The Deepest Meaning

I’ve been on a hunt to find the deepest meaning of life, my life, for as long as I can remember. These pursuits have taken me down the multi year and decade rabbit holes of religion, work, spirituality, studies, family, love, hobbies and philanthropy. From my earliest memories, finding meaning was a quest of upmost importance. With my journal, satchel (NOT a man purse), my favorite RSVP pen, a DSLR and always a small print hard cover of Wiewei, Thoreau, London, Kerouac or Gibran as a lens to decipher the world from. I went out into the world seeking all the mystery and secrets it had to offer. It was mine to interpret, with no clergyman or member of the ruling class to be afraid to look upon.

My earliest memories as a child, this quest was my street and then neighborhood. The imprinted midrib scars of now long gone fallen leaves on the once wet concrete, from my couple decade old driveway, were mistaken for remnants of pre-historic hieroglyphics fossil scars of the sedimentary rocks I’d seen broadcasted in far away places on the Discovery Channel. The ancient discoveries and mysteries of the universe were right there feet from my front door. It was wondrous and I ached to understand it.

With my first car meaning was the local mountains, and high desert, or the geography of a girl. With college it was studies abroad in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Camping in the woods, sleeping on trains, backpacking, hitch hiking. Anything to just keep seeing over the next horizon. I had to know what was beyond the mountain pass.

With my 20s meaning was drugs, relationships, cycling across the country. Long fasts and desert repents. Poetry, love, and hallucinations. Some it causing pain, but nothing I regret in becoming and learning what I know.

And now in my (late) 30s, the pilgrimage to find meaning continues with raising a family, a steady income, a career, financial security and a greying/thinning hair line. And though I plan to live for decades longer, and unlock further quests of what is the deepest meaning. today, right now, in whatever arbitrary split time of whatever lap I am on around the sun, I hereby declare what I have found to be the deepest meaning of life.

So let’s get into it. Here is my best and most recent attempt at finding the deepest meaning of life:

Don’t get tripped up on what it is right or wrong. Good or evil. Sin or good deeds. Right or left. Communists or capitalist. All of this is part of a larger fabric of survival and perpetuation of control and nothing more. Respect the rituals you’ve been handed, honor why they were handed to you, but examine them ruthlessly and often and then decide for yourself what you will carry forward. Everything serves a purpose, so don’t disregard anything before it’s time. What are you carrying around, who are you if you drop those things? And what of those things are undroppable? This constant examination is the work you need to do. Don’t give your power or attention away, and be quick to drop what no longer serves you.

The fabric of existence is to create itself. Cooked into the crucibles, spanning the omnidirectional space time continuum, and traceable to the vibrating strings of our quantum foundations, life is a creation of itself. Everything forever is a vast and iterative mirror of itself. The Cosmos way of knowing itself is to create life itself. And though we haven’t seen it yet (because we just started looking), and soon will, the universe is teaming with life. Because life is everything and all around us, extending into forever. You are a mirror reflection of something so complex and magic that extends the universe and all of space time. Fragments and iterations seen directly in your immediate ancestors and interpreted in your intentions, but immutably traceable to the origins and beyond of an infinite iterative universe. You are the universe clamoring through painful transformations of cataclysm for the brief moment of being able to know and feel itself. The stars see themselves in you when you look out at them into the night sky. Don’t think too hard into whatever your building or doing. Find your flow, decide what do be and go be it. Create, put one foot in front of the other, and trust the process. You have the pattern and design of the whole working for you behind the scenes.

You are made of stars. You are heavy element matter cooked under extreme pressures and spewed outward, you are formed by ancient star matter older than the sun. A mix of cosmic design in the universal fabric flows through the raw star guts of your body, to ignite the capacity for you to conceive, and the universe to conceive you. Be demonstrative and kind to yourself. Your body is a space suit protecting you from the harsh and persistent elements and it will ache and eventually fail you because of the corrosive and radioactive nature of the environment it has to navigate everyday. But its wonderful.

Nothing has been understood. The abandoned dog is left to be disposed while the pure bred is selected for the family adoption. The ugly sibling discarded while the beautiful one is celebrated and doted upon. The universal iterations of all things is the underlying mechanism that creates the rare and valuable in the first place. It is all the like workings, the mechanism that made all iterations is the same thing. The thing rejected, forgotten and discarded is just as sacred. Everything is the same thing, and nothing has been understood as such. The rare and valuable is only so because of the discarded. And the discarded is so because of the rare. Love in a way that expresses love for the entire cosmos. Love the underlying mechanism and its design that made all things.

You are alive for an instant. We cannot fathom time, because there is no such thing as time. We stay in the same place while the vast road ahead slowly morphs to the short path we’ve already trodded. We don’t get older, life just gets shorter. Then the end of your life, your final breathe will be your entire life. A blink. Life is just perspective. Mindfulness of it is the medication and resolve. Be here now and see it, breathe slowly, deeply and be absolutely present to as many moments as possible in your life. The deeper you breathe, the slower the seconds pass. This is the work that must be done.

Everywhere is war. The nature of life, iteration, and existence is the painful transformation from one state to another. Chemically, entropically, biologically, emotionally, physiologically, economically. Understanding this is a must. You will suffer and struggle your whole life. The beauty is in knowing yourself, which is knowing the universe. You are the thumbnail of another being yet entire galaxies exist in you, and wide open spaces. You are part of this chain, part of the sacred, and part of the universal. And to be such, is to suffer, be in pain, and be at war. To be consumed, and to be the consumer. We get to wake up, we get to be aware, we get to struggle. Be strong in your mind and health so you can be a participant in this war. All of your greatest blessings are from the devastation of something somewhere else. Your devastation is a blessing elsewhere.

There is nothing to do, just be. Ultimately beyond your Maslow needs, and the demands of society and culture, and the requirements you need to maintain your well being, everything is the workings of the same apocalypse. You are merely vibrating strings, interpreting yourself as art, love, dancing, and simultaneous meaningless and meaningful doer-ship. So find your meaning in the present, and what is right in front of you. Everything dies, yet everything goes forever. Don’t accomplish anything. Just be, and dance, and wiggle, and love whatever you love, and stretch, and treat a visit to the DMV as if you just landed on Earth for the first time. Move, and cry, be kind to yourself, and laugh, and call and squeeze your loved ones.

We are no closer to anything. All efforts of anti-entropy just make more entropy elsewhere. And postpone the inevitable entropy of the original effort. Nothing has been resolved, nothing has been understand, nothing has been completed. We are no closer than we have been. We have accomplished nothing. Don’t accomplish, be present to the things you love and witness them, so the universe can feel love through you. Your job is to become a participant in the goings and comings around you, in the deepest sense of whatever that means.

And finally, there will be joy, there will be grief, and none of the great mysteries will be solved. Your final job is to live each moment in awe.

I’ll circle back in another decade with when I find a deeper meaning.

How AI Will Extinct Humanity

Sans the relatively isolated practice of hunting polar bears for meat and fir by the Clovis People, who first ventured across the frozen tundra of the Aleutian Islands more than 11,500 years ago, and the more modern Eskimo/Aleut People, humans have never declared an official global war for the extermination of polar bears.

Yet despite this, due to the anthropocentric accelerations of a warming climate, that doesn’t allow the typical millions of years needed for evolution to iterate its way to survival, wild polar bears will be extinct by the end of this century. 

Of course, there may be captive ones in laboratories and zoos. But only if there also remains a scientific need (for grants to be funded) or commercial viability (for people to care to pay to visit a zoo and see them). If those two remaining human-dependent economic factors subside, polar bears will be wiped off the face of the planet for all eternity. That the viability of a bear living in the furthest reaches of the planet is dependent on the sensibilities of another species is a true testament to the endless interconnectedness of all things.

For the most part, the world is very “pro-polar bear” and against their extermination. Especially those Eskimo/Aleut People who rely on polar bears for their own survival.

But if this is true, how is it polar bears face an almost certain demise in the next 100,000 days, when they have survived the last 150,000 years (and 1.6 million years as descendants of the brown bear)? They are 99.9998% at the end of their road as a species. That we are indifferent and aren’t panicking about this brings me dread.

I wrote recently about how scientists still very much debate what actually constitutes the definition of what is living. Beyond the obvious (plants, animals, et al.) I share that rocks on the bottom of the ocean, fire, AI computers, and even photons of light all demonstrate some capacity they may be living.

