I am part of a hereto unnamed lost generation. As such we are part of a lineage of disaffection—not in aesthetic, but in structure. The Lost Generation—those post–World War I writers who fled to Paris with their alienation—gave us dislocation as literary stance. The Beats, in a rejective fit against post–World War II conformity, turned that disaffection into ecstatic refusal. And today, scattered across newsletters, group chats, and algorithmic voids, we carry the same recursive tension: interior coherence that doesn’t slot neatly into institutional life. This isn’t just a literary gesture. Economics, after all, is the study of people—their justifications, their coping mechanisms, their architectures of sense. So the inner life matters. It must be understood not as indulgence, but as data.
Still, I didn’t arrive here lightly. To connect myself to that lineage feels audacious—but it came only after long periods of self-enmity, of asking whether I’d simply failed to adapt. I’ve tried, and still try, to account for my own contributions to dislocation. But even after that reckoning, something remains. A sense—shared more widely than we admit—that life right now is structurally peculiar, and that to feel disoriented isn’t pathology, but proximity to something true.
There’s always a devil-may-care fringe—flappers in the twenties, Beats in the forties, meme-radicals and digital absurdists today—saying, with a wink, “There’s no tomorrow, baby!” But they’re the minority. They hold cultural cachet, sure, but they don’t carry the burden of continuity. Most of us are somewhere harder. Scarier. We’re still trying. Trying to stay tethered to meaning in a time that rewards spectacle and collapse. And that place—between inherited security and earned coherence—is lonelier than people admit.
Some suggest the wealth gap between generations will resolve itself through inheritance — that when Boomers pass, the losers of the limping gamble that the American dream has become, such as some millennials and Gen Z will simply step into their parents' shoes, homes, and wealth. I am, in many ways, living that presumed resolution. As an only child, I will inherit two homes in Southern California. By the lottery of lineage and legal vehicles two households and two generations of accumulation will pass to me — enough to meet retirement needs, even if my working life remains unmoored. And yet, that future certainty does little to justify the intermediate arc—the decades between now and then—when so many traditional forms of legibility, contribution, and reward remain out of reach. I am not speaking from precarity. I’m speaking from pause—a strange suspension between projected security and present dislocation.
I say this carefully and with love, but the only reason I will be financially secure is because, someday, my parents will die. That’s not a wish. It’s a structural inheritance schedule. And until then, my life exists in a kind of moral purgatory—too secure to be desperate, too untethered to be legible. Lovers have called me a family dog reflexively even though I have raised and deployed millions of dollars before we met. Parents that see the whole arc can’t untie their life’s promise that their children might flourish from questions of whether I am trying hard enough.
Recursion, after all, is not a mood. It’s a structure. And like any structure, it exerts force—on time, on thought, on legibility itself (or normal force, to borrow the physics term, reminding us that structure’s massiveness isn’t metaphorical—it presses back). What I’m tracing here isn’t just a personal reckoning, but a pattern that emerges when interior coherence and exterior permission fall out of sync. That pattern has names: dislocation, collapse, burnout, precarity. But it also has architecture. And that’s where we begin.
This piece started as a personal justification for why I wanted to do the indecorous: move to the desert. I love it. It is the Swedish minimalism of biomes. As it would in libraries, where ideas hold more traditional sway, my imagination starts stacking. Arid regions also let me cohere with an idea I have dwelt on for a decade: the first widely distributed magazine describing human-made climate change was the March issue of Popular Mechanics, 1912. I have a full copy of the magazine. The intervening 113 years were not just filled with inaction; they were also filled with the largest increases in standards of living for the most people in human history. It is that dual legacy of desertification and progress that does not make me feel hegemonically indignant about climate change. Rather, I look at it as Dedalus might the Minotaur. Ghoulish or not, its godly origins cannot be ignored. Learning to deal with the externalities of our legacy is our legacy’s legacy. It is our charge. And, our indignation does not become us. Therefore, where else would one go to experiment with your daydreams on how to wrangle the desert. I can’t do it from the temperate river bank. It is good thing, then, that I love the dust.
I used to think I was bad at explaining myself when people said I was giving up too much present joy in service of some imagined future. But the truth was more complicated. The future-state wasn’t some distant mirage—it was already emotionally embedded in my present. If I disqualified it, I didn’t feel more free—I felt severed. The happiness people said I was sacrificing wasn’t just about rest or comfort. It was the internal cohesion that comes from not betraying the deeper signal I already felt. My charge wasn’t to escape burden, but to carry it without letting it calcify into severance or prompt collapse. It makes perfect sense to me to organize my life around an article in 1912, and it is symmetrically valid to me to make certain my life choices make sense into my future. And for a long time, I didn’t know how to say that.
The result, I suspect, will be a life many will recognize in part, but few would choose. And while that path might resemble, in moments, the conviction ascribed to figures like Edward Abbey—a man praised for his open celebration of landscapes not often trodden—I do not view my choices as a constellation of virtues. I see them as something more massive. More structural. And, as I will say repeatedly, architectural. This is not an eccentricity I can afford to dismiss—it’s ballast. The past must recur in the present or the future becomes incoherent. This is the only thing that makes sense to me, and I have to build a life that honors that.
Gila monsters, road runners, tortoises, owls, condors and big horn sheep all defy my expectations as just another set of animals to appreciate. They loom large in my attention when I see them.
Grappling with the clay, bedrock, and sand. Personal landscaping is all so much easier when you can see the soil rather than when it is under a blanket of ever-encroaching grasses that I need a laboring class to maintain while I differentiate my labor. There’s dignity in the desert.
My mad scientist modalities also are rewarded in places with high solar constants. Electricity for my machines, if I source them with electric drive trains, are dignified by not needing a supply chain to run. Direct solar systems, the inelegant Rube Goldberg-like apparatuses compared to electricity's logistical simplicity, can also be explored delightfully. Hybrid systems where the 1000 W per square meter solar constant can do the heavy lift of mid-to-high heat treatments would be elegant compared to the tank-sized tonnage of lithium ion batteries one might need to do the same.
There is also how I think. This. This ultimately became the broader exploration now framing this essay. Before we talk about micro-economics of attention or of the epistemological structure of recursion I just want to say that I do not want your version of an office. My attention and I traverse between different—what might be metaphorically akin to compression levels in information theory—in real time. This has nothing to do with “decompression” in stress management. Rather it has to do with how infrequently I naturally anchor thoughts in transmittable narrative arcs with introduction, exposition, rising action, and conclusion. I think in helixes with careful balancing of the accretive acts with cognitive load management. It was not a learned skill. Rather I learned how to name it. It lets me inhibit thoughts for years, sometimes gathering data points without reanchoring, sometimes raw-processing the accumulated information, other times integrating results or retaking inventory. But, this form of thought has real-world consequences. I am imperious with table space. I easily out-source cognitive capacity to method of loci or chunking in physical space - including where papers are on tables or where notes are in books or where books are in libraries. Needing to dismantle workspaces before a thought reaches conclusion is not a messy mind in need of tidying. It is a severance.
This is not a permissions slip for mess. My books can be arranged in right angles if it pleases me aesthetically. It does not need to be a shambles to be alive. However, it also does not need to look like a caustically under-grown garden like the books on a bookshelf at a WeWork either. Thinking like this needs space. Chunking spatially needs room. Each idea could have its own office suite - a whiteboard room, the computer room, the mud room to hang my mobile computing solutions and clean my boots after a thoughtful walk, a typewriter room, and more. The cost of construction in Southern California is approximately $500 square foot. I don’t think I can afford my imperiousness here.
However, I am no longer here just to tell you why I want to move to the desert. That eeking along towards self-permission to want to go where most people don’t belied a lifelong sense of dissonance. It is not exile. It is not rupture. That dissonance has topography though. Perhaps its more like a subduction zone? A slowly grinding sensation that by all accounts is meant to be there. And accepting that part of my life — the grinding between my greatest joy coming from my authentic self as one plate and my human desire for legibility and a self in context with others as the second— is how a personal inspection became a macro-photographic lens through which to perceive the contours of context density, recursion, cognitive load shedding, self-patronage, carrying cost capacity, nonsense, psychological objects, psychological inhabitability, time-dilation, personal friction, dwell time, cohesiveness, and—ultimately—a 21st century, everyday, non-horrific companion to Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
This approximately 90-page essay is part one of three of a larger project that I will get to. This essay begins with the concept of dwell time as a portal into the recursive psychological architecture required to sustain dwelling. Further exploration of the subjective phenomenology, implications, and praxis are scheduled for the next essay. I am setting up personal file systems that honor this thought patterning, and data visualization, that will allow for approximations of subjective personal recursion without anchoring. Hopefully, others may explore with me whether I have the capacity to move this idea beyond a framework and into a legible branch of psychology. Part three will be an exploration of what dwelltime predicts rather than just what it describes. Whether parts two and three of this essay reach lofty heights, however, is not the finish line. The work will get done regardless of outcome because I find it cohesive to do so.
Book 1 - Cohesiveness
Part 1 - Introduction
The missing net at the end of Good Will Hunting
This essay is, in part, an attempt to… re-substantiate? Secularly transubstantiate? The net that was mythologized at the end of several of Gus Van Sant’s movies including Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester—the idea that talent, intelligence, or unconventional insight will always be recognized and absorbed into existing economic structures. The reality, however, is that these nets do exist, but they are selective. Some are caught with ease; others are treated as bycatch, valuable only in contexts they never intended. Some, sensing the sorting mechanism, reshape themselves—acting as salmon when they are trout, or vice versa—hoping to be legible to the system. But what happens to those who are unwilling or, perhaps even more relatably, unable to perform that kind of self-contortion after decades of genuine attempts? What if the net itself is no longer reliable? Or at least not reliable for me. This is about what happens to those who find themselves out of phase with the options presented to them, and how to build meaning when the old pathways don’t fit.
It is not a petulant stomp of a person unseen. Instead it is a personal response and mirror to the felt reality when the economy, writ large, is perceived as no-longer accepting applicants due to its structure. When that structure is rigid and unwelcoming regardless of how much some public voices attempt to position that blockage as momentary or a product of personal responsibility.
I knew that I could imagine myself in the daily rhythms of being a teacher, professor, or writer from early adolescence onwards. That was me patterning after the people in my life that had expanded my mental horizons the most, and that impulse was triangulated over the years by feedback that I could write well. The pastures I grazed in intellectually matured and the ideal evolved to professorship. That was not to say that I was predestined from birth to be one of history’s great minds, or even preordained for elite tenure track at the world’s most prestigious universities. Heaven knows there’s a pedant or two there among the incandescent minds. Professorship as a profession roosts at many levels of tertiary education. One of those many places could have been my chicken coop.
The doors of academia opened up for me. I did my undergraduate study at one of those venerated national universities. I was accepted within a week to an English graduate school when a member of Secretary Clinton’s senior policy advisory team wrote me a recommendation letter. By the time of writing I have various recommendation letters from the dean of Penn Law, the head of Agricultural Studies at UC Davis, a letter from Emily Oster squirreled away somewhere, another from a department head at ITAM, and another from Rice. A local dean invites me to speak to their students, convincing me despite my protestations, even when I am feeling low in between projects… and yet.
Twenty years ago, with none of the language of this essay yet in mind, I knew that the economic trajectory that might best fit my predisposition was closed. The way was shut. I knew of and was intimately introduced to the capriciousness rather than capaciousness of the professorial profession; at the time I was receiving my pedagogy, the only people who still had upward mobility in the system were people so transcendent and so rare that they not only got a prestigious postdoc fellowship before becoming low-income adjuncts. They had two. Concurrently. Instead. At the most prestigious places humanly possible. My mentor was a simultaneous fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and UChicago, which gave her an outside chance to be a professor in the social sciences. It still took her years of assistant professorship and multiple books.
While there she introduced me to the study of the psychological and felt implications of space. I never met her mentor, John Stilgoe as he was already emeritus at her undergraduate alma mater, but she recommended his book Outside Lies Magic. It is still my book most gifted even though it is out of print. I trace a lineage in this essay, the first generation of which was received into institutions. Stilgoe or the Harrisons are examples; there is a full section later in the essay on the Harrison’s professorships at UCSD. Their projects did not always need to prove utility—they needed to be formally legible as inquiry only.
By the time my mentor had earned her fellowships, the system still nominally held space for such inquiry—theory and abstraction begets publishable citations begets funding—but the scaffolding was thinning. The bar for institutional absorption rose while its payoffs shrank. Aesthetic and intellectual freedom remained possible in academia, but its purest forms were limited in access to intellectual giants. All others had long odds of funding, and increasingly required grant writing, portfolio entrepreneurship, or a level of performative productivity that eroded the very conditions of original thought. One of my close friends, a person who I hold up as having the incandescent intelligence necessary—but who was predispositionally unlucky like I am that his interests aligned with the social sciences, had one of these stretched out doctoral experiences. His Ivy League Ph.D. was pockmarked with funding attenuation, uncertainty, near begging, mentorship abandonment, nine years of self-enmity, literal banishment at the edge of a south American desert, and—ultimately—no professorship in site. He works for a bank now.
In my generation the system can no longer receive the input. It can’t metabolize it. The lineage remains traceable, but the institutional receptor sites are calcified or closed. And so the final irony:
the person most equipped to carry forward the epistemic thread posited by Outside Lies Magic as laid down by the first academic generation,
Is the same person that the second academic generation, my mentor, sensed so much confusion in that she told me “you need wisdom” as I tried to make sense of my life’s trajectory.
So, the third academic generation drops out of grad school for an all or nothing entrepreneurial attempt at tremendous personal risk. I did so in order to re-justify the exercise of carrying forward what I thought was cohesive. I took the cross-disciplinary expertise I had fused together in my education and brought it outside the academic walls for testing. I took the college-for-all-ladder and a top-5 education I got and transplanted its results into the new productive container of founder, entrepreneur, and CEO. Just as I was told I could. And should. It is not effete. It’s productive! The neo-liberal and neo-conservative confluence pushed that good ideas should be honed in the market. I raised millions and eventually left with naught but “experience.”
My life experiences are of a privileged echelon of mid-to-elder millennial. My financial station is that of Gen Z 1.0 and 1.5 — those who were at least in college during the economic and social shocks of the 2020 pandemic. I was in undergrad during the 2008 financial crash. I graduated to its aftermath. I re-enter the economic milieu after my business sold in 2023. In the aftermath of the pandemic. The world felt shut. The “disappearing ladder” phenomenon felt real. Yet something else bothered me even more.
There was a part of me that wasn’t sick of tribal media factions. Or sick specifically obfuscating my confusion through nihilistic shrugs or quips. The most confusing part of life was that my joy came from thinking about what would make sense—about policy, about engineering, about economics, about the psychological livability of the current moment—and yet the more cogent my thoughts on related topics, the less I could communicate them.
I define “livability” as the condition in which a person can remain in recursive contact with their own life—its work, its rhythms, its demands—without feeling like they’re scraping their brain against itself. It’s not comfort or ease, but the absence of the unbearable dissonance that makes continued engagement feel neurologically violent. Livability means your inner loops are survivable. That the act of staying with yourself doesn’t feel like a betrayal. That coherence is possible—not as perfection, but as a structure that holds.
At first I examined the implications of our many attenuated attention spans as a point of entry. That I might be out of sync with some kind of temporal or conversational priming. Partial answers revealed themselves. I examined the role of precocity into adulthood. Awe as a psychological phenomenon as defined by Daschel Keltner (Berkeley 2023) is unfortunately as exhausting to witness as it is addictive to share. That gave partial answers too. Then I probed dopaminergic cycling and friction, even everyday friction, as a substrate for meaning; whether I was over presenting or under clocking other people’s perception of friction. Possible answers again. But one key aspect of my mental map was unaccounted for: cohesiveness.
My therapist often doesn’t know what I am talking about. She has told me so. But she never assumes I am blathering. My business partner—otherwise mild-mannered—would get angry when I ideated, but would listen to the same advice if I found a different advisor he aligned with more. My parents from childhood onwards have adopted an approach of “If he needs something, he’ll ask.” rather than persistent engagement because… what I offer is coherent but too effortful to drop into easily. My father is an architect and concepts he yells at me for asking to him to think about, once thought through, he sometimes shows to mutual friends proudly. Lovers and friends have been intrigued by the context density of my life, but depending on their predispositions, fade for the same reason they were once interested.
What real-world signal determines the amount of context density in a person’s life? Virtue narratives about education or intelligence or productivity did not do much for the notion of coherence. There are plenty of non-virtuous educated, intelligent, and productive people. All of these in some manner talk about computations per unit time. Cohesiveness was a measure of integration across time.
I thought about this on two hour walks every day for years. The same people who told me cliches about time being the ultimate commodity were aghast that I would take that much time with my own thoughts. That aghastness itself was a slowly accumulating data point. The walks, in turn, were the final data point. You see: I had been steadily increasing the distance of my walk until I reached two hours. The original signal was fitness. I could go farther therefore wellness-dictums-extrapolated told me I should. But there were a few times when I walked ten to fifteen miles and they were okay multi-hour jaunts, but they were effortful in a way the two hour walk was not. Outside of training to walk the Camino de Santiago, the extra hour of walking did not do much for me in the long-run. After a year of pondering, I started to ask others how quickly they get bored, or how they experience boredom. An adjacent question I learned to ask another year later was, “How often does it take for your thoughts to turn over? For you to do the personal subjective version of ‘What do we talk about next?’”
