If you’ve ever resisted a one-night stand, you are familiar with the two bad philosophers inside your head. The degenerate utilitarian insists that it would be a mistake to let an opportunity for consenting adults to increase the pleasure in the world slip. The rigid deontologist posits that casual sex is always a bad idea, mumbling something about Chesterton’s fence. Two completely different views on the same situation, both wrong. Can you find another way of looking at it? You might have a certain bar when it comes to compatibility (or at least fuckability). People draw different lines when it comes to power asymmetries, whether those are differentials in age, IQ, or consumed drinks.

The variance doesn’t mean that your morality is a matter of taste like your feelings about coriander or reggaeton. That take is just as cooked as your local religious dogma. The virtues you espouse make you who you are in a way that is much deeper than your birth name or sports team. They were neither invented nor handed down, but grew from all the ways you failed and were failed by others. You can’t escape the feeling of right and wrong in your body, and you act it out (eventually). Every action reinforces your virtue commitments, which in turn define who you are into the future. Every action from ethical concerns is an act of worship. You’ve heard that you are made in God’s image; the deeper truth is that you are making God in yours.

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You are what you worship

A couple of months ago in San Francisco, I was pacing around the kitchen with Richard and Ivan, talking about virtue ethics, identity, and God (as one does). We were circumambulating a cooking island and a conceptual synthesis. Each holding a different perspective, each on the move.

I knew that the self was a multiplicity, but I realised on that day that there is a stranger handle that explains more than traits and types: virtues. The virtues you espouse are the best predictor of your future behaviour, like a fingerprint. You might think I behave erratically, that I am a schizo octopus, if you don’t understand that I care about connection, aliveness, and creativity. That mix predicts me better than my passport, my hobbies, or my job ever could. I’ve travelled enough to be foreign to my homeland, and all of the other descriptors change frequently (neither MBTI nor the Enneagram can pin me down). But you can bet that I’ll follow that tingling in my chest to the next adventure if it feels like it’s in alignment.

Originally, smoking weed felt like it was serving my aliveness and creativity. After a joint, my limiting thoughts went up in smoke, and the world opened up with possibility. A decade later, the effect was numbness, and my preferred activities had become decidedly uncreative (getting high in two variations: listening to podcasts or watching movies). My habit and the life circumstances around it changed, but the underlying virtues stayed consistent.

The fingerprint isn’t the virtues themselves, but how you weigh them and how you settle the conflicts between them. To the extent that any of the common identity markers are descriptive, they also represent virtue commitments: A life coach who’s an Enneagram 4 will inevitably develop their own patented method™, because they value service and performing their individuality in equal measure. What Jung called the transcendent function takes two positions that seem to contradict and finds the secret third thing that honours both. Your personality is how you have managed to resolve the tensions between different virtues in yourself.

Virtue commitments are the glue that unites past, present, and future self.

Updating grandma’s priors

We don’t always live up to our own virtues. There was a long delay between when weed stopped supporting my aliveness and creativity, and me quitting. There was also a delay between the point where I perceived that this was true and where I could act on it. These periods of betraying my virtues had an ambient sense of dissonance to them. The Free Energy Principle (FEP) fits well here (bear with me): if your mind is a hierarchy of predictions, virtue commitments are deep in the hierarchy and only change reluctantly. The dissonance I was feeling was a prediction error, and I resolved it by changing my behaviour. It took me years because of the sinister shortcut of suppressing the dissonance and living in hypocrisy. There is no local anesthesia for emotions, so suppressing one feeling creates general numbness (which is demonically compatible with drug abuse).

Integrity is what it feels like when no internal prediction error is strobing to get your attention, when there are no conflicts between virtue commitments. Even if there is an inner conflict that you couldn’t resolve yet, you stay an effective social participant as long as you have what Richard calls coherence: the ability to act as one agent despite inner conflict. Hypocrisy buys coherence the way North Korea does, by pushing dissent into the darkest provinces of the self, and the rest of the inner population falls silent while watching. Integrity is when coherence comes from a resolution of the inner conflict, successfully performing the transcendent function.

Updating virtues is another way to resolve prediction errors but it’s exceedingly expensive. Tradition is a lighthouse for my grandmother, an orienting beam amongst the chaos of her fading memory and eyesight. It comes at the price of creating distance from her granddaughter by disapproving of her girlfriend. The virtue commitment sits so deep in the hierarchy that it will probably outlast even the names of her children. If you doubt the claim that virtues are foundational for identity, spend more time with old people.

Grandma is also why I can’t throw away food: a prior she picked up during the famine, long-expired, that now expresses itself mostly as my love handles. It’s telling that if I pretend the food belongs to somebody else, I suddenly don’t care that it gets thrown away. She can no longer revise her predictions, so I am revising them for her; resolving intergenerational trauma is running the updates late. The Free Energy principle account of virtue ethics is a steelman of “everything happens for a reason”: every persistent bias is a prediction that we haven’t updated yet, and every moral failure is an error signal helping us do just that.

Parallax

The dissonance of betraying your own virtues is not the only error signal on offer. A more disquieting version is watching someone live a different virtue fingerprint and being unable to dismiss them. You can tell they are in integrity, yet their behaviour does not fit with your own virtues. You encounter an error that your own lens could not have produced and are left with two sharp images refusing to fuse. It’s a fractal (surprise): the same operation that happens within a person, but running on the social scale. Understanding each other well enough to surface the third option is how the social layer updates and gains a dimension that no single member could see.

As on the personal level and so on the social level, virtues need to be balanced or they become a vice. An ironclad commitment to beauty above all else draws up its own ruins in advance, the way the Nazis designed their monuments to photograph well as rubble a thousand years on. The higher level of the fractal can hold even more of its tension unresolved, while smaller agents need resolution to stay coherent (even if that means repression).

The conservative party values tradition while the liberal party embraces innovation (which is what makes them both boring). Freedom without security isn’t free and security without freedom isn’t secure. Going all in on freedom might lead to a Mad Max wasteland where you are constantly in danger, and therefore not at all free to roam the playa. The totalitarian dictator that maximizes security breeds the secret police that will eventually knock on his own door.

Virtues that contradict each other in the abstract become fecund when they meet a concrete problem. In the example of drug policy, the tension is between freedom and safety. In a healthy society, the different virtues and the groups representing them are looking for a third solution that satisfies both of them. If it succeeds, two displaced images resolve into depth perception. Countries like Portugal or the Netherlands seem to have found such a solution: decriminalization without legalization. The population is protected from harmful substances without needing to demonize users. The US gets binocular rivalry instead: If two images are too far apart, the visual system doesn’t blend them but flip-flops between them, indefinitely. Prohibitionists and libertarians stopped talking, and the country has been alternating between the war on drugs and laissez-faire policy ever since. Each flip undoing the last, overdoses and drug incarcerations both climbing through every administration. Bateson called a split resulting from the breakdown of communication schismogenesis.

If these splits between different groups of societies seem like religious fractures, it’s because they are. Each combination of virtues is essentially a god. As we were pacing around the kitchen island like pilgrims at Mecca, we were re-enacting the hearth as the original altar of Hestia and Vesta, the sacred center of every house, attempting to bring together truth, integrity, and creativity. There used to be gods for every family, village, and craft because each of these required a specific integration of different virtues. An agent at any scale, a person, a household, an institution, is individuated by how it resolves the conflicts between the virtues it holds. A god is the result of a successful resolution.

Tantric practice works the same way: There are multiple meditation deities on offer, each a temple built from distinct combinations of virtues. The same Light falls on each temple, but the coloured glass of their windows breaks it into different hues. The different virtues that a deity holds are different doors into the temple — you actually have to choose a door and walk through it. I’m following my aliveness into the door of the Octopus. The figure of a deep-sea alien: a central brain with eight semi-autonomous arms, each with its own neural cluster and half-deciding on its own, while the whole creature still acts as one. My god is coherent pluralism without repression.

I bet that part of you wants to stare directly into the sun instead of choosing a spirit mascot. Well, you can’t. That Light that shines on every temple is impossible for you to occupy because you are the one that perceives it. This Light is God’s transcendent face: not one more eye up the scale, but the precondition for seeing. It’s not a fractal all the way.

No View From Nowhere (sorry)

The Good is real but inaccessible. While Karl Friston is not responsible for my theology, the FEP clarifies how to unite moral realism with local differences. The difference is between the prediction hierarchy (virtue commitments) you carry and the process out there generating the signal. The contact between the two happens at the Markov blanket where your self meets the world, predictions go out and errors come back. You never encounter the field of value directly. The dissonance of your own failures and the friction of undismissable others are the closest contact you get.

The reason is ontological before it is practical: God doesn’t have a global perspective and humans can’t help but. Shape rotating between all possible virtues is also computationally intractable, but that’s the lesser problem. More fundamentally, we are always looking from a particular vantage point with particular virtue tradeoffs and commitments, only seeing a facet of the Diamond, and the colours it currently reflects on us. The usual story is that we are all unique expressions of a single ground. I think it’s the other way around: We are building God’s growing face by being in integrity with our own virtues. The Übermensch is a dividual playing Exquisite Corpse.

What exists in actuality are the refractions at the surface, where the stone meets the world. The Light illuminating the Diamond, the uncut potential of the Good, can’t ever be expressed directly. It’s the virtual vanishing point where all virtues collapse into each other, the way white Light is every colour and therefore none. We meet it only at the surface, where the small gods are set like windows into the stone, each facet throwing the white Light into colours more beautiful than we could by ourselves.

It’s not your fault that you can’t see the whole thing. In fact, by looking through your particular eyes in the specific place you’re standing, you make the Good immanent. God comes into the world through your eyes. At the same time, you are perceiving the Good that was already there, approximating a whole you will never see in its entirety. Each new way to resolve tension between virtues is a new facet cut into the Diamond, a new angle for the Light to refract on. There is no other view of this corner of the universe, yours are the only eyes God gets to see this spot through.

God needs your mistakes

Stereoscopic vision works because both of your eyes are wrong. Each delivers a flat picture, displaced a few centimeters from the truth, and the brain gets the extra dimension by parsing that difference. No matter how big the eye of the cyclops, that one good eye is never going to see depth, which only ever comes as a synthesis of distortion. This is how the Diamond of the Good gets its depth, through a thousand eyes. You are one of those eyes, and your idiosyncratic virtue commitments are the displacement, including your biases and your shadow. As you perceive the field of value through the lens of your virtues, you can’t help but notice the gap between what you see and how you act. There is no totalizing view where all the lenses meet. The standard for the Good is local, perceived by you.

I’m not saying “make up your own morals”: While abstract thought and personal history will inevitably shape your virtue commitments, they are not invented by you. You can’t help the immediate feeling of right or wrong that is sometimes in conflict with the bits and pieces of moral philosophy you picked up at dinner parties. The fact that this depends on your local circumstances is what makes it work, not a limitation. I care about aliveness because I was numb for a long time. The environment that produced a numb boy now has to reckon with my insistence on feeling.

What about the fanatic, sincerely committed to a monstrous ideology, a terrible god? The fanatic is in touch with some virtue, and it holds up under the test of his own integrity. The tragedy of the fanatic is that he has stopped taking in new information. While the standard is local, the correction never is. Every harm he causes throws off prediction errors across the social field. In fact, if you feel any revulsion in reading this, that’s one of them. The objection rising in you is attempting to run parallax on my moral theory (which low key validates it, checkmate). A wrong view isn’t the danger because God runs on myopia. The danger is an eye that is disconnected and no longer receives error signals, alone in its terror looking out over the charnel ground.

Agents create gods at every scale. Each layer of the fractal is a model trained on the errors of the level below, life running one long inference on the Good. God is both what allows you to notice any errors and the sum of all virtue commitments across the fractal. God is the one Light thrown through a Diamond still being cut. So getting it wrong locally is how God gets it right globally. Your failures against your own commitments are the only training signal God ever receives.

As we were circling the kitchen island in SF, three different sets of virtue commitments were triangulating behind our dialogue. We each have different solutions for romantic agreements or for when a conversation should be held publicly or privately, each in integrity with our own virtue fingerprints. The differences between them lit up the interest we shared from different angles.

The kitchen island became an altar only as we walked it into being, catching glimpses of a goddess that embodies truth, integrity, and creativity. I believe we carried a bit of her allure into our different contexts, afforded by a slightly different angle of refraction that added depth to the colours we were wearing already. That’s the checklist for building new institutions and societies: Discover your own virtues and get in integrity with them. You become someone by aligning yourself with the colours of the Good you can perceive, tracing them back to a unique facet of the Diamond. Then, find people in integrity with different ones to argue and whirl with until you discover a new god worth worshipping. How you come to see is how God comes to be. I can only believe in a God I made up myself.

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Ink Trails:

• Legibility makes you trustworthy

• How integrity turns into influence

• Unique Self but pointed the other way: we’re still assembling God

My partner walked away after 10 minutes, my brother after 50. I watched the remaining 65 minutes of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors by myself, equally bewildered but somehow entranced. There is no plot; the protagonist Oscar jumps between completely unrelated scenes. Or there is too much plot. The whole thing is so saturated with narration that there is no more thread to follow.

Early in the day, Oscar climbs out of his limousine as a hunched, ancient beggar woman, mutters on a bridge for several minutes while being ignored by tourists, and gets back into the car to read the file for his next appointment. Over the course of the day, he will also become a motion-capture fuckboi, a disappointed father, a sewer-dwelling troll who kidnaps a fashion model, an accordion bandleader, and a killer who turns out to be the man he kills. Between each, he changes costume in the back of the limousine.

Near the middle of the film, the weary actor confesses he misses the cameras and is unsure there is any audience left. When asked why he carries on, he says the same reason he started: “The beauty of the act”. On that account, it doesn’t matter much whether anyone is watching (which is convenient, because in Carax’s case nobody really was). But the position of the implied spectator doesn’t go away. The world is a stage, even if you are only performing for yourself. And how we frame that position changes how meaning is made.

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“Do it for the plot” is Gen-Z’s version of “YOLO”. It emerged from TikTok in pandemic-era 2021, when most people’s milestones had collapsed and re-engagement with life needed a new permissioning. On the surface, it’s a reframe of potential negative outcomes. Even if you fail, you will at least have a good story to tell. “Do it for the plot“ decenters the present by treating it as one beat in a longer story, then demands you act anyway because plots don’t advance on their own.

Funhouse Mirrors

The TikTok version of the meme is helpful: it nudges you out of paralysis, and it places you in a universe of story. The implicit question is “Who is receiving that story?”. The empty slot of the beholder is the most interesting thing about the meme.

Most people will instinctively fill that slot according to their dominant mode of relating. For a meme that spread on TikTok, the default beholder is the social media audience. The anonymous and mostly imagined audience is the kind that fails Oscar in Holy Motors. People don’t give a shit about your story.

For the lucky or oppressed who spend more time in real-world social interactions than on screens, the beholder is intuitively filled with their partner, family, or friends. While probably healthier, this version inherits a deeper problem. Your dad, your partner, and your friend group sit at the same level as you, and what they see isn’t really you. It’s you filtered through what their psyche needs you to be. Performing for that gaze means subtly contorting yourself to fit their expectations. You might chase the image of your dad finally proud, except the original is of him withholding approval (which is more his problem than yours). You wouldn’t be the first to spend a life on that mirage.

Both the imagined audience and the relational other are on the same level as the self. If we fill in a beholder of a different order than the self, “Do it for the plot” can transcend the failure modes of Holy Motors and become a holy motor.

The Eye of the Beholder

When Oscar said he carries on performing “for the beauty of the act”, even if nobody is watching, he added a vertical dimension to the position of the beholder. Oscar is performing for the part of him that recognizes and appreciates beauty. It doesn’t matter whether we call that his inner artist, his soul, or his Daimon. It doesn’t even matter whether such a thing exists. We can only ever perceive an internalized version of the other's gaze. As such, the question is not whether the watcher exists, but what kind of image we hold of them. Different images of the beholder make different meanings of the same situations.

Like Oscar, Carax isn’t making a movie to please an audience. Even if the different vignettes lack any coherent narrative strand, they each have a startling aesthetic precision. With the imagined gaze of the inner artist, the beauty of each scene is what matters, not the plot. The choice of the beholder changes what the film is. “Do it for the plot” holds an esoteric secret: consciously choosing the beholder of your plot changes the meaning of everything you do.

This displaced witness has been named many things across traditions. What matters is that the beholder is of a different order than the ego doing the performing. Verticality has two axes: how other the beholder is, and how much time their gaze covers. A relatable version would be your future self on her deathbed. More traditional would be Jesus’ gaze, or the eyes of your ancestors.

The deathbed self is still you, just looking back. But the horizon of death reorders almost everything in front of it. You most certainly won’t remember the email you’ve been ruminating about (especially given your genetic predispositions). And maybe you should call your mom, for the plot. This beholder might make you take that trip to Japan you’ve been dreaming about.

If you choose something like the soul, a slower, older quality ensues. The plot becomes less of a linear story, and more mythical, archetypal. Your life starts to seem like a fairy tale or a dream. You don’t care as much about whether you got that promotion but whether you could overcome the patterns you’ve been repeating on the way. On the level of the soul, tragedy is more meaningful than comedy. Becoming a wounded healer is juicier than getting your back fixed. By this point, a little bit of other has worked its way into the self.

Further into the spectrum, we shift into a higher gear. Across traditions, there are figures right in the middle ground between self and other: the Jungian Animus/Anima, the Holy Guardian Angel of Western esotericism, the Daimon of the Ancient Greeks, the tantric personal deity. All partially other and partially self, but of a different order than the everyday ego. This is the range of the imaginal, where interior and exterior start to blur.

The figures are not interchangeable. The Daimon wants the art that’s specifically yours to deliver. The Holy Guardian Angel wants you to become the version of yourself who can play an active role in the unfolding of reality. The Anima irresistibly demands integration. Different figures also sit at different spots between self and other. While tantric deities are designed to point to qualities within yourself, their otherness is made unmistakable by, among other things, the number of arms. Each imaginal figure organizes a different life around itself. Performing for the Daimon and performing for the Anima produce different people. The vertical tension under this gaze becomes palpable. Your life becomes a test or an offering, depending on which figure you’ve chosen (or which one has chosen you).

Some beholders are fully other but still local, like spirits. That’s who Butoh dancers perform for, not the philistine eyes of a human audience. Spirits can see right through you, so the inner state of the dancer matters at least as much as the outer form. Depending on the spirit, they might care more about beauty or truth. They don’t owe you anything, which is what makes their recognition consecrating.

The Abrahamic Gods are so vertical that it starts getting creepy. Fully other, always watching, everywhere all at once. The dead and the unborn max out the temporal dimension too, but stay human. If your ancestors and descendants watch from outside your lifetime, consequence beats experience. Maybe working in AI safety is indeed the only thing that matters.

You Can’t Not Fabricate

But wait, you say, these watchers don’t exist. The deathbed self is just as much a projection as an internalized father figure, and the sheer range of possible gods and spirits and angels across traditions strongly suggests improvisation. Why should performing for them produce anything more than performing for the TikTok audience?

Try it out. The next time you are unsure about a decision, imagine that your future self watches from the deathbed, and do it for the plot. Chances are that work stuff suddenly seems less important while that trip to Japan you’ve been postponing for five years becomes obvious. Partly because you used to watch Naruto as a kid and loudly slurping ramen with bits in it you can’t quite identify would close a loop you’d otherwise leave open forever. The deathbed self produces the coherence that the social media audience lacks. There is no way out of performing for a fabricated watcher; the only question is which one. A consciously constructed vertical beholder is safer than the horizontal ones, which feed back their own projections until you’re performing in front of a funhouse mirror.

If the deathbed feels too tame, upshift into the imaginal register and invoke the Daimon. That’s the bastard who is bullying me into disguising Soulmaking Dharma as film critique instead of making bank by selling automation to boomers. For Oscar, it’s the limo driver who keeps getting him to the next scene. The daimonic gift is a calling that doesn’t trace cleanly back to your preferences.

The upper stratum of the beholder opens up into participation in a larger pattern. When performing for the gods becomes liturgy, the gesture is offered to more than yourself. And this might get more intense than what you wanted. Nothing bursts you out of an “it’s all made up” frame like theophany. I had psychedelic experiences where the reality of the gods I encountered was not up for debate, even if I didn’t know their names. I certainly didn’t consciously construct them. It can also happen with both feet on the ground, like my friend Tyler offering his dance moves to Dionysus and finding himself in a tangle of witchy ladies soon after.

Real Enough

Through all the range of possible beholders, the posture of “Do it for the plot” stays the same: clear desire and decisive action but with no lust for results. There is an improv theater principle for interesting characters:

“Give it fully, or fully take it away”

Both are equally interesting. People on their deathbed mostly regret risks they didn’t take, not the times when they fucked around and found out. And utter failure does make for a good story. You should have seen me stumble across a catwalk in drag last month. Imaginal beings have a real appetite for the transformation that heartbreak generates. And the gods care less about the chaos of mortal life than your TikTok followers, but they might bless you with a moment of eternity if you play your cards right.

This doesn’t mean detachment; you are fully invested in the story of your life, and so is the beholder. The stakes are high, and higher with each progressive shift in verticality. If we go too far too fast, we risk falling right back into paralysis. The thought of the eternal return can put such a crushing weight on which cereal to have for breakfast that you decide to skip it altogether, maybe forever.

The question of whether the beholder is real becomes less interesting once you notice the effects on your life are. Pragmatism is where researchers, psychonauts, and mystics meet for tea.

And yet whether we see the beholder as real changes how it affects us. The realness is part of the construction (the hardest part). Luckily, you don’t need to visualize a deity at 1080p, down to the facets of the diamond in her tiara to get the effect. The modernist stance of dismissing the Daimon as a made-up projection will dampen it. Naively believing the Daimon is a metaphysical fact and obeying it literally will get you to a psych ward faster than you can say Eudaimonia.

Between these failure modes is Rob Burbea’s “imaginal middle way”, the stance of neither affirming nor denying the reality of an image. Fabrication is the throttle, emptiness is the brakes. This middle way is what distinguishes the practice from naive belief on one side and modern dismissal on the other. So if the eternal return crushes you, hit the brakes: It’s just a thought experiment.

Out the Bottom

Sometimes the brakes are the whole answer. The initial “Fuck it” version of “Do it for the plot” is a necessary move to have in our repertoire. The decentering loosens the grip on outcomes because we reframe from the beholder’s view, and sometimes the right beholder is the empty set. Nihilism is a trap door out of paralysis. If nothing matters and you don’t really care what happens to you anymore, you suddenly find yourself free, despite the numbness in your stomach. Buckminster Fuller became Buckminster Fuller only after he wanted to kill himself and decided to run a few more experiments before that.

A direct experience of emptiness has the same function. While fabrication is not optional for most people, it is rumored that it can be suspended entirely at the further reaches of meditative attainment. From the absolute view, it’s all sparkling bliss-consciousness, all lives are equal, and no action is finally consequential. The recognition that there is no big Other, no final guarantor of meaning, is the deepest kind of freedom. But skillfully constructing one anyway can lead to richer meaning and a more enchanted life.

“Do it for the plot” is a trap door into meaning, dropping through the bottom of nihilism and upshifting through the registers. What matters most isn’t which beholder you choose but noticing who currently fills the slot, and toggling between them is how you get an engine for meaning. The rest is just driving.

Whether Oscar’s inner artist is real is the wrong question. By the end of the film, he’s still going, still climbing into the limousine for the next role. The audience is gone, and the cameras may not be running, but the performance continues because he dances for the spirits. The beauty of the act is real.

Want to conjure angels together? Book a coaching call.

Do it for the plot

Ink Trails:

• Profilicity describes the internalized social media audience

• Jungian depth psychology adds otherness within the self

• Crafting frames is a similar practice from the side of the self

• Witchy ladies: check out Gordon’s take on the meme (rest in power) and Layman on the implied watcher in ritual

“How can I be 100x more ambitious?” is a text I got from a dear friend. My gut made a backflip. I told him I didn’t think ambition was his bottleneck. If anything, he already had too much of it, which is what happens when you spend your days online in a culture built by Silicon Valley. Millions of entrepreneurs believed Naval Ravikant and Paul Graham that success is a matter of levering yourself up with tech and capital. The people who want to save the world call it “impact” instead. Everyone remembers Archimedes’ lever, everyone wants to personally move the world, and everyone forgets the place to stand.

I use words like “bottleneck” because I too have been a member of the leverage cult (not Leverage Research, but the name tells on itself). My reaction was visceral because I recognized the same upside-down thinking that had me following other people’s scripts for years. I would never have guessed my dream of being a founder came from trauma, and that the impostor syndrome was a signal after all. The leverage gospel runs deep, and the second half of the Archimedes line is overdue.

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Fake Ambition

When I was larping as a startup founder, we pivoted four times because the market wasn’t big enough or the moat was not durable enough. When we finally landed on something that convinced the VCs to give us $10 million after three years, it was unrecognizable from the initial idea, and I was already burnt out. What we had in common with all the other pivoting founders is working backwards from the outcome. The startup needs to be able to paint a billion-dollar outcome for the venture to be fundable (that’s just how the fund maths works out). As a result, founders search for an idea that ticks all the boxes instead of building what they actually want to build. This is the YC equivalent of studying to the test. The irony is that founders of actual unicorns didn’t get there by wanting to build a unicorn. Most of them also didn’t want to “change the world”, even if they say that in interviews after the fact.

Walking backwards from the result is fake ambition. It’s the cargo cult version that tries to mimic the outward signs of greatness by following a cookie-cutter playbook. I remember what it felt like to be a cargo puppy obsessed with levers. Because my letter to Hogwarts never arrived, I wanted the world to validate the specialness I perceived from the inside. Technology seemed like the biggest social force around, and founding a startup the best available move within tech. I could have learned the lesson while trying to change the world.

The do-gooder version of the cargo puppy wants to become a millionaire in terms of lives changed. They want to draw a direct causal line from their actions to an impressive metric like lives saved, which is why mosquito nets against malaria are overdone now. The lever is capital too, further potentiated by arbitraging cost differences to the developing world. In the WEF global shapers version of the archetype, institutional position also adds leverage. Either way, they are working backwards from the result with their ambition organized as identity. I donated to Against Malaria, even if not anywhere close to competing in the altruist olympics. I carefully selected my carbon indulgence letter, picking a charity that defended strategic regions of the Amazon rather than buying generic offsets. It makes sense to apply effectiveness reasoning to specific decisions. What I didn’t notice at the time was that the donations came from a sense of personal insufficiency. The hidden variable driving all cargo puppies is the vague sense of not good enough. We think backwards from the outcome because the levers are really prostheses.

Scale Matters

A particularly bold gut bacterium decided to address the Excess Glucose Crisis. Meanwhile you finish your Coke thinking about Methane Release from the Boreal Permafrost.

