If you look back to section 8 of Introduction II, Heidegger proposed to write two parts to Being and Time, each containing three “divisions”, but only completed Division One and Division Two of Part One (with Division Two being rushed).

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At the same time, truth is something that everybody seems to care deeply about.

No one likes being lied to, and no one wants to live their life based on what’s false.

The result is that we become obsessed with questions like “how do we know what’s true?”, or “how do we regulate information to prevent the spread of falsehoods?”

But what if everybody is asking the wrong questions?

In his masterpiece Beyond Good & Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche begins by asking a question so uncomfortable that no one, in his opinion, has even been willing to ask it:

What if untruth is more valuable than truth?

The entire history of Western philosophy is firmly built upon a commitment to the pursuit and value of truth above all. To take a famous example, whenAristotle offered a famous criticism of Plato’s Theory of the Forms, he defended himself by saying the following about truth:

“Still perhaps it would appear desirable, and indeed it would seem to be obligatory, especially for a philosopher, to sacrifice even one's closest personal ties in defense of the truth. Both are dear to us, yet it’s our duty to prefer the truth”.

-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I

The foundational commitment to truth has influenced nearly every aspect of Western civilization and culture. There are few things that the vast majority people hold in higher regard than concepts like beauty, goodness, morality, and rationality.

Truth, beauty, and goodness, are commonly referred to today as the transcendentals, or the ultimate properties of being that exist beyond the material world and are embodied by God.

These master concepts provide the foundations for millions of lives.

And yet, Nietzsche argues that because dozens of philosophers have failed to question these very assumptions they have fallen into deep and harmful prejudices.

But Nietzsche isn’t just another philosopher criticizing philosophers.

He goes even further — beyond.

Nietzsche believes that because the entirety of Western civilization and culture is built upon the prejudices of the philosophers (and more recently scientists), it is threatening to destroy everything that makes human life worth living for by collapsing into an age of “nihilism”.

At the time Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good & Evil, which was in 1886, he already viewed Europe teetering on the precipice of Nihilism — an phenomenon in which human beings would face a prolonged crisis of meaning and value.

If even half of what Nietzsche had to say about nihilism is correct, then things have only gotten worse since he first tried to warn humanity of the impending crisis.

We now live in a world suffering through the absurd effects of “late-stage capitalism” on ordinary human life. A world in which meaning and purpose seem more elusive than ever, and truth is a distant memory.

When Nietzsche urges us to go “beyond” the traditional binary of “good” and “evil”, he is not telling us to act immorally.

He is urging us to transcend the inevitable limitations placed on the human spirit by traditional belief systems and create a new future for humanity in which we can live freely once again.

This may require calling into question the very foundations that the world as we know it was built upon.

It may require taking seriously the idea that untruth is more valuable than truth.

Although this may seem like an abstract philosophical question, philosophy for Nietzsche is not something that people do at a university and leave behind when they go home.

Philosophy is a way of life.

This gives Nietzsche’s work a relevance and weight that most philosophy is lacking.

Almost everything he says is meant to force you to question the assumptions by which you are living and whether they are promoting or devaluing your life (and life itself).

The “prejudices of the philosophers” are also our own.

That is why we must understand and go beyond them.

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Suggested Reading

For this week, we will cover the first half of Part I, since it is incredibly important for making sense of the book, and Nietzsche approach to philosophy as a whole.

It is suggested that you read the following:

• Nietzsche’s untitled preface

• Part I, sections 1-13 (pages 9-21 in the Kaufmann)

If you want to understand Part I more deeply, and are feeling more ambitious, I recommend reading the entirety of Part I for our upcoming meeting this Saturday, and then re-reading it again the following week.

Since Nietzsche packs many layers of meaning into the smallest of spaces, and many of his ideas acquire deeper meaning when understood as existing within a complex web of relations to other ideas and themes, his books reward being revisited multiple times.

This is what makes him a great author and thinker.

Suggested Assignment

It is suggested that you complete the following two tasks prior to our next meeting in order to maximize learning:

• Choose one section to read 3x very carefully

• Bring one specific question about the text to our next live meeting

Part I Overview

Beyond Good And Evil is divided into nine parts (chapters), each of which contains multiple small sections.

The first section to each of the nine parts of the book is generally a statement about methodology, or about the difficulties of pursuing a certain set of questions. Likewise, the last few sections of each part often comprise a summary statement, draw conclusions, or move into another, deeper level of questioning.

They provide a sense of climax and transition.

In Part I, Nietzsche sets the tone for the entire work and introduces several key concepts.

The overarching aim of Part I is to provide a devastating critique of the history of philosophy and the philosophers who have made it into what it is. Nietzsche begins this critique by calling into question the “will to truth” that has served as the fundamental force driving the history of western philosophy. Nietzsche also introduces the idea of “life” as being what ultimately matters. This is connected to his famous concept of the “will to power”, which is really a “will to life”. The analysis of philosophers and people in terms of their “wills” brings in Nietzsche’s famous “psychology”, according to which the self is a collection of competing “drives”.

In what follows, I will provide a detailed commentary of a handful of key sections from this week’s reading.

Section 1

In this first section of BGE, Nietzsche takes a radical new approach to philosophy that forces readers to question the fundamental assumptions about how they live.

Nietzsche puts his inquiry onto what he considers to be a dangerous path (and embraces this fact).

He writes:

“it finally almost seems to us as if the problem had never even been put so far — as if we were the first to see it, fit it with our eyes, and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater”

Nietzsche, BGE, Part I, section 1

What problem is Nietzsche referring to as risky?

It is the problem of “the value of truth”.

Nietzsche’s main aim in the opening section of BGE is to introduce a completely new line of questioning and set of problems that most people simply ignore.

This is a classic Nietzschean move — to approach a familiar set of questions and assumptions from an entirely new and previously unrecognized angle.

How is Nietzsche able to do this?

Because he takes himself to be willing to attack and question the deep background assumptions that we all take for granted, either because we aren’t aware that there is a legitimate alternative, or because we are too afraid to ask.

Truth, which was the opening theme of the book in the preface (“Suppose truth is a woman — what then?), is something that philosophers have esteemed as their highest value and ultimate aim for the entire history of philosophy.

Truth is also something that everyone, yourself included, seems to care deeply about.

This is what makes Nietzsche’s opening section so provocative.

Nietzsche is not merely addressing a philosopher’s problem that is stuck inside some abstract academic debate — he is attacking something that everyone cares about.

Nietzsche begins the book by asking a strange question about what he calls the “will to truth” — he asks what questions the will to truth obscures or prevents us from asking.

“What strange, wicked, questionable questions!”

Nietzsche is aware that most people would find the questions he is interested in asking to be “strange” and “wicked”, perhaps even “evil” or “immoral”.

This is one reason why he takes these questions to be risky.

“For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater”

But there is also a great risk in not questioning the will to truth if, as Nietzsche suggests, the will to truth itself prevents us from asking all sorts of important questions, such as:

What is the value of the will to truth?

What’s fascinating about Nietzsche’s opening section is that it completely subverts our philosophical expectations and common ways of thinking.

Typically, philosophers treat truth as a kind of unquestionable ideal worth pursuing and treat falsity with disdain and contempt. Those who question the value of truth are viewed as agents of chaos, immoral, and irrational.

To return to Nietzsche’s preface, he begins BGE with the provocative question:

Suppose truth is a woman — what then?

When read in conjunction with section 1, Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that if truth is a woman whose heart we are trying to win, then we may need to be willing to challenge her, rather than put her on a pedestal.

If truth is a woman, would she choose the man who pursues her endlessly and worships her unquestionably? Or would she choose the man who is willing to think and live differently, to take risks, and to ask difficult questions?

In this section, Nietzsche prepares the ground for asking questions that most people, let alone philosophers, would never even consider:

What if untruth is more valuable than truth? What if truth (as a woman) can only be won through lies?

Nietzsche is a philosopher willing to explore uncomfortable questions at length in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of what’s taken for granted in our ordinary thinking.

While most philosophers aim at developing theories and giving answers that justify what we already believe or wish to be true, Nietzsche constantly seeks to challenge his readers to think for themselves and question what everyone else takes for granted.

Nietzsche’s reflection on the will to truth and the value of untruth raises a deeply personal and discomforting question for his readers to consider:

Is it possible to live a truthful life without taking any risks?

Sections 4 & 6

While Nietzsche asked us to question the value of truth in section 1, in this section he considers the idea that the value of truth may have little or nothing to do with whether a judgment is in fact true or not.

Consider this in your own life.

Does the value of what you take to be true actually consist in it’s being true? Or is what we believe to be true valuable for some other reason — perhaps because it makes us feel good, or is useful?

Nietzsche argues that the value comes from whether truth is “life-promoting, life-preserving”. He writes:

“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; int his respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating”

BGE, I, 4

What does Nietzsche mean by “life-promoting”? Is he saying that things are valuable if they lead us to procreate? Not at all.

Although the topic of “life” and “life-promotion” for Nietzsche is complex, the basic idea is simply.

The ultimate value for Nietzsche is life.

Beliefs, actions, and the like, promote life if they increase our creative activities and lead human beings to affirm their life rather than wish it were to be different.

One of Nietzsche’s most famous criticisms of traditional moralities (like Greek and Christian ethics) is that they implicitly train us to hate ourselves and deny the value of our life here on Earth.

Nietzsche idea above, then, is that a false judgment might have a kind of life-promoting value that far outstrips its disvalue from the perspective of truth. Later in that section Nietzsche writes:

“To recognize untruth as a condition of life — that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil”

BGE, I, 4

Nietzsche provides an example to support this claim — the example of mathematics.

Nietzsche writes:

“without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live — that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life”

BGE, I, 4

The radical implication of Nietzsche’s idea is that we can’t help but view the world through falsehoods because we need them to live.

While most philosophers and scientists are constantly willing and striving to see the world objectively, Nietzsche is calling into question the very value of this aim and presenting it as dangerous or harmful for life.

This completely inverts the standard view of things like science as leveraging objective truth and technology to promote and improve life.

Another way in which life is connected to philosophy for Nietzsche is spelled out in section 6.

In this section, which is one of my favorites, Nietzsche argues that all of philosophy is an involuntary “confession” or “memoir” of its author. He writes:

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir”

BGE, I, 6

The idea that a philosophy is really a representation or outgrowth of its creator is something that makes a lot of sense to most people, but has been strongly resisted by many academic philosophers.

According to some conceptions of philosophy, the aim of philosophy is like that of the sciences — to provide an objective description or explanation of the way things are generally speaking.

The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars famously said that:

“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”

If what philosophers produce is necessarily an expression or byproduct of their personal biases and prejudices, then this would undercut the aims of this entire project.

Whatever “understanding” or “explanation” philosophy could provide about how things hang together would, if Nietzsche is right, merely be an expression of how things seem to hang together for someone like me.

Nietzsche does, in fact, end up developing a famous position called “perspectivism”, according to which it is not possible to know anything outside of a particular perspective. He writes:

Let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’’ let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself’: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be”

On The Genealogy Of Morals, III, 12

Nietzsche also considers a radical twist to this very idea in section 6, suggesting that what ultimately shapes our perspective is our moral beliefs.

Typically philosophers separate one’s moral beliefs and values from their “theoretical” beliefs about knowledge or reality.

But Nietzsche understands beliefs as inseparable from psychological and bodily drives. He writes:

“Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy; but rather another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument”

BGE, I, 6

If Nietzsche is right about this, then in order for someone to understand why they view certain things as true, they must radically rethink the relationship between their worldview and moral beliefs.

What if the reason why we perceive things to be true is not because of how we are neutrally seeing the world, but because our personal morality is causing us to see it that way?

Looking Ahead: Week 3 Preview

In Week 3, we will study the second half of Part I.

In the second half of Part I, Nietzsche continues his attack on the fundamental philosophical prejudices that have upheld the edifice of Western thought and culture.

In sections 14-23, Nietzsche develops several fascinating critiques of famous ideas in the history of philosophy such as Descartes conception of the self and cogito argument, freedom of the will, and self-causation.

Nietzsche also engages in unique and thought-provoking discussions of various sciences, such as Psychology and Physics, arguing for the bold claim that Physics is “only an interpretation and exegesis of the world … and not a world-explanation” (BGE, I, 14).

Lastly, Nietzsche introduces one of his most famous concepts — the will to power.

~

If you found this guide helpful, or have any questions, let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

-Paul

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Welcome to the wonderful and terrifying world of 19th century Europe.

This was a world in which the horrors of mass industrialization led to violent and widespread revolts in 1848, a world in which Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony, and in which Italy and Germany became the unified nations we know them as today.

This was the world that Friedrich Nietzsche was born into, and also the world that he died in (1844-1900).

Nietzsche’s life was completely contained by the 19th century, and he understood the significance of his own age perhaps more deeply than anyone.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is an embodiment of his historical self-awareness and it serves as both a warning to future humans, as well as a reason for hope.

What he has handed down to us is not only relevant to contemporary life, but urgent.

Nietzsche believed that the future of humanity, the human spirit, and everything that gives our lives meaning is being fundamentally threatened in the modern world.

If you agree…

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I am incredibly excited because by the end of this week, you will all have achieved something very impressive.

Making it through the introductions to Being and Time is a major intellectual achievement.

Congrats!

You should also, at this point, start to have a better idea of what Heidegger is proposing to do in the work and why it matters not just to the history of philosophy, but to humanity.

These difficult sections contain Heidegger’s revolutionary remarks about “phenomenology” and “hermeneutics”, and help us understand the method through which Heidegger will carry out his investigation.

Every philosopher has a method, and Heidegger’s is incredibly fascinating.

~

If you want to check in with yourself and see how you are understanding the work, I recommend reading section 8 very slowly and seeing if you can understand what he is saying there.

Section 8 contains an incredible condensed summary of everything we have been discussing so far and serves as a kind of “test’ …

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This article provides a brief introduction to Nietzsche’s life and works for anyone who is curious about Nietzsche’s popularity and philosophy, but doesn’t know much about him. It will also be beneficial for individuals who have attempted to engage with his life and works to some extent, but struggle to grasp the big picture of Nietzsche’s significance.

I provide some comments in the second half that will be helpful for anyone considering where to begin studying Nietzsche’s philosophy and how to avoid adopting the wrong approach.

Finally, if you were interested in studying Nietzsche’s masterpiece Beyond Good & Evil with me, I will be reading through the entire book with my subscribers here on Substack starting this Saturday April 18th at 12pm EST.

There are only a few days left to sign up and spots are limited. You can read more about the course here.

Nietzsche’s Life: General Overview

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was one of the major figures of 19th-century European philosophy.

Nietzsche’s influence on intellectuals, artists, and thinkers of all stripes has been immense.

Intellectual giants such as Freud, Jung, Hesse, Mann, Heidegger, and Foucault, as well as conflicting social and intellectual movements, such as Anarchism, Feminism, Nazism, Socialism, Marxism, Vegetarianism, and the “avant‐garde” art movement have claimed Nietzsche as a key influence.

Trained as a classical scholar of antiquity, he was forced by ill health into an early retirement from his academic career while still in his thirties.

Despite living with relentless mental and physical pain for years, Nietzsche transmuted his suffering into a powerful philosophical vision aimed at promoting human excellence and the affirmation of life.

No one took the philosophical stakes to be higher than Nietzsche, who was one of the first individuals to recognize and offer a solution to the impending threat of global nihilism.

Philosophically, Nietzsche was famous for his scathing attacks on traditional morality (especially Christian morality), his penetrating psychological insights into human behavior, and his startling views about the nature of truth and knowledge.

But Nietzsche was also famous for his achievements as a stylist.

According to Walter Kaufmann, who was a world-renowned Nietzsche scholar, Nietzsche was “one of the greatest German writers … and influential Europeans of the nineteenth century”.

He was most well-known for writing aphorisms, which are concise, but intellectually rich, sayings that often contain many layers of meaning.

It would be a mistake, however, to treat Nietzsche as merely a producer of great quotes.

Nietzsche has been interpreted by many to have developed a comprehensive philosophical worldview, or “system” (although this term is controversial because of Nietzsche’s was strong critiques of traditional philosophical systems).

Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas and style were instrumental to the new directions that philosophy would take in the 20th century in the form of existentialism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, to name a few.

Prior to his mental and physical collapse in early 1889, Nietzsche spent all of his time writing his most celebrated works (including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality) while living in various inns in Italy, France, and Switzerland.

Despite receiving very little recognition for his writings during his life, by the time of his death in 1900, Nietzsche’s books sold like wildfire (and continue to sell to this day).

Nietzsche’s ideas are more relevant now than ever.

As traditional belief systems crumble around us, nihilism continues to rise as an existential threat to human flourishing.

The moral norms that once used to structure and ground our lives have been violated by reckless agents of greed.

What does the future of humanity have in store for us?

Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers who took this question seriously.

In this article, I provide a general overview of Nietzsche’s life and works in order to help anyone who is interested in learning more about why his ideas matter now more than ever.

Nietzsche’s Life

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, located in the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15, 1844 (the year in which an assassination attempt was made on the life of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, for whom Nietzsche was named and whose birthday, October 15, he shared. Also, the same year in which Marx and Engels met in Paris).

The modern state of Germany did not even exist when Nietzsche was born.

It was not until 1871, when he published his first book, The Birth Of Tragedy, that Germany was bound together by the militaristic rule of Bismarck.

According to Walter Kaufmann, despite significant tensions and divisions, Germans were:

“united linguistically and culturally, thanks to Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible (which played a major role in the standardization of modern German) and their deep appreciation for the accomplishments of German musicians (especially Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert), literary figures (such as Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin), and philosophers (such as Kant and Hegel).”

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

A dominant theme in Nietzsche’s writings is a consideration of what it means to be part of a nation and whether that supports or interferes with the ability to see oneself as connected with a culture.

Nietzsche’s father, Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran minister, and his mother, the daughter of a Lutheran minister.

Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s sister, was born less than 2 years after him.

By all accounts she adored her brother but was deeply envious of the attention he received. She was especially jealous of Nietzsche’s youthful relationship with the great composer Richard Wagner.

