Category: philosophical counseling

• August 5, 2019

  Sadder Still Is Humanism

  You look around but find no magic. No animated rocks or trees. No spells cast. No she-devils howling in the night. You say to yourself that you have no evidence of deities or of a deity. You label it “QED” and close the book on ‘this utter nonsense.’ Meanwhile, the natural world goes on, you…
• August 3, 2019

  In A Dream, I See My Sister Again

  In a dream, I see my sister again.  Jen, who died in 2014, and I are sitting at the bar table in the kitchen back in Platteville, Wisconsin, the small town in which we grew up, and I am trying to convince her to see, to grant, to accept that sunyata is God. She is…
• August 2, 2019

  But Taskification Is All We Know

  Making each day of your life into a function of the number of tasks you can get done I call “taskification.” It’s a bad idea. A bad idea that spread around the world. The metaphysical picture? One’s life is one great plan or one monumental To Do List. Which is not only weird but genuinely…
• August 1, 2019

  Slogginess, Our Curse

  Burnout is just one symptom of a larger phenomenon I call Total Work, the 500-year-plus-old process by which human beings were slowly transformed into Workers and nothing else as more and more aspects of life were transformed into work. Today Total Work manifests itself in all of the following forms: “time famine,” the belief that…
• July 31, 2019

  It’s Not True That Philosophy Is Impractical

  The rap on philosophy is that it’s impractical. But as in Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest, so too here: you’ve got the wrong man. Consider: Philosophy starts from one’s actual experience. In a Big Think interview, I state, “I think that philosophy begins with a convulsive experience, an experience that shakes you out of your own certainties, out…