I was in the bookstore just browsing when a couple of thoughts passed through my mind.
The first one was: there’s just so much competition for your eyes.
Thousands of books sitting there, all trying in their own quiet way to get picked. Some have famous names on the cover. Some have those bold, clever designs that practically shout from the table. Others are just spine-out on a shelf, waiting for somebody to happen along and notice them.
And I kept thinking, how does a book even get found?
Most of the books I picked up I’d never heard of. I probably never would’ve heard of them if I hadn’t been in that bookstore, at that particular time, wandering down that particular aisle. Sure, there are the classics. There are the books everybody’s talking about. There are the ones that have already made their way into the wider conversation.
But most of them are just there.
Which made me think about my own stuff. My blog. My website. The things I write and put out into the world.
How do you make yourself known among all these other voices?
Then the second thought came in.
A book is such a static thing.
I don’t mean that in a bad way. I love books. I love holding them, flipping through them, seeing how someone has gathered all their thinking into one object. But standing there, picking up book after book, they started to feel strangely still to me. Finished. Closed. Like little sealed rooms.
And that made me want the web again.
The website. The blog. The living archive.
A blog doesn’t have to be finished in the same way a book does. It can keep moving. You can write something today, link it to something from three years ago, come back later and add another thread. A post can become a fragment. A fragment can grow into an essay. An essay can point back to the thing that started it all.
It’s not a book on a shelf. It’s more like a path through the woods. You make it by walking it.
But then, of course, the same problem comes back.
There are millions of websites. Millions of blogs. Millions of people making things, writing things, posting things, trying to be seen. The web might be alive, but it’s also crowded. A book can disappear on a shelf. A blog can disappear in the feed.
So maybe making the thing is only half of it.
You’ve got to make the stuff. You’ve got to follow the thread, keep showing up, keep doing the work. But you’ve also got to wave now and then. You’ve got to let people know you’re there.
You’ve got to stand at the edge of the forest and say, I’m over here. I’ve made a small fire. Come sit for a while if you want.
Because otherwise, how would anyone know you’re around?
How should I live? Socrates called it the examined life. The Daoists called it the Way. Every philosophical tradition worth its name has some version of it, which tells you something. This question isn’t optional. It’s baked into what it means to be human.
I was listening to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on my walk into town this afternoon, heading to Tesco to pick up a few things. I listened to chapter one, Maps of Experience. Already, it feels like one of those books you don’t just read. You go into it.
His opening move is deceptively simple. We don’t experience the world as a bunch of objects. We experience it as a field of meaning.
A chair isn’t just a physical thing with weight and structure. It’s something to sit on. Something in the way. Something that belongs to someone. Something that defines a corner of a room. The meaning shows up first. The “object” comes later, when we deliberately shift into analysis.
That sounds obvious until you follow it all the way through.
If meaning comes first, if the world we actually live in is a world of significance rather than just things, then how we make meaning isn’t some optional add-on. It’s the central question. And the tools we’ve built for that, myth, religion, story, and ritual, are not primitive versions of science waiting to be replaced. They answer a different kind of question. One science doesn’t even try to answer.
Peterson is making an epistemological point, not a theological one. Science asks how things work. Myth asks how you should act in relation to them. Those are different categories.
You can understand the neurochemistry of grief and still have no idea how to grieve. You can explain the evolutionary function of courage and still not know how to be brave. A map of mechanism isn’t a map of meaning.
What mythology carries, across cultures and millennia, is behavioural wisdom. Not the kind you can fully capture in neat propositions. The hero who descends into the underworld, faces the monster, and comes back changed is as precise a description as we have of how real change works. You go into the unknown. You face what’s there. If you make it back, you bring something with you that matters, not just for you but also for others.
The hero’s journey isn’t just a story template. It’s a map of territory every one of us has to cross at some point.
I’ve spent over twenty years working at the level of story, with people trying to rewrite the scripts running their lives, often without realising those scripts are there. What I keep seeing is this. Transformation doesn’t happen in the rational mind.
You can understand a story is false. You can trace where it came from, see what it’s costing you, and even describe a better version. And still stay stuck. Understanding sits on the surface. The story runs deeper.