Elisabeth married a radical anti-Semite with whom she left Germany to found an Aryan colony in Paraguay. After her husband’s suicide following a financial scandal, Elisabeth returned home where she lived with her mother and later cared for her ailing brother.

Elisabeth is a notorious figure in Nietzsche scholarship because of what she did with Nietzsche’s ideas after he went mad.

Elisabeth carefully guarded her brother’s literary estate, and unscrupulously edited his notes for publication under the title The Will to Power.

The Will To Power is a book Nietzsche never wrote (although it contains plenty of fascinating and important material).

Elisabeth published The Will To Power in order to have Nietzsche recognized as the intellectual forbearer of what would become National Socialism (In 1885, his sister married to Bernhard Forster, a prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement which Nietzsche loathed).

Nietzsche’s Education

Nietzsche was educated at the famous Schulpforta on a full scholarship, where he helped to found a musical society and pursued his own compositions.

At the time, Nietzsche deeply admired Schumann (composer) and Hölderlin (poet).

He attended this famously strict boarding school for six years (the same school was attended by Navalis, Fichte, Ranke, as well as the brothers Schlegel), and did exceptionally good work in religion, German literature, and classics.

According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche was bad at math and drawing.

After Schulpforta, Nietzsche pursued university studies at Bonn where he initially pursued theology, but quickly changed to philology (classical studies/interpretation of ancient texts) after one semester.

Nietzsche was widely considered a prodigy in this field and became well-trained in foreign languages and ancient studies. This early work in history, interpretation, and ancient cultures would significantly influence his later philosophical work.

Nietzsche finished his studies in Leipzig, where by chance he came upon the works of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) in a second-hand bookshop.

He was deeply struck by Schopenhauer’s ideas in his magnum opus The World As Will And Representation that he read the entire (600+ page, two-volume) book straight through.

In particular, Nietzsche was gripped by Schopenhauer’s ideas about the nature of the Will, which Schopenhauer regarded as the driving force of reality.

Nietzsche was also impressed with Schopenhauer’s views on the aesthetics of music, according to which music is the highest form of art. Schopenhauer’s reasons for thinking this are idiosyncratic, but fascinating. Schopenhauer’s idea was that music is able to neutralize the raving desires of the will and thereby temporarily reduce our suffering.

Nietzsche was enamored with Schopenhauer’s idea of a ceaseless, blind, and passionately striving will at the foundation of life which signified, for him, the ecstatic abandonment of the ancient Dionysian cults.

At the same time, Nietzsche strongly rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimistic conclusions which, in Nietzsche’s estimation, undermined the human creative spirit.

At just twenty-four years old, Nietzsche became a professor — an incredible feat at the time (especially in Germany).

He taught for ten years at Basel (from 1869 till 1879) but was forced to retire early because of poor health.

Scholars have speculated about the source of Nietzsche’s poor health (a theme that would underwrite most of his philosophy).

According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s illness may have been connected with his brief military service in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.

In 1867, Nietzsche fell from a horse and had his initial military service cut short. In 1870, when the war broke out, Nietzsche volunteered for service as a medical orderly.

While attending to six men in a boxcar who were severely wounded and also sick with dysentery and diphtheria, Nietzsche is thought to have caught both diseases and, after delivering his patients to a field hospital, required medical attention himself.

The relation of a possibly incomplete recovery from his illness to the continued spells of migraine headaches and painful vomiting which made Nietzsche miserable during the next ten years has never been clarified conclusively.

Wagner And Anti-Semitism

In 1868, Nietzsche became personally acquainted with the great composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) at a dinner party at the home of Wagner’s sister.

Nietzsche loved Wagner’s music (particularly Tristan and Isolde) and he considered the composer Germany’s greatest living creative genius. It was Wagner’s presence that convinced Nietzsche that greatness and genuine creation were still possible.

Nietzsche believed at the time that Schopenhauer and Wagner were the most important men in German arts and letters since Goethe’s death.

Eventually, Nietzsche became a regular guest at the Wagner’s home in Tribschen, spending numerous birthdays and holidays there, and he worked to raise funds for Wagner’s Bayreuth concert hall.

Years later, Nietzsche broke off the relationship and wrote sharp criticisms of his former mentor but retained admiration for him.

Nietzsche maintained ambivalent feelings towards many of his main influences.

It was not until he completely broke with Wagner that he would come fully into his own.

Why did Nietzsche eventually decide to “break” with Wagner?

Nietzsche was put off by the emerging culture of Bayreuth, the city where Wagner’s opera’s were performed, because it was becoming a culture in favor of the “German Reich” over the “German Spirit”.

In Kaufmann’s words, it had become the “holy city of anti-Semitic Christian chauvinism”.

Anti-Semitic Teutonism — or proto-Nazism — was one of the major issues in Nietzsche’s life. His sister and Wagner, two important figures in his development,
forced him to confront this ideology.

In his last letter to his friend Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote:

“Abolished Kaiser Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites”.

And to another friend, Overbeck:

“Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot”.

Despite Nietzsche’s clear hatred of anti-semitism, after the Second World War, almost anything associated with German was viewed with suspicion in the United States and United Kingdom, including Nietzsche’s provocative remarks.

According to Kaufmann:

“Thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (who became a party member) were listed as enemies of “the open society,” and Germany itself was thought to be haunted by a dark, romantic, irrationalist, counter-Enlightenment specter”.

In continental Europe, however, Nietzsche continued to be studied (especially by Heidegger), and inspired existentialism, phenomenology, critical theory, post‐structuralism, and deconstructionism.

When the latter two movements first gained a foothold in the United States, it was Nietzsche who once more was acknowledged as the major source of their inspiration.

In Kaufmann’s final assessment, Nietzsche would have

“looked with scorn on almost everything that has been written or done under his aegis, and the successful take‐over by the academic world, though it cannot compare in horror with some of the other appropriations he has suffered, would have seemed to him most like a final defeat, because he wanted at all costs not to be assimilated to the world of learning, where everything becomes a matter for discussion and nothing for action”

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

There is much more to be said about the details of Nietzsche’s life.

For anyone interested, I highly recommend the BBC documentary “Human, All Too Human” in addition to Kaufmann’s groundbreaking intellectual biography referenced above (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ).

In fact, Kaufmann’s book was one of the first philosophy books I ever read and was one of the primary reasons I ended up studying philosophy at all!

Nietzsche’s Works

Throughout his life, Nietzsche’s books sold poorly, and he often complained that readers were not prepared to receive his forward thinking ideas.

After Nietzsche went insane, ironically, he became world famous, and was celebrated as the originator of a kind of avant-garde philosophy.

Kaufmann writes:

“Those who found official bourgeois culture philistine, materialistic, small-minded, smug, self-satisfied, and conformist found a voice in Nietzsche, as did those who found it sexually repressive, timid, boring, and hostile to change”.

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

In his works, Nietzsche does not state positions and argue for them in the manner traditional in modern philosophy.

He did not write extended essays with chains of argument responding to the academic literature, and he was not very much interested in counter-argument (although he had a thorough knowledge of major figures and positions in the history of philosophy).

Many of his works are also quite different in style and tone both from themselves and from what other philosophers have produced. Nietzsche’s works continously make new demands on readers and tempt them into misunderstanding his ideas.

In fact, Nietzsche famously stated:

“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood”

Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 290

The dominant theme of Nietzsche’s work is a critical diagnosis of deep cultural and philosophical problems.

It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Nietzsche to a nay-sayer (or “hater” as we might say today).

Throughout his entire life, Nietzsche took Socrates’ question very seriously:

How should one live?

Nietzsche denies, unsurprisingly, that there is any “one size fits all” or pre-determined answer to this question.

This alone sets him apart from many pre-modern thinkers (both secular and religious).

Instead, Nietzsche encouraged human beings to live creatively, even dangerously, and continuously push the boundaries of human potential in order to promote new forms of human life.

He certainly believed that some answers to Socrates’ question — any answers that place rigid constraints on human life — are most certainly “wrong”, or as he might put it harmful to life.

It is worth mentioning at this point that Nietzsche was not merely a talker or writer, he lived out his own philosophical ideas as much as he was able to, and treated philosophy as something that truly mattered (Nietzsche was famous for thinking and writing while hiking through the mountains of Europe).

Nietzsche’s ideas are developed in a collection of works that have self-important, dramatic, and often apocalyptic sounding titles.

Nietzsche’s titles (and subtitles) collectively suggest that some some great historical moment is imminent, and Nietzsche is it’s herald.

Nietzsche’s published titles are:

• The Birth Of Tragedy

• Untimely Meditations

• Human, All Too Human

• The Dawn

• Thus Spake Zarathustra

• Beyond Good And Evil

• On The Genealogy Of Morality

• The Gay Science

• The Case Of Wagner

• The Twilight Of The Idols

• The Anti-Christ

• Ecce Homo

• Nietzsche Conta Wagner

• The Will To Power (unpublished notes).

Some of these “books” are mostly collections of aphorisms, or short sayings.

Some resemble sociological or historical essays, while others read like prophecy.

Nietzsche’s works, like most “greats” in any field, are often divided into “early”, “middle” and “late”.

Nietzsche himself considered Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in 1885 to be a complete statement of his overarching philosophy and his magnum opus.

But since Zarathustra was written in a highly metaphorical and poetic style this made it difficult for readers to understand, and I do not recommend reading Zarathustra until one has read at least 5+ of Nietzsche’s other works.

Nietzsche followed Zarathustra with Beyond Good & Evil, published in 1886, and restated his philosophy in a more familiar essay-like style (although this work also contains many short aphorisms as well).

Beyond Good & Evil provides, in my judgment, the best starting point for those interested in Nietzsche because it touches upon all of his major themes and is written in a clear and accessible style.

I strongly recommend avoiding a “chronological” approach to reading Nietzsche’s complete works, as many are often tempted to do (I was tempted into starting this at one point many years ago).

Although The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first book, it is a real stumbling block for beginners.

Nietzsche’s “middle period”, which includes Beyond Good & Evil, On The Genealogy Of Morals, and The Gay Science, serves as a much better starting point.

Nietzsche’s books can be somewhat easy to read (because they aren’t overly technical or academic), but are hard to truly understand. They contain multiple layers of meaning in addition genuinely challenging ideas that force the reader to ask themselves uncomfortable questions. They reward deep thought and multiple readings (especially at different stages of life).

Nietzsche’s writing style can be described as elusive, ironic, funny, crude, penetrating, profound, prophetic, subtle, unfair, and insightful.

Each seemingly isolated statement he makes both has a meaning of its own, but also acquires multiple new meanings when considered in relation to every other statement.

This rewards a “holistic” approach to his thought.

One should not try to read Nietzsche like a systematic philosopher who builds his philosophy brick by brick.

Crucially, Nietzsche consistently brings together multiple distant topics and themes into the smallest of spaces.

Nietzsche’s atomism should not be interpreted as trying to reduce complex topics to axioms or truths.

Nietzsche always tried to retain an open-minded experimentalism in his work, and encouraged philosophers to always be prepared, if necessary, to “boldly at any time to declare himself against his previous opinion,” as he did with Wagner.

Nietzsche wanted philosophy to become scientific.

But he did not think of “science” in the usual sense — a rigorous attempt at describing objective reality.

What Nietzsche had in mind was “joyous science” — something more akin to what the modern philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend called “epistemic anarchy”.

The spirit of science, for Nietzsche, was the spirit of fearless experimentation and willingness to shatter previous paradigms.

Nietzsche criticized philosophers of the past for having the delusion that they would be able to become the “unriddler of the universe” and solve the mysteries of life with “one stroke”:

“To solve all with one stroke .. . that was the secret wish .... The unlimited ambition ... to be the ‘unriddler of the universe’ made up the dream of the thinker ... many had the delusion, ... at last Schopenhauer, that they were this one being”.

The philosophers of the future, Nietzsche thought, would have no such delusions.

Nietzsche writes:

“A new species of philosophers is coming up … these philosophers of the future might require in justice, perhaps also in injustice, to be called attempters [Versucher). This name is… only an attempt and, if one prefers, a temptation [Versuchung]”.

Nietzsche took himself to be the pre-cursor to this philosophy of the future and dedicated his life and work to giving birth to these unknown thinkers.

Nietzsche hoped to show, by way of example, that it was possible to live with full confidence, boldness, and vigor, despite lacking any foundation or system to fall back on.

He was a philosopher walking a tightrope without a harness.

Eventually, Nietzsche fell.

The End Of Nietzsche’s Life And Work

In 1879, although Nietzsche was forced to resign from the university due to significant health problems, he did not stop living and producing his new kind of philosophy.

In fact, Nietzsche set out to overcome his illness through philosophy.

The result was that he produced an incredible series of books in a very short period.

In 1888, Nietzsche’s efforts produced a sense of euphoria — something that was unprecedented in his long experience of illness and recovery.

Kaufmann speculates that the rapid decline of Nietzsche’s health also led to a decline in his inhibitions, thereby allowing him to write and think more freely than ever before.

Working at an increasingly frantic pace, Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner, Twilight Of The Idols, Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner within six months of each other.

The Case of Wagner was the last book which Nietzsche himself saw published.

According to Walter Kaufmann, although some dismiss these works as the ravings of a madman, they actually are “perhaps his most important”.

Nietzsche had a strong sense of purpose and little doubt concerning his own historical significance (it turns out he was right about this).

Kaufmann writes:

“Large parts of his last books are actually distinguished by a clarity and lucidity that are almost unequaled in German letters, and by a startling depth of insight.

Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ

In January of 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin, Italy.

As Nietzsche fell on the pavement, he threw his arms around the neck of a mare that had just been flogged by a coachman.

He had to be carried home.

Nietzsche would spend the final 10 years of his life completely helpless and having lost the ability to think philosophically forever.

If you were interested in reading the entire text with me, on April 18th I am launching a complete beginner’s course on Beyond Good & Evil right here on Substack.

You can learn more about it here.

Additionally, has invited me to deliver a “how to read philosophy” workshop at the end of April. If you wanted to learn more about Robin’s work and the workshop, you can visit A Mug Of Insights.

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Thanks for a great chat last week on sections 4 & 5.

The recording from last week is posted in the paid subscribers chat.

This week we will move confidently into Heidegger’s Introduction II to Being and Time.

This is his “methodological introduction”.

We should expect to learn more about how he plans to investigate the Seinsfrage — the question of the meaning of being.

The answer is through history and phenomenology.

Suggested Reading

• Being and Time, Introduction II, sections 6-7A

Notes

Section 5 (The Analysis Of Dasein)

This section was especially difficult, so I want to take a second pass at it with a few notes before moving on to the second introduction and sections 6 & 7.

• In order to avoid a kind of dogmatic statement as to what constitutes the meaning of Dasein, the existential analytic must begin from an account of Dasein in its “average everydayness”.

• “Everydayness” does not have any pejorative connotation -- it is merely descriptive.

  • It means that uncritical mode …

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Thanks for a great discussion last week.

Week 2 Recording Here

As some of you have heard, immediately after our meeting, I got a phone call requesting that I make an emergency trip to New Hampshire to see my mother. As I was leaving my apartment, I discovered that she passed away.

I have been spending the past few days with my family healing, bonding, and grieving. It has been an incredibly challenging and profound experience for all of us.

In her last words to me, shared in private letters, my mom expressed that she wants me to use my writing and mind to impact lives, so here I am.

I truly appreciate all of the patience, understanding, and support you have given me. You’re all so awesome and discussing philosophy with you is an incredible privilege, so thank you.

One request I have, given the circumstances, is to move our meeting to Saturday this week at 12pm EST.

I hope this time works for everyone.

Link For Google Meet

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Most reading advice online is focused on what to read or the benefits of reading rather than how to actually read.

This is because book lists and recommendations grab more attention than actual reading advice.

If you are tired of constantly trying and failing to read great books like The Brother’s Karamazov or Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, then you are in the right place.

We now live in a world where people spend 10-100x more time watching videos or listening to podcasts about books rather than reading the actual books themselves.

Functional illiteracy = having the ability to read complex texts but never doing so

I have nothing against online educational resources that help people understand difficult idea, or even just intellectual entertainment in the form of people engaging in a passionate conversation about something they find interesting.

The problem is when the consumption of “edutainment” content replaces the actual development of an individual’s own skills, experiences, sensibility, taste, and perspective.

There is simply no substitute for reading or thinking through something on your own.

This is one of the very few ways that human beings can develop their ability to think independently instead of just repeat what everyone else is saying.

Being able to think independently and develop one’s own perspective is quickly becoming a rare and valuable skill in the age of artificial intelligence where knowledge has become a commodity.

People used to view readers as “smart” because they knew a lot of facts or information that others didn’t.

But facts and information on their own are basically worthless in the modern world.

What matters is perspective.

In this essay, I am going to share with you the personal framework that I developed to go from absolutely hating reading to becoming obsessed with reading, thinking, writing, and developing my own perspective.

Reading has been the greatest joy in my life, and there are few things I get more excited about than helping people experience that for themselves.

My hope is that by the end of this essay, you will have a general framework you can use to avoid getting stuck the next time you encounter a difficult page.

How To Actually Read Hard Books

So much reading advice online is pitched at the wrong level.

People get caught up on what to read, which translations are best, and what order to read books in.

But all of this doesn’t matter if you are unable to sit down and get through a single difficult page on your own.

If you think about it, almost every “great” author in history had to figure out how to read books completely on their own.

They did not have the internet.

What they would do is intensely read and master whatever books they were fortunate enough to stumble upon in their local library or book shop.

Friedrich Nietzsche himself claims to have discovered Arthur Schopenhauer’s masterpiece The World As Will And Representation while browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig, writing:

“I cannot say what demon whispered to me: ‘Take this book home with you’ … At home I threw myself into the sofa corner with the treasure I had acquired, and began to allow that energetic, sombre genius to work upon me.”

By the way, on April 18th I am launching a 10-Week Live Course on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. If you have struggled to read Nietzsche, this is an opportunity to make sure you not only finish the entire book, but understand it as well.

If you’re interested, you can read more about it here: The Micro-University

Okay, so let’s assume that you have found a life-changing, consciousness expanding, masterpiece of a book that you desperately want to not only finish but deeply understand.

