There is a particular kind of panic that strikes when you feel like you should be doing something. Your inbox is full. The market is crashing. Someone said something wrong on the internet. Every cell in your body screams the same command: act. Do something. Anything. Move. And that, according to a Roman emperor who […]
Karl Marx died in 1883. He never saw a ring light. He never watched someone unbox a package on camera while whispering about a discount code. He never encountered the phrase “link in bio.” And yet, if you sat him down in front of Instagram for fifteen minutes, he would probably nod slowly and say
Karl Marx on Influencer Culture: Are You the Product or the Producer? Read More »
Friedrich Hayek spent most of his career warning us about a specific kind of danger. Not the danger of bad ideas spreading. The danger of someone deciding which ideas are bad in the first place. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Because the moment a society appoints itself a guardian of truth, it
The Censorship Paradox: Why “Protecting” the Truth Actually Destroys It Read More »
There is a strange comfort in believing that the modern university invented serious education. That somewhere around the 19th century, brilliant minds sat down and designed the four year degree as the ultimate vessel for intellectual development. Four years of lectures, exams, electives, and a capstone project. Then you walk across a stage, shake a
Why Your 4-Year Degree is Just a Diluted Version of Cicero’s 4-Year Plan Read More »
There is a particular kind of nightmare that does not involve falling or being chased. It involves getting everything you ever wanted. John Maynard Keynes had this nightmare. He wrote about it. And almost a century later, we are still pretending he did not. In 1930, while the global economy was busy collapsing, Keynes did
The End of Ambition: Why a Stable Economy Is Actually Really Boring Read More »
Descartes sat by a fire in 1637 and tried to doubt everything. His clothes, his hands, the room itself. He stripped away every certainty until only one thing remained standing. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Thought, the stubborn thing left over after the great demolition, became the foundation of selfhood for the
I Like, Therefore I Am: The Shallow Cartesianism of the Attention Economy Read More »
Most self help advice today follows a predictable formula. Set goals. Build habits. Wake up at five in the morning. Drink green juice. Optimize your morning routine until you become a productivity machine that occasionally remembers to feel emotions. Aristotle would have found all of this amusing. Not because goals and habits are bad ideas.
The Ethics of Excellence: Becoming Your Best Self, According to Aristotle Read More »
There is a particular kind of advice that makes your stomach tighten. Not the motivational kind that slides down like warm soup. Not the generic wisdom printed on coffee mugs. I mean the advice that lands like a slap. The kind you immediately want to argue with. The kind that makes you think, “This person
Why the Best Advice You’ll Ever Get is the Advice You Hate (Karl Popper) Read More »
There is a popular story we tell about the Enlightenment. It goes something like this: a group of brilliant European thinkers finally decided that reason was better than superstition, that science was better than dogma, and that all men were created equal. Then they wrote some declarations, started some revolutions, and the modern world was
The eighteenth century had a project. It was ambitious, optimistic, and slightly drunk on its own confidence. The project was called the Enlightenment, and its promise was simple: human reason could figure out everything. God, morality, politics, the natural world. Give us enough time and enough thinking, and we will hand you the blueprint of
Hume vs. The Enlightenment: The Man Who Broke Reason Read More »