We live in a world intentionally designed to reduce the quality of human thought in order to extract as much economic value from the human mind as possible.
I read the main essay and then your older article on micro-philosophy as well. I really like the intention behind it: pushing people toward reflection instead of pure consumption.
I did struggle with the tone and some of the big claims though. Especially the line about living in a world “intentionally designed” to reduce the quality of human thinking to extract economic value. I’m not denying market incentives or attention engineering, but “intentionally designed” makes it sound like one coordinated project called “the world.” That feels a bit totalizing and, ironically, close to the kind of pessimism you’re warning against.
Also, I don’t really recognize the picture of widespread passive nihilism. People aren’t just sleepwalking. There’s a lot of conscience and agency out there: mass protests, community organizing, mutual aid, resisting systems, and big personal life changes happening every day.
So when you state “evangelists for mediocrity" i wonder why you assume mediocrity is the enemy? A lot of human life is ordinary by nature. Caring for other people, crafting things, deep conversations with loved ones, traveling and experiencing new realities. There’s meaning there too, and a lot of reflection happens inside that.
Stating that self-inquiry is “too inconvenient to be done,” or that billions never spend "even a few hours" thinking about their beliefs, feels unverifiable and also a bit unfair. It starts to pathologize normal life. Besides, let's not forget there's a group of people who are forced to spend all there hours surviving and dealing with life, rather than having the luxury to sit back and write deeply about who they would like to be.
Finally, the micro-philosophy pitch left me torn. I get the intent, but the whole system/framework/templates vibe can read like a self-help product aimed at the same anxiety the piece diagnoses. And “I don’t teach people what to believe” sounds nice and neutral, but some ethical guardrails aren’t optional if you’re encouraging people to create their own belief system. We still need shared rules, rights, and responsibilities. I’m curious where you draw that line.
Thanks for taking the time to read and write such a thoughtful reply. I will try to address each point in order below.
Yes, the main intention is to help teach people concepts, skills, and frameworks that can empower them to think for themselves and reflect on their own lives. I don't see very many people teaching this in the philosophy space as opposed to big ideas meant to be consumed primarily as entertainment or education about the history of philosophy for its own sake.
Regarding the intentional design of the attention economy, I do think that there is a coordinated effort to harvest human attention. It is hard for us to appreciate just how much money, thought, and engineering goes into the design of technology and apps that become normalized for us to use. There isn't some global or national conspiracy, but the current situation is close enough to that to be very concerned.
Regarding the passive nihilism, many of the things you list here are compatible with the truth of passive nihilism. Obviously there are plenty of people who take action to fight for the things that they believe in, but I would push back on the idea that this is widespread. But most of the post-college adults I know live pretty busy ordinary lives that are consumed by work, childcare, and pockets of entertainment throughout the day. This leaves very little time for leisure activities that enrich the human spirit and raise personal consciousness. Political awareness and concern can, in many ways, be a byproduct of passive nihilism/consumption culture. Finally, keep in mind that I was imagining what the end result would be if we continue down this path, not suggesting that everyone is sleepwalking already.
Regarding mediocrity, the activities you describe are not mediocre to me at all. Those sorts of activities are what I am advocating for. But I don't think internal reflection is enough. I think that much is lost when we internally reflect on meaningful experiences and never do anything with those insights or memories. If someone were to write something, craft something, tell a story, record themselves, etc., those meaningful experiences would be transforming into agency enhancing activities. The enemy is a life of no real agency, self-knowledge, or personal growth, but just going through the motions of life.
I think that ordinary American life should be pathologized because we live in an unjust system of exploitation which convinces us that it is normal for someone to work 40-50 hours for a large corporation and not see their kids for 75% of their lives.
I don't see how a self-help product that is designed to help people clarify their own values and beliefs can cause anxiety. My system gives people the tools to organize and understand their own beliefs. I am not writing online to change people's beliefs. If someone has hateful beliefs and wants to use my framework they are able to do that. They won't be a part of my online community, but I can't stop people from using ideas they find on the internet. If I were to build my own personal ethics into my system and moralize to my audience that would defeat the entire purpose of what I am doing, which is to promote agency, free thinking, and self-knowledge.
In the end, I am trying to help people in a way that I am able to. It's not going to be for everyone.
Hey Paul. Thank you for taking the time to reply point-by-point. That’s rare, and I really appreciate it.
