I recently saw an arts grant organized by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on the topic of “New Aesthetics.” Check it out if you’re interested! Anyways, seeing this prompted me to think about design, aesthetics, and where my own taste lies.

II.

First, here are some of the worst design and aesthetic trends of recent years:

• Drab colors

• “SSRI chic” interior design (you could also call this “airbnb-core”)

  

• Synthetic / artificial / obviously unnatural materials in furniture / interiors

• Tacky and gaudy baubles (e.g. Funko Pop)

• Corporate HR art style

• “Posing for Instagram” backdrop vibes; bringing the trendy Millennial bar-and-eatery experience into your living room

III.

Some of the overlapping themes here are:

• Brash, in-your-face vulgarity

• Overwhelming sense of fakeness / cheapness / not-realness

• It somehow manages to be simultaneously loud and not say anything of substance

• Adjacent to the fakeness is that the cohesive effect of this is a sense of… sterility? Lifelessness? Un-vitality?

• I don’t know how to describe it precisely, but many of these things also give off strong Current Thing cultural energy. A lot of young people and 35 year olds care a ton about Marvel right now. I am not so sure many people will care about it very much in 50 years. Now, why is being associated with Current Thing culture a bad thing aesthetically? Well, Current Thing culture tends to be most valued for its newness. Which is, regrettably, the one thing it loses the second it is arrives in the world. In other words, Current Thing culture depreciates hard and fast.

IV.

So, Matt Kramer, what would you like to see change about our world of aesthetics?

I would like to see a return to beauty. To natural beauty. There are many opportunities for us to incorporate natural beauty into our interior designs (and architectural / exteriors too). Consider… the sun. The moon. Clouds. Sky. Trees. Forests. Mountains. Leaves. Lakes. Ocean. Rivers. Glaciers. Flowers.

Could you capture the feeling of “Ahhhh, I am glancing at Heaven…” that you get when you look out an airplane window, but in your living room? Or suppose there was a room that made you feel like you were underwater–shimmering natural light, flora and fauna that seems almost otherworldly, ethereal? Can you feel the richness of the colors? The temperature I’m describing, the coolness of the blues and the greens in such a room?

We all know the saying, “Nature abhors a vacuum” – well, it’s true! Nature converges towards life, energy, flow, movement. Nature is inherently maximalist. Nature is inherently NOT minimalist. The antidote to a culture of sterility is life.

Picture colorful carpets. Floors that are made of something real; stone or wood.

Japanese architecture and design does this quite elegantly; the Japanese have an intensely honed sense that beauty requires the absence of ugliness and that nature and real things tend to be inherently beautiful. We could learn from that.

There is a sense, sometimes, in America’s cultural elite that beautiful things are only for the wealthy. But I think this is not true. We have never been more efficient at manufacturing so many different things. Many people stumble at the chokepoints of taste and imagination. As the saying goes, you can’t buy taste.

Are you dedicated enough to only acquire beautiful things, and ruthless enough to let go of the ugly things you may currently have?

V.

So this is the shift I wish to see in aesthetics and design: moving in the direction of complexity, natural beauty, and intricacy. Towards substance and cohesion.

It is easy to fall for the cultural illusion that one must reinvent the wheel in art and aesthetics, or that things which are tried and true are in danger of “losing their luster” and going out of vogue. But there is a genuine timelessness to beautiful things, as beauty, like truth, endures.

gratitude:

• (n.) The state of being grateful.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

“C’Era Una Volta Il West” - Once Upon a Time in the West by Ennio Morricone

I watched Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West with my dad a few months ago, greatly enjoying the strikingly beautiful cinematography, the life-or-death drama of survival in the frontier, and the captivating performances by its stars. But more than anything else, Ennio Morricone’s score stuck with me long after the movie ended.

My cat Eleanor, a fiesty, free-spirited tuxedo and true American sweetheart, passed away on August 20. The day after her death, I found myself driving up a winding, privately-maintained road in the backcountry of Morgan Hill, dust flaring as I drove over gravel. I was listening to this song, and thinking of her with tears in my eyes.

More than a handful of the YouTube comments mention this song being played at their dad’s funeral. Isn’t that beautiful, how a song can bring people together across time, space, and even life or death?

Great music inspires emotion and transcends the material world. The shimmering, gentle hope, optimism, and loving tenderness in this song moves me deeply. I like to think that all the dads in cowboy heaven are gazing on blue skies and green pastures.

And what a blessing it is to have music that conveys the warmth, clarity, and force of someone’s good nature.

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

It is easy to be disaffected with something about the world. Maybe there is bad energy in your community. Maybe, as you see it, people care far too much about politics, or perhaps far too little. Maybe that thing you purchased didn’t make you feel the way you thought it would. Maybe your work is tedious, your boss takes you for granted.

Maybe you were misunderstood by someone, and that hurt. Or maybe you weren’t misunderstood, just not valued, and that hurt much worse.

Whenever something is going wrong in your life, if you focus on it, that will become your entire life.

But when you stop and think about it, isn’t it utterly ridiculous for any of us to feel like we are owed something? Like the unviverse hasn’t given us enough?

This is the most miraculous time to be alive in human history. We can access the full spectrum of human knowledge and wisdom using a magic tiny rectangle that fits in our hand. We can speak to people on the other side of the world in real time while walking through a park. We can see all of the greatest works of art, for free and on demand, whenever we want. We can walk down the spice aisle at our local grocery store and see more flavors than the wealthiest king from a thousand years ago would encounter in a dozen lifetimes.

There is so very much to be grateful for. Beyond screaming news headlines, beyond vapid Instagram reels, there are so, so, SO many beautiful things just waiting to feel the kiss of your attention on it. Our ancestors—by which I mean the people who came before us in time—left us an incredible cultural inheritance. There are more things to worship and revere than we could ever hope to make contact with.

And whenever I am feeling a sense of lack in my life, I can return to this comforting truth: that there is much to be grateful for. That my problems are small, my blessings are many, and reality is full of things that are substantial, real, meaningful, and good.

I am grateful for this.

Today, I am writing with a stream-of-conscious list of ideas and perspectives that poured out of me at the coffee shop the other day. I had intended to write nine, but the friction between my brain and the page was low and so I ended up with 27. Oops.

Enjoy!

1. Like it or not, you are a spiritual being. So think of yourself as a spiritual being (i.e. a being with spiritual needs, spiritual desires, and spiritual capacity).
   

2. Focus on good, positive things (even, and perhaps especially, when times are tough). People at funerals really need a laugh.
   

3. Money is good, but it is not an end. Learn to stay within the lane of fulfilling needs more than desires. Resist the narrative of, “You are incomplete without X” that advertisers have been imposing on you since the day you were born.
   

4. Some people prefer misery to happiness simply because it is familiar. You cannot change this in someone else. However, you can change it in yourself.
   

5. Current Thing™ needs you more than you need it. If everyone stopped reading the New York Times overnight, the world would keep on spinning without missing a single beat. We should all be talking more with people instead of about things. Current Thing™ culture is just an excuse for people to not develop personalities.
   

6. If you are not using a tool intentionally, it will be using you (according to the intentions inherent in its own design).
   

7. Everyone and everything has a true nature.
   

8. Comparison is the thief of joy because resentment blocks gratitude.
   

9. Aesthetics, far from being superficial and meaningless, tell you quite a lot about someone or something. It is completely valid to reject a cultural movement or social group for aesthetic reasons alone.
   

10. False authorities assert themselves. True authorities simply rule and defend their territory.
    

11. In the grand scheme of things, nobody will ever care about your life more than you do. If you are waiting for someone to save you, save yourself (or have the humility to turn to a higher power, like God or The Universe). If you are waiting for someone to tell you what to do, take the responsibility of being your own navigator. Other people’s designs and desires for you will—inherently—never have the same capacity for being in alignment with your true self as your own.
    

12. Beginners make beginner mistakes. You can avoid many easy mistakes in any hobby or activity just by doing a little research. A few years ago I injured my shoulder in a highly preventable way by doing push-ups with bad form. It’s worth it to take the time to learn how to do things right and deferring to humanity’s collective wisdom and (earned) expertise. (Life works the same way too.)
    

13. You can never avoid bad luck entirely, but you can minimize it. Driving recklessly creates narrower margins for you, every other driver on the road, and all the chaotic randomness of the universe.
    

14. Life is chaotic (good). Life is ordered (good). This is a divine and beautiful truth.
    

15. People who are frequently unlucky tend to go around thinking that bad things just happen to them all the time. People who are lucky tend to go around giving freely and generously while being open to exploring and receiving unexpected good things in their life. Both of these orientations are a choice.
    

16. Inclusivity is incredibly overrated. Shut the door on people who are evil, bad, mean, selfish. Bad things spread like cancer. Healthiness is fundamentally based on exclusion.
    

17. Your standards, spiritually speaking, should be at least 10x higher than you think. We live in a default culture of significant spiritual and moral decline, and there are ten million screaming voices telling you to compromise, compromise, compromise… sell yourself out because everyone else is! Consider that this is an elaborate and self-interested cultural illusion, necessary for the self-preservation of a hollow secular default lifestyle of shallow hedonistic gratification.
    

18. There’s only so many geniuses and visionaries in any generation. Turning to history opens that up and gives you access to orders of magnitude more truth-beauty-good-love-wisdom. Reject this and you only punish yourself.
    

19. The truth endures.
    

20. A lie never endures.
    

21. Men and women are asymmetric equals, that is to say, not equal at all in any way that makes sense for that word other than spiritually, before the eyes of God.
    

22. Never let unhappy people tell you how to live. They clearly don’t know how to!!!
    

23. You are a spiritually sovereign individual. A spiritual sovereign. Never forget that.
    

24. Happiness/joyfulness is an energetically activated emotional state (e.g. an ‘up’ state rather than a baseline). You cannot reside in happiness forever. So make a revereant, grateful neutrality your baseline state, which can easily slide into happiness and joy when appropriate.
    

25. Every day has a unique, one-of-one sunrise and sunset. This is a perfect opportunity for worship and gratitude.
    

26. Every month has a cycle of waning and waxing moon. These, too, are opportunities for worship and gratitude.
    

27. Know what makes your heart sing, your spirit soar, and allow the universe (God) to lovingly nourish you.

serenity:

• (n.) The state of being serene; calmness; peacefulness.