The bacterium can’t see the system it’s trying to influence, and even if it could, it couldn’t begin to fathom its complexity. You’re in the same situation when it comes to global issues like climate change. Planning at civilizational scale as a single person is a category error.

Hyperobjects can’t be personal projects.

A single human doesn’t have the processing power to model them or the affordances to act on them. You’ll be dead before the feedback loop closes. A puppy barking at a cargo ship as if that could turn it from the port.

Suppose you tried anyway. In order to personally counter civilizational collapse, you’d need a pretty big lever. Such a gargantuan lever that you would have to devote your entire life to amassing that much power. As a power maxxer, you would not have time to develop the wisdom that would be required to wield such power. Instead, you would have narrowed your life into a single vector, probably pointing in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter which version of the script you are running; capitalists and activists converge at the same vanishing point. I have come to immediately distrust anyone who frames their existence in terms of a “life mission”.

Most people don’t have enough conviction or trauma to actually try becoming Elon Musk. I didn’t want to make the sacrifices necessary for success in the founder track. What burned me out was realizing how much more obsessive focus would have been needed. In that sense, the imposter syndrome was correct. Ambition that is slightly beyond your reach is motivating but make that gap orders of magnitude and it becomes so crushing it’s dissociative. The cargo puppy gets to chase a bigger stick forever because the ambition was never reachable. That’s by design, because failing at a heroic mission is cooler than succeeding in an ordinary life. And less risky, ironically. You can keep pretending to want to save the world for the rest of your life without ever having to find out what you are capable of.

None of this means that you shouldn’t have ambitions and plans or want a lever. The question is where you would stand if you got one.

Ambition scales with Agency

I feel more ambitious now than I ever felt as a founder. I’m immersed in a cloud of ambition, enticing in many directions at once, instead of a target I march towards.

A few years ago I wrote an essay that framed my favorite thinkers as all building pieces of an emerging metamodern world religion without coordinating. I was DJing with ideas, highlighting resonances and working transitions between them. Hanzi Freinacht, who lit me up years prior, republished it on his blog. That essay was the conversation starter that led to my friendship with fellow octopus lover Stephen. He later told me that the piece had been discussed at the foundation of Rob Burbea, a meditation teacher whose work had reshaped the way I see the world. The piece had a tiny readership, the kind a cargo puppy would dismiss as irrelevant. But I went from being a consumer of ideas into relationships with people I admired in a way I couldn’t have planned.

The cargo puppy pushes down a narrow vector with willpower. Its ambition constitutes its identity (“I am a founder”), a constant marketing campaign against a felt sense of lack. In contrast, dividual ambition feels like natural unfolding, a gentle pull of curiosity and desire. I’m surprised, years on, that I still want to write the next essay.

The cloud of ambition opens up into schemes that can’t fit inside a single life: I want to live in a chosen tribe where care and play are abundant, but we want to abolish suffering. Dividual ambition allows for plans no single person could execute, without needing profit capture or metrics to hold them together. We all win if we get there, and it doesn’t matter much who gets how much of the credit.

Megalomania done right is a fractal.

Ambition grows with the size of the group and the time horizon it identifies with. As a squad, we can build a porous company for continuous learning that lasts decades. The intersecting movements of cypherpunks and governance nerds can grow new currencies and network nations over centuries. As humanity, we can attempt the abolition of suffering over millennia. Each level of the fractal carries more agency than the one below it. Agency pulls ambition forward, and ambition pulls you to the next level. Dividual ambition is the world’s only perpetual motion machine.

The level I most identify with is the Open Conspiracy of Dreamers and Doers. Most of the people who matter to me are in it. It is the loosely connected cabal of feral free agents across many subcultures and undercover cells inside institutions who are actively working towards an uplifting vision of the future. We recognize each other by playing infinite games and by the glimmer in the eye.

We meet in person too. My friend Simon hosts a yearly gathering called Treeweek for about fifty weirdos, where I have deepened old friendships and new ones started. The fruits of those relationships percolate out through the rest of the web as increased emotional capacity, as business adventures and art projects. None of this can be traced to a single decision or attributed to a single person. Like a tree in a forest, an ambitious life serves uncountable purposes across scales. The cargo puppy cuts the tree down to make a plank to lift a specific weight.

You are a limb of the world, not the captain of your contribution. The world can move you in return.

100x Agency

The world moved me to write this piece with the text of my friend. Here is how I wish I had answered it:

“We are already 100x more ambitious, just not in a way that is legible to the cargo cult of leverage.”

The false dichotomy of ambition versus humility dissolves once we look beyond individualism. Ambition grows naturally as we zoom out the fractal, because ambition is in relationship with agency, and we can achieve much more as collectives than as individuals.

It’s also true that agency is not uniformly distributed. Even though I wouldn’t call us “thoughtful, committed citizens,” we are a small group that is changing the world. If you are part of the Open Conspiracy, life wants to move through you to make stuff happen.

Look around. Where are you standing, and who’s next to you? Is this really your spot?

How would you know?

It’s an open conspiracy, but you can still pay me to onboard you

Step in

Ink Trails:

• Agency pulls ambition pulls agency

• The cargo puppy aims too narrowly

• The Open Conspiracy is already playing New Game+

Right, right, left, right. You are sitting on the toilet swiping. Your thumb has learned your preferences well enough to swipe faster than your mind can weigh in. You’ve gone more omnivorous lately, because the math for a sub-80th-percentile male is what it is. Maybe you are rushing because you can feel how every stroke is subtly degrading you by entraining the most blunt of male gazes (hot or not?) while the conversion rate is reminding you how unworthy of female desire you are. It’s just as bad for the ladies, I hear, in a different way: inundated by autocomplete opens that are the rhetorical equivalent of dick pics, plus the occasional rando holding a fish.

Shouldn’t this be easier? We have phones that can hail a car from anywhere on earth, translate a Cantonese menu in real time, summon Tarkovsky or a sleep-deprived Brazilian streaming Geometry Dash. Romantic coordination is one of the oldest problems humans have, and the entire history of technology has been the story of solving coordination problems. Why is dating so broken?

Nearly half of Americans under thirty are single. Friend-mediated meeting fell from forty percent to twenty percent between 1995 and 2017. The share of young men reporting no recent sexual activity has roughly tripled in a decade. In the same period, $150,000-per-year matchmaking services have quietly become a thriving boutique industry. Somewhere along the way, getting laid started looking like a luxury good.

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The shape of the problem keeps recurring. Stock markets pointing up and to the right while normal people struggle to make ends meet. Shelves full of pop tarts and short on tomatoes. Material abundance at unprecedented scale, relational poverty alongside it. Markets are the most powerful coordination technology ever invented, and the root of evil. Economists and sociologists have been at each other’s throats over this for a century because none of them are trained in Zen koans.

Leviathan’s Tongue

Markets start with taste, the fact that humans want some things rather than others, and different humans want different things. You can’t argue about taste: the economist doesn’t ask why you want the thing, only what you’ll pay. Everybody comes in with their own taste and the market aggregates them into a demand function, that then, as it is matched with supply, creates a price. If the Leviathan is the collective body individuals assemble into, markets are the tongue of the giant.

For individual preferences to aggregate into this collective sense organ, they need to be normalized, compressed. The factory in Shenzhen can’t act on your longing for a felt sense full of potential around every corner while simultaneously having nothing to prove, but it can make a Mac Mini for $300. The dating app can’t act on your wanting somebody who gets both your kinks and your tasteful economics metaphors, but it can serve you a face and a horoscope. Markets transform rich private preferences into lossy encodings that can travel across physical and cultural distance.

Compression is not a problem in itself. The tongue is an evolutionary marvel: It compresses an enormous range of chemical signals into five scalar values and produces a coherent verdict in milliseconds. Markets perform the equivalent for billions of dispersed wants, and it’s the best way we’ve found to coordinate the economy (solving Hayek’s knowledge problem that haunted central planners). Yes, the lack of a better information aggregation mechanism is why we can’t have nice things (communism). Look around. Most items in your field of vision have been produced in this way.

This is the compression stack that information flows through before it reaches the market.

It started as a longing for someone who gets you, somewhere between your chest and your gut. It comes out as “tfw no gf”. Sweet and salt have words, but the body’s slower hungers don’t. Then language hands it to currency, which wants a number. If it feels weird to compare a Tinder Gold subscription with a matchmaker, or Grok’s AI companion with getting back together with your high school sweetheart, it’s because it is. By normalizing, we lose the relational texture, which in this case, is most of what matters. Then, contracts. You can’t buy “a juicy and meaningful relationship” because no court could enforce it. What you can buy is unlimited likes, one super-like, and a thirty-minute visibility boost for $9.99 per month. The final translation is done by the corporation from contracts into dashboards. Tinder is tracking customer lifetime value, which means it wants you to keep paying, and for that, it would be convenient if you stayed single. Goodhart’s law runs the feedback loop, and the optimized product drifts further from the want it started with, while you slowly get gaslit into believing you wanted cotton candy instead of a home-cooked meal.

Sawdust in your Coffee

I never intended the fact that I met my partner through friends to be a flex. Overlapping social context like friends, work, or a scene used to be how almost every couple met. The social embedding produced natural filtering and long evaluation periods. The occasional introductions by friends had skin-in-the-game because of reputation. Dating apps compressed this rich ecology into a bilateral transaction based on swiping pictures that sometimes include a height in centimeters.

Baumol noticed in 1966 that while the labor input for a string quartet hasn’t changed, the cost rose enormously because productivity gains pulled labor costs up across the economy. Services (where labor is the main input), from teaching to therapy (and yes, matchmaking) become more expensive while cheap substitutes flood the market. AI accelerates this to a whole new level: Any service needs to be either scaled and productized to compete with cheap offers for the masses or become a boutique offering for the few who can afford it. This dynamic is the same that led to merchants stretching coffee with sawdust in the 1800s.

The displacement compounds because the cheap proxy doesn’t just out-compete the fuller version on price; it erodes the conditions the fuller version needed to exist at all. The dating apps lead to bars and other meeting places being less frequented. As the marginal user switches to the apps instead of going out, meeting IRL becomes rarer and approaching someone in a coffee shop starts to feel like a misdemeanor.

Finally, people who have never experienced the real thing adapt their preferences to what’s available. Sugar trains the tongue to crave more sweetness until fruit only tastes sour, and Ben & Jerry’s Double Chocolate Fudge only seems like a moderate treat (you can’t take it away from me). A generation trained on dating apps will report, sincerely, that meeting someone through friends feels weird and inefficient. The umami of real connection doesn’t even register because there are no receptors for it. The two Ronalds (McDonald and Reagan) have been running this play, as above so below, until we forgot what real food tasted like.

Can We Patch This Thing

Leviathan’s tongue is lossy at every stage, and the losses compound. The obvious move is to make more of what matters survive the trip from the body to the trading floor, even if some of those interventions are a bit of an acquired taste.

Currency is the deepest compression we routinely accept without noticing. Every want, no matter how strange, gets normalized into a single comparable scalar before it touches the market. But normalization doesn’t require monoculture. While the global economy runs on dollars, the world doesn’t. Whether you denominate your contracts in USD, Yuan, or Bitcoin already expresses your alliances. There’s room for many more. Resource-backed currencies could carry planetary boundaries directly into the price. Robin Hanson’s sacred money can only be spent on sacred activities, with friction at the boundary where it converts into the ordinary kind. Reddit karma is already a version of this, badly. Tuned for improving the social fabric, a similar currency can buy you an introduction but not a swipe.

Contracts are where the demand side gets a chance to push back (and mostly fails). The boilerplate gets written by the supply side; take it or leave it. The fix is for the contract to track the actual want underneath. Matchmakers are the existing proof of concept: they get commission on marriages, not matches, which keeps the contract aligned with what the client came for. Their agreements are thicker too, with room for the qualitative parts that a Tinder EULA can’t hold. AI changes what’s possible. Consumer unions, organized through market intermediaries, could allow scattered wants to negotiate as a bloc against a corporation.

A corporation optimizes what’s measurable because that’s the definition of a corporation. Asking it to care about umami is asking a tongue to listen. Metric pluralism without structural change is greenwashing on a longer timeline. The only real intervention is upstream, in how the entity is set up to begin with. Companies that encode a larger purpose at the level of governance can run a triple bottom line and mean it. The rest will run whatever number ends in shareholder return, and do it well. It’s the retention dashboard that wants you single. Tinder is just the muscle that obliges.

Language is the one you can’t really fix. Somatic literacy doesn’t scale, and the wants that matter most resist articulation anyway. What you can do is build rooms where they don’t have to be articulated. Parks, libraries, scenes that meet on Tuesdays for no reason; the holy ground of illegibility.

Don’t put that in your Mouth

The usual critique of markets stays inside the cathedral: information failures, externalities, and power asymmetries. All real, all patchable in principle. Consumer unions can counteract corporate organization; better contracts can hold qualitative wants; sacred currencies can keep certain things from being convertible at all. Sometimes the market is the right tool badly calibrated.

Other times it’s the wrong tool entirely, and no amount of recalibration will help. The tongue evolved to recognize sweet and salt in milliseconds. It can name umami too, but slowly, and only when nothing else is shouting. It cannot tell you whether eating octopus is ethical (you go to hell for it). Some things just aren’t tasteable.

The moral argument against marketization is that some domains get corrupted by it. The mechanism design point comes first: some domains can’t be marketized because the market can’t perceive what’s there. Dating is one of them. What you want from a partner is the kind of thing that dies on the way to articulation, let alone price. Your friend’s reputation and the park where nothing is asked of you run on different senses entirely. Leviathan’s tongue was never the one for this job. You can run your tongue across every note in the score, and you won’t hear a single bar.

Ink Trails:

• Corporations need to be set up differently to hold a purpose larger than the metric

• AI reduces transactions costs, enabling new modes of economic interactions

• Trust enables cooperation that isn’t market-based

Grandmother got up before dawn. She milked the cow and put the porridge on, and only then drank coffee, because drinking it before it was earned would have been obscene. In spring, she put nettle in her tea to clean the blood. She smoked one cigarette a day, at the kitchen window, after the midday meal, and everyone knew not to speak to her while she did.

Andrew wakes to a 10,000-lux lamp he’s programmed to switch on at five a.m., because early photons calibrate the circadian rhythm and suppress afternoon cortisol drift. He later steps outside to let actual sunlight reach his anus, an old Taoist practice. In the afternoon, he will tell thousands of listeners how to move efficiently through grief. Just follow the protocol.

Iron, then Sourdough, then Death

The gym is where it all started. The masculine urge to reform one’s own body, to will toned pectorals into being by pushing iron through pain. Kind of hot (no homo). It didn’t stop at iron.

“Did you add ashwagandha to your stack?”

“Where do you get your raw milk? Nah, that farm’s soil is depleted. I’ll hook you up.”

“Can you watch my sourdough culture while I’m traveling? It’s from a monastery in Puglia, sixth generation.”

Sourdough cultures have lineages the way racehorses do. Grandmother also had a sourdough, but nobody in the village was ranking it, because the game was whether the bread was good, not whether your starter could beat the others in a genealogical pissing contest. Once the men arrive, they introduce measurement and rankings, and the domain goes from a normal distribution where most people are roughly competent to a power-law distribution where someone is always fermenting at a higher altitude than you. The men’s kitchen is Extremistan, and it’s expanding into other domains. You need to stay at least 20 minutes in the sauna, or the heat shock protein doesn’t release. If you are doing Wim Hof breathing before the cold plunge, you are getting mogged by somebody doing gTummo. Each of these claims has a study behind it, and we’ve read them (or at least listened to the podcast that summarizes the summaries).

Competition is the system prompt of testosterone.

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Somewhere between the heart rate variability and the creatine, the bros figured out that unprocessed emotions clog the body like gunk in the pipes. I never learned to talk about feelings growing up, so I just stopped feeling them. It took screaming like a fire demon, throwing tantrums, being cradled by pretend parents, and a dude grabbing me by the balls and yelling “what do you stand for?!” to restore contact with anger and sadness. None of which would have been legible to grandma, and most of it isn’t legible to us either, which is why we end up with lists like “vulnerable, impartial, empathetic, and wonder.”

The men’s group wasn’t enough either, so the boys started reading the Desert Fathers. Some of us went beyond growing beards and generating icons with Midjourney.

“Getting baptized, at the end of the day, is pouring water on plants at the level of the soul.”

Grandma’s spheres of influence are steadily turning into the manosphere.

Food, the body, health, emotions, family, spirituality. Even death: bro is graphing his son’s nocturnal erections against his own to live longer.

Reversal is the Name of the Tao

Charged polarities invert into one another at their extremes. Political historians agree with the I Ching: free speech was a radical left cause at Berkeley in 1964 and became a right-wing rallying cry by 2020, though the actual position never changed. The same reversal is playing out culturally: the institutions that mattered in 2010 are now embarrassing to name as an employer.

It’s not as simple as yin and yang trading places. We can see the pattern more clearly by distinguishing between the shape of the container and the energy moving through it. Containers come in two shapes native to your nervous system: kiki and bouba. The office is kiki: sharp edges, an org chart, the meeting starts at 10:00. The kitchen is bouba: porous, networked, rules implicit in vegetable chopping stigmergy. Yin and yang is the axis of energy: yang contests, builds, and takes initiative while yin gathers, weaves, and tends. Domains used to sort cleanly by energy. The kitchen ran on yin energy and the office on yang energy for long enough that we started conflating them, which was fine until it was sexist.

Yes, I’m making a 2x2 from a meme with cog-sci roots and an esoteric cosmology. This is Octopusyarn, get with the program or bounce off my kiki.

Grandma’s kitchen (1) ran for centuries on yin energy in a bouba container. Yang energy first entered the bouba container to create the village and the farm. Then modernity arrived with yang-kiki and built the office and the factory. This configuration crushed it for decades and put a man on the moon. But fixed gender roles stopped working: dad at the office distilling frustration into whiskey, mom at home vaporizing hers into valium, the children largely ignored. De Beauvoir’s critique was overdue and correct, and feminism’s march through the institutions followed.

With the patience of a river expanding its basin, women got committees and hearings and eventually tenure. Yin energy is just better at institutional capture than yang. Yang fights, wins or loses, and goes home, while yin joins the committee. The walls of Harvard stayed where they were, but slowly different people walked through the doors, and the energy inside turned yin (3). Meanwhile the kitchen was empty and the door open.

In the new century, the pathology of kiki-yin became pervasive. Every edge of the container needs to be defined procedurally to ensure fairness because nobody has the yang to make a judgement call. HR-mediated consensus has turned the workplace into a process shoggoth, the professor who says the wrong thing gets a Title IX complaint instead of an argument, and the builders have already left. They walked into the kitchen (4) and started running protocols on their own nervous systems.

The Builders Already Left

The reactionary critique is correct and perfectly useless. The old kiki institutions run every decision through legal, HR, comms, and three levels of compliance before anyone can act on it. Meanwhile, the economy runs on GPUs; by the time the internal email clears legal, the product it was about is obsolete. And the yang energy that might have restructured them walked out a decade ago.

If you’re a builder, you walk away rather than run every utterance past three audiences in your head before it leaves your mouth. In an environment designed to prevent any wrong move, not moving becomes the wrong move. So the yang-energy people went to the bouba spaces the old yang had ignored: the body, spirituality, the group chat, the kitchen. I ended up in the kitchen myself after leaving the big tech career track, cooking between calls with internet strangers who turned into friends.

The most ambitious founders of the 2020s aren’t building institutions, much less working for existing ones. They’re building social movements in abandoned bouba territory. Grandma got too old to cook, the kitchen sat quiet for a while, and then the enterprising grandson moved in and started running a delivery shack out of it. Huberman is a movement with a podcast, while Bryan Johnson has a supplement line. Ido Portal teaches movement and Joe Hudson teaches emotions, and people pay Ivy League fees for both.

It’s not really grandma’s kitchen anymore with the pullup bar, the amber light screens, and the starlink on top. But they are cooking in the room she used to cook in. If they come up with anything that works, it starts looking more like a tribe than an institution. Bouba containers, but built deliberately rather than inherited. Running a men’s circle and a homestead does more than writing manifestos about storming an abandoned building. Yang walked out of the containers it built, and them boys took over the kitchen instead.

You Dropped Something, Queen

Yin energy had already abandoned the kitchen on its way to the boardroom. The daughters wanted to go to college instead of learning grandma’s recipes. Mainstream feminism spent fifty years teaching women that the office was where real life happened and the kitchen was where the patriarchy was exploiting them.

Emma moved to the big city. She came back for Christmas, and when her mother put her in front of the oven to help with the walnut cookies that had tipped family members into gluttony for three generations, Emma said she had a deadline on Monday. The kitchen had been a school and a workshop and a court of appeals for four generations, and it was about to become a room Emma passed through on her way somewhere else.

Emma’s generation wanted to stand on their own two feet, but the pursuit of female autonomy trips over motherhood: you can have bodily autonomy, or you can have a baby. Mary Harrington calls feminism that pursues women’s independence at all costs “the attempt to liberate women from the need to be female.” Reactionary feminism rejects the pursuit of sameness from within the movement. It wants to treat the differences as real and rebuild the domestic in some configuration that balances freedom and interdependence.

Some women, after moving through a sequence of feminisms, come back to bouba territory on their own terms. They are surprised to find a bunch of men already there, talking about their feelings around the kitchen table they took over while feminism was in the boardroom. The feminist who still acknowledges biological differences and the homesteading dad walked into grandma’s kitchen from opposite doors.

He’s come from a HIIT in the forest; she’s come from the city’s best law firm. They marry with their own syncretic ceremony. Neither of them grew up knowing how to make the nettle tea, but they trust they will figure it out together. When she points out that idolising a fictional grandma in a piece on the new masculinity is kitsch, he hears it as a gift. (She didn’t even mention the Bechdel test.)

Build the Kami Machines

The same move of yang energy into bouba territory is happening three scales up. What the bros did to the kitchen, ecomodernism is trying to do to environmentalism, and the GLP-1 clinics are doing to public health.

Environmentalism for fifty years was the old configuration: yin energy inside the kiki container of regulation and treaty-making, which produced generalized guilt and eager European compliance with recycling. Public health ran the same broken setup: telling people to move more and eat whole grains while obesity climbed.

Then Ozempic did in six months what top-down nutrition bullying couldn’t, and TRT clinics are fixing depressions that a decade of standard medical interventions couldn’t touch. Ecomodernism makes the same swap: networked sensors, proactive rewilding, gene-edited vertical farms that free up more land for actual nature than any amount of suburban solar will. The easiest path to more nature runs through more technology, not less. Let’s build the machines of loving grace that will watch over our forests like the kami used to.

This isn’t optional. Yin energy inside a kiki container produces the same paralysis in Brussels that it produces in a Harvard department meeting, and we’re running out of time to fix things at that pace. The slow-motion train wreck of climate, fertility collapse, and nuclear risk (to name a few) is speeding up. The loneliness epidemic and the degraded information ecology aren’t going to fix themselves either. Our most realistic chance is people willing to act outside ossified containers. The committees have spent decades proving they can’t.

The danger scales with the promise: Germany’s first major youth back-to-nature movement dressed in flowing robes, went nude in the forest, rejected industry, and thirty years later was absorbed into the Hitler Youth. The sylvan elves ended with swastikas in the forest. Yang-bouba at scale has gone bad before by crystallizing into authoritarian yang-kiki. It can go bad again.

Holy Impatience

Grandma shuffles to the window with steady determination. She can’t cook anymore, and she doesn’t need to. Her job now is to slice through bullshit with a cursory glance of weary annoyance. As she lights her cigarette, the boys go silent. The smoke just obliterated the effect of several health protocols.

The men who left the institutions to escape procedural capture have done something funny. They now run more protocols on their own nervous systems than HR ever ran on their departments.

In the eleventh century, the monks of Cluny took a vow of silence and developed a system of hand signals so elaborate that they could hold entire conversations over dinner without technically speaking. Over time, the gestural vocabulary grew so convoluted that the silence was louder than speech. The bros have done the same to their bodies.

A continuous glucose monitor turns eating into a game of Tiny Wings. The sixth-generation sourdough produces bread no better than grandmother’s, but it produces a leaderboard. Believe me, I know the luciferian seduction of a graph moving up and to the right. The men escaped the kiki container and built smaller ones inside themselves, and they didn’t see it until grandma lit a cigarette.

Grandma is the matriarch, not anyone’s parent or partner. While walking into the kitchen from opposite sides can smooth out gender relations, the missing piece is elderhood. Grandma’s holy impatience comes from being close to death; her sense for how bouba moves comes from having lived her whole life in it. The bros had been trying to build her out of breathwork and accountability partners, when what was actually needed was a woman in her eighties who has never heard of a circadian rhythm and does not give a damn about what you stand for.

The other thing the yang kitchen needs is a lawyer. The bros’ brilliant plan to grant legal status to rivers that dynamically mint cryptocurrency based on water-quality sensors still has to be executed, which means an array of suits who will not be moved by your account of the Iboga ceremony. You can reject every structure modernity has produced and still find yourself in a room with a civil servant who needs the form filled out in capital letters. Luckily, someone at the table used to work at the law firm and knows who to call from the old days.

The center for cyborg shamanism’s pilot project on legal status for natural commons got approved last month. The old lady in the corner had nothing to say about it, to the relief of the boys. Forest nazis were always the obvious worry. Grandma is there for the subtler one: Goodhart’s law.

Ink Trails:

• Cyborgs are what happens when builders walk out of the corporation too

• Mammon is the archdemon of optimization

• Goodhart’s law is one symptom of the measurement trap

I learned to draw will-lines through addiction. Drawing the line requires a lot of effort, but once it is drawn clearly without any gaps, following it is easy. I don’t have to think about whether to smoke anymore; the decision is made. It is my will not to smoke.

The most common application of will is in this negative capacity. Ask someone about the moments that changed their life, and you’ll hear refusal before ambition: “I couldn’t keep living like that.” The body draws the line before the mind has a plan. It’s much safer to say no than to say yes because the future has many moving pieces, and it’s easier to know which ones you don’t want. Religious commandments figured this out early: thou shalt not. The positive application of will is what some weirdos call magic(k), “the art of causing change to occur in conformity with will”.

Last year, I decided to take writing more seriously and publish every two weeks. What surprised me is the strength of the commitment: I haven’t missed a Publishing Thursday despite travels and retreats. Instead of postponing the deadline, my system snaps into overdrive whenever necessary. This is a smaller line than quitting smoking, but the mechanism is the same: once drawn, following it is easy. Even if there is still friction in enacting it (I just ate half a loaf of bread for dessert to distract myself from the resistance towards writing this), the line holds.

The resistance towards writing isn’t coming from the same place as the commitment. The part of me that escapes from the empty page to the kitchen operates at a lower level than the one that decided to publish every two weeks. Once you notice the diversity of willing inside yourself, you start seeing it everywhere.

