One subscriber recently told me he doesn’t care what I write about but he’s curious about the lens I’m looking through at the subject. It gave me a new perspective, even though I never quite understood why people read me. This Substack has recently crossed 1,000 subscribers, which prompted me to reflect on what I’m offering to each of you here.
My range of topics is eclectic, from AI-assisted software development to coaching, meditation, future of work, psychology, Buddhism, venture-backed startups and my personal life. But the lens I bring to each topic is the same: myself.
I hope that my essays help you see a different perspective regardless of the subject, and talking about how I see each topic is my way to show it.
Maybe perspective isn’t the right word. This implies that I want you to look at things from a different vantage point, but what I am actually trying to do is to help you stop looking at things only from whatever perspective you are using right now.
What I care about is that you see a richer perspective, because there’s always a richer perspective. The richest direction is where you don’t expect a new perspective at all. It’s easy to look for the opposite of what you know, for example. Maybe you worked hard your entire life and are imagining what it might feel like to never work again. But can you see a perspective that makes that entire dichotomy disappear, for example?
Talking about perspectives is almost pointless. I can only drop breadcrumbs that you might not even notice but they might nonetheless stay with you without you realising it. No, not even that. I can only write without really knowing what I’m trying to say, and then notice that I wrote something interesting without me realising it.
Take last week’s essay on disciplined receptivity towards AI. Re-reading it, maybe the most important part there was that losing the connection to the spiritual dimension of life would be like a death sentence both for me and for humanity. And yet, I only realised it myself after publishing it because that wasn’t the subject of the essay. I wasn’t trying to say it.
We often learn, do, or say something important when we think we’re focused on something else, don’t we? That’s the beauty of life and growth: we keep discovering valuable lessons and we rarely find them where we look.
This observation helped me to doubt my certainty. Sure, I have opinions and perspectives, and… what if I doubted them, but not in a cynical way? Could we learn to doubt in a loving and open-minded way?
For example, you probably doubt much of what I say. Good. It would be a shame for you to learn the lessons I’ve learned. You want to learn your own, I imagine. It’s a bit of a tragedy that we work so hard to understand how to navigate this complex life and when we get a sense that we’ve got a grip on it, we often stop. We decide we know something and stop learning without even realising it.
That’s where the really interesting lessons start. I don’t know what yours will be, but I hope you don’t stop looking for them with the enthusiasm of a five year old. You know how children constantly ask why? Why is the kettle hot? Why can’t dogs fly? Where is the biggest volcano?
If you think you know how to be happy, question what happiness is. If you feel you’ve got a grip on happiness, question who is it that’s got a grip. If you saw the empty nature of self and imagine you’ve got somewhere, no you didn’t. A step in the right direction, sure, but what’s a step on an infinite journey? You’re back to square one, which is the same as the end and everything in between.
I would love to see you breaking free and in that moment realise that it’s the same thing as giving up your agency altogether to serve something greater than yourself, which is you to begin with but that’s not how it appears.
That’s one of my favourite paradoxes, actually. We want to be free and happy, and to do that we try to understand and control the world. But then we get a sense that loving and serving the world is a better way forward, and there’s less freedom and more suffering there. But we discover freedom and happiness, too.
I hope you learn to hold paradoxes. I hope you can see that the world is completely broken and do something about it, and also realise its inherent perfection. Could we set ambitious goals and work hard to achieve them but let go of striving, and then of letting go itself, for a good measure?
I often think that if all of us started the journey at the finish line of perfect wisdom, there wouldn’t be anyone to enjoy this thing we call life. Wouldn’t that be a tragedy?
Yet holding paradoxes isn’t the point. The reason it’s important to be friendly with them is that it will help you to be you. Not the Buddha, or David Whyte, or Mother Theresa, or Gandhi, or Jane Goodall or whoever your role model is, but you. It will help you discover not what you think you should be or who you want to be but who you already are, if only you strip away the shoulds and the wants that are only getting in the way.
Maybe what I’m trying to do on this Substack is to show you my process of trying to learn to be me in my own way. The questions I ask, the choices I make, the words I choose. The life I live, the mistakes I make.
But mistakes will be a matter for another post. What’s relevant here is that ten years ago I couldn’t have imagined my life today. Not in the sense that it’s somehow grander than my imagination — it is not — but in a sense that today I’m a person I could not have imagined when I was 32, when the only thing I cared about was the success of my startup. And this gives me hope that my life a decade later will be different in ways that I’d struggle to comprehend right now. And I hope it won’t nearly be the end of the journey.
And that’s my journey into the unknown. I hope you discover yours too, even if it looks nothing like mine. I don’t care if you meditate like I do, or pay attention to AI, or anything else. That’s not the point.
The point is that you find out what life is about. I care that you aren’t afraid to listen to your heart and soul, wherever that might take you. I care that you aren’t living in the prison of thinking that you know anything at all about life.
You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. And that attitude is the beginning of wisdom, the point where we stop thinking about what we know and start living. Your true life starts somewhere there and it looks nothing like what you were imagining it should be.
Thank you for staying curious together with me.