11 Sunday Oct 2026
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Daniel Drezner, Disney, Donald Trump, fascism, Iran, Nazism, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, United States, war
Every day that I wake up in the United States I give thanks for the stupidity of Donald Trump and his administration. Because that’s what’s going to save the country.
Continue reading13 Sunday Sep 2026
Posted in Certainty and Doubt, Epicureanism, Fear, Food, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Phenomenology, Pleasure, Work
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Andy Puddicombe, anxiety, autobiography, Fleetwood Mac, Headspace, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, music, Pierre Hadot, Robert Burns
Modern mindfulness meditation is helpful in a great variety of ways. Most importantly, it trains you to notice when your mind is distracted. Once you’ve done it for a while, the benefits go further. Especially, you can notice how your mind is distracted.
Some of Andy Puddicombe’s more advanced Headspace meditation series ask you to notice the kinds of distractions your mind faces: starting with whether it’s a thought or a feeling, and then examining the kind of thought or feeling it is. Once you’ve done this enough, you start to notice patterns: what it is that your mind tends to do in the moment. In my case, I noticed that my mind returns over and over to future plans.
Continue reading02 Sunday Aug 2026
Posted in Action, Attachment and Craving, Food, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Pleasure, Psychology, Self, Self-Discipline
Last year the Zen philosopher Seth Zuihō Segall invited me to speak to a course on seven universal virtues, on the topic of self-discipline or temperance. I want to return here to the point that I think was most important in that talk: there’s an apparent contradiction between the virtues of self-discipline and mindfulness (at least in the modern form of mindfulness) – but it is only apparent.
Specifically: self-discipline is all about delaying gratification – focusing on a future benefit that makes it worth avoiding the thing that seems appealing in the present. Whereas mindfulness – at least in its modern forms, which have more historic precedent than is sometimes supposed – is all about a focus on the present moment, letting the past and the future fall away. Aren’t these two supposed virtues then in contradiction with each other: the one telling you to focus on the future over the present, the other telling you to focus on the present over the future?
Continue reading26 Sunday Jul 2026
Posted in Daoism, Death, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Politics
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Alex Caring-Lobel, Aśvaghoṣa, David Gelles, George Grant, Karl Marx, Patton Oswalt, Richard Swinburne, Ross Coggins, theodicy, Zhuangzi
The great Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa famously tells the story of the Buddha’s father, the king, who tried to keep his son as an heir rather than a monk by isolating him from all the bad things in the world. Of course the king’s plan doesn’t work: the Buddha-to-be sneaks out and sees an old man, a sick man and a dead man, reminding him that these fates will come to a king as surely as anyone else, and so he renounces the world and becomes a monk. The story shows us that there always remains a gap between what is and what should be: we will always face sad facts like illness and death. That gap is bad, it is always with us, and that is unfortunate; it is just the way things are, whether we like it or not. It provides a need and an impetus for us to improve our minds, to escape the suffering that comes from craving in the face of those sad facts.
A very different take on that gap comes from Jacobin senior editor Alex Caring-Lobel in the Springer Handbook of Mindfulness, which collects over thirty essays objecting to the modern mindfulness movemennt. These essays take particular objection to David Gelles’s claim that “stress emanates from a mismatch between our expectation of how things should be and the way things are”. (p85) Caring-Lobel, in particular, objects to Gelles’s view because it
dismisses that glorious gap between “how things should be and the way there [sic] are” as a kind of impediment to flourishing. This is, after all, the space of the social imagination. It is also the space in which democracy operates. (Caring-Lobel p209)
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19 Sunday Jul 2026
Posted in Anger, Buddhism, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Patient Endurance, Serenity
Readers, I’m delighted to announce that my first book is officially scheduled for publication! It’ll come out in November but you can preorder it now, and I would really like to encourage you to do so if you’re interested: preorder numbers encourage bookstores to order more copies, which will help the book do well. I am particularly delighted that the book is coming out with Shambhala Publications – the esteemed Buddhist publisher of Ken Wilber, whose work has inspired a ton of this blog’s reflection, and Pema Chödrön, whom I’ve increasingly found a powerful source of wisdom.
