There’s a version of me that doesn’t exist yet, but I keep building my week for him anyway. He commutes fourteen hours and works fifty without losing an ounce of himself to it. He trains, writes his newsletter, shows up fully in his marriage and as a father, and still has room left for the friend who needs him at nine on a Tuesday night. He never gets tired in the wrong places. He never has to choose.

I keep scheduling for that guy. And every week, the real one — tired by Thursday, pulled in three directions, apologizing to someone for something — has to live the week that was actually built for someone else.

For a long time I read this as a discipline problem. If the schedule wasn’t working, I hadn’t tried hard enough yet. So I added. Another commitment, another hour of tracking, maybe even one more thing I was “still doing” even if I was doing it badly. It felt responsible. It felt like care, even, for the people and the work I didn’t want to shortchange.

I recently came across a distinction from David Epstein’s new book, Inside the Box, that some researchers use — the difference between the “ideal citizen” and the “real citizen.” The ideal citizen weighs every option with total clarity and acts on the best one, every time. The real citizen has limited attention, gets tired, and means well about tomorrow in a way today rarely lives up to.

I’d been building for the ideal citizen. Scheduling for someone who could hold ten priorities at full weight and never drop one. And I kept being surprised — genuinely surprised — when the real one, the one who has to actually live the week, came up short.

What if that’s not a flaw in me. What if it’s a flaw in the design.

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Two months ago, this newsletter went out three times a week — Day One, Day Two, Day Three, a little arc building toward something. I liked the shape of it. It felt generous, like I was showing up for you more, not less. Then the numbers told me something I didn’t want to hear: two or three unsubscribes a week, almost always right after the second or third touch. People weren’t leaving because the writing got worse. They were leaving because I’d asked for their attention three times when I’d only earned it once.

So I collapsed it. One essay, once a week, everything I had to say folded into a single piece instead of spread across three. It felt like doing less. It felt, if I’m honest, a little like giving up.

It wasn’t. The single essay lands harder than any of the three ever did, because it isn’t competing with itself for your attention. Whatever I have this week — one idea, one thread worth pulling — gets the whole of me instead of a third of me, three separate times. The care didn’t shrink when I narrowed it. It found somewhere to actually land.

I’m thinking about that now as I catch myself trying to hold the job and the training and the writing and the marriage and the parenting all at full weight in the same week, the way the ideal citizen would. He doesn’t get tired. He doesn’t have a body that needs sleep or a family who needs presence. But I do. And the version of the week that works for me isn’t the one with the most things in it — it’s the one where I’ve had the nerve to let something go quiet on purpose, so the thing I actually chose gets to be real instead of just attempted.

Everything I actually care about was already competing for the same finite hours, whether I admitted it or not — and pretending otherwise never once produced the version of me who could do it all. It just produced a real one, worn thin across too many places, apologizing on a Thursday for something he meant to do fully and didn’t.

I don’t know yet what the right box looks like for this season. I know it’s smaller than the one I’ve been trying to live in.

How many open boxes do you have?

Be well.

I’ve started to believe that one of the greatest sources of our collective suffering isn’t evil people.

Rather, it’s something quieter and harder to point at: our own delusion about what meaning an…

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It turns suffering into something useful. It gives adversity meaning. It suggests that whatever we go through, as long as we survive it, we come out better on the other side.

But I’m not sure that’s true.

Or at least, not in the way we tend to believe it.

Because if you l…

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“Life is like the harp string, if it is strung too tight it won’t play, if it is too loose it hangs, the tension that produces the beautiful sound lies in the middle.”

— Buddha

Good morning, philosophers.

Here is today’s big idea: The same ability that makes us capable of everything we accomplish, is the same ability that makes us suffer the most.

We are t…

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Last week we explored how Ikigai can redirect us away from the endless treadmill of optimization culture and into the work of designing our life around our authentic self and goals.

Today I want to…

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New here? These three essays are the best place to begin.

• About Matt — Matt’s journey from the mountain top back to himself.

• I Don’t Want to Kill Anyone — The founding essay. What TPP is about.

• “Rainer Maria Rilke” — A gentler one, to feel the weekly rhythm: on why “wisdom is a dance, not a march,” and how knowing who y…

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Wrong field. Wrong company. Wrong title. Wrong pay. The assumption is that if you can just optimize your external circumstances enough, something will click into place internally.

But I’m not sure that’s how it works.

