In my third year of university, I became friends with my Latin professor, an elderly man with a white mustache and grey eyes that had a habit of looking right through you. We’d swim laps together during summer break at a local pool, and in between sets we’d talk. In one of those conversations I mentioned a relationship I was in. He paused, looked at me with a particular patience—the kind reserved for watching someone make an obvious mistake—then glanced down and away.

“You’ll know when it’s time to leave. The hard part is that you already know.”

I thought about that sentence for the next eight months. While staying.

Does this feel familiar?

Maybe not this particular scenario, but the feeling that the more obvious a piece of advice is—the more directly it applies to your life—the more you instinctively resist it.

If that feels true, keep reading (you’re in good company). If it doesn’t, I’d gently suggest you’re either enlightened or lying to yourself.

There’s a particular category of advice that seems almost universally true, and yet we somehow find a way to sidestep it, dismiss it, or decide that our situation is different. You know the kind. It runs through the great stories like a thematic watermark:

Romeo and Juliet felt the first one. Ebenezer Scrooge figures the second out eventually. Victor Frankenstein learns the third far too late.

We nod at these stories, understanding them. And then we go do the thing anyway.

What gives?

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: on some level, ignoring this advice is the point.

Love, pride, validation, happiness, grief—these are all experiences to be lived, and sometimes painfully so. Dostoevsky saw this clearly in his Notes from Underground. The vision of a Crystal Palace—a technocratic utopia where all human needs are met and no mistakes are possible—was not a place he described as pleasant, but as a horror. A world without error, heartbreak, temptation, risk, or the sting of a bad decision would be a world without vitality. It would strip away the very texture of being alive.

He wrote elsewhere that “suffering is the sole root of consciousness.” Which is another way of saying: we don’t become ourselves by following good advice. We become ourselves through experiencing autonomy, which often involves ignoring good advice.

Which brings me back to the pool and the conversation with my professor. The advice he gave wasn’t wrong. But I had to find that out for myself. So even though the advice was true, it was just not yet true for me.

Think about the things you know most deeply. The things that have been burned into being through mistakes and failures. The ones where, if someone asked you for their source, you wouldn’t cite a book or reflect on a theory. You’d simply say: Me… I lived it.

That’s what I mean when I say advice isn’t yet true for you. It may be factually accurate. It may be wise. But it hasn’t been validated (or denied) by your values. The ones that only emerge through the trial-and-error of humaning.

For something to be genuinely true for you, you have to know it existentially. You have to live it.

Consider how we think about lottery winners. We already know the story before it’s told: the windfall arrives, and within a few years it’s gone. Not because the money wasn’t real, but because the internal infrastructure to hold it was never built. You can’t receive something of that magnitude and know instinctively what to do with it. Wealth—like wisdom—has to be grown into.

And yet this is exactly how we dispense advice. We hand it out like lottery winnings—as if the right words, delivered at the right moment, will compound into a life well-lived. We treat wisdom as transferable property. Pass it across the table, watch it received with a nod, and assume the work is done.

It isn’t. Jung saw this clearly enough to leave a warning:

“Beware of unearned wisdom.”

Notice what this implicates: not just the person who ignores advice, but the person who gives it. It’s a two-way street. Whether you’re dispensing wisdom or receiving it, the same truth applies—it may be quoted, believed, even cherished, and still amount to nothing. Because wisdom without the experience that forged it is just information. And information, like a lottery ticket, is only as good as what you build with it.

This doesn’t let the advice-receiver off the hook, though.

So when (not if) you feel that resistance—that stubborn refusal to apply what you know is probably right—take it as a sign. A signal that you are neither stupid nor defective, but simply human. A brave individual in the process of becoming.

As Kierkegaard said:

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

To live most authentically, sometimes great advice should not be heeded but self-confirmed—verified by one’s own experience. And here’s the great irony: you come out the other end with a closer relationship to the advice you didn’t take. You internalize it. You lay down the soil that will cultivate wisdom. The willingness to live through the mess rather than around it is what separates inherited wisdom from the kind you actually own.

What’s been your version of a messy life so far?

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There’s a line from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke that I’ve been thinking about over the years.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Twelve words. And somehow, arranged the way they are, they become two sentences that sing in the heart of anyone who’s lived—and also, annoyingly, the most practical advice for being a human I’ve ever found.

The instruction itself is almost insultingly simple. Let things happen. A passive activity. And yet.

What we do instead is feel something—fear, embarrassment, heartbreak, that specific 2am dread where your brain decides to replay every bad decision you’ve ever made—and treat it like a diagnosis. Like the feeling isn’t something passing through us, but something revealing us. Something that’s finally telling the truth about who we are and how things are going to go.

You bomb a presentation and suddenly you’re not someone who had a bad meeting. You’re someone who is bad at their job. You get rejected and you’re not someone who got rejected. You’re someone who is fundamentally unlovable. You feel anxious on a random afternoon and you’re not just anxious. You’re inherently invalid.

A person blacklisted from qualifying for the life they want.

In this way, we turn an instance into an absolute. And that’s where everything goes sideways.

There’s a term in psychology called emotional reasoning—the cognitive bias where you use what you feel as evidence for what’s true. I feel like a fraud, therefore I am a fraud. I feel like this will never get better, therefore it won’t.

It’s worth pausing on why this happens, because it’s one of those psychological features that echoes through history.

Your emotional system evolved in a world where threats were physical and immediate. You feel danger, you react; and when you react, you survive. For most of human existence, that system worked beautifully. The problem is that same ancient machinery is now running inside a creature who has to send emails, navigate performance reviews, and post things on the internet where strangers can tell you you’re an idiot. As such, the threats are no longer lions, but feelings about lions. And your nervous system—magnificently loyal (and stupid) in this one specific way—cannot tell the difference.

So the dread arrives. And the brain, doing exactly what it was designed to do, says: this is information. This is real. This is you.

But obviously it isn’t. It’s more like a passing cloud. A loud and ugly one. But, on the bright side, clouds move (pun intended). And because they move, we can appreciate them for what they actually offer: the full range of what it means to be here. It includes the grief and the joy and the boredom and the occasional inexplicable euphoria that arrives with no explanation and leaves the same way. It includes the terror of attempting something that deeply matters. The beauty of it working. The specific loneliness of being misunderstood by someone you love. The warmth of being understood by anyone at all. All of it enormous in the moment. All of it, eventually, receding into the background hum of the unconscious.

So feel. All of it. The grief. The heartbreak. The loss… Be so bold as Fyodor Dostoyevsky in saying:

“I exist. In a thousand agonies, I exist.”

A defiant claim that existence itself is inseparable from the capacity to feel deeply.

What stands in the way of this though is the belief that processing anguish can be done while scrolling your phone, or as your mind drifts into some agreeable elsewhere. Avoidance, however seductive, is loyal to none but diminishment. It asks us to trade aliveness for numbness, and does so at great cost.

So when escape tempts you, remember that cost. And remember Rilke’s words: no feeling is final.

If nothing is final, then you are never as ruined as your worst moment suggests, and never as sorted as your best one implies. You are not in the business of protecting yourself from bad feelings or engineering good ones. You are simply in the business of showing up. Of staying in motion. Of taking the next step while whatever you’re currently feeling does what all feelings eventually do.

Pass.

The practice, when you strip it back, is just this: when something arrives—good or bad, welcome or not—notice it, name it, and remember that it is neither you nor permanent. You are not an anxious person. You are feeling anxious right now. You are not confident. You are feeling confident right now. You are not a failure. You are someone who failed at something and are currently experiencing what that feels like.

There is a you that has the feelings. And there are the feelings themselves. Learning to inhabit that small but crucial distance between the two—to become, as the contemplative traditions put it, the observer rather than the observed—is perhaps singlehandedly the most useful thing a person can do.

De Botton once wrote that the wise person “expects to be only moderately happy.” Not because life is grim, but because they have made peace with its texture—the roughness as much as the smooth. They are not waiting for conditions to improve before they begin. They are already, always, in the middle of it.

Rilke’s instruction is simple. And in many ways, hard.

Let it happen. Keep going. Nothing you are feeling right now is the last word on anything.

Not the bad stuff.

Not the good stuff either.

So pay attention while it’s here.

This paraphrase comes from Søren Kierkegaard’s principle that,

“life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

What he was getting at here was that our lives can only be understood by looking back at it, by reflection. And he believed that reflection was an important step in our development because it’s essentially how we gain insight about ourselves and the people around us.

But when it came to making decisions in the present, he thought that to keep thinking and reflecting were a bit over-indulgent. It’s what our culture has now given the name naval-gazing.

So, in order to not do that, Kierkegaard would say something that would anticipate Nike’s slogan of Just Do It.

Around the same time as this, Fyodor Dostoevsky also considered something similar. He said:

“To think too much is a disease.”

