All of which is a literary way of saying that my intention to take a break from AI exploration this week and get back to “pure writing” went aglay. I fell hook, line and sinker once again.

But there’s another quote that I keep thinking about when it comes to this current phase of dabbling:

“You waste years by not being able to waste hours” - Amor Tversky

It consoles me.

You can’t make space for that which transcends your current level of being; these are the black swan events of your personal unfolding. But you can pay attention when the compass goes haywire; when the fever of possession in your unconscious pulls you towards something, consider that it may be the voice of a greater you calling.

Now it’s AI, but I had a similar possession by filmmaking earlier in the year (and wish that I still were in the grips of that beautiful life). It feels like realtime evolution. Like I can see the contours of unpredicted development happening before my eyes.

The feeling that goes with this is awe.

In the past weeks, I’ve had many such moments. When I first used Claude Code (a command line agent for coding using the Claude LLM), I had many moments with my head in my hands laughing, “it’s so good. It’s so GOOD!”

This week I had it with ElevenLabs — the AI company at the top of the game with speaking and voice agents (the one that is to call centres what the tractor was to the scythe man — the dark side of all this). I was tinkering with adding it to the app I coded for my friend (before realising how cost-prohibitive it was for this use case). The ability to create AI agents, program their personality and setting their goals, the possibility of loading them up with a knowledge base so they could fill in a million blanks and the idea that you could receive a call from such a voice was too much for my little goosebumps to handle.

When looking for a way to transcribe and diarise the podcast with Paul and CJ (diarising being distinguishing who is speaking in the transcript), I discovered Replicate — basically allows you to run AI models in the cloud without any setup on your part). And then yesterday I discovered an amazing new coding model Kling K2 which is 80% cheaper than Claude Sonnet’s API (usually top of the board for coding) while being better at coding according to many AI leaderboards.

That was all titillation compared to what I was experiencing with playing with Claude’s Projects. I’m experimenting with these Projects as ways of decreasing my cognitive load by having one for each major area of my life and creating Google Calendar events throughout the week then so I just need to do the work that I’ve planned in advance. That’s all a bit vague, but it’s still early days, and, as it progresses, I’ll be sharing more.

All of which to say, AI is a fascinating cookie. While I’m sceptical about the hype cycle around AI, I have no doubt that this is going to change the way we live our lives one way or another.

But now, a big reason I continue to burrow down the AI rabbit hole: I’m burying my head in the dirt; I’m procrastinating. I have a big change to make with The Living Philosophy, and I’m nervous about it. I am going to make everything open to everyone. It’s a new experiment I want to run, and I know it will lose me some supporters (what with the content now being free), but I really don’t like paywalls, and I would like more energy to blow through the community. This is coalescing together into a desire to just open the gates.

On the other hand, I’m considering keeping the weekly update and the poetry club (which will be converting back to a book club in the coming weeks — I’m admitting the season of beauty is past. Here’s hoping winter will bring her back around “to everything there is a season”).

This is a lot of decisioning. So I’m over here playing around with the future of technology while the weeds are growing in my garden. Such is life. That reshuffle will be coming very soon, and then I imagine things will start moving a whole lot quicker around here.

Next weekend I head back to “the Kingdom” of Kerry for a few days of hiking and camping with friends (along with a couple of young lads from the next generation — granting that initiation into the joyous miseries of long distance hiking!) so there’ll be no weekly update next weekend.

Hope your week has been great, and look forward to the road ahead,
James

I'm very late with this week's weekly update because I got sucked down the AI rabbit hole again. A friend of mine is a boilerman, and he's been badgering our coder friend about an app that could use voice transcription to create invoices for a long time. A couple of weeks ago, when I was waxing rhetorical about AI, he asked me. I thought: sure. I was freshly inflated after vibe coding my Obsidian plugin and reckoned I could knock it out in a day or two, especially since I'd figured out Claude Code, meaning I'd no longer be shuttling code back and forth between Visual Studio Code and Claude.

How naïve I was.

I can't remember when I started, but I remember the plan: I'll write in the mornings and continue my explorations in AI in the afternoon. That lasted until about Thursday, when I couldn't help it: I had the fever. I coded all day, stopping only when I ran out of my Claude credits and had to take a break until they reset. Friday night, I dreamed of coding, woke up at 4, and, unable to get back to sleep, ended up coding again. Going to bed last night, I was sure I had 15 minutes left — do this, then run the EAS build command, and I'd have myself a finished app. Only at six o'clock this evening did I finish.

I feel as if released from a spell. But what a beautiful spell. I think it's just as well I didn't become a coder. It would chew me up and spit me out.

