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Analects

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Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.

Why do people kill themselves?

Article

We’ve always had a troubled relationship with suicide. In any given period of history, you can see roughly two perspectives living in tension with one another. The first, that suicide is an affront of some kind, and the second, that suicide is something somehow righteous or noble. What’s interesting about these two competing attitudes around the act of suicide is that they more-or-less capture the reasons people kill themselves, and that those reasons help us understand the rise in rates today. In all cases, it’s very clear that there is a point of failure that seems so, so easy to do something about.

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connection on-(un)happiness on-culture somatic-architecture

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Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.

Pop-neuroscience is just a fancy way of saying 'calm down'

Article

I’m often struck by just how much of the pop-psych/neuroscience advice one sees for the average working person boils down to little more than “just cool the fuck out, and you’ll be better at stuff”. I guess, more to the point, I’m often left wondering why we feel the need to over-engineer this kind of thing so egregiously, particularly when most of these theories seem to produce as much bad advice as good advice. I have some thoughts, but let me show you what I mean, and maybe we’ll work out what’s so attractive about it along the way.

Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.

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betterment on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

article

Brain waves are subject to the same pop-psych fluff as everything else brain related. There’s no harm in it, but looking a little more carefully actually makes them a useful tool for understanding behaviour.

The Value of Brain Waves

Article

Brain waves are a thing that appear with increasing frequency in pop-psychology and business blogs, as hackable features of the brain. As far as I can tell, this is more-or-less a confidence game. Take more breaks and listen to slow music and you’ll be less stressed is far less sexy to say than taking breaks and listening to slow music fucks with your brain waves and you’ll be less stressed, even though the informational content is identical. But brain waves have slightly more value, I think, when they’re explored for their actual behavioural correlates than this new wave of pseudo-scientific self-help.

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betterment on-being-fruitful on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

article

Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.

Active listening is misleading

Article

LinkedIn invited me to contribute to a bunch of articles on active listening recently, and while I was thinking about whether I should bother answering, it actually is kind of an interesting topic. My point is not that it isn’t reasonable. My point isn’t even that people should be able to intuit this sort of thing, because although the principles are simple, it’s not always easy to take an empathetic stance during a fundamentally individualistic life. My point is that having a model for active listening almost defeats the purpose of the exercise.

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betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-leadership somatic-architecture wealth-architecture

article

Mushrooms change the balance between inside-out forces (the all-consuming neural networks that support the ‘self’) and outside-in forces (the environment and world around us). This model seems most useful in explaining the mushroom experience.

On managing magic mushroom experiences

Article

Like finance bros and cocaine, brain scientists and psychedelics have always gone together. It’s a hot topic of conversation at my department, and in this psychedelic renaissance it’s a hot enough topic that I’m regularly asked about it by non-brain sciencey people too. So I thought I’d jot down some notes. This one is about mushrooms. I’ll talk a little more generally about what they seem to be doing to us, and why those things might be interesting to people.

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betterment connection gratification on-(un)happiness on-aesthetics on-being-fruitful on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture spiritual-architecture wealth-architecture

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