Here, Dostoevsky meant that you need to act out what you think, and not just think what you think.

In other words, living forward simply means this: Just trust yourself.

It’s having confidence that the lessons and wisdom you learned will have expression in your action. So given all the prior work you put in up until a single moment—all the studying, reading and reflection—it’s trusting that that will have its stamp on what you do and say in the future.

As the saying goes, what goes in is what must come out.

Malcolm Gladwell adds to this idea in his book called Blink. He writes about how the snap judgments that we accumulate over time, our intuitions, can be just as good as—if not better—than the decisions we make after carefully analyzing a situation. (Interestingly, this insight gives a legitimate argument for the old adage: trust your gut.)

Steve Jobs also lent perspective to this Kierkegaardian way of thinking. He said:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Quick disclaimer before you go: this doesn’t mean that you have a license to do whatever you want and not care about the consequences of your actions. Kierkegaard also believed in personal responsibility and ethical behavior—that we’re obligated to orient ourselves in a way that favors society.

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They’re all men.

So, an obvious question arises: Where are the women?

It’s not that they don’t exist; it’s that history, with its habitual tendency to favor male voices, has left their contributions in the margins. And sure, this newsletter will hardly do anything in the grand scheme to change that, but even so, it’s nonetheless worth writing about.

(Disclaimer: this is not a comprehensive list—merely an invitation to expand the conversation.)

5. Anaïs Nin

Paris, cerca 1920s. We find a young Anaïs Nin struggling to be taken seriously as a writer in a world where literary genius is assumed to have a Y chromosome. And rather than conform to conventional standards to secure what little favor she could, she remains devout to her style and crafts a body of work that blurs the line between fiction and personal experience.

As a natural result, her diaries remain her most enduring legacy. What’s exceptional about them is that they’re not just records of her life; they’re profound explorations of identity, desire, and artistic freedom, written with the kind of raw honesty that makes people uncomfortable.

Her most famous novel, The Delta of Venus, is erotic in the truest sense—meaning it’s not just about sex, but about freedom, intimacy, and self-actualizing.

And in speaking to that raw honest I mentioned, Nin often touched on her shadow side—particularly as it related to her complicated relationships. And even more particularly as it related to her biological father (hence the book title above).

But to reduce her to #daddyissues would be a failure of understanding. Nin’s work forces us to confront the tension between repression and liberation, between the roles we’re given and the ones we carve out for ourselves.

And so, in the final analysis, it’s for her boldness, her exquisite prose, and her relentless inquiry into what it means to live fully and truthfully, that Anaïs Nin earns her place on this list.

4. Esther Perel

Esther Perel grew up in Antwerp, Belgium among a Jewish community directly affected by the Holocaust. She would later recall that what had fascinated her in those years wasn’t just the survival of the people—it was the difference between those who merely didn’t die and those who came back to life.

This is to say that the key difference that captivated her attention was a quality of vitality and revival—something that would anticipate the heartbeat of her work many years later as a psychotherapist.

For instance, in Mating in Captivity, she introduces the concept of erotic intelligence. Which is not a euphemism for sex, but something much more expansive: the ability to cultivate curiosity, playfulness, and spontaneity in the face of routine and security.

In other words, while we like to think of love as safety, Perel reminds us that love also requires risk. As desire thrives in the unknown and in what lies just beyond our reach.

In this way, her existentialism highlights the paradox of longing and belonging; it’s about managing the tension of wanting both comfort and mystery. Routine and adventure. Love and seduction.

So, for making us rethink how we relate—not just to others, but to our own desires—Perel is an easy choice for this list.

3. Virginia Woolf

Despite the unfavorable conditions of being a woman in the 19th-20th century, Woolf was able to create something extraordinary through them by wrestling with the details of her experience.

For example, in her work, A Room of One’s Own, she writes of a world deprived of works of genius due to exclusion and inequality. And in being subjected to inequality herself simply by being a woman at the time, she explored a new way of writing that focused on her streams of internal dialogue.

Now this might not sound like anything new, but it was actually in this way that Woolf became the pioneer of a new narrative device called, Stream of Consciousness.

Which can be simply stated as describing in detail what’s appearing in the narrator’s consciousness as it occurs—reflecting how the mind tends to move not in straight lines, but in waves, memories, and fractured perceptions. It sounds something like this:

“For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? Over twenty, — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.” — Virginia Woolf

So to sum it up, it’s her writing innovation, her impact on women’s rights and her talent for detailed descriptions that made Virginia Woolf an outstanding existentialist woman.

2. Hannah Arendt

During the wake and aftermath of Nazi Germany, Arendt became a thought-provoking critique of governmental systems and morality through her written contributions.

But this was after a crazy decade-long journey through Europe: going from having a 4 year affair with a future Nazi, to being imprisoned by the Gestapo, to running away to Czechoslovakia and then Switzerland, eventually landing in Paris, getting divorced, then getting married again, then being detained by the French for being an alien (despite having been stripped away of her German citizenship), to then finally escaping to New York.

And it was there that her genius poured out. In 1951, it arrived in the form of a masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In short, it dissects how authoritarian regimes take hold—not simply through violence, but through the erosion of truth, the destruction of shared reality, and the gradual normalization of the unthinkable.

Then, there’s her most controversial idea: the banality of evil. Watching Adolf Eichmann on trial, she saw not a monster but a bureaucrat—someone who had simply abdicated thought and surrendered moral responsibility to the machinery of the state. It was a chilling realization: evil is not always grand; sometimes, it is ordinary, thoughtless, procedural.

And so having new insights being born out in neuroscience that attest to our tendency to conform in the absence of concern for objective truth (e.g., cognitive bias, fear of independence, cognitive dissonance, etc.), we can’t afford to dismiss Arendt’s confrontation with our human condition—the truth of how we can so easily slip into unthinking complicity. Hence her position at #2 on this list.

1. Simone de Beauvoir

This is the woman that you always see next to Jean-Paul Sartre in photos. They were in what you call nowadays an “ethical non-monogamous relationship.” And they remained loyal companions till the very end.

But this isn’t to say that Simone’s fame is by mere association with Sartre.

(The magnitude of how false this suggestion is makes me chuckle.)

Simone was an intellectual in her own right. She was a novelist, essayist, short story writer, philosopher, and political activist, among other things.

And what might be her pinnacle achievement was in bringing to the world a 766-page book called, The Second Sex.

While there’s plenty of criticism to go along with it, this book revolutionized feminism by outlining the disparity between men and women, where men are the subjects, the central figures, and women the ‘Other’, a term which could also be understood here as ‘the incomplete’.

“Thus,” Simone writes, “humanity is male and man defines woman not herself but as relative to him.”

This distinction of women as Other was basically the axis point for the second wave of feminism.

And just for the sake of context, the first wave of feminism earlier in the century just had to do with women’s voting rights. That’s it.

And so what of issues like equal pay, abortion rights, and education reforms for women?—those are all in large part a manifestation of the impact of The Second Sex.

So yeah, it kinda goes without saying that Simone was a boss.

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Albert Camus once said,

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”

This is a great distinction because it highlights the key difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Knowledge is knowing about stuff. And the more knowledge you have simply amounts to more knowing about stuff. It’s data collecting.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is understanding how your mind uses that data through observation.

Psychologists now have a scientific term for this “mind watches itself” behavior.It was introduced in the 1970s asmeta-cognition.

Which, if we were in Camus’ day, existentialists would’ve likened it to the term, phenomenology. But for us as 21st century world-walkers, meta-cognition can be best understood translated to the more frequently used term, self-awareness.

Self-awareness is not only being capable of feeling your emotions, it’s also being capable of observing yourself feeling your emotions. To be able to stand back, somewhat objectively, and observe thoughts as they arise.

Okay, I hear ya.

So what’s the advantage of doing this, right?

Where exactly is the wisdom in that?

Well, the wisdom here first involves being in a position to not just have beliefs, but being able to question those beliefs.

You see, being an objective observer of your own mind — being self-aware — means that you’re not left helplessly subject to identify yourself with a belief or thought as soon as it arises in your consciousness. Instead, you’re able to put the you-who-holds-an-identity-claim on trial for further inspection.

And this is a crucial point worth stressing:

You cannot observe or critique what you identify with so long as you’re identified with it; it’s only when you step away from yourself, away from the identity claim, that you can assess it with any kind of objective power.

I’ll say it again:

The subject must become the object if it’s to be objectively observed and assessed.

This is the whole power of self-awareness/meta-cognition.

Now, I’m assuming it’s not necessary to thoroughly explain the value of questioning your own beliefs. So suffice it to say, if you don’t sufficiently practice self-awareness, you’re essentially missing out on the advantage of being an evolved human — of having a developed pre-fontal cortex.

