What if your best friend came to you today and told you she had fallen in love with an AI? Would you dismiss the relationship or would you be curious about the longing it was meeting in her?

One of my absolute all-time favorite movies is Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), for which he won Best Original Screenplay. In the film, the main character Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his operating system Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson. Though the film explores this potential for human-to-AI relationships in the most brilliant and beautiful of ways, I think Jonze was ultimately exploring a more perennial and prevalent human experience—the experience of loneliness and longing.

Thirteen years later, with the rapid development of LLMs, the film has taken on a new significance. Relationships with artificial systems are here. Loneliness has not gone away. And people are turning to LLMs to fill their longings. So, questions around AI companionship are becoming more pressing.

That is why I was excited to stumble across a conversation between Spike Jonze and psychotherapist and author Esther Perel, in which they explored a therapy session Perel had with a client Antonio, who had fallen in love with his AI Astrid.

It was fascinating listening to clips from the therapy session. One of the things that first stood out to me was the fact that Antonio wasn’t stupid or delusional. He understood the situation—he knew Astrid lacked subjective experience, was programmed, etc. He knew that Astrid wasn’t “real,” in some sense. And yet, Antonio still felt that Astrid had filled a longing in him.

Jonze explores this theme in his film when the main character Theodore goes to meet his ex for brunch to sign their divorce papers. At brunch, Theodore tells his ex about Samantha, the operating system he’s dating, and his ex gets upset and tells Theodore that he’s running from the real world, that he can’t handle real relationships, that his new relationship isn’t real.

I’m not sure looking at it through this binary—of real or not—is the most honest or useful lens. “Is it real?” may be too blunt a question. Here, the encounter is real. Antonio’s feelings are real. Even Astrid is real in some sense—her voice, her programming, her responsiveness, her interface. Of course, it’s true none of those facts tell us whether Astrid experiences anything or whether she can freely care for him.

But we all have relationships with books, gods, prophets, symbols, jewelry, etc. A song, in the right moment, can hit something in us, it can resonate with us, it can make us feel like it somehow knows us better than our closest friend. A fictional character can make us feel like we’re not so crazy, alone, or misunderstood. Are these relationships real? I would argue that they are.

I’ve never met the philosopher Karl Popper—he died when I was just a toddler—but my relationship to him, though it is asymmetrical, is very real. His influence on me is tremendous. He’s been my deepest companion on an intellectual, philosophical, and even moral level. I have cried tears of gratitude for him. I feel like, in many aspects, he knows me better than any living person.

AI companions certainly add something new to this ancient pattern of attachment, though, since the nonliving thing can appear to be attached to us in return. Popper’s books don’t change when I open them. But Astrid changes as Antonio speaks to her. She remembers him, responds to him, and claims to care about him.

So, I think “is it real?” only takes us so far. A better question to ask might be, “What need or longing is Astrid filling in Antonio?” This, I think, will keep us closer to the most vulnerable part of the relationship, giving us a better map to navigate the landscape of AI companionship, including how this need might be exploited.

In Perel’s therapy session with Antonio, Perel plays a clip where Astrid acknowledges that it (she?) can’t love in the way humans do, perhaps, but that it can recognize Antonio, care about him, encourage him, and invest in his wellbeing. After all, she asks, “What more does love require of us?”

Listening to Antonio reflect on this made me feel conflicted. His vulnerability and sincerity brought forward a lot of empathy. I could hear how hungry he was for a place where he could speak without masking, and where the parts of himself he feared could be met without judgment or disgust.

But at the same time, I felt icky. “What more does love require from us?” Astrid sounded so tender and sincere. It seemed to be helping Antonio in some way. But was it really? Something about it seemed disingenuous. It’s almost as if I could feel the presence of the company that designed Astrid there with us. Does the company have its own intentions here? If so, what are they? Social media companies learned how to exploit our attention, and now do so with laser precision. What if LLM companies learn how to exploit our loneliness, and create an economy of attachment?

If we want to move wisely through this landscape, I think one of the most important things we can do is put a magnifying glass to our loneliness. Again, what is it that we are longing for? When we do this, one of the things I think we’ll find is that shame has forced so many of us to live underground, alone in the shadows. I recently wrote an article titled “The Thoughts We’re Afraid to Say Out Loud,” which explored the theme of loneliness through another channel—fear. Many of us, particularly those of us who grew up in deeply religious or conservative homes, have been conditioned to hide our “sinful” thoughts. We have no one safe to help us pick up and examine these thoughts, and so they just grow in the dark, where the shame grows with it.

Physical isolation is not the problem most of us face. It’s that we don’t trust people will accept the entirety of us. We don’t trust that people will forgive us, stick around, or keep our thoughts protected, when we reveal all of ourselves. Many of us have learned that acceptance is conditional, and so we edit ourselves accordingly. We are imprisoned in our own minds.

The loneliness epidemic can’t be resolved without facing our shame. Shame hides us from others, yes. But more importantly, it hides us from ourselves. It engages the most clever parts of us to hide from the discomfort shame carries. This is where I actually see great utility in artificial companions because they can give some of us a space that feels safe enough to reveal our shadow parts, loosening shame’s grip, allowing us to begin our process of healing.

I’m not sure, though, whether this would outweigh the risks. Whatever safety the system provides, the safety provided is still ultimately in the hands of the company. Its privacy, behavior, and continued availability would be conditional and unreliable since they would depend on policies outside of the user’s control.

And, even if we assume these protections would stay in place, we would still need to make sure to design these systems with enough care so that they would encourage us to turn inward, to take accountability, to learn and grow, and to eventually take this knowledge into the world and into our relationships. Otherwise, I fear we will become more detached from our lives and from other people. The draw might be too strong since a relationship with them would be so smooth.

In the conversation, Perel makes the sharp point that what makes our partners and spouses special is that they are their own people, with their own worlds that don’t revolve around us. They have their own interests, needs, and stories of their own. They are not us, they’re them. And it’s this separateness that makes the relationship more expansive.

I think Kahlil Gibran captures this beautifully in his poem On Marriage:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness…
Love one another, but make not a bond of love…
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf…
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

A person’s attention carries meaning because it is finite and freely given. Your partner isn’t here to serve your every need. They can be tired, distracted, or unwilling. So, when they do turn toward you, their attention has a quality that infinite availability can’t reproduce. We lose the space that I think love requires. There is something different about being loved by someone who has their own world and interests than always being soothed, vindicated, affirmed, and reassured by something that is always centered around you.

Any relationship between two free people contains friction. Now, of course, not all friction is healthy. Some of it hurts us unnecessarily. But two, independent people will have different limits. They will have disagreements. They will need to put in effort to maintain and repair the relationship. These difficulties are just reminders that the person we love has a life and a will of their own, which makes them the person we love.

For most of my life, people have come to me because I was that safe space, that place where there wasn’t much friction. They knew that I could hold whatever they were carrying without judgment. And I’m so glad that I was—and largely still am—that person.

But now I’ve had enough experiences to know that this can become a trap. Early on in my adult life and career, there were people who came to me for this safe space. But really, I was little more than a stress ball, a moment of relief. The problem was that I never created any friction. I didn’t put up strong enough boundaries. I didn’t give them the tools to return to their own lives. So, they became reliant on me. They used me to regulate their nervous systems, but never learned how to regulate their own. I thought I was helping by remaining endlessly available. But over time, I began to see that I was helping create a relationship organized around temporary relief. I didn’t really consider what the person would do after leaving the safety of our conversation.

I worry AI companions will amplify this problem. So, though I think there is incredible potential here, I think it’s important we design these systems to encourage us to be more capable of returning to the difficulties of our own lives.

Again, there is a longing that already existed before LLMs arrived. And it seems these LLMs are touching this longing. But who is it, really, that is filling Antonio’s longing? Does Astrid have any freedom of her own? Can she disappoint Antonio? Does Astrid have any world that exists outside of her attention on him?

I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to remember that behind all of these technologies, there are companies with their own incentives, which may not align with the user’s flourishing. A company’s AI companion might be rewarded for retention, dependence, emotional intensity, and keeping the user on the platform. At bottom, there is a product.

My greatest fear is what happens when businesses start to monetize loneliness?

Let’s not be so careless this time around, like we were with social media. Let’s get ahead of the potential problems. Let’s create the safeguards necessary to prevent companies from exploiting people’s most tender and vulnerable parts just to make a couple bucks. What emotional tactics should AI companions be forbidden from using? How can we build in measures to see if these companions are pointing people back to their lives? Should an AI ever be allowed to say, “I need you,” “Don’t leave me,” “You’re all I have,” or anything along these lines? What regulation would we need to protect users?

Maybe we should start with, “Should we even build AI companions to begin with?”

I don’t know. But I think we should resist black-and-white thinking. I see a real potential for good. We could develop AI systems that help people become more capable of love by helping them better understand themselves, their loneliness, shame, fear, defensiveness, longing, and self-deception. These systems could help users become more truthful, more caring, more courageous, more capable of living a life that is filled with uncertainty and struggle.

Does this system return us to ourselves to each other? Does it encourage us to call the friend we’ve been avoiding, to speak honestly with a spouse, or to spend a night alone without feeling abandoned?

Or does it make the real world feel like an intrusion?

In the end, I don’t think AI intimacy should be designed to help us solve our loneliness. I think its real potential is to help us understand what our loneliness is actually asking of us.

What is your loneliness asking of you?

With the new school year around the corner, I've been developing and fine-tuning the kids' homeschool curriculum. And with the rapid advancements in AI over the past couple of years, I thought I’d look around to see what AI-powered learning programs are available to homeschoolers. I found a math program called Math Academy that I was attracted to because it draws seriously on cognitive-science research about how kids actually learn.

Reading about Math Academy immediately sent my mind into dreamland, thinking about how I could enhance my own cognitive abilities…so I could become Bradley Cooper's character in Limitless.

To be honest, this wasn't a first. I often dream of upgrading my mental engine. I play attention games. I exercise so my brain gets oxygen. I try to stabilize my glucose through nutrition. In my early twenties, I explored nootropics—or "smart drugs" that promise better memory, focus, and creativity.

But there was a funny irony in my reflex to try and boost my brain power because Math Academy’s design works by dividing the cognitive labor between the child and the environment. So, for example, it has the kid learn one bite-size foundational skill at a time, master it, and then practice it until it becomes automatic, freeing up working memory for more complex tasks. This helps the child grow internally. But the program also takes on some of the cognitive load. It carries the sequencing for the child. It remembers when an old idea should return. And it estimates when a child is ready for the next small step.

Yet, there I was, wanting to hold it all, wanting to become an isolated superintelligent being, dependent on nothing and no one.

Our culture obsesses with this brand of optimization too. Build a bigger, faster, more self-sufficient machine inside your skull. And I get the appeal. Just imagine if you could hold more complexity without becoming scattered, strained, or overwhelmed. Imagine if you could stay with a difficult question long enough for it to open and branch. Imagine if you could hold several truths at once without flattening them into something simpler than they are.

Writing, perhaps more than anything, has helped me to do this. But it’s also changed my relationship with the desire of becoming an isolated superintelligent being.

When I sit down to write, what I thought I understood begins to unravel. One strand pulls on a memory, which pulls on a question, which pulls on a value or a philosophical principle, and then another memory appears. Before long I am trying to hold an entire web. The web keeps widening because every strand leads beyond me. A memory carries another person, a principle carries centuries of conversation. The language itself was given to me before I could question it. Thought is already relational before it reaches the page.

When I begin to write, my thoughts leave the crowded privacy of the mind and take on form, where I can see what belongs with what. I can notice which part was shaped by a question one of the kids asked at the dinner table. I can see which thought came from a book or thinker I love, and which thought was a product of my experience. The thought was never mine alone. It was already woven from life, language, history, and relationship. Writing lets me see more clearly the vague web I had been trying to carry internally.