The answers, anecdotally, were in line with two major nodes of attentional research: the legacy studies of ideal commute times and the contemporary algorithmic optimization from medium-form video platforms like YouTube. Both nodes prescribe twenty minutes as the upper-bounds for engagement before the average person may take inventory of their thoughts and surroundings. For the commute its the threshold where you are no longer thinking on the same topic you were when you left your starting point; if you arrive home before ever having to take stock of being in the car then the commute has no negative impact on your psyche. Whereas when you pass the inventory threshold and have to conscientiously affirm your surroundings, trapped with time passing, it does. Similarly, YouTube algorithmically and explicitly tells creators it prefers content on the slightly shorter side of the twenty minute threshold‚ twelve-fifteen minutes, in order for the average person to be mid narrative when the natural impulse to take stock of whether you can continue to afford the time is counterbalanced with the maximum potency of narrative you’re engaging with. If the narrative is stronger than the inventory signal, then they get your time for another loop. This all relates to my walks because these nodes of study sit as a gravitational counterpoint to personal experience. If the large scale studies on commutes and the 2.5 billion person monthly user-base for YouTube suggest that the hight of the bell curve is twenty minutes, then my 110 minute dwell time is an outlier.1
I do not get bored often. The rhythms of normal life often interrupt my dwelling before I grow fatigued with what is going on inside my head. As a literary distinction, I am not just talking about thinking slower like Tolkien’s Ents. These are normal thoughts—as far as I can extrapolate the subjective mysteries of individual mentation—but chunked into larger, for longer, recursive loops.
We will talk about the architecture of recursive thought at length in order to burrow into what I mean here. But it suffices to say for an introduction that recursive loops—an accretive, helical act that uses its output as its next input—can encounter non-recursive objects. These are things that just do not make sense to any of your previous subjective engagement loops. It gives us a term of art and an expanded definition for “nonsense”.
Nonsense: a psychological object whose characteristics are so far from ones ongoing recursive engagement loops as to be non-metabolizable. This traverses beyond the liminal psychological space of not wanting to learn, inertia, or diagnosable lack of empathy and into the domain of the subjective absurd.
I believe that dwell time is predispositional or exists in our individual psychological firmament. Perhaps it can expanded somewhat with training or inducement — such as how many of us study far beyond our natural fatigue points when the stories, the means of cultural reproduction, all point toward the personal risks and payouts of education. Like, epigenetics, as a metaphor, however, the genetic starting point determines how much the firmament may drift epigenetically due to behavior. Whether or not this dispositional type of attention is actually genetically constituted needs further study, but I do think it is largely firm and creates one of the silent but major design parameters of each of our lives.
Dwell time might be the tightest proxy variable for individual psychological intolerance to nonsense. Put another way: longer dwell times might architecturally favor coherence. Remember, nonsense in this framing is not a moralizing concept. Therefore coherence, the cultivation of recursive thought that eschews nonsense, is not a moral concept either. The correlation between dwell time and coherency is built around the implicit allowances we make when our thoughts turn over. We are tired in this moment. It is part of the definition of thoughts turning over that we have run through our psychological metabolism to think about this topic any further at this time. Those predictable psychological ruptures in the loop are structural opportunities to shrug about the non-recursive object you can’t solve. These are the cracks where the “That’s how the world works” cliches seep in. With an absolute fewer number of those turning over events my mentations either keep turning over recursive objects until I solve the difficult to solve or I break like code that won’t compile. I am stuck solving, re-solving, resolving nonsense endlessly.
Examples of things I try to solve for because I cannot help it and need psychological help if I cannot address:
Can’t pay-off a house in my jurisdiction unless I get married 16 years ago and we both work for 50 years; time travel aside, the 18-65 arc is 47 years, so even if I were 18 and already married I would be extending my retirement age.
I was a CEO with demonstrable capacity for value generation, capital formation, and systems thinking. How do I navigate hiring managers who do not want subordinates to present as psychographically ungovernable?
The cost of a home was on average equal to two years gross wages in the 1950s and middle class trappings like televisions were outrageously expensive; what part of the neo-liberal promise gets an 80 inch TV to fit in my tent?
My dog is my best friend but I would need to leave him for 60 hours a week for a mid-career job that still leaves me house poor. How do I find income that doesn’t ask me to abandon my friend or violate residential zoning laws?
What cultural conception separates a big country like the US from a small country like Japan? We suppose that stick-framed homes will have perpetual value appreciation regardless of physical depreciation while Japan pre-supposes its timber-framed houses will depreciate below the value of refurbishment cost. I start looking up self-built housing permissions in state building code and the history of the thirty-year mortgage faster than I start strategizing for yield on a HELOC.
There are many, many more.
I felt the rupture in the liminal psychological space so acutely that I wrote this essay with no promise I would become a professional writer. I did not hold out for a book deal. I felt the intensity of need for coherency to the point that if I did not stay true to figuring these things out I would break, or leave some essential part of myself behind. I even abandoned the idea of writing it in the hours after another job. Instead, I opted for a state of intentional cash poorness as I wrote. That was more cohesive to me. This is how much I yearned. In the end I had to permanently accept coherency as a design perimeter for my life. The sentence before this one reads normally. As a life, however, it is ghastly.
I don’t espouse it as a virtue. Echelons of my family have loved me but never liked me. The subtext to most things they say is a subconscious need to blunt my know-it-all tendencies. Context density makes explaining even a basic part of myself take most of 100 pages like this essay. I do not explain it because I think it makes me exceptional. I explain it because I think my personal pain could have some explanatory power for others who do not feel what I feel as acutely, but still feel some of it.
This is an urgent project. It is about what gets lost when systems lose their ability recognize, receive, or metabolize cohesiveness. And it’s about the possibility that we, the many, are predisposed to need coherency.
Recognizing this shortcoming of the current moment might act like a salve for many minds. But like aloe vera it does not relieve the burn itself. This essay will not on its own vindicate one side or the other of the culture war in the United States. It will not alone legitimate some forms of economic and cultural labor or subordinate others. It applies to more circumstances than the privileged white man looking through the window pane at the career could have if only the system saw him, as in Good Will Hunting.
Segments of this essay can help explain why connection to land can mean so much to individuals and to cultures — as rupture can sever recursive meaning making, as described later. Or why retirement can feel meaningless to some — as their major form of recursion was directed towards their relationship to work, and now it's not the abundance of choice that paralyzes them but rather that all choices seem equally new and therefore meaningless. Portions of the essay can explain how to navigate what “enough” might mean to you — when it is regarded as a circle rather than a finish line. The framework enclosed here tried to earn its logic both as descriptor and predictor.
Yet, the irony was that all of this framework was only discoverable because my way was shut. My career traversing from would-be professor to entrepreneur was my first attempt at coping with epistemic displacement into a form that the zeitgeist still had capacity for. The subsequent burn out and my continued search for livability in a life that feels displaced resulted in me inventing ways of earning money that honor my long dwell time and my search for cohesiveness over multiple timescales. “Compound” and “Strand” businesses in the last section of this essay are my way of metabolizing the orthoscopic seeking of early adopters for example.
But, please do not just look on Part V as the final version of my solutions to intractable problems. It is one rigorous attempt. One that I am trying in real life with my livelihood as the stakes. Yet it is just another chapter in an epistemic sojourn from what could have been to what is.
This is dedicated to every graduate of tertiary education in a time of college for all. It is dedicated to every PhD in a time where more degrees are conferred than there are positions to fill. It is dedicated to the students who participated in the 1150% increase in computer science students at elite universities over the last 10 years. It is dedicated to the millennial that has persisted in their working lives through two “once in a lifetime” economic shocks. It is dedicated to the gen-Z person who is talked of on the evening news for never being able to afford a house in one segment and talked about as lazy in the next. It is for everyone who is lectured about “jobs” because they are coded the same way as they were during the Marshall Plan as they are now, even though the psychological means of production have shifted as much as the economics of the age. It is dedicated to the USAID worker laid off as well as the male podcast listener that voted for President Trump — both wondering “What do I do now?” It is even dedicated to President Trump, a person whose dwell time might be as far to the left of the bell curve as mine is to the right. These are all examples of people who are explicable, in part, by the microeconomics of attention.
What follows is what I figured out. It’s the product of twenty years of inquiry—of trying to metabolize being priced out of where I grew up. Of redefining what dignity, community, sovereignty, and enough mean as my projects begin to sustain themselves only when they stay small. As my dog and I move to marginal lands.
But don’t feel bad for me. This is not injustice. It’s just a lived recollection—and a framework for mooring in a time of displacement.
The Epistemological Basis for Dwell Time
Recursion, as I will try to show here, is not a tool or a virtue. It is a design structure that patterns how we hold truth. Do not be afraid. That is not “capital T” Truth. This essay makes no claims about Truths. A more invitational architecture built around how personal honesty is not left up to a choice in recursion. Rather it is built into the structure of how recursion re-metabolizes its own outputs. If your recursive loops are tight enough that you hold the outputs, then your own creation of epistemological kidney stones won’t be an externality as in the greater Attention Economy.
Your outputs won’t, in that circumstance, contribute to content-over-information pollution. Your “throw it at the wall and see if it sticks” marketing campaign is less palatable to you as an audience of one. Generating AI slop is less viable when you are the only audience member. Those who try to metabolize what they make rather than spam it, even with AI, spend many hours refining prompts and charting results and training models. Non-recursive objects within this system are unpassable or painful. They will be your kidney stones to pass again, again, and again. Like a renal Sisyphus. Or like Prometheus’s eternal banishment but with an eagle eating your urethra instead of his liver. It is agony. In a time when speculation and capital flows zigzag across the dust and call the shape in the sand an epistemology rather than the tracks of a drunken snake… When feedback loops track our panic over the prolificity of the very kidney stones we could all stop making and the ping-ponging signal is called virality and bet on with increasingly massive capital flows unmoored from material assets or material markets... Then the recursive act of re-metabolizing one’s own internal state becomes not merely therapeutic—it becomes the only failure mode we still have control over. A lived form of verification, of coveted signal amongst the noise.
I’m reminded of a moment in the beginning of Ghost Town Living, when Brent Underwood tells the story of an enigmatic man who lived near Cerro Gordo, maybe 100 years ago. Every day, that man took a pickaxe and chipped away at a mountain. He never found silver. That was not what he was doing. The whole arc of his life was enigmatically taken up burrowing through solid rock. The act of making the tunnel itself was the meaning. Underwood doesn’t just find the story beguiling—he’s beguiled by his own need to understand why someone would do such a thing. And I find that beguiling too.
This layering—this recursive gaze upon coherence—feels like the lifeblood of narrative plurality. We don’t need to live each other’s stories, but we need a framework generous enough to allow them. The Mobius Method, discussed here, is one such framework. It does not ask whether a life makes sense from the outside, only whether it makes sense again and again from within.
Dancing on Atoms
My layman's understanding of meaning and meaningfulness mirrors my layman's understanding of quantum mechanics. I do not pretend to grasp it precisely, but through modeling we can intuit three things: 1) it exists, 2) some of its contours can be inferred, and 3) we have a difficult time reconciling our findings on the smallest scale with our heretofore understandings of the largest one. Quantum mechanics is to general relativity as personal meaning making is to culture and religion.
This piece discusses the idea of meaningfulness from an individual-personal and individual-psychological perspective. If I accomplish the goal I perceive as possible, then my framework could be helpful to others. Yet it is only capable of scaling in the manner Rational Actor Theory does in economics. That is to say this framework only exists in the subjective reality of an individual and scales only because populations of individuals do.
There is a cliché that predictions about the individual rational actor are inscrutable but predictions about groups of individuals are statistically certain. Certain because they fit a normal distribution where most people do the most rational thing, some do it to the extreme, while some do it not at all. This piece generates its conclusions by direct inspection of psychological architecture, and it circumvents that reliance on statistical analysis for its certainty. Instead, it presses ahead into that previously inscrutable zone about individuals themselves. This piece is not alone though. However difficult the mental terrain may be, entire disciplines ranging from functional neuroscience, behavioral economics, and behavioral psychology have pushed forward into similar areas of thought.
Accordingly, at this small scale—the space and repeated activities of a single person—my framework does not prescribe that these conclusions should and will scale up to mass adoption. Therefore it is not ideological. Similarly, these conclusions do not claim to be the mechanism by which to scale many individual imaginations into a singular divine truth or religion even though they graze up to the subject matter of the latter.
I heard a good line on religious pluralism from a fallen Hindu monk. He said, “There may be eight billion religions in the world, and I don’t need to convert anyone to mine. I just need to keep converting my ego into my soul.” We will see together if that is psychologically accomplished by recursion.
This framework also avoids the reductive temptation prominent in the wellness-industrial-complex that is so common today to say there is only one thing missing from your life, and with it, perhaps for a recurring fee, your life will finally be legible to yourself and others. Instead everything I say will be able to be done for free, be presented as self-healing frameworks that are built around trying more than around succeeding, and do not require continuous leadership or guidance to function. What I am talking about would be a lousy business.
Emile Durkheim backed away from a stance that “Elementary Forms of Religious Life” could be extrapolated to Christianity; Darwin demured from “The Origin of Species” solely being attributable to the rise of human beings; and I too back up. It is not due to cowardice but from humility. I will attempt to synthesize what I have found, and—to be clear—I only wrote this down because I knew none of it not too long ago.
Part II - The Framework
The purpose of enumerating what I call The Mobius Method is to detach a framework of common skills and tasks from the various epistemological sources that brought them about. In other words: I want to talk about meaning without getting bogged down in any one tradition foisting its baggage upon the discussion. The result is a survey of the themes in meaning making. That, in turn, is important because it reveals that the individual psychological tenets and economic decision-making behind a meaningful life were sat down (like one puts down one’s phone) not too long ago in human history. However, unlike a simple notification from your smartwatch that you may have left your device behind, we didn’t have a contemporary way of discussing these very old thoughts. Without that contemporary methodology, some of our mentors, parents, and pedagogy did not have a means of communicating some basic skills.
The Name - The Endless Method to the Madness
I chose the name Mobius Method for three reasons:
First, what we will be talking about can be thought about as a repeating cycle, so the Mobius Strip’s endless band with a half-twist was suitable.
Second, mathematics is broadly considered uncontroversially secular.
Third, I chose it because the mathematician Alfred Ferdinand Mobius who described the mathematical object in 1858 has nothing to do with the rest of this piece.
That third bullet point may seem humorous to you. Roger Ebert once wrote a piece in defence of his attending Alcoholics Anonymous; I bring it up here because he explained that he tried other frameworks but found it bothersome that some meetings would spend forty-five of their sixty minutes debating what each other meant about a higher power rather than just getting on with helping each other. I chose Mobius to promote “getting on with it.” For example, I will want to discuss the secular psychology of meditation and prayer without the named deities or traditions excluding some readers or favoring others. The skills I wish to discuss are secular in essence but the manner in which we transmitted them from time immemorial was not. I want to be able to bring up self-derived meaning without traditional forms, such as religions, asserting themselves on the reader’s psyche.
There is one minor parallel between how A.F. Mobius’s work and ours: his description of the strip is relatively recent compared to how depictions of a circle with a half twist date back as far as Roman antiquity, and that is similar to how we will be talking about old topics in a new way. Beyond that coincidence, however, the method about meaning needed a heretofore meaningless name that did not bring old baggage to a new discussion.
The Simplified Model
The most basic articulation of how human beings make their own meaning seems unremarkable. I postulate that engagement is the thing itself. Engagement over time is meaning. Not a proxy, not a precursor. That’s the axis this essay turns on.
This context provides a lens for how common meaning is. And for how common our ability to truncate it, bypass it, sever it can be. If engagement is meaning, as processed by human subjective interiority, then it is a useful framework both descriptively and prescriptively. That dualism makes it robust. It describes the subtle but growing integration of a hobby into identity as well as it prescribes a solution to a flatlining early retirement. If your major form of engagement is severed—employment—you can intellectualize that you may do anything but all your choices seem equally meaningless at the moment of decision. Engage in anything; even that dissonance.
There is a kinship here with Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. But where Frankl found meaning through extremity—when suffering is chosen or faced with dignity— this essay looks for meaning in quieter terrain. It looks instead to the dissonance of daily trade-offs—to the quiet tension between imagination and economic life. It is an essay for now. It also does not limit engagement to the venerated mediums of pure artistic output. Like Matthew B. Crawford’s work in Shop Class as Soulcraft I identify that the deep work phase of engagement can be with objects and ideas that are outside the short roster of classical arts. But, my recursive architecture of engagement is even more pluralistic still. Again, I think this makes this an essay for today—for a moment when recursion is possible at any level of financial life, but rarely legible.
Engagement can be broken down into a four-part cycle in which
We take inventory of our current situation and form goals,
Do deep work on them in an attempt to modify or transform (ourselves, objects, materials, etc.) towards those goals,
Review and integrate the results relative to our self-stated objectives,
And repeat the cycle over time.
This may very well seem like a poor version of the scientific method. A knockoff. A predecessor. From the discount rack. If the 17th century refinement of the above into something actionable was so important as a watershed in human inquiry—so important that it became worth discussing in high school history class—then why revisit this earlier version of the cycle at all?
The reason to revisit it is that three fundamental skills are embedded within the simplified model — in excess of the deep work phase we culturally seem most able to hold onto. The others are conveyed in such an incoherent fashion today that common lessons for personal acceptance and wellbeing almost always feel like a mirage that is only and always an arm’s length away. At least they do to many people. “Only” because we use the words and often think we understand them. “Always” because well-being constantly seems subjectively fraught.
The scientific revolution is often depicted as the early stages of departure of new learning from old learning. The rise of the empiricists, among other traditions of knowledge, set the stage for epic heroes of the secular West such as Galileo and Newton pitting their genius against the mythology of old. Those are still good stories. Those are good heroes. I refute none of it. But, I also hypothesize that there is a difference between
historical mythologies,
the wisdom they contain (i.e. norms and normative ideas of what people should do), and
most importantly to this piece—the skills needed to integrate any wisdom at all.
That last part is emphasized because it implies that we may have undergone a multi-century, or at least multi-generational, deskilling. That has nothing to do with the culture war-level battle of religion and secularism, or conservatism and liberalism, or traditional to contemporary, or even efficient to artistic. Rather, I think the dialectic has steered the means of cultural production away from at least three skills and a handful of repeated tasks that assist each of us in our endeavor to understand ourselves, even in the secular, late-stage capitalist moment in which we live.
