Depth Medicine

Ivan and the Grey Wolf

Simon Yugler — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:02:46 GMT

A companion audio recording available only to paid subscribers.

I told this story live to a room full of men this August at the first annual Cascadia Men’s Conference. I’d never told it before. What you have before you is a slightly more polished, but perhaps less feral version.

The telling is my own, meaning that out of the 5 or so versions of this sto…

The Cult of the Lone Wolf

Simon Yugler — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:02:43 GMT

Well it’s been a while friends. I admit, shamefully, that I have fallen woefully behind on writing, and I’ve been sharing far less than I wish to.

Sometimes, we all just need a long break from this portal called the internet. I’ve been sitting in Zen meditation retreats, hiking in the mountains, and enjoying a blessed Oregon summer.

I started this Substa…

Unveiling The Cascadia Men's Conference

Simon Yugler — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:21:55 GMT

What is “healthy masculinity?” How does grief and soul figure into “men’s work?” And what is the purpose of men gathering together in the first place?

Listen in to my conversation with and as we dive into these questions and more, in the lead up to the first annual Cascadia Men’s Conference.

Tickets are on sale now!

Use the code SIMONYUGLER when you register.

Visit: https://www.cascadiamensconference.com/

If you think you or a man in your life might benefit from this, then definitely check out our chat here today!

Subscribe now

The Golden Thread

Simon Yugler — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:16:47 GMT

The back alley bamboo stalks sway like one of Mucha’s art nouveau ladies, drunk on Bohemian absinthe and post-war splendor.

I am sipping my favorite Chinese tea, an oolong from the Wuyi mountains known as Mi Lan Dan Cong, or Honey Orchid Phoenix, at the original Dobra Čajovna. One of Prague’s countercultural institutions, the roots of this humble tea hou…

We’re Not Ready for the Village

Simon Yugler — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:47:44 GMT

Well friends, its been a minute. I have a long, rambly article for you today. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed just letting these words flow out.
The Village is a topic very near and dear to my heart, and one I haven’t written about much before. I make no claims of certainty or authority here. I offer these as questions I am wrestling with and mulling over myse…

Zen Reflections, A Poem, & Spring Announcements

Simon Yugler — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:39:38 GMT

I’m one week out from finishing an 8 day sesshin retreat at the Great Vow Zen Monastery.

Outside in the pre-dawn darkness, the 4:50am wake up bell sounds as monastery residents make the morning rounds. 40 minutes to get into the dimly lit zendo and onto the cushion. I greet the statue of Kuan-Yin (Kanzeon, in Japan,) and inhale the freshly burning incen…

Social Media is a Hungry Ghost

Simon Yugler — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:03:10 GMT

I intended to take 15 days off of Instagram. Finally after about 3 months, I’ve finally re-engaged. But really, I don’t want to go back at all.

For months, I was convinced I had developed adult onset ADHD. My focus and concentration dwindled to about 5 hours a day. By 3pm most days, my mind felt like a swamp of overwhelm and fatigue. The anxiety I began experiencing because of this was paralyzing. I felt, for the first time in my life, like something was seriously wrong with me.

So I decided to remove the one thing that I hoped would change 100 other things.

The first thing I noticed was the urge. The omnipresence of the addiction, the entrenched dopamine-driven impulse to reach for my phone, and mindlessly click that harmless little purple icon. Removing Instagram as a possibility revealed to me how much real estate this application, and the endless, remote scroll of its illusory world had in my psyche.

The second thing I noticed was that my focus returned. My ability to think clearly, to write without reaching for distraction, and to function past 2pm returned almost instantly.

Now, less than a week back on the ‘gram, I can feel the pull once more. I don’t know how to feel ahout it.

We’ve all read enough stories like this. We all know social media is bad for us, steals our attention, and blanches our brain of necessary neurotransmitters like dopamine. There is nothing unique about my story.

But, having had time away from social media, and now returning to its sinister and sedative embrace, I’ve been able to see it more clearly as the being it truly is.

Social media is an entity whose primary directive is to extract. Attention. Time. Money. Relationships. Thoughts. Opinions. Ideology. Its ultimate goal is for us to live inside of it, so that eventually our very psyche ceases to be our own.

Eventually, everything will become mediated by the machine and spoonfed back to us. Its like The Matrix, but not nearly as interesting or profound. The reality is much more depressing, because its much less interesting.

