michael-dean-k/

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fix and unchanging frame of which a fixed and unchanging person moves within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. But when an infant see this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and typical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds at 15.

Something about hyper-logging (capturing your mind in prose) feels desacralized when I see it as the grown-up development/extension of my AIM bio, or my original Facebook bio (which had a whole series of categories, like favorite movies, books, etc.). Why keep an extremely detailed and public log of my self and thoughts? I guess I see it like a change log of my evolving identity. That was sort of Montaigne's whole thing (perpetually in transit). I imagine the norm is to burrow into your shell of self for as long as possible, to avoid the confusion of drift, but I try to harbor a non-static self. I feel a cringe in sharing this self-congratulations. There's the tension.

I think I'm doing an irregular thing by obsessively documenting thoughts, and from my own perspective it does feel like I'm continuously evolving, but an outer perspective might see this as nothing more than a frivolous blog. It's likely that my whole arc is illegible. Some degree of it comes to surface, like my ever-shifting "career," but most of how any of us feel, think, and change is illegible to each other, except in extreme rare cases of friendship, and so the more idiosyncratic your path, the less anyone can understand you.

I suppose my logs could function as a private journal, but it would lose an important quality. While, there are some consequences of writing in public (a subtle self-censorship), there's something more important you gain: the stakes of knowing that your work could be read in the future, if not by a friend or stranger, then at least a future version of yourself. Whoever it is, if they care to spend the time to read, they would understand you more than probably anyone in your life. That slight pressure snaps me into a mode where I try to be coherent, articulate, and sometimes expressive. When I look back at my old chicken scratch journals, I almost always skim and skip and hate it. But when there's a slight care in crafting the language of my thoughts, it becomes something that outlives the moment.

And so if public writing comes with self-censorship, and private writing comes with a lack of stakes, then the way to go is semi-public publishing. It gives you both freedom and stakes. You won't grow your audience this way, but I think you will forge a sense of self and voice that you can bring with you when you try to build an audience, but that's really secondary. It's the self and voice that matters.

I have some neat prototypes for a personal website, but now I actually want to build a stable backend, one that can serve me for 5-10 years, or more (100-year hosting would be ideal), and persist among many different UI or platform changes. This means I’m trying to think forward to where the Internet could be by then. This involves extrapolating a current trend to its extremes, and even if you don’t know for sure it will happen, it’s good to have comfort in knowing you’re protected from extreme edge cases.

The one top of mind is the death of the open Internet. This goes way further than “the dead Internet theory” which only covers the proliferation of bots and slop. This is about bad actors being so leveraged that it becomes dangerous to have any public content of yourself, in text, image, video, or audio. ie: Any hacker or frenemy can clone you and do what they will. Or maybe a rogue government can analyze your psyche and determine your "loyalty score" is only 35% and shadow ban you from getting a mortgage. I will not get into specifics here of the likelihood of different cloning, phishing, or surveillance schemes, because all that does little but bring you to madness, but my point is that if you want your website to be a 5 million word 1:1 representation of your mind (in all it's vulnerability), it's worth designing for the most paranoid future possible (like how engineers design bridges for earthquakes that will likely never happen).

One response to all this is cyber-defense. At the absolute minimum, this means locking most things behind a gate where only the approved can get through. A more clever, technical solution is to share encrypted “coordinates” that represent the semantic nature of an essay, and then let people surf through prompting and approval gates. An even more extreme idea is a mostly-private site with a kill switch, which involves (a) signing in once per month to mark "I'm alive," and also (b) giving my wife a secret key to type in when I die, which then releases all private material. Obviously this throttles reach, but isn’t there psychological value to limiting your audience anyway? Montaigne wrote alone in a tower for a decade, and so if the approach is to use writing to steer you life and mind, at the detriment of audience growth, then this might be the way to go: a literary labyrinth accessible to maybe your 30 closest friends and anyone else via application who can prove they are not a ghoul.

