michael-dean-k/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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