When I was 14, my appendix nearly ruptured.

I was living in Germany, the only member of my family who spoke German, and due to the cocktail of whatever the doctors had given me in prep for surgery, let’s say my German was less than optimal.

Going in to that surgery—between the language barrier, and my age, and my confusion, and pain—I wasn’…

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Last week I wrote about building your own taste—intentionally curating what you actually like, instead of what an algorithm shapes for you.

Before algorithms, there were other pressures shaping our desires. So much so, that while Slim Aarons was galavanting the world capturing attractive people doing attractive things, a well known French philosopher called Pierre Bourdieu set out to argue that taste isn’t a pure, personal aesthetic reflex. It’s a social product. What you find beautiful, tasteful, or refined was shaped — quietly, mostly without your permission — by how you were raised, where you were educated, and what class you moved through to get here.

In 1979 he wrote a book called Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste extensively covering the topic.

He had a word for the mechanism by which we are influenced: habitus. Habitus is the whole set of instincts and manners you absorb from the rooms you grew up in, so early and so completely that by the time you’re old enough to notice, they don’t feel absorbed. They feel like you.

Once taste is something absorbed rather than chosen, it starts working like a kind of currency. Bourdieu called this cultural capital — knowledge, manners, and preferences that function socially the way money does economically. Knowing which fork to use, which composer to name-drop, which wine to order: none of it costs anything at the table, and all of it opens doors. You can’t use it to pay your dinner bill, but it still spends.

Here’s where the book’s title does double duty.

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Last week I expressed my frustration about Substack’s decision to deploy a tool that guesses whether AI was used in a Substack post.

I won’t relitigate the thoughts and feelings which I’ve already shared—but this experience has spurred some deeper reflections that I do want to share with you today.

At its core, what I was really grappling …

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Today’s post is an update on two fronts:

1. An update on in-person philosophy clubs, and

2. A note about our friend Claude who helps with TPP

Last week in London I held the first ever TPP Philosophy Club—it was amazing.

Since starting TPP my goal has always been to help people develop the tools, frameworks, and language they needed to understand …

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There’s a version of me that doesn’t exist yet, but I keep building my week for him anyway. He commutes fourteen hours and works fifty without losing an ounce of himself to it. He trains, writes his newsletter, shows up fully in his marriage and as a father, and still has room left for the friend who needs him at nine on a Tue…

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I’ve started to believe that one of the greatest sources of our collective suffering isn’t evil people.

Rather, it’s something quieter and harder to point at: our own delusion about what meaning an…

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It turns suffering into something useful. It gives adversity meaning. It suggests that whatever we go through, as long as we survive it, we come out better on the other side.

But I’m not sure that’s true.

Or at least, not in the way we tend to believe it.

Because if you l…

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“Life is like the harp string, if it is strung too tight it won’t play, if it is too loose it hangs, the tension that produces the beautiful sound lies in the middle.”

— Buddha

Good morning, philosophers.

Here is today’s big idea: The same ability that makes us capable of everything we accomplish, is the same ability that makes us suffer the most.

We are t…

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Last week we explored how Ikigai can redirect us away from the endless treadmill of optimization culture and into the work of designing our life around our authentic self and goals.

Today I want to…

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New here? These three essays are the best place to begin.

• About Matt — Matt’s journey from the mountain top back to himself.

• I Don’t Want to Kill Anyone — The founding essay. What TPP is about.

• “Rainer Maria Rilke” — A gentler one, to feel the weekly rhythm: on why “wisdom is a dance, not a march,” and how knowing who y…

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Wrong field. Wrong company. Wrong title. Wrong pay. The assumption is that if you can just optimize your external circumstances enough, something will click into place internally.

But I’m not sure that’s how it works.

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The searching for certainty took longer to stop than I would like to admit. Years longer. I want to tell you how it actually unfolded — not as theory, but as a sequence of months in my actual life.

When I first left the world of high-control religion, a piece of me was still running on the old operating system. The framework had collapsed,…

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In our last post I left you in the deep end of a pool. Backwards, upside down, blindfolded, reaching for certainty. Today I want to come back to that water with you, and turn you to the searching to see what was actually underneath it.

Here is what I came to, slowly: the thing I kept reaching for was the wrong thing.

The longer…

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It felt like I had fallen backwards, and upside down, into the deep end of a pool, blindfolded.

That’s the actual felt sense of what happened when the structure I’d been living inside stopped working. One moment I was oriented. The next I wasn’t.

Backwards, because I didn’t see it coming.

Upside down, because I didn’t know whic…

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“The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”

— General Omar Bradley, Armistice Day 1948, Boston

Good morning, philosophers.

I want to start with a scene.

I was on a bus. It was my first day at West Point — what they call Reception Day — and somewhere beside me, a man who looked like he could move a car sat with his hands in his lap, terrified.

I don’t remember saying anything to him. I don’t remember putting a hand on his shoulder or offering some piece of wisdom. I just remember sitting there, feeling the fear in the bus the way you feel humidity, and getting calmer.

Fear has always done that to me. The bigger the moment, the more present I become. I process it later, privately, usually when I’m safe enough. But in the moment, I go still—not quite a freeze, but hyper-fixated on what’s in front of me. All my faculties oriented toward problem solving.

I didn’t think much of it. Years later, he told me that bus ride was the reason he made it through that first day.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t, entirely. What I know now is that I was doing something in that bus — something that took me years to find a name for — and that the name, when I finally found it, came from the last place I ever would have expected.

The world I grew up in had a clear map.

You could be one kind of strong — composed, mission-focused, willing to bear whatever the moment asked — or you could be weak. West Point rewarded the first kind. There was a saying: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Composure wasn’t softness. It was the thing that kept people alive.