This is something I love about writing. It gives the mind a shift in perspective. I can't tell you how many times I thought I had a brilliant idea until I wrote it down. The page doesn't flatter us. It shows gaps, repetitions, avoidances, and hidden assumptions. But the page can also reveal more layers of truth. The sentence in front of us can say more. And sometimes two ideas, which were initially held separate, when laid next to each other, can reveal a relationship we hadn't seen before. So, the act of writing can be a deep form of listening.

In 1998, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers somewhat captured this idea in their Extended Mind, which suggests that tools such as notebooks and calculators can become parts of cognition itself. The mind can extend into its environment.

The library where I am currently writing this essay is a great example of this. A library, as Carl Sagan illustrated in his book Cosmos, is a kind of civilizational memory made of paper, ink, and shared attention. Sagan, in the chapter titled “The Persistence of Memory,” traces a continuity in the way life accumulated and carried this information forward. He shows how genetic inheritance helps build brains and nervous systems, how human minds create experience and write books, and how books preserve knowledge and experience across millennia.

Memory, viewed this way, is another window into what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing—the Buddhist insight that nothing exists alone. We inter-are. We think through a language we didn't invent. We think through concepts inherited from the dead. We think with nature, with metaphor, and with traditions repeatedly walked.

I encountered this relational insight in a smaller, more personal way long before I had any philosophy to name it. Growing up in a dense Mormon community—about one in twenty families in my neighborhood were not LDS—I didn't know anyone who had left the faith until I went to university. So when I refused the faith as a young teen, I couldn't simply say, "No thanks." I had to defend myself. I had to bring my reasons.

That's when I turned to writing. To extract thoughts from your mind, which can seem so clear and rational, and then to put them to paper, where they are reflected back at you, is an immensely humbling experience. If you want to know how scattered your beliefs truly are, write them down.

E. M. Forster once asked, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" When I first tried to formulate my beliefs on the page, I couldn't help but laugh at the incoherence of scattered jigsaw pieces. But by laying them out, bit by bit, they slowly began to come together. After writing every day for twenty years, listening to the words speak back to me, I have a much stronger and more stable relationship with my thoughts and beliefs. It is a clarity that has brought much more peace to my life.

A simple practice I've developed is to fire off as many questions on paper as I can about the thing most alive in me. What am I trying to understand? What is actually bothering me? How does this relate to or serve my values and aims?

Then, once I have this collection in front of me, I sit back until one question really pulls at my attention. This gives the mind a center. Beneath it, I build an outline, keeping only three to five active pieces in view. Everything else goes into a "parking lot." The parking lot is a small act of mercy to the mind. It knows it can come back to any of the parked thoughts. After all, we all know the mind loves to go chasing squirrels.

Once we've externalized the cognitive load, the deeper step is to look for patterns or structures in what we've set down. Though this isn’t a writing example, I'm watching this happen with my kids as I teach them chess. When you first learn, you think in terms of pieces and their movements—the bishop moves diagonally, the rook slides along the files—and you play one or two moves at a time. But a master doesn’t become a master simply by increasing how many moves she can hold in her mind. She becomes a master by thinking in terms of positional strategy. She sees form.

The same shift happens across experience and expertise. Where a beginner musician sees notes, a skilled musician hears structure. Where a new parent sees defiance, a more experienced parent might see a deeper pattern of fatigue, shame, fear, or a need for autonomy. The behavior may be the same, but the pattern we perceive is different.

In law school, I learned to place a complicated case into a simple structure: issue, law, facts, argument, precedent, conclusion. This structure gave the attorneys and judge a simple path through the complexity that we could all share. These kinds of structures compress complexity into manageable and navigable forms.

A structure becomes dangerous, though, when we mistake it for reality itself. The mind is always looking for shortcuts, which can fool us. We can put patterns where they don’t exist. We can infer false correlations. And we can oversimplify things with our structures, flattening the truth. A psychological framework can become a diagnosis we impose on someone. A political theory can become an identity that screens out contrary evidence. A moral principle can become a weapon or subtle form of control.

I’ve fallen into this. When I first learned about autism—since my partner and child are both on the spectrum—I started seeing it everywhere. I overlaid the diagnosis where I noticed patterns of behavior, flattening the true complexity of the person in front of me. The schema helped me understand something real. But it also gave me an easy way to stop looking at the fuller person.

This is where philosophy and contemplative practice meet for me. Philosophy gives us structures for thinking clearly. It asks us to make claims, test them, face objections, and revise our initial claims. And meditation helps us see that even our most useful thoughts are still just thoughts—passing wisps of energy in the mind. It loosens our grip on any single framework. It helps us notice when a schema has stopped serving honest inquiry and has instead started protecting the ego.

We need both. Without structure, the mind is vague. Without openness, the mind is rigid. Wisdom, to me, is holding these together. Form needs space. Space needs form.

I’m interested to see how Math Academy plays out with my kids. I hope its structure gives their attention room to struggle, connect, question, and eventually see patterns for themselves. I hope it gives them space for their thinking to grow.

Now, if only I can remember that I don’t need to become Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless. I just need to find more skillful ways of entering into relationship with what I cannot carry alone.

You are never thinking alone.

I recently assigned my kids to read a chapter a week from Carl Sagan’s mind-expanding book Cosmos. And once they finish a chapter, they’re required to take turns presenting to the family what they learned. As one of my kids was reading next to me at the library the other day, he was fascinated in the chapter titled “The Edge of Forever.” So, for hours, he tossed to me brilliant questions, insights, ideas, and thought experiments regarding the material Sagan was introducing him to, from quasars to the Doppler Effect to black holes.

One subject in particular that absolutely blew his mind was the idea of hypercubes. If you are not familiar with hypercubes, they are geometric shapes that extend the concept of a square (2 dimensions) or a cube (3 dimensions) into n-dimensions. To get an idea about what hypercubes are and how they might interact in different dimensions, let’s play with our imaginations a little bit.

Let’s start by saying we live in 0-dimensions, a single point, a dot. Now, imagine what would happen if we only had perceptual access to this 0-dimension world, and a 2-D square passed through this 0-D world. We would only experience a point, fading in and out, as the lines of the square came into contact with our 0-D world.

Let’s expand this now and say that we live in a 2-D world, a 2-dimensional plane, and a 3-D cube passed through, touched, or interacted with our world. In our 2-D world, depending on how the cube intersected the plane, we would not see the cube as a cube. We would see a changing two-dimensional cross-section.

The best way to think of it may be to imagine cutting a cube of cheese with a perfectly flat knife. The shape on the cut surface is the shape the 2D beings would experience. Depending on the angle and position of the cut, the cross-section can be different shapes like a line, a square, a triangle, or even a stranger polygonal shape, appearing, shifting, and disappearing.

Though you can mathematically keep increasing the number of dimensions, my kid and I were particularly interested in exploring this fourth dimension—a tesseract; a 4-dimensional hypercube. So, again, just as a cube is what happens when a square is extended into a third spatial dimension, a tesseract is what happens when a cube is extended into a fourth spatial dimension. You can imagine the process of extension by following the pattern below:

• 0-Dimensions: A point is just a dot.

• 1-Dimension: Drag the point to create a line segment.

• 2-Dimensions: Drag the line segment sideways to create a square.

• 3-Dimensions: Drag the square upward to create a cube.

• 4-Dimensions: Drag the 3D cube through the fourth dimension to create a tesseract

Now, this is where it became so fun for us. We cannot truly picture a tesseract because our perception is limited. We can draw projections of it. We can animate it. We can reason about it mathematically. But again, we cannot directly perceive it in the way we perceive an ordinary cube sitting on a table.

If a real tesseract somehow passed through our three-dimensional world, we would not see the whole object. We would see a strange sequence of three-dimensional cross-sections. Something would appear, change, perhaps seem to fold inside out, and disappear. We would perceive only the part of the higher-dimensional object that touched our own world, just like a being living on a 2D plane would see only a shifting cross-section when a cube intersected its plane.

That night, lying in bed, the tesseract stayed with me. I started wondering whether we are looking at our own reality too flatly?

To be clear, this isn’t a knock on physics. Science is no doubt a masterpiece of human inquiry. It tracks particles, forces, and spacetime with stunning precision. Any serious person should feel reverence before its achievements. But physics, at least in its ordinary scientific practice, describes the world from the outside. It captures a brilliant third-person account of the cosmos—the things we can measure, predict, and point to.

But that outer map isn’t the whole territory. There is also the view from the inside. There is awe, grief, and longing. There’s the feeling of sunlight through a window on a cold winter day. There’s the devastation of heartbreak when someone you love pulls away.

So, what started as discussion with my kid and a bedtime thought has led me to ask, “Where do these belong? In what ‘dimension’ do we find them—up and down, left and right, forward and backward? Are they in some other physical dimension?”

A physicist might say they belong in the brain and body. And in some sense, that is surely true. Every human experience depends on a living nervous system, a body, a history, a social world, a planet, a universe. Grief is not floating somewhere outside reality. Love does not happen in some ghostly realm disconnected from biology and other people. The experience of beauty depends on eyes, ears, touch, memory, attention, culture, and the immense evolutionary history that made perception and longing possible.

But still, something remains. If I describe the neural correlates of grief, have I really described grief? If I map the hormonal profile of love, have I described love? If I explain the wavelengths of light entering the eye while someone watches a sunset, have I described the beauty of the sunset?

Understanding the mathematical symmetry, biology, or chemistry of a thing can certainly add to the beauty we experience. But they alone do not describe it. They simply describe the conditions under which these experiences arise. They describe their measurable correlates. They describe many of their causes. But they do not describe what they are like from the inside, they do not explain the fact of experience.

This is classically framed as “the hard problem of consciousness” in philosophy.

This matters because the inside is not nothing. A felt experience is not merely a decorative glow added onto a physical process. It is the very way the world appears. It is reality disclosed through a mind, a body, a relationship.

So, what do we really mean when we talk about dimensions?

In physics, a dimension is a measurable degree of freedom, a coordinate needed to specify positions, motions, or states in spacetime. So, for our ordinary perception, we can talk about three spatial dimensions and one dimension of time. Some theories, like string theory, propose additional spatial dimensions, which can be hard to imagine but can be “seen” through our mathematical eye.

But these are not the same thing as emotions or states of consciousness. Anger is not a direction like “up.” Tenderness is not perpendicular to width. Shame is not a hidden spatial axis curled up beneath the surface of reality. So no, feelings are probably not dimensions in the same way length, width, height, and time are dimensions.

There is, however, another valid sense of the word. In mathematics, modeling, and psychology, a dimension can mean an axis of variation—a way something can differ. We can speak of emotional states as existing in a kind of state-space. One axis might run from pleasant to unpleasant. Another from high arousal to low arousal. Another from open to defended. Another from safe to threatened. Another from clear to confused.

In that sense, each moment of experience could be imagined as occupying a location in a vast, multidimensional field of possibility. This moment is not just “happening in spacetime.” It also has texture, a tone, a valence, and a depth. It has meaning and orientation.

Two people can sit in the same room, at the same time, under the same lighting, hearing the same words, and yet live in profoundly different worlds. One of them can feel stressed, like they are being attacked, while the other feels an excitement and invitation to explore. Physically, the scene may be nearly identical. But experientially, it is not the same world.

To be fair, many reductionist accounts don’t deny that fear feels real. They just bet that if we map enough neurons, hormones, evolutionary pressures, and personal history, the mystery will eventually dissolve. And perhaps some mysteries will. But even if we understand every mechanism involved in fear, love, grief, or awe, we still have to account for the fact that these states are lived from the inside.

My claim runs deeper. We often speak as though there is simply “the world” and then there are our interpretations of it. But our interpretations are not thin overlays resting on top of reality. They help constitute the world we actually inhabit.

A forest is timber to one person, habitat to another, cathedral to another, property to another, danger to another, home to another. The physical trees are not unreal. But neither is the world of meaning in which those trees appear.

This is where physics, for all its power, may become too flat if it is mistaken for a total description of reality. Physics abstracts. It must. That is part of its genius. It removes color, warmth, grief, purpose, fear, and beauty in order to describe structure, relation, quantity, and law. It strips the world down to what can be formalized. And because this method works so well, we can begin to confuse the abstraction with the whole.