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The searching for certainty took longer to stop than I would like to admit. Years longer. I want to tell you how it actually unfolded — not as theory, but as a sequence of months in my actual life.

When I first left the world of high-control religion, a piece of me was still running on the old operating system. The framework had collapsed,…

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In our last post I left you in the deep end of a pool. Backwards, upside down, blindfolded, reaching for certainty. Today I want to come back to that water with you, and turn you to the searching to see what was actually underneath it.

Here is what I came to, slowly: the thing I kept reaching for was the wrong thing.

The longer…

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It felt like I had fallen backwards, and upside down, into the deep end of a pool, blindfolded.

That’s the actual felt sense of what happened when the structure I’d been living inside stopped working. One moment I was oriented. The next I wasn’t.

Backwards, because I didn’t see it coming.

Upside down, because I didn’t know whic…

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“The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”

— General Omar Bradley, Armistice Day 1948, Boston

Good morning, philosophers.

I want to start with a scene.

I was on a bus. It was my first day at West Point — what they call Reception Day — and somewhere beside me, a man who looked like he could move a car sat with his hands in his lap, terrified.

I don’t remember saying anything to him. I don’t remember putting a hand on his shoulder or offering some piece of wisdom. I just remember sitting there, feeling the fear in the bus the way you feel humidity, and getting calmer.

Fear has always done that to me. The bigger the moment, the more present I become. I process it later, privately, usually when I’m safe enough. But in the moment, I go still—not quite a freeze, but hyper-fixated on what’s in front of me. All my faculties oriented toward problem solving.

I didn’t think much of it. Years later, he told me that bus ride was the reason he made it through that first day.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t, entirely. What I know now is that I was doing something in that bus — something that took me years to find a name for — and that the name, when I finally found it, came from the last place I ever would have expected.

The world I grew up in had a clear map.

You could be one kind of strong — composed, mission-focused, willing to bear whatever the moment asked — or you could be weak. West Point rewarded the first kind. There was a saying: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Composure wasn’t softness. It was the thing that kept people alive.

I was good at that world. I understood the rules. And underneath the rules, I understood something I couldn’t yet name: that the person sitting next to you mattered, that the human in front of you was the whole point, that whatever you were supposed to be accomplishing, you could only accomplish it together.

The religious communities I ran in had a different kind of map. They wanted something from me that felt like the opposite of composure. They wanted need. Brokenness. A particular kind of vulnerability that served a particular kind of God. I tried. I brought everything I had to those communities. I thought for a long time that my calm was the problem — that I was too proud, too far from what they were asking me to reach for.

I was anxious. I just didn’t know that anxiety was a message, not a character flaw.

Then I ended up in a philosophy class.

This sounds unremarkable. It wasn’t. I was in uniform. The instructor was a civilian. He ran the room like a room where there were no right answers — where we were all just trying to figure out what better meant, together, with no particular destination and no one taking anything from us.

I didn’t know how to sit in that. Part of me loved it. Part of me kept waiting for someone to tell me I was in trouble.

The second class I took with him was on care ethics — a framework I’d never heard of, built entirely from feminist philosophy, and largely overlooked by the canon that had produced everything else I’d studied. The argument was simple and radical at the same time: that a web of relationships, rather than a set of rules or outcomes, was the better lens through which to understand how to live.

Something in me recognized it. I couldn’t have told you why, not then. But there was an overlap I couldn’t ignore — between what I was reading in that classroom and what I’d been reading in the red text, the words of Jesus, in my own private attempt to make sense of what I actually believed. Two things pointing at the same thing.

I thought I’d bring it back to my community. That they’d be as excited as I was.

That’s not what happened.

A few years later, I was deep in officer training. We ran simulations — tactical scenarios with real stakes on paper. I was being graded, in part, by the casualties I produced.

I’d started well. Then I started doing worse. I couldn’t explain it.

My wife was out of town one weekend. I went to see a film — a war film, as it happened, about a conscientious objector. A man who refused to carry a weapon while everyone around him carried theirs.

I judged him for most of the first half. I didn’t understand him. I didn’t resonate with what I saw.

About halfway through, I got sick. I thought I’d eaten something bad. I got up, found the restroom, and tried to vomit.

I didn’t vomit. I dry heaved and cried for a long time, and somewhere in there, words came out that I hadn’t known I was holding:

I don’t want to kill anyone. They can’t make me.

