About Soulcruzer
Somewhere along the way, the internet stopped being a place you could get lost in.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The web I fell in love with, the one that let you follow a link from mediaeval alchemy to cognitive science to a poet’s notebook at 2am and feel like you’d discovered something, has mostly been replaced by feeds, funnels, and content engineered to keep you scrolling without actually going anywhere. The algorithm decides what you see. The personal brand tells you what to expect. The niche keeps everything tidy, and the curiosity slowly dies.
Soulcruzer is my argument against all of that. Not in the form of a manifesto. In the form of a practice. I read and I write and I walk and I wonder, and I do all of it in public, and I have been doing it since 2004. The variety isn’t a bug. A blog that moves between philosophy and walking and AI and chaos magick and depth psychology and the book that wouldn’t leave me alone last week — that’s not an identity crisis. That’s what a curious human being looks like when they refuse to specialise.
Robert Heinlein had a line I’ve never forgotten: a human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, write a sonnet, and comfort the dying. Specialisation is for insects. I didn’t choose this as a philosophy. I discovered I’d been living it. The titles have accumulated over the years. Barefoot Philosopher. Narrative Alchemist. Trainer, coach, guide. Army officer. NLP practitioner. West Point graduate who ended up asking strangers on the street what they think a good life looks like. None of those titles are wrong, exactly. But none of them are the whole thing either. Kierkegaard said, ‘When you label me, you negate me.’ What’s underneath all the labels is simpler: someone who can’t stop asking how to live and who has decided to do that asking out loud, in public, on a website that has outlasted every platform shift since the mid-2000s.
What you’ll find here is a mind in motion. Essays when something has fully arrived. Journal entries when it’s still being worked out. Fragments when that’s all there is. Walks that became philosophy. Philosophy that went back out for a walk. The question connecting all of it is the oldest one: how shall I live? Not as an abstract puzzle. As a daily practice, running live, in this medium, with you reading over my shoulder.
If you’ve ended up here because the narrow web wasn’t enough, if you’ve felt that curiosity itself is a legitimate way to spend a life, you’re in the right place. Pull up a chair. The conversation has been going for twenty years, and there’s no sign of it resolving, which is exactly how I like it.
— Clay