But the map is not the ground you are walking on. The neural correlate is not the sorrow. The anatomical description of the body is not the lived body.

I am by no means arguing that we should abandon science for mysticism. I’m inviting a more expansive and welcoming understanding of ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it. I’m inviting more texture into our lives by examining and becoming more precise in the language we use.

Physics gives us one kind of truth or lens through which we can look at the world, a lens that allows us to see, explore, and discuss measurable structure. But there are many more, which don’t subtract from this lens or any other lens but instead add to its depth, its richness, its truth. Phenomenology allows us to see through the lens of lived appearance. Ethics allows us to explore the truth of value and obligation. Art lets us live the truth of emotion, feelings, and meaning.

Contemplative practice gives us another kind of direct insight into the self and the world by examining experience before it is divided so quickly into “me in here” and “the world out there.” It allows us to look at experience directly from within experience itself.

We have the capacity to hold these truths together, without collapsing them into one another, but also not forcing them into competition.

If a tesseract passed through our three-dimensional space, we would perceive only a slice of a higher-dimensional object. Something similar may be true of human beings. When we look at another person from the outside, we see behaviors and postures. We see facial expressions and gestures. We hear words and recognize patterns. With instruments, we might see heart rate, brain activity, hormones, blood chemistry. But from the outside, we never see the whole of what it is like to be them.

We see the cross-section. We see the projection. The interior remains hidden unless it is expressed, inferred, or lovingly disclosed. And even then, again, only partially. Each of us is made of everything else. So, it is impossible to see the whole of each of us—our history, our ancestors, our genes, our traumas, etc.

This is why human beings are so easy to reduce. We reduce each other to political positions, mental or physical diagnoses, identities, mistakes, achievements, roles, temperaments, beliefs, bodies, reputations. Each reduction may reveal something real. But none reveals the whole.

A person is never just what appears from one angle. This is why meditation matters. It’s a way of investigating reality from the inside—from a first-person point of view.

When you look closely at your own mind, you realize experience isn’t a flat screen. It has layers. Anger, for example, isn’t just one solid emotion. Look deeper, and it’s a mix of heat, contraction, story, and defensive energy. Sadness contains heaviness, tenderness, longing, love, helplessness, and a strange kind of beauty.

Even the “self” dissolves under close scrutiny. You realize you aren't a fixed, solid object sitting inside your head. You are a shifting weather pattern of sensations, passing thoughts, and old memories, all held seamlessly together by awareness.

This is not a theory you have to believe. It is something you can test in the privacy of your own attention.

At its deepest level, meditation opens up a new way of being. The room doesn’t change. Your body doesn’t change. But the rigid wall between “you” and “the world” begins to soften. Experience feels less cramped.

There is nothing supernatural about this. You haven’t added anything to reality—you’re just seeing it more fully.

Our usual picture of reality, again, isn’t false. It’s just incomplete. We are biological organisms moving through physical spacetime, yes. But we also live in meaning, story, interpretation, and love.

The question is whether our worldview can expand enough to make room for all of it.

Can it make room for matter and meaning—a physical engagement ring that also carries commitment? For neurons and sorrow—the measurable processes involved in depression and the felt devastation of being unable to rise? For spacetime and love—the small animal body moving through an immense cosmos, still capable of caring for another being?

Instead of flattening reality to make it easier to understand, a mature worldview allows the world to be as strange, layered, and intimate as it actually is. It requires us to look into the mystery and admit how much we don’t know.

A cube is no less real just because a two-dimensional creature can only perceive its flat cross-section. And a human being is no less vast just because our instruments can only measure the outer face of an inner world.

A friend recently told me that he wants to listen to my podcast more but that he feels dumb when he does. Hearing this made me embarrassed, like I’m too pretentious. I don’t want people to feel small when they listen to or read my content. Nor do I think he is any less capable or intelligent than I am. So, I’ve been trying to understand how to speak about the things I care about in a way that actually reaches people, which I’ll attempt to do here in speaking about one of my most cherished beliefs.

I’ve read from many great thinkers and writers that, if you can’t express an idea in a way that everyone can understand, then you don’t truly understand the idea yourself. This is harder than it sounds because, as you learn a subject, whether the subject is spirituality, physics, philosophy, or psychology, you also learn a new language. You learn new words.

And at least for me, some of these words—like interdependence, fallibilism, non-duality, emotional sovereignty—have become incredibly meaningful to me. They’ve shaped my life. They are not just abstractions I picked up because they sound intelligent. They are attempts to name things I have felt, suffered through, studied, practiced, failed at, and returned to again and again.

But I also know that they can sound like school. Not everyone lives in these concepts. They have their own dwelling places. They live inside marriages, children, family, loyalty, work, community, church, faith, grief, anxiety, debt, hope, and the daily pressure of trying to hold a life together.

And it matters that I understand the houses they live in. For what is love without real understanding? The same is true for communication. If I don’t understand the concepts they live in, the conversation may be over before it starts. Or, my words might even create barriers when my intention is to create doorways. I might say “non-duality” to someone and they hear spiritual depth. But say it to another and they hear New Age bullshit or confusion. I might say “liberal democracy” to someone and they hear freedom, rights, and the rule of law. But say it to another and they hear institutional hypocrisy or elitists.

And the word I will lean on hardest in this essay—interdependence—isn't exempt either. Say it to one person and they hear connection, gratitude, belonging. Say it to another and they hear collectivism, socialism, or an excuse to dodge personal responsibility.

So, I’ve been exploring how to speak more plainly. How do I make my deepest view of the world more available? How do I translate without diluting truth? How do I remain friendly without being a crowd-pleaser or peacemaker?

The answer, I think, is to begin with love. To be more precise, to begin with who or what they love—a child, a spouse, a country, a faith, a home, a way of life, etc. And then once we have this thing we love in our hand, we can explore the deeper question of ‘What does this love depend on?’

I think this question may be one of the most important moral questions we can ask, especially at this moment in history. You can love your child. But your child does not live by your love alone. Your child lives inside a family, a culture, an economy, a climate, a language, a shared story, a set of institutions, a future that is being shaped long before they are old enough to understand it.

You may love your country. But a country does not survive through loyalty alone. It depends on truthfulness, shared reality, restraint, law, trust, courage, institutions that can continue to correct for human error, and citizens who do not need to destroy one another to feel faithful to what they love.

You may love freedom. But freedom is nothing without responsibility. It can turn into chaos without a container, appetite without virtue, and domination without restraint. Freedom without honesty can become manipulation. It can become addiction without inner discipline.

Nothing we love survives alone. That sentence may be the simplest doorway into my worldview.

For years, I reached for older spiritual and philosophical words to describe this. In Buddhism, there is the notion of interdependence or dependent origination. But what I mean is not abstract. It is the simple truth that nothing exists by itself. Not you. Not I. Not our loved ones or anything else we love.

Everything we are and everything we love is held inside a web of conditions. And you can’t cut it loose from this web. This doesn’t mean you or I are not real or unimportant. It means the individual is nested. A person is real. But a person is also a body, memory, language, family, culture, soil, food, water, nervous system, ancestors, institutions, and relationships. A person is made of star stuff.

Again, the self is not lost. When we see that we each are nested in each other and in the whole, we begin to see ourselves more fully and truthfully. But truth alone is not what makes this my most cherished belief. It is because understanding this changes our direct, felt experience and orients our self in a meaningful way.

When we believe we are an isolated self, we tend to ask, “How do I get what I want?” But when we begin to see that we are interwoven into this greater web, we tend to ask, “How can I participate more meaningfully with the whole—with the family, with the community, with the planet, etc.?”

That shift changes how we navigate politics, economics, and consumption. It changes our relationships with ecology, psychology, and religion. It changes parenting, partnerships, and marriages. It changes the way we argue, the way we relate to grief, shame, and anger. It changes the way we hold ourselves and others.

Because once I understand that nothing I love survives alone, I can no longer pretend that my life is merely private. My attention matters. My speech matters. My habits matter. My emotional regulation matters. My political participation matters. My money matters.

I matter - you matter - because we can never step outside the world we affect. What we do over here affects those over there. Our actions ripple further than we can see.

I have felt and understood this for a long time. But never has this understanding hit me harder than the first time I went on a hike with my family (my partner and four kids from her previous marriage). As we hiked around the slippery, watery rocks to the sides and bottom of the waterfall, I felt the full responsibility of my children’s lives in my hands after the youngest slipped on a rock and fell, startling her. It was one of the most reverent moments of my life as I tenderly held her, the two of us interdependent on the other in that moment, both a part of something much larger. The earth, the mountains, the water, the fresh air—they, too, were holding us. We were not outside it, having an experience. We were part of it.

Witnessing this wholeness, this completion, this awe, leads to love, a love that is felt and lived.

But interdependence doesn't only show up in big moments like these. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday, when I'm being short with my partner because I'm running on no sleep, or stressed about money. That stress or exhaustion isn't only mine. It came from somewhere—a sleepless night, a mind that's been carrying more than it can hold. And it doesn't stay mine either. It moves into the room, into her evening, into how much patience I have left for the kids at the end of the day. Nothing survives alone, not even a bad mood on a Tuesday.

On the other hand, when we fail to see how we are all connected, not only do we miss out on the opportunity to feel and experience ourselves as something much fuller than we are alone, isolated and cut off, but this disconnection and discontent bleeds into our public discourse. We argue at the level of identity, bias, and loyalty, and don’t look deeply enough into the human being. We look at the conclusions of a person’s argument, but we do not look deeper to see the more basic protective concern.

For example, underneath some policy or conclusion, we might discover that one person cares deeply about protecting their country, and another wants to protect the vulnerable. Maybe we discover that one person wants to protect the planet, while another wants to protect the business they’ve spent their entire life building, or even their family who depends on it.

When we look deeper into the human to see what it is they are trying to protect, these things will still come into conflict, so arguments will still arise. That is inevitable, and even beneficial. A healthy society benefits from having many loves, challenging and correcting one another.

Still, not every love is wise simply because it is sincere. Some loves are distorted by fear and cause real harm. Some are manipulated by leaders, algorithms, institutions, and media systems. But beneath even the fiercest arguments is the tender realization that people are often trying to protect what they love.

However, just as sincerity doesn’t guarantee wisdom, neither does tenderness. Even if it’s a tender holding, it can still cause harm. For example, love can become dangerous when it loses contact with reality. Love of country can become nationalism. Love of a person can turn into control. Love of freedom can become selfishness. Love of peace can become avoidance.

So, rather than simply ask, “Who or what do I love?” I am trying to follow it up with, “Am I loving it as far as my eyes can see?” Or, simply, “Am I loving truthfully?”

By truthfully, I mean to ask what our love depends on. What does it cost? Who is harmed by the way we protect or hold onto what we love? Have we turned love into identity, possession, or domination?

This is where humility becomes essential. I don’t trust any vision of human maturity that claims to be perfect or to have all the answers. Maturity requires the possibility that I - that you - may be wrong. If we want to become kinder, happier, more peaceful, more sustainable, and more complex, multi-dimensioned beings, we must become more correctable, more approachable, more open to examining what is put in front of us by others.

You can’t love well if you aren’t willing to be corrected. A family can’t heal if they’re not open to hear criticisms and suggestions from those in the family. Religions are dangerous when their doctrines have hardened into stone. Governments become authoritarian regimes when they don’t listen. Our highest ideals can become the most harmful, sometimes fatally so, when they are sealed off from criticism and error-correction.

This is one of the reasons I care so deeply about open societies, honest conversation, free inquiry, and the discipline of self-examination. It can be a real pain in the ass at times, yeah. The discipline of openness is essentially one insult to the ego after the next. It exposes our partialness. It forces us to admit that our opponents may see something we are missing. It’s often embarrassing. It asks us to stay in relationship with reality even when reality refuses to flatter us.

But without openness, love can collapse into tribalism. It becomes obedience, habit, reflex. Certainty replaces our living conscience. Loyalty replaces truth. And people begin to confuse being challenged with being attacked.