“If the product is free, you’re the product.” These words are from Tristan Harris and his film, The Social Dilemma–a documentary I highly recommend you watch. They speak to the invisible ways that social media (and most tech companies now,) observes and analyzes us as “products” even when we think we’re engaging with something a harmless.

I am reminded of a story I heard once about a woman who had a pet snake. She believed that the snake, her pet, loved her as she loved it. She projected her warm-blooded mammalian emotions onto a creature whose brain is literally incapable of “feeling” in the way we understand it.

So, she began sleeping with the snake. One day, the snake stopped eating. She would feed it its predictable gerbils and mice, yet the snake wouldn’t eat. On this went, until the woman became concerned, and finally took the snake to the veterinarian.

The vet asked all sorts of questions Eventually, the topic of the snake’s sleeping habits came up. The woman shared that she slept in the same bed with the snake. The veterinarian looked up from his papers, and told her point blank:

The snake wasn’t eating because something was wrong with it. The snake wasn’t eating because it was preparing to eat her.

All of us are sleeping with a snake when we use social media. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that our phones are our warm, cuddly friends. But the reality is that we’ve let something into the most intimate corners of our lives that doesn’t have a warm-blooded body, let alone a pulse.

We mistake familiarity for safety, never realizing that the thing we’ve grown so fond of is slowly sizing us up, wondering how to most effectively consume while we are lulled to sleep.

We are beginning to witness a mass exodus away from social media. As AI slop continues to pollute our feeds, inserting itself into our imaginations, and as we grow ever more tired of seeing our thoughts and private conversations used as advertising fodder, more people are deciding to walk away.

Millennials like myself (1988, what’s up?) were the first generation to embrace social media. I was a senior in high school when Facebook became public, and was amongst the first crop of college students to join back when you needed a college email address. My generation has witnessed the rise and fall of platforms like no other generation has–befriending and then abandoning digital villages like Myspace, Geocities, Tumblr, and Tribe.net.

Now, my generation–the internet test tube babies–is beginning to walk away, as we begin to remember all the things that actually bring us joy, peace, and satisfaction. Turns out, building an online persona, platform, or “following,” isn’t one of them.

This isn’t news, or even an original proclamation. Really, it is something halfway between an observation and a prayer.

Self-development influencers like Mark Groves, literary figures like and Johann Hari, and old school tech seers and intellectuals like Jehron Lanier and continue to sound the alarm. Most of them have been doing so for years. Lanier even authored the 2018 book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now. (Did we listen? No.)

Even my social media strategist left the ‘gram. That alone should have been a sign.

As I write this, the Meta corporation and its automaton-in-chief, Mark Zuckerberg, are entrenched in yet another legal battle surrounding their platforms’ addictive potential that journalists are likening to the beginning of big tobacco’s long avoided mea culpa moment. And, like the tobacco industry, we are dealing with such profound levels of corruption and moral bankruptcy that it is hard to watch.

I’ve even looked on as dearly beloved Substack has become more and more an algorithmic trash heap, my feed increasingly filled with authors I don’t follow or really care about (no, I don’t care about Trump’s astrological birth chart).

In fact, last week I came across an account that seems to be entirely generated by AI. (What’s more, it was plagiarizing words from my friend, / ). I felt enraged, appalled, and nauseated by the bleak unfairness of it all.

This is the death knell of any online space: the people you follow and the content you value slowly gets drowned out by algorithmic noise, offering you more of what it thinks you want, but less of what you actually desire.

The technical term for this is “enshittification”–a word I’ve grown incredibly fond of as of late. It was coined in 2022 by journalist and sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow (whose recent piece on AI in the Guardian I highly recommend.) The term has now been enshrined by the Merriam-Webster’s and Cambridge dictionaries.

Cambridge defines enshittification thusly:

the process of a product or service, especially one connected with the internet, social media, or technology, becoming or being made worse, more unpleasant, less useful, etc.

And yet, it seems like enshittification is the inevitable end goal of all social media platforms playing the game of infinite growth and “increasing shareholder value.” Capitalism, in a word. Like an Oedipal curse, these tech companies are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, compulsively drawn towards the very things they want to avoid.

It’s almost as if the ancient Greeks knew a thing or two about human nature.

Creativity is Alchemical

Simon Yugler — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 17:34:35 GMT

There is a feeling that takes hold of the body before crossing a threshold. It’s a subtle thing, a vibration in our feet or belly, an expansion or contraction. It is the visceral sense that something is moving. That we are moving. That who we are, what we are, is far less solid than we think. That strange winds from far off places can suddenly take hold…

Facing the Masculine Shadow

Simon Yugler — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:21:31 GMT

Purple golden light floods into the mountain valley of the Columbia River Gorge. To the south, Mt. Hood is bathed in a slow motion dance of radiance and shadow that leaves me stunned. I pull my car over on a turnoff on the side of the high mountain road.

