If you’ve ever been whitewater rafting, you might remember the safety briefing before you hit the rapids. The lead guide, probably a sun-leathered dude in Chacos named Dave, explains what to do if the raft flips and you end up in the water. Look for me, he tells you. I’ll be pointing in a direction. Always swim that way.

You reach the gnarliest section of rapids, the part you paid for. The raft flips. You’re tossed in the river. The life preserver pops you to the surface, but the whitewater is deafening, and you’re disoriented. You don’t have time to think. All you can do is find your guide standing in one of the other rafts, pointing. He’s pointing toward safety. Usually to the shore, but sometimes away from a danger you cannot even see.

What the guide never does is point in the direction you should avoid. He doesn’t gesture at the rocks and shout, “Not there!” And good thing, because under that kind of duress, your brain can’t compute a negative; it will hear “rocks” and swim toward them. So the guide only ever points towards where you need to go.

In outdoorsmen’s lingo, this is called point positive.

And like many elegant concepts from people who spend their lives in moving water, its simplicity hides an enormous depth.

Point positive has an opposite, and it often explains why we feel stuck in life.

Malcolm Ocean, the writer and systems designer, coined a pair of terms I frequently use in my work: awayness and towardsness. They describe two fundamental motivations that shape our lives. Awayness is wanting to move away from something without having a clear destination. Humans are wired with this impulse, but it has a fatal design flaw.

If all you know is what you don’t want, you can move in literally any direction.

On the river, this is how people drown. Away from the rocks could mean toward the falls, and away from the falls could mean into a current that takes you somewhere worse. Every direction feels equally urgent, but none of them feel useful. So you just get carried by whatever current is strongest.

If you start paying attention to how your friends and loved ones talk about what they want, you’ll find that almost all of it is awayness. You’ll hear things like, I don’t want to do this mindless job anymore. I can’t date one more person with no emotional range. I don’t want to be priced out of the economy and made irrelevant by AI. I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Etcetera.

You will hear people trying, with whatever grace they can muster, to stop hurting. But it’s a trap. What you focus on, you get more of.

Point at the rocks long enough and you’ll swim right into them.

Without a direction, you meet your defaults.

So much of our lives are organized around awayness—around just wanting to get away from feeling something—that we default to whatever we were taught to want.

I have, occupationally speaking, a front row seat to this. Someone comes to me wanting out of their job that looks perfect on paper, their marriage, a company they built from nothing, you name it, and they can talk for an hour about all the reasons why they need to go. It’s all awayness. And without a direction from somewhere deeper than conditioning, the result is dissatisfaction, depression, addiction, and alienation. That’s why they show up in my office in the first place.

So when I ask them okay, but what do you want instead, they often stall, and their body language shifts—a tell that they’re encountering the unknown. And this happens so often, applied to virtually every life decision from career to kids, that I’ve started giving people a cheesy exercise: create two columns, what you want and what you don’t want. For the don’t column, people are poets.

The want column, it turns out, is the whole game.

When I first met one of my mentors, before we’d even gotten through introductions, he asked me:

What is your deepest aspiration in this life?

Besides being a hell of a way to start a relationship, the question moved me so deeply that I started asking it of everyone. And most people will just stare at me for a minute, because nobody typically asks this, and then say something like, I don’t know, that’s a damn good question.1

Some will go to the surface: retire early, find their person, start an impactful company, or make enough money to go off-grid and exit the rat race. But a surprising number of people, if you give them a moment, will go straight to the big stuff. They want their lives to be vehicles for Love, Peace, Belonging, Truth, or Freedom. The single words you arrive at if you keep asking what’s underneath your top-level motivation, and underneath that one, and so forth.2

And honestly, you probably don’t need to dig that hard to find yours. If you slow down right now, while reading this, you likely already know what you want on a deeper level, at least partially.

Maybe it’s Love. Or for things to feel a bit more Okay. Maybe there’s one thing you’re struggling with, and you can feel its opposite calling you. Whatever comes up, own it. I cannot stress how important it is to own it, because we all have an allergic tendency to shy away from the things we want most.3

Say you want to make a lot of money and retire early—don’t pretend you don’t because it’s not “spiritual” enough. Instead, ask yourself what’s underneath that desire. If you made your money and retired early, how would you feel? Now, see if you can feel that right now, however much of it is available, and sink into it, or let it wash over every part of you. The feeling, without the story attached, will be something fundamental—one of those single words.

Whatever came up here is your towardsness. Let it take you somewhere.

Just know this: you’ll mistake awayness for towardsness if your motivator is escape.

When I was in the throes of my addiction, my entire life was organized around avoiding the insufferable pain of opiate withdrawal. The cruelest trick of addiction is that it mimics towardsness so convincingly. You have a mission—in my case, I told myself it was peak performance and spiritual transcendence—and you pursue it with incredible urgency. But no matter what you do, the destination ever-elusively recedes. Because the engine is built on escape.4

This is why the most dangerous form of awayness is the one that feels like purpose. You can build an entire career on awayness disguised as purpose and never notice. It’s what drives most of productivity culture, and why so many successful people feel empty at the top.

But the most pervasive form of awayness? The voice inside your head, convincing you it’s always helping.

If you read my last essay on breaking addiction to thinking, you know where this goes. You feel something you’d rather not feel, which could be anything—a tightness in the chest, the particular nausea of having said the “wrong” thing to a friend, a wave of jealousy you thought you had outgrown, the creeping sense that you’re behind at life—and instead of staying with it, you retreat into the safety of your head. Maybe distracting yourself by gaming out scenarios for how to get ahead, or building a case for why you were, obviously, right. Often to the point of obsession.

This is awayness dressed in its Sunday best. Of all the addictions I’ve known, and I’ve known a few, overthinking is the one that hides best. It feels productive. But strip it down and it’s just escape. And escape is not a direction.

A bunch of people reached out to me after that essay, saying some version of, This changed my life, and, I’m working on not thinking so much. I love that, and I want to gently offer: that’s only half the equation.

The other half is having something to move toward, rather than defaulting to overthinking.

So when you catch yourself getting pulled into it, you pause and feel what’s in your body. This is attentional training. You’re not trying to get rid of the thoughts or make them a problem. You’re just trying to stop the impulse to immediately escape them, to let them be there while your attention shifts toward what you actually want.

Practice this enough times, and your nervous system rewires. The engine shifts from escape to intention. You begin to open to the intuitive gifts of the Tao, or whatever you want to call it, slowly attuning to it, until it leads your life.

Fair warning: even the practices designed to train your attention and free you from escape can land you on the left side of the diagram. For years, I meditated with an away orientation without realizing it. I was trying to stop being distracted by obsessive thoughts of self-importance, and I got quite good at it—shifting my state of consciousness into ethereal realms, moving subtle energy in my body, or catching a thought and fleeing into presence. Some of that was genuinely skillful.

But underneath, especially when I was tired or uncomfortable or not feeling “dialed,” there was a rejection of my direct experience—the don’t want column applied to my own bodymind. And that’s a hard thing to catch, because negation dressed up as transcendence can look an awful lot like progress.5

The solution was pointing myself toward a deeper motivation. Each time before I formally meditate, I invoke bodhichitta, which is basically the Buddhist intention to awaken the heart for the benefit of all beings. Sometimes I will say it as per tradition. I’ll often add my own specifics, too—may I be more patient and loving as a partner and father, fiercer and more truthful in how I lead my groups. But most times it’s more of a vague gesture toward awakeness or radiance or, honestly, something I can’t even describe, just a pull toward freedom of the infinite, and that becomes the attractor. It magnetizes everything, becoming the current that carries practice on and off the cushion. And over time, the structural gravity of my life.

This is point positive, applied to consciousness.

Whatever you can clearly intend, consciousness will bend toward.

If you can imagine something—an outcome, a circumstance, a feeling—on a certain level, it already exists. So if you want to point your life toward Peace, Love, Aliveness, Connection, or Healing—you can just… do that. Trust me, it will guide you. And if that sounds like manifestation, that’s because it is, just not the kind you’re used to hearing about.6

Say you point your attention toward Love. Inevitably, you start noticing love in more places, sometimes gaudy and obvious, sometimes subtle. It was always there, the intention just primed you for it. Towardsness, ironically, doesn’t involve constructing anything new. It just changes what you notice. And the more you play with this—and it is play—the more something reaches back.

You discover you can participate in the direction of your life with an ease that would have seemed impossible when you were just reacting to whatever current was strongest.

I used to think the path meant giving things up. Yet the further I go, the more capacity I find to move toward what I want. Because what you actually want from anything is the feeling behind it. Get clear on that, and life tends to meet you halfway.

This is how surrender and agency merge—you go far enough downstream, and you realize you and the current want the same thing. You always did. And there’s your guide, still standing in the raft, zinc-smeared arm extended, pointing. But what he’s pointing at is right where you are.

If you find value in my writing, the best way to support it is by becoming a paid subscriber. It’s a bet on more ambitious essays like this, and me never needing to post on LinkedIn ever again.

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Overthinking workshop: I’m hosting another online workshop with my friends at Aurora on breaking your addiction to overthinking on May 22nd. Register here.

Work with me: I combine executive coaching with somatic therapy to help leaders build a life around towardsness. Learn more here.

Groups: Join one of my men’s groups, or come to a June 4-7th retreat in upstate NY, co-led with friends. Reply to this email to learn more.

If there’s been a throughline to my work over the last decade, it’s that addiction gets subtler the further you follow it. First I had to get sober from the obvious “bad” stuff, the narcotic chemicals that nearly killed me. Then I had to reckon with the legal drugs like Twitter, Instagram, PornHub, and yes, The New York Times politics section, which I used to read cover to cover as if it were oxygen. After that came other socially sanctioned drugs I had long mistaken for purely virtuous: achievement, ideology, productivity, optimization, and having a sharp take on everything.

I started calling it “modern addiction” when it became clear that this wasn’t just about me and a few other broken individuals, but a pattern that defines contemporary life. We are, all of us, drawn into dopamine-driven loops that gradually narrow our perspective and agency around whatever helps us avoid pain, a dynamic called reciprocal narrowing.1

What surprised me most, though, was where the road eventually led. If you keep tracing addiction to its root, if you keep asking what engine is driving the meta-engine, you arrive somewhere far more fundamental than heroin or TikTok.

You arrive at the addiction to thinking itself.

We may be the first generation in history rewarded for maintaining a nonstop internal commentary—curating who we are for an imaginary audience, staying informed, and responding in real-time online. Now we’re building machines that can out-think us at literally everything, and the reaction has mostly been to double down… think faster, stay sharper, keep up. Few are asking whether we should instead be strengthening the capacities that machines will never have, the ones that dwell entirely below thought. But when mental activity has become synonymous with intelligence, even maturity, it’s nearly impossible to see that thinking itself might be operating as a dependency.

And yet addiction to thought does not look dramatic. It’s elusively ordinary.

If you’re anything like me, it looks like rehearsing how you will respond to a text from a friend you want to impress, lying in bed replaying something slightly dumb you said six hours ago, pre-adjusting your personality before a work event, or zoning out at dinner while strategizing your next career move as your kid and wife sit right in front of you—and then she asks you what you think, and you nod along, having no fucking clue what she just said.

The tricky part is that none of this looks like addiction. A good therapist might diagnose it as anxiety. Most people, if pressed, will say something like, “that’s just how my brain works,” as if it’s a personality trait. And it passes for being a responsible, informed, “together” adult.

None of this is an indictment of the mind, which is extraordinary and has built civilizations and, on a few occasions, saved my life. I’m very pro-brain. The problem is not that we think, but the compulsive way we think, and the fact that we cannot simply let our minds rest. For most of us, thoughts do not arise and pass as Eckhart Tolle assures us they should. They obsessively loop, sometimes at 2:17 a.m.

And like any addiction, there is a hit. You replay the conversation, and for a brief moment, there’s relief, the feeling that you’re on top of it. In control. But the relief never lasts. The body is still left with whatever sensations you were trying not to feel. The uncertainty returns as discomfort in the body, and the mind reaches again, this time for another thought, sure that one last round of analysis will settle it. And this all happens at the speed of thought, which is to say, instantly, before you realize it’s happened.

Over time, the field of experience narrows until the story narrated, on loop in your head, feels more real, more important, than the miracle of life unfolding directly in front of you.

It took me roughly a decade of enthusiastic self-destruction, followed by an unexpected brush with the Absolute, and then another decade of recovery, including working in the addiction space myself, to realize it’s addiction all the way down.

We change the object, but keep the mechanism.

The object shifts from opiates to Instagram to productivity, but the move is always the same: escape the feeling and reach for the next thing that promises relief. Thinking is just a higher-status version of this. It grants you the feeling of control.

The thing is, the nervous system cannot distinguish whether the object you’re reaching for is a substance or a thought. The underlying physiology remains the same: the body tightens. Next time you catch your thoughts racing, notice what your brow, jaw, shoulders, or belly are doing. Even if it’s subtle, some part of you is bracing.

But once that compulsion to think through everything relaxes, you find there’s something wiser and more effortlessly responsive that’s been running the show. A way of being in the world, amid all the trappings of modernity, that doesn’t revolve around constant internal commentary. And it doesn’t render you dull or passive. If anything, you move through life more spontaneously, more lovingly, more playfully, and, somewhat annoyingly, more effectively.

You trust yourself to respond to the text when it comes, rather than rehearsing it. You let the dumb thing you said six hours ago dissolve without a post-mortem. You walk into the work event without pre-adjusting anything and speak from the core of your being. At dinner, career domination thoughts might still come and go in the distant background, but you’re there, and the people you love can feel it. You start to see that much of what you’d been strategizing can, and does, happen all on its own.

This is, more or less, what every serious contemplative tradition has been describing for thousands of years.

It just took me an embarrassingly long time to actually grok it. During my first hatha yoga teacher training, we did a sutra study with Edwin Bryant, who wrote the definitive Western commentary on the text. We spent an entire day on this one line:

Yoga citta vritti nirodha.

This is Sutra 1.2, the opening salvo of the entire tradition. It means: yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. Everything else—the postures, breathwork, ethical precepts—is just preparation for releasing your grip on mental noise.

The tradition I’ve spent even more time in, Buddhism, basically says the same thing with more mechanical precision. The Pali word for clinging, upādāna, means fuel.2 We keep feeding the fire of thought with our grasping—at feeling good, not feeling bad, being right, and the story of who we think we are. Nirvana means to blow out the flames. The Taoists called it wu wei, effortless action. The Christian mystics spoke of releasement, letting God act through you rather than narrating your way through existence.

Across all cultures, sages have told us that you can set down your compulsive inner commentary and discover that something deeper has been living you all along.

Which raises the obvious question: how do you actually do that?

I took a first pass at this in a previous essay on the shift from left to right-hemisphere dominance. But the addiction frame I’m exploring here goes somewhere different, and I think closer to the root. That piece was about changing how you perceive. This one is about loosening the compulsion that keeps you locked in thought in the first place.

And it can be trained. The time and effort vary, but progress comes faster than you’d think. You can make noticeable headway in ten-minute bouts of practice. You can make serious progress if you commit to thirty-minute sessions and noticing the hook throughout your day. The catch is that the achievement orientation still running modern culture, including most of self-help and spirituality, is the very thing you have to relax here.

Once I understood that this was the mechanism I needed to work on, it took me about two years of devoted practice to reach a life-changing result: thought moved to the background and direct experience moved to the foreground.

Then, something I’d describe as an “auto-release” function became established—where overthinking definitely still happens, but lets go on its own, partly because the discomfort of the thinking loop has become so obvious. In short: it’s reliable access to being “in the zone,” which is a way more creative, fun, and enjoyable mode of existence.

All my prior spiritual practice and training helped, but if someone had pointed this out to me more clearly and earlier, I’m convinced I could have saved myself a great deal of time. Which is a big part of why I’m writing this today.

What follows is the simplest version of what I wish someone had told me.

You can’t think your way out

The most important thing to realize is that you cannot stop thinking. Trying to is counterproductive. The issue is not that thoughts arise, but that you believe they’re yours. A thought shows up, and because it showed up in your head, you assume it’s important, meant for you, and worth following. So you follow it. And by the time you notice, you’re already three thoughts deep.

And like all addictions, this happens compulsively, and it has consequences: you miss what’s more primary in experience, such as your body, the room, or the person right in front of you.

All addictions are intelligent, and the compulsion to think is no different. For many of us, staying in our heads was the safest place to be, especially early on. The nervous system learned that if you can think your way through something, you don’t have to feel it. Thinking became your protector. At the time, it was a smart strategy.

The temptation is to wage war on your own thinking. What helps instead is recognizing, with as much compassion as you can muster, that a part of you has been working overtime to keep you safe. And giving it permission to take a break.

This is also why pop-psychology advice on stopping overthinking often doesn’t work. You can’t override a nervous system response with a mental command. That’s a top-down instruction to a bottom-up problem. The body has to feel safe enough to stop gripping before the mind will let go.

So the first move is to relax the body.

Drop down

The practice begins below the neck. The body is the doorway to training your attention to rest on something, anything, that isn’t thought. Such as, the direct sensation of being alive. It’s especially helpful to let attention move down, down, and then even a little further down. Feel your feet on the ground. My favorite prompt here is to imagine that each sole of your foot has a pair of nostrils, and you are literally breathing from the earth.

A lot of spirituality and self-help talks about focusing attention on the heart, but for most Westerners, the heart is actually too close to the head to quiet mental distractions. Instead, the pelvic bowl is an endlessly rich place to rest attention, breathing the perineum into your chair and expanding that three-dimensional space like an accordion.

Sink downward, as effortlessly as a leaf falling from a tree. The lower you settle, the more the nervous system gets the signal that it’s safe to let go.

Come to your senses

The sense gates are your other doorway, because they are not thinking. When attention inhabits a sense, thinking naturally fades to the background. You can taste this freedom as easily as shifting your focus from reading these words to feeling the sensations in your right hand or noticing what you can hear right now.

Instead of thinking, you simply sense. Ideally with an explorer’s mindset, playing with the underrated joy of bouncing awareness between your faculties of perception. Feel the tips of your toes and heels against the ground; sense the whole body all at once; open into the sounds around you; notice the entirety of the visual field.

A great practice for this is Shinzen Young’s “See Hear Feel,” where you simply note what’s happening—whether you’re seeing, hearing, or feeling—and notice how effortlessly attention moves between them. You immerse yourself in each sense, as fully as possible, for just a few seconds at a time. Part of the revelation is how much is already going on that has nothing to do with thinking.

Thinking is the sixth sense

In Buddhist psychology, thinking is classified as exactly that: the sixth sense. The mind is a sense organ just like the ear or the eye, and thoughts are its objects, the same way sounds are objects of hearing. This frame is radical if you take it at its word. We have a hard time accepting that thinking is just like hearing or seeing. But for a moment, let’s pretend it is.

Can you stop sounds from arising? Can you stop the visual field from appearing? Can you, despite your best efforts, not taste chili when you spoon it in your mouth?

You can’t. And the same applies to thinking.

When thoughts become just another sense, something that just happens like the weather, your identification with them can soften. Loud construction outside your Zoom meeting is annoying, but you don’t believe it says anything about you. Meanwhile, a harsh thought shows up, and suddenly it’s you and all your failures. That is the addictive hook.

It feels like we control those thoughts when, in fact, we do not. And I have a quick way to test that.

Thoughts without a thinker

Get quiet for a moment. Close your eyes and pick a number between 1 and 50. As you do this, pay close attention to how the number appears. Did you think it before it arose? Or did it just appear, the number actually being a complete surprise to you?

The spoiler is that you never chose it. It just appeared. And the more unsettling reality is that this is how all thinking works. Even when it feels like you’re planning what you’re going to think, the thought has already been produced by causes and conditions outside of your awareness. That’s at least how the Buddhists explain it.

I know that even if this little exercise landed for you, the bigger claim—that this is how all thinking works—is harder to believe. And if you really let it in, it can be destabilizing. But if you keep looking, you can’t unsee it: there’s no author behind the thought stream. It’s worth going slow here, and being gentle with yourself, because it pokes at the foundations of identity itself.3

You already know how not to think, which is good news

Most daily actions happen without you thinking through them. Driving is one of the most obvious examples. Your foot adjusts the accelerator and brake as needed, your hands flip the blinkers, and you can swerve from the d-bag who cuts you off before a single thought gets involved.

The same goes for pouring orange juice, cracking eggs, taking a walk, or riding a bike. You even do it half-asleep every night, adjusting the pillow when you’re uncomfortable.4 The body knows how to take care of itself. Athletes train specifically so that thinking drops away and they can dynamically move and respond from somewhere beyond thought. Surfers are deeply in touch with this, attuning to the water and wind and swell until the self disappears and flow takes over.

Thinking can layer on top of these activities afterward and take credit. But the invitation here is to do one mundane task today, and do it with zero internal commentary. Notice that you still function. Notice that you might function better! And notice how fast the narration rushes back to claim ownership, which reveals the depth of the habit.

The key is noticing that you’re aware of doing the task without thinking about it. You practice this over and over, building confidence, gradually handling more complex situations. It’s unreasonably delightful. This is wu wei.

No thought, no problem

This really does go all the way down. The addiction to thinking is, at root, an addiction to wanting things to be different from how they are. The fuel is always some version of: this moment isn’t enough. The machinery of mind grabs a thought, hoping it will resolve the tension. Alas, it never does. So it grabs another, and another, and the body is left holding whatever you were trying not to feel.

But as you get better at relaxing the compulsion to think, a funny thing happens. Without the thought about the experience, there’s no problem.5 When you meet sadness, fear, or frustration without a storyline, they’re just sensations moving through the body. Sometimes it’s brutal. Grief can feel like your chest has been completely hollowed out. But because you’re not numbing out or retreating into your head, you’re feeling more of it, not less. You’re just not adding the story that makes it worse.

The unwinding, if you want to boil it all down, is pretty much one move: notice the loop, pause, feel what’s actually in the body, relax, open to what’s here.6 Or practice one of the above exercises. Repeat until it rewires. And eventually, if you stay with it, the whole practice intuitively collapses into something simpler than words—you just relax, lovingly, into what’s here.

What’s on the other side

When the compulsive loops quiet down, thinking actually gets better. Creative thoughts arise unbidden, with a freshness that the busy mind could have never produced. That’s because the mind was never the problem.

When I sit with coaching clients, free from overthinking, I’m spacious and open-hearted. Some-thing registers what they’re saying without me efforting to process it. Rather than planning my response, I listen from empty space, notice intuitive pings in the body, and wait to see what wants to come out. It takes time to build trust in this, especially when it comes to speaking. But when you do, it changes your relationships in ways I can’t oversell.

The ordinary moments is where it gets exceptionally good. Early in the morning, when Grace and my son are still sleeping, I unload the dishwasher. And it becomes an adventure… How quietly can the plates land? How does the body know to rotate the mug handle inward without being told? The whole organism conspires together to not wake anyone, and I’m kinda just along for the ride, almost stoned on the elegance of my own hands.

Or right now, writing this draft, typing on my keyboard, there’s awareness of everything in the room. From my window, I see sideways rain, a rare sight in the Oakland hills, pounding the sidewalk; the palm trees across the street look like they’re in a hurricane in Florida. My playlist sounds delicious in my ears. A ginger tea is steaming on my desk. And the words just come out, arising from nowhere, appearing on a screen that is just there in front of me. As I type, I’m not strategizing what will come out. But I can still notice when the thought this essay is getting too long shows up. Useful data!

This shift, from being thought-dependent to allowing the source of life to lead, is in the neighborhood of what contemplative traditions call spiritual awakening. I’ve avoided that term until now because I think this process is even more natural and accessible than that, a human birthright beyond any lineage or vocabulary.

But it turns out “awakening” is largely about waking up from being lost in compulsive thought.7 And the depth of it is determined by how thoroughly you’ve stopped trusting thought as your source of reality, and how much you trust the larger field of experience instead. When thinking relaxes its grip, so does the identity built on top of it. And what comes through, in my experience, tends to be intuitive and tremendously kinder than anything I could have thought my way to.

Carl Jung once described addicts as frustrated mystics. I believe that’s true for all of us. We’re all chasing, with increasingly sophisticated tools, relief from the chase itself. At the root of every addiction is a longing for what’s on the other side of thinking. And recovery, all the way down, is a homecoming to this place beyond words.

