Editorial · No. 20 Leave Aristotle Alone Happiness, Eudaimonia and the erasure of context. Modern happiness culture loves to cite Aristotle. This essay argues it has him backwards. When figures like Laurie Santos, Arthur Brooks, Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Gretchen Rubin invoke eudaimonia, they treat it as a richer feeling or a measurable, optimizable…
Editorial · No. 19 Numbers and Lies How Self-Development Cites What the Author Has Not Read They Are Lying to You The Self-Help Delusion Coming out this fall They Are Lying to You. The Science is wrong.The Advice doesn’t work.That’s the business model. Out Fall 2026 There comes a moment, somewhere in the middle of…
Editorial · No. 18 The Professors and the Brain They Made Up The Meaning of Life and a Brain That Does Not Exist Arthur C. Brooks is back with a new book – The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness – and a relentless podcast circuit, telling millions of listeners…
Editorial · No. 17 The Horse Does Not Care About Your Story Equine Coaching Beyond Mirrors and Mysticism This essay examines equine coaching as a neuroscience-grounded developmental tool while dismantling the mystical interpretive frameworks that dominate the field. Federico Malatesta argues that horses are effective in coaching contexts because they detect somatic incongruence and bypass…
Editorial · No. 16 The January Illusion On Stories, Desire, and the Architecture of Change. The annual ritual of New Year’s resolutions rests on a flawed premise: that we can identify and execute “right decisions” independent of context and narrative. Most people approach January trying to fix a meaning problem with a purpose tool, expecting…
Editorial · No. 15 The Long Return On identity, home, and a considered holiday recommendation. In this piece, I reflect on identity as something unfinished, layered, and resistant to clean allegiance. Through a paired holiday recommendation, Julia Ioffe’s Motherland and the film An Englishman Abroad, I explore exile, return, and the persistence of what we…
Editorial · No. 14 Easy Wisdom The Circulation of Easy Wisdom and the Collapse of Leadership Thinking. This essay examines how contemporary culture confuses the appearance of wisdom with the practice of judgment. A short video of Slavoj Žižek, in which four contradictory statements all sound equally profound, was the spark for a reflection on…
Editorial · No. 13 The Happiness Shortcut When helping others feels good — and why that feeling isn’t the whole story. This essay examines a Washington Post interpretation of a Cornell study claiming that small acts of contribution can significantly increase happiness. While the data is compelling, the cultural enthusiasm around it reveals a deeper…
Editorial · No. 12 Purpose, Meaning, and the Cult of “Why” How the “Why” Movement Misunderstands Purpose and Meaning. We’ve been told that if we “find our why,” everything else will fall into place. But clarity is not truth, and no slogan can carry the weight of a human life. In my work with both…
Editorial · No. 11 The Absurdity of Personal Branding How corporate logic turned identity into packaging — and why it leaves people hollow. The modern fixation on “personal branding” has quietly reshaped how people understand identity. What began as a corporate marketing strategy has migrated into professional life, asking individuals to package themselves with the…