There is a fear underneath everything I do. I am going to name it now so you can decide if you want to stay.

The fear is that I will reach the end of my life and discover I never arrived. That I kept something in reserve. That the potential was never unwrapped. That the examined life, which Socrates said was worth living, was something I circled rather than inhabited.

That fear is the engine. It makes the work honest because the question I ask of others, I am always asking of myself: how shall I live?

The question has followed me through a West Point education and a commission in the United States Army. Through ten years of service that included places I did not choose and decisions I would not unmake. Through the rupture of leaving military life, and the slow, deliberate reconstruction of meaning that followed.

Through twenty-two years of work in professional learning and development, coaching executives and teams in organisations that often had no language for what was actually wrong with them. Through an NLP practice that opened the territory of the inner world. Through Lumina Spark and Clarity4D and the typological lenses that help people see themselves without the cruelty of a fixed story.

Through years of calling myself different things. Coach. Trainer. Consultant. Barefoot Philosopher. Narrative Alchemist. Rogue Learner.

Each label was accurate. Each one was insufficient. As Kierkegaard noted, labels have a way of negating the person they are meant to describe. The label stands in for the thing rather than pointing toward it.

The thing, as best I can describe it:

I am a philosopher in the oldest sense. The Socratic sense. Philo-sophia: lover of wisdom. The person who asks the hard questions about how to live and refuses to be bought off with easy answers.

I do this in public, on the page, in conversation, on the street. Because the questions themselves are worth living inside.

Philosophy, in the tradition Pierre Hadot spent his career recovering, was a set of practices. Spiritual exercises, he called them: ways of transforming the self, of learning how to attend to the world more fully, of practising death so that life became visible.

Socrates did not run seminars. He stopped people in the street.

That is the tradition I am working in. The blog, the coaching, the writing, the AI collaboration: all of it is the same practice conducted in different registers. The question underneath all of them is the same: what does it mean to be human, to be alive in this particular moment, to have been given a consciousness that cannot quite rest?

I draw on a constellation of lenses for working with the inner world. NLP is the backbone, the most practically useful framework I have encountered for understanding how human beings construct their experience. Depth psychology: Jung, Hillman, Adler, the dream logic of the unconscious. Archetypal psychology: the gods have become symptoms. Clean Language and metaphor. Chaos magick as philosophical lens: belief is a tool, internal reality is malleable, the sigil must be fired. Existentialism and Daoism. The “as if” philosophy of Hans Vaihinger, who understood that we live by fictions and the question is only whether we have chosen them consciously.

No hierarchy among these. They are all lenses on the same territory. The territory is the self, and what the self is capable of becoming.

What I do is help people see the territory. Specifically: the stories. The ones running in the background, shaping perception so thoroughly that they become invisible, mistaken for reality itself.

Stories are code. That is the central insight underneath everything I call Narrative Alchemy. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are capable of, what we deserve, what is possible: these are programs. And programs can be rewritten.

This is an uncomfortable thing to sit with. If the story is not fixed, then neither is the limitation. If the limitation is not fixed, then something is required of you. The territory becomes territory you are responsible for.

I have sat with this in both directions. The corporate coaching path and the personal transformation path look different from the outside. From the inside, they are the same practice. A leader with an inner conflict they have no vocabulary for, and a person living inside a story that is slowly taking their life: the methodology is the same. Find the story. Examine it. Decide whether to keep it.

This blog is the evidence of that practice in motion.

It is what it has always been since 2004, when I first started writing here: a philosophical practice conducted in public, on the open web, in a medium that rewards the rhizomatic mind and punishes the broadcast one.

I write at the intersection of narrative alchemy, imaginal psychology, mythic imagination, chaos magick, self-development, self-authorship, meaning-making, and conscious living. That breadth is the point. The examined life does not stay within a niche. It follows the thinking wherever the thinking goes.

More recently I have been caught by the question of what it means to operate as a text-based ontologist in a world where text is becoming the universal substrate. Where the prompt is the brushstroke, and words typed into a box become image, sound, code, story, interaction. The word was always generative cosmologically. The mystics understood this long before the engineers did. Now it is generative technically as well. The two registers have converged. That is where the work is.

