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.
‘The School of Life’ Preaches Pessimism over Romanticism
‘The School of Life’ is on a crusade to avail us of our emotional ignorance. Philosopher Alain De Botton seeks to remedy the shortcomings of contemporary education systems and the institutions that have failed to instruct us in how to approach the big questions in life.
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
Natural Mysticism and Its Dangerous Allure
Natural mysticism focuses on awakening us from our ego-bound ordinary life to a universal oneness. But it comes with many dangers.
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.
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.
A Divided World Needs to Make God a Useful Idea, Again
In his newest book, God: A Human History, Reza Aslan seeks to provide an explanation for this rise of what he refers to as “the humanized God.” He proposes a more pragmatic idea of god, instead.
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.
What the Covered Bridge Reveals About Our Struggle Against Nature
All important technologies must be granted the option of becoming passé. In fact, the goal behind any technology should be for it to serve well and to die young.