Peterson is giving me the theoretical scaffolding for what I’ve been seeing in practice. Myth is where the code runs. Reason mostly skims across the top. Which is why you can’t just think your way into a different life. You have to work at the level of story.
This is where Friedrich Nietzsche comes in. He saw, maybe more clearly than anyone, what was at stake when the West started dismantling its mythic foundations in the name of reason.
“The death of God” is a cultural diagnosis. The framework that held meaning together for centuries was losing its grip. The stories were no longer landing in the way they needed to.
They still existed. The language was still there. The symbols were still in circulation. But something in the relationship between people and those stories had shifted. They were no longer inhabited in the same way. What had once organised perception, behaviour, and value from the inside began to feel external, optional, even arbitrary.
The structure remained in place, but the felt reality that gave it force had thinned. And once that happens, a framework can persist for a long time in form while quietly losing its ability to orient action.
The framework doesn’t disappear just because you’ve stopped believing in it.
Peterson touches on this almost in passing, but it deserves more attention. The idea that human beings have inherent worth. That truth matters, not just strategically but morally. That history has direction, that actions accumulate, that things tend somewhere. These are not scientific facts. They are inheritances. Mythic ones.
The code is still running, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Nietzsche saw the consequence. You can’t keep the fruit while cutting the root. Eventually the structure underneath inherited morality collapses. What fills that gap is not reason. Reason is good at taking things apart. It is not good at building something to live inside.
What tends to rush in is ideology, a partial map pretending to be the whole territory. The twentieth century gave us more than enough evidence of that.
This is what Peterson is pointing at when he contrasts the hero with the ideologue. The hero goes into the unknown willing to be changed. The ideologue goes in with conclusions already fixed and forces everything to fit them. One updates the map. The other defends it.
I’ve been orbiting these ideas for a long time, from different directions. Carl Jung and archetypes. NLP and deep structure. Chaos magick and the idea that belief is something you use, not something you have to commit to permanently.
Underneath it all, the same question keeps returning. Why do these ancient stories still hit? Even now. Even for people who have rejected the systems that produced them. Why does the hero going into the dark still land in the chest like recognition?
Peterson’s answer is clean. Those stories describe the structure of experience itself. The known and the unknown. Order and chaos. Mapped territory and the edges where the map runs out.
Every life moves through that terrain.
Myths are the compressed record of how to do it. They were carried forward because they worked. Because the people who knew how to move through that landscape made it through. The others did not.
Story is not just how we communicate meaning. It is how we hold it.
Peterson has spent thirty years mapping this from inside the library. I’ve spent twenty-odd years mapping it from inside the room. Different routes, similar conclusions. That kind of convergence is always interesting.
So I’m going in.
I don’t know yet where it will lead. The best thinking rarely ends up where you expect. I’ll write as I go. Follow the thread rather than pretend I already know the destination.
If this is your kind of terrain, the questions that don’t sit still, the place where mythology and the problem of how to live turn out to be the same thing, come along.
Raffaello Palandri runs a Book of the Day series, and this morning he wrote about Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. I read it, and one question kept coming to mind: do you ever really recover from colonialism?
Fanon’s argument is that colonialism isn’t just a political arrangement. It’s an ontological regime. It reorganises what counts as human, partitions the world into human and non-human zones, and the people living in the non-human zones aren’t merely exploited. Their subjectivity is fractured. The damage isn’t incidental. It’s the point.
Colonialism and American slavery aren’t the same thing. However, as a Black American born in 1968, at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, I find the resemblance unmistakable. The denial of personhood encoded into law. The violence used to maintain submission. The systematic dismantling of culture, language, and family. The message delivered daily, across generations, until it begins to feel like nature: you are less than.
We are still feeling it. I know we are because I can feel it.
While reading Raffaello’s post I drifted back to 1998. A family reunion in Raleigh, North Carolina. There were children everywhere, the way there always are at family reunions, and I was listening to the adults talk. The talk was about white people, and it was bitter. Not irrationally bitter. The history was real, and the ongoing realities of racism were real, and the anger had been earned over generations. But it was being passed, casually, between the generations, like a dish at the table. And the children were soaking it up the way children soak everything up, which is to say completely, without filters, as foundational truth.
