I distill a decade of experience as an existential philosopher, researcher and consultant into these letters. They’re not meant to be consumed as ‘content’, but committed to practice to transform your relationship with life.

The word ‘exist’ originally meant to step out and stand forth. That’s our ethos here: to truly emerge into life in all its joy and suffering.

My dear reader,

As someone with ADHD, I’m deeply concerned about what’s happening to our attention on a mass scale. This is how I generally feel about the issue…

One of the most rewarding achievements of my life is the relationship of trust I’ve built with my attention.

Like any relationship that matters, I worked on it. A lot. And eventually, I formed a beautiful connection with it.

This doesn’t just mean focusing on one task for a long time. This is important and helps me greatly, but as many other people with ADHD will tell you: hyperfocus isn’t the problem. Lacking agency over your attention is. Meaning, consistently feeling like you have no control over what you pay attention to and when you pay attention to it.

Through a lifetime of struggle with this, I’ve gained an intimate knowledge of the ways my attention can be sabotaged. I know how to bring it back home when it’s displaced. And I know how to take care of it so I have greater agency over how to deploy it.

This isn’t to imply that I exist in some post-ADHD enlightened bliss. F*ck no. I still have many struggles with executive function, task switching, losing things (apart from professional/important documents), laundry… that all exist at different levels of frustration and striving. But I can safely say that overall I love and deeply trust my relationship with attention.

In fact, I’ve come to see attention as sacred. I don’t say that lightly. Or moralistically. I mean that it is foundational in a way that deserves our deepest protection. When people give up on their relationship with attention, they tend to become more addicted, anxious, nihilistic and angry.

As someone who escaped the cave of chronic inattention - nay, crawled out of it - I have written this piece as a rope-ladder for you to climb out too. I’ve set out practices to improve not just focus, but also another very neglected aspect of attention that is crucial to building inner trust.

As we do this together, I have two requests: 1) Please try to complete this piece in one sitting. It should take you about 15 minutes. 2) Start implementing the practices as soon as you can.

Ready? Let’s begin the climb.

The Relentless War on Your Attention

If you’ve been following me on Instagram for a while, you may have noticed that I’ve drastically reduced the number of reels I’ve made over the last couple of years. I post regularly but I’ve shifted my focus to making very text-heavy carousels, and I actively encourage people to join me here on Substack instead.

Although everyone told me that’s a terrible “growth strategy” - I don’t care.

That’s because I’ve been creating on IG for almost 7 years to a large audience I feel genuinely responsible toward. Over time, I’ve seen a truly disturbing trend in user behavior that’s reached a fever pitch lately…

Read more

I distill a decade of experience as an existential philosopher, researcher and consultant into these essays. They’re not meant to be consumed as ‘content’, but committed to practice to transform your relationship with life.

The word ‘exist’ at its core means to step out and stand forth. That will be the ethos that guides this series: to truly emerge into life, in all its joy and suffering.

This might sound ridiculous but…

I look forward to anxiety. I welcome it when it arrives.

That’s because when I feel its electricity buzzing through my body, I know what to do with that charge. It’s muscle memory now.

But it wasn’t always like this, and I didn’t get here alone. There was a time I used to chronically numb myself to avoid anxiety. This backfired so profoundly that I was forced to get to the roots of my inner discomfort, which led me to the great thinkers who taught me about anxiety in a way I had not encountered before.

In this essay, I’m going to walk you through the ideas that shaped my understanding of anxiety, and the ‘4-pathways’ practice I synthesized from them.

By the end of this piece, I aim to show you why numbing yourself is the worst response to inner discomfort. And I hope to equip you with the practical skills to improve your relationship with anxiety for the rest of your life.

But first let me tell you a personal story.

I got high almost every single day from 2007 to 2011.

I started smoking weed as a teenager because it was a way to meet other kids who didn’t care about arbitrary rules. As a third culture kid with ADHD who had a pretty turbulent childhood, belonging was very important for me, and stoners were generally similar in different countries: chill and welcoming. Plus it was fun and introduced me to awesome music.

But underneath all that, there was a hidden reason I smoked so much…

Read more

I’ve been thinking about this idea all week: everything that we perceive as “personal” is actually transpersonal if you go deep enough down the rabbit-hole of individual consciousness. This idea has featured in my essays, especially “Who Are You Really?” and I’ll be building on it in upcoming works.

In the meanwhile, here are some videos of wonderful humans who continue to expand my thinking on the transpersonal dimension of life:

1. Imagery in Healing feat. Jean Achterberg

2. Rabindranath Tagore by Satyajit Ray (i.e. legend on legend)

3. Power of Technology feat. Aldous Huxley

4. Being An Island: The Buddha’s Last Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh

Until next time,

Yepi

This week we’re clarifying some core principles from Jungian psychology so that we can use them to cultivate genuine inner wisdom, and step away from the poppy sloppy ‘hacks’ that masquerade as wisdom.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

1. The Personality Test Misconception

A lot of people find personality tests to be an entry point into self-understanding. That’s okay, but they can also derail this journey, if used improperly.

Jung (who is the father of personality psychology) found personality tests to be quite dangerous when used to label The Self, which he thought of as dynamic and constantly evolving.

The most famous and dubious example of improper usage is the MBTI which is famously based on Jungian concepts of extroversion, introversion and the four cognitive functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition).

The MBTI, apart from being empirically lacking, is actually antithetical to the Jungian model of personality as he believed these concepts were fluid, that one person could possess all of them at different points over the course of a lifetime.

Using the MBTI as an entry point to understand cognitive functions and personality tendencies is fine but Jung believed that using such tests as rigid identity markers to reductively view yourself and others could actively derail your individuation journey.

Here’s a practical alternative:

Read more

Dear Reader,

It’s been a while since my last compilation post, but I come bearing gifts of horizon expanding, soul nourishing videos. At a glance they may seem like a motley array of unrelated topics - what do Bell Hooks, Cleaner Wrasse fish, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Kurt Cobain have in common?