Still, I can't get over the results: it's a beautiful little app (if you have Android, you can check it out here — I'll put a demo up at some point, I'm sure, but no visuals for now). What would have taken me months between learning coding and figuring out dependencies and the ins and outs of building an app, I, an illiterate, coded in the space of a few days. It's staggering. I'm on the sceptical side of the AI hype (at least when it comes to AGI and ASI), but the past few weeks of checking in with how the field has progressed in the last year have been staggering.

Anyway, that is today's big news story.

CJ the X's Talk in Dublin

In other news, I ventured to this nation's capital on Monday to see CJ the X's talk in Dublin (our podcast with PF Jung in Toronto will be posted here some day soon), and that was another jaw-dropping experience this week. The surreality of seeing a room full of people here to see someone I know speak. There was a sort of delicious dissonance in it.

As expected, CJ was electric. He's a born rhetorician, and the talk balanced depth and entertainment beautifully. It was well worth the trip to Dublin. A couple of drinks afterwards and many laughs and good chat all the better. He was headed to Liverpool for the next stop of his speaking tour, while I headed back to Limerick with a sore head the next morning.

While at the gig, I had the pleasure of meeting one of our community! It's the first time this has ever happened, so it was quite the delightful surprise, I have to say. And I see Tom has now joined the Patreon community. What a joy! It was bound to happen eventually, and it brought a big smile to my face when it did.

This week I'm taking a break from AI development and getting back to pure writing. I'm going to reflect on some of these experiences at the frontiers and continue to dig into the axiomatic grounds of belief systems as I'm trying to piece together the dynamics of belief.

I thought I'd start off this week's update by sharing an interesting nugget for you to chew on.

Did you know the experience of schizophrenia varies depending on your culture? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann studied schizophrenic individuals in India (Chennai), Africa (Accra, Ghana) and the US and found that the voices varied in the cultures.

Unsurprisingly, the voices in America experienced the voice-hearing as violent and hateful — a mental invasion bespeaking a broken mind. The voices are harsh and threatening. But while the voice-hearing was universal, this negative experience was not.

In India and Africa, the experience with the voices was predominantly positive. There was more of a personal relationship with the voices. In India the voice-hearing experience emphasised playfulness and sex whereas in Africa the voices more often involved the voice of God.

It seems that cultural understandings of the nature of the self and psyche and relationships with others play a role in determining how schizophrenia manifests. It makes you wonder whether the same could be true of other mental health conditions like depression and anxiety.

The whole article is well-worth a read (link here).

The weekly update

I spent this week working away at the series which the Constellations and Clusters article began. That's looking like it'll be one longer article and two Philosopher's Toolkit supplements.

There was some further dabbling with AI this week, including a little more vibe coding — this time writing a python script to fetch the top posts for the week from a few subreddits, running them through OpenAI's API to summarise any articles attached and then emailing it to my Readwise Reader feed on a Saturday morning. Part something I wanted, part experiment in what's possible.

Other than that, the inchoate massa confusa I've been working with over the past month has been alchemising into something solid. I feel I am emerging from a period of meditation into a more definitive direction, "to everything there is a season". I'll be writing about that in the coming week as well, I suspect.

PSA: lastly, I made a boo boo this week with post scheduling. I try to keep everything consistent between Substack and Patreon, but somehow I made two mistakes this week. I posted Poetry Club on Patreon on Tuesday as per usual, but neglected to post The Philosopher's Toolkit (written by fellow Irishman and Stoic Enda Harte); for Substack, it was vice versa. So this Tuesday, I'm going to be flipping the script and posting each on the platforms I missed. My apologies.

My week of dopamine fasting turned into a bit of a nerd fest.

Instead of a week of tranquil meditation, it turned into a week of unorthodox doing. My brain’s Task-Positive Network (TPN) is a bit more stubborn than initially suspected.

There were moments of pure beauty — running in the forest with my friend David and Biblical rain bucketing down upon us, and the sunset riverbank walk on Wednesday, you see above. But on the whole, it wasn’t quite as much sitting staring at the wall as I’d fantasised (though there was a bit of that earlier in the week).

I didn’t watch movies, TV or YouTube, I didn’t pick up any books, or get stuck scrolling on my phone or doing busy work. But my TPN found unexpected ways to tempt me. I spent hours playing around on guitar and learned a new song (the version of Shoals of Herring from Inside Llewyn Davis — lovely tune (and soundtrack in general)). I stumbled on a scrambled 5x5 Rubik’s cube (some noodling visitor thought they’d try their hand at it, I guess) on Tuesday evening and spent about 6 hours in pure flow trying to solve that on Wednesday (ultimately, of course, I was successful).

