We’ve heard this story before…

A plague brakes out. Everyone is stuck at home, with nothing to do, and no end in sight. For entertainment, all are watching this amazing but crazy story unfold…

But this isn’t Covid.

It was the summer of 1592. There’s an outbreak of the plague (the OG kind) and officials shut everything down — yes, they knew even back then that people gathering in groups spread it…it’s a small world. At its peak about a thousand people died a week and about ten percent of the population perished.

Shakespeare’s company couldn’t perform in the theater, and the actors were out of work. To get a little money, Shakespeare penned what was at the time his most famous writing. He’s know today for his plays, but he first broke on the scene in his own time with an epic poem: Venus and Adonis.

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The story is of a goddess (Venus) pursuing the hunter, Adonis, for…love. Adonis is more into hunting and isn’t so sure about all this until…this is a steamy story. Look at what Venus tells him:

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:

Venus telling Adonis to wonder south? Into her “garden”…The poem is a fun one. Elizabethan sexuality was actually less puritanical than we realize, but even this poem had trouble getting to print because of its scandalousness.

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Other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time were trying to understand what was happening and document historical events. But Shakespeare? He was writing hot steamy poems with draw-me-like-one-of-your-french-girl scenes for Elizabethans to get their thang on…

The poem was so popular it was reprinted multiple times within his lifetime (rare, even then). Everyone was at home but this little poem was power packed with delightful little tidbits that are scandalous by today’s standards, but even more back then.

The poem isn’t as widely known today, but it’s what made his name then, and probably made his career, ushering people to see the play written by the poem’s author.

Covid wasn’t the first time humanity had a moment of life interrupted by a virus.

When cooped up, with no clear timeline of when normal events will resume, humans need something to pass the time. And what helped our Elizabethan forebears to do that? Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis.

We had Tiger King. The Elizabethans had Shakespeare’s erotica.

Tiger King was a crazy moment culturally. We were all pent up, at home, with nothing but time and a Netflix subscription to pass our days. We didn’t know how long it would be…and the same thing happened with our fellow humans, 500 years before us.

We aren’t as far removed from the past as we think.

I discovered this story from Dame Sarah over at Shakespeare Made Clear and owe her work to bringing this to light. Her YouTube channel is so charming and fun.

I don’t know when the next lockdown will happen but I know that whenever it comes, we humans will venture into our imaginations for anything to escape the pain. For us, it was a crazy gay zoo keeper in Oklahoma. For Elizabethans, it was the erotica of Shakespeare.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Our parents had cigarettes — we have smartphones.

We’re now starting to discover the downside to smart phones and social media.

An we’re seeing how it can dumb down an entire generation (ignore the influencer in the clip, and just focus on Dr. Horvath’s testimony…best video I could find):

When it’s severe enough, tech addiction turns a person into a zombie of sorts: no personality, no original thoughts or opinions…just an amorphous blob.

Chances are, you probably know someone like this. They’re not just from Gen Z, though a disproportionate amount of them are. No, many Boomers and millennials have the same issue. They’re are so plugged into to devices and apps that they have outsourced their personality.

They have no originality. Their opinions are just the sum of their algorithm.

These little dopamine casinos are draining their life-force…many have no drive, no zest for experiencing anything unless it’s filtered through a screen.

Remember when people said how dangerous marijuana was? Adults warned how it would make you stay at home and play video games all day, never connecting to the outside world? Ya, that times 100 is what smartphones are doing to people.

The real tragedy is just how BORING they are. These phone addicts are just…there. Nothing to say beyond what their feed tells them. For many, they’ve forgotten how to live without a phone.

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Human Ringwraiths—neither dead nor alive

Instead of swiping, why not read a cautionary tale about what happens when we let our tools control us: grab a copy of Lord of the Rings and read about the Ringwraiths.

Given a gift from a seemingly helpful foreign entity, these humans (“nine mortal men”) took the rings believing they would enhance their lives…but they grew addicted to their power. At some point they stopped living and became empty vessels, tools of their drug’s dealer.

They learned that no gift from the dark lord is a true gift.

Phone or social media addicts are like the Ringwraiths: they accepted this tool for all the cool benefits, but its corrupting power degenerates their being.

At some point, they are neither alive nor dead, but puppets of an evil entity.

Take heed, lest you too waste away your personality with every thoughtless swipe…don’t outsource your life. Don’t give up your lifeforce.

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Detox from your phone OR become a Phonewraith

Dear Phone Addicts…

If you are an embodied soul in this world, you’re made to create instead of constantly consuming; but many are so addicted to dopamine they can’t even see anymore. Color in the real world is boring.

But like all addictions, it’s never enough, it never fills that void, so you scroll longer and longer but it still is just…meh…

Please, for yourself and for those who deserve to experience your unique expression…get a life. Put down the phone. Have your OWN opinion. Your OWN experience.

You’re passively going through life…

Life is passing you by with every swipe.

I know, boredom sucks. But boredom is the prerequisite to doing anything worthwhile. It’s so essential that monks cultivate a zone of silence to maintain and protect it. Special things happen in boredom. Namely, you get a glimpse of the divine.

When you run from boredom to your phone, you’re turning into a phonewraith: a being wasting every minute pursuing their unique purpose in this world for dopamine. Your phone is that dangerous. It’s ruining your life. And your personality is the engine light that’s blinking for all of us to see.

You know what’s fun to meet? A person who gives a damn.

Look at this Swiss watchmaker smile. He makes one watch a year and LOVES it. Sure, I couldn’t do that, and I doubt you could either, but he found what lights up his entire world. He’s LIVING (I’ve stopped it at the right spot, just listen for about a minute or so):

What lights up your world? I don’t know what it is, but I surely know what it is not: your phone.

Realize your phone and social media usage are bad for your health.

If not, you’ll become a lifeless tool, feeding a foreign corporation in exhange for your attention span…and your very life.

Friends don’t let friends become Phonewraiths.

It’s hard to miss how hard it is out there. Most major metro areas are experiencing what the West Coast has known for decades—something is deeply wrong. More homeless people are in major metro areas all across the country.

And it’s crazy how many Southern and Midwestern cities are starting to feel like LA, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle.

Many of these poor souls are victims of an inequitable economic system, and they were just the “bottom line.” Some were dreamers, who headed West, in pursuit of the American dream and the pursuit of happiness itself…and their dreams never panned out.

Some fell into addiction. When life is that hard, the temptation to leave this world, if only for a moment, is far too real.

Substance abuse is at an all time high, and as we head into more economic turbulence, addictions often grows worse as people struggle more.

And then, consider all the new forms of addiction: where you once had to traverse to the desert of Las Vegas to gamble, now the desert has gone nationwide. As of this writing, thirty-eight states now allow you to place bets directly from your phone. With the ease of swiping, you can gamble on sports teams.

But what I find most fascinating are not the apparent and very obvious addictions, but the less obvious addictions that our culture not only haz but but downright encourages:

The American economy is built on consumerism and materialism — it tells us we need something outside ourselves, or a newer model, to fix our problems and find happiness…and the next, and the next, and the next…

If our attentions aren’t gorilla glued to our phones, then they’re waiting for our drugs to arrive…even illicit drug dealers aren’t as fast as Amazon.

The addictions pop out in consumeristic expectations. Just watch any “Karen” not get the entree to their table in time, and notice the response — exactly like a junkie who’s gone too long without a hit.

So many of our casual addictions are not just acceptable, but the standard of living.

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Acceptable addictions camouflage the truth

Pick your poison, but for me it’s workaholism and success. And when I hit the office building, I’m not greeted by the 12 Step counselor — no sir! I’m rewarded all the way to the top of the corporate ladder.

Nobody may get hurt by my indulgence to this addiction (at least not directly or visibly). It’s nonetheless a sign of a disordered soul. Can I really say I’m living while I white-knuckle my way up the corporate ladder?

I pay my bills, take care of the family, get to appointments on time…I’m not addicted.

Because my addiction runs parallel with the culture, I’m empowered to keep going. But I’m not okay.

Taken to an extreme, any good thing ceases to be good.

Socially acceptable addictions are reinforced with tangible benefits (higher pay, praise, identity, etc).

Imagine the strange society that encourages everyone to shoot up heroin, every day, and write books on “3 Easy Steps to Increase Your Daily Heroin.” It slaps you in the face it’s so obvious; but if you’ve ever been through an airport bookstore, it’s almost exclusively about business success—the socially acceptable drug of choice for workaholics.

And at a meta level, all addictions are addictions to stories we tell ourselves, and when that story fails I just have to trust the medicine will eventually kick in…this is just how the world works and because it’s working out for me (paying my bills, few speeding tickets) I’m fiiiiine.

But what if I was born in France or Italy? Another culture that sees workaholism for what it is, and condemns it (France has a four day work week). My addiction would run counter to the culture at large.

