A quick note before we get into it: I’m heading to California this week to spend time with my father, so there won’t be any live streams for the next two weeks. I’ll be back with you live on Wednesday, September 16. In the meantime, I’ve already filmed a couple of videos that’ll go up on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok while I’m gone, so you won’t be totally without me.

I also want to say something about Dolly Parton, who crossed over this week. I wasn’t surprised — her sister had asked for prayers a couple of months ago, so I knew it was coming. And honestly, I’m not sad about it. I’m celebrating what an incredible light she was with her life, and how she used her time here as a teaching tool for so many of us. That’s really one of the best uses of time there is.

Today’s article grew out of Saturday’s live stream, and it ended up weaving together Dolly, a night I almost talked myself out of, and my dad — all through the lens of time. I hope you enjoy it.

Lots of Love, Max 💫💖

Time Itself Is a Choice

Friday night I woke up from a nap and looked at the clock and thought, there’s no way I have time to get to Lincoln Center. Sarah Bareilles was doing this storytelling project in the lobby of the Vivian Beaumont, singing a few songs from her new album, and I love her, I have loved her for years, but I was foggy from the nap and the math in my head said no. Not enough time.

And then I decided it didn’t matter. I went anyway.

It was incredible. I got to meet her. She signed my album. And none of that would have happened if I’d stayed in the story my head was telling me about how much time I did or didn’t have. The nap-brain math was never the truth. It was just time, doing what time does — telling me a story about before and after and not enough, so convincingly that I almost missed something extraordinary.

There’s something about music, about art, that doesn’t play by time’s rules to begin with. A song written decades ago still lands exactly the same. It doesn’t age the way a body does. That’s what I keep thinking about with Dolly Parton, who died this week. I have loved Dolly since I was a kid — I still have the shirt to prove it. What she gave the world, what she’s still giving the world, so plainly is not contained by the years she spent walking around in a body. Her songs are still going to be sung at kitchen tables and in cars and around campfires by people who weren’t alive when she wrote them. Her generosity, her particular way of making everyone feel like family whether they’d met her or not — none of that clocks out. It doesn’t have an ending the way a life in time appears to have an ending. Her impact is already living somewhere time can’t touch it. That’s not a nice sentiment. It’s the whole teaching.

In our Wednesday class we’ve been sitting with a line from Chapter 10 of the Course, in the section on the denial of God: “Arrogance is the denial of love, because love shares and arrogance withholds. As long as both appear to you to be desirable, the concept of choice, which is not of God, will remain with you.” Choice — the thing we protect like it’s the last freedom we have — is not of God. It’s not of unconditional love. It’s a construct. Not true in eternity. True in time. And the Course says it plainly, in exactly these words: time itself is a choice.

Say that slowly, because most of us never made that choice consciously. We were just born into a character who was born into a world running on clocks, and we picked up the story of before-and-after so early and so completely that it stopped looking like a choice at all. It started looking like reality. Living in time is, for almost everyone, an unconscious choice. Nobody sits down and decides, yes, I will now experience my life as a sequence of moments moving toward a future and away from a past. It just happens, the way water finds the shape of whatever it’s poured into. And because it’s unconscious, it feels like the only option there is.

I want you to actually look at this one, not just nod along with it. Notice how many times a day the separated self drags you back into time without asking permission. I’m going to be late. I’m going to be early. Will I succeed at this? Will I fail? What’s going to happen next? I wish I hadn’t done that. I hope I do better next time. That’s the whole operating system, running underneath almost everything you think and feel, and it’s running on time — a past to regret or improve on, a future to fear or hope for, rarely, if ever, just what’s actually happening right now. You don’t choose this consciously any more than you choose to breathe. But it is still a choice. Every single one of those thoughts is time, reasserting itself, pulling you back out of the only place anything is actually happening.

But there is another option. You can choose not to live in time. I want to be honest with you about this one — it might be one of the hardest things there is in releasing the separated self. Harder than most of the other letting-gos, because time isn’t just a belief you’re holding. It’s the water you’ve been swimming in since before you could talk. Choosing out of it isn’t a decision you make once. It’s a thousand small returns, over and over, to what’s actually happening instead of the story about what happened and what’s coming.