Each challenged dominant assumptions within their own domain, leading to significant resets that transformed the way we appreciate that which is beyond our narrow band of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Some of these changes have made their way into everyday life such that you may no longer perceive them as radical or may even take them for granted.

And some of them you’ll see, haven’t garnered nearly as much attention as they deserve. These videos offer some insights into the people that lead these transformations - a peek behind the curtain, if you will - of who they were.

1. Speaking Freely: Bell Hooks

Bell Hooks taught us how a culture of authoritarianism robs us of a culture of love. Love is not what we usually think about as a casualty of unfreedom, but it absolutely is - and few people talk about it with as much intellectual and moral clarity as Hooks.

In this interview, she talks about love, mutuality, systems of domination all while answering phone-in calls from the audience!

2. We’ve Been Testing For Consciousness Wrong

Jonathan Safran Foer says of fish, “their lives are forgotten in a radical manner that is much less common in our thinking of farmed land animals”. Of course, he is speaking in a different context - referring to Kafka’s inner thoughts (yes, the Kafka), when he was able to look at a tank of fish in an aquarium without guilt after becoming a vegetarian. However, this quote is quite revealing in how it exposes the way we think of animal consciousness.

That is to say - when we debate whether animals have a sense of consciousness or self awareness that can be compared to humans, fish are never even considered and defy, in many ways, a neat categorization. Below animals - but maybe, above insects?

Either way, the idea of fish consciousness, to most of us - is likely a question we’ve never thought to ask. But what would you say if I told you that a simple, tiny, unassuming fish - the Cleaner Wrasse might help you reconsider animal consciousness - and perhaps even change your relationship to nature itself. Aside from this life altering discovery - the scientist behind it, will also capture your heart, as you will soon see.

3. One of my favorite interviews of Kurt Cobain

The only way for me to describe Kurt Cobain is that he was an unbelievably cool, deeply compassionate and very troubled individual. As his fame grew so did his disdain for the media. He famously resented giving interviews, answering the same tired questions over and over again and hated the intrusive nature of the tabloids.

But here we have him in this interview - at the height of fame and a year before his death - happy and chatty, and it’s so beautiful to see. He talks about what books he’s currently reading, love and parenthood, and the desire to move beyond grunge and Nirvana’s ‘current formula’. It’s bittersweet to hear him talk about his future in such a hopeful and sure-footed way.

I often think about how the world would look if he was still here - what kind of music would he make, who would he collaborate with?

4. Ravi Shankar, Master of the Sitar on BBC

You may often see the word Pandit (or Pundit) before the name Ravi Shankar. This is actually an honorific, similar to Maestro, given to someone who is an expert in their field. It’s a Sanskrit word that means wisdom (which is also why its a bit jarring that its mostly associated with political commentators)

South Asian music has silently and significantly influenced Western music over the last century. Jeff Buckley famously called Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan his ‘Elvis’, TOOL often uses the rhythms and percussions from Hindustani classical music and of course, The Beatles, who were heavily influenced and inspired by their time in India, specifically with Pandit Ravi Shankar (Fun fact: Ravi Shankar is the father of famous American singer/songwriter Norah Jones).

Ravi Shankar even taught George Harrison how to play the Sitar (you can see the video on YouTube)! The sitar specifically was a huge feature in the pop-rock of the 1960s, shaping the musical compositions and in some songs, being the dominant sound (Love to You, Norwegian Wood, Within You Without You). If you haven’t heard this instrument before, you’re in for a treat. It’s beautiful, complex, and Ravi Shankar is indeed the best man to play it.

Until next time,

Yepi

Believe it.

Before we begin, a couple of notes:

• Substack has already warned me that this piece is too long for email. So I won’t be further extending it with a synopsis, so if you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend that you watch it or read a detailed synopsis and come back.

• I have tried to keep this essay as un-graphic as possible but some elements might be disturbing, especially when analyzed. Know yourself and please proceed mindfully.

Let’s dive in.

In a post-COVID world where going to the movie theatre is not the event it used to be, Obsession might be the most successful film in recent memory. And yes, I say this even with The Odyssey out in theatres as we speak. Obsession has now made almost 633 times its reported $750,000 production budget. For Christopher Nolan’s $250 million epic to match that ratio, it would need to generate an astronomical $158 billion at the box office.

It is safe to say…

People are obsessed with this movie (sorry to pick this very low hanging fruit).

There are, of course, many reasons why this film has achieved the type of cultural capital it has: good plot, entertaining premise, phenomenal acting from a newcomer cast, great pacing and editing. It’s well-made. It’s also luck. Horror is a winning genre right now, and there is something to be said about the right time and the right place. It can also be attributed to the fact that Curry Barker, the young director who’s also a YouTuber, knows how to captivate an audience specifically at a time when attention seems to be an elusive commodity.

But beyond all that, it is smart, relevant and ambiguous enough to allow our own interpretations of it. That is what has allowed it to remain at the centre of so much public discourse even months after its release. Barker has spoken about trusting a modern horror audience to pick up on small details rather than treating viewers like they’re dumb.

The film avoids spoon-fed morality and refuses to force every person into a single interpretation - but this doesn’t mean dissolving every judgement in the waters of relativism. There are some aspects of the narrative that we should be able to agree shows us morally reprehensible behavior.

Which brings me to the point I plan to belabour throughout this piece:

Bear is the villain.

And what makes him a particularly reprehensible villain is that we actually start by rooting for him because he seems like a nice guy. He is soft-spoken, unencumbered by the weight of traditional masculinity, brought into particular relief by his friend Ian, who seems much more like a douchebag dudebro. Bear loved his grandma. His cat died. He is on the unfortunate side of unrequited love. I mean, he has all the typical markings of a sympathetic male protagonist.

