michael-dean-k/

Aristotle’s virtues are structured as the mean between two vices; “temperance” is the mean between indifference and indulgence; “courage” the mean between “cowardice” and “recklessness.”

I’ve been working out a system of virtues where paradox is the organizing element. It’s not about finding the mean of a spectrum, but about simultaneously straddling two opposites, two ends of a spectrum. But the spectrum here doesn’t run vice-to-vice—you wouldn’t want to be cowardly and reckless—, it covers two opposite modes of thinking: right brain, left brain.

Right brain virtues are about embodied presence, where left brain virtues are about abstracted principles. Both matter, and if I lean towards one mode or the other, I find myself untuned, either scrambling through passion, or strangled by structure. The solution isn’t to shift from order to chaos or chaos to order, but to be maximally orderly and maximally chaotic.

Kairos is about being aware of a moment and boldly taking it (it’s a military term) where agape is about unconditional love (a Jesus term), and so when I repeat the prayer “Καιρὸν θεωρῶ, ἀγάπην σπερῶ,” it’s a paradox embedded in a single phrase: “I recognize the moment, and will bestow love as a gift.”

I haven’t mapped the other virtues into sayings yet, but there is the spontaneous, generative, and wild ecstasy (ékstasis) paired with a prudent and monk-like systemization of everything, logos. There is the serene inner stillness, the now without thought, hesychia (ἡσυχία) paired with the striving towards your destiny, your purpose, your final end, your telos. There is the immersion into the inner dream-world of images, fantasia (φαντασία) paired with the builder mentality to order and craft your environment to shape your mind, cosmesis (κόσμησις).

Now that I write this, I see the difference between cosmos and cosmesis. Cosmos is an abstract, left-brained noun, the order of matter, it's physical configuration; cosmesis is the embodied, right-brained verb, the participatory act of ordering matter yourself (ie: making your bed, shaping your government, designing your church). It's important for all of these virtues to be verb words, because they are not static nouns, but actions to take. In that spirit, I should change logos to logismos, telos to teleiosis, and agape to apagan.

This is turning into a pattern language of virtue, and though there are many differences with the Essay Architecture pattern language—it’s made of spectrums and not triads—there are similarities too: each virtue telescopes into more sub-virtues, virtues are interlinked, they all combine to create a nameless quality. I think only through making many types of pattern languages, across different fields, will I be able to understand the different constraints and components of any system: the patterns of pattern languages.

Where do I have to grow? Not just as a writer, but a thinker, and more importantly, a person? It’s dangerous to stop asking this question; it’s too easy to see yourself as fully matured, individuated and at your edge. Even the self-labeled "curiosity seekers" may unknowingly confine themselves to a shape. We identify with our skills and clumsiness, our knowledge and gaps, and assume these as static traits of our nature. From the other end, someone once told me there’s nothing they could learn from fiction, since they have no doubts on who they are. Can you not have both? To propel forward with confidence on your proven strengths, but also with the humility that you have much to learn? I am grateful for how architecture school set off an explosive inner drive in me, and certainly do feel I've cultivated a unique way of seeing things, but surely I'm blind in ways I can't see, with some habits I must have gotten very wrong, and if continued unfixed, will clamp me down from greatness.

Greatness! I shouldn't be shy to admit what I strive for, to feel the subtle pressure to play down my quest for complete, utter, spine-chilling mastery as a cool and casual endeavor. What is the root of this? Maybe I can tell you but I will likely be guessing and justifying.

One guess is that I've been receptive/perceptive to feel the viscerality of great works—in architecture, music, writing—and it feels to me there's no greater ability than being able to do that myself. This isn't unique to me of course, it's possibly what drives at least half of artists, but I imagine many people are content experiencing art in all its fullness with no desire of making it themselves (no desire to make, or to recreate that experience in others).