I’m lulled into a an illusion that I am somehow different and better than an “addict.” Since I pay my mortgage and my life doesn’t implode spectacularly.

But my addiction is far more nefarious…I have a grenade tucked under my pillow and I’m living a lie that everything is fine because everything is peaceful right now.

I’m actually powerless.

Until I hit a wall, I persist in the notion that my addiction empowers me — a false control.

A person does have total control over their own choices, but we have almost none beyond that. And as long as the system feeds my socially acceptable addictions, I persist in the false notion…and any one thing can send my world crumbling.

We are all addicts

When someone hits rockbottom they find out a hard truth— they’ve have an illusion of control. Addiction tempts us to a false hope, that we can control the uncontrollables of life.

But it can’t.

And we resort to the addiction. Again, and again…

Until it no longer works.

Addiction feels like we have power over reality itself (“I get paid for running my body into the ground…so what’s the problem?”).

And my socially acceptable addiction is far worse, because I can get high on this illusion for my entire life and never know it. A heroin addict learns very quickly they have no control — but with a bonus and sweet corporate package…I’m TOTALLY in control.

This is probably what the core idea of Western Christianity’s “original sin” meant, that we all come into this world addicted, and needing help. It’s not original badness, as the Eastern Christian point out, but an addiction. That is why the Eastern Church views the Church as a hospital — rehab for the soul, helping us to work through the withdrawals.

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There has been more technological progress in the last 400 years than the past 40,000 of recorded history. Naturally, our cultural assumption is that all new developments should be radically better than the next, as our history has proven.

As the 2026 Super Bowl ad for Starlink suggests, we have a salvific view of technology, that it will be glorious and that it will save us — Oh what hath Starlink wrought.

Yet, if you scan any list of the top literature of Western Civilization, one finds:

• If we’re being generous in our selection, 70-80% or more were written before the printing press (1500s)

• And if we’re even more generous, maybe 90% were written before the personal computer (but even assuming 10% since the 1980s may be too generous)

That means a shocking amount of works that define western civilization were written well before modern technology.

So as our technology develops…shouldn’t these newer and better tools help us make more and better things? From art to literature to…everything? Technological progress is ironclad, right?

Progress suggests that with each new iteration, that we should be able to do things faster, easier, and MORE. And yet…

• If these tools are so wonderful, why are there not more and better works of art because of newer tech, like computers or AI?

• Or put another way, if tech progress is supreme and our tools are so good, where are the laptop Shakespeares, iPad Dantes, or AI Aquinas?

• Why have the majority of our greatest works come before both the printing press and the personal computer?

Many have noted how poor we are culturally, that older music and movies are doing better than current works.

As companies build AI into their products, the assumption continues that we should be capable of even greater things, all because these technological wonders keep marching onward. Shouldn’t newer and better tools help us to make more and better work? Thus sayeth the dogma of progress.

But like those dumb software upgrades, some of today’s brightest authors seem to have opted out of the latest tech updates too (sorry AI!). Just look at the number of living authors who still use low-tech to no-tech— it’s astounding:

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Even comedians use the power of the the legal pad & pen over the laptop, as Jerry Seinfeld said (I’m time stamping right where he mentions it, but it’s a brief part, so no need to watch the entire thing):

I always thought examples like these were relics of a fading era, like “oh, look at them, they succeeded in spite of their handicap...”

And then I ran across this quote, and was dumbfounded:

“Thomas Aquinas…had perhaps only twenty-five years of productive activity in the thirteenth century. He had none of the mechanism” (of today, such as computers)…”yet, Aquinas produced an amount of brilliant and profound matter that is simply astounding. How did Aquinas do it? It is highly doubtful that he would have written more or better if he had the latest computer at his disposal. In fact, in some sense it may have been a hindrance.” James Schall, in the forward to the Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges. (Bold my emphasis)

Why is low to no-tech the tool of choice for today’s top authors? All but Martin and McPhee (from what I can gather) do some portion of their drafts longhand—just as our our ancestors did thousands of years ago before them.

Maybe one of the listed authors has written something on the level of Shakespeare or Dante…but most did it with tools similar to 400 years hence (hence sounds waaaay more Shakespearian than before, no?)…why?

If success leaves clues, it would be shortsighted to dismiss their tools to just old codgers, dinosaurs of a bygone era. They’ve sold millions of copies, won countless of awards, surely they’ve put some thought into their craft? And they have…

“I have only said that a computer cannot help you to write better, and I stand by that. (In fact, I know a publisher who says that under the influence of computers — or of the immaculate copy that computers produce— many writers are now writing worse).” - Wendell Berry, Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer (Bold my emphasis)

On using a pen, Stephen King said it’s “the world’s finest word processor…It slows you down. It makes you think about each word as you write it.”

“As I’ve said, I write my first drafts in longhand—pen or pencil—on white legal pads, narrow lined. I seldom have only one draft in longhand—I’d say I probably have three or four. Then I do the same pages over on a typewriter.” - Robert Caro, Working.

“I did the first draft in pencil. But then I typed. The two-finger minuet. I had to reach up to the counter to peck at the keys of my faithful Underwood Champion. Eventually, I hurt my back. That’s when I stopped typing and started writing everything in pencil again. I still write in pencil. I’m writing this with a number 2 pencil.” - James Patterson

“I still like writing by hand. Normally I do a first draft using pen and paper, and then do my first edit when I type it onto my computer. For some reason, I much prefer writing with a black pen than a blue one, and in a perfect world I’d always use “narrow feint” writing paper. But I have been known to write on all sorts of weird things when I didn’t have a notepad with me. The names of the Hogwarts Houses were created on the back of an aeroplane sick bag. Yes, it was empty.” - JK Rowling

And listen to George RR Martin’s rather luddite attitude for computers:

If the story of technological progress is true, that the newer is better, why do so many successful writers avoid the latest tech?

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Cognitive Offloading…Kinda

The nature of technology is leverage — to do more with less. As our tech fuses into everyday decisions, we are offloading more of the mental work: Our GPS picks the best route. Our virtual calendars remember for us.

The speed and ease of use is what makes modern life “modern.” Nobody wants to haul their dirty laundry down to the creek and scrub their clothes on a washboard. *cue the banjo*

Though some tasks can be done faster, few aspects can be fully offloaded. Writing is a clear example.

The core of writing is thinking. You can’t write much without first thinking, and you can’t write well without thinking clearly. As the saying goes, it’s garbage in, garbage out.

No matter what app you use, you cannot eliminate the inherent friction within the writing process because your thoughts are the writing process. This is true for other fields beyond writing itself, that the quality of your thought is the quality of your work. Quality knows no bounds.

Even if they claim you can, and they definitely are claiming you can, you cannot offload thinking to AI.

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Efficiency vs Effectiveness

Your quality of thought precedes the quality of your writing — there’s no hack for shortening your thinking time.

A fundamental point at the core of the tech ideology is that it assumes that because it can be done faster, it can therefore be done better — all work is reduced to the lowest common denominator of tasks.

It’s conflating efficiency with effectiveness. Any task could be more efficient (in theory), but for things of quality, lasting works of art are not judged by how quickly they were made, but by their impact: their thoughtful details, their usefulness, their quality, and their beauty.

The quality of your work can only happen at the speed of your ability to think — and many of these writers keep saying that speed itself isn’t helpful for depth.

Look at what Robert Caro said about a college professor after putting in minimal effort for his writing assignments:

“I thought I was fooling him about the amount of preparation and effort I had put into it. At that final meeting, however after first saying something generous about my writing, he added: ‘But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.” Robert Caro, Working. (Bold my emphasis)

New technologies give a false impression, that just because words are on a page they are even worth reading. Yet, while there are dozens of apps to put words down faster, there is no “hack” to eliminate thinking from the process.

It seems that when quality matters, the speed of modern tech can be a disadvantage and even compromise depth.

Real World Results

Go with me on a quick detour…

Let me introduce you to Pavel Tsatouline, the “father” of the kettlebell movement in America specifically, but more important, the guy who first advocated for “functional strength.”

Hang with me…

Pavel advocates for more free weight usage, like kettlebells, because you use whole muscle groups at once, just as in real life.

In contrast, weight machines isolate a specific muscle during a work out. Yet in the wild we seldom use a single muscle, all by itself.

This is why there are so many stories of bodybuilders and gym bros that have no functional strength in real world situations.

Weight machines focus exercise so narrowly, they limit its effectiveness.

Now, look at this…

This is a chart from an NIH study depicting the cognitive benefits of writing by hand vs typing, and showing which areas of the brain lit up with each activity:

“Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing, contributing to deeper learning, enhanced memory retention, and more effective engagement with written material. Typing, while more efficient and automated, engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. These findings suggest that despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.” (Bold my emphasis)

For our brains, a computer is like a weight machine: it isolates parts of our brain, but doesn’t engage our full cognitive abilities. A pen and paper do, and give more real world benefits (you should just google how many therapies—physical as well as emotional—that use writing by hand for growth and recovery…there’s a reason).