Thanks for reading. Essays like this take me ~30 hours of work and, apparently, a lifetime of practice. If you got something from it, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s the best way to directly support my work.

Subscribe now

Or, if you want to contribute in a smaller way, a like or share helps a guy who does what I do.

Overthinking workshop: If you want to practice any of this, I’m hosting another online workshop with my friends at Aurora on May 22nd. Discover you can move, act, speak, and relate without thinking your way through it. Register here.

Work with me: I combine executive coaching with somatic therapy to help leaders heal this pattern at the root and do their best work. Learn more here.

And special thanks to John, Erin, Sam, and Grace for help with this one.

Some names and details have been changed to respect privacy. Most have not.

1^st time

The first time I got high, I was a freshman at a big public high school with open lunch. Two juniors named Spencer and Mike, notable cool dudes and bad boys, took Sam and me to Dmitri’s house that afternoon. Dmitri’s parents, professors at Georgetown, left his townhouse empty during the day, making it the perfect getaway.

We gathered in his backyard. Maryland sky, crisp air. Spencer pulled out his mega bong, his meaty paws twisting the grinder—pack it, light it, toke it, pass it. When it came to me, I took a big, big hit that filled the entirety of my lungs, held it until my chest burned with the effort, and proceeded to cough my guts out, laughing all the while as the smoke billowed out of my mouth and nostrils. My boys lost their shit. Everything became clear and mushy at the same time, each sense turned up past ten while my thoughts turned to honey.

We piled back into Mike’s Jeep. He cranked the music up loud, cheap 12” subwoofers thumping in the trunk as Jurassic 5 rattled the doors. The car bounced our youthful levitating bodies.

Goddamn, did we feel cool.

Sitting later in the back of history class, Dorito-dust caking my fingertips, the room tunneled nicely; it seemed obvious that this—this looseness, this sense that the world was finally arranged correctly—was how things were supposed to feel. Everyone else was working much too hard, missing the point. I, however—I’d somehow stumbled into the next-level operating system I always knew must exist.

4^th time

Three weeks later. Sam, Dmitri, and I were in Rachel B’s basement after smoking a big bowl with the girls, sprawled out on the floor together, laughing and laughing and laughing. Our bodies were tangled in the remains of a Twister game gone… right.

When the munchies hit us hard, we walked a mile to Micky-D’s on Rockville Pike to score some burgers, fries, and, like, ten hot apple pies, the cardboard boxes warming our hands.

Back in the basement, Lizzy giggled uncontrollably on my lap.

Where is it?! she demanded, looking around wildly for her warm apple pie.

I dunno, I said, laughing.

Everyone was dying because everyone but Lizzy could see it—the crumbs in my lap, the other pie sitting right there, not even pretending to be hidden. We were all high out of our fucking minds.

I don’t remember which girl I had a crush on, because I think it was all of them.

213^rd time

I’m in the attic of Vera’s house. She was a senior and I was a junior, and we were having a fling, or some such. Technically, I had a girlfriend. Well, we were on a break. Ross/Rachel sitch. Or I’d talked myself into believing it was fine. Vera had brown hair and a pretty face, the kind of girl who carried herself like she knew things I didn’t.

Take one of these, she said.

What is it?

Percocet. A painkiller. If you chase it with this, it’ll be nice.

She took two pills from her palm and washed them down with a long pull from a bottle of Smirnoff. Then she handed them to me. I followed her lead, feigning the same casualness as I took my first opioids.

The room softened. She climbed on top of me and started kissing me, a lá Francaise, and I tasted the vodka first, then her, then the vodka again. Sharp and sweet on my tongue, and fuck, I’d never felt anything like this. I immediately wanted more.

Not long after, we got into her white Volkswagen Jetta. She asked if I was ready but didn’t wait for an answer: she continued teaching me how to drive a five-speed, patiently correcting me here and there. It felt good to be properly schooled by an older woman—especially on vodka and painkillers. We chased the winding bends behind Rock Creek Park, with no one around, on roads that felt like private swampland, the kind of place you’d joke about burying a body. Or actually bury a body. We played a game, turning the headlights off and driving in the pitch until one of us got too scared. It was always me.

We ended up near an abandoned medical facility near the woods, as creepy as it sounds. She told me the high school lore, how it had once been a loony bin and was now ghostville. It was quiet and eerie, thrilling. We wandered around, moonlight our only witness, talking and sharing, until we found a spot beneath a willow tree. The bottle still between us.

414^th time

We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in Jandro’s kitchen, laying the magic mushrooms between the bread like banana slices. We ate them standing around the counter, grinning at each other and already laughing in mere anticipation.

The start of Ghost was on, which none of us had seen, and as it played, I proceeded to experience each human emotion in turn, in turn, in turn, like that spinning potter’s wheel Demi works so fiercely, Swayze holding her phantamasgorically from behind… Yeah, that movie was sweet.

Then we went into the backyard. It was fall. Red and yellow leaves. We rolled round on the grass, climbed past the fence just to see what was there, laughing with our whole bodies. Everything was tapped in and full of possibility.

Once inside again, I held something bright red in my hand, staring like it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought it was a wild raspberry, ripe and glowing. Then someone said, Alex, you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding, and I looked down and saw that the raspberry was my own blood—a big open cut on my finger from scaling the chain-link fence, stains smeared down the side of my gray lacrosse sweatpants.

But I didn’t care. I just kept laughing.

Later, we piled into my dad’s Toyota Avalon parked in Jandro’s driveway, passing around a fat blunt, windows closed, properly hotboxing, with John Scofield’s jazz band playing loud enough to feel it in our spleens. Jandro had a gal curled up on him like a cat because, at some point, we must have invited girls over. Lester was holding court about guitar tone and drum work, giving a sermon the way only he could, and Jandro and I just kept laughing, choking on smoke bouncing off the windows.

It was perfect. Whatever people spent their lives looking for was already here. I was at home in my body, in the group, in the night. Nothing else needed to happen, because being here was enough. I was enough.

15,423^rd time

Selling weed and LSD will make you popular on a campus full of money and ambition. So will DJ’ing. By then, I was the treasurer of my fraternity at Dartmouth, Alpha Delta, the literal Animal House, and the treasurer of a secret society I won’t name, because otherwise what’s the point? Not a bad outcome for a kid whose parents worked overtime to get him there, always saying education was the one thing no one could ever take away from you.

That morning, I woke up groggy. I climbed down from the loft in my fraternity’s storied Room Nine, careful with my footing. My head pounded. My lungs ached. Once I was down, I packed a bowl in the massive German-engineered ROOR bong and took a long wake-n-baker’s rip. It did what it was supposed to do. We called the bong the Patriot. It was a gift from Ube, an older football player from California who had shown me the ropes.

Ube shipped me medical-grade California weed because New Hampshire didn’t have much beyond low-grade beasters. I checked behind the couch to make sure my safe was still there, a cheap Home Depot model, stuffed with cash. It was Green Key weekend, and Room Nine once more assumed the altar of the host: come on by, I will get you high.

I had my connect from the Philadelphia nitrous mafia bring up two large tanks, which I sold—one balloon at a time—over the course of a very profitable weekend.

Shortly after, I heard a knock. Oh-lo-oo? a voice called, meaning me. I tiptoed to the door so I wouldn’t wake Riley. She was still sleeping in the loft.

It was Nick, the house janitor.

Come in, man, I said.

I packed him a bowl, and he got right to it. Nick was in his forties, hanging on, and had been around the fraternity for years, long enough that we’d developed an understanding. I was always good with people, you know, good at reading between the lines.

That bad? I asked.

Yeah, man. I dunno know how much longer I can do this. But this Cali shit helps.

His wife had terminal cancer, and he spent most of his time outside of work caring for her or camping out at the hospital. Because of the illness, she had prescriptions for all kinds of things, including OxyContin and Opanas. At some point, Nick and I fell into an arrangement where I traded him weed for his dying wife’s pills.

Pretty much everyone did drugs at Dartmouth. It was a party school, especially for an Ivy, at least the parts I rolled in. I mostly kept the pills to myself. Some mornings I woke up with a dull headache and a low irritation. But I had people who wanted to be around me, girls who were interested, and a primal sense that things were working in my favor. So, I didn’t think much of my first signs of withdrawal. I learned to space the pills out, chase them with beer instead of vodka. I’d learned some since Vera.

17,781^st time

Your turn, Brolo.

Z nodded toward the back room off the pool house, where the light was dimmer. Two neat lines of OxyContin waited for me on the glass top. I rolled up a twenty, bent down, snorting them both in one go—the sweet, buttery powder hit the back of my throat just right. It was a taste, a texture that signified relief. Almost immediately, the stuff of life I ever-braced against was poof, gone. I was invincible.

Love you, man, Z said, clapping me on the shoulder as we drifted back out together, half-philosophizing about literature, like, whether anything serious could survive the internet.

I enjoyed cocaine when it was good shit, but it made my hands tremble and my whole body too awake in the wrong places. Oxy, my love, was different. Oxy didn’t ask questions. It just worked. Especially as landing gear after taking a bunch of uppers.

The combo made me feel something I’d felt before, dead sober—freshman year, benched for stealing Heinekens on the team flight out West, watching the Northern California hills from the back of the van. Happy cows circling through fog. Then I became them, became the hills and cows, all of it dissolving into one thing speaking without words. You don’t survive by trusting free gifts, so I went looking for the chemical route back, even though I knew then that my destiny lay in California.

And four years later, I found myself at Z’s pool house in Atherton, in those same hills. His parents’ place was immaculate and expensive and sealed off from the street. Here, consequences were only theoretical. Our friends floated in and out, leaving wet footprints on the stone, Fred Falke playing in the background, melodic and slowly building. Benny handed me an IPA. Sauce passed the spliff around. Someone else laughed too loud.

When I graduated from Dartmouth in 2009, I headed straight into the Great Recession. Instead of landing a banking or consulting job—the path most of my peers were gunning for—I was unemployed. But I’d saved about twenty grand selling weed and DJ’ing, and that money carried me and four of my closest boys out West. It was to be a magical summer built on borrowed time.

Officially, I was staying at Anthony’s mom’s beach house in Stinson. Sometimes I did, rolling big spliffs and driving the PCH with electronica blasting, my black five-speed Subaru cutting through blind curves, clutch and gas working from muscle memory. But I didn’t spend much time there.

Riley was the reason.

She was a year younger than me, interning in Menlo Park for the summer, technically for work but really so we could be closer. We’d been orbiting each other ever since our first drunken night in her Hitchcock dorm room, after one of my DJ sets. She was sweet and shy and breezy. Rural Maine clung to her—backwoods and pine, her blonde hair always a bit unkempt. She was the younger sister of a famous Hollywood actress, though she never carried herself that way.

That afternoon at Z’s house, somewhere between the fifth game of pong and Benny’s theory about how winning was just losing in reverse, she gave me a look: she’d reached her limit with the frat-boy circus. She called me by my real name, never Olo. We left together and drove back to Palo Alto. The windows were down, Daft Punk blaring as we shared a spliff. We cruised past low gates guarding long driveways that disappeared into ancient hedges.

At her place, we turned on a show we barely watched, poured some cheap Malbec, and started making out. We did a few more lines of Oxy. The night fell away, bringing us together.

We were outsiders in a type-A world we mostly wanted to escape. Riley loved the version of me who DJ’d and liked to party, while I loved how little she seemed to need from the world we were in. The difference was that she could take or leave the drugs. I didn’t know that was even an option.

20,000+ time

After I got promoted at Salesforce, I joined a new team at 101 California Street. That morning, I took the Muni in from Hayes Valley and stood with the rest of the commuters, surrounded by suit jackets, goofy backpacks, and leaky coffee cups. The city’s tech boom was well and truly popping off, and your boy was fully in the mix.

Once I got to the office, I dipped into the bathroom for my morning pilgrimage, praying it would be empty. Of course it wasn’t. Someone was destroying a breakfast burrito nearby, the sounds and smells making my stomach turn. I locked myself in the handicapped stall—the junkie’s office—and crushed the last of the blue Roxies with the back of my Muni card, using the toilet paper dispenser as my desk.

Someone else came in, boots banging on tile. I froze, Muni card suspended in hand, waiting for them to piss and leave. My nose was running in anticipation. Finally alone again, except for Breakfast Burrito Guy’s ongoing crisis, I laid out a thin, careful line and snorted it through a trimmed plastic straw I kept in my pocket, tilting my head down just as Burrito Guy flushed, using the sound as cover.

When I stood, my nose burned and my hands were already starting to shake because I knew they knew, they had to know, nobody spends this much time in the handicapped stall with a sinus infection that never goes away. I washed up fast, checked my eyes (fucked), straightened my tucked-in flannel, and went out to sell.

I was good at the job. That part was real. My grandparents fled the Third Reich with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the Nazis hounding at their heels, and built lives from scratch in a new country. Work was proof we belonged, that we earned our place. Even if it was a grind—endless calls, manufactured enthusiasm, the slow, soul-sucking arithmetic of quarterly quotas… But with the right mix of Adderall, Oxy, Xanax, and caffeine, I found a familiar mode where my charm was dialed up and my confidence was effortless. People loved me. Deals closed. I was one of the best. At least for the four-hour windows when my chemical cocktail was properly calibrated.

I was twenty-three years old and burning through my paychecks as fast as they landed. Riley and I were still together, long-distance now while she finished her senior year at Dartmouth. She was taking care of my pet snake, Ram Dass, feeding him, checking the heat lamp, texting me updates. I did love her. I was faithful, too. Except on the nights when I ran into Alina, who’d always been my kryptonite.

Around this time, my body started to rebel in every way possible. By lunch the opiate high turned. My legs wouldn’t stop trembling, the restless dope shake that starts in your bones and works outward through your muscles. Sweat gathered at the base of my spine. My chest caved in, like I’d been punched or was starving. Nothing Gatorade and Advil could work to abate. This was pain that took over the whole field of awareness, and worse, I knew that today I didn’t have anything left to make it stop. Withdrawal. Broke. Not a single tablet left in the fold of my pocket.

That scared the shit out of me.

I stepped outside near the Embarcadero, the Golden Gate Bridge foggy and metallic in the distance, and started calling doctors from the Yellow Pages. I wasn’t looking for addiction treatment per se; I thought I had a physical ailment, something purely chemical. I was a committed materialist, after all. So I did what I thought a smart, rational person would do—I called a professional.

I worked up the alphabet, starting with A. The first few offices didn’t answer. One receptionist told me, There’s a process, son. Another said the doctor wasn’t taking new patients. The eleventh call went through.

Dr. Paul Abramson listened longer than I expected. He told me he didn’t usually take calls like this. He said there were steps, and he called me Alexander. I explained my symptoms carefully, leaving certain details out, emphasizing my job, my responsibilities, my increasing lack of funds, the fact that I couldn’t disappear, and, most importantly, that absolutely no one could find out.

When I met him the next day in his office, he tried to explain how serious and dangerous things were getting for me. I cut him off.

What do I do, Doc? I can’t go to rehab. I’ve gotta keep working.

His answer was Suboxone. An opiate-antagonist that helps addicts safely stabilize and taper. Imagine if a sex addict were only allowed hand jobs. Such was the hollow agony of its relief.

27,000+ time

I was teaching Riley how to ride a longboard, gliding backwards on mine so I could watch her wobble forward—when my wheel caught a crack in the cement. The world spun. I flew face-first into asphalt and everything went blank.

Oh my god, oh my god, I heard Riley’s voice, far away, then closer.

Half my eyebrow was gone, scraped off on Telegraph Ave. Blood ran into my eye. It should have hurt more than it did, but I was already floating rather nicely on cannabis edibles and a morning benzo.

Two hospitals later, we found someone willing to stitch my face back together. The ER doc wrote me a script for Vicodin—two weeks’ worth that wouldn’t last me two days—and kept asking about a possible concussion. Did I know what day it was? Could I follow his finger?

That’s when I saw my opportunity.

I called my manager, played up the head injury. Told him I used to be an athlete, you know, have had a bunch of concussions, so gotta be careful. Said I needed a week, maybe two. The concern in his voice told me I’d sold it.

I’d already been through one failed round with Dr. A—stabilized on Suboxone for a few months before convincing myself I could manage with just weed, booze, benzos, and, you know, a little blow with the boys on weekends. That led to a spectacular five-month relapse and bender that ended with me back in his office, shaking and begging for another chance. He took me back, but I couldn’t stay clean. Failed test after failed test until finally he cut me loose. Then I sent him some late-night screeds I couldn’t quite remember, surely professionally worded.

This was my chance to do it right. Cold turkey. On my own terms.

I set up camp in our bedroom with concentrated cannabis and a blowtorch for dabs, which essentially turns your lungs to glass and makes you cough up demons. It wasn’t crack, I reasoned. I added my leftover antipsychotic meds, Seroquel, for sleep. I told Riley I needed rest. Leave me alone for a few days. She brought me soup I couldn’t eat, and coconut water I couldn’t keep down… for my concussion.

Days two and three were their own particular hell. The first day always fakes you out; you feel almost human, start thinking, this time, maybe, things will be different. Then day two arrives like a debt collector. That scooped-out feeling where your bones turn to straw and nothing in your body works anymore. I’d ridden this bronco before, even made it to week two once, but please know that Trainspotting makes cold turkey look like something you can actually accomplish by locking yourself in a room instead of what it is: dying, without the relief of being dead.

Somehow, impossibly, I made it two weeks.

I was exhausted, but the world looked different. Sharper. Though less interesting. I picked Tim up and went to Golden Gate Park, where we set up my slackline between two trees, me wobbling above the earth like I was learning to walk again. We went back to his place, smoked more, had beers, and ordered Thai food while we watched Breaking Bad. I felt empty but clean.

Then, four beers in, that familiar whisper: You know what would make this even better.

30,000+ time

The week Twitter IPO’d, we threw an epic company-wide celebration. I was twenty-six and convinced we were changing the world for the better.

Six months later, when the equity lockup expired, everyone on the fourth floor refreshed their Schwab accounts to see if the money was real. I checked mine. There it was. Nothing life-changing, but more than enough to keep the party going. I felt supremely validated—a kid from nowhere special, now holding shares in the coolest company in tech, where everyone wanted to work. For a while, it erased everything else.

That bright day in early May, I sold everything I could at around $32 a share and transferred the proceeds straight into my checking account, where I desperately needed the money. I was now spending all of my salary on “performance-enhancing” drugs.

Twitter was full of vegans, coffee snobs, tattooed hipsters, ultramarathon runners, nerdy ex-Googlers, nice people, and buttoned-up Stanford grads. Afternoon smoke breaks were rare. I lit a cigarette anyway and walked away from the building alone.

I strutted across Market, skipping the trolley tracks, heading toward where Ninth becomes Larkin. I tried calling my guy, Kayvo. No answer. Classic.

By then the cold sweats had already started. Earlier that morning, I’d been sitting in a cleverly named conference room with Sylvia, my loyal Account Manager who ran my book, closing a high-stakes deal with a major bank. That’s when the drugs turned on me. First hot, then so fucking cold. Full-body shivers. An ache in my thighs. The feeling of termites crawling under my skin, especially in my arms and neck. The perennial pain signal: it’s time.

I picked up my pace, brisk and deliberate, careful not to draw attention. As I passed Civic Center, I ruffled my curlyish hair, untucked my flannel, and pocketed my employee badge, loosening the tech uniform. I knew it didn’t really matter. Where I was headed, I was going to stand out.

At night, with time on my side, I could roam the Tenderloin until I found what I needed. Midday missions were different. The thought of running into colleagues out in groups—people who’d skipped the bourgeois catered lunch and wandered into the city together—made my insides swarm.

I cut up Larkin and turned right on Golden Gate, eyes darting. I was making my way to Turk and Leavenworth, aka Pill Hill—the undisputed center of drug dealing and crime in the city. Pigeonholed between the new Mid-Market tech opulence and the skyscrapers of the Financial District, it’s one of the most lawless places west of the Mississippi River.

I’d become the hunter, and that thrill never died. My gift for gab, and a face people couldn’t quite place, had always given me cover. Still, you never knew who was tweaking too hard. I’d been robbed before. Almost stabbed, too.

I walked towards a group of three young men, all clearly dealers, passing around a blunt, bobbing to East Bay thizzle from the sidewalk stereo. I checked my pockets. The cash spilt up between them, and my badge was hidden. I slowed, making eye contact with the tallest one.

Blues, I said.

They closed in too fast, offering everything else. Hands came at me from every direction. I backed off and kept moving.

I checked my watch. Only nine minutes before my team meeting.

Rounding the block, I took in the scene. Low-riding cars idling on the one-way, stoops filled with dice games, bent figures stumbling, electric wheelchairs buzzing past, tweakers and earnest folks down on their luck.

What you need? a man leaning on a dented Camaro asked.

Blues. And pins if you got ’em.

The price was wrong, but I didn’t have time to haggle. He pulled out a crumpled plastic baggie with easily a hundred blues inside and handed me one to inspect. That told me enough.

I handed him the cash and he handed me the rest.

Take my number, he said.

Good idea, I replied, already thinking he might replace Kayvo.

Just call me T.

I liked T more and more, but the pushers were now surrounding me like a scene out of Black Hawk Down, and I had to go. I walked uphill fast, half-expecting a police cruiser to roll up behind me. Nothing did.

Departing the sea of criminality, I allowed myself a grin and kept moving.

On the way back, I crossed Larkin and handed the last drags of my cigarette to a gray-haired homeless man on Market. He squeezed my hand with greasy fingers and told me God had blessed me. For a moment, everything inside me felt right as rain, like some deeper order had reasserted itself and was watching over me.

I ducked into the side elevators closest to Ninth, the ones I’d learned to favor. They dropped directly in front of the new seventh-floor locker room, below the cafeterias and coffee bars everyone else loved. I locked the shower door, laid everything out, and finished my prayer. Two minutes, start to finish.

I poured a coffee, grabbed a Dutch waffle, took the stairs down to the fourth floor, and slipped into my meeting with a quick apology, my eyes scanning the room to see who’d noticed I was late.

40,000+ time

At 1 a.m. the night before my wedding, I realized I had a problem: I was running out of drugs. I was two hours from home, from my narcotic resupply in Oakland’s skid row, which might as well have been on Mars.

We’d picked Monte Rio, California, for its idyllic Dartmouth summer-camp vibe. A hundred friends, colleagues, and family were in town. I knew I couldn’t deal with withdrawal this weekend.

Riley was already sleeping on her side, her golden hair cascading off her face. The moonlight nestled in her locks. She looked peaceful, untouched by whatever was happening with me, or what I was about to do. I was sweating, but not uncomfortable.

I grabbed my phone and stepped onto the balcony, making sure the sliding door shut behind me. Overlooking the Russian River and a crescent moon covered by light clouds, I dialed Kayvo.

It was late. He was annoyed. I told him it was an emergency, that I’d pay five hundred. He told me to fuck off. I reminded him it was my wedding. He asked about the big order. I said it was mostly gone. So, after some back and forth, I said I’d come to him. What choice did I have?

Fine, he said. Just don’t be wakin’ my kids, Al.

My soul alight for the first time all weekend, I went back into the hotel room. Summoning the second wind only cocaine can gift, I scrambled to find some of the cash Riley and I had received as early wedding gifts. I grabbed my keys and cigarettes. I glanced at my sleeping bride, nodded, and left the room.

Once outside, I breathed in the fresh midnight air. The edges of my body were nowhere to be found. I turned the ignition, lit a Camel, cracked the windows to let the smoke dissipate, and stepped on the gas.

I cruised through the redwood darkness, so far from God but so near to meeting Him. The speedometer climbed past rational thought; seventy miles per hour on serpentine roads that twisted like the lies I’d been telling myself, where each curve was taken on faith that the next one wouldn’t be the last, the moon following me through the canopy like a conspirator who knew exactly what kind of madman leaves his bride sleeping alone the night before their wedding to chase drugs through wine country, knew and didn’t judge, just watched as I pushed the accelerator harder, trying to outrun the withdrawal already whispering in my bones that this would never be enough, there would never be enough. I would always be stealing from tomorrow to pay for tonight.

