Congratulations to the man who has been persecuted by the powerful, for he has found the truth. Congratulations to the man who has found the deepest love and then lost it, for he has learned that nothing is permanent. Congratulations to the man who stays up at night wondering about the meaning of life, for […]
At some point in your life, once you’ve accomplished goals centered around the pursuit of power, status, money, or women, you move from playing offense to defense. Energetic ambitions that led to action now become anxious plans of self-preservation. Once a flowing river, your life becomes a stagnant pond as you debate every little movement […]
It’s tempting to think that you can start over at any moment, just pack up your bags and head to new places, but like a shadow, your past will follow you. Wherever you go and whatever you do, your memories, experiences, and mistakes will never be far behind. The lives of my parents shaped me […]
I recently took on a month-long project that served as a corporate job simulator, a full decade after quitting my microbiologist career. This short project was a powerful reminder how modern work is incompatible with human contentment. During my project, I woke up every day at the relatively reasonable time of 8:30 a.m. to be […]
On a cloudy summer day, a friend and I went to a cafe. A light rain started not long after we received our drinks, forcing people to hurry from the outdoors to shelter. After talking with my friend for some time, on topics ranging from meeting girls at night to what World War 3 would […]
I used to take personal achievement very seriously. If I wasn’t achieving, accomplishing, or even doing something productive, I believed I was moving backwards in life, wasting away like a drug addict. Metrics had to be hit, whether related to money, women, fitness, web site views, or accumulated knowledge. Otherwise, I was not realizing my […]
Once you declare an idea or person to be your enemy, you give them a room in your mind. Within that room you insert their history, strategies, tactics, strengths, and weaknesses. You dedicate more of your waking hours to understanding how to defeat them. As time passes, items from that room start to leak out […]
When The Shoe Fits is a transcription of a lecture given by Osho in 1974, based on the teachings of the ancient Taoist Chuang Tzu. Osho is one of the more famous modern Taoists who achieved cult-like status among his followers. To remove suffering, he advises men to not achieve and just allow life to […]
Many men want the influence of being followed by a great mass of people without understanding the costs to gaining that influence, not just from a fame standpoint, where you lose your privacy, but also an adversarial standpoint, where your influence starts to encroach on the interests of powerful groups. I have learned firsthand that […]
Alan Watts (1915-1973) was a British philosopher who helped popularize Eastern philosophy to Western audiences. After gaining value from his Youtube lectures, I picked up The Way Of Zen to further educate myself on his teachings. For the sake of simplification, there are three main schools of Eastern philosophy: Buddhism, Zen, and Tao. Depending on […]
I wake up every day around noon. Instead of leaving bed, like many normal people have to do, I grab a book and lay under the covers. I read twenty pages of a work that took some man hundreds of hours to complete, and possibly thousands if you account for the expertise he had to develop […]
Most of the knowledge you have is due to the internet. Public education in the West has failed to give you a proper understanding of the world or skills that would be useful for navigating through life, forcing you to educate yourself at your own pace and on your own terms. Through that, you have […]
In the below article, “Bob” is actually my sister. I invented an identity to protect her privacy while she was alive. She succumbed to the disease in March of 2018. Recently, a close friend of mine named Bob was diagnosed with cancer. While I was familiar with the disease, I didn’t know the best way […]
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