How do you actually go about doing that?

How do you avoid the all-too-familiar scenario in which you brew a cup of coffee, sit down in a comfy chair, and crack open some hefty tome, only to fall asleep within 10 minutes?

Here is my approach.

Reading Is Like Music

I like to approach reading in the same way that I approach learning music.

Like playing an instrument, reading is a skill.

If you want to learn how to play guitar, you have to learn the individual notes, and then how those three notes together form a chord, and then how the chord creates a chord-progression, etc.

I took Jazz Guitar lessons for several years and the only way that we would make any progress was by breaking a complex piece of music down into it’s individual components.

I approach reading the same exact way.

• Notes → Words

• Chords/Melodies → Sentences

• Chord Progressions → Paragraphs

• Songs → Chapters

• Albums → Books

Just as every song is a collection of notes that are arranged to produce complex and interesting passages, every text is a collection of words, sentences, and paragraphs that are being used in interesting but sometimes challenging ways.

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When you really think about it, what makes reading challenging is often the exact same thing that makes music challenging.

Time.

When it comes to playing music, most people don’t struggle to play the correct notes in a song, they struggle to play the correct notes in time.

Anyone who has played an instrument knows the stress of time rushing by while you are trying to prepare for the next chord change, or sequence of individual notes.

But if you were to take a complex musical piece, like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor, popularly known as “Moonlight Sonata”, and slow it down to half-speed, it would actually be quite playable.

What’s amazing about this example is that it not only seems pretty playable for the average person, but it actually sounds like beautiful music.

Underlying every difficult text is a collection of micro-challenges that most readers can overcome with a bit of perspective, skill, and patience.

The trick is to learn how to overcome enough of these micro-challenges within a reasonable time-frame so that you can start making real progress.

In order to help you do this, I took everything I have learned over the past 15+ years of struggling with challenging books and transformed it into an analytical system that anyone can use to break down challenging texts into manageable micro-challenges.

I call it The Micro-Reading System.

If you can overcome enough of micro-challenges using this system, then you will be able to not only finish hard books but also enjoy them.

The Micro-Reading System

In this section, I present a general overview of The Micro-Reading System and walk you through an example of how it can be applied to a difficult passage.

The goal of using the system is to become skillful micro-readers.

A micro-reader is someone who can skillfully break down complex texts into more manageable micro-challenges and avoid getting stuck.

Let’s take a look a high-level overview of The Micro-Reading System.

The Micro-Reading System is built around two general concepts:

• “Loops”

• “Levels”

You may have heard about “reading levels” in school, but I am using the word “levels” in my own way.

In The Micro-Reading System, a “level” refers to the scale at which reading occurs—from the smallest units of meaning (words) up to entire books.

Reading hard texts requires being able to fluidly synthesize and integrate information on different levels of scale in order to achieve understanding.

Let’s walk through two examples of “levels” before introducing the concept of “loops”.

Level 0: Letters/Symbols/Syllables

The smallest level at which reading occurs is the level of letters, symbols, and syllables.

For fluent readers, this level is usually automatic.

You don’t consciously think about how words are constructed out of letters or how syllables are formed—you simply recognize them.

However, this level becomes relevant again when:

• reading in a foreign language

• encountering unfamiliar scripts (e.g. Arabic)

• dealing with unusually dense or difficult text

In most cases, though, this is not where reading breaks down.

That brings us to what I take to be the most important level: the word-level.

Level 1: Words

The word-level is where most reading problems begin — and end.

Resolving these word-level issues goes a long way toward improving comprehension and enjoyment.

It’s important to point out that, even in extremely difficult texts, readers typically understand the vast majority of the words.

It’s actually very surprising just how many words native speakers know.

I would estimate around 90% on average.

The word-level challenges come from the small number of words readers do not understand—or think they understand but actually don’t.

Understanding words alone is not sufficient for understanding an

That said, understanding every word is not always sufficient for understanding a text.

For challenging texts, readers will struggle with how words they know are structured into sentences, arguments, and larger conceptual systems.

Poetry provides a perfect example of familiar words being used to convey deep and challenging meaning.

Still, in my experience, if you fix what’s happening at the word-level, you eliminate a huge percentage of the confusion and anxiety people experience when reading.

Alright, that is the concept of “levels”.

Let’s take a look at “loops”.

Loops

What is a Loop?

In general, a loop is a reliable and repeatable process that a reader go through whenever they get stuck or want to deepen their understanding.

Loops are meant to help you diagnose the source of confusion, resolve it, and return to the text with clarity. Additionally, loops can be used to add layers of meaning and depth of understanding to prior knowledge.

At each level of The Micro-Reading System there are micro-loops that a reader can perform.

There are also macro-loops that a reader can perform between levels.

For example, after reading an entire chapter you can return to a difficult word from earlier in the chapter and rethink it’s deeper layers of meaning based on what you learned.

The entire system as a whole also forms one big macro-loop that a reader can run through as well by feeding each level back into it’s previous level.

Let’s look at a detailed example of how a micro-loop would work on the word-level.

Micro-Loops: Heidegger Example

Let’s look at a particularly challenging excerpt from one of the most difficult philosophical texts of all time — Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.

These are the first few lines of Being and Time.

I. The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being

THIS question has today been forgotten. Even though in our time we deem it progressive to give our approval to ‘metaphysics’ again, it is held that we have been exempted from the exertions of a newly rekindled “Γιγαντομαχία περὶ τῆς οὐσίας”. Yet the question we are touching upon is not just any question. It is one which provided a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside from then on as a theme for actual investigation.

What’s interesting about this excerpt is that most of the words are familiar. In fact, I would say about 90% of the words in this particular excerpt are familiar.

When applying The Micro-Reading System to the word-level, then, the goal is to hyper-focus on the words that are problematic.

In this case, there are a handful of words that might trip people up:

• “Being”

• “metaphysics”

• “Γιγαντομαχία περὶ τῆς οὐσίας”

Perhaps one or two other words present a challenge for you in this particular passage, but I just want to point out again that we have just looked at the opening lines of what is often considered one of the most difficult philosophical texts of all time and realized that there are only a handful of words which we don’t know.

This example suggests an incredibly important principle.

Let’s call it The Familiarity Principle:

For most people, if they are reading in their native language, they will know the majority of words in any given book, no matter how hard. The challenges of reading on the word-level are the result of a small minority of words they do not know but can learn in a reasonable timeframe.

Let’s put this principle to work by going through the “small minority” of words I picked out from the passage and seeing if it’s true that we can “learn them in a reasonable timeframe”.

“Being”

This one is tough because Heidegger’s entire book is actually an investigation into the meaning of “Being”. But we can learn an important lesson from this word.

We shouldn’t expect the meaning of every word to always be available to us within a reasonable timeframe, even though most words will be.

Sometimes we need to “bracket” or “suspend” words as we investigate their meaning.

I take this to be an “exception that proves the rule”.

“metaphysics”

This word presents a challenge because it is a technical philosophical term (“jargon” as they say). If you have never studied philosophy before, you may have never heard of “metaphysics”, or may have an inaccurate understanding of what it means.

In this context, “metaphysics” refers to an area of philosophy in which philosophers theorize about the ultimate nature of reality, existence, and related abstract questions.

The meaning of “metaphysics” can be complex and vary by philosopher, but the basic idea is easily searchable and can be grasped within a few minutes.

“Γιγαντομαχία περὶ τῆς οὐσίας”

This collection of words would likely trip up 99.9% of readers because it is a quote written in a foreign language that very few people can read — Ancient Greek. Heidegger is quoting Plato’s famous dialogue Sophist in Ancient Greek here. Foreign words are always going to present challenges to readers and should be expected to appear in any work that is originally written in another language.

In philosophy, readers should expect to encounter foreign words and quotes in Ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, and Sanskrit.

In fact, “metaphysics”, which we saw above, originally comes from Aristotle’s Greek expression:

των μετὰ τὰ φυσικά

This expression just means “those after the Physics” and refers to the books Aristotle wrote after Physics which address fundamental and abstract philosophical issues such as substance, form, causality, and so on.

What I have just done is provide an example of how to break down a passage on the word-level.

I now want to share with you a more systematic “micro-loop” that you can use when reading difficult texts.

After reading a sentence or paragraph, stop and perform the following micro-loop:

Step 1: Word Check

“Do I know every word?” → Yes/No

If No, then…

Step 2: Isolate Words

“Which words do I not know?” → Make a list or circle them

Step 3: Categorize Each Word

“What type of word is it?” → Jargon, Foreign (untranslated/translated), Redefined, Common, Undefined

Jargon = Technical term used in special ways by experts

Foreign= Translated or untranslated foreign word

Tip: When reading philosophy, keep an eye out for words that are both foreign and jargon!

Redefined = The author is defining or using a familiar word in a way unique to them

Common = A normal word in your native tongue that you simply don’t know

Undefined = A word that is difficult to define and may require further reading

Step 4: Define Each Word

Take 3-5 minutes and look up each word.

Tip: There is a serious danger of falling into a rabbit-hole here. I recommend limiting yourself to a “good enough” definition and moving on unless you really want to go deeply into something.

Write the word by hand in your book or pdf with a simple definition that seems to fit the context.

Tip: Some words have multiple definitions, so use context clues to see which one is in the right ballpark.

So this is a complete micro-loop you can run through on the word-level when you read a sentence that presents word-challenges.

Now, you might be thinking that this is a lot to think about and it will really slow you down if you were to do this for every word.

It will.

In general, that is a good thing!

Again, would you want to play a song faster than you actually can and miss a bunch of notes along the way?

If you never slow down to identify and overcome the micro-challenges posed by the words in a given text, you will actually end up slowing yourself down in the future because you will continue to read books and not understand them.

The more you do this when reading challenging books, the easier and easier it will get, since your vocabulary will grow and you will have more context and depth of knowledge to draw on in the future.

Consider this an investment that will not always pay off immediately.

Eventually this process becomes “internalized” to the point that you don’t even need to follow the steps explicitly.

Your mind becomes used to recognizing patterns and running through these micro-loops automatically.

When I read the Heidegger passage, for example, my brain immediately recognized that Heidegger was quoting something in Ancient Greek and instead of panicking, I calmly just looked it up and moved on.

Conclusion

Each level in The Micro-Reading System contains its own unique challenges and micro-loops that can be used to address them.

The demands placed on a reader by sentences differ from those placed on them by words. The demands placed on readers by chapters and macro-structures also differ radically from the demands of individual sentences.

Before I end up making this article 4x longer than it already is, I want to make sure that you actually find this framework helpful.

So let me know in the comments below if you found this helpful and would like to learn more about how to break down sentences and avoid getting stuck at Level 2.

There is a lot more to breakdown, but I want to make sure people would actually read it before I write thousands of words.

-Paul

I wanted to share with you a short guide to help you prepare for our next session.

What you will find below is the selected reading for our next session, some general notes on the selected readings, and some key terms you will encounter in the reading (including ontical vs ontological).

Selected Reading:

• Untitled first page

• Introduction I: sections 1-3

Notes

Untitled First Page

• Heidegger begins the book with a quote from Plato’s Sophist.

  • Michael Gelvin suggests that Heidegger chooses to begin with this quote from Plato for a variety of reasons.

• First, Plato was unique in relating the problems of the individual human being to the immensely speculative reaches of abstract metaphysics.

  • For example, Plato’s theory of Forms arose out of immediately existential needs such as love, death, and justice.

  • Gelvin suggests that Heidegger may have wished to achieve a similar kind of unity between his own ontological theorizing and the immediate existential realities of everyday life.

• S…

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This is the first installment of an ongoing series in which I build my own philosophy in public, and talk through my entire thought process along the way.

I was fortunate enough to have on my first live stream as a special guest. Taylin is a former college teacher who become a full-time ghostwriter, but is also someone who has been secretly building an entire worldview from scratch. In this free flowing live conversation, Taylin and I discuss what it means to “build your own philosophy” and how one should approach such a task.

If you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments.

Like I said in my original post, the goal is to be as open, honest, and creative as possible as I pursue this crazy idea of building a philosophy in public.

I am happy to try (almost) anything in future live streams if you think it would benefit people to see it.

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I am publishing this guide to help you prepare for our study of Being and Time.

With a text as difficult and easily misunderstood as Being and Time, it is absolutely critical that we adopt the appropriate approach and start off with the right expectations, assumptions, and warnings.

My first warning to you is this:

This study will be a bit like sailing.

In order to sail it is necessary to do quite a bit of preparatory work — equipment checks, studying the weather, tying knots, untying knots, etc.

But my promise to you is this.

If you put in the time and energy necessary to safely launch into the open ocean, eventually you will be able to sail with this text and enjoy the intellectual thrill that comes with it.

I truly believe your life will never be the same if you are able to understand the key insights contained within it.

Like I said in my video lecture on Heidegger’s philosophical project, what we are receiving here is a new way of seeing — a new kind of truth.

Ready?

Let’s go.

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This raises a fundamental question that everyone must confront at some point in their life:

What does it mean to live authentically in a world that you didn’t chose or create?

My own inability to answer or even understand this question has caused me years of suffering and confusion.

It has made it difficult for me to make major life decisions, secretly undermined my relationships with others, and led me to constantly feel like there is something “off” about ordinary life.

I remember when I was assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye in high school.

I didn’t read it.

But I liked being in class and hearing my teacher talk about it’s main character Holden Caulfield, because I saw myself in him at the time.

Holden was a 16-year-old boy who constantly called the people around him “phony,” judging everything and everyone as inauthentic, shallow, and fake.

“One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddam window”

-Holden Caulfield, The Catcher In The Rye

Holden’s attitude led him to experience profound loneliness, which he justified to himself as a good thing, since it would protect him from becoming “phony”.

The irony, of course, was that Holden himself was plainly guilty of the very same phoniness that he saw in others.

He would lie, perform socially, and act inauthentically — just in his own differentiated way.

It’s easy to read The Catcher In The Rye as suggesting a general point about human development — that we all must outgrow the immature state of being judgmental and narcissistic in order to develop authentic human relationships grounded in compassion and understanding.

Once we stop being so obsessed with ourselves and start making the effort to understand other people and their circumstances, we will see that they are not “phony” after all, but simply doing the best they can in an unfair world.

This reading misses a deeper point that might be true.

Perhaps Holden was right that everyone is phony, but not for the shallow reasons he believed they were.

Consider these two questions:

What if most people are inauthentic most of the time, but the real explanation of mass inauthenticity is not found in blaming individuals for failing to create themselves, resist conformity, and act authentically?

What if the real explanation for mass inauthenticity is something fundamental about human existence itself?

Whenever it’s the case that “everybody’s” doing something, I think it is a good rule of thumb to look for deep structural explanations rather than to blame particular individuals for failing to be different.

This shallow way of thinking often ends up being a psychological device that we use to make ourselves feel better than.

Perhaps the reason we are so quick to blame individuals isn’t just to make ourselves feel superior.

Maybe it’s because we often find ourselves wanting for explanations, but also lacking the awareness or ability to articulate the deeper causes of human behavior.

After all, we often find ourselves having to say something.

Maybe blaming individuals is the only thing we can genuinely think of.

Personally, I think it’s time we stop blaming individuals for things that depend upon structural features of human existence itself and instead try to understand what’s really going on.

These considerations raise the central question that I want to answer in this essay:

Is “phoniness” real and built into the nature of human existence itself, or is it just he byproduct of an immature, narcissistic, and judgmental mind?

I will argue that most people are inauthentic most of the time, but not for the phony reasons Holden had in mind.

Most people are inauthentic because being inauthentic is the primary way that human beings avoid having to confront the deep anxiety of human existence itself (most of all the fear of death).

Inauthenticity, then, is the byproduct of deep features of human existence that are impossible for anyone to fully avoid, rather than the blameworthy moral failures of phony individuals who sell themselves out.

In order to understand the unavoidability of inauthenticity, we will need to dive deep into the hidden source of human anxiety that no one talks about.

das Man

Modern life has become increasingly dominated by an unseen oppressive force that Heidegger referred to as das Man.

There is no perfect English translation of das Man, but common translations are “the They”, “People”, “Anyone”, or simply “One”.

The basic idea is that das Man is the anonymous public voice in our heads that we constantly use to judge ourselves and others and to make sense of our lives.

Das man is the mysterious entity that tells us what we “should” be doing by age 40.

Most people naturally think that the source of their anxiety is the pressure to meet social expectations or standards.

To succeed according to what “society” expects of us, but what no one who actually loves us should be pressuring us to do.

But the real source of human anxiety is not the pressure that “society” puts on us.

It is the very nature of human existence itself.

It is our fear of confronting our authenticity, death, freedom that comes with being human that causes us to flee into living for society.

It is the anxiety caused by human existence itself that leads us to seek refuge in das Man and have others choose our lives for us.

This is what it means to live inauthentically.

In order to understand how this works, we need to unpack the hidden source of human anxiety and see how it pulls us into living inauthentically and having the anonymous public dominate our lives.

Some of the ideas below you’ve probably never heard of, and they will be genuinely difficult and strange, but if you really want to understand how to live an authentic life and overcome the deep fears of human existence, it is worth making the effort.

We shouldn’t expect understanding deep truths about life to be easy…

Anxiety (Angst)

In Being and Time, Heidegger famously argued that what it means to exist as a human being is to exist as what he call Dasein (literally “being-there”).

Dasein is a being-in-the-world.

You are Dasein.

The basic idea is that “what you are” is not an “ego” or “self”, but a being that is “always already” fully immersed in the world.

You are a situational being.

You cannot be properly understood independently of the situations you find yourself in.

Since you are completely immersed in the world at all times, any attempt of modern science to study “the human mind” or “human nature” will always be in some sense artificial or limited, because it requires isolating and removing the object of study from its actual lived circumstances in order to “analyze” it.

This is why many have turned towards philosophy to understand certain deep truths about human existence that science cannot make sense of.

You were originally thrown into a world, just as if you were thrown into the ocean, and forced to swim.

For most of our lives, we are fully at home in the world that we were thrown into and we aren’t really able to question it.