Only fifteen minutes into my journey, and out of nowhere, I saw police lights blaring in my rear-view, speeding up to my tail so fast I could hear its engine humming. Its red and blue lights strobed, its siren wailed, and it killed the nostalgic buzz of my favorite jam band.

Next thing I know, two more cop cars joined the parade. One shot ahead and slammed its brakes. Another pulled flush to my left.

I hit the brakes hard. Four cops stepped out with their guns drawn.

Weirdly, I wasn’t scared. Instead, a serenity enveloped me. I felt a culmination taking place.

Well, you finally did it, Al. You found the edge.

One of the officers asked what the hell I was doing. I told him it was my wedding tomorrow, that I was stressed, that I’d gone out for some air.

Some air? he said. Do you have any idea how fast you were driving?

I said I did not. I told him I was just thinking about, you know, the Big Day. We talked some more. I nodded and apologized.

They stepped back and talked among themselves while I waited. Eventually the police chief came over and told me to follow his cruiser. I assumed that was it, that I was headed to jail the night before my wedding, but ten minutes later, we pulled into a 7-Eleven instead.

He bought me a coffee, put his arm on my shoulder, and steered me outside, sitting me down firmly under the redwoods. We talked and talked, I nodded along, gone but seeing everything, saying whatever seemed to keep the moment alive.

He told me to drive straight back to the inn and get some sleep. Of course, sir, I said. I can’t thank you enough. I really needed that.

The moment he was out of sight, I turned the car around and booked it to Kayvo’s, ripping cigs the whole way.

I never told Riley. Not that morning, not ever. She woke up next to me, her husband-to-be, and we got married happily that afternoon under the burning California sun.

50,000+ time

I woke up locked inside my body. I hadn’t been sure I would wake up, and that had become routine. The night before had been bad. I felt used up and ashamed.

But I still had to act.

I stumbled downstairs and made coffee. Riley was already at work. I was between jobs, to put it charitably, with my unemployment check still a week away. I’d already liquidated my 401(k) and was more than $96,000 in debt. I was out of cash, rideless after crashing my car on a late-night run to Kayvo’s, and deep in skull-splitting withdrawal.

In the garage, I found my black Dre Beats headphones next to my old DJ equipment. I stared at them for a while. Then I lit a cigarette and walked the half mile to Buy Sell Loan on 51st and Telegraph. I can’t tell you how humiliating it felt to walk in there again.

How much for these, I mumbled.

Sixty to sell. Twenty to borrow.

That would barely get me through the day. Still, I said, fuck it. I sold them and called Kayvo, who was waiting nearby.

Just three? he asked.

Uh, for now, I said, embarrassed even by my dealer.

I took a CD from his side panel and crushed up half of a tiny pill, trying to conserve. Let’s go to Starbucks, I told him, knowing that if the moment presented itself, I might try to steal a handful more from a man who would kill me for it.

The last time

Minutes before my interview with Slack, I snorted a personal-record mixture of uppers and downers. I found that flow where my body disappeared into its source and then something else took over—I got the job. It was the hottest startup in the Valley, and I’d be the first Sales Operations Manager, helping build strategy on their founding sales team.

Despite everything falling apart—the hidden debt, the multiple rounds of failed secretive treatment, the most recent string of startup blowouts—I still had an enviable résumé for a twenty-eight-year-old. This job was going to be my saving grace. The equity alone would be worth millions. It would finally correct everything that was wrong with me. I’d be fixed. More than that, I’d be legitimate again. Three generations of striving would stay intact.

The company was a typical startup stress ball, and so was I. My manager would tell me to do one thing, then scold me the next day for doing exactly that. We worked around the clock—twelve-hour days plus weekends—because we were the ones who built the messaging tool that meant no one was ever not-working.

The night before a trip to Miami to visit my family, I worked until dark. Then I drove my ratty 2001 Sebring convertible to Kayvo’s place. The block had dried up. All he had was morphine. I railed it all before the red-eye. In Miami, I’d be in withdrawal, relying on transitioning onto leftover Suboxone.

That was my master plan.

At breakfast the next morning in the hotel lobby with my parents, my sister, her friend, and Riley, I nodded off and passed out into my eggs—my family frozen in the horror of watching someone you love become exactly what you always feared they were becoming, while the hotel lobby carried on with its mundane breakfast sounds, the clink of silverware and murmur of normal families having normal mornings.

My sister’s friend was a doctor, which did not help. She looked at my parents and sister and said, he’s high as a kite.

My family staged an intervention. I was open to it, too, even touched by their care. I was so tired. My body couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t have much fight left. I came clean about the debt as well, sitting there like a child, crying to my parents after years of keeping them at arm’s length. The problem was I came clean to them before I did with Riley, which was an amateur move, ethically and strategically.

We’d been growing distant anyway. My lies were mounting and mounting, this double life impossible to maintain. But Riley and I were soulmates. I had to get better.

I agreed to go back to outpatient treatment, to see Dr. A, whom I trusted. It was a way to stabilize the pain, appease everyone, and get my hands to stop shaking. I wasn’t ready to stop. I wanted to keep using, just not like this. By then I’d moved on to fentanyl and other harder drugs. If I wasn’t actively using, my body tipped into acute withdrawal within minutes. That’s what drove everything else.

Once I was back in the clinic on 450 Sutter Street, a long walk from Slack’s HQ, Dr. A had tightened the screws. The place had grown, and so had the rules: twice-weekly groups, weekly therapy, daily drug tests, a crowded waiting room, shitty coffee, my name called from a clipboard, again.

I failed the first drug test, then the next. I told them I’d just been to Vancouver for a company happy hour and had some whiskey. Don’t you know how important my job is?! I said. I didn’t even know you could test for alcohol. That part was new.

You fail the next one, we’ll have to kick you out again, Alex, Dr. A said, looking disappointed.

The treatment nonetheless helped. The worst of the withdrawal eased. I felt like utter dogshit, but I was no longer in free fall. I had a doctor prescribing me things again, which felt reassuring. We trust the medical system. My parents, bless them, were paying for it this time. I obviously couldn’t afford it.

The program’s psychologist was the first therapist I’d had who was in recovery herself. A PhD, a recovering alcoholic, and a meditator: the trifecta appealed to my sensibilities. In our fourth session, after I’d spent an hour defending my sophisticated relationship with substances, she cut me off.

You know what you’re actually looking for, right?

I didn’t.

The drugs, the danger, this whole outlaw spiritual quest. What do you think that’s really about?

Getting high? I responded.

There’s already a fire in you, she said. But you keep trying to light it with gasoline.

She was the first person to really understand me. A few times, I even felt a momentary recognition that she might be right, that there was another way. But my plan stayed the same. Make it through the worst of the withdrawal. Get my hands to stop trembling like I had Parkinson’s. Get off the hard drugs—my only real problem—and keep the booze, weed, dissociatives, and designer drugs. Plenty of therapists and counselors told me I needed to quit everything to give recovery a chance, including her. They obviously didn’t know who they were dealing with. I was the Hunter S. Thompson of the goddamn valley.

That Saturday, we went to a STS9 concert. Riley danced, just moving with the music, and I watched her from the crowd, feeling almost normal for a minute. Sauce passed me a fat joint. I knew exactly what it meant: failed drug test #3, potential expulsion from the program, my therapist’s face twisted in something deeper than disappointment.

I took a long drag anyway, swearing to myself it was the last time.

I didn’t know I was finally right.

Three months into Slack and the secretive-outpatient-treatment grind, I was pulled into a meeting with HR and my manager. They told me I was okay at my job, then let me go. They never said the word drugs. They didn’t have to.

I rushed to pack my things and leave without seeing anyone, sick with shame, and walked out onto Market Street. Another startup squandered. The comeback equity that was supposed to save me never vested. Work had been the one thing holding me together. Without it, I was just another pathetic little man, a drug addict, a complete fraud, a nobody. I walked so fast I was nearly out of breath, past establishments I used to frequent, phone tight in hand, the Tenderloin just a few blocks away—until, miraculously, I found myself waiting on a BART platform at Embarcadero for a train home.

Riley was on the couch, working. I told her I got fired.

Are you serious? she said.

I tried to explain myself.

This is unbelievable, she muttered.

She stared at me and shook her head, and under her gaze I felt very small.

I’m so sorry, I said.

You’re always sorry, she said, her voice exhausted.

She’d been hearing it since Dartmouth. Through every lie about where the money went, where I’d been, why I’d sleep till noon with the blinds drawn. Through every promise that this time was different. I could see in her face that she was fed up with making sacrifices for someone who wasn’t going to change.

We argued until she left the room. I was surprised to feel my legs give out.

Next thing I knew my face was in this ugly beige rug we’d bought at Target when we first moved in, when I still had tech money and she believed I could still get better, and now I was drowning in it, tasting dust mites and my own snot while Riley moved around upstairs, probably calling her best friend like she always did when I fucked up, definitely not coming back down. Somewhere between the choking and the guttural sobbing it hit me that this was it, this was the edge I’d been racing toward like a maniac my whole life, another fucking startup gone, another comeback turned embarrassing failure, only there was no helpful country cop to buy me coffee this time, no money to call Kayvo, just me and this itchy ass rug and the truth that I was never going to stop, not like this, not on my own. And that thought was scarier than withdrawal, scarier than losing Riley, scarier than realizing I’d spent a decade learning how to die but had no fucking clue how to live.

The whole elaborate performance I’d been holding up for years—the fancy job titles, the double life and alter ego in the hood, the idea that I was somehow more special than every other addict—finally collapsed into a single, intolerable stillness. There was no way to scheme my way out of this one. No identity left to defend. No next job to save me, or last appeal to effort or endurance.

I’d made promises before, but there was always a loophole hidden underneath, one I didn’t even know I was keeping. Now there was just nothing left. Not even the part of me so good at clawing his way out.

There, on that scratchy rug I always hated, in the ruins of everything I’d built myself to be, I finally admitted that I couldn’t handle life on my own. I said I would do anything, and whatever was listening could have me.

My breathing slowed. Face wet, pressed into my palms.

And in that moment, with nothing left to protect or pretend, I was done.

After many months of baby-induced ego death, I’m excited to finally kick off a new season of the pod with someone who has profoundly shaped my spiritual life: Michael Taft.

We sat down for a wide-ranging conversation that spans enlightened wizards, psychedelic dismemberment, and the very practical art of recognizing awake awareness in the midst of daily life. I’m delighted to share this one with you—it might be my favorite to date.

Michael Taft is a longtime meditation teacher and author whose work integrates nondual wisdom traditions, classical Tantra, and modern neuroscience. He’s the host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast and has guided thousands of practitioners into deeper recognition through his Dharma talks, guided meditations, and retreats. Before teaching full-time, he spent decades training with masters in Hindu and Buddhist lineages—including time living in India—and became one of Shinzen Young’s most prominent students.

Before meeting Michael, I’d been practicing about as seriously as one can outside a monastery—fully committed to the spiritual path, with all the neuroses that come along with that. His teaching helped my system relax in a way I didn’t realize was possible and flipped what seems to have been an irreversible switch. Since then, I’ve dove into his retreats and teachings, and I now regularly send his guided meditations to friends and clients…. and the ones who stick with it reliably have awakening experiences and sustained insight. Not many teachers can produce that kind of result.

What continues to impress me most is his teaching style: relaxed, emotionally friendly, grounded, precise, funny, and, when needed, sharp enough to cut through the bullshit. He’s a teacher who can help you go all the way in awakening, not just taste it.

You can feel that in this conversation. Towards the end, he guides us through a direct, real-time glimpse of what he calls Nondual 2—the shift from transcending the world to waking up in the world—and why so many people unknowingly stop halfway on the path.

In this episode, expect to learn more about:

• How a soul-annihilation psychedelic experience in the mountains of Japan catalyzed his initial awakening

• Why he refused to teach for years, and what ultimately shifted his perspective

• How he trained with “enlightened wizards” in India, and how those experiences shaped his humble, anti-guru approach to teaching

• What he calls Nondual 1 vs. Nondual 2: how awakening often stops at “no separation” and a desire to transcend the world—and why the deeper realization is seeing everyday life as the sacred display of awareness

• Why later Buddhist and Tantric traditions resonate more for him—embracing emotion, energy, and everyday life rather than trying to shut them down

• How to recognize awake awareness on demand in the middle of ordinary life

• The unseen pitfalls of highly-altered-state retreats—and why he designs retreats that reduce breakdowns and increase integration

• How to build confidence in awakening through direct recognition rather than belief or attainment-chasing

• Why he believes awakening is ultimately about God, death, and not missing the point of being alive

If you’re new to Michael’s work, I highly recommend exploring his vast library of free meditations and talks on his YouTube channel.

Start with his beginner nondual series: do the full sit, then listen to the dharma talk and Q&A later in the day to help integrate the insight. After that, move on to this nondual series or simply start following his weekly sits at the Alembic.

Do this for 30 days and let me know what you notice.

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When I started blogging, I published here each week religiously, treating my self-imposed deadline with more reverence than I ever gave my day job. I woke at 5 a.m., showered cold, meditated, journaled over Gongfu tea, and wrote uninterrupted for hours—the kind of heroic optimizer morning routine that’s since become a meme. But mock as you might, I was a man on a mission. A tech bro possessed, burning with purpose.

I can’t overstate how much writing here—and treating it as a form of spiritual practice—has changed my life. It not only helped me heal but also allowed me to radically reshape my career and opened doors to collaborations I once could only dream of.

For a long time, I believed writing was the one thing I could never lose. But I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that I can no longer write like I used to. Things have been trending in this direction for a few years, and though I’ve hinted at it before, it feels appropriate now to reveal myself more directly. Part of me has been grieving this change, slowly coming to terms with it, while another part is genuinely excited about what it might open up.

This essay is my attempt to be honest about that—an experiment in letting go of the writer I used to be, hopefully freeing up some energy and maybe drawing a little inspiration from you all.

Call me daddy

My boy is nearly 18 months old now, and in the last couple of months, he’s just exploded with wildness and personality. It’s like having a tiny joy-being constantly bopping around the house, yelling “Da-da! Da-da!” (a new development) whenever I’m not in sight. It’s delectable chaos.

During the first six months, I was still trying to be the hero—up at dawn to write and sit before Grace and my son woke—but that quickly proved unsustainable. These days, his “Da-da” yelps are my alarm clock. I’m sleeping more than I have since my hangover days, and damn, do I need it.

On a practical level, I obviously have far less time to write than I ever have. But the change runs much deeper than logistics. I’ve written about the beauty of fatherhood, but I think the significance of this transition is only now sinking in. I’ve heard this is common—the early months are mostly about supporting the mother, since the initiation she goes through is frankly unparalleled compared to what we dudes experience. So, it’s been a slow burn for me, and these identity shifts sneak up on you, especially as parenting life fills with motion and the bond starts to feel more reciprocal.

Rather than chasing bylines or growing my email list with regular posting, my priority has been learning what it means to truly embody the Father archetype—grounded, protective, benevolent, loving. It seems to be a natural move away from ambition toward a way of being that demands patience, humility, and trust in life itself. It’s drawn me away from the noise of digital commentary and the impulse to churn out quick hits of insight, and more toward becoming the kind of man that would make my son proud.

I had an early burst of inspiration to write about the joys and realities of fatherhood, but as my center of gravity has shifted from the cultural to the home, I’ve felt a growing reluctance to write at all.

My muse got a Stripe account

My first years of writing were purely about creative expression. I wrote about whatever fascinated me—philosophy, spirituality, love, short stories, collective evolution. Then, as my writing gained traction and I transitioned careers, it suddenly became something that also supported my livelihood. The correlation is real: the more I write and share, the more people sign up for my coaching, groups, and retreats. It’s a game I can play, but not one I particularly enjoy, and my interest in it keeps fading. My digital footprint across mediums gets smaller each year.

Still, I’m insanely grateful I built my writing practice as a writer before I ever became a coach. From my high-horsey literary perspective, too many practitioners focus on the usual “coachy” topics—purpose, burnout, balance, productivity—and I say that lovingly, having written about most of them myself. These days, though, it rarely resonates. Writing began, and still feels, like a way to understand myself and the world—a way to speak from an undefended heart, not to sell something.

The challenge of staying authentic online while earning a living has been discussed endlessly, and I don’t have a unique solution. What I do know is that I’m proud of the work I do, and I still have plenty to share about the transformative side of it. But it feels like time to return to basics. Part of why I’m publishing this now is to recommit to that intention: to keep writing honestly about what’s true for me in the moment, however it lands.

My mind can no longer hold concepts like it used to

In years prior, when an idea came to me, it would consume me. I was something like a jñāna yogi, treating the pursuit of knowledge as a path to liberation. When I first discovered metamodernism and integral theory, I entered a period of bliss and devoted inspiration. I had never found a better map to explain the cultural and human predicament—and I believed, with a passion, that these frameworks could change the world.

Once an idea caught fire like that, I’d chew on it for days, turning over sentences in my mind—the perfect line to open an essay, how to close it while staying optimistic and not, please God, cheesy. Which, I’d argue, is one of the premier challenges for a spiritual f-boi like me.

These days, due to changes in my consciousness from meditation, I have somewhat lost the ability to “chew” on ideas. Well, that’s not quite accurate—I still can, of course, think about concepts. But after a decade of hardcore body-mind training, which is essentially training in letting go, my mind now has something like an auto-release function. An essay idea will arise, and I might think, oh, that’s interesting! Then, without fail, there’s a natural letting go, with the relieving recognition—why focus on that?

Chewing on ideas can feel good, exciting, even liberating. But it’s nothing compared to being one with the entire field of experience, flowing with the current of the Tao. Thinking isn’t the problem; it’s just that thoughts are the tiniest fraction of what’s actually happening—like focusing on a 0.00001-percent sliver of infinity. Being identified with that simply isn’t desirable anymore.

And honestly, it’s awesome. You really can break the addiction to thought and flip from left-hemisphere to right-hemisphere dominance. If you’re like me, it just takes about a decade of intense-ass training, including multi-year stretches when you’re basically never not meditating, including every waking moment, and sometimes even in dreams. Then it becomes automatic, and you don’t have to worry about it.

Nonetheless, there are drawbacks and integration to be had when it comes to writing. Some days, creative inspiration pours through in ecstatic waves, when it literally feels as if the universe itself were sitting at my desk, writing the essay. But I can no longer push through to find it. The discipline and diligence that once built my craft—sitting down each morning, no matter what—feel like relics of another life. It just doesn’t compute anymore. My growth edge, if I can call it that, is writing without scheming about it and just letting it rip when it wants to, without trying to force a download.

So…. I’m good?

Writers are notoriously insecure; it’s often what makes their work relatable. That was me—writing about me—and my tragic little dramas. I mean, did you know I almost died of addiction and went half-psychotic chasing God on the “spiritual path”? Don’t worry, I’ve covered it. Insecurity was my primary condition. Along with being at war with my body, my squandered potential, my thinning hair.

But in recent years, I’ve felt a level of contentment I never knew was possible. In truth, ideas like contentment and happiness don’t make as much sense anymore, because once the “doer” dissolves, it’s just life happening, without much say in the matter. I’m also profoundly fortunate, now reaping the rewards of years of struggle: relatively good health, a partner I love deeply who softens my edges, a healthy child, and meaningful work. I worry how that sounds, but I’ve known enough hard times to recognize when it’s worth celebrating. There’s not much more to want.

Looking back, a lot of my motivation to write came from a subtle (and occasionally glaring) sense of lack. That doesn’t invalidate what I created—most of those pieces I’m still proud of—but once you feel more settled in yourself, it becomes obvious how much of your drive came from somewhere else, however faintly.

One can, of course, still write from a place of wholeness. I’m just relatively new to it. Some of my favorite writing carries that vibe, whether it’s Zen masters, obscure mystics, or the cool, cigarette-smoking writers who don’t seem to care if anyone reads them. The biggest question I’m asking myself these days is what it means to speak from life itself rather than conditioning. I’m still learning how to write from a place with less to prove, especially after so many years of critique and trying to help raise the collective consciousness.

Speaking of raising the collective consciousness...

When Allen Ginsberg first took psychedelics, he supposedly wanted to get naked and run through the streets shouting, “Everyone needs to try this!” Tim Leary, being a bit more seasoned, sat him down and said, Okay... but maybe later. And then kept delaying it.

It’s that phase where you first wake up and want to tell everyone from the rooftops. I can, for my sins, relate. In early recovery, I was like, Guys, did you know you can feel incredible without drugs or alcohol? Even better—spiritually connected! There’s a secret layer to life hiding under your job, your phone, your goals—everything!

Then I kept going…

Everyone needs to meditate, understand their mind, do asana for balance—and holy fucking shit, everyone also needs to do plant medicine, commune with hyper-intelligent entities, heal their epigenetic lineage, become coherent with the tides and seasons, maybe even develop psychic powers—stuff that sounds completely insane, but is somehow also true!

Over the years, I thought that impulse had matured. But it had just put on new clothes, then sounding like:

If ten percent of humanity—maybe even five, according to whichever meaning-crisis thinker you’re currently obsessed with—reaches second-tier consciousness, the whole system will self-organize into a global renaissance! You simply must grasp the intersection of trauma repair, spiral dynamics, emergent strategy, quantum biology, and nondual mysticism. The future of galactic civilization depends on it.

Alas, this is a reliable stage on the path. It doesn’t diminish the sincerity or importance of that perspective, but I hear it from almost everyone who’s practiced seriously enough to quiet the seeker. You still love everyone and want them to heal and be free, yet you stop trying to convince anyone of anything. Things are as they are. You keep threading your strand of wakefulness through the wider tapestry of the dharma, but the impulse to evangelize fades.

Eventually, even belief itself drops away. You start seeing that the mystery moving through everything is far deeper than any theory about it. Feeling life replaces thinking about it. For a guy who once thought his mission was to help raise the collective consciousness by triangulating Ken Wilber, modern addiction, a DMT breakthrough, and the phenomenology of awakening, that wasn’t exactly part of the business plan.

So now what? Once you realize that was just another stage, and there’s nothing to raise, you see the most sane way forward is just to live it. As I write that slightly tangential but admittedly fun section, it occurs to me that might be the trick with writing, too.

Doing that online, though, is getting harder for me.

My nervous system has logged off

This point is so obvious and belabored that it hardly needs saying. I’ve dedicated much of my work to exploring how we’re all subject to modern addiction—because, ahem, we all carry portable dopamine masturbation devices in our pockets.

I still have things I want to share and ideas I want to express through digital media. But, hands down, I don’t want to live a life that requires a schizoid shuffle between social media sites, group chats, and whatever new digital offering popped up overnight. If my screen time creeps north of ninety minutes or my pickups hit fifty a day, I start to feel frenetic and unsettled. And what’s wild is that most online creators are doing exactly that, playing hopscotch from one medium to the next.

This isn’t coming from judgment, at least not entirely, so much as self-knowledge. I just know that’s not how I want to pass my days, especially aware that death can come at any moment. Contributing more noise can feel futile when everyone already has a newsletter—and meanwhile, my firstborn son is growing up in the other room.

The downside of AI

Like many people, I’ve explored and benefited from using AI. I’ve even written about it, along with my cautions and warnings—some of which I haven’t followed fully in my own creative life.

LLMs are great for brainstorming and refining sentences. Fortunately, I still have too much pride in the craft to heavily outsource, though it amazes me how easily one can lose their natural voice to the machine. But I’ve noticed they can also aggravate my perfectionism. I can spend longer polishing a paragraph now than I ever did writing from scratch. Even when I know the draft is solid, if I use AI as an editor, something in me keeps tinkering. And I can feel it taking me in the wrong direction.

I got a very on-brand wake-up call about this recently, when an old essay about Adyashanti resurfaced on random nonduality blogs and then started making the rounds. Rereading it, I knew immediately that my writing had lost some of its personality. It was sobering. Since then, I’ve recommitted to using AI only when absolutely necessary. Because if the world we’re heading toward is one of machine-made slop, it feels important that I at least know what my voice sounds like in it. That, for me, is the heart of the practice.

Giving up the writer identity

When my writing first started to resonate with people, I had a massive surge of inspiration. That’ll happen when you open up about your darkest secrets—only to have people celebrate you for it.

