In which I discuss Plotinus’s (and Advaita’s) critique of our entrepreneurial age. The Medium story can be read in full here. The opening section is included below.

A Grand Illusion

Entrepreneurs, Plotinus would have urged, are living under a grand illusion: they think that work, broadly or narrowly construed, comes before contemplation and, as a result, they’ve built their lives on a shaky foundation. Because of this, their lives will be laced with suffering except when, for brief moments, such suffering abates.

Could it be that all action is but a “shadow of contemplation”? Could it be that all action circuitously, as Plotinus rightly suggests, longs for the object of contemplation? If this is so, I argue, it would be wise for us to go directly to contemplation itself. In time, we may see that right action flows from right contemplation. But not in this piece and not today.

If you entrepreneurs and technologists out there really want what you say you want and therefore if you really want a genuine life hack, then here it is. It is the life hack to end all other life hacks — a metaphysical life hack. Henceforth you can set down all your tools — or rather be in right relation with them from here on out — and go back to the source from which all action (and all talk of action) arises.