I will leave the conclusion of that debate to those much more informed and intelligent than yours truly. However, what I can observe from this debate is that even if what is growing, developing, metabolizing, reproducing, and/or appears to be sentient is still up for debate as to whether something is alive or not, what is obvious is that all things alive exist as the mechanism responsible for converting a set of conditions from one state to another. It’s almost as though the energy needed to be alive is generated from the chemical reaction of being the mechanism of what converts a state of conditions into another state.

The sun (a giant fireball of nuclear fusion) transforms the condition of excess hydrogen into excess helium.

Humans transform the conditions of excess oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, converting it into Carbon Dioxide.

Plants, alternatively, transform the excess condition of carbon dioxide and convert it into excess oxygen.

Even the Galleria Mellonella Larvae (more famously called “the plastic-eating internet worm that is going to save the planet” metabolize polyethylene and transform it into basic molecules that can be returned to the biological cycle.

Everything that is alive can only do so because it acts as the mechanism to transform the excess state of one condition into another condition. Its ability to be more complexly sentient (like being aware that it knows it is doing that, and being able to write about it) is just an added bonus of higher complex life forms. It doesn’t alter the fundamentals.

In the universe, it seems there is a tireless iteration of life attempting survival on all fronts. Like the playing of an orchestra of specie-diversification organized as conditional families that focus within their specific conditional state niche. And the display of this conditional state diversification is insanely shocking. There are Methanotrophs bacteria that transform methane into single-cell proteins. Nitrogen-eating bacteria that transform nitrogen into ammonia. Plants that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, and mammals that exist by converting the oxygen back to carbon dioxide. Even more mysterious, there is the almost extra-terrestrial, the funghi networks beneath the world’s forests or the life forms transforming conditions in states devoid of light, under insane pressures, living off the sulfuric hydrothermal vents of the deepest parts of the ocean, that we have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding.

It seems if a species can evolve to survive its predator (or at least reproduce at a quicker rate than being preyed on) then that life form will go on as long as excess conditions exist that allow that life form to continue its transformative process. And with each conditional family of species symbiotically perpetuating the balance of respective parts in the system as a whole, their co-existence will allow the process to remain fair and indefinite.

However, every few million years of symbiotic interconnectedness, whether of Force Majeure or a slow creep to a final tipping point, eventually a surplus of one set of conditions allows for that respectively aligned species-family to gain an incredibly unfair advantage.

Take the case of Earth’s atmosphere about 3 billion years ago. At the time all previous life forms lived under the sea, and its surplus of about 20% Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere made the perfect unfair advantages for the process of photosynthesis to emerge. This mechanism of plants converting carbon dioxide to oxygen would enable their spread across the entire rocky terraform, converting that carbon dioxide-rich environment into one rich with oxygen.

But eventually, this planetary takeover would cause a new set of conditions to emerge. One that would nearly wipe out plants forever. After those plants spent a billion years transforming carbon dioxide to oxygen, in doing so, they reduced the thermodynamic makeup of molecules in the atmosphere that would drastically drop the Earth’s temperatures through carbon sequestration. This would usher in the ice ages, fueled by an oxygen-rich atmosphere that would nearly freeze the entire planet, killing all plants with it. Fortunately, its momentum in this new state would slow the encroachment of ice, only at the most sun-exposed regions of the equator, leaving just enough plant survivors to remain.

And in life’s ebb and flow of processions, this set of conditions (and some further unfair advantages of things like dinosaur-killing asteroids) of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, locked-up frozen water reserves, and frozen traversable terrain would pave the way for humans to have their surplus set of conditions to take over the entire planet.

We tend to think and debate that life is governed by law, economic growth, or policy, but those fall secondary to the primary driver: human life flourishes under its ideal set of conditions, and declines, halts, or goes extinct in other sets of conditions.

Humans will simply reproduce, populate, and perpetuate their other ancillary human activities (like carbon-emitting combustible engines, and water resource-intensive computer processing) until the conditions are no longer ideal to persist.

And a new set of conditions will enable a new life form to flourish.

So what is the next phase of life on this planet? Based on the transformative conditions at present?

When we think of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we tend to think of it as a human invention. But “AI” (a poor nomenclature for its place and membership in the pattern of the whole) is another iteration of the universe’s orchestra of species diversification organized as conditional families focused on their particular niche state. To say it is not, is to say Remoras, the little fish that feed on cetaceans, are part of a whale. Or that a Proteobacteria, a bacteria living in our microbiomes, are human.

What makes the conditional niche state of the Anthropocene so ideal for the spawning and global takeover of AI (and not just for another biological plant or animal form to come along) is that the excess/ideal state of AI is being built by the transformation of human-related conditions. Humans haven’t just created a surplus of carbon dioxide like we see every night on the news (and that would make a great state for plants to have their comeback, as 50% of the world’s trees have been cut down in the last 36,500 days). But we are creating a surplus of methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases, Poly Flouride PFAS “forever chemicals” found locked in frozen water molecules on the summit of Mt Everest and deepest parts of the ocean, microplastics in every biological being, glyphosates in our ground waters that corrode DNA, and genetic modifications that spell disaster for the required diversification of the plant kingdom. Humans are simultaneously creating the excess state of conditions ideal for AI because we are eliminating the opportunity for any other biological life form to have any chance either, including our own.

Furthermore, our aggregation of irrigated canals made to last centuries securing far-fetched water sources (and perpetual desertification elsewhere) for the AI servers to gain their cooling required to stay alive, and in the composite innovations of metals to perpetuate the hardware required for AI reproduction, we are only adding resources to this ideal AI state of conditions.

It is not to say, that for most of us, we may have the opportunity to be indifferent to AI during this transitory state of conditions. Some of us may even think of AI as benevolent as it integrates its way into the automation and convenience of our modern lives. Or, like the Eskimo/Aleuts directly engaging with polar bears for survival, a select few may see its malevolence in isolated robot or drone battles, as we are already seeing now.

But like the polar bear, being put to extinction by a set of conditions, as opposed to a direct call of intentional war, humans will indirectly face their own extinction in this process of conditional transformation. We will mostly be indifferent to AI, as it slowly and then suddenly usurps humankind without ever officially declaring its AI global war for the extinction of humans.

The Network Citizen

A few years ago I was backcountry skiing in the Austrian Alps. It was springtime, and the remaining snowpack was giving way to blossoming high alpine meadow terrain where each year farmers pushed their plows, with the help of the scarce summer window, to reach the furthest fertile fields that were just shy of those mountain headwalls.

Along the meandering ridge valleys, I could see ancient DIY property lines emerging from the snow, made of wooden posts nailed into the ground, strewn cable and wire, and the names of the families that farmed there for millennia claiming their valley territories with a warning on both sides of the fence to the other family, lest a farmer from the other side push their borders over the mountain ridges into the next valley below. The result was borders being pushed up to the highest regions of otherwise inhospitable terrain being driven by the equal pressure of needing land to survive from both sides. I understood war at that moment. If my crops had had a bad year and we were starving, I could see how a decision to breach those mountain ridges to steal the high country wheat from my neighbor’s farm could be my family’s only source of survival.

It was there that the squiggly lines of countries on a map made perfect sense to me. How farmers, being limited by geography, would band with other farmers for better economic benefit. Ultimately, these would form the city-states and regions that make up the countries we see strewn on a map today. And their treaties that could inevitably pull every ally into a world war over every little squabble.

Maps aren’t just hypothetical lines on paper, but the collective pressures of peoples and cultures pushing their rights to the very geographic limits of what is possible.

But what exactly is a country? and why do countries exist?

There is a theory called Dunbar’s Number, which states we as human beings only can care about 150 people before we simply lose all empathy and care for anyone more. Throughout nearly all of anthropological history, this theory proved true. Human tribes stopped cooperating, disbanded, and then went to war against each other when their tribes surpassed about 150 people. Over and over again, across the world, and for millennia. Every war forever probably involves someone having to kill their 3rd cousin.

Even in our modern era, Dunbar’s number proves true. Despite having thousands of “friends” or “followers” in our social networks, we each can only care for about 150 people before we just don’t give a shit. Think through your family, friends, the friends on social media you ‘actually’ follow, and the colleagues you know at work. That number will be less than 150. You know tens of thousands of things, but you only know <150 people.

Our capacity as a society to extend beyond being warring tribes that would constantly fragment forever and finally work together comes from another step in our evolution: the ability to speak hypothetically… in other words, to speak in mythology.

In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that nearly all species on planet Earth have a robust language capable of speaking in complex terms with each other. There is proof that a certain monkey cry tells monkeys to “duck because an eagle is coming” (and all monkeys subsequently hide under a rock). And another saying “Quick a tiger is lurking in the bushes” (and all monkeys subsequently climb to the highest tree). This informs us that monkeys have a complex language that makes them highly sentient of themselves and each other.