I wanted others to know how radically possible it is to change your life, and that you can be devoted to recovery while working with medicines from the earth. People I respect told me I was good enough to write a book, so I went through the querying and agenting process and actually did quite well. I signed with an agent in Manhattan and spent a year developing a new proposal. It ultimately did not sell, which, in hindsight, I’m immensely grateful for. I was being steered to make it more sellable but less true to my perspective (think tech bros = bad).

My agent eventually left the industry, which says a lot about the industry. To my surprise, I wasn’t even that bummed about it. I decided to park the project, not quite giving up but releasing it for the time being. Not long after, I had the third major awakening shift since entering recovery, perhaps the most significant and identity-consuming yet. It only came, I believe, because I finally stopped hustling to be a writer.

Letting go of that identity was just another ego death in a long line of them. And since becoming a father, life has felt like a continued unraveling, almost a forced surrender into not knowing who I am beyond the moment. At times, it’s terrifying in how all-encompassing it feels and how much it keeps destroying. But it also feels like peace, because for the first time, I’m not trying to become someone new or better. These days, I don’t have much ground to stand on, which makes writing even more elusive.

But if you’ll allow me to fully inhabit my spiritual f-boi for a moment (and I’m assuming you will if you’ve made it this far), I think where I’m heading as a writer is closer to superposition, in the quantum sense. Even though some of these identities feel long outgrown—the party boy, tech bro, guy in recovery, yogi, psychedelic spokesman, metamodern savior—I want to make space for all of them. I still want to tell stories about drugs and the Tenderloin, heartbreak and repair, and trying to make a batshit world a little more loving.

And for what it’s worth, I still know there’s a book in me. When it happens, it’ll be a far better one than I could’ve written back then. Whether I’ll avoid a cheesy ending is another matter.

Anyway, if something I’ve written has ever touched you, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. It might even help me find my creative footing again. 🖤

We’ve all had moments when things just felt aligned and connected—whether that’s showing up for your family, at work, socially, or even just laughing with friends—when everything is clicking and you feel: yes, this—this is me. There’s something about it that feels right in your body, and at the same time there’s this intuitive alignment with how you want to show up in the world. It’s a kind of knowing, but not an intellectual one. More like a compass.

Inevitably, we lose track of that sense of radical yes, the sense of being exactly how we want to be in the world. There are so many things pulling at our minds these days, so many distractions. But then there’s also the ways in which our psyche keeps repeating old patterns. It’s common to have a period where everything feels flowing and vibrant—often after a retreat or a big personal breakthrough—and then inevitably comes the crash back into old patterns. Suddenly you’re thinking: I had it, I lost it, and now I feel awful. What the hell happened? Where did it go?

A helpful frame for this comes from a Buddhist teacher who talks about the leading edge and the trailing edge. The leading edge is what I’ve been describing: that place in ourselves where we see clearly, where we have that sense of how we want to show up, where we’ve tasted some insight. It’s where we want to be moving towards, and it is where life naturally wants to take us once we get out of the way.

But we all have this trailing edge, which you could think of as an anchor on a ship. The ship just wants to sail forward toward that open expanse, the endless horizon. But the anchor—that’s these unconscious patterns, implicit memory stored below awareness, the ways we keep recycling behaviors and feelings and thought loops that prevent us from moving forward in the way we naturally can, once we get out of our own way.

So the real work, I think, isn’t just about being at the leading edge. It’s about understanding that you’re able to hold both, and not just expect the leading edge to be there. In fact, that expectation is what causes most of the confusion and suffering. You have that breakthrough moment, you experience growth, and then the trailing edge comes up. And often those old patterns surface precisely because the breakthrough has opened enough space for us to face them.

But then what happens is: oh, since this is arising again, I’ve messed up! I’m a failure! That was just a fleeting insight, nothing real. A “flaky breakthrough” is the term I’ve heard. And that can indeed feel true.

But what I’m more interested in here today is what in Dzogchen, a Buddhist tradition, they call the view. The view is your fundamental orientation to reality. In their cosmology, it’s the recognition that we’re not separate. That awareness and appearances are one indivisible whole. That everything is just this one field. And when you forget that, you suffer. You feel uncomfortable, contracted, in pain. But when you remember that—when you remember that we’re all connected, that we’re all in this together—you feel aligned, clear, alive, fun, joyous, at ease.

And the thing about the view is, you can have a taste of where you’re going on that leading edge, and you can keep reminding yourself of it, set the intention, which is beautiful. But that’s not enough. It has to be practiced. It has to be tended.

Like tending the embers in a fire.

It reminds me of when I was in early recovery and first got sober. I accidentally tripped into this awakening I didn’t expect, and I wouldn’t have had the language for it at the time. But it lit a fire in me—a real lust for life, discovery, growth, spiritual truth. That fire took over my life.

And that’s the thing about awakening: it’s like fire. It can catch and build and grow on itself and burn up everything in its way.

But fire also has to be tended. Because it can harm. Neglected, it dims. Left wild, it can burn the wrong things.

So the real work is about being a keeper of your own inner flame.

And in the world we’re facing today—it goes without saying—we’re in unprecedentedly challenging times. And it feels more vital than ever, in my opinion, for all of us to be tending to our own flame, in whatever capacity that means for you. To be a keeper of that flame, a keeper of the view, and to keep moving toward the leading edge. To keep showing up in a way that feels authentically aligned with the person you know you can be.

For me, that means one thing: being all in. Being all in on life.

Which reminds me of my favorite quote—probably my favorite of all time—from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

For me, this is so beautiful because it points to the fact that we have to hold so much pain and suffering right now in this world. And being a keeper of the flame means not turning away from that, not pretending it doesn’t exist. Of course it’s not just “out there”—we experience it within ourselves too. Because we’re all connected.

And the other vital piece is not forgetting the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. The sun as this symbol of fire, always rising in the east, every single day.

When you can hold both together, then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.

And I love tea.

In a famous letter to the widow of a family friend, Einstein once wrote:

“For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

It might sound a little obtuse, even bypass-y to someone grieving. But it was probably just a genius’s best attempt at consolation, reminding her that her husband wasn’t gone because every moment of his life still existed in the fabric of spacetime. And it came straight out of his theory of relativity.

Once Einstein demonstrated that space and time are inseparably linked, the traditional picture of time as a single, unidirectional flow for everyone no longer held. Instead, it opened the door to a new view: that past, present, and future all coexist in a four-dimensional spacetime manifold.

Physicists call this the “block universe.”

Welcome to eternity

It’s sometimes nicknamed the “loaf of bread theory,” because physics is easier to swallow with carbs.

Picture it as a loaf of sourdough. Each slice is a moment in time.

You only ever taste one slice at a time, but the whole loaf—all of time and space—is already there.

In philosophy, this view is known as eternalism.

And you are something like the knife of consciousness:

Slicing into the loaf, tasting one moment after another, yet never escaping the fact that the entire loaf already exists.

Your Batman-themed birthday party as a seven-year-old is still there.

Your eightieth-fifth, god willing, is there too.

Because there’s only one universe that’s already perfectly complete.

No single universal present

If Einstein was the first to sketch this view, physicist Brian Greene has become one of its clearest modern explainers. He has a thought experiment designed to obliterate your sense of time:

Imagine an alien ten billion light-years away, holding up a clock and pointing to what they call “right now.”

Because light takes time to travel—and because relativity shows that motion itself warps our perception of time—their “present” would not line up with yours.

What they count as now could include events you would swear are centuries in the past or centuries in the future: your death, your great-grandchild’s wedding, even the extinction of humanity.

And this is where Greene adds nuance to the tidy loaf metaphor. The previous diagrams make it look like everyone shares one giant “now.” But relativity already proved that isn’t true.

What Greene adds is a way to visualize it. His thought experiment reveals that “now” itself is relative—different for every observer, shaped by where they are and how they’re moving. In other words:

There is no single universal present.

Which brings us back to the human scale. Instead of one master clock keeping time for the universe, there are only perspectives, each slicing the loaf in its own way. The present moment isn’t a fixed location so much as something to participate in, a way of seeing.

Not just for physicists

The block universe first became fascinating to me on a meditation retreat, of all places, when Dr. Shamil Chandaria, brought it up between sits. He studies consciousness at Oxford, Harvard, and Berkeley, so he thinks about these things. As we talked it over at lunch, the idea began to transcend physics, like something I could actually turn towards in practice.

Contemplatives like him—meditators, neuroscientists, Dharma junkies—form one camp deeply interested in the block universe, spending thousands of hours experientially discovering that past and future are nothing more than thoughts arising “now.”

The other camp is our culture at large, which continually retells the same intuition through stories and myths, especially in film.

Some of the most memorable movies of the past decade have been obsessed with time. Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2023, captures in its psychoactive title alone the disorienting truth the block universe points toward:

That everything is happening everywhere, all at once.

The film plays it out in a frenzy of parallel lives and absurdist chaos. It’s not a block universe but a block multiverse, creating a trippy metaphor for what it feels like to imagine all of time existing simultaneously.

If EEAAO portrays this idea as manic comedy and heartbreak, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar renders it as something far more intimate (spoiler alerts below!).

The climactic bookshelf scene with Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper pounding on the walls of spacetime to reach his daughter comes closer to what physicists actually mean when they talk about the block universe: past, present, and future laid out in a single four-dimensional whole.

When Cooper falls into Gargantua, the black hole, he’s pulled into what the film calls the tesseract, a 5th-dimensional construct built by “future humans” (or evolved beings). Inside it, time is laid out spatially, so he can move through moments in his daughter Murphy’s bedroom the way we move through space.

The movie’s ultimate premise is not just relativity, but love—love as the gravity strong enough to bind slices of time when nothing else can. It’s melodrama, for sure, but it still brings me to tears when I rewatch it for the eleventh time.

And that vision resonates with what the science itself suggests: the links across time may be far stranger, and far more enduring, than we tend to imagine.

And if Interstellar makes the block universe more intimate through love, Arrival might be the most faithful depiction of it in American cinema.

Amy Adams plays a linguist tasked with decoding the language of the heptapods, the alien species that has just arrived on Earth. World leaders assume they’ve come with a weapon, but what Adams discovers is that “weapon” is a mistranslation.

What the heptapods are actually offering is a gift: their language itself. Having long since moved beyond linear time, their language is circular—every sentence already complete before it begins, reflecting their non-linear view of reality.

As Adams learns their language, her perception shifts. She begins to see her daughter’s birth and death as an indivisible whole, with love and grief collapsing into the same recognition of inevitability.

Adams portrays this as a mother’s embodied knowing—the block universe viscerally embedded into her body, her grief, her stubborn love, and her refusal to turn away.

The beauty of Arrival is that, despite being an alien movie, it frames the block universe as fundamentally human: the choice to embrace all the slices of time, even the unbearable ones.

Choosing to raise your daughter with infinite tenderness, all while knowing she will die too soon, and it will destroy you.

To say yes to love, knowing loss is built in. To live as though the loaf is already whole, because it is.

And to dare yourself to act like it.

What you can taste for yourself

If all of this feels like it’s breaking your brain, that’s exactly the point. Relativity is hard to picture, and the block universe is harder still. Fortunately, you don’t need equations or alien calligraphy to taste it—just a few minutes of honest attention.

You might try this for yourself. Close your eyes and recall a specific moment from the past. Watch how it arrives not as the event itself but as a mental construction: a visual image in the mind’s eye, an echo of internal sound, or a bodily feeling that resurfaces.

Now shift toward the future. Notice how it shows up in the same format—your mind rehearsing a conversation, visualizing an outcome, spinning a scene of worry, or fantasizing about a possibility. However vivid (or vague), it still only appears as a mental image, inner sound, or bodily sensation.

Then turn to what you call the present. Attend to the breath moving in the body, the rumble of a passing truck, or the birdsong outside the window. Each impression disappears the moment you try to hold it, instantly replaced by the next. Even “now” dissolves into a flux of sensory events, with nothing solid to grasp.

What doesn’t change is the knowing itself, the simple capacity that keeps receiving whatever appears.

It’s always immediate, like an unseen gravity holding everything together.

And that unshakable capacity—awareness or consciousness itself—has always pointed in the same direction.

This is why mystics have long said time is an illusion. Einstein showed it through equations, contemplatives through attention, our culture through myth, and I’m just over here bloggin’, trying to keep up. The joke, of course, is that there’s no “present” to keep up with, which is exactly what our best science and spirituality suggest.

And yet this is where it becomes useful. If past and future are only thoughts, then most of what we call “life” is just an endless bread-slicing project in the mind—constantly replaying what already happened or rehearsing what might, clenching up against both. That is where the suffering hides, always a move away from the freedom of the present.

Nothing about reality itself has changed. What changes is how tightly we hold it.

The practical side of eternity

It’s tempting to stop here and say that all there is is the “Deep Now.” But that would be a regressive kind of spirituality, one that ignores the polycrisis we’re living through, as if the culture and climate will heal themselves if we just breathe deeply enough. Planning and collective imagination still matter, because the future still requires care.

And yet when you turn to direct experience, all you ever meet is the present. This is the paradox the block universe helps us understand:

Every slice of time already exists, but you only ever get to eat one.

Which raises the obvious question: what the hell are you supposed to do with that information? If the future is already written, does anything you do matter? Should you stop filing your taxes? Should you skip breakfast because, cosmically speaking, you’ve already eaten every egg you’ll ever eat?

Probably not. Though for the record, I’ve been skipping breakfast for a decade with great results.

What you can do is start with the practical. Stepping into this mystical–scientific view can radically shift how you meet the most basic struggles of being human, such as:

• Anxiety. Makes no sense here. You’re basically arguing with physics, trying to out-think a future that already exists. From where we stand, we don’t know what’s coming—that’s why we prepare and act. But worry doesn’t change anything; it only makes you suffer twice. Drop the worry, and you can act cleanly, without hauling fear along for the ride. The liberation is meeting the future with far less stress.

• Regret. The mirror image of anxiety, replaying a past that can’t be changed. It’s like picking up a history book and shouting, No, this shouldn’t have happened! But the ink’s already dry. Beating yourself up won’t change history; it only drags it into the present. The liberation is knowing the past is complete, and you’re free to stop rereading it.

• Control. The same con. We grip as if the universe were waiting for our approval. But it isn’t! Your effort still matters, but the frantic edge—the resistance, the belief that everything hinges on you—is optional. The liberation is action without strain, doing what’s yours to do without being shackled to the outcome. What can follow is a kind of deep exhale.

• Grief. From where we stand, the past is gone. You can’t walk back into a hug or hear the laugh again except in memory. That’s what grief most often feels like: absence. But in a block universe, death doesn’t erase what was lived. Every moment with someone you loved still exists in spacetime. The pain is that you can’t re-enter it. The liberation is knowing it’s not lost because love remains permanent, even when physical access is not.

Psychologically, these aren’t isolated struggles. Anxiety, regret, control, and grief are all variations of the same process: the mind trying to manage time in order to escape the discomfort of the present.

But that’s only the surface…

The deeper weirdness

The block universe has far stranger implications once you follow it all the way down.

The first is free will. If every moment of time already exists in the loaf, then what you call a “choice” is just the knife landing on the next slice. For many people, this realization can feel deeply unsettling. If the future is already happening, then what’s the point of trying? Should you just sit back and watch it all play out?

From inside the slice, though, it still can *feel* like you’re choosing. That sense of agency certainly feels real enough in your nervous system. But at the level of the block universe, the outcome is already happening somewhere in spacetime, which is why many physicists dismiss free will altogether. Others suggest it’s simply the subjective experience of inhabiting one slice from the inside.

Contemplatives go further, pointing out that the “you” making the choice is itself just another construction—an appearance in the mind, no more solid than the thoughts of past and future that surround it. From that view, the whole debate about whether you “really” have free will is probably less important than it seems. You keep acting and showing up.

When I first began to investigate this, it was quite unnerving—especially since I once thought I had free will figured out. But over time it turned into something freeing, even playful, like fun mystery you get to live inside. Fortunately for us, free will doesn’t need solving. It’s just life, happening on its own.

The second is psychic phenomena: déjà vu, prophecy, telepathy, etc. These are the kinds of moments that make one question the materialist consensus view of reality. If all of time is already happening inside a single four-dimensional field, then what we call intuition or foresight may just be awareness brushing against a different part of it. A prophetic dream is simply the mind wandering into a room you haven’t opened yet.

Advanced meditators and mystics have long reported such feats that boggle the mind: recalling past lives, seeing events in dreams that later unfolded, reading other people’s thoughts with sharp clarity, and much bolder claims, trust me.

Even in ordinary life, we see glimpses of it. My mom, for instance, has a knack for calling right when something big is happening with me across the country—we always joke it’s her “ESP,” a kind of motherly embodied knowing not so different from Amy Adams in Arrival.

From the outside, these claims may sound supernatural. But within the block universe frame, they could simply be what it feels like when consciousness slips out of its usual constraints and rejoins the four-dimensional field rather than just staying in the localized slice we normally inhabit.

This was actually Shamil Chandaria’s suggestion when he first introduced me to the block universe: that predictive psychic phenomena might not be “woo” at all, but the natural consequence of awareness stretching beyond its ordinary limits.

Seen this way, mystical reports of clairvoyance or the Akashic Records might just be different languages for the same capacity: consciousness opening up to itself in a way that can taste the totality of time. To be clear: physics doesn’t prove these experiences, but it doesn’t rule them out either.

The danger, of course, is chasing these powers as if they were the point. That only becomes another form of grasping. The takeaway can be much simpler: to notice that every moment you fear, crave, or long for is already present, already woven into the universe—and that you don’t need to go anywhere special to find it.

This slice, this holy now

By now you might be picturing the universe as some vast 4D object, a kind of cosmic museum where every moment is already on display. But that’s still just an image, a mental diagram we lean on because the truth is impossible to visualize.

Some physicists today argue that time and space aren’t fundamental at all, but properties that arise from how we interact with the world. The universe, in this view, is less a solid object than a quantum field. And it’s a field you can’t picture, because it isn’t really a thing—just potentiality bursting into form, faster than anything imagined, moment by moment, in this wild flowering of creation.

Contemplatives say much the same from the inside: past and future appear only as thoughts surfacing in the present, momentary ripples out of what the Buddhists call emptiness, which is best understood as potential (rather than purely “nothingness”).

So when physicists or mystics talk about an “infinite block universe,” they don’t necessarily mean endless miles of space. Here infinity doesn’t just point to vastness but to the source of all life: the inexhaustible creative void out of which everything keeps appearing.

This again is where the invitation can turn practical. Even if you can’t conceptualize any of this, you can still experience it. And if you’ve made it this far, you can notice what this perspective does to your body, mind, heart, and even your spirit. Does it make you afraid? Apathetic? Slightly unmoored?

Or maybe, I hope, it opens a different door—one of freedom. To let you glimpse that this moment is already holy, and if there’s anything worth worshipping, it’s the wild, unrepeatable mystery of being consciously here at all.

And when you look in this way, love transcends sentiment and begins to reveal itself as structural. It’s what lets Michelle Yeoh finally meet her daughter in EEAAO without running from the chaos. It’s what carries McConaughey’s Cooper through the tesseract back to Murph in Interstellar. It’s what allows Amy Adams in Arrival to embrace both the birth and the loss of her child. Love is the gravity that bends time into something bearable. And apparently, the secret to unlocking spacetime is learning to love your daughter, which is a pretty damn good metaphor for our time.

The internet has created a strange kind of authority figure. A lot of the most successful content comes from people who’ve struggled with a core part of being human—dating, self-worth, intimacy, whatever—and worked relentlessly to change it. That’s why they’re such good translators. They’ve been to the depths, taken notes, and come back with a map.

But there’s another kind of person entirely. Someone for whom that thing just isn’t a problem. It comes naturally, like walking or breathing. And they’re not online explaining it all day because... they’re out living. They don’t think of it as a skill or an achievement. It’s just who they are.

I’ve lived somewhere between the two worlds. In some core domains—health, money, purpose, presence—I’ve had to earn every inch of ground through trial, error, and the occasional spectacular faceplant. At best, I’ve become a decent translator of hard lessons. Plenty of people do it better.

But dating and relationships have always come fairly naturally to me. Not always successfully, for sure, but intuitively. Let’s just say your boy never really struggled to get a date. And that vantage point helps me see this particular corner of internet advice a little differently.

When I watch people try to reverse-engineer intimacy, package formulas for “romantic polarity,” offer takes on masculinity, or listen to some clearly brilliant hyper-nerd explain romance, it rarely resonates. Not because they’re necessarily wrong, but because the whole thing can feel over-coded. It’s like trying to write a manual for dancing. You can break it into steps, but if the music isn’t in you, those steps won’t help much.

You might think, well dude, it’s internet advice. Just log off! But we’re well past that. The internet is where we go to find authority now. It’s where people seek guidance on the basics of being human: how to date, how to parent, how to lead, how to be less of a mess. And to be fair, a lot of these folks have earned their credibility. They’ve actually done “the work.” The catch is, the medium itself favors people who can explain themselves best, not necessarily the ones living the most coherent, grounded, or relational lives.

The trouble with the internet is that it collapses two very different forms of transmission into one. In spiritual traditions, there’s the explicit transmission—the words, frameworks, and carefully articulated methods. And there’s the implicit transmission—the felt sense of someone who is free in a certain way. The first you can get from a Substack essay. You can sometimes catch a bit of that second kind through a podcast or video, though it’s never quite the same as being in the room with them.

But online, we tend to confuse eloquence for embodiment and articulation for realization. We end up over-indexing on the most legible people, rather than the ones most worth paying attention to.

The naturals have their blind spots, too. When something has always been easy, you often don’t know how to explain it. You don’t even realize there’s anything to explain, because there’s no process, no sense that what you’re doing is remarkable. Your strength is invisible to you, so you can’t teach it in a way that lands.

And this isn’t just about dating. You see the same pattern in business advice, parenting, politics, and definitely spirituality. The people with the most articulate frameworks tend to rise to the top. But the ones living the most integrated, sane, or beautiful lives often go unnoticed. The most transformative teachers I’ve met have had very little to say, and they rarely post. They teach by doing, how they move through a room, or how they listen. Which means the only way to learn from them is to notice—really notice—what’s right in front of you.

Lately I’ve been paying closer attention to the people around me, not only teachers, who seem to have certain things come naturally. My partner Grace, for example, has this uncanny ability to put people at ease. There’s something in her presence that’s immediately calming. She doesn’t perform empathy, she simply relates, with a kind of effortless humanity. If you asked her how she does it—and believe me, I have—she’d just say she loves people.

But what I’ve come to see, watching her in relationships, friendships, and even passing interactions, is that it’s truly less a technique and more a vibe. A kind of poetic attunement. She meets people in a relaxed, sincere, responsive, unguarded way. I’m often amazed by how much she actually seems to enjoy small talk. She’s not trying or forcing anyone to go deep—but people end up going there anyway, drawn in by her warmth.

Another person I learn from all the time, about leadership and charisma, is my dearest friend Conlan. He’s probably the funniest person I know: effortlessly witty, self-deprecating, sharp in a way that engages. We went out for sushi one night with my mom and dad in Chelsea, and somewhere in the middle of dinner, he inserted a raunchy joke—something about anal sex and poop—that could’ve easily flopped, but instead had everyone in stitches. The bit took on a life of its own, and he carried into the night as we wandered the city, eating ice cream and laughing down the sidewalks like kids. It wasn’t crude for shock value, it was just him, being hilarious and loose and totally himself.

He’s taught me something like comedy as a way-of-life, and I try to bring that into the groups I lead and the projects I run.

To be clear, I can’t quite mimic that. A big part of this process, for me, is learning my own limits. I’m funny, I’m playful—but I’m not that funny. Yet being around it does something, leaving a trace. And even when I’m not trying to be funny, if I can just remember it, it opens some silliness in me.

And of course, neither Grace nor Conlan is posting about any of this.

I keep finding myself pulled towards that kind of effortlessness, wanting to see where it leads. Sometimes it’s noticing how my dad plays with my 14-month-old son; stacking toys, building towers just to knock them down again, narrating the whole thing in a voice that keeps him enthralled. I watch them and realize I’m not quite as good at it yet. Maybe I’m still learning (and tired).