It is simply what we know.

It is how life seems to be for us.

Imagine you were a child born into the Soviet Union and had no internet or television access. In this example, your entire world would have been determined by your family, community, and culture.

It would be hard for you to imagine the world as other than it is.

Some people eventually begin to realize that the world doesn’t have to be the way that it is (usually when they are a teenager like Holden).

They realize that if they had been born somewhere else, it could have been fashionable to wear brown shoes with black pants rather than a faux pas.

The world suddenly becomes strange.

You might ask yourself:

Why is this the world for my life? Could my world have been different?

Others go on for years, and even in some cases decades, without ever questioning the “homeliness” or familiarity of their world (usually because it is serving them well).

At some point, however, everyone will experience a significant rupture or break that throws them into a mood Heidegger calls anxiety.

Heidegger argued that it is in anxiety (angst) that the free and authentic self first comes into existence.1

Perhaps this shift in mood is caused by a nervous breakdown or the end of a serious relationship.

It is almost always triggered by death.

Whatever it is that causes us to question our world, when we shift into the mood of anxiety, what happens is that we become acutely aware of the conditions of our existence which is, as we will see, the very meaning of authenticity for Heidegger.

Disclosure, Anxiety, and Authenticity

Anxiety is a mood in which the world is “disclosed” to us rather than simply thrust upon us.

Disclosure means to “make known”.

So anxiety is the mood in which the world is made known to us.

As we will see, the way in which anxiety makes the world known to us is special.

Normally, the world discloses itself to us in a more mundane sense.

We simply find ourselves in it, and it makes sense and feels familiar because we grow used to it.

We find ourselves in a world that comes “pre-loaded” with meaning.

A world in which the background structure of social norms, rules, customs, and language is given over to us as the way things simply are (“one does not wear brown shoes with black pants”, “you must not say that”).

As you develop and are raised into a culture, this world discloses itself to you through your practical day-to-day encounters with other human beings and objects.

All of this is mediated by language.

In order to see this, imagine how different the world would appear to a human being from the inside if they never develop language.

The world still discloses itself to them through their practical engagement with it, but it’s meaning would be very different for them.

The meaning of the world for you depends upon the totality of the situations which you find yourself in, just as the meaning of a word or a language as a whole depends upon the totality of a culture and way of life.

For example, what it means to make love or have a meal is wildly different depending on where you were raised.

You can easily imagine a foreigner coming over to your house for dinner and saying “that’s not a meal!” because you didn’t include wine.

So the idea of disclosure supposes that the meaning of a word or thing depends upon the context in which we encounter it, including the way of life of which it is a part.

The meaning of everything is “given” to us by virtue of its connection to complex network of activities.

This network is part of the background “conditions of intelligibility” for the world. In other words, the conditions that must be in place for the world to be intelligible to a human being at all.

So anxiety is the mood in which the world discloses itself to us.

But what’s the difference between the way in which world that makes itself known to us in childhood and the way in which world makes itself known to us through the mood of anxiety?

Heidegger believes that there are two fundamental ways the world discloses itself to us.

On the one hand, the world discloses itself to us simply by us being-in-the-world and engaging with it.

This is the ordinary sense of disclosure.

We treat the world as given, stable, but we conceal the fact that it is part of our fundamental nature as Dasein for our world to be contingent and for our lives to be open and free.

While we are living in what Heidegger calls “average everydayness” the world seems, in some sense, necessary.

We say things like “I need to take the train to work”, or “You can’t raise your voice, we are in a restaurant, people will stare”.

These things are, again, just “what we do”.

They come from our understanding of das Man.

This necessity is broken by a shift towards the mood of anxiety.

While in this mood, the world discloses itself to us in a different way.

In fact, Heidegger thinks that we are not merely passive recipients of the world, we also “open” or “disclose” the world ourselves.

We become aware of the contingency of our own existence as thrown into the world and understand ourselves as fundamentally a possibility.

The meaningful social norms and rules no longer seem necessary, but completely empty inventions.

“Who cares if we are in a restaurant? All of these rules are so ridiculous. Who cares if people will stare? What if I want to make a fool of myself? What if I want to have my dessert before my entree?”

The world appears to suddenly lack significance or genuine meaning while in this mood. The rules of dining etiquette seem absurd, arbitrary, and perhaps even oppressive.

This is why Heidegger says that “anxiety reveals the nothing”.

Anxiety discloses to us the very nature of our own existence which allows us to see that we are fundamentally the sort of creatures for which “the world” could be different, we could be different, and our identity is not fixed.

Heidegger calls this “the disclosure of possibility”.

It is in this anxiety which authenticity consists.

We realize that what we are is a possibility.

Heidegger famously says that anxiety reveals Dasein as:

“the being for whom its own being is an issue”

Inauthenticity and das Man

If anxiety discloses our freedom and the possibility of living authentically, why do most people remain trapped in inauthentic ways of living?

Heidegger’s answer is that we are constantly tempted to flee from anxiety.

Anxiety confronts us with the unsettling truth that our lives are radically open and ultimately groundless.

When anxiety reveals our freedom and groundlessness, the world suddenly feels uncanny.

Rather than face this, we quickly reinterpret the feeling as fear—fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of uncertainty—and retreat back into the familiar world of social norms and expectations.

We flee into das Man.

Social expectation — what “they” would think.

Actually, this is much better — “what someone might think”.

What a ridiculous expression that is!

“What someone might think”.

That is inauthenticity par excellence.

We think that our usual routines, social customs, and expectations will provide us with psychological comfort and a solution to our fundamental anxiety as free beings because they make life feel stable and predictable again.

The old meanings return.

So we flee from our authentic nature as Dasein and into das Man.

It is important to point out at this point that Heidegger did not intend for inauthenticity to be understood as a kind of “moral” failure.

Rather, it is a fundamental feature of human existence.

It is part of the rhythm of human life.

We all find ourselves naturally drifting into inauthentic average everydayness from time to time, until something shakes us out of it.

This is why Heidegger says that das Man has a “tranquilizing” effect on us.

We find ourselves feeling pulled towards “what one should do”.

“I guess I should have kids”, someone might think, because they don’t really know what else to do.

“We should have a party?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s your birthday!”

The majority of our lives are already pre-determined by social scripts, traditions, rituals that provide a deep background structure for us to subconsciously follow.

This background becomes absorbed into das Man and internalized by everyone.

Falling

Our tendency to drift towards das Man is what Heidegger calls “falling”.

Falling, for Heidegger, does not mean sin or moral corruption, but the way in which we naturally find ourselves becoming absorbed in everyday life and living inauthentically.

We are constantly falling into small-talk, gossip, work, and what Heidegger generally refers to as “idle talk”.

Idle talk is what happens when we simply find ourselves repeating things without truly understanding them, or having conversations which require no genuine thinking or individuality.

It can come in the form of gossip, popular opinions found on social media, slogans, inherited half-baked political beliefs, and so on.

Idle talk is what happens when two people spend an hour at a family party “arguing politics”, and a spectator who listens on notices that they are literally not having a conversation but just saying a bunch of quotes that they have heard on a podcast or television.

When we talk about things without genuinely thinking about them, we keep ourselves busy and avoid confronting deeper questions about our existence.

Another way in which we keep ourselves falling is by constantly seeking new stimulation.

When we choose to spend our free time seeking novelty, entertainment, and stimulation that allows us to avoid our existence, we are living inauthentically.

Scrolling, watching the news for hours, switching channels, multi-tasking.

These are all uniquely modern ways of living inauthentically.

The irony is that we escape or flee into inauthenticity in order to “feel better”, only to find ourselves putting off a confrontation with the realities of our existence that are constantly getting worse in the background.

This can all carry on for quite some time until, of course, the nature of our existence thrusts itself upon us in the form of death.

Pre-occupation prevents us from confronting deeper questions about existence.

We might even take a permanent stance of avoidance by reaching some sort of personal resolution such as:

“I’m just a simple guy. I don’t want to think about those things. I’m happier if I don’t”.

As if the unavoidable conditions of existence will respect this statement…

Conclusion

In a way, Holden Caulfield was right.

Most of us are living inauthentically most of the time.

But not for the phony reasons he thought.

It is not because of some unique moral failure of you as an individual to avoid selling out, or to become interesting.

It is because we are constantly falling into inauthenticity as a way to avoid the fundamental anxiety of human freedom.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

Heidegger thought that the secret to living an authentic existence is to become someone that is able to live in genuine awareness of their own death rather than avoiding it.

This is what he famously called “being-towards-death”.

Properly understanding the hidden source of human anxiety and how it drives us into living inauthentically by avoiding our own freedom and mortality provides the hidden path one can take to answer the opening question I had struggled with for years:

What does it mean to live authentically in a world that you didn’t chose or create?

What that path requires and where it leads is something I will save for another essay on how to properly live towards death.

-Paul

This essay was the sequel to an earlier essay on Heidegger and “thrownness”. I provided a brief summary and link below for you.

In my previous essay on our “thrownness” into the world, I offered a diagnosis of why so many people today feel that life has become shallow or “flimsy” and that they are missing a deeper engagement or connection with the world, but struggle to articulate it.

I appealed to Heidegger’s idea that it is a fundamental existential condition for human beings to be “thrown” into a world they did not choose and find themselves “lost in it”, drifting towards inauthenticity.

This drift is accelerated by modern technology and culture, which quietly nudges people to trade meaning for material comfort on a mass scale, only to realize that something has been taken from them.

Philosophy—in particular Heidegger’s existential analysis—promises to provide a radically new perspective on existence that helps individuals recognize the true source of their anxiety, the fundamental conditions of their existence, and how to consciously choose an authentic life.

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But what does that even look like anymore, and why does it seem so difficult to find?

Where can you go?

You already paid over $50,000 for a college degree…

You already consumed 1,000+ hours of high quality podcasts and videos…

Despite having instant access to more information than ever before and the ability to connect with others through the internet, people are finding it harder and harder to get the real thing.

Not hoarding notes in a second brain…

Not arguments in the comments section…

But a real education.

Real conversations with real people about things that matter.

An education where you learn how to think for yourself.

An education where you learn how to ask the right questions, come up with your own answers, and become an independent, unique, creative, and lifelong contributor.

An education where you can teach others and challenge them about things you care about — about those things where getting the details right matters because of how much people care about the details.

Sadly, some people have never experienced the joys of this kind of education and may have lost their love of learning (along with their intellectual self-confidence). Some people may have become convinced that education is merely a means to an end because they have forgotten what it is like to wonder, what it’s like to experience one of those rare “aha!” moments.

What it’s like to approach reality with a childlike enthusiasm.

This is what happens when people are forced through an “education system” that wasn’t designed for them on a mass scale and into careers that don’t move their soul and leave them with no room to develop or express their individuality.

When I look online, I see people desperately searching for this because they really have nowhere to go.

Mainstream institutions have mostly failed to provide this experience because their fundamental aim is the economic development of “human capital” rather than spiritual development of the individual (you might get lucky and have one or two rare and incredible professors — or they might be on leave doing research).

The internet contains plenty of amazing videos and courses that provide much of the same knowledge and information found in universities, but what often happens is that people consume high-quality content and are left with nothing to do with it and no one to talk to except some random person in the comments section.

Real education requires an intellectual community where people can have deep and meaningful conversations about the things they love, take intellectual risks, and learn from people of different backgrounds and life experiences.

Some people may not even know what this feels like because they have never had the opportunity to experience one of those rare “aha!” moments.

Some people may have become convinced that education is merely a means to an end because they have forgotten what it is like to wonder.

Because they were forced through an “education system” and into a career that doesn’t really speak to them and leaves them no room to develop or express their individuality.

This all leads to one big question — why?

Why are things this way for so many people despite record levels of wealth and opportunity?

Why are so many people alienated from the joys of reading, writing, learning, and deep discussion despite the fact that they desperately crave these truly human activities?

The short answer is that, in the modern world, education has largely become an economic tool and opportunity rather than a spiritual one.

The result is that millions are forced to spend a quarter or more of their lives progressing through an “education system” that was not designed for them.

People don’t want to check off boxes, receive meaningless grades, and “progress” through a series of steps to get things they didn’t want in the first place.

They want to have their mind’s blown.

They want to discover something that makes them absolutely obsessed — that makes them feel alive and need to get up in the morning.

They want real conversations with real people about things that matter to them and others.

When is the last time you had a deep conversation that felt like it could never end but wasn’t about some personal problem?

A real education.

When I look online, that’s what I see people desperately searching for because mainstream institutions have mostly failed to provide it.

An education where you learn how to think for yourself.

An education where you learn how to ask the right questions, come up with your own answers, and become an independent, unique, creative, and lifelong contributor.

An education where you can teach others and challenge them about things you care about — about those things where getting the details right matters.

How did we reach a point where so many people don’t know where to go to find these things despite there being more opportunity than ever before?

The answer can be found by taking a brief look at the history of mass education since the Industrial revolution.

It is the story of how education, once understood as aiming at spiritual transformation and personal growth, became transformed into the main source of development of “human capital” in order to grow the economy and reinforce social order.

A Brief History Of Mass Education: Productivity And Conformity

The global system of mass education that exists today is mostly an outdated byproduct of the 19th century industrialist idea that the ultimate purpose of education is economic.

In any value system that has an ultimate aim or purpose, this ultimate purpose will create a hierarchy of value that serves it.

This is what structures the hierarchy of subjects taught in school.

The most highly valued and prioritized subjects are those that are viewed as most useful for work.

This is why the arts and creativity are the least prioritized and most mocked.

What does the fact that you don’t need to learn or practice creativity say about the nature of the work that an education is preparing you to perform?

Mass education serves one ultimate master — the economy.

Economics And Education

A major shift in human economics occurred when people suddenly realized that education increases the economic productivity and earning potential of human beings by transforming them into “human capital” which can then be used to create and extract wealth on a mass scale.

Prior to the rise of modern education, human capital was like an unrefined or undeveloped natural resource.

It was primarily found in the uneducated laborers of the world, such as serfs and slaves.

Their economic value was comparable to the value of a horse or a plow (and thought of in these terms), since they were viewed as having little to contribute beyond their physical output.

Being an intelligent serf gave no added value to your master.

Due to a lack of modern technology, the methods of wealth extraction were quite simple — get people to produce things like food or goods, and take the majority of the physical stuff for resale.

Education was viewed as completely unnecessary.

But major developments in moral and legal thinking, as well as new technologies, radically altered the role that education could play in the growth of economies around the world and forced governments and companies to innovate by finding new ways of creating and extracting wealth.

For example, slavery was outlawed in the United States in 1865 with the 13th Amendment To The Constitution.

If people could no longer be enslaved, then how was one to “use” them to make money?

The primary answer ended up being wage labor.

Human beings are widely thought of today as “capital”.

What is capital?

Capital is a broad term for the assets used by a business to generate returns. It most commonly refers to cash that is used for the purposes of production or investment, but it has also become common to apply the concept to human beings themselves.

This is what’s called “human capital”.

What is “human capital”?

Well, it’s the economic value of a worker’s skills and experience to a business and the economy overall. It is the value employees bring to a company that translates to productivity or profitability.

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It is an intangible asset that is not listed on a company’s balance sheet, but absolutely vital to increasing productivity and profitability.

So if you are no longer able to literally enslave people, how can you find new ways to treat them as an economic resource that serves the bottom line?

You treat them as human capital to be educated, up-skilled, and maintained in order to guarantee perpetual increases in productivity, profits, and economic growth.

Seem’s like a pretty good deal, right?

The Rise Of Human Capital Theory

In the 1960s, economist Theodore Schultz analyzed the value of human capacities. Schultz compared human capital to other forms of capital that improve the quality and level of production, and argued that companies must invest in the education, training, and enhanced benefits of an organization’s employees.

Since human capital is based on improving employee skills and knowledge through education, these investments can be easily calculated. Any return on investment (ROI) of human capital can be calculated by dividing the company’s total profits by its overall investments in human capital.

All of this has great economic value for employers and the economy.2

The basic idea is that people who participate in the workforce with higher education will often have larger salaries, which means they can spend more in the local economy

As more physical capital accumulated, the cost of education decreased, making it an essential part of the workforce. Although educational institutions seemed to have found a way to make themselves indispensable when the cost of education was low, building themselves into the foundation of the economy, and then turn around and raise prices once their position was solidified.

Ultimately, students end up paying for the corporate investment in human capital without realizing it (under the belief that they are paying to improve themselves for themselves).

It is a subtle trick that has worked on a mass scale.

It’s one of the great American tricks — getting people to pay for things that should have been built into the basic structure of society under the belief that it is an optional form of self-improvement, but actually it’s a way to fund someone else’s investment.

After the 60’s, the term “human capital” was adopted by corporations and viewed as a renewable resource that drives productivity and innovation.

In his original paper, which was published during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Schultz was well aware of the moral hazards with this kind of thinking. He writes:

“The mere thought of investment in human beings is offensive to some among us. Our values and beliefs inhibit us from looking upon human beings as capital goods, except in slavery, and this we abhor. We are not unaffected by the long struggle to rid society of indentured service and to evolve political and legal institutions to keep men free from bondage. These are achievements that we prize highly. Hence, to treat human beings as wealth that can be augmented by investment runs counter to deeply held values. It seems to reduce man once again to a mere material component, to something akin to property. And for man to look upon himself as a capital good, even if it did not impair his freedom, may seem to debase him”

Schultz, “Investment In Human Capital” (1961)

After raising his moral concerns, and discharging his obligation to do so, Schultz presses on with his argument and presents his central claim:

The failure to treat human resources explicitly as a form of capital, as a produced means of production, as the product of investment, has fostered the retention of the classical notion of labor as a capacity to do manual work requiring little knowledge and skill, a capacity with which, according to this notion, laborers are endowed about equally. This notion of labor was wrong in the classical period and it is patently wrong now.

The basic idea is that human laborers are too complex to be reduced to a mere body count when trying to understand the impact on the economy.

Counting humans is not like counting tractors.

Instead, each human being is understood to have the capacity to produce a unique level of economic output depending on the level of development of their knowledge and skill.

Now I am not an economist, and I am not here to argue against Schultz’s theory.