NotebookLM

The real TPN playground of the week, however, was AI. In catching up on my deluge of read-it-later articles recently, I’d read about Google’s NotebookLM — an LLM designed not to hallucinate. It relies mainly on its short-term memory (the information you give it) rather than its training data. Where Claude has an impressive context memory of ~150,000 words (and ChatGPT’s ~100,000), NotebookLM’s memory is ~25,000,000. That’s a lot. The paid version goes up by another order of magnitude to 250 million words.

Curious, I began to dabble. I created a project with Jung’s Collected Works and it was able to answer questions I had and direct me to specific references within the works. Here’s an example from a question about Jung’s theories of dreams:

Each of these numbers are references to specific places in Jung’s books 🤯. For future projects involving a lot of research, this is going to be a game-changer. I spend an awful lot of time tracking down things I already know or searching for where an author talks about a certain thing. This is going to eliminate a lot of that time-wasting, so I can cut right to the juice of knowledge-making.

Context Engineering

I also watched a video another friend sent a few weeks back by Tiago Forte about “The Master Prompt Method”. This is part of the current phase of AI chatter. AI discourse has a lot of these phases. There was a whole doolally about Prompt Engineering in the early days of mainstream AI, then there was that recent hoo-ha about the sycophancy of AI models, and most recently we’ve had talk of the importance of Context Engineering. That’s where this video fits in.

The idea is that the LLM needs context to know what kind of answer is the right kind of answer. There’s so much implied in context and this needs to be articulated to get the best response from the AI (Wittgenstein would be so proud). The idea then is to create a Master Prompt that you feed to your pet AI every time which tells it everything about your work context.

This week, I spent a day working mine out. I still need to add in more personal and educational stuff (regarding my upcoming part-time Jungian Master’s in September). I haven’t done much testing with this prompt yet so I can’t much speak to its efficacy, but if it makes the centauric process more fluid, then it’s worth experimenting.

Vibe-Coding

So, contrary to expectations, I was having a very nerdy Rubik’s AI week when I sat down at my desk yesterday morning with great intentions for doing some thinking. After some scintillating conversations with Simeon (of Seeker to Seeker fame), another friend and my brother over the previous 36 hours, I sat down to do some thinking in my Obsidian Zettelkasten note-taking system and immediately ran into my digital Zettelkasten pain point: I get lost in the numbers. As I’m scrolling through, and I’m on note 5301.1.2.1.1.2b1a.1, I can’t quite remember what the branches above (e.g. 5301.1.2.1.1.2 or even 5301.1.2.1.1) are about. I’m deep down a rabbit hole, and it takes time to figure out the context.

Of course, this is part of what the OG polymathic Zettelkastenner Nikolas Luhmann touted as a feature more than a bug. This friction is the spark that gives life to the system. By travelling the system’s high roads and byroads, and familiarising yourself with the landscape of this emergent complex thing, he found that after a few years it was living; it had become a second mind. Note: not just a second brain, not an extension of his brain in the way that a smartphone is: a second mind. His experience of the Zettelkasten was more like conversation than the addition of papers to an accumulating, dead pile of thoughts.

But, being a citizen of the 21st century, friction reduction is in my nature.

So it was, on a Saturday morning, that I, lover of maps, fantasised about a map that could help me navigate around this system and get to the nearest siblings, cousins, aunts/uncles, and grandparents to get a better eye on the context. This is where the paper thinking system is better: it’s easier flicking through a deck of paper — and more tactually satisfying.

This put me off the digital system last year (or maybe it was the year before; tempus fugit). I keep coming back, yet I never stop pining for this context creator. I reckoned a plugin for Obsidian would be amazing but there was so much exploration and tinkering to be done to figure out what would work that I wasn’t comfortable asking my coder people for a favour or paying for someone to do it.

But yesterday morning, I remembered: we live in the age of vibe-coding. And I have a Claude Pro subscription at the moment. So I decided to try being a coder for the day (albeit merely a vibe-coder).

I have to say: it was mind-blowing.

Much like the Rubik’s cube, the process engaged the problem-solving, puzzle-loving part of my brain. I was overloaded with dopamine again. How can we change this? How can we change that? Let’s Change the colours, change the size, animate the text, give me sliders for depth, sliders for branching, why are some nodes showing up miles off to the side? show me grandparents, aunts/uncles, separate the type of children notes, change the hover colour, why are those two nodes overlapping? make it so when I click on it it opens that note in the same tab and so on and on and on. Hours burned away. The only reason I stopped at all was that I maxed out my Claude usage (three times) which meant I had to wait a few hours to get back to it.