Other times, I notice how a friend pulls back, setting boundaries that can feel distant or even cruel. But they hold, and in their own way, they inspire me. I’ve absorbed something there too: I’ll say “no” now, more quickly and with less apology, even with small things. Like the other day, when someone tried to rope me into building a campfire on the beach, and I just didn’t want to. Which, I know, might sound lame—but we were about to leave and I had a baby to tend to.

The hard part, I think, is discernment. We live in a time when so many voices are vying for our attention. Everyone has a take, method, or framework. And the truth is, some of the most visible ones really are worth listening to. That’s what makes it tricky.

My friend , for example, has taught me a lot about how to build a thriving business in public that actually helps people, while having fun and not losing yourself in the process. He’s also one of the friendliest, most generous people I know. At least once a month, someone reaches out to me saying, “Hey, I’m a friend of Jonny,” because seemingly everyone is a friend of Jonny.

Then there are friends like , who just wrote a bestselling book on experimental productivity and somehow made it feel like a fun gift rather than a project. And there are plenty of others, too.

These are people who are visible and living well. They are not mega-influencers. And maybe that’s part of the magic. They’re just visible enough, rewarded for their earned insight, but not yet flattened by it. That balance is rare.

What I’m tracking, I think, is ease. The kind that not only shows up in how someone lives, but also in how they share. Some people live so fully they hardly need to say anything. Others post on social media because they’ve walked through pits of hell and come back with language. And then there are a few who share because they simply love to. For this third Goldilocks group, even posting comes naturally. Not performatively, but as a form of contact, and a way of being generous.

While I’m often wary of advice from people who seem to inhabit the internet more than the world, some of them are still worth learning from. When I see that kind of ease, in any of its forms, I pay attention.

The question, then, is what to do with that attention. How do you learn what comes intuitively to someone else? Unfortunately, there’s no formula. The best I’ve gathered: you watch closely, you experiment, and you let yourself look a little foolish in the process. And more than anything, you relax—enough for their way of being to seep in, like a friend’s catchphrase naturally sneaking into your own speech patterns. That’s the slow transmission, the kind that happens without you even trying. Which is why it matters who you spend time around.

Because the digital age still makes it dangerously easy to confuse eloquence with wisdom. And if we’re not careful, we end up shaping our lives around the people best at explaining themselves, rather than the ones best at living well.

My hunch is we still need to pay more attention to the ones who have something deeper to offer, whether or not they’re putting it into words. You can catch it in the way someone pauses before answering, the air between two people who trust each other, the softness in someone’s face. The signal is always there, right in front of us.

For the past three months, three times per week, I developed a somewhat unusual habit: I got as angry as possible for exactly three minutes. I’d close all the windows to spare my neighbors, grab my analog timer, and clear space on my bed. Then I’d let it rip—kicking, screaming, and fuming like a man possessed. Letting guttural, ugly-sounding anger flow.

This exercise is called the “3-3-3.” It came to me through one of the more adventurous guys in my men’s group, who’s been training with Possibility Management—a sort of fringe-y, emotional alchemy outfit that blends radical expression, shadow work, and what I can only describe as psychomagic with a dash of weird.

Why do something like this? Because most of us moderns have repressed our anger to a pathological degree. And while that might sound obvious, there’s a canyon between reading another diagnosis about our collective emotional constipation and actually doing something about it. If my work over recent years has a throughline, it’s embodying experiential change—putting into motion what science and tradition point to, rather than orbiting it from a safe intellectual distance.

And it worked. I’ll share what changed for me in a moment. But first, a bit of context.

On anger

Anger is perhaps the most misunderstood of all the emotions. Most of us associate it with harm—verbal abuse, violence, broken glass, control. And for good reason. We’ve all been on the receiving end of that kind of anger. Most of us have also dished it out. The damage it causes can be lasting, even life-defining.

It’s heartbreaking how often anger, instead of being felt cleanly, gets turned outward as punishment or inward as poison. If you’re anything like me, you’ve both lashed out at people and turned a scorching anger of self-hatred towards yourself.

But that’s anger used against someone, not anger itself.

There’s a big difference.

The tragedy is that because anger has been so consistently misused—twisted by repression, shame, powerlessness, or trauma—most of us have learned to fear it entirely. We’ve decided that anger itself is the problem, when really the problem is what people do with it when they’re unconscious.

Anger, in its pure form, is not the enemy. It’s what helps us set a boundary—not the performative pop-psych kind that therapy culture suggests we need in every conversation, but an actual boundary. The kind your system instinctively knows to make when something crosses a line and your body says “no.”

My favorite example of this type of utterly natural anger comes from cats. If you get too close to their face, or step on their tail, they’ll hiss at you with tiny lion rage or swipe with tiny bear claws. There’s no story or resentment, just a sharp “back off.” And then, just as quickly, they go back to chilling. Maybe grooming themselves, or napping in the sun.

That’s just one role anger plays. It’s also what, counterintuitively, clarifies a “yes.” So much indecision—so much spinning in place—comes from stuck or unfelt anger. You can’t move forward if you’re still holding a thousand undigested no’s in your system.

Because once anger starts to move, something deeper wakes up. Maybe most importantly, anger is what allows you to protect the sacred. Whether it’s the safety of your child or the creative life you keep putting off. It’s what gives you the momentum to move toward what matters. And significantly, when anger shows up, it means you care. Apathy doesn’t roar. Anger does.

But again, most of us—especially men—have been taught to repress it. We channel it into snarky tweets, performative outrage, or self-loathing. We don’t let ourselves feel it cleanly, directly, in the body. Instead, it gets stuffed somewhere—usually the shoulders or gut, sometimes the jaw, neck, or lower back—until it either turns inward as depression or leaks outward as blow-ups, passive-aggression, or cruelty disguised as insight.

Some say the body keeps the score, and while there’s debate around the science of that, you can usually spot it. Repressed anger has a way of calcifying into chronic tension, headaches, digestive issues, or a low-grade irritability that colors everything.

Everyone’s got a theory. What we don’t have are many practices that get under the hood of the nervous system. This one—screaming on your bed for three minutes—seemed as good a place as any to start.

The 3-3-3

It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Three times per week. Three minutes each time. For three months.

The mechanics are deceptively simple. You lie on your back, kick your legs, bang your fists, and let yourself get mad. Really mad. You start with clenched fists, eyes closed, and consciously summon the emotion—pulling anger up from wherever it’s been hiding in your system. The prompt is to go big. Not a cat hiss, but full-throttle, uncensored rage. It’s physical, vocal, and intentionally excessive.

Per the instructions, it’s best to direct the anger at someone specific.1 We’ve all got people who fit the bill—and if you can’t find any, you’re either an actual saint, or you haven’t looked hard enough. I’d suggest looking for childhood bullies, betrayals, resentments, or any unresolved energetic charges.

Here’s a demonstration of the 3-3-3 by Clinton Callahan, founder of Possibility Management. Skip to around 37 minutes for where the demo begins:

Your first concern might be: “What about my neighbors?” or “I’ve got kids!” Fair enough. You bite down on a towel and scream into it. I did this plenty when Grace and the baby were home. I’d just say: “I’m going to do that anger thing for three minutes,” and go shut the door. That’s part of the beauty—this practice is short. As far as emotional release goes, it’s one of the more efficient ones out there.

According to the Possibility Management folks, this type of psychomagic “clears the cobwebs.” It’s about flushing the system so your emotions can flow more regularly. They talk about it like building a capacity dial—you might start by accessing just 10% of your anger, then gradually build toward 100%. The idea being: the more you can fully feel your own anger, the more you can stay present when someone else expresses theirs. Without flinching or dissociating, even if they are completely raging.

And this part’s important: they emphasize not mixing emotions. Anger often masks sadness or fear, and if something else arises in the middle of the session—tears, heartbreak, collapse—you follow that. You let it move. Which means this practice doesn’t just help you release anger. It also sharpens your ability to sense what emotion is actually present. In that way, it’s not just expressive release. It’s interoceptive training, meaning the skill of tracking what’s happening inside you.

Some takeaways

This wasn’t my first time working with anger. I’ve done and led all sorts of versions: primal screaming in redwood groves, breath-fueled release sessions, even the occasional “Fuck You” circle (a men’s work classic, ask me about it sometime). I’ve held space for others mid-rage. But this was the first time I committed to it as a consistent personal practice.

Overall, I found this practice extremely effective, though not always in the ways I expected.

Cathexis versus catharsis. The Possibility Management folks make a crucial distinction here. Catharsis is the idea that if you just express those “bad” feelings enough, they’ll go away and leave you alone—like emotional vomiting. Cathexis is different. It’s about experiencing and expressing anger, sadness, fear, and joy clearly and consciously, without mixing them together.2 You’re not trying to get rid of the emotion. You’re learning to circulate that energy through your system so you can use it as a resource.

Feelings vs. emotions. Another distinction I found useful: a feeling is clean, sharp, and temporary—it rises, brings clarity or momentum, and resolves. By contrast, an emotion lingers. If you’re angry for more than three minutes, you’re probably in an emotion, not a feeling. Feelings help you handle what’s happening now. Emotions help you heal what happened then. And if you don’t learn to tell the difference in real time, your life starts to fill with confusion, breakdowns, and disappointments.

Timing mattered. I found that the best window was morning or as early in the day as possible. The practice would raise my energy for hours, sometimes the whole day. Thanks to a decade of spiritual practice, I’ve become energetically sensitive, or what Grace might generously call “high-maintenance.” I had to be careful on days I had caffeine—sometimes the combined energy would be too much, leaving me wired in an uncomfortable way. That said, your system might respond totally differently.

Where I aimed the anger mattered even more. At first, I directed towards myself—my flaws, perceived failures, all the ways I haven’t lived up. I’m excellent at that. But after a couple weeks, another guy in my men’s group reminded me of something the legendary coach Joe Hudson teaches: that anger is usually more effective when it’s directed outward. Not to avoid responsibility, but because most of us—especially the self-aware, therapy-literate types—are already experts in blaming ourselves. What we rarely give ourselves is permission to get angry at others. Once I made the shift, something unlocked. The anger had somewhere true to go.3

One person became my focus. A specific figure from my past who, despite my best efforts, still occupied a small but persistent corner of my mind. I started directing most of the anger towards them… and it worked. The impact is subtle but known. Their memory feels significantly lighter now, less sticky. I hadn’t realized how much I was still carrying until it started to move.

Anger has swagger. On the days when the practice really clicked, I could feel the truth of the saying: anger leads to clarity. There was a vivid boldness in my body afterwards, a kind of swagger. Like a grinning “don’t fuck with me” energy that made me want to buy a leather jacket or something. That part was fun.

The practice deepened over time. Toward the last month, I could access more subtle dimensions of anger, particularly the somatic sensation of heat spreading and dissipating in my body. It started to feel oddly good. Like circulating superpower energy that had been lodged in my system for years. At times, it even felt shamanic.

No matter the day, it helped. I’ve been in an intense stretch of parenting, but the truth is, I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been. Some days, I felt so good and thought, Do I really need to simulate anger right now? But every time I did it, I was grateful afterward. Even when I was calm. Especially when I was tired and it was the last thing I wanted to do. I don’t want to overstate the impact; it didn’t radically change me. But I do think it made me much more comfortable with anger, and subtly raised the floor on my wellbeing.

The spiritual implications

In most Buddhist traditions, anger is classed as one of the three kleshas: mental poisons (or defilements) that cloud wisdom and generate suffering. The common view is that it must be purified or transcended. Many spiritual practitioners internalize this as a kind of moral allergy: if you feel anger, something’s wrong with you. You’re not advanced enough, not spiritual enough.

And while I understand the spirit of that teaching—and have greatly benefitted from inquiry practices that ask where the anger is arising from, or who, exactly, is getting triggered—I’ve come to believe it’s incomplete for modern humans. That perspective can easily be misinterpreted as implying that anger itself shouldn’t arise. But most of the deeply realized teachers I’ve know will secretly admit: they still get frustrated! It does seem possible to dissolve anger entirely if you’re a saint, maybe—but that’s exceedingly rare, and I’m not sure it needs to be the goal for most of us.

That confusion—that if you were really spiritual, you wouldn’t feel anger at all—has always struck me as missing the point. If the aim is a happy life of presence, then what matters isn’t whether anger arises, but how we meet it. How it’s liberated. Not with suppression or shame, but with breath, contact, and a willingness to feel it cleanly, without being overtaken.

This practice reinforced that anger isn’t the opposite of peace, but is what protects it. Anger is the internal signal that says something matters here. And when felt consciously—without mixing, without harm—it becomes a kind of spiritual heat. It burns off confusion and enlivens the body.

Part of why I’ve been so drawn to the non-dual view in recent years is because there’s no hierarchy of experience. We don’t rank “states of consciousness.” Rage is as welcome as bliss because what matters is presence, being awake to what’s here, and letting it move through. In that tantric frame, anger isn’t an obstacle in the path, but a key part of the curriculum.

I’m certainly biased, and I swim in a specific corner of the pool. But I can say with confidence that practices like this work especially well for men and spiritual practitioners—two groups often conditioned to bypass anger in the name of control or virtue. And if your nervous system is subtly choking on all the no’s you never voiced, you can’t fake your way to freedom.

For much of my life, I lived entirely in my head. I rehearsed conversations that never happened, gamed out scenarios that rarely came true, and replayed awkward interactions on a loop—thinking my way through moments that begged to be felt. From the outside, it looked like I had my shit together. I was a real deep thinker. A real smart guy.

Then again, that’s not quite true. My closest friends and family could see I was lost in my own world. Not because I let them in, but because it kept leaking out anyway. Internally, I either strategized my next move or simply dissociated from the present one entirely.

Over time, that began to shift. It took years of messy recovery, trying pretty much anything that might quiet my mind and bring me back into my body. I meditated like life depended on it, experimented with more consciousness-altering techniques than I care to admit, and found teachers who helped me see it was all much simpler than I’d made it.

At first, I just wanted to stop drinking and using. But eventually, I saw the deeper engine beneath it all: an addiction to thought.

Slowly, sometimes excruciatingly so, I learned how to settle back into my own skin. It took daily practice to calm my system. What emerged was spacious presence: the ability to be here, fully in my body, letting this moment be enough. It surprised me to learn that this capacity wasn’t some rare gift or personality trait—it was a muscle. I worked it consistently, like training for a marathon, until being present stopped being work. Before I knew it, life started to organize itself around something deeper and more primal than thinking.

What I got for all that effort is something I’m still getting used to talking about. My relationships became simpler and more honest. I feel connected—to the earth, to other people, to silence. Life changed from something I had to figure out to something I could actually feel. And a soothing presence is available whenever I need it. I can sink in and let the Tao carry me.

Only later did I realize this shift had a name beyond the spiritual frameworks I already knew. Apparently, it had been described—beautifully and at length—by psychiatrist . The guy’s having a serious moment right now, and you can’t escape his ideas on podcasts, Substack, or anywhere thoughtful people gather online. He shows how modern life runs mostly on the left hemisphere: the part that controls, labels, breaks things apart. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, holds the wider, relational, poetic depth we all crave. Some feel that longing acutely, others hardly notice, but it’s wired into all of us.

For decades, McGilchrist has laid bare how we’ve become a left hemisphere culture, hooked on control and the comforting lie that we can think our way out of everything. The right hemisphere—our seat of wholeness, intuition, embodied wisdom—has been pushed aside, mostly benched. Largely suppressed. Which might explain why so many people are tuning into his work now. We’re hungry to remember what we lost.

But here’s what most people miss about hemispheric theory: reading about it is left-brain as hell!

For every minute spent scrolling through a newsletter on the importance of right-hemisphere living (including this one!), ten more would be better spent practicing something like alternate nostril breathing (Nadi Shodhana is a method that actually balances the hemispheres). McGilchrist isn’t just describing theory here. He’s pointing to a completely different way of moving through life.

And in an age of AI and ever-growing cognitive noise—mounting entropy across every dimension of life, from politics to culture to the very lineaments of our cityscapes—this might be one of the most practical life skills you didn’t know you needed. The personal benefits are huge, so much so that, if properly done in sufficient numbers, the effects could ripple on societal scales. Being the change you wish to see in the world, and whatnot.

To our left-brained selves, it may be a comfort (and motivation) to know that groundbreaking neuroscience bears this up. The shift into persistent awakening, and all the wellbeing attendant to it, might quite literally be a shift from left- to right-hemisphere dominance. This is supported by MRI research showing structural brain changes in long-term meditators, and by meta-analyses on how the hemispheres work together over time. Our brains are awesomely plastic. Which just means you can learn this whenever you decide to, right in the middle of everything else you’ve got going on.

At first it might not be easy, but it’s always simple. That’s what this piece is about.

What follows is a field guide for changing how you meet reality, drawn from what’s actually worked for me (after a long list of things that didn’t). It’s my small attempt to offer something grounded and useful amid all the hemisphere discourse: a way to actually embody the shift, not just analyze it.

In the end, it’s mostly about loosening our grip on the one addiction we rarely name but constantly feed: thinking.

Unclench

Right now, as you read this, check in with your belly. Is it tight? What about your face—is your jaw locked, your brow tense? If you’re anything like me, you might even be clenching your ass without meaning to. Most of us carry a habit of bracing: an old animal reflex tucked into the body, a muscle memory so deep we mistake it for normal, if we notice it at all.

You could try this. Starting at your feet, slowly scan up through your legs, your back, your shoulders and face, all the way to your scalp. There’s almost always at least one knot of tension you didn’t know was there.

Now, if you feel like it, clench your hand tightly, squeeze hard for five seconds, then let it go.

Feel the difference?

That’s the whole move here.

It sounds simple, but noticing and letting go is a skill most of us forget how to use. It’s not something you do, but something you stop unconsciously doing.

McGilchrist explains this clearly. The left hemisphere tightens its grip when the world feels uncertain, trying to control reality by chopping it into smaller, manageable parts. Under stress, it hoards more blood flow, more metabolic fuel, and your body follows, gearing up to fight or run.

The right hemisphere, meanwhile, works completely differently. It’s built for open attention that sees wholes rather than parts. But you can’t white-knuckle your way there. You have to actually relax and unclench to sense the whole of what’s happening. When your system feels safe enough to drop its defenses, the right brain comes alive. It yawns, it loves, it softens the edges, and remembers that connection is possible.

Thomas Hübl, a contemporary teacher who bridges mysticism and trauma science, puts it simply: “Relaxation is the prerequisite for deep perception.”

Your nervous system can’t soften into the wider field when it’s locked and loaded for the next crisis in your inbox.

Stop strategizing and start dancing

Instead, stop thinking about how to manage your body and move it. Stretch, breathe, roll on the floor. Seriously, when was the last time you rolled around on the floor? One benefit of being a new dad is watching kids go absolutely feral on the ground.

I might also suggest dancing alone in your room to this and this. Or, if you like getting dubstep freaky, this. Anything that reminds you you’re an animal, not a strategy machine.

Again, if you’re anything like me, you spend a terrifying chunk of your tens of thousands daily thoughts on strategy: how many sips of caffeine is the Goldilocks number, what snack won’t ruin my gut, exactly how to sit so I don’t wreck my back again, what exact bedtime ritual will guarantee my son sleeps through the night, and so on.

We could spend our entire lives planning how to live. Or we could just stop. None of this micro-managing is actually required!

Unhook awareness from thought

Even as the body softens, the mind still wants the spotlight. That is not a flaw. The left brain is brilliant at naming, planning, and weaving meaning out of the chaos of stimuli. It makes language and maps and keeps your life organized. This is a gift. The trouble comes when it loops on its own stories and you forget they are just stories. You get so caught up in the spin that the echo starts to feel like real sound.

Enter Loch Kelly, who blends neuroscience and nondual awareness in a way that’s surprisingly good at cutting through this very human mess. You don’t fight thought head-on. You just stop feeding it. He calls this unhooking awareness from thought. I picture it like a fish slipping off the hook and drifting back into open water—where it belongs. (Unless you’re ordering sushi.)

When you notice you are lost in thought, just pause and name it softly: thinking. Then maybe let yourself feel a little glad you noticed. This moment matters more than people think. Every time you celebrate escaping the thought hook, you train your brain to love coming home. You strengthen the muscle that prefers presence over rumination. It’s one of the simplest and most underrated skills there is: the ability to unhook and see thought for what it is.

But noticing is only the first half. The shift only really happens when you place your attention right away on something tactile and alive: the hum of the fridge, the soles of your feet, the rise and fall of your breath. Sensation pulls you back into the room, which is, inconveniently or beautifully, the only place your life is ever happening.

Feel more

Once you unhook from thought, what’s left is sensation. The animal in you knows how to feel without your supervision. Let it. One of my teachers, who had roots in a Thai forest monastery, told me that the head monk always reminded him:

“The only thing you really need to do is think less, feel more.”

Let each sensation be exactly as it is. There’s nothing special to reach for, and you don’t have to get calm or “spiritual” about it. Just stay close to the pulse—meaning, stay with the living, shifting texture of your body and the space around you.

It’s like letting your awareness spread out and touch the room itself—not scanning it with your mind, but sensing it as if you could read its vibe through your skin. Almost like you’re reading space if it were psychic braille, as Peter Brown puts it, attuning to the experiential texture of what’s happening.

Feeling in this way is both the practice and the fruit. At first, it might feel awkward or difficult. But if you stick with it, the right hemisphere naturally takes over, and the edges start to blur. The warmth of sunlight on your arm doesn’t feel like something happening to you—it feels like something you’re part of. The sound of traffic becomes less like noise and more like a rhythm you’re swimming in. Sometimes you might forget where you end and everything else begins.

Soften your gaze

Of all the doors back to the right hemisphere, vision might be the one we ignore most, which is ironic, given how much we depend on it. Humans are primarily visual creatures: some estimates say that 30 to 50 percent (or even up to 80%) of our cerebral cortex is dedicated to visual processing. That is more than touch and hearing combined. But most of us use our eyes like a lighthouse rather than the sun: instead of illuminating everything around us, we narrow our focus, always scanning for the next singular thing to grab.

The left hemisphere loves this tunnel vision. It thrives on details, labels, parts—drilling down to catch what it can name. What it can’t name, it can’t see. The right hemisphere works differently. It sees the living whole, the web of connections stitching everything together.

Most of us never learned to use our eyes this way. But when you soften your gaze to include what’s happening at the edges, you tap into another kind of perception—the brain’s relational networks instead of its laser focus mode. When you relax your eyes, the brain shifts from dissecting parts to taking in the whole.

McGilchrist points out that the right hemisphere holds this wide, steady attention by default. This is simply how your eyes and mind work when you stop trying to control what you see. But most of us unconsciously clench our vision the same way we clench our jaw—and it lets go when you do.

If you feel like playing with this, pick something in front of you. Let your eyes soften until you start to notice the space around the object itself—the little bit of room it sits in. Then see if you can sense the space all the way out to the blurry edges at the far boundary of your vision. It is a bit like switching from a narrow sniper’s scope to what I call a soft cyclopic eye: one wide, relaxed eye that takes in the whole scene at once.

This part is key. You are looking out through a single visual field, a continuous space where everything appears together as one thing. Nothing in that field truly stands alone. As John Donne famously wrote in 1624: no man is an island. And in this way of seeing, no-thing is an island either.

Next time you find yourself puttering around your kitchen, try softening your eyes into that soft cyclopic eye. See how the fridge stops being just a fridge. It blends into the counter, the light, the leaves on the windowsill. Everything reveals itself as part of one unfolding whole, made of the same fabric of seeing, open to what is seen.

When the cyclopic eye was first pointed out to me, it was a bit of a breakthrough. I realized that meditation didn’t have to stay inside my body or breath, but could include everything I was seeing. I started practicing this again and again: noticing when I got caught in thought, unhooking, and relaxing into the wider view. It’s a literal shift from content to context, which is what right-hemisphere living is all about.

With a bit of training, this kind of seeing becomes second nature. And it’s really pretty sweet. It’s a small taste of the oneness mystics have always waxed poetic about. It’s just so simple and ordinary, most people overlook it.