But that is precisely the point…

You do not have to be a red-pilled, looksmaxxing Andrew Tate fanboy to be despicable. You can be soft-spoken. You can be a cat-person. You can apologize constantly. You can wear sweaters. You can know the language of boundaries, attachment styles and emotional safety.

And you can still be cruel beyond belief and cowardly when courage matters most.

To understand why, let’s begin with the foreshadowing: Bear’s inability to tell the difference between love and romance.

Love Isn’t The Same As Romance

Near the start of the movie, before he makes the wish and chaos unfurls, Bear is driving Nikki home after trivia night at the bar. They’re talking about the novel Nikki is writing, and Bear calls it a romance. Nikki corrects him and says it’s a love story. Bear can’t tell the difference between the two.

This gives us a revealing insight into how Bear’s psyche has been primed…

As Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson argues in We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love:

“The fact that we say ‘romance’ when we mean ‘love’ shows us that underneath our language there is a psychological muddle. We are confusing two great psychological systems within us, and this has a devastating effect on our lives and our relationships. The passion of romance is always directed at our own projections, our own expectations, our own fantasies. It is a love not of another person, but of ourselves.”

On the other hand…

“Love is the one power that awakens the ego to the existence of something outside itself, outside its empire, outside its security.”

Love transcends egoism to connect with another.

It is not just a stronger version of romance. It is a fundamentally different psychological ethic.

Romance asks, “What does this person awaken in me?”

Love asks, “Truly who is this person, apart from what I want them to be?”

This is why I believe that Bear never really knew Nikki.

Yes, he knew facts about her. He spent a lot of time with her. They shared jokes, work and went to school together. But knowing information about someone isn’t the same as understanding them as a real person.

The Nikki he thought he knew was his anima projection.

Bear Didn’t Know Nikki

In Jungian psychology, the anima is the unconscious feminine dimension of the psyche. This doesn’t just mean stereotypically “feminine” traits, and it’s not to be reduced to a list like sensitivity, softness or emotionality. The anima is a symbol of inner relatedness, imagination, embodiment and inner guidance.

The anima also represents vitality and soulfulness itself. It is the psychic capacity that makes life feel animated and emotionally connected rather than merely mechanical.

A man who is connected with his anima is able to find meaning, beauty, tenderness, spontaneity and soul within himself. And one who is disconnected from his anima, often projects these traits onto a romantic partner as the magical source of these traits.

Bear is cut off from this vital spirit. His life feels passive, stalled and emotionally stale. He does not know how to meet his longing directly. Instead, everything in him that feels alive, beautiful, desirable, creative and redemptive is projected… onto Nikki.

This is why anima projection can feel so overwhelming. The man is not merely attracted to a woman. He is encountering disowned parts of his own soul in the image he has placed onto her. And this image is loaded with psychic material that is split off from Bear himself!

This is not to say that the attraction is fake or that every powerful romantic feeling is “just” projection. Projection is a normal part of how most relationships begin. We all initially fill in what we do not know about another person with hope, fear, memory and fantasy. The problem begins when we refuse to withdraw the projection as the real person becomes more and more visible.

Mature love gradually says: I need to see you more clearly, even if clarity disappoints me.

Bear’s romance, on the other hand says: I need you to remain the fantasy I imagined, even if the real you has to disappear.

Unable to connect with his own anima, Bear projects it onto Nikki and becomes infatuated with his own projection. The real Nikki is effectively still a stranger to him, even as he claims to love her over everything else.

This is common enough. The next part is where it gets pretty disturbing.

Limerence Isn’t Love

Dorothy Tennov’s Love and Limerence gives us the right vocabulary to understand Bear’s projections. Tennov coined the term “limerence” to describe an involuntary state of romantic fixation. Its characterized by intrusive thought, idealization, emotional dependency and an intense longing for reciprocity.

One of Tennov’s most important observations is that uncertainty feeds limerence. Not knowing whether the other person returns your feelings can make the fixation more intense. At some fundamental level, the person stops being a person. They become what Tennov calls the limerent object i.e. the object of the fantasy.

This is why Bear can feel so deeply “in love” with Nikki while remaining so unwilling to discover who she actually is and what she actually feels. The uncertainty hurts him but it also protects his fantasy. As long as he doesn’t ask her out, the imagined Nikki cannot definitively reject him. He can keep interpreting their closeness as evidence that there might be something more…

Some part of Bear knows that the real Nikki cannot match the idealized object of his limerence.

Real intimacy would force him to discover and reckon with Nikki as a real person. This would require her to become a whole human being rather than an idealized image. And that would eventually destroy the fantasy.

Only a wish could freeze-frame the fantasy by transforming the limerent object into its logical conclusion: an obedient body.

This preserves psychological uncertainty (Nikki’s inner life remains unknowable to Bear), while guaranteeing physical compliance.

An Unhealthy Ego Loves Shortcuts

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the ego itself is not evil. A healthy ego is a necessary tool to navigate reality. It gives us a stable sense of identity, helps us make decisions, protects boundaries and allows us to function in the world. A healthy ego can say “I desire this” while recognizing that desire does not create entitlement. It can survive disappointment.

An unhealthy ego, on the other hand, cannot tolerate the gap between desire and reality. It takes a boundary and rejection as deep humiliation. It needs reality to confirm its preferred story about itself. An unhealthy ego is always looking for an easy hack out of an inconvenient reality.

Bear cannot stand the idea of being rejected by Nikki, so he wishes for reality to bend to his fantasy rather than being courageous and accepting whatever result is meant for him.

Bear is a clear example of what happens when you let the ego rule. It becomes a false god and bad things tend to follow.

Remember, Bear does not just wish for Nikki to love him. He wishes for her to love him more than anyone else in the world.

The inflated ego will settle for nothing less than absolute possession, the full exclusive guarantee against disappointment.