A short note on how I do not conflate this de-skilling with the contemporary use of the word spirituality. In the West, many modern spiritual frameworks appear to compress the mythological aspects of older traditions into individualized, secularly palatable forms—filling the vacuum left by the decline of communal faith traditions. The shared mythology of major religions is truncated to “energy,” “connectedness,” or “something greater than ourselves,” but is most polite to hold in personal silence rather than to try to express out loud or to another — for example. This piece instead avoids the mythological component completely. By focusing on the architecture and skills of wisdom integration, this framework opens up a more inviting, more generous, and hopefully more generative description of how the various aspects of the Mobius Method, which may seem contradictory but actually are not, stack and hold each other in constructive tension by design.
The key insight that opened the possibility that the epistemological break at early modernity might have left something out, culturally, came from recursion — the act of coming back proactively rather than via retreading or retreat. It opened up a rift in the metaphors of progress I had been given. Progress was a wave pulse. A line walked. Waypoints on trails. Finish lines or points scored. And yet every wave reflects. Every walk is a circle starting at home and ending at home. Every trail must be turned back upon in order to get to the car. Every race and competition is the crescendo of many more unheralded moments that include rest, recovery, inventory of what went well and what needs to be improved on, retraining, and peak performance in cycle.
What caused me to nod, to acknowledge as common sense, every time another circle was linearized to me?
As best I can tell this happened in my life due to how the main cultural currents of the moment conflate financial logic, economic logic, and meaning. Let me give you a paraphrasing of the collapsed syntax that I am normally presented with in sources ranging from pop songs, to counsel from friends, and the zeitgeist:
We can buy everything. Every precondition for happiness and wellbeing is within our purchasing power or our potential purchasing power if we work hard enough. Except the same zeitgeist acknowledges we cannot buy happiness itself. What are we missing?
Let’s examine that closely to understand how tightly the conflation of financial largesse with importance binds our sense of what’s possible.
Efficiency is Meaningless
An interview between Ezra Klein and Kyla Scanlon that aired on 7/8/2025 had both thinkers contorting themselves to say “There must be a There there” about the sums of money being traded in betting markets for minute behaviors. They both strained their voices to say the capital flows are so large they have to be meaningful even though the speculative asset itself is devoid of meaning its value triangulation is known to not measure meaning. Like how a CO2 sensor doesn’t measure light. We will get to financialization and speculation in recursion more in Part III.
Netflix also spent a quarter of a billion dollars (March 2025) on a flop, one that faded into obscurity immediately upon release, and is currently rated at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes. The top review reads as follows:
The Electric State is so transparently eager to satisfy as many demographics of viewers as possible that it proves its own message: that a world dependent on business interests and technological optimization dulls artistic potential and human ingenuity.
- Shirly Li, The Atlantic
I am not the only person pondering the relationship between financial logic and the domains of human meaning. Ms. Scanlon talked about friction and meaning directly. And IMDB lists over 1700 roles that worked on the aforementioned film alone. I bring this up because we miss something when we talk about building a business, or building wealth, or building anything that is primarily for someone else to buy. We graft “building,” an accretive act, onto a logic that prioritizes severability.
Economic efficiency presents an inherently destructive logic, not a constructive one. It has undeniable and great importance, but that importance is not synonymous with meaning making in the human experience.
And that stands in direct contrast to how the aspects of life that are cross-culturally reflected upon as being meaningful to the human experience are seemingly all accumulative rather than destructive.
That is what we normally miss. I do not espouse any “all-or-nothing” secondary conclusion from this. Your investment of time in reading this will not be stolen by conscripting your hopes of a more peaceful personal existence into an ideology or movement you cannot inhabit. This piece neither asks you to put down capitalism nor embrace Hippy or Luddite conclusions. Yet, there are still consequences that are worth highlighting when the zeitgeist conflates two important parts of life as miscible—sometimes to the point of being synonyms in efficient and meaningful—when they are actually adjacent and cannot mix by definition.
What follows
This piece, with the above acknowledgment of adjacency in hand, attempts to synthesize how to marry one’s economic choices to one's imagination for your days, months, years, decades, until the end. In other words: how one’s personal economics can match what one imagines what one’s life can be. Not just what one can own in one's life.
First, we will start with a brief examination of the differences between finances, economics, and meaning.
Second, we will conduct a brief literature review of how the Mobius Method connects various forms of contemporary thought together, each one contributing a portion of our synthesis.
Third, we will expand the definition of imagination—away from its usual connotations of whimsy or fantasy—toward its role as both the starting point and the recursive outcome of engagement. The goal is to render meaning-making a lived, accessible practice, rather than a vague or esoteric ideal.
Fourth, we will expand the definition of patronage as a means of conceptualizing how one might harmonize economic choices with your imagination.
And, fifth, I will provide examples of how I do this. I am experimenting so as to share that this is not just an abstraction but a lived reality – one that you can pick up or borrow from as you see fit.
Part II - Tweezing Definitions
Important vs. Meaningful
My first thesis that efficiency is meaningless can be summarized in an anecdote: reformatting a hard drive is different than the act of filling it.
Reformatting is efficient. It clears space, removes clutter, prepares for optimization. But it contains nothing. Meaning emerges from what is chosen, kept, revisited—what fills the drive over time. This contrast between clearing and accumulating isn’t just digital—it mirrors a broader tension between how we build meaning and how we optimize for efficiency.
While not exhaustive, a cross-disciplinary view of human meaning-making—from its biochemical underpinnings to its cultural expressions—consistently reflects patterns of cumulative iteration. In relationships growing. In habits blossoming into identity. In sentiment deepening over time. In caregiving generating closeness. In addictions metastasizing from gateways. In spirituality seeded from feeling-free intellectual premises. In physical recovery reclaiming acts of sovereignty. In epigenetics translating our lived experiences into the blueprints for our being. This orientation is antithetical to economic efficiency, which elevates disruption and discard over continuity—a contrast I hope to explore more deeply in future, more focused work.
Efficiency may still serve what we call “importance”—speed, scale, technical success—but that’s a different axis than meaning. Many things are important without being meaningful. And vice versa. With that in mind, it’s time to separate another conflation: economics and finance.
De-financializing a Useful Term
Economists in the 1980s coined the term “Pathway Dependent” to describe the forms of economic activity that were peculiar in that the cost of destroying the previous inefficient allocations exceeded the implicit costs of trudging along with them.
Just above, we invoked economic efficiency as a wave pulse wherein the instant a better allocation of resources was established it either directly out-competed or demonstrated a better method for other rational actors to adopt. Higher efficiency had literal potential energy to inspire creative-destructive behavior.
Yet, in rare cases it was so difficult to switch that a curiosity blossomed momentarily in university circles about these case studies that kept inefficient choices even once the better precedent was set. Their highest contrast study presents an intuitive example: the cost of tearing out a railroad network for a dimensional change exceeded the infuriating cost of dealing with transhipment. If it would take 70 years to recoup the investment in re-deploying thousands of miles of track to off-set the amount you lose per train in transaction costs, and you will be dead by then—then you may just deal with it. In economic terms it was irrational. In lived terms, it was real.
The concept turned into an academic backwater because it was descriptive not predictive when used to talk about the deployment of scarce resources. It was an economic historian’s lens on the past. It was interesting, relatable even.2 But the foundational promise of economics is to provide methodical frameworks for predicting what comes next—not for classifying what came before.
Yet these theorists gave us a term that does, in fact, describe the architecture of how we set goals, do work, contextualize outcomes, and repeat—when scarcity is treated as an adjacency rather than the psychological center of the loop. The way we form things as varied as habits, communities, addictions, spiritual attachments, sentimentality, identity, and other non-financial aspects of our lives are all pathway dependent. Pure forms of financial pathway dependence are rare, but they are incredibly common in other aspects of our lives.
As a corollary: the sunk cost fallacy does not apply to non-financial aspects of lived experience. Yes, meaning-making often involves material or monetary inputs—dates cost money; hobbies gather gear—but the experiences themselves are not fungible, and their value does not depend on optimal yield. In domains of engagement, repetition isn’t irrational—it’s constitutive. And yet, we’ve so deeply internalized the language of economic logic that continuing without promise of payoff reads to us as failure, or delusion, or risk miscalculated. Rarely do we stop to ask: what made us want to continue in the first place? What shaped the recursive loop that carried us to that threshold? The language of sunk cost pretends to diagnose irrational persistence, but it reveals more about the limits of financial framing than about the endeavor itself. When applied to meaning-making, the question is not ‘why persist when it doesn’t pay?’—it becomes ‘why build systems in which persistence only makes sense when it does?’
Take skydiving. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and weather-dependent. A canceled jump costs fuel, gear, travel. Financially, it’s a waste. Economically, it’s a misallocation. But in terms of engagement, it’s part of the loop: planning, adapting, responding, integrating. The experience that “didn’t happen” still builds toward the next one. That’s not fallacious. It’s meaningful.
This is not to say that one can skydive without scarce resources. Therefore economic decisions must still be made. However, if we take the non-intermicibless of efficiency and meaning into full consideration, then we should expect two distinct forms of engagement: one loop for the activity itself, and another for how to sustain it. The latter would be characterized by the manner and methods for developing financial robustness in your life and would be psychologically distinct from the systematic iteration on how to get better at your hobby. The robustness required to afford one’s chosen forms of meaning-making—or ballast, as this essay will later call it—has its own principles, personal rules, and iterative logic. It, too, resists perfection and requires the ability to metabolize fluctuation in yield. I suggest that miasma may emerge when these two non-miscible loops begin to dictate each other’s conclusions.
One may argue that time, our life span, is the ultimate scarce resource. Both cliché and academic utterances of opportunity cost espouse this. I do not disagree that our time here is finite. Given that finitude, however, it’s worth asking whether you're content to fill that time with the creative destruction of efficiency alone. The potentially pernicious logic efficiency deploys into our lives is that it is better to reformat the harddrive repeatedly while relegating the hope of filling it with something worthwhile to a residual byproduct—an outcome defended only as a secondary concern.
Therefore efficiency is important. It is a powerful tool for understanding how we deploy scarce resources. Yet it is antithetical in modality to how we accumulate—and especially how we accumulate meaning—a thing that, by definition, grows with repetition, iteration, acceptance of parameters, building off of them and not creatively destroying them. Meaning is pathway dependent. It is in this way that efficiency is meaningless.
Life needs money. How much?
We teased apart the difference between importance and meaningfulness. We now need to tease apart the difference between finances and economics.
Finances are simple. They deal with money—how much you have, how much you need, and how best to accumulate or preserve it. But economics is something else entirely. It isn’t specifically about money; it’s about behavior—about how people make decisions under scarcity, how they assign value, how they navigate trade-offs. It is why so many micro-economic surveys seem more akin to psychology questionnaires. And it is why, in the abstract, stock pricing tutorials or a savings plan would seem totally different from both other categories of thought. Finance asks, ‘How much do I need?’ Economics asks, ‘What am I optimizing for?’ The difference is subtle but fundamental. Financial logic tells you to maximize salary, to scale a business, to prioritize liquidity and returns. But economics, as a decision-making science, reveals that more isn’t always better, that efficiency has costs, that value—as the individual thinks of it—often resists simple measurement. A financially optimal life might be one that endlessly compounds wealth. An economically optimal life, in contrast, might be one that recognizes when enough is enough.
We tend to treat economics as a money discipline, but that’s a fairly recent compression—an artifact of how thoroughly financial logic has absorbed the vocabulary of scarcity. If you imagine three towers—finance, economics, and meaning-making—you’d be forgiven for thinking of economics as the midpoint. But that’s not quite right. Finance and meaning-making are both load-bearing systems. Economics, in its classical form, wasn’t a tower at all—it was a construction line. Dotted, provisional, spatial. A story pole architects might use to map the span between two structural masses. It wasn’t meant to carry weight on its own. It was meant to hold proportion, tension, dynamic dialog between the other two.
This isn’t just metaphor. For most of its intellectual history, economics was closer to moral philosophy than mathematics. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill—none of them mistook money for meaning. Scarcity could be land, labor, time, religious sanction, reproductive capacity, proximity to ports, or spiritual peace. The generalist economist—the one who asked, “What do we want?” and “What might we give up to get it?”—was always working in plural forms of value. But over the course of the twentieth century, that plurality thinned. Under monetarism, financialization, and a broad, post-war cultural consensus on liquidity as virtue, money replaced other scarcities as the predominating variable not by decree but by drift. The generalist economist became the macroeconomist, then the political economist, then the social economist. Greater specificity in job titles connoted not increased clarity, but the slow epistemological drift of generalist economics toward the fringes—political economy, social economy, environmental economy—where non-financial scarcities were allowed to survive only under specialization. This culminates in scarcity collapsing into its most exchangeable form—money—and the general economist actually means someone who dissects all behavior the most specifically, not the most generally. And so economics, once a grammar of judgment, became a justification layer for finance.
Even behavioral economics—often seen as the subfield most attuned to real human variance—owes its rise to this collapse. Behavioral economics didn’t gain traction by resisting financial logic. Nor did it rise because we had developed tools to measure every kind of scarcity. It rose because money had already become the only scarcity that episomelogically mattered. It gained traction because money had become so totalized as the predominant variable that the primacy of price could be proxy for most all behavior. We did not solely get more sophisticated; rather we capitulated to a reduction of complexity and called it “sophistication.” It took the inscrutable individual and rendered them almost entirely modelable—not through empathy, but through the assumption that money was their primary interface with the world and elasticity or inelasticity of demand could account for almost any deviation.
And now we live in that assumption. We try to span the space between finance and meaning with nothing but intuition and guilt. The economic construction line—what used to help us evaluate fit, proportion, scale of trade-off—is either gone or silently enforcing financial grammar. We ask ourselves not whether a choice fits, but whether it will compute—to a bank, to a spreadsheet, to the panopticon’s gaze of someone who’s figured out money better than us. Meaning and money start leaning toward each other, trying to close the distance unaided, like two stone towers drifting out of plumb. Without ballast, they lean. Without a construction line to guide proportion—economics, that is, or what used to be the grammar of judgment—they begin to tilt inward, like two Pisan towers, each made unstable by the other’s lean.
Ballast is the stabilizer of each tower—not the bridge itself, but the mass that keeps each tower upright so the bridge can eventually be drawn. Without ballast—material ballast, psychological ballast, epistemic ballast—we ask our lives to hold up under pure verticality: meaning untethered from cost, or cost untethered from context. Either one topples. But the quiet mantra in the morning, the repeated savings plan, the accumulating acts that create ballast for either end doesn’t create the span between them. That relationship is where personal economics steps in. Where our financial and meaningful recursion loops are held in practice, in tension, in dialog.
We don’t need to abandon economics. We need to reopen it—to let it become what it was before it became an unconnected cantilever from one of the towers rather than a bridge. Economics is not a manual for profit, but a mapping practice. It is not a prescription, but a tension-reading tool for the individual. A dotted line that makes space for fit. And, in the case of this essay, it is your fit.
This isn’t an argument against financial prudence or accumulation—far from it. It’s simply a recognition that neither financial optimization nor economic efficiency are synonymous with meaning, and conflating the three terms can lead to decisions that maximize one at the expense of the others.
None of this is an indictment of wealth, nor a romanticization of its absence. The privilege financial freedom does afford can give one the luxury of stepping back, but there’s no guarantee that one will do so. Conversely, scarcity can sometimes clarify what’s actually meaningful—but only if there’s room to reflect rather than merely survive. This isn’t about prescribing an ideal financial condition, but about acknowledging that neither wealth nor deprivation guarantees meaning, and conflating financial maximization with purpose is a mistake available at every level.
Rather, if this piece recommends an ideal financial condition, then it is neither zero nor infinite. I recommend a total that is much harder to determine and—even though it would be a real number in the mathematical sense—it may still be non-finite as a recommendation. Speaking for myself: I recommend enough for me to reconcile my imagination of my own life.
Therefore enough is not a number. It isn’t answering how much? It’s a grammar of justification. And in the absence of a shared grammar, it must be your own, my own. Enough is a personal economics of wellness.
The Accidental Long Route: The Everyday Consequences of Conflation
There are many ways we optimize our lives for the short term. Yet Anna Lempke in Dopamine Nation (2021), The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi (2013), the works of Alfred Adler of the Vienna School of psychology (1925), Atomic Habits by James Clear (2018) and The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) all speak to a similar set of small eddy currents in life that, over time, have big impacts in our lives. However, our implied preference from the logic of economic efficiency—for optionality and liquidity over long-form persistent structures—is the exact opposite, countermanding modality of this cycle. It is my intention to demonstrate that these different writers, in their key works over the last 100 years, all speak to different aspects of the same issue: that we build meaning, and the capacity to be ethical to ourselves–which I will demonstrate is the same thing—through a cycle of inventory, goal-setting, deep work, assessment, integration, and repetition.
Economic efficiency, as a decision-making paradigm, doesn’t just prioritize speed or optimization—it inherently assumes that the most valuable path is the one that maximizes output with minimal waste. In financial terms, this often makes sense: a higher salary, a liquidity event, or a rapid career climb all seem like self-evident goods. But what happens when the efficiency imperative forces a trade-off with meaning (read: long-form iterative structures)? In industries like tech, job-hopping is an expected feature, not a bug—companies structure their incentives around short-term retention, knowing employees will cycle out within two years. This maximizes individual salary growth but erodes individual continuity as well as institutional memory. Entrepreneurial success, as dictated by merger and acquisition events, often makes the pursuit of a meaningful project synonymous with selling it—and walking away. There is no other planned liquidity event for either the founders or the seed-round shareholders that made the endeavor possible. Even outside of work, this logic creeps into our smallest habits: why walk when you can run? Why linger when you can optimize? Efficiency doesn't ask what should come next—it simply assumes that more time, more money, or more optimization is inherently valuable. But meaning isn't found in the empty space efficiency leaves behind.
Here are two relatable anecdotes about meaning accumulating in a pathway dependent fashion:
At a certain point in adulthood we realize that any person could be our life partner if we chose to mutually accept and keep coming back to each other wholly. Adler would describe this as the lifestyle of “me” finally becoming the lifestyle of “us”. It is something that you choose to live with and hold rather than expect it to hit you forcefully. That sounds unromantic to the uninitiated. It sounds blissful to the one that’s ready. No vital truth-telling here: neither dating apps nor casual IRL interaction is optimized for that. It just is.