I was good at that world. I understood the rules. And underneath the rules, I understood something I couldn’t yet name: that the person sitting next to you mattered, that the human in front of you was the whole point, that whatever you were supposed to be accomplishing, you could only accomplish it together.

The religious communities I ran in had a different kind of map. They wanted something from me that felt like the opposite of composure. They wanted need. Brokenness. A particular kind of vulnerability that served a particular kind of God. I tried. I brought everything I had to those communities. I thought for a long time that my calm was the problem — that I was too proud, too far from what they were asking me to reach for.

I was anxious. I just didn’t know that anxiety was a message, not a character flaw.

Then I ended up in a philosophy class.

This sounds unremarkable. It wasn’t. I was in uniform. The instructor was a civilian. He ran the room like a room where there were no right answers — where we were all just trying to figure out what better meant, together, with no particular destination and no one taking anything from us.

I didn’t know how to sit in that. Part of me loved it. Part of me kept waiting for someone to tell me I was in trouble.

The second class I took with him was on care ethics — a framework I’d never heard of, built entirely from feminist philosophy, and largely overlooked by the canon that had produced everything else I’d studied. The argument was simple and radical at the same time: that a web of relationships, rather than a set of rules or outcomes, was the better lens through which to understand how to live.

Something in me recognized it. I couldn’t have told you why, not then. But there was an overlap I couldn’t ignore — between what I was reading in that classroom and what I’d been reading in the red text, the words of Jesus, in my own private attempt to make sense of what I actually believed. Two things pointing at the same thing.

I thought I’d bring it back to my community. That they’d be as excited as I was.

That’s not what happened.

A few years later, I was deep in officer training. We ran simulations — tactical scenarios with real stakes on paper. I was being graded, in part, by the casualties I produced.

I’d started well. Then I started doing worse. I couldn’t explain it.

My wife was out of town one weekend. I went to see a film — a war film, as it happened, about a conscientious objector. A man who refused to carry a weapon while everyone around him carried theirs.

I judged him for most of the first half. I didn’t understand him. I didn’t resonate with what I saw.

About halfway through, I got sick. I thought I’d eaten something bad. I got up, found the restroom, and tried to vomit.

I didn’t vomit. I dry heaved and cried for a long time, and somewhere in there, words came out that I hadn’t known I was holding:

I don’t want to kill anyone. They can’t make me.

That Monday I went to find a counselor. A few weeks later, I was advised to seek a discharge as a conscientious objector. Two lawyers. Several hundred pages. A dissertation on what I believed and why. The standard was sincerity — could I prove that my objection wasn’t to a particular war, but to violence as a profession?

I could. I knew it in that restroom before I knew anything else.

There’s a phrase for what came after. A therapist gave it to me later: reunion grief. The particular ache of meeting yourself for the first time and realizing what you’d been missing.

I’d spent years inside worlds that wanted something from me. The institution needed my compliance. The community needed my vulnerability. The map needed my belief. None of them were especially interested in who I actually was — not because they were cruel, but because that wasn’t the architecture. You can have power over people or you can have connection with them. The worlds I’d been raised in had made their choice.

The philosophers I’d read in that classroom didn’t want anything from me. They were just making a point: that a web of relationships was better, for me and for everyone I cared about. The friend who helped me understand what that looked like in practice was figuring out something about himself at the time that he hadn’t yet found words for — something that required the same courage mine did, just different content. Being around him taught me that self-honest wasn’t a luxury, it was a need. Something each of us desperately requires, and deeply deserves.

I didn’t know I was allowed to feel that way. I didn’t know it was good to be honest with yourself.

I’m still in the middle of this, if I’m honest. The newsletter you’re reading is part of the search, not the answer to it. London, where I live now, is the first place I’ve felt like the right version of myself might actually fit — a city full of people with reasons to have left somewhere and reasons to rebuild, putting down roots together amongst family found not family forced. I’m building the deepest connections of my life here. It turns out the parts of me I spent the longest time dimming are exactly the parts the right community needs.

A therapist once told me the key to enlightenment is being able to answer two questions honestly, at any given moment.

1. How do I feel?

2. What do I want?

That’s it. Not a philosophy. Not a framework. Just the willingness to sit with those questions and not flinch from the answer.

Everything I write in this newsletter is downstream of learning — slowly, imperfectly — to do that. The bus, the classroom, the restroom, the friend, the lawyers, the grief, the city. All of it was practice for two questions I’m still learning to answer.

Be well.

Here’s how I feel: exposed.

Here’s what I want: I want this to reach someone who needed it before I did. If that’s you — send it to one person.

There’s an essay I’ve been writing for a year. I’ve realized that virtually every other essay has been a way of approaching it without quite getting there.

It’s called “I Don’t Want to Kill Anyone.”

It starts on a bus at West Point, NY. It ends in a new city halfway around the world building a life I once thought impossible.

In …

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Here’s what I’ve been building toward.

Meaning is something your brain makes. It is not a substance waiting to be found. It is not external to your experience. It is your experience — the particular output of a particular mind, shaped by a particular history, processing a particular stream of information.

This is not a diminishm…

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Many of the systems we experience as uniquely human—sleep, hunger, fear, attention—are not uniquely human at all. They are ancient biological systems shaped long before Homo sapiens existed.

Even consciousness itself appears to be an evolve…

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It is practical.

Because the question is no longer:

“What is the meaning of life?”

but instead:

“What am I doing with the meaning my mind is constantly generating?”

This is where things become personal.

Because once you accept that meaning is cons…

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There’s a moment I keep returning to. Someone I care about was going through a stretch of life that looked complete from the outside — work that mattered, relationships that held, a routine that kept them moving. And yet. “I just don’t feel like I have any meaning in my life,” they said.

I knew what they meant immediately. I di…

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