A computer is to a weight machine as a pen is to a kettlebell.

The wrong tool leads to less functionality and poorer outcomes.

Therefore…

(If you don’t know this SNL Sketch and have 5:42 seconds to waste…you’re welcome.)

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Right Tools for the Journey

We’re not trying to romanticize specific tools (so cancel that order for more ink and quill pens!)

The point is to understand how our tools affect us and therefore affect the quality of our work. Look at what Wendell Berry said about how a pen shapes his writing:

“The computer apologist it seems to me, have greatly underrated the value of the handwritten manuscript as an artifact. I don’t meant that a writer should be a fine calligrapher and write for exhibition, but rather that the handwriting has a valuable influence on the work so written…as longhand is transformed into typescript, it seems increasingly resistant to improvement. More and more spunk is required to mar the clean, final-looking lines of type. I have the notion — again not provable — that the longer I keep a piece of work in longhand, the better it will be.” - Wendell Berry, Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer (bold emphasis mine).

And it’s not just writing by hand. Other low-tech tools and processes may contribute to depth too.

Look at what Ryan Holiday said about Robert Caro’s writing process with a typewriter and why, even as friction filled as it is, it might have some secret advantages (listen for about one minute for his full comment):

He said it briefly, but what he suggests is profound:

• Inefficiency could be an advantage for your work *mind blown*

• The process of writing (longhand) and then transferring to a typewriter (retyping each following draft) IS an advantage

• A sentence on Google Docs or Microsoft Word is “weirdly more permanent” because you’ll never retype the same sentence. If you write longhand or on a typewriter, you must retype each sentence and paragraph…Every. Single. Time.

• “If you had to retype your book, multiple times, you would have a different sense of the rhythm of it.”

Caro writes historical biographies, but his pros read like fiction. He’s considered by many as the greatest biographer in human history. For someone who cares deeply about the rhythm of the story, retyping drafts to get a feel of the text…this isn’t an “inefficiency,” it’s a necessity. We shouldn’t be quick to dismiss a slower process that creates works that will outlast its maker.

This is why Ryan Holiday creates a commonplace book because it allows him to absorb the material. The physical process of transcribing key passages from books assimilates into his mind, and thus his writing.

And I’m sure you’re doing mental cartwheels at the thought of writing anything by hand (I get it). But look at the end goal of any author, especially a biographer—they’re writing a book. We’re not discussing an email, but something an author wants to be in print long after they’re gone.

For the amount effort required to write a book, you’d want your work to withstand the test of time.

So, if your process purifies your work to purest gold, fortifying it against the assault of time…who cares how long it takes? It should take as long as it needs to work, to be impactful, to be beautiful, to be lasting.

Say it with me…

I need more kettlebell.

Our tools can help us make work that stands the test of time, and when the the ideology of tech is trying to banish all “inefficiency” from our lives, it’s missing a key insight — thinking related work is fundamentally inefficient. You cannot outsource this task, so anything that helps you craft better and deeper is the point. Efficiency by itself won’t get your there.

Quality is what matters. Speed (within reason) is secondary.

Thus…

The Human IS the technology.

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Far or Fast — What Game Are You Playing?

Your end goal determines the tools. The knee-jerk assumption that any tool will do, or that whatever app is faster or easier… is a reckless assumption. These authors prove otherwise.

Friction is at the core of most knowledge work, and no amount of tech can eliminate it. In fact, as with Aquinas, the could even make the quality worse.

If quality is the ultimate objective, whatever empowers you to work with and through the friction is a better tool. You don’t scale a mountain in running shoes.

And if you mean to scale your own cognitive mountain, old tech (handwriting, especially) is hiking gear for the mind.

They create more functional strength, a better grip for the terrain. And slowing down makes the movements more intentional — you don’t tread quickly along a precipice.

You can only strengthen yourself in the struggle. Slow and steady are the tools of our best thinkers because…

This is human work.

The success of these authors and the ancients are rooted in our biology. Don’t be afraid to reconsider the tools of your task. The pen is indeed mightier than AI.

Because…

The Human IS the technology.

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If you were looking for more quotes from Thomas Merton, here’s it is. This is the first final list I initially assembled for the post but couldn’t work in…and this is still only half of all that I recorded. The man could write.

I’m going to keep some of the original quotes from the first post in, but you’ll find plenty of new ones to comb through.

Here is a poem he wrote when he learned his brother was killed-in-action during World Word II

FOR MY BROTHER:
REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION, 1943

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb; 
And if I cannot eat my bread, 
My fasts shall live like willows where you died. 
If in the heat I find no water for my thirst, 
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.

Where, in what desolate and smokey country, 
Lies your poor body, lost and dead? 
And in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?

Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head, 
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed—
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest. 

When al the men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust, 
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for us both. 

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain, 
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring: 
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand, 
And buy you back to your own land:

The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb. 
Hear them and come: they call you home. 

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American Pragmatism vs the Human

Even though most of the world thinks we Americans are dumb (and we do give them a run for their money on that), most of our decisions are driven by a deep philosophical underpinning — Pragmatism.

American Pragmatism holds that if something isn’t “useful,” it’s of no value. And useful is primarily a question of “will this make me money?” Because let’s be honest…

If we can’t use this to make bank, what are we even talking about???

The philosophy is the very air we breathe (we have no clue), but implications flow into every direction—especially into education.

Watch how strange a question like this sounds to our ears: What if the primary purpose of education wasn’t meant just to help us get a job…but to make us MORE human?

Just asking the question is foreign. But the contemporary notion, that it’s exclusively to earn a higher income, is both recent and new in human history.

At one point, education was an end in itself, something that was valuable to your formation as a human, for your own good and for the common good.

Yes, a high-school educated person should be able to do the basics in reading, writing, and math; and if they can’t, we can honestly say there’s something wrong with the system.

But in our profit driven culture, we tend to think that anything done without the pursuit of money as the primary driver is absurd.

And when you dig deeper into our history, one finds the public school system was influenced to turn people into good factory workers — not to help people become more human.

The predominant view of education is exclusively money seeking, for financial ends. It’s totally unmoored from its value, for its own sake.

Anything without the aim of money is a waste of time.

K-12 Education is now just expensive daycare in many public schools

Most public schools are unwieldy, short term prisons for children. Education is a side note, not the primary activity.

From the overworked teachers, or the inability of teachers to even truly teach their kids…

It makes sense why so many wealthy parents pour ungodly sums into private schools; but as one education consultant confided to me, the best private schools today are basically what the best public schools were in the 1990s. I’m sure there are exceptions, but the exception proves the rule.

In many places, students access all books and homework through a Chrome Book or an iPad; they no longer even touch books anymore.

And most are already addicted to screens before they set foot in the classroom, so for them to get a hit on an iPad at school is actually a relief. Ooof….I feel for these kids. They show all the symptoms of addicts on withdrawals, as this teacher points out:

Whichever political party can crack the code for K-12 education will become a political powerhouse for decades. It is the modern civil rights issue of our times — the wealthy can help their children, but the poor students in bad schools have no other option.

We’re not educating these kids. We’re destroying their minds and their attention spans.

Children should be the measure of education

For the past few decades, STEM was all the rage. And now that AI is threatening to dismantle half of all white collar jobs, it begs the question…

If AI could so wipe out so many jobs so easily, was this even an “education?” Did STEM just turn our kids into glorified algorithms?

That may be a bit uncharitable (sorry STEM people…”STEMYS?” STEMERS?”) but it’s not without a point. STEM is not just outdated because of AI; it was suspect from the very beginning.

To treat science and math as the most important is like treating the left hemisphere as the only one that matters for your brain. It’s important, but it’s not the ONLY thing that matters.

But in our black and white world only money-making activities count in terms of value.

The idea of beauty or the sacred is gone. If it doesn’t lead to revenue…what’s the friggin point?

But even our souls know this makes no sense. There is an intrinsic beauty to all of existence.

You will always remember when you got down on one knee and she said yes. You cannot buy what makes this life worth living.

But we reduce life to only what is measurable, quantifiable, and therefore (according to the reasoning) justifiable.

Life is more. Our education should be more too.

Towards a new definition of education

Our metrics aren’t just measuring the wrong things. Our system is aiming for the wrong ends.

The whole human should be the measure.

Education should be oriented around who humans are and how they best learn. And…WHAT is valuable for them to even know.

Of course, they need to know the foundational concepts (reading, writing, math, etc). But to reduce them to only this or only STEM is to shortchange their humanity, and our future.

A child should learn Shakespeare for no other reason than it is the most beautiful thing in the English language. They should learn Dante because few other works will tower over them and humble them with it’s beauty.