My dog is afraid of cars so he can’t walk with me daily. We have to commute to special places, which is the exact opposite of how I like to organize my exercise. I have to fondle his shit most days. I squeeze foul smelling glandular secretions out of his anus so they don’t leak on my bed in the night. Sometimes I wonder if I am even doing a good job by him. Sometimes I feel like breaking down because of how inconvenient his need for attention is or how he loses his mind when I try to shut a door for completely normal reasons like momentary sound isolation. Yet our bond grows with each cry. With each bonehead way he scrapes his knee. With every time he snores next to me. With every time I fireman carry him. With every, abundant, smile. The meaning is in the years till now and the years to come. We mutually accept and mutually iterate on each other with new training, toys, treats, compromises, gear, sticks… The relationship grows.
Here is another personal anecdote highlighting purposeful inefficiency as a design choice. I am planning something wildly unconventional. I share it as an example of how, upon encountering an everyday compromise between efficiency and meaning, I am choosing a third path and doing so in order to preserve my access to new experiences that I want to keep accumulating:
I have come to love cooking with whole foods for most every meal. I have optimized the most flavorful, lowest active time cooking methods to integrate the practice into part of my day. It is a vital part in how I seek my daily engagement with my weight, my cardiovascular health, my sense of novelty, my daily dopamine cycling, and accomplishment. Yet, if I got a conventional job, it might be one of the first parts of my life, two years in the making, I would be encouraged—with a shrug—to abandon. I would stop accumulating new experiences around it in favor of a healthful subscription kit, or take out, or a corporate job with a high-quality cafeteria or other easier foods where ingredient modification and flavor-stacking was outsourced to others. I would go back to being a critic of what I ate rather than a creator and curator. My book scanner and home server of cookbook pdfs that I saved up for and learned to code would become obsolete. We will conclude this piece with more about how I plan to make the premises in this text into a lived experience rather than just an abstraction, but I will start here by sharing that my dreams include building a modular, mobile, solar-powered kitchen that, like a slow-moving line following robot, brings my kitchen with me to each of my work stations in the desert. I want to experiment with rammed earth pavers for the road. I want to base the mobility suite on available off-the-shelf hub motors. I’m willing to use what is meaningful to me (continuing to personally iterate with food) as the design parameters for my economic decision making. It is a response to the paradox that society tacitly permits you to cook when you are either struggling or successful, but in between, the cultural current discourages it—not because cooking is impractical, but because it conflicts with the expectation that cooking is a way to spend your time that you must earn back.
These anecdotes also elucidate how common meaning is. It can be found wherever we do something repeatedly, have goals, iterate, engage in deep work… you get the idea. Anywhere you do something and don’t stop doing it.
Depending on what it is you enjoy doing, which experiences you want to keep applying The Mobius Method to, stopping them in the name of efficiency could actually turn out ot the the long route. However ironic it may be, “the long route” is the opposite return on investment compared to what the notion of efficiency promises.
Avoid Unintentional Autotomy
I wanted to call this section, “Don’t Be a Self-Amputating Lizard”. Autotomy, not to be confused with autonomy, is “self-amuputation.” If our recursive loops are accretive and our sense of meaning making is tied to our engagement with them over time, then be mindful of the cost of severance.
Many already attempt to experiment and iterate. Perhaps there are two major flows of people who do this: first there are those people who carve out time for hobbies, personal projects, adult play, or alternative pursuits, and, second, there are those whose major form of engagement from the ages of 18 to 65 is in how they manage their compromises with capitalism itself. The former is often fragmented; the populations of the like-minded are small and justification for your choices to carve out time or move for a relationship feels as small as you are. These efforts are often fragile, abandoned the moment they conflict with other economic, usually financial, imperatives. The second current sweeps far more people up within it. It confounds fungibility of cash with the idea of derisking long-term cyclical/meaningful pursuits (as in that relationship could have lasted a lifetime, and therefore been iterated on much more, but this two year tech company engagement is less risky because it sets up the heretofore unrealized opportunity for more two year engagements at higher rates of remuneration). This jousting with the conditions in which we work is common enough to go unnamed, or if named, then de-fanged in terms such as “work-life balance” disguising in plain sight that the major fulcrum of life that most of us engage with, iterate around, and compromise with in long-form is how to make money. Without a framework that legitimizes and integrates the “life” part of ‘work-life balance’ into daily life—one that metabolizes iteration within our economic reality rather than exiling it to a sacrificial side pursuit—these other choices remain vulnerable to erosion. The problem isn’t that these pursuits lack value; it’s that they are rarely valorized highly enough to accept them as design parameters in our subsequent decision making. We have yet to construct a paradigm that resists efficiency’s vacuous pull—one that instead asserts, unapologetically, that meaning-making is an end in itself. The challenge, then, is not just resisting efficiency’s logic but designing a realistic, non-utopian life where meaning-making isn’t an afterthought—it’s structurally embedded.
Between Whelms in the Land of Topia
Non-utopian ideas of how to live within the current version of late-stage capitalism are rare but not unheard of. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport comes to mind. His advice is a less polemical version of the “quiet quitting” movement of the early 2020’s. He says: do less. However, totalizing, often polarizing reductions of alternative lifestyles are even more common. It is easier to roll our eyes at contemporary hippies, for example, than it is to take inventory of our own states of being. Our personal fatigue about the inconveniences of the financialized culture we live in is difficult to talk about without either a long-form retort (such as this one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 624 page New York 2140) or an invocation of a different economic ideology such as socialism or communism. It becomes even harder to communicate in context when our gripes grow to the proportions of aberrations or injustices. Our thoughts can come as half-hearted whispers to the like-minded, Potemkin wishfulness, or full-throated anger. At the bar, at the dinner table, at the union hall… it does not usually matter. They all seem similar to a “grass is greener” fallacy, and often hinge on some kind of simplification that if this “one thing” were different we would feel better.
I have already stated that the counterpoint is equally bleak and undesirable to me. I summarize it as an unlabelled, under articulated, all-to-common form of meaning-making that late-stage capitalism has in abundance: the long-form iteration that most of us engage in is our compromises with capitalism itself. The most consistent kind of bonds we make in the middle part of life seems to be the quotidian exchange in which we inquire about each other’s work weeks, agree they are unsatisfactory, acknowledge it’s what we must do, share what we are iterating on to cope, and we conclude by recognizing each others’ ache. Sometimes we are hoping the dining experience you are sharing during this conversation is novel enough to mutually ameliorate the mendacity gnawing at you both from the inside like a termite colony of the soul. But most of the time it’s just fries and ranch served in a plastic cup.
I am tired. I am fatigued by how the idea of the optimal allocation of resources either frames other forms of meaning making besides the above as irrational or principled to the point of rebelliousness. Like I must either protest or conform with my every dollar or my every hour. I am fatigued by the characterization of deference to what I find meaningful being the domain of the brave. Or of the crazy. Both people and artificial intelligences have told me that peeling off the dominant current is so perilous that I must be standing for something. They also tell me I may set myself up for a lifetime of defending my choices. Matthew B. Crawford, another graduate of my alma mater and the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, turned defending a career digression into a career unto itself. I have seen other, more everyday social media personalities similarly choose to endlessly defend their choices post after post—basically as a career choice—because fencing with whataboutism is the best form of algorithmic uplift they could devise on the platforms of their choosing. It is exhausting for me to watch. Every moment of parasocial connection is overwhelmed by five moments of parasocial fatigue as I watch a single person fight like a bear in a medieval ring. They were never designed to win. I see this need for constant defense as a trap.
There is no circumstance in which having more money, more optionality, more efficiency is not attractive in a vacuum. Yet my second thesis—that human meaning making is engagement itself—resists the need for the same long-form justification as thinkers such as Crawford have done. I respect his conclusions so much I even tried to make a pilgrimage to visit his motorcycle shop in 2011. My emails went unanswered and my drive to Richmond turned into little more than a lost adolescent’s weekend excursion. I have read his other books, and his conclusions in The World Beyond Your Head are deeply similar to those in this piece but they stop short of where I am heading. Crawford identified skilled manual labor as the form of engagement that the world was missing. It was inline with a cultural moment that foisted “craft” as the marketers’ nom-de-jour. One that eventually diluted his otherwise interesting arguments – as now craftspeople are skeptical about describing their work as “craft.” This has been due to overuse. His book concludes with an elaborate clockmaker’s workshop serving as metaphor for our need for loci for our engagement. This contrasts to how I say it is not the skilled labor but the engagement itself that is architecturally important. While skilled labor is one form of deep work that can be enacted in step two of the Mobius Method, it is also not the only one. Further still, step two of the Mobius Method, deep work on the task at hand, is only one fourth of the cycle. Yet, it is seemingly the only one we have not lost sight of over time.
In summary: The individual psychology of engagement is not scalable as the individual is not scalable, so I am not advocating you change the system. It does not require defense either because only you need to determine what you wish to engage with. I am advocating for something simple: reframe engagement as the core value. The goal isn’t to say, “This is meaningful until I sell it, until I outgrow it, until something better comes along.” Instead, it’s to say, “The act of engagement is meaningful, full stop. The outputs may change, the specifics may evolve, but the act remains central.”
You may ask, “Well how the hell do I figure out how to do what I imagine? I have these other responsibilities!” Engaging with that question is not a flaw or a short circuit to the Mobius Method. It is the first thing to engage with and iterate upon. It does not take utopia. It does not require you to be overwhelmed or underwhelmed. You are not lost. You are just beginning.
Part III – The Limits of “Imagination”
The last section proposed that meaning emerges when we align our economic choices with our imagination—specifically, with the activities, habits, and forms of work we want to keep returning to. But the word imagination, as it’s commonly used, isn’t built for the level of synthesis implied here.
Engagement, as I’ve defined it, accretes to the individual. Imagination, by contrast, is often treated as whimsical, fleeting, and detached from the gossamer threads of “utility,” “importance,” or “meaning.” It’s a spark—casting the actor as a spark plug, not an engine. A fantasy—casting the imaginer as a tween poet, not Simón Bolívar. But that framing won’t get us where we’re going.
I’m not talking about picturing yourself on a beach. Or a one-off act of envisioning a better version of your current life. Or mistaking imagination for curation—where selecting from a pre-made set of options feels like progress simply because it resolves indecision. This isn’t a judgment against choosing well-made things; sometimes the right option already exists, and choosing it is the most efficient way to get back to the work that matters. But what’s often missing in the invocation of “imagination” is the moment before the choice: the part where we take real inventory, articulate what we actually need, and imagine the difference between what's offered and what we’d choose if we could begin from scratch—or even just imagine what that would mean. That capacity—to discern that gap, to stay in it long enough to re-enter the loop of engagement—is what I mean by imagination. Not even the engineered whimsy of Walt Disney’s Imagineering quite fits.
What I am describing is recursive. It’s a loop in which one act of imagining—when paired with effort, reflection, and repetition—becomes the seed for the next. It’s not just fantasy. It’s a compounding process that carries the embodied memory of earlier imaginings forward into each new cycle. The way compound interest works. Or sedimentation. Or selective breeding in a garden.
Dictionary.com currently defines “imagination” as3:
The faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.
The action or process of forming such images or concepts.
The faculty of producing ideal creations consistent with reality, as in literature.
A mental creation, often a fanciful one.
The ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness.
(Psychology) The power of reproducing images stored in memory, or recombining them to solve problems.
(Kantian) The synthesis of sensory data into coherent objects.
(Archaic) A plan, scheme, or plot.
Not one of these definitions captures what I’m pointing to: the unbounded, time-linked structure of engagement as it builds on itself.
So, I offer a ninth:
A recursive structure through which engagement produces not only outputs, but new imaginative inputs—refined and reshaped by action, reflection, and repetition. A forward loop between what is and what could be.
This isn’t merely wordplay. Language becomes so overfamiliar at the center of lived life that precision gets slippery. I could invent a new term to counteract this phenomenon rather than rely on “imagination”—projective alignment, situated imagination, the felt shape of a life—and those might even work better. But we’ll stay with imagination, because it’s what we reach for, colloquially and culturally, when we try to describe the invisible bridge to what we want but haven’t yet built.
The Architecture of Severability: From Cosmology to Craft
But before we move into practice, it’s worth asking: why has this form of imagination become so hard to hold? Why do recursive structures feel outdated, even quaint? Earlier, we touched on how we are often taught that the scientific revolution was a rupture—a lightning bolt of insight that dispelled the fog of myth. And to some extent, it was. But what we rarely ask is what form of thinking it actually introduced. It’s easy to say we moved from theology to empiricism, from old learning to new learning. But the deeper shift wasn’t just in what we studied—it was in the way inquiry itself was structured. The scientific revolution didn’t invent reflection, recursion, or long-form discernment. Those patterns were already embedded in older systems—ritual, myth, communal repetition, embodied craft. It did not even just redirect us from inquiring about the unobservable to the objective — as we are told in history class. What changed was the directional logic: from loop to line. From livable coherence to knowledgeable extraction. What had once been circular became escalatory. What had once oriented towards the features of human interiority and thusly built to be returned became something to “learn, master, and move on from.” We didn’t just abandon interiority; we re-coded it as inefficiency.
Another way to frame this isn’t to pit the supposed conceit of ancient humans—imagining themselves the center of the cosmos—against the brave empiricists who later dislodged that notion. Rather, it may be that the human mind—the only processor we had—could only ever build cosmologies that mirrored its own psychological tenets. Whether the origin stories of early religions are historically accurate or apocryphal matters less than the functions they performed: pattern recognition, deep work, integration of outcome, tolerance for ambiguity, and repetition as a stabilizing force. These weren’t just metaphors. They were cognitive infrastructure. Their veneration across time may stem less from belief in sky gods or beasts of Babylon than from their ability to scaffold coherence—epigenetically, evolutionarily, experientially. What they preserved wasn’t just story, but a livable shape for complexity. They made it possible to loop back, to stay inside uncertainty without collapse. And in that sense, they weren’t primitive. They were precise.
This drift from loop to line rewarded a particular kind of severability. In the name of clarity, we began to isolate variables, reduce the noise, and assume perfect models. Chemists to this day laugh at jokes that start with “You need to assume a perfectly spherical cow.” That cleanness had utility. But it also created a recursive blind spot: the belief that the most fruitful truths to pursue were those that could be studied without contradiction or entanglement. As our esteem for this kind of knowledge grew, so did the courage required to maintain belief in what could not be severed. Joseph Ratzinger warned that as the “canons of verifiability” narrowed, belief would no longer feel native—it would have to be chosen. Adler might say it even more precisely: that courage, a relational act, becomes newly necessary when the self risks alienation for affirming what the world has deemed inadmissible. When knowledge becomes synonymous with certainty, belief becomes an act of defiance. Or worse—eccentricity.
Giambattista Vico saw this tectonic drift beginning in the early 18th century. In The New Science (1725), he wrote:
“Man makes himself the measure of all things. But he comes to know the things he makes better than those made by nature or by God, and hence he begins to believe he can only truly know what he himself has made.”
This was not celebration, but a premonition. Vico feared that what couldn’t be made—and thus remade, manipulated, modeled—would fall out of our ontological vocabulary. He understood that as our sense of truth converged with what could be built, tested, or traced, the domain of the unmade—love, meaning, myth, belonging—would start to seem not wrong, but irrelevant. The world of entanglement would not be disproven. It would be reclassified as pre-theoretical. We would forget that recursion was the native shape of coherence, and start to view the cyclical as a vestige. Progress would be imagined as linear, even when the terrain of the human had never been that tidy.
I didn’t realize any of this at the time. I just knew I was growing up in a secular household that had no mentors for how to carry meaning forward without numbing or severing. I had curiosity, but no method. Values, but no architecture. In the absence of any sanctioned framework for integration, I began to build my own. The practice I would later name the Mobius Method wasn’t an academic project. It was a prosthetic—designed to help me remain coherent in a system that confused clarity with legibility, and speed with insight. When I first encountered Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, I mistook it as a permission slip: an argument that manual labor could be philosophical. That I wasn’t alone. And I wasn’t. But what I didn’t realize then is that his work on craft was only one entry point into a larger effort—mine and others’—to reclaim recursion itself. To acknowledge the utility of linearity while refusing the rhetorical graft that allows it to colonize circularity. Whether by accident or design.
When I recently read Crawford’s reflections on Ratzinger and Vico, I recognized the shape. They had arrived from philosophy and faith; I had come from economics and endurance. But we had both walked long enough to notice the canyon between the knowable and the meaningful—and the courage required to keep crossing it. This realization doesn’t make the Mobius Method authoritative. It makes it legible. It is not a novelty, but a restatement of something older than the rupture. A scaffolding to hold the loops we were never meant to abandon. And in that recognition—in seeing a private survival mechanism as part of a centuries-long effort to reconcile recursion with modern life—I stopped feeling eccentric. I began to feel rooted.
This drift was not pernicious. In its time it served the cause of livability as well as could be expected. It was not just abstract—it shows up in the very materials we now prefer to use. Vico’s conclusions can as easily be applied to the iterative engineering that went into the creation of synthetic materials — many of which have properties that exceed—sometimes vastly exceed—the limitations of their most proximal natural analogs. Take a few examples: Concrete has the structure and compressive strength of stone, but none of the natural variations that would be aberrations in homogeneity that could be the failure point leading to collapse. We may like to look at the stone hedgerows of rural Scotland and Normandy, but would be loath to build one or to contemplate the spiders within. The smelting of steel created an industry that continuously iterated on the abundance of iron oxides and carbon to make an seemingly endless number of permutations of a single class of substance rather than the geographic need to search for vanishingly unlikely sources of those combinations in nature. It’s human-made quality begat its ability to be known and its prolificacy simultaneously. On the smallest scale: MDF is easier to laser than the wood it is made up of because its manufacture removes the idiosyncrasies of wood grain as a parameter that must be understood and worked with. Striations of any kind are natural in sedimentary stone and biological systems like wood rings, yet in certain circumstances we work in homogenous materials and re-build striations for effect as with damascus steel and decorative rammed earth. To want to build using the old ways ends up taking the same courage that Ratzinger and Adler described. It requires one either have the personal economics of this essay—or this courage that is the only emotional substitute when integrated personal rules for economic decisions are absent—to engage with the less efficient material. Especially when one’s goals exceed the limitations of veneers such as beach rocks mortared onto cinderblocks or flagstone as factory surface treatment. Inventory, deep work, integration, and repetition on intricate materials would be the exact loop of life-affirmation Crawford points out in Shop Class as Soul Craft and The World Beyond Your Head. But, as I stated earlier the engagement loop and imagination do not have to be limited to manual work. Material constraints naturally guide recursion, which will be further elucidated below, but that does not make it the only or most valid domain in which recursion is possible.
