Am I the Catcher in the Rye?
The Catcher in the Rye follows a few restless days in the life of Holden Caulfield, a disillusioned sixteen-year-old boy who has just been expelled from yet…
Culture
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Systems Need to Be Bottom-Heavy (not top-heavy)
Popular thought has always been that systems should be top-heavy. That strength comes from centralization. From concentration. From a few people at the top carrying the weight…
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RE-COMMUNITY: Re-Seeding Social Deserts
What if the future of struggling communities isn’t charity… but re-seeding? Not just with money. Not just with programs. But with the actual conditions required for healthy…
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Living Together at Scale (is it even possible?)
I’ve been obsessed with a question lately, Not a new one, really. Not mine, even. How do human beings live together at scale without destroying one another?…
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Find the Courage to Dream
The hardest part of pursuing a dream is being brave enough to dream in the first place… believing in yourself enough to think that maybe you can…
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What is Real Merit?
My work is founded on the premise that the current system doesn’t reward merit; it rewards capital. And the two are not the same thing. A person…
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Short Essays Collection # 11
We Must All “Unself” Iris Murdoch coined the term “Unselfing”. A really beautiful idea. It’s not a dramatic renunciation of “self” so much as an exacting labor…
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“Tribe” by Sebastian Junger
Tribe by Sebastian Junger is a short but surprisingly heavy book about something most modern societies have lost: a deep sense of belonging. Junger’s central idea is…
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Humanity Is Unwilling to Change
Here’s a brief conversation between two characters in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. (I bring it up at the beginning of this essay because…
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Building a Collapse Community
There’s something that I say so often, I sound like a broken record: It’s better to be proactive rather than reactive. Sounds simple enough. Most people would…