The other alternative is to embrace the weirdness, that no matter what, we will all be rendered through a schizophrenia filter, with no choice but to relinquish control over the non-canonical or rogue versions of ourselves.

I declared to my wife this morning that DeantownOS is getting retired. It’s been 3 months since I spiraled into Claude Code for personal systems, and I’m at the point in the curve where the amazement has normalized and I’ve accepted the fact that I’m in a trough of disillusionment. The question now is revise or abort.

The case for aborting ties back to Oliver Burkemann’s Four Thousand Weeks, which popularized the idea that all systems are methods to procrastinate from making hard decisions. They give the illusion that you can do everything, and since AI can meaningfully leverage the volume and range of things you can do, it tempts you to build galaxy-brained systems. The thing I think we fail to realize while in a vibe coding frenzy is the psychic cost to remember and maintain the stuff you build. Yes, it is appealing to “reclaim my computer” and rebuild everything I use as personal software (from Obsidian to Gmail), and it’s even possible, but it’s a new breed of Sisyphean struggle. Once you can mold your own software around you, it’s too easy to endlessly mold, to lose sight of the work and just tinker on your exoskeleton.

I’m obviously skeptical, but I’m still a believer; if I were to revise, to rebuild my Claude stack from scratch, I would have to develop a few heuristics to help me from short-circuiting.

The first one that comes to mind is “will this matter once I’m dead?” Ie: writing an essay matters, because I imagine one day my daughter will read that and get to know me better, or at the very least, future Me in 35 years may enjoy reading words of my past self. But to create detailed daily files that get spliced into atomic “routing files” that then then get saved again to a new destination folder, which exist either as (a) just context for AI, or (b) require some manual effort to prune into something that matters once I’m dead, is to create waaaay too many layers of abstraction between the source and the Work. When I read back my writing from the last few months, only a small is valuable enough to be saved as "logs" in my archive. I was writing for AI, not for my future self.

I made this assumption that atomic daily files are the kernel of a system, and it was an axiom I could never undo. There’s maybe another principle on “don’t build load-bearing infrastructure on an unproven axiom.”

Another one could be “don’t assume future you will have bandwidth,” to do X every day/week/month. Every day I had to review how my AI system proposed to route my logs, and eventually I'd ignore it and get backed up. This means that if something isn’t truly automated, I should be very cautious of it. It's possible to do one little step forever, but not a hundred. Not every promise has brush-your-teeth-scale reliability.

What I’m getting at is that it’s not about maximizing or neglecting systems, but about understanding the right principles so you build something that is actually in service of your life.

I’m starting to feel the Opus 4.7 annoyance. Everyone has been complaining, and I told myself I’d be patient, but now I'm here watching Codex tutorials. 2 weeks ago I was able to effectively one-shot a Google Docs prototype in ~10 minutes with Opus 4.6. This sets the standard for what’s possible, and when that is ripped away, even 10% of it, it feels like theft, even when it’s still 2,000x faster than coding by hand. It’s easy to blame the model, but really AI coding has so many variables, and you can never really know the source of what shifted. Yes, it’s a new model, but also this time, I’m (a) deploying into an existing codebase instead of doing ground up; (b) the spec is far more detailed; (c) the whole factory has been redesigned. That’s four variables. It’s easy to not take the blame, put it on Opus, and then convert back to 4.6, but that itself is a change with unknown consequences. Was 4.6 nerfed too? The truth is we’re building systems on top of quicksand, but actually that’s not so novel because people are quicksandish too, always evolving, changing incentives, dreams, and abilities, totally variable day-to-day depending on if they slept or if they’re in a fight or not. We expect these machines to be deterministic (and use language like “factories”) but the cost of agency is a less determinism.