• (n.) A lack of agitation or disturbance.

• (n.) A title given to a reigning prince or similar dignitary.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

“arurian dance” - Samurai Champloo Music Record: Departure by Nujabes

One of the most serene songs ever created. Can’t you feel your spirit relaxing as you listen? Like floating down a cool river on a perfect day with a breeze and no bugs.

Ahhhhhh, yes… that’s the life.

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

I hope you’ll pardon my presumptuousness here, but I have been thinking a lot about you and your life lately, and you know what I realized?

You already have everything you need inside of you. There are no new ideas, no gleaming perspectives, no fresh insights nor decisive actions that could possibly make you more worthy of love than you already are. It’s all right there within you.

So for this week, I simply write to you with tidings of serenity and inner peace.

Which, of course, you already have… so there is no need for me to bring it to you.

Right?

;-)

insanity:

• (n.) The state of being insane; madness.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

“Y.M.C.A.” - Cruisin’ by Village People

This is, to my knowledge, the only song that properly captures the unbridled joy of setting foot inside of a really, REALLY good rec center.

Something to look at:

Look, we’ve all been here, in some sense of the words ‘been’ and ‘here.’

Something to think about:

I.

A sense of enchantment with the world is a difficult thing to convey with words. The nature of reality is expansive and mysterious. The nature of language is prescriptive. People who have had spiritual experiences often find themselves utterly transformed by them, forever shifted beyond what felt like a fixed and rigid frame for seeing reality into something new—something strange, otherworldly, magical, mystical, enchanted. Something that invites a new way of experiencing reality; a new way of experiencing experience itself.

These types of shifts are inherently challenging to capture with language. When you are talking to someone who hasn’t experienced such things (or has but without being fully aware of them) you effectively come across as insane. "Yeah, I used to see the world that one way, the same way we all did, the way we were supposed to… but now I see it as it REALLY is. Overflowing with beauty and magic and wonder. Don’t you get it?? Don’t you see it too????!”

There is something to be said about the relationship between joyfulness and insanity in the Default Culture. I often think about the “““infamous””” Tom Cruise appearance on Oprah when he was fully overcome with the joy of his love for Katie Holmes, and how expressing that joy caused him to be labeled as ‘insane’ by the sneering media class. This speaks to the power of media distortion: because I can guarantee you that the majority of the audience of screaming, cheering women in that room were not feeling, “Here is an insane man having a manic break!” They were feeling, “Here is a man who is DOWN SO BAD for his girl, and it is beautiful!”

Using the label of ‘insane’ (read: irrational, incorrect, unmediated) for expressions of happiness is a simple technique for culturally policing joy. But when you recognize that for what it is, you get to make a choice: do you fear the label more than you fear a life of shrinking all your happiness, all your joy, all of your LOVE into a tiny box that meets our miserable secular society’s narrow expectations of what is permissible to express? Or do you choose freedom?

A choice. I cannot make it for you. But I can, and have, obviously, made it for myself.

II.

I’ve come to view one of the core threads of modern misery as revolving around this sense of enchantment versus disenchantment with the world. If you are disenchanted with the world, you are almost by definition focusing on negative things. You are focusing on what you do not have. You are focusing on what you feel entitled to. You are focusing on Things That Are Wrong With The World.

Indulge me in a thought experiment: suppose that whether you are enchanted with the world or disenchanted with the world is not something beyond your control, but is, in fact, a choice. A personal choice. Suppose that you have the ability to choose what you focus on. Suppose that you can choose to appreciate the good things in your life and the world without tacitly endorsing any of the following: evil, suffering, misery, pain, injustice. Suppose that joy vs misery is not a zero-sum game and that your joy is not coming at the expense of anyone else’s well-being.

This is an idea that is beyond the frame of the Default Culture. The Default Culture both explicitly and implicitly instructs us that joy is zero-sum, that it is wrong to be happy or joyful when other people are unhappy because it is “inequal.” If you listen to secular liberal-progressives on Instagram and their list of grievances (which would surely put even a CVS receipt to shame), you might start to get the sense that these people will never allow themself to be happy. And what does it mean for your own joy if you are not allowed to be happy until they are happy?

Ah.

When you achieve this insight, when you really let it into your body and mind and heart and think through all the implications and ramifications of it for your own life, everything becomes crystal clear:

1. I am allowed to be happy and joyful.

2. I cannot allow someone else’s lack of joy to be a precondition for my own joy.

3. If I am waiting for someone else to be happy before I allow myself to be happy, I am committing a sort of walking spiritual suicide.

4. If I am waiting for someone who will never be happy to be happy before I allow myself to be happy, I will never be happy.

5. I am allowed to be happy and joyful.

The sense of joy I am articulating here intellectually is both circular and self-reinforcing. The idea that you are allowed to be happy, joyful, and grounded in your gratitude for the good things in your life acts as a misery-circuit breaker. This is one of the foundational ideas for your spiritual sovereignty and well-being. Embrace it!

III.

Performative misery about the state of the world is very in vogue. That doesn’t mean it is good, true, or beautiful. It is, in fact, none of those things. Most often, these expressions of misery about the state of the world are little more than narcissism masquerading as empathy. A (self-valorizing) selfishness masquerading as selflessness. And resentment-based entitlement masquerading as justice. But when you are a careful student of history as an actual reality divorced from our politically-expedient cultural narratives about rational “enlightenment” and secular “progress" you understand the truth:

The world has never been made more beautiful by people performatively worrying about her. The world has never been made more beautiful by people feeling miserable. Just the opposite, it turns out. Good energy begets good energy. Negative energy begets negative energy. This is a simple and elemental truth of the universe. A foundational rule of reality. You cannot hate hate into becoming love.

You can only love.

So if you want the future to be as shiningly bright and vividly beautiful as it can be, that begins with YOU becoming as shiningly bright and vividly beautiful as you can be. I can feel that potential inside of you, pulsing, crackling, absolutely radiant. It inspires me every time I think about it. It fires me up with the joy of being alive when I think about it, with the joy of being alive in the SAME world, at the SAME time, as YOU and your ESSENCE. Can you feel it too?!

So come! Gather one, gather all. Let us rejoice together. Let us shout, from every mountaintop, every balcony, every social media post, every coffee-shop conversation and town hall debate and sultry sweet-nothing whispered into a lover’s ear, that joy will prevail!

Oh let us shout: Joy will prevail! Joy will prevail! Joy will prevail!

sunset:

• (n.) The moment each evening when the sun disappears below the western horizon.

• (n.) The changes in color of the sky before and after sunset.

• (n.) (figuratively) The final period of the life of a person or thing.

• (n.) (attributively) A set termination date.

• The region where the sun sets; the west.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

“sanctuary ship” - Samurai Champloo Music Record: Impression by Nujabes

kick back feet up heart open mind clear go go go

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

Every day, there is a sunrise and every day, there is a sunset. Isn’t that a remarkably consistent and powerful truth? And like many consistent and powerful truths, its consistency and its power makes it easy to take for granted.

When we are given something repeatedly, it can easily shift from its true nature (a gift) into something else: an expectation.

Hmmmm…

I have many thoughts about sunsets, actually.

The first is that every sunset, God invents exactly one (1) brand new color, a special reward to be injected straight into the spirits of those who are consistent and careful observers.

The second is that I have never regretted taking—making—the time to watch a sunset. This is one of those things in life that is just plain good for the soul. Inherently nourishing. I’m going to repeat that. Inherently nourishing. It’s so very good to pay attention to the things in life that are inherently nourishing.

I’ll add that I don’t think we were created with the intent of worshiping our own efficiency, or our own cleverness, chasing rapture in the intrepidness of our ways. No, I think we were created to worship what is beyond the Self. The natural world invites us to worship it with the pulsing love of our attention. Sunsets are a sacred opportunity to do exactly that.

The third thought I have is that each sunset marks a transitional period, delineating between day and night, between energetic wakefulness and restorative slumber. It’s good to notice such periods, or perhaps rather than notice (which starts to sound a little mentally exhausting on an extended basis), be aware of. Yes, it’s good to be aware of the transitional periods in our lives; be they daily, monthly, seasonal; be they solar or lunar, masculine or feminine, man-made or naturally occurring. It is good to be aware.

The fourth thought is a bit vulgar. I’d love to have sex while her and I are both watching the sunset someday. The right positions could facilitate this nicely.

(Yeah, I think this just made my bucket list, matter of fact.)

The fifth thought is that the majesty of each sunset is a collaboration between the sun and its divine fire, the clouds and their wispy hearts, the mighty wind, keeping everything in motion, keeping everything on time, and a trillion other tiny-huge miracles that—just as fast as you can comprehend them—will softly hit your spirit like BB bullets. Don’t sleep on what’s at work here. And consider the truth that this collaboration working so beautifully is an invitation for us to be more collaborative with each other, too. We can go places alone, sure, but we’ll go farther together.

The sixth thought about sunsets is that it is a parting, a farewell, the kind that is made easier by our faith that what we are saying goodbye to will return reliably the next morning. What if that doesn’t happen one day? What if the sun sets and… never comes back? How would you feel to have taken the significance of that parting for granted?

The seventh thought about sunsets is that they are good alone, but so, SO much sweeter together. Let’s all be sure to share a sunset with someone we love, or a friendly stranger, soon.

I think this will be good for the world.

elevation:

• (n.) The act of raising from a lower place, condition, or quality to a higher; said of material things, persons, the mind, the voice, etc.

• (n.) The condition of being or feeling elevated; heightened; exaltation.

• (n.) (astronomy) The distance of a celestial object above the horizon, or the arc of a vertical circle intercepted between it and the horizon; altitude.

• (n.) (Christianity, chiefly Roman Catholicism) The raising of the host—representing Christ’s body—in a mass or Holy Communion service.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

“mist” - Samurai Champloo Music Record: Masta by FORCE OF NATURE

I love the simplicity of “lo-fi” music, that scratchiness, the coziness of the imperfections and how they are lovingly accepted as part of the track. Does this track evoke elevation or groundedness for you? Perhaps a little bit of both?