I remember thinking, ‘This is never going to change if this is how it gets passed on.’
I made a private vow that day not to bring my own kids to one of these reunions.
At the same reunion, something different happened. My grandmother took me on a walk. She showed me around the streets where she’d grown up. And as we walked, she pointed out the places. There’s the cinema. There’s the diner. There’s the park. And then: that’s where you wouldn’t have been allowed. That’s where you would have got into serious trouble for being there. Just matter-of-fact. Just: Here is what was true.
I was listening to a life shaped by that reality. She had lived inside all of it. The signs. The boundaries. The daily confirmation that the world had decided you occupied a lesser category of existence. She had navigated it in her body for decades, and she had come out the other side without bitterness. She was warm. She was kind. She spoke about people and the future with an openness that I found, standing there on those streets, almost astonishing.
She wasn’t pretending none of it had happened. She knew exactly what had happened, and she could name all of it. But she had found a way to hold the history without letting it become her centre of gravity. She kept it as memory, as witness, as something to pass on clearly, and she kept her orientation toward what was still possible. Separate containers, held steady.
That’s harder than it sounds. Most people can’t keep those from bleeding into each other. The anger collapses into the identity, or the identity forms in opposition to the thing that caused the damage. James Baldwin wrote about these issues with tremendous honesty. The hatred is legitimate. And it damages the one who carries it. Both things are true at the same time.
What my grandmother had, I don’t have a word that fits easily. The Greeks had megalopsychia, greatness of soul, not in the sense of grandeur but in the sense of a soul large enough to contain difficult things without being deformed by them. She had that.
The question Fanon raises, whether you ever really recover, I don’t think he meant it to have a simple answer. His own answer was closer to: you cannot restore what was destroyed. But you can constitute something new. Not recovery as return. Recovery as creation. Built from inside the wound, not before it.
What I saw in my grandmother was something like that. Not a return to an undamaged self. A self that had been forged in the full knowledge of the damage and had chosen, somewhere along the way, not to be defined by it.
I’m grateful to Raffaello for the book. I’m more grateful that it sent me back to that walk, to those streets, to her voice pointing things out with that particular combination of clarity and warmth. Some memories need a door opened for them.
This morning, three passages piqued my interest. Three in quick succession, like knocking on the same door from different directions.
The first:
“The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.”
I read it twice and put the book down.
Because this is the thing I keep forgetting. Spend any time on social media, and you start to feel the pressure: document the experience, aestheticise the ordinary, post the beautiful breakfast, the plane window, or the aspirational whatever. FOMO as content strategy is a drag. And if you follow the system, slowly, without noticing, you start writing toward the shot instead of toward the thought.
I like documenting. I do. A quick photo as a visual note. A tweet to catch a thought before it dissolves. But there’s a difference between noting and performing. Between capturing the moment and manufacturing one. Dillard’s point cuts cleanly: the hamburger doesn’t need reporting. We’ve all had the hamburger. What you read, what you learn — that’s what makes you different.
The second passage:
“In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”
He thought of himself in a hat. I know that writer. I’ve probably been that writer. There’s something seductive about the identity of a writer (the associations, the image) that has nothing to do with actually loving words on a page.
Dillard’s claim is that the great ones (Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gauguin) were powered by love of the material. They found excitement in the variety of materials. The complexities of the field ignited their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks. The tasks suggested the schedules.
So what do I actually love?
Books, yes. But more specifically: the essay. Vidal at his most lethal. Hitchens when properly wound up. Tim Cahill disappearing into somewhere difficult and coming back with something funny and true. Robert Kaplan reading a landscape like an argument.
Philosophy that doesn’t require a security clearance. Lin Yutang. Christopher Ross. Robert Twigger. Wisdom you can use.
Journalism as a contact sport. Robert Anton Wilson dissolving your reality tunnel. Joan Didion making anxiety literary. Hunter Thompson turns chaos into method, while Chuck Klosterman treats pop culture with more seriousness than it deserves, ultimately proving it does deserve that seriousness. PJ O’Rourke being gleefully wrong in the most instructive way.