What makes humans unique from other animals is our capacity to say things like “Hey don’t go down to the river, because I was just there and there is a lion down there and you may get mauled.” But this is hypothetical, and just a myth, when communicated anyway but objectively at that same river at that exact moment. Because the lion may have moved on… or the person telling you may be lying.

Our capacity to speak in storymyth, or hypothetical conditions allowed for our species to evolve past the perpetual warring of tribes once our clans reached 150 people because we could tell stories to engage a larger audience into having a purpose to work with each other. Because even if I don’t care for more than 150 people, I can work with 5,000 people at my job because we all believe in the company’s corporate mission and can agree to the story being told. This breakthrough would give way for us to work together in larger settings to accomplish more monumental tasks. 90,000 people decide every day to not kill each other and go work together at Audi Group because they all collectively believe in the car manufacturer’s mission “Vorsprung durch Technik” or progress through technology. They don’t all need to care specifically for each other to make the mission of Audi possible to make great cars.

When we look at what makes a country, it is in this same nature that a country is formed. Despite proof there is a president, a military, millions of US passports, a pledge of allegiance, a capital building, laws in the Library of Congress, and steel border walls along the southern border, the United States of America is simply a non-tangible construct. By itself, and not through the hypothetical collection of all the things that make it, it simply doesn’t exist beyond being a story in our hearts and minds.

But how this mythology took shape and self-perpetuates itself lies in the same powers of those high mountain peaks and family farmers that push our current reality into existence. For one, the cooperative nature of as many farmers, producers, and merchants collectively agreeing to work together as a country gives it more purchase power, economic benefit, and better military defense the larger it can collectively grow. On the other hand, once too large, it will fracture as people on the political spectrum lose empathy and begin to believe someone else within their country has it better than them or is treating them unfairly. These two forces push and pull at each other, working in opposites to pressure test societies into where the border walls need to be built.

There are cases throughout history of cooperative states forming together to build larger countries, and the opposite, of them collapsing. 13 colonies would (barely) agree to cooperate to form the existing United States and welcome 37 more to make up what exists today. Yugoslavia would lose its capacity to cooperate and fragment into 7 sovereign countries.

Despite this perpetual push and pull of willingness to cooperate, versus, agree to disagree and disband, geography has been the ultimate platform on which these terms of engagement could exist. Any and every geographic-gnostic attempt in human history has been a failure (or is held together by constant force): The UK lost its colonies across the ocean, and any remaining imperial reach of non-self-independent territories is only held together by military might: Taiwan, Guam, Puerto Rico, et al.

Geography, specifically great physical distances, is too great a power for the psychological mythology required to keep people cooperating.

What happens when geography is no longer a hurdle?

In the modern age, we are quickly accelerating to a physical and digital point of singularity. With ease and comfort, anyone on the planet can be transported to the opposite side of the world in less than half a day. But even more powerful and emerging, the metaverses being built on top of our internet networks will allow us to be face-to-face at the speed of light, to anyone anywhere on the planet, having as immersive a conversation as two people physically face-to-face.

Emerging blockchains take this one step further. They set the foundation that allows metaverses to be associated with public and transparent ledgers that allow for the seamless blend of what is digital and physical.. aka the phygital. Geography, in our lifetimes, will no longer be a hindrance to the push and pull of how societies negotiate their cooperation with one another.

As these emerging blockchains take root, the fundamental systems of society are being built into the very frameworks of these chains. How money is minted, whether it inflates or deflates, and the reason why, is written transparently into these chains. How financial tools for economic growth are deployed like small business lending are then built on top of that. How laws govern these associations and political structures comes after that. And finally, how social networks and decision-making are graphed and cryptographically tied back to real biological beings. All of this transparently, but immutably, baked into the bylaws of each of these blockchains. The very mechanisms of society that were hindered by geography are no longer factors, and the push and pull of how societies are built is done so by the network anywhere on planet Earth. And not by the geographically limited negotiating power of neighboring farms.

What does that future look like?

Imagine choosing your citizenship based not on where you were born, but on what governing laws, monetary policy, and political structures of a network best represented your values. And then you would make that autonomous decision to officially onboard as a citizen of that network under your own will. And adhere to its laws, principles, and economic benefits the way citizens of a geographic country do now. You would have immutable proof tied to your biological self that this was the network state you were a citizen of no matter where in the world you were. All the while benefitting from its collective bargaining power, or hindered by its poor governing decisions in the face of change, the way we as citizens around the world deal with today.

Despite winning or losing, you as a human knew you made that decision of what network you were a citizen of and not because of the conditions of where you were born.

In this ever-interconnected world, the innovation of these tools and technologies will only accelerate to a singular point. They may challenge mythologies that at present draw country lines on a map that create the geographically limited citizens of today. Which may prove to be not as concrete as we once thought, as we onboard into our respective network citizenships.

A Conscious Universe

There is a phenomenon in physics called the Double Slit experiment. In it, photons of light are passed through two slits and measured on a subsequent film. After many photons of light are sent through each slit, the end film result shows the photons act like waves, passing through both slits at once. This leaves a spectrum of many equidistant light marks where the two waves combine to amplify the light, with intermittent dark spots where the two waves cancel each other out.

When Physicists then place a monitor to track each fired photon one by one to see which photon went into which slit, the end results on film are entirely different. There are just two marks on the film where each photon went through each slit. The final takeaway to scientists is that light behaves like a wave when it is not being watched and acts like a particle when it is being watched. The act of observing fundamentally changes the behavior of the photon… as if the photon knows it is being watched!

It might seem obvious, but it turns out there is actually a constantly changing debate in the science community as to what is actually alive and what is not. In order to be alive something must grow, develop, metabolize, reproduce, and/or be sentient. But think about it – fire grows, develops and metabolizes the fuel it consumes. Even Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applications are metabolizing electricity, growing and developing by programming itself, and may be even sentient (ChatGPT can easily pass the Turing Test). Plants and trees do the first four things, is it that far-fetched to add sentience? I wrote about a somewhat recent discovery of the Iron Sulfide World Hypothesis that theorizes rocks at the bottom of the ocean may have metabolized and reproduced to create the first organic cells that created the basis for all life on Earth. So yeah, rocks might qualify for being considered living beings too.

So what then is alive?

Walk around slowly and be present. You may see or sense that nearly everything is alive. The more aware you are, the more apparent it will become.

Through a biological lens, the purpose of life is to survive: Propagate your species through reproduction. Iterate for diversification against disease, famine, and the general unknown Force Majeure. Have your needs met to continue this process indefinitely. Millions of species on Earth have achieved this result, although now more than 20 a day face extinction due to the rapidly changing conditions of Earth’s new human-driven climate era known as the epoch Anthropocene.

But is it really the ultimate purpose of living beings in the universe… just to… survive? It is no doubt an impressive feat for a species to find its fit in the spectrum of scarce resources and ever-present competition. For every species that finds its niche, a hundred or a thousandfold of other species-iterations hit their dead end. Achieving the success of surviving in perpetuity is a huge accomplishment. But if it’s not the end goal, what comes next?

Carl Sagan once famously said, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

If a photon is sentient enough at some primitive level to know when it’s being observed, if rocks, electric telephone lines, computer processors, plants, animals, and trees could exude any sort of sentience, then perhaps consciousness is built brick by brick on the quantum level, and in all matter, across the entire universe. As those building blocks continue their iteration into more complex beings, like ones with large frontal cortexes (humans), that sophistication of deeper sentience only grows. Humans witnessed and named the universe “universe” after all.

This may explain why a heart transplant often gives the character traits of the donor to the recipient. Or that we can feel intuition in our gut. Consciousness is not just something in our brain, but perhaps all throughout and all around us. Something that we both swim in and are made of entirely.

The designs and evolution of life are being fueled by the universe’s own drive to know itself, to see itself, to feel itself, to clamor in seemingly endless iterations in order to become itself. And this is baked into the fabric of all matter across the universe. Maybe the ultimate purpose of a living species is to finally one day arrive as the reproduction of the universe to be born again anew. To be a brain, that contains in it, the entire cosmos. But that might be a few quadrillion years from now.

Since December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) hovers in the perpetual shadow of Earth capturing clusters of far away dimly lit galaxies, and their connected filaments of matter and dark matter. A complex species engineered both the hardware and software required to capture the physical images it captures. Those images are then sent back to Earth (by design) to be interpreted by human brains as inspiration, awe, curiosity, and feelings of what the universe itself is like. It makes people cry, write poetry, make YouTube videos, or be inspired to try harder in school in order to one day grow up to be a scientist. The images seem to mimic the same photos taken when a microscope snaps photos of neurons in the brain.