And here’s where the Course gives you somewhere to stand while you’re still in the middle of that: if you are going to live in time, it says, use time as a teaching tool, not as something that keeps the separated self alive in its own illusion. That’s a completely different relationship to a Tuesday than the one most of us walk around with. Time isn’t the enemy. What it does when you’re not looking at it honestly — reinforcing the story that you’re a separate little character marching from birth to death — that’s the enemy. Used the other way, time becomes the classroom instead of the sentence.

We love the image of the crossroads, too. One road goes this way, one goes that way, and you, brave little decision-maker, get to pick. It’s a good story. It’s just not what’s actually happening. What’s actually happening, once you stop forsaking yourself into time, is that you’re guided. Not guided like a suggestion you can take or leave — guided like water finding the low ground. You do the next thing. You don’t do that other thing. There’s no agonizing at the fork, because there was never a fork. There’s only the flow of unconditional love, doing what it does. And here’s the part people get wrong immediately: this doesn’t mean you’re always doing the “right” thing. There is no right thing. There is no wrong thing. There only is what is.

You know that line from the twelve-step rooms — your best thinking got you here. Every choice you’ve made, in time, built the reality you’re standing in right now. Not eternity. Not the timelessness running underneath all of it, unbothered, unchanged, waiting for you to notice it was never gone. This is why there’s no death. Why there’s no birth. Why you’re not a body. Not a comforting idea to hold onto — a description of what’s true once you stop looking at everything through the lens of a clock.

I’m about to go visit my father in California. He’s eighty-nine, and his body has gotten to a place where he’s almost immobile now — he depends on other people for nearly everything, and he’s been tired of that dependency for a long time. That’s a big part of why time carries such urgency for him. It’s not an abstraction. We talk about it a lot — time, time, time — get it? And I actually think that’s a good thing, for both of us. It’s not morbid. It’s honest. He gets to say the true thing out loud instead of circling it, and I get to sit in it with him instead of managing it from a distance. His relationship to time has an urgency mine doesn’t, because from where his character stands, time is running out. My character has released a great deal of what time used to mean to it. His hasn’t, and I understand why. I’m not going out there to teach him a lesson about eternity. I’m going to sit with him, in whatever time we call it, and let that be exactly what it is.

This is why the Substack and the live streams are called the Fire. Not because it’s dramatic — although, fine, it’s a little dramatic — but because what we’re doing is burning it down. All the stories. All the fictions. All the coulda’s, woulda’s, shoulda’s. What people call the dark night of the soul isn’t really a crossroads either. It’s the character’s annihilation. Not destruction — annihilation, which is a much better word, because it means the whole architecture that was never true just stops being propped up. And when that goes, you don’t get a new belief system to replace the old one. You get to see there was never a choice to begin with. Only the flow. Only what’s happening.

There’s a line from Wednesday’s private A Course in Miracles class I keep coming back to: start now to practice your little part in separating out the holy instant. You will receive very specific instructions as you go along. The holy instant is the Course’s word for something Eckhart Tolle wrote about too, in his own language, in The Power of Now — those small openings where the story of time just stops, and what’s actually here is what’s here. You already know what this feels like, even if you’ve never called it that. It’s whatever you’re doing when you completely forget to check the clock — painting, writing, playing music, cooking, working with your hands at something you love. It’s sitting with a child or an animal, where there’s no agenda, no before or after, just what’s happening right now between you. In those moments there’s no time. There’s only what you’re doing. That’s the holy instant, already available to you, already happening more often than you give it credit for. Not a permanent state you achieve and keep — a gateway. It opens, timelessness is unmistakably present, and then the character usually wanders back into the story. That’s fine. You just come back to the gateway. Again. And again. That’s the whole practice. Not figuring out the right choice. Not white-knuckling your way to the correct fork in the road. Separating out the instant. The one that’s actually happening, underneath the story about the one that already happened and the one that hasn’t happened yet.