I know it’s vain (and dangerous) to want extrinsic fame, and more measured to do things for the love of it, intrinsically. But if it were purely intrinsic, would I not just journal and take my words to the grave? I could riffed on the intrinsic benefits—ie: it simply feels like great to pick something you enjoy and commit to improving through your whole life—but also, if you take that idea seriously, it’s not enough to just enjoy it uncritically, because your blind spots may prevent you from reaching your greatest internal heights.

This makes it worthwhile to understand the caliber of the minds and lives around you, and throughout history, to estimate yours in relation to theirs. Of course, "comparison is the thief of joy," but there's a way to get feedback without letting it consciously or subconsciously crush you. I imagine a reasonable person just makes an assumption, that someone they're inspired by is just made differently. Instead, we each have a range of extreme and unreasonable actions available to us, that if we act upon consistently for years, can evolve us out of one head and into another.

There’s a level of contradiction here, where I’m totally happy writing in obscurity as a suburban dad, and it’s fine if no one but my daughter ever reads my work, and also I want to unblock all my obstacles so that it increases the odds and eliminates the luck of becoming “a figure,” someone beyond my local Dunbar limits, outside my audience, and if I'm being honest, outside the 21st century. I realize this might be a confession of vanity, but I don’t think it’s for the sake of being known or idolized, for I’d do the whole thing anonymously or pseudonymously if that’s what it took. I’m an introvert and very much appreciate my solitude. But to rise above the filter of obscurity from great work is to offer others the experience that triggered me to make stuff in the first place. There's a sense of paying it forward.

Again, I'm not sure here if I'm trying to justify an inner, hidden vanity of mine, or if there really is a paradox worth sitting with. A different and possibly wiser point of view is to be indifferent to outcomes. Mastery is all you need: sometimes it gets recognized and sometimes it doesn't. Figures without mastery are idols, influencers, farces. What matters is the inner quest to transcend your limits.

So back to the original question, what are my limits? I am under-studied compared to Huxley, under-lived to Kerouac, unexplored compared to Pessoa, inarticulate to Woolf, unwise to Christ. And so half the battle is in trying to sustain conversations with these people, through their work, for a full decade, until you absorb their particularities into your own essence; but also book knowledge is useless unless you live and integrate it; that involves courage, which is not something you absorb in prose.

That is the bottleneck to everything, to life and art: courage. We each have to overcome our sheepishness and strive to live in Third ways. And while I have extreme courage in some areas, I am a coward in many others (I will spare you the accounting). How do you wring that out of your nerves? It is the limiting constraint in everything. It is the weakest link. In each sport I played as a kid, I had one trait of excellence that was rendered useless by a handicap: the hardest shot in soccer but I could not dribble; the best rebounder who could not lay up; the golden glove with a wimp’s arm; lightning legs but Super Mario sprinting form. Likewise, I can’t write or live without courage.

And so really I’m six years into writing, the same length of time I spent in architecture school, but as if I built my own curriculum. I am only at square one with everything ahead of me.

It's a mistake to think of effort as a single spectrum between a Gary Vaynerchuk grind-till-you-die flip-slop-on-Facebook-marketplace vibe and a Wu-Wei, non-effort, sabbatical-brained, Netflix-and-chill vibe. Something not on that spectrum is obsession. It's not work for work's sake, or work for status climbing, but work by seduction, by tinkering, by vision, by purpose or duty or whatever. It often can look like grind work in terms of focus and intensity and prolificness and hours spent, but it feels different because it comes from a different place.

I framed this question to my cousins: would you rather work hard for 8+ hours a day on something you feel compelled and intrinsically motivated towards, or, go into an office for 8 hours a day for a bullshit job that only requires 1-2 hours of simple work, mindless and purposeless work, and then spend the rest of the time socializing?