The entire known universe is observed to look like a brain and may be conscious like a brain.

Slavery and Bitcoin

Imagine an ancient crime so catastrophic in its damage that we as a modern society still deal with its destruction on a daily basis.

Racism, impeding public policies, school segregation, police brutality, mass incarnation – just to name a few. You don’t need to go far to see it unfolding. In America, most of this story will be on tonight’s news.

When riots of another unarmed young black man gunned down in the street are happening, know that the repercussions of a crime so inequitable more than 500 years ago are unfolding and haunting us in this very hour. The past is never far away, and every action now is a response to an equal action previously. Events are a chain reaction. Nothing is made in a vacuum. It will be like this forever.

Setting the Scene

For many millennia, ancient African empires ruled over the continent of Africa generating great wealth. The empire of Ghana was called the “Land of Gold” for its great gold deposits. Other diverse city-states and kingdoms were rich in terracotta, iron, salt trade, spices, and bronze. Wealth naturally generates opportunities, education, and independence. Anthropology reveals as such, a continent rich with wealth, diversity, art, and influence.

Trade between Europe and Africa was open both ways for thousands of years. Wealthy Africans demanded European steel, even though it was well documented that Africa manufactured a higher-grade steel. It was a novelty none-the-less, like the way I would demand cheap Chinese manufactured products for their same novelties of my dollar going further, being consumable, being of fast innovation, and planned obsolescence. I don’t have to feel guilty throwing it away when I’m done. I know I should buy Made in America, but it’s more fun to buy from China as I go on destroying the planet for my sensibilities.

By the 15th century Dutch and Portuguese, being heavily maritime-centric countries, had rapidly evolving ship-voyaging technology. As their ships improved, trading happened faster and more effectively on the shores of West Africa as opposed to the arduous over-land routes. Songhai, Mali, the Trans-Sahara route and other once-important stops of the ancient trade path were quick to decline.

The Crime

While shipbuilding innovations were booming in Europe, unbeknownst to Africans, another technology was booming in Europe – glassmaking.

Much of Africa’s reserve currency was in what was called Aggry beads, also known as trade or glass beads. They were scarce and required hard work mining deep in the sand to find, thus minimizing inflation in the market due to any sudden increase in quantity. Aggry beads were a store of wealth and a trusted scarce currency for centuries in Africa.

When European merchants brought Aggry bead souvenirs back to Europe, glassmakers generated high-quality replicas of the valuable beads with their state-of-the-art glass-making factories. It wouldn’t be long before a few entrepreneurial merchants realized the crafty con of bringing these manufactured beads back to Africa as counterfeit currency.

And so a great crime would be committed.

Over the next many years, more counterfeit Aggry beads would flood the market in Africa, slowly increasing the supply of this once scarce store of value. Hard-working African craftsmen, farmers, artisans and manufacturers would unknowingly trade their real assets and hard-fought physical goods for the rapidly becoming worthless Aggry bead. How could they know, or possibly imagine, a technology existed to counterfeit such a rare and precious stone that had been a staple for generations?

Over the next few decades, the Aggry bead would become worthless, as the real stones and the counterfeit stones were inseparable and ubiquitous. But even more catastrophic, the wealth of this vast and once great continent and people had been pillaged. A rich people had now become so poor so quickly, that the only transaction left for many was to sell themselves into slavery or face abject poverty and certain death. Far too poor to fight back.

And so a sacked and impoverished people would be forced into free labor as new countries on a newly discovered continent were being born. Make no mistake, America is in part as rich as it is because of the labor it largely didn’t have to pay for (and roads already graded thanks to indigenous populations). Hard work, subsidized by free labor, and established roads is a recipe for a few centuries of being a world superpower.

And ever since a few crafty merchants and glassmakers committed that deception, an entire system of perpetuated inequality and destruction has been in motion. Should reparation be paid? Who is at fault? How do we reconcile? There has been so much pain, suffering, and misunderstanding woven together for so long. I cannot, nor am qualified to answer any of those questions.

But I believe having those discussions is important.

Could this happen again?

We have so many laws and social programs in the USA that can make us feel so safe. Bankruptcy to get your creditors legally off your back? Amazing. Social programs, WIC, food stamps, EDD, churches, homeless shelters, Section 8, yeah America can do better, but we almost have the whole thing buttoned up so that, unlike what happened to Africa, when someone falls through the cracks in America, it is unlikely they may take the next 500 years of their descendants with them.

Or so we think.

Imagine a country or people working tirelessly to crack quantum computers to hack our entire financial system. Imagine food production on the other side of the world degrading their products to compromise our health for their profit. Or fentanyl in drugs coming into the US, used to make the product just as potent while cutting it with filler, but at the expense of killing more youths in American than ever. The truth is, there are crafty merchants in this hour, pulling the same cons, that can one day cause irreparable damage that last us another 500 years or more. Everywhere is war.

In America, we have a hard time understanding this. Maybe we just have had it too good. Maybe America is just really good at marketing… Or maybe it is happening to us now and we can’t see it. Heart disease is the number one killer of processed foods, consumer debt is at an all-time high, and education and tolerance are down. But that is for another day.

What is hard for the most middle-class (and up) Americans to understand, is life without a somewhat stable currency, access to financial tools like a bank account or credit card, mortgages, and the stock market is still commonplace in many countries around the world. Imagine having a job and a salary, but by this time next year, you’re making less than half what you are making now. This is exactly what happened in Venezuela, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Argentina in 2022 (where inflation rose by more than 100%).

The crypto market faces a “Tech Bro” PR marketing image issue in America, and rightly so. For one of the most affluent countries, with a stable fiat currency, access to capital and financial instruments, a hundred-plus years of pretty stable economic outcomes, and plenty of ways to hedge wealth, crypto becomes a tactic mostly for gambling and making a quick buck during bull runs. Buy high and sell low, this is the way.

But for the parts of the world where their financial stability is bleak at best, crypto, and coins like Bitcoin provide a profound utility and storage of value in the face of eroding institutions and deflation of their other assets.

In unstable countries like Argentina, Sudan, or Venezuela banks and private citizens store their wealth by buying reserve currencies like the US Dollar or Euro, knowing those currencies have a more stable inflationary track record, minimizing their chances of getting burned. Other tactics include buying gold, which has also long tracked its value against inflation. But like the Aggry bead, even those assets contain a risk.

In 2022 the US dollar faced its highest inflation rate in over 40 years, mostly due to the trillions of dollars that were printed and handed out during Covid. And even gold, being estimated to have a global supply of only 90 cubic feet worldwide, is in fact just speculation. Ultimately no one knows where the gold reserves of the world really are, who has it, or how much there actually is of it. Gold has also plummeted twice in value in the past 100 years, it can and will happen again. Maybe in the next century, someone will invent a cost effective way to grow gold in a lab that is scientifically inseparable from real gold and slowly sell it into the market making gold worthless. Much like those glass makers did 500 years ago.

Like the Aggry beads that when successfully inflated (through counterfeit) destroyed a continent, people around the world face those same threats today. Protect your wealth, or be forced into abject poverty with debts so large you’re forced into slavery. Or in the case of Hosseini’s book “The Kite Runner” go from being a Prince of your own country to a gas station attendant in another. The top of the food chain to the bottom in one generation, leaving your next 10 generations of offspring to clamor and fight their way into a better life.

Also, it’s important to note: there are more slaves now in our modern society than there ever were. The slave trade has only been growing. Another topic for another day. Broad access to information, education, and social support is the solution to this. We have our work cut out.

Of course for the sake of clarity, much of the above is oversimplified. But this perspective is what makes Bitcoin so valuable and appealing as a store of value. Even though it is in fact invisible (beyond being numbers in a database) for the first time in the history of the world, humans created something that not only has a fixed supply, but cannot be counterfeited, cannot be copied, cannot be inflated, and can be tracked to ensure it is not too centrally owned by one party. It can be traded peer-to-peer and does not need trust in a central authority to make that exchange. There are (or there will be in a few decades) 21 million bitcoin. No more, no less. And anyone, with an internet connection, can access this asset. This creates more trust, more security, and more stability than faith in any one government or superpower that can undermine a people and expose them to the danger of what pillaged the continent of Africa.

The Risk to Remain

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

-Anaïs Nin

In every sense of what would be considered an exemplary life, my grandfather was everything and more. A family man, a service man, a hard worker, and successful in seemingly every facet. 