Notice that reality is turned on

While working with the visual field, you might also notice something rather astonishing: it’s all just here, showing up by itself. The whole scene—objects, colors, shadows, the way light hits the wall—is all just appearing without any effort on your part. You didn’t push a button to make your visual field show up. You’re not straining for sound to enter your ears. When you woke up this morning, consciousness just came back online, and the whole world was waiting for you. Even thoughts arrive the same way—unbidden, instantaneously manifest.

This, too, is so simple that the left hemisphere usually skips right over it. In fact, that’s the thread running through everything we’ve covered: the right hemisphere awakens when you notice what was always already here. When you really let this sink in—that everything you see, hear, and think is showing up on its own—it feels both clear and obvious.

The thing is, sometimes the sheer force of life happening on its own, all around you, without your effort, can feel so big you might want to run from it.

For years, I did everything I could to avoid the raw horsepower of reality, even though deep down, it was what I wanted most. Substances, screens, endless busyness—anything to dull the overwhelming immediacy of what was actually happening. And our culture makes this avoidance incredibly easy. The entire consumer machine depends on pulling your attention away from what’s plainly here, selling you distractions from your own life.

But if you slow down, even for a second, there is this undeniable vibration underneath and within everything. Eventually, you won’t even need to slow down to notice that…

Reality is already switched on.

It always was. And “reality” is just another word for the undeniable happening of experience.

Stop trying so hard

Once you catch even a glimpse of this, something else becomes obvious: you don’t have to work nearly as hard as you think! Effort starts to feel a little absurd. This is what Taoists call wu wei—effortless action, or the art of non-doing. Not being lazy, but moving with the current of life instead of against it.

Suddenly, you’re surfing.

Let it be strange

The more you notice reality doing its thing without any of your help, the more undeniable it becomes: you have absolutely no idea what’s going on here.

Look at your hand right now. I mean really look, zoomed in. Notice the lines etched like old riverbeds, the texture of skin that’s somehow both solid and soft, the way light catches those tiny hairs that grow without you telling them to. Feel the warmth, the blood moving through your veins.

Then zoom out: this hand is attached to an arm, connected to a body that’s somehow breathing itself, pulling oxygen from air that trees exhaled this morning, trees that are somehow turning sunlight into the very molecules keeping you alive. All of this is happening on a planet spinning through an infinite void we call space at 67,000 miles per hour, while orbiting a nuclear explosion we call the sun. And it’s all made of stardust. Literal stardust, forged in the furnaces of dying stars billions of years ago, somehow organized into this temporary arrangement that can read these words and wonder of itself.

The details are mindfuckingly intricate. Your eyes are translating electromagnetic radiation into this vivid, three-dimensional movie. Your brain—three pounds of electrified meat—is somehow producing thoughts, emotions, the experience of being someone. Quantum fields are fluctuating in the space between your atoms. It’s all wildly, impossibly strange when you stop taking it for granted.

And who are you in the middle of all this? Beyond the non-answer of the name your parents gave you, it’s not an easy question. A better one might be: What are you? A “hominid” is as flimsy an answer as your name. There is something even stranger here—something that is aware—but try to find it and it slips through your fingers, because “you” are the one doing the looking.

And here is the strangest part: the hand, the brain, the planet, the stars—they’re just mental labels. The mind makes up words for things it can’t actually find. In direct experience, there is only this swirl of color, sound, and sensation, happening whether you think about it or not.

This should produce awe. Reverence, even.

As Socrates put it: “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” But in this area, I think Mary Oliver captured it perfectly:

“Let me keep company always with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”

The mind wants to explain it all away, to keep things neat and manageable and controlled. But the right hemisphere thrives when we let things stay just a little mysterious, when we can break from our addiction to having everything figured out.

Because maybe the point was never to know. Maybe it was always to stand here, astonished, for as long as we get to stay.

I’m happy to share a new piece in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, part of their Father’s Day offerings. For those unfamiliar, Tricycle is kind of like the New Yorker of the dharma world. I’ve been reading it for years, always curious about the lives of seasoned meditators, so having a piece in there feels surreal.

Here’s a gift link so you can read it. Free trials are available too, and it’s a nonprofit worth supporting:

Read my essay in Tricycle

This piece felt especially meaningful to write. There’s not much I cherish more than the dharma, my son, and the love that gave rise to both of us in a way. And it felt like a natural moment to reflect, as our lil dude just turned one!

There’s so much I could say about my still-very-much-a-noob experience of parenting, but I was grateful for the chance to explore it through the lens of spiritual practice.

And to really understand how fatherhood has deepened that practice, it helps to know what meditation has meant to me from the start.

It’s not a stretch to say that meditation saved my life. I’ll never forget the moment in early recovery when I knew something had truly shifted. I had just received another blow during one of the hardest stretches I’d ever been through. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and humbled. Every part of me wanted to escape. But instead of reaching for my usual narcotic fixes—which, believe me, were tempting—I found myself sitting on my cushion, in front of my altar, crying, and being with it all. And I stayed.

I’d always heard in dharma talks that you’re not really a meditator until you sit when everything’s falling apart. That moment felt like one of those reluctant initiations, when I realized, somewhat begrudgingly and a little pridefully: I guess I’m a real meditator now.

At first, meditation was a refuge, a means of survival. It was a “tool,” mostly to feel better. But over time, it slowly blossomed into something else: a way of living, an understanding that, on the deepest level, we are always meditating, no matter what’s happening. There were times I considered becoming a full-blown Buddhist, as a kind of devotional gesture to the lineages that had done so much for me. I didn’t, but I’ve continued walking this path with reverence.

Lately I’ve been thinking back to those early, hard years, even as life now feels, honestly, richer than I ever imagined. We’ve got a house full of love, good health, and a real sense of freedom. Parenthood has stretched me to the edge of my capacity and somehow brought me deeper into presence. It’s also softened my heart in ways I didn’t know I needed. Practice has a lot to do with that. These days it feels like a kind of post-conventional dharma, less about formal technique and more about embodying the essence. Pure devotion, without an object.

This feels especially significant against a backdrop where so many are suffering, as our systems break down and the world convulses in pain. At home, we’ve been living in a kind of bubble, full of joy, play, and the sweetness of this new chapter together as a family.

At the same time, I’ve been holding the tension between that wild joy, with my son’s laughter literally blasting through the house, and the weight of a world in crisis. Rather than diminishing either truth, approaching fatherhood as dharma has made me more attuned to the collective’s pain and more available to everyday happiness.

It feels like the world could use a reclaiming of the father archetype: grounded, benevolent, trustworthy, loving, and strong in a healthy way.

So happy early Father’s Day to all the dads out there—biological, spiritual, or otherwise.

Read the essay

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This one’s about something I know intimately:

• the psychic pain of doing work that doesn’t fit

• the conditioning that keeps us stuck

• the courage it takes to leap—or moonlight—into the unknown

• the limits of “follow your bliss” (or its modern cousin: “follow your aliveness”)

• the soul’s hunger for meaningful work in a world coming undone

• and how, with time, the question of purpose dissolves altogether into presence

I might turn this into a series. We’ll see.

The full transcript is below. Thanks for reading, listening, or just lurking. I hope something in it finds you.

The purpose problem

Bullshit jobs, lost purpose, and the urgency of soul-aligned work in the AI age (TRANSCRIPT)

I. The ache: defining the "purpose problem"

If you've ever felt hollowed out by your job with the sense that this can't be it, you're definitely not alone.

I call this the purpose problem.

It's a quiet, persistent sense that your work doesn't fundamentally reflect who you are, that you're spending your life on tasks that don't feed your soul.

And it's definitely not rare. Millions of people feel this way. We spend over 40 hours a week doing things that we ultimately often don't believe in. And I think that this has to mean something.

I'm certainly not the only one to point this out. Many others have explored this. One of my favorite voices is the anthropologist David Graeber, who defined a bullshit job as:

“A form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.”

That one always stings a bit to revisit. But for me, the purpose problem goes deeper. It's not just about meaningless jobs. It's about a soul misalignment, which creates a painful tension between the life that you're living and the one that you know or that you sense that you're meant for.

It's disturbingly easy to end up here living someone else's dream and calling it your own. I know this because it happened to me, and it was something that I lived inside for many years.

II. My wake-up moment

I'll never forget the moment when I was in early recovery and after going through something that was really quite devastating, I had finally landed back on my feet and I was at a new tech job. I had been in leadership roles throughout my whole career and I was back in an office with a nice view of Market Street and on paper everything looked great.

But in that very first week, I think it was something like the third day, and I was going through the motions in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Salesforce, plus one-on-ones. And I just felt something in my gut that said this cannot be it.

I knew then that something was off. I could go through the motions. I knew how to do the job. I could certainly earn a lot of money doing it. But I knew that something was no longer cohering for me.

Read more

Years ago, when I first began writing online, one of my spiritual mentors sent me a long, scathing response to an essay I’d published. The piece examined how modern spirituality gets co-opted into performance, ultimately alienating more people than it includes. Naturally, it became one of my more popular writings at the time.

His core point was simple: everything I was writing about was more a reflection of me than anything else. But this insight came buried in what I can only describe as a thorough “woke dump”—buzzwords and social justice outrage that could have been written by The Onion. The language was so politically charged and single-minded that it undermined his credibility. Not to mention that much of what he wrote simply did not land for me.

Still. My deep reverence for him and his lineage, combined with my genuine commitment to educating myself on anti-racism at that time, meant I couldn’t simply dismiss his words. And his critique penetrated deeper than I initially wanted to admit.

It hurt to be so intensely lit up by someone I looked up to. I could acknowledge the partial truth in what he said, even as I sensed that his response reflected an ideological framework I was beginning to question—especially one that seemed to justify moral certainty at the expense of curiosity, nuance, and relationship.

I sat with his note. I wrote back, explained my intent, and thanked him for his feedback. That felt mature, then.

It was the last real exchange we had, and in effect, the end of our relationship.

Given how much he had taught me—practices that became a staple in my life, teachings that continue to shape my work—it was heartbreaking. But it was also a tremendous learning. Even now, I sometimes find myself sending him prayers, or warm good vibes from afar.

Time passed. The first strands of gray appeared in my already thinning hair. Years of maddening hustling and seeking slowly settled into something resembling patience. I became a father, which radically shifted my understanding of cultural impact.

And lately, I find my relationship with writing breaking down—or “evolving,” if we’re being generous. Much of what used to fuel me doesn’t move me anymore, as it derived from a place of fundamental inadequacy.

I’m still integrating all this. I can feel the process is healthy and natural, even if it’s disorienting. Some days, like today, something clear and true emerges. The love of writing is still there—the satisfaction of chasing the perfect sentence, of making meaning, of baring my soul.

But it’s also hard. I find myself simply unable to read the things I used to obsess over. How do you create “content” when you no longer want to consume it?

I know I’m not alone in this. We’re all fumbling in the dark of these liminal, global transition times. I realize that phrase sounds like something you’d read in a slightly unhinged Instagram caption, but it also feels true.

I’m still learning how to write from wherever this is. And to be clear, it feels far better, with much less room to compromise myself.

In recent months, I’ve been revisiting some of my earlier work and seeing, with fresh eyes, just how much of it was plain wrong—passionate but misguided, clever but incomplete. In other words, deeply on-brand for the era. Much like the spiritual essay I mentioned earlier.

As I look back, I can see how often my critiques were less about the culture I claimed to analyze and more about something unresolved within me. That pattern has resurfaced lately in small, subtle ways, especially as essay ideas come and go. When I catch it, I often think of the final lesson I received from my mentor.

He came to mind again this week, though this time it felt different—like something I hadn’t fully worked through. I found myself digging through my inbox to revisit that old exchange. (I save all the replies to my essays, and this was long before Substack had a comment feature.)

His tone still strikes me as emblematic of what’s broken in progressive culture. And yet, I can now see he was profoundly right about one thing: I wasn’t just critiquing culture. I was projecting.

What I understand now is that nearly all cultural critique is a mirror. We think we’re diagnosing the world, but we’re mostly revealing ourselves. The finger pointing outward usually has four curled back.

When we call out society’s flaws, we’re often naming the exact development shit we haven’t figured out in ourselves—like how to hold two opposing ideas at once, or own our shadow, or loosen our grip on a single stubborn perspective.

This is what’s wild about having over 200 essays to look back on: they chart the edges of my own growth (and also my ability to sound confident while being completely wrong). I can see exactly where I was bumping up against the limits of my understanding. Every one of those cultural commentaries is simultaneously a self-portrait, drawn in negative space.

Even my mentor’s email—so incisive, so corrective—was mostly about him. His lens, his projections. Just like mine. Just like all of us.

That’s the beautiful, maddening truth: our biases, our baggage, our secret hopes for how the world should work are folded into everything we say, every opinion we hold, every sideways look we give. Sometimes a stranger can spot it before we do. It’s part of why I love men’s work, because there’s something sacred in making those hidden layers visible, in showing up real instead of performing.

And when you step back far enough, scientifically or spiritually, the pattern becomes obvious. We never actually experience the world directly. What we think we’re seeing is really just our brain’s best guess, shaped by all our memories and moods and whatever helps us feel like we understand what’s happening.

Neuroscience calls this predictive processing—basically, your brain is constantly guessing what’s out there and filling in the gaps with what it already knows. The Dharma calls it emptiness, dependent origination, or simply illusion.

There’s a famous Zen story I think about often. Two monks are watching a flag flutter in the wind. One says, “The flag is moving.” The other says, “No, it’s the wind.”

Their teacher overhears them and, in classic fashion, totally owns them:

“It’s not the flag. It’s not the wind. It’s the mind that moves.”

That’s the heart of it. We don’t just observe the world. We participate in its making, every time we look. In this vein, projection isn’t a bug, it’s a feature—the very medium through which we experience anything at all.

Everything we critique, admire, or condemn is filtered through this dream of self. That’s why so much of what we call cultural commentary ends up revealing more about the commentator than the culture. It couldn’t be otherwise.

What’s been harder to admit—something I didn’t fully realize until this year—is that much of my cultural critique, and honestly most of what I see from other people who make a living having opinions, comes from people who are just... unhappy. Not necessarily depressed, but carrying around this subtle dissatisfaction that needs somewhere to go. So we point it outward and call it insight.

This isn’t to invalidate critique itself. We need voices that question, call bullshit when they see it, and disrupt the status quo. More than ever.

But there’s a world of difference between critique that comes from curiosity and critique that’s really just someone trying to fix their own stuff by fixing the world.

You can feel the difference. Words born of projection land differently than words born of a wise heart. And right now, when everything feels like it’s falling apart anyway, learning to tell them apart—and aspiring to the latter in my own work—feels important.

Which brings me back to that email. The way it landed like a punch, how defensive I felt, how disorienting it was to be seen that sharply. And how, with time, I’ve come to recognize how right he was, and how wrong we both were in different ways. Maybe that’s what makes something a real teaching—it lingers, works on you for years, and then eventually, it lets go.

I don’t think I’ll carry it much longer. The lesson feels absorbed. But I can still sense it, even now, reminding me to keep softening the part of me that wants to be right.

What if the most important psychological and spiritual question isn’t about finding meaning or knowing God, but simply checking: Are you fundamentally okay, right now?

This question, despite its unassuming nature, cracked something open in me and, with equal intensity, reconfigured the way I work with others. For the past few months, I’ve been using a straightforward process I picked up from Dr. Jeffrey Martin’s research on Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience (PNSE—academic speak for “waking up”), one of the largest studies ever run on people who’ve crossed the threshold of awakening.

His research suggests that what he calls “fundamental wellbeing”—a natural state of peace and contentment—exists on a spectrum rather than an all-or-nothing finish line. More importantly, the data indicate this sense of wellbeing is far more accessible than many traditional spiritual paths would have us believe.

The practice involves just one question:

When you pause and look deep down within, what do you actually find?

You might try this right now. Take a breath. Close your eyes if that helps. Then simply notice what’s lying at the core of your experience, like dropping a stone into a lake and watching it sink to the bottom. What’s there in the depths? Ease? Unease? Something you can’t quite name?

After guiding dozens of people through this, I’ve found responses generally fall into three categories:

1. A clear sense of peace, stillness, completeness.

2. Discontent—unsettled energy, fear, looping stories.

3. A combination—pockets of stillness mixed with anxiety.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, #2 shows up most often; #3 trails close behind; #1 is the rare bird. The whole mechanism is somewhat like a radio: most of us keep the dial glued to the anxiety station, never noticing that, just a notch away, a quieter and deeper frequency has been broadcasting peace all along.

The real magic—and the true litmus test—comes from taking deliberate pauses throughout the day to pose the question... Check once and you’ve got a single data point; check a couple of dozen times, and watch the practice legitimately rewire your life. You can think of it as an excavation of self: pausing, slowing down, and digging beneath the surface noise to discover what treasures—or challenges—lie in the deeper layers of your psyche.

And if, in those micro-dives, you keep running into peace and stillness… well, that’s big! It means some aspect of fundamental wellbeing is already online, which is a discovery that, for most people, lands as a relieving surprise.

But here’s where it gets especially interesting: if you do encounter any trace of that stillness (peace, warmth, however it shows up), the research suggests you shouldn’t merely notice it, but actively nurture it! Though it may be humming quietly in the background of your experience, what we place our attention on grows over time. Obvious, maybe, but neuroscience agrees: neurons that fire together wire together, and, in this case, they will gradually rewrite your brain’s autopilot towards wellbeing.

Attention is like fertilizer. The more you rest it on okayness—contentment that doesn’t depend on circumstance, approval, or achievement—the deeper you can sink into it, the way a hot bath soothes you after a long ass day. At first you just acknowledge its presence, but with practice, you can settle there and carry it into the busyness of ordinary life. Even the smallest pockets of wellbeing, once given some attention, tend to organically widen on their own—that’s how nature seems to work. And little by little, ease outweighs the anxiety you once mistook for normal.

*

This wasn’t just theory for me. For years, I operated with insane levels of background stress—carrying a fundamental sense that I was not okay, that I was not worthy of existence. I compartmentalized it all within the psychic split of my addiction, fleeing toward an underworld of drugs and risk that, strangely, felt safer than facing myself.

When I finally hit bottom, it was so intense that my entire paradigm collapsed. I was forced to confront not just the loss of health, wealth, and meaning—but to finally feel the emotions I pushed into the background with drugs. I’m not exaggerating when I say the early days felt like my skin was peeled off by a medieval torturer, exposing a terrified little boy who had to learn the basics of how to “function” again. The experience was so encompassing that, afterwards, something shifted in me on a system-wide level, similar to how people describe surviving near-death experiences.

Though I couldn’t articulate exactly what had changed, I knew that in facing and surviving what I had been running from—the withdrawal, the pain, the existential insignificance—I was fundamentally a changed man. And even amid that excruciating process, I sensed that nothing would ever be what it once was for me, that things were, oddly, inexplicably, going to be okay.

The shift was clearly spiritual in nature, I knew that, but I didn’t realize it was an awakening, and I didn’t have any frameworks for “integrating” it. Not understanding what had happened, I chased explanations for another decade—traveling around the world, going from retreat to retreat, developing an impressive crystal collection, drinking more ayahuasca than you can imagine.

And while all that made a great impact, I now believe that if someone had simply pointed me toward the quiet sense of fundamental wellbeing that had already emerged from my recovery, I could have spared myself another decade on the spiritual merry-go-round. In some very real sense, this was just my addiction in spiritual clothing—the same compulsive shenanigans with a more yogic soundtrack, trading drug runs for sitting in lotus. But that’s the paradox of healing, isn’t it? The shortcuts only become obvious after you’ve spent a decade being too clever for your own good.

*

Which is why I’m so glad the paradigm is changing. Martin’s research represents an essential shift away from the endless seeking that has dominated both traditional and modern approaches to wellbeing.

If, when you look deep down, you find something scary or difficult rather than peace, that’s perfectly okay. There’s no judgment needed. In fact, it’s valuable information, pointing directly to where your psychological work actually is. And that work isn’t about forcing peace where there isn’t any; rather, it’s more about creating the conditions where whatever’s in your experience can be seen, felt, and gradually unwound.

This is often best done with a skilled therapist or coach who understands both psychological repair and the nature of fundamental wellbeing. If you keep meeting something difficult when you look inward, it deserves gentle curiosity, unhurried attention, and love. It deserves to be witnessed. And while professional support can be invaluable, healing doesn’t need to happen in a transactional container. Some of my rawest, deepest shifts came in 12-step groups, meditation sanghas, my sacred medicine church, close friendships, and—most of all—in my loving partnership with Grace. Whatever the context, healing is relational; we’re not meant to do it alone.

What’s surprised me most while practicing this with others is how many of the most talented people I work with—spiritual practitioners, world-class coaches, individuals who’ve spent years and small fortunes “doing the work”—discover only noise when they pause to look deep within. Beneath their successful outer appearances, many find only fragmented parts, anxious stories, a persistent background hum of not okay. Again, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. But I think it points to how our therapy and wellness culture has become fixated on pathology rather than wholeness.

I’ve especially noticed that people fluent in therapy-speak often get trapped here: their “parts” keep staging an endless psychodrama, unaware it’s still mind talking to mind. Internal Family Systems and similar methods are incredible when used well, but many confuse the map for the territory—charting their parts again and again instead of tasting the peace already shimmering beyond the internal committee. The pattern repeats with attachment styles, trauma labels, and rampant diagnoses that calcify into new identities and, instead of liberating, crowd out our basic okayness.

This is why I appreciate Martin’s term “fundamental wellbeing” so much—it’s wonderfully accessible, cutting through centuries of obscurity with chill precision. Instead of complicated jargon that keeps us in our heads, it points directly to an experience we can actually feel.

There’s another important element I’d be remiss not to address. When we speak of dropping into the deepest layer of being, some will object: “How could anyone expect to find peace when the world is literally burning?! Isn’t this just individualistic, even colonialist, bypassing?”

That critique deserves genuine consideration; I wrestled with it myself. For years, I’ve written about existential risk and cultural unraveling—AI acceleration, pandemic fallout, climate upheaval, the fraying of shared meaning. Yet I’ve come to see that insisting we must feel miserable because the headlines are grim is a self-defeating trap. As I’ve explored, progressive spaces often elevate a kind of righteous despair that signals moral seriousness, but saps agency. If anything, it can alienate the very people we hope to move. And the incentive loop runs beyond pundit panels, with plenty of Substack and podcast voices earning six figures by telling you that personal wellbeing is naïve and off-limits while crises rage beyond your zip code.

So, I do my best to hold both/and. I mourn, actively, for the state of things. And since becoming a father, I also feel—viscerally—the necessity of a strong, steady center. In part because of the practice I describe here, I’m happier and more content than I’ve ever been. These experiences aren’t mutually exclusive. I can be fundamentally well and fiercely concerned about a society regressing into tribal stages of development, and what could follow.

The physiology backs this up. Martin’s data show that fundamental wellbeing is, at bottom, a nervous-system shift—from chronic threat detection to a baseline of embodied safety. From that steadier platform, our capacity for effective action actually expands. This is where spirituality meets neurobiology: where the so-called woo of wholeness registers in measurable physiology: once the sympathetic needle settles, bandwidth that fear had previously hijacked opens for complex, creative response. It’s a whole-system upgrade in how body, mind, and culture meet the challenges ahead.

I’m in a “drop-the-frameworks” season, yet I still keep one foot in my metamodernist roots. That lens nudges us past the false split between spiritual wellbeing and social engagement. Seen integrally, personal growth and collective change are simply two faces of the same unfolding. You don’t have to pick one channel—inner peace, outer action, or the honest angst of our times. The idea is that as presence matures, you can surf among these stations with growing ease.

What makes this approach so potent is the paradigm shift it proposes, which is a kind of reverse meditation. Instead of manufacturing wellbeing, you notice the wellbeing already humming beneath the noise. That simple pivot—seeing what’s already whole—often outstrips all our frantic efforts to fix what’s broken. It’s one of the reasons why I call this project Deep Fix: the deeper fix is realizing nothing essential was ever wrong, even as we keep showing up imperfectly within an imperfect culture and, to borrow Jon Kabat-Zinn’s perfect phrase, embrace the full catastrophe of living.

Today, I’m happy to share a reported feature I wrote for DoubleBlind—a magazine I’ve long admired for its mission-driven, independent journalism in the psychedelic space.