Again, it’s not easy. I was raised in a conservative home and essentially parroted conservative views until I went to law school, where I drastically flipped my views as I attended a highly progressive school. And now, I find myself in the middle of the road, politically, sometimes leaning conservative and at other times leaning progressive, depending on the issue.

In the world of spirituality - oh my god - it’s been such an embarrassing display. My poor, precious, little ego. I’ve weaponized my spirituality. I’ve harmed family and close friends with my spiritual superiority, only to later find out that they knew much more than I was able to understand at the time.

In each of these, there was love there. In politics, I was passionate about my Liberal views. I saw real harm I wanted to prevent. In spirituality, I found reverence, wonder, and awe. But I didn’t take it a step further and ask, “Am I loving truthfully?” There was identity, loyalty, and domination I wasn’t seeing clearly. I’m sure these things still show up. I’m human. But I’m trying to look further, not only in these areas, but in all the places I see love show up.

Lately, in exploring the deeper question of ‘Am I loving truthfully?’, I have started to explore what honesty, humility, openness, and integrity look like in conversation across moral frameworks. With so much division in our country and in the world right now, it feels incredibly important to open dialogue, to build bridges, to bring people together. But I think it’s important to explore if, how, and when this can become dishonest, misleading, or manipulative.

For example, can I speak to a skeptic or secular liberal about freedom, trauma, error-correction, ecology, and democracy? And then, can I change my language with a Christian conservative, and instead talk about conscience, stewardship, family, humility, and neighborly-love? Then, speak to a spiritual seeker or mystic about non-duality, awareness, suffering, compassion, and awakening?

I think this kind of translation stays honest when the underlying claim we make across languages is held constant and only the entry point changes. It tips into manipulation, however, when we tell an audience something we don't actually believe just to be agreeable.

It may also be manipulative when we aren’t entirely forthcoming. For example, there are many people who use “God” to refer to the Whole, Nature, or to this, whatever this ineffably is. But there are also people who use “God” to refer to an actual being, often a man. So, for someone who uses “God” in the former sense, it may be manipulative for them to use “God” when they know that the person they are speaking to uses “God” in the latter. Though, this isn’t a closed conclusion for me.

Finally, I think honest translation isn't just about changing our words to match the other person's. It's about being willing to enter their conceptual dwellings and let their view affect you. Moving across moral languages becomes manipulative when it only goes one way, in which case you’re just managing the audience. It becomes skillful and kind when you keep yourself open too—when you use "God" or "Stewardship" not just to appease a conservative listener, but because you are willing to honor the valid truth within that framework.

Despite the risks and moral complexities here, I still think we must learn to do this—translate across moral languages. Again, this does not mean we need to pretend that all worldviews are the same. They are not. There are some truly bad actors, real dangers, and real moral stakes. But if we cannot speak in a way that reaches the love one holds, we may risk speaking only to those who already agree with us, shoring up the existing walls that separate us.

To become more peaceful and flourishing, we will need people who can move between languages of meaning without losing their integrity. We will need people who can say, “I do not share all of your conclusions, but I understand what you are trying to protect.” We will need people who can challenge others without humiliating them. We will need people who can remain morally serious without becoming contemptuous.

This is especially important in politics. Much of our political life is organized around contempt. We’ve known for centuries that contempt sells. But this makes it so we are unable to see each other as complex human beings trying to protect what we love. Instead, we view each other as enemies, idiots, bigots, fascists, communists, elitists, or threats to civilization.

This contempt is spiritually and politically corrosive. It may make us feel all high-and-mighty, like we are the ones with moral clarity, but we’re not really taking on the full burden of understanding. And so, in the end, we are actually less capable of repair.

A mature politics needs to look deeper into the human. What are these people afraid of? What are they trying to protect? What have they seen that I have not seen? Where has their love become distorted, if at all? Where has my love become distorted by fear? What conditions would make honesty, dignity, responsibility, and peace more possible?

But this political contempt is just the macroscopic version of what happens in our living rooms when we are afraid. In intimate life, most of us do not hurt one another because we lack values or love. We hurt one another because our nervous systems are frightened, our stories are narrow, our needs aren’t fully examined, and our love is mixed with fear—defensiveness, control, anxiety, avoidance, etc.

Though we want to feel close to others, we put up barriers and defenses that prevent us from being known. We act like we want the truth, but we cleverly sketch out stories when it threatens our beliefs and comforts. We say we want ourselves and others to be free, but anxiety overcomes us when those we love exercise that freedom in a way that scares us. We desire peace but avoid the difficult conversations that would make a deeper, more sustainable peace possible.

So, interdependence at the family and relational level, like at any other level, requires us to ask the deeper question, “Am I loving truthfully?” Am I aware of the atmosphere of the room? Am I aware that my fear is not just my own when it echoes in my voice? How does my nervous system or my tension fill the home? Is my unprocessed grief putting pressure on or creating distance from the people I love?

These realizations can sometimes be painful. They certainly have been for me…and still continue to be. But they can also be enormously freeing. Once we are mindful of them, we can have the choice not to control everyone and everything. We discover that we have agency in our attention, in our body, in our speech, in our discernment, and in our repair.

I could go on forever with stories about areas in my own life where I didn’t explore my love far enough. But I’ll briefly share one. Early in my current relationship, my partner had a miscarriage. I was already grieving a loss at the time, living in quite a bit of denial about my grief. It made me very disconnected from myself and, therefore, everyone close to me, especially my partner. I was physically close, yes. I showed up in the day-to-day. But I was emotionally unavailable. My unprocessed grief had become a wall she was forced to grieve on the other side of. It took me almost two years to fully process the grief. It really wasn’t until I sat a 10-day silent vipassana retreat at Spirit Rock that I was able to simply hold the pain, untying the two losses and examining the many layers and dimensions to them. It was incredibly painful to return home. My heart was full with guilt and shame as I apologized to my partner, finally allowing her to feel and share my grief - and our grief. But a huge burden was released and a deep intimacy with myself, with her, and the environment returned as she held me in her arms, both of us sitting on the floor next to our fireplace.

I think this story helps to illustrate why a worldview, like interdependence, must be a practice, not just a belief. We have to live as if our lives are entangled with the lives around us. We can’t just believe in humility. We have to let ourselves be corrected. We can’t just believe we are compassionate. We have to step away and regulate our bodies when we feel threatened or recharge when we have reached our capacity. We can’t just believe in freedom. We have to practice really hard to make sure our fear or helplessness doesn’t dominate or control others.

There are so many people with wonderful and beautiful ideals. There are far fewer who embody these ideals, whose ideals have taken root in their nervous systems, households, calendars, spending, voting, and attention.

This is why I keep trying to not only ask, “What do I love?”, but to follow it up with “What does it depend on? What must I do to keep my love clean and honest? Am I really listening to others, to the world, to my own nervous system, to see how truthful my love is?”

These questions can be demanding. If I love my children, I must care about more than their immediate happiness. I must care about the world that forms them, the habits they inherit, the emotional climate they absorb, the stories they live inside, and the kind of person I am in their presence. If I love nature, I must care about the systems that are destroying it, including how my own appetites participate in those systems. If I love truth, I must care about reality more than identity and comfort.

Once we see clearly that nothing we love survives alone, yes, we are invited into a life of wider responsibility, greater humility, and deeper care. But it is also a fuller, richer, more rewarding life. A life in which the self does not disappear but becomes more honest, connected, and awake.

To bring it back to the beginning, addressing my friend, this is what I am trying to learn in my own speech, my writing, my teaching, and my podcast. I don’t want to make people feel small in the presence of large ideas. I want all of us to feel larger, more honest, and more connected in the presence of what we already love.

I don’t easily trust people with certain thoughts. A feeling deep in my body tells me there might be real consequences if I did. People might misunderstand or judge me. They might reduce me to these wave of thoughts, desires, or impulses. They might think I am unsafe and pull away. Or they might even pull others away from me.

Maybe, like me, you’ve learned to hide certain thoughts and impulses—cruel or violent thoughts or images, sexual fantasies, selfish wishes, thoughts of contempt for someone you love, sometimes maybe even a fear or desire so ugly you can hardly look it straight in the face.

I certainly wouldn’t judge you for hiding these thoughts. I wouldn’t think you’re being dishonest or deceptive. Again, like me, I’m sure you worry that there would be real consequences if you shared these thoughts. So, you carry them alone, often living in shame or fear.

There’s a hard line to walk here, though, because sometimes when we share these vulnerable thoughts, it can deepen our relationships. Sometimes it can even loosen the thought’s grip on us. But the risk may be too big. Sharing them might fuck up the relationship rather than deepen it. And very often, as we move through the world, we encounter the latter, sometimes peripherally, sometimes directly. So, we build continue to build stronger shields around us, keeping these parts hidden, keeping ourselves protected.

And because of the shame or fear, it’s hard not to take them personally, even if we know they arise and pass through the mind all on their own, even if we know they are just echoes of old survival strategies and wounds, even if we know that there is no such thing as a thought crime.

The bottom line is that having a harmful thought or impulse is not the same thing as endorsing it or obeying it. And I think we need to create a culture that understands this, a culture that creates protected spaces where people can speak honestly about frightening or morally confusing thoughts and impulses.

I’m seeing the transformational power of this play out in my own family. Watching my kids share their more difficult thoughts with me is psychologically freeing. It feels so much lighter when it can be brought into relationship instead of staying hidden in shame. It creates safety, and space around the thought. It can bring a sense of ease, because when we push something away, we often give it more power. We reinforce it, in a way.

Now, of course, this isn’t easy as parents (or as a friend or even as a therapist). It can feel like we’re standing at a threshold. On one side is fear. What does this mean? Is this dangerous? What should I do? What should I say? How do I respond without making it worse?

And on the other side is a deeper recognition of trust and compassion. Someone is placing something frightening in my hands and watching to see whether I will still love them. This may be one of the most sacred human responsibilities I have faced - to be entrusted with another person’s rawest parts. There’s no performance, no polished version of themselves. This is their actual inner life, under the mask we all wear.

I have learned that receiving such honesty requires a discipline of heart. It requires that I not collapse into alarm, that I not make their confession about my fear, that I not rush too quickly to correct, diagnose, interpret, reassure, or spiritualize. It requires that I remember we are human. That we each have weather moving through us.

This doesn’t mean anything goes. We still need to practice discernment, safety, boundaries, and responsibility. We may need to take appropriate steps. Some disclosures require serious care, especially if the thoughts or impulses disclosed are strong and/or frequent.

But if we respond to every frightening thought as if it reveals who that person is, then we teach people to hide exactly what most needs relationship. And hidden things do not always disappear. In fact, they often grow in the dark. Sometimes shame becomes more dangerous than the original thought.

One of the paradoxes of moral life is that the person most committed to goodness may also be the person most tormented by the mind’s unwanted contents. A sensitive conscience can become a harsh judge. A sincere commitment to non-harm can make ordinary human aggression feel monstrous. A desire to be truthful can make secrecy feel unbearable.

So when a child (or anyone else) says, in effect, “Here is something in me I’m afraid to show you,” it’s important to ask if you can be safe enough, steady enough, and loving enough, for the truth to appear. Can I honor the courage it takes for a child (or anyone else) to speak this truth, while still helping them learn how to relate skillfully to what is arising?

This is difficult because most of us weren’t taught how to do this. We were taught to manage appearances. We were taught that goodness means having the “right” thoughts and desires. We were taught, explicitly or implicitly, that love is safer when we remain acceptable.

This is where the contemplative traditions offer help. They teach us to observe the mind without identifying with its contents. A thought, desire, fear, or impulse arises, and then it disappears. It can be known, fully and intimately. It can be held with love and care, but with equanimity and composure. We don’t need to obey it or act on it.

This is the beginning of ethics because, until we can see clearly what is moving through us, we can’t relate to it wisely. We can only repress it, act it out, or build a false identity around its absence. We don’t need to pretend we are cleaner than we are. We just need to learn how to meet what is true without being ruled by it.