Also, just to be clear.. I like your intention a lot. If my first comment read harsher than intended, that’s on me. I was challenging some framing, not dismissing the mission!
A few follow-ups:
I agree attention is engineered and monetized. My hesitation is the rhetorical scope. “The world is intentionally designed” reads bigger than the incentives inside big tech, advertising, and app ecosystems. I’d personally find it stronger if it stayed closer to “a major part of modern media and tech is optimized to harvest attention.” The broader wording risks sounding totalizing.
On passive nihilism: I think the reality is split. For some people, enriching leisure and reflection are a genuine privilege (time, money, bandwidth). At the same time, many of us in wealthy countries do have historically high levels of comfort and free time, which is exactly why frameworks like yours can matter. My only pushback is that when the baseline is stable, it’s easy to treat enrichment as urgent and non-negotiable, while in real crisis (war, collapse, insecurity) that layer disappears overnight. That doesn’t make it meaningless, but it does suggest the diagnosis should stay grounded in material conditions as well as psychology.
You convinced me on agency. The distinction between having meaningful experiences and converting insights into something that builds self-knowledge and agency is strong. That’s exactly where a framework can help.
On the “unjust exploitation system” point: I sympathize with the moral discomfort. I just react strongly to anything that sounds like a clean utopia claim when reality is messy and interdependent. What’s the workable solution at scale? If everyone cuts working hours sharply tomorrow, what happens to healthcare staffing, food supply, logistics, public services, and the infrastructure that makes leisure possible? I’m not defending the status quo, but there are trade-offs and coordination problems here. A critique feels incomplete if it pathologizes ordinary life without grappling with how a complex society keeps running.
On ethics and tone: I get what you mean by not moralizing. My point is that some of the wording can land as pressure. Lines like “make sure everything we believe isn’t being used to keep us under control,” “we must always continue to think,” and “freedom is the heaviest burden” can read as: you’re probably compromised and you’re not doing enough. Then the framework can feel like the one “right” way out, even if you explicitly say it isn’t for everyone. And very practically, “people can believe whatever they want” runs into limits fast in any real community.
Thanks again for the thoughtful reply. I’ve enjoyed the exchange, and your work gave me a lot to think about.
I have learned a lot from the main article and your follow-up question.
Emma, most respectfully If a system is corrupt, oppressive and tyrannical. Shouldn’t be there a mass movement for radical reforms for social justice? Why should someone wait for slow reforms? this would just benefit the elites and delay the suffering of the masses.
“The infrastructure that makes leisure possible”
- A sentence from your question.
If this leisure is limited only to a specific class and is only possible If the entire families of the middle and lower classes work tirelessly to afford their basic needs. Shouldn't this be termed as modern-day slavery? And hence cause an uproar in the masses to don’t accept it as their fate and ask questions?
Indeed, Why would anybody want to spend their time fabricating their own "belief system"? Surely this is the road to anomie..anxiety...alienation..whatever?
Re intentional design, or reshaping the human mind, really was a neoliberal project that that might have begun with the Mont Pelerim Society, and is being continued by the current oligarchs, https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffip&q=mont+pelerin+society&ia=web.
Reading a book entitled The Desecration of Man by Carl Truman (NY: Sentinel, 2025). He outlines the historical reasons for this shift into making our own systems. I’ve not finished it, but it’s super interesting.
Paul - I appreciate how you lay out and frame why the slow erosion of thinking happens inside ordinary life, not just as an abstract problem or philosophical idea. The picture you’re drawing is of a gradual shift in how people live with their own minds, and I find this extremely fascinating and a bit sad given what you highlight. Over time, the work of forming values, questioning assumptions, and creating a personal orientation toward life is replaced by ready-made frameworks, incentives, and distractions. That feels very close to what you’re pointing to with passive nihilism: not the loss of thought, but the loss of responsibility for it.
One layer that feels important here is how much the mind is already shaped to privilege what is wrong. The negativity bias keeps our attention oriented toward perceived threat, conflict, and deficiency. In an environment built to capture and monetize attention, that bias becomes a natural vulnerability in the mind. It steadily trains our nervous system toward being on high alert or being geared toward the negative rather than spending time for reflection and thinking about aspects of positive experience. Over time this could easily reshape the inner conditions under which thought happens at all. What I respect in what you’re building is the insistence that people can take our authorship back. That a micro-philosophy is not a set of answers, but a practice of examining what/why one is living by.
All to say, I love what you are doing! It gels well with my own thinking about how to better contend with the difficult human condition to begin with.