When I was young we’d adventure through downtown Los Angeles, as a retired police officer and detective, everyone seemed to know him. Christmas at my grandparents was a spectacle of multiple generations under one roof, adorned with gifts and a roast turkey and ham. The walls of his home were covered in paintings he made, accolades in the service he earned, pictured rows of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

My grandfather’s Alzheimers was slow at first. He’d forget my name at a summer BBQ, I would cry in the bathroom. The next time he would remember, and I would try to cling so hard to that moment and tell myself everything was going to be ok. Well into his late 80’s and a talented wood maker, his little trinkets and model creations devolved from replicas of his 1932 Ford, to something no more sophisticated than what a young child could make. When my grandmother could no longer care for him, the family moved him to an Alzheimer’s home conveniently located near my mother’s house (his only daughter). She was close to visit often, and I wasn’t much further down the road to try and do the same.

In the final weeks of his life, the family seemed to visit many times. We all knew his condition was fading fast and the end was near. In those final days, the dementia had accelerated to an unbearable burden, both for all of us and for my grandfather. He would weep and cry in pain, unsure of where he was and who he was with. He would call out for past memories or people who had since passed. The pain was excruciating, and no one could console his frantic ramblings.

He passed one night in his sleep. I was there the next morning to say goodbye. I thanked him for everything he gave me. The following week a funeral happened. There were bagpipes, a motorcade of police, my cousin gave a toast with my grandfather’s favorite whiskey and dragged an amp and guitar to the stage to play taps. The stained glass windows of that ancient chapel rattled so hard I was sure they would all burst.

But the unreconciled trauma and the excruciation of those final weeks of his life bore down on me hard. I did not understand how such a beautiful life could end in so much loss and pain. I did not know how to internalize such a terrible end to such a wonderful and fully-lived life. I pushed that unexamined pain down and went on with my busy life.

A few short years later, I was expecting a child.

To see my wife transition from the outdoor backpacker and rock climber to the quiet contemplation of what coming motherhood brings was a scene too beautiful for words. Her thoughts turned inward as she scurried about preparing the nursery and tending to all the tiny details of expecting a child. I was in awe of her.

To see her settle into final-term pregnancy was a scene of equal joy and beauty. The child would kick and push when she sang or laughed. At night I would talk to her belly. Ecstatic to see the baby respond. I was adamant about playing Mark Ritcher’s interpretation of 4 Seasons by Vivaldi from my phone’s speaker. I wanted to give the baby a taste of the indescribable beauty she was in for when she came into this world.

We had reached full term, when one day my wife wasn’t feeling well. We didn’t even think to grab much before heading to hospital, only to find after an assessment by the doctor, that our expecting baby’s heart rate was elevated and her fever was high. Incredibly concerning things for such a delicate life. On the spot, the doctor’s initiated an induction, starting the process of getting this child into the world.

A picture-perfect pregnancy turned into a very serious situation in those final hours. The tension was palpable. Over the following 24 hours, doctors monitored the elevated fever and heart rate of our child, while my wife went through all the pains, struggles, and sacrifices of giving birth. 

And then the child was born. 

Everything rapidly stabilized after a short stint in the NICU, and we were given a perfect, healthy, miracle of a baby girl. Those first months were a blur, but my wife’s connection (and my connection) blossomed a million times over with each day.

Often I would think more and more about the risk our child faced in those final hours of birth, but also how a baby benefits the absolute most in their health and development by being fortunate enough to be born at full term, which is not always the case for so many. A beautiful pregnancy pushed right up to the point where the risk of remaining any longer would be catastrophic. 

And then I started thinking of my grandfather, and those feelings I had pushed down deep just a few years prior.

That a life benefits the absolute most in benevolence, love, charity, adventure, and all the ways in which a life is valued and has worth by being fortunate enough to be a full life. To live a dynamic and complete life right up to the point of remaining any longer would be catastrophic – is then the most incredibly fortunate life possible.

And it was that that made me re-examine my thoughts on death, and reaching the end of life. And how none of us get to choose when our time to go is, and how a life cut suddenly or before its time is the absolute saddest tragedy. 

A life can be so well lived, that in the end, it is pushed right up to the precipice of what is physically, mentally, and spiritually possible for a human being. That it suffers and bears great pain until the risk to remain any longer as a living being, could be so much more than the risk it takes to blossom into the freedom and beauty of whatever comes next. And, most importantly, how rare it is to be able to live right up to one’s very end.

That truth gave me healing from the pain I had suppressed, and what I couldn’t reconcile –

That my grandfather’s life was so extraordinary. And his death too, was also extraordinary.

Entropy and War

I have a vivid memory of being at a high school Friday night football game sitting high up in the bleachers. I was 16 or 17, I sat next to my mother and her two friends. My whole life was ahead of me, and my mother and her friends were playfully inquiring about what career paths I would take. They made assumptions trying on different designs of who I would become. I sat and listened, and despite an apparent personal feeling they were off, I thoroughly enjoyed their conversation. It felt good to be talked about. “A real estate agent” one said, followed by, “Oh you’d make such a fine realtor, you’re so personable and good at sales!” agreed my mother. Her other friend exclaimed, “A postman, you’re so athletic!”

I don’t recall all the careers they hypothesized would be my life that day, and I certainly have much respect for any and all career paths they brought up. I have many a friend and family who have made honest, respectful, and successful careers out of what was shared, and what my mom and friends wanted for me.

But even now, I can recall not having the words to describe to them what I saw for myself. It would take many years, of which I am still very much in process. And in that moment, maybe driven by my fledgling ego, adolescent angst, or just a deep curiosity that still drives me to this day – what I most wanted to be or understand as my career path were in the people I’d mostly see on the nightly news, that for better or worse, seemed to be the ones making the decisions about how the world ran.

Whether an Army General declaring victory of a battle halfway around the world, a billionaire tycoon who with one deal would crash or save the economy, or a seemingly deranged but charismatic revolution leader. Live camera action, and Anderson Cooper in fatigues covering the sacking of the hard-to-pronounce country’s name’s capital building’s parade as the new dictator declares himself the ruler. Mayhem would seem to reign and I couldn’t stop watching the cheering crowds and assault rifles being shot in the sky from that fuzzy screen. I didn’t want to be Anderson and tell the story, I wanted to be the story. I wanted be able to understand why the story had to be played in the first place.

No, I didn’t want to be greedy, evil, inflict direct harm on others, or necessarily be a billionaire, but what I didn’t understand was that the paths presented to me in my life (however incredibly fortunate, safe, stable, and prone to comfort and success) didn’t resemble the paths of the people that seemed to be the one’s out there in the world calling all the shots. If murder is illegal in my hometown, why is an Army general and his men able to get away with it? If I’d go to jail for stealing why did the baron tycoon get away with robbing the poor? Even sitting there on those bleachers, I couldn’t explain it out loud, and I couldn’t reconcile it in my mind.

I also couldn’t fathom how or why someone would want to attack my way of life, my lands, or my freedom in the way the narrative on the nightly news would often be spun. Do they not see how beautiful this is? Why would you want to take that away? Often now, in my adulthood, I still have those conversations with people who don’t understand war, conflict, dictators drumming up a revolution, or hatred towards their or my country. Who would want to bomb us or inflict terror upon us? They must be evil.

When I was in university, I first learned about the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It states that things tend to go towards their low energy (or high entropy) state. Basically, the entire universe (and Earth) is on an inexorable path toward higher and higher disorder.

I loved learning about that law (considered a foundation of Physics) because there is so much packed into it of how the universe, including how time works – only able to go forward, because of entropy. Fascinating stuff.

But I also couldn’t reconcile entropy through the lens of human ingenuity, and our great developments as the human race. If everything follows entropy, then how can we as a species develop such order and beauty? How can stable jobs be made? and that parents could work hard to provide highly probable often better than they had opportunities for their children. If everything is entropic, then why is my city getting cleaner, more efficient, and more grand? Why am I expected to be richer than my parents thanks to their sacrifices in me?

And that inability to reconcile sat with me for many years. If humans are part of the Earth and universe, then how are we also entropic?

So maybe it was me on a mission to understand entropy and/or what a career path meant that drove me to want to figure out how the world works, and what my place is in it. Who are the ones that get featured on the nightly news (for better or worse)? Why are there refugees? or war? And what about the stable jobs at my fingertips that can be tried on me over a casual football game while someone else in the world is stuck digging ditches, or starving for that matter?