I am here to draw a connection between this line of thinking and the purpose of mass education.

I think their purposes are the same.

Our minds are to be “educated” for the subtle purpose of wealth creation and extraction without us realizing it, all the while believing that we are improving ourselves and “doing a good job” by progressing through the system.

In short, there is reason to believe that the “education system” is really a system designed for the production and development of human capital, rather than the enrichment and development of the human spirit.

By “going through” the system, our beliefs and desires are shaped and manufactured for the ultimate aim of increasing economic spending, productivity, and output.

If we taught everyone to become Buddhist monks, our economy would collapse because no one would desire anything.

Perpetual economic growth requires desire manufacturing.

Human Capital And Education

When the foundation of the value of your own education is your economic value to a corporation, something has gone wrong.

The main thing that has gone wrong is that individuals believe they are investing in themselves but they are really investing in the development of society and corporations at their own expense.

The point here isn’t to say whether it is a good or bad overall to have such a system — that is what the Capitalists and Marxists are arguing over endlessly — the point is to make it clear to us that this is how things are.

To clarify what the actual foundation of the education system is.

Education is another kind of economic exchange which ultimately generates more wealth and returns for the institutions and corporations than for the student (although the student obviously must get something out of it to make it worth it).

There is intrinsically nothing wrong with an economic exchange where one person benefits more than another so long as both people understand what is happening in a way that allows for genuine consent.

I think the problem is that people don’t realize what’s happening and end up suffering greatly for it.

It would be one thing if the costs that people incurred were transparent and they knew exactly what they were signing up for such that they could meaningfully consent.

I think there are a lot of areas of the economy where this is the case.

If you sign up for a course to become an electrician at the end you become an electrician — it’s pretty straightforward.

What’s interesting is that these kind of exchanges are often more transparent and cheaper.

My hunch is that a lot of people believe they are paying substantial amounts of money and going into debt to receive a highly unique educational experience that will radically transform their soul, help them self-actualize, and get a dream job on top of it all.

The reality is that in many cases they are going into considerable debt to pay for their own job training to eventually end up in a narrowly defined role that eliminates their individuality and self-expression.

“We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall”

Pink Floyd, “Another Brick In The Wall”

The sad truth is that I personally know several students who have spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives receiving a “higher education”, only to end up feeling like they completely missed something and wish they had taken one or two literature or philosophy courses and learned how to think more deeply about their life.

Obviously there will be many cases where students do flourish and receive an outsized return (depending on how you measure this…).

But that misses the point.

The point is to clarify the foundation of the system as a whole and to recognize that it is not about the individual student, despite the marketing efforts and cultural myths around college that make them believe that it is on the front-end.

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There is a suspicious misalignment between the incentives, outcomes, and foundation of our education system, and what individual students and parents believe about it.

What’s so slippery about this is that systems are not individuals, so there is plausible deniability everywhere and no specific person to really blame for the way things are.

The only thing left to do is try to change the system and raise awareness, or put yourself in a position to benefit from it and do good elsewhere.

There is another idea of the ultimate purpose of education which comes from modern Sociology.

It is the idea the purpose of education is to shape individuals to fit into “society”, transmit shared cultural and social values, morality, and beliefs, and create a moral and cultural foundation that is necessary to sustain and reproduce social life.

Education is the means by which society reproduces and upholds itself.

As you will see, the second purpose of mass education powerfully feeds back into the first.

Education As Social Transmission: Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) was a French sociologist who formally established the discipline of sociology.

Durkheim was considered a “functionalist sociologist” and saw education as performing two major functions in advanced industrial societies – transmitting the shared values of society and simultaneously teaching the specialized skills for an economy based on a specialized division of labour (we already covered that).

He believed that schools were one of the few institutions uniquely poised to assist with the transition from traditional society to modern society.

Durkheim believed that education realizes this transition to modern society by creating a sense of social solidarity in the individual which will tie them together as society grows more abstract and complex.

This involves instilling in them a sense of belonging and a commitment to the importance of working towards society’s goals and a feeling that the society is more important than the individual. He writes:

“To become attached to society, the child must feel in it something that is real, alive and powerful, which dominates the person and to which he owes the best part of himself”.

“Society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity: education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child from the beginning the essential similarities which collective life demands”

-Durkheim

Durkheim also argued that a second crucial function for education in an advanced industrial economy is the teaching of specialized skills required for a complex division of labour.

In other words, the development of “human capital”.

In pre-industrial societies, skills could be passed on through apprenticeships and familial knowledge, which rendered formal education unnecessary.

The nature of labor changed dramatically in industrial modern societies leading to the breaking apart of the artisan economy, the disruption of the family unit, and mass education (as a form of child rearing and childcare).

Parents no longer worked the fields shoulder to should with their children, but sent them off to school while they went to the factory or office.

If the purpose of education is social cohesion and the development of human capital, and the historical, social, and cultural values of a country like the United States are strongly capitalist, it is no surprise that the education system fundamentally devalues subjects like the humanities and the arts.

The education system is optimized for conformity and productivity rather than independence.

Both of these great masters, the economy and social stability, conspire to undermine the unique needs and interests of the individual and deprive them of a real education.

This is the core of my argument.

Human individuality, creativity, uniqueness, have no role serious to play in such a system and are, in many ways, a threat to its longevity.

Anything which cannot be measured or reproduced is disincentivized as counter-productive, wasteful, or flat-out harmful.

Ultimately, this makes what the individuals needs and wants of the student to be viewed as problematic, in many cases leading to the elimination of the individuality entirely.

The Elimination Of Individuality

So far, we have examined at a high level two big ideas about the purpose and nature of mass education: economic and social training.

What both of these ideas have in common is that eliminate the individual subject and absorb them into some abstract plan.

Mass education is engineered to absorb individuals into larger social projects fundamentally devaluing creativity, independent thinking, and risk-taking.

In his famous Ted Talk, Sir Kenneth Robinson (1950-2020), who was a British author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, education and arts bodies, argues that modern mass education is killing human creativity, which is the very thing that we will need in an uncertain future.

In the 15th century Europe, the world was slow and predictable.

There was war, sickness, and death, but the world itself would not change.

Back then the world changed at a glacial pace that would only be accelerated by technological breakthroughs like the printing press.

For most of human history the world you were born into was, for the most part, the same world you would die in.

Today, we are all living in a world that is rapidly changing such that we have no idea what it will be like in 1-5 years, let alone 50!

And yet, Robinson points out, we still need to educate people for a future we cannot even begin to understand.

This raises an important question:

How do you educate human beings for an unpredictable future?

The answer is that you teach them how to be flexible, adaptable, and creative.

You teach them the skills that allow human beings to adapt to novel problems by creating novel solutions.

As Robinson puts it, we need to teach people how to be more childlike.

Children are highly creative, innovative, and unafraid to take intellectual risks. Robinson believes that human beings have a extraordinary creative potential that comes in many forms, arguing that “creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status”.

Modern mass education, understood as a form of economic development and social training, is optimized to kill creativity at every turn.

Kids will take a chance if they don’t know something.

They aren’t frightened of being wrong.

“If you are not prepared to be wrong, you won’t come up with anything original”.

Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

But by the time they become adults most people have lost that capacity entirely.

They have become frightened of being wrong, paralyzed by imposter syndrome, and afraid to take big risks.

Robinson argues that this is unsurprising because we run companies in a way that stigmatizes mistakes, and we run our education system in a way that prepares students to work in such companies.

Robinson quotes one of my favorite lines from Picasso to drive home his point:

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up”

-Pablo Picasso, Artist

Think about it.

Every kid draws, dances, plays music, and even writes or makes up stories.

These are all things which are at the core of “the humanities”.

They are what separate us from everything else we know of in nature — including AI.

“We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it”.

Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

Robinson argues that most education systems around the world share a similar hierarchy of subjects — one shaped by university admissions and industrial-era economic priorities.

At the top of the hierarchy are “high-status” and economically “useful” subjects like:

• Mathematics

• Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology)

• Engineering

• Technology / Computer Science

What is ironic, though, is that you aren’t supposed to become too interested in a subject like Mathematics and turn yourself into a researcher, because then it is less clearly “useful”, except for goal of becoming a university researcher.

You are supposed to learn Mathematics, or coding, to do something deemed economically useful.

These subjects are valued because they are “objective”, “rigorous”, and pathways to high-status careers.

Next up is the large collection of subjects rooted in human language and communication — what’s often thought of as “the humanities” broadly speaking:

• Law

• Philosophy

• Literature

• Sociology

• Anthropology

• Political theory

• Cultural studies

These are considered important and can be high-status, but are viewed as less obviously “useful” or “practical” because they are not “objective” or “technical”, and inessential to certain fundamental forms of “production”, such as infrastructure and weaponary.

In last place are “the arts”, which include things like:

• Visual arts

• Music

• Creative writing

• Theater / Drama

• Dance

The Arts are often mocked for being a complete waste of money, a politically immature wasteland, and not something that can lead to a valuable career.

“What can you do with a dance major!?”

Robinson’s overall point is that this hierarchy reflects certain deep assumptions about the fundamental purpose of education, such as:

• Academic intelligence (especially analytical and abstract) is superior to creative or embodied intelligence

• Economic utility defines educational value

Robinson argues that education systems are organized around a narrow definition of intelligence — one that prioritizes analytical and technical ability over creative, philosophical, and expressive forms of thinking.

We train young people to start doing the thing they will eventually do in school, rather than developing them as people and allowing them to chose the thing for themselves later.

What’s strange about this is that most students who go on to start a job in a field that aligns with their major end up saying that the things they learned in school didn’t even help them do the job and that they learned almost everything after graduating by just doing the job itself.

If people pay tens of thousands of dollars to study business only to end up getting a job in that field and realize that nothing they learned actually helped them do the job, then why are people studying these things?

These students would have been better off studying something like Russian Literature and spending their early twenties filling their soul with meaning so that they would be less burnt out after a few years in corporate, feeling regret that they haven’t read a novel in 5 years.

“If an alien visited and asked ‘what’s it for? what is the ultimate output if you do everything you should?’

The answer would be a university professor”

Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

I think Robinson is mostly correct that what we are often teaching students is how to become something like a university professor, but another answer might just be that we are teaching them how to become “an employable citizen”.

Modern mass education teaches us to devalue our bodies and become rewarded for our academic ability using our non-creative parts of our brains.

The result, Robinson argues, is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they are not.

Consider the story of Gillian Lynne.

In 1930’s England, Gillian Lynne was a young girl whose teachers thought she had a learning disability because she couldn’t sit still and was disruptive in class.

Seeking help, her mother met with a child psychologist and explained what the teachers had said. Today, the girl would have been diagnosed with ADHD (but that wasn’t a thing at the time). The psychologist listened for a bit, then told the girl he needed to speak with her mother privately and left her alone in the room with the radio on.

The mother observer her daughter begin to get up and dance.

The psychologist said to the mother that her daughter doesn’t have a learning disability, “she is a dancer and you need to enroll her in dance school”.

Gillian Lynne would go on to become one of the most influential choreographers of all time and a multi-millionaire.

The tragedy of Gillian’s story is made clear by Robinson, who points out that “somebody else would have put Gillian on medication and told her to calm down”.

The suggestion here, of course, is that there are millions of kids who never get to realize their true potential because of ignorance.

Because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized.

Robinson doesn’t just complain, he has a broad vision for what the future of human education might look like and require.

He argues that “We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence”.

Intelligence, according to Robinson, is three things:

• It is diverse

• It is dynamic

• It is distinct

Intelligence is diverse because “we think about the world in all of the ways that we experience it” — through sight, sound, movement, abstraction, and so on.

Intelligence is dynamic “wonderfully interactive” and creative. Robinson argues that creativity, which he defines as “the process of having original ideas that have value” more often than not comes about through the interaction of different ways of seeing things that go across discipline.

Finally, Robinson argues that intelligence is distinct. By this, he means that it is unique to the individual.

Robinson’s puts his positive vision for education in ecological terms. He says that “Our only hope for the future is a new conception of human ecology”.

What he means by this is that we must rethink the relationship between human beings and the world.

“Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we have mined the earth for a particular commodity”.

Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

We must rethink the richness of human potential and what it means to develop human beings rather than mine them as a resource.

Robinson argues that, in the future, this approach won’t work anymore.

We have to rethink the fundamental principles with which we are educating children.

Our job is to prepare them for the future.

In the next section, I provide three alternative visions for what a humanistic education might look like and aim to accomplish.

Three Visions For A Humanistic Education: John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Maria Montessori

I want to sketch three visions of what education is about that I find particularly attractive and that I take to be compelling alternatives to the economic and social training models.

They come from John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Maria Montessori.

John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, and one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian educator and Marxist philosopher whose work revolutionized global thought on education and is widely regarded as one of the most important educational theorists of the twentieth century, alongside figures such as John Dewey.

Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori (1870-1952) was an Italian physician and educator best known for her philosophy of education (the Montessori method) and her writing on scientific pedagogy. Her educational method is in use globally in many public and private schools.

1) Dewey’s Vision: Democratic Participation

Like Durkheim, Dewey does think that there is a social function to education, but it is a democratic social function in which individuals are taught how to actively participate in democracy, use their individual capacities for reflective judgment, and think critically and creatively.

Dewey’s philosophy of education connects the uniqueness and development of the individual with the health and development of democratic society as a whole. He thought that schools are the primary institutions that shape democratic society, and it is important for a democracy to develop citizen’s thinking capacities.

In short, education prepares people to participate intelligently in a democratic community.

In order to make this possible, Dewey thought that teaching should be treated as a profession on equal footing with professions such as medicine or law. He thought that teachers serve a crucial public function to not merely deliver content but guide human growth and development.

The problem is that the promotion of the teaching profession does not have direct economic benefit beyond a certain point, unlike medicine and law.

In general, Dewey viewed education as a guided experience for personal growth and development, not the reception of content, or pre-job training.

Several themes recur throughout these writings. Dewey continually argues that education and learning are social and interactive processes, and thus the school itself is a social institution through which social reform can and should take place.

In addition, he believed that students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning.

The ideas of democracy and social reform are continually discussed in Dewey’s writings on education. Dewey makes a strong case for the importance of education not only as a place to gain content knowledge, but also as a place to learn how to live.

In his eyes, the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one’s full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good.

He writes that:

“To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities”

John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed”, 1897

In short, education, for Dewey, is not the delivery of information, or skills-training, but the guided construction of human experience and intellectual independence.

2) Freire: Emancipatory Pedagogy

Freire argued that education always does one of two things:

• Reinforces the existing system (produces conformity), or

• Liberates people by helping them critically understand and change their world.

In other words, it is never “neutral”. Even education that appears neutral, such as “technical training”, is not actually neutral. Being a mere technician still means that you are participating in the technical economy and whatever it does.

Education either integrates people into the existing order or becomes a “practice of freedom.”

Freire’s core idea is that education is political and transformative — it shapes how people see reality and their place within it.

Freire was critical of what he called the “Banking Model” of education. This was his most famous concept.

According to this model, the teacher is treated as the authority and the students are passive recipients of knowledge-deposits into their “bank”. Learning, then, becomes the consumption, retention, and reproduction of knowledge.

Like a bank, you must be able to withdraw a previous deposit.

The problem, as most of you are probably aware, is that this produces passive learning, discourages critical thinking, and reinforces dependence on authority and social conformity for success and self-worth.

This model treats students as objects rather than independent thinkers.

Instead, Freire thought that education should be dialogical and that teachers and students should co-create knowledge.

It should engage them in real dialogue, teachers and students should learn from and with one another, and knowledge emerges through the push and pull of questioning, discussion, and reflection on real experience.

Learning happens through conversation about real problems, not one-way instruction.

Freire believed this this kind of education could lead to the development of what he called critical consciousness, or the ability to recognize the social, cultural, and ideological forces that shape life, uncover power relations, question assumptions, and act towards improving unjust conditions.

The teacher aims to develop in students intellectual agency, awareness of social conditioning, and resistance to manipulation. Freire thought that this type of education was necessary to free the minds of oppressed groups who often internalize dominant beliefs and stop questioning them.

In short, education should help people become authors of their own lives, not objects shaped by others.

3) Montessori: Natural Freedom

Maria Montessori argued that education should support the natural psychological development of the child, rather than impose external instruction.

Her approach held that children are naturally motivated to learn, that education should adapt to the unique individual rather than follow a fixed curriculum, and that the teacher’s role is to observe and guide development.

One crucial aspect of this approach was creating an environment in which children could learn independently, explore, and grow.

The goal is independent learning without constant teacher intervention or rigid requirements.

This approach emphasizes promoting autonomy in children by allowing them to select their own activities within a flexible set of structured options.

Eventually, children would learn how to freely construct their own identity through guidance rather than control, leading to increase self-reliance, intrinsic motivation, and meaningful engagement with learning.

The Future Of Humanistic Learning

A common thread running through Dewey, Freire, and Montessori is that a humanistic education involves the formation of the self.

It is not job training or the development of human beings as an economic resource.

A real education is the process of intellectual and personal formation — learning to understand reality, think independently, develop a coherent worldview, and direct your own lifelong learning.

This is what I have begun referring to as perspective development.

In many ways, this is what I teach in my Micro-Philosophy: Foundations course.

The goal of that course is to use philosophy to teach people how to think for themselves about what their own philosophy of life is rather than consume someone else’s.

Being able to develop and think from your own perspective has always been essential to a good human life, but is becoming increasingly rare and valuable in the digital age with the rise of artificial intellgience.

The traditional approach to mass education is fundamentally threatened by artificial intelligence because we are now living in a rapidly changing world where fixed curriculums and pre-determined tracks in life no longer make sense.

Teaching “safe skills” to prepare students to enter into a predictable economic job market no longer seems viable.

It is a real possibility that we spend decades teaching students a specific skill like coding only to realize that it was rendered obsolete overnight.

We are leaving an era of extreme credentialism and degrees as proof that you endured something difficult and onerous and now entering an era of educational anarchy.

We are entering an era of educational anarchy.

So what are we to do?

How are we to educate human beings for this uncertain future?