Imagination Continued
Now that we’ve reframed imagination as both the input and the output of engagement, we can move forward. We can talk about how to enact it. The Mobius Method contains four steps, and the thinkers I mentioned earlier—James Clear, Dr. Anna Lembke, Alfred Adler, and Bill W.—shed light on one or more of them.
Their work helps us trace the shape of imagination as a lived experience, not a static idea.
The string of moments: James Clear
Clear gives us the machinery but not the map. He lays out how to build a habit loop—inventory, behavior, reinforcement, repeat—but his framework is agnostic about why you would loop that habit in the first place. His system is tactical, even elegant, but it's still downstream of whatever goals the user brings to it. His preamble and introduction range in topics from academic achievement to business outcomes to international sports. His work gives you the steering column and pedals, by tying habit repetition to intermediate identity formation, but doesn’t ask what road you’re on or where you want to go.
And that’s where you start to see the Mobius Method as not just a cycle but a framework for orienting cycles. Clear slots neatly into steps two and four: the doing and the repeating. He gives tactical weight to those actions, shows how to reinforce them, and validates that small behaviors shape identity over time. But without a deeper sense of step one (inventory) or step three (integration), his framework risks becoming a kind of self-reinforcing treadmill—efficient, but not inherently meaningful.
It’s not the size of the friction, it’s how you use it: Dr. Anna Lemke
Dr. Lemke sharpens the edges of what Clear leaves soft. Where he says, “make it easier,” Lemke says, “easy might be killing you.” Her lens reframes the inventory phase not as a calm self-assessment, but as a crucial act of honesty and discernment in a saturated environment where our instincts have been hijacked by engineered dopamine loops. She turns the everyday question—“what do I want to do again tomorrow?”—into a loaded but simple arithmetical confessional. It’s simple because accurately counting your current state is easy; loaded because we often do not want to.
That gives the Mobius Method a vital second layer. Clear helps you iterate. Lemke makes sure the thing you’re iterating isn’t a trap disguised as progress. She points out that loops begun in inaccuracy can spiral. Her references to honesty are not moralistic, and they are not framed as “radical.” They are diagnostic. She brings a physiological weight to the question of where the loop begins. Her work also bridges into integration by reminding us: not every form of pleasure is sustainable, not every feedback loop is regenerative. Some loops cannibalize your attention, your baseline, your life.
And friction, to her, becomes sacred—not punitive. It’s a sign you might be reclaiming your own cycle from the preloaded ones being sold to you.
It also introduces a hospitable proto-moral edge to the Mobius Method—one that stands up to the expectations of the contemporary, secular moment in which we live. She demedicalizes mental health, perhaps creating space for a new Public Mental Health, akin in scale to Public Health, by postulating a point in saturation at which phenomenological reporting—as required by the DSM—begins to break down. When we can move frictionlessly from one dopaminergic activity to another without ever reaching an overabundance of any one behavior, the statistical basis of diagnosis fractures.
Thereby, she doesn’t tell you what you should do; she creates a container in which you might start asking that of yourself with clearer eyes. She holds a mirror to the biochemical patterns, shows you the shape of your own behavior in the era of frictionless dopamine, and then gently invites you to take inventory—not with blame, but with care.
So instead of prescribing norms, she delineates the terrain in which norms might meaningfully arise.
lifestyle vs. Lifestyle: Alfred Adler
Clear and Lemke, taken together, can generate what feels like a lifestyle: coherent habits, managed impulses, some degree of friction tolerance. But it’s Adler who injects the deep intentionality needed to align that lifestyle with something beyond the self. And more importantly, with a self in context—a self in relation.
Adler is described as the “Missing Giant” of The Vienna School of Psychology along with Freud and Jung. His own wikipedia page describes how his lack of prodigiousness as a writer—he spent his time as a lecturer, teacher, and practitioner—left a hole in history that has been filled by adherents without attribution. That same page quotes another historian that thinks Adler may have the rueful distinction of being the most cribbed, least attributed thinker in history.
Adler’s breaking from Freud and Jung occurred on multiple levels, both personally and theoretically. The most fundamental difference in theory was a postulation that individual psychology could be goal oriented rather than trauma oriented. This leaves room for an internal, potentially subconscious dialectic between one’s past and one’s perceived future that the other thinkers did not adhere to. Freud and Jung presented a more fatalist drawing upon past psychological experiences as the foundations for future ones – i.e. trauma begets reaction. That obviously had less connective tissue between where the individual was and where the individual wanted to go. Adler presented that goals in context beget action. This was Freud’s etiology vs. Adler’s teleology, respectively.
Next, Adler postulated there are three core life tasks that no other could do for the individual — namely work, friendship, and love. This was not work in terms of employment, but rather the iterative discovery of how we relate to others. Koga and Ichimi, two disciples of Adler’s who levied his teachings in a modern context in The Courage to Be Disliked (2013) extrapolated as far as to say that all problems are interpersonal relationship problems, which is is a bold, seemingly paradoxical introduction to a subject coined as Individual Psychology. Yet, Adler’s work here describes the individual’s momentary, current psychological state of indefinite length as being a Lifestyle. It is not static, but it is resilient. And, with inventory, support—but with no other person doing the task for the individual—one’s lifestyle can change.
It is this deeply intentional work of identifying life tasks and pinpointing what is precluding an individual from completing them that bridges the contemporary use of lifestyle—an aesthetic arrangement of choices or a flexible consumer identity—with the deeper, but still related work of a teleological unfolding of self in service to life tasks that inherently involve others. The acts of accepting, finding, exploring, searching, affirming, farming, building—in a word, being—in one’s cajoling of the one’s life tasks is one’s Lifestyle. And when those life tasks—work, love, friendship—are pursued consciously, the individual becomes legible to themselves in a way that reinforces the cycle rather than fracturing it.
Adler closes the loop and describes what it is that the individual discovers through engagement: an unimposed, self-guided moral clarity. It’s this intentionality—and the perception that the individual is capable, not helpless, in bearing both the responsibility and the privilege of being intentional—that Clear and Lemke’s frameworks orbit but never fully enact.
To truly understand Adler’s long shadow, though, we have to look at the idea that made him both indispensable and, in his time, inconvenient: Community Feeling.
Babies, Bathwater & Community Feeling
The early twentieth century that Adler was operating in had a stomach for some metaphors and had less of an appetite for others. Adler’s idea—that subjective goal-setting can manifest in objective action—was fully absorbed into disciplines like Rational Actor Theory and organizational science by century’s end. Its metabolization into common thought was so complete that an enumerated framework for iterative goal-setting can seem unremarkable today.
On the other hand, some of Adler’s statements—specifically those that postulated that happiness was ultimately derived from a subjective sense of being well substantiated, of subjectively felt community belonging—seemed metaphysical or unrigorous by standards that predated the advent of evolutionary psychology as a field of study by more than half a century.
The fledgling intelligentsia of the psychological schools were trying to transform their work from the providence of philosophy and theology into science, and therefore found his idea of meta-cognitive connection unacceptable. Twenty First Century evolutionary psychology, which studies the social patterns and individual phenomenology of species ranging from invertebrates to humans, has far less difficulty talking about togetherness and its real psychiatric and psychological outcomes on wellness. It is now common knowledge cited by school children that humans are “social beings.” Yet Adler’s contemporaries wanted, needed, finite provable mechanisms of relaying their study of the subjective into the objective and therefore selectively rejected Adler’s “Community Feeling”.
The Vienna School predated the discovery of dopamine by 25 years, and it would take nearly a century before dopamine cycling—as described by Clear and Lemke—entered therapeutic practice with any ontological clarity. Therefore the same goal of transforming subjective experience to objective understanding that ultimately resulted in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual Version 5 (DSM V) that any mental health patient knows also condemned any reliance on unprovable metaphors like “Community Feeling” as it was anathema to the stated goals of the field’s thought leaders at that time.
Perhaps uncoincidentally to this piece—an essay which might be described as a missing “economic theory of wellness”—Adler’s metaphors weren’t out of step with the moment so much as adjacent to where fledgling institutional psychology was allowing itself to go. Keynes while writing The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) in the same academic generation used the term “animal spirits” to describe how human emotions and psychology influence economic decisions. That book went on to form the bedrock of early 20th century political economy and influenced the lives of billions of people to this day.
Adler used a metaphor to describe the translation of a subjective reality in a decision-making discipline that wanted to wean itself of metaphors. Keynes used a metaphor in a decision-making discipline that did not have that prejudice, and became one of the Mt. Rushmore-type thinkers of his science well before Behavioral Economics tried to synthesize finance and psychology more microscopically.
Cognitive Load Shedding: Bill W.
Taken together, Clear, Lemke, and Adler give us a powerful model for how imagination becomes real: how habits take shape, how discernment anchors repetition, and how meaning is made through intentional alignment with life’s core tasks. But something is still missing. What happens when the system works—when the sculpture of one’s life is shaped—and it becomes too heavy to carry alone? When habits bend, relationships fray, when it’s no one’s fault but it’s still hard? What do we do when the very structure of engagement begins to accumulate too much weight?
That’s where Bill W. enters—not with a new model, but with a necessary coda. His contribution isn’t in opposition to the others, but in completion of them. He offers a secular method for cognitive load-shedding as deliberate and elegant as Clear’s habit loop. Through communal unburdening, recursive inventory, ritualized repetition, and shared meaning-making, he extends the Mobius Method into terrain the other thinkers only gesture toward: how to lay something down without disengagement. How to stop carrying without dropping the thread.
The phrase “cognitive load shedding” may be novel here. It blends two well-known domains: “load shedding” in electrical grid management, and “cognitive load” from educational theory and working memory science. Both involve limits—of energy, of attention—and the need to protect essential function under strain. But the metaphorical combination of the two? No results on Google.
Clear, Lemke, and Adler each offer variations on the recursive loop: ongoing experimentation, inventory, integration, repetition. Taken literally, it’s a lifelong project. And how exhausting would that be without somewhere to set things down?
At its simplest, accretive engagement sounds like a prescription for constant accumulation. Yet cognitive load theory reminds us: working memory is finite. Once we exceed it, we must either offload to long-term memory—or lose it altogether. Addiction specialists debug the externalities of another common coping mechanism: numbing. And though rarely discussed, there’s always a third, quieter option: continue accumulating and go insane. That, too, is a form of engagement. Just not a sustainable one.
Long-term memory, as commonly understood, resembles a storage unit. It houses engrammatic objects: facts, impressions, scenes. We imagine memory as static and spatial, and this model is upheld by popular archetypes. Both the BBC and CBS versions of Sherlock Holmes in the 2010s reenacted scenes about “attic theory”—the belief that the brain has limited storage, so useless memories crowd out useful ones. When Watson reminds Holmes that’s not how memory works, he retorts: “It is how my brain works.” And with that, the most Victorian, least dynamic metaphor for memory survives—our archetype of the rational thinker perpetuating a linear, volume-based model of cognition.
But what if memory could be something more dynamic? Less like a dusty shelf, more like a temporarily powered node. A difference engine, a personal server still computing when not in view. What if memory could be visited and released, rather than remembered or forgotten?
That’s where Bill W. reorients the frame. He created a proto-secular version of the very schema I’m outlining—a lived method of cognitive load-sharing and release. Through communal storytelling, embodied repetition, symbolic memory structures, and mutual witness, he gave people a way to unburden without disengaging. A way to live inside the recursive loop of engagement without drowning in it.
A lot has been made of Bill W. and Alcoholics Anonymous—much of it dismissive, and much of it missing the point. In modern secular discourse, AA is easy to punch at. Addiction, as Dr. Anna Lembke has pointed out, was long treated as something that happened to other people—a failure of character, or an affliction of class. And so any system that helped those people was seen, by implication, as beneath those who didn’t need it.
Others critique AA for its religious language, for its utterances of God, or for the way it skirts the edge of cultishness through repetition and shared ritual. But these critiques conflate aesthetic trappings with functional architecture. They mistake the scaffolding for the story.
I’m not here to salvage religion. I’m here to trace the load paths—to map the invisible support structure that allows engagement to continue under strain. Not the comfort. Not the metaphor. Not the sentiment. The function.
If I were to give the least culturally loaded definition of religion, it might be this:
A habitually lived intellectual framework that combines the active, working memory and the deep, burrowed recall of expertise-building so adherents may catalyze the inputs of an ever-changing life—without overwhelm, and without the need to numb.
That is what Bill W. built.
It’s a framework that is static in form—repeated, familiar, unchanging—and yet generates motion. It is a paradox: a static engine. It keeps people moving without requiring reinvention each time. It’s livable because it’s repeatable—not because it’s fully understood.
Where Clear gives us habit loops and Lemke gives us friction, and Adler gives us teleological selfhood, Bill W. gives us release—without disengagement. A way to set something down without surrendering to amnesia or anesthesia.
He builds what I might call a lived, liminal dialectic—something that lives in the space between:
Long-form: the scaffolding, the worldview, the shared story of becoming
Short-form: the micro-habit, the daily inventory, the turning-it-over-again
Liminal: the threshold where short becomes long, and practice becomes belief
Dialectic: the productive tension between autonomy and belonging, ritual and change
Where Holmes gives us the “attic” theory of memory—finite space for fixed items—Bill W. gives us a container. Not a compartment. A ritualized structure into which thought can be placed consciously, not suppressed. A system that carries memory forward without demanding it be constantly carried by you.
It replaces the Victorian metaphors of stored genius with a more sustainable loop of lived reflection. Something you can push into practice—like a drawer, like a muscle, like prayer—but without requiring you to go unconscious to do it.
This is not an argument for belief. It is an argument for believability. For ritualizable cognition. For the kind of habit-supported engagement that doesn’t crumble under the weight of modern information density.
As Alain de Botton pointed out in Religion for Atheists, there’s a cultural hole where functional belief once lived. But I’m not interested in mourning that loss. I’m not saying “isn’t it interesting how ancient rituals mirrored modern needs.” I’m saying: we still need the functionality those rituals provided. Specifically for cognitive load shedding. And when we hollowed them out, we didn’t build better systems. We just de-skilled ourselves at load management, integration, and meaning retention.
Bill W.’s Twelve Steps are not a nostalgic revival or a discount hybrid of formal religions or isolationist spirituality, where its only valid if you never say it outloud. They are a re-sourcing of wisdom architecture—turning what had become inert back into usable process. They allow engagement to continue without collapse.
Mechanisms of Cognitive Load Shedding in Practice
What makes the Twelve Steps sustainable isn’t just their intention—it’s their design. They operationalize the invisible work of cognition: offloading strain, re-centering identity, metabolizing emotion, and ritualizing the act of meaning-making. They aren't optimized for elegance; they are optimized for repeatability under pressure.
They offer something better than cleverness: usability. Here are some of the core strategies embedded in the program’s form.
Apostrophe
The most famous move in AA is also its most misunderstood: the second-person address to “God, as you understand Him.” But this isn’t dogma; it’s apostrophe—a rhetorical turn where a speaker reaches toward a known unknown, a placeholder of trust, a listening presence.
This isn’t for the stupid or the desperate. It’s for the practical. In every other domain of life, we accept that we can call out—ask for help, name a problem, open a valve—and some process begins. Why should interior life be the one place where we demand full comprehension before permitting release?
Yes, it feels hokey. Everyone says that. That’s the point. It’s not a design flaw; it’s a mirror. Integration of discomfort is the real practice—not spiritual elegance. And if you find the word “god” irritating, it’s probably because it’s acting as a compression algorithm for dozens of unspeakable variables: selective surrender, provisional trust, intuition, pattern recognition, imagined benevolence. You could say all that—or you could just say “god.”
It doesn’t stick until you can do it. That’s why the act precedes belief. Again, not a bug. A feature.
Traipsing
Traipsing into a container for belief or a container for Community Feeling or for Sovereignty Feeling (defined later) is akin to the conscientious choice to suspend disbelief during a melodrama or a classical Greek play, but it has the opposite vector. It is as benign a purposeful psychological contortion but you inhabit a frame rather than suspend it. In the case of belief it does not negate your atheism elsewhere or your individual responsibility, etc. You may conscientiously inhabit this form of the loop without it polluting the others. For those it matters to: traipsing is similar to the audacity of inhabiting hope without the Democratic Party-inside virtue signaling.
Method of Loci
The physicality of recovery spaces—the church basement, the community hall, the folding chair—offers a kind of spatial indexing. Each meeting becomes a node in a mental map. The phrase “take it to the rooms” means more than just attending—it’s a location-based anchoring of mindset. You don’t just recall a lesson; you go to where you learned it.
This is Method of Loci, whether the founders knew the term or not. And for some the “God box” becomes another locus. A spatialized offloading structure. You write it down, fold it up, and place it inside. Not because the problem is solved, but because it has somewhere to be that is not you.
This isn’t a central tenet of the program, but it’s a cognitive pattern many adherents independently arrive at. You build a mental room for incongruency that doesn’t have to live in your front pocket.
Communal Unburdening
Confession is often construed as catharsis-as-penance. But in AA, you don’t confess to be punished—you share to redistribute weight.
A person with 20 years of sobriety doesn’t share because they’ve relapsed. They share because they remember. They say, “Numbing used to seem like a valid choice. It still does sometimes. But things are more meaningful now.” And in doing so, they model integration without shame.