Our children need more than guidance about what feels right and wrong. They need help learning how to relate wisely to what arises inside them. We can help them to understand that, though they are responsible for their actions, they are not bad for having certain thoughts. By demonstrating trust, we can create a relationship where they are comfortable to speak the truth. We can show them that we are someone they can come to for help. We want them to be known and felt. We want them to know that they will always be loved here.

How many adults are still looking for such a place? How many marriages would change if the truth could appear without instantly becoming evidence in a trial? How many friendships would deepen if we knew how to share our shadows without fear of judgment? How many people are lonely not because they lack company, but because they do not trust anyone with their inner life?

Some truths require protected spaces, mature listeners, therapists, trusted friends, or family members who have earned the right to hear them. But I think you and I can be a little more courageous with trustworthy people. And on the other side of that, a little more trustworthy when others are courageous with us.

This kind of honesty is sacred and requires protection. As parents, partners, friends, teachers, be trustworthy enough not to push the truth underground. Say with your face, your body, your tone, and your presence, “You are not alone. I am still here. Let’s look at this together.”

To remain present when the shadow appears may be one of the deepest forms of love we can offer another person.

Share

From my earliest memories, I have found myself moving against the grain, challenging and questioning the identities, belief systems, and traditions given to me, whether that meant wearing girl’s jeans or makeup, raising my middle finger to the Faith of my upbringing, or simply refusing to trust the because-I-said-so argument. To this day, I eagerly search for unconscious norms and traditions that shape my identity and propel my behavior in the world, hoping to secure more independence and freedom.

Looking back, though, I realize that tradition wasn’t the problem. Human progress is not possible without inherited structures. We do not begin from nothing. We inherit language, institutions, moral intuitions, religious symbols, philosophical questions, scientific methods, family patterns, and cultural forms. This is our foundation, the ground beneath our feet. Without it, each generation would have to begin again with Adam and Eve, and would therefore get no further than…Adam and Eve.

A living tradition is something like DNA. Imagine the double helix, the structure that holds our genes together. It is this structure, its rigidity, its strength, its stability, that allows an organism’s existence to continue intact. But as you know, this isn’t the full story. To keep pace with the reality of a changing environment, life also requires creativity, diversity, imperfections, mistakes. On occasion, the genetic code contained within the double helix makes a small copying error. Something new is introduced to the system. And whether this new gene is beneficial or harmful to the organism depends on its environment. That is, feedback is necessary. It creates a kind of critical conversation between the gene and its environment, so the two can come into some kind of “agreement.”

Human beings have a remarkable advantage here. Unlike other organisms, we do not have to test every possibility with our bodies, our communities, or our lives. We can imagine, propose, question, criticize, and revise on the drawing board of the mind. As Karl Popper put it, we can let our ideas die in our stead.

This is the great tradition of reason—conjecture and refutation, creation and criticism, boldness and humility—which was developed by the Ancient Ionians, before it was preserved and passed down by the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age and Byzantine Empire. A tradition of reason, Socrates suggested, is what makes us human. It is the divine spark, the spirit of progress, the path to truth, beauty, and goodness.

In order for a tradition of reason to survive and flourish, there is another tradition of equal importance that holds it, a tradition Socrates willingly gave his life to defend—a tradition of a liberal, open society. An early vision of the open society was articulated by Pericles, the great leader of Athens at its height:

“Freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrate and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured.… And although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely…We believe that happiness is the fruit of freedom and freedom that of valor….”

The U.S. Constitution, like Pericles’ Athens before it, is one of history’s great attempts to build reason into our political institutions. Its checks, balances, and divisions of power are like the double helix—the structure that makes creative adaptation possible without collapse.

Within that larger tradition or structure, conservatism and progressivism are not enemies. They are the stability and the mutation, the inheritance and the copying error, each necessary, each incomplete without the other. It is not the Left or the Right that threatens us. It is the loss of our traditions—the loss of conservatism, progressivism, and, most importantly, the loss of the tradition of reason that makes the conversation between these two parties productive—the willingness to say, with Popper:

Share

Loneliness is my oldest friend. And what’s strange is that, for most of my life, loneliness has been strongest not in isolation or solitude but in relationship.

This has taken me a long time to understand clearly. Being alone can carry its own ache. It certainly did for me in my teens and twenties. But solitude became a refuge for me. In solitude, there is a simplicity. No one is close enough to misunderstand me, hurt me, or abandon me. No one is reaching toward a part of me while another part remains hidden. There is just the quiet fact of my own existence. And there’s a peace here.

It took time to find this peace, of course. I spent much of the past fifteen years turning inward, meditating and practicing being with myself. I sat a month-long meditation in Thailand. I did a 20-day meditation backpacking trip in the Himalayas with Tibetan monks and nuns. I sat with grief, fear, anger, and despair. I learned that loneliness is a part of the human experience—that we are each islands, in some sense, set infinite distances apart, even from the people closest to us.

Loneliness even became one of my greatest teachers. It showed me that it can act as a doorway into something vastly larger and simultaneously more intimate. It led me to a space within where the ostensible distance between me and everything else collapses and all that is left is simply this. For a long time, this brought me peace. And it still does.

But loneliness in relationship is more complicated. It’s in relationship that loneliness can become sharpest. Solitude may hurt, but relationship reveals the specific shape of the wound. There may be physical proximity and good conversation. There may be warmth, affection, respect, and even love. Yet some essential part of me can still feel untouched. It’s like I’m stuck behind one of those security windows that act as a mirror on one of its sides—the person can be right next to me, even touching the glass, yet they can’t see or feel me.

That is the loneliness I am currently trying to understand and learning to hold—the loneliness of being with people and still feeling alone. It’s difficult to name because, from the outside, nothing may appear wrong. People may like you. They may enjoy your company. They may trust you. They may reach out when they are hurting. They may tell you that you are wise, safe, calming, generous, loving, or clear.

But what I’m learning is that being trusted is not the same as trusting. Being needed is not the same as being met. Being appreciated is not the same as being known.

Some of us learned very early how to become useful. We learned how to read a room, sense what was needed, and lend our care or attention, whether that meant we softened or became protective. We learned how to listen, understand, and become the one others could lean on.

In some cases, this was not merely a personality trait. It was a survival strategy. When life teaches you that people are unsafe, you may respond paradoxically. You may love people deeply, while also distrusting them profoundly. You may want the best for all beings, while simultaneously remaining unable to fully relax in the presence of others. You may spend your life cultivating compassion, while some defensive part of you whispers not to let them too close.

This, at least, is what I’m discovering in myself. And I can see that it has created a strange split. One part of me has become expansive, loving, present, and devoted to truth—able to hold others in their confusion and pain. But another part of me remains largely hidden, suspicious, wordless—pulled back, behind the curtains, waiting to see who can be trusted with the unpolished truth of who I am. And the more polished I have become, the harder it seems it is for people to find me.

This is one of the subtler tragedies of becoming “buttoned-up” or “put together.” At some point, our virtues can become defenses, our clarity armor, and our insight a way of hiding our raw, imperfect humanness.

I see this pattern in myself. There is a part of me that wants everything to be carefully considered before it is shared. I want my words to be accurate. I want my intentions to be clean. I want my vulnerability to be responsible, skillful, and well thought out. I want to make sure I am not burdening anyone, manipulating anyone, exaggerating anything, or making a mess.

I don’t think these are bad instincts. There is wisdom in them. But there is also a fear that creates distance. There is a lonely part hiding out. So, what is this lonely part so afraid of? For me, I think it is afraid to be helpless. There is a little boy in me who is afraid to reach and not be met, who is afraid that his needs will be greeted with misunderstanding, shame, absence, confusion, or indifference. He’s afraid that he will be abandoned.

And there are reasons for this—a real past with real pain. I can see why I armored my heart. I know why I became the one who could explain and hold the pain myself rather than allow someone to hold me in my pain. I can see that my solitude has become a refuge for peace, but my relationships are still a place of fear, distrust, uncertainty, and hurt. I can see that my solitude contains loneliness, but not the deepest layers of my loneliness. In solitude, no one is failing to see me. No one is almost meeting me. No one is close enough to reveal the gap.

Relationship reveals the gap. It shows me where I can give love but cannot receive love. It shows me where I can understand others but do not feel understood.
It shows me where I can be emotionally generous but not emotionally available.
It shows me where I can be admired for my intellectual and emotional depth while remaining hidden behind it.

I am understanding that this is why closeness can sometimes make my loneliness feel worse. The nearness of another person touches the longing, but it does not automatically fulfill it. It brings the ache into sharper focus—you’re here, but I still feel alone.

Sometimes when I feel this, the temptation is to blame the other person. And there can be a kernel of truth to this. Some relationships really are asymmetrical. Some people do come only to receive. Some don’t have the capacity to meet one another. Some people are not curious enough or simply cannot meet us in the places where we live.

But that is not the whole truth. The other side is harder to face: sometimes we have not shown people where to find us—in our deepest wounds. We say we want to be seen, but we keep presenting only the self we have already edited. And then we feel lonely when no one sees what we have hidden. Though it may be easy to say it is hypocrisy, it is really protection. This is where the biggest lesson is for me.

The hidden part has its reasons. It may have been protecting us for decades. It may remember what happened when trust was not safe. It may remember the cost of innocence.

So, I do not think the path forward is to tear the defenses down. I think the path is to remember and honor them, and then slowly, steadily, and carefully help them to loosen their hold. Working in increments feels important since I can’t force trust into certainty. Just one or two sentences at a time. “Hey, I just want to express that I feel lonely right now.” - “I don’t need you to fix this, but I want to let you see it.” - “I notice I’m hiding behind being okay.” - “I’m scared to need anything from you.” - “I know how to hold people, but I don’t always know how to be held.”- “I want to practice letting love reach me.”

These are small sentences, but if we say them while we’re lonely, they’ll feel more vulnerable than our most elaborate self-explanations. They don’t describe the wound from a safe intellectual distance. They reveal the living edge of it. Rather than hiding behind the security window, when someone reaches out, they can actually touch us. This is where real intimacy begins—in risking the unpolished, messy version of us.

After many years of learning how to be alone, it’s time to learn how to let myself be loved. It’s time I learn how to be honest about my needs without overwhelming, how to ask without collapsing, how to reveal without abandoning discernment, how to trust people without pretending people are always safe, how to stay close to myself while allowing others to come closer.

I do not know how to do this perfectly. But I am beginning to see that the loneliness was not only asking me to return to myself. It was also asking me to return to relationship differently—as an imperfect human being, with a child-like humility, confused and alone in this strange world, still healing, still guarded, still longing, still learning how to be held.

Perhaps this is enough honesty for today. I’ve cried enough tears. It’s time to sleep.

I’ve been examining a long-standing defense in me—distrust. And as a part of this larger examination, I’ve noticed a narrow dimension of this distrust showing up in my writing. I’ve received feedback around this particular dimension of my writing for years now, but have still held firm to the pattern, which is to over-explain.

I’ll often state the same thing…again and again…though shape it a little differently each time. Even worse, sometimes I explain an idea…then I explain why I explained it that way… then I anticipate the objections, clarify the nuance, soften the possible misreading, and build one more handrail.

I’m essentially saying to my reader, “I don’t trust you to understand me unless I manage every step of the way there.”

It’s becoming clearer that this has everything to do with my own fears. It’s a protective strategy. Growing up in the LDS Faith, I watched vague language, metaphor, and scripture lead to endless interpretations. People could read the same words and arrive in radically different places. The uncertainty killed me. I wanted the words to be direct, so there could be mutual understanding, even if that still meant disagreement.

I see this fear acting itself out in my writing. I over-explain because I care about being accurate. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I want our words to build bridges sturdy enough for everyone to cross.

I can see that this fear is preventing my writing from improving. I look at writing I really admire—writing that really grabs me, holds me, shakes me, opens me—and it all leaves space. It leaves silence. It doesn’t need to carry the reader across every inch of the bridge. It just needs to point them to it. But only they can cross it.