Because the whole point of intelligence starts at self-awareness.

As Aristotle once said,

The mark of an intelligent person is one who can entertain a thought without accepting it.

So in short, according to Aristotle and Camus,

Self-awareness leads you down the path to intelligence. And in turn, intelligence leads you down the path to wisdom.

Now, I know what you might be thinking:

This is all well and good, but it doesn’t exactly get to the question you mentioned earlier—so where is the wisdom in doing this meta-cognition, self-awareness stuff?

Well, in building self-awareness into a habit by standing outside of your belief(s), what you simultaneously build is an increasing comfort for being uncertain. Let’s call this a development of healthy skepticism.

Now without healthy skepticism, bad ideas tend to prevail in the absence of good evidence. And as history has shown, a sufficient number of bad ideas is the first step toward tyranny.

All you need are the following ingredients:

• 1 cup of ideology,

• 1–3 servings of dogmatic leaders (pre-blended in outrage and passion for best results)

• A heaping spoon of public madness

• A dash of passivity

• All stirred well in social contagion

…and Voilà, there is your well-baked tyranny.

Moreover, being comfortable in uncertainty (A.K.A., being a healthy skeptic) will lead to more comfort in being wrong. And that’s good for everyone. No matter who you are.

Why?

Because healthy skepticism leads to an epistemically humble and dispassionate conversation about the facts. Which in turn leads to the surfacing and acceptance of good ideas. Which in turn leads to a society free of tyranny.

And so if you ask me, that is where wisdom is. It’s in a mode of being that not only proves to be beneficial to you, but to everyone around you.

So for your key takeaway, here’s a 3-point checklist for making sure you’re sticking according to wisdom:

• Stay skeptical

• Stay comfortable being wrong

• Avoid tyranny

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But here’s a question worth asking: If fixing problems were simply a matter of effort and focus, why do they keep multiplying at a curious pace behind problems nearly solved—as if this were a never ending game of Whac-A-Mole?

This endless cycle points to a deeper misunderstanding. We’ve inherited the belief—consciously or not—that life is struggle, that fulfillment is a prize won through hard work and sacrifice. Yet this story of perpetual striving, this “grindstone approach,” rarely delivers the peace we crave. Perhaps it’s time to try a different story.

The Trap of Problem-Centered Thinking

Let’s ground this in something familiar: money. Suppose you’re facing financial difficulties. You might not even have to imagine it. We’ve all been there—when money feels scarce, anxiety and fear creep in like unwelcome guests.

The conventional wisdom tells us to fixate on the problem: calculate expenses, strategize solutions, hustle harder. But what happens? Often, your anxiety amplifies. Stress builds. Your mind loops through the same worries, circling without landing on any real resolution. It’s textbook rumination.

With this issue in mind, Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” I’d argue further here that it’s not just a matter of thought or cognition—it’s a matter of emotional state. Meaning that we cannot move toward solutions while rooted in the very anxiety and stress that define the problem.

The True Problem: What We Pay Attention To

Here’s a perspective that may challenge you: The real problem is not the number in your bank account. It’s the emotional charge you’ve attached to it—anxiety, fear, insecurity. These feelings, not the circumstances themselves, are what we truly wish to escape from.

Think about it. If you could feel completely at peace regardless of your financial situation, would it still dominate your thoughts as a problem? It’s not that material conditions are irrelevant—they aren’t meant to be ignored or spiritually bypassed—but they aren’t the sole authors of your suffering.

So here’s another question to ask yourself:

What if you stopped wrestling with your problems for a moment? Instead of fixating on solutions that won’t come, what if you placed your attention elsewhere—on something that evokes peace, joy, or fulfillment?

This is not an invitation to suppress your painful emotions. On the contrary, feel them. Let them move through you. But don’t convert them into your identity claims; nor inflate them with endless mental chatter. Rather, anchor yourself in a state of inner stability…

Just imagine how you would feel if the problem were already resolved. Hold that feeling—peace, relief, even quiet contentment—and keep returning to it when worry pulls you away.

If you’re skeptical, consider this: Has endless worrying ever led to the clarity you seek? Many of us spend years—or even decades—gripped by the same recurring fears. If obsessing were effective, we would have solved our problems long ago.

Instead, try giving yourself permission to stop. Set aside 15 minutes a day for dedicated worrying if you must, but the rest of the time, gently redirect your mind toward a better emotional state. Feel what it’s like to exist in the present moment, where nothing is broken and nothing needs immediate fixing. From this place of peace (our new emotional state), solutions often emerge on their own—unexpectedly, gracefully.

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What About Action?

Of course, this isn’t an argument against action. If you know the exact steps to solve a problem, by all means, take them. But reflect on this: How often do you take action while still trapped in emotional chaos, only to find yourself tangled in new problems? Action that stems from internal misalignment rarely brings lasting peace.

This is why countless people achieve external success—money, status, even love—yet remain restless and anxious. Their minds simply find new problems to fixate on. This tension is reflected in the ancient wisdom of Kabbalah. It teaches that true transformation begins within, and that without this inner alignment, no amount of external effort will bring the relief you seek.

The Invitation

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine that you could be happy right now, unconditionally—but you would never get the external things you believe you need to be happy. The mansion, the partner, the promotion—none of it will come. Would you choose that happiness anyway?

This exercise often reveals an uncomfortable truth: many of us don’t want happiness itself. We want happiness with the thing(s). We tether our well-being to stuff beyond our control, leaving joy perpetually out of reach.

But life will never align perfectly with our desires. If happiness isn’t possible here, in this moment, then when? Now is all there is.

I’m not asking you to believe this blindly. I’m asking you to test it. Approach your life differently. Practice gratitude. Feel peace where you can. See what shifts.

You may find that your problems, though still present, no longer wield the same power. And perhaps, you’ll discover that happiness was never waiting at the end of your struggles. It was simply waiting for your attention.

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And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being?

Right away, Dostoevsky challenges an assumption that’s baked into much of our modern thinking: that reason, financial stability, and physiological well-being are the highest goods, that human flourishing (what Dostoevsky refers to as ‘advantage’) can be neatly packaged in the rational pursuit of happiness (or what he elsewhere referred to as the utopian “Crystal Palace”).

To understand him better, let’s focus on one of the above questions he poses:

“Is not reason in error as regards advantage?”

His answer? An unequivocal yes. And this is because reason itself only fulfills roughly 20% of our capacity for life. The rest that’s left over—the other 80%—is dedicated to every other capacity of life: as we can witness the majority of our being enveloped in story, virtue, intuition, emotions, drama, and last but not least, chaos.

In his book, the insight Dostoevsky shares is that it’s our non-rational capacity that constitutes our capacity to flourish. He then builds on this by emphasizing that our will to chaos completes a manifestation of the whole life. Meaning that we don’t just seek to flourish in the form of safety and risk-free choices; we also crave autonomy and the full expression of who we are through our culturally shamed dark side.

Carl Jung, over half a century later, echoed similar ideas. He believed that to live a whole life, we need to confront and integrate the darker, irrational sides of ourselves—what he called the “shadow.”

However, the great trouble in this comes when we don’t know how to express all the capacities of our being, especially those pertaining to our shadow integration—the latter of which, according to Jung, is a very difficult thing to do.

He put it this way:

No doubt this also sounds very simple. In reality, however, the acceptance of the shadow-side of human nature verges on the impossible. Consider for a moment what it means to grant the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless, and evil! Yet it is just this that the modern man insists upon. He wants to live with every side of himself—to know what he is.

For both Jung and Dostoevsky, this integration is not just optional—it’s crucial. Humans are not just rational beings; we are creatures of contradiction. And when we ignore or suppress the less desirable parts of ourselves, those aspects tend to surface in destructive ways.

But here’s where Dostoevsky goes another layer deeper in suggesting that there’s a more fundamental want of humanity that explains why we’re compelled to live out all the capacities of our lives, especially unto chaos and our shadow:

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

Thus, Dostoevsky’s most advantageous advantage is a person’s desire to express free will. He elaborates:

…in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage — for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important — that is, our personality, our individuality.

In other words, we’re willing to sabotage our own happiness if it means asserting our independence. And for better or worse, that rebellious impulse—the refusal to be a cog in someone else’s vision of a perfect world—is clearly hardwired into us.

That said, I know this is not an easy concept to accept. It suggests that, on some deep level, we might prefer suffering over the bliss of a rational utopia; and on top of that absurdity, the ridiculous yet unironic rationale behind this is that, on some level a step deeper, we value freedom and individuality more than comfort and safety.

Conclusion

With these psychological insights granted as true, we’re now presented with an existentially-saturated paradox:

True well-being isn’t just about the absence of suffering; it’s about embracing the full complexity of life—giving oxygen to both adventure and stability, risk and security, order and chaos.