This is emotional load balancing. The goal isn’t absolution. It's reconnection.
Group Cognitive Load Sharing
This is the positive inverse of “groupthink.” It’s not about conformity—it’s about distributed cognition. In meetings, no one person is holding the whole question. Instead, each person brings one thread of the fabric.
Someone else is naming the thing you haven’t yet. Someone else is modeling the action you’re afraid to take. The group becomes a kind of shared processor—a crowd-sourced difference engine.
You get access to collective memory, emotional pattern recognition, and language you don’t yet have for your own state. This isn’t magic. It’s cognitive outsourcing at its best.
(And yes, as Lembke notes, it’s a high-club good: you only get the benefit if you play by the rules. But many come not because they’re forced to—but because they want to learn. That’s part of the paradox: commitment generates value.)
Temporal Bridging
Bill W. didn’t know what we now accept neurologically: that it takes roughly 60 days for dopamine baselines to reset. But he designed for it anyway.
“One day at a time.”
“The next right thing.”
“The promises.”
All of these are directed mindfulness techniques, designed to help a person stay engaged with an action before it starts to feel good. That’s psychological sleight of hand. That’s future-building under strain.
The Twelve Steps ask people to do the hard thing because it is right, not because it feels good. That’s not just moralism. That’s temporal resilience. And in a culture of instant feedback, it promotes a quiet sovereignty.
Mindfulness (by another name)
AA doesn’t call it mindfulness. But it teaches it every day.
“You are not your thoughts.”
“Pause when agitated.”
“Take it easy.”
“Don’t go into your head alone—it’s a dangerous neighborhood.”
“...grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Each of these reframes internal experience without denying it. You don’t suppress. You observe. You narrate. You stay—without going under.
And when you do this long enough, it becomes what Clear would call identity: I am someone who stays. And that, again, is the full circle.
Selecting ontology as the first rung of belief
Ontology is one subcategory of epistemological systems—a way of making sense where the method privileges discrete classification, linearity, and traceable relationships, often at the cost of accounting for recursion, emergence, or fuzzier dynamics. While we should be careful not to mistake its convenience for universal adequacy, it remains one particularly potent method for wresting something semi-stable out of the flux of reality.
Ontological mapping tends to carry an impulse toward linearity—not because it denies complexity, but because it prefers to crystallize it into sequences or linkages that feel traceable and clear. It doesn’t easily accommodate loops or self-modifying systems unless explicitly expanded to do so. Look at micro-cellular process diagrams. Protein cleaves DNA base pair. RNA recombines. That may be true. But, do you really think your innards are so orderly or described so simply? And yet, ontology remains one of our most powerful narrative patterns: subject, predicate, object. There may be biological or cultural reasons why that structure feels so sturdy to us, even when it is not always the best map.
Choosing an ontology, then, is itself an epistemological act. It is a deep claim about how things are—but also about how we can know them. Even when unstated, there’s a backdrop: this is a good enough way to organize what reality offers.
And so, when people say, “This is all part of my higher power’s plan,” or “He has a plan,” or “It will work out as long as I follow the steps and don’t put my will first,” they are not merely surrendering to a simple idea of fate. Nor are they fully inhabiting a follower’s role. They are dilating both complexity and time—stretching the now into the hope for better—into a format compact enough to be internalized and lived through, even when language struggles to communicate that liminality as fully as it is felt.
Coda on Ontology: What We Lost, and What We Substituted
We have articulated that the loss of traditional belief systems did not erase the architectural needs they served. It simply left certain structures unassigned. The recursive loop—repetition, review, integration, surrender—was not religious by essence. It was religious by use. And when the social contract eroded below critical mass in some communities, we didn’t discard the desire for stability in the face of complexity. We relocated it.
Linearity—so deeply embedded in both ontological grammar and cultural metaphor—migrated from scripture to balance sheets. The cognitive load-shedding phrase once tethered to “He has a plan” found a new home in “move the ball forward (by earning money),” or “make progress (by earning money),” or “that’s the way the world works (by capitulating to financial ontology).” Both promise resolution through submission to structure. That doesn’t make them morally equivalent. It makes them functionally rhymed.
We didn’t replace linear belief structures as cognitive load-shedding mechanisms with nothing. We replaced them with financial dutifulness. Because it was available. Because it was secular. Because it came with charts—literal lines, not metaphorical ones. Because it didn’t ask us to say “God” out loud.
The result is a persistent misdiagnosis of our need to momentarily step into ontology—flattened either into embarrassment, irony, or dismissal. That need still exists. A secular person may balk at the continued presence of faith in others. And he may daily explain his duty to work, family, and complexity as “I need to move the ball forward.” But that man is not reducible to a mere capitalistic pagan. Nor are the faithful reducible to blind acceptance of their most non-literal claims.
In one way religion has a benefit that financialization lacks: the obviousness of its metaphors. It makes traipsing into them harder, but it makes identifying the containers for pacifying ontologies easier.
What we were always trying to preserve was livability. A way to hold complexity without collapse. A structure, repeatable and socially reinforced, that let engagement continue—even when it hurt.
Taken Together: Tensions and Time
This is the moment where the Mobius Method turns—from a description of psychological process into a proposal for wisdom architecture. Not wisdom as static knowledge, but as a dynamic, embodied framework: accessible at multiple scales of time and conscientiousness.
Each thinker contributes a step:
First, the tactical mechanics of habit, divorced from efficiency as an intrinsic good.
Second, the biochemical reality check: which goals are our systems actually feeding—and do they serve wellness?
Third, the philosophical scaffolding of lifestyle in the Adlerian sense—a coherent, contributive self-in-relation.
And fourth, the container—Bill W.’s cognitive architecture—that makes the whole cycle livable over time. Not through grit, but through shared processing. Not by disengaging, but by putting something down.
Each introduces not only a concept, but a corrective tension against the others:
Clear gives us tactics, but Lemke reminds us they can become traps.
Lemke sounds the alarm, but Adler shows how to live inside that reality.
Adler offers purpose, but Bill W. shows how to carry it without collapse.
Bill W. offers release, but Clear reminds us: action still matters.
The Mobius Method lives in the movement between them. That’s where its power comes from—not just structure, but tempo:
Clear: moment-to-moment behavior
Lemke: neurochemical rhythm over days and weeks
Adler: purpose and selfhood over the arc of a life
Bill W.: the recursive return across time—what endures, and how we endure
Together, they form a kind of psychological music: motif, variation, recapitulation, transcendence.
The Shape of the Framework
What I’ve been trying to sketch here is not a new doctrine or a closed lexicon. It’s a structure. A mnemonic. A mesa. A place to put things down—without forgetting them. A repeatable architecture for engagement that doesn’t require belief, allegiance, or spectacle. Something you can use.
It resists monetization not because it's anti-commerce, but because its value lies in being structurally non-extractive. Like AA, like Adler’s community feeling, like the scaffolding of ancient rituals that didn’t require gurus or brands, the Mobius Method is durable because it is distributed. It survives because it doesn’t require ownership.
It’s a pluralistic interface for transformation—one that lets anyone choose their own metaphor without altering the code. Whether you call it God, the mesa, the algorithm, or the stillness, the framework holds.
And in a world where every structure is suspect of manipulation or monetization, that structural audit matters. So let me say it plainly:
Why the Mobius Method Is Not a Brand. Or a Cult. Or a Belief System.
It doesn’t require belief in a founder. There’s no guru, no gatekeeper, no origin myth you have to revere.
It doesn’t charge you. No subscription. No conference. No upsell.
It’s not binary. You don’t “fail” it. You don’t need to agree with every part to benefit from it.
It’s not optimized for growth. It doesn’t need virality. It’s not a funnel.
It’s structurally non-extractive. It asks for attention, not allegiance. It offers reflection, not reward.
It works best when you forget who gave it to you. When it becomes yours.
If it feels incomplete, that’s because it’s supposed to be. It leaves space—for you.
The Mesa
If I were to picture my own container—my own mnemonic—it would look like this:
I’m standing on the edge of Mitchell Mesa in Monument Valley. There’s no road behind me. No apparatus that got me here. Just the quiet hum of imagination.
Facing the table-like formation in the center, the first thing I see is sky. The plateau falls away in every direction. The first thing I hear is the scratch of sandstone under my boots. The first thing I smell is honey-baked dust.
I blink.
Four transparent containers appear, clear acrylic against the desert light. Inside each: a brass-and-steel difference engine, alive with rippling logic. Waves of conditionality move through the tiny teeth of the cogs, like wheat in a dry wind.
Ghosts gather: Babbage. Ada Lovelace. Twain. Foucault. Mencken. The air rustles with ideas.
A helpful AI poltergeist floats around the second container like static fog. It vanishes around a bend—off to patrol some other edge of thought.
Here begins the infrastructure. Here is my mesa. My offloading site. My altar, my scaffold, my anti-attic. Not a place for numbing or forgetting, but a place to put things down without dropping them. A place where static engines hum, held in place by attention and care.
Your Turn?
What will yours look like?
The digital age has calcified our understanding of language. It has encouraged the idea that words are correct or incorrect, that definitions are settled, that meaning is a fixed grid of spellings and search results. Lexicons like Merriam-Webster or the OED may continue to dredge up new terms and codify slang, but they rarely revisit what has already passed their gates.
Yet I use the word “imagination” here—but not as whimsy or escapism. I mean it as the recursive act of mapping one’s internal architecture onto the shifting terrain of material life. Not dreaming, but placing. Choosing. Building.
The Mobius Method is not a solution. It’s a loop you can step into, a scaffolding you can inherit. It’s not mine to give you. But it’s yours, if you want it.
And if it works—if it really works—you won’t remember where you learned it.
You’ll just remember that it held. So, when I say, “map your economic choices onto your imagination,” then this is what I mean.
Part IV - Expanding Patronage
The last two sections propose that meaning emerges when we align our economic choices with our imagination—specifically, with the activities, habits, and forms of work we want to keep returning to. I also stated that engagement, as I’ve defined it, accretes to the individual as long as we do not unintentionally sever its recursion.
Previously we needed to expand the definition of imagination by 12%. A modest change. Now, I intend to explain how a discussion about broccoli led me to expand the definition of patronage much more broadly.
I want to reframe “patronage” as the economic support necessary to do our Adlerian work (the life task of Work). That is that patronage is the support that provides the foundation for our “vernacular of justification” as we approach the life task. Expanding to that definition of patronage gives us the sense that our personal economics are the trade offs we make between meaning and finances that we want to continue returning to it through honest recursion. It is both a starting point and ending point of the Mobius Method for our work. This reframes conventional employment as one form, the socially predominant form, but an interchangeable form, of patronage.
This definition recontextualizes both the type of support that we may seek and the idea of work as the thing we’re drawn to do because it induces our traipsing into Community Feeling—which is part of Adler’s definition of work—rather than the thing we must do. That can be done at an investment bank or a soup kitchen depending on your sense of Community Feeling. In this frame of reference the concept of matrimonial exchange, tenured professorship, and the forty hour workweek are moral equivalents, each one being a form of patronage—that if entered into willingly and with foresight—could be seen as the structure within which one earns the privilege of doing the work one desires to do. Whether that is homemaking, research, or wage labor is up to the individual to decide. Any actor would still be rational in selecting the form of patronage that required the least dispositional ablation or emotional pain in the pursuit of their path towards, and recursively cycling through, the meaningful arc of work of their choice. That would be coherent as well as rational in the framework of this essay.
This positioning of patronage reassesses work then as the investment in time, narrative, and material that in synthesis, as in Adler, is the basis of human meaning-making.
Rather than a hegemonic approach to one form of patronage being more valuable than another (i.e. whether steeped in temporal valorization such as one choice being more modern vs another being more traditional or any other hegemonic approach to saying one form of engagement, imagination, and meaning is better) it more comes down to the individual’s imagination to decide what meaning making resonates with their disposition, intellect, education, experiences, etc. The power here is to opt for the form that matches you and your dreams as you conceive of them best.
Work then stops being merely an economic necessity to a structural arrangement that enables meaning-making. This perspective is particularly powerful because it sidesteps the moralization of different forms of labor and instead focuses on how individuals can choose the patronage structure that best supports their work—potentially their “life’s work” if no unintentional severing is committed—with the least personal compromise.
If patronage is the economic structure that enables the Adlerian life tasks—the iterative engagement that constitutes meaning—then work itself must be reconsidered not as a brute necessity, but as a form of selected support. Traditionally, we have viewed work as obligation, a necessity for survival. It is that, but it is also an obligation that many of us carry well past the threshold of literal survival as well. Under this expanded framing, employment becomes simply one of many patronage structures available to the individual, judged not by its prestige or historical validation but by its ability to secure the foundation for meaningful work.
A salary, a grant, a tenure position, a spouse’s income, an inheritance, a wealthy benefactor—each serves the same structural purpose. They are all different vessels for patronage: systems for stabilizing the base layer of life so that iterative, meaningful engagement can continue without collapse. They differ only in the terms of exchange and the friction they impose on the imaginer's disposition.
If this is true, then choosing a patronage model becomes an economic decision—but in the personal economics sense I have previously outlined, not merely the financial sense we previously differentiated it from. A rational actor, in this light, should select the patronage structure that provides sufficient stability with the least dispositional or emotional compromise. It is a selection process governed not by hierarchy or moralization—who works harder, who suffers more nobly—but by alignment: which form of support best protects the inner recursion of engagement without unacceptable distortion.
This is a profound divergence from conventional frameworks that imbue forms of work with moral weight. Wage labor is lionized as noble. Financial dependence on a spouse is dismissed as parasitic. Tenure is vaunted as prestige, while small grants or flexible living are diminished as unserious. Under the patronage frame, all of these are morally neutral. They are mechanisms. Their virtue lies only in their function: Do they safeguard engagement? Do they reduce or amplify internal friction? Do they preserve or distort the individual's imagined life?
Rather than valorizing a particular lineage of support—industrial, entrepreneurial, academic, matrimonial—we are invited to imagine patronage selection as a personal, imaginative act. It is not a judgment about the past (modern vs. traditional) or the future (secure vs. precarious). It is a selection at the Mobius fold: a choice made by the individual standing at the intersection of their own recursion and their external environment.
Patronage as Means, Not End
This reframing clarifies another hidden danger: the temptation to mistake patronage itself for the goal. Accumulating patronage—wealth, tenure, a powerful marriage—is not the object of the exercise. Patronage is only meaningful insofar as it secures the ground from which iterative, imaginative work can arise. The goal is not infinite accumulation, but sustainable landscape for return and the next loop. Not so much that the structure eclipses the work itself.
This demands a continuous reckoning. It requires asking not simply "Can I get more?" but "How much patronage is enough?" Enough to withstand friction. Enough to provide ballast. But no more than needed because to do so would relocate the loci of my recursion to the patronage and not the work.
Three Questions about Patronage
Thus, a more useful line of inquiry emerges—not in search of a definitive answer, but as a compass:
What is the work I truly want to do?
What do I wish to build, research, love, protect, or steward through time?What form of patronage best enables that work with minimal sacrifice?
Which vessel—wage labor, grant, tenure, marriage, business, inheritance, crowdfunding, or otherwise—offers the least distortion to the imagined arc?How much patronage is enough?
Not the maximum available, but the sustainable sufficiency that allows work to recur without disintegration or dispositional exhaustion.
Personal Context: The Transition in Progress
In my own life, this reframing explains much that once seemed contradictory. I am in the midst of an active patronage transition—rejecting the old structure (a business whose growth demanded dispositional self-ablation) and seeking a new, consciously constructed one (more on that in Section V below). I am not seeking maximal patronage. I am seeking the shape and tension that sustains engagement. Enough ballast. Enough lift. But no more than needed.
This also clarifies why returning to the old business model, however lucrative, feels impossible. It was never just about money. It was about a form of patronage that, though economically "successful," was psychically devouring. To refuse it is not laziness or fear. It is an assertion of the need to match the patronage structure to the life I am actually trying to imagine and enact.
The Further Expansion: Poverty as Self-Patronage
In this expanded frame, even poverty itself—voluntary or circumstantial—can be reinterpreted not as failure or abdication, but as a potential form of self-patronage. If patronage is simply the structural means by which meaningful engagement is enabled, then it follows that reducing one's material needs to the point of self-sustainability can be a valid strategy. It becomes another vessel—an internally sourced one—for maintaining the recursion of meaningful work.
This is not a romanticization of poverty. Nor is it a call to perform self-excision, to reject all external patronage as some knockoff philosopher king roosting on Diogenes’ now petrified trash heap. To voluntarily constrain one’s material needs as a strategic move is not best enacted performatively. We do not need another material martyr as a foil against society. Self-patronage is not rebellion. It is a legitimate choice if it genuinely and subjectively preserves the recursive loop better than the available market-allocated alternatives—and if it enables the continuation of one’s Adlerian life tasks without collapse.
For example: no one paid me to write this essay, but no amount of re-reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity could teach me what enough was. A synergistic melange of support and missing mentors said, “He’ll figure it out,” but couldn’t teach me what to value. Another example: no one pays for the unfunded business plan you may have written, but they would also never fund the one you failed to write. It is a valid way to live if your imagination requires it and your patronage structure permits it.
In a market system, there will be moments when no external actor is willing to sponsor the recursion of a particular kind of work. In such cases, self-patronage—by way of radically lowered needs—may be the only rational preservation strategy. It is not failure. It is not disengagement. It is not retreat into principled martyrdom. It is, simply, a reallocation of resources: shrinking the structure until it matches the available energy, so that the loop can continue.
It is a choice to keep the engagement alive, even when the external world finds no immediate value in its outputs.
Just as selecting a grant, a tenure track, or a business model is a form of matching the structure of support to the structure of imagination, selecting voluntary constraint can be another rational iteration. It is not an abandonment of Adlerian work. It is the protection of its soil until conditions improve.
In this light, patronage—whether externally granted or internally constrained—becomes not a question of moral worth, but of structural fit. The goal remains the same: to preserve the capacity for recursive engagement, for iterative becoming, for the slow accumulation of meaning over time.