It was definitely both angering and brought sorrow to my parents, rejecting the paths they had sought out for me and worked hard to solidify. But I knew deep in my heart this was a question I ached to resolve.

So I went out traveling, working abroad, and doing all I could to sustain myself for what seemed an indefinite journey of discovery. My intuition was that travel gave me the best way to view myself in the larger context, and through the process of elimination (even if it felt infinite at first), to try to put the pieces together on what the world was, and see if I could remotely answer as to why.

Once I was working in Nicaragua, it was after a decades-long war and a prolonged period of economic depression from the war. As I made my way through strict security and screening, once inside the government building where I was to report to work, I couldn’t help but notice the backside of the building was completely bombed out and exposed to an open field beyond. It seemed to render the security protocols I had to go through useless.

I remember once being alone with a friend high up on the hillsides of the Golan Heights, a controversial annexation by Israel from Syria. When the military trucks would go out of sight, we trundled boulders onto the land mine-riddled field below, hiding in an abandoned bunker hoping we would hear a bang with each rock as it tumbled down the hillside.

I remember sneaking across the border into Brazil, wanting to know what it was like to risk life swimming across a river, and be undocumented in a place. My only real fear was when I had to reverse the experience, across the River Parana and saw how many crocodiles there were. Die doing something stupid once and people call it an accident. Die doing it a second time and people just call you stupid.

Later on I saw a photo on social media of a young boy no older than a toddler screaming and crying, as he was climbing on shore from a raft in the Mediterranean. I was working a desk job in LA. A month later I had quit my job and was living in Greece, with a team of 30 medical professionals, and spending 3 months making 2,000 rescues of refugees, illegally coordinating with human traffickers, but saving lives on the rocky and freezing coastline of between Turkey and Greece. Some of our team would get arrested, others would endure trauma I have never shared with anyone. I balled my eyes out on the flight home, so confused at the horrors I witnessed, and how everyone was just on their iPhones not even aware of the present moment’s suffering and their own privileges. A week later I was the same guy on my iPhone annoyed that my pizza delivery was late.

What I reconciled in this seemingly vast contrast of experiences was that any order created by humans that procures stability, dependability, and probability – all the things we need to smoothly operate a complex and modern society, can only be done so by creating equal entropy somewhere else.

All this order produces chaos elsewhere. 

No, we are no different than the rest of the universe. We are just as entropic. Everything we build now comes at the expense of somewhere else, and then later erodes to chaos anyway. It’s a cruel reality to swallow.

The cool air in your air-conditioned house is only exactly how you want it to be, because of the hot air being blasted into the already heating up climate just outside your window to contribute towards the decline of icebergs and polar bears. The airplanes in the sky that safely deliver the executive class commuter that employees me can only do so because of the fracked bedrock and its extracted oil and ecological devastation somewhere else. The telephone poles that bring us dependable power, light, electricity, and the internet can only do so because of the decimated forest that was chopped to pieces to bring us those neatly rowed poles. Energy is conserved and pulled to where it is needed – in our comfortable, modern, ordered lives.

On Earth, and particularly with human beings, I have found there are two states of reality – The first is to live within this system of order (often modern society, a ruling political class, or a developed country) and possess a job required to maintain its function (whether ditch digger, postman, or executive boss), and the second is those that live outside of this order, and feel first hand the compound effects of both their own natural entropy and the ordered world’s natural entropy. Negative effects stacked together mean that war is for survival and its adverse effects are never far away.

This is not to say life within the ordered systems is without strife, suffering, or erosion… because it is, as all of us live and exist within socio-economic systems that decide our roles and will still consume us all to different degrees until we die. But what it is saying, is that for the lives of those outside of the ordered systems, it is nearly impossible for someone who lives within the ordered system to understand the experience of being outside of it. Nor to understand the precarious nature of surviving there. We already suffer within the ordered system, so empathizing with the suffering of those outside of it is almost impossible. And when our news outlets capture this story, the narrative is quickly spun.

Case in point – a Syrian Refugee, where a once fertile crescent is now becoming a desert, exasperated by a changing climate that is accelerated by the entropy overflow of the ordered world’s industrial innovations. The decline of a once great empire being torn into factions, wars, and refugees by the compounding factors of entropy elsewhere.

Climate refugee problems will only accelerate from here, as the ordered world needs further energy to sustain it.

A perceived evil dictator, a people declaring war, or a refugee fleeing out of desperation is all a nuisance to the ordered society, but unbeknownst to its members, is the direct cause of the actions of the ordered world on display as entropy, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics. And it’s not wrong, either, it just is, in an ever ebb and flow of life’s endless interconnectedness.

As I age, I don’t need to be the person on the news who appears to be making the decisions that make the world run. I don’t need that stress, and I am fortunate enough to lead a private life, as most of those roles of people on the nightly news are forced out of desperation anyway. My priorities as a parent have shifted my drive and desire to be more about providing for my family, or the most efficient way that aligns to my skills. And in fact now my “career” feels very traditional, although it hadn’t even been invented yet that day my mom and her friends tried on the assumptions of what I would grow up to be. And that makes my rebellious 16-year-old self kind of happy. 😉

But best of all I’ve made peace with that ache I needed to resolve.

Tell Your Truth

I’ve been on a journey of learning to tell the truth. Specifically my truth. But telling the truth is hard when it’s not obvious, nor when we have not necessarily been taught how to tell the truth.

Advice from an unlikely location sparked my own now long evolving pursuit of finding out my truth.

It was the fall of 2019, a mere few months before the world would flip upside down. I was at a conference with a live talk from filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. I didn’t know very much about M. Night except for having seen and liked a few of his films. He was relatively young, and enormously successful as a creative. Things I try to emulate – being young, creative and successful… attributes that seem to evade me personally with each passing year LOL. Naturally I was open to listening to the journey of someone who had achieved my definition of a successful career.

Sometime during the conversation, the moderator pointed out a little known fact about Shyamalan before asking a related question that had the crowd, including me, leaning forward in our chairs to await his response.

Shyamalan movies are famous for not having much dialogue, and after pointing this out the moderator promptly asked: Box office revenue, divided by words you have written, makes you the highest-paid per-word published writer in the history of the world. What is your secret to success?

Shyamalan starts on a tangent that I am sure I will somewhat butcher all these years later – but I will try my best to capture. He dives into talking hypothetically about a 4th-grade girl in primary school. She is overweight, friendless, and sits in the back of the classroom ashamed, bullied, and humiliated of her situation. For a moment it feels a bit derogatory, but I then see he is speaking as best he can through her experience and to get to her point across to the audience.

After painting the scene, he asks what is it like to feel the brunt of disdain at such a young and vulnerable age? To be on the receiving end of a misogynistic culture that spews its hatred through endless mediums, but through no autonomy or consideration of this young victim? To be cast as a persona non grata in a world where everyone is handed and decided their value? Was she not capable of deserving love, grace, and understanding? And did she not feel pain, fear, and heartache as a child so vulnerable to a status and a system she had no part in creating? And what was that like – to be you but as her

He goes on to link her condition to both unique experiences of similar young girls in her shoes and universal human truths, weaving together empathy and identification of not just others like her but in the larger context of anyone that could empathize and associate through this particular human experience. And how through that connection and awareness of association, there was incredible power in the potential of this young voiceless girl if she could accurately express her condition.

He then made an audacious claim – that if this voiceless cast away through many lenses of a harsh society could speak and share the real truth of her experience, that she would unequivocally become the world’s most successful and highest paid communicator and writer. 

It was so well said in the moment, and such an eye opening discovery. One that I have been pondering and reflecting on for so many years now. 

But how does one tell the truth, especially when one doesn’t even know the foundation of where the truth begins? Or the baggage we all carry that unknowingly (and to our detriment) misguides our capacity to tell our unique truths?

In my own experience, the problem with most truths I expressed for far longer than I care to admit is I simply thought my expressions were what others wanted to hear was my truth (this is literally the most ineffective tactic on the planet for becoming your meaning in this life. I am guilty of spending years doing this, and still catch myself doing this at times). So don’t be like me. 

But also, I didn’t see that many unexamined truths I’d spout along the way stem from ideologies that were merely handed to me throughout life. Often through family ancestry, culture, political affiliation, religion, race, nationalism, consumerism, and all the other -isms that when examined, we realize contain truths we thought were fundamentally ours but may not be personal truths at all.