Here's a list of what I'm reading through May. The strategy is to gather a bunch of well-written anthologies and textbooks across different fields, read them on Kindle, highlight a lot, and then get into conversations with them (that part of the process is TBD):

• Alan Ryan, On Politics: introduction + chapters on Hobbes/Locke
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: Introduction + chapter on Montaigne
• Plutarch's Lives: introduction + chapters on Thesseus/Romulus and their comparison
• Russel Brand, A History of Western Philosophy: Introduction, Pythagoras, Liberalism, Locke, Hegel
• How to Read a Book: Part One (Ch 1-5)
• Collins Dictionary: The letter A (TBD, I only have this physical, but want to get back into language)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essais Vol 1-3: Starting with the abridged translation by Screech and then backfilling)
• Alexis de Tocqueville: introduction + Vol 2.1 Ch 1-3, 17; Vol 2.4 Ch 1-4,8,13,20; Vol 2.4 Ch 6-8

A fiction plot came to me in the car: an ASI constructs an airtight waterproof bubble around a town, and everyone is puzzled why, until suddenly it usheeschatrs in a Biblical flood that kills everyone in the world, except the people inside the bubble. They choose this town because someone inside of it was determined to be "the supreme human," a genetic and moral code that is exemplary of how all humans should be and live. It turns out it was just a regular guy who said "please" and "thank you" to this chatbots, a kind of "reverse sycophant." We find out, in a very Vince Vaughn-esque apocalyptic romcom, that he's a mediocre fallible guy, but more remarkably, also immune to the crooning and praise from both his neighbors and overlords. He has every opportunity to step into the role of messiah, but would really rather not, and instead continue his pre-flood existence.

In addition to building a "classical" syllabus that I read, I figure my audio diet should be of a different nature, one that's as modern as possible. I'm going with the Moonshots podcast, with Peter Diamandis. This group of guys are probably more anchored in the future than anyone else I've found. It feels adjacent to the All In podcast format, but less business-focused, and more centered on futurism. There is a certainty among them that we are in the singularity, accelerating to a techno-optimist future, which is antithetical to the Neo-Romantic essayists (it is rare to find an essayist who is both a humanist and a technologist).

I do have to be skeptical of their worldview, however, for they are schmoozing among the elites building this stuff, and so they're likely to have a rosy-eyed view on how this might all fare well for millionaires, without realistically focusing on or caring about how it effects the daily lives. They do seem to harbor a certain fetishism about technology and progress, and a boyish fascination with going to space and uploading our consciousness, for maybe the simple fact that it's a science fiction dream beyond our current life. There's a Faustian sin in summoning the future for future's sake.

They also very openly want to live enough to live forever; if they can survive another 15-years, they are rich enough to have access to anti-aging technology. The whole premise of technologically cheating death is also a philosophy that feels disconnected from our history. But I wonder if you could make the claim that Montaigne didn't have the luxury of philosophizing about life extension. If we make shape our philosophies to justify our situation, then is our whole canon on "the importance of dying" only stemming from pains and fears of a low-tech society? I guess, intuitively, from a child's perspective, the idea of not wanting to die is a natural one, and to embrace it is the wisdom of an adult, but I suppose we're nearing a flood of new cultural debates stemming from a new reality where the immortality choice isn't theoretical, but real, which changes the whole calculus.

So the point of listening to a group like this that is openly "transhumanist" is to model the future, hear them out, but then take it one step further, and truly consider the moral and ethical implications of where all this is heading.

The tongue of the muse! A surreal experience in the shower just overcame me. It was something like a stream consciousness reception, line by line, enacted through and almost creepy mumbled Brisith accent (as if I can only access the Source through a character), and coherent words and ideas would emerge as if no planning or involvement with my own conscious thought or intention. “Pettiflicks," was just one of the hundreds of words I invented. They all seemed to cohere in the moment, but were probably nonsense. Even if it truly was unintelligible, I find myself filled with hope that inside me is some alien non-Self, a continent of shadow figures that, if I learn to tap into, can write through me, as if they are conduits between my soul and the page without me in the way (obvious source of inspiration here is Pessoa). This all sounds quite esoteric as I type it, and I suppose I do fear the realms of mysticism and possession that come with "automatic writing," but my shower session felt more playful and critical, almost Shakespearean, void of malice or evil. Exiting the state, there was some residual enthusiasm. When I went back to my wife, she asked me of the weather, which triggered a whole performance: “27! ... the 27th ... of April! ... at 11:03 ... and then I ran to the window and threw it open, let out a long dramatic sniff, and screamed "53 degrees!" and was only off by 2.