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

I find it curious how often the word “elevated” is used to describe an experience as “better” than something else (a less elevated experience, presumably). In the major American cities, people derive their sense of power quite literally from how “above” everyone else they are. Are you in a high-rise suite looking out over everyone else in the city or are you in a first-floor apartment? One is thought to be “better” than the other, although… how superior is the man who has to get into a little metal box and pay with time just to get into his home? Versus the man who simply arrives and is there?

As is always the case, a tradeoff exists wherever something claims to be strictly superior.

On the other side of elevation is groundedness. Grounded, as in, making direct contact with. Touching the ground, or, to sink into metaphor, touching reality. Elevation creates a distance, groundedness creates a connection. I like the connotations between grounding and electricity, too—being grounded allows you to safely expose yourself to incredible, electrifying currents safely.

The more you crave elevation, the more dangers there are of dissociation, of losing touch with something important. There is no consumer experience more rarified than breathing in clean air on God’s green earth. It’s the difference between being alive and cultivating an illusion of liveliness. The wealthiest people in the world get the same sunrise and the same sunset as the rest of us. Once you realize this, doesn’t it feel utterly ridiculous to be motivated at all by resentment against the rich? Don’t you see how you’re already as wealthy as they are in all the ways that actually matter?

Elevation does, of course, deserve its credit where credit is due. Many journeys in life are about an ascent and a descent. The view from the top, that journey of ‘there and back,’ can and does unlock extraordinary things for your spirit. Growth, love, connection, tenderness, awe.

These things (and many more beautiful mysteries) can be found, shimmering and wordless, at the crest of the mountain, in your quest for the summit. But a caveat:

Be sure the mountains you climb come from the exhortations of your soul—from what is within, or more accurately, what is chosen with intention and love—rather than the seductive yet superficial desire to gain esteem (aka elevation) in the eyes of another.

When you orient towards the wrong things, you might trick yourself into thinking that you’re climbing up when in actuality, you are falling down, down, down…

horizon:

• (n.) The visible horizontal line (in all directions) where the sky appears to meet the earth in the distance.

• (n.) (figuratively) The range or limit of one's knowledge, experience or interest; a boundary or threshold.

• (n.) The range or limit of any dimension in which one exists.

• (n.) Any level line or surface.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

“Green Hill Zone” - Sonic the Hedgehog by Masato Nakamura

Don’t you just love the energy, the sense of forward momentum and exploration and optimism in this piece? Doesn’t it just make you smile and relax? Like driving down a coastal highway in a convertible on a sunny spring day where the air is pure and God is everywhere and then you look out to your right and see—

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

You see what you look at.

You don’t see what you don’t look at.

In life, it is a natural and instinctive reaction to gaze at something you wish to avoid. Unfortunately, this all but guarantees that you will hit it. (Oops!)

We used to understand reality by perceiving it directly. We saw with our own eyes, heard with our own ears, and maybe occasionally got a whisper of gossip or news from a member of another tribe. Now, though, we receive updates about the world constantly, a kaleidoscope of sounds and perspectives that overwhelm the senses and assault the spirit. There are so many people mainlining spiritual schizophrenia just because they can’t stop looking at the screaming infinite noise machine.

But living in a world overflowing with this much data and information, what we look at really is a choice. The Default Culture would have you believe that it isn’t. That all morally good people are paying attention to the same things and freaking out about them in the same way under the same secular-materialist moral framework. And that doing this is, in fact, a driver of “progress,” ushering in a bright and beautiful future using the energetic forces of fear and anxiety.

This is an arrogant and contemptible lie.

There are so, so, SO many things in life and the world that are more important than anything The New York Times has ever written about or ever will. You could live a perfect life without looking at a newspaper headline ever again.

You do not need Current Thing. Current Thing needs you.

So on this Friday, one of those liminal days between summer and fall where the clouds hovering over New York City have been painted on, I invite you to think about what you look at and who that serves. What’s on the horizon in your life and future is tethered to that choice.

In closing, I offer you a heartfelt benediction:

I.

One of my favorite short stories is State Change by Ken Liu from his collection The Paper Menagerie. It’s a short, wondrously creative, joyously life-affirming story in the genre of magical realism. I recommend reading it directly, but here’s a summary of the premise and why it’s relevant to the topic of spiritual transformation:

In the world of State Change, people are born with their souls materializing into a physical object: a candle, a box of cigarettes, an ice cube. Your body must remain close to your soul-object to stay healthy and you must protect it because if your soul-object is destroyed, you will die. In this world, people can tap into the power of their souls through their objects: a poet whose soul is a candle might be able to write with extraordinary clarity and illumination when she lights it, glowing, radiant and alive. But each time she does so, she burns closer to death. A precious, exhaustible resource.

And—SPOILER WARNING—here is what we discover at the end of the tale:

A woman whose soul is a box of cigarettes—accidentally losing her last cigarette while drunk—is surprised to discover that her soul isn’t just the cigarettes; it was also the box all along. And now that her last cigarette has been smoked, she isn’t dead, out of life. No, now she is carefree, adaptable, full of capacity to hold new experiences. But she had to go through all the cigarettes to get here.

She had to experience a state change.

II.

I believe there are at least two different types of spiritual rebirths a person can experience. One type is received. It happens to you. Like being tapped on the shoulder with a sword and made into a knight, or anointed with holy water. You knelt as one thing and rose as something else, born anew.

This type of received spiritual rebirth, of course, can also happen without any ceremony whatsoever. The divine, the mystic, the unknown can touch your spirit directly and change you from within. A blessing received.

But there is another type of spiritual rebirth: the kind you choose. I want you to take a moment and think about who you are. Your soul, your personality. Do you have a visual metaphor for your spirit, for your sense of self?

(This is also a terrific journaling prompt by the way.)

Now, how much of the way you think about yourself is a choice? How much of it is contingent upon the past? (A story, in other words). Does that story still feel true? Is it true? Do you think it will be true forever?

These are questions a man must answer for himself. But it is important to consider that the answers here do not have to be fixed. What is true in one moment may change with time—just like how a boulder in the river is gradually worn down into a pebble, then into sand. This transformation is only perceivable at a sufficiently long time-scale; you need that birds-eye view showing what once was and what now is, without the obscuring granularity of everything that was in-between.

Gabi Abrao aka sigh swoon writes about identity in Notes on Shapeshifting:

“The first time that I integrated the mantra, “I am constantly shapeshifting, adapting, and evolving,” I was attempting to define what kind of woman I was…

I paced around my room and attempted to recall everyone I had ever been - every identity I explored whether built for myself or for others, every personality trait embodied, every whim followed or feared. When I felt that I had discovered a steady trait in myself, I’d fish my memory for another situation in which I countered that behavior. As traits canceled each other out, it was clear that there was no overarching theme. There was no recognizable archetype fit for a sitcom character. There was no “kind of woman.” Just a wide range of behaviors brought out at different times, for different purposes.

What a truth. No context had ever felt more honest or freeing than the lack of any at all.”

III.

I had a conception of myself, a visual metaphor for my spirit. Picture a round flask. Inside of it is an ocean. Filled up to the halfway point or so. Water and waves. In the center, there is a sharp rock, jutting out and towering above the waters. Something solid. At the top of the flask is a cork, sealing and protecting my spirit. “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

This visual metaphor captures the predominant elements that constitute my spirit: water (primary) and earth (secondary). I am fluid, reflective, nurturing. But I also contain sharp edges, solidity, and some level of distance between me and the world.

I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint when it happened or what the catalyst was, but there became a moment when I started thinking this wasn’t really who I am anymore. That this level of distance and guardedness wasn’t quite right. That “bottling my essence up” was not, in fact, protecting me but instead slowly suffocating me.

And when that realization occurred, what also came to me was an instantly felt sense that it doesn’t have to be this way. I can, using the power of my mind, my will, and my own spiritual energy, shatter that layer of glass. I could be free.

I let this idea sit with me for a few days until the right moment arrived. Swimming alone in a tranquil backyard pool on a particularly quiet afternoon, I decided it was time to change. I prayed to God in the water, for guidance and love in the spiritual transformation I was about to embark on.

Then, I focused on my breathing and calmed my mind. I submerged myself in the waters and held the image of my spirit in my mind. I pictured a big iron spike, like the kind used in the railroads, appearing next to the flask. Then a hammer, swung by divine force, driving the spike into the glass and SHATTERING it.

I saw the waters of my soul rush outward, hungry for the open expanse of the world beyond. And as this occurred, so did something unexpected. That jagged rock in the center of my spirit, sharp and inhospitable? It was revealed for what it actually was: a mountain on an island. There was a base underneath it, rich earth and stable sands, full of capacity for life. Under the surface previously covered by water, the mountain was mossy, green and alive. And like a time lapse, I saw visions of life erupting everywhere, trees sprouting out of the ground, flowers blooming, birds and beautiful animals making a home there.

This is who I was meant to be. This is who I am.

All this happened while I was underwater, holding my breath. When I emerged and breathed in the clean air, I felt a sense of peace and clarity and joy. The shift was a success. Relief.

I wanted to seal this experience with something special. I decided to swim two lengths of the pool in one breath. It was the type of distance where one length would be pretty easy and two lengths would be pretty challenging. I took a deep breath, then pushed off and went for it, kicking so hard my swim trunks almost fell off my waist. I didn’t make it the first time. I gathered my breath in the shallow section, calm and relaxed as the sunlight danced with the rippling water.

As my heart rate recovered, I realized that the resistance tugging on my shorts was a hint. I slipped out of them, watching them float and slowly start to sink. Then, naked, honest, and trusting-in-God, I prepared to try again. I took a deep breath of the clean-sacred-air and kicked off the shallow end wall. I flowed through the water, so smoothly. Each powerful stroke propelling me forward. I was in my element, in pure flowing connection with the water all around me.

I hit the deep end wall and fluidly turned back and kicked off, shooting like a bullet. As I pushed through the water, my lungs began to burn. Push, pull, kick. Push, pull, kick. I raced towards the wall. Muscles surging. I was approaching the edge of my limits, desperate for air, and—

BAM. My hands touched the cool concrete of the wall and I burst through the surface. Air and gratitude filled my lungs.

It was done.

IV.

Since this spiritual transformation, the world has opened up for me in increasingly beautiful ways. Friends, family, romance, everything is flowing with more honesty, more love, and less friction than before.