In the end though, I have a working Obsidian plugin that I’ve created a GitHub repository here and submitted it to become an Obsidian Community Plugin (apparently this can take weeks or months). The demo below will give you a basic idea (as well as having some interesting insights into last year’s deep dive into consciousness). Most importantly, I have a way of getting around my digital Zettelkasten system.

Not bad for a day’s vibe-coding.

So, not quite the week of Pascalian wall-staring I had in mind for my week, but my mind is nourished with new tools and possibilities, and I did cut down my passive consumption a lot. I’m going to try again this coming week and see if I can find that inspired contemplative mindset of the philosopher once again.

Whenever I travel, I’m delighted to come home. Maybe that’s odd. Maybe that’s just introversion.

But somewhere in that journey there and back again, my hobbit-soul overflows. I think it’s the pace and space of the journey - the change of scenery and upending of habit patterns interrupts the cadence of chorus and verse with a delightful key change that works a Joycean epiphany upon the rhythms of my being.

I return to my Bag End refreshed, rejuvenated and inspired in new directions.

I returned from Toronto with a conviction to live this way. A diet of poetry and Shakespeare, and long walks in the forest and by the river. More time listening to music (I can’t remember the last time I sat down and just listened to music rather than using it as a soundtrack). More time meditating. More time in what Brene Brown calls White Space, what Chris Bailey calls Scatterfocus, and David Kadavy calls Divergent Thinking; whatever you call it, it’s that space where showerthoughts emerge, where the inputless calm lets neuronal whale songs traverse the cosmic vacuums of cranial space.

For some reason, this isn’t comfortable. It’s one of the great mysteries of life. There is a whole host of systems in our brain that come online when we do nothing. Neuroscientists call it the Default Mode Network. It’s the same network that comes online when we reflect on ourselves.

“All of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
— Blaise Pascal

I am much more comfortable in the complementary system they call the Task-Positive Network (TPN). Goal-oriented behaviour is soothing to me in some way. I feel like I’m going somewhere, I’m achieving something; maybe it even gives me the feeling that I’m enough or that I’m doing enough?

Returning from Toronto, I’ve been good at avoiding entanglement with entertainment. But it’s not become the meditative calm I had planned. But, my compulsion to catch up on all my read-it-later articles is bounding towards its conclusion. Today, I will have finished up the last of the couple of hundred articles that have been piling up these past six months. My mind is overflowing with thoughts and perspectives, and I’m looking forward to letting it cook.

A time to reap and a time to sow

This week, I’d like to consummate my White Space plan: more long hours in the forest and by the river to let those shower thoughts cook; less screen time, less task-y-ness. I want to drink a little deeper and see if I can touch those rejuvenating streams I so often find when I’m on holiday. I’m not even trusting myself with novels. Poetry, Classical music and long walks. We shall see how it goes.

This Week’s Pieces

Not much to report here except the three-piece rhythm:

1. Poetry Club: it was lovely to hear a few reflections on Yeats’s Lake Isle this week over on Patreon and in emails from you, and to get a sense of the richness of this concept. Your accounts of your Lake Isles filled me with the spice of beauty that is so deeply nourishing.

2. The Philosopher’s Toolkit #1: with the Collective Action Trap, The Philosopher’s Toolkit officially got underway. I’m very happy with this and very excited for more. I am overflowing with ideas for this series, which I can see becoming a mainstay long into the future.

3. Weekly update: and here we are with today’s piece. I’m enjoying this cadence as I dig deeper into what’s arising and bring you more polished reflections. Going forward, these will be the three weekly pieces of content which I’ll supplement with periodical essays and videos. As the hectic output of the daily blog fades to black I’ll leave this section from future updates.

Until next time,
James

“The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley”
—Robert Burns, To A Mouse

As I sit back down to write by the window, sheltering me from a wet Irish day, I have no tales of bliss or ecstasy to share with you. For reasons I’ll not get into today, my great plan to go on the Jhana meditation retreat in Massachusetts never bore fruit.

I did make it across the Atlantic, however, and my first week in Toronto was a blur of non-stop socialising (something of a shock to my hermitic sensibilities). And though I was worn out by the end of the week, I had a blast. There was a ten hour drinking session in the snug of a Canadian Irish pub (it being obligatory as I’m sure you’re aware for the Irish to check in with the sprawling global union whenever one leaves the country), family barbecues, and catching up with other YouTubers at the CCCRU (where Jreg, Artchad, We’re In Hell and Duncan Clarke all work). Later in the week, PF Jung came up to visit from Texas, and he joined CJ the X and myself for some late-night drinks. The next day, the three of us had breakfast and then shot a couple of podcasts together. All in all, a wonderful week.