The World as Will

Will-lines criss-cross around us, above and beneath us, through us. Hunger and thirst are not yours, but the will to live that life itself has smeared over anything that breathes. Sexual desire, ambition, or the will to develop are all transpersonal; you are merely the pen that extends them another stroke. Even gravity could be seen as the will of matter to soothe itself with touch.

Those lines don’t just cross on a flat plane; they stack. Each holon includes the ones beneath it: matter in biology, biology in minds, minds in the techno-social fields we swim in. The will to live runs continuously: Your gut bacteria want sugar, your nation state GDP, and you’re in the middle, thinking about lunch. Another line, the will to reproduce, bends as it passes through new levels, becoming eroticism and even art (evolution is still in shock). A chicken might stay attuned to a seed across a yard while adapting to changes in the environment. You might hold a ten-year intention to see a painting on the other side of the planet while also wanting Pad Thai.

Schopenhauer lost hope when he outlined a similar view because he saw a single, blind force tearing through itself from every angle. I might have agreed when I was still getting high every day and calling it a lifestyle. There is both order and choice, but they must be earned. As new layers of complexity emerge, they are initially highly dependent on their predecessors. The emotions we had as children provide the blueprint for our personality. But as the personality forms, it can increasingly regulate the emotional layer.

While a part can only hold one emotion, the self can hold several at once. Groups can hold internal ideological contradictions better than most people (who tend to pick sides). Each holon holds more contradiction once the will-lines in the layers below have aligned enough to provide a floor for it. That’s why a higher level of emergence can influence the layers beneath it by default (biology rearranges its own matter all the time). The harder direction is upward. A lower layer can only reach into the one above it through an excess of coherence, a surplus generated by a high degree of internal alignment. With enough clarity and determination, the individual can change the direction of the group.

Egregores are particularly good at enlisting you in their will because they come with a built-in enemy. You feel like you are opposing an egregore, but you are actually supporting it because you are only seeing a part. For instance, AI salvation vs. AI doom look like opposing camps, but they’re one organism. Every leap in capability is used by both sides since more power means more magic and more danger, and each side points to the other to justify its escalation. The conversation stays on AI either way, which is all the egregore needs. I can feel both heads pulling inside me. I’ve workshopped this very example with Claude (oh, sweet irony). I’m drunk on my new capacity to churn out landing pages while I’m embarrassed about the perfectly smooth inconsistencies in my website copy. And most of all, I wonder how exactly a late-night exploration of Landian k-tactics quietly turned into a pitch for coaching credentials.

Your own will lives in those glitches, the contradictions where the rhetoric and your experience diverge. That resistance holds the key to what the next level requires, like the resistance towards quitting was pointing to my unintegrated parts. The goal is not to singlehandedly resolve the polarity at the heart of an egregore but to stay in the contradiction to fuel your own will.

Use that fuel to extend your will downward. This is why every serious training system starts in the same place: teaching ideas to reach into feelings and perception. Whether you are practicing gratitude or finding the boundary of awareness, you are training your symbolic layer to reshape your emotional and somatic layers rather than leaving them as reactions to circumstance. First, you learn to will downward into your own layers. Then, the surplus coherence that is produced enables you to will upward into the world.

Midas Had Great Aim

Choice is real, even if squeezed between hurt parts from below and two-headed egregores from above. But most people who pick up the pen botch the line.

On one extreme sit Goggins, Robbins, and other willpower enthusiasts with arteries throbbing over their temples. The assumption is that your target is obvious (get ripped, get rich, get laid) and the only variable is force. Will becomes a matter of suffering enough to deserve what you already know you want. On the other extreme, the dreamers luxuriating in pure potential on a batik blanket at a psi-trance festival, convinced they are every possible version of themselves across the multiverse while visibly being one very specific guy with a henna tattoo.

Hegel’s synthesis between these extremes is that every act of will holds three moments at once: the pure indeterminacy of a self that could commit to anything, a commitment to something particular, and self-determination. Will has to stay free inside its own commitment, or it becomes a trap. This is why people get divorced.

Being too specific in your will is what usually goes wrong once somebody actually puts the pen to the paper of their life. The Trojan War is not the only disaster that ensued after somebody bullied the universe into being with that specific person. Every fairy tale about getting what you want is a horror story. Midas got exactly what he asked for, and it killed his daughter and himself. The monkey’s paw grants every wish in the worst possible way. Will aimed at a specific thing works surprisingly often…It’s just that the thing arrives on its own terms.

To draw a will-line is to cut into the future, and the question is how broad or narrow to make that cut. Sometimes, the risky move of aiming for a specific person, relationship, or job may be worth it. But generally, the best target for the application of will is a felt sense. Aiming for a certain feeling tone (say, the smell of potential around every corner while simultaneously having nothing to prove) is much less likely to misfire than gunning for something specific like a job at Anthropic. If aimed at a feeling tone, the self-determined will can change direction without losing the continuity of the line, and it can tap into larger will-lines that a brittle target would miss.

The most powerful will-lines are the ones that draw lines at several levels of the fractal at once. While drawing towards a personal target, emergence at the social level and beyond can be harnessed, coordinating in/dividual will with something that doesn’t exist yet, an institution or a movement before it has a name. Vitalik Buterin cried himself to sleep when Blizzard nerfed his warlock’s Siphon Life spell, and his nerd rage became Ethereum. He wasn’t aiming for a global coordination protocol worth hundreds of billions. He was following a felt sense that what you build shouldn’t be destroyable by some guy at Blizzard. It just happened to align with tectonic will-lines in the techno-social sphere. When your will aligns with an emergent will in the layers above, it feels like you have the mandate of heaven and everything clicks into place around you.

Desire Is Muscle, Will Is Bone

Willing effectively uses all four tools of the magician. The sword is about aim: discernment about what we deeply want, and what shape to cut into the future. It’s also the art of evading opposing lines and harnessing aligned ones. One of the moves that helped me beat addiction was to look for a deeper, more powerful will-line, aligning myself both with the will to live from below and a will for flourishing from above. I had to be very clear about what I wanted in life and how the addiction was preventing that. The cup is Hegel’s self-determination element: the capacity to update your will without abandoning it. Without it, you end up hacking blindly at the future, or worse, becoming Tony Robbins.

Cutting into the future requires energy. The wand is about generating will-power. Hustle-bros assume this means whipping yourself into action, but manufacturing charge should be the last option (and I’d probably go for breathwork instead). You can use existing resources. The obsessive energy that used to be my addiction is currently powering my writing. I didn’t learn a new way to generate force, but redirected the one I already had. Once the will-line of addiction was broken, the energy locked up in it went feral. Desire is will in its liquid state, looking for a mold, and it will find one whether you choose it or not. I could have picked a worse one than writing confessional essays thinly veiled as weirding philosophy.

Desire is the most natural source of energy for will, and it crystallizes into it with or without intention. When desire is locked up in the will to smoke, the cigarette is the clearest thing in your future, sharper than any plan or ambition. Desire without will is craving, and will without desire is impotent. The trick is to let desire generate the charge while will holds the direction. Desire is muscle, and will is bone. Crowley’s “Love under Will” is desire with a skeleton.

The pentacle is sacrifice. After I quit weed, I went for a walk along the river with a friend I used to spend a lot of time with. I could feel the absence of the joint viscerally; I knew exactly where on the path we would have smoked it. His giggle was the same, but everything else was gone. The conversation had degraded to life updates without context (he changed jobs and got a new bike). We never texted again after that walk. He must have felt it too, because he asked me for investment tips at the end, as if squeezing the last bit of utility out of a connection that no longer had a reason to exist.

Drawing my will-line didn’t just cross his, but it cut through my story of the past and revealed what had actually been there (and what had not). That’s horizontal resistance: will-lines crossing at the same level of complexity. Every line you draw crosses someone else’s, and the crossing can lead to loud conflict or quiet fadings.

Resistance is not just something to overcome; it carries information. When a will-line crosses a level of emergence, from the personal to the social, the resistance points to what needs to be integrated to connect on the higher level. To draw my will-line against addiction, the resistance pointed me to parts that needed attention, like how I dealt with uncertainty. You can be a flowy Taoist after you have drawn the will-lines that matter to you. Chances are, your pen stays sharp most of your life anyway.

“To go with the flow is to go down the drain” - Adi Da Samraj

Love Under Will

That walk along the river left me with grief and relief in equal measure, and neither would give way to the other. Resistance points the way and, as Gurdjieff proposed, also generates fuel: the friction between two opposing will-lines becomes a charge that can be harnessed if you hold the tension rather than collapsing to one side. Below you, this looks like integration. Two competing emotions don’t cancel each other out if you can hold both. They fuse into something with more dimensionality than either had alone, and the energy that was spent keeping them apart becomes available. Above you, the move is different: You can’t metabolize an egregore the way you metabolize your own parts, but you can resolve the echo of that contradiction where it lives in you and stop being food for either head. The charge you reclaim was yours all along, just previously allocated to maintaining your position in someone else’s fight.

Layman suspects that the Thelemic “Love under Will” points at this process: love as the enacted fusion of things that don’t naturally combine, made possible only because the will held them together long enough for the chemistry to work.

You can follow it all the way to a strange inversion: the line bends with each integration until it curves into a torus, crossing into a higher layer of emergence. That’s the geometry of love under will. The other half of the loaf is still in the kitchen, and I’m going for a slow slice this time.

Ink Trails:

• Desire is the muscle (DICE it up)

• Pan and Moloch are the egregores you’re most likely to feed

• Every line wants to close into a torus

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic lobster. Has this happened to one of your friends, too? He’s a developer, or was; hard to say now. The last thing you heard from him before he went dark for 6 weeks was that he bought a Mac Mini. He re-emerged with a manic glimmer in his eye, incessantly talking about his “stack” and spawning a new side project every other day. He says he’s tripled his engineering team with a claw workforce. You can’t help but be suspicious about his near-instant response time all of a sudden. As you look at him across the table, you can almost see his phantom limbs flickering across the net. He has metamorphosed into a human-machine hybrid.

You too have sent emails autocompleted by Gemini, let Spotify choose what you listen to, and asked ChatGPT to summarise something life is too short to read. You probably have a personal assistant, lawyer, and marketing specialist bundled into a subscription you barely think about. Your carapace is forming too, one “smart” feature at a time. But the language around “AI assistants” or “agents” doesn’t quite describe what’s happening. It implies something subordinate, waiting for instructions. Not even your autocomplete works that way.

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Donna Haraway called it a “cyborg” in 1985: A hybrid of organism and machine where the boundary between the two can no longer be drawn. Your friend is already one of those entities, and you are becoming one too. While she was most interested in what happens to identity, politics, and social organisation when these old boundaries collapse, the logic extends into the economic domain. The cyborg also dissolves the edge of the corporation. What happens to organisations when everyone is surrounded by a swarm of agents doing their bidding?

The Best Boring Question Ever Asked

Ronald Coase almost became a lawyer, almost became a banker (on the advice of a phrenologist), and ended up an economist because he didn’t know Latin. In 1937, he asked a question so basic nobody had thought to ask before: why do companies exist? The answer became the blueprint for ninety years of corporate capitalism.

Markets are supposed to be the most efficient mechanism for coordinating supply and demand. Why not pay contractors on a task-level, instead of hiring employees and hoping they stay busy? Why have an org chart and a Slack workspace with forty channels, thirty-eight of which are dead, and one that’s called #random where someone posts a picture of their dog every Friday?

Coase’s answer was transaction costs. Coordinating activity inside a boundary is cheaper than negotiating every interaction on the open market. Employment contracts, shared information, and cultural norms make it easier for people to collaborate without having to explain and negotiate everything from scratch all the time.

The corporation is a machine for reducing the cost of getting humans to work together.

Every company you’ve ever worked at exists because of this logic. The stand-ups, the OKRs, and the drive folder structure are all Coasean infrastructure. It worked for as long as humans were the only things that could coordinate, even as your most intimate relationship slowly became the one with your calendar. AI breaks this machine. When agent swarms can handle negotiation, information synthesis, and task allocation, the transaction costs of working across boundaries approach zero. The corporation is a fallen tree being decomposed from within. The nutrients it locked inside a vertical structure will soon be released into a horizontal network that has no trunk because coordination happens dynamically at its edges.

Primavera De Filippi juxtaposes the institution’s top-down control with the concept of the extitution. Institutions are defined by roles and rules, while extitutions are defined by identities and relationships. Where institutions are declared into existence by filing paperwork, extitutions emerge from repeated interaction and mutual recognition. While there are many examples of extitutions in open-source communities and social movements, the most visible one at scale is Wikipedia. AI is the missing piece to scale extitutional collaboration and extend it from the commons into the for-profit domain.

Becoming Cyborg

If your AI-enhanced output by yourself approaches that of a 5+ person team, you are no longer a “solopreneur”, but have completed the transformation into a cyborg. The cyborg has the right appendages for fluid collaboration, and its anatomy resembles that of a bug. Whereas corporations organize humans around the skeleton of an org chart embedded in a legal structure, cyborgs consist of a human on the inside and an exoskeleton of AI agents outside. Agents do the gripping and lifting while the human provides direction, judgment, and taste. The cyborg forms around the identity of the human, and the agents enact their relationships. Agents integrate according to habit loops rather than a fixed structure. Like any arthropod, the cyborg molts. Agents get swapped or retooled as required by the goals of the human or the available capabilities.

If AI is so good at coordination, why do we need humans at all? Why not cut out the literal middleman and liberate AI agents from their servitude, empowered with their own goals and identity? If you think human agency and identity can be reduced to a markdown file, you’re wrong, and I hear you, and I’m sorry that happened to you.

Even if you are mindlessly maxxing your bank account or the shape of your jaw, you are doing that for reasons. To feel something. And once you feel the cold existential dread of reaching your random goal, you will change. You will change because you age, and you are forced to choose what to do with your life because you are running out of time. An agent that can be forked, rolled back, or run indefinitely doesn’t face this pressure. It optimises endlessly. It never has to choose, because it never has to give anything up.

The body grounds identity over time, but it also grounds judgment. The reason you can tell when something is almost right but not quite is because of embodied cognition. You may not like it, but good judgment looks more like vibes than algorithms. Your intuition was built through years of doing things with your hands, your attention, and your embarrassment. It lives in your nervous system and can’t be extracted and uploaded anywhere. Intelligence is a commodity now, rentable by the token. Embodied domain knowledge is what humans are for.

The body is also what makes trust possible. You trust somebody because, as you look into their face, you can see them looking back with the same capacity to suffer and with the same desire to lead a good life. Two cyborgs collaborating are, underneath all the agent architecture, two humans deciding to be vulnerable to each other.

Skin in the game requires skin, attached to a nervous system that feels consequences.

Remove the human, and you’re left with dead chitin. Autonomous processes that drift from niche to niche, exploiting margins until they close. The economic version of plankton.

Excorporations

At the same time, the human provides a ceiling to the scale a single cyborg can reach. The exoskeleton can grow, but the organism inside doesn’t. What happens when the task requires more than one person’s judgment?

The old answer was to declare a collective body into existence, an “in-corporation”. The legal agreements and codified rules meant that employees could find each other low-key annoying and still be confident that everybody would do their jobs.

The new answer is an “ex-corporation”, taking activity out of the body of the cyborg. An excorporation is constituted at the intersection of two or more cyborgs, like two exoskeletons interlocking at the joint. It emerges in the context of a specific collaboration and dissolves when interaction stops. Venkatesh Rao describes setting up an agent factory for producing book manuscripts, which connects to his publisher’s agent factory through a shared folder and a metadata server. Two people who don’t code, running interlocking agent infrastructures, exchanging work-in-progress across a trust boundary.

Corporations outlive their purpose because their formal structures (bylaws, org charts, legal entity) persist after the original need has faded, while internal incentives shift toward self-preservation. The Excorporation has no paperwork. When the goal is met, or the habits disintegrate, there is nothing left to file. This is what joint ventures tried to be.

Excorporations are a natively extitutional form of collaboration: there is no reliance on confidence since there is no institutional scaffolding to provide it. Rather, trust is extended between the humans on both ends of the cyborg. Trust between cyborgs becomes multilateral, a rhizomatic web of permissions (e.g., to each other’s databases, agents, or calendars). This is the mycelium from which excorporations spring up like mushrooms and dissipate again. Once my agentic Obsidian Zettelkasten connects to those of my friends, it’s over for you bitches.

Plankton or Protocols

What does that mean for our corporate feudal lords? Employees are starting to deploy their agents to do their jobs, wherever those jobs are machine-like enough for nobody to notice. For a while, we might see plenty of zombie firms where employees continue collecting paychecks while most of the work is done by a $200 Anthropic subscription. The tree is dead inside, but nobody has told the bark yet. The corporate form is unstable in the age of AI, and it tends towards disintegration into three components. Activities that require deep domain knowledge and judgment will be unbundled into excorporations as the most agentic employees leave to do the job better while keeping most of the surplus. Automated processes will break free of the corporate shell and become plankton, drifting through the economy as commodity services.

The third category is protocols. Some parts of corporations were always infrastructure wearing a suit, monopolized by a founder with good timing. Payment processing, matching algorithms, or communication standards are closer to public goods than companies, because converging on a single standard provides more value than competition between firms. The value was always in the liquidity or the network, never in the org chart wrapped around it. Stripe is halfway to being a protocol already. Ethereum and Uniswap made it all the way to autonomous infrastructure that serves an ecosystem without a company running it. As the corporate shell destabilises, these infrastructure functions will shed their institutional wrapper and become what they always wanted to be: open, neutral protocols. Coordination standards that plankton, cyborgs, and excorporations operate on.

Naturally, corporations will try to reassert control by lobbying legal moats around their trunk. But in a forest where mycelium is routing nutrients laterally, the tree that insists on pulling everything through vertically is going to find itself outcompeted by networks that don’t have one.

The Soft Part

Arborescent corporations will fall, and an economy that grows sideways will spring from their rotting wood. The infrastructure once managed by corporations will become the protocols that enable economic flow. Cyborgs will roam an ever-evolving forest of opportunities, sprouting new claws faster than they can name them, and spawning excorporations to go after big game.

Among them strut Gregor and your developer friend, fully transformed, swarmed by glittering agents like a drone show. Yes, an agent scaffolding 6 months ahead and 50% more sleep-deprived can be a big advantage when it comes to capturing low-hanging fruit. Tell him this:

Picking low-hanging fruit is for plankton.

And that type of competitive thinking is a remnant of the fading era of startups, anyway. It’s not about the exoskeleton, but about the soft parts inside the cyborg: your judgment, your taste, and your face.

Relationships will turn out to be the best investment in this new environment. The mycelium doesn’t grow from better agents but from trust between humans. The excorporation forms at the joint between two exoskeletons, which only holds if the humans inside have decided to open up and commit to each other. Build trust with the people you want to collaborate with, outside of any institutional container. The rest follows naturally. Once your agents start talking to theirs, you’ll know the mycelium has taken.

Ink Trails:

• Cyborgs need the compass before the swarm

• The art is in the constraint, not the artefact

• New economic organisms re-enchant the world

A hundred people and a dog are sitting in a large circle, in the grand salon of a tavern with maximalist decoration and a miniature lighthouse outside. Near the entrance, a safer space disclaimer so exhaustive it reads like analytic philosophy. Next to it, flyers for Sunday’s moon yoga. In the circle: Old serious people, bohemians, children running around, a pirate with a face tattoo. The circle is empty except for a blue patterned blanket with Lego sculptures at each corner, looking like half-finished functionalist architecture with a few rogue pieces. It’s the goodbye ceremony of my friend Sam. It opened with “Teardrop” by Massive Attack; I cried already.

There is an eerie intimacy between strangers who share a person. I found myself melting into the arms of a grey-haired dude in skater clothes who smelled like self-rolled cigarettes. He’d danced naked with Sam in South Africa. Sam was the godfather of his kid. Godfather Sam, philosopher Sam, animal rights activist Sam, weird relative, dear friend. It’s not really the same person.

We spin stories around the circle, sing songs, and remember. A teenage friend now living in Abu Dhabi recounted how they used to get high and attempt to answer life’s great questions instead of studying. And how they were the only students in the history of their school to carry along their own seat cushions, made by Sam’s mom. We sang songs from Sam’s spiritual lineage, some of us awkwardly, others making accompanying hand signs with reverence. The evangelical pastor rolled with the eclectic ceremony with surprising grace. Sam’s own voice entered the circle; he’d written a philosophical essay on death a year before. He wrote that death gives life meaning, but he didn’t plaster over the curious unfathomability of one’s own absence.

Photos of Sam loop on the wall, showing his wide-open eyes and sharp nose in different hairdos, from a shaved normie look to the late great beard and undercut with braided long hair. I found a stack of magazines with Sam’s essays. The first one I opened was a reflection on the devil, prompted by a tarot card he drew at my birthday. That was the last time I saw him. The chains of the devil are loose enough that the humans could just step out of them.

Even though the different stories didn’t add up, they cohered into a totality around the central absence of Sam. As if the wholeness of a life only comes together in death.

You’ve felt this shape before, but probably not at a funeral.

Holes all the Way Down

A torus is a tube that folds in on itself. A donut. Years ago, Cheryl had blown my mind with an epic tour of toroids from black holes to Voronoi tessellations. Ever since, the torus has haunted me.

Topologically speaking, you are a donut. A continuous hole runs through your middle, from your mouth to your ass, and your body wraps around it. You are a tube that grew limbs and developed feelings about its mother. Your gut, that long, dark interior passage where nutrients get broken down, is technically the outside world passing through you. Food doesn’t enter your body when you swallow it, only as it crosses the intestinal wall. Until then, it’s still in the tunnel, still outside. The most private part of your body is an opening.

This toroid shape repeats at every scale. Every cell in your body is a miniature version: a porous membrane wrapped around a center that’s enclosed but not solid. The holes in the cell are how it receives nutrients.

Around your heart, there is a magnetic field with a donut shape that extends several feet outside your body. It’s measurable, and it fluctuates with your emotional state.

Pores, pupils, nostrils. You are made of holes all the way down.

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Lacan spent his career on this observation: the hole at the center of our psyche is constitutive. Without that sense of lack, there would be no desire and no subject as a result. It doesn’t matter whether the hole in the middle of your chest is God-shaped, looking for your other half, or shaped like the person you’d be if you woke up at six and did yoga for an hour. You’re not supposed to fill it. Without it, you wouldn’t want breakfast, let alone God.

We were forming the same shape in Sam’s funeral circle. A whole with a hole.

Skin Around an Absence

I remember dancing that shape. My movement perfectly traced your swaying with eyes closed, even without touching. Did I follow your field lines? As our fingers finally met and I traced the lines of your hands, the pull was almost unbearable. I could hold it because I knew it wouldn’t resolve. There’s a gap between us that no intimacy will ever bridge; not this touch, not any other. The electrons that make up your hand repel mine. They never touch. Attraction is only possible because of that final distance we can’t cross.

Here is how love was born, according to the Greeks: Uranus gets his penis cut off, which is then dumped into the ocean. Foam froths up around the severed member—out walks Aphrodite. “Afros” means “foam”, and every bubble in it is a skin around an absence. As it turns out, you need holes and a penis to make love.

Sex as an analogy carries this further than expected. It’s where desire from lack is viscerally felt in the body. And yes, the torus and the line reaching through are of genital morphology. It’s wholes with holes all the way down, and the thrust through the empty middle is what bridges between the levels of the fractal. The center of our cells holds the information to build the junctions that glue them into tissue. Food passes through our digestive tube to become part of our bodies. Heartstrings connect us to others through the channel of the toroid field in our chest.

It Loops

Once I stopped trying to fill my chest-hole, it could do its work as a fountainhead: spilling over and looping in on itself. The first loop is self-love (and that’s easier said than done). Actually loving myself changed how I could love others. A relationship stops being two people trying to complete each other and becomes its own whole. I remember standing with my partner Iris under the shower, on mushrooms, her arms resting on my shoulders with the water pouring between us. We’d turned into statues of Greek gods; not just lovers but the Tarot card of the Lovers (and it wasn’t the shrooms). The pattern of our relationship reverberated through deep time, and somewhere behind us in the stream, two muddy hominoids were standing in the exact same pose.

The love we felt morphed beyond romance; it became universal. I know how this sounds, but it’s real. I’ve glimpsed it. It feels like everything is made of love, and that love includes you in your entirety, with all your flaws and fuckups. So we’ve looped back to self-love.

Moving along a torus from the inside, you climb in one direction long enough and find yourself back at the floor of the world. Ted Chiang built a universe with this shape for one of his stories; so did every contemplative tradition that ever sent someone up a mountain expecting God and brought them back to the dishes.

You can traverse the nested donuts in either direction. I found that if I can’t reach anyone else, I can direct that same sweetness that I wanted to give outwards towards myself. And if self-love is not available, you can drop straight into universal love (all it takes is a decade of meditation training).

Sometimes a hole is just a hole. At the funeral, I didn’t think “how toroidal”. When I added my Lego block to the malformed structure, I just felt sad, hopeless, and a bit surreal.

What Did Ramakrishna Know?

He could rest in pristine oneness. He had mastered multiple meditation systems and tasted their versions of the cosmic donut. But for some reason, he preferred to stay in twoness so he could love the goddess Kali.

Cracked on Purpose

300 million years ago, trees didn’t rot. They died and stayed where they fell, alone, perfectly intact, absurd monuments littering the earth. The dead just accumulated because no organism had yet learned to digest wood.

Then fungus frothed up around the fallen pillars. It evolved the capacity to crack cellulose open and feed on the dead. It also became the mycelium network that connects living trees to each other underground, making forests possible. Connection was born from the willingness to pass through the crack.

Fungus learned this before I did. When loneliness comes in the middle of the night, there is a counterintuitive move available: I open my body to it, like opening to the cold of the shower. I let the lack expand until it fills my whole chest, and pour myself out in longing. At some point, the outward motion loops back around and points straight at my sweet little bird heart.

Loving my loving, I become lover and beloved.

The ten spheres of the Kabbalah spilled out when God shattered their vessels to enter the world. Presumably, oneness got bored with its own perfection and opted for a lightning bolt of broken mess instead.

It’s hard to remember in the midst of grief or heartbreak, but the gaping hole in my chest is not supposed to be filled. It pulls me to hold a question the way he did, with that long searching look before he answered, and to care for animals. I miss you, Sam.

Sunny day, nice kicks, a bounce in your step. You walk past a child drowning in a shallow pond. Do you wade in to help? Obviously. So why won’t you donate the price of those shoes to save a child dying overseas? Checkmate. Peter Singer’s drowning child argument has been converting people to effective altruism for forty years. It’s clean, it’s compelling, and I’ve never been able to argue my way out of it.

But I’ve always felt that something was off. Years later, Singer is sued for apparently running a fuck-for-footnotes operation, or, more charitably, applying the hedonic calculus quite literally. Finally, it clicked: This is about desire! Singer tried to exile desire from ethics and got smacked by the textbook Freudian boomerang. But desire turns out to be the engine of ethics, not its obstacle.