That Monday I went to find a counselor. A few weeks later, I was advised to seek a discharge as a conscientious objector. Two lawyers. Several hundred pages. A dissertation on what I believed and why. The standard was sincerity — could I prove that my objection wasn’t to a particular war, but to violence as a profession?

I could. I knew it in that restroom before I knew anything else.

There’s a phrase for what came after. A therapist gave it to me later: reunion grief. The particular ache of meeting yourself for the first time and realizing what you’d been missing.

I’d spent years inside worlds that wanted something from me. The institution needed my compliance. The community needed my vulnerability. The map needed my belief. None of them were especially interested in who I actually was — not because they were cruel, but because that wasn’t the architecture. You can have power over people or you can have connection with them. The worlds I’d been raised in had made their choice.

The philosophers I’d read in that classroom didn’t want anything from me. They were just making a point: that a web of relationships was better, for me and for everyone I cared about. The friend who helped me understand what that looked like in practice was figuring out something about himself at the time that he hadn’t yet found words for — something that required the same courage mine did, just different content. Being around him taught me that self-honest wasn’t a luxury, it was a need. Something each of us desperately requires, and deeply deserves.

I didn’t know I was allowed to feel that way. I didn’t know it was good to be honest with yourself.

I’m still in the middle of this, if I’m honest. The newsletter you’re reading is part of the search, not the answer to it. London, where I live now, is the first place I’ve felt like the right version of myself might actually fit — a city full of people with reasons to have left somewhere and reasons to rebuild, putting down roots together amongst family found not family forced. I’m building the deepest connections of my life here. It turns out the parts of me I spent the longest time dimming are exactly the parts the right community needs.

A therapist once told me the key to enlightenment is being able to answer two questions honestly, at any given moment.

1. How do I feel?

2. What do I want?

That’s it. Not a philosophy. Not a framework. Just the willingness to sit with those questions and not flinch from the answer.

Everything I write in this newsletter is downstream of learning — slowly, imperfectly — to do that. The bus, the classroom, the restroom, the friend, the lawyers, the grief, the city. All of it was practice for two questions I’m still learning to answer.

Be well.

Here’s how I feel: exposed.

Here’s what I want: I want this to reach someone who needed it before I did. If that’s you — send it to one person.

There’s an essay I’ve been writing for a year. I’ve realized that virtually every other essay has been a way of approaching it without quite getting there.

It’s called “I Don’t Want to Kill Anyone.”

It starts on a bus at West Point, NY. It ends in a new city halfway around the world building a life I once thought impossible.

In …

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Here’s what I’ve been building toward.

Meaning is something your brain makes. It is not a substance waiting to be found. It is not external to your experience. It is your experience — the particular output of a particular mind, shaped by a particular history, processing a particular stream of information.

This is not a diminishm…

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Many of the systems we experience as uniquely human—sleep, hunger, fear, attention—are not uniquely human at all. They are ancient biological systems shaped long before Homo sapiens existed.

Even consciousness itself appears to be an evolve…

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It is practical.

Because the question is no longer:

“What is the meaning of life?”

but instead:

“What am I doing with the meaning my mind is constantly generating?”

This is where things become personal.

Because once you accept that meaning is cons…

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There’s a moment I keep returning to. Someone I care about was going through a stretch of life that looked complete from the outside — work that mattered, relationships that held, a routine that kept them moving. And yet. “I just don’t feel like I have any meaning in my life,” they said.

I knew what they meant immediately. I di…

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Here’s an old puzzle. Theseus, the hero of Greek myth, owns a famous ship. Over the years, every plank rots and is swapped out for a new one. When the last original plank is gone — is it still the same ship? Now imagine someone saved each old plank and built a second ship from them. Two ships. Which one is really Theseus’s?

There’s no …

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In most sciences, progress follows a familiar rhythm: observe, measure, test, repeat. The hard problem breaks this rhythm at every step, and the obstacles aren’t just practical — some may be permanent.

The deepest issue is called the explanatory gap. Imagine neuroscience advances to the point where we can map every sin…

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Here is a question that sounds simple until you really sit with it: why does anything feel like anything? When you bite into a lemon, your brain processes sourness — but why does that processing come with an actual sensation? Why isn’t it all just silent machinery, humming away in the dark?

This is what philoso…

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Today, let’s explore a tool to help you cultivate harmony through a practice drawn from Taoist philosophy.

This week, pick one situation in your life where you’ve been pushing hard — against resistance, against someone’s will, against the grain of how things seem to want to go.

And ask: what would it look like to move with this, rather than a…

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