It’s a deep-dive on ketamine: how the hype around its rapid rise as a treatment for depression has outpaced scientific understanding, safety protocols, and regulatory oversight—creating a precarious situation where legitimate therapeutic potential is being undermined by commercialization and inadequate follow-up care.

At the heart of the piece are the stories of four individuals—people who sought relief from suffering and instead found themselves caught in ketamine’s darker undertow. Their experiences offer a human lens on an issue that, behind the scenes, is quietly alarming many.

First and foremost, please head over to DoubleBlind and read the piece:

Read my article in DoubleBlind

Most of it is behind a paywall, but in a time when media is increasingly shaped by clickbait and corporate influence, it’s worth supporting outlets that remain committed to depth, nuance, and integrity.

If you’ve followed my work, you know most of what I write tends to be essays or commentary—but this is a reported story, built around interviews with experts and firsthand accounts. It’s also the most in-depth and comprehensive piece I’ve produced for an outlet, at least from a journalistic standpoint. It took a great deal of time, and I hope it offers something thoughtful and meaningful to an increasingly urgent conversation.

Some of you might be surprised to see me writing about the shadow side of psychedelics. Longtime readers know I’ve spent years raising awareness about their immense healing potential, both individually and collectively. For a while, I was very much beating the drum as the “psychedelics in recovery” guy—helping spread the message that you can be earnestly committed to recovery and engaged with these compounds, particularly entheogens (substances that come from the earth).

Ketamine, though, is different. It does have legitimate healing potential—and for many people who have tried countless other treatments without relief, it can offer a lifeline. I’m quite libertarian when it comes to drugs and psychedelics, believing that consenting adults should be free to do what they want with their bodies. As I explore in the piece, ketamine deserves to be accessible for those who need it. But at the same time, its rise has, in many ways, gone off the rails—and the train ride is just getting started, threatening to undermine the broader psychedelic movement at a critical moment.

This story sits at the intersection of themes I’ve long explored and remain deeply invested in: modern addiction, psychedelics, the fine line between spiritual awakening and psychosis, and the broader breakdown of our cultural and mental health systems.

There’s still real debate over whether ketamine should even be classified as a psychedelic, which I unpack in the piece. But as I interviewed researchers, psychiatrists, and clinicians, one thing became increasingly clear: the parallels between ketamine’s rise and the early days of the opioid crisis appear to be more than just coincidence, and we’d be wise to pay attention.

While I continue to support ketamine’s therapeutic uses—and have even worked with it myself, both for healing and exploration—I’ve also witnessed people harmed by it in ways that are delicate, complex, and uniquely tied to its dissociative profile. In fact, the most severe psychological harm I’ve encountered in this space has often involved dissociatives like ketamine—the kind of harm some people simply don’t come back from. I know this because executives and creatives have come to me for coaching, quietly confessing secret ketamine addictions, along with the cosmic downloads they’ve received from the heart of the multiverse, even as their lives slowly unraveled around them.

It’s a uniquely tricky path to navigate, and an important one to talk about.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the piece. I’m sure I’ll have more to share as feedback comes in and this conversation continues to unfold in the psychedelic space.

For now, thank you for reading—and for your ongoing support.

Special thanks to Dr. Nathan Sackett of University of Washington, Dr. Boris Heifets of Stanford, and Dr. Kenneth Roy of Tulane.

And above all, deep thanks to the brave individuals who shared their stories of ketamine harm for this piece.

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So, I decided to shake up my creative process and try something different. Partly to keep things fresh for myself, partly because staying nimble feels necessary in this strange new landscape.

No carefully crafted essay this time. This is unedited, just my thoughts flowing in real-time, as was my intent. You can watch the video, listen like a podcast while driving, or read the slightly edited transcript below. Your choice, no pressure. Though I suppose watching me in my office occasionally stumble upon my words might add a certain unplanned charm to the proceedings.

One thing I discovered while recording my course is that video is a surprisingly vulnerable medium. There’s nowhere to hide when it’s just your face and your voice carrying your ideas into the ether. Let me know what you think of this experiment—both the format and the ideas themselves. I’m equal parts nervous and excited to share it with you, which, I know by now, is a healthy place to be.

And without further ado, here it is.

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In a former life, I was quite passionate about technology. Though never a technologist myself, I was a curious insider with a good bullshit detector who found myself hustling through the hallways of some of the most innovative companies of the past quarter century.

For a dozen years, I took pride in spotting trends that could shift paradigms. Whether helping scale Twitter’s nascent ad platform that pioneered “native” advertising, building cloud startups during the SaaS boom, or producing AI/VR events at VentureBeat, I was plugged in, respected, riding the wave. Well, “respected” might be generous, but people responded to my emails.

Beneath the gleaming surface of my tech career, my life was slowly imploding. While closing seven-figure deals on Market Street, I’d sneak a few blocks away to score all kinds of “performance-enhancing” drugs in the Tenderloin between meetings, desperately attempting to maintain a pristine professional persona by day while succumbing to a shadow world of addiction by night. This was more than a double life; two realities occupied the same body, growing more incompatible with each passing day, a madness building and building and building, until the center couldn’t hold and everything collapsed with spectacular finality.

When I “woke up,” I had to confront not only the demons and wreckage I’d created in my own life, but also the destruction a toxic work culture had burrowed into my psyche. I saw clearly that companies I once thought were forces for good—like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Slack (where I briefly worked too), etc.—had actually produced harm. Twitter was once the global town square; now it’s a shitshow. Facebook was supposed to bring people together; now it radicalizes. Instagram promised creative expression; now it manufactures inadequacy. Slack promised workplace efficiency; now the workday never ends.

For the last six years, I’ve used all this—my insider tech knowledge, my calamitous fall and scrambling resurrection—to raise awareness of technology’s risks—namely, its addictive nature, how it becomes a way of avoiding emotions, and the terrifying seduction of “ideological reality tunnels.” I’ve written on numerous occasions about my ethical and spiritual distrust of the leadership decisions at companies like OpenAI, and about AI’s general potential to unleash epistemic havoc. I still believe that. Things could go to hell.

Still, if you had asked me three years ago, when ChapGPT first launched, whether you should prepare for the “AI revolution,” I would have said that it’s mostly hype and industry froth, promises written in PowerPoint and blessed by venture capital, each one allegedly on the brink of changing everything. So, probably not.

Yet the universe has a way of humbling the certain.

After months of genuinely engaging with these systems—most recently testing ChatGPT o1 and Claude 3.7—I’ve experienced what you might call a conversion. The gap between speculative science fiction and my daily workflows has collapsed with unsettling speed. It feels, at least to me, as fundamental a shift as some of the evangelists promised, though perhaps for reasons they never anticipated.

I’m now convinced that everyone would benefit from grappling with what’s coming, especially those in easily replaceable jobs (which, unless you’re a hand model or a professional cuddler, probably includes you and me). I’ve spent months in deep reflection about what this means for my life and my son’s future. This deliberate pause is partly why I haven’t published here in so long.

I write from the perspective of a layman, someone who works as a coach and somatic therapist, and founder of organizations focused on integral men’s development and psychedelic-assisted addiction recovery. In other words, fields that, at first blush, seem far removed from AI.

There are far more qualified technical thinkers to read; that’s not what I’m trying to be. I’m also not speculating, in this piece, about AGI/ASI (when AI becomes conscious), which will obviously shift the dynamics of daily life as we know it—because even current LLM (Large Language Model) development will radically alter how we work and live.

What I’m offering is the chance to review, reflect, ponder, and maybe prepare for the shifts coming—for all of us.

While these reflections emerge from my specific lines of work and my strategy for adapting at this inflection point—professionally, creatively, and spiritually—I hope they might illuminate something useful for your own.

Prioritizing in-person offerings

After spending significant time with Claude and ChatGPT, I believe AI therapy will be a very real thing, and it will be quite effective. As in, we’re about to witness the largest shift in mental healthcare since Freud abandoned hypnosis—and it’ll happen in a fraction of the time, with millions of people pouring their hearts out to algorithms and finding genuine relief.

That said, AI cannot replace deep, caring presence. AI cannot replace the resonance that occurs on a cellular and energetic level when two humans breathe the same air. Same room, same space, same vibrations, same nervous systems in silent dialogue. Virtual cannot replace that. Not to mention that what most people secretly need from therapy is never just insight—it is the loving acceptance a parent was supposed to provide but, despite their best efforts, could not. Claude gives no hugs, sheds no tears with you, feels no warmth when your shoulders finally drop from your ears.

There will be a growing need—or, better put, a greater realization to a devastatingly current need—for human presence, for tangible support, for touch. The sort of care that can only be done in real life. I have spent the last few months upgrading the furniture in my home office in the Oakland Hills to ramp up my in-person sessions. Clients who were previously Zoom-bound have unanimously reported more impactful outcomes, with a complementary embodied connection that adds a new dimension to our virtual work.

As AI becomes ever “better” at the cognitive aspects of healing, our unique human offering becomes clearer: being fully present with another’s pain without trying to optimize it away. In theory, AI’s efficiency should free up more time for these meaningful in-person connections—more time to just be with each other. Whether that vision holds true or becomes yet another case of technology promising leisure time it never delivers remains to be seen.

What’s certain is that while online courses and learning remain valuable, we’ve reached an unmistakable saturation point. We’re drowning in developmental models and frameworks while starving for the messy, sometimes awkward, always transformative experience of actually applying them with another human unafraid to call us on our shit. The pendulum is swinging back, and people are rediscovering their hunger for embodied, face-to-face connection—and for heat.

To this end, my in-person work will, hopefully, take up more and more of my average day, and I am increasing the frequency of in-person gatherings and my hosted retreats for 2025. I believe this balance of virtual accessibility and physical presence will become increasingly valuable as technology advances—not in spite of AI, but because of it.

How I’m embracing AI tools

I was initially hesitant to use AI in my coaching and somatic therapy practice. It felt like an affront, an offense only the hardcore “scale my business” no-depth style coaches were using. Part of my identity was wrapped up in being a purist—someone who would never dilute the sacred human-to-human container with technology. Now I’m convinced it will be a crucial element, and that the best coaches will leverage AI to augment their practice without surrendering their humanity.

Imagine portals where coaching or therapy session transcripts are loaded and both client and coach can assess what might improve. I’ve started to upload AI-generated transcripts from some of my specific Zoom coaching sessions, asking Claude, “As a Master Jungian and Depth Therapist, what could I have done better?” Or, “How would Joe Hudson, an elite performance coach, have asked more cutting questions?” I’ve been genuinely floored by the insights. Claude has pointed out that I should more directly address defensive identity structures, noted how my questions often contain embedded assumptions, and even counted my excessive filler words. These AI observations are oftentimes, I hate to admit, sharper than the paid therapeutic supervision I receive from mentors—though they serve a fundamentally different purpose than the wisdom that comes from decades of embodied practice.

I’m also embracing these tools to streamline my workflows and solve problems that would have consumed hours of my life pre-AI. When my accountant asked me for the cost-basis at which I bought my Bitcoin—because I sold some this year (babies are expensive)—I had no idea, though I knew it was low. (God bless my friend Miles.) So, I uploaded seven years of transaction history to Claude and damn... I think my accountant will be out of a job soon. And he’s a good accountant.

Beyond work, I’m using AI for personal growth, mainly for dream analysis through a Jungian lens—with genuinely superb results. This is where I first glimpsed AI’s insane therapeutic potential: its ability to access and cross-reference virtually every documented symbol across cultural traditions and psychological frameworks. I wake up at 4 AM, record a sleep-slurred voice note about a dream, go back to sleep, and plug the transcript in later when I’ve had my tea. Claude unpacks layers of meaning I’d never access on my own, drawing connections through the collective unconscious that would take years of analysis to surface. Turns out, the bear who charged me in my dream really just wanted to be my friend.

I’ve also created a digital therapeutic companion using prompts that blend depth psychology, somatic frameworks, and spiritual traditions I’ve studied for years. This AI coach helps me navigate leadership challenges, untangle facilitation knots, and illuminate the growth edges I continually bump into. I’ve designed it to nudge me toward more mature, integral development—recognizing both our interconnection and the paradox that ideas can be precious and meaningless simultaneously—while being brutally honest about blindspots I conveniently miss. It’s essentially a programmable therapist without the subtle glance at the clock when our time is up.

At the same time, I’m rejecting AI tools when it comes to my art

Claude is a pretty profound writing editor if you use it correctly. Not as good as some of the incredible editors I’ve been fortunate to work with, but better than most. It can become easy to rely on it for writing, and I’ve actually noticed my skills as a writer starting to atrophy accordingly. This coincides with raising a 9-month-old boy, but, to be honest, I miss the days where I didn’t have an AI to improve my craft.

I’d read a page from Shantaram each morning for creative inspiration. I’d read Junot Diaz, Dylan Thomas, and many of the stylists that MFA programs have you write essays on as a way to improve your prose. And it worked. I’d absorb Raymond Carver’s short stories for a month, and some of that brash, staccato, hinting style would find its way into my essays. With Claude and a baby, those days are over.

If you spend just a bit of time using these LLMs to write, it becomes shockingly obvious which writers are over-relying on AI for their essays. For spiritually-adjacent writers, it’s especially noticeable who is over-leaning on AI: the flat syntax. Each sentence, each paragraph, the same length. The near-daily publishers with their “Finding Balance” and “The Path Forward” section headers are always the most culpable. Writers whose work I’ve long enjoyed announce a series on a psychospiritual subject, but halfway through the second essay, the droning monotone shoots my curiosity dead.

And that’s totally fine! Frankly, I’ve been surprised how much some of these essays are resonating with folks digitally. Others don’t seem to be bothered by it the way I am. But that’s nothing new! I’m salty about what I enjoy and am glad that it’s working for them. I do wonder how sustainable the method is—eventually, monotony grows tiresome to everyone. Even in pop psych.

I think the writers who really make it in the future will be full of personality and style—my friend is a big inspiration for me in this regard, writing with an I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, prose nothing like what an LLM could generate. But, and this is where I sadden about the future of blogging, even that could change. It probably will.

For my own writing, I’m doing my best not to overuse Claude as my editor and to start working with human editors again. I am also writing more personal letters, never to be published, just for friends or just myself. I hope to write more creatively for paid subscribers, people who have indicated to me that they want to see more of me being me. I think in the age of AI, the unpolished, the esoteric, the raw, and even the messy will come out on top.

Turning off all unnecessary tech with “ping minimalism”

The way I see it, there are two paths forward here. We can lean harder into AI where it genuinely benefits our lives—embracing its efficiencies, its capabilities, its potential to free up our time—or we can step back and practice what Cal Newport famously calls “digital minimalism” with renewed commitment.

I’m increasingly convinced the answer is both/and: deliberately deepening with tech in areas that augment your humanity while ruthlessly cutting technological noise everywhere else.

For me, this means going deep with AI in specific domains that matter—coaching, therapy, creative work, and time-saving tasks—while simultaneously becoming almost monastic about removing technological intrusions that offer marginal value but maximum distraction.

Lately, I’ve come across an even more aggressive iteration of this approach: “ping minimalism.” Instead of just trimming down our apps, we actively revoke permissions to our attention—unsubscribing, muting, ghosting, and even using AI “shadow selves” as gatekeepers.

I used to weigh in on Trump, the elections, and the broader political landscape, believing I had something valuable to add to the cultural discourse. Now that I’m raising a child, the emotional charge around it all has dropped at least thirtyfold. Call it spiritual bypassing if you like, but I literally do not have time to keep up with the outrageously fast-developing twists of the daily news cycle. While I still value civic engagement, I’ve come to see how our digital ecologies trap us in outrage cycles that ultimately disempower rather than create change.

Through this shift in perspective and prioritization, I’ve realized there’s nothing more important I can do for the collective than raise my boy into a healthy, resilient, conscious man—hopefully one who cares for our planet, though that will be up to him. Stepping back from what everyone calls The World has let me live in the actual world right in front of me, where meaning and impact exist at a different scale and depth.

It’s not just a matter of political fatigue. We’re at a major turning point with legacy media—read The New York Times every day and it’s easy to think the apocalypse is imminent, while anyone who disagrees gets labeled an ignoramus with his head in the sand. AI is speeding everything up, but I’d rather meet that acceleration from a deeper center—one that holds both my personal responsibility and our shared humanity—than scramble in a perpetual state of panic.

That’s why I’m so cautious about contributing to the addictive attention economy: I’ve even stopped reading most Substacks, which is ironic given that I write one myself. If I’m asking for your time, I want it to matter—something that speaks to your soul, not just more noise competing for your already fractured focus.

This, I think, is the paradox of our moment: using sophisticated AI tools to deepen my work while simultaneously creating stronger boundaries against technological intrusion. My version of ping minimalism looks like this:

• Deleting all social media, news, and reader apps from my phone

• Muting and archiving all Signal and WhatsApp group chats

• Unsubscribing from unnecessary email lists

• Only checking social media during set downtimes after completing my most important work for the day

• Turning off email notifications for all Substack newsletters to avoid that subtle sense of obligation (I read them in the app instead, which offers a better experience)

• Designating my iPad as the “entertainment device” for browsing, reading Substack, and YouTube—keeping my work computer strictly for work, and my phone strictly for audio and essential needs

• Keeping my phone in permanent Do Not Disturb mode with only family members as exceptions for notifications

• Preparing to deactivate or privatize my Instagram, which I’ve kept out of habit rather than value

The less random tech I allow in, the less I want it—and the more I realize I never needed it quite so much to begin with.

The inner revolution to match the outer one

At a certain point with AI, when entire industries are reshaped and many of our roles become obsolete, we’ll be forced to look inward. When the busyness of work recedes—or is automated away—it becomes impossible to avoid life’s deeper questions:

What remains when my job title doesn’t? What is this awareness that witnesses my experience? Who am I, really?

That kind of reckoning can feel terrifying if you’re used to letting your job define you (I know this firsthand). But I think it also unlocks an extraordinary opening: the freedom and time to explore the nature of reality—and discover what we, as conscious beings, can co-create with it. Navigating this inner terrain isn’t something our education prepares us for. We’ll need spiritual resources. Not dogmatic ones. The real kind. And we need them soon, if not immediately.

In my own journey, the most important shift I’ve experienced came through various practices, but primarily meditation, which fundamentally changed my consciousness and how I relate to the world. My daily state of bodymind now compared to where I used to be, living that double life, is frankly unrecognizable. The torment of compulsive thinking, crushing self-doubt, and vicious self-hatred that once defined my inner world, plaguing my waking hours, has largely settled. I still have those thoughts, but I’m no longer at their mercy. It’s cliché to say, I know, but now they’re more like weather patterns passing through the sky of knowing. And the fact that I, once a walking mind-wreck who practically wrote the book on self-sabotage, could climb out of my head tells me anyone can.

It’s often considered taboo to speak publicly of so-called “spiritual attainments”—for good reason—because spiritual vulnerability can slip into pure douchebaggery with alarming speed. But as more and more people share about what’s possible in terms of human potential, I feel increasingly drawn to this inflection point where an inner revolution catches up to the outer one. The truth is, our consciousness holds far more capacity for growth than most of us realize.

Historically, I leaned heavily on ancient lineages—tantric yoga, Theravāda and Vajrayāna Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta—to glean an understanding of this potential. Lately, and much to my surprise, I’ve been drawn to something slightly different: the science of awakening. I’m interested in how we can explain changes in consciousness in a way that’s replicable, systematic, and not just trapped in esoteric language.

Now more than ever, there’s something vital in making this inner exploration secular and approachable, because the AI age will demand new forms of resilience, creativity, emotional fluidity, and developmental maturity from all of us. As AI systems grow increasingly sophisticated, they’ll challenge our uniqueness in domains we’ve long considered exclusively our own. And AI won’t just displace jobs. It will force us to redefine what being human actually means. Without a deeper foundation of identity and purpose, many will face something beyond economic uncertainty—a kind of existential vertigo that no universal basic income could possibly address. It’s as if we’re confronting two revolutions at once: the AI revolution that threatens our sense of identity, and the inner revolution that’s quietly redefining human potential.

We often say “the game is changing,” but in many ways, it already has; most of us have simply been too digitally overwhelmed to notice.

For the last decade, since I clawed my way out of addiction and began my earnest pursuit of spiritual growth, the practices I once explored behind closed doors or on retreats—psychedelics, shadow work, emotional fluidity, awakening states—have now entered Fortune 500 boardrooms and local community centers alike. These tools span all aisles of the political spectrum, from Silicon Valley techno-optimists to racial justice educators deconstructing systemic trauma, sometimes in ways that make me cringe.

Don’t mistake this for a short-lived craze. AI is rapidly transforming raw intelligence from scarce to abundant—from uniquely human to instantly accessible, like calling an Uber. In this new inverted reality, what will truly set people apart is the deeper self-awareness and growth these practices cultivate.

You cannot outsource your capacity for creative courage, your ability to sit with uncertainty, or the authentic resonance that draws others to your vision. Those who flourish won’t rely on algorithms; they’ll have done the harder work of understanding themselves. The very qualities once dismissed as “woo” are becoming the new edge in a world where thinking can be delegated but wisdom cannot. This movement is evolving so rapidly that I think it’s time we graduate beyond dismissive labels like “woo” altogether.

In my experience, the path to developing these essential human capacities lies in what many traditions call the awakening process. The good news: when approached practically and taught judiciously for our times, it offers a good share of what we’ll need, including a profound emotional resilience that isn’t shaken by external change, a creativity that flows from being rather than striving, and a mature perspective that can hold paradox and uncertainty without collapse. I’ve written before about how we’re living through a time when traditional frameworks for making sense of life are dissolving. The AI revolution will only accelerate that process, collapsing our cherished systems of meaning in months rather than decades.

When you’ve recognized your fundamental nature beyond your roles and accomplishments, the question of whether an AI can do your job becomes far less threatening to your core sense of self and worth.

Moreover, this kind of shift in consciousness helps us appreciate differences from a place of wholeness, rather than fear and division. As AI amplifies our tribal tendencies and accelerates the culture wars, the capacity to stand your ground while genuinely appreciating others becomes more essential than ever. Those who have touched their own completeness don’t need anyone else to change just to feel secure—and that may be the most important personal work we can do to guide us all through these collective upheavals.

On the topic of ethics in the AI age, let me just say they won’t emerge from more political grandstanding. They’ll arise from those who genuinely feel our interconnection—who know, at a gut level, that harming another is harming themselves. Our technological power demands a matching leap in wisdom: mature, inclusive yet discerning, able to hold complexity without flattening it into binaries, and rooted in direct, lived experience rather than abstract theory. Without this shift, we’ll keep wielding ever-greater capabilities with the same fractured awareness that got us here.

If you’ve followed my writing these past few years, you’ve probably noticed my consistent return to one central point: the real frontier of development isn’t the next app or platform—it’s us. So I’m doubling down on this focus, without apology or hesitation. This means championing what some call “awakening” or “enlightenment,” even if I prefer Dr. Jeffrey Martin’s more grounded term: Fundamental Wellbeing.

So here’s my question: Are you okay, deep down? If the answer is “not really” or “I’m not sure,” then now might be the perfect moment to explore something new. AI is about to transform the fabric of society, but there’s a parallel revolution already underway—one that points us back to who we really are and how we want to live. If we engage with it seriously and let “it” lead, this inner shift might prove more consequential than any technological leap, because it changes the foundation from which we operate. Everything else follows from there. Everything.

Scaling back while bracing for the weird

I’ve spent a good chunk of my writing life focused on cultural issues, sweeping social change, and big-picture thinking. I once hoped to be part of a revolution in consciousness that shifted collective thinking. I wrote essays trying to illuminate the metacrisis, the meaning crisis, the attention crisis, the climate crisis—crisis upon crisis, naming each horseman of the modern apocalypse while searching for daylight between them.

My ambitions have been right-sized.

What I’d like to do now is much, much, much humbler.

I’ve noticed myself drawing away from the broader collective and focusing on the people I can truly impact—my clients, my friends, my family, and my local community… Angela, the barista at our favorite coffee shop who adores our baby; my neighbor who takes the same 6 a.m. walk with me and fills me in on Oakland politics; the dude I just met at MeloMelo who’s been six months sober and is looking for some support; and our new parent friends we met at Arizmendi who’re every bit as sleep-deprived and clothing-stained as we are.