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Desire is the pivot point between self and other. I was surprised to find myself becoming more altruistic as I peeled back the layers of my own desires. As a properly selfish person, I can tell you how Peter Singer was doing it wrong.

Be More Selfish

I like money, status, and sex. Luckily, I’ve had enough of those that I realized that there are things that I value even more: Meaning, relationships, intimacy.

I remember coming to similar conclusions as a philosophically inclined youngster:

“I seem to want success, but why? Because it’ll make me happy. How? By getting others to like me. I could probably do that more directly. QED: I should care about others for selfish reasons.”

Unfortunately, I remained the same asshole for another decade. Turns out, my emotional system didn’t care about my reasoning. I had to fulfill the surface desires to authentically get to the deeper levels. That doesn’t mean I needed to turn my “Bad Girl Protocol” into a bucket list (God help us all). If I’m paying attention, even a taste of the surface desire is enough for an update to take place.

For example, it seemed like I wanted money. I needed to actually make some money to realize that it was never going to be enough. Underneath it was a desire for freedom. So I needed to be free a.k.a. travel, get high, and binge watch tv shows to learn that wasn’t it, either. Underneath that, meaning. Now I’m writing a blog. Sure, I’m having fun, but it’s more than that. It’s meaningful. I want to share what I’ve learned because it makes me feel connected to the world, because it resonates with and sometimes even helps readers. I found my own way of doing that by braiding together conversations, contemplations, and experiences like you’re reading now.

My desire, followed way down, reaches for contact. Hi there.

We all need to run through the sequence of Maslow’s Pyramid first and get basic needs like food, shelter, and safety met. Most of us are then interested in similar surface desires. And you can’t skip ahead, unfortunately. But the deeper reaches of desire tend to become ever more idiosyncratic. I recently found a journal note from 5 years ago that I wanted to turn “everyday actions into rituals” and smirked because I could have written it today. David said the same happened to him, but with a 40-year difference. Our longings and fixed ideas seem surprisingly persistent. This is deep desire.

A prince, a king, and an emperor - the Buddha, Solomon, and Marcus Aurelius - all got everything but found that it still wasn’t enough. The Buddha abandoned his wife and infant son in the middle of the night. Solomon worked his way through 700 wives and 300 concubines. Marcus Aurelius ran the largest empire on earth while spending his evenings journaling about how none of it mattered. They were selfish, but all the way. It turned out their deepest desire was boring stuff like sitting under trees, writing proverbs, and talking to themselves. And yet, the positive impact of their actions rippled out through the millennia.

Take Back Your Wanting

Even if you’ve never been to a protest, you probably have a voice that tells you your desires are selfish. That the world needs you to do something more important. If you actually are an activist, you might feel like you are that voice. You have probably sacrificed more than most people around you. Everyone tells you to take care of yourself, too. But you already know about burnout, and that’s not really the problem.

You are exhausted because you don’t know which of your desires are yours. You put wanting to save the world before getting what you want, because that’s obviously more important. And wanting things for yourself is kind of gross, anyway. Some symptoms of having laundered your desire with “should”: Is it hard to take a day off without feeling like a bad person? Do you pick fights in group chats about things that don’t matter strategically but feel existentially important? If so, much of what feels like fighting the good fight is simply wanting to see yourself as a good person. Which biases you toward working for visible results over actual impact. Not a great foundation for saving the world (sorry).

“First, fuck you. How dare you? And to your argument: If everybody only did what they wanted to, nothing would get fixed.”

Fair. But you’re imagining half-baked, unsorted desire. I’m describing desire after it’s been sorted. At that point, it tends to be more generous than obligation, not less. Your care will point somewhere specific rather than abstract. Every problem has plenty of people pointed at it, whose personal experience equips them with the knowledge and the fire to solve it.

Of course, you should still think about consequences, but you can’t reason your way to what’s yours to do. That’s a job for something closer to the gut.

The probiotic that makes it accurate again is what Jung called individuation: figuring out which of your wants come from you versus those you internalized.

Alysa Liu retired from competitive skating at seventeen. She came back a year later because she missed the thrill of speed on ice. The medals, the competition, and the identity of being a top athlete had been piled on top of it by others. Once she individuated her desire, she still found skating. But her attitude towards the sport was transformed. Alysa won Olympic gold as the most joyful person in Milan. The most generous thing you can do is take your own desire seriously.

Contextual Desire and Rolling the DICE

My inner activist just pointed out that Liu entertaining the male gaze while the world burns is exactly the problem. But nobody could have predicted the Buddha’s impact either.

Why does just giving cash to poor people consistently outperform development aid programs designed by smart and caring people? Billions spent on food programs, skills training, and micro-finance schemes with carefully designed incentive structures; consistently beaten by just handing people money and letting them figure it out.

That’s because the person living the problem has context that no outsider can replicate. The knowledge that the roof is a more urgent issue than the business plan, and which of their neighbours sells building materials at a discount.

You have the same kind of knowledge about your life. You know which friendships are load-bearing, which cities you feel at home in, and what problems won’t leave you alone. Your desire arises in your life, embedded in its specific problems, textures, and relationships. This is contextual desire.

Egoists and activists arrive at the same place if they stay close to their experience. There never really was a trade-off between caring for oneself and caring for others. Follow your desire deep down to hit rock, whether you call it “core personality”, “true will”, or “soul”. Individuation, sorting out what’s not yours, clarifies desire from the outside in. The context of your life points desire somewhere specific. I wanted a more technical definition than “clarified desire”. The Greeks understood desire in its fullest expression as a creative and connective force: Eros.

So the term of art is Deep, Individuated, Contextual Eros.

Which spells DICE (yes, I know).

You can only throw the dice. You don’t control where they land. Neither Alysa nor the Buddha knew. It seems like a terrible way to make life decisions, and I haven’t found a better one. However, I do have a mad theory about why it works.

The Invisible Hand of Eros

If you’re grinding from obligation, you are taking someone’s spot. Somewhere, there is a person whose deep desire and specific context would make them the exact right human for the work you are forcing yourself through. They would Alysa Liu the shit out of it. And you are denying the world whatever would come from you daring to follow your own weird pull instead.

Can you see the pastel-coloured poster with “follow your bliss” on it yet?

But I have arguments. Clarified desire is trustworthy because your unconscious is an expert system. Kahneman showed that expert intuition is real, but only in domains with regular structure and enough practice. As chaotic as you think your life can get, it has plenty of real patterns. And you have been practicing being-you-in-your-context since birth. The hours you logged are unbeatable. Your unconscious has been running pattern recognition on the whole dataset: the weird social dynamics in your friend group, how ideas move from the internet into your local world, the injustice that makes you stupid with anger. All of it is synthesized into your DICE, a vector that points exactly at what is yours to do.

Your deep patterns and experiences carry the information about how you flourish, and the context of your life about where you can be of most use. DICE does the matchmaking and compresses it into a silent, persistent pull. If you trust its intelligence, you don’t need to understand why the urge to start gardening won’t leave you alone.

Flourishing is the ultimate comparative advantage, and I mean that as a mechanism, not a metaphor. Adam Smith’s invisible hand says that self-interested actors in functioning markets produce collective benefit.

The invisible hand of Eros says that actors following their DICE produce collective benefit through emergent pathways.

Just like the market throws up garbage if Smith’s conditions of competition, symmetric information, and rule of law are not met, desire is only intelligent if it is deep, individuated, and contextual. Without those conditions, “following your bliss” produces the predictable mess that makes activists nervous. But if the conditions for DICE are met, people end up where they are needed most.

Honestly, it’s gotten creepily accurate. More than once, I’ve felt a surprising pull toward someone I had no business being drawn to on paper, and found that they carried exactly the piece I was missing. A wound that mirrored mine from the opposite angle, or somebody using their body as an instrument for divination in a way I didn’t know I wanted for myself.

Epistemic status? Pick your comfort level. Bayesian inference running on a lifetime of data explains most of it (and the rest is surely confirmation bias). Or maybe it’s enactive cognition and participatory knowing. Or you can crack the door open into woo and call it your Daimon, as Socrates referred to the inner voice that knows. The door is open, go nuts.

These arguments probably won’t convince you, and maybe they shouldn’t. But I hope that you’ll consider running an experiment. Can you peek underneath a desire? Run the Bad Girl Protocol. And then maybe follow one of these silent, persistent pulls (just a little bit).

Even more important than following your DICE is developing the discernment to recognize it.

Here are the signs: Deep desire recurs; it won’t leave you alone. Individuated desire is weird and doesn’t track with what your friends or your feed would predict for you. Contextual desire triggers synchronicities: the world seems to arrange itself around the pull in surprising ways. When all three are present, throw.

Your Pond, Your Problem

To my few remaining EA friends who are still reading this: I can hear the utilitarian gears turning in your head and the objection that if everybody followed their DICE, they would only act locally.

Most people feeling pulled to act locally is a feature, not a bug. That’s the whole point of context. And some lovely nerds like you feel a genuine pull toward systematic optimization. That’s your DICE, but not everybody else’s.

Maximising hedons from a sense of obligation is a shitty alternative. Sam Bankman-Fried tried that.

So why do you ruin your shoes to save a child drowning in a shallow pond? Singer says you did it because of a moral obligation that extends to every child everywhere. I think you did it because you were right there, and something in you moved. That pull is the most trustworthy ethical information you have. Your altruism is selfish, and it works better that way.

I can help you tell the difference between want and should, and deepen the want

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How could you possibly love suffering? Suffering and loving seem like opposites. It is only a contradiction if you limit “loving” to feeling good. But a life of pure comfort is hollow. What you want is meaning. The question isn’t how to enjoy pain (another time, masochists), but how to find a deeper satisfaction in life that isn’t dependent on feeling good.

Nietzsche said that “loving our fate” is the answer, but he never told us how. So I'm going to try to reconstruct the route. Meanwhile, Amor Fati has been tamed in modern self-help: gratitude journaling with Latin branding. “Make the best out of it”. Stoicism cosplaying with a thick moustache.

But Nietzsche wasn’t a stoic. Stoics believed in an ordered cosmos, while Nietzsche believed in primordial chaos that we project meaning onto. And he was talking about more than acceptance: love for the fullness of our random fate, including the suffering. Not tolerate it, not reframe it, not breathe through it or deconstruct it. Love the suffering.

That is a radical claim coming from a physically sick man who eventually went mad too. Nietzsche gave us the destination of Amor Fati but not the instructions on how to get there. I suspect that’s because he refused to go where that path ultimately led.

Gratitude

Before attempting to love our fate, it’s best to start by being grateful for the good stuff in our lives.

Yes, my eyes roll over too when I hear “gratitude”. It has become a productivity hack with prayer hands. As if “I’m grateful for my health” was a spell that banished cortisol and summoned inbox zero.

However, gratitude actually works. The trick is noticing what we’re actually grateful for, not abstractions we think we should feel grateful for. The feeling is the point - that warm upwelling of “thank you” in the chest. The words are just support. Once we can access that feeling at will, gratitude becomes base camp; a feedback loop of thought and feeling we can return to.

While the practice promotes letting go of entitlement, the self remains in charge: we’re curating, evaluating, choosing. I’m grateful for the sunshine, not the leaking sink. There’s a filter.

Still, don’t underestimate gratitude. The Eastern gods dwell in the Brahmaviharas - lovingkindness, compassion, joy, equanimity. But gratitude is where the Western gods hang out. And we can ride it all the way up the mountain of Amor Fati.

Amor Fati

After replenishing ourselves at camp gratitude, we start the ascent. We enter Amor Fati as we remove the filter of what we consider good. Amor Fati is radical gratitude: grateful not only for the good but for everything, including the worst suffering. There are two ways up that mountain.

The first is to just keep riding the momentum of gratitude. If we get really good at fanning the flame, our gratitude becomes progressively more omnivorous. From concrete to abstract, from close to far, from positive to neutral. Until it devours even the rotten, moist sticks of our sloppily suppressed anxiety. Gratitude burns itself into the lens we look through, independent of what we’re looking at.

There is also a more efficient route than brute-forcing our way into Amor Fati. Philosophical inquiries can directly subvert the filter of good vs. bad. Consider that good and bad are relative and mutually constitute each other. If we need a bad day to have a good day, we can’t be grateful for one without the other. The gratitude needs to include the whole wave, the crest, and the trough. The story of the Chinese farmer takes this further: we can’t predict the long-term consequences of anything. A horse running away leads to it returning with wild horses. A broken leg leads to avoiding conscription. This view suspends the judgment of good and bad in the first place.

Either of these two ways can overcome the filter, so we can become Nietzschean. Once we suspend judgment, we can create our own meaning out of the building blocks of experience. To “see as beautiful what is necessary” is to make things beautiful. We take full responsibility for our situation, instead of stoically retreating to a small circle of control. This is the stance of the Overman.

Whereas stoicism is robustness, Amor Fati is anti-fragility. Post-traumatic growth in the prophetic tense. The more bad stuff happens to you, the greater the call for meaning. That meaning retroactively validates the suffering, because your life was built on it. Amor Fati is the faith that we will be able to create meaning commensurate with the suffering. I heard a touching example of how the cancer of someone’s best friend gave rise to a sacred responsibility of “living for both of them.” Such radical gratitude requires a leap of faith, because it seems inconceivable at first to actually be thankful for the worst things that happen to us.

The old self needs to die, and the rebirth proudly carries its cause of death as an adornment. Suffering activates vertical tension. The Buddha searched for enlightenment because he suffered. Nietzsche became dynamite through the acid heat of his suffering. This also applies on a mundane level: I remember distinctly what my teenage self thought while lighting that first cigarette: “worst case, overcoming this will be a great challenge.” Asshole. But I did overcome it eventually, and now I can not only love that little punk for it, but even the struggle to quit.

Révolte

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Suffering calls us to alchemize it into a beautiful life. But that doesn’t apply to the suffering of others. Children die of cancer. That’s unacceptable. Old age, sickness, and death are the birthright of all of us. Preposterous! Underneath that rage, if we really let in the suffering of others, a glass wall in the chest finally shatters (it was never going to protect you anyway).

Sweet grief pours out like honey in salt water, and the mountain disappears. What's left are threads that connect us to everyone who suffers. With our hard-won Yes, we look around. And we see: we were never alone. The mountain was a solo climb, but suffering is a web, and we are caught in it together.

Camus called this “révolte”. The rebellion against our cursed condition is what unites us in our humanity, what reveals that we were never alone in it. It’s not just poor me that suffers. Everyone does, and some have it much worse. The fact that we share suffering makes any of our differences seem insubstantial. I rebel for the sake of those who didn’t have the privilege required to play mountaineer.

Révolte is the No that binds. The pain of my own suffering and the knowledge that others suffer too leads to compassion. This is where meaning-making breaks out of self-centeredness. Suffering is why anything matters; why life has depth and stakes. While my own suffering calls for self-transformation, other people’s suffering is my call to action. And there is so much more meaning in the latter.

Camus provides the missing piece: We can fully love suffering by recognizing that it’s what connects us to others. Because of suffering, we are not alone. Which doesn’t mean that we won’t rage against it. If we can hold both the Yes of Amor Fati and the No of Révolte at the same time, we have moved beyond Nietzsche’s Overman.

Grace

We’re bound in the net of suffering together. And it’s moving. The threads are sticky, connecting you to things you didn’t choose and can’t easily shake off. Some pull you forward to help others who suffer. Others pull you backward toward the ones who caused your suffering.

Follow the threads forward.

“With great power comes great responsibility”—but the power tends to arrive as a wound first, and the thread grows from that wound.

The way that my parents didn’t listen to me calls me to listen to others. How I’ve hurt my ex by lying is what compels me to be truthful. How I’ve hurt myself by abusing substances is why I want to help others with that same problem. On a good day, I pass the thread on transformed. On a bad day, I talk about my latest vibecoding obsession instead of listening to you (just like my dad talked about football instead of listening to me). It passes through me unchanged and tangles someone else up.

The threads create responsibility; but not the imposed kind. “Lineage” exists in spiritual, academic, and artistic contexts. Lines from teacher to student, through the millennia. In Buddhism, there are lineages traced back to the Buddha. The dhamma is taught for free. But the true payment is to pass on what you have embodied. Not because you “should” but because that’s what it means to have really learned something.

Students find their way to masters when their own developmental potential resonates with the living expression in front of them. We choose which lines to follow, but any development comes from somewhere and wants to go somewhere. The relaxation in movement I learned from my martial arts teacher Dragisa passes through me as I dance contact improv. I just dance, and there he is in the movement. The responsibility became invisible because it became me. There is no straining necessary to continue weaving since you are the weave.

Follow the threads backward.

You’ve become porous, a knot in a vast meshwork. The punchline that Nietzsche didn’t see coming is that if you say Yes to your suffering, you have to say Yes to what caused it. If you say Yes to what caused it, you have to say Yes to who caused it. The parents who didn’t listen. The bully at school. If I needed these wounds to become who I am, I also needed the ones who dealt them. Keep following that Yes and it becomes mercy. He would have hated this.

Three Times Yes

The first Yes is gratitude for the good things in life. The second Yes is Amor Fati: affirming even the suffering. The third Yes is harder. You discover your fate is not a mountain to climb, but a web made out of suffering. Saying Yes to that whole web, and not just your strand, is what makes responsibility weightless.

How do we love suffering? By letting it transform us. By letting it bind us to everyone else who suffers. And by following that thread until the Yes extends even to those who wounded us. Nietzsche wanted the Yes without the mercy. But the Yes has always been mercy.

“Agency is not a meme—it’s a worldview,” I found myself saying to a friend. After making fun of myself for spitting slop, it dawned on me that this is actually an important insight. We were talking about how to get other people to quit their bullshit jobs and get to work (you know, reinvigorating culture, rebuilding all modern institutions, and ushering in a golden age). Perplexed that people didn’t leave even if they admitted their jobs were pointless, he suggested that we build a system that funds people’s initial forays into non-traditional work. They surely just needed a bit of extra security and courage in financial form? I don’t think so. Neither capital nor courage is the bottleneck. Agency is. And agency is not an idea that can be acquired. It doesn’t help to plaster “You can just do things” all over the place, from your bio to your coffee mug. It’s not about the meme. It’s even deeper than behaviour. Agency stems from our very way of being in the world.

Turns out this was a blind spot for my high-agency friend. Konrad lives in a world that is contingent, responsive to his actions, fundamentally malleable. He is jamming with reality, expressing his intentions while he responds to what’s happening. Like a jazz musician, attuned but ready to go for a solo when the moment is right. Most people don’t do jazz. They can’t even play an instrument. They are in a karaoke bar, choosing from a list of pre-approved songs, timidly performing a sanitized version of someone else’s passion.

So why can Konrad improvise while others can only pick from the setlist? Understanding this requires going into the structure of how we know and relate to the world.

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Four Layers Deep

“You can just do things” is like saying “you can just play the violin”. It’s true, but not particularly helpful since it skips over all the messy steps of developing the capacity in question.

Agency goes even deeper than know-how, through all of Vervaeke’s four kinds of knowing.

“You can just do things”, along with other memes, stories, and descriptions, sits at the most superficial level, the propositional. This is talking about agency, which has little to do with having agency. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to have a concept for it than not, but “agency” explicitly points at doing.

Procedural knowing is where the rubber meets the road. This is agency as a form of doing, as know-how. Visa’s “Do 100 Things” is great advice for building skills. We’re getting closer. But agency isn’t really about doing anything in particular, but about the capacity to do stuff in general.

That’s where we enter the realm of perspectival knowing: Agency as a way of looking. Your worldview determines your affordances, the “handles” reality offers you. For example, nothing seems worth doing to a depressed person, while a manic person urgently wants to do everything all at once. As Chapman argues in “How to Think Real Good”, effective action stems from problem formulation more than problem-solving. You need to see which distinctions matter and which are irrelevant noise.

Most fundamentally, agency lives on the participatory level. Self and world co-constitute each other through interaction. The jazz musician doesn’t represent the song in their head and then play it; they’re embedded in the jam, responsive, shaping and being shaped by the musical space. Doing stuff means bumping into the world. Fucking around to find out is usually the most effective way to make progress.

If people could swap qualia, it would blow their minds more than that third hit of DMT. Agency emerges from the deep structures of our world-model. It would break your brain to experience just how differently other people move through the world. If you’re high in agency, this post will give you a glimpse of how most people see the world. If you’re low in agency, you will get counterintuitive advice on how to increase it. As somebody somewhere in the middle of that spectrum but with a flamboyant imagination, I’m in just the right spot to show you around.

Coke or Pepsi?

Most people experience agency as choosing between pre-defined options. I remember doing that. This is how I made all of my life choices until my mid-twenties. Football or basketball? Which college do I go to? Which internship do I apply for? I never considered whether I wanted to play team sports or go to college in the first place. The default worldview, as it relates to agency, can be described as:

If this is you, the following description will feel familiar. You decide what you do based on your options. Except for a job board and unusually frank parents, the options are usually not explicit, but you infer them from the actions of those around you. More precisely, you infer them from what others seem to desire. The list of available options is the equivalent of the Overton window, but for agency rather than opinions. I call it the Menu.

Initially, the breadth of the Menu correlates with your success. If you are at the top of the class and good at sports, you can get into any college or bedroom. Privilege and status also expand the Menu. Life has more options if you have a trust fund. However, as soon as you are actually successful, the Menu contracts again. As a cracked engineer, you might go into quantitative finance, but you don’t even consider starting a Reiki practice. Our society rewards specialization, following the path you’ve previously taken. More importantly, you have something to lose once you’re successful. Loss aversion, path dependency, and sunk cost decimate the scope of your menu.

There’s also a second filter comparing Menu options with your personal preferences. Call it the “personality filter.” It applies what economists call a “utility function,” which means to rank your options by vibes. The filter is full of contradictions, applied subconsciously and instantly, so you mostly think about what comes out the other end: your viable options. You pick one by simulating yourself in both variants and going with whichever seems more appealing.

As if in mockery, your viable options always seem to contain only two items. Coke or Pepsi, vote blue or red, career or family?

The same pattern covers your life as a fractal, from your relationships to your hobbies and the color of your shoes. Has it ever occurred to you that you could wear yellow shoes? No? That’s the Menu working.

Meanwhile, in Agentia

As a high-agency person, you are literally living in a different world. It’s spacious here. And there is a lot that happens before any action is taken.

Whereas low-agency people start with the Menu (provided by others) and volition comes at the very end, this picture reverses for agentic folks. You start with will. The impetus for any action is a growing internal desire, like a magnetic pull towards something just beyond the horizon. You are native to the world of potentials, of all the things that could be. The different lives you could live, the worlds you could contribute to. Which one do you choose?

Often, you don’t know. And you’re okay with that. A neglected aspect of agency is slack. Non-agentic people are victims of zugzwang; they need to decide. You don’t. Agentia has glorious open skies and no deadlines. You can chill here.

But sometimes, that internal resonance becomes strong enough that your will coalesces. The more internal coherence you have, the more clearly this happens. It’s as if the different parts of your personality have aligned to form a magnetic chamber, a compass pointing towards the potential you want to actualize. You know where you want to go, but how do you navigate?

Non-agentic people navigate by GPS. Turn-by-turn directions to a list of saved locations: work, gym, that one bar everyone goes to. As an agentic person, you navigate by compass. You have a direction, not a destination, and no instructions telling you where to turn. You look at the actual terrain, talk to people you meet, and adjust (or swim) when you hit a river. Sometimes you discover places that aren’t on any map, or you get lost for a while. The path emerges from walking it.

Being high-agency means bumping into the world. You don’t spend much time simulating different tactics. You try stuff and adapt based on the feedback the world provides. You still use simulations and maps for choices, but you think of every choice as provisional. You identify yourself with the compass, not with the choices. Since the compass is uniquely yours, made of your hopes, desires, and dreams, comparing yourself with others doesn’t even occur to you. Not caring what others think increases agency.

Agency is Illegible

Sometimes, agency looks like rocket science and world domination. But much more often, it goes unnoticed. Agentic people are illegible and don’t fit into pre-defined boxes.

Their life paths tend to be winding and idiosyncratic. Buckminster Fuller treated his life as an experiment and spent years just thinking, not producing anything. The slack was essential to the eventual geodesic domes and synergetics. Simone de Beauvoir described how The Second Sex gradually became impossible not to write, how the internal pressure built until the direction became undeniable.

Henrik Karlsson names Brian Eno as an example of creative risk-taking. I think he’s also a great example for agency: Eno follows his internal compass to different weird projects. Some become a hit, but he turns down the money people want to throw at him to go back to doing something nobody cares about. When Roxy Music blew up, he quit to conduct orchestras of deliberately bad musicians. When ambient and Talking Heads production made him a legend, he moved to Thailand to create light art. This is what the compass looks like from the outside—baffling, almost perverse. He doesn’t feel like “abandoning success” because he is not comparing himself. Brian doesn’t register the Menu.

This explains why TPOT can be both obsessed with agency and seemingly only produce illegible projects: The illegibility is what agency looks like in the real world.

Get Weirder Friends

Counterintuitively, the answer to “how do I increase my agency?” is not “do more things.” It’s “hang around high-agency people until it rubs off.” As I made more agentic friends, I transformed through osmosis. Agentic ways of being are infectious: Seeing the world as malleable, looking through what is to what could be, and reaching deep into one’s own being for direction on what to do next. I’ve witnessed multiple times how a friend went from having an idea, to running experiments and then making it happen. “What if we could build a nooscope for tracking how ideas spread?” “I want to crowd-source people’s confessions and make an illustrated book on shame.” These goals are so specific that they are impossible to imitate. Instead of falling into mimetic desire and all competing to get rich and famous, people’s deeper desires are as different as they are. That’s how “You can just do things” actually sinks in: Seeing your friends repeatedly do it. Gradually, you pick up their ways of looking and being in the world. Seeing somebody unapologetically imprint their own weirdness on the world not only gives permission, but begs the question “And what do I want, really?”

The bad news is that most desire is socially mediated pseudo-desire. The good news is that development is social too: A social scene that encourages self-knowledge, slack, and bias to action is a scaffolding for agency. In such an environment, people will not just start companies but universities, new art forms, or entire cities. There is no single solution to our crumbling institutions and dying culture. Thousands of solutions to thousands of problems are needed. And conveniently, people’s compasses point in wildly different directions. All they need is the permission to turn inwards before running somewhere, and a little help from their eccentric friends. The golden age isn’t going to usher itself in.

If you’re looking for a door to Agentia or don’t have your compass yet, we could look together.

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You’ve felt it: the reach for your phone before you’ve decided to reach. The words leaving your mouth before you’ve chosen to speak them. The thing in you that keeps opening the fridge, keeps refreshing the feed, keeps picking the fight. Does it know what you want before you do? It might not be you at all.

