Why subscribe?

Authentic Human Craft and Content Guaranteed. (No AI nonsense here.)

I am a philosopher. That is my profession in the real, practising sense. I don’t mean that thing that dickheads do all over the internet hawking regurgitated academic pablum and calling themself a philosopher.

My job is to pay attention to everything about a human life that normal folks don’t have the time to think about, and then to work out how and why it is broken, and then to recommend what to do about that in a meaningful sense.

This substack is one of the places I share the proceeds of that craft and that calling.

The ancient Greeks normalised the convention of a resident career philosopher, someone who had the best interests of the people at heart, who safeguarded and guided our higher-order reasoning.

That is my job. I have a very unique way of seeing things, a very uncommon set of skills, and an extraordinary knack for explaining things that can change the way you relate to the world.

This substack is a distillation of that skillset aimed at the project of helping people adapt to the unfolding madness and applying better practices and perspectives to the projects of life you care most about. This was once called Eudaomonia: The Life Art of Flourishing and Living Well.

I frame all of this as a game which we can play consciously or unconsciously, skilfully or haphazardly.

I welcome engagement! You can submit your difficult questions, pose me challenges, and get me to debunk bad ideas you encounter elsewhere online.

I’m Not Like Those Other Philosophers

1. Authenticity Guaranteed. I don’t spew AI garbage out and call it my own writing. I value my craft, and I write with discernment and a human touch. I am pledged to upholding this standard.

2. You can directly apply my philosophy. My philosophy is current and relevant to our present moment.

3. My philosophy is aligned with universal principles, that is to say it will always be congruent with any and all forms of universal sense-making, or wisdom traditions like Taoism and Agile.

4. I come from the heart. My work is human, heart-centric and strictly focused around the project of meaning-making.

You will be inspired, educated, enlightened, and entertained. That is my guarantee.

The Conversation I am Leading

Surely you can tell that everything is losing coherence in the world?

There are better and worse ways of understanding what is happening and what to do about it.

If you already recognise the ‘apocalypse vibes’ growing in the world, this sense of unravelling, if you are feeling the disruptions and are trying to work out the pattern to all of it, and how to respond in a coherent way, then let’s get to it.

If you are struggling to know which voices to trust or how to filter out all the noise; in other words, if you want to play the game better and more on your own terms, then I am leading a conversation that cuts across all of that.

My work threads a needle between philosophy, game theory, systems thinking, behavioural psychology, grounded spirituality, metaphysics and archetypes.

I write about:

• The dysfunctions of business, social media, politics, and academia, and what to do about it, collectively and individually;

• The disruption of AI and the immaturity of the platforms, the developers and the users; and other emerging technological disruptions;

• How to reclaim, safeguard and grow your agency to defy the systems of influence and control; and

• How to understand the meta context of current unfolding events and wider trends.

• How our norms and social operating systems are setting us up for critical failure;

• How to develop coherence in your projects of personal development, relationships and work.

Won’t You Join Me?

Rocco