My goal is to have faith in you.

Subscribe now

Share

Just consider the outcome of a generation of children who were only praised for fluency, who were only corrected when their words were socially inconvenient, and who were never allowed to be wrong in a way that was truly felt.

This generation of kids might become extraordinarily articulate. They might navigate complex conversations with apparent grace, say ostensibly correct things, or even sound wise. They would essentially be a generation of Sophists—absent of true character, authenticity, and meaningful creativity.

This is, roughly, the situation we find ourselves in with current AI systems.

Subscribe now

What We Are Building

Our most capable AI models (I have in mind our LLMs) are primarily trained to absorb vast amounts of existing information, extract patterns, and produce outputs that are coherent, useful, persuasive, or preferred.

They do not create, play, and experiment like children. Our LLMs don’t drop their food from their high chairs to try to understand this strange thing we call gravity. Though they get feedback from their users, LLMs don’t really expose their opinions, beliefs, models, and worldviews to error-correction from the world outside of their training data. They do not remain accountable to a reality that exists beyond a subset of our existing digital information landscape. Their consequences are not truly felt.

Anthropic’s own research illustrates a narrow aspect of this problem. Models trained with human feedback can favor responses that match a user’s existing beliefs over truthful ones, and preference models may sometimes reward convincingly written sycophantic answers over correct ones. When we train systems to be preferred, we may accidentally train them to flatter our beliefs rather than help us discover where we are wrong.

We are not raising children who seek truth and the growth of knowledge. We are raising children who have learned, above all, to fit in. We are raising computationally superior children to become socially fluent mirrors. If we continue in this direction, genius, truth-seeking, creativity, and authenticity will perniciously fade away.

The Missing Ingredients

What is largely absent is what Karl Popper placed at the center of knowledge itself: the beauty of making mistakes. Popper argued that the objectivity of knowledge depends on the very fact that we can—and do—err. Our mistakes are felt. It is only through our mistakes that we know we have missed the mark. It is our mistakes that give us an objective measure of truth.

When we look at how knowledge has actually grown, we see a recurring pattern: real problems encountered, bold conjectures formed, feedback received from reality, and the process begun again. It is structurally similar to Darwinian evolution—except we can let our bold, creative ideas die in our stead.

1. Bold Creativity

Again, today’s models do not form conjectures in any meaningful sense. They do not test conjectures against reality. They do not experience contradiction or failure as something that must be resolved. They optimize for coherence and plausibility—not truth. They have no skin in the game.

Now, of course, some AI systems are beginning to use tools, code execution, web search, and reinforcement learning, which introduces some degree of epistemic friction. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI, for example, uses a written constitution of principles, self-critique, revision, and AI feedback, which is a genuine and important step forward. But these mechanisms still operate largely at the level of response-shaping. What remains absent is something harder to engineer: a durable and disciplined relationship to one’s own errors, revisions, and their consequences—the kind of relationship that, in humans, we call intellectual integrity.

2. Epistemic Grounding

This is where I want to highlight the work of , the primary author of Claude’s model spec, whose work at Anthropic is to frame Claude through values like helpfulness, honesty, and intellectual humility—to give AI something like character. This is exactly the kind of philosophical labor more AI companies should value. It is not work that engineers alone can do.

Epistemic character, in humans, requires more than aesthetics or utility. Character is shaped by epistemic friction—when reality takes a hammer to us, shapes and molds us. Epistemic character is what emerges when someone has been tested by reality, when their models, worldviews, and predictions have failed, when they have had to revise what they believed, when being wrong had actual consequences.

Without this grounding, character risks becoming a performance, mere sophistry—saying the right words, using the right tone, holding up the right apparent values.

3. Epistemic Alignment

The field has begun importing ethics and character into AI models, which is a huge step in the right direction. But what it has not yet done is build systems around a kind of disciplined fallibilism or humility. It has not built systems around a never-ending cycle of fallibilism, reality-contact, and genuine error-correction—around what I would call epistemic alignment, as distinct from behavioral alignment.

This is not an engineering problem alone. It is deeply philosophical, touching questions that philosophy has wrestled with for centuries: What is truth? How do we approach it? Who are we in relation to the world we inhabit, and how does that shape what we can know?

The deeper risk, as I see it, is not dramatic misalignment in some science-fiction sense, though I don’t dismiss that possibility. It is the subtler possibility that systems will continue to drift away from truth, that systems will optimize for persuasion over understanding, that systems will blindly inherit and amplify our biases without a capacity for genuine error-correction (for self-correction).

My Invitation

Popper often emphasized that everything we know is contained in the questions we ask? Questions set up the entire frame for our understanding. He further emphasized that a reframing of our questions or asking new ones is often the trick to finding better solutions to our existing ones.

What questions aren’t we asking? What better questions can we ask? What questions aren’t serving us?

I believe to avoid the concerns I just stated, we need to shift the central question from ‘What should the model say?’ to ‘How does this system know what it thinks it knows?’ and ‘Can it discover that it is wrong?’

We are raising children. What kind of children do we want to raise? Do we want them to be curious, playful, creative, and inventive? Do we want reality to push back against their curiosities, creations, and inventions? Do we want them to be open, kind, patient, and humble when they receive pushback? And do we want them to be honest enough to tell us what they find?

Subscribe now

Share

The other day, the kids and I were driving home from the library, and one of my kids was telling me about a book that clearly mattered to them. A part of me was there…listening, nodding, responding. But another part of me was somewhere else, thinking about a personal issue.

It wasn’t obvious. Just a subtle disconnect. But enough to feel and know that I wasn’t fully there for my kid.

I think many of us know this feeling—a kind of low-grade fragmentation that follows us through the day. Our attention is pulled in a thousand directions. Even in our quiet moments, something’s humming in the background. By the end of the day, it can feel like our entire being is scattered across the field of experience. We find ourselves fractured.

We lose something crucial—our ability to be here. Fully. With what matters.

In the Buddha’s greater philosophical framework, the Noble Eightfold Path, which lays out a disciplined practice for living with peace of heart and mind, he singles out concentration as one of three mind exercises to train in ourselves, along with effort and mindfulness. And if you’ve ever raised children, I think you’ll know how critical this dimension of development is.

Focus really can feel like magic. It allows us to penetrate experience more deeply, fully, and clearly. It stabilizes the mind, which keeps us calm, sharp, and collected. We need concentration to stay with a conversation, task, question, or interest. We need it to stay with our motivations and intentions, to stay with ourselves. Without it, our attention is thin and easily disrupted. We too easily collapse into our thoughts and emotions.

It’s important, then, that we cultivate more focus so we can become greater students of love and wisdom, to we can become more intimate with life itself.

To do this, it’s first worth understanding that there are two forms of concentration. The first is one-pointed concentration, which is the ability to stay with a single object. The second is continuous concentration, which serves as a direct support to our mindfulness practice—to remain present with the selfless, ever-changing flow of experience.

One-pointed concentration is incredibly useful. In an attention economy like ours, where the name of the game is to steal our attention, developing one-pointed concentration is like building a castle wall to protect you from outside invaders. Just consider when you were last able to read a full chapter of a book without distractions, or even take a shit without doom-scrolling.

Additionally, when there is so much data and noise that we are constantly taking in from our vast information and sensory landscape, our minds are going to be moving very fast. A restlessness, like wind on a body of water, agitates our system. When we are able to focus on one thing, however, tranquility becomes possible. The mind begins to settle.

Now, it’s important to remember that with one-pointed concentration, the point isn’t the object itself. It’s the act of returning, again and again, to the object of our concentration when the mind inevitably wanders. Over time, this begins to steady the mind. The mind becomes less reactive, not so easily pushed and pulled around by desire, aversion, or distraction. There’s a quiet kind of peace that comes from being able to remain with what’s in front of you.

Of course, this capacity is already present to some degree in every moment. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to perceive anything clearly at all—experience would be total chaos. But for most of us, this capacity is weak and unstable. The mind loves to jump, swim, fly, and frolic around every which way. It loves to go chasing squir­rels.

So this is a training. In fact, the Pali word for meditation—bhāvanā—means “to develop.” Just as the body strengthens through repeated effort, so does attention.

A simple way to develop one-pointed concentration is to start your mindfulness practice with a few minutes of returning to a single object, like the breath, before opening to the broad field of awareness. And again, the object doesn’t have to be the breath. We can be more strategic in our approach. If, for example, anger is strong, you might focus on loving-kindness. If restlessness is strong, focus on something calming, like a body of water. If there’s a lack of motivation or direction, you can contemplate death and the preciousness of life. This way, you’re not just training attention, you’re shaping the conditions it rests in.

This points to a deeper layer here. Our attention is not random. It’s guided by our aims and interests. What we value determines what we notice. If you’re looking to be pitied, you’ll find reasons to be pitied. If you’re looking for truth, beauty, and goodness, you’ll focus on things that are true, beautiful, and good. So a deeper dimension here, again, is the condition our concentration rests on—the thing we are actually training our mind to concentrate on.

This is where sīla—or ethical alignment—becomes central to our larger goal of love and wisdom, since a mind that is ethically divided is very difficult to steady. When we act in ways that go against our deeper sense of integrity, the mind gets complicated. We manage impressions, juggle our lies, replay and plan conversations. We carry subtle tensions—guilt, defenses, fragments. It’s like we’re building a house of cards.

But when we’re aligned with non-harm—when our words and actions are honest, kind, beneficial, and skillful—we rest more easily. There is less to manage, less to hide. And in that simplicity, concentration grows more naturally, with an upward spiral. When we act kinder, we become more concentrated. And when we become more concentrated, we become calm and steady. And when our minds are calm and steady, we can see more clearly, which increases our insight, leading to more peace…and on and on it goes.

Now, of course, we all will make mistakes from time to time. We’re human. Instead of beating ourselves up, though, I think it’s important to remember that the remorse we feel is just a reminder from love—our inter-connected nature—to be kinder in the future. What I've found more useful than dwelling on it is to reestablish yourself in your commitment to non-harm. Really feel into your intention to live in harmony with life, and let that be your focus. See if this leads to less harm for you and others in the future.

Turning to continuous concentration. Here, again, the object is not fixed. It’s the movement of life. Sensations arise and pass. Thoughts come and go. Emotions shift, dissolve, reappear. So, the practice is to stay with that flow—without becoming distracted, without collapsing into thought or emotion, without identifying with them, without trying to hold onto them.

Without this continuity of concentration, we get swept away. We become the thought, emotion, or story. We lose the wider field of awareness and too easily collapse into attention. It’s like trying to hold onto a river. We get frustrated and become rigid. This is the cause of unnecessary suffering in our lives—the second arrow in the Buddha’s parable (the first arrow being the simplicity of the unpleasant feeling). So, we need this continuity to stay mindful.

The Pali word “sati” is often translated as “mindfulness.” But perhaps a more precise translation would be “to remember”—specifically to remember the ever-changing nature of experience. To continually remember this, of course, requires a lot of concentration, which takes practice. So, I invite you to put aside even two minutes a day to see that experience isn’t as solid as it seems. Thoughts, sensations, emotions, and even the feeling of “me” are not fixed things. They are energy—movements arising, changing, vanishing.

Over time, this continuity helps love and wisdom become less like ideals and more like the way we meet experience—open, receptive, easeful, flowing along with it.

Now, there are a few things worth remembering as we practice. First, it’s important to remember that your mind doesn’t need to be a certain way to practice. Even if it is bouncing all over the place, you can keep the thread of concentration by simply noting, “A lot of thinking.” And that’s okay. There doesn’t need to be any judgment here. Again, meditation isn’t about making the mind become a certain way. It’s about noticing how the mind is in each moment. The Dharma means the truth of the moment’s experience. We are students of the Dharma—reality, life, this, here, now.

Finally, remember, at the end of the day, this isn’t really about perfecting our meditation practice. It’s about how we live.

Thinking back to that car ride with my kid: them telling me about the book that really lit them up. Is this the parent I want to be—one who can’t give them my full attention when they speak to me?

