There’s something almost primal about the chorus of Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping. A few simple words, belted out over a driving beat: I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down. It’s not poetry in the traditional sense, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a…
Category: Social and Self-Help
Exploring things social, inspirational and motivational
Are We Really Living or Are We Just Not Yet Dead?
There was once, or perhaps there still is, a rhythm to things. A cadence not dictated by the artificial metronome of notifications, nor the pale blue hum of an LED-lit existence. We moved, once, in step with breath and hunger, with desire and fatigue, with the rise of the sun…
Backpack Dreams and the Weight of the World
I have a fantasy, man, and it’s not the kind you find stitched into the neon glitz of billboards or rattling the brass-balled dreams of Wall Street brokers, no sir. It’s a quiet little dream, a whisper of a life, a ghost of an idea that rattles around my brain…
The Curse of a Good Idea
It is a peculiar habit of mankind to reject its benefactors, to stone its prophets, and to drive mad its visionaries. One might suppose that a good idea, like a well-planted seed, would take root wherever it falls. But the world is a field of salted earth, and the better…
The Floating Plank
Men have a peculiar way of fastening themselves to their own misery, of constructing their prisons and then bolting the doors from within. They will toil from sunup to sundown, breaking their backs over ledgers and lathes, pushing papers and pulling levers, all in the service of what they have…
Work That Cannot Be Bought: The Soulful Necessity of Community Service
To serve is to place oneself in relation to another not through force, not through exchange, but through attention. This is the foundation of any authentic human society. Community service, in its true form, is not a hobby, nor a civic requirement, nor even an act of benevolence. It is…
The Tokenization of Time – Good or Bad
Time is an odd thing. We never have enough of it, and yet we waste it like fools. We sell it, we trade it, we give it away for free. Some people hoard it in boardrooms and vacation homes, while others bleed it out in factories and fields. The trouble…
“A Splendid Exchange” by William J. Bernstein
By now, the world of economic history has developed its own niche readership—enthusiasts who, rather than shrink in horror at words like “tariffs” and “mercantilism,” actually lean in. For those readers, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein delivers exactly what the title promises: a…
The Obstacle is the Path – The Strength Found through Challenge
If a man never encounters resistance, he never learns what he is capable of. He walks through life as if in a dream, untested, unshaped, and unaware of his own limits. He remains soft, unformed. But place an obstacle before him, and suddenly he is awake. He must struggle, he…
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
Some books lose their edge over time. Brave New World isn’t one of them. Nearly a century after its publication, Huxley’s vision of a world numbed by pleasure and stripped of depth feels more like a commentary on the present than a warning about the future. If Orwell’s 1984 is…