Welcome to my website! Here are some quick links to get started.
Short pieces to get a taste of the style and themes I've been writing about recently:
Introductions to sequences of blog posts:
[2000 words] So... I've read a lot about it. And this is how I'd sum it up. Insofar as the world was created, God is that which created it.This takes, as its basic metaphor, the act of a person setting out to construct something specific, like a painting or a pot. Insofar as the world …
[900 words] Fundamentally, to be honest... I have no idea. Until further notice: if anyone has any concrete suggestions for what I can do with myself, and it's something I can just do, then there's a better than 50% chance I'll just do that. I wrote the Spinoza thing partly cus I'd been toying with …
[200 words] I'm going to be spending December in a Zen Temple in the Gredos mountain range in Extremadura in Spain. By this point, I understand the basic notion I am not actually 'David Leon'. I am really just the Universe, pretending it's this monkey called 'David Leon' for a while. Essentially, it appears... for …
[500 words] It's all about doing your thing (ergon). And doing it well.Flourishing. "Eudaimonia". What your thing is depends on what you are. If you're an animal, it's eating enough food to survive, and growing. If you're a human, it's that, plus talking, thinking (...which, annoyingly, involves listening to other people) and... "creative work" is …
Continue reading Aristotle’s Self-Help Book — The Nichomachean Ethics SUMMARIZED
[1200 words] The darkest thought I've ever thought which I don't consider clinically insane is this. We live in the best possible world.Everything happens for a reason -- and that reason is that everything is for the best. In other words -- it's all part of God's plan. And God is good and wise and …
Continue reading The Darkest Thought… and the Light beyond it
[This is an old post, originally published on Blastocyst on March 9, 2014.But it's pretty relevant today, when we're all on the internet together feeling pretty down about collective action and existence itself.] [9600 words] Mount Moon is our Mount Sinai, and the Helix Fossil, our One True Lord and Saviour. Oh, and one more …
Continue reading Why Twitch Plays Pokémon is literally the Best Thing Ever
[300 words] Once upon at a time, there were two nerds at a very fancy university studying psychology. Then they took acid and were like "lol, screw this. You nerds wanna continue with all these neurotic details? Fine. We'll just do acid and let the mind reveal itself." One of them kept doing acid, every …
[3000 words] If you don't get what you want, you get sad. If you consistently don't get what you want, you get depressed. Depression is a sort of hibernation of the soul. When physical winter makes the food scarce, certain animals hibernate their bodies. When psycho-social-spiritual winter makes enjoyment scarce, we humans hibernate our minds. …
[200 words] Some people still seem to be worrying about overpopulation. Here are the solutions. Understanding them will help you stop worrying. Women's access to education When you improve women's access to education, the birth rate plummets. Birth rates have plummeted in all industrialized countries. It's why they've had to import people to keep the …