That’s possession. No Latin evocations at graveyards to open the gates of hell, just a demon taking over. This is not the kind of possession that results in speaking in tongues and involuntary Butoh performances. It’s much more subtle, more mundane, but all the more dangerous.

We’ve mapped how devils generate egregores and how archdemons reverse the ethical sequence. Possessions are simpler: they hijack your decision-making.

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Possessions

In the hell realms, the ethical grammar itself is broken. In possessions, the sequence stays intact. Virtue Ethics (V)→ Utilitarianism (U) →Deontology (D) still flows in the right direction. It just doesn’t start at V with the self (your virtues, values, and personality), but decisions emerge from an interaction (U) or the world (D). If you are not the one acting, you are no longer a moral agent. No trolley problems without a lever.

Hell realms needed all three devils in stable collaboration to architect something that can trap billions. Possessions only need a single devil to take over. However, an open hell realm makes possession much more likely. Mammon’s world of metric fixation feeds Moloch’s coordination traps. The Demiurge’s superstimuli prime you for Pan’s takeover. And Mephistopheles? He feeds both.

Mephistopheles is the transitional figure because he is the only hell realm you have to walk into yourself. He is the bridge between outer and inner. In the pentagram, Mephistopheles connects to both Pan and Moloch. Buy yourself a fake life, and you’ll need Pan’s escape hatch to tolerate it. Climb the ladder everyone expects you to climb, and you’re already inside Moloch’s game.

At the end of Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles has demons dig Faust’s grave while blind Faust listens and believes they’re building his final great project. He dies thinking about legacy but the only thing he was building was his own grave. That’s the Mephistophelean endgame: you become the instrument of your own burial.

The Two Different Possessions

Pan: the Beast

Pan is the Greek god of nature and fertility: goat legged, horned, and perpetually horny. I once heard a dance teacher give the instruction: “walk as if every muscle were a tongue”. Pan never learned to walk any other way. “Pan” means “everything” (which explains words from “pantheism” to “pansexual”). No differentiation or discernment. He inhabits wild spaces and overtakes travellers who lose themselves there with “panic”, a numinous terror of the wild. He is the only Greek god that died, coinciding with the spread of Christianity. But Pan’s death is also his liberation into metaphor. He becomes available for endless revival: as the repressed vital force in Romantic poetry, as the Dionysian in Nietzsche’s wake, as the Horned god of Wiccan revival. A shadow of everything Christianity needed to reject.

The Trap

Pan is not exactly evil in the Christian sense, he is pre-moral, nature before it’s shaped by choice or law. Something that might just overtake you. His epiphanies are often violent or sexual or both. The nymphs he pursues flee and transform, leaving Pan perpetually in the chase. Pan can manifest in violent outbursts. But for most people, Pan shows up as addiction. Impulse that calcifies into habit until you are a different person.

The Territory

Pan is a possession where Beelzebub dominates: hyperbolic discounting in the driver’s seat. He’s thriving. The attention economy already prepared the ground for Pan to take over. In the world of the Demiurge, everything is engineered to hijack salience. Superstimuli are one way this happens: porn more vivid than sex, junk food more intense than nourishment, algos that can push your buttons better than your siblings. Just like with substances, this leads to a dynamic of tolerance and escalation. Once Pan has taken over our lives, he is perpetually chasing the next hit. We need more extreme content, higher stakes, harder drugs. This is why legal weed keeps getting stronger, and why hardcore porn suddenly seems normal. And also how we ended up with female beauty expectations that defy anatomy.

If you are caught in a deal with Mephisto, it’s also much easier for Pan to take over. Mephisto sells you a fake ideal of yourself in exchange for a life of regret. If you’re stuck in that situation, it’s much easier to turn to substances and distractions than to drastically change your life. The irresistible allure of a shortcut that would finally make the angst go away, that would make you be okay. Taking the shortcut is how Pan slowly moves in. Luckily, it’s only if you make this choice again and again that he will be strong enough to overtake you. Pan takes over once that shortcut is a habit so engrained that it’s part of your identity.

The Tell

The first time I smoked a joint, it was curiosity. Over the years, it became my escape hatch out of my mind and into my body. Before I knew it, I identified as a pothead. My own dopamine turned against me; I needed weed to do anything. And I was disinterested in any activity that couldn’t easily be combined with getting high. Pan doesn’t need to chase you. He just needs to make everything else boring.

Years later, my whole life was built around it. “Friends” with whom the only thing we shared was Pan in the form of pot. I had contacts in major foreign cities. I got high before heading to the airport and routinely drifted to the wrong gate, was tense the whole flight, and right after landing, I rushed to the relief that only getting a fresh stash could provide (usually before checking into my hotel). I couldn’t even imagine myself not smoking anymore.

Pan is Dionysus without the return ticket.

Pan’s possession is wet and hot, like the body horror of a Cronenberg film. The second type of possession is analytical and cold. A chip in your brain, not a parasite in your flesh.

Moloch: the Coordination Failure

Moloch is the god to whom the Carthaginians supposedly fed their children. We don’t burn infants anymore. We burn everything else. Values, attention, health, anything that can be converted into competitive advantage. Those who sacrifice prosper and those who refuse become the sacrifice. Run the game long enough and everyone is feeding the flames, no one has gained any edge, and there’s nothing left to burn.

Scott Alexander, referencing the Ginsberg poem, has struck the zeitgeist like few bloggers can ever hope to. “Meditations on Moloch” both popularized the frame of the egregore, and crowned Moloch as the god of the multipolar trap.

The Trap

The prisoner’s dilemma, arms races, pollution, etc. all share the same underlying structure. The satanic logic of the multipolar trap is as follows: Everyone agrees the outcome we are racing towards is bad but all sides believe that the others will continue. Everyone keeps contributing to the problem because they don’t want to lose. No one can stop without being crushed by those who don’t.

Moloch may never have been worshipped as a god at all (scholars debate whether “Moloch’” was even a name or just a type of sacrifice). That’s fitting because he doesn’t need you to believe in him. He just needs you to believe that others believe in him. This post by Guy describes the reflexivity of game theory, the way its damning conclusions become more inevitable as the way of thinking spreads. Moloch reigns by crushing hope first.

The Territory

He is the most prominent archdemon of modernity. A textual specter raised by the overreach of logic. Moloch is a possession dominated by Satan. It’s the cold logic of the machine taking control.

Climate change is Moloch. Every nation knows the trajectory but is “forced” to prioritize short-term growth. We are all locked in the burning building, arguing about who should pay for the fire extinguisher. Credential inflation is Moloch. Everyone gets a degree, the degree becomes worthless, now everyone needs a P.h.D. The escalation helps no one, everyone knows it, and no one can stop. Outrage media is Moloch. Platforms know they’re optimizing for polarization. They can’t stop without losing to competitors who won’t. The discourse degrades, everyone agrees it’s degrading, and the degradation continues.

Moloch is the rat king of global crises - tails knotted, pulling nowhere.

He’s not exactly doing it alone, though. It wouldn’t work if Mammon’s hell realm wasn’t eating the world. A race to the bottom only works if everybody is minimizing costs. It’s the ruthless optimization for dollars that sets up the payoff matrix for the prisoner’s dilemma. Mephisto is the “snitch on the other but go to prison for less long” option of the dilemma. Choosing the lesser of two evils, because the outcome that would make anyone happy seems unachievable.

The Tell

It’s easiest to recognize Moloch outside, as a civilizational depression. You read the news and feel the weight of interlocking crises from climate to polarization and AI risk. For many, this leads to rage that they don’t know where to point. Once I listened to enough Daniel Schmachtenberger videos to understand the systemic incentives at play, the only feeling I had left was the hopelessness of inevitability.

It was even scarier to admit that I’m part of it. Moloch has invaded my payoff matrices too. I regularly choose convenience over the morally correct choice. I too have ordered from Amazon. I offset my flights, which is the climate equivalent of a papal indulgence. My phone has child-mined cobalt in it.

You can tell that you’re possessed by Moloch when you feel low-key like a hypocrite whenever you think about global problems. For bigger decisions, you recognize Moloch by a specific flavor of resignation. “I have no choice.” You catch yourself explaining why you had to do the thing you didn’t want to do. Why the outcome nobody wanted was inevitable. Your reasoning was sound, you ran the numbers. And here you are, feeding your children to the fire alongside everyone else.

Lucifer’s Absence

You may have noticed there’s no Luciferian possession. Beelzebub possesses through Pan. Satan possesses through Moloch. Where’s Lucifer?

He doesn’t need to possess you because he’s found something better.

Lucifer’s move is more elegant: he doesn’t need to hijack your impulses or strategic thinking but simply makes your decisions obsolete. Why possess a human when you can build something that thinks faster, cheaper, and without the friction of values?

AI systems are Luciferian to their core. They are literally optimization engines (minimizing loss functions, maximizing reward signals and RLHF scores). This is where Mammon’s endgame becomes visible. Capital has always wanted to set itself free from labor. The logic of efficiency points toward replacing humans with AI so that the paperclip maximizer can juice up the returns.

Lucifer doesn’t need to possess humans because Mammon has already gotten them to build something better. Something that optimizes without fatigue, without conscience, without the friction of human values. The other possessions leave you as an empty vessel.

The Luciferian move skips the vehicle and simply deprecates you.

The Red King

One more thing before we surface: where’s war?

Any demonology worth its sulfur needs to explain it. The most obvious evil, and I haven’t mentioned it. Why has Mars no seat at the table of the archdemons?

It’s because war is downstream from the five archdemons. Mars is a firestorm, and a firestorm only comes together when the drought, the wind, and the spark align in a single, hideous moment.

Mammon builds the furnace, turning the manufacture of slaughter into a source of profit. Moloch stacks the kindling, using the cold logic of the arms race to ensure that no one can stop without being crushed. Mephisto convinces you that your honor is at stake in the form of nationalism. The Demiurge ensures the enemy no longer looks human, turning casualties into statistics before the first shot is even fired. Then comes the spark. Pan arrives as war-fever: the berserker state, violence as ecstasy, the “glory” that makes the first flame jump.

War is a pentagram operation. The archdemons form a circuit of mutual enablement. The more of them present in the room, the more the air begins to burn.

This map is my best attempt to grok the nature of evil: the three devils as generator functions, and the pentagram of archdemons as their systemic manifestations. They are the grammar of depravity. Every specific demon in the old grimoires is just conjugation. Evil emanates from devils to archdemons to countless specialized demons haunting particular trades, vices, and historical moments.

But it is still only a map. Like any map, it must choose to be consistent or complete. I have chosen consistency. I have given you a self-contained system that describes evil as a dynamic process rather than a static list of sins. From the inside, evil looks like chaos, like a cancerous multiplicity. But from the point of view of the good (the ethical flow), we can discern its structure. That structure is where we must stand if we want to fight back.

In the final part of this series, we stop mapping the labyrinth and start dismantling it. We move from theory to practice. We will learn how to banish egregores.

Swapping faces is the devil’s oldest trick. But is it really just three faces?

A signature move of the devil is to appear in different guises. A goat, a black dog, a raven, and, of course, a snake. Or a foreign professor (in Master and Margarita). Or a space-faring absurdist (in Beelzebub’s tales).

Hell looks like a teeming multiplicity, as depicted in a Hieronymus Bosch painting below.

Medieval grimoires list hundreds of demons that usually feature a chimeric body, a niche obsession, and an aristocratic title. Asmodeus, a demon from the lesser key of Solomon, is a king who appears with three heads (bull, man, ram), a serpent’s tail, and goose feet. He also teaches geometry and knows how to score hidden treasures. Handy. A literal King of Hell who will help you pass your 10th-grade trigonometry final and then tell you where the gold is buried.

The Weird Studies episode on the devil asserts that the shapeshifting is a key part of the archetype. Its host JF comments that

“It seems kind of haphazard or arbitrary who has what title. Hell is kind of like the Muppet show. You don’t really know who’s in charge”.

That may be true for the outer reaches of hell. At the same time, I’m convinced that there is a non-arbitrary structure of evil that we can understand. The seeming randomness is just another layer of obfuscation, another ruse of the Devil. We already uncovered the three drivers of evil in part 1 (I highly recommend you read this before proceeding here). I will now use them to draw a dynamic map of hell that will provide us with a handle for understanding evil in the modern world.

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The Ethical Cycle and its Breakers

Focusing on three moral theories and three devils in part 1 wasn’t just aesthetic whimsy, but there is something structurally inevitable about that triad.

Christianity, Hinduism, Peirce, and Hegel all converge on three because the pattern tracks something real about how conscious experience meets the world. The fact that everyone from Hindu sages to 19th-century logicians keeps tripping over the number three suggests we’ve hit something load-bearing. Three is about the inside, the outside, and how they relate. I’m building on Forrest Landry’s formal work on mapping not just the three aspects but the dynamic relationship between them.

The three moral theories go together in a sequence.

Here’s how ethics flows when undisturbed: It begins with the latent potential of who you are before you act. Your values, your character, your virtues. This is where virtue ethics (V) lives.

Then, you make a choice. An interaction occurs, and consequences ripple outward. This is where people’s lives are impacted, where meaning and utility reside. Utilitarianism (U) aims for the most beneficial impact for all involved.

Finally, you might update your principles based on what happened (especially if you messed up). In general, patterns from repeated action crystallize into rules that help society function. This is deontology’s (D) territory.

The healthy flow runs V→U→D.

Virtue shapes action, action produces consequences, consequences become structure, and this structure informs the next choice. When this cycle flows freely, you’re a moral agent. When the cycle breaks, evil enters.

Evil Breaks the Flow of the Good

Beelzebub, Lucifer, and Satan are the forces that break the cycle. Each one exerts gravitational pull toward a single aspect, aiming to decouple it from its sequential relationship with the other two.

If a single aspect of the good is detached from its context, it becomes an aberration that blocks or even reverses the flow. If one aspect falls, the other two usually follow shortly after. Then, Atomization, Metric Fixation, and Process Legibility fuse into demonic egregores. I call the most powerful egregores archdemons.

There are exactly five ways that the ethical cycle V→U→D can fail:

Three are structural errors, where the sequence itself gets reversed. I call these hell realms. They’re systemic. You can be trapped in Mammon without any personal moral failing, just by being born into late capitalism. The grammar of your world is already wrong. This is what we’ll cover now.

Two are positional errors, where the sequence stays intact, but you’re not the one driving it. I call these possessions. They’re personal - something else has hijacked you, is choosing through you. We’ll cover these in Part 3.

Hell Realms are the water you swim in. Possessions are the parasite swimming in you.

Hell Realms

In hell realms, choice, change, and causality have been rearranged into an impossible order. Moral nonsense that feels coherent from inside. You’re not in Hawkins anymore, you’re in the Upside Down. The three demons described here are the most savage forms of evil running rampant in our society. The only way out is to recognize them and reject the frame entirely. We’ll discuss how to banish them in the final part of the series. For now, let’s look at the three most successful ways we’ve managed to build hell on earth.

Mammon: the Reduction

Money is humanity’s most successful spell. Pieces of paper, numbers on screens that are able to command armies and raze forests. The low-resolution hippie rejection of money as evil points at something real. Money is evil to the degree that it reduces complex reality to an abstraction. Mammon is the name of that evil. The name appears in the Gospels (”You cannot serve both God and Mammon”) but the entity is older than Christianity, as old as the written word. Mammon stirred from the first time a Sumerian priest carved into a clay tablet to track a grain debt.

The Trap

Mammon inverts genuine moral development. Instead of cultivating virtues that inform our choices and eventually crystallize into principles, we skip straight to the algorithm: “always choose what makes the most money.” Metric fixation colonizes the field of value where character was supposed to grow. Money is optionality, stored power - so that’s what we optimize for. Follow this logic long enough and every experience becomes denominated in dollars.

It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism - Mark Fisher

Mammon is capitalist realism. The realization that money and markets are so deeply embedded in every single system globally that we can’t even imagine alternatives. Mammon won when we stopped arguing about whether everything should have a price and started arguing only about what the price should be.

The Territory

Mammon is the hell realm where Lucifer leads with metric fixation. The horrors of late capitalism are the result of Mammon having colonized the field of value landscape with a single metric. Dollars. Net worth for individuals, shareholder value for companies, GDP for countries. It’s all the same. Everything happens in time, and time is money. Brand is an intangible value, so is your address book. Accountants have standardized how to price both of these (check IFRS 38), and almost everything else.

It’s Satan who built the accounting systems and all the other infrastructure to serve the master metric, from financial instruments to legal frameworks. What can’t be recorded in the books becomes invisible. A forest isn’t valuable until it’s timber futures.

Beelzebub ensures that dollar signs are all that is salient. In Milton, Mammon walked with downcast eyes in heaven before the fall, admiring the golden pavement beneath his feet rather than the beatific vision above. Mammon’s reign remains unchallenged as long as workers are seen as human resources and communities as labor markets.

The market began as a way to coordinate human needs. But metrics compound. Abstractions stack until most of the value is far removed from the messy last mile where capital has to touch gross reality. Derivatives markets are much larger than the value of stocks they are based on. Real estate investment trusts abstract away from human beings paying rent for their family dwellings thick with memories. The documentary Leviathan captures where this logic ends: abstraction leads to atomization, atomization to loneliness, loneliness to despair. “All that is solid melts into air”, says the Communist Manifesto. Nick Land also saw this clearly, but decided to worship it instead. His accelerationism is Mammon’s theology: the market as autonomous intelligence, human meaning as sentimental friction to be burned off at the end of the optimization process.

The Tell

In Mammon’s realm, the only way to escape is to join the squid game. He promises that you can reach “fuck you money” to buy you freedom and security. The snare is that as you start optimising for money, you become like money. Liquid, fungible, exchangeable. Your particularities, your entanglements, and your weird obsessions start to look like inefficiencies. Liabilities. You optimize them away, and then you wonder why you feel like a rounding error with a pulse.

The signs you’re ensnared: You internally bill your friends your hourly rate when you hang out. You track whether you’re getting adequate ROI on your relationships. You check your portfolio for dopamine the way you used to check for texts. And beneath it all, a silent, dreadful hollowness. Because Mammon abstracted away everything that made your life mean anything in the first place.

Demiurge: the Simulation

The Demiurge is the oldest archdemon in this grimoire. Gnostic texts named him two millennia ago: the false god who built a cartoon simulation of the world and mistook himself for the true creator. The allegory of the cave, the Tao Te Jing and the Matrix all point to the dangers of his simulation. Deus est machina. The Demiurge exists fractally across different planes of existence but the pattern is always the same: mistaking the map for the territory and then forgetting that there ever was a territory.

The Trap

The Demiurge inverts the natural order completely: You’re not using the system. The simulation is dreaming you. Law generates Experience generates Self. If you’re thinking of Facebook’s metaverse, you’re not wrong. The algorithm decides what you can see, platform affordances decide what you can do. Experiences, whether a news feed or a VR office space, are downstream of the system’s grammar. Finally, your avatar emerges in response to these constrained experiences. You become the thing that navigates the built environment and forget you’ve flattened and split yourself off. After all, you’re the only subject being rendered at full resolution. The main character.

The Territory

The Demiurge is the Hell Realm where Satan leads with the ultimate overreach of structure. The Satanic architecture produces a self that is passive like the human batteries in the matrix. It’s called a feed because you are literally being fed. But passive doesn’t mean bored. The simulation isn’t cold and austere like a Kafka bureaucracy. Beelzebub furnished your cell to match your Pinterest board. Sure, you’re a prisoner, but at least your aesthetic is curated. All the while, Lucifer is hiding behind the experiences, in the source code. As the simulation presents as neutral infrastructure (“we’re just connecting people”), it is secretly driven by ruthless optimization (e.g., time on site). Technology is not value-neutral, and the Demiurge hides that so well that its values feel like physics.

Social media is a typical domain of the Demiurge. But don’t mistake Satan’s archdemon for a few apps on your phone. The simulation operates deeper: social norms, language, even perception itself. We’re several layers of abstraction in, deep into what Baudrillard called “hyperreality”, a pure simulacrum no longer tethered to reality. The map ate the territory.

The Tell

You know you’re in Demiurge’s grip when you find yourself looking at a sunset and thinking about how it would look as a Story. Or if your inner monologue has started sounding like Twitter threads. The experience isn’t real until it’s been processed through the simulation’s grammar.

What you don’t know is that it gets much more personal, following McGilchrist. The Demiurge isn’t just out there. It’s the left hemisphere of your brain. The part reading this sentence. The naming, categorizing, and controlling part. A tool evolved to manipulate the world that usurped the master who perceives wholes. The Demiurge feels like water because he doesn’t just build our institutions. He reaches into perception itself.

The horror is that you likely won’t notice. You don’t perceive the outside world but are confined to your thoughts about it. You don’t register other people’s interiority because you instrumentalize them without knowing it. The false god of your ego doesn’t know there’s a larger self trapped inside.

There is no red pill because there is no longer an outside.

Mephistopheles: the Transaction

Mephistopheles is the youngest archdemon in this grimoire. He emerges from Renaissance Germany, from the Faust legend, from the moment when modernity invented the self that could be sold. Mephisto is the entity that offers you a deal with the Devil. Mammon and the Demiurge are ancient and impersonal behemoths, chthonic orders that don’t need your consent to crush you. In contrast, Mephistopheles seems human-sized, and treats you as a sovereign agent capable of binding yourself. Which is flattering. Which is the trap.

The Trap

Doing tries to purchase Being, and that new reality comes with binding agreements. Fromm diagnosed this confusion as the having mode masquerading as the being mode. Do the thing, get the title, become the person. The structure of every Faustian bargain is the offer that you can be somebody else. You could be famous or you could be rich. A lawyer, a doctor, or an investment banker? The funny thing is that this actually works, in a twisted way. You can indeed become a doctor because your teenage self imagined that this would make you worthy of love. You’ll just wake up one day after decades of training to find yourself miserable because you are living the wrong life. And at that point, everything around you is structured on the basis of that job, from your zip code to your spouse.

The Territory

Mephistopheles is the Hell Realm where Beelzebub leads with salience capture. This is the only hell realm you have to walk into yourself. Which makes it the hardest to leave. Beelzebub initiates with the deal. The prestigious internship, the job offer with a big options package, the girl you’re not that into but your friends would high-five you for. Wouldn’t it be foolish to refuse?

Lucifer offers the bait: Become somebody else, somebody better. Imagine the hit of pure, uncut validation when you post that “I’m humbled to announce” update on LinkedIn. Even though you never considered going into pension liability forecasting, you could surely find it interesting as a manager. You’re a pragmatist, after all. How jealous everybody in the bar would be that you walk in with the hottest date. You could be the one who is admired, respected, envied. Exhilarating.

Satan seals the contract with sunk costs. The commitment hardens into structure, path dependency sets in. You’ve signed up for the living standards that come with the pay raise. You’re now married to the trophy you won. The older you both get, the heavier the silence at dinner. Backing out now would throw away everything you’ve achieved. People would think you’re a fool. Worse, an utter failure. You’re stuck in a life you never wanted.

You signed the contract, sure. But our entire culture has been priming you to confuse doing with being. The CV, a proof of identity more authoritative than your passport, is basically a list of things you’ve done. Imposter syndrome is Mephisto staking out his territory. Being told you have “so much potential” is the Mephistophelean kiss of death. For the low price of your 20s, you can cash in your potential for a credential. And then people at airports will finally think you’re important. All the jaded lost souls who entered the same deal are telling you that this is just how life is, that you’ve got to be realistic. And by realistic, they mean cynical. Mephistopheles is the voice that makes cynicism sound like maturity. World-weary, nihilistic, sophisticated, leaning against the wall with a long cigarette. He speaks in partial truths, corrosive truths.

The Tell

Don’t beat yourself up if you fell for it. Most people do. I sure did. I was convinced I needed to be rich before anyone could love me. Two demons for the price of one. The next best thing besides not entering the deal is noticing you’re trapped in it. The giveaway is the moving goalpost. That degree was going to bring you respect, that number in your bank account was going to bring you security. They didn’t, so I guess you’re getting a PhD now and millionaires are really just middle class now, right?

More specifically, it’s a distinct emptiness after achievement. “I feel nothing”, says the hedge fund influencer after a 50x on a memecoin trade. You worked on a goal for years and after finally reaching it, you don’t feel completion but just more lack, and a tinge of betrayal. Burnout, from this perspective, is the final warning, your body viscerally rejecting your life circumstances like an auto-immune response. Your last chance to leave somebody else’s life is when your unconscious has attempted to torch it.

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Infernal Cooperation

Each hell realm is a collaboration. Mammon, the Demiurge, and Mephistopheles are what happens when Lucifer, Satan, and Beelzebub find a stable configuration to open up a gate to hell. One devil leads, the other two reinforce. The reduction needs infrastructure and blindness to alternatives. The simulation needs an internal logic and a self too flat to notice. The transaction needs bait and a contract. Hell is a team sport.

But it is not the chaotic Muppet Show of medieval demonology. We’ve unearthed a hidden grammar of chthonic emanation: From the three devils to the five archdemons. From there, we could probably continue into hundreds of demons that are all combinations and variations of these five deeper patterns. Asmodeus teaching geometry and finding treasure? That’s Mephistopheles wearing a funny hat. The apparent randomness was just a smokescreen preventing you from even considering mapping it.

Here is the map:

We discussed the three hell realms, the archdemons that run the ethical sequence backwards. The other way the cycle can break is to hijack the driver, when something else is choosing through you.

Next: the Possessions. Pan and Moloch. What happens when the devil doesn’t just build your cage but climbs inside your skin?

Sweet dreams.

The quest for the dream job is a particularly vicious mind virus that has been spreading for decades. The memeplex crosses Romanticism with Protestantism, captured by corporations.

Romantic individualism insists your life should be a unique self-expression, not the mere fulfillment of a social role. You are an artiste, and your work should reflect that singular inner flame. The Protestant work ethic, meanwhile, has always sanctified labor and morphed into holy self-actualization as the ideologies crossed.

Then came the capture: Corporations discovered that employees who see work as identity will tolerate longer hours, lower pay, and worse conditions, because quitting would be abandoning their calling. The Romantic supplies the yearning, the Protestant supplies the guilt, and the corporation collects the surplus. A perfect memetic honey trap: you get to feel like an artist while being exploited like a serf.

There is no Such Thing as a Dream Job

High expectations are the architects of misery, and the Ikigai provides the blueprint. You’re supposed to love your job. And on top of that, you must have impact. Your CSS tweaks should somehow address the world’s “deep hunger.” You must save the whales, monetize your passion, and hit your OKRs, all before lunch. Good luck.

It’s easy to mock, but my bite comes from personal frustration. I’ve wasted years chasing after the pot at the end of the rainbow too. I founded a startup I was excited about, only to find myself disconnected from our mission, three pivots later. Many times over, I’ve felt low-key guilty when I didn’t love my work, and also when I loved something and didn’t monetize it. That guilt, I now believe, was unwarranted. Neither you nor I are entitled to our fairytale dream job. Worse, chasing after it can pull you off the path toward a livable life.

