Start Here

I have been writing here since 2009, and I’ve produced about four hundred posts. The topics range from chickens, physics, parenting, meditation, technology, economics and the meaning of life, usually in the same week.

There are overarching themes, though.

I didn’t start writing because I wanted everybody to get chickens and start baking sourdough – it was because I had deep questions about meaning, purpose, and how to live in a world of systems that are out of alignment with the flourishing of either the human or the natural world.

Posts That Get to the Heart

  1. Beauty All the Way Down (2011). Things are cheap because somebody else is paying for them. What would it take to find beauty all the way down?
  2. What is True? (2011). We all carry limited models of the world. The trouble starts when we mistake them for the truth.
  3. The Illusion of Choicelessness (2011). Structures limit us, but they don’t decide for us.
  4. A Question of Scale (2013). You live at the boundary between the past and the future, surfing on the accumulated experience of a billion billion sentient beings. Every one of us knows only a small, situated part of the world, and we still have to act.
  5. A Big Question (2015). What could the world become if every person were right-sized?

Several key questions emerged as I wrote, thinking in public. I’ll start you off with five themes, and then gather a handful of other representative posts.

Each post in this collection is also graded as “entrance, twilight, or dark.” If we imagine ourselves descending into a cave, this classification depends on, “how certain I was, how challenging the ideas were, and how uncomfortable the conclusions turned out to be.”

Welcome to the archive!

How does a many-sided person find their way?

  • Idea Collector (2010, entrance): on worrying that every good idea has already been had.
  • Why Dilettante? (2010, entrance): The original blog title was “The Practical Dilettante.” This post is about reclaiming the right to be an amateur, as in “one who loves.”
  • Multipotentiality: It’s a Thing (2014, entrance): the octopus that won’t fit in the box.
  • A Big Question (2015, twilight): what if everyone were right-sized?
  • Breadth or Depth-First? (2018, twilight): choosing a life as a search problem.
  • Amateur at Everything (2020, entrance): We are each amateur at almost everything that matters in life and we have to keep doing all those things anyway.

What counts as work?

Who pays the costs we don’t see?

  • Beauty All the Way Down (2011, twilight): economies of scale have become economies of externalization.
  • The Elitism Question (2011, twilight): How the way I think about food is a question of class and justice, not taste
  • Science is not Technology (2012, twilight): The twin pulls of “what is?” and “what might be?” and how using a single bucket for them makes it difficult to reason about new technologies
  • Local “Reality” (2014, dark): Belief systems keep themselves coherent by filtering out contradictory information
  • What Technology Does (2023, twilight): Every technology makes order in one place by exporting disorder somewhere else.
  • 8 Good Reasons to Help Build your Local Economy (2024, entrance): resilience, relationships and the skills we may need again.

How do we know anything?

  • What is True? (2011, twilight): our models keep us safe until we mistake them for truth.
  • Giving Up on Truth Will Set You Free (2011, twilight): holding ideas as partial rather than right or wrong.
  • A Question of Scale (2013, dark): The challenge of accurately knowing things that take place over time that is longer than a human lifetime, or that no one person can see and experience
  • Primacy of Reason, Primacy of Text (2013, dark): What happens to a society that loses the ability to value emotion, insight, and the arts that aren’t text?
  • The Conditioned Self and Enlightenment (2013, dark): We needed culture to survive to adulthood, but there comes a point that it holds us back from genuinely engaging with the world

Do we have a say in the unfolding story?

  • No Body (2010, twilight): The body was never separate from The Mind… We are driven by self-preservation, but we have the ability to move into something more intentional.
  • The Illusion of Choicelessness (2011, entrance): Feeling trapped is often fear in disguise.
  • We Are the Story Keepers (2011, twilight): We tell stories to make the world easier to navigate… until they develop so much power that then we have to navigate them.
  • Squirrels, Time and Is-ness (2014, twilight): How the patterns in the world are entangled and preserve knowledge, even when individual members don’t know them explicitly
  • I Would Still Plant a Tree (2020, twilight): taking hopeful actions in a world we can’t predict, even when we fear it is too little, too late

Other rooms in the house

And for everything else, including a great many chickens, the full archive is always here.