A Thousand Small Choices A wasted life does not happen in a day. It does not arrive with sirens. Not with a thunderclap. Not with a dramatic...

Practical Phenomenology When most people hear the word "phenomenology," their eyes begin to glaze over. It sounds like something t...

The Strange Case of est During the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people attended a controversial personal development program called est, ...

The Difference Between Phenomenology, Mindfulness, and Zen Spend enough time around philosophy, meditation, or personal development circles...

The Hidden Curriculum of Bad Days My twelve-year-old daughter had the day off school. The teachers had a conference, which meant that while ...

One Large Important Button I recently stumbled across a product called the Keychron Q0 Mini 8K Action Key. At first, I genuinely had no idea...

My Next-Door Neighbor My next-door neighbors are a large Swiss family. They have lived next to me for more than ten years. We greet each oth...

There Is No Donald Trump People still talk about Donald Trump as though he were a person standing inside politics. That already misses what ...

The Importance of the First Assumption Paul Watzlawick became famous for his work on communication, misunderstanding, and the realities peop...

The Quarter Millennium I rarely read newspapers the way I used to. Most days I skim headlines, glance at the first paragraph, and move on....

An Anthropological Visit to a Bakery There are two bakeries near where I live. The first one is deeply, profoundly Swiss. Not the products. ...

Understanding Is the Booby Prize One of the most famous lines to come out of est was this: "Understanding is the booby prize." The...

The Swedish Backpack This morning I had an argument with my daughter over a backpack. No family crisis. Just one of those ordinary domestic ...

We Already Know Modern society behaves as if human beings mainly suffer from lack of information. If people smoke, they need education. If c...

Forced to Spend the Afternoon at the Public Pool This is not satire. This actually happened. A Swiss newspaper recently reported on citizens...

Vendor Locked-In Organizations talk a lot about vendor lock-in. A government becomes dependent on Microsoft. A company builds its entire inf...

The American Presidency as Content: Governing in the Age of Stimulation Something is seriously wrong with the American presidency. Not just ...

TikTok Planet Something enormous is happening to human beings. Not politically. Not economically. Anthropologically. The species itself i...

Scrolling Without a Phone I recently went to a shopping center with my daughter and saw something so strange that I immediately thought: t...

The Dialectic of Attention Hegel believed history moved through contradictions in consciousness. Marx believed history moved through contr...

The Loop The philosopher Werner Erhard once used the word “distinction” in an interesting way. Not as a synonym for intelligence or clever t...

Questions and Answers I was listening to Werner Erhard speak the other day. Or rather, half listening. That always happens to me with certai...

The Dialectic of Veganism I bought a vegan protein powder recently. Not because I suddenly became vegan. I simply wanted to try it. The pa...

Social Work as an Art I was reading about Bismarck recently and came across a line that stayed with me. Politics, he said, is less a scien...

What Is Freedom For? For centuries, Western civilization fought to liberate the individual. From kings. From churches. From rigid morality. ...

Why Continue? For decades, modern Western society operated on a powerful assumption: human beings are unhappy because they are constrained. ...

This Is It A woman in a book from the 1970s describes the strange exhaustion of her generation. She had done everything. Psychoanalysis. Med...

The Softer Weapon People usually imagine control as something obvious. Police. Censorship. Threats. Prisons. Visible force. But most huma...

The Necessary Devil There is a tension running through civilization that never disappears. On one side stands order: limits, continuity, obe...

Apocalypse in Switzerland A man in Zurich recently discovered that his Migros supermarket sandwich weighed 14 grams less than indicated on t...

The Managed Life There is a version of life that works. It runs on time. It eats well. It doesn’t overreach. It keeps its impulses contained...

Moralized Epistemology I recently read a sentence by the German labor minister: “Nobody immigrates into our social welfare systems.” Wh...

Against Dead Morality William Blake was not simply a poet or painter. He was one of the earliest and most radical critics of moral systems t...

Running Out of Ideas There was something clean about The Devil Wears Prada. Not because of fashion. Not because of New York. But because it ...

The Devil Wears Compassion Now “First of all, my dear friend, I think we should calm down a little with the word ‘evil.’ It’s a very mediev...

The Missing Key I spent nearly an hour looking for a motorcycle key. I searched the apartment, the hallway, outside the house, every jacke...

Spiritual Bureaucracy One of the strangest transformations in Western history is the distance between the world of the Gospels and the atmos...

Superficial Diversity Modern institutions speak endlessly about diversity. Diversity of backgrounds. Diversity of identities. Diversity of e...

Psychological Gym Membership There was a time when therapy meant something had actually gone wrong. A divorce. Panic attacks. Depression. Tr...

Interrupting the Drift There’s a way people talk about Atomic Habits that never quite lands. As if it’s a philosophy of life. It isn’t. Or a...

Accidental World Power The strange thing about power is that sometimes the people who possess it do not fully understand it until somebody e...

Back to Reality For a long time, the West behaved as if history had quietly ended. Borders became psychological rather than physical. Energy...

The Refusal to Grow Up There is something strangely adolescent about modern elite culture. Not youthful in the good sense. Not adventurous...

Atlas Logging Off There is a quiet bitterness spreading through parts of modern society. Not revolutionary bitterness. Not mobs in the stree...

Germany; The Stranded Whale Is this still reality, or has it already slipped into parody? A whale strands itself on the German coast. A sick...

Interpunctuation Conflicts rarely begin where people say they begin. Ask two sides to tell the same story and you won’t get two versions of ...

What Is Truth? There’s a moment in the Gospel where Pilate asks a question that should stop the world. “What is truth?” He doesn’t wait for ...

Pulp Scripture Recently, Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon and delivered a prayer. He reached for the Bible. Or something that sounded like...

Running a Dialectic on Yourself There is a phase in life where everything is outward. You try things. You move. You test limits. You go plac...

When the Madman Stops Being a Strategy There is a familiar idea in politics: play the madman. Act unpredictable. Blur intention. Make the ot...