The word "work" itself is a bit tainted, because there's a sense of obligation ("I have to do this to get paid"), sacrifice ("I'm doing this at the expense of things I love to support us"), and utility ("I'm making things that are functional for other people"). The work that I'm most drawn to is something like the inverse of this. It's pleasurable ("I lose track of time doing this"), primary ("There's nothing else I'd rather do"), and visionary ("I'm doing this because I see the value in it, and even if others can't see it now, they may eventually.")

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

This is a memo I wrote after a talk with Will at the diner, about startups vs. institutes, in the general vibe of Emerson (grandiosity, certainty, metaphorical lushness):

I want to understand the different range of “social organizations,” and so I’ll use the domain of writing to paint the differences between types.

The “institution” of writing is the centuries-old, intergenerational norms, traditions, and constraints that are inherent to practice, medium, and distribution. One does not simply “start” an institution; it is an abstract, ancient entity; an “institute,” on the other hand, is a concrete group with a specific purpose, aiming to steer or reform the behemothic institution. We are in a ruthless river of progress, and the cost of civilizational acceleration is the endless erosion of institutions, and so it’s the near-holy responsibility of each generation to build institutes that inject vitality into their dying fathers.

An institute is born from a “dream” in one man’s head, but they’re not on a “mission” until they step out of the stream of circumstance and act. An “institute” is not a planted flag from the fumes of excitement—I refer to a friend who, on an acid trip, claimed to have founded The United States of Brooklyn, right then and there—, but the ripcurrents created by decades of stubborn action. It is not a name nor brand, but the systematization of one man’s unreasonableness.

It all starts with a “project,” a spasm of effort, a groping forward to find leverage towards their purpose. The visionary will find projects drooling out of their mouth like the blood of life; many will fail, some will hurt, but once a cluster of projects start spiraling around a central spine, you have an “embryonic institute.” I use the word embryonic because institute mortality rates are high. It is far easier to start projects than to nurture them past infancy. The hallmark of an institute is stability through time. 5.4 years, I’d guess (+2,000 days, spanning 3 molts).

In the case of Essay Architecture, I am stretched across (6) verticals: a curriculum (the 24,000 word textbook), a school (the AI app), a library (the 100 essay archive), a club of shared practice (Essay Club), an economy (the $10k prize), and media (the anthology). In a single year I’ve planted these seeds, and you can see the buds poking through the soil. There is something happening, you can see, but it will not be a force of authority in the eyes of me or the world unless it all survives and feeds society through several winters.

An institute, then, in its dizzying scope, contains interconnected “objects”: (a) knowledge, (b) services, (c) events, (d) activities, (e) opportunities, (f) people, etc. It is a fractal version of society; it contains all its parts, but all dedicated towards a single thrust of mission. This is hard to maintain! So in comes the money.

The question is, how does the structure of the institute not get corrupted by the cannibalizing incentives of capitalism? How can you sustain the mission without it becoming a cog of the market, the mission reduced to a dress?

Unless an institute has an endowment, it needs a for-profit wing. A “startup” is about discovering new market opportunities, while a “company” is about operationalizing, scaling, and extracting from a known opportunity. Startups, companies, and institutes can all have “missions,” but only the institute is “mission-driven.” An institute will take money, but never compromises. If you cow to the market, a drip turns to a torrent, and the mission will be gutted, twisted, used as a narrative mask to help you lie to the world and yourself. It is a common and tempting line of logic to say, “once I make all the money, then I’ll do good.” Meta thinks that once it conquers the entire economy, it can finally focus on doing the good work of helping people “connect.”

The year one actions cannot be only tangentially tied to the mission; they need to be the mission itself. Building an enterprise-grade API for Grammarly and Brown will make me rich but tired; having spent my years spawning my anti-mission, the death of the essay, I would move on to some other project, maybe music.

When I look at all the writing technology startups, you can see how, in their first years, they’ve completely oriented towards business writing, towards the automating of prose, towards things that betray the ancient institute of writing. They either don’t get it or don’t care or just really need the money, but writers see their slogans of “helping writers write” as marketing drivel.