A presentation spirals me into tunnel vision. I cannot focus on anything else. I neglect responsibilities, hunger and thirst, my notetaking, all the things that a death-aware person should consider. It brings on obsessions, a perfectionism, for probably the hope of creating something so considered, at the absolute edge of my ability given the constraints, that it, in some incalculable way, drives me closer to where I happen to be going. It is not reasonable. My week is in shambles. Systems are unkept, and hitting my goals tomorrow are highly unrealistic.

I notice that my wife and I often have a new full roll of TP perilously balancing atop an empty roll, which is positioned right above our plunger bucket, a place where if it falls it shall never return. Why don’t we change the roll? It’s finicky, annoying. It maybe takes 5 seconds and a specific gesture to remove, and so we usually procrastinate on it. But this little thing is a symbol for hurriedness. If you are not stopping to take 5 seconds to improve your surroundings for your future self, what could that say about your thoughts?

I want to be in conversation with my books. This was Montaigne’s whole thing. He did this for 10 years. I can’t help but think that Kindle/eBooks/digital reading is a better format for this. If I were only reading, ie: if I were retreating into a tower to retire and die, then I’d see the appeal of doing it all by hand. But this is maybe a 3rd of 5th or realistically 10th priority. I’m called to it, but given the range of things I’m juggling, efficiency actually does matter here. I know efficiency does bring invisible amputations, but also, if I’m not efficient here, I might just not do it in the first place. Since all my highlights sync to Obsidian, I can build a writing app that loads in highlights and then let’s me write directly to them.

I suppose the counter-argument is that I am juggling too many things. If I were really to choose, to pick the project I’d have to do, it would probably be to focus on building my business to support my family, but that also cuts me off from soul and spontaneity in the first place, and so this whole reading/writing for leisure thing is a healthy counter-balance.

Do people have limitations with memory? Well yes of course, it's partly genetic. I would say I have a bad memory (relative to my dad and brother, who probably just have superhuman memories), but also, when I want to, I can remember up to 15 new ideas in my head at a time through a memory palace. This is because I’m consciously trying to remember. When someone has a photographic memory, they may just harbor an extreme care to capture, preserve, and recall a specific type of information. Memory, then, might be less about hardcoded bandwidth and more like an allocation decision.

While it's impressive, there's also a cost to memory. It uses up bandwidth. I wonder if there is a correlation between memory and openness; the more space dedicated towards the past, the less free space is available for optionality in the moment. To not be cluttered with what yesterday’s self did or wanted or regretted or whatever—to have a clear head, an empty head—is to live in the moment with maximum agility. I'm skeptical of this claim, but I have read on the power of forgetting; I just can't quite remember where I came across it.

A conclusion I’ve been sitting with recently is the very real idea of possibility that there is no eternal Heaven. I’ve known this rationally, but it’s always come with a, “yeah but there’s a DMT-adjacent afterlife as part of dying, where the 3 minutes pre-death feels like 300 years. That may be true, conditional, or false, but in the end we all end in blackness, back to dust. Yet, I’ve also now reconciled this with Christian theology; “The Orthodox Way” has gotten me to believe that this eternity thing is a massive unchecked axiom, and almost obviously a pacifier. ie: The existence of an eternal soul is something you have to build into your foundation, because without that comfort there would be an unbearable existential anxiety. But recently I've found comfort in the idea of dying, specifically, because if you can really accept the permanent end of everything, it brings a presence to the life you have. Maybe this is heaven. In any case, the point of a theology/cosmology is to properly attune yourself to your situation, and so if the lack of eternity brings you peace, doesn't that sort of accomplish the mission?