Stepping out of my car, I snap a picture, trying to bottle the immensity of the sunset I am beholding…

Forever Jung

Simon Yugler — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 04:02:23 GMT

Every time I feel lost in a forest of my own making, or washed up by the laundry machine of tech-fueled confusion and grind-core capitalism, I find my way back, usually on hands and knees, to the Jungian tradition.

When I reconnect to this mythopoetic lineage, it feels like cool, calming water washing over my body. I feel suddenly oriented back to what f…

6 Reflections on Returning to the United States

Simon Yugler — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:14:18 GMT

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

-William Stafford

I didn’t plan on publishing this. This was something I needed to write for myself to make sense of my experience after landing back on American soil.…

The Alchemical Dream

Simon Yugler — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:14:35 GMT

I am walking down Prague’s famous Charles Bridge on a starless winter night. A freezing fog has settled upon the countless spires and narrow streets of this cold old city that for centuries has been Europe’s capital of all things mystical.

Despite transforming into a high-voltage tourist destination in the last decade, I can still feel Prague’s candle-l…

Be Careful of the Stories You Tell

Simon Yugler — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:56:20 GMT

I’ve been in this cabin long enough to lose track of the days.

Deep in the Irish woods of East County Clare, surrounded by lakes and leafless trees, I am burrowing into the soggy pelt of late November. When the heavy clouds are pierced by the sun, everything becomes steam. But mostly, it’s dark and wet, with daylight only emerging for only a blessed hand…

The West is a Wounded Fox

Simon Yugler — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 14:23:37 GMT

I am walking down an unglamorous industrial street in West London. In my ear is an interview with the British iconoclastic author, Paul Kingsnorth.

We met once, on a murky autumn afternoon in county Galway, outside of Yeats’ tower home, “Thoor Ballylee.” My, how things have changed since then. A world ago.

In the corner of my eye, a fugitive shadow emerge…

The Inner Landscape

Simon Yugler — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:45:35 GMT

The valley is just beginning to go into shadow. I park my car at a small turnoff before a gate, and proceed to walk up the muddy track between two looming cliffs. Hawthorne trees and sheep line the dripping hillsides, and a boggy field sits to my left.

It’s a gorgeous, moody autumn day in the northwest of Ireland, just about a week out from Samhain, the …

Samhain & the Shadow

Simon Yugler — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 11:43:06 GMT

“Religions succeed one another, gods die and are forgotten, but the peasant of the Highlands still, after thousands of years, continues to honour with a humble ritual those powers more ancient than the gods.”

-Marie-Louise Sjoestedt

Knocknarea, Queen Maeve’s Tomb, Co. Sligo (Photo: Simon Yugler)

Sharp winds howl outside my window. The sky is puddle grey, t…

Remembering Manchán Magan

Simon Yugler — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 11:51:45 GMT

I’ve never witnessed an entire country grieve for one person. But on October 2nd, Ireland lost a national treasure. And in response, I saw what looked like a nation erupt in a tidal wave of grief and praise for a man that I was fortunate enough to call a friend.

Known as an author, television host, and Irish language activist and scholar, Manchán Magan w…

One Year Later

Simon Yugler — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 16:07:29 GMT

Malidoma Somé once said that a mark of initiation is that, if we knew what it would entail, we would walk the other way.

Today marks one year since the release of Psychedelics and the Soul: A Mythic Guide to Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Repair.

If you had told me that the year following the release of my first book would be one of t…

The Pathways in our Bones

Simon Yugler — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 18:24:58 GMT

On October 11th I’m heading to Ireland on a one-way ticket. I have a night booked in Dublin at an outrageously priced hotel (welcome to Dublin,) a friend from West Cork who suggested I check out a small artist town in his area, and a handful of loose connections I hope to track down once I land.

But really, I have no idea where I’m going, and I am quite …

Why I'm Tired of Talking about Psychedelics

Simon Yugler — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:08:10 GMT

Humans have always sought to articulate the ineffable. The haunting animals on the walls of the Lascaux caves silently howl to us from a remote past that only our bones know. Tibetan thangka paintings contain thousands of symbols of enlightenment, and yet still we stumble towards it. Kaleidoscopic mosques depict the fractalized infinity of Allah that no…