I am grateful to God for the gift of this experience. And I am grateful to myself for allowing it to happen; for making the choice.

I think I realize now that my guardedness was, in some sense, a form of cowardice. Of lack of trust in my own discernment. And I do trust myself and my discernment. I trust my ability to see good and bad clearly and to assess the character of people—not for the purpose of passing judgment on them but simply to decide whether to move towards them or away from them. This is not to say that I do not guard my heart; but I now have a more default-open, default-giving position that allows love to flow more effortlessly from me. It feels good to give love, and the more I give, the more I seem to receive. Isn’t that such a beautiful aspect of how the universe is designed?

I share this story as a personal testament in support of a plain truth: that you can step into a turning point in your life whenever you are ready to.

You and fate are the co-authors of your life. You can decide when one chapter ends and another begins. All you must know is that narrative structure suggests the new chapter in your life be different in some meaningful way from the one before it.

May fate and your spirit always guide you well, leading you closer to truth, beauty, and all good things.

expectation:

• (n.) The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.

• (n.) That which is expected or looked for.

• (n.) The prospect of the future; grounds upon which something excellent is expected to occur; prospect of anything good to come, especially of property or rank.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

“Main Title” - Jaws by John Williams

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

Have you ever seen a movie where everyone said, “Oh my God it’s the best movie ever, you’re going to love it!” and walked out of the theater disappointed? Sometimes, we fall victim to the gap between what we expect and what is. But do you think our experiences might be different if we were starting from a more neutral place of detached curiosity? Expectations of greatness can ironically become a blinder that obscures us from seeing the goodness that exists in an experience. Ditto that for negative expectations, which prime us to look for the worst aspects of a thing.

Our expectations about the world can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect bad things to happen to you, you might subconsciously act in a way that invites more bad things to happen to you. You might also avoid acting in a way that allows good things to happen to you. The fear of bad things happening causes you to shut down the same pathways that good things would use to reach you. You should only burn a bridge when you are certain that evil is about to cross it.

Here are some real-world examples of beliefs, expectations, and what happens when we try to avoid updating our mental models of reality:

A woman believes that men are selfish, untrustworthy, and primarily out to get sex from her. This woman dates a variety of men, some of whom express normal sexual interest at some point in the relationship, which CONFIRMS her belief. When she has sex with a man she is dating, she feels as if she has given up something powerful and that she is weaker for having done so. Subsequently, she acts in a way that reflects this belief, trying to assert a power she doesn’t have and finding that the men she’s dating react negatively and pull away from those attempts. This further confirms her belief.

Any men she encounters who don’t indicate a strong sexual desire or impatience to escalate the relationship into sex don’t fit her mental model. And so she discards those men (“What kind of man isn’t after sex? That’s not what a man is!”) rather than updating her mental model, which is cognitively harder to do (or, at least, appears to be that way until you become fully acquainted with the fact that you really can just fluidly update your beliefs and expectations whenever you want). Change is scary, man. People, especially past the quote “more malleable” unquote childhood state, are wired to revert to what they “know and understand”, rejecting information that doesn’t fit with their preexisting mental model of the world.

Here’s another example: I have a friend who is insecure about the fact that despite growing up in a wealthy, education-focused environment with a lot of financial opportunities, he wound up doing blue collar work. He feels like his lack of career prestige and top-percentile income makes him unattractive to women. He told me that he’s been on multiple dates with women who have explicitly expressed to him that they don’t care about that at all, and the way he responds mentally is, “Well, what is wrong with you? You’re supposed to care about that!”

Needless to say, those relationships did not develop and that friend is still single.

Our expectations about the world filter the information and energy that we allow in. If we think we are difficult to love, that love is scarce, then we will shut down any evidence to the contrary, including by rejecting—more precisely, refusing to accept—love. If we think that men are a certain way or women are a certain way, we will shut down anyone who does not conform to that view. Their mere existence challenges our conception of reality.

Our challenge—as humans in a world that is vast, complicated, full of mysteries and more than we could ever hope to understand—is to not let our expectations act as blinders to the wellspring of truth, good, beauty, opportunity that awaits us in life.

I love living in America.

It is an incredible country; culturally, geographically, and economically, America is one of one. We have abundant prosperity, transcendentally beautiful nature, and many individual freedoms which are protected by centuries of legal precedent and powerful institutions.

I full-throatedly reject the miasma of performative dismay about America and her future that is pervasive in online and social media spaces, especially in liberal-progressive elite culture. Ordinary people everywhere are working hard and not freaking out. We do not need this much doom and gloom from the upper middle class. It is long past time to quit complaining so loudly and start doing more quietly.

If you think something is wrong, take action in your life to fix the problem or forever keep your peace. Talk is cheap and it is only getting cheaper.

I celebrate America for still being the only country in the world where anyone from anywhere can melt into a new national identity and be embraced by her citizens as one of their own. This sense of camaraderie is a rare and precious thing worthy of being cherished and celebrated. It is one of the many things I love about America.

I celebrate America as it is far and away the least racist place in the world. Nowhere else has this much diversity along so many dimensions. Nowhere else has this many different kinds of people getting along so well in close proximity, freely exchanging culture and goods. This is a beautiful thing.

I celebrate America as a safe haven for religious refugees. People in America of all religions are free to worship and organize together, protected from both government and societal oppression. This kind of freedom is not to be taken for granted; many people in the world must still worship in secret, whispering their praise to God in the shadows for fear of persecution. In America people can worship joyously and loudly, just as God intends.

I celebrate America for our freedom of expression, an especially powerful and unique right. Many countries, even first-world countries, have substantial restrictions on free speech. Imagine getting arrested and sentenced to real jail time for posting something online that offended someone (if you don’t want to imagine, you can just move to Britain and experience it for yourself). The comprehensive rights protecting free speech in America are a blessing not to be taken for granted.

I celebrate America’s culture of artistry and innovation. America is full of many kinds of people who have much to offer each other and the whole world. Our culture travels the globe in part because it contains and reflects so many multitudes, a full-spectrum chromograph of artistic wavelengths from the commercial mainstream to the underground. America is a culture where fresh and original connections get made, drawn from a rich tapestry of cascading influences.

I pay no heed to apocalyptic narratives of impending future doom or American decline. Every generation has its doomsayers and every time they have been wrong. Betting long on America and humanity is a good bet. Climate change narratives underestimate the positive effects of shifting climates as well as the potential for technological innovations to rapidly change and redefine our conception of what is possible to achieve in our relationship with the environment. AI-death-God narratives underestimate the divine complexity of consciousness and overestimate the fact that a computer being able to arrange words together without understanding them is more akin to a ventriloquist’s trick than proof of a sentient dummy.

It is, in fact, arrogant to proclaim doom and spread unfounded misery. To inflict your narrow-mindedness on others. To claim that you alone can read what the future holds, that only by listening to you can the rest of us be saved. But it is a marker of humility to accept that the future contains a deep and profound capacity to surprise you.

All this is to say, and doubly so if you are troubled by “the current state of affairs”: everything is going to be okay. America is a beautiful place full of amazing, passionate, hard-working people. The future is bright.

I am eager to receive and celebrate the uncertainty of the future together with my fellow Americans (and the rest of the world) as it is revealed to us, one day at a time.

God bless.

responsibility:

• (n.) The state of being responsible for something or someone.

• (n.) The opportunity or ability to act independently.

†Meanings from OED

Something to listen to:

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

- James Madison, Federalist no. 51

Jordan Peterson struck upon something incendiary when he identified the modern cultural fault lines running along the concept of “responsibility.” The notion that a man is responsible for the cleanliness of his room is both undeniably true and proved to be highly controversial. What was controversial, of course, wasn’t the factual truth of the statement, but the implication that it’s not okay to shirk that responsibility. That it’s not okay to make YOUR life someone else’s problem or fault.

In the waters of the default culture, we have never had more opportunities to shirk responsibility than we do now. You can escape from reality into video games and pornography. You can escape from basic skills like cooking and cleaning with DoorDash and maid services. You can escape from boredom (aka presence with your own body and thoughts) using social media’s infinite supply of tiny amusements: instagram, TikTok, twitter, reddit. Podcasts let you eavesdrop on the conversations of others as if you were all friends, sitting at the same table. Everything is on demand.

But there is a cost to convenience; I’ve come across 30-year-olds who don’t know how to do their own laundry. I’ve met college students—on the surface, highly successful, attending elite universities and racking up awards and fellowships—whose parents micromanage and hold their hand through every interaction. Can you imagine dealing with a 22-year-old man who is incapable of emailing you his own plane ticket receipt for reimbursement? Or formatting his own MS Word documents? I have.

Universities, for their part, have done a lot to feed into this problem. Stanford University has nearly a 1:1 administrator to student ratio. People whose full-time job is to participate in handholding and micromanaging specific aspects of the student life and experience. Sometimes, this level of micromanagement results in situations that are almost beyond parody. At one point, the university decided that one of the issues facing undergraduate students was “lack of community.” The solution? A committee of administrators developed the “neighborhood concept” and divided residences into arbitrary “communities” and put up signs all over campus like this.

This attempt to create community by top-down fiat—by centralized committee planning—is both ineffective and a perfect metaphor for their politics and broader worldview. By declaring jurisdiction over a “problem” (student social life not being good enough) they had no business intervening in, they both failed to solve “the problem” and created a bloated class of administrators working on “the problem.” The project might be fake… and the sense of community they create might be fake… but the money they spend, the payroll checks they cash are all very, very real.

When you don’t trust people to take care of themselves or act on their own, you create the conditions that turn them into disempowered individuals with an external locus of control and responsibility. How bleak is it that the capital-a Adults running one of the most prestigious and elite universities in the world don’t trust the students there with the responsibility of figuring out how to have fun or make friends on their own?

On the topic of responsibility, I want to talk about how there are two kinds of men in the world. One type of man walks into a public mixed-gender restroom, sees the toilet seat down, and pisses all over it because he can’t be bothered to spend the requisite two seconds lifting it up. This type of man is exceedingly common (as we all know). The second type of man might walk into that exact same restroom, see that exact same piss-covered toilet seat, lift it up, take a piss himself, then lower it down and wipe it clean because he knows that just because someone else bucked their responsibility towards the common good doesn’t mean he should too.