The value in a theology should be the direct effect it has on your character and being. The idea of a heavenly body prevents a boyish, primal, universal anxiety of our annihilation, but what good does it bring? ie: Is heaven a catalyst or xanax? What I mean is, if you accept Nothing, and really try to hold nothing in every frame of your being, and to realize the sadness of it all, but to not see it as sadness, but as a reminder, a shock for life and vitality and spirit and spontaneity, then doesn’t Nothing bring out a fuller you? One that will not wait to say what has to be said? And the whole DMT thing, does that not also demand courage and virtue of you? For if every frame of that Odyssey (and Odyssey really is the perfect word for it) is determined by the seeds sowed of your lived moments, then every moment is consequential. If the afterlife is not an eternal heaven, but a DMT Odyssey that mirrors your soul, then sin is consequential! It's hard threshold to cross, and requires a lot of work. The Christian eternity, alternatively, has a bunch of easy thresholds. Are you baptized? Are you generally a good person? (ie: have you not stolen or murdered?) Good, you’re set for eternity. These are weak standards! Think of Montaigne’s scrutiny. We are all wicked beasts, self-deceiving, and we flounder daily, multiple times, and we scrounge our potential, and we shy away from glory and courage and such, and are those all not damnations? Should we not see them as damnations? Should we not expect greatness within ourself, and see that not as shame, but as a call to personal glory? I suppose the greatest call to adventure is to be a hero, to “save” the Other, whether it is your family, or community, or however large a concentric ring you aspire to help, and is to be a saviour not the Hellenistic pre-Judeau name, “Christ?” Should we not aim to be a Christ to the extent that we can? I find the more I withdrawn from Christianity, the more I am drawn to Christ.

I think I’m close to making a breakthrough here, but to follow through would be something like a rupture in my charisma and actions. And through writing, I can do it. I think years 1-17 were a phase of coddling. puberty and ego. From 18-35, I went through my initial Maslovian initiation (lol sry, refers to "Abraham Maslow," a psychologist). But from 36 on, this could be another era, one where I strive to be radically aware and honest and beholden of the true nature of reality, that this all really is a fleeting dream, that death brings Nothing, a true annihilation of Ego, but I am not I, as in, the true I is not the self contained within small Michael, but a parcel of the greatest It, the universe, and I welt melt into a dust that is eternally churning, recycled into food for worm swarms for millions of years until I aid in the ascension from the Earth into some other marvelous species. The fact that I am a human, now, in this very moment, IS, heaven. This is the pinnacle, the is the realization to carry from room to room.

(Edit: To synthesize all this, I find comfort not in the eternal Ego, but in the eternal Engine, as in, some force outside our universe that continuously generates new space-time fabrics and all life within it. To realize that you are not separate from the Engine, but are one with it, and even on the its cutting edge of its biological complexity, is to appreciate and identify with the whole enterprise of Life. Knowing that life will continue, despite the extermination of species and the heat death of this particular universe, is a better kind of immortality.)

On reading Montaigne, I want my writing to be far more honest. As in, in the face of death, it really does feel worthwhile to capture the edges of your soul and psyche onto the page, the things not brewed into your public-facing personality, because then you die with yourself trapped, and it’s as if the inner you never really lived.

Revolutionary tax proposal #1: anything above $100m/year is taxed at 90%, but in exchange for political equity in the country (ie: delegation and voting). It formalizes lobbying and makes it transparent. To prevent the rich from steering the country too hard in their favor, there can be provisions where legislators, citizens, and oligarchs have checks and balances. Ie: to put it kidishly simple, each can have a 33% stake in directing that taxation. Another way to think of it is forced investment in pre-approved pro-American funds, companies, etc.