When I made the first iteration of this post on IG last month, a lot of people objected by pointing out that Bear had no idea that the wish would come true, and therefore there’s no reason to think of him as having any negative intent at this stage. I have qualms with this reasoning.

But first, a point I agree with: no, the moment of the wish is not sufficient, in and of itself, to claim that Bear is villainous. Sure, he’s being cowardly and revelling in his insecurities rather than being direct with Nikki, but that’s not malice. And sure the wording of the wish is extreme and absolute, but maybe we can chalk that up to being impulsive and inarticulate.

However, once we have the whole story unfold, we must use that full story to understand Bear’s character and how he had all the ingredients to become despicable. There are direct links between his seemingly innocent actions at this stage, and his deeply unethical actions and omissions later.

I’m going to show you that nothing about Bear’s decision seems surprising when we analyze it in the full context of what actually unfolded. For this we must return, once again, to Carl Jung’s idea of The Shadow.

The Shadow of the ‘Nice Guy’

The Shadow is everything the conscious personality refuses to recognize within itself and disowns from conscious awareness. Because Bear identifies himself as gentle, passive, harmless and nice, he cannot consciously admit that he also wants power.

He doesn’t know himself enough to acknowledge a dark suspicion that he feels entitled to Nikki because he’s nice.

But dark feelings don’t instantly disappear because they’re disowned. They tend to become unconscious and become more likely to pull the strings from the background.

Shadow integration requires us to become conscious of the impulses we disown from consciousness. Only in doing so can we achieve enough awareness to not be puppeteered by these repressed impulses.

Under the right guidance, Bear might admit to himself: “I think part of me believes that being kind should make her choose me. Part of me wants to avoid the humiliation of hearing ‘no’ more than anything else.”

This private admission might be painfully uncomfortable and politically incorrect, but it creates internal honesty and a genuine sense of choice. What is acknowledged within oneself can be examined, restrained and transformed. Bear might even find that the deeper root of his desires isn’t actually Nikki, but the desire for self-esteem and wholeness.

But that’s not what happens…

Bear does the opposite. He denies his shadow, and his shadow starts pulling the strings long before he makes the wish.

For instance, consider when Bear goes to the gift shop to replace the crystal necklace that Nikki loses. He looks at a substitute that Nikki might like, but instead gets her the One Wish Willow, which has nothing to do with her and everything to do with his repressed desires.

Well before the wish, Bear’s shadow swerves him in the direction of the wish. He’s not operating from malice at this stage, but from lack of self-knowledge and self-trust. He overindexes on Ian’s assessment that Nikki doesn’t like “sappy things”, and defaults to his own unacknowledged wish to be with Nikki. A subtle but significant self-indulgence is already guiding him at this stage.

And then we come to the wish itself…

Far too many people are unquestioningly accepting the premise that the wish was just a harmless expression of Bear’s angst and desire.

Very few people are asking “Wait, but of all the things, why did Bear’s wish necessarily have to be about Nikki?”

Why couldn’t he have asked for more courage to ask her out? Or more courage in general? Or the strength to face his suffering with grace?

Because he lacks the wisdom and inner engagement to see how these are the roots of his problems.

And you might reasonably say: Yepi, these are pretty high level asks. The lad doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, right?

Right, fair, so here’s something more basic…

Why, at the very least, did he not ask for his cat and/or his grandma back?(!)

Because, at some level, these are the mundane, earthly sources of love in his life that don’t cut it for him. They’re easy to take for granted. His vital spirit doesn’t come back if they return. Bear’s anima projection is fully locked onto Nikki. His fantasy of gaining her love is more magnetic than the reality of the actual sources of love he lost.

Every word of the wish is his shadow speaking his selfish, repressed desire into being: “I wish Nikki Freeman would love me more than anyone in the f*cking world.”

And once the wish is granted, it’s only a matter of time before Bear begins his slide into darkness until we reach the two moments which seal his villainy beyond question.

In the restaurant, after it becomes clear to Bear - without a shadow of a doubt - that Nikki is indeed possessed… the very next scene is Bear having sex with Nikki. This is non-consensual and he knows it. Many people are primed to see this scene from Bear’s eyes, but this is precisely the frame that must be challenged. Bear chose to continue the fantasy even after he knew it was a farce. He is deep in villain territory at this point.

And if you take the character implications of that scene seriously, the later scene that’s supposed to be the “true mask-off” moment looks a lot more like the logical end-point of Bear’s character than a sudden heel turn.

I’m of course talking about the scene when Real Nikki finally emerges while Wish Nikki is sleeping. She desperately pleads with Bear to end her misery, and instead of even consoling her, he indignantly asks:

“What would be so bad about being with me?”

It is one of the most evil lines in the film precisely because it is so utterly pathetic and self-involved.

Even as she tells him that she’s been buried alive and desperate to escape her torment, he makes it about himself.

At the very moment when her suffering should destroy his fantasy, his narcissistic injury becomes more important to him than her captivity. He fundamentally still sees himself as the victim.

And then he walks away from her.

We are whisked away from this moment far too quickly in the movie.

Imagine the cruelty of walking away from someone who you know is trapped in hell, who has desperately clawed their way to speak to you, pleading with you to end her misery and you walk away. Someone who you claim you “love.” Bear has become monstrous.

Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving writes that “the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism.”

He is not using narcissism here as a clinical diagnosis or just a synonym for vanity. He is referring to an orientation in which the individual experiences only his own inner world as fully real while others matter mainly in relation to whether they are useful to him.

That describes Bear’s orientation to a T.

Nikki is useful when she validates him. She is dangerous when she can reject him, even when she is utterly removed from agency and held captive. Her suffering fails to become real to him even when its undeniable and pleading with him. It makes him grow colder.

Real Nikki is met with disdain and malicious apathy.

This confirms that it’s always been about his possession of the limerent object of his fantasy, Wish Nikki, rather than care for Nikki as a real being.