When I sit with my father this trip, that’s what I want to practice too. Not fixing his relationship to time, not correcting it, not even really talking him out of the urgency. Just finding the holy instant with him, in the middle of a conversation that on the surface is about how much time is left. Because underneath that conversation, there’s still only what’s happening. There always is.

So here’s what I’ll leave you with — the same thing that got me to Lincoln Center on Friday even though my nap-brain swore there wasn’t time, and the same thing Dolly’s whole life is quietly proving all over again this week: time itself is a choice. If you stopped believing time was something happening to you, and started seeing it as something you’re choosing, unconsciously, moment to moment — what would you choose instead, right now, if you actually noticed you had the choice?

Tonight I got to be in the room for something small and beautiful. Sara Bareilles played a few songs at Lincoln Center for a free even…

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As a history major, and honestly as someone who’s always been fascinated by patterns — in individuals, in families, in entire civilizations — I find myself coming back again and again to one simple observation: history repeats itself. It happens in our personal lives, and it happens on the world stage. Right now, if you open your eyes, you’ll see it playing out everywhere — Ukraine and Russia, the US and Iran, conflicts across Africa, Lebanon, Israel. I follow a number of scholars who understand these dynamics far better than I do, and I learn a great deal from them.

I’m not telling you this to suggest you need to become a student of geopolitics. I’m telling you because understanding what’s happening in the world helps you understand what’s happening in the personal world too — in your own life, your own patterns, your own family. Nothing happens out of the blue. There is no “outside” and no “inside” — there is only what’s happening. If you want to simplify it, you could say the outside is a reflection of the inside. But really, it’s all the same thing.

Which is why, when I opened A Course in Miracles at random this week for what I call “ACIM roulette,” and landed on Chapter 23 — The War Against Yourself — it couldn’t have been more fitting.

So today I want to ask you directly: what war are you currently fighting with yourself? Where are you defending a position that’s actually rooted in a belief that you’re not enough? Where are you calling something “strength” that might actually be fear wearing a disguise?

The new video is live now on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok:

• 🎥 YouTube

• 🔥 Substack

• 📱 TikTok

A quick update on the schedule: I did my very first YouTube Live yesterday, and I’ll be doing another one this coming Saturday. Wednesday and Friday remain right here on Substack, all sessions at 10:00 AM Eastern. If you want to catch the Saturday sessions, make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube with notifications on, and of course subscribed here on Substack for Wednesday and Friday.

One more thing — after next week, I’ll be heading out to California for a couple of weeks to visit family, so keep an eye out for how that affects the schedule in the coming weeks.

Lots of Love,
Max 💫💖

Just wanted to share with you a short video of the spread at the housewarming. It was super fun. We had a great time. And I completely forgot to take any pictures lol. But my friend took this short video and watched till the end because there’s a special appearance!

Love you so much

💫💖

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Yesterday was a whirlwind — I hosted a housewarming for my newly renovated apartment, a full mid-century modern soirée, and got to share the space with some of my dearest friends. It was an incredible afternoon, and I’m still a little bit floating from it today.

Now that I’ve caught my breath, I’m so excited to share the start of something new. We just wrapped up our series on how everything is a story — and this week, we’re going even deeper, into a question that gets right to the heart of it: what if what you think you are is also just a story?

This is a big one. We’re talking about the character you believe yourself to be — your history, your beliefs, your culture, everything you’ve built your identity around — and asking what’s actually underneath it. It’s not always a comfortable question, but it might be one of the most important ones we can ask.

You can catch this series and everything else on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok — and don’t forget, I’m live here on Substack Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 10am ET if you want to dig into any of this together in real time.

Lots of Love,
Max 💫💖

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The weather here in New York has been absolutely gorgeous lately, and I’ve been getting out and exploring the city a lot more than usual, thanks to my new scooter — the battery life is incredible, and I’m having so much fun on it. It’s given me a whole new way to move through the city.

Last week I mentioned a change was coming to how I’m doing things around here, and starting today, it’s official: Sunday newsletters are becoming Sunday videos. Most weeks, instead of a full written article, I’ll be sharing a short intro here on Sundays — why the week’s topic matters to me and what we’re diving into — along with the first video in a new weekly series. From there, I’ll be posting follow-up videos through the week going deeper into that same topic. (Don’t be surprised if some weeks you still get a full article too — I’m keeping this flexible.)

