• This week, I’ve been building a personal brand that feels capable of holding my writing and coaching, and figuring out how that translates into a wider audience. I need a shower to wash it all off. But it is nourishing to revisit and rearticulate my values.

• I’ve had the idea of an essay in my head for a while: “TRE: the first 6 months.” After another unbelievable TRE (Trauma/tension release exercises) session, facilitated by a local practitioner, I might push it up the priority list.

• One song on repeat: Over When It’s Over by Lucy Rose. Jazzy, sunny beats.

• One quote I’m still turning over:

We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning. Despair is a difficult, beautiful necessary, a binding understanding between human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half of our experience is mediated by loss, but it is a season, a wave form passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us. A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.

—David Whyte, Consolations

• This week, I shared a short essay about how clarity is the cure and writing is the best way to begin:

—Dan

talks the walk by exploring the many virtues of walking; for well-being, creativity and sanity:

The Convivial Society

The Ambling Mind

Welcome to the Convivial Society. This is a newsletter about technology and culture, or, to borrow the title of my friend Lee Vinsel’s excellent podcast, peoples and things. The general idea is to th…

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2 years ago · 116 likes · 14 comments · L. M. Sacasas

Every time I start to feel oppressed by a laptop I realise I’ve not been walking enough. Walking was so integral to moving through burnout that I made myself do it twice a day, every day. After a while, I didn’t need any encouragement.

So many things fall into place at walking pace.

🌱 On tending to your aspirations

I shared my first micro-essay this week:

I’d love any feedback or comments. There are plenty more of these pieces to come. I’ve set up these mini essays as their own section, alongside the Weekly Roundups which will continue to drop every Friday. With the increase in writing, I will be hitting your inbox twice a week. You can always tweak your subscription settings here if you want to opt out of one section or another.

✅ Getting things done with Things

During my sabbatical, I survived for many months without any real to-do list. (In fact, the absence of a to-do list is perhaps why I survived…) But these days things are busy and there are a lot of balls in the air. After a brief detour into task management with Obsidian, I switched to using Things. The standard of the UX and interactions leaves most apps in the dust. It's expensive and Apple-only, but I use it every day. My favourite features are the quick entry, natural date parsing on due dates and just how powerful it is. I’ve added it to my Recommended page.

💊 One book I enjoyed

I devoured Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, in a week. (The recently released Dopesick series is a TV dramatisation of this story.)

It centres around the development, release and widespread abuse of OxyContin. This multi-generational story is addictive, depressing and often infuriating. The impact of what was allowed to happen is hard to appreciate, but I think this book does a comprehensive job of laying it bare. Whilst the Sacklers seem uniquely divorced from the impact of their actions, I do wonder if society is set up to stop this happening all over again. The FDA's incompetency alone deserves its own book.

I also finally joined Goodreads to track my reading and start writing more off-the-cuff book reviews.

—Dan

It was a strange week. My energy was all over the place after an intense, facilitated TRE session. I also found myself saturated with any kind of practical reading. Instead, I fell gladly into the arms of poetry and story. A friend recommended Frank Skinner’s Poetry podcast a while ago; it is accessible, hilarious and moving.

As someone who values words, I’ve always been drawn to poetry: words at their most precise and potent, evoking things only a poet can. I ended up reading this wonderful essay by who recently joined Substack, on the value of sitting with poetry and other “acts of attention”:

In the hurly-burly of the world we all need space, and spaces. When you are a teenager perhaps you need these all the more, as you try to come to terms with what you are and what you can be… Studying a poem in class is an act of attention in a world of inattention (think of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’ which enacts such attention): just the words on a page, a teacher, a group of peers, attending together to the deepest things of life via the medium of the best words in the best order, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry. You will be developing what Maryanne Wolf calls ‘cognitive patience.’ And when you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, lines of poetry you read at school will come back to you, long after you have forgotten everything else from your studies.

✍️ Big pictures & small essays

I’m a big fan of big pictures. But I have often smothered ideas by trying to neatly arrange them in some wider structure.

I realised that maybe the big picture I've spent so much time tending can only come into view when the elements sing for themselves. So instead of trying to mash ideas into a wider web that takes months to emerge, I want to grant some recurring themes the sovereignity they deserve.

You’ll start seeing these mini-essays pop up soon, on anything from authenticity to building things. They will be short, punchy and hopefully illuminating. My goal is to go from idea to publishing in as direct a manner as possible. Here’s a sneak peak at the pipeline:

📺 Making YouTube less insufferable

I recommended Unhook to another friend recently. The YouTube algorithm is one of my least favourite. Unhook is a browser extension that removes all Recommended videos from YouTube. And pretty much anything else. It’s a wonderful viewing experience:

What to remember when waking

In the spirit of this roundup, here’s What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte (source).

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

I simplified my main coaching page and added a new offering: engineering career coach & mentor. Since I started coaching, I’ve had people who work in Engineering (software, not real engineering) asking for something that not’s quite coaching, but more along the lines of mentoring and career planning. I’ve worked in Tech for a long time now, in roles spanning from junior engineer up to technical cofounder, and I love sharing experiences with people and hearing how they’re navigating this intense but rewarding field. Whether you have a clear goal in mind (promotion, new roles) or just want some ongoing mentorship, let’s talk.