Now, consider that the men who piss all over toilet seats are doing the same thing, metaphorically, everywhere in their lives. A man who cannot take even the smallest action of responsibility towards the common good has approximately a 0.01% chance of successfully clearing higher and harder burdens of social responsibility.

So whatever utopian political vision you might have for society, you are going to have to factor in that some people are simply going to refuse to take even the tiniest responsibility for their miniscule share of the common good. They are going to piss on toilet seats and let their dog shit in your driveway without picking it up and they are going to freeload and exploit and take whatever they can get away with because they have no conception of the commons and no conception of personal responsibility. The question then becomes: are you going to let your society be held hostage by the very worst of us? Or are you comfortable designing systems and incentives so it is in their best selfish interest to contribute in positive ways? (Including removing them from society for serious / repeat infractions, as need be)

All societies carry the burden of the tension between those who take responsibility and those who shirk it. What’s important for the aspiring morally good individual is not participating in the race to the bottom. Don’t feed into the power of those who are lowering standards left and right by thinking, “Well, I guess I could get away with that too!” Be the type of person who takes responsibility for the circumstances of their own life and cares for the people around them because the world, as ever, needs your determination, your effort, and your love.

Honor the call.

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.”

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

decoy:

• (n.) A person or object meant to lure somebody into danger.

• (n.) A real or fake animal used by hunters to lure game.

• (n.) Deceptive military device used to draw enemy attention or fire away from a more important target.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

2019’s Parasite is the story of what happens when good people lack discernment. No need to complicate the analysis further. Evil gets off on being let inside.

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

We are living in the Age of Inversion. Up is down, left is right, and golly gee I guess there’s really no way of saying if moral relativism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Historically, one of the core purposes of culture was to serve as an inoculation against bad ideas but that too has become corrupted and inverted. Now, the default culture has become one of their chief proprietors.

We worship cynicism as a proxy for wisdom, ceding spiritual territory to people with ugly thoughts, ugly ideas, and loud voices. We assume that because someone is trying to sell us something there must be some kind of inherent value in what they’re selling. We are always looking for external sources of our problems; if you’re unhappy, if you’re depressed, according to the default culture that has nothing to do with what you are thinking or how you are living your life but is instead a “chemical imbalance” that can only be remedied through psychiatric medication.

In this distinctly postmodern cultural environment, decoys are enjoying their day in the sun. We have seemingly infinite substitutes, mannequins masquerading as the real thing. Social media as a decoy for real community. Video games as a decoy for real achievement. Pornography as a decoy for real sexual conquests. ‘Casual sex’ as a decoy for real committed relationships. Foods ridden with preservatives and weird chemicals as a decoy for real nutrition. Even our education system has itself become a decoy-factory, churning out certificates and endless representations of false prestige, false accomplishment.

We even have decoy morality and decoy virtues. For example, somehow it has become insufficient for a business to just be an entity that specializes in something (one of the core precepts of capitalism that has driven the creation of so much prosperity and mutual benefit in the world). No, instead of simply making a really good chocolate chip cookie and selling it to people, decoy-morality demands to be included in the story like: “Baking is just a medium for our TRUE PASSION: ENDING RACISM.”

Virtue that feeds the ego is virtue that has been corrupted. We used to understand that it’s not just about what you do but how you do it. This, too, has been lost.

What happens when you pour your real energy into decoys? You become disempowered. You become disenchanted. You become cynical, full of despair.

Thankfully, countering decoys is easy: get back in touch with meaning. You are real. The world around you is real. Feel that connection and follow it wherever it takes you.

Resanctify the profane. Remember that you do not need to be religious to have religious experiences. Remember that rituals aren’t merely performative but tap into real energy, real emotions. Even making your bed with clean sheets is a powerful ritual that unlocks better sleep, mood, and energy. Cherish the rituals you already know and trust to be real and good. And be curious enough about the world and yourself to discover new ones. The more open you are to the idea that your life can be full of enchantment, the more enchantment will rush to fill that space in your life.

Nobody else will romanticize your life for you, but this is a good thing—a beautiful thing even—rather than a cause for despair. Each of us was born with an infinite capacity to do just that. We can generate deep meanings from what we perceive in the real world, what we exchange with each other. When we practice discernment, when we reject decoys and embrace the real, we can let it all the way into our heart.

Good food, good music, good relationships. There is often such an elegant simplicity to truth, to beauty, to good things. All we need to do is trust ourselves to recognize that when we see it.

People inside of the default culture often say things like, "This won't fix you, that won't fix you.” Respectfully, I have to disagree. A really good sandwich has fixed me. A glass of cold water has fixed me. Making a stranger laugh has fixed me. You can find salvation and enchantment in the simplest of places. It just has to be real.

I’ll close with a question. What if the default culture and its postmodernist orientation towards thinking everything is arbitrary and meaningless is, in fact, exactly what makes everything feel arbitrary and meaningless? What if rejecting that false frame is all it takes to get the real world—the world of the real—to open up to you?

America has a serious culture problem. I am writing this statement as a 34-year-old Millenial. Behind me is Gen X; a generation that has, by and large, been skipped over. You look at the world of politics, business leadership, tech and entrepreneurship, and you mostly see Baby Boomers clinging to power or Millennials gaining ground.

Ahead of me is Gen Z; the first generation to be truly raised on screens and social media. It’s become common to see even toddlers now with noise-canceling headphones and an iPad in front of them at restaurants. You can already see in real time the social quirks this style of upbringing is creating, as well as the related decline in Gen Z’s sense of community and connection. A perfect example of this comes from the teenager who watched Clueless and—upon getting to the house party scene—asked the internet: “Were parties like this ever a thing??”

And I am a Millenial. The ‘failure to launch’ generation. Best known for being mentally untough, too fond of valorizing our own helplessness and inability to do basic things. Millennials invented both the word and the concept of ‘adulting.’ (We must take ownership of this fault. Sorry everyone.)

All three of these generations suffer from physical and mental health issues at higher rates than any other generation in human history. We have never had more depression and anxiety than we do now. We have never had more obesity than we do now.

These generations grew up in radically different technological environments: Gen X was raised on TV, cartoons, and phonelines, Millennials had internet-free childhoods with internet-heavy teenage years, and Gen Z was immersed in the internet from day one. But what do they have in common? Each was raised in the Default Culture.1

The Default Culture can be thought of as the set of values and cultural norms, aspirations, and taboos in the American mainstream. Our notions about what we should value, what will make us happy, and how we should relate to each other largely come from this culture and the way it is perpetuated through the education system, advertisements, and popular media.

Alas. For the Default Culture is a culture that is continually failing its constituents. People are not being equipped with the right skills and values for navigating life. For instance, we were all taught that our professional work is the most important thing in life, that “having a career” is more important than “having a family.” Men and women were taught to be suspicious—resentful, even—of each other and themselves. We were taught that Having The Right Beliefs and asking someone or something powerful (like The Government) to intervene on our behalf is how we make the world a better place instead of, you know, actually taking our own actions.

These are all lies, rooted in that eternally dangerous combination of “good intentions, bad ideas.” The end result? Multiple successive generations that are increasingly unhappy, disenchanted, disaffected, and disempowered. Victims of their own mindset.

My goal in writing about the Default Culture and using this framing is simple: change lives by changing how people relate to the culture they were raised in. If you or someone you care about feels depressed, alienated, lost, confused, or unhappy in life, my writing might be for you. I will try to identify the patterns of cultural failure and widely-accepted falsehoods that are not serving us well so that we can each re-evaluate and, as needed, re-negotiate our relationship with the Default Culture.

Culture is hard to change. Many powerful institutions and coalitions are deeply invested in the culture being the way it is. Trying to change it directly is like trying to push a breaking wave back into the ocean with your bare hands.

But each of us also has our own personal relationship with the Default Culture. If we become more aware of the ways it is not helping us live good lives, that will unlock shifts. Shifts leading to realignment, and realignments leading to new, healthier relationships between yourself, the people around you, and the world.

So maybe we can’t change the culture. But as individuals, we can always reject falsehoods and orient towards life, towards beauty, towards all good things.

It just requires us to stop sacrificing truth on the altar of convenience.

I’ve already touched on this theme in some of my Postcards and previous writings, but THE DEFAULT CULTURE is now my main focus.

In the months ahead, we will explore in depth the various threads at play here—looking at the real-world effects of the Default Culture (on topics like sex, gender, work, virtues, happiness) as well as the mechanisms through which the Default Culture is transmitted to people (like advertisements, education, media).

I wish to close simply by sharing that I’m delighted to be working on this topic, which is both deeply personal and deeply meaningful to me. FULL STEAM AHEAD!

clarity:

• (n.) The state or quality of being clear and easily understood.

• (n.) Transparency or purity.

†Meanings from OED

Something to listen to:

I imagine we all have a song that induces a sense of deep clarity in us. This is mine.

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

Three ideas about clarity:

I.

The desire to have nUaNcE about something bad is antithetical to moral clarity and an accessory to evil. You don’t always need to get down on your knees in the weeds to know that you’re in the weeds. You can simply perceive the situation as it is. So consider that good and evil are real, and that you will know them when you see them.

Reject attempts by others to supersede your gravity with their own; they want to pull you down into the mud with them, where as the saying goes, you’ll both get dirty…

…but they’ll enjoy it.

II.

In parallel with the previous idea, a caveat: one of the most prevalent cultural traps in the modern world is the notion that your sense of moral clarity is an invitation to treat others with cruelty. This lie is repeated again and again through politicians and celebrities, through academics and journalists, and reinforced through how horribly we treat people who have been deemed “acceptable scapegoats.” I refuse to participate in condemnation rituals, purity tests, and pile-ons out of principle alone. No further justification is required.

Contra default culture narratives, there are not many truly evil people in the world—but there are very, very many ordinary people who evil does work through. If you deny the possibility that evil could ever work through you, I regret to inform you that you are just lacking awareness of your own shadow and therefore—ironically—the perfect conduit for evil to work through. Does your sense of being a good person serve others?Or your own ego?

At the end of the day, nobody will ever make the world a better place with righteous cruelty; the associated false sense of virtuousness is no more than lipstick on a pig.

III.