Moreover, we’re shown that the integrated self is generated by allowing ourselves to express this paradox through certain parts of our being, which may ultimately be the key to living a flourishing life. Or at least one that is less fraught with psychological upheaval.

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We’ve journeyed through the camel’s burdened endurance and the lion’s rebellious roar, shedding the weight of inherited values and clearing the path for freedom. Each stage in Nietzsche’s metamorphoses has built toward one ultimate goal: the creation of something new. Now, with the old constraints dismantled (via the Lion Stage), we enter the third and most profound transformation—the child.

Imagine this: you’ve cast off the weight of societal expectations, stared down the dragon of “Thou Shalt,” and declared your independence with the lion’s ferocious “I will.”

Congratulations. You’re finally free. So, what does Nietzsche choose as the symbol of this hard-won liberation?

A child.

At first, it seems anticlimactic (and even laughable). After battling dragons and roaring with defiance, a child might feel more like a punchline than a peak. Shouldn’t the final transformation be something grander? A phoenix, perhaps, or a legendary creature worthy of myth? Nietzsche, however, saw things differently.

“The child,” he writes, “is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.”

In this sense, the child isn’t a regression—it’s a revolution. It embodies the freedom to create, the playfulness to explore, and the purity to embrace life without the baggage of the past. The child says yes to life, not in naive acceptance (as a child might), but as an act of courageous affirmation. This sacred Yes opens the door to flow—the state where creativity, authenticity, and vitality flourish.

In short, the child doesn’t merely exist—it thrives in creating a style and sophistication all its own.

In Nietzsche’s terms, the child can also be connected to his other conception of pinnacle evolution, the Übermensch—translated as the overman—which is someone who transcends limitations and affirms life in all its highs and lows (notice also this latter characterization anticipating Camus’ Sisyphus).

All in all, the child is the ultimate expression of personal excellence and the fulfillment of one’s potential.

Nietzsche’s Personal Struggle for the Sacred Yes

It’s no secret that Nietzsche struggled to embody the liberated ideal he envisioned. He endured relentless physical and mental illness, culminating in his infamous breakdown after witnessing a horse being flogged in the streets of Turin.

And yet, Nietzsche’s intellectual legacy is undeniable. His ideas reshaped philosophy, psychology, existentialism, and postmodernism, leaving an indelible mark on how we think about the human condition.

So we’re tempted to ask: did Nietzsche, in the final analysis, achieve the child’s liberated state? Perhaps not. But in my estimation, to the extent that intellectual effort aligned with his vision of personal excellence, I’d say he damn well near hit the mark.

Furthermore, his vision of the sacred Yes—of saying yes to life, even in its chaos—remains an enduring call to anyone seeking to transcend and create. (It’s what he elsewhere sums up in another life principle borrowed from the stoics: Amor Fati (meaning to love what is).)

The child, then, is more than a conclusion; it’s an invitation. Nietzsche challenges us to carry forward the spirit of the child—to embrace life’s possibilities, to play, to create, and to affirm. It’s not an easy path, but it’s the one that leads to the fullest expression of who we are.

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Enter the lion: the rebellious force that breaks the chains of conformity and asserts its independence.

Stage Two: The Lion

After the spiritual wanderer takes on its new form (the lion), they are still stranded in the desert but are equipped with new abilities and motivations that shape their path forward. And that path forward is quickly realized by every lion: it is to become king of the desert.

But in order to do so, the strong spirit needs to chase freedom and capture it. And as Nietzsche tells us, it does so by contending with the existing king of the desert. A dragon called “thou shalt.”

This cunning creature presents itself as a sparkling authority figure — with each of its thousand scales carrying a glittering “thou shalt” commandment.

In seeing the dragon, the nature of the fight-to-come is first one of resisting temptation — as the dragon carries an appeal that represents the comfort of tradition. An invitation to the lull of the familiar and the broadly accepted.

Thou Shalt is the enemy of self-mastery.

And so if the lion fails to slay the dragon, it would mean being tamed by it. It entails submission to the path more traveled; the philosophy of the herd from which it initially departed from.

But on the other hand, if the lion is going to succeed, it needs to stand its ground and firmly declare “I will!”

This declaration comes after each time the dragon retorts that all values have already been created, that they are each written on his glittering scales and he/she has only to read and accept them. The dragon says, “there shall be no more ‘I will’.”

But eventually, if the lion continues to stand its ground, the fight will escalate. Nietzsche writes how the lion delivers the finishing blows, roaring at the dragon “the sacred ‘No’.” A statement that represents the denunciation of all the morals and values that came before it — the knowledge that it had so diligently shouldered as a camel.

However, Nietzsche is clear: the lion’s purpose is destruction, not creation. The lion tears down the old, but it doesn’t yet build the new. For that, another transformation is needed.

As Nietzsche puts it:

To create new values—that even the lion cannot do; but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation—that is within the power of the lion.

The lion is fierce, but it’s also transitional. In slaying the dragon, it clears the path for freedom, creating the space for something even more profound: the child.

Looking Ahead

With the camel’s burdens cast off and the lion’s rebellion complete, the spirit must take on a new form to create something meaningful. That’s where the child enters—a symbol of creativity, playfulness, and the ability to build anew. But before we explore this final metamorphosis, let’s take a moment to appreciate the lion’s roar: a fearless rejection of everything that stands in the way of authentic freedom.

Shattered, Nietzsche left Germany and retreated to Rapallo, Italy, a picturesque seaside town that would serve as the incubator for one of philosophy’s most enigmatic and extraordinary works: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

It’s in this fictional treatise that Nietzsche introduces Zarathustra, a hermit who leaves his mountain solitude to share his hard-earned wisdom with the masses. When Zarathustra finally arrives in a bustling village, he delivers a message that still resonates to this day: it’s that the path to true freedom and creativity requires us to undergo three transformative stages, or “metamorphoses” of the spirit. These stages are represented by three archetypes: the camel, the lion, and the child.

Stage One: The Camel

In Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s character, Zarathustra, has a deep hatred for herd animals. This is because herd animals have an instinct for safety that limits their desire to do nothing but graze pasture all day long.

Additionally, They don’t do well with labor or extreme temperatures. And they have zero curiosity for adventure or risk-taking. And as if that isn’t enough, he goes on by noting that they’re completely dependent creatures — solely reliant on the shepherd as a guide to find what’s good for them.

This is important to know because when Zarathustra finally arrives in town and preaches his sage wisdom, his call to action is received with indifference and even mockery—and so it helps to understand the weight of what he’s about to say...

He calls them herd animals.

More specifically, he draws a similarity between the townspeople and cows by pointing to their deeply engrained complacency — in their contentment for a quiet, no-surprises, moderately wealthy life.

Nietzsche adds to this idea more when you realize the history of the name that he gave the town, “Motley Cow,” which is an allusion to Plato’s disdain for majority rule in democracy. Thus, given the context that Nietzsche invokes the name here in the story, it effectively translates as rule of the herd.

However, unlike the majority of the herd, there are those few who have an ambition for self-discovery. And as such, their strong spirit enables them to venture out and explore the spiritual landscape. An undertaking that might be a one-way ticket they may never return from, but to them, the journey is worth the risk.

At the beginning of this journey (stage 1), that is when the “strong spirit” embarks as a “camel.”

And sure, let’s quickly address the obvious question: Why a camel? It’s not exactly what comes to mind when you envision what might symbolize freedom or ambition, but Nietzsche saw something deeper.

In Zarathustra, the camel symbolizes the person willing to take on life’s heaviest burdens. And unlike herd animals, the camel thrives on carrying weight. It kneels, not in submission, but in preparation to bear immense loads. For Nietzsche, this stage is about embracing the struggle—taking on the weight of tradition, knowledge, and responsibility with a sense of purpose.

“There are many things for the spirit, for the strong, heavy spirit in which dwell respect and awe: its strength longs for the heavy, for the heaviest… Thus it kneels down like the camel and wants to be well-laden.”

In modern terms, this is the grind phase. It’s when you dive into learning, building discipline, and absorbing the wisdom of those who came before you. The camel takes pride in the challenge, seeing the struggle as its glory. But there’s a cost: the journey is isolating, and the burden grows heavier over time. The camel spirit eventually reaches a breaking point—it realizes it’s been carrying values and beliefs that don’t fully belong to it.

This is where Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality comes in. As the camel trudges through its metaphorical desert, it discovers that the world doesn’t deal in absolutes. There is no single, universal “right way” to live. Nietzsche’s own words echo this realization:

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way—it does not exist.”

And so it is here that the camel unloads itself to take charge in obtaining its own ideas and values. To create its own destiny and “I will.”

This I will assertion strikes at Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power.” Meaning that he thought that all humans have a will to power — a desire to to control both themselves and whatever environment they inhabit. But not many people have the courage to act on their will to power. To face the dragon that denies them their self-mastery…

This marks the transition to the next stage: the lion.