Reframing patronage in this way does not eliminate friction. It sharpens it—making visible the trade-offs we must weigh if we are to preserve the recursion of meaningful work over time. The next step is to confront those trade-offs directly: to ask not just what scaffolding we need, but what costs we are prepared to bear to keep building.
Ablation, Engagement, and the Inherited Scaffolds
Before we can meaningfully advance this expanded definition of patronage to its most actionable conclusions, we must understand the twin architectures we have inherited:
the stack of historical economic abstractions, and
the shifting mediation of value across contemporary domains of work.
It is my intent to show that a series of economic abstractions have had huge ramifications on how we discern work. They were started and stacked on top of history from the early modern period (circa the 1500s) to now. Many of these abstractions are so commonplace today that they go unnoticed or it is unintelligible to us to really imagine what work would be like without them. I have expressed these upcoming ideas as a stack because their creation story was sequential—conclusions of the ones before them allowed for the abstractions that followed—but it is also important to understand now this inventory of historical thought innovations is meant to be non-chronological. For example: if I talk about rationalized time, the stack’s first abstraction, then a landowner in the Early Modern period or the last town in all of 21st Century rural America to put a public clock at the bus stop are both engaging in the same abstraction. They are rationalizing time because an economic actor selectively intuited that it would positively influence economic growth, regardless of when that choice was made.
It is also true that common forms of work today pick and choose which of these abstractions are part of the project or job description, yet both their presence or the absence has a profound impact on our perception of the work. Once again I draw an example of what I mean from our first abstraction – rationalized time. There was a time before the long-modern-moment in which time was not regimented by a clock and therefore all of the types of work that require temporal coordination were not as easily feasible then as they are now. It is not immediately important for you to contemplate what your life would have been like as a medieval peasant, which is a reality you cannot return to. Rather, I bring up these abstractions because I want you to understand this one (and all of them) as a toggle switch that you can metaphorically turn on or off when selecting the proper role for your patronage structure. Being an independent contractor or an entrepreneur, for example—two forms of patronage that let you build your own schedule to different degrees—would be different from being a wage laborer or a salaried worker with formal office hours.
The importance and modulation of each of these abstractions still has resonance today. They are:
rationalized time,
labor,
capital,
Keynesianism,
rapidity,
and access.
Each has their own effects. And each can either feel pre-dispositionally natural to you as you choose your path or can feel psychologically grating if not avoided with clarity.
The second inherited framework we will talk about is a spectrum of mediated value. I will present four different levels of economic activity that have widely different timescales for, and therefore different relationships to recursion.
M0 is the longest where those who are predisposed can work on projects they may never see the end of. Often these people can still see meaning in the future-sighted work of economic-preplanning, natural conservancy or restoration, or other fields where they can still feel like they are doing something meaningful while engaging with cycles that will outlast them.
M1 is classic synthetic work. Examples from techniques of mining, Adam Smith’s pin factory, Marx’s industrialized labor, and modern hyper-technological manufacturing still bounded by the recursion of the materials they work on. Did a weld hold. Did a stone break. Did a silicon wafer deposit perfectly.
M2 is the economic mediation strata where value starts its divergence from materiale towards narrative structure and perception. It still maps material flows but brand owners, not their manufacturers are more interested in positioning, perception, value capture, and the recursion here is liminally but less tied to the underlying materials. A good example would be the same factory making tools or distilled spirits for different price points just with different knobs or bottles to capture the consumer no matter how price sensitive that consumer is.
And, lastly we have M3 – the financial strata. This divorces asset and value entirely in the form of securitization.
As you will see there is not a lot of difference between the mechanics of recursion at these different levels. The Mobius Method is pertinent regardless of the topic of one’s engagement. But, the architecture of the more highly mediated strata would require extra effort, the establishment of secondary skills, resources; extra engagement and recursion in the inventory and integration steps are needed in the Mobius Method to ensure that the recursion was honest. For example: a copywriter may need to also be an expert in or need to work with an expert in focus group data gathering and statistical analysis in order to know if their recursion loop is honestly integrating results and starting the next loop off of an accurate inventory. This type of honesty is not a moral sensibility. It is an honesty to self. And, we will discover, to no one’s surprise, that the recursive model of engagement sets up an accurate lens for why that honesty may often be attenuated the higher we go on the value mediation scale.
Introducing the Line Demarcating You
The reason to bring these two towers into the foreground is to help you orient yourself—so you can draw a line between them. Not a prescription, but a prompt. That line might feel, for you, like a zipline: a playful, friction-minimizing ride across daunting terrain. Or it might feel like a tension cable: a delicate, practiced walk, requiring focus, balance, and self-trust. Or it might be more quotidian but no less real—like a pull-up bar mounted in a doorframe: something to grab onto when you need a frame of reference, a test of strength, or a moment of re-centering between rooms.
Whatever form the metaphor takes, the act of drawing that line matters. It becomes a primitive vector analysis of your predisposition toward patronage—what you can tolerate, what brings peace, and what ablates you psychologically. It's a calibration tool. A way to ask not just what’s available, but what’s livable.
I submit that this line, drawn in good faith, approximates your most stable personal economy—your grammar of justification. Like all grammars, it can evolve. You can riff. Introduce slang. Shift clause length. But in moments of drift, it may help to return to the center—to the balance point you triangulated. That is where your everyday acts are most likely to feel like acts of sovereignty and of community. That is where ballast accumulates, and meaning begins to recur most readily.
Figure 1. The line connecting the Abstraction Stack and the Mediated Value Spectrum might be a way to gauge patronage opportunities and whether they best align with your predisposition. That is not to say that you cannot or should not take other opportunities; rather it is a tool to predetermine whether they should be pre-organized for purposeful short-termism, severability, or—in the case the opportunity cost is too high—perhaps say “no” to after all.
The Abstraction Stack
Throughout history, the abstraction of human economic life has proceeded in distinct, selectively filtered thresholds — each emerging not from top-down design, but from the aggregation of countless individually rational choices. At each threshold, what mattered was not beauty, not wisdom, but workability: the ability to unlock growth under the prevailing pressures of the time.
The first great abstraction was rationalized time — the division of days into hours, the severing of labor from natural seasons. With rationalized time, landowners and early industrialists no longer depended on nature’s rhythms; they could enforce productivity according to clocks and schedules. From there emerged labor commodification — the abstraction of human energy into standardized units of trade. Then came capital formation — the abstraction of stored labor into reproductive investment, extending economic reach beyond immediate material cycles. Keynesian synthesis followed, attempting to unify labor and capital growth curves, in a kind of constructive interference fourier analysis, through managed aggregate demand and full employment as national policy. Finally, rapidity and access, the dual hallmarks of the information age, completed the current stack: value detached from production cycles and attached instead to speed, immediacy, and reach.
Importantly, not every life or venture today embodies all six abstractions simultaneously. Some roles remain close to material rhythms; others operate almost wholly in narrative or financial acceleration. The architecture is modular — but without conscious diagnosis, individuals can feel trapped within inherited abstraction layers they do not recognize, forced to conform to logics they never consciously chose.
I tend to think of the stack within a modified version of Maxwell’s Demon. The metaphor of Maxwell’s Demon, as used here, is not thermodynamic in the traditional sense but epistemological and structural—an image of selective filtration across historical economic thresholds. Each dominant economic abstraction—rationalized time, commodified labor, financial capital, Keynesian hybridization, and finally rapidity and access—functioned as what we might call a “first principle” of its era: a conceptual bottleneck through which the economy could be reoriented and scaled. Within this framing, the left chamber of Maxwell’s box contains the visible limitations of a prevailing paradigm; the right chamber holds what appears, at that historical moment, to be a near-infinite growth frontier. The demon, in this metaphor, is not God, destiny, or systemic optimization—it is the countless individual actors whose seemingly infinitesimal decisions, enacted under local rationalities, permitted passage into the next abstraction. The manager chaining labor to the clock; the clergy moralizing time discipline; the banker extending credit beyond deposit—each opens the gate by an act that is minor in scale but massive in accumulated directional effect. These actors do not consciously build the next paradigm; they merely operate within its pressures and possibilities. And over time, these pressure gradients sort activity in favor of the new abstraction’s apparent infinitude. What results is not a top-down transition, but a selective filtration of economic life—choice by choice, actor by actor—into a structure that increasingly conforms to the affordances of the new abstraction. But this process only worked because each new chamber—each successive first principle—still seemed open-ended. Now, as we approach the apparent finitude of speed and access—wherein rapidity is measured in imperceptible fractions of a second and access for some products reach Total Addressable Markets of all humanity in an era of plateauing population—we must confront the unsettling possibility that there may be no next chamber to enter—only a recirculation of optimization within closed, over-sorted systems. What, then, becomes of the demon? And what of the actor, when there is nowhere else left to be sorted?
This historical abstraction stack structures the economic landscape. But it does not, by itself, determine the nature of one's engagement within it. For that, we must also understand the second spectrum: the shifting mediation of value across domains of work.
Preconditions, Synthesis, Narrative, and Securitization: the Mediation of Value
At the foundation, M0, are those who engage with systems whose time horizons extend beyond personal experience: ecological restoration, civic architecture, intergenerational infrastructure. M1 encompasses material synthesis — the transformation of tangible inputs into outputs whose value exceeds their parts. M2 centers narrative and positioning — the manipulation of framing, distribution channels, and psychographic segmentation to control the perception of value. M3 culminates in securitization and asset abstraction — the packaging, bundling, and trading of value propositions largely severed from their material origins.
At each ascent along this mediation scaffold, the challenge of maintaining honest recursion grows. In M1 and below, material reality subsidizes honesty: the wood splits or it doesn't; the weld holds or it breaks. But in M2 and M3, the environment no longer reliably corrects illusion. Success is increasingly determined by perception, liquidity, and strategic framing. Without physical feedback or institutionalized checks (like journalism's requirement for multiple sources), the burden of building real feedback loops falls entirely on the individual actor.
As Anna Lembke has written, honesty — facing reality without defensive distortion — is essential for maintaining emotional and neurological stability. In highly mediated domains, sustaining this honesty demands not only discipline but the layering of multiple recursive skills: building technical mechanisms for real feedback, stress-testing one’s outputs, and resisting the seductions of cleverness without verification. It demands, in short, the construction of personal ballast in an environment that offers none. It is a thematic foil to the cliche on bumper stickers that “Dirty hands = Clean money”.
Compounding this challenge is the systemic acceleration of expectations. In knowledge work, the substrate no longer dictates time: a stonecutter’s material resists the clock, but a marketing strategist’s brilliance is expected on demand. Institutions once designed to buffer temporal pressures have frayed, and the pressures of liquidity, growth, and perception increasingly compress the time allowed for genuine recursive engagement. In this environment, burnout becomes the only remaining heuristic for whether one's pace is survivable.
This is no longer merely an individual dilemma. It has metastasized into a collective instability: a social fabric straining against the geometry of engagement itself. Our economic system invites us to ascend into higher mediation, to chase liquidity and cleverness, without providing the structural time or stability needed to sustain the recursion that makes work meaningful. Yet, we code it the same as M1-M2 occupations of the 1960s - as “jobs”. The result is not simply exhaustion, but existential attenuation: the fading sense that what we are doing — and what we are building — is real, stable, and worth handing forward.
A Vector Analysis of our Economic Selves
Standing within this dual inheritance — abstraction stack and mediation spectrum — each person faces a set of questions that cannot be answered by system or society alone. They must be answered from within.
Which layers of abstraction am I inhabiting comfortably?
Where does my engagement feel natural — and where does it feel forced or corrosive?
At what point along the mediation spectrum does the burden of self-constructed recursion exceed what I can, or wish to, sustain?
Am I better suited to a life closer to material synthesis, where time and feedback are tangible?
Or do I find my engagement deepening even amid the abstractions of narrative or finance, willing to construct the layered integrity they demand?
There are no universal answers. There is only the invitation to see clearly, and to step deliberately, choosing economic structures that nourish engagement rather than erode it.
This is not a morality tale. It is a design challenge.
And it begins with the courage to ask: Where am I standing now?
Book 2 - What Do I Do Now?
I deputized “patronage” in Part IV in order to create a more expansive explanation of how we can graft the psychological architecture of our interiority onto the outside world. How we internalize a never ending amount of information and set it down proactively rather than forget it or retreat from it. Patronage is useful because it describes a pure case of the individual economic actor and the financial sponsor engaging in work where value exceeds the purely quotidian value captured in money-capital-money prime transactions. This many chits for this many widgets + profit. This many pukka shells for this meal + risk. This many dollars for this shampoo, this car, this mortgage + interest. Yet, invoking patronage as a concept is only powerful if it can be predictive and not merely descriptive. In order to orient the reader to how they may use this framework, then I must marshal more historiographical and thematic evidence about what patronage was, when it reached its cultural acme, what psychological architecture it afforded rather than just what financial architecture it provided, and from there we can decide, individually and together, “How much of it we want back?”
Rutger Bregman wrote “Moral Ambition” (2025) and an interview about his book ran on New York Times Audio on May 16, 2025 under the title ‘The Interview: Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives”. In that interview the author held a mirror up to the intelligentsia on the left. They questioned whether it was appropriate for him to dissect the moral validity of other’s careers. He explained that he had more push back from academically minded moralists than from workers themselves. The interview went on to describe a cultural shift witnessed in the “American Freshman Survey” in which the percentage of incoming students who cited they wanted a coherent moral framework for living versus the amount who cited they wanted to make as much money as possible basically switched between the 1960s and now (90% moral/60% monetary to 60% moral/90% monetary). Bregman took those starting points and extrapolated to many conclusions. Some I share. Many I do not.
He combined the inputs of personal intelligence and privilege with simple moral honesty. He turns these three factors into a rich person’s choice like International Development’s “White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” with none of the latter’s black humor about the risks of emulating Kipling’s apocryphal, imperialist, racist, world-bending original poem. I, by contrast, combine the inputs of predispositional-self and inventory of capacities—endogenous and exogenous—to ascertain whether structural recursion is possible in your life. Mine is honesty as function rather than his moral binary. Bregman says that if you are not working on something that probably will not be resolved in your lifetime, then you are not working on something with the maximum moral grandiosity. Instead, I say that certain of us are more predisposed to recursion on long timelines (M0 value mediation) without a creeping sense of speciousness or self doubt creeping in to sabotage our sensation of self-validity. I believe a person who is at home in M3 recursive loops may be existentially unequipped to value long-arc evidence chains. Bregman cites the “mental breakdown” of an early English Abolitionist and, by deeming that diagnosis as anachronistic and equivalent to burnout today, he equivocates that burnout is inevitable, so we might as well burn out working on something moral. I have experienced burnout. It is in part what prompted the focused inquiry that resulted in this essay. And I do not presume that it is inevitable. Burnout is profoundly undignified. It is a state of perceived structural helplessness. The costs of that affliction are not the necessary tithe of working on what matters.
Patronage is not limited to self patronage in my framework. It can exist in escalating amounts of material wellbeing and financial success.
I started with self-patronage because—like the train track gauge example in pathway dependence, earlier—it was the strongest signal amongst the noise. Yet, its conclusions are built on one of the most vital silver linings of the weakness and limitations of human psychological architecture: interiority does not scale.
Even though the typical amount of remuneration of a position increases as one works up the value mediation spectrum (a conservationist could earn less than a manufacturer could make less than a marketer could make less than a financial trader), the human psychological regard for recursion and what it grants the individual does not increase in scale.
We only connect horizontally with the same difficulty to the same number of people. We only live in one room at a time regardless of the number of houses we own or their size. We do not inwardly benefit more from a workbench made from mahogany than one from pine. We have but one butt regardless of our number of couches. Our subjective needs for sovereignty or subjective sense of community are still internal psychological projections of pattern recognition.
Community Feeling for example is made of acts of community — letters received, calls returned, face time. Community itself is a psychological object composed of that pattern. The status of the pattern is modified by repeated or abandoned practice and by ballast created by acts that self-signal connection.
The end result of our limitation, from this lack of scale, is obvious and can be interpreted as a gift if one desires: recursion and the mobius method can be had on any point on the mediated value spectrum, or with any amount of financial largesse. One must just choose to recur.
As stated before, let’s recreate some of the historical and personal conditions of patronage to understand what it can mean for us. Let us start where I did: with an absurd question. It began with a man eating manure and his son talking to me about broccoli.
Art or Yard Work?
It occurs to me to share how I came to focus on patronage as an idea. It started with a simple question and a preposterous photo to which I wrote in a book margin: Art or yard work?
…
I am at a library table. Bright earth tones reminiscent of topological maps contrast the cover of my coffee-table book from the grey melamine the book sits on. I remember that I am using a crimson felt-tip writing implement, which confused me. It was made by the company named “Highlighter” but was it more like a marker? I decided it was translucent enough to serve as the bright, over-text emboldener that I needed even if its color and hue were undeniably dramatic, nearly avant garde-seeming on the acme whiteness of the book’s pages overlaying the deep black of its modern typefaces.
…
I walked out immediately the first time I walked in. I started reading a long-form poem describing the scope of a project in the watersheds of the high-sierra. The exhibit hall displaying the Harrisons’ work hung this—a work brief in the form of stanzas but with the scansion of prose—on the wall directly next to the attendant’s desk. I knew I was intrigued yet my excitement immediately butted up against how I was feeling at the time.
“My blood sugar is too low for this. I will come back.” I said to the gallery attendant. The woman, with shoulders held at the slope of someone 45% of the way through her career, laughed at my unexpected comment.
I brought a friend with me the next time. We started with the same poem next to the attendant’s desk.
“Have we met before?”
I remind her of my low blood-sugar moment and there is recognition. She seems ruffled in a vague way that someone would not just stumble into her gallery but do the work to return. My friend and I explore the one-room gallery for over an hour. We get down on our hands and knees with magnifying glasses to look at room-scale satellite photographs of the ecological region in question, as the gallery intended. We sit and watch the videos looping on the wall.