The answer is that we need to return to developing systems that deliver a real education because that is the only thing that empower us to flourish in an uncertain and rapidly changing future.

A Real Education

What is a real education?

A real education is the process of forming a self-directed, truth-seeking, critically independent person who can continue learning and contribute responsibly to society.

It teaches someone how to:

• Ask their own questions

• Evaluate ideas independently

• Build a coherent worldview

• Learn anything they need to learn

• Contribute original thought

• Direct their own intellectual life

In short, it teaches people how to leverage their unique human intelligence and how to become themselves.

But how do you teach these things? Aren’t these things that cannot really be taught?

Only if you think of teaching according to Freire’s “banking model”.

Philosophy has been teaching these “critical thinking” skills for thousands of years by demonstrating them and actively involving students in the practice of them.

Literature teaches these skills by helping students understand what it means to think about a text for themselves and develop their own interpretation.

The humanities teach these skills by doing them with others.

I have often said that philosophy should be taught like a dance class.

In a dance class, you don’t just watch videos about how to dance, you spend the majority of the time actually dancing yourself, practicing the steps, and receiving feedback.

Why can’t we teach philosophy the same way?

Many of the best philosophy professors already do, but most people don’t have access to them.

Fortunately, the internet has now made is possible for millions of people around the world to come together and receive a real education for a fraction of the cost of traditional education.

But event though this is a real possibility, it’s potential has not even begun to be realized.

The fact is that there are still few places online where people can go to receive a real education.

That is why I decided to do something about it by creating The Micro-University.

My hope is that by creating an online school for philosophy that is founded on the idea of teaching people how to practice and think philosophically, rather than giving them a bunch of information to consume, I can play my part in building the future of online education.

What human beings need is to leverage the power of technology like social media to not just create massive content libraries of video courses that people passively consume, but real learning environments where adult-learners can practice the skills of thinking independently and developing their own perspective and worldview.

That project lights my soul on fire and gets me to wake up every morning and figure out what I can do to make it happen. There is nothing more exciting to me right now than the challenge of helping people develop their own perspective through philosophy.

If you are interested in learning more about how I plan to do that, there is a link to The Micro-University below. Thanks for reading.

-Paul

But it wasn’t always this way.

I used to hate school, struggled to read, and lack confidence in articulating my ideas.

Even when I started to fall in love with philosophy, my relationship to it was full of struggles, doubts, moments of pure joy, and disappointments.

But I stuck with it and was eventually able to reach a point where many of those struggles have suddenly vanished, leaving me to thrive in the pure joy of the intellectual life and in a powerful position to help others do the same.

In the last year, I have develop a course that teaches people how to build their own philosophy (Micro-Philosophy: Foundations), started a one-person online philosophy university (The Micro-University), and I have developed the ability to teach philosophy in a way that my 17 year old self desperately needed — accessible, enjoyable, but also incredibly deep.

In order to help inspire others who might be struggling somewhere on their intellectual journey, I decided to share my story of how I fell in love with philosophy and, ultimately, with life.

I am sharing this story not to brag or receive praise, but to show people what they are capable of (even when they think something is wrong with them or their life).

I am sharing this because I still remember what it was like to walk into a bookstore like Barnes & Noble and head straight for the philosophy section, desperately wanting to access the insights and wisdom in these incredible works, and filled with awe and excitement about learning.

This is my intellectual auto-biography.

It is the story of how I went from an aimless and lazy kid who was obsessed with video games to someone who wakes up every morning excited to read hard books and teach them to others.

I hope you find it useful.

Part I: The Early Years (0-15)

I was born in 1992 in southern New Jersey, USA.

I was the youngest of four and spent the first 7 years of my life living at my grandmother’s house because my mom couldn’t afford to move out yet while raising four kids on a single income.

Being the youngest, I was protected from a lot of the typical hardships that low working-class families have to deal with.

In hindsight, I am deeply grateful for the sacrifices my siblings and family members had to make so that I could have the freedom to be a kid and explore the world.

But this freedom, as I would learn later in life, also set me back in various ways.

Unlike some kids, I had no structure or discipline imposed on me.

I was allowed to make my own choices and pretty much do whatever I wanted as long as I didn’t hurt anyone.

This highly free and individualistic childhood has probably shaped my thinking and personality more than anything in my life.

But it had a cost.

As I started to get older, I would constantly seek out fun and enjoyment at the expense of doing some of the things I was supposed to do, and also at the expense of working hard towards specific goals.

I learned to constantly seek novelty which fueled my endless curiosity.

My main interest was, like most kids who are left alone to choose for themselves, video games.

While I did end up wasting what is likely 20,000+ hours playing video games as a kid, I do think that there was some benefit in this obsession (although it is hard to put my finger on exactly how it shaped my mind).

One tangible thing I can say is that, largely thanks to the influence of my older brothers, I grew interested in “mature” video games quite early in my life. Games such as Metal Gear Solid which introduced deep political and moral themes that I found fascinating but hard to understand. I also became interested in historical strategy games and learned quite a lot about world history through games like Civilization and Rome: Total War.

One thing I can say about the influence of video games on my life is that they trained me to seek novelty and pleasure (which is a dangerous pathway that I had to eventually overcome later in life), but they also fueled my curiosity and desire to play with reality as well as fictional worlds.

I still don’t feel like I have fully understood the depth to which my experience with video games has shaped me as a person (I think most gamers who have later gone on to become writers, educators, or content creators will understand what I getting at here).

It is incredible to look back through your life and notice the subtle ways these experiences have shaped your taste and preferences.

Since these early years, I found myself perpetually interested in history, politics, morality, and (eventually) philosophy.

Children are some of the best philosophers in the world (even though most adults suppress their natural philosophical instincts).

They have endless wonder and curiosity.

We “educate” them to kill this part of themselves.

When I was eight years old, I underwent what I now understand to be a life-changing experience which protected my philosophical instinct from ever being crushed.

I watched The Matrix for the first time.

I still remember when we went to hang out at a family friend’s house on a Friday night (people did that sort of thing way more in the 90’s) and they had rented The Matrix on VHS from Blockbuster. Every time we would go to this house, my mom would spend a few hours talking to her adult friends in the kitchen, and my brothers and I would go upstairs to hang out with their son who I only remember as being a young and smart guy who had a sick computer and knew how to do all sorts of cool things on the internet.

The Matrix tapped into that sense of wonder about technology, the internet, and the future that existed in the late 90’s.

Most of all, it introduced me to philosophy.

I remember being blown away by the film in ways that I couldn’t even understand.

What stuck with me was the feeling that there was more to reality than I’ve been told.

I doubt that anything has influenced my life more than this experience.

For the rest of my early years, I would always be the kid who wanted to talk about space, history, and big ideas.

I desperately wanted to understand what adults were saying.

Although I would later come to realize most of it was simply just drunken banter at parties.

Part II: The Year When Everything Changed (16-17)

For most of my childhood and early teens, I was a pretty predictable sort of kid.

I loved video games, sports, and hanging out with my friends.

I did what most kids would do who did not have any life plan superimposed onto them and lacked supervision.

Eventually, though, this started to cause some problems in my life, especially when it came to school.

I mostly hated school as a kid.

I would not do most of the assignments, or just put in the absolute minimum effort so that I could go back to something which stimulated me (video games or sports).

I would never do any reading.

The only books I was even vaguely intersted in reading were books that dealt with military history.

Eventually these habits caught up to me as school started to get a bit harder.

I remember sitting in my English class during my sophomore year of high school and deeply feeling like a loser.

I actually liked the teacher (Mr. Lefevre) and he did a great job trying to make the class exciting for us.

I wanted to impress him (especially since I lacked a father figure in my life).

But I just felt like I couldn’t.

During that time I also started working at Dominos because I wanted to buy a Fender Stratocaster.

Why did I want to buy a Fender Strat?

Because I wanted to play heavy metal on the same guitar that my favorite guitarist from Iron Maiden used.

I had big plans in life, big plans…

So I did it.

I worked at Dominos. I started making some money. I bought my guitar, played video games, ate pizza, and blew off anything that felt even remotely challenging.

This went on for an entire school year.

That summer, however, everything changed…

I can’t say exactly what happened during the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school, but here is what I think happened.

After working at Dominos for a while, I started to deeply hate it.

I hated having to go there (because I already got my guitar), I hated having no time to have fun because I had a job during high school, and I hated feeling like a loser in my classes.

I received a letter in the mail that summer from my school asking me to choose my classes for the upcoming year.

I remember standing outside of a school building, the summer shining directly on my face, and reading this letter.

I had the option, as a junior, to take what are called “advanced placement” courses for the first time. (If you did well on the national exams after taking these courses, you could receive college credit).

I remember in that moment asking myself a question which, in hindsight, was the question that would change my life forever:

What if?

I had always told myself secretly in my head that I could be good at school, I just didn’t feel like it (I was one of those kids).

I could get straight A’s but I don’t care.

Well, I asked myself in that moment “What if I started trying in school for the two years I had left? Am I really as good as I think I am?”

In hindsight, I was calling my own bluff.

I was testing myself to see what I am really made of. To see if I really could do what I always said I could do, but put no effort into doing.

I also remember thinking that I on my current path, I am not going to go to college anyways, so “what do I have to lose?”.

“If I fail then everything will be the same”.

So I did something which seemed crazy to me at the time.

I enrolled in two advanced placement courses — history and literature — even though I received a C+ in literature the previous year.

Those precious minutes in which I reflected on where I was going and who I wanted to be were the hinge upon which my entire life began to turn.

If you are someone who doesn’t believe that you can “change your entire life in 1 hour”, you are massively underestimating the power of a perfectly placed thought or question.

Part III: The Climb (17-32)

The hardest part about changing your life is that when a major shift occurs, you mostly feel the same as you did before, even though the axis upon which you live has tilted.

The secret is to never stop moving in the new direction no matter how long it takes.

After signing up for AP English, I was assigned a summer reading project — East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.

I had never done summer reading in my entire life.

I thought it was ridiculous that schoolteachers could infringe upon my right to a free summer.

So I showed up to AP English on the first day and everyone else had read the book except me.

My teacher, Dr. Bierman, started asking us questions about the book and I immediately felt like I did the previous year — a shameful loser who had to fake it to get through class.

After class ended, Dr. Bierman asked me to speak with him.

I was quite nervous, as he was a pretty serious man and also the first teacher I ever had with a PhD (I didn’t really know what that meant, but I knew it was a big deal).

He asked me directly “Why didn’t you read the book?”

I remember trying to give a defiant response — a philosophical argument about my right to a free summer — but I fumbled.

I felt exposed by this man.

He would not accept bullshit.

Finally, a serious man in my life who would not let me bullshit anymore.

It scared the shit out of me.

He told me that I would finish the entire book over the weekend and come back on Monday having done my summer reading.

I was shocked.

I had never finished an entire book in my life up to that point (I tried to read Harry Potter once and got bored after 10 pages).

How could it be possible for me to read the entire book (~350 pages) by Monday when other students had the whole summer to read it!?S

So I went home that weekend and bought the book (I didn’t even own it!), and told myself that I am going to stay home and read this book for as long as it takes me to finish it.

If I fail, then I fail.

That single conversation with Dr. Bierman helped me understand the sheer power of human will. So many of the problems we face in life are only there because of the limitations we place on ourselves.

Dr. Bierman looked at me as a bright young man who was capable of doing what he knew was possible, but what I thought was impossible.

Reading East of Eden was a struggle.

I probably read for 10 hours/day over that Labor Day Weekend.

But I got it done.

When I came back to class, I was a completely different person.

I felt proud of myself that I did the reading rather than ashamed. I started to find myself having things to say (even though I was scared to say them still). I started to realize that learning can be enjoyable and feel good too.

Thank you Dr. Bierman for not accepting my bullshit and giving me the gift of real learning (I will be in touch).

As the semester progressed, I continue to take the same approach that I did with East of Eden.

I began to devour the assigned novels through sheer force of will in order to make up for my lack of reading skill.

It was slow and painful, but I never felt more proud of anything in my life.

I read the first novel that moved me to tears — Frankenstein.

As the semester progressed, my grades began to improve across the board and I started getting A’s in every class.

I started to realize that school was actually easy this entire time, it was just me who made it difficult and unenjoyable.

As the year progressed, I remember going up to Dr. Bierman and telling him that I want to get a 5 out of 5 on the national advanced placement exam.

I wanted to try to achieve that goal.

So I started doing more than was required.

I started practicing vocab every day, learning about grammar, and working through different test prep books late into the night.

I remember having a whiteboard where I would write a word of the day and also a grammatical concept, quotes from Shakespeare, and anything I needed to advance my learning.

I actually am starting to remember through writing this essay that I wrote out an entire quote from Macbeth, which I loved.

If you do not have a daily writing practice or journaling practice, I am begging you to write.

What should you write about?

Write about your life.

There are so many incredible memories, ideas, and insights you will unlock through writing and working through the raw material of the self.

Just now these quotes and memories are flooding back to me because I am writing this.

(I wrote an entire essay about this which I recommend if you are interested. I wrote this entire essay you are reading in one sitting. It took me two hours, but I am telling you, there are few things that make you feel more alive and human than writing).

When the AP exams came around, I entered them with as much momentum as I possible could.

I got a 5/5.

I cannot tell you just how powerful it is to see something through. Even if it is just once in your life, a single complete episode of achievement can propel you for years.

As high school progressed, I became more intellectually confident and found myself loving my classes.

I started talking ideas with teachers, friends and acquaintances.

I started learning about philosophy for the first time.

I maintained perfect grades throughout the end of high school.

In my final semester, I decided to enter a public speaking contest with a chance to become the graduation speaker for my high school (it was a position called the Ivy Orator).

I ended up giving that speech to a crowd of 5,000 people beating out a very nice kid who had perfect grades. I did not give that speech because I was valedictorian, I gave it because I wanted to overcome the fear more desperately than anyone in my school.

When I applied for colleges, I was incredibly stressed about money.

I had no money and I wanted to study philosophy.

I needed to find a way to pay for college, so I decided to look into joining the Navy, or going abroad (because I thought college in the UK would be way cheaper).

I ended up applying to a single university — Rutgers University.

Rutgers was one of the top philosophy schools in the world at the time.

But more importantly, I was able to get in-state tuition because my mom was living in New Jersey (I forgot to mention that while everything above was happening, I pretty much had an entire apartment to myself because my mom had to move back to New Jersey before our lease ended).

I got in to Rutgers and decided to major in philosophy as a freshman.

My years at Rutgers were great.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do and I set out to doing it.

I spent the next few years taking as much philosophy as I could and straining myself to improve my reading, thinking, speaking, and writing every single day.

I would often spend hours in the library, completely alone, wearing noise canceling earmuffs, to do anything I could to make it easier for me to focus.

This was the exact pair of earmuffs I would use. I looked like I worked on an aircraft carrier.

I would also bring with me a sheet of paper to track exactly how long I was able to study for each day.

I kept noticing that I would only be able to read deeply in 48 minute chunks.

So that’s what I did.

I stacked as many of those that I could into a single study day, taking coffee breaks in between sessions.

But it was not a linear path.

There were times where I really disliked the philosophy I was learning in my classes and I questioned whether I wanted to keep learning what is called “analytical philosophy”.

There were times where I would not hit my deep work goals and get distracted by video games.

It wasn’t until much later in life that I would fully understand how the inefficiencies in my life and work, the binging of work and play, the undisciplined boyish habits, were things that I was able to do at the expense of others.

So no, this was not a perfectly upward ascent.

It was a long and strenuous maturation process for a boy that was essentially addicted to novelty and pleasure, and had to learn how to become responsible for themselves and others.

I once spent an entire summer working in an “office” I set up for myself in a closet underneath a staircase. The idea was to literally force my mind to focus on what I was reading, giving myself nothing else to look at.

This is where I first read Beyond Good & Evil as well as Reasons & Persons.

I continued to work inefficiently but in the service of an overarching goal for several years.

I eventually applied to several graduate programs in philosophy, which was my original goal as a freshman.

I ended up getting into two of the twenty programs I applied for after spending several thousand dollars that I didn’t have to pursue this dream (not to mention the $80,000 of undergraduate debt I accumulated through funding my entire education with government loans).

When I got into the University Of Pennsylvania with 5 years of guaranteed funding, a stipend, and health insurance, I thought that I had made it.

I thought I had reached the mountaintop.

It felt like the journey that began in Dr. Bierman’s class was now complete.

I was overjoyed.

It was one of the happiest periods of my life.

But I was in for a rude awakening when I arrived to my first semester of graduate school, the youngest PhD student in my cohort of 4.

In the first semester of a humanities PhD, students have to take a class called “Proseminar”.

Proseminar is a first-year intensive seminar that is meant to teach you how to be a professional academic and also dive deeply into some advanced topic.

It was the hardest class that I ever took.

I remember that for the first 2 months, I barely said anything.

I was struggling to adjust to graduate school and didn’t understand why the methods I had used before were no longer working.

I did the reading, I took the notes, but I found myself having nothing to say.

In hindsight, some of this was simply being too in my head and placing all sorts of expectations on myself that were preventing me from being present.

But it was actually hard too.

We were reading advanced papers from the history of Analytic philosophy and I was expected to have semi-original thoughts about them.

But I just couldn’t find the words.

So I would sit there, in a three hour class with 3 other graduate students, all of whom were in their mid-thirties, and my professor who was the smartest person I had ever met.

It was brutal.

Six years later, that very same professor would be my primary thesis advisor and biggest advocate beyond graduation.

When I defended my thesis in order to receive my PhD, I remember that it was actually fun. After six more years of working to constantly improve, I had reached a point where I not only had a lot to say, but it felt like I could enjoy talking about ideas with people who I used to be terrified of.

After I passed my defense, my advisor opened his speech with something along the lines of “To be honest, I wasn’t sure he was going to make it, but he did”.

When I think back to these cycles of struggle and growth, a few major themes emerge.

First, the pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, and truth never ends and you should never want it to end.

It is a lifelong commitment to personal growth and there will always be new and exciting challenges to overcome.

It will always be hard, incredible, rewarding, frustrating, and all of the above.

