city — no music, no podcasts, and my ears protected by ‘high fidelity’ earplugs you’d wear at a concert or club (they reduce the volume but don’t muffle everything). This has been a revelation: precious inner stillness among the sirens, the jackhammering, and the hissing engines of the great machine that we call an economy.

I got the idea from one of my sound meditation teachers, the wonderful Alexandre Tannous, who has dedicated his life to work at the intersection of acoustics and consciousness (if you ever get the chance to hear him play, go!). If you live in a city, Alexandre even recommends sleeping with earplugs.

Anyway, my walks have turned into a peaceful inner oasis amidst the buzz of the human beehive. Sometimes I consciously choose to listen to an audiobook or music, but I no longer default to distractions. The walks become a walking meditation, a space for the creative night shift (I record ideas with Otter.ai).1

One thing that happens at the intersection of stillness and consistency is increased awareness. This felt like the first year in my life that I truly witnessed the arrival of spring. Every morning, I noticed a different corner turning green, a new kind of flower blossoming, another layer of branches sprouting. Each day I felt surprised by how much had happened in the short while I’d been gone.

Jonathan Haidt named “finding awe in nature” one of the core six spiritual practices and assigned his NYU undergrad class to take ‘awe walks’: slow walks, anywhere outside, without their phones. He called the students’ written reflections “among the most beautiful I’ve seen in my 30 years as a professor.

He points out the work by social psychologist Dacher Keltner who wrote that “awe shifts us from a competitive, dog-eat-dog mindset to perceive that we are part of networks of more interdependent, collaborating individuals. We sense that we are part of a chapter in the history of a family, a community, a culture.”

That’s exactly how I feel among the birds and trees, open to the small wonders of the world — and especially so in contrast with the sharp edges and noises of the urban environment.

Every morning, you step into the garden of your mind.

Some days it may feel a little barren. Trust me, I have moments when I tap my head and ask, ‘is this thing on?’ That’s the garden in winter. What kind of seeds you plant at that time matters. What kind of thoughts you pursue matters. Whether you open space for new plants and new ideas, matters.

Keep showing up. Keep tending to your garden. Add an X to the calendar every time you do.

One day, spring will arrive.

One day, you will find yourself surrounded by flourishing, blossoming, and lush colors.

One day, you will look at your garden in awe.

A few seeds for Sunday:

Gurwinder: Why Everything is Becoming a Game. A fantastic essay that touches on dopamine culture and “the creeping phenomenon of gamification” which makes us “act against [our] own interests.”

Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide-open world to create your own.

Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation (New Yorker). This reminded me of young Warren Buffett who had the same combination of ruthless drive and knack for games. If I ran a hedge fund, I'd hire a bunch of these kids, provide them with infrastructure and a profit share, and unleash them on markets. Guess I just re-invented the pod shop.

Some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’ ” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations.

Jerry Seinfeld’s movie promotion tour: New Yorker and GQ interview. We already talked about Seinfeld’s emphasis on mastery — “I don’t believe in being good at a lot of things—or even more than one.”

He also made an interesting point about money and culture picked up by Ben Carlson:

SEINFELD: In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle. I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. … the eighties was the first time that young guys could make a lot of money fast. Never existed before. Rich guys were Aristotle Onassis, Andrew Carnegie, shipping, iron. You couldn’t make a lot of money fast in those days. And it has poisoned our culture to this day.

Technology and finance have indeed made it possible for people to get rich fast and while still young (and with little starting capital). Buffett was once asked why his moat persisted and his answer was that nobody wanted to get rich slowly. But mastery takes patience, something that Seinfeld understands well.

You must master waiting as a comedian. You must be able to just wait, comfortably. 'The show's gonna be delayed a half hour,' you just go 'fine'. 'The plane's gonna be delayed two hours,' fine. 'Career is gonna be delayed five years,' fine. You gotta be able to wait. — Seinfeld on an old episode of 60 Minutes

Then again, he also falls into the trap of idolizing the early days, the simple days, when it was all about the craft and not the money.

“You wake up in the morning and you paddle out. You make whatever little money you need to survive. That seems like the greatest life to me. … You want to be broke. You want it to be all you’ve got. That’s when life is great.”

That’s of course a thing you say after you’ve made the money.

Happy Sunday!

You don’t have to venture into spiritual spaces to feel the collective yearning for community, values, and shared rituals. It fuels our obsession with sports, concerts, self-help seminars, and even shows up during college protests (watch the kids get together to dance and chant). In Omaha, even the capitalist hyper-rationalists do it.

Derek Thompson recently wrote about America’s churches emptying which didn’t surprise me one bit. I grew up in Germany, baptized protestant but agnostic from the get-go. Religion felt like old news, an outdated and unnecessary remnant of darker ages. The churches had been emptying for as long as I could remember. It seemed like the US was just catching up with the rest of the secularizing West.

And why wouldn’t the modern, educated, and independent consumer leave behind their society’s antiquated religious institutions?

I can think of a laundry list of issues beyond mere lack of faith — a rejection of institutions that are too rigid, too stale and corrupt, whose language is too antiquated, and whose values may seem outdated. Why bother? Does consumer culture not teach us that we have ample choice? The market, we are told, will provide a solution, particularly if we’re willing to pay up. And Sunday mornings are for brunch anyway. Off we go in search of something that better suits our personal vision of life.

The rapidly growing crowd of the “spiritual but not religious” (myself included) picks through a buffet of global philosophies and traditions and visits retreats and gurus from Tulum to Bali. Assemble your meaningful life à la carte. Atheists and agnostics crowd into ‘secular cathedrals’ including concerts, conferences, self-help seminars, raves, festivals, and retreats.