Let’s turn now to what Wish Nikki really is…

The Split Psyche & The Witch

Nikki isn’t possessed by a demon, at least not in a conventional supernatural sense. What happens to her is more real and far worse…

In Jungian psychology, the psyche is made up of many parts. These parts are normally brought into some kind of coherence and unity by a mediating force i.e. The Self. But a cluster of unconscious material can split off from conscious awareness and become what Jung calls a complex. When a complex becomes powerful enough, it can behave almost like an independent personality and even overwhelm conscious awareness.

The wish decenters Nikki’s self and replaces it with an autonomous complex made up of Bear’s desires and projections.

Wish Nikki takes over, submerges the real Nikki into the unconscious and traps her there. Real Nikki can only emerge when Wish Nikki sleeps. She is trapped in a bad dream in the underworld of her own unconscious.

This is also what limerent projection does in real relationships. It makes the subject psychologically invisible. The projector interacts with a limerent object crafted by their imagination and then becomes frustrated when the living person contradicts this fantasy.

In the movie, of course, Bear’s projection does not remain in his own head. It becomes autonomous and begins acting on the world. The fantasy he used to avoid reality now creates a horrific reality.

He is literally haunted by his own desire to possess Nikki.

Wish Nikki can also be seen as one of the darkest archetypal figures: The Devouring Mother or The Witch.

The phrase can sound pretty judgmental if taken literally. That’s why it must be understood in its proper context.

Archetypally, the Devouring Mother is any form of love that refuses separation. She “protects” through imprisonment. She “nurtures” by making independence impossible. She says “You are mine, therefore you must never leave. All separation is evil.” Like a snake devouring its own tail, one’s life force that needs uncertainty to evolve becomes trapped in the sickly comfort of certainty.

Bear doesn’t actually want a partner. Bear is a child who wants a spiritual mother, an outsourced anima figure who will save him from himself.

And that is exactly what he gets, in a perverse way.

He gets an entity that needs him so desperately and violently that it will not stop until it absorbs him fully. This entity experiences all separateness and distance as a threat.

Bear wants unconditional love without the adult burden of mutual recognition and growth through uncertainty. The Devouring Mother is the logical outcome of that wish. It will grant you your wish to remain a child, as long as you promise that you will never leave, never grow, never differentiate…

In this way, Bear’s inflated ego, repressed shadow, and negative anima create the Witch.

Or, at a fundamental level, Bear is the Witch.

The autonomous complex possessing Nikki is composed of his obsessions and insecurities. Non-Nikki is his unintegrated psyche boomeranged back to him in monstrous form.

This dynamic is the key to understanding the disturbing Hansel and Gretel story Non-Nikki tells at the party.

Before the wish, Nikki saw Bear as a little brother.

(That detail is actually so tragic because it establishes a form of genuine love that Bear refused to value. She cares about him, but not in the form his ego demands.)

Non-Nikki distorts this narrative and eroticizes it. Her version transforms the sibling bond into coercive incestuous possession. Gretel threatens Hansel when he tries to separate from her. The story turns love into selfish hunger. Hansel is not allowed to remain a brother, a separate person or a self. He must become part of Gretel.

In that scene, which I consider the scariest in the movie, Wish Nikki is actively trying to manipulate and break Real Nikki’s version of care for Bear into the perverse script it must follow to satisfy Bear’s selfish fantasy. As the story is told, the last frontier of Real Nikki’s individuality is being broken into conformity.

Bear is still too ego-obsessed to see the consequences of being a child who wishes a witch into existence to become his spiritual mother. He wants someone who can feed every hunger without limit. He fails to remember that the witch in Hansel and Gretel preys on hungry children after luring them in with sweet desire.

The Courage to Be

This brings us back, full circle, to cowardice and courage.

The film is not saying that unrequited love makes a person evil. It’s not saying that loneliness, insecurity or romantic fantasy or even projection makes someone a villain. Those experiences are painfully human.

The evil lies in the repeated refusal to let another person’s reality matter.

Bear has chances to stop.

He can speak honestly before making the wish and risk an answer he does not want.

He can be honest with himself and reject the false relationship when Nikki’s personality changes overnight.

He can respond to Real Nikki’s suffering without making the moment about his wounded self-image.

Again and again, courage is available to him, and again and again he chooses the path that protects his egoic fantasy for one more moment.

This is why the ending deserves attention. When death becomes the only remaining way to end the wish, Bear finally swallows the same pills that accidentally killed his cat. But even then, he panics and tries to reverse his decision.

Outside the bathroom, Wish Nikki uses another One Wish Willow and wishes that Bear will love her back. For a brief moment, he receives the very condition he brought about in Nikki. His freedom is overwritten by somebody else’s desire.

Only then does he love as he demanded to be loved. Only by becoming another obedient body. No more need for discernment or courage, just blind “blissful” conformity.

The antidote available to him at all times was courage. Remember the Tiger’s Eye Nikki gifts him? That symbolizes the courage he could’ve and should’ve called on.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich tells us that courage is the core existential value and it comprises “the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.” This is where the transcendent magic lies. It is precisely in the capacity to be rejected without being existentially demolished that we can find the real ground for self-respect as well as compassion for others.

It brings us to eye level with our true selves. Your existence no longer requires validation, because you are infused with the knowledge that you’re able to survive uncertainty, failure and rejection and still persist. Even when you’re faced with the ultimate threat of non-being, you’re able to look it in the eye courageously and affirm life itself.

And funny enough, it is in these states that we are able to truly receive and appreciate the love of another. Not in desperation or scarcity, but in a state of being able to accept the risk of suffering and loss with courage - that is when we have the space for love in our hearts beyond illusion and projection.

All along, Bear could have just thrown the One Wish Willow away, and gone in search for the courage within himself. This would have been the narrower and better path to love.