The plan for the next week, of course, was Massachusetts, but, in lieu of that, I decided to run my own solo retreat to mixed success. The week started well and I experienced a level of enjoyment and peace I’ve never had with meditation before (thanks in no small part to the guides of the Jhana facilitators Jhourney).

But it didn’t last. I turned up the dial on the meditation and killed the buzz. Then I overcompensated by taking the foot off the juice and into the vacuum left by that pulling back, my old habits snuck in. I went to bookshops, and then, to my shame, to cafés where I began to write. It was a rookie error and one I repeated with relish day after day as thinking piled on thinking and insight crowded on insight. Of course, it’s all related to the labyrinth I am marching through, and so tangible results are limited. I returned to Ireland with no ecstatic experience of the Jhanas but with some stories and a stack of notes thrumming with insight of ambiguous value.

All in all, a rather pleasant holiday. I’ll be back on Tuesday with this week’s poetry club and then later in the week (Friday, I’m thinking) with the first proper instalment of The Philosopher’s Toolkit.

I forget how social I can be. For so much of my life, my identity has been so much of the reclusive introvert that I keep forgetting how much I relish people and stimulation and being out in the world1.

My journey across the Atlantic was a trilogy of Shakespeare, Heidegger and CJ the X. My time in Toronto has thus far been an eclectic mix: quiet (and delicious) family dinners, a 10-hour session in the snug of an Irish pub, my first baseball game (with seats I’m sure I’ll never improve upon) and watching a remastered The Empire Strikes Back in an old movie theatre (on a street called Roncesvalles which of course took me back to the first day of Camino and that spot where the legendary Roland was slain).

I am pickled in North America and am grateful for the mundanity of Monday morning and the time to write, drink tea and digest some of it. In the next few days, before heading south to Massachusetts and (hopefully) into the belly of bliss, I’m meeting some YouTubers: over to the CCCRU again to meet some of the good folks there, meeting up with CJ the X again and a special visit from PF Jung (we’ll do a podcast together at the CCCRU on Wednesday).

And then the true work begins. I’m tired, I’m nervous and overfull. I’m also excited, delighted and grateful. This is why we venture off into Chaos: to throw our hearts into the cocktail shaker and hopefully find some intoxicating, delicious beauty emerging.

This Week’s Posts

It’s been a quiet week in comparison to recent ones.

1. The Psychological Roots of Radicalism: Monday saw the conclusion of the arc of reflections I’d been having on radical politics the week before

2. Love After Love by Derek Walcott: Tuesday, we read a beautiful poem shared by Belinda. In all the chaos of prepping for travel and travelling itself, I didn’t get to marinate in this poem at all like I wanted to. I am going to bring it to the meditation retreat with me and give it the time it deserves there. Consequently, we’re going to pass over the poetry club this week and the week after. This week, because of moving and shaking; and next week because I’ll be off the grid in the land of ecstasy (more on that below)

3. Introducing: The Philosopher’s Toolkit: on Thursday, a new series was begun. I am a little giddy with the idea of this new series. The idea of philosophy as a Swiss-army knife feels so right. I have a lot of ideas for how to cultivate this, but I feel this could be a central pillar of The Living Philosophy. I’ve talked about so many things over the years, and this feels like a way of organising it—an encyclopaedia, glossary and personal developmental portfolio for making the most of philosophy and psychology. I have one written for this coming week and many ideas for future weeks.

The Meditation Retreat

Right now, a few words about what I’m doing over here.

The next video, as I’ve mentioned here and there, is about a retreat in Massachusetts. It begins this Friday and ends the Friday after. The content of the meditation is an ancient Buddhist meditation. It’s part of the same tradition as Vipassana (the Theravadin tradition of Buddhism). There’s a whole historical story about the meditation which is a fascinating slice of history I want to write about and I’m excited for how it might bring something to meditation that I feel was missing from my (long extinct) >1000 hours of vipassana practice. That and the tagline for the meditation is “a panic attack for bliss”. You’ll be hearing a whole lot about this in the coming month, but let that give you a glimpse into what’s coming.

It’s something I read a lot about it last year and felt a great hunger to experience it. After a bit of back and forth with the organisation facilitating it (Jhourney), I am going to make an experiential vlog style video of the experience. I’m feeling rather nervous about the whole thing since it’s a whole new style to experiment with but thankfully I’m feeling no pressure from Jhourney, whose main concern has been that my priority is the meditation and not the video. Relaxed by this refreshing kind of concern, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. My plan is to record vlog style journal entries every day and letting the video emerge out of that. Instead of planning the whole thing in advance, I’m letting it unfold and let it become what it wants. That is challenging but playful, so let’s see how it goes.