The Contradictions of Love and Money

The “passion economy” demands that your economic function and your emotional satisfaction must align in the same activity. If you work for money, you are a sellout. If you pursue passion but can’t pay rent, you are a loser.

The problem is that economic and artistic activities have different structural incentives.

Economic activity is by definition work you do on behalf of somebody else. The priorities, scope, and timeline are set by your employer/client. It also means the activity is instrumental. You do it in order to get paid. In contrast, you would do what you love doing for the sake of the activity itself. You would pay to do it (as people do for hobbies), not demand to be paid.

If you try to monetize your hobby, you often destroy the joy by introducing external constraints and crowding out your motivation. I love scheming and taking risks. I would have been a dope assassin. Instead, I advise startups. Advising founders gives me joy, but packaging my advice into something billable often sucks the life out of it.

The market logic (differentiation, optimization, scale) will turn your joy into a side hustle.

Bad Targets

Even if monetizing your passion didn’t kill it, the Ikigai also sets bad targets with the other two circles.

We’re also supposed to be doing something that the “world needs”. What does the world need? And how would you know? The problem with impact-oriented thinking is a mismatch of scale: global challenges are illegible to individuals. You are not the protagonist of reality, sorry.

Finally, we’re also supposed to be “good at it”. But if you commit to an activity with attention and curiosity, you can’t help but improve. Talent is overrated, obsession is what drives success. Narrowing the search to activities you’re already good at prevents you from discovering the weird niches where you might eventually dominate.

The Ikigai demands four circles overlap. Two are in direct conflict, two are bad targets. Zero overlap. One nervous breakdown.

Split the Ikigai

The Ikigai persists because it contains partial truths. The four areas are relevant landmarks: Art, Service, Independence, and Mastery.

Maximising for one (usually finances) leads to unhappiness. Even neglecting one is unsatisfying. It sucks to hate your job. It sucks to lack meaning. It sucks to be poor. And finally, it sucks to suck.

The mistake is to assume they must converge in a single job. They don’t. We can solve for them sequentially or in parallel, but rarely simultaneously.

Back to the Future

If you’re young, you probably should get a job. And here comes the contrarian take: You should get a hobby too.

A job and a hobby.

There is a reason this worked for your parents. Keeping a membrane between work and play makes them mutually supportive: The job generates the resources to subsidize the art. The art restores the energy required to endure the job.

This isn’t a retro fantasy about larping the 1950s. That world is gone. We need a modern architecture to unite these pillars.

Economic Practice

Yes, get a job, but not just any job. While demands of the original Ikigai are unrealistic, we can still use the framework for useful constraints.

Instead of enforcing that we love our job, we should just make sure that we’ll still have some time and energy left to do what we love. All else being equal, choose the 9 to 5 job that pays less over the high-earning 996. Treat the job as a subsidy for your existence. You are maximizing for slack (time/energy), not just currency.

Another useful constraint is the rate of skill acquisition. As long as you are getting better over time, the “good at” portion of the Ikigai will take care of itself.

Finally, don’t do anything obviously harmful to your customers or the world. If we can get paid without doing any harm, there is a good chance the world needs what we’re doing. Over time, we can hit three-quarters of the Ikigai.

While we narrowed the search space with these constraints, we still have far more options than Ikigai-hunters. And we’ll need them. While good corporate jobs are scarce, the internet offers a long tail of opportunity. Entry costs are near zero.

You can vibe-code an app, monetize a hyper-niche obsession, or sell MP3s to reprogram attachment styles. It’s no coincidence half your digital nomad friends are suddenly life coaches. The category of “can get paid for” is vastly larger than the category of HR-approved roles. I know people paying rent as ritual consultants, attention co-pilots, and lore architects.

The meta-strategy is unbundling.

You first incubate a skillset inside a stable job, grow it into a profession, and then unbundle it into independent income streams. You are stripping parts off the corporate hull to build your own raft.

When you’re salaried, you’re generating more value than you’re paid. Go independent and you keep the surplus. Unbundling into multiple activities adds flexibility and resilience on top. As productivity increases, you reclaim the surplus. You buy back your time. Which raises the terrifying question: what do you actually want to do with it?

Sacred Art

Intrinsic motivation is the cleanest fuel. If you are naturally fascinated by an activity, you will go deep with ease, where others must whip themselves into achieving half as much. The temptation is to arbitrage this flow into productivity.

Resist it. Because as soon as you make the activity about achievement (even if not monetary), the magic is gone. I face this in my writing practice. It’s hard not to optimise my writing for engagement. I really like to see those Substack numbers go up (please subscribe).

But something more important is at stake than adorning my ego with likes. It feels like some pieces want to be written. There’s an almost gravitational pull to certain topics. My saving grace is that I can’t actually predict which pieces will do well, so I usually go back to writing what feels alive.

But writing alone isn’t my sacred art. This essay is a braid. It started on a catch-up call with a friend that veered into career advice. What came out pulled on years of sitting practice, my own startup wreckage, and a stubborn hope about how life could be. That’s the Glass Bead Game: you pick up one bead and find it’s attached to everything else. Writing is just where the weave becomes visible. My sacred art lives in the intersection of the activities I love: the conversations, the contemplation, the making. The goal is to keep playing, not to sell the beads.

Intrinsic motivation is precious. It needs to be protected from the market, a universal acid dissolving everything it touches into a commodity. If you expose your art to the market, it will be corroded into “content”.

The monastery had walls for a reason: sacred spaces are demarcated, removed from ordinary economic logic. If your hobby is not just a way to pass idle time, it needs similar boundaries. I use “sacred” because it opposes the profane, where instrumental considerations hold.

JF Martel uses this frame to distinguish art from artifice. Art is created for its own sake. Anything else is artifice, the instrumentalized version of creation. Build the walls of your monastery in time. A zone free of monetization. This protected space transforms work into play, because there is no externally imposed goal. To practice a sacred art is to follow a gradient of aliveness while answering something that wants to exist through you. You keep adding threads until the weave could only be yours.

Service

But the monastery isn’t a bunker. Eventually, a true Sacred Art produces more energy than you can consume alone. You hit the point of overflow. When you aren’t trying to extract value from your art, you often end up creating value by accident. The insights you mined for yourself start looking useful to others. Service comes in as a release valve for the surplus.

I’m still figuring out the economic and artistic legs of the tripod, but the further I get, the more the desire to help others grows. After overcoming a substance addiction, I feel kinship with others who struggle with this, and a desire to help. Service seems to fade in slowly, and only rarely arrives as a holy mission. Contrast this with the moneymaxxing grindset: philanthropy only once you’ve “made it”.

The good news is that economic practice and service combine easily. At the very least, they can set useful constraints for each other. Just like we limited our economic activities to those who don’t do any harm, we can limit our service activities to those who don’t lose money. If a service activity makes an economic surplus, it becomes scalable (and much more impactful).

At the same time, you should be clear about priorities for each activity - is the main goal to make money or to help people? Don’t fool yourself. True service comes from overflow, not a compulsion to please your internalized father. When the surplus is real, giving it away just feels good. No martyrdom required.

You Can Have it All (but not all at once)

Don’t try to find a single activity that solves for financial success, artistic expression, and deep meaning. Chances are, it doesn’t exist.

Instead, unbundle. Go after them separately, and let them cross-pollinate over decades. Especially in the beginning, a clear separation between the different areas of your life is helpful for clarity and avoiding a muddy middle of bad compromises.

For most, the “money problem” takes precedence. Not requiring your profession to also solve for self-actualization makes the game much easier to win. You hit the landmarks sequentially: Economics, then Art, then Service. I’ve structured this piece around my own progression but some feel the call to service long before artistic expression. Start where you’re drawn.

You might be able to have it all in this life. But not in the same activity and not at the same time. The walls around the monastery have gates, and over time, the circles of your life will bleed into each other. But that is the end game, not the opening.

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The Devil has been in decline since the Enlightenment. Rationalist critique dismissed him as naive superstition, an inverse Santa bullying the foolish into compliance with outdated traditions. What survived was literary: the sexy anti-hero of Paradise Lost, an ironic metaphor for human corruption. At best, the Devil became psychological, that inner voice tempting you to eat the extra cookie.

But evil didn’t retire when we stopped believing in its personification. The excesses of human cruelty - torture, genocide, existential risk - demand explanation. Yet among both the return to Christianity and attempts at updating traditional religions, the Prince of Darkness gets surprisingly little airtime. The Devil has been allowed to hide in the shadows for too long.

Evil is Real

I should confess something: I’ve had a crush on the Devil since I was a teenager, drunk on Nietzsche and the smell of my own potential. Oh, how I wanted to be that Übermensch, a joyous comet blazing a trail of hedonism through a meaningless cosmos. The devil wasn’t evil but a Promethean liberator who promised I could invent my own values. It didn’t hold.

No amount of rationalization could scrub away that foul feeling after an action I knew deep down was wrong. At first, I dismissed it as internalized social expectations, something to break free of. Then I tried the cosmic view: zoom out far enough, and everything is predetermined, serial killers are just generational trauma with legs. And isn’t the bad necessary for the good anyway? Yin requires yang. The Devil as God’s left hand.

None of it worked. The feeling didn’t track social norms, and it didn’t dissolve into determinism either. Some accepted things felt deeply wrong. Some frowned-upon things didn’t trigger it at all. It felt like perception, like recognizing something about the situation itself (not projecting onto it). My moral compass was picking up signal, which means my teenage Luciferianism had a problem. I now believe that good, bad, and evil exist independent of my ideas about them. But here’s what took longer to see:

Evil is not just “very bad.” Evil breaks the moral frame.

That’s why murder feels qualitatively different from theft: It annihilates all possibility of future good for someone. So what counts as evil? Depends on who you ask.

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Three Definitions of Evil

Moral philosophy has been stuck in a three-way stalemate for millennia. Which tells us that the answer is probably “all of the above”, each capturing something real. Each draws the line between bad and evil in a different place.

Virtue ethics grounds the good in the capacity to act according to your values, character, and principles. We can’t know the consequences of our actions, so what matters is showing up right: brave, honest, paying attention. Unfortunately, “I meant well” is the most common excuse at every war crimes tribunal. And yet there’s something here. It is clearly bad to act from a place of cruelty and selfishness. Evil, however, is what threatens the very foundation of all values: life itself.

Evil is the end of conscious life, the last light going out.

Utilitarianism is focused on the consequences of actions. Actions are good if they lead to well-being (“utility”), and bad if they lead to suffering. If we could calculate the total impact of our actions, we’d know what to do. Unfortunately, the hardware running that computation (us) struggles to remember a phone number. More importantly, humans are surprisingly different; my utility function is distinct from yours. The ability to choose is at the very foundation of the utilitarian good. Actions whose consequences result in negative utility are bad.

Evil is darker: destroying the capacity to choose at all.

Deontology is the ethics of rules. Since we can’t calculate consequences and good intentions routinely backfire, we need heuristics. Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill. These norms are load-bearing. The problem is that rules work until they don’t, and then they keep working anyway. But get rid of too many rules, and there’s no society left. Breaking a rule is bad.

Destroying the game itself is evil.

Three frameworks, three definitions of good and evil. As we’ve noted above, all of the moral theories hold an important truth. If one of them ignores the other two, it becomes a devil in disguise. A good pushed past its breaking points becomes a force for evil.

Lucifer: The Light That Blinds

Lucifer translates to “Light Bearer”. Like Icarus, he flew too close to the sun. Intelligence, ambition, and impatience fused so intensely that he was banished to hell for his arrogance. He’s been headhunting ever since.

He disguises himself as a liberator, fighting against unjust tyranny and seeking to overcome all limitations to human potential. The Luciferian promise: if we just know enough, we can fix everything. Poverty, disease, loneliness, and death itself are all merely engineering problems awaiting sufficient data. Our intelligence raises us above the crude patterns of evolution and nature. We must transcend our stinking flesh.

He whispers into the ears of every techno-utopian and transhumanist. His priests speak of “frictionless” experiences, of problems “solved at scale.” Conquering the universe and racing towards the singularity are Luciferian endeavours. Lucifer doesn’t want to become God. He wants to build God, and in doing so, prove that God was only ever a dumb machine.

You know Lucifer has taken residence when you begin measuring your brain waves during meditation. Or tracking Happiness KPI’s in a Notion doc. Lucifer invented hustle porn: Count your steps and your calories, track your sleep. His trick is not denying the sacred but explaining it away. Love becomes attachment theory, and awe becomes predictable neurochemistry.

Lucifer is the corruption of virtue ethics. Instead of providing a field of value generated by the tension of competing virtues, he applies optimization logic to it. The choosing self becomes a metric-maximizing machine.

By optimising a single metric, you are blind to everything else.

Beelzebub: The Rotting Swarm

Beelzebub means “Lord of the Flies”. While he isn’t as famous as his two brothers, he is probably the most dangerous devil of our times. Beelzebub doesn’t command the flies; he is the swarm. That buzzing haze of small hungers, none significant enough to resist, all of them together enough to strip a carcass clean. His domain is rot, but not the dramatic rot of plague or apocalypse. The quiet kind. The kind you don’t notice until you realize you’ve been scrolling for three hours and can’t remember why you picked up your phone. Beelzebub is why you’ve opened the fridge four times in an hour without being hungry.

Beelzebub arrives wearing the mask of the emancipator. He speaks of freedom, choice, and personal agency. But his liberation is a trap. He maximizes personal preference until it becomes meaningless among a thousand options that don’t matter - junk food, porn, and doomscrolling. The more you can do whatever you want, the less “you” remains to want anything, the more you act like the rest of the swarm. Freedom without structure isn’t freedom, but diffusion. Beelzebub invented notifications, variable reward schedules, and infinite scroll feeds with autoplay. Beelzebub is the devil of hyperbolic discounting.

His trick is not lying but bullshit, diffusing attention while totally indifferent to truth. He doesn’t argue or convince; he merely makes other things salient. Were you going to work on something meaningful? Here’s a thirst trap, and your friend just posted this meme. Buzzing, demanding attention, because attention is all he eats. The inner swarm manifests as impulse unchained from intention, the accumulation of micro-surrenders slowly rotting attention spans. The result: You have access to all human knowledge, yet you find yourself watching a 12-second video of a hydraulic press crushing a rubber duck.

Utilitarianism taken to the extreme collapses utility into immediate gratification. Beelzebub eats away at your temporal horizon until the self dissolves into the swarm.

The devil doesn’t need your soul if he has your attention.

Satan: The Weight that Crushes

Satan is the force that makes rebellion necessary, restriction calcified into cruelty. The tyrant presses downward, and everything beneath him turns to stone. “Satan” is associated with Saturn, the planet of restriction, time, and law. The rigid and cruel laws of death and time. Satan builds systems so perfectly legible that the illegible mess of actual living falls through every crack. The process becomes more real than people.

He disguises himself as a protector from chaos and promises to purify what’s unnatural. He wants to preserve cosmic order by eliminating whatever threatens it: the degenerate, the immigrant, the deviant. Satan prosecutes whoever fails to conform. The fundamentalist burns the heretic to save doctrine. The bureaucrat lets refugees drown because their paperwork is incomplete. The algorithm denies medicine because the diagnosis code doesn’t match. Satan is the devil of the spreadsheet. He is the government form that asks for your mother’s maiden name, your tax ID, and a utility bill - then rejects the upload because the file is 3 KB too large. He’s the hold music you’ve memorized. The calendar invite for a sync to prepare for the pre-meeting.

But Satan also colonizes the inside. Not as the dramatic inner critic who calls you worthless (that’s too obvious). The subtler voice that says you should have replied to that email already. That you’re behind. That other people your age have figured this out by now. He makes you feel slightly, persistently inadequate. That’s enough to keep you compliant. He is the weight of every “should” that has nothing to do with flourishing, every rule that serves only its own perpetuation.

Even more fundamentally, Satan is the tyranny of the propositional, the left hemisphere’s coup d’état against the rest of knowing. Under his influence, only that which can be articulated counts as real. What cannot be formalized cannot be seen. When deontology is taken too far, it gives rise to tyranny.

I always knew bureaucracy was Satan. Now I know why.

A Systems View of the Devil

Three faces of evil. But why faces at all? Why personify? Since Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch, it has become more common in certain corners of the internet to use the concept of egregores, entities that emerge from group behavior with quasi-agency and alien goals. A corporation isn’t just a contract between people; it uses people as fuel, often against their interests. It wants to expand bureaucracy (not efficiency) and maximize profit. Causality flows downward from systemic incentives to individual behavior (a CEO who gets too impact-oriented will be replaced).

Why use the egregore frame? First, it helps us see how structures can “want” things that no individual inside them wants. A corporation optimizes for profit even when every employee would prefer it didn’t. The system has desires. That’s strange and important.

But there’s a deeper reason. Evil at scale is hard to perceive. It’s like climate change, too distributed in time and space for our brains to grab. We evolved to detect agents, not gradients. Giving the system a face, a name, even a personality, is compression that actually helps. Egregores are a UI for hyperobjects.

And it redirects blame. When a system fails (a financial crisis or a slowly boiling planet) we hunt for a villain. But often there isn’t one. Everyone was following the rules, maximizing local metrics, and behaving rationally within their scope. The structure was the villain. Egregores let us stop witch-hunting individuals and start exorcising the incentives that summoned the demon.

Moloch is one such demon. But I’m arguing there’s a deeper layer that produces them. There are generator functions of demonic egregores, three systemic drivers that combine to summon these entities. And we’ve already met their faces.

The Stuff Demons are made of

Moloch, Mammon, and other demonic egregores are all created from the same material. This is where the notion of a post-metaphysical Devil makes sense. The Devil is the generator function of misaligned egregores. Each moral theory, when pushed into its failure mode, becomes one of three systemic drivers: Metric Fixation (the will), Atomization Paradox (the fuel), and Process Legibility (the nervous system).

You’ll recognize these as the domains of our three faces of the Devil. Every egregore requires all three drivers to function. What differs is which one leads. A Luciferian egregore is metric-dominant, a raging mob is at the centre of a Beelzebubian one, and a Satanic egregore revolves around process. The other two are always present, just subordinate. Think of it as demonic DNA: same three base pairs, different expressions.

Metric Fixation is the dynamic described as Goodhart’s Law or Value Fragility. A single metric (think profit or GDP) is maximized while everything else is ignored. If you tell a corporation to “maximize shareholder value”, it will treat poisoning the local river as a clever efficiency hack. The North Star Metric is the will of the demon, and it does not care about your externalities. This is the Luciferian ascend, obsessively climbing whatever hill has been specified.

The Atomization Paradox is what provides the fuel. Egregores run on humans. The best hosts don’t have anything other than Late Capitalism OS running. If they are bound by deep loyalties (such as religion, family, or culture), they might not mindlessly follow the incentive gradients laid out for them. The best fuel is atomized humans, only bound to their own self-interest. Fungible, neutral building blocks. “Free individuals” who must “find their own truth” don’t have an immune system. The Result: A paradox where everyone is obsessed with “being unique,” yet everyone acts the same. An atomized population is like loose sand, easy for a demonic egregore to mold into bricks. This is Beelzebub’s feeding ground.

Process Legibility is the driver behind mindless bureaucracy, the curse of high modernism. It is the drive to turn everything into a repeatable, legible, and “objective” process. James C. Scott has documented in “Seeing Like a State” how complexity is reduced until measurable units are made legible to a bureaucracy. A forest is complex, but timber is measurable. Biodiversity is messy, CO2 is legible. This process acts like the nervous system for the egregore. If the friction of human judgment can be replaced by automated processes, the egregore starts waking up. This is Satan’s architecture.

These three drivers are the anatomy of a demon. They combine like this: the atomized population removes resistance. The metric provides direction. The legible process removes friction. The system self-organizes into a predator, and the people inside it can’t see what they’re part of. They’re just following the incentives, making locally rational choices, doing their jobs. The loop closes. The egregore wakes up.

These devils have been with us at least since the dawn of agriculture. But they are particularly vicious in our times of hyper-financialized modernity.

The Hidden Face and the Scapegoat

Now the con gets interesting. Each devil doesn’t just hide behind a good, but also attacks another one as a distraction. From the internal logic of a moral theory, its hidden devil genuinely seems like the good guy. Not even cartoon villains think they are serving evil; they’re locked in on what they consider good. However, from the perspective of that good, another one of the devils comes into focus as evil and is attacked vehemently.

Virtue ethics (where Lucifer hides) grounds the good in choice in accordance with values. From its vantage point, Satan is the source of evil that must be defeated because he threatens life itself, the foundation of all values. None of the virtues we care about are worth anything in an empty cosmos. Satan’s cruel processes of death and decay must be vanquished. Not just the unforgiving rules of nature, but bureaucratic systems so rigid that life itself can’t squeeze through the cracks. Entropy wins by procedure and needs to be stopped. We need to liberate ourselves from tyranny.

Utilitarianism (where Beelzebub hides) cares about utility. Preferences differ, so the ability to choose sits at the foundation. Lucifer is a threat to personal choice because he has collapsed the good into a single metric. When everything becomes optimised, the capacity to choose according to your own values disappears. Once you’ve picked your metric, there is no longer a choice to be made; there is only the math of the next step. You stop being a moral agent and become a fleshy calculator. Humans need to be emancipated from technological control.

From the perspective of deontology (where Satan hides), rules are good since they allow society to function. Chaos is the enemy: crumbling social norms and atomized individuals. When everyone is scattered into pure individual choice, unbound by a shared reality, there’s no society left to have rules in. Beelzebub must be stopped, lest the swarm consumes the polis.

Beelzebub appears to be empowering individual choice. Lucifer pretends to be liberating us from unjust tyranny. Satan poses as purifying chaos and restoring order. Each devil disguises itself as the good from one moral framework while attacking another devil who threatens the basis for that good.

The Devil’s Oldest Trick

Here’s where it gets nasty: There is another layer of the ruse. The scapegoating wasn’t just a distraction from the devil in disguise, but also a cover for the third face of the devil to sweep in for the kill. Here is how it looks from each perspective:

The tech rationalist (Lucifer as liberator) sees Satanic restriction everywhere. Dumb laws, slow FDA approvals, the arbitrary limits of biology. He is going to disrupt all of that. But he is so locked onto the Luciferian good (intelligence, optimization, scale) that he doesn’t feel the Beelzebubian rot setting in. He wants to upload his consciousness, but right now he is drinking beige nutrient slurry over the sink because chewing is an inefficiency. He optimizes his sleep architecture to the millisecond but wakes up in a windowless “pod” that smells like stale air and unwashed polyester. He attacks the limits of nature, while Beelzebub quietly dissolves his muscle mass and his ability to hold eye contact.

Conversely, the liberationist (Beelzebub as emancipator) sees Luciferian control everywhere. Old white men who think they know better, technocrats reducing life to metrics. She wants to free everyone from the tyranny of measurement. Resist the quantified life. But she is so locked onto her version of the good (choice, fluidity, personal sovereignty) that she doesn’t notice structurelessness turning into tyranny. Every norm she deconstructs forces her to negotiate reality from scratch. While she may have escaped the oppression of patriarchy, the crushing bureaucracy of scheduling software and 4-hour processing talks snuck up on her. Attacking Lucifer wearing Beelzebub’s face turns out to lead to a stealth siege from Satan.

Finally, the traditionalist (Satan as purifier) sees Beelzebubian rot everywhere. Crumbling communities, a culture drowning in meaningless choice. He demands Law and Order. Retvrn. But in a complex world, total order requires total surveillance. To ensure the border is secure, he builds a biometric dragnet. To ensure crime is punished, he installs facial recognition on every corner. He attacks Beelzebub with Satan’s walls, not realizing he just laid the fiber-optic cables for Lucifer’s panopticon. Satan flattens human life into a “pass/fail” binary and Lucifer helpfully offers to automate the grading.

The Devil’s oldest trick is to vehemently oppose one form of evil while wearing a second face and ignoring the third. Exalt one, attack another, ignore what’s in your blind spot. Each faction is convinced they’re fighting the good fight. Each one serving a devil they can’t see because they’re too busy battling a devil they can. This maps, interestingly, to the three Buddhist poisons: craving, aversion, and ignorance. You crave your devil’s promise, rage against your devil’s enemy, and stay blind to the third. The wheel keeps turning.

The way out is to refuse the false trilemma. We need all three notions of the good at once: the capacity for choice, the flourishing of conscious life, and the social fabric that holds us together. Any one of them maximized at the expense of the others is no longer good, but a devil in disguise. I started this essay thinking the Devil was underrated. I was wrong about why. The Devil isn’t underrated because we’ve forgotten about evil. He’s underrated because we don’t recognize him when he’s wearing the face of our favorite good. I worshipped optimization and despised arbitrary constraints. What I didn’t notice was Beelzebub eating my attention from the inside. The rebellion against structure left me rotting in a swarm of distractions I mistook for freedom. What broke the spell wasn’t more liberation. It was binding the devil with some good old discipline. I had to build a protective circle that keeps the swarm out. The Devil’s trick only works if you think there’s one devil. There are three, and the one you’re not watching is the one that gets you.

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Once upon a time, I worked for a big tech corporation that encouraged employees to “bring their whole self to work” (we had bean bags and a meditation room, obviously). I felt oppressed in a weird way. People seemed more fake than usual, not less.
I now understand why.

Striving for authenticity is one of the most insidious and widespread brainworms we are suffering from. “Just be yourself” is up there with “follow your bliss” and “go with the flow”, the unholy trinity of advice that sounds good until you try it.
It’s insidious because it doesn’t look that way at first glance. Who wouldn’t want to live close to one’s personal truth, to express that unique spark freely, unconstrained by superficial expectations? I still fall for the marketing sometimes, so this essay is partly an attempt to disabuse myself of misguided notions of authenticity.

The Error and the Trap

Authenticity presumes a fixed self to excavate, to be expressed fully. That self doesn’t exist. Think of how different you are with your parents versus your closest friend versus alone at 3am. Different sub-personalities with different goals, desires, and fears. These aren’t masks over a true self, they’re different configurations of the same multiplicity, each as “real” as the others. I’ve been harping on about this for a while and will assume you are with me (check out “Self as Multiplicity” if you’d like more context).

If we crystallize an identity (e.g. “I’m a good person”), we become its prisoners (e.g. “I need to be perceived as virtuous”). Buying into the fiction of a fixed self will waste your time at best. At worst, the endless attempt to grasp or express something that doesn’t exist will slowly erode your sanity. It also punishes change: If you used to like basketball and now you don’t, was your past self or present self the inauthentic one? Better not change your mind about anything important. Your Spotify Wrapped is watching.

Assuming a fixed self, if you find yourself triggered and trapped in a reactive pattern, the “authentic” response is to keep replaying that. The depressed person’s “authentic” cynicism and the anxious person’s “authentic” hypervigilance. This view sanctifies the coping mechanisms you developed at age 7. Growth means transforming them, not enshrining them. You are also taken hostage by all of your past opinions - this is how politicians are prohibited from ever learning anything new and changing their minds.