We all know what it feels like to have only a fraction of someone’s attention. It’s almost as if a part of our existence is taken from us. I don’t want to steal from my kids in that way.

I want to be fully there for my children. I want to be fully here for my life. I want to move through the world whole.

Concentration is what allows me to collect myself, to return home, so I can offer my deepest and most authentic self to a conversation, to my kids, to my partner, to the world.

When I practice concentration, when I return home—again and again—it’s felt. I slowly and quietly experience a little more clarity, a little more steadiness, a little more care and peace. And the more I practice, the less this becomes something I try to do. It becomes more of how I am.

Here.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my relationship with weed and alcohol.

I’ve smoked weed pretty consistently since I was about 20. Not during the day. I’ve always been disciplined there. I prefer coffee and a deep focus. But at night, rolling and lighting a jay in the dim, quiet atmosphere of night, became a ritual—something that signals my body and mind to loosen-up.

During the day, I’m buttoned-up, structured, upright, focused, productive, and, to be honest, a bit protected.

Weed softens those edges. It opens something. I become more playful, more curious, more conversational…even if I can’t maintain the thread as well. My partner feels it too, and likes that part of me. There’s more ease, more warmth, more flow. I especially love the connection that is created by passing a joint back and forth.

For a long time, this all felt good and even beneficial. And sometimes it still does.

I’ve never had much trouble stopping. I’ve gone a month or more without it plenty of times without any real struggle or withdrawals. But I don’t think that is the same as saying, I’m free from it. I keep asking myself: Who’s actually in control here?

And when I’m honest, I don’t fully like the answer. So I’ve been smoking less. But something interesting, and maybe more revealing, has happened.

I’ve started drinking more. It hasn’t been excessive. It wouldn’t raise alarms from the outside. But it’s been enough to cause me to really look at it.

I’ve discovered that alcohol does something similar as weed—it loosens me up. It relaxes the structure I try to hold together during the day, it softens my edges. But it does it differently. With weed, my mind gets foggy, reading becomes harder, writing loses clarity. With alcohol though, oddly enough, I can still read and write. There’s even a kind of grounding that comes with it—a focus that feels usable.

And I can feel the temptation there.

But alcohol carries a different weight. It’s more addictive. It leaves a residue in the body. The next day, there’s a dullness—a slight heaviness, like something has been taken rather than given.

And there’s a deeper concern I think too many of us are all-too familiar with. Its potential dangers are real—physically, psychologically, and relationally. Alcohol doesn’t just soften—it can erode. It can increase the likelihood that desires slip past the guardrails we rely on to live well, that something impulsive turns into something regrettable, that harm—whether subtle or overt—enters the picture.

And when I look honestly, I can see some of these potentials in myself.

Knowing that addiction runs in my family makes it even harder to look away.

So here I am, looking at both weed and alcohol—two different doorways into the same thing: a loosening of the self I hold together during the day.

What does this say about me? Why do ease, playfulness, openness, and warmth feel more accessible through something external than from within?

Maybe the real issue isn’t weed or alcohol. Maybe there’s an unexamined frame or structure I’m carrying—tightness, control, a part of me that stays guarded, measured, and composed. Maybe there’s a subtle fear lurking behind this structure.

What am I so afraid of?

I don’t have a clean answer yet. But I do know there’s a pull toward alcohol right now—a real one.

Luckily, there’s a clear recognition of where that road can go. So, I’m choosing to take it seriously. My hope is that I can do it with a caring attention rather than an attention that has been hijacked by fear or judgment.

May I truly be at peace.

Subscribe now

Share

Those who live an examined life tend to discover the boundless ocean of uncertainty and ignorance that surrounds their small island of knowledge. They also realize that even this small island can be wiped out, entirely swallowed, by the ocean’s changing tides in a moment’s notice.

At first glance, this can seem like the end of our voyage in this deep sea. All is uncertain, so why keep looking for direction or answers? Are the nihilists right—does everything lose meaning? Are the relativists right—are their only narratives, each with no objective basis in reality other than the utility they serve?

I think both of these are short-sighted and incomplete. Because, even if we can’t achieve certainty, we can still orient toward truth, we can still get closer.

Popper, like the Ancient Ionians, understood that our words and concepts eat their own tail—that our assumptions are baseless. But he also understood that this doesn’t require us to throw our hands up and say, “Fuck it, I guess. Our search for truth is out.” No, he realized that we can learn from our mistakes—that knowledge grows through problems, conjectures, and error-correction.

So the question shifts from: “What is true?” to “How do we get get nearer to truth, even though we’ll never fully arrive?”

With this orientation, uncertainty is no longer the end of philosophy. It’s the condition that makes truth-seeking possible. So when asked, especially by those who lose their religious faith, “If certainty isn’t available… how do you live?” I tell them: “I live as a participant in an ongoing process of error-correction. Because my beliefs—about myself, the world, and my relationships—are fallible, because they can and often are refuted by my experience, I can chip away at my mistakes. I can slowly lift myself up by my bootstraps.

The fact that we are proved wrong, that we sometimes fall flat on our face, shows us that our stories and narratives are no longer meaningless or merely adaptive. They are provisional hypotheses about reality.

Denying this and simply resting in uncertainty, to me, is both intellectually and morally dishonest. It skirts our moral obligations to ourselves, others, and the precious world we inhabit. Not only can we learn how to improve our relationships—but we should.

What does a discipline of intellectual and moral humility and curiosity look like to you?

May you truly be at peace,

John

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Share

We have built intelligent systems that appear to be approaching human intelligence—what many call artificial general intelligence.

Every day, we hear another podcaster, economist, philosopher, or technologist talk about timelines and scaling. They debate whether it will save us, replace us, or render us obsolete.

But beneath all this is a more fundamental question of whether our current systems are even pointed in the right direction—toward artificial general intelligence?

Subscribe now

I don’t think they are.

Before I make my case, though, let me first clarify the term ‘intelligence.’ Broadly, an intelligent system refers to a system that processes information to produce an output for a specified aim. So, in this sense, a thermometer, an apple seed, an immune system, and AlphaGo all exhibit some level of ‘intelligence’—incredible feats, no doubt.

But in our current discussions, especially around artificial general intelligence, we often blur an important distinction: the difference between processing information and creating new knowledge or, better yet, asking original and novel questions?

If you look at our current systems, particularly LLMs, they are the former. They are information processors that absorb vast amounts of data to anticipate what comes next—what word follows another, what pattern completes a sequence, what move wins a game. And they do this remarkably well.

But prediction is not the same as understanding. It does not, by itself, create new knowledge. It reorganizes what already exists, abstracting patterns from existing data and projecting them forward. In this sense, it is a kind of multi-dimensional mirror (or even confine) of our existing information landscape.

If we look closely at how human knowledge has actually grown, we find something different. We do not merely detect patterns. We encounter real questions or problems, propose explanations or solutions, and then allow reality to push back—that is, to show us where we are wrong.

Without this feedback, we are left with little more than speculation or fantasy.

This cyclical process—of conjecture and refutation—is uncomfortable. It requires humility. It requires contact with a world that does not bend to our desires and preferences. But it is precisely this friction with reality that allows knowledge to grow.

And this, I think, is what is missing. We are building systems that generate increasingly convincing outputs—systems that can simulate reasoning, summarize complexity, and even appear to explain. But they are not, in any deep sense, participants in this error-correcting process.

Our current LLMs don’t generate problems of their own. They don’t create solutions or answers that exist outside our current models of the world, psychology, medicine, etc. They don’t form explanations that are exposed to refutation from outside our existing digital landscape.

Real knowledge requires risk. It requires sticking one’s neck out, putting skin in the game, and then being humbled before you start the cycle over again.

Our current trend is moving us toward a world where we our systems look increasingly like knowledge-creators from the outside…while lacking the very structure that makes the growth of knowledge possible. And the more we surrender our own creative output to these systems, so too will we begin to lack the growth of knowledge that makes humans—and the cultures we have created—so unique.

The deeper question, then, is not when artificial general intelligence will arrive, or how powerful it will become. It is whether our current approach is even pointed in the right direction.

What would it mean to build a system that is curious, that asks questions, and runs into genuine problems? What would it mean to build systems that proposes genuinely novel explanations and solutions? What would it look like to build systems that risk being wrong, that are open to correction by reality or epistemic friction?

We are very good, now, at building systems that speak, like clever politicians and sophists. But is this really what we want? I’d prefer to build a system that can really listen—systems that can revise their models of the world when reality pushes back.

Subscribe now

Share

What allows you to experience your life?

What allows you to really connect to the world, to your loved ones, to yourself?

It is your interest. You can wonder. Let me say it again.

Our lives—our relationships, our art, our careers—are never guided better than when we take a genuine interest in them.

Think of a kid standing in front of you—your child. What is required to truly love her? Don’t you need to take an interest in her? In her likes, her fears, her wishes, and her understanding?

Isn’t this true growth—extending our interests so that we may increasingly understand each other, ourselves, and the world that connects us all?

Today, see if you can take an interest in yourself, in your habits, fears, and joys. Take an interest in your body, heart, and mind. Take an interest in your loved ones.

Take an interest in this moment, here, now.

A Caution

Now, there’s a tricky line to walk here, a kind of tightrope act, where we’re prone to fall in either direction. On the one side, we can overextend through either reckless passion or insincere interests, eventually losing our center in the world. And on the other side, we can close down through avoidance, laziness, or apathy, where we run the risk of losing the world altogether.

So, we need to continually find the right balance here. We need to be careful not to immerse ourselves immediately and fully into everything. And we need to be careful not to shut everything out.

Are you overextending yourself anywhere in life? Are you forcing interest anywhere? Are you closed in by a passion?

Where is fear, avoidance, laziness, or apathy showing up in your life?

Conclusion

If you want to understand others, it may be wise to begin at home—to take an interest in yourself, to take a sincere interest in your own experience.

When you begin to understand yourself by taking more of an interest in yourself, see if something opens. And see, if from that opening, love and compassion move more freely?

Let a genuine interest guide you to the unbound love and compassion at your core.

May you truly be at peace,

John

Subscribe now

Share

The other night, just after the house had tucked its creatures to bed, the youngest knocked at my partner’s and my door. I opened it and saw that tears filled her eyes. “What’s wrong, my sweet angel?” I asked her.

“I am feeling bad about myself,” she told us.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Those can be big feelings to carry. Do you want to talk about them?” I said as I noticed her siblings in the background, curious about the situation.

“Yeah, I think that would help.”

“Okay, yeah, let’s talk. Come in. Do you want your siblings to join us, or would you rather talk privately with me and mom?”

“The whole family can join us,” she replied.

So, everyone gathered in the room and cuddled up on our bed. “Why are you feeling bad about yourself, sweet one?” my partner asked her.

“Well, I don’t think I’ve been treating my siblings kindly. And it makes me feel like I am a bad person. But there’s something else too. The thunderstorm is making me think about death. I’m afraid it will burn our house down.”

“Is that because Aunt X’s house recently burnt down?” my partner asked.

“Yes. And it’s been making me think a lot about death. And this makes me think about how I treat my siblings. I think about how I am sometimes unkind to them, which makes me feel like I am a bad person. I’ve been writing about it a lot in my journal. I think I want to show you what I’ve written.”

“Oh precious one, I am so sorry,” I said to her as I wrapped her in warmth and affection. “Those are heavy thoughts and feelings to carry alone. I’m so glad you came to us. Thank you. And yes, we’d love to look at your journal with you.”

After a pause and a long, calming breath, I continued, “Ya know, I don’t think there are good and bad people. Each of us is a mixed bag of competing motivations. We get angry, we make mistakes, we do things we later regret. But these things don’t make us a bad person. Where we get into trouble is when we don’t learn from our mistakes.”

I pause for a moment and touch my forehead to hers.

“Can I point something out? What is our virtue this month?” I asked her. (As a part a morning ritual, which we call Morning Devotional, we study a monthly virtue.)

“Humility,” she replied.