The insanity of a true institute is the stubbornness to put the mission before everything: before markets, before investors, before people, before ego, before legibility, before reason. This sacks your own speed, and is only fueled by heroic effort and the faith that, with time, it will find a real, timeless form.

The fruit of this insanity is trust: the various guilds of people that orbit an institute can sniff beyond the rhetoric and see what’s really driving its actions. If there is no track record of humility, or of “doing things that don’t scale,” or of “doing things without revenue potential,” or of “directing resources towards weird ideas because they advance the purpose,” then trust is lost, and all the mission-driven rhetoric is seen as the wolfish guile of someone who can no longer notice their own animotronic limbs and memes.

I believe the will, hope, and talent of an institute’s founder are the pre-requisite to birth a society-scale entity, but once you operate at abstract scales, architecture matters, extremely. Has Christ not been bastardized? Did the American experiment not get wrecked by the hyper-capitalistic invention of trains? Our very best religions and governments did not have the foresight or civic inventions to prevent them from getting sacked by barbarians and wolves. What I’m getting at is that we need some sort of 21st century constitution for institutes, an immune system to enable the virtue-driven founder to build something that has a chance to make it in an exponential landscape of virtueless technocapitalism.

I imagine it should look more like a loose collection of protocols than a single canon. For what it should contain, I can’t sketch right now, but I think it has something to do with mediating power, money, status, people, etc. My intuition is that the playbook is possibly the opposite of a startup.

The institute is the inversion of the startup. Where startups are designed to accrue all of the upside, an institute is sacrificial: it should be designed so that society gets the upside, even at its own peril. Really, it’s quite Christian. Of course, this shouldn’t prevent the founder of the institute from getting wealthy, but if the primary goal is personal wealth, then it’s not, definitionally, “mission-driven.” Instead of saying, “I need a $10 million valuation so I can open up $250,000 in grants for writers,” I want to say, “through paying writers $10 million, I will somehow make $500,000 a year for myself.” The idea is to become potentially wealthy through spearheading a radical mission, one that is worth it for itself—an adventure of a lifetime—, and one that is also, a magnet for capital.

This maybe gives some context to my goal for the next 1,000 days: “become financially independent through a mission-driven company and non-convergent artistic practice.”

To close with some specific examples, here are “acts of institute” (for Essay Architecture) that a startup would never make:

• No demographic optimization: The curriculum is not tailored for the biggest demographic (beginners). It starts at the edge of my knowledge (301), and then radiates in each direction (towards 501 and 101). Eventually, it will touch all demographics, so I need to start where my energy is, and never stop.
• Virtue-driven development: Even though people want the AI to write for them, and they want to use this for fiction and books and business memos, this is squarely an app to advance the genre of the essay, and it will never write for you. Even though more and more people will automate as AI gets better, this will be the go-to app for anyone who wants to engage with the process.
• Community voting: Any big decisions about the format of Essay Club are presented to the community as votes, which treats them like shareholders instead of customers. Of course, the founder won’t present options that contradict the mission, but instead of assuming which specific form is best, or choosing the one that is best for me, the community will sustain if it is co-shaped by them.
• Checks and balances: To promote the Essay Architecture tool most directly, I would have made the app the sole determinant of the prize winner, but instead 2/3 of the vote is determined by external judges. In some areas, my own perspective and taste is required, but it’s important to know when I need to systematically remove my own ego and preferences. An institute is not about scaling my taste, but in creating scalable systems that help achieve an ideal that I couldn’t reach on my own.
• Paying the public: At the start of 2026 (Q1), I want to crowdfund $100,000 for the next essay prize. I think this creates even more buzz and intrigue in the institute. It’s not at all what I would do if I were a startup: I’d be fundraising to build a team and scale the app. The goal is to create an ambitious cultural magnet that gets writers paid, while simultaneously catching the tailwinds so that I can get paid for my tool and curriculum.