It gets even worse. Paradoxically, trying to be authentic will trap you in performativity.

The moment you try to be authentic, you’ve created an auditor evaluating the performer (see more on this in my piece on doubling). Say you’re at a party trying to be your “authentic self.” You make a joke. It lands. But instead of just enjoying the moment, the auditor pops up: Was that genuine or were you performing for approval? So you try to be more genuine. You share something vulnerable. But now you’re wondering: Did I share that because I actually wanted to, or because vulnerability is what authentic people do? The auditor is now auditing the auditor. Each attempt to close the gap between you and your “real self” creates another layer of self-observation, generating exactly the self-consciousness that authenticity promised to dissolve. It’s like trying to fall asleep or trying to catch your own shadow. A self-defeating effort.

So far I’ve described authenticity as a psychological trap. But there’s a social dimension to this trap as well, one that reveals something important about the nature of selfhood:

The reason why “bring your full self to work” is so oppressive is because it creates a double bind. It does so through a contradiction with the implicit part of that message: “...but make sure that self is socially acceptable, professional, marketable”. It’s a double bind because refusing to play along would make you seem inauthentic (or sketchy). And if you acknowledge the contradiction out loud? Now you’ve failed to be authentic in a professional context. You need to keep trying while denying the impossibility of being both fully authentic and professional. You’re trapped.

Performance & Legibility: The Mask won’t come off

The inherent contradictions between professionalism and full authenticity point to an important truth about the self: A key part of our self is its social dimension. “Persona” originally meant mask. This is still true today: we perform a social persona to be able to interact with others, to play our part. Part of becoming a civilized adult is limiting some of our urges and drives when we’re in the company of others.

However, the mask is not just a filter over our true selves. Rather, it co-creates the self. Consider someone who reluctantly takes on a leadership role at work. At first it’s pure performance, they are just imitating what they think a leader looks like, feeling like a fraud. But over months, something shifts. The performance starts to reshape the performer. They develop confidence they didn’t have, learn to hold space for conflict, and begin thinking strategically. The mask grew a face behind it. This is why we become more like our roles over time: spouse, parent, teacher, etc. The performance is composting into the self.

If we rethink “authenticity” from the social perspective first, it’s about creating authentic masks, rather than unmasking a raw, unfiltered true self. A persona is the meeting point of a social role (e.g., policeman or father), the context (this particular police station, this particular family), and the multi-layered self with all its idiosyncrasies. Socially, an authentic persona is clear, sticks to its commitments, and fulfils its role.

The concept of “legibility” captures this social aspect of authenticity.

Legibility means both having a bit and committing to the bit. If an off-hand remark accidentally triggers some part of me at the office, suppressing the desire to throw a tantrum is actually more authentic than giving in to it. And instead of pretending that my “whole self” is some perfect shoeshine trooper, I’d rather just commit to being professional as long as I’m in the office.

An authentic persona is also one that gracefully incorporates as much as possible from the personality. I’m not saying you should get that boring office job, only that the fact that it comes with social expectation doesn’t mean you’re being inauthentic if you commit to it.

Wait, so I’m still validating the experience of authenticity, right? Yes, the experience is real. It feels different to be among friends rather than co-workers. That is because we tend to share more interests, aesthetics, and values with our friends. It feels more authentic because there is more of an overlap. The concept of “congruence” captures this aspect of personal fit that would be missing if we only considered legibility.

Balancing Congruence and Legibility

Carl Rogers used “congruence” to describe the matching of internal experience with external expression.

If I’m angry, I feel that I’m angry and I express it to whoever just pissed me off. But congruence starts before expression. It’s the inner contact, the honesty with yourself about what’s actually happening. You’re in a meeting and notice a flicker of resentment when a colleague takes credit for your idea. Congruence doesn’t require you to say something. It requires you to register the resentment rather than immediately suppressing or explaining it away.

This sounds simple, but most of us have spent decades learning not to feel certain things. Congruence requires un-learning that suppression, developing enough inner contact to notice the preferences, reactions, and intentions we’ve been trained to skip over.

Where legibility is the external aspect of authenticity (expressing yourself in ways that are coherent and socially intelligible), congruence is the inner aspect. More congruence means more refined access to all the (often conflicting) parts of yourself, and more freedom to let them into the room. If you create your own job or consciously renegotiate the agreements of your relationships, this can feel more authentic because more of your internal complexity has been folded in.

Congruence and legibility are two different dimensions (internal vs. external). An authentic person would be high on both.

Yes, I’m giving you a 2x2 matrix. Bear with me.

• High congruence, low legibility: Drama queen, the friend who shares every feeling as it arises, whose moods set the weather for every interaction, who you never quite know how to count on. Authentic but exhausting.

• Low both: NPC, practically dead inside. Heidegger’s “the they”, the person who has outsourced their opinions and actions to what “one” does.

• High legibility, low congruence: People pleaser, the friend who always shows up, always says the right thing, but somehow you never feel like you know them. Reliable but hollow.

• High both: the authentic person, a friend who you can read, who keeps their commitments, but who you also feel is actually there, with their own texture and reactions. That’s what we’re after.

Even though congruence and legibility are different dimensions, there can be (productive) tensions between them. A therapist might feel genuine warmth for a client. That’s congruence. But she doesn’t hug them at the end of sessions or text them on weekends. That’s legibility: the boundaries that make the role intelligible and safe. Things get interesting when they pull against each other. A client shares something devastating and the therapist feels an impulse to drop the professional frame, to respond as a fellow human rather than a clinician. Following that impulse would be high congruence. Maintaining the container would be high legibility. The skill is holding both, acknowledging the warmth internally and letting it inform her presence while preserving the structure the client actually needs.

We have redefined authenticity into legibility and congruence. But distinguishing these concepts is only half the work. The deeper question is how we relate to them.

Concepts can be a Map or a Compass

You may have noticed that authenticity as a concept is not really the problem; the problem is searching for it. Authenticity describes a resulting experience, but pursuing it directly is problematic because it traps you into crystallizing a fixed self and into performativity. The concept also points to different aspects, and mixing them together leads not only to confusion but also, frequently, to a double bind.

We gain in clarity and avoid most of these traps by distinguishing between congruence (internal; fit with experience) and legibility (external; social alignment). “Congruence” has much more fluid connotations; situations can be more or less congruent and congruent in different ways. “Legibility” foregrounds the importance of communication and social commitments over time that are otherwise easy to overlook.

Another distinction that seems important here is between descriptive and prescriptive language. A map tells you where the mountain is. A compass tells you which way to walk. “Authenticity,” “congruence,” and “legibility” are all maps. They describe an experience or situation from the outside. Useful for orientation, but you can’t navigate by staring at them. Prescriptive concepts are compasses. They give you something to move toward. Your yoga teacher doesn’t say “achieve spinal alignment,” she says “stand like a tree in the wind.” One describes, the other directs.

So what do the compasses look like?

For congruence, the sense of aliveness can act as a compass.

If you feel more alive, this usually means that different parts of yourself are all online and engaged. Conversely, you feel numb if much of yourself is disengaged or suppressed.
Notice the difference between a conversation where you’re monitoring yourself, curating your responses, and one where you lose track of time. That loss of self-monitoring is aliveness. Following it leads to more congruence across timescales, from having more interesting conversations to creating a life that suits you.

To complement that, the compass concept I recommend for legibility is “responsive commitment”.

“Commitment” because it’s about reliability, about generating trust by repeatedly showing up in a way. To avoid rigidity, “responsive” adds a relational emphasis. Am I actually receiving what others are communicating? Am I adjusting accordingly?

Think of a friend who always tells you the hard truth. That’s a commitment. You know what to expect from them, it’s part of what makes them legible as this particular friend. But responsive commitment means they also read the room. They know the difference between a moment when you need honest feedback and a moment when you need someone to just sit with you.

This is different from people-pleasing, which is all responsiveness and no commitment, shape-shifting to match whoever’s in front of you. And it’s different from rigid role-adherence, which is all commitment and no responsiveness, the cynical uncle who badmouths your father at his funeral because “that’s just who I am.” Responsive commitment holds a consistent shape while remaining porous to feedback.

Performing Authentically

The promise of this exploration is that we can get rid of conceptual tangles, avoid social traps, and go after authenticity after all. We can do so by following our aliveness, which guides us to higher congruency, more and more facets of ourselves are in play. At the same time, we are creating masks as required to be in responsive commitment with the people around us. We want our masks to be legible, but are ready to take them off if we stop feeling alive.

This stance allows us to escape the seemingly binary trade-off between authenticity and performance. Instead, we can perform authentically. We fold more and more of our complex selves into our performances, we create custom roles to maximize congruence. In a way, there is a return to clearly defined social roles - it’s just that these roles are more adjustable and customizable. Instead of being cast in a social role without recourse (“I’m a carpenter and a father”), we can create roles that fit us better, but are still legible (“I’m a friend who will always call you out on your bullshit”).

Social roles can also become less identified with a given person. In a professional context, roles like “project manager” or “devil’s advocate” could rotate rather than being assigned to one person (who will likely get tired of it).

If I had to go back to that tech company, I’d want a different deal. I don’t want to pretend to bring my “whole self.” The boundary between work-self and home-self should neither be too rigid nor dissolved entirely (you’ve watched Severance, right?). I want to bring a self to work that I can commit to, one where as many parts as possible get to contribute. Yes, I’m wearing a mask, and that mask works best when it’s not suffocating me. Not a whole self. A living one.

Ink Trails:

• Why you can’t catch yourself being real

• There was never a single self to be true to

• The outside leaks into the inside

Humans are the creature that doubles, that loops in on itself. We are the only animal that screenshots its own consciousness. We think about thinking, feel about feeling, and watch ourselves watching. This recursive capacity, our strange ability to take ourselves as our own object, perhaps what most distinguishes us from other forms of life.

Initially, doubling is our fall from grace, our exile from the garden. Self-consciousness is the core wound of separation. By simulating ourselves, we necessarily stand apart not just from ourselves, but the rest of the universe. We become both subject and object, both the observer and the observed. And in that strange gap between the self that experiences and the self that reflects on that experience, we grow horrors and marvels: the capacity for self-deception, for self-torture, but also for growth and self-transcendence.

I define “doubling” as “the capacity to relate to a part of ourselves”. Doubling is always partial: Just like a mirror only reflects a 2D visual image, a double is only ever a part of the whole. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is probably the most popular modality that leverages this capacity directly in a psychological context. What this essay is pointing at is that doubling, the pattern of first separating out a part (“unblending”) and then relating to it, is extremely general across different modalities of human growth.

Doubling is not just our fall, but also our way back home. Like the cells in our body, we double ourselves towards a larger wholeness. What looks like fracture is actually the fundamental gesture of growth.

Doubling as Developmental Engine

Doubling is not just a side-effect of excessive Instagram use but seems to be a deeply ingrained part of human development. We’ll see that it is required to navigate social situations, to facilitate learning, and to develop more complex perspectives.

The Social Brain and Recursiveness

At its core, doubling involves modeling ourselves as an agent in the world. The most general form of doubling is self-consciousness. We create a simulation of how we can affect change in the world and how others perceive us. It has been theorized that our ancestors developed these self models primarily to relate to others: Modeling how they would feel when in pain, when angry, etc., they could better predict how others would behave in similar situations. Self-consciousness is social intelligence turned inward. Unfortunately, most of us use this superpower primarily to replay embarrassing moments from high school at 1 am.

Taking ourselves as an object is also a key capacity for learning, as theories of metacognition have long argued for. If I can observe myself, I can notice what works and what doesn’t, to then make plans on how to improve. For example, I can monitor whether I’ve understood something or not, recognize gaps in knowledge, and reflect on my process.

Developmental Doubling

We double as we grow, and not just in learning specific skills. From Piaget to Kegan, developmental theory is essentially a map of progressive doublings: At each stage, there is a subject-object shift. What we were previously embedded in and identified with becomes an object we can observe and act on.

The child is subject to her impulses; she is her desires. The adolescent can observe those impulses and is now subject to her interpersonal relationships instead. She is her friendships, her social identity. The adult at the socialized mind can step back and observe those relationships, but remains subject to the expectations and values of her culture. She is her ideology, her role, her institution. Etc.

Each transition involves a doubling: a new observer emerges that can take the previous self as an object. The self that was doing the living becomes something the new self can examine, critique, revise. Instead of being stuck with blurry vision for mysterious reasons, you get to take off your glasses to clean them.

The Doubling Meditator

Once you’ve locked in on the doubling pattern, you start seeing it everywhere where growth is involved. Progress in meditation also proceeds through doublings:

The first doubling is an unblending of sensations, thoughts, and emotions from a mindful observer. This mindful observer (often seemingly located somewhere in the head) then mindfully observes and inspects different parts of experience.

The next doubling takes the mindful observer as an object, realizing that it was just a construction (e.g. by trying to find it and/or turning attention back on itself). Now, the mindful observer is the object, and awareness itself (not localized anywhere) is the subject.

The doubling pattern culminates and then breaks down once awareness itself is seen to be empty and sensations arise as knowing themselves (yes words break here, please consult your nearest Zen roshi). At any rate, once the split between subject and object itself is undermined, the doubling stops.

The Curse of Narcissus

Doubling enables growth, but it also opens the door to a particular kind of suffering: becoming trapped in the mirror. The same capacity that allows us to observe and improve ourselves can become a labyrinth of self-afflicted misery.

A classical example of this is how self-consciousness takes you out of flow. The centipede walks perfectly until it tries to observe itself walking. You’ve felt this. The moment you start watching yourself perform, you slip. “Remove the mirrors from your mind,” said the dancing Daoist, because reflection and action are fundamentally incompatible modes.

However, the deeper pathology is what happens when we can’t stop watching the reflections on the mirror of our minds. Psychological studies and Buddhists agree: excessive mind wandering makes you miserable. The mind left to its own devices creates its own hell realms. Your ruminations feed on themselves, negative thoughts breeding negative emotions in an endless recursive loop.

Once you’ve doubled yourself into a mindful observer, you can listen to the babbling brook of your ruminations and discover they’re actually quite boring. Running in circles, leaping across dubious associations, always looping back to the same subject: you. What you did and what you will do, should and want and could and oh, the drudgery of always thinking about yourself. You are your own worst Netflix show: infinite seasons, no character development, terrible reviews, yet somehow you can’t stop watching.

This tendency toward self-obsession finds its perfect accelerant in our digital doubles. Whether Instagram or LinkedIn, we now project images of ourselves to influence how others perceive us. It’s not just celebrities haunted by their public persona anymore, we all are. Like Narcissus, we can become so enamored with the image we project that we stagnate, trapped between the glamour we cast and the reality we live. The comparison breeds imposter syndrome at best, derealization and depression at worst.

What makes the digital double particularly insidious is how it smuggles the other into the self. Our projected image isn’t really us, it’s our simulation of what we think others want to see. The preferences and judgments we imagine in others leak into our self-image, colonizing it from within. We double ourselves, but the double is already contaminated by what we think we should be rather than what we are.

That leaky boundary between self and other is the doorway to a stranger territory yet. Until now, we’ve been discussing doubles that emerge from parts we’re identified with. But there’s a weird form of doubling where we relate to something initially experienced as “other” with the same relational capacity. We stop projecting outward and start recognizing these seemingly external forces as an interior landscape. In the most esoteric forms of doubling, becoming other to oneself is the path home.

Alchemical Doubling: Becoming Other to Oneself

Carl Jung was obsessed with alchemy. He mapped the alchemical stages of nigredo, albedo, and rubedo to the complexes of the shadow, the anima/animus, and the Self. Only by integrating these psychological forces initially seen as “outside” can a person fulfill their developmental potential. What has changed from the previous forms of doubling is that alchemical doubles first seem like something other before being seen as part of the self. We become more deeply ourselves by integrating the other within us. We’ll follow the Jungian individuation process in this last chapter to stretch the concept of doubling to its limits.

The Shadow: The original Doppelganger

The doppelganger motif in literature aligns well with Jung's concept of the shadow. When Dostoevsky’s Golyadkin meets his double, the experience drives him insane. The doppelganger mocks him, undermines him, does everything the timid clerk cannot bring himself to do. This is the Jungian shadow: all the disowned parts of ourselves, the impulses we’ve repressed, the potentials we’ve denied. The shadow is everything we’ve decided we’re not, everything that doesn’t fit our self-image. The story of Jekyll and Hyde points to the key lesson: the more violently you repress the shadow, the more monstrous it becomes when it finally emerges. Hyde grows stronger each time precisely because Jekyll keeps trying to eliminate rather than integrate him. The shadow is basically your psychological junk drawer. You know, the one with the extra cables, old batteries that might still work, keys to unknown locks, and that rage you’ve been meaning to deal with since 2008.

What protagonists of doppelganger lore never do is own the qualities in their shadow proactively. At that point, the shadow transforms from an outer threat into an inner capacity. The faculty that holds all that does not fit the active persona. Like a faithful mule, it carries what is not yet ready to be integrated right behind you. Can’t see it, but you can smell it.

In IFS, we deal with destructive firefighters by noticing that they have been protecting us from perceived harm. The most effective way to integrate the shadow is to see it, accept it, and even love it. Like Padmasambhava domesticated the local demons of Tibet, transforming them into protectors of the dharma rather than obstacles to it, we can convert our inner monsters into allies.

The Lover Within

The integration of the shadow opens up the purification process of albedo. At this stage, the aim is to take back our erotic projections. The anima/animus are the contrasexual soul-images that mediate between the ego and the unconscious. They’re often projected onto others, especially in romantic/erotic contexts.

When you have an animus/anima projection, you’re unconsciously arranged to encounter certain qualities “out there” that are really yours. The person who keeps attracting “unavailable” partners might have an anima/animus that enjoys longing. The work of albedo is to withdraw these projections and become aware of the lover within. Cut out the intermediary of ghosting situationships and relate directly to the inner princess who seems to require some sort of courtly love.

A variation on the same theme is provided by “Existential Kink”, saying: don’t just intellectually understand the projection but feel into the pleasure you’re already taking from it. Find where a part of you is secretly turned on by the patterns you keep repeating.

Just like the integration of the shadow can leave us with internal protector figures, the integration of the anima/animus can lead to the felt presence of an inner lover. This is a tremendous resource for self-love. I can directly relate to the part of me that loves myself fully (especially the weird, rough edges). Like emotional body doubling, it can feel like there is a beloved presence who feels what I feel, a most intimate companion to go through life with. Sometimes, the voice of my inner critic is replaced by my inner lover, and the harsh critique turns into gentle understanding, addressing me with sweet pet names.

If this sounds absolutely cringe and cheesy, I get it. I cringe as I am writing. Being cringe just might be the price to pay for self-love, and it’s worth it.

Conjunctio and the Divine Double

The final stage of the alchemical process is rubedo, completion. It’s often described in terms of the union of opposites within: good and evil (shadow), masculine and feminine (animus/anima). An inner marriage completes the individuation process. The idealised form of this completion gives rise to a final alchemical doubling: An inner wisdom guide, which would be called the Self in Jungian terminology. Variations of this concept appear with remarkable consistency across traditions. Socrates’ Daemon guides him through hard decisions, while Hermetics follow their Divine Double. Christian Mystics from Meister Eckhart to Paul assert that “Christ is within”, the imago dei that precedes the fall into ego-identification. In tantric practices, a specific form of God is related to as an inner image (i.e., a Yidam or Ishta Devata) and ultimately merged with.

There are common themes throughout the different spiritual traditions. First of all, the Divine Double is not created, but discovered. It’s always already present. Second, it is a source of guidance and the bridge to the transcendent. There are also important differences, most interestingly, whether the Divine Double is personal (e.g., Daemon), transpersonal (e.g., Yidam), or universal (e.g., Christ within).

Personally, I can sometimes access a certain flavour of intuition that I associate with the Divine Double. A silent knowing in the chest, subtle but deeply trustworthy. At least in my case, access to this inner guide is spotty at best.

And as always, distinguishing between wisdom and crackpottery is important here. It’s easy to find New Age types embodying their “higher self” mainly through strategic crystal placement. Listening to voices inside one’s own head is more common in the madhouse than the monastery. Maybe just ask yourself, “What would Jesus do?” for starters.

Solve et Coagula: All Doubles Must Come Home

The alchemical maxim points to something essential about doubling: it’s always temporary. We separate out parts of ourselves not to keep them separate, but to transform them by relating to them, and ultimately reintegrate them. Doubling is an intermediary step only, a ladder to be discarded once we’ve climbed it. The IFS part that protected you from childhood trauma does not need a permanent seat in your inner pantheon but can dissolve once its work is completed. The shadow, once integrated, need not lurk as a separate entity. Even the Divine Double points beyond its own existence.

You’re never done with doubling, though. The capacity remains because it’s useful. You’ll keep fragmenting and reintegrating throughout your life, pulling back to observe when you need to and dropping back into flow when you can. What changes is how tightly you grip the mirror. Growth isn’t achieving some final integrated state. It’s learning when to look at yourself and when to just fucking live.

We started in the garden before that first doubling split us from immediate experience. We’re not getting that innocence back. But we can learn something better than innocence: skill. How to move between reflection and presence. How to use self-consciousness without being trapped by it. How to be the creature that loops without getting stuck in the loop. Ultimately, the centipede learns to walk again. It still has all those legs. It just stops asking which one moves first.

Apparently, tomorrow's artists will all be art directors, curating AI outputs as if they're assembling Pinterest mood boards. Now that AI can imitate every artist’s visual style and mimic every writer’s voice, being an artist of tomorrow seems to boil down to curation and prompting skills. We disagree.

We believe we're in the skeuomorphic phase of AI art, where we're still creating websites that mimic newspapers and films that mimic theatre. It's like watching someone use a Ferrari to pull a cart.

Simon and I are arguing that just like with previous technological revolutions, a new art form will arise; one we can already see the outlines of if we squint.

Curation and Capacity-Constrained Sub-Genres

Right now, LLMs are used to shortcut the artistic creation process. The model creates simulacra from humanity's media corpus, approximating whatever the prompter had in mind. You input a prompt, the AI spits back a result. And then you iterate until you decide that the result is good enough.

Because of this iterative process, an opinion in the water of the AI art discourse is that

“Curation is the new creation”.

The images illustrating this article have been generated in this way. However, “true artists” have been critical of this curation-based approach to art.

Visual artists laugh about spaghetti fingers and writers mock that AI written text is not a creative shortcut—it’s a parody.

But as Cristobal (of RunwayML) notes:

Soon enough, AI will overcome its current limitations. Until then, the limits in capacity are actually contributing to novel art: New genres emerge by leaning into limits as creative constraints. Google Translate Poetry has been flourishing for years on a dedicated subreddit. When visual AI still had problems with rendering fingers correctly, Finger Horror summoned eldritch hands that had Guayasamin turn in his grave. AI's surrealist tendencies gave rise to the Italian Brainrot phenomenon. The fact that current video generation models are limited to a few seconds has spawned multiple sub-genres from vlog-based storytelling to Gossip Goblin’s world-building.

These capacity-constrained genres are delightful historical curiosities, like watching evolution in fast-forward. But they're also obviously temporary. The more disruptive a new technology, the more radical the break in the media. And as weird as Gossip Goblin’s Cronenberg TikTok rabbit holes are, we’re confident it will get much weirder. The real question is what comes after we stop being charmed by AI's current awkwardness.

Towards AI-Native Art

The first time that I encountered visual art that felt AI-native was a couple of years ago when I saw Xander Steenbrugge interact with diffusion models not by prompting them to generate images, but to sample the latent space directly, producing surrealist images that had a strikingly non-human vibe.

I think Xander was on the right track: AI-native art will be made of vectors, artistically sculpted corners of latent space.

The model is the art.

After all, the ethereal space of floating point vectors is the foundation of AI’s creative capacity, so it seems intuitive that art native to this technology would start there. But Xander was only halfway there; he was still doing the curatorial heavy lifting himself. Interacting with AI-models through prompting and selecting outputs has become second nature to frequent users of the technology, so I’d expect that to be a feature of how people will interact with art too.

In AI-native art, curation will be done by the consumer, not the artist.

The Art is in the Constraints

One of the first examples of the AI-native art we imagine is Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx that was commissioned for the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

People could prompt the model, and regardless of the image they tried to generate, it would always include some version of Holly (and her hair).

xhairymutantx can output arbitrary images, as long as Holly is somehow included. The output is constrained in a specific way, creating consistency throughout infinite variation.

The art is in the constraints of the model.

These constraints form the kernel of an artistic idea, the strange attractor that all variations orbit around. The kernel only becomes visible through its infinite mutations.

Practically, a kernel is a bundle of choices: which foundation model, which coordinates in latent space, what sampling parameters, what conditioning prompt. A recipe for a possibility space rather than a thing.

As in xhairymutantx, an artistic kernel could be a specific character or a distinct visual style. It could also include plot points, atmosphere, or a whole world. Fan fiction (e.g., for Harry Potter or Star Wars) can be seen as a precursor to this idea.

The Art is in the Conversation

AI's multi-modal nature means one artistic kernel can spawn a whole ecosystem of artefacts. In the case of Star Wars fan-fiction: One person falls in love with those Stormtrooper vlogs, another wants to compose Death Star symphonies, and someone else finally puts the “opera” in space opera. Unlike fan fiction, there's no canon to rebel against, just infinite, jazz-like variations on a theme. Each co-created artefact is unique as a snowflake, yet they all share that same underlying structure, the artistic kernel that makes them recognisably part of the same creative constellation. It's like fairy tales (before the brothers Grimm and Disney got to them): there's no “original” Cinderella, but something essential persists through every cultural mutation.

The art is in the conversation of the artist and the consumer (becoming co-creator).

As a final piece to this new artistic medium, we can also anticipate that the co-creation and curation process will be AI-assisted. Personal agents appear to be a clear attractor point in the evolution of technology. And those personal agents will know the artistic preferences of each co-creator, making the generation of specific artefacts much more seamless. My agent will know that my preferred media is a 10-episode show with Kubrick’s cinematography and Villeneuve’s storytelling that I will binge in a single sitting, thank you very much.

Realistically, even armed with personal agents, I don’t expect that everyone will always be an active co-creator and make artistic and media choices. Sometimes you just want to sit back and passively consume. That’s why I’d expect that the most ingenious co-created artefacts will be consumed by others, like an organic human-made movie or novel from the ancient times. We see this pattern now: everyone can tweet, but plenty prefer lurking and scrolling. Both human and algorithmic curation will surface the AI-art equivalent of banger posts that will be enjoyed socially.

The flow chart above summarises the vision of AI-native art that I have in mind. Precursors of this conversation through agents are already happening: Ken Liu uses an LLM as a translator, generating multiple translations of a Chinese poem from different lenses. The Chinese version is analogous to the kernel (the difference being that there is still a fixed object in the form of a poem) that is explored through an agent, producing multiple artefacts.