That's a solid question Paul! The answer is no if we are thinking of turning the negativity bias off like a switch. However, if we are thinking about it in terms of rewiring brain circuitry the answer is more along the lines of yes if we think about it like rebalancing our attention away from negatives to positives in our lives so that the negatives don't completely override the positives.
Science has shown our brains are plastic to some degree so using measures like mindfulness, as mentioned aspects of attention shifts consciously, cognitive reframing and gratitude practices have been shown to be successful.
When you learn effortless mindfulness (the ability to shift attention to the awareness within which all experience takes place) you can radically reshape virtually any neural pathway.
If you have a neural pathway that supports your "I hate broccoli" mental framework, you can actually change the way your taste buds respond but doing this practice.
This resonates — but the diagnosis risks placing a structural failure back onto individual will.
What seems new is not simply that people think less, but that thinking no longer occupies the point where outcomes can still be interrupted. Reflection, critique, even self-examination persist — yet increasingly downstream of decisions already resolved elsewhere, through delegated automation and pre-structured flows where no one fully owns the judgment, yet outcomes bind us.
In that sense, the danger is not passive nihilism as a personal failing, but a quieter condition: agency migrating away from sites where lived experience and deliberation can still exert constraint.
The question then becomes less “how do we get people to think again?” and more “where does thinking still have standing to intervene before action closes?” That is the fault line of our moment.
The book I’m reading explains how the Reformation and printing press led people who were mostly uniform in thought in Western Europe, (not Jews or Muslims—who woukd feel some in their lives as well in other ways ) to go from sameness of life, lived in a 71 mile radius, doing usual things, to suddenly having to decide what one as an individual believes, and the great unsettling of this, and industrialization and so on. It is describing the issues of our current times with even more of this post-enlightenment, and so on.
Very interesting to describe our times as living with distraction, also—from a different article!
Yes, can personal thinking outweigh benefits of apps, and so on?
Some want community but it’s hard to find. If informed by wise principles, with prayer (in my belief) , maybe it’s a helpful tool. We need to not abdicate thinking to AI nor tools. Like, run it by the Word, other believers, might be impirtant, if something is off.
Hey Paul, great thoughts. Comes at a perfect time for me as I am about to take a sabbatical from work.
One thing I was already planning on doing: I've been underlining non-fiction books as I read them for a long time and always wanted to take the time to write down all those nuggets in a notebook but never got around to it. I just gathered up some of the most impactful ones and will be starting a notebook for those quotes. I imagine these will definitely help me in creating my own micro-philosophy.
I'll definitely be checking out your older article. Keep up the good work, thank you.
Writing demands to look inward in ourselves. Most people don’t wanna do that because they been running from it or afraid of what they could find there. It also requires a lot of focus, which modern social media has taken away with short form content. The brain isn’t train to do task for a long time anymore.
Definitely. Fear is such a huge part of it. Some are even afraid to realize that they have nothing to say! But what’s the alternative? You must face it.
Everything you wrote is true. The biggest example of this i see is in India currently. I see this defeatist attitude among everyone nowadays. And yes we can try to wake people up but to be very frank, those very people ridicule and try to bring you down to their level. Something is fundamentally wrong with the minds of people nowadays.
And to fix that we need people who have awakened to come together and create a better society and a better world.
Hi Paul - I've also been thinking recently about the importance of contemplation, and in particular imagination, which I believe is fundamental to human intelligence. I agree that writing is a key tool in this process, as it enables us to engage with and hone our ideas in a more efficient and structured way than would otherwise be possible.
Really enjoyed this, and I think there's something real underneath it — but I'd push the diagnosis a layer deeper than "weak will" or "comfort-seeking."
Nobody chooses to stop thinking. What happens is that the thirty minutes you'd spend writing gets eaten first: by a second job, by a commute that's grown longer because rent forced you further out, by a phone built by people paid specifically to make putting it down feel harder than picking it up. The "last man" isn't lazy so much as out of runway. Give someone shorter hours, a shorter commute, and a feed that isn't fighting them for every spare minute, and I'd bet the appetite for reflection comes back on its own — it doesn't need to be taught.
That's really my only quarrel with "intentionally designed." It's not that nobody profits from distraction — plenty of people clearly do — but it's not one plan with one author. It's a thousand separate businesses independently discovering that fragmented attention is more profitable than whole attention, and the effect looks designed even though no single hand drew it up. I think that distinction matters, because if the problem is diffuse and spiritual, the fix is "think harder" — but if the problem is hours, wages and interface design, the fix is structural, and a lot more achievable than it sounds.
