My writings tend to revolve around a few reocurring themes:
- Investing in perennial practises over short-term lifehacks. This means cultivating the slow habits that really make a difference to our minds and bodies. This is achieved through prioritising consistency and cultivating a skepticism towards the immediate solution.
- Protecting ourselves against the misdirection of attention from things that appear to provide fulfilment and instead focusing on those timeless sources of fulfilment under our noses. This involves: 1) discovering those practises that are worth investing in and 2) embedding them in our lives via ritual.
- Prioritising basic fitness as your primary health insurance and mental health aid. This comes with the happy consequence of looking good naked.
- Indulging in regular solitude and finding ways to carve silence into your life. Each of us— especially if we wish to be creative and productive—has to balance consumption with enough reflection to metabolise incoming information into insight.
- A reconnection with the body—the ancient emotions, intuitions and cues that are so often left behind. Questioning the tendency to live life exclusively through the medium of thought.
- Finding the sacred in the everyday. Discovering not just the practical but the profound. Giving ourselves to the friction of flourishing as a wellspring of meaning and wisdom instead of the one-dimensional struggle to maintain a state of happiness.
- Regularly reconnecting with your values and virtues, and building them into your daily life through ritual. To be fulfilled and productive you have to know what you’re shooting for, point yourself in that direction, and find ways of regularly course-correcting. Being the weird you want to see in the world
- Practising minimalism as a means of removing the bloat that prevents your values shining through more clearly. Minimalism is a noise reduction system.
- Understanding that every path has some pain. Pick the one you know will make you a better person by the end. Be vulernable and honest.
- A reckoning with suffering. Suffering is what is often most real to us and orchestrates a large part of our lives, yet we rarely discuss it. A conscious relationship with the simple and all-pervasive nature of suffering can remake our lives in ways we can barely imagine. By default we push suffering away but this distance creates a host of other problems for us and separates us from one of the most important source of wisdom and growth.
- We’re surrounded by wildly different surroundings compared to our ancestors of 10,000 years ago, but our internal struggles with fear, craving, jealousy, love, bliss and deceit have remained remarkably constant.
- Practising forgiveness—towards others but most importantly for ourselves. Each of us is fallible and liable to err. Avoiding political ideologies that place the blame with certain groups or economic policies.
- The joy of reading great books—their ability to help us to correct errors in thinking and open up new vistas and possibilities in us. Reading classics allows us to participate in the great conversation we as a species have been having with ourselves for over 5,000 years.
- The therapeutic gift of writing and journalling in making what is cloudy and chaotic within us visible and meaningful.
- The prevalence and challenge of anxiety. Why it matters, how it happens to the best of us, and how to standup to it and grow into someone better because of it.
- How to use technology with intention and care, instead of following the multi-tasking path of least resistance.
—Dan