We need to re-evaluate our pragmatism — beauty has a place in society. It’s no accident the typical architecture in the American is a rather boring and drab box. This has no personality.

If we shape our buildings, and then they shape us…what would happen if we started to live as if beauty does matter? That the sacred is equally part of the “bottom line.”

I think we’d take a bit more care for every day questions, including our education.

Children aren’t algorithms. They aren’t flesh-bodied AIs. And they should be the standard of success, not how many new coders are pumped into the economy.

Do they serve the economy, or does the economy serve them? C’mon now…

If this education system is molding kids to the needs of an abstract concept, instead of molding the education to the child, we’re gonna have some problems.

And we’re starting to see much of that now.

Don’t let the creeping assumptions of Pragmatism sneak in, like intellectual spiders, into our view of education.

Tribalism has now breached the gates. It first took our cable news stations. Then our political parties. Now it’s come for logic and reasoning itself.

Everyone now has a “side.” Yours vs mine. Us vs them. Good vs bad.

The spectrum of truth is exclusively black or white now. Nothing in between. No room for nuance.

How did we get here?

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When the Ego Takes over

The ego is the thing that keeps us alive as children: it propels us forward, makes us aware of the environment. When we are “conditioned,” it’s the ego doing this conditioning work.

The ego is built to keep us alive. Survival is the name of its game.

But we’re no longer in the jungle, defending ourselves from lions, and tigers. We’re in our homes with our families, safe places with people who love us.

The survival tricks that worked in childhood often stop working into adulthood.

But these little egos can’t help but continue the pattern. They paint in very stark categories to help our bodies navigate our surroundings. When we lived on the Serengeti, this was a huge help.

LION = BAD.

WATER = GOOD.

But as we mature, so does our nuance. Not all water is good. Ever been to Mexico? Or India? You have to grow up with that water for it to not leave you in the fetal position for a good thirty-six hours.

We learn to make distinctions. We qualify our experiences, because few are totally bad.

Some are degrees of good or bad (mostly good, kinda ish). But we learn to understand the distinctions. It’s rare for something to be categorically bad, especially when it comes to things of insurmountable worth…

Our Present Moment

Our modern politics is a great starting point. We didn’t always paint matters with such massive brushstrokes. It was just who’d be better at this moment. Swing voters are an exemplar of this, because they will vote for whoever is the best person on the issues, not based on political party.

The country used to be much less black and white in their thinking, and it was so common, that as recent as George H.W. Bush, about a third of the country was open to vote for either party.

But by the time his own son George W. Bush, ran for office, swing voters dwindled dramatically. By 2004, something like 3-4% were true “swing voters” who would willingly vote for either side.

And as our pool swing voters disappeared, our political discourse dissolved with it. The Right often used words like “commie” or “socialist” to describe ANY position a Democrat takes. The Left often uses “racist” or “facist” even when it makes no sense.

And to be fair, some of these words are accurate, but they are not accurate all the time, for every position, for every elected official. But the problem is, we tend to think exclusively in categories now, this box or that box..

Nuance is dead.

All that’s left is an Either-Or fallacy. There’s never a third option.

In our 64 Crayola pack, we only reach for Black or White. Never another shade. Nor any other color on the spectrum.

We Miss the Person

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Was that a bald eagle?

Enter Stephen Colbert: running around his stage like a rockstar, audience on their feet, sending their adulation.

He strutted out in a Brooks Brothers suit, a signature Bic pen in hand, and eyebrows of justice.

He may have started on TV as the Robin to Jon Stewart’s Batman, but his talent was so obvious that he wouldn’t be without his own show for very long.

From 2006 to 2015, Stephen inhabited a character that was a masterclass in the art of satire: a Fox News type guy, making fun of the those in power. His humor was savvy, like he was in on the joke, but his character didn’t seem to know it. He was so good that both Right and Left thought he was one of their own.

On the Colbert Report, Stephen embodied the Shakespearean archetype of the fool: the ignorant knave that somehow speaks the deepest truths to the most powerful people. He was so good at his craft that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrat leaders banned their party members from doing interviews with him because he made them look ridiculous.

This gift came at a great cost — his humor was forged in a crucible. As a young boy, he lost his father and two older brothers in a plane crash. Somehow through that pain, he learned to alchemize the human experience, to turn sadness into joy.

As he transitioned from cable to mainstream TV and started on the the Late Show, he let go of the character schtick and decided to play the hardest role of all—himself. In the Trump and Covid years, we needed his true self even more than we knew at the time, because we needed an alchemy that could only come from the depth of his soul. He bore witness that what we were seeing was in fact crazy, and we weren’t the crazy ones.

His show is scheduled to end this May. Here is a tribute to the past 20 years…

*NOTE* Almost all the video clips are time stamped, so most will cut to the best part. Don’t be afraid to click and see his talent…

His Rarity

Most celebrities are a one-note kind of talent. They can sing, act, or be funny. Few can do more than one. Even less can do more than one well.

Stephen is multidimensional. There are no public performers today with his breadth of talent.

His memory is incredible:

Look at his recall in a recent interview with Michael Pollan. He could full passages from memory:

His witticism:

Unfortunately, most of the old Colbert Report clips are gone, so I can’t link any (you gotta trust my memory here), but in so many of his amazing interviews, he showed one of the fastest minds around.

If he was debating an opponent and they straight up disagreed with his position, regardless, he would still say “I accept your apology.” It was always hilarious because they weren’t apologizing at all and it short-circuited their brain. (It’s a fun trick to do with friends actually, try it :)

He’d do live shows, late into his career:

After a major political event, he would do a live show. It was fresher and hit harder. He and his crew would only have 1-2 hours to hours to get jokes lined up. Even with a full cast of writers, that’s impressive. With his improv chops and strong writing process, you could hardly tell the difference.

He can sing:

He actually had a voice! He could hang with broadway performers like Anna Kendrick here:

Or watch him sing a cover of Friday (lower register but still impressive).

He has ballz:

In countless moments, he said the craziest and most awkward thing to the person in charge, and none was as bold as his speech at the the White House Correspondents Dinner to George W. Bush. How many comedians would have whiffed this because it was the president…but not Colbert.

Top Moments

• That time he lost an award to Barry Manilow. This is a classic from the Colbert Report Era:

• In a sketch on the Report about Koalas suffering from Chlamydia, he famously asked “whoever is fucking our koala bears, KNOCK IT OFF!”

• After his mother passed away, he gave the most moving tribute and said losing her was like “the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut:”

• Truthiness—he foreshadowed where politics was headed. Not based on reality but in our feelings. It became a recognized word by Merriam-Webster because…it hit a nerve.

• He foresaw MAGA: His book Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t was MAGA before there was even a MAGA…

• One of his Report guests came on to advocate for ending marriage as an institution, and after letting him ramble for few minutes, Stephen ends the interview by asking “but what if this is just an elaborate way for you to be an asshole?”

• Colbertisms: “Great president OR the GREATEST President?” He would ask a question and only give “great” or “greatest” as the two options.

• Here is a classic Colbert Interview segment from the Report days (also…this was filmed before 2010, not in 2026 like it feels)

• His satire was unparalleled. Look at this clip of his actual testimony before Congress — “This is America. I don’t want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan, in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian.”

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• Even though he played a character, when people treated him as a real person, his true self couldn’t help but peak through. Listen to why he cared so much about immigrant laborers (the schtick had deep roots):

• His “Better Know a District” from the Report was LEGENDARY. This was the best full clip I could find (c’mon Paramount Plus!) but even it was amazing:

• When Daft Punk broke their promise to come on his show, what did he do? He made his own music video to mock them. He’s that talented and he’s THAT petty (the whole clip is a procession of celebrities):

• Helping Anderson Cooper grieve: Notice how he so casually quotes the Lord of the Rings like some quote sacred texts. And watch him help his friend get through a dark time…

  • “What punishments of God are not gifts?”

  • “It’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that.”

• One of his top interviews on the Late Show was Will Ferrell. This entire clip is worth the watch, even it’s more about Will here…but it’s amazing…

• Remember that time that Nicki Minaj made Stephen blush because she made a rap lyric on the spot about wanting to…get with Stephen? Ya, it was an instant classic for a reason:

• “Can I get you some duct tape?” That time Stephen brought on an instagram influencer who couldn’t stop pulling up her dress. Nobody could just say the awkward like this man could:

• “You go to hell:” Stephen learning how to pronounce Irish words with Saoirse Ronan:

• If you know anything about him, you’ll know he’s the biggest Lord of the Rings fan on earth. That’s not an overstatement either. He beat an on-staff expert for the LOTR movies in a quiz off. He quotes the books like some people quote sacred texts. In honor of the movies, he made one of the best LOTR tributes with almost all of the original cast. Epic, just epic:

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Thank You, Stephen…

For the past twenty years, I’ve watched you (I was 19 when I first watched you, and I’m about to hit my 39 birthday this June). My adult years have been punctuated by your performances: You started the Colbert Report right as I started college. You started the Late Show as I got married. And as the strange phenomenon of the Trump presidency kicked off, you were there to give voice that we were seeing what we thought we were seeing.