None of which is against the idea of a personal philosophy — I just think it works best as something people build once the material floor is already under them, not as a substitute for it.
Thanks Spencer, I actually agree with a lot of the ideas you suggest here. I should write an updated version of the article that gets a bit more precise about it all.
Paul, You have some really great thoughts here. This one especially resonated with me and relates to some writing I’ve been doing on society and civilization “We need to make sure that the belief systems we occupy, and the values we deeply attach ourselves to, are actually serving us and those around us.” Thank you!
This landed hard, and in an uncomfortable way. I recognized the grief you're naming almost immediately. I've spent a long time wondering why questions like these feel so essential to me and so unnecessary to almost everyone I know. There's a real loneliness in that, one I don't see written about much.
Where I get stuck is the word "intentionally." You're naming something structural, a world designed to extract value by degrading thought, but then the explanation for why people don't resist it lands back on the individual: weak will, convenience, not writing things down. I wonder if some of what looks like passive nihilism might actually be a rational response to a structure that makes deep reflection a luxury good. Time, safety, and slack you have already before you can spend a Sunday afternoon interrogating your beliefs. If the design is structural, doesn't the failure to resist it have to be structural too, at least partly? Not an excuse for everyone, but I think it changes where the responsibility sits.
Mona, thanks for sharing this thoughtful critique. I definitely understand where you are coming from and have a lot to say about it. Personally, I struggle with figuring out whether to place all the responsibility on individuals, or none. The middle position seems even harder to justify!
To be honest my instinct is to actually put a lot of weight on individual agency. That is something I think we're not teaching nearly enough anymore. But then I think about where that instinct comes from. I had parents, people and life circumstances that asked more of me, who modeled that agency was even a possibility and nessessary. Not everyone gets that. If you're never shown it, never made responsible for anything, it's not simple to just arrive at on your own later.
So I keep landing somewhere uncomfortable. Agency matters enormously, but the capacity for it has to be built and nurtured into someone, and the system you're describing actively fails to do this. It may even depends on not building it. That puts real weight back on the people who built and keep perpetuating that system, not just the individuals moving through it.
I think what you're doing by handing people tools to reclaim some of that agency matters a lot. I just don't know if it's enough on its own. It might take enough people reclaiming it together to actually change the conditions producing this in the first place. And asking more of individuals only works for the ones who already have the time and capacity to answer that ask. A lot of people just don't.
I loved your article Paul, loved every question you asked, as each one of them reminded me of how I felt lost and overwhelmed all over the years that I have been trying to rediscover everything and every thought. Reading have been that thing that drove me to question a lot and be curious towards every new thought and angle of discussion, specially from the ones whom are the opposite of me. but since the awareness journey wasn't very easy and It actually comes with a very huge price, What about the ones who shaped their entire life around some thoughts? and if these thoughts were to be doubted, they only have two options, one is to fight against these doubts by every way possible, and two is the lose everything and the structure of their life. and to sum up, not every one can handle the price of awareness and it's for their best to keep on with their functional life.
I read the main essay and then your older article on micro-philosophy as well. I really like the intention behind it: pushing people toward reflection instead of pure consumption.
I did struggle with the tone and some of the big claims though. Especially the line about living in a world “intentionally designed” to reduce the quality of human thinking to extract economic value. I’m not denying market incentives or attention engineering, but “intentionally designed” makes it sound like one coordinated project called “the world.” That feels a bit totalizing and, ironically, close to the kind of pessimism you’re warning against.
Also, I don’t really recognize the picture of widespread passive nihilism. People aren’t just sleepwalking. There’s a lot of conscience and agency out there: mass protests, community organizing, mutual aid, resisting systems, and big personal life changes happening every day.
So when you state “evangelists for mediocrity" i wonder why you assume mediocrity is the enemy? A lot of human life is ordinary by nature. Caring for other people, crafting things, deep conversations with loved ones, traveling and experiencing new realities. There’s meaning there too, and a lot of reflection happens inside that.
Stating that self-inquiry is “too inconvenient to be done,” or that billions never spend "even a few hours" thinking about their beliefs, feels unverifiable and also a bit unfair. It starts to pathologize normal life. Besides, let's not forget there's a group of people who are forced to spend all there hours surviving and dealing with life, rather than having the luxury to sit back and write deeply about who they would like to be.