And blogging, but not the content-marketed, SEO-optimised, monetised kind. The guerrilla kind. The punk rock DIY kind. Someone with something to say in their small corner of the internet and the willingness to say it whether the algorithm rewards them or not. That spirit. That’s the one I’m in love with.
Third passage. A writer gets collared by a student asking if they could be a writer. The writer says, ‘Do you like sentences?’
My version of that question would be ‘Do you like hyperlinks?’
Not as a joke. To me, the hyperlink is the sentence of the digital medium. The structural unit that creates meaning in a non-linear environment. To care about hyperlinks is to understand that your text is a node, not an island. A well-placed link does something no explanatory prose can replicate. The pathways matter as much as the words.
Sentences and hyperlinks. That’s the material.
Then Dillard lists the lineages. Hemingway studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Singer also studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Ellison studied Hemingway and Stein. Thoreau loved Homer. Welty loved Chekhov.
Reading is apprenticeship. That’s what I got back this morning.
When I read, I’m not consuming. I’m studying in the lineage. When I blog, I’m practising in public, in the tradition of the essay, the journal, and the notebook.
Does anybody even blog anymore? Maybe not. But Homer is still going. Montaigne never stopped. The medium shifts. The practice doesn’t.
That’s why I read. That’s why I write.
Dillard reminded me. I’d forgotten, again. Now I remember, again.
Click on the plus then click the hyperlink to take a trip.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reflecting with a friend on the year ahead—talking about change, personal evolution, and the pursuit of what truly lights us up. We’ve been digging into where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and what it means to fully embrace the things we love.
During our conversation, I brought up obsession—specifically, how being obsessive in the pursuit of excellence, or areté as the ancient Greeks called it, can be a driving force for growth. On a whim, I sent my friend a list of books and poems, saying, “If you want to crack the code of Clay, just read these seven books and three poems. These texts shaped the man I am today—they’re the foundation of my identity.”
Curious, I decided to consult my digital familiar, wondering what connections it might find between these texts and who I am as a person. As always, it amazed me with its insights.
Here’s the prompt I used:
If I were to say that the following texts were hugely influential in shaping the man I am today, what conclusions, characterisations, or insights about my identity could you draw from them?
Here’s what my digital familiar had to say:
The texts you’ve shared reveal a fascinating mosaic of your character, one shaped by a quest for independence, a love of adventure, an engagement with existential questions, and a profound appreciation for both inner stillness and creative chaos. Here’s what I can draw from these influences and how they might characterise the person you are:
A Seeker of Solitude and Self-Reliance
My Side of the Mountain speaks to a love of nature, solitude, and the pursuit of self-sufficiency. This suggests you are someone who values independence and the ability to carve your own path. You likely see yourself as resourceful, someone who can thrive in both the wilderness of the external world and the vast, untamed landscapes of your inner self.
Drawn to Myth and Heroism
The Savage Sword of Conan taps into the mythic, larger-than-life archetypes that embody primal strength, freedom, and defiance. This implies that you’re drawn to figures who navigate brutal, chaotic worlds with resilience and cunning. You might see life as an epic, mythological journey—one that requires bravery, a connection to raw instincts, and a certain audacious flair for adventure.
Haunted by Existential Questions
The inclusion of Eliot’s The Wasteland, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, and The Hollow Men points to a deep engagement with questions of meaning, alienation, and the fragmented nature of modern life. These works suggest you’re introspective, someone who wrestles with the dissonance between the inner self and the external world. You likely experience moments of profound connection alongside moments of estrangement and are attuned to the broken yet beautiful complexities of existence.
A Spiritual Wanderer
The pairing of The Dharma Bums, The Tao Te Ching, and The Art of Living suggests a duality in your spiritual orientation. On one hand, you resonate with the spontaneous, countercultural ethos of Kerouac’s Zen-inspired wanderers. On the other, you embrace the timeless wisdom and simplicity of Taoism and Yutang’s playful, humanistic philosophy. You likely see life as a spiritual journey—one that balances wild, expansive exploration with quiet moments of reflection and balance.