This week, we’re talking about the idea that everything is a story. Once this really sinks in, everything changes. It starts with Lesson 2 from A Course in Miracles: you are giving everything the meaning it has for you — not the truth of it, just your meaning. In this first video I use a simple tape measure and the Rashomon Effect to unpack what that actually means in daily life.

Next up this week, we go deeper with Albert Camus.

Lots of Love,
Max 💫💖

Happy Thursday Everyone,

I want to give you something real to hold onto in a moment when almost everything about how I show up online is shifting.

Insight Timer has changed its policies around Live Events, and after a lot of back and forth, my Live hosting there has come to an end. I could tell you this is a loss — and in some ways it is — but the truth is, I’ve been talking to all of you for years about what happens when the ground moves. This is that, in real time. Not a metaphor. An actual floor giving way, and an actual choice about what to do next.

So here’s what I’m doing: not clinging to what’s gone, and not pretending nothing happened either. Just building something new, right alongside you.

Starting next week, here’s exactly where and when to find me:

Live, with me, in real time:
Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays here on Substack — 10 am ET same as it’s always been there. This is where the conversation happens, where I riff, where anything can come up.

New videos, every few days:
Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, around 8:15 AM ET, on Insight Timer, YouTube, TikTok, and Substack. Fresh material each time — not reposts, not old clips. Readings, reflections, and riffs pulled from the book, from A Course in Miracles, from wherever the week takes me.

I’m not going to pretend I know exactly how this new shape will feel yet. But I do know this: the work has never been about the platform. It’s been about the burning away of illusions we mistake for our lives — and that doesn’t require a specific app to keep happening.

I’d love for you to find me in this new rhythm. Come say hi.

Find me here:
📖 Substack — https://substack.com/@maxryan
🎵 TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@maxryan1
▶️ YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@MaxRyan777
🧘 Insight Timer — https://insighttimer.com/maxryan

Lots of Love,
Max 💫💖

I had one of those weeks where the universe apparently decided I hadn’t had enough mythology in my life. It started with The Odyssey in theaters — and yes, I’ve seen the critiques, I’ve read the takes, I know people have opinions about what got compressed or cut. But trying to fold an entire epic into one sitting is an absurd task to begin with, and I think it pulled it off. Odysseus doesn’t get home because he’s fearless. He gets home because he keeps moving even when every reasonable instinct says turn back.

Then I went and saw Hadestown, the filmed stage production, and it wrecked me in the best way. If you don’t know it — it’s Orpheus and Eurydice, the trip down to Hades and the attempt to come back, set against Hades and Persephone and the whole cycle of winter and spring. It’s gorgeous and devastating, and it’s only in theaters for a couple more days, so if you have any interest, don’t wait on this one.

Here’s what stuck with me about both: nobody in either story is unafraid. Orpheus is terrified the entire walk out of the underworld — that’s the whole point, that’s what makes the ending land the way it does. Odysseus is afraid on nearly every island he touches. Trust doesn’t show up in these stories as the absence of fear. It shows up as the decision to keep walking anyway, without the guarantee of an ending you’d like.

That’s exactly the territory of the piece I want to share with you today. It’s a section from my book Miracle Mindset, technically titled “Courage Is Not the Absence of Fear,” though for this newsletter I’m calling it Fear Is Not the Enemy, because that’s really the argument underneath it. Fear isn’t the obstacle standing between you and courage. It’s usually the thing walking right beside it.

And a small teaser: the moment I walked out of that theater, I knew Orpheus and Eurydice had to make their way into my second book, which is all about the development of trust. More on that as it comes together.

If it resonates and you want the rest of the book, you can find it here: Miracle Mindset.

Lots of Love,
Max 💫💖

Fear is Not the Enemy

I want to say something clearly that I think gets lost in a lot of spiritual teaching:

The goal is not to eliminate fear.