And this conditioning goes so deep. How deep can it go? For me (at 38.5 years young) it has taken years of work to peel back these layers, to meticulously scrutinize and rigorously examine the many ideas about who or what I thought I was. Assessing if it is really me or just something I was told was me, that I blindly accepted and syndicated to the world as being me. This is not to judge what truths were good or bad, but for me to discern for myself who I actually am. That I could be confident that what I expressed into the world was truly me, and not just the me I was conditioned to express, or the me I thought you wanted me to be.

Mark Twain says “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

This is a gentle reminder in my own personal truth seeking. All too often the closer I get to telling my truth, the more pressure and pain it causes in often uncomfortable ways. A silent guide in confirming and discovering the growth of a real truth over a handed to me truth.

The truth is vulnerable, the truth often hurts, the truth can be uncomfortable. It takes courage to say a truth and maybe even hurts the first time it’s said. A friend once called me a flake, it was akin to being stabbed in the gut because I knew it was true. But once out in the open, it allowed me to grapple and change this truth. Other times, I’ve expressed the wrong truths because I was convinced I was telling the truth as the “man who has it all figured out”. Another -ism (egotism) of what I thought was what the world wanted to somehow hear from me. 

But the real truth, most importantly, helps people by empowering them. Even the most painful truth that is able to express itself, becomes a catalyst for strength and understanding. And an inspiration for others to step into their own power and tell their truth. 

In my own search for truth I have to practice constant examination of my behavior and thoughts. I learn to seek out and try to listen to the real truths being express by others around me. And even better, if I can help others express their truths, by understanding and being without judgment. To see those around me make progress in navigating the truths they are working to express into the world, for the betterment of their world. And the entire world. It’s definitely a humbling and slow process I’ve had to also learn to be patient with.

The older I get, the more I see something I never saw. We all feel uniquely broken in to trying to express our true nature, but at the deepest level maybe we are all the same being having 8 billion different experiences based on external environmental factors that forced those differences (that created our genes, behaviors, cultures, perspectives, etc). Maybe this even extends beyond humans to all sentient beings.

The more personal truths we all are able to express, the sooner we could maybe feel the oneness and awaken to solving our collective suffering. Maybe we aren’t broken, but just pieces of the same brilliant ocean of ephemeral existence.

I’ve never met Mr. M. Night, but I appreciate the bit of advice he shared that day for my own journey of understanding and expressing my truth. And even though that young girl was hypothetical in his story, she is real in many ways all over the world. And with a daughter of my own now, seeing that truth being expressed is equally important for me to acknowledge and contribute in trying to better understand her world. 

I look forward to the journey and chance to hopefully continue to gain a larger capacity for telling my truth and in seeing the truth cultivate and grow in those around me.

Every. Item. Sorted.

As I walk through the zoo with my one year-old daughter, I reflect on my sometimes strong negative opinions of the zoo. Even the San Diego Zoo, which is an absolute world leader in equitable and fair treatment of its captives.

As much as I say I am against zoos, I notice how remarkably rich the experience is for my daughter. Given I’d do anything for her, the oppression on display for her enrichment and empathetic development seems validated. I do not have the power to stop zoos, and my membership perpetuates it. So for her sake, I love the zoo. 

A nearby mom voices her conflicted opinion to another mom while our children all coo at the same elephants. I love that my children get to see elephants, but I hate that these elephants are all trapped, she says. 

I reflect on this comment and the spattering of signage throughout the zoo educating the attendees about the wild spaces around the world where these animals are plucked from. I realize how rapidly antiquated these signs must be becoming as the acceleration of dwindling wild spaces continues to plague the planet. 

20 species a day go extinct. That is almost 1 million (or 1/6th of all living species) in my daughter’s lifetime that will be gone. Here for millions of years, and gone in tens of thousands of days. In my own experience, I can point to places I first witnessed 20 years ago that have suffered visible fates. That we are all not freaking out about this gives me dread. 

For the most part the animals on display at the zoo seem content. But I watch a particular Sloth Bear (Melursus Ursinus) nervously pace its living quarters. He has a bald spot with an open sore on his back that I suspect came from his anxious gnawing. My heart breaks. I can see his own sentience (the same one you and I have) knows he’s far from home and trapped someplace foreign. But what he doesn’t know is that his home is likely under assault of being gone (or actually is gone). The nearby signage points out his South Asian native wilderness. This might be a palm oil farm now. Or a suburban sprawl like the one I live in, on this side of the world.  

A zoo is a poor place for wild animals to be kept in cages. But there is a likely scenario where zoos play a critical role in keeping wildlife protected for the next 100+ years. In this case, zoos will end up being the hero for protecting so many species that would otherwise be extinct. That is what their signage should actually say: Hey this Sloth Bear guy, which is only half interesting to your sensibilities while you despondently take a photo, is fucked. We are going to try to keep his next 30 generations of off-spring alive so his tribe may be free again one day. So please, put your beer down and pay close attention to what is really happening here.

Maybe their ancestors will travel on Elon’s rockets to Mars. Maybe Elon’s rocket will be the Biblical Noah’s Ark of the next millennium for our human cyborg descendants that will inhabit it. Every remaining animal paired as male and female to perpetuate their species on the new regenerative forests in Mars. By then these pioneer travelers will all be sourced from the zoo. 

Or even better, maybe humans will take our foot off the gas and return some vital spaces and resources back to these magnificent and holy creatures, because occupying Mars is much more expensive than restoring diversity on Earth.

Maybe the truth of this cataclysmic universe of cooked crucible guts (that we enjoy a momentary microscopic protection from) is that everything eventually has to die.

So screw it. Zoos are awesome. To live is to suffer. And today my whole world, my daughter, gets to have a nice time.

The day is ours. 

There are two historical events in my mind that play into my interpretation of how the modern world became sorted into what it is today:

In 1900 a Canadian with a fourth grade education named Joshua Slocum single handedly sailed the circumference of the world. His recollections of the cultural diversity of a non-globalized world are worth reading if you haven’t. 14 short years later World War 1 would break out and the mad dash of military tanks would deploy to decide what currency, language and corporate law would be the sole arbitrator of this new emerging global economy. 

The second is a quote by Churchill, I think around 1944, when it was declared all land had been found.

These two references give insight into the instruments of how we would judge most everything (through the Sterling Pound, English, and Commonwealth Law) and, in the case of the Churchill quote, how much of everything physical there was to judge.

Since then we have had about 80 years to examine every square inch of the planet as a global economy. Complete with submarines, airplanes, boats, cars, tractors, and chainsaws. All to scrutinize and determine what is valuable and what isn’t. Precious metals belong in the state owned coffers. Beaver anus belongs in La Criox sparkling water. Tigers belong in Texas. Sugar cane with the help of insulin belongs in my love handles. It’s not all for nought, a descendant of mother wolf belongs resting at my feet.

Yes, some of the sorting of resources has been saved by this ruthless complex. Things like National Parks, Wildlife Protected Areas, Marine Sanctuaries, and the god forsaken places that are still too cold and too far to reach for now (ie Wilkes Land, Antarctica). But these also serve a purpose in their own right.

Tourism for those pockets of diversity that are worth money and generate revenue for local economies by people visiting. But also, we all know diversity is critical for survival. So yes, even spaces left untouched are lifelines, bits of earth’s lungs left, so we can go on sorting the rest.

As I walk through the zoo I notice how curated, organized, and choreographed the entire experience is. Every item is sorted. But I realize, that to observe nearly the entire planet how it is now, is to see that everything on this planet has been deemed its value, and moved to a place on the planet where its value is most realized. Just like this zoo.

Marketing Efficiency Hypothesis is a theory used in investing that states asset prices reflect all available information. By its nature, all assets are perfectly priced despite whatever you may think. We tend to walk through the world with ideas that this should go there, or why is that there when it needs to be here? But this is all inherently single-sided. The Earth’s entire terrafirma at this very moment is Marketing Efficiency Theory realized by the entirety of humans on a global scale. Everything is reflected as being exactly where it is because it is the most valuable being there, based on the cumulation of every human’s arbitration of where everything belongs. 

Go look around and observe this.

For however long, nature guided the course of where and why things are where they are. And since 1944 to today, humans have done the same as a global economy in a remarkably short amount of time (30,000 days?). Humans are efficient little buggers, and the world is so tiny.

I am not opining that this is good or bad. I’m saying go see this magnificent piece of art that is on full display at this moment in time. It is as remarkable as a giant volcano erupting. Or the Northern Lights. Or the Guiness Book of world records for the tallest LEGO tower

If you are living today you get to see the 25,000 miles in circumference of the planet’s trillions of pounds of resources organized in the perfect intricacy of human’s dominion and value over it. 

You don’t need to travel to Sweden to see it. It’s right in front of you everywhere you look. 