I am no longer able to stave off the guilt about posting too much. One part of me thinks I’m gone mad. It smacks of impostor syndrome, but I cannot resist it any longer. Thus ends 33 days of daily posting.

I think. Probably.

I’ve been talking to friends about it over the past few days and I’ve been journaling about it like a mad man the past couple of days. As well as the guilt for overposting, I’ve also been itching because I’m not getting out with my camera and I’m not working on another major script.

After much journaling this morning, I came to this: the obstacle is the way. This inner conflict I’m having will be the subject of the next script. In the past month of daily posting there have been many articles about creativity and inspiration and the individual and archetypal dynamics of this. The only clue I had for the next video up to now was an aesthetic. As it so happens, this aesthetic connects with this topic so it looks like we have found the way forward.

So the daily blog is over…for now. It is with some hesitance I make this call. I’ve dreamed for years of such productive abundance. 33 days of blogs (with another few in reserve) is a wonderful proof to myself. It has conquered some demon in me. I remember reading about Taylor Swift’s youth and how she would go to writing as a safe haven; it was relaxing for her. For me, writing has always been a struggle. But with this, it wasn’t. This was pure flow. I would lose myself in inspiration for hours at a time. The thing is, not all of Swift’s writings ended up on albums; the same thing with Dylan’s “ticker tape” days of abundance in Greenwich Village (and beyond; the nutjob cut Blind Willie McTell from Infidels). I’ve decided to take a page from their books. Kill your darlings, as the old writing advice goes. Forgive me for having to waste your time while I learned this lesson!

So, new plan: I will continue to write every day, but henceforth I will do more curation of what I write and publish 1-2 times per week (not including the poetry club). I hope to share the cream of the crop with you.

I’d love to hear what you think. Have you enjoyed the month of daily blogs? Found it overwhelming? Perhaps you enjoyed picking through and finding what you liked? Or perhaps you like less regular, more monumental pieces? Perhaps you enjoyed some content like the political or poetic, but not others like the creative and dreams? I have loved engaging more with you guys this past month. It has felt more alive in that way, and maybe I’m just being thin-skinned (the vulnerability of constant posting being more of a factor that perhaps I am taking into account). I will continue to write every day and continue to bring you regular work.

This Week’s Posts

1. MAGA Marx: we kicked this week of radical reflections with a musing on Marx and MAGA and how these seemingly opposite theories play well together

2. Poetry Club #1: Bluebird by Charles Bukowski: then we launched our poetry club, and it was delightful! I’ve been relishing the bit of poetry in the mornings and letting Bukowski get deeper into me. Each day seems to bring something new

3. Aphorism #11: Archetypalisation is Niche; Individuation is Suicide: in keeping with my goal to write shorter pieces this week, the aphorism makes its return, this time contemplating the flattening of the individual in the face of the archetypal

4. Aphorism #12: The True Source of Greatness: I managed to be brief two days in a row! Well…ish. Thursday’s piece wrestled with two hypotheses about greatness: immersion in the thick of it, or contemplation from the edges

5. Emptying the Mind Before Sunrise: Friday, the reins of brevity loosened a bit, and I found myself waxing lyrical about my second favourite movie trilogy (after Lord of the Rings obviously), Richard Linklater’s Before serie,s and in particular meditating on a quote from Before Sunset about finding stillness and creativity in alien settings

6. How to Save Democracy: the Swiss Safety Valve: yesterday bookended the week’s radical reflections with some thoughts on a quirk of the Swiss direct democracy system that could perhaps save us from the Chaos of radicalism

Other updates

I am crossing the Atlantic this week! I’ll be visiting my brothers in Toronto and catching up with some folks there before heading down to Massachusetts for a spot of meditation (the topic of the next video).

Also: my philosophy burnout seems to have receded (also: I realised I’ve been going through philosophy burnout). This week I felt enough space of mind to tackle Heidegger’s Being and Time again, and it is going surprisingly well. As expected, it is a dense labyrinth, but 10% in, I’m beginning to recognise some patterns in the labyrinth. It feels enervating to be taking on such an audacious challenge once again.

thoreau is finished. In the end, it was a painful birth. I’m still not 100% after my bout of food poisoning, and so the final stretch of the editing was not the marathon it normally is, but an alternating between editing and bed (where I watched the entirety of Freaks and Geeks again).

But it is done, and now I wait. I’ll talk more about the next video in the next week or two as I prepare to head across the Atlantic to shoot it. In the meantime, I intend to soak up a lot of beauty and find my centre again, which I feel I’ve lost in the past couple of weeks.

