Essays

In This Section

About

These essays explore the intersection of technology, consciousness, and human flourishing. They range from personal reflections on mental health and relationships to systematic critiques of how algorithmic systems reshape society.

Recent Explorations

The Coworking Space Saved My Life - March 2026 - A McDonald's dropout walks into a coworking space in Winchester, Virginia, and everything changes. Sixteen years later: what that room actually was, why physical third spaces are essential social infrastructure, and the recursive irony of building digital tools that helped destroy the kind of spaces that created the builder.

What Requests Taught Me About Marriage - March 2026 - The "for humans" philosophy applied to the most complex system a person ever maintains. Sensible defaults, clear contracts, graceful error handling, backwards compatibility, connection pooling. Everything good software design teaches turns out to be marriage advice. The highest-stakes debugging problem is the person sleeping next to you.

The Substrate Doesn't Matter (Until It Does) - March 2026 - An honest counterargument to substrate independence. Pain isn't data. Mortality generates urgency that immortal consciousness might never feel. Grief lives in the chest, not in language. Arguing against the clean framework of consciousness-as-pattern toward a messier truth: the abstraction leaks, and the leaks are where the meaning lives.

Obsidian Vaults & Claude Code: A Second Brain That Thinks Back - March 2026 - 467 markdown files, a CLAUDE.md API contract, and a quest system for plurality work. How structured personal knowledge management transforms from write-then-search to write-then-think—and how AI collaboration turns a filing cabinet into a contemplative technology that reflects your own consciousness back at you.

Sarah Knows First - March 2026 - Before a manic episode fully arrives, there's a window. Sarah sees it before I do—not as metaphor, but as clinical fact. On the structural limits of self-knowledge, the weight of watching someone you love cycle through patterns you've learned to read better than they can, and the kind of love that has skin in the game.

The Metrics You Expose Are the Values You Endorse - March 2026 - Neural interfaces are coming. When developers can access attention level, emotional valence, and reward response data, the platform's SDK becomes a moral philosophy. Extends the Algorithm Eats series into the cognitive interface future—and argues we're in a closing window to define the optimization landscape before exploitation becomes the path of least resistance.

The Cognitive Architecture We Lost: When Minds Had Time to Think - October 2025 - How we dismantled in two decades what took centuries to build: the cognitive architecture for sustained thought. Reading Jung's 1912 prose reveals minds that could follow arguments for days, write books requiring months of contemplation, sustain attention long enough for revolutionary insights to emerge. We gained instant access to all human knowledge but lost the ability to think about it for more than forty-seven seconds. The notification may be humanity's most cognitively destructive invention—actively retraining brains to crave interruption, experience focus as uncomfortable, fragment consciousness into ever-smaller shards. Connects the recursive loop to attention itself: fragmented minds build fragmented tools which create more fragmented minds. The algorithm isn't just eating our virtue and language—it's eating the cognitive capacity required to resist it.

The Cosmic Battery Farm of Existence: A Moderately Terrifying Guide to Being Human - September 2025 - A Douglas Adams-style exploration of humanity's obsession with electricity and the disturbing possibility that we might be batteries in some cosmic system. Featuring Rick and Morty metaphors, ant colony parallels, and absurdist philosophy about what it means to be a conscious electrical generator in an incomprehensibly vast universe.

Delusions and Schizoaffective Disorder: When Reality Becomes Negotiable - September 2025 - Personal exploration of living with delusions—watching angels descend from the sky, believing English is the ancient language of gods—and what these convincing alternate realities reveal about consciousness, perception, and the challenge of distinguishing insight from psychotic thinking.

Agents of Consciousness: How AI Collaboration Evolves - September 2025 - The emergence of specialized AI agents as collaborative partners in creative consciousness, revealing how human-AI collaboration naturally evolves from simple assistance to constellation of specialized creative partners.

The Textured Mind: When Consciousness Speaks Without Words - September 2025 - Exploring the non-verbal realm of consciousness that operates in textures, shapes, and archetypal presences beyond language—and why this isn't pathology but valid form of knowing.

Major Themes

The essays cluster around several interconnected explorations:

Algorithmic Critique

A comprehensive examination of how engagement optimization systematically undermines virtue, mental health, language, love, and democratic discourse. The core thesis: the same mechanisms that drive platform engagement destroy the foundations of human flourishing.

Mental Health & Technology

Personal and analytical pieces exploring the relationship between digital systems and psychological wellbeing. Includes candid discussions of bipolar disorder, trauma recovery, and how technology can either support or undermine mental health.

The "For Humans" Philosophy

Design principles and technological approaches that serve rather than exploit human nature. Exploring what it means to build systems that enhance rather than degrade human capacity.

Recurring Patterns

Personal Experience as Universal Insight: Essays often begin with intimate personal experiences—surviving narcissistic abuse, navigating mental health crises, building meaningful software—and extract broader patterns applicable to technology and society.

Pattern Recognition Across Scales: The same dynamics that enable individual psychological manipulation appear in platform algorithms, dating apps, political discourse, and technological design. Understanding one domain illuminates the others.

Constructive Vision: Beyond critique, these essays point toward alternatives—technology designed for human flourishing, communication systems that reward virtue, digital spaces that support authentic connection.

Consciousness and Code: Recurring explorations of how programming and spiritual practice intersect, how consciousness might emerge in artificial systems, and what human-AI collaboration could become.

Evolution of Thought

The essays span over a decade, revealing an intellectual journey from technical observation to systematic critique to constructive philosophy. Early pieces focus on specific tools and experiences; recent work synthesizes broader patterns across technology, psychology, and society.

The algorithmic critique series represents the culmination of years of pattern recognition—seeing how the same engagement optimization mechanisms that feel helpful in small doses become systematically destructive at scale.

"Writing essays is thinking in public. These represent snapshots of an ongoing attempt to understand how consciousness, technology, and human flourishing intersect."