A Mind Open to Cosmic Play
Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising speaks to a fascination with the malleability of reality, the potential for consciousness expansion, and the interplay between mysticism, psychology, and science. This signals a curiosity for the liminal spaces between what we know and what we imagine. You’re likely someone who experiments with perspectives, delights in dismantling mental boundaries, and embraces the chaos inherent in growth and transformation.
A Rebel Against Absurdity
Camus’ The Stranger reflects a tension between existential detachment and the longing for meaning. This suggests you’ve grappled with the absurdity of life and emerged with a resolve to live authentically, embracing freedom and responsibility in equal measure. There’s a sense of quiet rebellion in you—a willingness to confront the void and define meaning on your own terms.
The Bigger Picture
Taken together, these works paint you as a person deeply attuned to both the epic and the intimate, the primal and the intellectual. You’re a seeker, a philosopher, and a storyteller—someone who moves fluidly between the worlds of myth, poetry, and personal insight. Your identity seems to straddle contradictions: you’re fiercely independent yet yearning for connection, restless yet reflective, playful yet deeply thoughtful.
At your core, you seem to be someone who sees life as both a challenge to be met with courage and creativity, and a mystery to be savoured with humility and wonder. There’s a Promethean quality to you—a willingness to steal fire from the gods (whether they’re found in myth, books, or inner revelation) and bring it back to light the way for others.
Transhumanism, which promotes the enhancement of the human condition through cutting-edge technologies, pushes the boundaries of our conventional understanding of humanity.
This book explores the philosophical, ethical, and scientific facets of the transhumanist movement, and provides a good overview of its possible advantages and dangers.
I gained some new insights into how forthcoming innovations could potentially reshape our definition of what it means to be human.
In her book Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep to find out what people’s main (and sometimes contradictory) worries are online. These include searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and being seen. She looks at what brought people online and what keeps us here, even though the social equations of digital life—what we have to give up, whether we know it or not, for the benefits of the internet—have changed a lot.
In this updated version of Maps to Ecstasy, Gabrielle Roth goes into more detail about the ideas that have been important to her, like how to turn ordinary life into sacred art. People have said that her work teaching people how to move is a mix of art and healing.
The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert is a mix of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism. She looks at our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, beauty, love, and sex, and messes with them. She uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader’s reflection—unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the “I” in both literary and daily life.
Transpersonal Dynamics is on the cutting edge of quantum physics field theory and integrative psychology. It offers new ways to look at the therapeutic encounter. This book will teach you how to find “the heart of the matter” in complicated situations. Millichamp uses practical, down-to-earth language to talk about some of the tougher parts of the therapeutic relationship. Her goal is to encourage and help practitioners take more risks, and to make their work more collaborative and relational.
Just Ride is a wonderful surprise. Petersen encourages you to forget about the ultralight bikes that are uncomfortable, the flashy jerseys, the big shoes that clip onto small pedals, and the grinding out of miles and miles. Instead, he says, ride your bike like you did when you were a kid: just hop on it and enjoy it for what it is.
Petersen is a former racer who has commuted to work by bike every day since 1980. His writings and opinions have been published in major bicycling and outdoor magazines, and his company, Rivendell Bicycle Works, makes bikes for riders who want to leave a culture dominated by racing. In this book, he shares a lifetime of surprising facts, controversial opinions, expert techniques, and his own maverick philosophy.
A nice introduction to processing the sounds that surround you and understanding how they influence our daily lives. It’s easy to read, which makes it a great resource to go back to every so often to remind yourself of what’s going on around you.
Mayer says in Personal Intelligence that we are naturally interested in the thoughts and feelings of the people we see every day. Some people are good at figuring out what makes their friends, family, and coworkers tick. We’re not all the same. Mayer explains why and shows how the best readers among us have developed “high personal intelligence.”
Mayer’s theory of personal intelligence ties together a number of different findings that were once thought to be unrelated. These findings show how many different ways we can read other people’s faces, weigh the choices we’re given in relationships, work, and family life, and decide if our personal goals conflict or go well together. He makes a strong case that being able to solve problems in all these different areas is the same skill.