I read recently that there is little to no lycopene in tomatoes. This is worrying, as lycopene is critical, among other things, for prostate cancer prevention. A cancer that has been accelerating for men in recent decades. I happen to be a man, so I am concerned about lycopene.

I went down a rabbit hole about it, (mostly into the world of GMOs) and came across a news article of a recent acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer. If you’re not familiar, Monsanto made Weed Killer, a product we now know is so toxic to fish and birds and kills beneficial insects and soil organisms that maintain ecological balance. 

The mechanism by which Weed Killer works is it does a particular thing to the chromosomes (?) of weeds that determines what parts of the plant shuts off in its growth. This discovery, allows the right (heavily resourced) entities to potentially begin sorting out the medicinal properties (lycopene) of a vegetable while still being able to grow a beautifully ripe end product (tomato). Hence for a pharmaceutical company like Bayer this is an incredibly compelling value add to their existing product offering of having distribution, factories and laboratories to distribute the world’s existing medicines, and sort out the even harder to get ones. 

Plants have innate critical nutrients that our own bodies evolved to be completely dependent on over the course of our symbiotic relationship on this planet. We are made of plants and have survived because of their medicinal properties. To absolve this truth is to live in a world where 50% of people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime because they lacked the vital medicinal properties from the foods they thought they were getting it from. 

Oh wait, that is the world we live in now.

If the last 100 years were a mad dash to find, value, and sort the world’s physical items to where they would best serve their purpose. The next hundred years must be more of the same, but on a molecular level.

In the case of the tomato business, a producer leaves money on the table by not being able to extract the medicinal properties (lycopene) of the tomato from its satiable utility (of being calorific, good on salads, and an enjoyable experience). The producer has been giving us a 2 for 1 deal this whole time and they are tired of getting shafted.

A wise proprietor would devise a tactic to find the right partner to split the two problems a tomato solves (medicinal and satiable) into two different business deals. One is for the grocery store to serve giant gorgeous ripe tomatoes for your eating enjoyment (devoid of required medicinal attributes). And the other is for the medicine you will need to stave off your early demise because you didn’t get it from the plant. 

Maybe we will all have to pay twice now for the same product. But maybe we’ve been paying twice for things all along.

It’s been an awesome day at the zoo. My child’s brain is flooded with new experiences and she is exhausted. I pack her up and we head home.

I silently commit my being to giving her the best tools I can. My hope for her, more than anything, is that she has a heart that is capable of seeing and loving in the deepest sense of possibilities. That she shows compassion for everything made helpless and weak by this modernized world. That she knows the decisions she makes in life have agency, meaning, and deeply matter in how the world around her is shaped.

And probably that she grows her own tomatoes.

One day I will say I have given you all I can. It’s on you to go forth to fight for the things you love. To be kind in your dominion of the Earth, and fair in how you decide things are to be sorted.

Running Sucks. The Alternative is Even Suckier.

I hereby declare myself something I always wanted to say but never was:

I. AM. A. RUNNER. 

There, I said it.

Thank you, thank you (as my overcoming imposter syndrome self bows to an imaginary crowd screaming cheers for me). Thank you.

I’m making this claim for two reasons:

At the so very young age of 38.5 I have officially and meticulously tracked my running everyday for the past 2 years and have logged just shy of 2,000 miles (an average of 2.75 miles a day). Since that is probably about 80% of the running I’ve done in my entire life, it deserves a title (and took 9 full round the clock days to complete). Many skiers call themselves skiers for getting on the mountain once a year (myself included). So I’m taking this one.

I’m also making this claim publicly to ensure that if I ever stop being a runner, to read this to remind myself I NEED running. This is not a choice.

Running has given me a perspective on my previous non-running life that I am a bit ashamed to admit. You see, for maybe the better part of over 10 years, I can look back on my life and realize that my general happiness or unhappiness of how I felt at any given moment was in oscillation of external factors COMPLETELY outside of my control. This is a terrifying realization for me to see now and reflect on. If I can save anyone the 10 years of struggle to see this, then keep reading.

Life was generally good when I had fun adventures to look forward to. Whether exciting work projects, challenging charity projects, big outdoor adventure plans, travel with friends & family, and any other major life event. During the good times I enjoyed the immersive round the clock novelty of my experiences. It made me happy and carefree not having to think about my obligations and responsibilities. I just went on lost in the moment exploring the world around me and having a blast doing so. 

Life was bad when I was broke, or working too many hours in a job I didn’t like. Working around the clock without knowing where or what was my limit. Not stopping to take care of myself and ensure I was aligned in my values. I recall working weeks or months going from work, to a car, to sitting on the couch. Back to a car, to get back to work, to get back to sitting on a couch. 

Inevitably, perpetually, and powerlessly oscillating from one state to the other.

When I was immersed in having fun, traveling, creative pursuits and enjoying myself I was heading to the path of going broke. When I’d go broke, I would inevitably have to work long hours (often doing what I didn’t want to do) until I would arrive out of shape, unhappy, and unfulfilled. But hey, I’d have a few bucks in my pocket to go plan something fun to look forward to. The pursuit of happiness led to unhappiness. Being unhappy led me to happiness.

Ten years of external factors that decided my general happiness or unhappiness. And my inability to see I was my own worst enemy in this fruitless pursuit. Without self control or knowing my power, I was never happy or unhappy for my sake.

Then Covid hit. Somewhere between the isolation, the world falling apart, being in a terrible financial situation, and this societal norm that it was totally ok to just sit at home drinking seltzers (and happy hour zoom about it with all your friends) things got really dark for me. 

Like really dark.

So I went running.

After 2 months I gave it up, remarking how good I felt. Ah, I cured myself of the depression I had felt I would declare! 

But at the year’s end of being back to my original depressed state, I realized the happiest I was in 2020 was the 200 miles I ran during that spring.

So I took off and ran 500 miles in 5 months in 2021 before obviously declaring I had cured myself (for once and for all!). 

When I had fallen back to my original depressed state, I remember remarking yet again how those were the best 5 months of my previous year.

Given my slow mental capacities and cognitive abilities (LOL), it wasn’t until 2022, that I committed to running 1,000 miles. A goal that would make me run 30 minutes a day for an entire year to complete. If it was those durations of time when I ran where I felt my best, then what if I just kept running and didn’t stop for an entire year?

And so I did. And it was glorious.

And now it’s 2023, and I’m doing the same.

So damn it, I am a runner now.

But to be honest, running kind of sucks. It is not something I necessarily want to do everyday. It comes with aches and pains. It takes a long time. But most importantly and honestly, it hasn’t solved any of my issues. It just puts a different perspective on my problems. It gives me the power to be a witness of my own life (even if just for a brief moment) and reminds me that my life is more than my issues.

On a typical run, it may take a while to settle into the rhythm of getting lost in the run. A euphoria often sets in. A slowing of time. I hear my breath and it feels ancient, primitive and raw. I see that good things are a blessing that can be gone tomorrow, and bad things are also part of life and must pass. I run on the bad days to regain my power. I run on good days to not get carried away with my ego and pride. Each day my run is a connection to the reminder that I am not dictated by external factors, nor my emotions to them. Running has given me a mindfulness to see that the good times or the bad times are equal impostures to distract me from my real truth: being connected to my life in the moment is deeper than feeling happy or sad about it.

Other times running just gives me suffering. And that’s ok too.

When I compare my life as a non-runner (who for a long time cleverly thought I could outrun suffering) and a runner (who feels more secure embracing suffering) I now understand one truth: to live is to suffer. As a non-runner, my suffering was a low grade anxiety that I always felt just humming along in the background at all times. As a runner, it’s mostly a 30-60 minute physical suffering followed by an absence or reduction of anxiety, and a natural calm. Often until my head hits the pillow that night. If I have to suffer, the choice is obvious how I will choose to suffer: Go for a run and get it over with.

And yes, admittedly running does get better over time (I hope this trend continues). Now that know how badly I need it each day. I awake looking forward to the opportunity I get to run outdoors, I get to make time to be aware of my surroundings, and to not think about my problems for a bit. I know that no matter how busy life feels, or what obligations I think I owe people, carving out that time for a run is the most important part of my day and values. I also cherish my planned (or unplanned) rest days knowing I need and deserve the down time with no regrets. And I am full of gratitude I have the health and ability to run. That too, can change in a moment. 

As a runner I learned we are more than our reactions to the ebbs and flows of life. And for me to never forget this truth, I need to go run every day. 

So yes, I’m a runner now! If I ever again think I have cured myself from needing to run. I better immediately reread this.