📖 One article I enjoyed

examines the extent to which our online lives are unhinging us from our embodied lives and how this relates to the recently published Cass review.

With the advent of generative AI and increasing political polarisation, we have little choice but to learn how to withstand waves of intense emotion without losing our sovereignty.

The Bigger Picture

The Bright Forest: Social Media, Trans Activism, and a No-Truth World

Our first community sensemaking call will be announced on Monday, so keep an eye on your inbox if you’re a paid subscriber. On Saturday 27 April, I’m co-facilitating a one day men’s retreat in London, more info here…

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2 years ago · 65 likes · 32 comments · Alexander Beiner

✍️ One practice I’m reintroducing: Morning pages

As part of ramping up the writing muscle, I’ve returned to the practice of morning pages. The goal is essentially to write 2 pages (~750 words), no matter what. No one else sees them, there is no goal and there is no editing. Just write. I have returned to this practice 6 or 7 times, and each time I’m amazed at the therapeutic value and how good it feels to free-write without editing.

Morning pages are, as author Julia Cameron puts it, “spiritual windshield wipers.” It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found. To quote her further, from page viii

“Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.”

(Source)

👨🏼‍💻 One product that looks after me

After going through burnout, I could barely look at a screen without feeling nauseous and dissociated. As my energy improved, I would get overexcited, use my laptop for too long and feel wiped out again. The only way I got through this was using an app to remind me to take regular breaks. I use a free Mac app called Time Out. Every 20 minutes it will fade into view and stop me doing anything for 20 seconds. I usually stand, blink and stare at the birds. This small interruption makes a world of difference over a day.

I’ve added Time Out to my recommended page.

I have at least 38 versions of a tagline for this Substack. How to package what I’m doing is a minor obsession and the writer in me gets a kick out of trying to articulate it. This week, I’ve updated the tagline to clues and catalysts for full-contact living.

Which begs the question: what is full-contact living? I’ve revamped my About page to explain:

Full-contact living is the invitation to an uncensored experience of living, from the sublime to the shambolic. It is a playful challenge to stop and look life in the eye, without agenda or expectation. It is the possibility of puncturing an inherited myopia and rediscovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Full-contact living is not another thing to do, or a standard to attain. It is to lay down the default deficiency through which we often orient to the world. Neither is it an injunction to just go with the flow, dude. It is a call to come home to ourselves, whatever that looks like, and return to a wholeness that is always, already given.

👉 Read the rest now, please.

🤖 Funniest read this week

To someone, somewhere, this is not satire.

The Honest Broker

How We Became a Techno-Optimist Family

Our first attempt to incorporate Techno-Optimism in family life came with leftovers for dinner. Tara announced bravely at the table: “We aren’t calling them leftovers anymore. This is Meal 2.0.” That had a nice, cheery ring to it. So we sat down with the enthusiasm of true believers in progress, as we gulped down our reheated casserole and green beans…

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2 years ago · 247 likes · 65 comments · Ted Gioia

👨🏼‍💻 Coding… again

This week, I’ve been building out some email sequences that better explain what coaching is and what it is not. I have a lot to say about what it is not. I’ll share all of that here when I become sick of editing.

I also ended up writing a lot of code. I have a Megatron spreadsheet that helps me visualise and categorise my financial plight. After trying to make another painful update, I realised it was time to take it to the next level: get all this data in a database and build the UX I wanted around it. As someone who will have multiple streams of income and other non-standard financial affairs, this kind of visibility will be incredibly useful.

After going through a Tech-flavoured burnout, I didn’t see myself coming back to writing code. But it’s been therapeutic and deeply satisfying to exercise that muscle. I find myself appreciating how long coding has been in life and what a potent means of activating flow it can be. It had not occurred to me that building and selling software might still play a role in my future, but that feels like a direction this could move in.

🏃‍♂️ Running… again

On the topic of old passions re-entering my life, I ran my first Parkrun on the weekend. I’m back to being able to run 2 or 3 times a week without feeling rotten. I don’t have the ambition to run further right now. But I do find myself wanting to go a little faster… so I’ll be doing more of these Parkruns, and eeking towards that 20-minute finish time (I ran 23:19).

📕 The Deepest Acceptance

I listened to The Deepest Acceptance, an audiobook by Jeff Foster. It is more a relaxed set of talks than a book, which suits the topic. The theme of the book is that the deepest acceptance has already happened; that by something being here in your experience, it has already been allowed in; that our usual acceptance and rejection are always too late; and that what you are is not the pain or the joy, but the capacity for both. 8.6/10.

I’ve updated my Recommended page with new additions, alongside everything else I’m excited about.

—Dan

Oliver Burkeman writes about how our grasping ruins the good times we seek to preserve:

Had I put this feeling into words, it would have gone roughly as follows: “This is amazing! This is the kind of experience I love, so I want to make sure I’m getting the most from it, and I especially want to make sure that I keep on having this sort of experience repeatedly for the rest of my life!”, which, needless to say, is a sub-optimal way to be present in the moment. Mainly, though, the feeling in question wasn’t a matter of words. It was more of a clenching or a gripping, an attempt to grasp the moment and bring it under my ownership – which caused it, unsurprisingly, to draw back from me instead.