Khabib Nurmagomdev, a mixed martial artist with a professional record of 29 wins and 0 losses who is considered to be one of the greatest fighters of all time, once said, "I take people into deep waters and they discover themselves."

It’s an iconic quote partially because that’s just a badass thing to say when you have the ability to back it up, but also because it contains a powerful truth: difficult circumstances are a mirror for our deeper selves to be revealed in.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” Virtues that fail in deep waters cannot be claimed.

To truly know oneself, you must examine—with a sense of detached neutrality—your own behavior when you are “in deep waters.” It is a privilege to know yourself, in large part because it requires coming face to face with the unflattering aspects of your self: your failures, your shortcomings, what they all say about you. The ego is not meant to survive such encounters intact; but when it drowns or shatters, it does not kill you.

It merely invites clarity.

renewal:

• (n.) The act of beginning again after an interruption.

• (n.) To have given fresh life or strength to.

• (n.) The replacing of something broken or worn out.

†Meanings from OED

Something to listen to:

It is easy to make the mistake that just because something is popular it is overrated. Well, turns out Billie Eilish’s music is popular because she’s an incredible, prodigous talent who taps into those juicy universal parts of the human soul with her songs. There is a raw, aching honesty to her work, a maturity beyond her years reflected in her music. I get the sense that she will be capable of growing, making mistakes, learning—in the harsh and unflattering light of public scrutiny and fickle fandoms—and pouring it all into her work, creating many more beautiful things yet to come.

By the way, I wasn’t surprised when I learned she had been homeschooled. To have achieved what she’s achieved, at her young age, speaks to the way she was encouraged to specialize in her interests and accelerate beyond what would have been allowed in the mainstream schooling system. There’s an alternative timeline where she gets the default culture path; spends K-12 mostly bored out of her mind in classes that have little to do with anything important in life, and graduates the system like so many others do, dull and spiritually flattened. And that version of Billie Eilish might not get to an equivalent level of musicality until she’s 30. If ever. Isn’t that a sad thought?

Can’t help but wonder: how many potential Billie Eilish’s, in how many different domains, are being spiritually strangled out of existence in America’s schools?

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

Grief is totalizing. Lately I have been mourning the death of a decades-long friendship and struggling with the powerful, turbulent emotions it has evoked. Harmony and connection are incredibly important to me, and my inability to achieve that kind of an outcome here cut me to the core. My writing moved to the backburner as I struggled to cope with the intensity of what happened and its effect on me.

What did happen? This is the essential question, after all. Well, me and two close friends had a falling out and really that’s all that needs to be said. It’s tempting to tell a story about the conflict, to use narrative to protect my ego, which is necessarily hurt—deeply, in fact—by the clear and unflattering fact that some people I loved don’t want me in their life anymore. But telling such a fiction would not serve me, it would not serve truth, or the world, or anything good. Incompatibilities were revealed, breaking points were reached, and the threads of friendship were severed.

These things happen in life.

People grow and change, roots bending in one direction, new buds sprouting and blooming in another. One person’s sunshine becomes another’s hell.

Ah, but how using the passive voice feels like a nice way to create distance. “Incompatibilities were revealed, breaking points were reached—” Just the sort of cool, clinical detachment one might bring to bear in the aftermath of an airplane crash or a school shooting, typing up your report in a way that sanitizes the tragedy into something bureaucratically digestible. If I’m being honest, truly honest, I was emotionally wrecked, annihilated, flayed, even, by what I went through. I did my very best to achieve a mending, a reconciliation, and it was not good enough.

When I said grief was totalizing, I meant it. You feel it in your chest. A tightness in your heart, along with the sense that relaxing at all will leave you vulnerable to some sort of cosmically cruel killing blow. You show it in your eyes. The sadness lingering underneath them, evidence of an ever-present desire to cry that’s simultaneously too close to the surface to hide yet too deep, too raw to actually be accessed. And that shameful sense that you’re a wounded animal, that you must hide your limp, you absolutely MUST, or a predator will detect your weakness and end you once and for all.

Sometimes love, in the true, unconditional sense, means letting your guard down. It is terrifying to express to someone how much they hurt you. And in untender hands, such an admission just becomes more ammunition to hurt you with. Another bullet.

As days turned to weeks and the weeks started stacking up, I began to fear that this horrible, stuck feeling of grief and despair would last forever. Crying is difficult for me to access; that’s a story for another day, but something from my childhood taught me that crying is not a safe response to grief and so I instead learned to instinctually suppress and repress all the emotions associated with sadness. I cried just once between ages 10 and 30. And only with my eyes, not my chest. Only with my eyes.

I had already been interested in renewal as a topic to write about, but under these conditions I became obsessed. What I carried was an aching, desperate hunger for depletion. To feel all the feelings so deeply that my grief would be annihilated, that I would become empty (and thus could be refilled). Renewed.

One of the stories I told myself as I was going through it is that I need to feel this grief all the way, that I need to let it into my heart and feel it so deeply, let it destroy me so that I can be remade, so that I can live again.

Depletion, after all, isn’t just a precursor for renewal, it is the precursor for renewal.

But the depletion I sought proved elusive. My emotions mainly swung back and forth between a suffocating sadness and brief flashes of anger. I imagined what it would be like to make those former friends feel small the way they tried to make me feel small. No, we must tell the truth: the way they did make me feel small. I had been badly hurt. My ego, fragile, conjured absurd imaginary scenarios where I could destroy them with righteous anger. How good it might feel to hurt them the way they hurt me!

My sleep became broken, dysregulated. I struggled to get out of bed in the mornings, to find the energy to exercise at all in the day or create things. And I let myself go.

I wish I could tell you that there was a grand moment, an epiphany that led to a turning point and a turning point that led to a breakthrough, but real life is always less convenient than fiction. What happened was this: one evening, listening to a favorite song, the sort of song with a deep emotional resonance… it hit me. All at once. And I was finally able to cry. I’d been holding quite a lot of sadnesses, in fact, both near and far, familiar and unfamiliar; I honored them all and I cried and it felt so good.

Every day since, the tightness in my chest loosened a little, the pressure in my head lightened a bit. Weeks went by and one morning I woke up and finally felt good. Not good as in great, but good as in alright. And that meant the world to me. I felt free, I felt alive, I felt so grateful for how beautiful life and the world and God is. There are big renewals and there are small renewals and both alike carry the life-giving force.

As I reflect on this chapter of my life, I do not think this sorrow is squarely in the rearview mirror. I expect I will keep feeling pain, keep feeling disrupted by it in little waves that come and go, but it will be okay. I survived the experience. Like water, I bent and I bent—oh, how I bent—but I did not break. And what a beautiful, truly beautiful thing it is to know that about yourself. I did not betray myself, not even for fear of losing a deeply cherished friendship. And that is something. That is something.

My feelings of grief and rage towards those ex-friends have—most unexpectedly—slowly morphed into something more akin to gratitude. Their absence from my life has already created space for new friendships to flourish, deep connections forming and unfolding in that most delightful and unlikely of ways in which the universe works. My life really is beautiful and my future is too. I have so much to be grateful for.

Like I said, though, for a while I thought this grief was something I would have to deal with on my own, alone. That I would have to feel it fully, allow it to bottom out and deplete me emotionally. But I’ve come to realize that’s not the case. I can keep living, keep moving forward, keep giving and receiving love, and that these acts, far from being a distraction, will instead be an essential part of the healing process. They will push what remains of the heartbreak out, like a dead branch falling from its tree. And while there will be scars, there will be rawnesses, love will prevail. Joy will prevail. God will prevail. This is the way. It always has been, and it always will be.

And in this spirit of renewal, so I close. May all who seek renewal find their depletion.

beacon:

• (n.) A signal fire to notify of the approach of an enemy, or to give any notice, commonly of warning.

• (n.) (nautical) A signal, buoy, post, or other conspicuous mark erected on an eminence near the shore, or moored in shoal water, as a guide to mariners, particularly to warn vessels of danger.

• (n.) (figurative) That which gives notice of danger, hope, etc., or keeps people on the correct path; a source of inspiration.

• (v.) To give light to, as a beacon; to light up; to illumine.

†Meanings from Wiktionary

Something to listen to:

This is one of my all-time favorite songs. It’s a long-building slow burner, woven with intricate layers of instrumentation and emotionality. To me, it evokes that sense of true adventure, the mix of peril and awe as you’re sailing into a storm, about to be swallowed whole by something so powerful it feels otherworldly, almost supernatural.

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

In life, you are always either moving towards something or away from something. Those rare moments when time seems to stand still are so precious precisely because we know what they are: an illusion. To believe in the mirage is to believe in something more beautiful than reality itself. These elevated states whisper to us, so soft spoken as to be indecipherable yet hinting at vast secrets beyond both perception and comprehension.

More than once in my life, I have wandered deeply astray, falling off of the good path in my never-ending quest for more of those sacred moments of stillness. The fragile parts of my ego can lead me to become withdrawn and mercurial. It is easier to cloak shame, hurt, sadness, fear with just about anything else. A joke here, an unkind word there, or pushing someone away because you sense they want you to reveal something vulnerable about yourself and that’s scary, threatening even. Arguing about something small and insignificant as a way of hiding what’s really on your mind. Binge eating comfort food as a way to revert back to an emotional state from when you had fewer responsibilities in life. I could continue but you get the picture.

We all develop coping mechanisms as a product of our upbringings, and then become products of our coping mechanisms in adulthood. Fate is elegant and ironic.

This winter season has been unexpectedly difficult for me. Sustained sobriety has unlocked many beautiful things for me as well as revealed opportunities for growth, and one thing from my past that persistently challenges me is my fear of loneliness. Ever since I quit drinking, I’ve continued to spend quite a lot of time hanging around with old drinking friends and going to parties, bars, etc. This has led me into the sorts of situations which I frankly should not be running into anymore at this stage of my life. Physical injuries from clumsy drunk friends, emotional injuries, spiritual injuries, all circumstantial… yet don’t I bear responsibility for my circumstances?

After all, each of us has the innate right to exit any situation we do not want to be in. Circumstance is a multi-player game.