Finally, the micro-philosophy pitch left me torn. I get the intent, but the whole system/framework/templates vibe can read like a self-help product aimed at the same anxiety the piece diagnoses. And “I don’t teach people what to believe” sounds nice and neutral, but some ethical guardrails aren’t optional if you’re encouraging people to create their own belief system. We still need shared rules, rights, and responsibilities. I’m curious where you draw that line.
Emma,
Thanks for taking the time to read and write such a thoughtful reply. I will try to address each point in order below.
Yes, the main intention is to help teach people concepts, skills, and frameworks that can empower them to think for themselves and reflect on their own lives. I don't see very many people teaching this in the philosophy space as opposed to big ideas meant to be consumed primarily as entertainment or education about the history of philosophy for its own sake.
Regarding the intentional design of the attention economy, I do think that there is a coordinated effort to harvest human attention. It is hard for us to appreciate just how much money, thought, and engineering goes into the design of technology and apps that become normalized for us to use. There isn't some global or national conspiracy, but the current situation is close enough to that to be very concerned.
Regarding the passive nihilism, many of the things you list here are compatible with the truth of passive nihilism. Obviously there are plenty of people who take action to fight for the things that they believe in, but I would push back on the idea that this is widespread. But most of the post-college adults I know live pretty busy ordinary lives that are consumed by work, childcare, and pockets of entertainment throughout the day. This leaves very little time for leisure activities that enrich the human spirit and raise personal consciousness. Political awareness and concern can, in many ways, be a byproduct of passive nihilism/consumption culture. Finally, keep in mind that I was imagining what the end result would be if we continue down this path, not suggesting that everyone is sleepwalking already.
Regarding mediocrity, the activities you describe are not mediocre to me at all. Those sorts of activities are what I am advocating for. But I don't think internal reflection is enough. I think that much is lost when we internally reflect on meaningful experiences and never do anything with those insights or memories. If someone were to write something, craft something, tell a story, record themselves, etc., those meaningful experiences would be transforming into agency enhancing activities. The enemy is a life of no real agency, self-knowledge, or personal growth, but just going through the motions of life.
I think that ordinary American life should be pathologized because we live in an unjust system of exploitation which convinces us that it is normal for someone to work 40-50 hours for a large corporation and not see their kids for 75% of their lives.
I don't see how a self-help product that is designed to help people clarify their own values and beliefs can cause anxiety. My system gives people the tools to organize and understand their own beliefs. I am not writing online to change people's beliefs. If someone has hateful beliefs and wants to use my framework they are able to do that. They won't be a part of my online community, but I can't stop people from using ideas they find on the internet. If I were to build my own personal ethics into my system and moralize to my audience that would defeat the entire purpose of what I am doing, which is to promote agency, free thinking, and self-knowledge.
In the end, I am trying to help people in a way that I am able to. It's not going to be for everyone.
Hey Paul. Thank you for taking the time to reply point-by-point. That’s rare, and I really appreciate it.
Also, just to be clear.. I like your intention a lot. If my first comment read harsher than intended, that’s on me. I was challenging some framing, not dismissing the mission!
A few follow-ups:
I agree attention is engineered and monetized. My hesitation is the rhetorical scope. “The world is intentionally designed” reads bigger than the incentives inside big tech, advertising, and app ecosystems. I’d personally find it stronger if it stayed closer to “a major part of modern media and tech is optimized to harvest attention.” The broader wording risks sounding totalizing.
On passive nihilism: I think the reality is split. For some people, enriching leisure and reflection are a genuine privilege (time, money, bandwidth). At the same time, many of us in wealthy countries do have historically high levels of comfort and free time, which is exactly why frameworks like yours can matter. My only pushback is that when the baseline is stable, it’s easy to treat enrichment as urgent and non-negotiable, while in real crisis (war, collapse, insecurity) that layer disappears overnight. That doesn’t make it meaningless, but it does suggest the diagnosis should stay grounded in material conditions as well as psychology.
You convinced me on agency. The distinction between having meaningful experiences and converting insights into something that builds self-knowledge and agency is strong. That’s exactly where a framework can help.