I know that might sound strange coming from someone who has just spent several pages explaining how fear anchors your ship. But stay with me.

Gavin de Becker makes a distinction that I find incredibly useful here. Real fear, he says, is a signal intended to be brief — a servant of intuition, not the master of it. It does its job, it points at something real, and then it steps aside. That’s fear functioning correctly.

The fear that keeps the ship anchored is different. It doesn’t step aside. It moves in. It unpacks. It redecorates. Suddenly your mid-century modern clarity is gone and you’re living in shabby chic with a touch of farmhouse heritage. Shiplap everywhere. Throw pillows you didn’t ask for. And the sign above the door that used to say “Live. Love. Laugh.” now says “But What If It All Falls Apart?” in distressed wood lettering.

That’s not the signal anymore — that’s the ego using the signal as an excuse to stay in charge.

Which is where courage comes in. Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s what happens after the signal has been received and honored. Feel it and do it anyway. The signal came. You heard it. You assessed it. And you moved.

Some of the most courageous people I have ever known were absolutely terrified. They did the thing anyway. Not because they transcended the fear. Because they refused to let it be the last word.

This is actually the oldest story we tell. It’s David and Goliath — and notice who’s making all the noise in that story. It’s Arthur as a child, pulling the sword from the stone while all the impressive adults had already given up and gone home. The hero is almost never the loudest one in the room. Courage doesn’t announce itself. It just acts.

That’s what this anchor is really about. Not destroying fear. Demoting it. Taking it off the throne it has been sitting on and putting it in its proper place — as one voice among many, offering information that may or may not be useful, no longer running the show.

Now here’s the thing that changes everything once you really get it:

Fear is not the enemy. It’s not even a thing.

Since fear comes from the ego — and the ego itself is just a construct, a story the mind tells about itself — fear is ultimately an illusion built on an illusion. You have been shadow boxing. Expending enormous energy fighting something that was never really there in the first place. And the exhaustion you feel? That’s real. The opponent? Not so much.

This is actually one of the oldest stories we have. In Genesis there is the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel through the night — a struggle so fierce and so consuming that it leaves him changed, physically marked, permanently altered. Biblical scholars and mystics across traditions — Jewish, Christian, Islamic — have long read this not as a literal battle but as an interior one. Jacob wrestling with his own fear. His own resistance. His own terror made manifest as something he had to physically fight because he couldn’t see it for what it was. He wrestled all night with something that only had power because he gave it power.

And when he finally surrendered — when he stopped fighting and asked for a blessing instead — he received one.

That’s the teaching. You have been wrestling your own angel all night. The fear felt absolutely real. The struggle felt absolutely necessary. And underneath it, waiting patiently for the wrestling match to end, was the blessing that was there the whole time.

This is not a reason to feel foolish. Every human being does this. It’s part of the condition. But once you see it — really see it — something shifts. You stop trying to defeat fear and start seeing through it. Which turns out to be much easier and considerably less tiring.

The fear was never the enemy. It was just a story the ego told so convincingly that you forgot you were the one telling it.

Yesterday on the Substack live stream, we ended up in a conversation about not fitting in — and about actually preferring to be alone sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes. I mentioned that this character used to compare myself to other people constantly, and it cost me a lot of years of joy. I’m not saying I regret those years. I don’t. But I can see clearly now how much of the present moment got lost to a habit that never had a real payoff.

That admission sparked something in the chat. A lot of you said you’d felt the exact same way: that sense of being different or alone even in a crowd, because whatever seems to interest or excite most people just doesn’t do much for you. It’s not a judgment on anyone else. It’s just recognizing you’re in a different place. Small talk is the clearest example for me — I have zero interest in it, and for a long time I thought that meant something was off. It doesn’t. It just means I’m not that person. This character has actually made peace with that, and with being good at simply being who I am instead of trying to be someone else to fit in.

That’s the conversation that brought me to this section of the book, “Competing vs Creating.” If any of this sounds familiar, I think you’ll relate. And if you haven’t picked up the book yet, the link is waiting for you at the bottom of the article.

