On nature, society, and what it means to walk a spiritual path — Ever since I was little, I’ve been looking for God. I remember wandering in the wild land behind our house, pondering connections and the elements, then running home to write down all my inspirations. I wanted to understand how it all fit together — not scientifically, but energetically. I wanted…

Our philosophy, like our economy, is collapsing under its own contradictions — Ah, late-stage capitalism. At last, we have arrived. This economic system is falling down, falling down, falling down, my fair lady. Whether or not you like capitalism, we know that nothing lasts forever. This economic system, like every economic system that preceded it, will eventually end. It’s risky to say…

The one in which I offer social commentary about social commentary — It’s October now. Are we still talking about Russell Brand? Did I miss the chance to give my hot take? Well, too bad: I liked Russell Brand’s interview with Mooji and some of his commentary on addiction and the 2020 presidential debates. I find his fixation on clickbait conspiracy theories…

A short story — Report to the Federation — September 29, 2041 The first dog to reach a human-equivalent level of sentient consciousness was a four-year-old beagle mix named Pepper. Samson Gray, the man who was, at that time, her owner, did not notice her gradually developing a full comprehension of the English language…

We don’t have to forsake civilization, but we owe it to ourselves to consider it — “So you’re like, anti-civ now?” he asked me after I started ranting, once again, about agriculture. I laughed. Reddit always has a catchy term for everything, don’t they? In this case, anti-civ is short for anti-civilization, a position of critiquing human civilization itself and doubting whether settled civilizations are sustainable…

Healthy attachment requires much more than our parents — As discussions of trauma and psychological development become increasingly more mainstream, we’ve begun to see how much our upbringings shape our health and functioning later in life. We don’t know what the ideal of parenting is per se, but we know that when our primary attachment figures drastically miss the…

Seeing illusory divisions is hindering our ability to heal — The contemporary Western perspective is one of perceiving false divisions. We’ve been raised in a world that sees the mind as separate from the body, the self as separate from the collective and the human as separate from the natural. We divide up the world along these lines into disciplines…

A short story — Against the sturdy rhythm of the warehouse, the collapse is deafening. It’s an evil sound. The sudden loud that makes your heartbeat shoot to your hands. Halfway across the floor, the whole shelf has fallen and that means hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars of product is now broken. My head…

Changing the way we understand emotions changes the way they feel — Emotions are feelings. Everyone knows that. We tend to draw a distinction between emotional feelings like happiness, sadness, anger or shame, and other, more purely-physical feelings, like overheating, nausea or itching. By distinguishing emotional feelings from other kinds of feelings, we recognize that there is some internal process occurring when…