On the “unjust exploitation system” point: I sympathize with the moral discomfort. I just react strongly to anything that sounds like a clean utopia claim when reality is messy and interdependent. What’s the workable solution at scale? If everyone cuts working hours sharply tomorrow, what happens to healthcare staffing, food supply, logistics, public services, and the infrastructure that makes leisure possible? I’m not defending the status quo, but there are trade-offs and coordination problems here. A critique feels incomplete if it pathologizes ordinary life without grappling with how a complex society keeps running.
On ethics and tone: I get what you mean by not moralizing. My point is that some of the wording can land as pressure. Lines like “make sure everything we believe isn’t being used to keep us under control,” “we must always continue to think,” and “freedom is the heaviest burden” can read as: you’re probably compromised and you’re not doing enough. Then the framework can feel like the one “right” way out, even if you explicitly say it isn’t for everyone. And very practically, “people can believe whatever they want” runs into limits fast in any real community.
Thanks again for the thoughtful reply. I’ve enjoyed the exchange, and your work gave me a lot to think about.
I note with enjoyment the exchange between Paul and Emma.
I note my enjoyment of their exchange more than the position of either.
I note with admiration their genuine and gentle gathering, respect, and acceptance of ideas from each other.
I note the Fibonacci sequence of growth in their back and forth.
I note it is not a tautology that the more you know the more you know.
I note with awe that the more you know the less you understand.
I note with excitement the less you understand the more you want to know.
I note with sadness the less you want to know the more convinced you are right.
I note with hope that “Yes, I see what you mean, and I could add that” is much more powerful than “No, that is wrong.”
Thank you Paul!
Thank you Emma!
Thanks Emma, this was awesome.
Thank you. Your challenging points are spot on.
I have learned a lot from the main article and your follow-up question.
Emma, most respectfully If a system is corrupt, oppressive and tyrannical. Shouldn’t be there a mass movement for radical reforms for social justice? Why should someone wait for slow reforms? this would just benefit the elites and delay the suffering of the masses.
“The infrastructure that makes leisure possible”
- A sentence from your question.
If this leisure is limited only to a specific class and is only possible If the entire families of the middle and lower classes work tirelessly to afford their basic needs. Shouldn't this be termed as modern-day slavery? And hence cause an uproar in the masses to don’t accept it as their fate and ask questions?
Some middle class are working very hard to analyze things, in order to survive, but others may see it as leisure…
And sudden overthrow can be violent, but no one learns anything
Indeed, Why would anybody want to spend their time fabricating their own "belief system"? Surely this is the road to anomie..anxiety...alienation..whatever?
Re intentional design, or reshaping the human mind, really was a neoliberal project that that might have begun with the Mont Pelerim Society, and is being continued by the current oligarchs, https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffip&q=mont+pelerin+society&ia=web.
Reading a book entitled The Desecration of Man by Carl Truman (NY: Sentinel, 2025). He outlines the historical reasons for this shift into making our own systems. I’ve not finished it, but it’s super interesting.
Paul - I appreciate how you lay out and frame why the slow erosion of thinking happens inside ordinary life, not just as an abstract problem or philosophical idea. The picture you’re drawing is of a gradual shift in how people live with their own minds, and I find this extremely fascinating and a bit sad given what you highlight. Over time, the work of forming values, questioning assumptions, and creating a personal orientation toward life is replaced by ready-made frameworks, incentives, and distractions. That feels very close to what you’re pointing to with passive nihilism: not the loss of thought, but the loss of responsibility for it.
One layer that feels important here is how much the mind is already shaped to privilege what is wrong. The negativity bias keeps our attention oriented toward perceived threat, conflict, and deficiency. In an environment built to capture and monetize attention, that bias becomes a natural vulnerability in the mind. It steadily trains our nervous system toward being on high alert or being geared toward the negative rather than spending time for reflection and thinking about aspects of positive experience. Over time this could easily reshape the inner conditions under which thought happens at all. What I respect in what you’re building is the insistence that people can take our authorship back. That a micro-philosophy is not a set of answers, but a practice of examining what/why one is living by.
All to say, I love what you are doing! It gels well with my own thinking about how to better contend with the difficult human condition to begin with.
Thanks Bronce, you’re the best.
Do you think it is possible for us to rewire the negativity bias?
That's a solid question Paul! The answer is no if we are thinking of turning the negativity bias off like a switch. However, if we are thinking about it in terms of rewiring brain circuitry the answer is more along the lines of yes if we think about it like rebalancing our attention away from negatives to positives in our lives so that the negatives don't completely override the positives.