Lots of Love,

Max 💫💖

Competing vs Creating

Here is something the ego does so automatically, so constantly, so invisibly that most people don’t even notice it’s happening:

It measures.

Every room you walk into. Every conversation you have. Every scroll through your phone. Every time you encounter another human being who is doing something, making something, being something — the ego is right there with its clipboard, running the numbers. Am I ahead or behind? Better or worse? More or less? Winning or losing?

It never stops. It never puts the clipboard down. It never says okay, we’ve established the rankings, we’re good, you can relax now. Because the measuring is not actually about information. It’s about maintaining the ego’s most essential story: that you are a separate self in a world of other separate selves, and your worth depends on where you rank among them.

That’s competition. Not the healthy kind that pushes you to grow — we’ll get to that. The ego kind. The constant, exhausting, never-finished kind that is quietly running in the background of almost every human interaction.

And here’s what it costs you: everything you could have been creating while you were busy competing.

Both Sides of the Scoreboard

Before we go any further I want to make sure we’re clear on something — because this is the same mistake we looked at in Chapter Eight with specialness, and it applies here just as directly.

When most people hear “comparison,” they picture one direction: I’m not as good as them. I’m behind. I’m lacking. They have what I want and I don’t have it yet.

But comparison runs in both directions. Always.

I was training to be an Olympic ice skater when I was young — yes, really, that is a sentence about my life, and yes, there is a whole other book in that story. But what I want to tell you about is a skater named Elvis Stojko. He was extraordinary. Powerful, commanding, gymnastic, a real performer. And he was small, like me. And I would watch him and think: he is so great. I want to be exactly like him.

That’s one side of the scoreboard.

And then I would watch other skaters — I’m not naming names, I have some class — and I would think: I’m much better than him. My figure eights are cleaner. My arms are more balletic. I’ve clearly won this particular unannounced competition that only I know is happening.

That’s the other side.

Same ego. Same clipboard. Same separation consciousness. One direction points up and feels like aspiration. The other points down and feels like superiority. But both of them are the measuring game. Both of them are keeping you focused on the scoreboard instead of the ice. Both of them are the ego doing what the ego does — ranking, comparing, never just skating.

The spiritual teacher Osho — controversial figure, extraordinary thinker, read him for yourself and make up your own mind — said something I have never forgotten: misery is like vitamins for the ego. Joy is like poison.

The scoreboard is misery. It feeds the ego perfectly. It keeps the separated self exactly where it wants to be — in constant reference to other separated selves, measuring, ranking, never arriving, never enough.

Joy — real joy, creative joy, the joy of making something from your own truth without a judge in sight — is poison to that system. Which is exactly why the ego works so hard to interrupt it.

Comparison Is the Thief

Theodore Roosevelt said it first: comparison is the thief of joy.

He was right. But I want to go further than joy.

Comparison is the thief of creation. Of originality. Of your particular and unrepeatable way of seeing the world. Every moment you spend measuring yourself against someone else is a moment you are not making something from your own truth. You are not creating — you are reacting. To them. To their version. To what they have that you don’t, or what you have that they don’t.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you about comparison: it’s never actually about the other person.

When you look at someone else’s life — their success, their relationship, their platform, their apparent ease — and you feel that particular cocktail of admiration and inadequacy, you are not actually responding to them. You can only ever see through your own eyes. Which means everything you see in them is a projection from you. The other person is just a mirror. They didn’t do anything to you. They’re just living their life. The ego grabbed them and used them as evidence for a story it was already telling about you.

There is no them. There is only you.

I know that sounds advanced. It is. But slip it in somewhere and let it sit.

The things that trigger your comparison response most acutely are almost always the things you most want for yourself. The success that stings to see in someone else is the success your soul is pointing toward. The creative work that fills you with that complicated mixture of inspiration and envy is showing you exactly what your own creative impulse is hungry for.

The comparison is information. Not about them — about you. The ego uses that information to keep you stuck. The miracle mindset uses the same information as a compass heading.

Oh. That thing I feel when I see that — that’s what I’m moving toward.

Not to get what they have. To create your own version. From your own truth.