In short, it should make you feel alive.

Second, you need other people along the way to propel you forward.

People who inspire you, people who scare you, people who you desperately want to be like, and people who you desperately want to avoid.

I wouldn’t have been shaken out of my stupor if it wasn’t for a few people who truly cared and made me want to improve myself so that I could speak with them and learn from them.

Don’t go it alone.

Heck, reach out to me if you need help. I’m here for you.

Third, if you choose something that you genuinely care about, you can overcome anything.

I went $80,000 into debt and spent around 15 years in school to eventually be able to read and teach philosophy on a deep level.

I would have quite a long time ago if I didn’t truly want it.

Once you find this, commit to it with everything you have and falling as deeply in love with it as you can (this will get you through the hard times).

The human will is one of the most powerful forces in the entire universe.

Part IV: Joy (32-33)

I can now honestly say that for the past year I have reached a place of pure joy when it comes to philosophy.

What’s ironic is that this has actually been the hardest year of my life.

I took another Kierkegaardian “leap” and decided that, at 32 years old, I want to try to become a creator and eventually build something I had been dreaming about for years — an online school of philosophy that helps people like my 17 year old self learn how to fall in love with the subject and speak about ideas confidently.

I am proud to announce that on March 15th, I am launching this school after overcoming all of the challenges that led me to this point.

It’s called The Micro-University.

I couldn’t be more excited to give back and lend a hand to those who need guidance on their own philosophical/leaning journey.

Not only has it been way harder than I ever imagined creating content online (I wrote for over a year with 25 subscribers, no likes, and no audience), but my personal life has involved new and unexpected challenges.

Everything I do here on Substack and elsewhere is being produced while I am also working a full-time job and trying to find time to visit my mother (who lives 9 hours away in New Hampshire and is battling stage-four breast cancer).

As long as you keep showing up, I will keep showing up for you.

What’s incredible is just how much we are capable of dealing with as human beings when we invest in ourselves.

I never thought that I would be able to create things that I am deeply passionate about and that help other people while also dealing with some of the greatest personal challenges of my life.

I owe so much of that resilience to what philosophy has taught me, but also, quite simply to love.

First and foremost to loving the people who have allowed me to reach a point where I can realize my dreams and help others.

But also to loving a subject so deeply that it makes life not only worth living, but exciting, interesting, and fascinating, even during it’s darkest moments.

All I can say to you at this point is to find your philosophy.

Whatever that thing is for you.

Find it and trust that if you love it completely, it will never fail to give you a reason to keep going.

-Paul

Paul Musso received his PhD in Philosophy from the University Of Pennsylvania in 2022. Since then, he has founded The Micro-Philosopher Substack and The Micro-University. He has also created a course and community dedicated to teaching people how to build their own philosophy called Micro-Philosophy: Foundations. Paul maintains an open-door policy and is open to direct messages and inquiries.

1. Did you choose it?

2. Where did it come from?

3. Is it serving you, or are you serving it?

According to Suzy Welch, a world-renowned expert on human values and professor of management at NYU, only 7% of American adults can accurately identify their own deeply held core values. Why does this matter? Because being able to articulate and act in alignment with your core values is essential for finding purpose in life and career satisfaction.

Imagine a company or business that had no idea what its organizational purpose, values, or ethical principles are — it would probably fail and potentially harm people while doing it.

If you aren’t able to identify or articulate your core values or deeply held personal beliefs, then how do you expect to to act on them consistently?

Nobody just gets in their car and starts driving around without being able to say where they are trying to go. Why would you put your life at risk, and waste time, gas, and money for no particular reason?

The reality is that 99.9% of people have lived this way for at least some portion of their lives.

I know that I have.

But this is how it has to be. We all need time to figure out where we are going and who we want to become. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this.

Living a random or blurry life becomes a problem when you desperately want to know where you are going and what you are really meant to do in life, but get stuck for years (sometimes decades) unable to make progress.

Even though you “progress” through the game of life that society predetermined for you, it’s impossible to shake that feeling deep down inside that this path isn’t really yours. Even though you don’t fully know what you want for yourself just yet, or how to articulate what you are meant to do in life, you know that this can’t be it.

You silently tell yourself “There must be something else which I am uniquely meant to be”.

What ends up happening when someone realizes this and wants to make a change is that they start looking for answers in the wrong places because they don’t know where to start.

They seek to master things like “productivity” or change their “habits”, hoping that if they can start being productive or get a new habit to stick, the answers to life’s bigger questions will begin to reveal themselves.

This is not to mention the greatest and most tempting trap of all — learn how to start some kind of business that you aren’t passionate about and make $10,000 a month and you will suddenly figure out who you are.

I am not saying that things like habit and behavior change are unimportant.

They are incredibly important.

But they are only half or less than half of what most people really need.

Even James Clear himself, the worlds’ leading expert on this topic, says in the very beginning of his bestselling book Atomic Habits that changing your habits alone isn’t enough. He writes:

“True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. In this way, the process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

I think a lot of people have either misunderstood or skipped over what I take to be the most important idea in Atomic Habits — the idea that changing your habits without having any idea of who or what you want to become will not make a significant impact on your life.

It is true that acquiring and sticking to new habits can help us learn things about ourselves and who we want to become over time, but doing this without thinking seriously about who you want to become runs the risk of having you end up as the same exact person you were before who just happens to floss or make their bed every morning.

While I agree with Clear that habits are a powerful and practical way to change our identities and, therefore, our lives, I think that he places too much emphasis on the power of actions or habits to help us instigate the fundamental belief shifts underneath of our behavior that he mentions.

Clear says that you must “decide the type of person you want to be” in order to make everything he says in the book actually effective, but he doesn’t really tell us how to go about doing that.

In many ways, Atomic Habits is an incredibly useful practical guide for making and breaking habits that leaves us without any practical steps for tackling the much harder problem of figuring out who we want to become.

He writes:

First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level—as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation. What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?

I would ask:

But how do you actually figure out who you are or were meant to be? Do you simply have to live long enough, make a bunch of mistakes, and then suddenly it becomes clear to you?

Some people believe that if they just take enough action and have enough life experiences that they will “find themselves”.

When I look online at all of the wonderful content designed to help people improve their lives, I see plenty of “practical” advice because this is what most people think they need.

It makes sense to them.

Tell someone to go lift weights, then they go lift weights and feel better. But does lifting weights help them figure out who they are?

Clear’s book suggests that we can become things like a “weightlifter”, or a “runner”, but these are not complete identities, they are just parts of what someone is. If you suddenly are able to say that you are a “weightlifter”, does that mean you have figured out your principles and values in life? Does becoming a weightlifter help you determine how you are uniquely capable of creating value for the world and helping others?

I think there is an enormous gap in personal development when it comes to helping people deal with the more intangible problems of life.

Part of the reason this gap exists, in my opinion, is that philosophers have largely failed the public.

It is natural to turn to philosophy to seek answers to life’s big questions (especially since so many people are opposed to turning to religion).

But the overwhelming majority of philosophy content available to the public today fails to do one very important thing:

Teach people how to use philosophy to improve their lives.

The Story I Have Struggled To Tell

On December 17th, I posted a note that seemed to really resonate with readers on Substack.

The headline read:

The reason that philosophy is perceived as useless is because no one writes about how to actually use it.

I received some pushback for this universal generalization since it turned out that there are some people that I didn’t know were doing the sort of thing I am advocating (one example is who teaches Stoicism in a way that can actually help people because of his background in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).

Exceptions aside, I still stand by my original point, since most of what I see online makes the subtle mistake of writing about useful topics without actually teaching people how to use the thing.

For example, I can write an article or even create an entire course on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics — one of the greatest treatises on ethics of all time that is jam packed with useful content — but end up just getting people to consume a bunch of knowledge about Aristotle without giving them any guidance regarding what to do with it.

Philosophers have been guilty of dumping incredibly valuable and interesting theories and ideas onto students for years only to leave on their own to figure out what to do with what they have learned (leave a comment if you have experienced this before).

This happens for three primary reasons in my opinion:

1. First, some philosophers think that by making philosophy “useful” you are thereby corrupting it.

2. Second, some philosophers avoid the work required for becoming a better teacher by hiding behind the idea that we should only study philosophy for its own sake (it’s “intrinsic value”) rather than figure out how to make it relevant to people’s lives.

3. Third, the majority of modern Western philosophy is a byproduct of the culture and assumptions of the modern research university which has completely lost touch with the idea of philosophy as a way of life that dominated pre-modern philosophy in both the “East” and the “West”.

In a world where everything is increasingly defined by its utility or productivity, I am sympathetic to the idea that we should pursue certain activities for their own sake. What I am criticizing here is the use of this justification as a way to avoid figuring out how to actually make philosophy useful to people so it can benefit their lives.

After realizing that there was this massive gap online, I decided to do something about it by creating this Substack.

I will be honest, working on this problem scared the shit out of me.

Philosophy is the useless discipline par excellence.

I once had someone tell me “when I heard the word ‘philosophy’ the first thing I think of is ‘unemployed’. In other words, ‘useless’.

Who was I to tackle this great problem of figuring out how to make philosophy useful?

Well, I did have one thing going for me.

I spent years studying and teaching Ancient Greek Philosophy at the highest level. If you know anything about Ancient Greek Philosophy, you know that it was primarily concerned with the question of how to live — what Bernard Williams has called “Socrates’ Question”.

So, as I started to work on this problem, I derived some small confidence from the fact that I had a strong grasp of how the Greeks approached philosophy understood as a way of life.

The challenge, then, was to figure out how I could take their incredible theories and ideas and teach them in a way that would make sure students didn’t just learn them in order to say that they “knew what Aristotle thinks about X”, but learn them in a way that could be applied to the unique circumstances of their own life and actually change how they live.

What I ended up deciding to do was, in many ways, inspired by Socrates, the original source of Western philosophy.

Socrates was most famous for his “Socratic method” which was a way of practicing philosophy that did not consist of teaching anyone the answers to philosophical questions, but teaching them how to question and think for themselves.

When I realized how far philosophy had strayed from Socrates’ original method, everything clicked.

What I needed to do was to take everything I had learned after studying philosophy for 15+ years, teaching over 20 undergraduate courses, and getting a PhD from an elite university and use that knowledge to do one thing:

Teach people how to actually think for themselves in a world that is doing everything it can to undermine this ability.

(By the way, I recently wrote an article all about how human life is being intentionally engineered to reduce the quality of human thought in order to extract as much economic value from the human mind as possible)

Okay, so I wanted to use philosophy to teach people how to think for themselves, but how would I go about doing this?

Would I teach a class on critical thinking? A class on formal logic?

These are the standard places that philosophers go to “teach thinking” directly.

I had a different idea.

I would teach people how to think about their own lives by teaching them how to build their own philosophy of life.

I will admit, at first this sounded crazy.

If I were to bring this idea up to most academic philosophers today, they would criticize me as being deeply confused about what philosophy is (several already have).

It was here that I hit upon a huge gap that exists between philosophy as it is understood in the universities, and philosophy as it is thought of in normal life.

Most people who aren’t trained in academic philosophy would think it is a reasonable question to ask someone “what is your philosophy?”.

But to an academic, the idea that an ordinary person can “have a philosophy” would sound deeply confused. Why?

Speaking strictly from my life experience inside and outside of academia, my understanding is that most academic philosophers genuinely do not believe that a non-professional philosopher can have a philosophy of their own. The reason is that if someone thinks they “have their own philosophy” what’s really going on is that they are simply just repeating the ideas of some philosopher who already said what they believe is their own ideas and said it in a way that is much deeper and more sophisticated.

The default assumption in academic philosophy seems to be that the only way to “have your own philosophy” is to say something completely original that no philosopher has published about before. But since it would be incredibly rare for someone who isn’t a professional philosopher to be able say anything original, they cannot therefore have their own philosophy.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is absolutely ridiculous.

I understand the position, given very narrow assumptions about what the project of philosophy is, but I think it is deeply problematic.

After uncovering this conflict between the natural idea that everyone can have their own philosophy of life, and the academic idea that having a philosophy requires being completely original, I set out to justify the very natural idea of having own’s one philosophy against the academy.

My solution was this:

Having one’s own philosophy of life is completely original if philosophy is understood as something that we embody in the world through our thoughts and actions rather than an abstract body of knowledge.

This is something that I have been trying desperately to articulate for over a year here on Substack through many of my posts.

The strategy has been this — present a conception of philosophy as something lived by an individual in order to make the idea that everyone has an original philosophy defensible, since each individual life is completely unique.

One way to put this idea is to say something like the following:

You cannot be a Buddhist because there is no one thing called Buddhism. There are simply people living and thinking Buddhist ideas in the unique circumstances of their own lives. “Buddhism”, then, is an general term that points to all of the concrete and unique individuals living in a way we call “Buddhism”.

I used to be an avid listener of Noah Racheta’s wonderful podcast called Secular Buddhism, and he would begin every with the following statement that captured the spirit of what I was after:

“You don’t need to learn Buddhism to be a Buddhist, you can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are”

Noah Racheta, Secular Buddhism Podcast

At long last, this is how I came up with the idea of teaching people how to create what I would ultimately call their micro-philosophy.

I wanted to make philosophy useful to people by teaching them how to think for themselves through the project of creating their own philosophy of life that could serve as a meta-frame or operating system through which they could live, and which could also provide a well-defined perspective from which they could give context to their life experience and the information they acquired.

Everyone already occupies some perspective in the world that is unique to them, but our perspectives can be developed and leveraged for our own benefit, instead of merely serving as the background conditions of our life.

It has taken me over 15 months of writing consistently on Substack to finally be able to articulate this vision for philosophy education.

But identifying the gap, diagnosing the problem, and articulating it clearly were only half the battle.

The other half was to figure out how to actually execute on this vision.

That is why I created my flagship “build your own philosophy” course called Micro-Philosophy: Foundations.

Micro-Philosophy: Foundations is the only course that I know of which teaches people how to create their own philosophy rather than study someone else’s (only to end up feeling like you still don’t fully know what you believe).

It is my solution to the problem that James Clear left us with, and that the philosophers have failed to address.

The problem of having an actual system for figuring out who you are, who you want to become, and how to unify everything you believe and value into a coherent and livable personal philosophy of life.

The course represents my attempt to do this for myself in the simplest way possible.

Most people want to have more clarity around their beliefs, values, and purpose in life, but they simply don’t know where to begin and it seems like an impossible task.

This is understandable.

We don’t learn any of this stuff in school, or even in universities.

Life-design has largely been ignored by mainstream education and left to coaches, content creators to figure out for people.

The internet has made it possible for so many amazing coaches and creators to help millions of people improve their lives in recent years, but the problem is that the vast majority of these individuals approach this task from the perspective of business or entrepreneurship. Why? Because starting a business is what forced them to figure out their own philosophy of life for themselves.

But, what’s the problem with this?

The problem is that 99% of people are not going to start their own business or become an entrepreneur, so they will not connect with the messaging of these incredible teachers and might get skipped over entirely.

My hope is that by approaching this problem from the angle of philosophy that I will be able to help all of the people who need help thinking about their lives at a high level, but aren’t necessarily trying to become an entrepreneur.

Perhaps they are simply trying to figure some things out in their life so that they can feel less overwhelmed, have a deeper relationship to themselves, and clarify their life purpose.

Micro-Philosophy: Foundations, then, is a course designed to give people a system for doing this that doesn’t require start a business, or becoming an entrepreneur, but simply being a human being who wants to live in alignment with a belief system that they chose for themselves.

At the end of the day, you can master your atomic habits, start a $1,000,000 business, develop the perfect productivity workflow, but still be left wondering “what was this all for? Who am I? And what am I meant to do here on Earth?”.

I believe that by systematically targeting your deepest beliefs, values, and worldview, you can begin to make progress on these questions and avoid having to outsource your answers to “tradition”.

Ultimately, this is what I want to teach people how to do.

What Is A Micro-Philosophy?

A micro-philosophy is not meant to be a theory of everything, or the ultimate truth that everyone must accept.

It is your own personal philosophical belief system.

It is unique to you and your life.

It emerges from what you deeply value, believe, and want in life.

It is a meta-frame or operating system for your life that gives everything you are doing context and therefore meaning.

Our deepest beliefs give our practical goals meaning and also help us make sense of how we are living.

Why are you trying to develop a running habit?

Because it actualizes one of your core personal values in your micro-philosophy which ultimately connects with your life purpose and worldview.

Why are you meditating?

Because you believe that meditation is a practice that elevates the state of your consciousness and brings you closer to the source of ultimate truth.

Why are you afraid of death?

Because you have internalized an atheistic worldview according to which death is the ultimate and permanent annihilation of life and you are struggling to make sense of whether life has any meaning.

A micro-philosophy is not an archive of answers collected from outside of yourself, stored away in your note-taking app, and then “applied” to your life.

It is an organic outgrowth of what’s deep inside of your consciousness.

It is a self-revealing.

The term psychedelic, which was coined by Dr. Humphrey Osmond, literally means in Greek “mind manifesting” or “soul revealing”.

What is the goal of developing a micro-philosophy?

To increase human freedom, agency, and self-knowledge on a mass scale by leveraging the concepts and skills of philosophy.

To teach people how to think, rather than what to think.

That is exactly what Micro-Philosophy: Foundations is designed to do.

Micro-Philosophy: Foundations 2.0

Some of you may have seen that I am relaunching a completely revamped version of my Micro-Philosophy: Foundations course which has been out for several months already.

If you have never heard of the course before, or are curious to learn more about it, I wanted to provide a detailed look inside of it so that you can decide whether it will benefit your life.

Honestly, making this course is the coolest and most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life.

I can’t wait to share it with you on February 22nd when the pre-sale officially ends and the course officially launches.

Micro-Philosophy: Foundations is not your typical philosophy course.

It is a philosophy of philosophies course.

A kind of meta-course that teaches you the conceptual frameworks and systems underlying a plurality of philosophies, rather than teaching you any particular philosophy directly.

I spent years looking for answers in philosophy rather than developing them myself.

At the end of the day, you can either develop your own belief system, or follow someone else’s.