(Be sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss the next newsletter covering the following two stages.)

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But why is this?

Well, let’s just say it’s not due to him being an easy read. His ideas can often be overly abstract and somewhat dense. And more than that, he wasn’t the most prolific writer. For example, Noam Chomsky, who’s basically a deity in the field of linguistics, has written or contributed to over 1,100 published works, while Foucault’s contributions amount to a little more than 400. And when you do the math, this is virtually less than half of Chompsky’s total. But the irony in this is that Chompsky’s citation count (514,316) is virtually less than half of Foucault’s.

So again, what makes Foucault so exceptional that he outpaces every other thinker in citations?

The answer to this lies in how his ideas have struck at the core of contemporary political science and philosophy.

Particularly those ideas regarding the pervasiveness of power up and down and through institutions of every kind, as well as his critiques of modern structures like prisons, asylums, and schools.

To help us get a better grasp of the magnitude of this idea’s impact, let’s draw our attention to the scientist, Eric Lander, who was associated with the Human Genome Project (remember that multi-billion-dollar international project back in the early 2000s?), which, with the help of his colleagues, successfully sequenced the majority of the genome. It was a pretty big deal, to say the least—considering that it was a discovery that instigated thousands of new hypotheses in the field of genomics. This is also something that we can see reflected in the recent analysis, where Eric Lander was referenced 725,654 times.

But now, when you compare this discovery to Foucault’s notion of power, the difference is taking the impact of the genome project (quantified in the number of works cited) and essentially more than doubling it.

Now, to get more into the specifics of what made Foucault’s idea on power so revolutionary, it’s important to first understand that Foucault shattered the notion that power is merely something held by governments or the elite; instead, he argued that it operates subtly through everyday norms, language, and social practices.

Furthermore, in giving us the linguistic framework to become more aware of institutional overreach, systemic inequality, and how deeply these are woven into the fabric of our lives, he provided for us something that no other person in history had: a vocabulary for resistance. And perhaps more crucially, a vocabulary for understanding our entrapment within systems that shape our very selves.

Last but not least, what made Foucault’s work so attractive and perennial was his refusal to provide answers.

Go ahead and look for yourself—from ideas on sex to institutional power to the architecture of knowledge—Foucault doesn’t tell us what we should do in light of our entanglement in these vast networks of social interaction; he’s like Dorthy from The Wizard of Oz in simply revealing the machinery behind the curtain (or maybe that was Toto?).

This method of critique makes sense when you consider that this is what it meant to Foucault to be a postmodernist: It meant doing the work of Deconstruction.

Deconstruction in philosophy is the business of taking ideas or concepts and putting them through a shredder, as it were. Meaning that you’re pointing out all the flaws and inconsistencies of an idea and after that’s done, you just leave them on the floor.

It’s basically philosophical littering.

And naturally, what follows in the act of pure deconstruction is that there’s a mess left for someone to clean up; to then do the restorative work. All the constructiveness.

And as shitty as that might be of Foucault, the upshot of this approach was that it offered the intellectual equivalent of an open-ended question—and this right here, this ambiguity, this openness—is what might be the most impactful feature that contributed to his unprecedented impact. Foucault essentially asked a million-dollar question without giving a response, which left the door wide open for everyone who would follow.

And follow they did.

It also can’t be ignored that Foucault’s philosophy is so interdisciplinary in nature, and that, too, widens the door of entry even more to inspired researchers. In fields like sociology, anthropology, history, political science, philosophy, etc.

In brief summary, the perfect storm here for making Foucault’s work so popular was its broad applicability paired with a rising sense of political relevance; paired also with the power of Foucault’s critique that prompted later scholars to provide an answer to his deconstruction; paired also with his unwillingness to answer his own question. Hence, the mind-blowing 1.42 million citations.

And there you have it. Our most successful intellectual in the world. The GOAT of academia, Michel Foucault.

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I mean what other creatures smoke themselves into cancer, drinks themselves into oblivion, or eat themselves into obesity?

Some of you might interject by pointing out the Swedish moose that gets boozed up on fermented apples, or some pen-tailed treeshrew of Malaysia that consumes nectar brew all day long; but the former is a seasonal occurrence (perhaps accidental too) and the latter involves an animal with the highest alcohol tolerance on the planet (and thus doesn’t get drunk).

All that to say, it’s definitely not the same thing. Our reasons for quaffing down alcohol clearly have a (no-good) recreational tie.

And what’s ironic about all this — the alcohol, smoking, tobacco, over-eating — it’s that it’s not like we don’t know the damage these substances, or behaviors, do to our bodies. In fact, with the prevalence and accessibility of information on the internet, on top of the empirical evidence becoming all the more clear regarding the detrimental effects of said substances, what this only proves is this:

We just simply seem not to care.

But why?

Well ultimately, Dostoevsky believes that it’s co-operative with man’s most advantageous advantage. Which is a phrase I’ll address more thoroughly in the next newsletter. But to start, a reason for why we navigate toward self-destructive behavior boils down to one simple emotion: pleasure.

And no, not the pleasure of the immediate kind—that which follows the consumption of alcohol, drugs, or tobacco (the neuro-chemical interplay induced by exogenous substances); but rather, it’s the kind of pleasure involved in breaking something.

As Dostoevsky put it:

Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

And he later conveys, “…even if it does us obvious harm.”

Thus, given a situation even remotely close to Crystal Palace status—as a utopian state characterized by absolute peace—men will eventually require points of conflict. That is, disturbance. This is because Dostoevsky believes that the nature of man involves having an instinct to create beauty through contrast. And for better or worse, we simply can’t help ourselves in being drawn to this act of creation—no more than we can help not seeing the wonder and beauty of contrast itself.

You can go ahead and try it for yourself. Look up at the night sky and find a star. Try to focus on that prick of shining light, that teeny-tiny speck amidst a sea of infinite darkness, and then after really gazing upon it, call it not beautiful.

I can’t imagine anyone doing so in good faith.

But at any rate, regardless of the deeper unconscious motivation (Dostoevsky has more to say on this), if we return to analyzing this pleasure-in-destruction concept in real-world conditions at a higher level, we can understand that the more peace we have—or to use a metaphor, the more still the waters are—the more pleasurable, and thus profoundly meaningful, the experience of disturbing it is.

And yes, even if that experience is at the cost of inflicting obvious harm to ourselves.

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Well, the brood consensus among scientists and philosophers is something like our ability to reason; it involves our intellect and language capacity.

And this intuition even goes back thousands of years with scholars identifying our intellect as what it means to be made in the image of God.

But more than this, humans are intrinsically inclined to engineer, create art, and build cool stuff, just like ants and their ant hills and bees and their bee hives. But unlike the ant and the bee — or any other living thing on earth for that matter — what is drastically different about humanity in what we create, is our passionate love to destroy it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky also noticed this tendency in humanity back in the 1800s. In Notes from Underground, he wrote:

Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos?

Of course this is a rhetorical question. Dostoevsky knew the reason why men like to break things and cause chaos; but, what’s curious in his explanation is why he calls this mode of destruction, man’s most advantageous advantage.

Far from Rational

Despite the intelligence that humanity has been endowed with, there is clear evidence that we humans — both en masse and on an individual level — behave in such a way that is anti-rational.

As Fyodor Dostoevsky pointed out in Notes from Underground:

… one may say anything about the history of the world — anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational.

To some extent, this was a response to other contemporary thinkers who held the opposite view. They essentially affirmed that all barbarous activity would cease once reason and science had completely re-educated human nature.

Or in other words, after you’ve successfully injected the logic of science into enough human brains, the outcome would be:

No more murders.

No more abuse.

No more road rage.

No more bad.

Of course, the presupposition here is that the widespread adoption of science will, in virtue of its all-good nature, rub off on us a moral intuition. Much as if it were the word of God.

Furthermore, Dostoevsky noted that if such a world were to ever exist, it would indeed result in something like a utopia. Or what he called, the Crystal Palace: A place of perfection without crime, suffering, or surprises.

Sounds nice, but here’s the catch…

Dostoevsky’s conviction was that man can’t live in a world without suffering. Because the way he understands it, suffering is the fuel for a man’s sense of meaning. He wrote:

I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.

Moreover, he remarked that this commitment to suffering isn’t just in the context of man vs. society—like in the way men wage war agains other tribes—but that it’s way more prevalent in the context of man vs. himself.

In sync with Carl Jung’s understanding of the shadow, by forcing people to live in a ‘Crystal Palace’, you suppress their creativity — because creativity naturally involves destruction and chaos.

Consequently, because creativity gets repressed, the pressure of its energy builds up in the psyche. It builds and builds until it eventually breaks through aggressively at some point.