Science has shown our brains are plastic to some degree so using measures like mindfulness, as mentioned aspects of attention shifts consciously, cognitive reframing and gratitude practices have been shown to be successful.
If people are living in healthy ways, not being misrepresented, soon that will become obvious.
However, some seem to want to do away with the repentant, joyful, restored…
Neuroplasticity!
Try it, don't look up the research.
When you learn effortless mindfulness (the ability to shift attention to the awareness within which all experience takes place) you can radically reshape virtually any neural pathway.
If you have a neural pathway that supports your "I hate broccoli" mental framework, you can actually change the way your taste buds respond but doing this practice.
Quite so. Learn to like it.
Well said.
This resonates — but the diagnosis risks placing a structural failure back onto individual will.
What seems new is not simply that people think less, but that thinking no longer occupies the point where outcomes can still be interrupted. Reflection, critique, even self-examination persist — yet increasingly downstream of decisions already resolved elsewhere, through delegated automation and pre-structured flows where no one fully owns the judgment, yet outcomes bind us.
In that sense, the danger is not passive nihilism as a personal failing, but a quieter condition: agency migrating away from sites where lived experience and deliberation can still exert constraint.
The question then becomes less “how do we get people to think again?” and more “where does thinking still have standing to intervene before action closes?” That is the fault line of our moment.
Thanks for this great comment.
I am very sensitive to structural failures and injustices, and I love the way you explained how this undermines agency here.
Much of my writing focuses on the individual because that is who I think I can help the most.
The book I’m reading explains how the Reformation and printing press led people who were mostly uniform in thought in Western Europe, (not Jews or Muslims—who woukd feel some in their lives as well in other ways ) to go from sameness of life, lived in a 71 mile radius, doing usual things, to suddenly having to decide what one as an individual believes, and the great unsettling of this, and industrialization and so on. It is describing the issues of our current times with even more of this post-enlightenment, and so on.
Very interesting to describe our times as living with distraction, also—from a different article!
Yes, can personal thinking outweigh benefits of apps, and so on?
Some want community but it’s hard to find. If informed by wise principles, with prayer (in my belief) , maybe it’s a helpful tool. We need to not abdicate thinking to AI nor tools. Like, run it by the Word, other believers, might be impirtant, if something is off.
Hey Paul, great thoughts. Comes at a perfect time for me as I am about to take a sabbatical from work.
One thing I was already planning on doing: I've been underlining non-fiction books as I read them for a long time and always wanted to take the time to write down all those nuggets in a notebook but never got around to it. I just gathered up some of the most impactful ones and will be starting a notebook for those quotes. I imagine these will definitely help me in creating my own micro-philosophy.
I'll definitely be checking out your older article. Keep up the good work, thank you.
Thanks Jake.
That’s actually how I approach my underlines.
You can use AI to automate the extraction process as well.
Have been writing my own index of quotes and things I might want to retrieve, with page numbers in the backs of my books. This helps me.
A notebook might be great if I could keep them organized.
Writing demands to look inward in ourselves. Most people don’t wanna do that because they been running from it or afraid of what they could find there. It also requires a lot of focus, which modern social media has taken away with short form content. The brain isn’t train to do task for a long time anymore.
Definitely. Fear is such a huge part of it. Some are even afraid to realize that they have nothing to say! But what’s the alternative? You must face it.
One has nothing to say until one begins to process other things. I like doing this with prayer.
Everything you wrote is true. The biggest example of this i see is in India currently. I see this defeatist attitude among everyone nowadays. And yes we can try to wake people up but to be very frank, those very people ridicule and try to bring you down to their level. Something is fundamentally wrong with the minds of people nowadays.
And to fix that we need people who have awakened to come together and create a better society and a better world.
This is interesting. I don’t know much about India. What is this defeatist attitude? What sorts of thoughts and beliefs does it involve?
Hi Paul - I've also been thinking recently about the importance of contemplation, and in particular imagination, which I believe is fundamental to human intelligence. I agree that writing is a key tool in this process, as it enables us to engage with and hone our ideas in a more efficient and structured way than would otherwise be possible.
I've recently written a post about the importance of imagination which may be of interest - https://sajmalhi.substack.com/p/making-sense?r=2cl55d. Let me know what you think, thanks.
Really enjoyed this, and I think there's something real underneath it — but I'd push the diagnosis a layer deeper than "weak will" or "comfort-seeking."