If I were to reduce all of this to a single sentence, knowing what gets lost in the reduction: I help people recognise and rewrite the stories that limit them, so they can grow into their full potential.

The fear underneath is that I will fail to do this for myself.

The practice is the attempt not to.

You are welcome to watch.

How I Think Things Work

The question that has shaped everything I think and write is this: how does a human being work inside the world it finds itself in? That question has no floor. It keeps opening.

Here is my rough cartography.

The Basic Model

We are meaning-making animals. Constitutively. Sartre’s formulation is the cleanest: existence precedes essence. We arrive without instructions. The meaning is waiting to be made. That is the most extraordinary freedom available to a conscious creature.

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is where I send people first. It was arrived at in the most uncompromising laboratory imaginable. That authority is different from rigour, and more useful.

Stories are the operating system. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what is possible, what we deserve — these are programs running on the hardware of consciousness. They shape perception so thoroughly that they become invisible, mistaken for the territory rather than the map. The NLP tradition established this clearly. The narrative therapy tradition extended it. Chaos magick made it radically practical: beliefs are tools, to be picked up and put down deliberately. The skilled practitioner holds and releases them as needed, using each for what it can do.

Free will is a useful fiction. Useful fictions do real work. Hans Vaihinger spent his career on this. His “as if” philosophy is the most honest position available: the most generative stance is to behave as if your choices matter, because the alternative produces paralysis and bad stories. The skilled navigator behaves as if the stars are fixed, knowing they are not. The fiction earns its keep by being useful.

The chaos magick formulation is sharper: adopt the belief that serves the working, then release it when the working is done. The belief is the instrument.

Reality is layered, and the higher layers are real. Reduce a love affair to atoms and molecules and you lose it. The reduction is accurate and entirely beside the point. Friendship, meaning, archetype, narrative structure: these are genuine features of the reality human beings actually inhabit, the actual furniture of the world. James Hillman: the gods have become symptoms. The depression, the inflation, the rage. The psyche speaking in its native language.

Re-Visioning Psychology is the entry point. Give it time.

Framing is therefore one of the most powerful tools available. If reality presents itself in layers, and the layers we inhabit are shaped by the stories we hold, then the ability to reframe is a fundamental human capacity. To shift the lens. To step between interpretive frames deliberately. A survival skill. The difference between a person who is trapped and a person who is not is often nothing more than the frame they are standing in.

The examined life is a practice. Pierre Hadot spent his career recovering the fact that ancient philosophy was a set of exercises, not propositions. Ways of transforming the self. Ways of practising death so that life became visible. Socrates did not run seminars. He stopped people in the street. Philosophy, understood this way, is what you do with what you know.

Philosophy as a Way of Life by Hadot is the book that changed how I understood what I was doing.

What I Think Is Happening

We are living through the collapse of two of humanity’s primary meaning-delivery systems, without a replacement ready. This is the context for almost everything that is going wrong.

The religious frameworks are depleted. Better explanations replaced their literal claims. When we ejected the faulty claims, we accidentally ejected the meaning they carried. The crisis this has produced is real and largely unnamed. People are struggling because they lack a story big enough to live inside.

Harari maps this transition clearly in Sapiens, though he is more interested in the mechanism than the wound.

Work is next. The first wave of industrialisation replaced physical labour. AI is replacing cognitive labour. Not all of it, not immediately, but enough and fast enough to strip work of its role as identity anchor for millions of people. We are not ready for this. The economic and political institutions we have built assume that most people will define themselves by what they do for eight hours a day. That assumption is already cracking.

Language is becoming the universal substrate. This is the development I find most extraordinary and least fully reckoned with. In late 2022, something tipped. The prompt became the brushstroke. Text typed into a box becomes image, sound, code, story, interaction, argument, program. The word was always generative cosmologically. Every mystical tradition understood this, from the Logos of John’s gospel to the abracadabra of the chaos magician. Now it is generative technically as well. The two registers have converged. This changes what it means to be a writer, a thinker, a maker, a philosopher.