Would you buy a ticket to attend church? Of course not. But would you pay to re-create the sense of meaning that religious service used to offer your ancestors? I don’t have to ask. We’re doing it already. The evidence is all around us. While the old churches may be emptying, the new ones can charge surge pricing.

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In his new book about the impact of smartphones and social media, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt outlined six universal spiritual practices, namely “shared sacredness; embodiment; stillness, silence, and focus; self-transcendence, being slow to anger, quick to forgive; and finding awe in nature.” These spiritual practices are the “opposite in almost every respect” of life in the digital realm which is “disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.”

While the majority can be cultivated in solitude, shared sacredness and embodiment (think singing, dancing, shared meals) require community, space, and a shared calendar.

I didn’t grow up consciously practicing any of these — or with a strong sense of belonging to a community. I didn’t feel connected to my German hometown in its picturesque valley. I didn’t care for its church or its various clubs. This didn’t change in college or on Wall Street. A lot of ‘community’ seemed like people getting drunk together. I figured it just wasn’t for me and my social life revolved around my marriage, family, a few close friends, and the online world of fellow weirdos.

Then my life turned upside down. I got divorced and left my career to become a self-employed writer working from home. A lot of my relationships fell away and I fell down the spiritual rabbit hole until I hit my dark night of the soul. Suddenly, I grappled with both loneliness and a desire for deeper, more meaningful connections. On my journey, I’ve seen a variety of communities and spaces and often experienced a shared yearning among the “churchless” to recapture what is being lost.

Most recently, I visited two sacred spaces: a Zen monastery in upstate New York and an Episcopal church in Manhattan. The church was gorgeous, but let’s just say there was more than ample space for more believers to join the service. The monastery, on the other hand, was filled with spiritual seekers looking for meaning and community outside their culture’s mainstream (and, as if to illustrate my point, is housed in what used to be a Lutheran summer camp).

I’d ventured there in search of stillness but to my surprise experienced the full range of Haidt’s six practices. The days were structured around the core practice of meditation yet included plenty of shared rituals, including bows and prostrations, chanting liturgy, lighting incense, shared meals, and work done in silence. (Though ironically, despite being surrounded by lush forests, there was no emphasis on the awe of nature. Talk about missing the forest for the trees!)

It had been a long time since I’d experienced the “smells and bells” of traditional places of worship and each space resonated deeply with me. This brings me to why I believe we will see both hockey stick growth of new communities and disappointment in what they can provide.

I expect rapid growth of niche communities, events, and gurus answering the yearning for meaning and shared experiences among the wasteland of dopamine culture — everything from Discord channels and WhatsApp groups to your favorite podcasters hosting salons, anything from “alpha male camps” to furry cons and psychedelic retreats. And yet, these are unlikely to fill the void of what we are leaving behind.

Haidt pointed out “one of the founding insights of sociology,” referencing Émile Durkheim, namely that strong communities arise from more than mere assembly and communication. Strong communities are built on “powerful collective experiences” which lift people up, “into the realm of the sacred, where the self recedes and collective interests predominate.”

Sacred space allows us to transcend the limitations of self and it is this shared shift in focus from the profane to the sacred (the collective and the divine) that infuses the community with meaning.

In other words, we crave not just connection but a shared experience of transcendence, a lifting of the oppressive obsession with ego which our culture reinforces at every step.

Unfortunately, trying to buy this experience represents an inherent contradiction. The church, the temple, the mosque, and the monastery are inconvenient because they cannot be purchased with the fruit of our labor. They require submission to their customs, ideas, and calendars.

How much more convenient to purchase access to a variety of communities whose events and communication we can access on demand and in a way that fits into our busy schedules. Here, our hyper-individualistic lives are not disturbed. Here, we remain in control. But here, we don’t transcend. Here, we remain consumers.

Peter Kingsley perfectly captured this confusion of spirituality:

We’ve come to this crazy, ludicrous situation where we’ve actually come to believe that spirituality is about me and my progress and my spiritual evolution and my growth and that is a complete corruption of what spirituality is. And it makes me just want to give up and stop saying we’re doing anything, especially in America because it is so horrifically perverted. Spirituality is about the culture we live in.

Spiritual or secular, purchasing the experience of community leads to a kind of anti-transcendence in which we can at most lose ourselves temporarily. Afterward, we return to our lives of increasing atomization and digital disintermediation (also known as post-retreat depression).

By its very nature, the space of sacred community is not for sale. It comes at the price of making an offering from our hearts, not our wallets.

People spend thousands to travel to Omaha not so much for Buffett’s wisdom (the meeting is being live-streamed after all) but to reinforce their bond with community.

“Maybe religion, for all of its faults,” Thompson writes, “works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.”

Thompson and Haidt, an agnostic and an atheist, see what ails the soul of our culture yet can’t point to a solution. Neither can I. This is a spiritual crisis that will require a spiritual answer. I don’t expect it to be a widespread retvrn to the faith and institutions of old. Perhaps a variety of traditions will fill the void (again, college campuses may be an important petri dish to observe). Whether a new vision will take their place, or when, is anyone’s guess.

In the long run, I believe secular societies face an existential question: can they re-create what religion used to provide? Or is a culture that loses its spiritual core destined to be replaced by a more vigorous one — either through an internal spiritual revival or by vanishing in a demographic collapse?

I believe we deserve more than the kinds of spaces that can be created by commerce (though they have to be financed, of course). I believe we deserve spaces that fill our hearts and where we fill the hearts of others, spaces that elevate us not just temporarily but throughout life, by tethering us to a shared purpose, an eternal orientation towards something greater than the individual.

Whoever finds the answer to this riddle — whomever the answer will be revealed to — will find themselves with the cornerstone for the new cathedral. And I hope they will make it a gorgeous one.

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