What Bear’s Cowardice Can Teach Us

The easiest way to watch Obsession is to distance ourselves from Bear. We can say that we would never use a magic wish, never tolerate something so obviously wrong, never become that pathetic. But I think the value of the film is lost if Bear becomes a freak we can all just unthinkingly vanquish.

The harder questions that arise that we could contend with are:

• Do I love this person, or do I love how I feel when they validate me?

• Can I remain kind when kindness does not get me what I want?

• When someone says no, do I experience their boundary as an injury? If so, how deep do I get injured?

• Do I want to know who they truly are, or am I seeing them only as the person I hope they will be?

• Can I hear that I caused harm without immediately defending myself?

• Do I secretly believe that my sensitivity and niceness entitles me to their affection?

• Do I use emotional language to become more accountable or to become harder to criticize?

• If they never choose me… can I still recognize their freedom as good?

These questions are shadow work in a practical sense, and it helps us develop enough inner life that another person does not have to carry your soul for you.

That is the work of withdrawing the anima projection, especially for men. It means reclaiming the vitality, tenderness, imagination, meaning, and emotional depth we place onto others. By aspiring to wholeness, we expand ourselves and make real space for another.

And that is where love can truly begin.

A Caveat

One can read all this and just say “Or it could just be a movie about a wish gone wrong. Surely all these themes were not intended by the creators of the movie!”

Here’s the thing. There’s no need to claim that Curry Barker consciously placed every Jungian and existential concept into the screenplay or constructed each scene as a coded illustration of these themes. Archetypal readings do not depend on proving authorial intention. Anima, shadow, witches, devouring mothers and forbidden wishes are part of the inherited structure of stories. A good film can activate those patterns without authorial intent.

That said, I did come away with the sense that Curry’s dad Jeff who wrote parts of the movie (and worked as a psychiatric nurse) did have a good grasp of archetypal and existential themes. My ears perked up at the Hansel and Gretel scene (which he wrote) particularly because of how uncannily archetypal and darkly mythopoetic the monologue was.

I felt similarly in the scene where Wish Nikki says this haunting monologue that sounds a lot like deep existential despair:

“Well, if I have the bed all to myself tonight, I’ll lay there warm until slowly I feel cold,

like I walked into a freezer.

My hands will feel like they’re full of sand, like when you lay on them wrong.

And that feeling will slowly spread across my entire body.

You’re still in my heart, but you’re slipping.

Any thought of pain or regret will slip away like a chemical switch.

Even though it’s quiet in the room, somehow it gets even quieter.

It’s not painful.

You just let go of everything you want to work.

And then there’s nothing.

It’s not darkness.

No, sweetie.

Darkness is a color.

There’s just nothing.

…Or you could stay!”

This felt intentional, like a cold fusion of Sylvia Plath and Emil Cioran:

An Invitation

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References

• Robert A. Johnson, We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love (1983)

• Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love (1979)

• Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)

• Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (1995)

• Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952)

A few days after his vision, Jung dreamed his last recorded dream. In contrast to the terrifying vision, this dream brought him a sense of peace and finality.

Jung’s final vision and dream came from a place he had been investigating, studying and listening to his entire life.

What was the vision? And what was the dream? And what did it mean?

But wait. We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. We need to start at the start, and understand Carl Jung’s lifelong relationship with dreams. This piece will also function as an introduction to the art of dream work that I will build across the coming months.

Let’s dive in.

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This is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and its one of the most famous models of motivation in psychology. It shows you the different layers of human need, from basic survival and safety to love, esteem and eventually self-actualization.

The general idea is that our more fundamental needs tend to demand our attention before we can devote ourselves to growth, meaning and becoming who we are capable of becoming.

This model has been praised, criticized, debated, challenged, revised, clarified and everything in between. And to this day, its popularity shows no sign of slowing down.

The word “self-actualization” has entered our vocabulary as the ultimate goal of personal evolution. Self-actualization is the stage at which we continually strive towards our full potential as human beings. Our underlying needs are reasonably met, and we are now playing with house money - reaching for the stars while having a firm base as a launching pad.

So it would make sense that self-actualization would be at the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, right?

Well, just one problem: it actually wasn’t.

Almost all the diagrams you see today would not be approved by Maslow himself, because he considered the pinnacle of human potential and striving to be something else.

That pinnacle is what we’ll be learning about today, dear readers.

So put on your metaphorical hiking gear. We are scaling Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs all the way to the top.

Ready? Let’s go.

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I return to this show periodically to think about the hidden themes that my child brain couldn’t fully grasp back in the day.

The fourth episode of the show is called The Demon In The Mattress. And, oh boy, it brought back some weird memories, and sparked some cool connections.

A quick synopsis to start us off…

I gotta say, parts of this episode were still pretty spooky on the rewatch. Also it was only about 11 minutes long (why did time feel so slow when you were a kid? Well, I think I know why, but that’s a topic for another time.)

What I wasn’t expecting is that it would strike me as one of the best representations of the dangers of shadow repression.

I write extensively about the shadow across several essays, especially this one.

So I won’t bore regular readers with a long introduction to the idea, but in short:

The Shadow is everything in us that contradicts our self-image. It comprises all the elements we shun, repress or deny within ourselves. It acts as a counter-balance to our consciously held perception of ourselves. It is not just “our dark side”, its the repressed side of our nature, that was banished or neglected because it was unacceptable to our conscious personality.

Let’s zoom out and consider Muriel. What we find is pretty disturbing…

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Over the 7 years I’ve been doing this work, one theme has emerged more than others as a major blocker of existential vitality.

Its a fairly niche philosophical issue, and I was initially surprised it had become such a common point of everyday concern for people. But now, I hear it all the time, especially from young people.

And I am particularly alarmed at the number of young people who are thrown into despair by this issue, and the way it robs them of willingness to engage with life.