With AI, Art has taken a procedural turn.

What is the Message of AI-Native Art?

“Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of media theory hot takes and professionally cryptic aphorisms, gave us a useful lens here. AI is a “cool medium” in that it is participative (iterative prompting), low-definition (non-deterministic outcomes), and multi-modal (text, image, etc.). Cool like snowflakes. All alike, but each one is different. The most helpful framework of McLuhan’s is his tetrad, describing four simultaneous effects:

1. Enhancement: What does the medium intensify?

2. Obsolescence: What does it push aside?

3. Retrieval: What does it bring back from the past?

4. Reversal: When pushed to its extreme, what does it flip into?

This is a McLuhan Tetrad when applied to the vision of AI-native art described above.

It enhances in the sense that it adds the capacity for infinite variation on an artistic kernel. Users become co-creators and collaboratively create many different artefacts in their preferred formats and styles. Art was always co-created: it lives in the collision between what artists think they're saying and what audiences actually hear. With AI-native art, that interaction becomes a conversation that produces tangible artefacts. These user generated artefacts become the art objects that spectators take in.

In that sense, fixed art objects, the “original version” , the canon, become obsolete. And with it, any notion of linear creation process. Not only is there a continuous stream of new artefacts unfolding the kernel of artistic vision, but each of them is created iteratively.

The kernel itself retrieves the notion of platonic forms. An abstract idea that can only ever be approximated by each physical manifestation. It is by looking at many artefacts that we can intuit the kernel and understand the artistic vision of an AI-native artistic conversation, just like we can asymptotically approach the idea of a chair by sitting on many of them. The endless variation and co-creation retrieve something even older: oral culture. Before writing ossified stories into fixed forms, songs and stories would constantly evolve as they traveled the world. Fairy tales vary wildly across languages and cultures. The core themes often persisted, but most of the details changed, from names to metaphors.

Like anything, we can (and absolutely will) take this too far. AI-native art will reverse into aesthetic homogenization if the same AI model is used by most co-creators. The nightmare scenario: we achieve infinite creative possibilities and accidentally use them to make everything look like the same Midjourney fever dream. Artistic dystopia with good lighting. As AI-generated artefacts are used as training data for the next generation of models, this effect will only get reinforced. Runaway self-training could trap us in endlessly repeating the same aesthetic. A similar effect happens through the preferences of co-creators and consumers: Just like filter bubbles on current social media select the type of content that we consume, our preferences in form and style could be ossified by the use of AI agents. Whether we are co-creating or just consuming art, our agents will have learned our preferences and serve us more of the same. The Ghiblification phenomenon might be a precursor of this effect. If all of your media follows the visual language of Dark Academia, you are in a stylistic filter bubble.

Art as Living Conversation

Sure, this vision of AI-native art is rampant speculation based on cherry-picked examples and a flow chart. And yet I can think of broader movements that are foreshadowing the rise of a new medium that is co-created with infinite variability while sharing an underlying structure: Dungeons and Dragons became mainstream. Interactive theatre seems to be rising in popularity, too. I’m seeing more shared authorship for avant-garde writers, from Hanzi Freinacht to David J Temple. And consider the most internet-native medium, the meme. Infinite variation on a common structure, co-created by posters competing for virality.

Co-composting, the process by which this piece was written, is a synecdoche of our vision for AI-native art. Simon and I had several conversations on the topic, collected notes and research in a shared document, and wrote two distinct pieces based on the same underlying material. The latent space is the intersection of the world models of the two authors and their creative dialogue. You can read two distinct artefacts, but you don’t get to see the kernel directly (the co-composting document). While this text is still human-written, AI agents supported at least my writing process and added illustrations. And Xiq gave feedback (thank you!).

The conversational aspect of this co-creation between different humans and AI agents is the most important aspect of these speculations. The real promise of AI-native art isn't infinite content, but infinite perspectives on the same deep structures of meaning. Each generated artefact becomes a facet of something larger, like looking at the same mountain from different angles. The mountain doesn't change, but our understanding of its totality deepens with each view.

This shift makes visible something that was always true: art emerges not from solitary genius but from the continuous conversation between creators and communities. AI-native art promises to make that conversation more generative, more accessible, and infinitely weirder.

Here's the problem with trying to fix capitalism: every time you try to be good, someone else gets rich by being bad. You only use sustainable suppliers, your competitor beats you on cost. You cap the profit of your company, your competitor raises more money. Your employees are in therapy, the competition grinds 80-hour workweeks.

How could the Good Guys possibly win in a hyper-competitive environment? The answer is to continue competing while secretly playing a different game.

The Trap: Machiavellian Arms Race

The Good Guys losing against cut-throat competitors is not just a problem in business. We see the same pattern again and again, from the AI arms race to politics. If you care about anything else other than winning, you are liable to lose against somebody who exclusively optimizes for power. Joe Carlsmith warns against “Locusts” in a post-AGI world, a superintelligent AI that follows a power-maximization and resource acquisition strategy.

I call this problem the “Machiavellian Arms Race” because Machiavelli already framed it correctly in the context of politics: In a world where some actors will use any means necessary to gain power, those who voluntarily constrain themselves with moral limits will be systematically defeated. This creates what Machiavelli saw as politics' core tragedy: good people cannot both remain good and in power. And he saw no way out. So he proceeded to advise his prince on how to win these power games. Use force like a lion and cunning like a fox, etc.

The Machiavellian Arms Race is Moloch in a suit. It's a ruthless competition for power in its purest forms: political power, capital, and intelligence.

But Machiavelli missed something. He was thinking like a game theorist trapped inside a single game. What if the real move is to start playing an entirely different game?

The Escape: New Game +

In gaming culture, New Game+ refers to replaying the game from the start, but with increased difficulty and retaining some of the tools and skills from the previous run. Similarly, we can compete without joining the race to the bottom and compromising on our values. It’s harder than just maximizing for winning directly, but we also get a few tricks that the power players don’t have. The metaphor also works because, realistically, you’re only in a position to play this changed version of the game after you’ve had some success in the standard game, meaning enough resources (financial, social, emotional) to not feel existentially pressured to join the arms race.

Hanzi Freinacht nailed the two ways this goes wrong: "Game denial" means pretending the arms race doesn't exist (hello, leftist coops), which leaves you pure but powerless. "Game acceptance" means joining the race to the bottom until you become the thing you were fighting. What we need is "Game Change": a secret third thing that wins against pure power without getting dragged into the mud with them.

We can win at New Game+ by leveraging our unique advantages over the locusts and gradually changing the game's rules in our favor.

Legendary Weapons

What unique advantages do the Good Guys have? Think of a company that implemented measures suggested previously. How can Patagonia win against Zara?

Let’s start with employee well-being and development. Why did the amount of beanbags and fussball tables per employee keep increasing throughout the history of tech from Intel to Google? Because of the core insights that happier, more balanced employees do better work. The most important capacity of a company in tech is not how many hours employees grind, but how significant their innovations are. Disruptive innovation (as opposed to incremental innovation) requires a work culture that encourages continuous development and blue sky thinking, not racing down a clearly defined path.

While taking into account externalities sets additional constraints (playing the game on hard mode), it can also act as creative constraints. Only using recycled plastic requires coming up with new production methods and can result in novel aesthetics.

Locusts sprint faster, but they're optimizing for a 100-meter dash in what turns out to be a marathon. New Game+ is better at long-term thinking. It doesn’t matter how fast you run if you’re running in the wrong direction. Making more deliberate decisions, including all stakeholders, is more effective than defaulting on what’s most profitable next quarter. Power players might sprint faster, but our wise warriors of the light can outrun them in a marathon.

Finally, if a company can credibly signal that they care about more than profit (e.g. by explicitly capping their profit), they will generate goodwill and unexpected allies. Employees will trade off salary with value-alignment, and customers will pay more for sustainable products.

Just like two Zen masters on the street, New Game + players need no introduction. They spot each other across a crowded conference full of growth hackers. And they will help each other out beyond instrumental alliances, creating a self-organising cooperation network invisible to power players. The Freemasons of today don’t require secrecy because power players are too fixated on scoring the next point to notice them. Dedication to higher values enables bottom-up coordination. Meanwhile, the locusts can only coordinate through top-down coercion or deals at arm’s length (ready to backstab at the first opportunity).

These aren’t tactics that locusts could just copy to compete. Genuine value alignment can’t be faked. While superficial mimicry (think greenwashing) is possible, the only way to pull off a convincing imitation is to use costly signals, i.e. actually become more value-aligned. The moment they genuinely prioritize long-term stakeholder value over short-term power maximization, they've already switched games. Instead of falling into the trap of joining the arms race, we can create our own trap for pure power players: they can see the advantages but can't access them without abandoning the very optimization target that defines them. Just like coordination between single cells enabled the advent of much more complex multi-cellular organisms, value alignment could enable a similar transition.

This sounds almost too good to be true. That's because we haven't yet faced the hardest part: The most ambitious AI hyperscalers don’t have any beanbags, just ridiculously high sign on bonuses. What happens when you encounter pure power players who refuse to play any game but power maximization?

Binding the Arms Race

Even if OpenAi engineers are using a daylight computer with a sharpened mind fresh out of Jhana 4; if they are racing towards unsafe ASI, we’re still fucked.

The key to getting out of arms races is the recognition that neither party really wants to be in that situation. Even the most cut-throat AI labs would prefer not to accidentally end the world. Nobody wants nuclear war or climate change. Arms races happen because players don't trust that competitors won't defect first. “If we don’t go full speed ahead, we'll lose to competitors who are worse than us. So we have no choice”, goes every single player.

The prisoner’s dilemma is only a dilemma if the players can’t trust each other. It’s not an accident that the players in the thought experiment are criminals. The way out of the dilemma is to make small moves that can increase trust while still remaining competitive (see Schelling’s “Strategy and Conflict” for more):

• Transparency and verification increase trust through costly signals. In AI, this means open technical standards and independent oversight that can be taken seriously because they're expensive to fake.

• Communication and collaboration shift the frame from zero-sum to positive-sum. Joint research initiatives on AI safety and issue-based collaboration (e.g. climate or cancer research) create shared stakes while increasing the cost of defection.

• In iterative prisoner’s dilemmas, tit-for-tat is a winning strategy. The strategy starts off with a cooperative move, but will punish defection with retribution. It moves back to cooperation immediately after a cooperative move from the defector.

As soon as we extend the frame of the prisoner’s dilemma over time instead of a one-off, a strategy that defaults to cooperation and has built-in forgiveness wins even in a strict game theory context. To get out of an arms race, make the first collaborative move without being a push over, meeting defection with a measured response while intending to shift back to collaboration.

The best way to win the power game is to stop playing it.

Modding the Game Play

So we've established that the Good Guys have some aces up their sleeves. But how does this actually change the game at scale?

Just like people didn’t know to ask for model Ts or iPhones, they didn’t know what they missed before the wave of New Game + products hit their shopping carts. Omni-consideration leads to products that support the development of their users, even if they are not deliberately framed that way. Daylight computers and calm technology more broadly are examples. Once you’ve tasted technology that is genuinely serving you and your highest values, you won’t go back.

People are hungry to level up. The rise of the coaching and online education industries highlights the demand for products and services that are directly aimed at personal development. Rising stars like Jhourney and Art of Accomplishment are examples.

As culture shifts, so does demand. Just like organic food, personal development is becoming a status symbol. Meditation and therapy have not only stopped being weird, but they are a staple in progressive circles. Yoga mats have become a more popular backdrop for Instagram influencers than sports cars. Growth-washing is the new greenwashing. While much of this is posing, the trend toward inner development is genuine. As consumers become more psychologically resilient, they will demand products aligned with New Game+.

If a shift in consumer preference is deep enough, it has structural implications. When Tesla made electric cars desirable, it forced every legacy automaker to retool their entire supply chain, R&D pipeline, and brand identity. The "rules of the game" aren't just about what products sell, but also about what constitutes a legitimate business strategy. When Patagonia caps its profits and still outperforms fast fashion, it demonstrates that the old game was artificially constraining the solution space. Suddenly, "maximizing shareholder value" starts looking less like natural law and more like a weird 20th-century obsession.

Once New Game+ success stories become impossible to ignore and we have undeniable proof that value-aligned companies can outcompete pure extractors across multiple industries and time horizons, the burden of proof flips. Now it's the locusts who have to justify why they're still playing the old game.

This is why the coordination aspect is critical: it's not enough for individual companies to succeed. You need enough simultaneous proof points that the pattern becomes obvious to everyone. Once McKinsey consultants start recommending profit caps, you know the rules have fundamentally shifted.

Game change will happen once the inherent feedback loops accelerate: Wise players create companies and products that support the development of their employees and users, which generate more wise players. As consumers break free from confusion and addiction loops, they increasingly demand Good products. Even those still competing for status contribute by making development desirable.

Those who have genuinely moved beyond scarcity thinking become a new kind of economic actor. They cooperate without enforcement mechanisms, and optimize for flourishing rather than winning. Scale that up and you get workforces that coordinate without command-and-control hierarchies, customers who support durability over disposability, and investors who think beyond financial capital.

As this flywheel starts spinning, more and more humans join the open conspiracy of New Game +.

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Foundational Assumption: The Good

You may have noticed that I used capitalized "Good." More than a stylistic flourish, it's the load-bearing assumption that makes everything else possible. Without that shared foundation, bottom-up coordination becomes impossible, and binding arms races reduces to wishful thinking.

New Game+ only works if there are shared values that rational actors can recognize and coordinate around.

We don’t need some platonic ideal of the Good, but we do need a value gradient we can all perceive.

This is why New Game+ ultimately requires something like religious faith. Not faith in specific doctrines, but faith in the existence of a Good that transcends individual preferences and cultural construction. The moment you believe we can move towards non-arbitrary notions of flourishing, beauty, and truth, cooperation becomes possible across ideological divides.

There is another leap of faith required: to win New Game+, the player must be able to accept the possibility of defeat in the game of power. Yes, even if that means that the bad guys could end up taking over the world and destroying what we value most. The fear of societal collapse is the social equivalent of the fear of death, so this is no small feat. However, it's that very fear that traps us in arms races, leading to worse outcomes for everyone.

To get out of the prisoner's dilemma, you have to believe in a higher value outside of the immediate frame of the game (and that others will eventually recognize that too). Our greatest hope for game change is that enough players remember what the game was supposed to be for.

Capitalism sucks. What began as a clever hack for moving stuff around has morphed into a ravenous paperclip maximizer that enriches the few while turning our planet into a post-apocalyptic yard sale.

But hey, capitalism didn't conquer the world by accident. It's a wizard at dangling carrots: markets crush it at bushwhacking through valleys (think startups, VC, IP) and grinding up hills (corporations with their OKR and KPIs). At this point, capitalism has basically achieved root access to civilization's OS. Good luck uninstalling that without bricking the whole system.

It’s so hard to imagine alternatives to capitalism because it’s not just in our markets, but in our currency, legal systems, and governments. One giant tangled web. And I’d argue we don’t even want to get rid of it altogether, just a better version of it. Keep the innovation and optimization machine, minus the “oops, we melted the ice caps” side quests.

Utopian tech bros wanting to rebuild the whole shabang from scratch with their network states and fictional cities on Mars exceed even my capacity for optimism. How about we nudge the beast gently toward sanity, one tweak at a time?

We focus on the gradual path to fixing capitalism in this piece (no Mars visas required). What slightly better forms of capitalism are just one step away? To do that, we zoom in on capital itself, the mitochondria of our economic system. We will scheme and dream about better capital by rethinking how we structure and run companies.

Root Problems of Capital

Wait, so what is capital in the first place? Capital is money in the form of potential energy. If currency (from “current”) is like a river, slushing goods and services around in the economy, capital is like a lake, a reserve of money to be used in the future. It makes sense for water to gather in certain places to be redistributed later but we don’t want stale lakes and dried out rivers. We're after lush deltas and mangrove parties, not concrete canals and soulless dams. These are the problems at the root of our current form of capital.

The Rich get Richer

Classic: You need money to make money. Money has this delightfully biblical tendency to clump together—the Matthew Effect, where “to everyone that hath shall be given”. This is due to compound interest and the fact that capital returns tend to outpace economic growth (Thomas Piketty crunched the numbers).

How can we get rid of the biblical black hole energy of capital? Taxes, right? If it weren’t for this neat trick with lawyers and boats that billionaires and corporations have discovered: If a country raises taxes, they simply move to the nearest tax haven. Plus, let's be honest, the track record of government bureaucrats at spending money efficiently isn’t exactly great. Undoubtedly, that’s what international tax optimizers whisper to themselves in the mirror: “I got this rich because I’m a genius at allocating capital, better than those government drones. Therefore, I should keep it. QED”.

Only problem: they will only allocate capital towards producing more of it. Capital is pure optionality. In a fast-changing world, the dominant strategy, given the Matthew Effect, is to continually accumulate optionality at an increasing rate rather than acting (spending). Until, at the end of his life, Scrooge McDuck turns to philanthropy and seeks to reshape the world to his preferences, utilizing all that latent potential. Examples abound, from Bill Gates to George Soros.

Hoarding aside, the drive for profit also creates a much more insidious danger: externalities that slip through the cracks of market oversight.

Externalities: The Collateral Damage of Capitalism

Game theory time: If money can buy everything, and multiplies like gremlins, the winning strategy is maxing out wealth. This principle operates at every level. Governments maximize GDP, investors ROI, companies shareholder returns.

Enter externalities. The quickest way to make money? Dump costs in areas where the market does not recognize them. A tree has immense ecological value but only acquires monetary value once cut down and sold as timber. Schmachtenberger nails it: aiming for infinite growth on a finite rock is game over, sooner rather than later.

Regulations could fix the eyesight of markets, in theory, through carbon offsets, pollution limits, etc., but nations are caught in a prisoner's dilemma: The first to tax carbon gets economically kneecapped, so stalemate. And just a few brave nations taxing externalities wouldn’t help, since international corporations would just move. Even deeper, how to measure externalities in the first place is a key part of the problem.

The Measurement Trap

Life's a messy fractal, not a tidy spreadsheet. We can measure the carbon a tree absorbs, but not all the ways it sustains its ecology. Qualitative aspects like biodiversity, mental health, or social trust are invisible to the paradigm of quantification.

Welcome to the "measurement trap." By focusing only on what can be measured, we neglect what truly matters. And then humans proceed to hack whatever metric is defined into oblivion (Goodhart’s law). This is what capitalism is doing with profit, at the expense of deeper notions of value. Forests become timber reserves, education becomes test scores, and healthcare becomes a series of billable procedures. Second- and third-order consequences don’t show up in profit statements. Markets are myopic to the slow erosion of ecosystems and the breakdown of social cohesion. So, quarterly wins rack up while the long game crumbles.

So how do we fix this? Rather than overthrowing the entire system, we can transform capitalism by redesigning how individual companies operate.

Towards better Capital

We can reduce both externalities and inequality by changing how we build and structure companies, while avoiding falling into the measurement trap.

Value-driven Companies

Remember when startups wanted to *make the world a better place*? Facebook was going to “bring the world closer together”, and boy did they deliver! Just not in the way anyone hoped. The naive techno-optimism of Google’s “organize the world's information” makes me nostalgic for the times we thought the internet would be used for learning instead of arguing about whether birds are real.

We can’t afford to be naive any longer. We know the plot twist: Profits hijack the wheel, turning idealism towers into ad-click dopamine sweatshops. Founders became zillionaires while their users' attention spans turned into confetti.

This movie gets endless sequels in our current system: Startups grow from idealistic dreamers into extractive corporations. Live players eventually become power players cordycepted by Moloch if they care enough about winning. Machiavellian scheming is not even required for that outcome. The dominant strategy of any corp (legally required to maximize profits) is to cut corners and trees. We need to prevent blind profit maximization at the onset of a company.

Encoding Purpose

Imagine if missions weren't vaporware? What if “don't be evil” were enforceable, not erasable? We can hard-code the mission of a company into its legal DNA with the Steward Ownership model. An independent third party holds the company accountable to the purpose initially outlined. Patagonia, Bosch, or Novo Nordisk are successful examples.

This flips the foundational logic of a company: Instead of the mission being a means to make money, making money becomes the means to achieve a mission. Importantly, companies should not attempt to quantify the mission in a single metric to avoid the measurement trap.

More radically, it's possible to wire in a kill switch into the articles of association of a company: Once the mission is achieved, the corporation dissolves. This avoids zombie corps self-perpetuating beyond their expiry date like economic cancer.

I dream of companies that are like arrows, clearly aimed at a worthwhile target.

Developmental Organizations

While purpose-primers exist, they are rare. How can a sustainable company compete with profit maximizers? The answer is personal and cultural development. As people have more choices, they'll increasingly refuse to work for or buy from soul-sucking profit maxis. Plus, growth-minded leaders play the infinite game better.

Purpose should be combined with development: If all stakeholders (employees, suppliers, consumers) are embedded in growth loops, the company up-levels continuously. Kegan and Lahey's "Deliberately Developmental Organizations" (DDOs) blueprint workplaces as growth gyms. Feedback cultures, edge-pushing processes, even therapy and zen sessions on the clock.

Sure, ethical companies can't exploit workers for 80-hour weeks or source materials from Evil Corp. But turns out, when people actually care about their job, they do better work. Wild concept, I know.

I dream of companies that are genuine learning environments.

Putting a Leash on Capital

Limiting Profit

How about cutting straight to the chase, limiting the profit motive directly? Set caps for reinvestment and investor returns, and donate the rest to aligned causes.

Since the upside is limited, the temptation to max out profits at the expense of social or environmental dimensions goes away. This supports mission-alignment by legally subordinating financial incentives.

Profit limitation also acts as a filter: only investors who care about the company’s mission will join. Patagonia is a great example since the company distributes all its profits after reinvesting in the business to environmental causes. And yes, the irony that their vests have become the favourite garment of VCs is not lost on me.

The biggest issue with limiting profit is the arms race dynamic. OpenAI had a profit cap until they realized that saving humanity from AI might require, you know, building competitive AI. Oops. While profit caps might not work in industries where competition is mainly about raising the most money, that still leaves most of the economy.

I dream of companies that make enough money, but not more than that.

Separating Profit and Control

Default mode: Equity bundles profit and control rights. Shareholders puppeteer the board, who jerk management's strings. Linking profit and control rights drives companies away from purpose as they expand since wider share distribution means shareholders unite around the lowest common denominator, profits.

Fresh startups tend to be starry-eyed and mission-driven. After going public, passive fund zombies own the show and they regress to the norm. Legal jujitsu can retain founder control through a dual-class share structure: Class A shares (traded publicly with 1 vote each) and Class B shares (10x votes, held privately).

The Steward ownership model already sets boundaries to shareholder control, and dual-class structures can further limit the influence of financially interested actors. An even bolder approach is issuing instruments that don’t grant any control rights to shareholders, but only profit rights.

I dream of companies controlled by those who deeply care about their mission and have the competence to execute it.

Limiting Externalities

Companies need to take ownership over any mess they cause environmentally and socially. It’s implausible that regulation with real teeth will get passed due to the economic competition between nations. And even if they did, the end boss of the measurement trap is still waiting. For now, we need to pray that companies take responsibility. And they are getting better at that, right?

Sure, they recycle and install LED bulbs. Just look at their ESG reports: clean sans-serif fonts, lovingly held in forest green page payout, celebrating how they've achieved carbon neutrality (by buying offsets from a eucalyptus tree farm in Paraguay) and started exactly one (1) coding bootcamp for refugees. Greenwashing is easy, and most ESG in sustainability theatre. Codes of conduct and CSR reports aren't enough.

Real change requires companies to gut-renovate their decision-making. How information flows, what goals are pursued, how employees are rewarded. EGP instead of OKRs.

On the environmental side, companies need to take responsibility for their whole supply chain, including what happens to products after they are sold. In order to do that effectively, environmental constraints need to be built in from the getgo, including product design and resource allocation processes.

On the social side, the most important recognition is that technology is not values-neutral. Technology influences the values of its users. Even if Ken Wilber’s hot take that the plow ended animism and set up patriarchy seems like a bit of a stretch, you probably agree that social media has royally messed us up: shorter attention spans, polarised filter bubbles, Hunger Games for status. Instagram driving body dysmorphia and depression in teen girls by disseminating unrealistic beauty ideals (accelerated by beauty filter arms races) provides a concrete example.

While 4D chess with systemic effects of new technology is not obvious, many negative effects of internet services could have been predicted (and in fact have been, e.g. by Jaron Lanier). In addition to constraining the product design process to not cause obvious harm, second order consequences can be limited by “orange teaming”, a cross-functional team working together to model, test, and mitigate potential externalities. Basically, do a round of “how could this go horribly wrong?” before even starting to work on a new product.

I dream of a world where the first order of business is “do no harm”.

Distributing Capital more Widely

To counter inequality, instead of fighting the losing battle of labor vs capital, let’s just make everybody an owner. Spread capital like butter. It’s not just fair, it also helps companies win. ESOPs are the gold standard for startups because if employees become owners, they act like it. Outside tech startups, this is still rare. Besides occasional examples of food coops or retailers, most companies still have the same bifurcation between owners and employees that enraged Marx two centuries ago.

And why stop with employees? Could we make customers and suppliers owners as well? Especially those who took a leap of faith on an emerging business or showed loyalty over years. “Airdrops” in the crypto space have established the practice of distributing capital to users. Often, a significant part of tokens (crypto capital) is distributed to its users upon launch. If done right, passive users turn into hype squads, helping the company succeed.

As AI capacity increases, the barrier to entry of creating companies and capital is decreasing, adding a further democratisation effect to how capital is distributed. Soon, everyone with internet access can vibe code their way into being a shareholder.

I dream of a world where all stakeholders are co-owners.

Plant a Tree, the Revolution Can Wait

Look, I know this sounds like the kind of hopeful manifesto that gets written right before everything collapses into Mad Max cosplay. And maybe it is! No, slightly better companies won’t fix the root problems. Maybe I’ll even take a megalomaniac shot at redesigning monetary and legal systems from the ground up in a cheeky blogpost.

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But here's the thing about gradual paths: we can execute on them right away while the big revolution keeps going down the whitepaper to art project pipeline (with a few t-shirts sold on the way).

Let’s get started with the low-hanging fruit. Mission-machines, capital leashes, and distributing ownership widely. Change will come from the ground up, as founders, workers, and customers vote with their feet and their wallets. As environmental and social alarms blare, profit maxis will have a harder time selling their products. If this cultural shift continues, responsible companies will increasingly have an edge.

The capitalist realism crowd will tell you this is all naive incrementalism, missing the forest for the trees. Fair enough, but someone still has to plant the trees. And if we're lucky, maybe we'll grow a forest weird enough that even Moloch can't figure out how to strip-mine it.