There’s an acronym I’ve been teaching for years that students tend to love: Q-TIP. Quit Taking It Personally. I’ve had students say to me — mid-session, in the middle of a comparison spiral — I need a Q-tip right now. And they’re right. They do. Because the moment you take someone else’s success personally — as if it says something about your worth, your timeline, your ranking — you’ve just handed the clipboard back to the ego and asked it to take over.

Q-tip. Put it down. Come back to your work.

The World’s Largest Comparison Machine

Let’s talk about social media. Because we have to.

Social media is the most sophisticated comparison machine ever invented. It is engineered — deliberately, by very smart people who understand human psychology extremely well — to trigger exactly the measuring mechanism the ego loves most. Every scroll is a ranking exercise. Every like is a vote. Every follower count is a scoreboard. Every beautifully curated image of someone else’s life is an implicit question: how do you measure up?

And the answer the ego always gives — no matter how well things are actually going for you — is: not quite enough. Not yet. Almost. Keep scrolling.

And then there are the filters. Oh, the filters. I am not immune to this — my character has a relationship with a certain app called Beautycam, and I’ll just say that this character can be vain sometimes. More than sometimes. I’ve accepted it completely. The filter isn’t the issue. The issue is when you’re using it to compete with someone else’s highlight reel rather than just because you like the way it looks. One is creating. One is competing. You know the difference.

I made a decision at a certain point to leave some social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram — partly for political reasons and partly because I just couldn’t participate in the insanity anymore. Every expert in the world told me I was crazy. Max, that’s where your clients are. That’s how you build your audience. What are you doing?! And they weren’t wrong, exactly. But I couldn’t do it anymore. So I found a different way.

Here’s what I want to say about social media and creative impulse: use it to create, not to compete. Use it to share your truth, not to measure your worth. The moment you catch yourself scrolling and measuring — which will happen, because the platform is designed to make it happen — that’s the moment to put the phone down.

Oh. There’s the clipboard. I see you.

And then create something instead

f you haven’t gotten your copy of my book you can do that by clicking the picture below. And Thank you!

Everyone’s been celebrating freedom this week. I want to ask you a slightly annoying question about it: free from what, exactly?

Lots of Love,

Max 💫💖

Free from what, exactly?

I’m going to keep asking you that. Sit with it a second before you answer, because the honest answer usually isn’t the one we say out loud on the Fourth of July.

For over forty years I’ve studied a book that says, in a hundred different costumes, the same outrageous thing: you are already free. I knew those words the way you know the lyrics to a song before anything in your life has actually happened to make them true. I could recite it. I could even teach it. What I could not do for a long time was experience it, because I was still completely, convincingly my character — Max Ryan, with his history and his grievances and his very persuasive case for being a separate person who has things to lose.

Here’s the line that finally stopped being a concept and started being an experience: when the character thins, freedom is what’s underneath it. Not something you win. Not something you’re granted. Something that was there the entire time you were busy negotiating for it.

So — free from what?

Turns out we’re extremely creative when it comes to answering that question badly. We build prisons at every scale there is. Individually, cell by cell, out of every story we keep telling about who wronged us and what we’re owed. Societally, out of rules we insist are load-bearing walls when half of them are just old paint. And as a species, out of the oldest belief there is — that freedom is scarce, that if you have some of it, there’s less left for me.

Mamdani — who I have started referring to, only slightly joking, as my boyfriend, because a man cannot make me feel this much hope for a city without some kind of commitment being implied — said almost exactly that in his City Hall speech this week, and it stopped me cold. He described people who think freedom is an arena where only a select few get to win, where the whole thing shrinks the more people are let into it. Listen to that for a second. That’s not a policy position. That’s the ego’s entire architecture, running at the scale of a city instead of a single nervous system. Free from what, in that worldview? Free from other people existing near you.

And then, almost as if the universe wanted to argue back, the numbers came in. New York just had its safest six months on record. Murders down nearly 25 percent — the lowest ever recorded, in every borough. Nobody declared that freedom. Nobody set off a firework for it. It just quietly happened while everyone was busy arguing about bigger things. Free from what? Free from the fear of a subway ride, apparently. Turns out that one was available the whole time too.