Through rough times in my life, I’ve always had you to look forward to at night. You made my days and my life easier, making the strangeness of the past decade far more bearable. It’s like you filtered the poison before it reached me. I didn’t realize how much I needed you until you were about to be taken from us.

I saw you grieve the loss of your mother and will never forget the line “enormity of the room whose door is now shut.” I grieved with you. And it brings tears to my eyes because another door is about to close. I’m sure you’ll back but in a different capacity (podcast, Netflix?) and I’ll follow you there too…but I’m not ready for this room to be closed.

I wished I was able to see your show in NYC before it ends. But you’re so loved, it seems like it’s impossible to get in because we all want to say goodbye. If I never get to tell you thank you with my presence, I hope this post can at least do the same. I am so grateful for you.

I don’t know you personally, but I know you. I wish you and Evie all the best. I know saying goodbye will be one of the hardest things for you, and I hope it can still be a lovely experience. But I’m grateful for you. I’m glad you had the time to see it was coming. I wish you the best.

I don’t know what you’ll be doing after, but I will still follow you. Who else will alchemize our collective pain for us? We still need you Stephen.

And I almost missed it until I was assembling this: when you were asked who’d you love to interview from Lord of the Rings, you mention Neinna, Gandalf’s patron, and said “she weeps forever and turns grief into wisdom.”

Thank you for turning your grief into our wisdom.

I’m so glad we “better knew you.”

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In 1958, a Thomas Merton travelled to downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Looking around, he saw people shuffling around in their daily business…but as bright as the sun. Their splendor stunned him. He saw in them the light that animated all of existence itself.

The monk’s heart was opened to a deeper truth — the beauty of every person that walks the earth.

Monks of the Cistercian order (or “Trappist” as they’re commonly called) drench themselves in silence and solitude so that their cells might become like the furnace of Babylon “in which, in the midst of flames, they found themselves with Christ.”1

When Merton emerged from his solitude for a brief moment, the Love he found behind the cloister walls of his monastery was shining through the people in the streets.

Make ready for the Christ
Whose smile like lightening,
Sets free the song of everlasting glory
That now sleeps in your paper flesh
Like dynamite.

- The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

Merton’s Story

Merton was born in France to a New Zealander father and an American mother. He was precocious and worldly, even at a young age.

He was bound to write in some capacity, but his soul longed for wholeness. Something was missing, and he felt the pull of monastic vocation was his path to finding himself.

The draw into Catholicism started with a book on medieval theology, and unbeknownst to him, it was Catholic theology — the conflation of the two angered Merton who was sincerely atheistic.

The book argued that being itself is found in God, that the ground of all matter is loved into existence, at every second of every moment.

God then was not some object to know, like you could learn to study gorillas in the African jungles. No, everything was literally within God, and God was animating everything that is… this radically different notion pierced his heart and set in motion the course of his life.

Top Quotes

• “Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God, for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice, your mediocrity and materialism, your sensuality and selfishness that have killed his faith.”2

• “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering myself.”3

• “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.”4

• “Our life, as individual persons and as members of a perplexed and struggling race, provokes us with the evidence that it must have meaning. Part of the meaning still escapes us. Yet our purpose in life is to discover this meaning, and live according to it. We have, therefore, something to live for.”5

• “Before you can be a saint you have got to become a human.”6

• “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”7

• “To hope is to risk frustration. Therefore, make up your mind to risk frustration.”8

• “A ‘faith’ that merely confirms us in opinionatedness and a self-complacency may well be an expression of theological doubt.”9

• “The idea seems to be that there is a great Catholic revival in this country and that the future of the Church depends on us. That is all news to me. If we are supposed to be reviving, where are our saints?”10

• “One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we were afraid to ask.”11

• “No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is, and must always be, spiritual.”12

• “We find God in our own being which is the mirror of God.”13

• “If you hate the enemies of the Church instead of loving them, you too will run the risk of becoming an enemy of the Church, and of Christ; for He said: ‘Love your enemies,’ and He also said: ‘He that is not with me is against me.’ Therefore if you do not side with Christ by loving those that He loves, you are against him.”14

• “This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.”15

• “For in this world it is not good to be eager for the achievement of anything, even of the best of ends; and one who knows by experience that God is always present everywhere and always ready to make himself known to those who love Him, will not quickly prefer the uncertain value of human activity to the tranquility and certitude of this infinite and all important possession.”16

• “Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter silence.”17

• “The poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.”18

• “If you want to understand the social and political history of modern man, study hell.”19

• “The experience of twentieth-century dictatorships has shown that it is possible to for some Christians to life and work in a shockingly unjust society, closing their eyes to all kinds of evil and indeed perhaps participating in that evil at least by default, concerned only with their now compartmentalized life of piety, closed off from everything else on the face of the earth. Clearly, such a poor excuse for religion actually contributes to blindness and moral insensitivity, and in the long run it leads to the death of Christianity in whole nations or whole areas of society. It is this no doubt that has led to the great modern problem of the Church: the loss of the working class.”20

• “Even our mistakes are eloquent, more than we know.”21

The End…

“What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as ‘play’ is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echos of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlight night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our hearts; or when, like the Japanese Poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash…provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstandings the phenomenon of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we have been invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.”22

If you subscribe to the free version of the Tangle Newsletter, you probably got an interesting email, as I did, last week.

Tangle aims to have an objective analysis of events. It tries to articulate both sides of an issues (Right & Left), as honestly as possible, on the day’s topic. It’s a pretty cool model actually.

The times caught up with Tangle because many paying subscribers started canceling memberships. Why? Because those on the Right think it’s too left leaning, and hard on Trump. And those on the Left think it’s too rightward, and is “whitewashing” how bad it really is…

Yikes.

Our society is sick. It could be one of our worst times, other than the Civil War period.

I find it fascinating that in his attempt to analyze the character of a soul, Plato in his Republic looks to governmental structures as a window into the health of a soul. He lists them from how ill to well they are, based on their political structure.

But it doesn’t take a genius to see we are ill. And it does look like, as we transition through our political cycles at regular intervals, that we have years of chaotic politics left to go through. This time is much harder though because two cycles hitting at once.

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Growing up Evangelical Christian, the idea that something could be intrinsically good, in itself, was beyond me.

Wasn’t humanity imperfect? Didn’t God have to make a blood sacrifice to make me and the rest of existence, whole?

How does this even work?

It’s only through a new story do you begin to see the assumptions of your old story. That mindset is functionally Manichean, a dualistic view that perceives matter as bad.

Most of this theology is unintentional, but the view is unmistakable — We’re bad until made good.

Our egos love binaries: this or that, black or white. And when religion becomes egoic…

The sparkle of mystery starts to fade. Things fall into easy, tidy categories. And so it was with me.

Until I read Thomas Merton’s words: “Everything that is, is holy.”

Holy? Everything? What about the bad stuff? Like rattlesnakes. Or how people hurt others?

History is littered with the badness crowding out the good. How can everything somehow be good…or even holy?

“From non-existence into being.” So reads the orthodox liturgy, that something brought us into being. And this being-ness, in itself, is good.

Merton wrote that the “deepest ground of being is love.” Love animates our existence. Literally, if you ceased to be loved, you’d disappear from your chair (as James Finley says in Season 1 of Turning to the Mystics).

Love somehow animates our very being into existence. That’s profound…

It doesn’t just cause us to be, but it also sustains us. In this very moment, something keeps me going.

We are made by love, and in that love, given freedom. There can be no honest reciprocation of that love without agency, and to respond to this love, we are given the freedom to even say no. We are more supported, even than we realize.

Why do we even exist? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Why are we even here?

Some of these questions can only be answered by you, in your quietest moment, over the course of your life. Your road is your own, not mine; nor is mine yours.

But existence itself, to exist instead of not…is good. From non-being, we entered existence. Love animates us.

We may abuse our freedom and hurt others, but to even exist at all is good. Our being is seeped in goodness, even if we misuse that gift.

I can’t explain to you how even a rattlesnake is good, but even it’s existence belongs to Love’s creation. I don’t know why it exists; I only know that love animates it, just as it animates you and me.

There’s no reason that you or I should exist, yet we do. And there’s no reason we should be sustained, even in the hardness this life, but we are.

Your existence matters. And it is not just good, it is holy.

Holy has weird connotations in a post religious era, but we can at least say something about us is special (“holy”).

Your existence matters.

In an age that seems to treat the human as irrelevant, imperfect, and unneeded, the facts are something made us from nothing. You are supposed to be here. Don’t speak to me of our irrelevance when the very reality of your beingness says otherwise.