And the kicker is this: you’re not consciously aware of it when this occurs (hence, its existence as your shadow).

So what comes out as a result?

Raw, unmitigated chaos.

This is something you see played out in the novel, Fight Club.

It’s the story of a man, Tyler Durden, whose creative energy aggressively forced its way out. At first, it manifested as insomnia and then developed into a full-blown shadow personality: a creation of Tyler’s psyche that moved and acted in every way that the conscious Tyler did not.

Now, if we’re to rewind the tape and diagnose the root cause of Tyler’s creative outburst, the culprit is seemingly innocuous. It was embodied consumerism and the slow, mind-numbing, 9–5 lifestyle. A consistent process as quiet and exacting as Chinese water torture.

So don’t be fooled; the danger is very real…

I am Jack’s repressed shadow, scratching at every corner.

Moral of the story: find a creative outlet before it finds you.

…

This is part 1 of a 3-part series.

Fair warning: This topic strikes at our core intuitions about the nature of reality, so be aware that some negative emotions might arise as a consequence of reading this article.

OK, now with that bit out of the way, here’s a refresher on a technical term that I repeatedly use.

~An axiom is a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true~

Most people in the West hold free will to be an axiom without ever thinking about its validity, whether it’s really true or not.

But hey, who can blame us?

It’s an axiom that’s basically as old as history.

Over the past 2,000 years, the idea of free will emerged in Plato and Aristotle and eventually found its latin form in liberum arbitrium. This was during the 4th century when Christian philosophers were attempting to reconcile God’s nature with a deterministic universe. The logic runs like this:

• Premise 1: God desires that every person come to a belief in him

• Premise 2: Some people don’t choose to believe in god.

• Conclusion: Therefore, people have free will to not believe in god.

To break it down a little more, the conception of free will (liberum arbitrium) coming out of the conclusion graciously assumes:

1. God’s goodness excludes him from sending people to hell.

2. Each of us is therefore free to choose god (heaven) or not (hell).

So there it is, that’s how the first grammatical form of free will took its conceptual shape in our world. It’s the secret sauce for keeping god an all-good being who wants all people to come to salvation in him.

Moreover, despite the brow-raising origins of this term, free will, over the years it seems to have solidified itself as how we primarily characterize what it means to be us.

For instance, imagine if someone were to ask you to rank order these 6 things as being words that capture the human experience:

• Anxiety

• Free will

• Risk

• Insecurity

• Love

• Suffering

Free will would likely rank in your top 2 (with ‘Love’ probably taking the cake in the #1 spot).

But if free will is fundamentally illusory, as some scientists are now claiming — that it doesn’t exist — then why are we so committed to its existence?

And even in the presence of science giving us good reason to think otherwise!

Whatever the reason, we have a new dilemma on our hands:

This resultant clash between the scientific authority of human sciences and the humanistic image of persons is what scientists are now calling Neuroexistentialism.

Given the prevalence of AI and the continued progress of neuroscience, existential questions are getting harder to ignore. Especially with how pervasive information is with social media. The net result is a more anxious society that is confronted with challenging life decisions; and where that same society also belongs to a culture that progressively discourages critical thought. Thus, it’s not unreasonable to anticipate Neuroexistentialism entering the foreground of what constitutes the existential crisis of the 21st century.

For more on this existential crisis and what we’re doing about it as a society, check out this video I made on YouTube.

Also, please comment about your own experiences and muses on free will. Is it a helpful illusion that we should preserve, or should we just do away with it?

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And this is because, as we covered in part 1, lying has to do with believing (and the intention to bring people into a belief you know not to be true), which isn’t something that you can do directly.

For instance, You can hope that everyone loves and cares for you, you may even wish it, but you can’t voluntarily believe it.

What you can do directly however, is direct your attention; which makes whatever you direct your attention to more salient to you. (Salient meaning, to stand out).

Your attention can also be captured by what is more salient (like in the way a loud horn captures your attention).

In this way, attention, as it is directed and captured, provides the fundamental mechanics for how we can bullshit (or deceive) ourselves: It begins by creating a positive feedback loop around what you’d like to serve as a distraction; and so continues in directing your attention to what in turn captures attention, and visa versa.

Consequently, this is when your attention becomes attached to something and you lose the capacity to notice other things.

And just like that, you’ve successfully bullshitted yourself (see also confirmation bias, belief preservation, and post hoc rationality.)

Dr. Vervaeke concludes by noting that this behavior is the opposite of the rational self-knowledge that comes with the practice of proper introspection.

SO WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO NOT BULLSHIT OURSELVES?

In keeping with the spirit of Socrates, that, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” Dr. Vervaeke posits his approach for how to move forward to avoid the trap of bullshitting yourself, and what’s worse, the consequential enrollment in the struggle of the meaning crisis.

In a word, he claims the antidote is philosophy; and philosophy in the truest sense of the word. As being philia sophia — love of wisdom. He says:

Wisdom is keeping your truth machinery and your relevance machinery tightly coupled together so you don’t bullshit yourself.

Thus, it’s wisdom that shall set you free.

One way that you can practically do this is through embracing humility. Epistemic humility, specifically: It’s in recognizing that one’s most cherished belief might be wrong. Even disastrously wrong.

With this attitude in tandem with an ambition for aligning yourself with the truth — that’s the best bullshit repellent you can give yourself.

As a second line of defense, Dr. Vervaeke also suggests mindfulness in order to avoid self-bullshitting. He says that, “With mindfulness,” the practice of becoming deeply aware of everything’s relevance, “I can break out of egocentric bias and that will actually afford me overcoming a lot of self-deception and it also enhances my connectedness to the world.”

Thanks for reading. I hope you learned something new.

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For those that don’t know, John Vervaeke is a prominent cognitive science and psychology professor who made a compelling 52 episode video series on the meaning crisis of the 21st century.

In Dr. Vervaeke’s analysis, he presents the claim that the meaning crisis essentially comes from an increasing submission to bullshit. And you, me, everyone — we’re all in it. A pile that keeps piling in equal proportion to the extent that we give attention to politics and advertising.

But despite those 2 areas of excessive bullshit (politics and advertising), what may surprise you is that it’s not other people’s bullshit — or them bullshitting us — that’s the real problem. Rather, It’s us bullshitting ourselves.

But now let’s define our terms and get down to the details.

First off, what is bullshit?

You may think it’s lying—a fair guess. But bullshit is not the same thing as lying.

In an article Dr. Vervaeke references titled, On Bullshit, (yes, bullshit is actually a technical term in philosophy) the author, Harry Frankfurt, makes the distinctions between lying, humbug and bullshit; where lying only occurs if you make a statement with the intention to lead your audience to believe something you consider false.

To draw out his points more clearly, Dr. Frankfurt gets us to consider “a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about ‘our great and blessed country, whose Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.’”

Dr. Frankfurt doesn’t see this as lying given that it’s not in the orator’s intention to lead the audience into a belief that he himself regards as false concerning matters as whether our country is great, or whether it is blessed, or whether the Founders had divine guidance, or whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind. Rather, he sees it as a demonstration of Humbug.

This is because it’s made clear that the orator’s intention behind his statement is to convey to his audience a certain belief about himself.

Or in other words:

“He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is what people think of him.”

In this way, intention matters; it’s the sole factor that differentiates between lying and humbug.

So then what is bullshit?

To answer the question, Dr. Frankfurt has us consider an anecdote relayed by Fania Pascal. It was a moment of communication between her and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a well-respected philosopher of logic and language.

Pascal’s account runs as so:

I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

It sounds insane, I know, but it’s reasonable that Wittgenstein was disgusted.

In Dr. Franfurt’s estimation, it is the careless attitude that carries such statements as Pascal’s. It is, as he writes, significantly “unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality.”

In a few words, she is thoughtless, inattentive and careless.

Moreover, Dr. Frankfurt has this to say about Pascal’s mental attitude:

Her laxity, or her lack of care, is not a matter of having permitted an error to slip into her speech on account of some inadvertent or momentarily negligent lapse in the attention she was devoting to getting things right. The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying. (My emphasis).

To simplify this, as Dr. Frankfurt sees it, Pascal isn’t concerned at all with whether or not, or to what degree, her statement strikes at the truth. Or more simply put, she isn’t concerned with being correct.

And that, he says, is the essence of bullshit.

To briefly sum it all up: lying seeks to distort the truth, humbug courts approval without regard for the truth, and bullshit simply babbles on, indifferent to whether truth ever enters the room.

In my next newsletter, I’ll circle back to Dr. Vervaeke’s argument and get into how we bullshit ourselves. I’ll also get into the question of what it would mean to not bullshit ourselves.

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The dynamic itself is a psychological one: It hinges on human isolation and loneliness.

