If you haven’t eaten all day and arrive at your friend’s house at 4pm, what do you do? You can hide your hunger, but it might come out as grouchiness. You can blame your friend for not having guessed that you need to eat. Or, you can say directly that you’re hungry and see whether your friend wants to eat too. Sounds simple, right? But in our society, we have a weird concept of need. On the one hand, if supply makes something accessible, we think we “need” all kinds of useles

The Buddha said that the quantity of tears each of us has cried over many lifetimes is greater than all the water in the four oceans. Even if you don’t believe in rebirth, this image makes sense. Everyone you meet is carrying an unfathomable amount of pain, so great, in fact, that no amount of expression could ever scratch its surface. This is the paradox of grief: we need to express it, but we also need to understand that it is bottomless and inexpressible. We also need to f

About a decade ago, I wrote about a trend in pop-psychology toward claiming we don’t owe each other anything: "You don’t owe your friends an explanation." "You don’t owe your parents a relationship." "You don’t owe anybody shit." Taken to its conclusion, I said, this growing advice would erode our values, connections, and society. Well, here we are. Now, of course, many power dynamics depend on convincing people they owe debts they never really incurred. No, women don’t owe m

In the summer of 1939, as Europe edged toward war, Leonard and Virginia Woolf often listened to Hitler’s radio speeches. One afternoon, while planting irises in the garden, Leonard heard Virginia call from the window: “Leonard, come! Hitler is making another speech.” He replied, “I shan’t. I’m planting irises, and they’ll be blooming long after he is dead.” In his book Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger argues that modern attention tends to be pulled toward distant events, national d

A friend teases me: “Hey Paul, how many folk singers does it take to change a light bulb?” “I don’t know, how many?” “Five: one to change the bulb and four to sing about how the old one was better.” Point taken. We should be wary of believing the old days were better. I’m from New York — they weren’t. I don’t miss urine-soaked subway cars, blackouts, or getting mugged on street corners in broad daylight. But one reason I’m drawn to folk music is that it preserves the forms of

There’s a saying: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today. The same is true of community. People often lament its decline without recognizing that community is a tree that takes many years to grow. The absence we feel today has been decades in the making, and rebuilding it will take decades too. Community doesn’t appear by magic. It’s not given by the government, nor created overnight by co-working spaces and networking salons, most o

I recently heard a quote: “AI is the past repackaged as the future.” People imagine AI as a new technology “arriving” with new ideas, but it's really the continuation of an already-existing system designed to extract and exploit already-existing skills and knowledge. It's the cannibalistic phase of a paradigm that can no longer grow, so it devours itself. There are obviously legitimate uses for AI. In the search for cancer treatments, I’m grateful for a machine that can proce

A man goes to a Zen teacher. “I’m exhausted and overwhelmed,” he says. “Teach me how to find peace.” “Go look into the stream out back,” the teacher says. “It will give you your answer.” The man returns frustrated. “The water was too muddy,” he says. “I couldn’t see anything. What was I supposed to learn?” The teacher smiles. “How to leave things alone and wait for them to settle.” Have you noticed how tired everyone is these days? You’d think we were doing more physical labo

Over the past years, digital critics have started calling more and more AI output “slop.” Technically speaking, slop has three characteristics: it looks plausible at first glance, takes almost no effort to produce, and can be generated endlessly at industrial scale. Like the pig feed after which it’s named, AI slop is engineered for cheap consumption, not nourishment. How did we get here? Well, the internet is kind of like one big untrained mind, generating thoughts not becau

Alan Watts said, “When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we’ve got to jump that day, immediately we feel sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas actually, we’re just lying in bed.” A lot of our misery comes not from experience but from the way we narrate experience. The Buddha called it “becoming”: the way we twist reality into something else with our inner commentary. A quiet day becomes “I’m wasting my life.” A feeling of uncertainty becomes “Ev

About once a month, I get a noise complaint. I never throw parties, and the only music I make is low-volume and during legal daytime hours. But because we live in a world where people are afraid of direct confrontation, no one ever knocks on my door to introduce themselves and talk about their needs. Instead, they file an anonymous digital complaint, which management passes along to me, and the problem gets kicked down the road. It’s a good example of how poorly technology ad

Years ago, I knew a doctor who complained constantly about his wife and kids. “I know what’s best for them,” he said. “But they don’t listen.” I said, “You’re a man of science. When an experiment doesn’t give you the results you expected, what do you do?” “I revise my hypothesis,” he replied. “Then maybe,” I said, “it’s time to revise the hypothesis that your approach with them is working.” Most people don’t want feedback from reality. They want confirmation from reality. But

People are always wishing for a simpler life: “I wish I could leave work at work.” “I miss when people just knocked on your door.” “I’d like to live in a cabin in the woods.” Sometimes we get to that cabin and discover, to our surprise, that life isn’t simpler there either. The roof leaks, the mail gets lost, and the same thoughts about the past and future keep arising. As dharma teachers like to say: same mind, wherever you go. A simpler life doesn’t come from changing your

My teacher says that when you meditate, you should imagine your breath moving in and out through your whole body at once. Then, he says, notice the tendency of this full-body awareness to contract. Because untrained awareness tends to contract around points of tension in our experience. This is true beyond meditation. People say, “Take up space,” “Put yourself out there,” “Own the room.” But those are just words. We don’t shrink from our power because we lack the right affirm

Ajaan Fuang used to say, “If you can’t have any control over your mouth, how can you expect to have any control over your mind?” We tend to think of words as smoke that vanishes as soon as it leaves our lips, but everything we say echoes back as a voice in our minds. Hateful speech becomes self-hatred. Fake flattery becomes self-deception. If we truly understood cause and effect, we’d see that we are the conversations we have. Our myth of individualism teaches us that we poss

In a 1992 interview, Leonard Cohen said, “But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy.” He wasn’t just talking about songwriting. In all areas of life, we mistake difficulty for a sign that something’s wrong. We treat soreness after a workout as injury. We take the strain of hard conversations as proof we’re in the wrong relationship. We read frictio

Joseph Campbell used to tell an old Indian fable about three beings who drank from the same river. One was a god, and he tasted ambrosia. One was a man, and he tasted plain water. One was a demon, and he tasted filth. The point, Campbell said, is that what you receive in life depends on your state of mind. Some people take this to mean “always think positive.” But denial can be just as toxic as negativity. And as the Buddha taught, what makes a mind-state “divine” isn’t wheth

Not too long ago, I got a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant that said: “Love requires hard work.” My first response was, “Duh!” until I reflected: How deeply do I actually understand this? Isn’t there a part of me that, faced with difficulty in a relationship, often thinks, “It shouldn’t be this hard”? My teacher likes to say that we change not by wishing, but by acting. It’s nice to go on those loving-kindness retreats where you tell yourself all day, “May I be happy, m

When people talk about AI, I often think of Chuang Tzu’s story of the Great P’eng Bird, who could fly thousands of miles with a single flap of his wings, but flew too fast to notice anything about the world below. A little quail, on the other hand, who could hop just a few feet, truly understood the distance he was traveling. So it is with technology. An amateur typing keywords into ChatGPT doesn’t create a painting. Paintings come from painting, from taking the long journey

When Ajaan Suwat visited the United States, his attendants brought him to some major cities and national parks. When asked what he found most impressive, Ajaan Suwat replied: nothing. Americans put all their ingenuity into material things, he said, and none of it into training their minds. He didn’t mean that we don’t have great thinkers or psychologists. He meant that we tend to speculate about what the mind is rather than directly observe its workings. We go around labeling