The Town Square
All the Lonely People: The Atomized Generation
We’re not only facing a crisis of loneliness but we’re atomized. Our systems seem designed to further undermine social fabric and place.
The Locking Spine
Eating crab is a fitting tradition for an Appalachian community dealing with the intergenerational trauma connected to the opioid crisis.
America Needs to Build Strong Towns, Not More Infrastructure
The key to fixing our cities, to creating Strong Towns, is to treat them like complex, emergent systems capable of iterative change.
Can Social Technologists Solve the Atomization Problem?
To address rising atomization and alienation, we must account for radical inadequacy and experiment with more totalizing communities.
A Land Value Tax Fosters Stronger Communities
Not only is a land value tax economically efficient, it offers a development pattern and taxation philosophy that nurtures vibrant communities.
Tribes and Tribulations
Suspending Politics to Save Democracy
Just political systems secure the means of living satisfying private lives while political saturation crowds out key aspects of a good life.
Flourishing
How Deconstructing Anxiety Makes Transcendence Possible
With the understanding that fear is the fundamental problem in being human, we have our starting point. To pursue this quest, we must fully deconstruct anxiety, reveal its origins and mechanism, and find its resolution.
Haste Makes Waste
Haste becomes waste is intimately tied to the fact that many people have forgotten to inhabit their body, too eager to get somewhere else.
Happiness Precedes Success and Achievement
Our cultural institutions have the story backwards. Focus on well-being instead of achievement, and success will follow.
‘Follow Your Passion’ Is Actually Good Advice (Sort of)
Here are five recent research findings worth considering when weighing the wisdom of “follow your passion” or pursuing a calling in life.
Anxiety Due to Absence of Exposure to Real Danger
To better understand how anxiety works in us, we have to see fear in the context where it evolved—with hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago.
Religious Impulses
Unlearning Some Western Mindsets
An over-reliance on our Western Mindset creates several obstacles to human flourishing—informing agriculture, education, work, and parenting.
Wilderness Lost
Sages and Stoics
Comfort with Solitude Comes Before the Ability to Think
Freedom entails the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate their actions and develop their conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd. Solitude precedes moral thinking.
Momento Mori
The Mythos of Pandemic
Without a shared mythos or communal rituals, we face not only the physical threat of coronavirus but also an epidemic of hopelessness.
Communication and Connection
Tradition and Progress
A Progressive’s Take on Ron Chernow’s ‘Grant’
Individuals don’t make history but there are the “best of us” people, like Grant, who withstand the crushing pressures of their times.
Jung and Freud Feud: Is it Sex or the Collective Unconscious?
Once resembling the relationship between a devoted father and an admiring son, Freud and Jung split over the question of culture’s origins.
The ‘History of White People’ and Their Mixed Legacies
Nell Irvin Painter’s book identifies some of the roots of the inequality we see today, which are based on the antiquated “science” of race theory. We can use the social construct of race to address social injustices, but what do we do with the mixed legacies of race theorists?
How the Toothbrush Mirrors Societal Progress: An Oral History
Just as simple technologies have been abandoned for more beneficial advancements, so should we jettison institutions, laws, philosophies, and cultures which no longer incubate human flourishing.