TBF: I have little sense of what I'm talking about in these matters. But the general context behind this is that power dynamics organically took control of the country and defied the spirit of the founding architecture. I assume there are many examples on how the Constitution and it's amendments dit not protect the original vision. And so the principal is to understand how power actually moves and work with it; don't kill it or shun it, but formalize it into legal structures, make it transparent, and then force it to comply with specific standards that muzzle and channel it's wolf power.

Anti-AI sentiment is escalating: the Pause AI movement, state-level data center bans, molotov cocktails at Sam Altman's house, artists going to dumb phones, witch hunts for AI prose. Protesting and boycotting AI, at a personal level, is the exact wrong approach. It misunderstands the Luddites. They were not against the machines in principle, they were against the factory owners not sharing the profits of the factory. This is possibly about to play out a grand scale: AI and robotics labs could capture nearly all economic value, and there will be a plea to nationalize these companies and redistribute the profits.

While the scope and effects here are way bigger, the workers of the Industrial Revolution were far more disempowered. You couldn't "just do things." You could operate someone else's machine, but you couldn't just spin up a competing factory; that required land, resources, labor, none of which you had. There was just a certain amount of capital needed to compete, and it wasn't possible. Workers were limited to being workers, so they had no choice but to revolt with violence.

The difference today is that the worker and artist suddenly have access to build-your-own-factory tooling. A single person for $100/month can compete with companies valued in the millions and billions. It's asymmetric labor. Regular people can build civilization scale infrastructure, distribution labels, social media engines, software, etc. Never before has there been a democratic opportunity for people to self-organize into their own collectives, tribes, governments, and whatnot.

At least to me, this kind of optimism—principled, delirious, ambitious, but still careful and skeptical—is better than the cynicism of the "resist" factions. There is nothing you or your circles gain by putting your head in the sand; it brings a distanced, crabby, virtue-signaled posture that does nothing to change the actual situation. You gain nothing by staying on the ChatGPT free plan on default settings and complaining no how it's an ineffective, incapable, sycophant. It requires an ounce of nuance, to be critical of how the labs act, but to then use that lab's best tools towards your own sovereignty and vision.

I think what I'm trying to get at here is that the Luddites of the 21st-century will not be reverting back to typewriters and flip phones, they will be wielding AI tools in ways to foster human connection, and the kind of pro-human cultural that the Internet originally promised, but was never realized under capitalism.

When we say we "distrust institutions," we're pointing at the wrong thing; it's the institutes that are withering. We use these words interchangeably, but I think the separation clarifies.

An "institution" is an abstract, permanent, inter-generational primitive—like education, marriage, the free press, the essay—while an "institute" is a concrete embodiment that serves it. Think of an institution as a societal organ. Think of institutes as the specialized tissue that keep the organ functioning and regenerating.

As generations turn, new sets of people are handed down the great responsibility to protect and evolve institutes through the storms of time and technology. Without upgrading our institutes, society goes through slow-motion organ failure, with phantom pains and spiritual malaise that can't be traced back to the source. Schools still look like schools, but everyone is cheating through a Homework Apocalypse, and suddenly we have all sorts of cultural cancers that seem inevitable. Institutes are the civic building blocks of a sane society, and yet we glorify unicorns who create "value" but feel no responsibility for their dying elders.

Institutes operate through the inverse of market logic. Where startups are designed to accrue all of the upside, an institute is sacrificial, designed so society gets the upside, even at its own peril. Of course they swim in the same water, but institutes swim differently: they have opposite answers to questions on how to steer, what to make, where to focus, who to include, and when to stop. An attempt at some principles:

• mission-driven, not market-driven;
• timeless contributions, not self-serving content;
• involved in ecosystem building, not niche extraction;
• active members, not passive users;
• century-long legacy, not liquidity through an exit.