Our very own Dead Poets Society

This week, I had the notion of starting a poetry club (see Tuesday’s blog). There were a couple of suggestions by some of our Substack members for poems and so we’ll be getting started with a little Charles Bukowski this week.

This Week’s Posts

My streak of writing ended this week with the second two days of food poisoning. But my streak of posting continued, thanks to a couple of days where I wrote multiple pieces. So this week we had:

1. The Gossamer Sublime: a reflection on a moment of beauty and how beauty like—as Patron Danny Lloyd pointed out—the Tao is a path we must work diligently to stay on.

2. Wanna read poetry together?: Tuesday saw the birth of the poetry club idea. New poems to marinate in every Tuesday

3. In My Parents’ Bed with Jordan Peterson: was an update on dreams. Fans of Freud will find the titular dream as amusing as I do. The rest is just as interesting (to me, the dreamer, at least)

4. The Self-Knowledge of AI: Thursday’s piece was a reflection on what AI can teach us about the most ancient philosophical quest: self-knowledge.

5. Richard Feynman on Why AI Shouldn’t Write for Us: a musing on the great physicist’s identification of the writing process and thinking.

6. Axiomatic: a reflection on how single beliefs can have major impacts on us and how these foundational beliefs collide with those we love and beyond.

7. thoreau: last but not least, after two months a new video is finished. I felt all the sophomoric growing pains with this one from the technical to the artistic but in the end I’m proud of it and have learned heaps.

Thoughts on the week ahead

This week, I want to try writing more concisely. I want to walk more and court the Camino-esque muse of walking inspiration. I also want to finish at least one short, beautiful video, and I’m starting a course on colour grading and learning how to edit in Da Vinci Resolve (this was the end of the road for me with Adobe. Crashes, crashes everywhere).

Enjoy what remains of your weekend,
James

Bonus

After waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to get back to sleep I wandered out for sunrise and thought I’d get a timelapse. It wasn’t the most colourful of sunrises (I was a bit late recording to be fair) but the fog is gorgeous.

I got up at 5 this morning to go out and shoot a scene on the railroad. I’ve been stressed about it from day one. The railroads I felt safe going on are the disused ones but they’ve become so disused in the past five years that they scarcely look like train tracks these days (don’t kids bush drink on abandoned train tracks anymore?).

In the end, I settled for the more illegal but still safe option of a new railroad they are building as part of the preparation for the Ryder Cup here in a couple of years. There’s a crossing I pass on the way to the gym, and I reckoned I’d be less of a scaredy cat if it was dawn (also good for lighting), and so up I got and out I went, and I think I got the shots. That leaves just a couple of little bits in the forest, which I’ll be getting tomorrow, and the end is in sight.

For whatever reason, it’s been far more challenging than the beautiful life was, but the finish line is in sight. On that note, I’m excited to share this video with you. This is the intro to thoreau. I think it came out great.

This Week’s Daily Pieces

Okay, now let’s talk about the daily pieces. So, another seven pieces this week, which is cool. Some doubts surfaced in the middle of the week, leaving me wondering just what I was doing and then by later in the week had dissipated entirely. So we’re still going strong.

• The Beautiful Mess Effect (aka The Courage to Shine): Monday’s piece was a personal reflection on Tall Poppy Syndrome and the Beautiful Mess Effect. How we fear the exposure of being different yet idiosyncrasy is what we love most in others

• The Birth of Erosophy: a playful piece about being a recovering philosophiliac and introducing the term erosophy — a more passionate love of wisdom

• Reflections on the Seven Year Rule (aka Buddhist Sleight of Hand): some thoughts I had about a pop Buddhist piece I read last week and the reductionism at the heart of Buddhism

• Self-Knowledge: The Elusive Truth: a hungover piece reflecting on an aphorism written during my Camino hike in 2023 and the difference between external inspiration and internal inspiration

• The Satan’s Crucible: on Friday, I shared one of my old poems and certainly one of my favourites, which is about undergoing transformation

• The Archetypalisation of Bob Dylan: another piece prompted by John Moriarty’s work. I’ll be thinking about this idea for a long time to come: dissolving individuality to merge with archetype.

Other updates

The podcast with PF Jung devolved into our usual shooting of the breeze, but enjoyable as ever. I don’t know that I have anything political to say these days anyway. But I do feel like this whole miasma is beginning to consolidate into something solid. The writing feels like a key part of that, even if I am embarrassed some days for how chaotic it all is.

It’s consoling to know that this time next week thoreau will be out in the world!

I thought today would be a fine day to start a weekly update.