Silicon Valley has cannibalized The Fountainhead and inverted its meaning. They celebrate Roark-like rhetoric—innovation, disruption, individual genius—but then go on to act like Keating: obsessed with markets, perception, appeasement, hype, status, and conformity. To be Roark is to fundamentally not care what the market thinks or wants, which goes directly against the main ethos of “build things people want.”

Roark had an unshakeable ethical core, a vision for the world that the world didn’t want, yet. He was willing to endure hardship, poverty, and hate, but didn’t despair over it; he had patience, faith in his destiny, and saw no other point than to follow his dream even if all signs pointed to it being a dead end. He stuck to his vision long enough for it to manifest in the world, and eventually others saw the transcendent beauty in it (Roark is modeled off of Frank Lloyd Wright). Roark was a force of nature, understood by no one in his life time, but everyone afterward.

In contrast, Keating is a status-chaser that plays social games. He is practical, while Roark is extremely unreasonable.

The point of Fountainhead, to me, is that Roark tolerated pain without suffering for his virtues, making him far more like a Christ-like character than a capitalist. There is no doubt, anxiety, despair, spiraling. He accepts all pain and does what he needs to; it’s the reader that experiences the pain and questions his almost inhuman reactions.

There has to be a better answer to the “why is nothing beautiful anymore?” discourse. This usually takes the form of plucking two objects, two hundred years apart, to make a point. If you take the best thing from the past and the worst thing from the present, you can make any conclusion you want, in any field. Are there not beautiful phone booths made in the 2000s? Might there actually be more of them than in the past?

Ultimately, though, I’m less interested in aesthetic studies if they don’t tie back to character. What good is beautiful architecture is everyone is ugly in spirit? I mean that. If we built beautiful, luxurious, maximalist cities, might that not reflect a kind of materialism in the soul of its people? Not saying that’s a given, but the real dilemma of architecture—the one that troubled me in my later years in school—is if the design of our world actually has any role in shaping its inhabitants. Maybe that’s an unfair thing to ask of bricks and steel. But maybe that’s why I shifted to other fields of design that are more influential in shaping virtue.

Faith is overrated, what matters is that you act like Christ. You could have all the belief in the world and go to church every week, but if you haven’t rigorously and honestly observed your own soul under a microscope, you may be missing the point.

People assume that the rationalists in the LessWrong forums are logic worshippers that only think in Bayesian statistics. I'm sure many of them do. But actually, their genesis book Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Yudkowsky, is a cautionary tale about the extremes of rationalism. Yes, Harry is able to run circles around wizards with his command of statistics, but Voldermort is an evil master logician, symbolizing the danger of deploying rationalism without morals. So in the end, it’s more like a philosophy of “meta-rationalism,” on the discernment to know when the mode of rationality makes sense. Still though, I imagine that nuance is lost on many in and out of the community..

"The Death of the Corporate Job" went viral on Substack: 3.3k likes in a few days (eventually went up to 20k, I think). I am pretty sure this was AI-generated. I don’t feel like posting about it though. It’s clear to me that this is a kid in his 20s, building an AI tool for career discovery; he sees this essay as marketing. It will probably bring him a lot of customers. He might possibly help a lot people. I’m sure he believes in his mission.

What irks me is that the essay has been instrumentalized. There are fake I’s with vague personal details. Intellectually, it’s a ripoff of Bullshit Jobs. There’s no structural clarity, and it loops through the same points multiple times. No tension. Flat voice. Awkward repetition. I understand why the writer did this, but I’m more concerned about the state of readers, because this piece’s popularity is really a reflection of mass readers.

It shows that most people care about the topic, and barely notice or care about how it’s written. What thye care about is having their pain validated. To go viral, write about mainstream pain. So if this is what the masses want, shouldn’t we not care about composition and just write psychology-targeted think pieces? I mean, if you want to just build an audience at the expenses of your own satisfaction, then yes, possibility. But the quality of your thinking, and the friction to derive something original and independent, gives you something more than fleeting popularity, it actually shapes your lens for the longterm, and you earn something that is transferrable outside of narrow social status games.