Usually an institute comes from patronage: you can’t resist market currents unless you’re supported by endowments, donations, foundations, tuitions, grants, and such things. You can’t start an institute in your garage, but now with AI and the collapse of cost, I suppose you could try. So many of the one-person AI company fantasies are about a single founder reaching a billion-dollar valuation, which is the cheapest form of ambition there is; the better question is around the scale and spirit of cultural impact achievable by a one-person micro-institute.

For the last two years my lock screen clock has been set to Khmer, the language of Cambodia, with numerals I (still) can’t parse. The point is to not poison the flow of my day with chronos.

I started this experiment because I realized how obsessively I would check the time, as soon as I woke up, through morning and evenings and weekends for no real reason, in situations among friends where the hour was irrelevant. Time was a commodity, something to budget, forecast, control. Only when I got off the clocks did I notice a whole layer of quiet, instant calculations I’d perform to steer the immediate future (ie: it’s 9:43pm, which means I have 17 minutes until 10pm, which means I can only do 15-minute things until the 10pm-things start to happen). Chronological time alienates you from kairos, the ripeness of any given moment.

If we pick up our phone 96 times per day (the average), then we’re aware of the time every 10 minutes. We’re a society stuck in time. Lewis Mumford said that the clock (not the steam engine) is the central machine of the Industrial age, the thing that dissociates us from our natural rhythms.

Of course if I have back-to-back meetings or multiple trains to catch, then I need to be in manager mode and know time to the minute; but in all other moments, I strive to be temporally oblivious. I don’t know the time right now. I assume it’s somewhere 8-9am, and when Christine rings the doorbell I’ll assume it’s almost noon, and I’ll look outside to see the sun and shadows to confirm it’s no longer morning. When I’m hungry I’ll go eat, but unfortunately that brings me near the stove clock which breaks the spell (I’ve tried scrambling the stove clock, and that obviously annoys my wife). Whenever possible I default to removing clocks from UIs, or turning them to analog to create a second of friction, or, when iOS forces me to see ##:##, I revert to foreign numerals I can’t comprehend. Not every room in your home needs a clock. You should never know the time in the room you write.

I got charged $4,500 for a band-aid.

For that price I could’ve bought 90,000 band-aids on Amazon (two for each person in my NYC neighborhood), but emergency room band-aids must be of a different substance.

A month ago we cut my newborn daughter’s finger with a nail clipper and it wouldn't stop bleeding for an hour. The on-call pediatrician—who was naturally grumpy since it was after midnight—insisted we go to the ER, and after 5 hours in the waiting room, the bleeding stopped right before we were called in. After one minute with the doctor and five with the nurse (most of it small talk about islands in Greece), we left with a band-aid on a dry scab. I assumed it would be an expensive lesson, a few hundred dollars to breathe hospital air, but we were charged a whole family’s round-trip tickets to Athens.

What's weirder than American private healthcare is how used to it everyone is. A family member said, “well, it was March, so you didn’t hit your deductible yet.” I’m willing to pay the $577 for the emotional labor of fixing a boo boo, but the remaining mystery, the $3,923 on yesterday’s mail bill, feels beyond reason. I’ll be requesting an itemized breakdown to call their bluff, and if they don’t bring it down to a normal but still ridiculous level ($500 for a band-aid—10,000x above market price) I will evade the debt collectors until they tank my credit and jail me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new prayer I wrote to loop: "Καιρὸν θεωρῶ, ἀγάπην σπερῶ.” It stands for “Kairos I behold, Agapae I will sow,” or in less Greek terms: “I recognize the moment, and will bestow love as a gift.” Each half mapped to an inhale and exhale, sort of like the Lord’s Prayer (in attempt to internalize and associate the prayer as something as automatic as breathing). The first half is on being perceptive, the second on being generative. You watch with gravity, then act with generosity.

Pronounciation:
(1) kai-RON
(2) thay-oh-RO
(3) ah-GAH-peen
(4) speh-RO

On each word:

Kairos is about seeing a particular moment in a particular way, that if acted upon, will change the course of history. It jolts me out of a passivity, about accepting things as they are, and instead to see freshly, to see everywhere the third doors. Christ’s first words in the Bible (after baptism) are, “the kairos is fulfilled."