—You can’t hoard life

I loved Burkeman’s book, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He has a way of eloquently laying waste to many sacred cows around productivity and positive thinking. Prediction: in ten years time, he will be a prominent spiritual teacher.

On contemplative guiding

Each week, I share pointers from spiritual teachers I’ve found insightful. Meditation and awakening have been passions/obsessions since I was a teenager and alongside coaching I’ve now started working with people as contemplative guide. This was a fun page to write. If you’re drawn to practice in this way, let’s talk.

One teacher I’m going deep with

Peter Brown is not a well-known teacher. He was unrelentingly direct, funny and original. He taught the Yoga of Radiant Presence: radiant presence being the essence of reality, and yoga being the work of sensitively attuning to this reality as it appears, right now. His presentation manages to sidestep 90% of preoccupations with ego, self, not-self, spirituality and non-duality.

His book, The Yoga of Radiant Presence, centres around a series of modern Sutras, followed by commentaries to help unpack the meaning. Nic Higham has a great introduction to Peter’s teaching. I enjoyed Paul Dobson talking to about the impact Peter Brown had on him.

One piece of poetry

And this breath, in this body, able,
just for a moment to give and to take,
to ask and be told, to find and be found,
to bless and be blessed, to hold and be held.

We are all a sun-lit moment come from
a long darkness, what moves us always
comes from what is hidden, what seems
to be said so suddenly has lived
in the body for a long, long time.

—David Whyte, A seeming stillness

I published my executive coaching page. This year, I want to work with more founders. I've been there and I know the exhilaration and the excitement. Building something new is deeply rewarding. But it’s also intense: burnout is rife, boundaries are porous and overwork is the norm. To this end, I made this page explaining the why and how of coaching for founders and execs. Get in contact if you’re curious.

One Substack to follow

My friend and secret Daoist master Steve is writing again at . A previous contributor to Dark Mountain, this time he’s in Bali and making some noise about silence:

When we are forced, or force ourselves, to slow down, we do not merely become less agitated; we do not simply think the same thoughts, but slower. Instead, we discover that there is an opposition between hypercognition and feeling. Slowing down our thoughts increases the emotional affect we can experience across them; increases the ingress of the body and the heart into our ken; eventually allows us to begin to perceive the unstitched material between and around and behind the words we habitually think in.

One song on repeat

American Coffee by Jenny Hval. First heard in a hot yoga class. Having yoga teachers with great music tastes helps a lot.

One product that makes me happier

I recently paid for Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail. Superhuman was the new hotness for a while, but it’s way overpriced for me and I don’t want to be Superman; I just want to tend to email quickly and without distraction. Mimestream has great keyboard shortcuts, quick search, the ability to create filters and it’s very fast. The Inbox Zero confetti burst is a delightful piece of UX. Using a macOS app has the benefit of not having to open a browser each time you need to do email. Not having to face that endless row of tabs. Combine an email client with a decent read-it-later app, and you should be able to quit your browser daily. I now do this regularly and it brings me great joy.

One quote I was surprised to find attributed to Nietzsche

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s (found via Wikipedia)

As always, I’ve updated my Recommended page.

Until next week,
—Dan

🙇‍♂️ Waking up app

Despite being the target audience, I never tried Sam Harris' Waking Up app. Mostly because I don’t use guided meditations. But one of my favourite non-dual teachers, , shared her new course with a 30-day free trial and I’ve been using the app since. Her series is a direct exploration of the simplicity of being—more a sustained contemplative exploration than guided meditation—and across the app as a whole, I found the audio production and talk quality to be very high. There’s also beautiful artwork to boot. I’ve listened to ’s two series a few times and they’re also excellent. Gripes: I wish resuming a series was less painful.

📉 The importance of breakdowns

The Marginalian reshares Alain de Botton’s (of School of Life fame) insights on what breakdowns mean, and the myth of normalcy:

In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge.

🤖 AI is <INSERT_RANDOM_OPINION>

David Chapman shares a brief rundown on some research that concludes most AI predictions are meaningless. Every shiny new thing has to travel through the often unsubstantiated desires and fears of human psyches.

🎼 A dose of beauty

Tens years after Agnes Obel’s Fuel to Fire became one of my favourite songs, I found my way to a sublime live version. If you vaguely recognise the song, it’s been used in several TV shows, including an episode of The Last of Us.

👨🏼‍💻 Personal

This week has been spent outlining my coaching offerings—e.g. how I work with founders, people in Tech, those interested in meditation etc—in preparation for updating my website and kicking off a marketing push.

I had a great conversation with Christina Guimond, on TRE, filters, fetters and gargling for throat tension.

I added a Recommended page to my website. I’ll update it each time I recommend things in this newsletter. If you want to see all the books, tools and products I've recommended, check it out.

I also updated my Now page, added a last updated timestamp and created a monthly reminder to keep it current.

—Dan