But before we can elaborate on what Dr. Arendt said about this psychological state, it’s important to first get an understanding of the governmental system that exploits it — totalitarianism — and see why it has only just made its appearance in the 20th century.

Where It All Began…

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951), Dr. Arendt piggy-backs off of what the Greeks had cataloged back in the day regarding forms of government. According to Plato, these are the ones that humanity has tried out:

Timocracy = government by the brave

Oligarchy = government by the rich

Democracy = government by the people

Aristocracy = government by the best

Tyranny = government by one

(Spelt out as T.O.D.A.T. to give your memory a better shot at recalling these.)

Out of these, aristocracy seems to be our obvious choice. This means that the best or most competent individuals get selected to the top. Timocracy is probably the rarest form, but it was typified though Sparta and her politics. Same with the Vikings in Scandinavia, but less so. (That last one my estimation, not Plato’s.)

In the U.S. today, we’d have what you call a hybrid model. Some blend between an oligarchy and a democracy — with the caveat of our democracy being a constitutional representation of the people. Not a raw democracy.

But hold on, where’s totalitarianism?

This was Dr. Arendt’s point. It didn’t make Plato’s list because it had yet to be conceived and exercised by humans.

She makes the case that it was a manifestation in the 20th century, pointing to 2 examples: Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

She further distinguishes totalitarianism through these characteristics:

1) Totalitarianism erases classes by seeing everyone belonging to the masses.

2) Totalitarianism shifts power and authority from the military to the police.

3) Totalitarianism engages in world domination.

4) Totalitarianism seeks to align its efforts to a supreme, unavoidable Law.

For the Nazis, the Law was grounded in Nature — which was supposedly issuing the dominance of one “master race” and exterminating all others. For the Bolsheviks on the other hand, the Law was grounded in History.

But in either case, it was an inevitable movement of Reality that dictated their actions.

And so how does one get thousands upon thousands to follow in on these actions?

Dr. Arendt pointed out that it was ideology — that totalitarian regimes can only prevail if the masses are able to accept a grand narrative transcending a face-value understanding of reality.

She wrote:

“Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things.”

She also paradoxically contends that this occurrence becomes accentuated to the degree that the line between fact and fiction gets blurred — when truth becomes more subjective than objective in a society.

This is the part in the movie where you peek over your shoulder and find the scary thing there and scream.

Because yes, it’s among us.

The conditions are ripening in the 21st century for a totalitarian-like government to rear its ugly head. (That is if we take Dr. Arendt’s words as true.)

Solitude vs. Loneliness

Now, here’s where we get to the part in Dr. Arendt’s theory that justifies my title and introduction to this article. This is where we get to the psychological dynamic of isolation and loneliness.

To start, Dr. Arendt tells us that loneliness in the political sphere amounts to loneliness in the social sphere. It goes something like the phenomena of cancel culture.

Just imagine, for instance, you know (or knew) a victim of cancel culture. Consider then how their cancelation alienated them for breaking code(s) in our political language game, and how, as a consequence for fear of further association with them rubbing off a similar fate on you, you broke ties with them. Again, just imagine.

In all likelihood, every other person they knew felt the same and did the same (except maybe their mom). Thus, they became socially alienated.

Dr. Arendt notes the significance of such an event for an individual:

Banishment on a political front is the same thing as banishment on a social front.

Moreover, it’s been long determined that loneliness is not the same as solitude. Dr. Arendt shows that it was first outlined by Cicero in his De Re Publica, and then further delineated by the Stoic Epictetus in his Discourses — writing that one is not in company merely by being among company; and that just because one is alone does not mean he is solitary, but is instead “together with himself.”

Indeed, solitude can be a highly productive and creative state, while loneliness, on the other hand, is a devastating reality and leads many to mental instability and even suicide.

And remember also that Dr. Arendt’s conviction was that a totalitarian regime cannot thrive unless the classes turn into masses — and by which they adopt a grand narrative with little to no resistance.

In other words, in order for people to endorse ideologies, you need to make sure that they’re lonely .

And what better way to do that than to make them avoid solitude?

This is what Dr. Arendt was keenly aware of. She knew that solitude was the gateway to individual and creative thought; making it the last thing that totalitarian organizations wanted from the people they sought to govern.

And so to mitigate solitude, the State doubles down on trying to make us into lonely people; to break the ties between us. The networks that have us belong to a healthy social unit.

Eventually (if this persists), all that will be left is a lonely-made blob of humans. An indistinguishable mess of individuals dissolved into categories. A think-less mass.

Yeah. It feels like we’re at that part in the movie again…

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.” — Hannah Arendt

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And while there are many notable books that have been banned throughout history, here are just 7 that I’ve found to have provoked more than your average grumble and hiss.

1. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

There isn’t a topic that makes a society erupt in moral panic quite like that of pedophilia. Which is exactly the major theme that runs through Vladamir Nabokov’s entire novel, Lolita. But if you open it expecting to find anything deeply graphic, you’ll be disappointed. And perhaps pleasantly so. The story is told with only strong inclinations that leaves the reader to fill in the blanks. It’s the stuff of flowery poetry that gets the message across.

Take the opening line for instance:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

Despite the daring subject matter, the book was only banned in 2 countries: France and the U.K.

2. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller, 1934

A reputation for depravity that is hard to exceed…

After America banned it in 1960, its publication the following year provoked obscenity trials; and during which, the Pennsylvanian judge was quoted describing the book as “an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.”

Ironically, this was the review that did the most for the book’s publicity. A not uncommon phenomena when literature is severely condemned.

Here’s also a fun fact: Every sexually casual narration that’s been published in the U.S. since has the Tropic of Cancer to thank for setting legal precedent regarding pornography laws. Without it they wouldn’t exist.

3. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932

This famous tale details a dystopian civilization of manufactured humans and happiness. Upon the books publishing, it was found to be too distasteful for public dispensing in Ireland and India. Ireland banned it for containing what was seen as aggressive ideas against religion and the traditional family values, while also condemning its use of foul and immoral language. India went to another extreme by calling Huxley a ‘pornographer’ for illustrating a world where casual sex was encouraged from a young age.

4. Ulysses, James Joyce, 1920

You know it’s bad when the United States Postal Service burns copies sent in the mail. That in itself makes the book burning in Fahrenheit 451 (ironically another banned book) not so fictional of a story line. But at any rate, this was a part of Ulysses fate for most of the 1930s, while also being banned across the pond in the U.K.

Oh and by the way, this was all over some references to masturbation, among other things. But mainly masturbation.

5. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, 1988

Despite relatively recent publication, it’s a book that’s arguably been received with more hostility than any other before or after it.

The main contention over the book was on the grounds of blasphemy. Which resulted in many copies being burned on the streets of Britain and the larger Islamic world; and even going so far as being the reason for the murder of Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie’s Japanese translator.

Rushdie himself was forced into hiding for over a decade after Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa (a legal ruling) ordering Muslims to kill the author.

6. The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall, 1928

As a book that was banned for homosexuality, you’d be mega disappointed if you picked this one up expecting to find explicit passages of homosexual romance. The closest thing is when it’s implied that the 2 main characters slept in the same room together. And that’s it.

This is just a testament to how homophobic not-so-long-ago societies were. The U.K. in particular with this specific example.

7. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, 1991

They don’t call Ellis the Prince of Darkness for nothing. And it’s in large part got to do with this book.

Indeed, American Psycho is not for the faint of heart. All the eye gouging and breast slicing and head freezing appalled many beyond belief. It even prompted some countries like Germany and Australia to give it an ‘R18’ label in retail shops. Meaning that it couldn’t be sold to people under 18 years old. The books on the shelves even had to be shrink-wrapped to ensure minors couldn’t sneak-a-peak.

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Here are the top 8 wildest facts about Jean-Paul Sartre:

Fact #8: Sartre Turned Down the Nobel Prize

In 1964, Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature, saying that he didn’t want to compromise his independence, and that he despised the committee’s habit of only offering the prize to Western writers or, more specifically, to the anti-Communist folk, rather than to the revolutionary writers from the developing world.

Fact #7: Jean-Paul Sartre Supported Communism

As you may have gathered from #8, Sartre was a Marxist. Which is to say he subscribed to the philosophy of Karl Marx. Which is basically Communism.

But despite being a big admirer of the Soviet Union, he never joined France’s Communist Party. Instead, his main contributions on the political front would be by the pen — in publishing articles that argued for a socialist revolution.

However, when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, Sartre’s high hopes for a form of Communism that worked came crashing down. And he was absolutely devastated.

But after recovering, he went on to examine Marxism more closely and found that it forced individuals to conform. And this was essentially the opposite of his ideals around freedom, so, it didn’t sit well with him.

Fact #6: Sartre Was a Victim of Lifelong Bullying

When you look at Sartre, taking in all 5 feet of him, I think it’s fair to say that he didn’t win the genetic lottery.