Religion and work are depleting as sources of meaning, and arriving into that vacuum is a technology that most people have no framework for. The timing matters. Into that vacuum flows anxiety, tribalism, conspiracy, and despair. All symptoms of the same underlying condition: people living without a story they can stand inside.

The only question that matters right now is whether we can build new meaning-making frameworks before the old ones fully collapse. This is primarily a philosophical problem. A story problem. It will manifest as political and economic, but that is where it surfaces. The roots are elsewhere.

The work of helping people recognise and rewrite the stories that limit them sits at the centre of this.

It is a response to the actual emergency.

My Values

Life, as I am living it, is one long inquiry. Part field note, part pilgrimage, part conversation with something I cannot quite name.

At the centre of it is a simple but stubborn desire: to live freely and artfully. Freedom, for me, is the freedom to follow the rhizome. To let the mind move laterally, intuitively, associatively, without having to justify its path to some external authority. My thinking does not move in straight lines. It branches, loops, doubles back, disappears underground, and surfaces somewhere strange and alive. That is not a bug. It is the feature.

Curiosity is a way of being, not a method. A posture toward existence. To ask better questions. To stay open. To resist the dulling effect of certainty. I am suspicious of the person who has finished being surprised.

I trust lived experience. The wisdom that comes from walking, paying attention, getting things wrong, sitting with discomfort, allowing ordinary life to become a teacher. I am drawn to ideas, but I have no interest in living only in abstraction. Philosophy matters to me most when it touches the ground. When it changes how I take a walk, how I speak to another person, how I meet the morning.

Walking has become one of my primary ways of thinking. The path, the trees, the weather, the rhythm of the body: these are part of the work. Nature, solitude, and slowness are not luxuries I occasionally permit myself. They are conditions of the thinking. I need time away from the noise to hear what is actually moving beneath the surface.

Language is a living medium. Writing is how I discover what I think, what I feel, and what I am becoming. Words are thresholds. Through them I make contact with meaning, memory, myth, and possibility. The blank page is a place I enter.

Beneath the surface of ordinary life there are archetypes, symbols, patterns, ghosts, gods, monsters, and guides. To live well is partly to see through the literal world into its deeper dimensions, to recognise that every life is also a myth in motion. The stories we inhabit are structural. Change the story and you change the life. I take the imaginal seriously.

I want a simpler life. Room for what matters: reading, walking, writing, conversation, contemplation, friendship, beauty, and useful work. My ambition is to build a life-first practice, one that supports freedom, creativity, and depth rather than consuming them. The question I apply to any new commitment is whether it moves me toward that life or away from it.

The work I want to do is soulfully useful. To open doors, offer language, invite people back into conversation with their own lives. To help them remember themselves. The essay, the coaching session, the conversation in the street: if any of these help someone hear something they already knew but had stopped listening for, that is enough.

I am drawn to the solitary path. I am also drawn to the tribe, the campfire, the old human need to sit together and make meaning. The digital griot: gathering fragments, carrying stories, keeping the signal alive for those who are also trying to live more consciously. Both pulls are real. I do not have to choose.

Nature, mystery, language, meaning. The ongoing practice of turning lived experience into something useful to another person.

That is the life I am already living. Imperfectly, with great intention.

Some of My Most Important Books

A partial list. The books that rewired something.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

Two poems in this collection have followed me for decades. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a portrait of the examined life not examined: a man so paralysed by self-consciousness that he cannot act, cannot risk, cannot eat the peach. I read it as a warning. “The Hollow Men” goes further. These are the people who did not choose, who arrived at the end having been “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.” The fear I wrote about in the About page comes partly from here. Eliot named it before I knew I was carrying it.

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

The film is something else entirely. The book is a philosophical novel wearing the clothes of military science fiction, and it shaped how I thought about duty, citizenship, and the relationship between rights and responsibility long before I understood that was what I was reading. I first read it as a West Point cadet and again after leaving the Army. It reads differently each time.

Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life

The book that changed how I understood what I was doing. Hadot spent his career recovering the fact that ancient philosophy was a set of spiritual exercises, a practice of transforming the self. Socrates did not run seminars. This is the tradition I am working in, and Hadot named it for me.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Arrived at in the most uncompromising laboratory imaginable. Frankl’s account of finding meaning in Auschwitz is clarifying rather than uplifting. The argument underneath the memoir: we cannot always choose our circumstances, but we can choose our orientation toward them. That authority is different from rigour, and more useful.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling

The acorn theory: each of us carries a daimon, a guiding intelligence that knows what we are here to become. Hillman’s argument is that the psyche is teleological, always pressing toward the shape it was given at the start. This reframed the coaching work entirely. The question is not who am I becoming but who have I always been trying to become.

Stephen Larsen, The Mythic Imagination

Larsen was a student of Campbell’s and carried the work deeper into psychological territory. The mythic imagination is the native mode of the psyche. We think in stories, symbols, archetypes. This book helped me understand why the coaching work and the philosophical work keep converging on the same territory: the story beneath the story.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Overused, often misapplied, still indispensable. Campbell demonstrated that the monomyth is a story about how the psyche moves through transformation. Every person who walks through a threshold they cannot un-cross is living this pattern. Knowing the map does not make the journey easier. It makes it legible.

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

The most practically useful book I have read on belief and the structure of reality tunnels. Wilson’s argument: your nervous system filters reality through circuits programmed by your earliest experiences, your culture, your random encounters. You are seeing your model of reality. And the model can be updated. This is the philosophical underpinning of everything I call narrative alchemy, even if Wilson would have put it very differently.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Difficult, deliberately anti-linear, rewarding in ways I am still discovering. The rhizome: a model of thinking that grows in all directions at once, without a fixed root or a hierarchy of branches. It gave me language for something I had always done but never had a framework for. I have not finished this book and I never will. That is the point.

Michel de Montaigne, The Essays

The first blogger. A man writing in public about what it is like to be inside his own mind, across a lifetime, without arriving at conclusions. The Essays are digressive, alive with genuine inquiry, unafraid of contradiction. Every time I feel the pressure to be more systematic, I re-read Montaigne. He is the tuning fork.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche at his most exhilarating. The challenge to examine the foundations of your values rather than inheriting them by default, the insistence that the philosopher’s work is partly the work of creating a framework worth living inside. Beyond Good and Evil gave me permission to take seriously the idea that values are made, not found. Nietzsche rewards the careful reader and punishes the lazy one.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Eighty-one short chapters that have been generating commentary for two and a half thousand years without being exhausted. The Tao Te Ching resists being a system. Wu wei: doing by not doing, acting in accord with the nature of things rather than against it. The water metaphor: water yields to everything and eventually cuts through stone. I return to this book when I notice I am trying too hard.

Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

Written by a man who had killed sixty people in single combat before retiring to a cave to write philosophy. The Book of Five Rings wears the clothes of sword strategy. Underneath: the relationship between mastery and simplicity, seeing clearly without attachment to outcome, the way a practice becomes a way of being. My military background brought me to it. My philosophical practice is why I stayed.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Japhy Ryder’s rucksack revolution: thousands of young Americans walking into the mountains with packs on their backs, refusing the dream of the box, the car, the TV flickering in every window at the same time on every street. There is a passage where Kerouac stands in a suburban neighbourhood looking at the sameness of it all, everyone watching the same programmes, living out identical lives in identical rooms, and feels the quiet despair of it. I read it first at twenty and it landed like a diagnosis. I have been running from that vision of life ever since. The rucksack revolution never entirely happened. The aspiration was correct.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Walking

Two texts in one entry because they belong together. Walden is the record of an experiment: what if you went to the woods and refused to live a life you had not examined? “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Walking is the companion piece, Thoreau’s philosophical case for sauntering, for the walk with no destination except contact with the actual. He traces “saunter” to the medieval pilgrims walking to the Holy Land, à la Sainte Terre. Every walk is a pilgrimage if you take it seriously enough.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Walking as a philosophical act. Solnit traces the history of walking as a way of thinking, a form of political engagement, a practice of attention. This book gave me permission to take walking as seriously as I always had, and the language to explain why it belongs at the centre of the practice.