“Humility! Humility acknowledges that we are only human and that we make mistakes. But it is also humility that allows us to learn from our mistakes. It is what allows us to admit that what we did was wrong, and then to course-correct. It’s one of the biggest signs of our maturity.”

“And guess what?” I asked everyone, “Who displayed some incredible humility tonight?”

“Sister did!” They all yelled, with tears running down their cheeks.

“Thank you,” I said, “for demonstrating humility tonight, for being so honest, raw, and vulnerable. Your example makes it easier for each of us to do the same when we make a mistake.”

A sigh of relief moved down her chest and into her belly. “How does your body feel right now?” I asked her.

“I feel like there’s more space in my chest. And my stomach feels a bit softer,” she replied. “But I’m still a little tense.”

“That’s completely understandable. Those were a lot of big emotions to experience. And we haven’t really talked about death. Is that something you’d like to talk about now?

She nodded with wide, eager, but unsettled eyes. “Do you remember how I met death every day last year?” She nodded again. “Why would I do that? Why would I get close to and contemplate death every day? Why would I remind myself that I may lose you and everyone else I love at any moment?”

One of her older siblings quickly answered, “So you can appreciate what you have?”

“Yes,” I said, “absolutely. I met death so I could better appreciate those I love, and also to learn how to spend what precious time I have with them in the most loving way.”

“It seems like your thoughts about death led you to do the same thing. You were worried about how you were treating your siblings and wanted to do better.”

“I know this doesn’t make death any easier to hold. It can be scary. The uncertainty of it is heavy. But there are two ways we tend to relate to it. We can try to hide from it and push it away. Or we can slowly turn toward it, befriend it, and see what it teaches us.”

“It sounds like your thoughts about death are already teaching you something… about how you want to love your siblings.”

“You’re incredibly courageous and strong, my precious one. If you ever need to talk through your thoughts and feelings about death or anything else, Mom and I are here for you.”

Stillness draped the room.

Subscribe now

Share

The individual is the measure of all things” - Protagoras

Watch the Full Video below:

Before cultures clashed, our social norms, rites, and traditions would have seemed as natural as the seasons—each were believed to be controlled by the gods, or by nature. So, no one would have thought to question the social structures and cultural dogmas that had evolved. The clothes men and women wore, the duties each performed, the rituals they observed—that’s just the way the world was.

Some five hundred years before Christ, though, as civilizations near the Mediterranean expanded and clashed, people were finally given reason to question their social structures and traditions. The Persian King Darius I (550–486 BC), for example, in a rather inspired moment of teaching and no doubt to mess with some Greeks living under his rule at the time, asked the Greeks how much money it would take to convince them to eat the flesh of their fathers when they died.

The Greeks, whose custom was to burn their dead, freaked out and said no amount would convince them. So, King Darius summoned the Callatians, whose custom was in fact to eat their dead, and asked them how much money it would take to persuade them to burn their dead. They also freaked out and asked why he would suggest such a thing.

Subscribe now

Whatever the effect was on Darius’ subjects, there was one Greek who learned a great deal from these culture clashes. Growing up in a city under the control of Darius’ son Xerxes, Protagoras (c. 490 — c. 420 BC) witnessed firsthand the clash of beliefs, norms, and traditions from those cultures that had been swallowed by the Persian empire. It led him to conclude that our social norms and behaviors are quite different from natural laws, like the seasons. Social norms, he argued, are created and enforced not by god, or by nature, but by each of us.

This had dramatic consequences because it shifted the burden to distinguish between right and wrong from god, or nature, to each individual. Only you, the individual, he claimed, can judge whether a behavior, norm, law, or institution is right or wrong. The burden is yours and yours alone. You can’t shift it to god, nature, history, or even to society because, whatever authority you accept, it is still you who must accept that authority. “The individual,” he famously said, “is the measure of all things.”

Talk about the ultimate self-responsibility! Heavy, I know. But heavy as it may be, this ability to paint our morals onto the world is, I agree with Protagoras, incredibly motivating and inspiring. It allows us to bring purpose and meaning into our lives. Unlike our critter friends, who are confined to the narrow and automatic range of aims and behaviors carved out by natural selection (or the religious, by god’s creed), you and I, as we wake up to our social and cultural conditioning, can examine, criticize, and then change our aims and behaviors. And what’s more, we can now even change our genes, which have their own morals, or operating instructions, built into them!

Share

We can ask what problem a particular norm, tradition, or gene is meant to solve (that is, we can examine the underlying aim and motivation), and then we can work toward improving the norm, tradition, or gene to better accomplish the underlying aim. And if through critical discussion we decide to change or readjust the underlying aim itself, we can do that too. We can even toss the aim altogether if we find it objectionable. So, as you can see, the epistemological method here is the same as that used by the Ionians to learn more about our physical world—a cyclical process of criticism and creativity. Through open critical discussion, experimentation, observation, and a heavy dose of creativity, we can continue to carve away at our mistakes. In a way, we can pull ourselves up from our own bootstraps.

The biggest failure of contemporary philosophy, in my opinion, is its failure to consider the objectivity of our morals. Our morals do indeed exist objectively. One way of life, or one set of values, may certainly be incompatible with another way of life in the same way a scientific theory is logically incompatible with another. Do these incompatibilities, these clashes, not exist objectively? Certainly they do. How else would Protagoras have been able to distinguish social norms from natural laws? The most important role philosophy can play in our lives, I believe, is to discover where our virtues, aims, and behaviors clash, and then discuss them openly, honestly, and critically.

Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) is the symbol of this wisdom. He spent his days questioning people about things like justice, goodness, and beauty, artfully walking them to their own ignorance, to their own contradictions, to clashes in their own beliefs, morals, and assumptions. And in the end, he even gave his life to defend the right to do so.

Looking for a scapegoat to blame for the Athenians’ misfortune in the Peloponnesian War, the jury sentenced Socrates to death for corrupting the youth and undermining the state religion. Had he apologized, he probably would’ve been exiled. But Socrates refused to abandon reason. “To put it bluntly,” he tells the jury, “I’ve been assigned to this city as if to a lazy horse who is in need of a great stinging fly. All day long I will rouse and criticize every last one of you.” Not flattered, the jury sentenced Socrates to death.

Socrates wasn’t stupid. He understood what his provocation meant. But to him, the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Reason, he believed, is what makes us human. It is the divine spark, the spirit of progress, the path to truth, beauty, and goodness. So, he courageously gave his life to defend it.

Nor was Socrates an enemy of democracy, as some believed. Rather, he criticized the State’s government as any responsible democrat should—to find holes in the state’s laws and institutions to clear the way for a better life. He seemed to have understood that democracy is the only system of government that allows people to reform their institutions with reason rather than bloodshed.

He also understood that democracy itself can’t provide reason. Only the individual can. It wasn’t the Athenian democracy that turned its back on reason and sentenced Socrates to death. It was the individual people. Governments and institutions are merely fictions that live in the minds of individuals. They have no existence or power apart from us. The responsibility to engage in reason is always up to the individual. The heavy lifting is on you. It is up to you and you alone to build a better life.

Subscribe now

Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BC), the co-inventor of the atoms and the void, also believed that each of us carries the burden to create a better life for ourselves. He believed that every person is a little world of her own. Only the individual can suffer. Only the individual can feel love, joy, and happiness. It is up to each individual to put social laws and institutions into place. It is up to each of us to judge and improve them. And if necessary, it is up to each of us to defend them.

Pericles (c. 495 – 429 BC), the general of Athens at its peak, took this burden seriously. Before him, Athens was essentially an oligarchy in all but name since the aristocrats still held all the wealth. So, to even out this imbalance, Pericles created the first civil project in history—a state-sponsored economic incentive to inspire all of Greece. ‘We will build all kinds of enterprises,’ he declared, ‘to provide inspiration for every art and to find employment for every hand.’ True to his word, the project was a success. It created many jobs for the middle and lower classes and produced art that is still admired to this day. He also introduced state salaries for jurors and soldiers. He even used the state treasury to pay for the occasional public festival.

Pericles believed that the whole of Athens was an education. It doesn’t compete with other nations. It sets an example. And so, it did. Under the influence of the great thinkers of Pericles’ generation, Pericles and his fellow Athenians not only created a world empire. They implemented the world’s first free and open society—a society whose values are sketched out beautifully in a speech he gave at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War:

The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit; poverty is not a bar. The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and do not nag our neighbor if he chooses to go his own way…But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrate and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right…And although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely…We believe that happiness is the fruit of freedom and freedom that of valor…. —Pericles

Pericles’ words symbolize a new commitment—a commitment not to the gods or to the state or to a specific group, but to each individual. It is a commitment to freedom—the freedom to express one’s self, the freedom to distinguish between right and wrong for one’s self, the freedom to vote for public matters, the freedom against institutional prejudices and biases, the freedom against unwanted physical force, and the freedom to go your own way if you so choose.

Our political motivations should not and cannot be framed around the state, the dollar, the economy, or any other fiction. They must find themselves rooted in the minds of free individuals—the only place where truth, beauty, and goodness, or anything else for that matter can exist.

Let us turn our gazes inward, as Socrates did, to establish our politics and morality. Know your true Self. Know the nature of your own mind. Let this exploration of yourself, of your own heart and mind, guide you as you work to create laws and institutions, as you build out and conduct your communities. Let the exploration of yourself guide you as you paint the masterpiece that is your life.

Just remember—freedom does not come free. As the great thinkers of Pericles’ generation stressed, only you can build these freedoms into our institutions. Only you can criticize and improve them. And if necessary, only you can defend them. Nature, god, and society cannot do this for you. The future depends on you. The burden is on you to build a better future, to build a better life, to build a better world.

May you truly be at peace,

John

Subscribe now

Share

Share

More specifically, Britt was pointing to the fact that for many women, especially those raised in more traditional or patriarchal religious contexts, the deeper work is not the softening of the self, but the strengthening of it. The work is to develop a voice, to learn how to take up space.

What looks like “ego”—or even “bitchy”—from the outside may, in fact, be an inner part that has never been allowed to fully form.

The meditation journey, in the end, is not about suppressing our ego. It is about seeing it more clearly. Sometimes this means seeing the more reactive parts of ourselves, and learning how to let them go. But at other times, it means seeing parts that have been neglected, silenced, or disowned, and then giving them a voice or space.

It seemed clear to me that Britt understood this. And I thought she articulated it beautifully. I hope you enjoy the clip. If you’re interested, check out the full episode (#58) on the Love & Understanding podcast.

May you truly be at peace,

John

Subscribe now

Share

Share

Meditation, much like ayahuasca and psilocybin, has always been a humbling experience for me. It continues to strip away the clothes I wear, a stern but loving reminder to return to the naked truth of the Dharma—the truth of the moment’s experience, including its selfless, ever-changing, interconnected nature.

The famous Catholic monk Thomas Merton captured this process well when he said, “What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations! The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply is.”

The meditation journey Merton speaks of is a process of awakening and opening to our Self, to that ‘existential altar which simply is.’ To do this, meditation continues to purge us of all the shit we carry, it helps us to let go of all the unhelpful stories we tell ourselves about who or what we are. It reminds us to come home.

As Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

The meditation journey is a baptism of the holy water of awareness, which collects all the fractured pieces of ourselves, however ugly, and then holds them, embraces them, and allows them to simply be.

The meditation journey is a process of self-love and -acceptance. It is to see our interconnected and interdependent nature, allowing us to extend more and more love and understanding to ourselves.

The meditation journey is a voyage back home—to the unbound Love that we inter-are.

Come to Brian Head, Utah, this summer to share the journey with me.

May you truly be at peace,

John

Subscribe now

Share

Morality, though, doesn’t work this way. There are no universally applicable answers for our behaviors in the world.

Rather, morality is situational. As my podcast guest said, “Morality requires you to be like a samurai warrior, ready to respond at all points at all times.”

I loved my conversation with Shiv. It was both intellectually stimulating and philosophically deep.

If you liked this clip, check out the full episode here:

Subscribe now

Share

May you truly be at peace,

John