We matter, even if we know not why.

Your existence is special. It is holy. And it is good.

Is life what you expected it to be?

If it’s not, do yourself a favor, and see what is missing.

There are three questions that can really help you discern your life path: am I on the right track, and if not, what matters to me? Where should I go.

If your answer to any of these question is no or even “meh,” use this to help you get into alignment.

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I don’t know how we got here, but I fear we’ve been here too long.

Society is unmoored. The institutions that used to ground us…are dissipating.

And some will say “good riddance,” and understandably so. Many have been hurt by the power structures that be, especially with those with any hint of spirituality attached.

But when these spiritual institutions crater, and we lose the practices that grounded us for centuries, along with it go many important but unforeseen things.

The sense of the sacred is probably the biggest victim. In its wake, a profit-driven culture, designed to distract us from our deepest selves, has taken over.

What happens when we lose the sacred? When everything just “is” and we miss the deeper things? We’re missing something, and I suspect much of the cultural rot we’re undergoing is connected to these deeper questions.

When we lose our balance, we cling to the next best thing that gives us solidity, meaning, and purpose.

In a profit centric world, it makes sense for we poor humans to mistake “success” with money. But our external selves (the ones that the get the money, fame, attention) are not our whole selves. They’re only part of us. It’s missing an entire dimension of our being.

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Unlike Scrooge McDuck, we cannot swim in our money pit. Nor are we merely reducible to how much we make, like feathers adorning ourselves. We are far more.

There is something about this world that is mysterious, and we in the West, with our pointy pencil people who can tell you precisely down to a decimal point how much humidity is in the air, or how much the GDP grew by in the first quarter…miss the deeper reality.

What Edmond Burke called the “unbought grace of life:” Is there a price for the orange and purple hews that color a sunset? The smile of a newborn? The wag of your dog’s tail…

These are things you cannot buy…and before I hear a naysayer suggest otherwise, recall what Oscare Wilde said, that the cynic is “one who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”

I fear for Generation Z especially, the first group fully reared in a digital ether. Like crack babies, they’re predisposed to favor the false to the real. I’m sure we will be fine as a species (eventually), but this period will still be hard to get through.

How do you hold on to these mysteries of life, in humility and gratitude, with our technological progress? It’s hard to pin down, but something about this development is shortchanging the sense of the sacred.

The balance is a conundrum and it will take time for us to figure out. But both are needed, East and West, Mystery and Progress. We cannot ignore one over the other, but the problem of the present is looking at technology and development over and even against the deeper things.

Who are we? Where are we going? These are questions ChatGPT could never answer, at least not in a satisfying way. These are human questions, questions only a being, who is born and who dies in this world, could answer.

I’m sure AI will spit out words on a screen for you to read, as if it wrote something. But knowledge isn’t wisdom. Some things can only be known by experience.

ChatGPT cannot die, so it cannot live either. It cannot tell us from its own experience what it’s learned, because it has no experience. It just is a vibe of embodiment. We are the incarnation. ChatGPT is the caricature.

The price of everything, but the value of nothing. When we lose any sense of the mystery that surrounds existence, everything descends into a game of dollars and cents.

There is no price for your child. There is no dollar amount for that sunset. There is no way to put a price on that wagging tail that greets you. There is just a grace, received with open hearts. You cannot buy it. You can only experience it. It’s love, in physical form.

Existence is a precious gift.

Will you receive it? With an open heart?

Don’t ask ChatGPT…it has no heart to answer with.

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Efficiency.

We don’t even know the water we’re swimming in as Americans. Our whole system is built do doing things faster, better, with less work…or people apparently (why you gotta be so mean AI?)

We’ve been this way for a loooong time.

And then sometime around the ‘80s, efficiency merged with greed. The “bottom line” became an economic virtue, akin to honesty or integrity. The “almighty dollar” is now sacrosanct. Whatever gets your bag of money ASAP…

American’s treat billionaires like Europe used to treat saints. We don’t just respect them, we worship them. They’re closest to the light we long to behold for ourselves…

But life is more. There are things beyond accumulation, beyond the status.

What would really happen if you were a billionaire now? Would you only then start living?

Newsflash, you only have so much time left on this earth…you do NOT have to be the billionaire to live.

It’s absurd to focus exclusively on the material things. We aren’t taking them with us when we leave this world.

I’m still shocked at studies that show just how little the average person needs to reach maximum happiness. “The difference between $75,000 and $75 million was hardly significant.” Beyond basic needs, it’s about the non-material things of life.

We come to earth, for a time and a reason. We don’t control the time, not fully anyway (put down that Oreo Kevin!), but we do have some say in the reason.

We have gifts that are meant to be expressed. Desires meant to be explored. And visions meant to be realized. To walk in this life is to see your soul in motion.

Yet so many of us are stuck in a mindset from our conditioning that says we have to do more, be more, have more, in order to be fully alive.

We think we have to adorn ourselves with accomplishments, successes, status…because we’re not enough. We need more.

But your life is more than the things you do or have — life is about living (redundant, but true).

It’s about the human being, fully alive.1

To truly live is to be ignited. Such joy can’t help but overflow into natural action. Action flows from alignment, our whole being in-sync.

And the flow of alignment can feel like play, because it is, and we miss that because we associate play with the unserious — but that is a grave mistake.

Accomplishments, if they come, flow out of real alignment…at least the ones we can sustainably do. Don’t believe me? Look at Italy’s queen of the ice…

She’s been speed skating for twenty years for her country, and when journalists asked her about all her wins and awards, her response was “I did that?”

She wasn’t skating for the acclaim…she skated because she wanted to skate.

It’s the difference between love and acclaim. One does it for the pure love of it, the other the rewards.

True success is not found in what the culture teaches us, but in finding ourselves fully engaged in this life. To be about something that matters.

Do you have a yearning you’ve always wondered about? Is there a business you should be starting? Are you curious what the life of an artist looks like? Is there a book somewhere inside of you, waiting to come out?

Don’t die before you live. Live before you die.

If you feel a check in your spirit, a yearning but also an obstacle to realize it, can I offer you some medicine? Get you a copy of The War of Art. Resistance is a gatekeeper, waiting for you to take that act of faith and step out, and start living out who you really are. Let the good doctor teach you about resistance and what it really means.

True success is found in being who you were made to be in this life — alignment. Like kinks in the water hose, when it’s knotted up, it won’t flow.

But when you are living from your core, you can’t help but live fully. It’s not about the rewards or the money (they’re bonus).

And if fear is whispering in your ear “you can’t do that! You will FAIL.” Remember…

(Read you some Dune…or watch the movies because they’re a modern classic)

What will you really lose by trying and failing, than by not trying at all? Taking a shot is far less painful than not taking one at all. Just ask about the most common deathbed confessions.

Fear stops you now, but regret will haunt you.

True safety comes from doing what is most in alignment with who we are: we do what feels right, it’s fun, so we do it more and get better, creating a virtuous cycle. And it’s not about the money, though money can often follow. It’s about the meaningfulness of the act.

But the money isn’t the point. The point is to live.

It doesn’t matter how you pay your bills, the point is…are you living?

Get in alignment. Your life depends on it.

The lawn guy. The waitress. The plumber and electrician. And the nursing aide.

More and more people are entering the trades (and why not, it’s a bit of a gold rush). You don’t need a four year degree to make a good living anymore. Plumbers can make six figures in their first year now.

As more people enter this space, one of my biggest pet peeves is how people treat these hardworking folks with disrespect.

Boomers especially…I don’t know where their generation learned that if you’re not served immediately, it’s a personal insult . It’s so common it’s an internet trope — “Karen” with her short cut hair, berating the waiter.

Our world is changing. Office jobs are not what they once were. And even AI could supposedly could cut white collar jobs in half. The trades are now far more lucrative than they were just a decade ago. And a college education just isn’t as valuable.

Part of this is demographic: as less people are replacing aging generations, the choke points where you can only have a person to physically do the work (think nurses, plumbers, construction, etc) are far more important.

The reason your homeowners insurance is going up is largely because of a lack of workers. Something like 2/3 of your insurance premiums are actually because there aren’t enough dudes to get on your roof. And then we compound it by trying to deport them too (maybe Green Day had a point).

These people work hard, demanding jobs. They pay with their bodies. Imagine their grueling days and THEN for them to be yelled at because the food is taking longer…this isn’t cool…

Before You Rip Them a New One…

Before you launch into a tirade and rip that waitress/plumber/med tech a new one…can I pause you, just for a sec…

Look at them. Just stop and look at them.

Do you see the blood and shit stains on the med tech’s clothes? Do you see the bags under the eye of your waiter?

Ever seen a plumber’s knees…Ditto with construction dudes…

Do you think they have kids at home? How hard must it be to work this kinda job with little ones…could you imagine?