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming though. It is the issue that I had the biggest disagreement with one of my academic heroes. Yet I was caught unaware by just how deeply it had seeped into the culture, and just how often it gets brought up.

The issue is determinism.

We’ll talk about what it is, why so many people find it psychologically destabilizing, and why I ultimately believe many of its the nihilistic conclusions that people draw from it are based on a category error.

Along the way, we’ll explore free will, responsibility, meaning, human agency and the question that haunts so many people today:

“If all my thoughts and actions are the product of forces beyond my control, why make an effort at all??”

Ready?

Let’s dive in.

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I think we can all agree that philosophical thought experiments tend to get a bit… indulgent

And while these sorts of scenarios can be fun and thought provoking, they don’t really require commitment. The answers may even have practical applications, but more often than not… we carry on with our usual intuitions in the real world, unchanged by the conclusions we cleverly reached.

The thought experiment I’m going to explain in this essay isn’t like that.

It requires commitment. It demands the best of you.

You can't engage with it honestly without revealing something about your values, your priorities and the kind of life you believe is worth living. And once you've taken it seriously, it's pretty difficult to return unchanged.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

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My dear friends,

Even though I’m a naturally verbose person, words fail me sometimes.

But I like it when this happens.

Because everything goes quiet in my usually noisy noggin, and I remember the grand conclusion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:

“That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.”

This week’s list is about words and their power…

Starting with those of Marjane Satrapi - a creative powerhouse who left us too soon. Her words have changed lives, and I’m so grateful that she chose to share them with us. Rest in peace, Marjane.

1. Marjane Satrapi, 10th Annual Bita Prize for Persian Arts: (her part starts at 28:00)

2. Toni Morrison, A Day With Toni Morrison

3. “Dude”, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

4. Michael Sugrue on Wittgenstein

5. Robert Sapolsky on Language

Sharing is caring.

Until next time,

Yepi

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People will go on the most random side-quests instead of confronting themselves in an honest inward conversation.

Every extreme tendency ranging from the excessively material to, yes, the excessively spiritual seems to draw people in before they simply sit with the actual work they know they’re avoiding.

Grand escapes to the Himalayas, Ayahuasca rituals, cold plunges, eliminating entire macronutrients, fringe political ideologies, silent meditation retreats are all exciting… and yes, sometimes they may facilitate insights or even breakthroughs.

But all of these become sophisticated forms of avoidance if they keep us from developing a genuine relationship with ourselves. Nothing can replace true self-understanding that comes from the courage to reckon with ourselves.

And no, I’m not saying all this from atop a high horse. I’ll share my personal story of when I was avoiding my inner work, and set out what an honest inward conversation looks and feels like.

But first, let’s start with one of the most hilarious but profound explorations of self-avoidance: an old movie from Kerala, India. It’s originally in the Malayalam language, but I’m going to break it down for you to illustrate what superficial “Inner Work™” looks like, and then contrast it with real inner work.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

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Squidward, to many, represents what life is really like as an adult: drab, monotonous, burnt out, frustrating and disenchanting.

^ This is internet canon at this point. But what if we challenge the narrative?

What if we take a good look at Squidward’s life as a parable of sorts, and see the kinds of choices and modes of being that contribute to such an unfulfilled drab life?

Well, that’s exactly what we are going to do this week, dear reader. So grab your snorkels, and prepare to dive into Squidward’s depths. We will be aided in this exploration by Jungian psychology, particularly the concept of The Unlived Life.

Hopefully, you will return with pearls of introspection that can help you overcome Squidwardian traps in your life rather than just finding them relatable.

Ready? Let’s jump in.

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Fridays feature free letters with resources and insights that spark vitality.

Tuesdays feature deeper journeys into meaning, shadow and psyche to awaken the inner flame.

Subscribe to walk these paths together.

Subscribe now

Dear Reader,

The theme for this week is transformation: both inner and outer. And I’ve picked out some of my favorite videos that remind me that the only constant in change. What a gift it is to be able to become aware of how we’re changing and take a hand in our own development and adaptation.

As always, I hope these videos spark the change you need in your soul.

1. Dancing In The Flames - Marion Woodman

2. Mythos: Psyche and Symbol - Joseph Campbell

3. The Last Word - Terence McKenna

4. The Goddess in Art - Vicki Noble

5. Sarah Knauss with David Hoffman on how times have changed

If you resonate with these themes, you’ll enjoy my long-form posts such as:

The 7 Stages of Existential Awareness

(click to go to article)

Until next time,

Yepi

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Here’s a recap of the original story written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837:

In the original tale, the Little Mermaid makes a deal with the sea witch to gain a human form in exchange for her voice. However, every step she takes with her new legs causes excruciating pain.

Despite her sacrifices, the Little Mermaid fails to win the prince’s love. Eventually, the prince marries another woman, and the Little Mermaid’s heart breaks. However, her sisters inform her that she can return to her mermaid form if she kills the prince with a magic knife and lets his blood drip on her legs. The Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to harm the prince and chooses to sacrifice herself instead.

As dawn breaks, the Little Mermaid’s body dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, she becomes a spirit of the air. The story ends by suggesting that the Little Mermaid has the chance to earn an immortal soul by doing good deeds for mankind for 300 years. Only then will she be able to ascend to heaven and attain everlasting happiness.

Now, why am I telling you this infinitely more SAD and UNJUST version of the story?

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Welcome back to The Existential List!

Fridays feature free letters with resources and insights that spark vitality.

Tuesdays feature deeper journeys into meaning, shadow and psyche to awaken the inner flame.

Subscribe to walk these paths together.

Subscribe now

Dear Reader,

This week I’m… tired. But not bad tired.

I finally completed a piece that I’ve been sitting on for years which is very close to my heart: The Seven Stages of Existential Awareness.

Been creating depth psychology content on the Gram every day per usual, trying out new ways of expressing timeless ideas.

Doing multiple existential consultations every day.