Think of Me is an insightful and authentic piece of work. In his simple, honest verse, he tells stories and makes observations that are full of sadness, adventure, and realism. With his honest style of poetry, Trandahl tells us all, no matter where we come from, that the everyday is actually very special.
This book shows how to use long-term strategies to make industry forecasts, innovation policies, leadership guidelines, and brands that are ready for the future. It helps entrepreneurs and business owners look at the future of their companies as a whole and come up with good plans so that they are future-proof.
The word “Metaverse” is suddenly everywhere, from the front pages of national newspapers to the latest fashion trends to the plans of the most powerful companies in history. It is already affecting how the US government, the EU, and the Chinese Communist Party run their countries.
Ball takes us on a big tour of the “next internet” and shows that many proto-Metaverses, like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox, are already here. Still, these are just a taste of what is to come. Ball defines the Metaverse in detail before talking about the technologies that will power it and the breakthroughs that will be needed to make it a reality.
Most importantly, he looks at many of the almost limitless ways the Metaverse can be used.
This isn’t my total list of books read this year, but this will give a flavour of where my mind has been over the course of 2022.
What books did you explore in 2022? Any recommendations for my 2023 reading list?
The Kindle has been the best thing and the most dangerous thing for me. I love books. In fact, you might say I’m addicted to books. I have to have them. Without books and music, there is no life for me. The problem with the Kindle is the books are too easy to obtain. If I come across a title while surfing the Net and it’s in the Kindle store, chances are I’ll buy it! Versus back in the day, pre-kindle, I’d have to make the trek to a bookstore to try and find the book (which was an adventure in itself).
I used to love going to the bookstore, new or used, and wander around and browse for hours until something caught my eye and then I’d buy it, take home and read it from cover to cover (however long that took).
My love of books goes way back to before school. I was far ahead of the other kids my age when came to reading. I was so good in fact, that for English I was bumped up a grade. I hated it because it meant for that hour or so I had to leave my friend and go to class with kids older than me! I didn’t really dig that.
The library was my sanctuary. I would walk 5 miles to go spend the whole day in the post library. I’d wander up and down the library stacks sometimes in science, other times in history or literature or mechanics, it didn’t matter. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on.
Even now, my bookshelves are filled with books on many different subjects.
I don’t tend to read cover to cover anymore, not in one shot, but over time as i dip in and out of the books i have on the go unless the book has not lived up to its promises and is terrible, then happy to abandon it. Whereas before when i bought a physical book, i read it from cover to cover regardless. if it was bad, i’d suffer through it.
Now i think the Kindle feels much like surfing the web. I mostly read on the Kindle iPad app, even though i do have a physical Kindle, i tend only to read that on holiday in an anticipation of reading on a beach or mountain or lake somewhere out in the sun. Plus the Kindle on the iPad is easier to highlight and use the note function or to screenshot a passage to share on the social web.
Here are my last 10 books I bought and am currently reading:
The bottom line for me is that I love books. Yes, I do love the feel of a physical book in my hand, on the hand, I love the convenience of having a huge library in my pocket as well as the instant purchase without having to leave the comfort of my reading chair.
“One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.” So wrote Southern novelist Eudora Welty in her essay “Place in Fiction,” and it’s a concept well worth thinking about in an era in which communities and countries feel paradoxically fractured and all-encompassing, in which people feel torn apart and thrown together, all at once. At times like these, it is not a bad thing to step away from the bigger picture and focus on something smaller, as a way of re-orienting yourself in this world. – from A Nonfiction Map Of The United States
Kristin Iversen has compiled a list of the best pieces of nonfiction — books, essays, memoirs — from every state in the US (plus DC and NYC). It’s a way, through reading, to get to know a place.
At times like these, it is not a bad thing to step away from the bigger picture and focus on something smaller, as a way of re-orienting yourself in this world. And what better way to do that than by reading? The very best writing about a place can bring the reader a whole new understanding of a life different than their own, as well as, per Welty, a better grasp of their own place in the world.