Before you rage that your meal wasn’t quite right, that it took too long, or the nurse forgot one thing…

Stop and see the human before you.

There’s something very special about humans, including this one.

They don’t have to do this job. But they chose to.

They’re here, trying to serve you, and even then they sometimes have a bad day. I’m sure you’ve had a bad day…but ever had one at a blue collar job? For them, it can end in missing fingers, someone dying, or plates crashing.

You wanna swap your bad day for theirs? I wouldn’t.

They’re human. So are you.

There’s just never a reason to be rude. Sure, let them know if something is wrong, but we’re talking personal here…and your lawn guy mowing the wrong direction isn’t life or death.

Don’t let consumerism cloud the image in front of you. You’re not looking at an Amazon 2-hour delivery commitment…you’re looking at a single mother of three. She’s just trying to get through the day. Only you can give her the compassion she so desperately needs in this moment, so don’t withhold. You have no idea just how far your kindness can go after a 12 hour shift.

It’s one thing to mistreat them, but you impoverish yourself by looking down on them. Don’t rob yourself of their humanity. They are special…just as you are.

They didn’t have to work there this day. This didn’t have to be in this field. But they did. Don’t just pay them in your tip, pay them with your gratitude. They’ll forget your 20%, but they will remember how you made them feel…

So be unforgettable…

We Complete Each Other — No Person Is An Island

Something is special about a human, and something is special about their work. When something is done by hand, it means someone’s hands touched it. Human hands.

There are things that still require a physical person to work, to perform. You can’t get around that. A person installs your plumbing. A human constructed your house. Someone assembled your phone.

The transhumanist folks view everything in life as varying degrees of robot work, and would look at all this as a trivial thing, just basic industrial stuff before the machines can do it.

But they still can’t do it. It still requires human hands. A person’s eye to drop it in the right spot. And a human’s mind to know when to alter course.

What you cannot do, another human can. Where you are weak, they fill in. We cannot wholly fix all our own problems, because we aren’t made to. We need one another. You need the service worker, and they needs you.

You are not independent of this person. Nor they you.

We do not exist for ourselves alone, but to complete each other.

We are one human race, one body, and we fulfill each other. We are not separate autonomous beings that need nothing beyond ourselves…we’re humans.

We need the plumber, the waitress, the nurse. And we need you too.

See your own humanity, and then see it in your service worker.

It always pays to be kind…because the human matters…

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Dear Gen Z,

I know economically it’s rough out there and the future doesn’t feel great for ye Gen Z folks. But you’re not the first generation that had trouble finding work after a downturn.

You feel hopeless. It pushes many to desperate tactics, as if your only shot is to hit it big, cash out, and only then you can live.

But here’s a hard truth: only an extreme minority will “invest” their way “to the moon.” Robinhood, crypto, Pokemon cards…that path is akin to gambling because…it literally is gambling. As in, it is NOT investing.

You’re letting chance and luck determine your future, instead of the tried and true paths worn from generations before you. I get it—it’s not sexy.

But if you want to get wealthy, and I mean truly wealthy, it won’t be from short circuiting the system.

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“One of the things I love in the Seven Story Mountain by Merton, is that he talks about that we think ourselves are our achievements. We clothe ourselves in our achievements, in order to give the self that we do not know form, so that we might seem to be something or someone to the world.” - Stephen Colbert

We’ve all had those moments. We put on a cover, act differently, in order to win over someone. Whether for a job, a first date, or just our online persona.

But it’s not you.

Not at your truest. In order to survive and get through he world, something about it is constructed. The “fake it ‘till you make it” is second nature to us, especially in America. “Success” depends upon it. You can’t show any weakness, or else they might not take the deal, buy the product, or end in a transaction.

Authenticity is dangerous to the bottom line.

So, we clothe ourselves in a fakeness to smooth over any problems and secure our livelihood. It’s all well and good...except it’s a lie.

We are not just our presentation, not fully at least. We intentionally withhold our whole selves (at least most of us…present included). Life is too important, we think, to endanger our odds. Better to keep your opinions to ourselves, make the money, and move on. You’d be foolish to jeopardize your life by being genuine, no?

But what are we losing by not being true to who we are? At some point, this game of putting on a mask becomes real to us, as if we are the adjectives that describe us.

Yet, we are not our masks…

We come into this world as pure beings, but growing up, our childhood egos learn to camouflage our true selves in order to survive in the group. We learn very early that if you’re authentic, it can go against you. We learn to compromise who we are so we can fit in.

But it isn’t living. A mask is a coping strategy. And survival has its place, but by no means is it thriving. The more we live outside of ourselves, and adorn ourselves in false realities, the further we impoverish our truest joy — to live from our deepest selves.

The False Self

“If I never become what I am meant to be, but always remain what I am not, I shall spend eternity contradicting myself by being at once something and nothing, a life that wants to live and is dead, a death that wants to be dead and cannot quite achieve its own death because it still has to exist.”1

True living springs from who we are at our core. When we talk of the innocence of children, this is what we are really getting at—the purity of being our authentic selves.

You can catch glimpses of this true self when it comes out in your deepest joys, or flow states. It cannot hide fully. It’s a lightness of being that carries you.

But this purity is so subtle to see that it feels almost unreal. We feel like we are naked, that we aren’t enough in ourselves. We don’t feel adequate and we need something to make us good enough.

So what do we do?

The false self feels unworthy, so it clings to material things to prove itself. Our egos feel empty so it takes anything/everything and clothes itself in them to be something.

This is one of the meanings behind the Adam and Eve story: both were “naked” and found things to clothe themselves, so they could be, instead of be naked, before the void of eternity.

Our fig leaves today are a little more advanced: money, titles, fame. They can also be deceptive too: our gifts, skills, or our unique personalities. Anything we put our identity in that isn’t fully us.

The True Self

Because the authentic you is hidden and feels inadequate, it finds “real” things to prove its value and significance. But as the soul knows, there is nothing real to these things, the fig leaves of our own making. You are not your status. You are not your possessions. Even the wealthy are some of the most unhappy people — just ask most ultra rich.

“We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag” as Momma Ru says. We learn as children to conform, and act in ways that aren’t always authentic, in order to survive. It’s not entirely bad — our ego is just trying to help us.

But it isn’t “real.” It’s not who we truly are, at our deepest selves.

There is no one thing you can do, have, or achieve to make yourself into something. Like Adam and Eve, fig leaves cannot mask our nakedness. The true aim of life isn’t achievement, but finding who we truly are.

“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self...”2

You’ve not begun to live until you’ve realized the mask you’re wearing isn’t you. Only in being can you begin to tap into an endless well of joy found only in who you truly are. It is the ultimate treasure:

“This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”3

Until you see that you are not the material things in your life, but something deeper and far more profound, you aren’t living. Life doesn’t really begin until you realize that you are not your adjectives, you are not your successes or your failures. You are so much more.

Being

In the preface to the latest edition of Man’s Search for Meaning there’s a story of a Nazi officer inspecting the citizens of a small town in World World II. He asks for the credentials of a well-to-do, upper-middle-class person, and when the prominent person hands over his documents, the Nazi asks “is that everything you have?” The man nods. “Then the Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him ‘Good, now you have nothing.’”

If we are only what we can do or have, we are deluding ourselves. At some point life will show us, either in heartache or at the end of life, that we are not those things. They are gifts we came with OR things we earned along the way…but they are not our soul. We are far more.

Don’t lock your identity into any finite things…you risk losing yourself.

But more than that, you were never just those things. Life is so much more.

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Some people know themselves naturally: their unique tastes, desires, intricacies. That wasn’t the case for me.

From a young age, I learned that success was found in appeasing others (supposedly). I became a people pleaser from the very beginning, and was pretty good at it. But in a childhood survival technique, I lost myself. I’m trying to recover it now.

I don’t know if you’re in the same boat, but if so, welcome aboard! A journey of self-discovery can actually be a fun one, if you let it. That is, as long as you forgive your childhood ego. I beat myself up for years for going down wrong paths because I didn’t even know what I wanted…such wasted time…

Who am I? What do I even like? What makes me unique?

If you want to dig deeper into you, the true you (who you are in your purest form, who you were as a child), not a “false self” that Thomas Merton refers to, here are a few ideas that might help you along your journey.

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Post Summary:

• The US is about to revamp our institutions—especially how the Federal Government operates

• Key Theme: Specialization in political decisions has led to errors compounding over time.

• Implications: Anything touching the Federal Government will likely change; and education could be devalued going forward.

In the United States today, institutions established by our grandparents and great-grandparents, after World War II, are no longer working. It’s been eighty years since their creation, and they are about to be reborn within our lifetime. But first, a little background.