And all of these things bring me so much joy, and I’m so grateful that I get to live out my inner calling every single day.

But I am tired of heady intellectual stuff for today. I’m yearning for the outdoors and live music. So today, I’m sharing 2 of the most astonishing outdoors videos and 2 of my favorite live music videos right now.

And yes, the irony is not lost on me that I’m sharing these quintessentially IRL experiences across a digital medium - but hopefully it will inspire you to get out there too (but not as dangerously - yet gloriously - as the second video unless you’re a top 1% mountain climber, please)

Without further ado:

1. Pink Floyd - Pulse (1994)

2. K2 Summit - Jon Gupta

3. Arriving Somewhere… - Porcupine Tree

4. Magic Moments - BBC Earth

Have a nourishing weekend ahead everyone!

Until next time,

Yepi

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True story: this post started out as a viral meme I made 3 years ago. I’ve been fleshing it out sporadically since then, but a few days ago I finally decided to hunker down and turn it into an essay.

As someone who has dedicated his life to helping people overcome existential crises, this essay represents - at least in part - my journey. And those of many others, whose journeys followed a similar arc. I hope that it resonates with whoever is on a similar journey, at whatever stage you find yourself in.

So buckle up.

We’re going on an intrepid ride through the 7 stages of existential awareness.

Stage 1: Blissful unawareness of your own mortality and cosmic insignificance

Let’s be real: looking back at the old days, ignorance really did feel like bliss, didn’t it?

Think about it. When you were a kid, you probably didn’t spend your days worrying about the meaning and finitude of life. You were too busy watching toons or figuring out how long you could hold your breath before you turned blue (it’s a miracle we made it this far, folks.)

Some people dismiss this phase as simply a matter of being unaware. I don’t think this is true. I think its a different kind of awareness: a pure, unadulterated engagement with this strange world that we find ourselves thrown into. Don’t take my word for it though. Friedrich Nietzsche thought that the true mark of maturity is to regain the seriousness of a child at play. The transcendent nature of play or Leela is a fixture of Ancient Indian philosophy. Some schools even consider the divine play of ultimate consciousness to be the very reason why reality exists.

So when I say there is ‘bliss’ in existential innocence, I mean it. It really may have been the transcendent bliss that the poets, prophets and philosophers tell us about; the kind that most people spend their lives trying to regain. In this phase, we don’t question why we are; we simply are. It’s a time brimming with endless possibilities. The boundaries of life have not yet been drawn, and the concept of mortality is as distant as the stars in the night sky.

Sure there was that time you asked your parents why grandma didn’t show up for that sad party we threw for her. Why were so many people crying at the party, anyway?

You may have even asked them the dreaded, “Where do we go when we die?” question straight-up. And they probably gave you a sweet little untruth, or at best half-truth, and sent you right back into the playground.

Apart from these, you didn’t really feel the need to ask the heavyweight questions of why you’re here and where you’re going because you had ready-made answers from sources you trusted, like your parents, teachers, and faith leaders. These sources also helped you quickly manage any feelings of uncertainty that bubbled up once in a while.

Not to say that this stage is all rainbows and butterflies. Bad things happen, and they happened to many of us. Terrible things sometimes. Personal tragedies, economic instability, conflict and disaster mar so many of our little worlds before we acquire the sophisticated language or context to make sense of them. This might be why there were so many cultural or religious explanations readily available to us when bad things happen to our younger selves.

In fact, our existential innocence was preserved by an invisible construct…

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Fridays feature free letters with resources and insights that spark vitality.

Tuesdays feature deeper journeys into meaning, shadow and psyche to awaken the inner flame.

Subscribe to walk these paths together.

Subscribe now

Dear Reader,

The theme that settled in my mind as I was curating this week’s soul nourishing videos was “new ways of seeing.” Each pick made me see a concept in a new light: from meaning to mindfulness to movies to mountains to myths. (The alliteration flowed naturally :)

Let’s take a good look together.

1. The Self-Encounter Series, Hazel Barnes

2. Train Like A Jedi, Pema Chödrön

3. The Creative Person: Satyajit Ray

4. Why Thru Hiking Will Change Your Life, Traveling Panda

5. Archetypal Psychology, Jean-Shinoda Bolen

Please share if you’ve found these to be of value.

And if these themes, conversations and ideas nourish your soul, you’ll resonate with my long-form writing, for example: Please Don’t Kill Your Ego

Until next time,

Yepi

A note before we begin: this piece explores difficult emotional experiences and references to traumatic events. It may feel intense in places. I’ve kept it pretty general, but please take care as you read and read at your own pace.

You’re sitting on the couch and telling your therapist a story you haven’t thought about in years. This is what comes through:

You’re twelve years old again, and you’re standing near the kitchen of your childhood home.

Your brother is laughing with his friends, but the laughter has an edge that only you can hear… you know what comes after they leave.

A sudden change in his behavior. A flash of his anger.

You flinch at the thought.

In the dream you had last week, you saw the same kitchen, but the colours are all wrong: the walls are a pale, sickly green and a strange animal sits at the table watching you. It has the body of a dog and the head of an owl, but its eyes are human.

You feel it studying you, waiting for you to make a wrong move.

Part of you wants to run, but another part of you wants to give in and sit beside it, just to make the staring stop.

You wake up with your heart pounding. The animal’s gaze is still burning in your mind.

As you say this out loud to the therapist, you realize that you know this creature.

It’s the vigilance you’ve carried for years.

You see it in the way you constantly scan for danger, and the way you tense up before anyone can criticize you.

For a split second, you can see it clearly: how your vigilance has kept you safe and how it has also kept you isolated. Suddenly, it becomes too painful to see this reality.

You tell yourself it’s just a strange dream, probably nothing important. You change the subject instead. You go back home. You reach for your distraction or addiction of choice. You self-sabotage.

Why does this happen?

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