Continue reading28 Sunday Jun 2026
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conservatism, natural environment, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ronald Sandler, Sally Haslanger, Slavoj Žižek, technology
When we think about the natural environment and how to treat it, we often assume by default that what we’re trying to do is return the nonhuman world to where it was before we started seriously messing with it. That impulse is very understandable. The world’s ecosystems functioned better, in the way that they had evolved to do and a way that was helpful to us, before we started clear-cut logging and making vast pits full of plastic waste and so on. It would be great if we could get the natural world back to where it was in 1800.
The problem is we can’t do that. Extinction is forever, as they say – with a very significant exception that I’ll get to. The garbage dumps are there; we have no way of turning all the plastic in them into something not-plastic. As Alan Weisman vividly reminds us in The World Without Us, if humans were to disappear entirely from the planet tomorrow, our products – from ceramics to radioactive waste – would remain for millions of years. We can certainly take steps to diminish the impact of our future actions, but the effects of our past actions are going to remain with us. The natural world, now and in the future, is the natural world impacted by our actions.
Continue reading10 Sunday May 2026
Posted in Anger, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Gentleness, Morality, Patient Endurance, Play, Psychology, Serenity, Virtue
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A.J. Jacobs, André Comte-Sponville, Anthropic, Aristotle, Canada, Confucius, Martha C. Nussbaum, obligation, Śāntideva, technology, virtue ethics
I’ve been using Anthropic’s Claude.ai in a work context relatively often lately – to produce graphic illustrations, write summaries and so on. (I’m not crazy about referring to it as just “Claude”. That’s my grandfather.) One thing has struck me in those interactions: I’ve found myself saying “please” in the requests I make to it.
I suppose you could say that’s just me being Canadian – for decades the not-entirely-fictional joke has been that Canadians are so polite they say “thank you” to bank machines. But Canadian or not, I think the point raises an interesting question: should we humans act politely toward large language models (LLMs) like Claude.ai and ChatGPT?
Continue reading03 Sunday May 2026
Posted in Action, Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Virtue
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Amanda Askell, Anthropic, John Basl, Northeastern University, technology, trolley problem, virtue ethics
A few years ago I argued that utilitarian and Kantian ethics, with the trolley problem as their framing question, were suited for programming robots but not for human beings. It turns out I was wrong — not about the human beings, but about the robots.
Continue reading12 Sunday Apr 2026
I recently read Shadi Bartsch‘s Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. The book’s topic is fascinating to me: the ways that modern Chinese intellectuals have taken up classical Greek philosophy. In some ways it made me feel oddly hopeful – that even under the totalitarian régime that has run China since 1989, it turns out that classical learning, even foreign classical learning, gets more respect than it does in the anti-intellectual United States. Unfortunately the book itself takes a highly unhelpful method of dealing with the topic: Bartsch spends a great deal of time telling you what’s wrong with the views of Chinese pro-government intellectuals. A Western audience really doesn’t need that: we’re already predisposed to be suspicious of that way of thinking. I wanted to learn about how the Chinese intellectuals themselves think – something I can’t get for myself, since my Chinese isn’t nearly good enough – and the book gives them very little time to speak in their own worlds.
But there was one thing the book sparked in me, which I don’t think was the author’s intent: an appreciation for the work of Leo Strauss.
Continue reading22 Sunday Feb 2026
Posted in Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Happiness, Health, Hope, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Work
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André Comte-Sponville, autobiography, John B. Whitfield, Laos, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thailand, utilitarianism
I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation differently: the Vector Marketing (Cutco) approach of getting desperate youth to sell knives to their families is an exploitative business model; working that job was bad and I don’t miss it one bit. But what’s in question is the lessons we draw from that situation.
Yes, we should be clear-eyed enough about the badness of our situations that we have an eye to changing them where possible. But what I didn’t realize then is the lesson of the Serenity Prayer: we also have to accept, and even be positive about, the bad things we cannot change. If we don’t do that – if we decide to see every 50% cup as half-empty – then we are undercutting our own goals.
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