Every country has core institutions that regulate their affairs—whether governmental, educational, or social, these structures maintain order and continuity. But like all things, over time they’ve become outdated. Around every eighty years, roughly the length of a human life, the US revitalizes its institutions. Specifically, the role of Federal Government. The very first cycle established the Federal Government (Revolutionary War); the next asserted federal sovereignty over the states (the Civil War); and the third and current cycle established a direct connection with the economy at large (World War II).

The current cycle began in 1945, as the Federal Government directly interfaced in our economy because of the Great Depression, but also to ratchet up manufacturing to fight a world wide war. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress inaugurated the modern administrative state, and the plethora of alphabet soup that is the federal agency system.

What started as a sincere attempt to focus national efforts to produce everything from tanks to the atomic bomb, over time drifted toward mission creep. Our institutions ossified. From 2000 until now, growing failings of the Federal Government became clear. In each example was a problem of fragmentation, competition, and poor execution:

• Both 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis were a result of lack of cooperation: Various agencies had all the key data to see what was coming but refused share it, leading to siloed information and major failures.

• The Fed was incapable of executing its primary function—war: From Afghanistan to Iraq, the Fed couldn’t identify key objectives of success and got bogged down in its own bureaucratic wrangling. Its powers were too diffuse.

• Covid: It’s difficult to argue the Fed handled the pandemic well. And the response cannot be attributed to the extraordinary nature of a global plague—we had a whole agency dedicated to this specific scenario.

• Byzantine rules leading to people falling through the cracks: The agency system, meant to service the country efficiently, is arcane and confusing. American’s are treated like “objects administered than citizens served.”1

The Problem of the Administrative State: Errors of Specialization

Before the 1930s, the Federal Government’s footprint in the private sector was non-existent (just ask any robber Barron from the gilded ages). But the unique problems of the Depression and WWII led to the emergence of the expert at the helm of public affairs. As agencies sprang up, they needed specialized knowledge. The intent was to put highly qualified experts in charge—non-partisan employees who could rise above political pressure and focus on objectivity. No matter who was in office, the goal of the administrative state was to provide stability. Over time, the non-idealogical goal morphed into its own viewpoint—and ideology of its own. This is the hedgehog vs the fox conundrum.

The ideology of expertise assumes if we just put enough experts in a room that one expert can fill in the gaps of the next, so on and so forth, until the problem is solved. But there are limits to their specialization. No one hedgehog (expert) can know all the gaps between each domain. Their knowledge is essential, but by itself is insufficient to see the whole. Our system disincentivizes leaders to look at the entirety, gaps and all, before making a decision. We need more generalists—we need more foxes.

As George Friedman points out2, the core assumption of the expert class is that because specialization is essential, it is all that is required for political decision making. The problem is one of vision—a specialist can only see one thing deeply; however, political/governmental decisions often affect multiple domains simultaneously (economic, climate, social, security, privacy, etc). A microscope may be a necessity in a field, but political decisions require looking beyond any one domain. Governmental decisions require one to zoom out and see the entire field; but government by experts eventually ends in fragmentation, as we are seeing now.

Problem of Distrust

No one would ever claim the federal bureaucracy has ever been perfectly efficient. A deep frustration has been percolating for decades; the 2008 financial crisis was the tipping point. Before then, the worst opinion of the Fed was its ineffectiveness or possible incompetence at worst. After Congress bailed out the culprits and executives received obscene bonus checks, many Americans didn’t see incompetence—they saw favoritism. Why should Wall Street be rewarded for their greed while the middle classes’ retirement accounts were mowed in half?

The response to this explains why the current Republican Party is radically different from just two decades ago. After 2008, the political base of the Right believed neither party had their best interest, and even primaried their own members. All the way down to the grassroots level, the right purged their own and installed people they thought were outside the system. Today, the purity politics on the Right borders on Bolshevik levels—utterly insane because no one is ever good enough, no one can ever be fully trusted, and so the doom loop continues to spiral.

Distrust bulldozed a path for anyone who could speak directly to their pain. This is precisely when the Don descended down his golden escalator: Donal Trump is a product, not a cause, of two cycles colliding (political and institutional). This explains why he operated in total freedom from the kinds of political mistakes that would have wrecked anybody else. He tapped into the both, the distrust of the system (institutional cycle) and their economic pain (political cycle).

Economic inequality is very real. And now the poor response from the Fed is only going to make the perception worse. Because the expert class viewed empowering minorities as the top problem, it understandably passed affirmative action programs to help. But fast forward to today and now the more widespread issue is economic inequality. As the financial noose has been slowly tightening for decades, white Americans perceived that minorities were getting more benefits while they continued to struggle. The expert class continues to hold racial issues as the predominant struggle today and is missing how pervasive the financial disparity is. This unaddressed frustration is near a boiling point—a growing majority believe no one is trying to help them, especially financially.

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Lack of Accountability — the Brewing Storm

Governance requires results. The Federal Government has to change, because as of now, nobody is accountable for results: Congress blames the agencies, the agencies blame each other, and the problem continues. Right now our administrative state is no longer addressing the pain points (poor service, economic inequality), and nothing has fundamentally changed to address it. But it will. At some point, political pressure will force the system to change. A political storm is brewing, connected to two independent cycles that are crashing at once (the political and the institutional cycles). Economic inequality must be addressed and how our Federal Government functions must be altered. Both are coming due around now.

Implications

The major implications are largely political and bureaucratic. Because the Fed is so entangled in our lives, either directly or indirectly through regulations, all facets of American life will be touched as the Federal Government is reborn. The changes could be widespread and fast—anything and everything. The signs are pointing to the Congress and new President after 2028 to bring the change, but it could be as late as 2032.

The area that could have the greatest pain is actually psychological—any educated person or expert. In typical American fashion we could swing to an equal but opposite extreme and devalue expertise and education itself. We are already seeing this in Trumps admin, particularly in the CDC under Robert Kennedy. For over eighty years, expertise and education have been held up as the ultimate trait, but we may enter a period where it is treated with disdain. But don’t fall for the same error—specialization is vital, but it can’t operate in a silo. We need more foxes in the system, generalists, surrounded by hedgehogs. A fox without a hedgehog can be just as bad as a siloed hedgehog.

The Next Eighty Years…

We’ve all heard “this is the most important election of your life”, but what if instead you heard “the 2028 presidential election could determine the next fifty to eighty years?” Rings a little different, doesn’t it? The next decade could determine the next fifty years (political cycle) and create new institutions for the next eighty years (institutional cycle).

We were born and lived in a world that was ruled by the very institutions our great-grandparents built. Only a handful of generations get the opportunity to have that kind same impact—we’re one of them.

They fought WWII and left institutions that served us until just a few years ago. Carry that same gratitude with you as you evaluate who should serve as our next president. You can contribute to the next eighty years of history…slow down, pay attention, and make wise choices.

Let your grand children in 2110 be proud of your actions in the 2030s, just as we are grateful to our great grandparents.

As Hamilton tells us, “History has it eyes on you.”

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Here at the Human Matters, we want to cover stuff you can actually use, the “matters of being human” in our name. So, this is squarely a matters email, on a seemingly boring (but actually amazing) topic.

So tune in, put your seat upright, and lock in that tray table, because we’re gonna take off…on HSAs!!! Hold your applause to the end please…

Your workplace offers it every year, but you’ve never pulled the trigger. OR, you have one, and you only use it when you hit the ER or Doc in a box, but beyond that…what IS an HSA?

It’s not an overstatement to say that the Health Savings Account (HSA) could be the greatest financial account you’ve never heard of. And what’s cool, is you can touch the funds now, long before retirement, when other accounts won’t let you access them before age 60 (okay, it’s actually 59 1/2 according to the IRS, but let’s not be persnickety on who counts as “retired”).

The purpose of HSAs was to enable Americans to deduct qualified medical expenses that aren’t reimbursed through health insurance (deductibles, drugs, etc).

But there’s some aspects that make them game-changers:

• Every dollar contributed lowers your taxable income. And if done through a workplace plan, it is THE most tax savings—could avoid both income tax and even FICA tax on most work plans. That’s 7.65% for FICA, plus your tax bracket. A person in the 32% bracket would save 39.65% in taxes by just contributing to their account…now are you interested?

• Your HSA is a like a Roth IRA, but better. If all the rules are followed, a Roth is never taxable in retirement. To that, the HSA retorts “hold my beer”: your HSA could lower your taxes now, and if followed correctly, would also have no taxes in retirement. BOOM. There is no other account that lowers your taxes TODAY and could be 0% in retirement. Get you some…

• Unlike an FSA (another workplace account), the funds in an HSA roll over year to year. No “use it or lose it” rules here. And that means you can invest it for high growth…is your mind blown yet?

• It’s possible for your HSA to cover every day expenses…and then some, including:

  • Your gym membership

  • AG1

  • A Bidet

  • Sleep 8

  • Red light Therapy mask

  • Gym equipment.

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