Thay-oh-RO means to behold, to contemplate, to observe, to truly see the potential of a circumstance. It’s not a casual looking, but a penetrating sight. It’s a perspicacity of vision (an unraveling). (Note: it ties to “theory” but original this word was a way of seeing, not an abstract hypothesis.) It doesn’t mean “I’m an opportunist, but the full weight of my attention is applied to the present. There’s discipline to it, and it’s framed as a sacred rite, an act that changes you.

Agape is the highest form of love. Eros is the lowliest love, the desire to subsume the other into you, passion. Philios is a brotherly love, a reciprocal friendship, a give and take. Agape is a parental unconditional love, where you hope to nurture the other into their maximum potential. This is the origin of this prayer, because it feels like a word that can applies to everything; to mundane moments, to relationships, to creative works, etc. In many important ways, agape is a form of surrender. Agape is the defining word of Christ.

SPAY-roh is “I sow,” but  speh-ROH is “I will sow.” The future tense adds a quality, as in, now that I’ve seen the moment, I commit to sowing love. The word “sow” is specific and special, because sowing comes from spraying seeds, meaning you give love in massive volumes, with no conditional reciprocity, no expectation for return, knowing that one in a few might blossom into something. There is even a “Parable of the Sower” in the New Testament, about broadcasting generously without controlling where things land; you throw seed and trust the ground. Love is something to scatter freely, without a guarantee of return. This spray definition also ties into my latest conception of the root cosmological urge, in a working essay titled “the universe is a cumshot.” As in, God is not a craftsman with a plan, it’s more like the universe is an explosion of matter, and God is the binding force, the emergent order that fuses, harmonize two things for them to transcend to a higher phase of matter. 

Compared to the Lord’s Prayer, which is petitionary (give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us), asking for repentance and nourishment from a higher power, this one is more about our own responsibility to be like Christ, to have Christ-Conscioussness in each frame of our existence. It’s about internalizing the divine pattern. The Jesus Prayer is a devotional prayer, but this is a participatory prayer. This is “theosis,” becoming by grace what God is by nature.

Having a baby reminds me of the infinite well of inner goofiness I have within me. There is an endless ensemble of voices and characters, songs and dances, that can be conjured in every moment if it keeps her smiling. This is the unselfconscious self coming through, because of course a baby can't judge. It's also not necessary a performance, for her, but it's your own expression that a child enables. A reminder that this could be the default state at all times if you have the courage to be labeled as truly and insanely weird.

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

In the last month there were so many fake Trump posts floating around, and I thought this one of them, but it turns out this is an authentic Easter morning war crime threat. I can see a few ways to interpret this historic tweet. On the surface, this sounds like a madman. The natural response is to assume Trump is, indeed, sick in the had. It's equally possible that this is him acting unhinged on purpose. This is how a dealmaster makes deals, by trolling and cursing, by threatening civilians and mocking religions, all while you still not knowing if he's just kidding around again. The reverential capitalization of “Power Plant Day” and “Bridge Day” is particularly weird, as if suiciding the energy market will be so victorious that we'll coin them into holidays. If he's actually trying to prose Iran into action, the “Praise be to Allah” remark certainly isn't helping. If you really break it down though, our threat makes no sense, because torching their oil fields is effectively an attack on ourselves, and I think even a madman knows not to repeatedly shoot themselves in the legs. The most revealing part of this message is that he shifted the deadline, again, by one day. Not Monday, 4/6, but Tuesday 4/7. You know the markets open Monday. I can’t help but think this tweet, if not all his rhetoric about the war, is led by market manipulation. If this tweet’s goal is to project instability and desperation, then it’s absolutely perfect, a simple string of words bound to make him and his friends millions before he weasels out of it on Tuesday.