This is a difficult thing to confront, and to compassionately yet intentionally walk away from relationships that are now being strained by fundamental lifestyle and spiritual incompatibilities requires a level of courage that one must dig deep for. In my case, it also touches directly on my greatest fear, of being alone, which is the sort of core-wound-fear that one builds a sophisticated web of self-defense and coping mechanisms around protecting. A web that was developed and refined over decades of both conscious and subconscious patterns of behavior and thought. The more I try to unravel it, to navigate to the heart of the maze and release this tension forever, the tighter the walls seem to close and the blacker the shadows become.

To untie a knot, of course, brute force is wholly insufficient and indeed actively counterproductive. One must find exactly where the tensions in the knot are working against each other and then provide realignment. It’s surgical. Artistic, even. Finding that directionality in the tensions and the point of contact between them means everything here, and I am still searching. To discover it, I know I will need patience, trusting that there are no shortcuts but the solution does indeed exist, that I will find it, or it me, and that we will recognize each other like long-lost lovers. It is an exercise in surrender, not control.

As I wrestle with these weighty matters of the heart and spirit, what comforts me and provides guidance is the concept of beacons. A beacon can be a warning, a signal, a guide, a celebration. Everything we look towards is a reflection of who we are, our desires and our souls. Our inner selves are a mirror of how we spend our time and how we use our attention. I don’t like what I’m seeing reflected, or perhaps revealed, in how I’ve been using my time and attention lately. And that is as sure a sign as can be that the moment has come to make a meaningful change in my navigation.

The beacon I feel called to reorient towards is God. And everything downstream of God helps me stay connected to that path. The inherent truth and beauty in creation, in the world, in the way people express themselves… all of these good things can serve as a reminder of what really matters, of what is worth celebrating and focusing on.

The hyper-secular, hyper-rational world of the default culture feels increasingly hollow the more I age. Every milestone I’ve achieved within that cultural framework has ultimately felt meaningless. College, career, home ownership. I cringe when I think of how much energy and effort I spent in misguided directions, jumping through hoops held up by people and institutions that don’t care about me or know anything at all about what actually matters in life. And I shudder at the thought that I might still be doing so. That I might never figure things out, that I’ll get caught in the gravity of my own past, trapped in the context of the culture I was raised in, and fall all the way in, like a black hole collapsing in on itself.

But this fear, I think, is a good thing. It’s in line with how God uses fear. As a loving reminder to reorient towards the right things. And as the world around us continues to optimize towards endless convenience, I find it strangely reassuring that all the most important things in life—romance, meaningful connections, acts of creation and self-expression—remain as difficult as ever.

It’s important to remember that doing difficult things solely for the sake of their difficulty can lead you astray, too. A whole lot of suffering is self-imposed and self-inflicted through the way we are drawn towards doing difficult things in America. But avoiding important things because they are difficult is an even deeper mistake. I’ve been floundering in avoidance these past few months and the lesson that life is trying to teach me is, “You must adapt. You cannot stick to a plan when it becomes outdated. It will kill you, in fact, if you hold it too tightly. You must adapt. Let go. Surrender.”

As the seasons change and spring arrives, full of flowerful growth and singing birds, I can feel something shifting and blooming within myself too. It’s not an epiphany so much as a subtle relaxation, a clue that may be part of the mystery of the knot deep in my spirit. It’s far too early to talk about that, though, so I close with an observation:

Have you ever thought about how Beethoven’s music and the flap of a hummingbird’s wings both work through the same medium of air. Isn’t that beautiful? Breathtaking, even? And doesn’t that speak to the way the world was created with a level of intentionality and artistry beyond our understanding? Perceiving even small strands of the universe’s grand mystery like this help to settle my heart and soothe my spirit.

These tiny and beautiful thoughts are like stars, part of a vaster constellation that is blossoming into a beacon for me. May we all find good beacons in life, and be faithful enough to follow them, even when the uncertainty or darkness feels overwhelming.

That is when they are most essential.

Postcard: Whimsy

whimsy:

• (n.) Playfully old-fashioned or fanciful behavior or humour.

• (n.) A fanciful or odd thing.

• (n.) A whim.

• (n.) A merry-go-round, roundabout. (Obsolete)

†Meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

Something to listen to:

Something to look at:

Continuing my recent personal Studio Ghibli kick, here’s an appropriately whimsical still from Spirited Away.

Something to think about:

This week, I’ve mostly been feeling light and breezy. I find that, like the moon, I ebb and flow between generation and regeneration in both my personal and creative life. Lately I’ve been regenerating on all fronts. When my energy is low, I like to try and give myself space to just be low energy. After a while, the creative urge builds and I find I once again have something to say or an idea to play with.

Today, I want to extoll the virtue of whimsy. Every tiny interaction in life is an opportunity to practice whimsy. You can be playful with friends and family, you can be playful with strangers and animals. Do banter with a shopkeeper. Or a stranger on the bus. Make someone’s day. In attempting to do so, you also invite them to surprise you too and make your day back. How delightful!

You can even be more playful with how you think and talk about yourself. A theme that has emerged over and over again in my conversations with people about culture and happiness is how brutally tough people tend to be on themselves. When it comes to the origins of modern unhappiness, many times the call is coming from within the house, the murderer is already in the building. The first order of business is helping people love themselves like they love others, and getting people to beat themselves up even a little bit less is basically the gateway drug to that end goal.

In my own case, becoming more whimsical in the way I dialogue with the voice in my head significantly improved my relationship with myself. Self-love doesn’t always have to be hard, it turns out, and it got easier for me when I started deliberately cultivating a safe, fun, playful environment for all the parties involved (me, myself, and I).

Am I a totally worthless idiot because I forgot to do a task… or was I just saving the supreme joy of “getting to do something” as a gift for my future self? Am I a bad person because someone honked at me at a traffic light… or was I just bringing a little bit of levity and chaos into the driving experience for us all?

Humor is a wonderful thing in general. I view my own sense of humor as one of my greatest gifts (if I am not actually funny, please keep that thought to yourself at this time, thank you please). As in many cases, it is a gift born out of pain. The reason I am funny is because I suffered a brutal social exile when I was in middle school and so I learned how to be funny as a way to get people to like me in the future. (So now you have to also feel a little bit sad whenever I’m being funny. Like right now.)

Humor as a socializing tactic worked, but there was something misaligned and maladaptive about the way it functioned for me; like I was not worthy of love if I was not making people laugh. Needless to say, I have an intimate understanding of why the clown is sad.

It took me a long, long while to come to terms with this. After all, the point of our defense mechanisms is that they are automatic, operating on the subconscious levels of our spirits. There was a version of me that was fundamentally insecure; I did not know who I was as a person, I did not trust myself. For this me, humor was the ultimate defense mechanism: a way of pushing a conversation back towards the surface and away from depth, away from earnestness or vulnerability. Many things are easier to laugh about than to actually talk about. Comedians know this to be true and the risks of the power they wield.

Thankfully, I now have more awareness of both this pattern of behavior and what it feels like in the moment to reflexively grasp for humor when I am feeling uncomfortable. As I’ve become more comfortable with who I am and grown into my core constitution and the sense of self that provides, I’ve found I can instead sit with discomfort instead of retreating to humor; that the discomfort will not annihilate me. And even if it did, I would regenerate.

For me, the trust in regrowth is rooted in my faith in God. I know that God and the universe flow into and out of us constantly, with each breath of air, every circuit of blood coursing through our veins. Life is a never-ending cycle of moving between decay and regeneration. The way it is meant to be.

My gift of humor is now something I’m closer to peace and harmony with. It’s a powerful thing I can draw on, when I want to or for the benefit of others, but I don’t need to leave it stuck on automatic. Cruise control is for catching a quick nap while you’re on the highway, not how you move through life and relate to people.

Now, just because something comes from pain like my sense of humor did doesn’t mean it is a bad thing, of course. Many terrible people have children who turn out lovely. Every stormy cloud has its silver lining. But I do want to make a distinction here. The idea that “suffering is necessary” is one of the more pervasive lies in our default culture. Americans worship suffering. “No pain, no gain,” as the saying goes. We valorize suffering because it gives us a story, a narrative; a way to make sense of difficult experiences.

Making meaning out of your suffering or drawing out the wisdom in its lesson is a good thing. But confusing your suffering for the source of the meaning (or even worse, the meaning itself) and deliberately seeking more of it is bad. Meaning is everywhere. You don’t need to suffer to be happy, you don’t need to suffer to know the truth or recognize beauty when you see it. Too many people suffer just because they think they’re supposed to, or because they saw how someone else suffered and walked away from the experience with a story. I regret the many times I have made this mistake myself.

A friend of mine once said with an aching directness, “My curiosity has led me to a lot of really painful places.” Curiosity can indeed lead you into the dark, and our hungering desire to find deeper meaning can easily lead to self-inflicted suffering in a world where it often feels like we are drowning in a shallow culture of moral relativism. There is nothing inherently virtuous about suffering.

My friend and I both emerged from our suffering with stories, but the stories weren’t in and of themselves beautiful or good. The only thing that’s actually beautiful about any of your suffering is that it didn’t break you; that you survived the most painful experiences of your life and are still alive, still yourself, still loving. But that suffering didn’t make you who you are. That was always inside you.

So don’t let the culture lead you astray: not all destinations demand the same journey. When you come to a fork in the road between suffering and whimsy, make the wiser choice. Don’t let the voices of all the people choosing wrong override your own instincts and intuition either. The default culture implies that you cannot be happy until everyone else is happy, but that is a lie. They might even try to punish you for being happy and whimsical, but that still doesn’t mean you are wrong or bad.

The free expression of joy and contentment with life, with the miracle of being alive, are part of your God-given birthrights. All that is required to access this inheritance is your acceptance of it and rejecting any culture that would tell you otherwise.

Wishing you a week ahead full of blessings, peace, and WHIMSY. <3

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned: that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven… Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves one creature in the dark outside. But watch the sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe.

- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Postcard: Lucky

lucky:

• (adj.) Bringing, or regarded as bringing, good luck; auspicious.

• (adj.) Of a person: (originally) successful, prosperous; (in later use) having or enjoying good luck, favoured by good fortune, fortunate.

• (adj.) Of an event or circumstance. Occurring by chance and resulting in a favourable outcome; fortuitous.

• (adj.) Of a person: useful, handy. (Obsolete)

†Meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

Something to listen to:

I’ve been greatly enjoying this multi-instrument rearrangement of the Balatro theme by Luke Pickman, aka InstrumentManiac on YouTube.