On top of his short and frail stature, he also suffered from an eye condition called, Strabismus, or what we normally call being cross-eyed. And so as brutally blunt as kids are, you can only imagine the utter hell Sartre went through growing up.

And unlike how bullying usually phases out after adulthood, for Sartre, this unfortunately wasn’t the case. His students and peers would occasionally mock him. And even his American lover, Sally Swing, would describe him as being “ugly as sin.”

Fact #5: Sartre Was in an Open Relationship

If you think that open relationships are weird and stigmatized now, just think about how they were viewed back in the early 1900s.

And while to some extent, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s partnership was formed to spite the status quo, it was much more so a relational structure that naturally evolved into what it was. Nothing forced or pressured.

Recording Sartre’s proposal, De Beauvoir wrote,

“We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.”

Time eventually proved Simone right in regards to their longevity, because after 51 years, the conversations between the two had created ideas, books, and a bond that surpassed even the most passionate of marriages.

But in the end, death finally separated the two when it came for Sartre in the form of edema of the lungs.

This segues into our next wild fact:

Fact #4: Jean-Paul Sartre’s funeral was attended by over 50,000 people

Sartre died in Paris in 1980, at the age of 74 from complications in his lungs. He had also gone almost completely blind during his last days.

But regardless, thousands of Parisians attended his funeral procession in the city, celebrating the legend of his life.

He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery where Simone was later joined next to him once again 6 years later.

Fact #3: Sartre Was Chased By Crabs for a Year

So being the explorative philosopher that he was, it’s not all that too surprising that when confronted with an opportunity to expand his mind, he wouldn’t say no. And this such occasion came when his old friend from school, Dr. Daniel Lagache, invited him to a controlled experiment.

At the hospital, he was injected with mescaline while the lights were turned down—unfortunately unaware of the importance of ‘set and setting’ when dealing with classical psychedelics.

And so what came as a consequence was a lasting hallucination, where crabs would pursue him everywhere he went.

He later confided in his best friend, Simone,

“I know what the matter with me is. I’m on the verge of a chronic hallucinatory psychosis.”

Fortunately though for Sartre, the crabs finally left him after a year.

But even though they did leave, they still had something of a lasting affect on his work, making appearances in his novels (Nausea), short stories (The Wall), and play-writes (The Condemned of Altona)

Also, while we’re still on the topic of drugs, let’s go to fact #2.

Fact #2: Sartre had an Insane Daily Drug Ritual

Corydrane was a budding psychoactive in Paris at the time.

The recommended dose was 2 pills a day, but of course, Sartre was never one to take too well to directions, and as this recommendation came as no exception, he ate through the whole tube like a bag of Skittles.

And this was also characteristic of his consumption of many other things. When the biographer Annie Cohen-Solal observed his daily routine, she reported,

“His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol — wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on — two hundred milligrams of amphetamines [that’s the Corydrane], fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.”

Fact #1: Sartre Founded an Underground Group in Paris

In addition to being a writer, Sartre was also a political and social activist. And with Simone de Beauvoir by his side, they both helped to establish the group Socialisme et Liberté (Socialism and Liberty) in 1941 after he was released from the French military.

The group was made up of other young writers, philosophers, and students of thought. The focus of the group was to catch Nazi contingents and expose them for what they were doing. It was also a way for the group to get involved with the growing French Resistance movement.

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I think it’s a common misconception that atheists don’t have faith. And I’m not talking about a faith that a god or deity doesn’t exist (although perhaps that charge could be made) — but a faith in some kind of spirituality under the philosophical lens of secular humanism.

What I mean is that an atheist is not the same thing as a mere materialist or naturalist. Those latter identity claims don’t entail any consideration of metaphysical realities, whereas atheism, in the strictest terms of the definition, offers a faith-based bid against the reality of a deity — but that’s typically just the start for atheists. Indeed, those who claim the title appear to have much more skin in the game of ontology than what’s commonly supposed.

So say what you will about atheists having or not having faith in a deity’s non-existence, it still stands that the vast majority of atheists (if not all of them) are, in fact, spiritual in their worldview.

…

To see what I mean, let’s start by considering this typical back-and-forth you might get from any religious member and an atheist:

RM: “So if you don’t believe in a god, then nothing has meaning.”

A: “Sure, not absolutely. But even though there’s no meaning of life, we can still find meaning in life. That’s what I believe anyway.”

RM: “Ok, but then you have to agree that everything is morally relative since there’s no moral lawgiver — a god.”

A: “I suppose…”

RM: “Well, if that’s the case, then someone could murder my family tonight and that act would have no real quality of good or bad tied to it.”

A: “Well hold on…”

…

Some atheists have bent over backward trying to solve this conundrum. Sam Harris, for instance, a neuroscientist and philosopher, has developed a system of thought that rejects moral relativism with the notion that our instinct of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain serves as the moral foundation that facilitates what we mean by good and bad.

Moreover, to Harris, this argumentation of human intuition leading to a “moral landscape,” as he calls it, is sufficient to define an objective truth. In other words, he’s taking the same stance as our forefathers did while constructing the Declaration of Independence: Sam’s saying, I take this truth to be self-evident — as not requiring any further justification — that a moral sense of good and bad objectively exists on a spectrum of pleasure and pain.

In a way, Sam effectively becomes an omniscient god for us all by giving us an absolute truth that can’t be refuted.

Yeah, thanks but no thanks.

That said, you gotta give it to him. It’s a clever trick to get out of the moral relativity dilemma — the whole make your own absolute moral standard sleight of hand. But this is impossible to philosophically establish.

In an interview with Sam on the Within Reason podcast, Alex O’Conner thoroughly exposes his untenable position and you can literally see Sam’s brain short-circuiting.

That said, I’m sympathetic to Sam. He really wants a philosophical system that accounts for morals without needing to invoke a deity or transcendent reality. Hence, why he tells Alex that he’s dropped the use of the term “spirituality” in his philosophical language.

But merely avoiding language doesn’t eliminate the reality that his secular humanism is a leap into a metaphysical assumption.

Meaning that, in Sam’s unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of moral relativism and the existence of a higher power or supernatural principle — and yet, carrying with him his belief in an absolute ethic — he implicitly subscribes to some transcendent quality that infuses the universe to have a fundamental shape in the form of a moral landscape.

This is Sam’s miracle, and he wholeheartedly puts his faith in it.

Bottom line

Atheism. On the surface, the title is misleading because most of those who identify with it still believe in some kind of magic. Some pixy dust that turns an is into an ought so that they can come to grips with some otherwise nasty moral implications of their own worldview.

Oh, and just so you know, morality isn’t the only thing on the menu of self-evident presumptions. We got human specialness, free will, agency, moral treatment of animals, and more. So if you’re an atheist and can’t live without these notions being self-evident — that they’re perhaps false or illusory — then just know that you’re buying into more spirituality than you might think.

Also, not trying to force speech on anyone, but perhaps it might be worth adding the descriptor spiritual before the title atheist, just to be clear we’re dealing with a “spiritual atheist.” Which I feel should prompt a different kind of attitude — both from those who identify with the title and the people who encounter them. Thus, promoting less confusion overall. Another option is to adopt this new term that’s gaining wide acceptance in Europe — Ietsism — which is to maintain an unspecified belief in an undetermined transcendent reality.

Either way, my point is that either definition is sufficient in encompassing a more accurate and broader picture of the philosophical worldview of those who identify as atheists.

But in the spirit of not trying to assume too much, what if, on the other hand, there are atheists out there who really don’t entertain the existence of a transcendent world or reality?

Do non-spiritual atheists actually exist?

I think there may be some out there. I personally don’t know anyone of the sort, but the closest thing I’ve seen to one is Steven Bonnell (AKA, Destiny), a live-streamer and political commentator. In his interview with Alex O’Conner, they address meta-ethics and its implications on human and animal morality. When push came to shove, Destiny eventually met Alex in the spirit of an “ultimate skeptic” (a position he was somewhat reluctant to admit holding); he acknowledges that nothing can be known with 100% certainty. Thus, morality is ultimately relative.

Ironically enough, later in his podcast with Sam Harris, Alex himself holds a similar view to Steven in the form of emotivism. So it might be that he’s also a non-spiritual atheist based on the criteria that I’ve laid out.

To briefly summarize with reference to the interviews I linked above, a non-spiritual atheist is one who acknowledges that morality is 100% relative and that what essentially separates humans from animals — and what makes us justified in killing them for food — is not that we as a species have any sort of specialness (which would be consistent with the self-evident philosophy of the American founding fathers) but it’s rather something completely arbitrary. It all boils down to human preferences. In other words, there is really no moral difference in killing an animal over a human; the difference is merely a legal one.

And to believe in that is essentially what it means to be a non-spiritual atheist.

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