Nobody chooses to stop thinking. What happens is that the thirty minutes you'd spend writing gets eaten first: by a second job, by a commute that's grown longer because rent forced you further out, by a phone built by people paid specifically to make putting it down feel harder than picking it up. The "last man" isn't lazy so much as out of runway. Give someone shorter hours, a shorter commute, and a feed that isn't fighting them for every spare minute, and I'd bet the appetite for reflection comes back on its own — it doesn't need to be taught.
That's really my only quarrel with "intentionally designed." It's not that nobody profits from distraction — plenty of people clearly do — but it's not one plan with one author. It's a thousand separate businesses independently discovering that fragmented attention is more profitable than whole attention, and the effect looks designed even though no single hand drew it up. I think that distinction matters, because if the problem is diffuse and spiritual, the fix is "think harder" — but if the problem is hours, wages and interface design, the fix is structural, and a lot more achievable than it sounds.
None of which is against the idea of a personal philosophy — I just think it works best as something people build once the material floor is already under them, not as a substitute for it.
Thanks Spencer, I actually agree with a lot of the ideas you suggest here. I should write an updated version of the article that gets a bit more precise about it all.
Hehe
Who ever thought?
La fin de l’homo sapiens
Un livre italien
Paul, You have some really great thoughts here. This one especially resonated with me and relates to some writing I’ve been doing on society and civilization “We need to make sure that the belief systems we occupy, and the values we deeply attach ourselves to, are actually serving us and those around us.” Thank you!
Thanks for reading my work. 🙏
This landed hard, and in an uncomfortable way. I recognized the grief you're naming almost immediately. I've spent a long time wondering why questions like these feel so essential to me and so unnecessary to almost everyone I know. There's a real loneliness in that, one I don't see written about much.
Where I get stuck is the word "intentionally." You're naming something structural, a world designed to extract value by degrading thought, but then the explanation for why people don't resist it lands back on the individual: weak will, convenience, not writing things down. I wonder if some of what looks like passive nihilism might actually be a rational response to a structure that makes deep reflection a luxury good. Time, safety, and slack you have already before you can spend a Sunday afternoon interrogating your beliefs. If the design is structural, doesn't the failure to resist it have to be structural too, at least partly? Not an excuse for everyone, but I think it changes where the responsibility sits.
Mona, thanks for sharing this thoughtful critique. I definitely understand where you are coming from and have a lot to say about it. Personally, I struggle with figuring out whether to place all the responsibility on individuals, or none. The middle position seems even harder to justify!
To be honest my instinct is to actually put a lot of weight on individual agency. That is something I think we're not teaching nearly enough anymore. But then I think about where that instinct comes from. I had parents, people and life circumstances that asked more of me, who modeled that agency was even a possibility and nessessary. Not everyone gets that. If you're never shown it, never made responsible for anything, it's not simple to just arrive at on your own later.
So I keep landing somewhere uncomfortable. Agency matters enormously, but the capacity for it has to be built and nurtured into someone, and the system you're describing actively fails to do this. It may even depends on not building it. That puts real weight back on the people who built and keep perpetuating that system, not just the individuals moving through it.
I think what you're doing by handing people tools to reclaim some of that agency matters a lot. I just don't know if it's enough on its own. It might take enough people reclaiming it together to actually change the conditions producing this in the first place. And asking more of individuals only works for the ones who already have the time and capacity to answer that ask. A lot of people just don't.
I loved your article Paul, loved every question you asked, as each one of them reminded me of how I felt lost and overwhelmed all over the years that I have been trying to rediscover everything and every thought. Reading have been that thing that drove me to question a lot and be curious towards every new thought and angle of discussion, specially from the ones whom are the opposite of me. but since the awareness journey wasn't very easy and It actually comes with a very huge price, What about the ones who shaped their entire life around some thoughts? and if these thoughts were to be doubted, they only have two options, one is to fight against these doubts by every way possible, and two is the lose everything and the structure of their life. and to sum up, not every one can handle the price of awareness and it's for their best to keep on with their functional life.
Thank you for reading. The life of the mind is always a challenge to continue questioning, learning, and growing. But that’s what makes it worthwhile.
Why do you need to put PhD as part of your name?
Because I am proud of working my butt off to earn a phd
Why do you need to ask?
Love it. Thanks for responding, I’d love to see Dionysus posting ideas.
Understood. My point being Nietzsche didn’t add some signifier to add authority to his ideas.
He signed his last book as the greek god Dionysus. That’s a signifier.
Awesome stuff