If you wish to listen to the (similarly excellent) original version of the theme from the game, you can do so here on YouTube or Spotify.

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

LocalThunk, the pseudonymous indie developer behind the poker-based video game Balatro, recently published a timeline outlining the entire development cycle of his game from first conception to its release in 2024. It’s a fascinating read for many reasons, as it tells a gripping story about following your passion, about iterating and adapting and following the unexpected twists in the road when they appear, as well as the relationship between expectations and pressure, between hard work and health. It’s a beautiful and humanizing story about a creator chasing—or, perhaps, being possessed by—that essential artistic feeling: obsession.

What’s missing from his timeline, though, is the long-scale success of his creation. As of January 2025, Balatro sold over 5 million copies. It was nominated for many industry awards and won “Game of the Year” at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards (outcompeting games created by massive studios with 100x the resources and manpower). To call it a breakaway hit is an undersell; the success of the game has unlocked generational wealth for its creator and touched many, many lives. Of the ~110,000 player reviews for the game currently on Steam, 98% of them are positive.

My favorite part about the development of Balatro is the backstory of the game’s soundtrack. As a solo developer, LocalThunk knew he would need to hire someone to compose music for his game. Fate and search algorithms led him to Luis Clemente, aka LouisF on fiverr, a freelance marketplace, whose bio reads: “Hi, there! This is LouisF, soundtrack composer. Music is my passion and, especially, composing soundtracks for video games. I believe I have the right tools for creating the perfect tune for your project.”

LouisF charges about $1 per second of music he composes (and that’s finished, mastered product, not his work-time; an incredibly affordable rate, in other words). The low price he charges, though, reflects neither his talent level nor the passion he has for creating music. The theme he composed is enchanting, an ethereal series of chord progressions. It feels exactly like walking into a magical casino… someplace exotic, dreamlike, full of possibilities for adventure and change of fortune.

It was the perfect theme for Balatro, matching the game’s vibe exactly. And it has captivated millions of players right from the moment they boot up the title screen. There are countless covers of his music all over YouTube and the internet now, and huge professional orchestras have performed it live during industry award shows.

Sometimes in life, you get lucky. When you hire a composer off of fiverr to make music for your game, you are typically not accessing the highest echelons of musical talent or craftsmanship. And, similarly, when you are a composer on fiverr, usually the projects you get hired on don’t reach an audience of millions. But this is not a story of two people giving up in the face of unlikely odds; it’s a tale of transcending the odds.

LocalThunk and LouisF both showed up, ready to give it their all. They knew, on some meaningful level, what they wanted to do in life and allowed themselves to be driven by their desire to create. In doing so, they created their own luck.

The older I get, the more confident I become that there is nothing coincidental about luck. I was “unlucky” for many years of my life because I was living life in a way that did not leave space for the unexpected and serendipitous. When you keep doors closed, yes, you are shutting some undesirable things out… but you also preclude synchronicity and the possibility of unlikely connections. Much of the growth in my life has been driven by my shift to a new perspective: that being lucky is a choice and that you can create good circumstances, even out of what seems like disaster. Miscommunications and relationship stumbles don’t have to be a catastrophe; they can just as well be an opportunity to become closer. The universe, I have now come to fervently believe, rewards this kind of thinking.

The best way I have found to become luckier is to increase one’s surface area; the more people I meet and the more I express myself, the more chances for connection and resonance I create. Luck does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, luck takes two or more to create. There’s a reason we call it “getting lucky” when two people connect for a sexual or romantic relationship. All the best things that have happened to me in life were not things I did alone. They were the moments when someone else and I took some kind of risk together. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

So if you want to become luckier… get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Or just do the uncomfortable thing anyways, even when it makes your skin crawl just to think about it. Especially when it makes your skin crawl to think about it. Because, pro tip: the thinking is almost always more painful than the actual doing. The doing is what leads to growth, and the growth unlocks new ways to be lucky.

As an illustrative example of how growth works, when a caterpillar goes into its cocoon it literally digests itself, dissolving its own tissue into goo. One must imagine that this process is excruciating for the caterpillar. There is certainly a moment—likely many—while the caterpillar is dissolving in its tight, dark, self-created sarcophagus that it thinks in its tiny caterpillar brain, “Well, this is fucked.”

Yet like a miracle, caterpillar soup turns into something beautiful and unexpected. The moral of the story is that rebirth requires death first. Always. That’s the price of admission. Don’t let your self-preservation instincts strangle your own growth. Caterpillars are not meant to stay caterpillars forever, and neither are we.

Change and stasis alike are a form of death. But only one increases your surface area for luck. And while you might feel unlucky when you’re undergoing chrysalis, keep the faith. Keep the faith, keep the faith, keep the faith… because you’re doing growth, and growth is medieval, growth is chaotic, growth means being torn apart into a million tiny pieces and sewn back together.

When you’re dissolving into goo and thinking to yourself, “This was a huge mistake, how unlucky of me,” that is precisely the moment to remind yourself: there is nothing unluckier than being a person who never changes at all. When you disconnect the actions from the outcome and the present from the future, it all becomes crystal clear:

The dissolving is just as beautiful as the butterfly that eventually emerges.

And of course it is. They’re the same thing.

Postcard: Vantage

vantage:

• (n.) Advantage or superiority in a contest; position or opportunity likely to give superiority.

• An opportunity; a chance. (Obsolete)

†Meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

Something to listen to:

Something to look at:

Something to think about:

Living in a culture dominated by moral relativism, it is easy to become disillusioned or disenchanted with the world. This seems to be one of the default outcomes of the default culture. There are many cultural institutions—schools, journalists, Hollywood, advertisers, artists, churches—vying for the seemingly vacant role of AUTHORITY; to be the one who gets to say, definitively, once and for all, how the world really is. What everyone should believe. On this warpath of good intentions and imposed worldviews, truth and beauty are often the first casualties.

The power these institutions crave is to set your frame for you. When I say frame, I am referring to one of the many lens through which we view reality. Frames can be ideological, spiritual, religious, secular—anything that touches the vast spectrum of beliefs and values. Here’s an example of a framing: many kinds of activist will tell you, earnestly, that their cause is the most pressing and urgent cause in the world and demands immediate collective action. Obviously, this cannot be true. Some must be more important than others. To say nothing of material resources, we live in a reality constrained by both attention and willpower. It’s impossible to do everything, there are always tradeoffs. The straightforward conclusion here is these activists operate using false frames. We should not listen to them or take their word at face value.

Scaling down to us as individuals, what we focus our attention and willpower on is the most consequential decision in our lives. Something that I struggled with for many years was feeling the need to respond with urgency to other people’s ideas or emotions. When people express urgency, there is a normative human desire to reciprocate. Sadly, this fundamentally good and earnest instinct has been hijacked and weaponized by many of the cultural institutions I described earlier. If attention is powerful, then attracting attention is a form of consolidating power. Decades of hyper-optimization and technological breakthroughs led us to an unhealthy equilibrium where our human instincts are used against our own interests. Advertisers, teachers, activists, journalists… all want to lure you into their frame and keep you there.

Due to the nature of power, people who don’t care about your well-being will still try to set the frame of your reality. They will definitely try to set the frame of your children’s reality. Sadly, far too many people and institutions now view that as their God-given right, something they are morally entitled to. In the default culture, it seems one does not need to believe in God nor monarchy to claim the divine right of kings, to view other people’s children as potential footsoldiers to be recruited for their own ideological projects. Changing an adult’s mind about the world can be difficult, but children repeat what they’re told. Even if the lies crumble down decades later like a house of cards, as things built on lies inevitably do, the damage is done.

The cultural power these institutions wield is almost self-legitimizing. It feels so real. But once you wake up to the sophistry, you start to see the illusory arguments as they really are, statements propped up not by fact but collective delusion. No matter how loud a mob chants, “Wet streets cause rain! Wet streets cause rain!” it will not be true. Words may shape our thoughts and beliefs, but they do not shape reality itself.

The label is not the thing. It is the label.

Figuring out how to reject false cultural frames drastically improved both my base rate of happiness and overall outcomes in life. Holding my own frame and operating from it is a fundamentally empowering position. While the size of the effect for me was large, the actions required to unlock it were not. It was as easy as thinking about what I want to focus on—which can be a rational brain decision, a matter of gut intuition, or both—and then just… focusing on those things. That’s it. There is more truth, beauty, and goodness in the world than I could ever hope to perceive. I consider it a sin to take this abundance for granted (as I did for decades) by not actively looking for it. There are secrets under rocks, tender moss growing in sidewalk cracks, stars streaking across the sky if you make the time to look up in wonder.

Noticing beautiful things is practicing love.

Learning how to shift frames is an essential skill for the 21st century human, who is born and raised in the age of information. One of my greatest fears is that if we do not level up our cultural and spiritual antibodies, we will sink into an age of disinformation and disenchantment instead.

Disenchantment, after all, is the natural response to discovering you were lied to by someone you believed. Our default culture contains many falsehoods; some born out of convenience, some out of malice… some are simply old information. A map that hasn’t been updated to reflect changes in the territory.

The declining return on investment in college education in America is a great example; as college degrees lose their value, it becomes much more important to obtain it at a reasonable cost. Some people end up so far in debt to get something that has a value so low, we would use the word “scam” in any other scenario. Our present cultural narrative about the importance of college education simply does not match the current value received nor appropriately factor in the rising cost of education. It has been out of date for decades and we still show little sign of rewriting the message to reflect reality.

Now if you don’t fall for the lie in the first place, you won’t suffer any disenchantment…

… but if you do get tricked, it’s easy to reflexively become more cynical from the pain. This triggers something like a misguided immune system response, where out of the desire to prevent yourself from being hurt again your spirit starts rejecting good things too. Attacking itself. Humans are remarkably good at matching patterns, and if the pattern we’re trying to match with is unhealthy or out of alignment, we will sabotage ourselves with tragic efficiency.

The right to protect and nourish your spirit comes with the freedom to choose your own worldview, to set your own frames, and to reject what doesn’t serve you (or, of similar importance, what you don’t want to serve).

Everything in life is a matter of perspective. If you are not choosing your vantage wisely, it will choose you through the path of least resistance: the default culture.