The idea that dead relatives are "up there, looking down" is a comforting thought that enables weak virtues. I do believe “they are always with us,” but in the sense that they’ve shaped our character and they live through, not in the sense that they have a supernatural consciousness and can know and see what I do and say and think (or that they can manipulate our material reality to fulfill our egoic wishes). By assuming they could be gone, you have to be courageous and have all the conversations you want to have. You have to assume they could die not knowing how you feel. You have to assume that their waking life really shapes the DMT-hypnagogic-afterlife of theirs, and so what you do and say really matters. This life really matters. Heaven is an opiate that spawns cowardice and hides the real and urgent stakes of today. There is a deadline.

Re: to Veraeke's tweet … Purpose should come from virtues, not achievements. Don't have your self-worth contingent on realizing a specific hard thing. Rather, tie your self-worth in developing meta-traits that can be used towards any goal. This doesn't mean to NOT pursue ambitious goals, but it means to pay more attention to how your virtues can help you achieve it; and not the attainment of the thing. In fact, pursuing hard things generates the circumstances where you actually get to develop, test, and bolster your virtues.

What does it actually mean to be a good judge of character? I think there’s hubris involved in thinking you can know someone’s full virtue landscape from a few interactions. If anything, the better you get to know someone, the bigger your aperture, and so the less sure you can be of their character.

But in order for society to function, you have to make assumptions to trust anybody. To be maximally trusting or maximally paranoid are opposite forms of social risk.

And even if you spend your life building good heuristics, those are all conditional to the moment. If we plunge into war or depression or transhumanism, there’s little knowing in how friendlies will bend.

I’m landing on the idea that I’m not nearly grateful enough for society enabling the average person to be trusting and trustworthy, because if we had to make these calculations in real-time, we wouldn’t have time for anything else.

Imagine having the worst thing you’ve ever done broadcasted to the entire world? Everyone would assume that lapse in virtue was your full self. Everyone has a different mean and a different range, but the question is, where does this particular cheater—the CEO at the Coldplay concert—stand? We see this 10 second clip with no context into who he actually is, and we assume it’s representative of his whole character. But when I hear that his wife who was cheated on was actually the mistress from his first marriage, it points to a pattern. Still, who knows if it’s true or not. The situation is something like a perfect storm for a man who probably deserves it. Out of millions of Jumbotron kiss cam moments, all the wrong moves happened at the same time. They could’ve separated when the kiss cam was announced, they could’ve played off the reaction instead of devolving into horrific embarrassment, and Chris Martin could have held his tongue, but none of that happened, and so now an angry public—one looking for a scapegoat—found a powerful man in a cartoon situation, getting the fate we think he deserves.

I am undecided to the degree that I want to write about cockroaches.

First, obviously, they are skeevy. Roach prose is definitely less gross than a Google images search, but still, it’s far from a feel-good topic. I don’t want to put my readers through thinking about them too much, let alone myself. But I feel intrigued to write about them; there’s the Burroughs-like writerly obsession with roaches in Naked Lunch—which feels like an honestly twisted curiosity that is nothing to aspire to—but it would feel insincere to mimic him. Still, experiences with roaches are uncomfortable and memory piercing and physiology altering and I guess I want to freeze them in text.

I am the exterminator because my landlords are very nonchalant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they just crushed them with their hands (I have seen them do this once, at our lease signing). I have a new habit of applying Indoxicarb near the radiator with a syringe; the theory is that, since they are scavengers, they will grab the bait, bring it back to the nest, and poison their families. I’m skeptical of this. In any case, this my 2nd time finding “roach droppings” under the radiator. Does it immediately expunge everything in their intestines? This time though, I looked at the underside of my Clorox wipe and saw what seemed like a microscopic baby roach, dead or alive I’m not sure, and I couldn’t tell if it’s legs were wiggling so I pinched hard just in case, but now I am in this ethical haze of seeing my self as a roach abortionist.