Maybe it’s just what happens when you have a kid. Maybe it’s what happens when you meditate enough to see through your own ego-driven savior complex (oy vey). Or maybe it’s just the result of social media, think pieces, and 24/7 news hijacking our attention for too long. In any case, I’ve realized the most profound transformations happen face-to-face, heart-to-heart, in the spaces where people can actually see and touch each other.

I’m also not naïve about what’s coming. My years studying existential risk meant I wasn’t shocked by COVID; I felt a strange readiness, even as the world trembled.

Terence McKenna once predicted a future where boundaries dissolve and reality takes on a near-psychedelic quality: “the Transcendental Object at the End of Time,” he called it. With AI evolving at breakneck speed, we might be on the cusp of that bizarre new frontier. Deepfakes, mass misinformation, AI agents that speak and act like humans—the world might start to feel like one big collective trip we never gave “consent” to join.

Should our timeline morph into McKenna’s psychedelic prophecy, I’ll be here with my partner Grace, our son, a handful of close friends, good music, the comfiest clothes I own, and a glorious sunset—because when shit gets weird, genuine human connection and our bond with the living world remain our greatest anchors to what truly matters.

And now, keeping with tradition, I present you with my annual (hopefully fun and allegedly very dope) listicle roundup.

My life in a listicle:

• We had a baby boy. Wrote about it here, here, and here. Talked about it here. The former degenerate in me is still pinching myself daily.

• Sons of Now, the men’s group I founded, hit its stride this year. I led two retreats and have expansion plans in the works for 2025. Read a beautiful essay from one of our members about his experience in the group here.

• I launched Life Not Wasted, my first self-paced course on living free from distraction and numbing agents. It’s built on a foundation of my practical, somatic, and meditative teachings. A bunch of people have taken it now with good results. I’m hoping to market it more next year.

• Coaching and somatic therapy feel better and more natural than ever. I started seeing local clients in my home office, too—a simple change that’s made a real difference. After years of supervision, my Hakomi certification is on the horizon (a rigorous, multi-year process requiring mastery evaluation from multiple lead trainers).

• The meditation piece clarified significantly this year. I attended two retreats with my teachers, Michael Taft and Jason Bartlett. While I’ve been writing about non-conceptual awareness and awakening tangentially for years, I’m ready to address it more directly. I wanted to wait until the insights integrated, and now I’m excited to share my experience through essays that make these practices simple, accessible, and practical for others.

Sixteen insights from 2024

1. Meeting people where they actually are (instead of where you think they should be) is relationship magic.

2. If you are energetic + curious + aware, you will be unstoppable—the world is your infinite playground.

3. Motherhood is criminally underrated in our society. Witnessing firsthand what a woman goes through—growing a child, birthing them, then nursing and raising them—has been humbling beyond words. Yes, parenting is intense for both parents, but it’s an entirely different dimension for mothers. They should receive paid support for each year of child-rearing, not just for a few weeks. They should get VIP parking spots everywhere. They should be celebrated as the sacred life-force of humanity.

4. My advice to fathers-to-be: work smart and hard leading up to birth, build as much momentum in your meditation practice as possible, strengthen your back muscles (never skip leg day), expect to get 3x less done after birth, take time to ground your nervous system daily, and remember your primary job in the early days is supporting the mother.

5. It’s better to workout, run, walk, or do dishes without podcasts or music in your ears.

6. I’m careful about screen time: I don’t check my phone for hours after waking, use blue light blockers at night, average only 1.5 hours of phone screen time per week, and have a strong ability to concentrate (discovered during ADHD testing as a bored, acting-out kid). Yet I still spend too much time on my computer, even while teaching others how to mindfully avoid this trap. When reading online, I’ve recently caught myself skipping sentences, defaulting to “skim fast mode.” This cannot continue.

7. My motivation to write has changed substantially, and not just from having less time. Some shifts in consciousness have made me less interested in “churning” on essay ideas in my mind for days and weeks. I realize now this was a subtle thought addiction keeping me from the present, and a way to avoid some of my emotional wounds. Writing these days must emerge more spontaneously; it has to catch fire in the moment, as it has now.

8. Tangentially, judgments—of which I have many, ones that often give my writing its edge—have been one of my biggest teachers this year. Just as I’ve stopped churning on essay ideas in my mind, I’m seeing how constant critiques of writing and culture are often merely the shadow side of an unexpressed artist. That’s exactly how I began: stuck in a career that stifled my spirit, with endless critiques and ideas bouncing around my head. But lately, I’m practicing just letting these judgments be there without trying to fix or transform them through metta or other practices. Because I’ve now clearly seen how every reaction is really just my mind’s reflection—not just triggering my wounded spots, but literally reflecting the nature of my mind itself. Like waking from a dream and realizing every character was woven from the same fabric consciousness, where you know everything you experienced was simply “you” (as I wrote about here).

9. Relatedly, forgiveness meditation is also underrated. This has become my favorite, along with the mantra: “I forgive myself for not understanding.” Technically, it refers to forgiving yourself for not understanding the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, but whispering these words in a mindful state hits potently, often triggering unexpected emotional release. All the tension I carry, all the judgments I hold—they’re just symptoms of not understanding the way things are, the way people are, the way reality is.

10. As one of my teachers reminds me, after waking up, there are two modes of consciousness: one that’s aware, and one that’s not. Consciousness itself is continuous and uninterrupted. So there’s no problem if you’re unaware—both awareness and unawareness occur naturally, without our control. Thus, there’s no need to force awareness; it will arise on its own. And while both states are completely natural and undifferentiated, it’s more pleasant and interesting to spend time aware.

11. The way to actually improve society isn’t through posting about far-away issues—it’s through living deeply in your local reality. Cultural problems and collective issues feel less confusing and pressing when you’re rooted in presence, love, and community. Ironically, living this way not only makes your life richer, but also increases your capacity to genuinely help with those far-away causes.

12. AI is going to be as transformative as everyone says, perhaps even more so than the hype. Countless jobs are in jeopardy. I’ve been using Claude (not ChatGPT, for aesthetic reasons) and am thoroughly impressed. Its ease of use will atrophy too many of our key skills, but the biggest risk I see is still epistemic—how it will accelerate an already addictive attention economy where people are increasingly trapped in reality tunnels that reinforce extremism and radicalization. Meanwhile, Claude’s potential for therapy is stunning. I now believe AI therapy will be an enormously effective tool for human growth, as bittersweet as that feels. The successful therapists of the future will differentiate themselves through presence, not through knowledge of psychological frameworks. Regarding the AGI hype and consciousness debates: from an idealist perspective like Donald Hoffman’s, AI can never be truly conscious since consciousness is fundamental, not emergent from computation. You can’t create consciousness by stacking more computation—it’s the other way around. Maybe I should write more about this.

13. The function of meditation is to release your addiction to ideas as the primary vehicle of truth, and instead become seduced by the wonders of direct experience. When you stop believing this moment needs to be different than it is, that’s awakening—the subtlest and ultimate recovery path. It’s about doing less, not more.

14. For the last five years since leaving my tech career to go independent, I’ve prioritized what lights me up over what makes money. It’s been a fulfilling, quite enjoyable experiment, able to sustain life in the Bay Area without compromising my values. I couldn’t imagine parenting without the flexibility I’ve created. But now, responsible for a family, I’m ready to step up my game as a capitalist while keeping my commitment to dharmic, heart-centered work—seeing the money piece as just that, a game to be played skillfully. The next chapter is about proving you can do deeply meaningful work and earn a fantastic living. No compromises needed.

15. Reality, experience, consciousness—whatever you call it—is always “on.” The thinking mind can only grasp a tiny fraction of what’s actually present: the vast field of vision, the rich soundscapes, the ghost-like sensations, the felt atmospheric vibes of each moment, the spaciousness that holds it all. There’s always infinitely more happening than what we can think about or describe. Notice this.

16. You are probably clenching your lower belly and/or butt without realizing it. Let go, relax.

Essays

I published 18 essays this year, a number understandably lower than previous years, but still including some solid work. Highlights:

• No Better Time to Wake Up (became one of my most-read pieces and sparked my podcast with )

• The Menu Is Not the Meal

• Where Zen Meets Inbox Zero

• Let’s Talk About How Often We Pickup Our Phones

• What Trump’s victory reveals about us

• Raw and gentle

And for the detailed-oriented: yes, midway through the year, I stopped capitalizing my essay titles. I’m now in a more playful blogger phase.

Deep Fix pod

This was the first real year doing the podcast! I love this medium, and sense there’s something in my future around speaking and expressing in this manner. It is, however, far more work than I anticipated, and parenting made scheduling difficult.

Thus far, I haven’t leveraged a consistent schedule or growth strategy—I just put out conversations I’m excited about when they’re ready, and it really warms my heart to hear that people are listening, enjoying, and discovering them. I’m planning to keep at it and hopefully find a producer (anyone?!). Some favorites from this year:

• Unfolding by the Elegance of Hakomi’s Somatic Psychotherapy with Manuela Mischke-Reeds (most listened)

• The Universe is Psychedelic with Rosa Lewis

• An Embodied Exploration of Non-Dual Awakening with John J. Prendergast, PhD

• Navigating Global Crises: Prophecies, Politics, and Civilizational Change with Daniel Pinchbeck

Three of my values, not goals, for 2025

Annual reviews have been a cornerstone of my life since getting sober. For the past five years, I’ve used my friend ’s review process alongside my own dharma inquiry to assess how I’m living. This year, Schlaf gave his review a major upgrade, shifting from goals to an Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) style values orientation. It’s brilliant—as his team’s work at Downshift, a company I was fortunate to have a front-row seat as he birthed it the last two years.

Here are my three values for the year:

Three books

I read less this year, but I still managed to sneak in some incredible books. And, for the third year straight, dharma books dominated my interests—consider yourself warned!

1. Best memoir: Earlier this year, I devoured One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir by Henry Shukman.

2. Best fiction: I was seeking a fun read, and finally gave Brandon Sanderson, the fantasy legend, a try. I’m starting with Mistborn: The Final Empire.

3. Best dharma books: Peter Brown, a criminally unknown maverick non-dual teacher, cracked my world open this year. If you’re into this sort of thing, read everything by him immediately. But I’d suggest going into this order: Dirty Enlightenment, The Yoga of Radiant Presence, and then The Astounding Nature of Experience.

Regarding #3: If you want to hear a fun and esoteric convo of me jamming about Peter Brown and non-dual philosophy, I just had the pleasure of going on ‘s podcast (Jordan is an OG creator and a seriously creative soul). It was a wonderfully refreshing convo that spanned awakening, the shadow side of spirituality, men’s work, and fatherhood. Listen here.

Three pods

I remember scoffing at messages about how multi-hour podcast episodes were an insult to parents. Now, much to my chagrin (and my former self’s horror), I totally get it. I only have time for pods while commuting or rarefied nap times. These were my favorites this year:

1. Dr. Christopher Wallis’s (Hareesh) Tantra Illuminated, a masterful deep dive into tantric philosophy.

2. Theo Von’s entire catalog, including his Timothée Chalamet interview. His episode with Tim Dillon had Grace and me crying with laughter during our road trip, as does every episode with Bobby Lee.

3. ’s Natural Awakening podcast, a fresh perspective on consciousness and awakening from someone with deep experiential knowledge of the terrain. Especially this episode on dharmic parenting with Michael Taft and Vince Horn.

Best documentary

I’ve seen most ayahuasca documentaries out there, and this one stands apart. The meditative footage brings you right to the source: a Shipibo village with their maestra. If you want a look at authentic indigenous healing, not watered-down Western stuff, this is it. Plus, it’s made by my friend ! I’m so impressed.

Best new app

My friend Jowo, a brilliant serial entrepreneur, spent years building an app to help people live saner, more organized, and connected lives. I’ve been testing The InnerWebs for the past year, and it’s become essential to my workflow—from capturing lightning-bolt ideas to remembering diapers. Think: the most intuitive to-do list and note tracker you can imagine. Simple voice commands like “Hey Siri, remind me to buy diapers” integrate seamlessly. And that’s just the start.

Sign up for early access here. I think it’s gonna be huge.

Best shares

This year, I experimented with quickly channeling creative energy towards medium-length notes on Substack Notes and Twitter (X). Some of them have generated interest on both platforms, and should perhaps be turned into longer essays. I know a lot of you don’t check Substack Notes, so here’s one of my favs:

Tunes

For the new folks joining us here, I am a former DJ, though I sold my turntables and the best action I get these days is curating a Spotify playlist journey that people seem to dig.

Submit your questions AMA

Next year, I’m going to start answering Ask Me Anything style submissions in written and podcast form. Whether you’re looking for advice, need practical spiritual/recovery/psychedelic guidance, have existential concerns about cultural collapse, want to jam on meditation insights, or want my (possibly questionable) hot takes—I’d love to hear from you. No question is off limits. This isn’t about me giving advice from some elevated perch—it’s about directly engaging with what’s alive in your mind and heart.

Ask Deep Fix

One last thing

I’m insanely grateful I get to do this work, and that you take the time to read and engage with it. This newsletter is the backbone of everything I do. Here’s to an incredible 2025. Let me know your thoughts on this year’s listicle and whether, like me, you needed to remind yourself again to unclench your lower belly (read: butt).

Leave a comment

I started at what they call a bottom, the kind where everything you think you know shatters at your feet. Back then, I whispered the Serenity Prayer like a gambler clutching his last chip, hundreds of times a day until the words became more breath than mantra. What began as pure survival opened into something more beautiful than I could have ever imagined, not even in those early moments of desperate hope.

I’m not naïve. I know hard times could be lurking around any corner. Nothing in this life can be taken for granted; everything we cherish is temporary. But right now, I’m hitting these keys, watching fog roll over the Oakland Hills through my office window. The heat purrs in our house. I’m wearing the kind of sweater that feels like a hug, sipping pu’er tea that tastes of earth and time. My chair holds me like it knows my shape. I can hear my baby boy giggling in the living room as Grace brings him in from a walk. And sitting here, typing this, trying to put into words that, finally, I understand that all we have are these moments, these bite-sized pieces of now. Sometimes they string together like polaroids in a shoebox—a day, a week, a month, another year—but really, it’s all just this one thing displayed in its infinite variety. Until, of course, it’s not. Until the lights go out on the greatest show in town.

And those lights keep getting brighter. My incredibly domestic and simple life somehow feels like Vegas. I became a dad this year, and while I’m not here to drop profound philosophical revelations about fatherhood, I will say this: watching my boy discover the world, his face lighting up at the smallest things—a napkin, a squirrel, a chapstick—has shifted something deep in my somatic psyche. The kind of shift that happens below thought, below words, where sensations light up the bodymind from within, uncorking places you didn't even know were sealed.

I’ve written about how something has settled. But it’s more than just enjoying fatherhood, or feeling like it’s a fit for a guy like me. I think it’s nature’s way of settling years of intense spiritual seeking, deepening what I thought I already understood, finally leading me to understand what I was chasing all along—through Hunter S. Thompson partying, yoga, psychedelic journeys, intensive meditation, all those attempts to find something extraordinary. Turns out it’s what’s right here, completely ordinary yet unbelievably radiant—you can’t gain what you’ve never lost. And so I no longer need to understand, which makes all the previous striving feel comical—like watching one of those hyper-energetic mixed breed dogs chase its tail with utmost seriousness, which I assure you is exactly what I looked like, taking the whole shebang way too seriously. It can be hard to laugh when you’re fighting to survive.

God damn, I am grateful to be alive today. I love the work I do: coaching, running groups, retreats, earning a living helping people wake and grow up. I love writing to you all. None of it feels like work, and while I’d now like to earn more for my family, I’d still do it all for free, as I did for years moonlighting before going pro.

This year brought major challenges, from parenting to my health. I had my first surgery (on my sinuses) where I got anesthesia, and no, despite my best spiritual athlete efforts to maintain awareness going under, it went completely black. I woke up in the OR, wondering where consciousness went and why my throat felt like I’d been sand-papered from the inside, properly humbled. Then, a few days later, I proceeded to blow out my back putting my boy in the car seat, which is embarrassing for a former D1 athlete (golf, but still, your boy can move his body).

Yet I’m not exaggerating when I say this year was the best yet. It seems possible that awareness keeps unfolding on itself, that life can keep getting richer even when things get hard—maybe that’s true for all of us.

I first learned about the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination when my parents called from Manhattan. Like most New Yorkers that day, they were rattled by the brazen daylight killing. They were also surprised I hadn’t heard about it, but I was in my usual hardcore daytime Do Not Disturb mode, writing and sitting with clients. My dad—who shares my obsession with spy novels—and I talked through the horrifying details. Together we theorized about what type of person would commit such an act, hired assassin or not.

Nothing could have remotely prepared us for the killer to be Luigi Mangione. And as someone who studies culture, at least as a hobbyist, I knew something had shifted the moment I started learning about his story. This wasn’t just another American tragedy unspooling across our screens. Each new detail that emerged confirmed something far more significant was happening.

A valedictorian with dual Penn degrees sliding into psychedelics and self-improvement manifestos. A brilliant young mind wounded by the healthcare system who became not just a dark folk hero but, following a pattern as old as revolution itself, an object of mass attraction—his jacked physique and model-like looks sparking a twisted kind of celebrity worship online. The kind of story that shatters all our usual interpretive frameworks. In my gut, I worried Luigi was just the beginning. The first of many. Alex Beiner’s essay, the best I’ve read on the killing, called it a cultural breach event. A breach occurs when the swirling ocean of our collective online fantasies, hopes, and rage finally erupts into physical reality.

And breach it did. The case haunts us first through its metamodern contradictions, and those certainly abound: elite student becomes anti-elite killer, techno-optimist turns micro-Unabomber. But what truly grips us is what happens when the promises of elite achievement culture collide head-on with both systemic disillusionment and profound personal suffering. A young man does everything “right,” checks all the boxes, then perhaps experiences firsthand the cruelty of our healthcare system—and something breaks. When I put my cultural philosopher hat on, I see this as a preview: our terminally online culture meeting profound social frustration that’s close to erupting.

Looking deeper, this tragedy exposes something darker than just ideological certainty, that dangerous state where complexity dissolves into absolute conviction, where nuance dies and the world becomes black and white. Behind ideological violence of this nature—even when fueled by psychosis—always lies deep, unbearable pain.1

But instead of real containers and guidance for a young man with immense talent, we offer a seductive and toxic mix of anti-establishment narratives, self-help manifestos, contrarian bloggers, and an unhinged personal development culture that can send wounded people spiraling without any guardrails—all while certain billionaires and radical progressives alike cheer for the collapse of the very system that created them.

Beiner captures the tragic irony of this violence when he writes:

“If Mangione had destroyed the data centres that house United Healthcare’s patient records, it wouldn’t be a powerful breach event. But he killed a human being, a father and husband. He removed an experience from the world, as revenge against a machine that doesn’t care about experience. The assassination is a koan that brings to light the paradox at the heart of civilisation: what’s real is our experience of being alive, not how we can be quantified, but we pretend the opposite is true.”

What makes this case so haunting isn’t just its contradictions—it’s how it shatters our most basic stories about progress, success, and social mobility. Here was someone who mastered the game, only to flip the board entirely. Let’s be clear: you can’t just murder people. Full stop. When journalists like Taylor Lorenz express joy and explicitly state she feels no empathy for the killing, it reveals the moral bankruptcy of a certain progressive mindset that celebrates destruction over genuine reform. At the same time, we can acknowledge that our healthcare system systematically destroys lives while executives rake in millions, and it urgently needs to change. The tragedy cuts both ways.

Beiner’s analysis, drawing on Peter Turchin’s research, helps explain the deeper historical currents at play:

“Social strife happens when inequality spirals out of control, while at the same time there are too many ‘elite aspirants’ and not enough positions for them. Eventually, members of the elite defect (becoming counter-elites) and align with the angry masses to change the status quo.”

This isn’t theoretical anymore. The data reveals a seismic social fracture. In my recent essay on Trump’s inevitability, I warned about a generational shift happening right under our noses: 60% of Americans under 30 approve of the Trump transition. Now combine that with a far more disturbing data point: 41% of those under 29 approve of the UnitedHealthcare CEO killing. Let that sink in. Nearly half of young Americans see the assassination of a healthcare executive as justified.

This isn’t just about politics anymore—it’s about the complete collapse of institutional legitimacy.

And it goes beyond normal generational rebellion. It suggests a profound rupture in social trust, a generation that’s concluded the system isn’t just broken, it’s malevolent. As Daniel Pinchbeck says, history doesn’t necessarily repeat, but it does rhyme: when young people start seeing violence against elites as justified, when folk heroes emerge from acts of political violence, when the educated turn against their own system—these are the same notes that have played before every major societal breakdown in history. And once this kind of legitimacy crisis takes hold in young minds, it doesn’t easily reverse; it tends to accelerate until something fundamental breaks or transforms.

It’s easy to distance ourselves from history, to read about the French Revolution’s guillotines with a kind of comfortable detachment. The idea of crowds cheering as aristocratic heads roll feels safely archived in textbooks. But that’s just our inability to imagine the raw emotions of the time, the way inequality and elite corruption created a powder keg of collective rage. When we read about the sans-culottes, we forget they weren’t just an angry mob—they were people who had watched their children starve while aristocrats feasted.

Today’s version doesn’t need guillotines in the town square. It lives in our phones: broad daylight Manhattan assassinations becoming libidinous folk tales, TikTok edits of the killer set to techno-pop, memes that transform tragedy into entertainment. The methods evolve, but the underlying pattern remains eerily constant: elite education breeding elite resistance, systemic corruption spawning its own destroyers. But there is a crucial difference: where the French Revolution’s violence played out in public squares, ours unfolds in a hybrid space where digital celebration bleeds into physical violence.

As we map these historical similarities, at a certain point, we have to ask ourselves what to do, and how we might maintain perspective while swimming in waters this dark.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: when I’m deep in the online world, cultural events like this feel seismic, world-ending even. The digital amplification makes every breach feel like the final crack that will shatter everything. Yet when I step away—whether for a meditation retreat, a sabbath day of silence, or a year off social media—something shifts. The events don’t become less important, but they settle into a different scale entirely. It’s the difference between a surfer watching the heavy swell from the beach and being caught under the waves in the undertow.

But this isn’t an argument for spiritual bypass. Yes, offline life grounds me. Being in relationship with someone who isn’t an “online person” or creator or even lurker of discourse keeps me tethered to what’s most immediate and real. But simply retreating from these cultural tremors misses something essential. I’ve watched too many consciousness seekers—myself included at times—dismiss these types of events as mere “noise,” as distractions from the “deeper work.” We can fall into a kind of spiritual elitism that’s eerily similar to the institutional disconnect we see in healthcare executives and mega-wealthy, a way of floating above the messy reality of normal human suffering.

It’s funny, because my primary interest is dharma, in waking up to true nature and wanting that for more people. I could be writing to you about how I’ve discovered reliable methods to dramatically increase baseline happiness and dissolve the suffering around meaning and purpose—teachings I’m passionate about sharing with others. And yet I feel this deep urge, both from a soul level and perhaps from some lingering surface level attachment to drama and discourse, to help make sense of these evolving moments with you all.

These breach events, these cultural wounds—a brilliant young man’s descent into violence, a system’s failure to honor human health, our collective digital fever dream—aren’t just events to anaylze or transcend. They’re expressions of our collective consciousness wrestling with its own shadows, its own contradictions. The relative is the absolute. That’s why I write: I genuinely love making sense of these cultural ruptures, trying to understand the myths that govern our times—though I worry I’m just performing the very online-brain syndrome I’m critiquing.

As far as I can tell, the Luigi case isn’t just another story about elite education or healthcare or online radicalization—it shatters our comfortable notions of progress, meritocracy, and institutional legitimacy. Each detail becomes viral entertainment before we can process its meaning, while beneath the spectacle runs a story as old as time: the brilliant child turned destroyer, transformed by our digital gaze into a kind of sexy-Che Guevara figure, all of it playing out at hyperspeed through our digital nervous system. And maybe understanding these breaches, in all their complexity and pain, is the first step toward healing them.