This was one of the core insights that led me to design Micro-Philosophy: Foundations.

I wanted to figure out my own philosophy.

World-class motivational speaker and life coach Jim Rohn once said:

“Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out”.

By the end of this course, you will create your own micro-philosophy statement which means that you will be able to confidently articulate your fundamental beliefs, core values, and moral principles so that you can live a life of purpose.

Mastering your own beliefs will help you make better decisions, focus your time and energy on what matters, and reshape what you take to be possible for yourself.

The problem isn’t that people don’t want to do these things, it is that they don’t know how to get started and lack a system for making progress.

Take , for example.

Prior to taking my course, Steve was struggling to develop a way to integrate his personal philosophical beliefs and worldviews with his teaching. As a full-time science teacher, Steve wanted a way to develop a teaching philosophy that felt authentic and effective.

After taking the course Steve said:

“I feel like I’ve progressed in leaps and bounds since taking on the course. At the start I remember I wasn’t sure how to philosophize about my teaching philosophy, both in regards to teaching middle school science curriculum and also managing student behaviours”.

And…

“[It] has shown me that philosophy can be highly pragmatic in helping one to solve one’s problems as it did for me as I reoriented my teacher identity into something that aligns with who I want to become. I think there is now a greater awareness in me and from what I read on other Substack posts, mostly those who are educators, that the process of philosophizing or the knowledge of micro-philosophy is vital to this solution”.

Steve took the course while working as a full-time teacher and living in Australia and would wake up at 7am to join our live calls.

Micro-Philosophy: Foundations gives you the system you need to build your own micro-philosophy even if you are already busy with work and life.

In this course, you will learn the philosophical skills, concepts, and frameworks that you need to think clearly about your life, rewrite old beliefs, and act in alignment with your ideal self so that you can live less randomly, reduce overwhelm, and act decisively.

Not knowing what you truly believe or value creates mental drag that ultimately prevents you from acting and living with confidence in your beliefs.

The goal of this course is to help you develop a framework for your life so you can focus on what matters, act decisively, and live more in alignment like Steve.

This course is for individuals who refuse to live on auto-pilot and want to create their own system for living that is grounded in serious philosophy.

If you want to learn more about what you will learn in the course and how it can impact your specific life, then you can visit the course page on my Substack here.

The feeling that something is missing in the world.

That something about existence is off.

It took me 15+ years struggling to find answers within philosophy to finally be able to articulate what has caused this feeling.

I even spent 6 years pursuing a PhD only to find myself now throwing out much of what I learned and starting over.

I found what I was looking for in Heidegger’s masterpiece Being and Time.

The thing is, I couldn’t understand this book for over a decade.

I wasn’t ready.

But all of a sudden, for reasons I am still trying to understand, everything suddenly clicked.

What I am sharing with you emerges from a moment of utter clarity and conviction years in the making.

If you are anything like me, I believe this will change your life forever and help you feel a little less lost and confused by the modern world.

It’s not your fault that you feel this way.

But in order to understand why, you need to trust me and go on a short and challenging journey.

The Loss Of The Depth-World (Remembrance Of Things Past)

Lately, I have had the increasing feeling that millions of people are worried about losing their humanity (or coming to realize that they already have) but don’t know what to do about it.

Put simply, people are lost in the world.

They are lost because the world that they remember growing up in — a world in which it was possible to have genuinely deep experiences with your friends and family and feel a sense of wonder or adventure — is quickly becoming a distant memory.

You might tell yourself that this is just what happens when you grow up and lose your youth. But this is just a way of avoiding the more disturbing fact — the world has fundamentally changed and is never coming back.

How have you grieved this loss? Or are you still coping?

I was born during the summer of 1992 — a decade that I consider to be the end of what I can only refer to as the depth-world.

The world before it was stripped of wonder, surprise, and adventure.

The world before everything became known, captured, and commented on.

It was a world in which people would spend time together.

It was a world in which you could go to the movies.

It was a world in which riding my bicycle around the neighborhood with friends felt like a real adventure in which anything could happen.

It was a world in which people were outside — like really outside.

The shocking success of Stranger Things is, in my opinion, a direct result of the mass nostalgia for this forgotten world. The show has been a massive hit even amongst those who were born after this world was already lost (they know something is missing).

I cried when the show ended because it reminded me of just how much has been lost.

The depth-world has been replaced by a flimsy world.

A world that is becoming increasingly inhuman and empty — despite the fact that it is more full than ever.

A world where you can buy a new house that is worse than an old one because it is made out of papier-mâché. A world where everyone is talking but only a few people are saying anything worth listening to, and you are too exhausted to figure out which is which.

There has been a lot written about how the world has changed over the last twenty years.

But even though I have kept up with most of the discussion, I always felt like there was something deeper going wrong that no one was able to fully articulate.

The conversations around social media ethics, algorithms, and responsible tech were insightful and needed to happen.

But I still felt like something was missing.

I still felt like there way a deep existential shift which no one was able to fully articulate or identify.

I certainly wasn’t able to.

I didn’t have the words or the expertise.

But I finally feel that, for the first time in my life, I have found the concepts I have always needed to fully articulate what’s been causing in me the feeling that I am “living” but no longer living.

The feeling that, even though life keeps moving forward, it feels like something has been lost.

It’s like the feeling of having forgotten something you wanted to say, or that something is missing in your pocket but you don’t can’t remember what it was you are looking for. It’s the feeling that modern human existence has been cheapened or thinned out just enough that it’s rarely the real thing.

It is the feeling of having no ground.

It’s the feeling of forgetting what holds up the world.

It’s an answer to the question of “why does everything feel so shallow?”

Why do so many people feel “lost” in the world even though they are materially better off than ever before?

I found the words I needed in an unlikely and strange place — in Martin Heidegger’s masterpiece Being and Time.

Why is this an unlikely place?

Mostly because despite the fact that Being and Time is widely considered the most important philosophical book of the twentieth-century, pretty much no one understands it.

It’s the sort of book that even professional philosophers avoid out of fear or disdain.

It’s a book I always wanted to understand, but was never able to.

But over the last few months, everything has changed.

For reasons I still haven’t full processed, this impenetrable masterpiece has finally clicked for me in the most profound way.

I feel like someone who has discovered that they used to speak a native tongue but spent years fumbling around in a second language.

The reason I am writing this essay is to share with you a way of seeing the world that can instigate a paradigm shift.

A way of thinking and making sense of our humanity that gets to the bottom of what’s really going on.

A way to think deeply about your humanity, technology, the world that was lost, and what to do about it.

What I am offering you is a philosophical tool — a lever.

A lever that I believe is long enough to shift your worldview and situate it on a completely new foudation.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”

-Archimedes

Before I hand you this tool, I must warn you.

When you begin to use it, there is a real chance that everything you have grown accustomed to thinking can be thrown into doubt.

The world will remain, but your orientation to it will fundamentally shift.

Are you ready to world-shift?

The Shift: Recognizing The Inexorable Fact That Our Default Mode Of Existence Pulls Us Towards Being Lost In The World

In his master-work Being and Time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the default mode of human existence is inauthenticity.

By inauthenticity, Heidegger has in mind a kind of perpetual drifting or falling through life and towards death.

Sleepwalking.

Most discussions of authenticity online today are incredibly shallow and unhelpful.

It is often explained in terms of slogans like “be true to yourself”, “find yourself”, or “say what you really feel”. But these don’t actually help anybody figure out what it actually means to live an authentic life and in an increasingly flimsy world that is being overrun by technology and automation.

Heidegger’s account runs much deeper than our subjective self-conception or self-expression.

Heidegger believes that authenticity and inauthenticity are built into the very structure of human existence. It is a fundamental feature of being human that we live inauthentically for stretches of time.

We can’t always be authentic all of the time.

In many ways, this should provide us with some existential relief— it’s okay to just be a nobody on public transit or at the grocery store.

You are not automatically a “sheep” for doing so.

At the same time, if the default condition of human existence is inauthenticity, then this can quickly become dangerous.

Why?

Because if you fail to catch yourself inauthentically drifting or falling through life, then months or years of your life can suddenly pass by only to leave you feeling completely lost and having no sense of who or what you are even doing.

In the most extreme case, someone lives the majority or entirety of their life inauthentically only to be shaken by the sudden approach of death, but tragically unable to recover lost time.

In order to avoid an impending existential crisis caused by waking up too late, let’s take a journey together and venture deeper into Heidegger’s analysis of the fundamental nature of human existence in order see what we can learn to about how to avoid being lost in the world and live an authentic human life.

This journey will take us through an intricate web of concepts in Heidegger’s philosophy that few people are aware of or understand (some of which I will discuss in part two).

Concepts such as: “thrownness”, “falling”, “the They”, “idle talk”, “curiosity”, “ambiguity”, “anxiety”, “mood”, and, of course, “death”.1

I apologize in advance for throwing you into such deep philosophical waters, but don’t worry, I will guide you to shore.

Every Human Being Is Thrown Into Existence And Continues To Fall Until Death

The fundamental pre-condition of human existence is, for Heidegger, that we are “thrown” into the world.

The term “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) is first used in Being and Time to refer to our passive coming into being — our existential birth, origin, or ground.2

We are thrown into a world.

A world that we did not choose or create, and that already exists prior to our existence.

We are thrown into a world of facts, a world of inauthenticity, and perpetually “falling” through it.

Your birth is always something that is past and that happened to you.

Even though we are able to grasp the inexorable fact that we were thrown into the world, there is a deep sense in which this thrown condition also remains forever “hidden” to us according to Heidegger.

It is hidden in the sense that we don’t have an answer to the “why” or “where” from which we were thrown.

We just find out, throughout our lives, that we were thrown into existence from non-existence.

“I am, I exist”

- Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

The necessity of our thrownness is enigmatic because we cannot understand or explain the “why” behind it. If we are thrown, then there must be a point from which we were thrown — a ground of our existence.

Heidegger believed that this is hidden in darkness.

It is like the very real possibility that we can never see or know what was before the Big-Bang, since it is would be imperceptible and shrouded in darkness or nothingness.

We simply find ourselves existing and come to realize that we have been thrown.

In other words, the conditions into which we are thrown and begin to grow accustom to are not the result of our agency.

We did not, and could not, choose such a condition for ourselves.

This fundamental fact sets the background conditions of human life and constitutes one of the most important aspects of the human condition.

Plenty of people understand that they didn’t choose their family, or where they were born. They might even blame all of their problems on other people, or the society which they happened to grow up in.

But spending one’s entire life focusing on (and complaining about) these surface levels contingencies blinds and prevents someone from properly seeing and understanding the universal root causes of the human predicament.

The existential fact that we all find ourselves in the same condition of being thrown into existence is prior to any other contingencies which shape our life. Properly understanding this fact provides you with a lever and an Archimedean point upon which you can shift your entire view of the world.

It opens up the possibility of an existential paradigm-shift.

It is not just you that were unlucky to be born in the political, economic, or familial situation you found yourself in.

Everyone is thrown into the world and forced to live with a world they did not choose as long as they are alive.

This realization provides, in my opinion, a universal basis for human empathy.

Life is hard.

There is a sense in which we are all suffering in some way.

By truly appreciating and acting on the basis of this fact, I believe we will all be able better understand and, therefore, better help each other from a common existential ground that we all share.

Heidegger believed that because you are thrown and therefore stuck with existing as long as you exist, you are also stuck with the perpetual problem of learning how to be as yourself.

In other words, the problem of how to carry on being in this world.

So many people today understandably try to “find themselves” in empirical sciences such as Psychology, but end up still feeling like they don’t really know what it means to exist as themselves (even if they know all the latest theories of human development or personality types).

The reason is that the empirical sciences can never help you understand what it means to be you. They can help you understand some general features of what you are like and how you are similar to others in physical or material terms, but they cannot ever truly capture what it feels like to be you.

Such a task is beyond the scope of the empirical sciences (and rightly so).

But where can you find the answers if not there?

At this point, it’s natural to turn to Philosophy or Religion.

But I have come to believe that even within Philosophy or Religion, one can fall into the same trap of studying the major belief systems and thinkers, only to be left feeling unsure about how what you have learned really concerns you as an utterly unique individual.

I truly believe that what the world needs at this point is a new way of connecting philosophy with lived human experience.

What I am trying to do here on Substack is provide the conceptual framework that allows individuals to understand how to make philosophical and scientific ideas relevant to themselves in a meaningful way.

I have found that it is incredibly difficult to articulate the nature of the task, but through Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, I finally feel like the task is becoming clear.

The task is to help people use philosophy to recognize where they have come from and figure out where they are going in life.

The task is to help people who feel lost, overwhelmed, and unsure about how to own the responsibility of existing which has been thrown onto their shoulders to find a way forward for themselves.

Once you figure out where you have come from, then you need to decide where you are going.

If you don’t know where you are going, then you will become lost in the world.

This is what Heidegger means by living an inauthentic life.

It is a life in which you allow yourself to drown in the world that you were thrown into because you couldn’t decide which shore to swim towards.

If you have been drowning for a long time, don’t worry.

As long as you are alive you can reach the surface and choose where to go next. Once you start moving towards it, you will feel truly alive.

That is what I am here to help you do.

This is the ultimate purpose of philosophy.

By understanding the predicament we are in on a deep-level we achieve the perspective necessary to make a truly free choice (perhaps for the first time in our lives) in which we own the responsibility of existence.

The question then becomes:

Are you going to choose to live authentically in this world?

In Part Two, I will explain how to live authentically in a world you didn’t choose to exist in.

-Paul

The result?

Most people feeling constantly tired, overwhelmed, overstimulated, anxious, and lacking any clear purpose.

I wanted to share with you an opportunity to press pause on everything going on in your life and dedicate 8-10 hours next month to deep thinking.

On February 22nd, I will be releasing the newest version of my “design your own philosophy” course titled Micro-Philosophy: Foundations.

I first launched Micro-Philosophy: Foundations last August and over 50 people decided to join and create their own micro-philosophy.

Since then, I have been slowly reworking the course behind the scenes in order to bring it closer in line with my ideal vision.

That’s why I’m so excited to share this with you.

Micro-Philosophy: Foundations is the only course I know of that teaches you how to build your own philosophy instead of spending hundreds of hours studying someone else’s.

In this 5-week curriculum, you will learn the real skills, concepts, and frameworks that you need to start thinking for yourself, rewriting old beliefs, and living with clarity.

If you are curious about what its like to create your own philosophy and thinking about giving it a shot, there are more details here.

If you do end up enrolling and don’t like the course I will completely refund your enrollment cost within 60 days of the date you enrolled (even if you complete the course!).

If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to message me.

Happy to help!

-Paul

This is your push from the universe.

Substack has not only completely changed my life, but changed the world for thousands of writers.

But for every writer who has been able to overcome their fear of publishing, develop a consistent writing habit, and build a real following, there are thousands more who are stuck.

I am creating The February Writing Challenge to fix this.

The goal of The February Writing Challenge is to help as many writers as possible either:

• Publish their first article on Substack, or

• Publish their next article on Substack

So many writers struggle to simply get started, but once they do anything is possible.

I want this to be the small push that ends up changing your life forever.

What’s The Challenge?

The challenge is for everyone to write and publish an essay on February 13th, 2026.

But there’s a twist.

Not only is everyone going to publish their essay on the same day, but in order to complete the challenge they also have to publish a Substack note containing a video showing them writing their entire essay in one-sitting (details below).

You read that right — it’s a one-shot challenge.

No procrastinating.

No endless editing and self-doubt.

Just write and hit publish.

Your publication deadline is 11:59 PM EST on February 13th.

“Why Do I Need To Post A Video Of Me Writing?”

I came up with this entire idea because when I sat down to write my next Substack article on a random Sunday morning, I opened the rough draft I was working on and realized it was a disorganized nightmare.

I wondered to myself, “is this how everyone writes? is it always like this?”.

This led me to think about how interesting and potentially helpful it would be for some of my readers who are aspiring writers to see how I work behind the scenes. To see a video of what its actually like for me to write an article from start to finish, talking about the process as I go. I also thought that it would be just as interesting and helpful for me to see how the writers that I look up on Substack share their own process.

We can all benefit from being more transparent and vulnerable with each other.

My hope is that if everyone shows the imperfections of their writing process at the same time, it would make it easier for thousands of aspiring writers to simply get started and publish their work.

Challenge Requirements

Here are the rules — they are pretty simple:

• You must create Substack note where you nominate 5 other writers for The February Writing Challenge using the @ symbol to tag them( Nominate any writers that you want to encourage to publish, or whose writing process you are curious about. Please avoid spamming individuals, and only tag those who you think would genuinely enjoy this challenge).

• Here is a template for your note: “I am taking the leap and joining the The Micro-Philosopher February Writing Challenge with a chance to win $500. The challenge is to write and publish an essay in one-shot on February 13th, 2026. But there’s a twist. You also need to post a video showing yourself writing the essay so other’s can learn from how you write and to prove that you did it in one sitting. I nominate XYZ to do it with me and publish their writing on Substack”.

• You must publish a Substack essay on February 13th by 11:59PM EST.

• Your essay must be a minimum of 800 words (longer is fine)

• Your essay must abide by Substack’s content policies

• After you publish your essay, you must post a Substack note with a video showing you write the essay in one-sitting (record your screen, not yourself! I recommend using Loom or another similar screen recording software. If you can’t post the full video to substack, include a link to Youtube).

How Do You Win $500?

In order to be eligible to win $500, you must:

• Send me a direct message on Substack after you publish on February 13th letting me know.

• You must be able to verify your identity if chosen to win.

• I am going to personally judge the submissions and choose what I believe to be the best essay (I will not choose someone I know personally — they are not eligible).

• The winner will be announced by the end of the month.

That’s it!

Conclusion

This could be a total flop with only one entry and I am forced to pay someone $500 even if their essay isn’t that good.

And to be frank, I probably can’t even afford this financially.

The thing is I am not afraid to take risks anymore.

I am putting something on the line in order to send a message to all of the writers out there who are afraid to risk hitting publish.

Let’s put an end to that.

I can’t wait to see what you write.

If you have questions about the challenge, leave a comment below!

-Paul