If something is out of your control, all you can do is change how you react. But if it’s in your control, you can change how you act. Sounds simple, but I wonder how much distress comes from not applying this simple rule (a conditional heuristic). It’s common to (a) accept your initial reaction without realizing you can change it, (b) get worked up over things you can’t change, (c) justify a reaction to avoid taking action, because of fear, and (d) take delusional action towards something that is entirely unrealistic. This saying solves all four.

Another way to think about it: people don’t act on this because of mislabeling, avoidance, or incompetence. They either can’t measure their agency (they mislabel if they can control it ), don’t want to accept the conclusion (they want to avoid helplessness or meaninglessness), or don’t know the techniques of habit change or mindset change.

There's a viral clip of a kid at a college graduation. The camera focuses on him. He’s on the Jumbotron and he happens to have his laptop open, with his ChatGPT up, and you see him scrolling through all his conversations. If I remember correctly, he was flexing his bicep. This flagrant symbol of cheating is a good symbol for the times.

In April I came across a tool on X (Cluely?) with slogans like “take the short way” and “cheat on everything.” Of course, this is rage-bait positioning from a 21-year old founder. If you look into the fine print, it’s more honest: “3.1 Prohibited Uses: b) Using the Services to cheat on examinations, tests or assignments.” The manifesto is a middle ground between marketing and legal: “Why memorize facts, write code, research anything—when a model can do it in seconds? The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage.” On X, they claim that brain chips are the end state of this product. One of the replies called them “morel imbeciles.”

A key point from Nietzche is that our philosophy emerges because it has to. Most people don’t believe things out of principle, they believe things to justify and rationalize their life and decisions. This is just as true for tech founders. You find yourself locked into a technical problem, a way to make money, a way to guide your career, and then suddenly a product is rewriting your philosophical compass.

Of all the competing instructions of Christianity, which is most important? (a) To believe in God; (b) To read the Bible; (c) To go to church; (d) To pray; (e) To live like Christ. Arguably, a-d are just delivery methods to install (e), Christ as a “moral engine.” But what if you derive your own system to do this? If you live in the light of death, understand what you have to die for, see every moment as a moral act, and forgive everyone, but you don’t believe in God, are you really not a Christian? (Claude called this “anonymous Christianity” and “implicit faith”)

"If Christianity’s ultimate aim is human transformation toward love, justice, and forgiveness, then someone achieving that transformation might be closer to Christianity’s heart than someone who believes doctrinally but doesn’t embody these values.”

I eventually want to make the argument that going to church can easily turn into a stale habit that is separated from the actual act of “building a relationship with God” (however you define that).

I’ve found the practices of writing and meditating to be far more helpful in becoming aware of my insecurities, facing death, giving up control, forgiving, detaching from obsessions, re-aligning, etc. Church done right would require everyone to do these practices, in a group. Currently, I see it as a form of theological broadcasting, where tradition, ritual, and dogma are the core unifiers—but without an element that is vulnerable or ego-shattering, I think it’s limited in its potential effects.

I’m not saying we should not go to church. I’m saying we should redesign church. It’s also possible that these elements, groups, sub-practices exist and I’m just not aware of them, and so it’s on me to find them.

Beyond 11pm, all the food places near Bryant Park were closed, and so I found myself in a McDonald’s which led me to buy dinner for a possibly homeless man. He told me he lives in Connecticut, but his cousin (his ride back) didn’t show, and so he needs to wait overnight, needs money for food, has a spine injury, and I wasn’t sure if the whole backstory was real or an excuse. In any case, we talked for 10 minutes as we waited. As I left he reached out for a handshake and I saw what might have been infected blisters, and so I awkwardly offered him my pincers (thumb and finger). The gesture might have negated the kindness of me getting him food in the first place, and I feel bad about it.