Ideas on calm, focus and living well
Practical, unhurried writing on Stoicism, Taoism, ADHD, focus, productivity and the age of AI, from the authors behind our books. Search the journal.
What to Talk About on a First Date
Two people sit down, exchange job titles, compare commutes, and forty minutes later say we should do this again in the tone of colleagues ending a…
The Retirement Honeymoon, and What Comes After
The first months are wonderful: sleeping without an alarm, the permanent Saturday, the trip you postponed for a decade. Then, somewhere between month…
Satori: What Zen Awakening Actually Means
The word enlightenment conjures permanent bliss on a mountaintop. The Zen word, satori, points at something both smaller and stranger: a sudden…
The Uncarved Block: Taoism's Case for Simplicity
Before the wood becomes a spoon, it can still become anything. Taoism's name for that state is pu, the uncarved block, and it is the tradition's…
Premeditatio Malorum: Rehearsing the Worst, Calmly
The Stoics kept a habit that sounds like anxiety and works like armour: briefly imagining, in advance, the things that could go wrong. Premeditatio…
Why Zen Teaches in Stories
A professor visits a Zen master, who pours tea until the cup overflows. That image has taught more people about the closed mind than any lecture on…
Zero-Click Search: Where the Traffic Went
Rankings steady, impressions up, clicks quietly falling: if your traffic graph tells that story, you are watching zero-click search happen. More than…
The Tao Te Ching, Explained Simply
It is shorter than a quarterly report: eighty-one verses, about five thousand Chinese characters. Yet the Tao Te Ching has been translated hundreds…
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: ADHD and Object Permanence
The leftovers rot behind the milk. The friend you love goes unmessaged for months. In the ADHD community this has a shorthand, object permanence…