Then there’s the pet food pantry. New York’s very first — $750,000, nothing you’d put on a campaign poster, meant to help someone keep their dog fed instead of surrendering it because money got tight. It’s such a small, unglamorous kind of freedom. Nobody’s marching for it. But ask the person who gets to keep their dog what they were freed from, and I promise you it won’t sound small to them.

I keep noticing that the freedom we throw parades for and the freedom that actually changes someone’s life rarely look alike. One is loud, declared, defended, and has to be re-fought the moment someone challenges it — that’s the character’s freedom, the transactional kind, the kind with an opposite. The other doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t have an opposite, because nothing was ever actually taken. It was never behind a gate anyone could open or close. It was underneath the gate the whole time, waiting for us to stop mistaking the argument over the lock for the freedom itself.

So I’ll ask you one more time, and then I’ll let you go: free from what, exactly? Free from a person, a story, a country, a fear you’ve been rehearsing so long it feels like personality? Or free — actually, quietly, unglamorously free — the way it already is, underneath whichever character showed up to answer this question for you?

Because here’s the part I actually want you to feel, not just understand: when the character finally thins enough that you catch a glimpse of what’s underneath it, it is not calm in the way people assume. Nobody warned me it would feel like this. It’s not a nap. It’s not a shrug. It is thrilling. It is the most joyful, most alive, most “oh my GOD, there you are” moment available to a human being — because what’s under there isn’t empty, it’s ecstatic. It’s the thing every character on this planet has been frantically chasing through money and relationships and revolutions and, yes, even through freedom itself, and it was never going to be found that way, because the character is looking for a feeling that only exists on the other side of not being the character anymore.

That’s the joke and the gift at the same time. The character can fight for freedom its whole life and win every battle and still never touch it — because freedom was never the character’s to have. It’s not a possession. It’s not even really an experience you have. It’s what’s left, blazing and obvious and completely undeniable, the instant you stop being so sure about who’s asking the question.

That’s what I felt underneath every headline this week. Not politics. Not statistics. That.

If You’d like to see Mayor Mamdani’s FULL SPEECH CLICK HERE

Happy Sunday & Happy Pride Friends! 🌈

I almost didn’t go.

My Assemblyman Tony Simone’s assistant Yadira has been a quiet hero in my life for the past couple of years, helping me navigate my apartment renovation. When she reached out about the march, I hemmed and hawed. But when I woke up this morning I asked myself one simple question: how would I feel if I didn’t? That was enough. I got dressed and headed out into the streets of New York City.

And I’m so glad I did. I met new friends, I walked alongside thousands of people who showed up because something in them said this matters, and I got to see my boyfriend. (Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Don’t tell him I said that.) Watching him move through that crowd was a reminder of what genuine leadership looks like. He is a man of action, a man of principle, and he represents something this country badly needs right now: the understanding that hope is not passive. It shows up. It marches.

You’ll see in the photos below a moment that stopped me in my tracks. Two dads, holding their little girls’ hands as they marched. I won’t say much about it. Some things don’t need commentary. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and love, however it arranges itself, is still love.

I do want to say one thing, though, because it sat with me today. As much as I love being here for this, I’m also aware of the paradox. When we label and categorize, even with the best intentions, we can quietly reinforce the very separation we’re trying to heal. Last week I wrote about breaking down walls rather than building new categories. That doesn’t go away on a day like today. The deeper truth is that there is no us and them. There is only us. The march matters. And so does remembering what we’re really marching toward.

Which brings me to what kept running through my mind today. The Course teaches us that in truth there is no time. But as long as we perceive it, how we use it is everything. Use time as a teaching tool and something remarkable happens. The more you do, the more you begin to touch the timelessness beneath it. That question I asked myself this morning, how would I feel if I didn’t go, was not really about regret. It was about recognizing that this moment, this choice, this showing up, was the lesson. And I didn’t want to miss it.

Lots of Love,

Max 💫💖

P.S. Miracle Mindset is out now on Amazon. If today's post resonated, I think you'll love it.

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