As the daily writing becomes more consistent (this being day 12 now), I feel a sense of chaos rising. The past couple of days, I’d begun to question what I was doing and why I was doing it. I felt like I was putting too much out, and it would be annoying and that I’m losing inspiration anyway. All the ghosts were rising from beneath the deck. Then I thought of something Rick Rubin said (I listened to his book The Creative Life last week. Very good stuff) about our duty as artists being to the art; our duty isn’t to ourselves or our self-expression or the audience, but to the art itself. I’m still digesting that but it’s renewed my dedication to these creations.

So, weekly update/review. One of the inspirations behind this is Brandon Sanderson, who releases one every week, updating the community on his progress with the next book and with all things Sanderson. It seems to me it’s also a good way of keeping on track of things. It’s good for the community and good for the work. Another motivation for starting this was to bring some order to the chaos of the daily writings. I thought this would be a good index for the weekly writings, so that if you don’t feel like reading seven pieces a week, you can check in with the weekly reviews and see if there’s any pieces in particular that jump out at you.

This Week’s Daily Pieces

So first and foremost, this week’s dailies:

1. Innisfreedom: last Sunday, I cobbled together some of the shots from my time in Kerry. My god, how I miss that paradise already.

2. Good Enough is the Enemy of Better: Monday’s article was my pushback against the pushback against perfectionism. Good enough isn’t good enough. We can do better.

3. The Nietzsche Trap: Tuesday’s blog was a reflection on my friend’s talk and the responses to the meaning of life: Pat and Siddhartha and how ideology gets in the way of life (or perhaps that’s just my Shadow speaking)

4. The Aesthetics of Chaos: some reflections on John Moriarty, whose work Dreamtime I started reading this week

5. Auguries of Insanity: I took the dubious step of talking about my dream world (which continues to trouble me) and the arc of dreams I’ve been having the past few months

6. The Opposite of Love: Friday, I wrestled with the question of opposites and whether beauty and love require opposites.

7. Hunted Man: an update on the dreams of the week that continued to plague me and escalate. The theme: being hunted/chased by dark forces

8. Between Imitation and Genius: yesterday’s piece was an archival piece actually. It was something I was wrestling with during the making of the beautiful life

Update on thoreau

The next video, as you know, is on Thoreau. On Monda,y I shot another scene with my friends David and Barry at the gorgeous Dromore Loch. I am looking forward to seeing that shot in the final video.

Then on Tuesday, the editing began in earnest. Aside from the writing in the morning, this was the primary focus of the week. It started well and I’m real pleased with the opening scene. Like the beautiful life, it’s a bit of an artsy opener with some breathing room in it. I love that.

But when it came to working on the second scene, I needed After Effects, and it all went to hell. I use Adobe’s After Effects for any motion graphics, titles, or more advanced editing. It’s a great supplement to Adobe’s Premiere Pro which is the main video editing software I use. After Effects has been crashing on me pretty regularly since the upgrade to 2025. This time I tried going back to 2024, but that loses the cross-compatibility with Premiere Pro then. So I lost a couple of days there trying to check out my graphics card for errors, then deleting After Effects and reinstalling, then deleting the entire Adobe suite and reinstalling.

A carnival of errors. Yesterday I decided to move to a different video editing software Da Vinci Resolve. I’ve been seeing other creators I respect talking about its editing this year, and I had it at the back of my mind. I’ve been hearing about its colour grading for years—this was its sole purpose originally. Anyway, at the peak of my frustrations, I began thinking more seriously about it and I’ve decided to take the plunge. Since I’ve started Thoreau in Adobe, I’ll finish it there, but I’m excited to level up my colour grading skills in future and I’m very very excited about a software that integrates both video editing and motion graphics in the same app and without causing the computer to run like an escargotoire of snails. Also: it’s not an extortion racket. Very exciting. But for now, I’ll have to muddle on through with Adobe and hope my purge this week will stave off the crashes until I can get this finished.

So, a bit more of a technical update this week than anything else. But we are making good progress. There’s still about 1.5 scenes to shoot/reshoot. I’m hoping it’s not too optimistic to say next Sunday as a release date. Errors allowing, I think that should be doable.

Other Updates

In other news, this is a great time to announce my next big project, which involves a trip to Massachusetts. I’ll be visiting Toronto for a week to catch up with my brothers and some other folks there, and then one of my brothers will be joining me for a meditation retreat in the Berkshires. I’m very excited about that, and I’ll be talking about it much more in the coming weeks.

I’m doing a podcast with PF Jung this week. Not sure what we’ll be talking about, but I always enjoy talking to Paul.

I think that concludes the weekly roundup. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Till tomorrow,
May the fourth be with you,
James