I have a question for the attendant even so: what is this all doing here? Despite its nods to form, such as the prose being formatted as a poem or these photos being under gallery lights, the only thing striking about this work to me is that it is art at all… Rather than the work product of an environmental consultancy. She responded to my engagement with a gift and an invitation. I received a shrink wrapped copy of the coffee-table book (whose printing from proceeds from the Getty Foundation did not include a barcode or MSRP; this was not intended for sale as much as commemoration) and an invitation to a panel discussion that involved the artists’ son. He was the middle child who inherited the directorship of the husband and wife duo’s Institute for the Force Majeure.
…
I read the book as one might read a text before class. I wanted to honor the gift by showing it had meaning to me as an object, but I also wanted to have an idea of what these people might talk about. I sat in a distant corner of the highrise downtown library before the discussion began. I discovered even more questions. I marked them with my crimson highlighter.
The husband had been given his professorship at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in art in the late 1950s with only a masters degree. His credentials were as an abstract painter not an environmental advocate. His early work in San Diego was entirely object oriented, creating objects of art, and his early deviations from painting were mostly material explorations rather than narrative-based artistic assertions. In other words his work was open-ended explorations of what new human-made materials could do in an artistic context rather than telling himself or the viewer what the art was attempting beforehand.
His wife had a parallel career as an educator outside of but adjacent to her husband’s university work. Eventually their partnership, in its own idiosyncrasies, became so intertwined that UCSD offered her, and thus the couple, the school’s only joint professorship. Now they were both tenured, together.
Withstanding this chronology, however, further curiosities emerged. This early material work included collaborations with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His most popular early exhibition concerned high-voltage plasma tubes taller than a person engineered with JPL/CalTech researchers. Surely, they wouldn’t have collaborated on an art project unless… unless some force or perspective venerated the artist, the project, or the work itself. In a time before “.edu” email addresses, how did an unaffiliated researcher even propose an art project to a NASA affiliate? How did they get a response? And in the affirmative? How did they secure paid staff time and donated materials from JPL? A hypothetical everyday person couldn’t just call 1960s JPL—let alone during the height of the Space Race—and propose an art project. A tenured professor representing a west-coast contextualization—in a time when regional differences felt more pronounced–offers an outlet for democratized exploration of the space age to the masses… well… maybe not the masses but (more realistically) to the well-heeled visitors of art exhibits… Still! This hypothesis represents one possible reason the two nodes in the American Academy, their respective endowments, respective personnel, and respective missions chose to explore these new inventions in the context of each other’s work. This man was able to pursue exploration. The less obvious but equally vital truth was that when I read about his work, I knew—with equal parts curiosity and certainty—that no one would extend the same invitation to me. But I didn’t yet know why.
I compared the paradigms presented in the book to my understanding of now. A masters degree is a professional degree now. The transition to college for all in the 1990s onward made it impossible to get some entry-level positions without a masters’ degree. Therefore, certainly no tenured professorships at four-year research universities were being awarded. Further, there are cogent arguments that even the Ph.D. programs at even the most rigorous schools are either ignoring or exploiting the creation of more doctorates than there are positions requiring their credentials - both in and out of academia. One opinion columnist called this form of value exaggeration “the largest unprosecuted Ponzi scheme in history.” Whether you are swayed by the idea this is fraud or not, the idea of education as an unassailable means to material advancement has been made fraught by 2025 in a way the Harrison’s did not experience.
Then with a 0.2 mm fineliner in black, then coated with my crimson marklighter, I wrote a thought in the margins of that book that will never leave me: Art or yard work?
“The Population Bomb” by Mark Ehrlich irrevocably reoriented the Harrisons’ work towards the survival of the human race. Specifically they reoriented all of their work towards directly facing environmental challenges. Their beginnings in carrying capacity concerns, whether the land could meet the needs of human population growth, gave way to a broader set of ecological causes. This mirrors the broader ecological community’s debunking of Ehrlich’s work in light of the Green Revolution and other mid- to late-century agricultural advancements. But “Silent Spring” and other environmental manifestos sequentially added momentum to their evolving work. Ultimately, survival gave way to livability in lock-step with the idea that the earth does not need to turn into either Venus (a fire tempest) or Mars (a cold, thin-aired blanket over a lifeless rocky shell) for the human fabric, as we know it, to unravel.
They made indoor farms. They renewed soil. They hosted vertically farmed dinner parties before the term “vertical farm” existed. They used environmental considerations as design parameters to both fanciful and practical ends. Yet in the Western framework of the 1960s listening to the environment, as a form of self-binding (i.e. creating and sticking to limitations as part of one’s process) in design methodologies, was recondite if not radical. By contemporary standards following green principles during design stages is quotidian. By indigenous or other environmental epistemological traditions their work was flailing and rudimentary. Yet… it was a start. It presented environmental information in a form and forum that split the difference between being epistemologically respectable to the West and non-confrontational enough to industry. Their work was ensconced, as if by amber, by the same effeteness that their project was trying to overcome. It was art. The Harrisons told me. Their university told me. The Getty Museum told me. The white gallery walls and neutral-white spotlights over parquet told me. The book told me. It was art.
I am not trying to be obtuse: at this time I still had not been able to understand why their work was art. It had rigorous proposals; complex reasoning expressed in diagrams similar to academically-minded infographics; it expressed impacts using data-driven methodologies and empirical documentation. Why was this art? Why were tenured art professors paid to do this? Why were contemporary environmental consultants producing work that 30-60 years ago were the provenance of artists? What in the hell is going on here?
I needed more info. A second exhibition, this time in the wisteria-lined spaces of a wealthy coastal enclave’s historical society gave me some answers. The major difference between the Harrisons’ proposals, and similar work for which I personally had earned $500,000 grants for much more recently, was that almost none of their early proposals worked. The children collecting neighborhood snails for the ducks… were an obviously unreliable labor force for the first rung of their self-sustaining ecosystem that culminated to a farm to table dinner for the neighborhood. Surely, they made up for the shortfall in their engineered biosphere at the grocery store. Their attempt to raise their own brine shrimp, in another project, as an aquaponic source of human protein was inedible. Their indoor citrus grove was fine but the size of their planters greatly stunted the trees short of their nutritional production potential.
Were these pieces thought provoking? Yes. But, I finally had an epistemological breaking point separating their work from the consultancies and environmental systems theorists of today. Today’s work supposes that the proposals are invalid unless they work, or at least could plausibly work to the furthest extent our modeling allows.The Harrison’s were under no such pressure.
The Harrison's son made two comments to me in a one-on-one conversation in the mingling after the panel. The first was a recounting of his favorite anecdote about someone questioning his parent’s expositions validity in places like LACMA and other prestigious galleries. They wrote in the newspaper, “If this is art, I’ll take broccoli.” It was some comment that ran adjacent to my thoughts about how to contextualize something that took creativity but relied on enough technical insights to seem out of place. That made viewing the Harrisons’ art feel like masticating fibrous health food in the perspective of this critic. The second comment addressed my questions about their ability to choose a life of genre-bending work that neither produced the traditional objects of art of a classical artist’s career nor was expected to create practical outcomes. And, his response was to shrug and call his parents’ tenure an “open secret” and that this was possible because “the university was their patron.” Like Brett Underwood beguiling me with his witness of a man burrowing through rock, it was how he called tenured professorship an “open secret” that intrigued me. I know what the financial parameters of an endowed chair are. He did not have to describe it as indecorous. Yet he did.
This unified my out-of-place feeling about JPL validating their work. Or how renowned art museums displayed their work when it would have been a better fit in “Science Centers,” “Museums of Science and Industry,” or “Field Museums” today.
When I saw a series of intimate photographs of a shirtless, long-haired man raking his manure pile—carefully tilling his mixture of sand, silt, and clay into loam and adding two different types of organic nitrogen, carbon, and probiotics, and even tasting it—I was astonished. Not because he ate a parfait of soil and two different types of animal dung. And not just because what looked like a candid photo of your boomer dad doing yard work in the 1960s was being touted as art. A couple was patronized to explore life’s basic tenets—such as what living with the environment means, or just making some dirt—while raising a three-child family to middle-class standards in La Jolla, California. That is what is impolite to say today.
That manure pile, at the time of this writing, is long gone, but the plot it sat on in the photo is one of the most expensive places in the world to live today. I grew up in the shadow of this place. I long knew this is where people who hire my father as their architect live. It is not where we live. It is where the amuse-bouche crowd seek reprieve from consuming the hoi polloi or ignoring them. They do so from their many residences well above the 2024 average home price for the region of $2.5M. Sometimes as high as $108M.
Art or yard work? Either way I would never in 2.5 million different ways be invited to re-enact those photographs. That was my departure point. What changed between then and now? What do they have that I am currently struggling to find, materially and thematically? What is patronage today?
Where Has All the Patronage Gone?
The Harrisons had a patron in the University (UCSD). Their son pointed that out to me. I started to explain to the man how I wished I could find something similar. Some sustaining funding that could help me do the work on climate change solutions that I found important and that I found in alignment with my disposition. Mr. Harrison did not recoil fully, but his body language did retract. It did so in a way that mirrored his next words. His body said, “Woah, guy. Don’t get the wrong idea. We believe in the same things, but I can’t help you.” While he verbally said: we all have to navigate that (how to find a patron).
“Patronage” in its common usage evokes images of the Medicis patronizing the lone genius. Galileo may have generated great works under this arrangement. But, there is something about our modern sensibility about professional sterility that makes us nervous that even this titan of Western history might have felt trapped or kept. Is giving someone an allowance so that they perform for us a satisfying life? For the patron? For the patronized? Do they feel like a modern kept lover in an executive’s pied-à-terre, like an unequal prisoner behind gilded fenestration?
I bring this up because it elucidates two common ideas: 1) that the heyday of patronage was centuries ago, and 2) that our legitimate questions about whether such a life would be meaningful to us often leads us to project our questions about life onto others before we investigate whether there is a framework that could fit us.
It may be interesting to learn that the heyday of patronage was in the middle twentieth century and it temporally coincided with the largest increase in standards of living and economic growth the world had ever seen. It was not in the 1600s as many people think. Patronage may be a relic of history, but like the Harrisons’ work, it is a relic of recent history. Do we want it back? Or is it destined to stay in the reliquary?
The Recent History of The Golden Age of Patronage
The 1960’s were the Golden Age of Patronage. It was not just more recent than you think; patronage was most prolific during the absolute maximum of the Modern cultural moment. This is the same Modern moment we have been charting since the rationalization of time — when human kind began its slow march towards believing it had transcended nature and its rhythms fully, that it could exceed the mere husbandry-level dominion over animals as posited in Genesis but could be the keeper and progenitor of natural order. We chart time down to the oscillations of the atom so our satellites can tell us exactly where we are within millimeters so that we can show up on time for work. We dam rivers. We drain seas. We build new ones. We seed clouds. We create new deserts. We pull fertilizer out of the prehistoric ground and directly out of the sky with plasma in order to profitably feed billions. We leave craters in the forms of mines and weapons tests large enough to see from space. And, most importantly, we do the non-gigantic actions of eight billion individuals that collectively dwarfs the impacts of our flirtations with gigantism. I posit that the 1960s at the acme point of the Keynesian Synthesis in the Abstraction Stack were was the Golden Age of Patronage.
I have briefly defined Keynesianism and alluded to Keynes above as a “Mount-Rushmore-like” figure in economic history. The historical abstraction stack introduced us to the implications of each form of abstraction that we can either embrace or avoid as is tuned to our predisposition and capacities as we seek patronage. But, Keynesianism was always in a different register than the others — time rationalization, labor, capital, rapidity and access. It seems important to expand on the concepts of the abstraction stack briefly here in order to exsect why high-Keynesianism, high-Modernity, and high-patronage intersect.
David Rooney in About Time: A History of Civilization in 12 Clocks (2021) and E.P. Thompson in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism (1967) reveal that time discipline is a historical imposition, not a neutral feature of civilization—and that capitalism relies on controlling time as much as labor. E.P. Thompson’s work in particular focuses on the transition from agrarian to industrial economies; the previous modality of time measured by tasks, seasons, or natural cycles that created irregular, weather-influenced work punctuated by social obligations and festivals gave way to a disciplinary force in which workers had to lease “hours” of labor, regardless of output. Punctuality, efficiency, and regularity became moral virtues imposed on the laboring class. Nearly 200,000 years of plateaued productivity got its first major uplift in the history of humanity as farm laborers started to restructure their consciousness around time bounded work, time discipline, and the requirements of keeping employment. Yet, this organizing principal was did not limit its economic importance to the hierarchical relationship between landowner and serf. Nial Ferguson (2008) in The Ascent of Money highlights the ascendancy of labor as an abstraction — even well compensated labor for elite members of society. His case study is embedded in the generational transition between three successive holders of the title Duke of Buckingham. The family accumulated 67,000 acres between England, Ireland, and Jamaica but by 1861, when the Third Duke, stripped his father, the Second Duke, of his personal power of the purse after exceeding his estate’s income for 20 years, it was demonstrable that “In the modern world… a regular job (with the Northwestern Railway Company) mattered more than an inherited title, not matter how many acres you owned.” Regular cashflow through acquiescence to temporal expectations now also included the rich and could be a better predictor of financial growth than the remuneration of the landowning class—based on rents and variable crop prices—alone. “Keynsianism” as it used here is embedded in and extrapolated from the conclusions presented by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century (2013). He charted that the rate of return on capital in the last 150 years has outpaced the returns on labor. By way of simple review: returns on labor are tied to productivity and hours worked. Its growth is linear or bounded based on the biological and legal constraints of the labor force. Returns on capital are rents, dividends, capital gains. It is tied to ownership and reinvestment. It is subject to geometric or exponential growth (via compounding), and it neither tires nor has the same legacy of legal constraint. Piketty shows us two growth line graphs over the same timeline—150 years—with the returns on capital and labor vaguely mirroring each other, with both being subject to macroeconomic exuberance or recession, but with the curve for capital always being higher than the returns on labor. His book is the most rigorous analysis of how the two curves decoupling without structural intervention — and result in yawning inequality. But for a twenty year period post World War 2 a unique historical convergence of grand cultural unification, moral trust after a vindicated total war, government policy and unprecedented capacious industrial growth created an atmosphere wherein individual actors reached for retained earnings, high (corporate) marginal tax-rate, and full employment. CEOs, midlevel scientists, workers, and government reached for “coupling capital and labor” in our Maxwell’s Demon metaphor from above as “the one thing” they needed to grow their business limitlessly. It is an unprecedented type of hybrid abstraction that was never “one thing” and is an artifact of a potentially inimitable moment in all history. The Keynesian moment is from the Great Depression through World War 2, through the Marshall Plan in which we exported it back to Europe, and through the two and a half decades up until the beginnings of the deregulation movement, which attempted a great decoupling in reaction to it.
To inject more detail: Capital and labor were wed through high taxation (the highest marginal tax rate was 90%) so personal extraction was less financially beneficial than long-term reinvestment. Stock buy-backs by corporations, which use retained profits to decreased the traded amount of stock securities in the market place were illegal until 1982 as they were considered supply-side market manipulation. The Maxwell’s demon metaphor, as construed earlier in which rational economic actors reached for what economic growth the abstraction stack allowed, reached for full employment and long-term internal value generation. They did this because the stated goals of Keynesianism were the broadest participation in the economic uplift in both the labor and capital growth curves of the economy. Economic actors of all types said, “if we adopt the state-led synthesis towards full economic participation, then we all grow.
The 1960s represented a rare convergence of economic, institutional, and cultural forces—what can be described, through an expanded lens, as the golden age of patronage. This is not patronage in the narrow sense of arts funding or aristocratic subsidy, but in the Adlerian sense: the social and economic scaffolding that allowed individuals to participate in long-cycle work and generated emergent value. Under the high-Keynesian paradigm that shaped much of the postwar West, full employment was not a side effect of economic health but its explicit purpose. Governments, corporations, and universities alike structured their macro and micro-level decisions to promote broad-based participation in economic life—not through zero-sum gatekeeping described as efficiency, but through sustained integration.
This patronage environment did not emerge by accident. The long tail of World War II policy choices, including the G.I. Bill and the vast expansion of higher education, created a virtuous cycle in which graduates entered a labor market capable of absorbing them into new, meaningful, upwardly mobile roles. Demand for skilled labor met an unprecedented supply of newly educated citizens, and the economy was capacious enough to reward even average contributors with dignity and stability. Those who were neither exceptionally gifted nor ruthlessly strategic still belonged. The social compact was clear: one’s willingness to participate with seriousness and integrity in the economic process would be met with recognition and reciprocity. The psychological result was profound—an environment in which community feeling was not a luxury, but a lived economic reality.
During this era, institutions acted as buffers between individuals and the high-variance risks of emergent value. Organizations like Bell Labs, NASA, and ARPA (the precursor to DARPA) did not expect immediate returns on investment; they absorbed the uncertainty that today would be offloaded onto individuals. Tenure-track academia, then still expanding, provided the intellectual equivalent of shelter-in-place orders: protected zones where long-form thinking could gestate without pressure to monetize or capture engagement. Even the arts—supported by public grants, institutional fellowships, and philanthropic largesse—were seen as worthy recipients of social surplus, not as side hustles to be justified in clicks or self-branding.
This alignment allowed for a fundamentally different relationship to value. Emergent value—slow-burning, risky, hard to quantify—was legible enough to justify support for even before its returns became clear. There was cultural permission to believe in it. People funded what they sensed was becoming, not just what had already succeeded. And while it would be false to idealize the period—patronage was still unevenly distributed, and many were excluded—the structural principle held: large systems absorbed uncertainty so many more individuals could engage in meaningful, recursive work.
The story of superglue was highlighted on the YouTube channel Veritasium. For context: the channel has 17.4M followers and the video has 9.1M views in its first four weeks. The episode itself presents an enduringly celebrated kind of science story. The reason I bring it up here is because it is the kind of science story that is celebrated in hindsight… but unfundable today with foresight.
The story of cyanoacrylate (CA) starts at the Eastman Kodak company during World War 2. The company had myriad government contracts during the war. Anything to do with optics their domain. I have even hiked one of their calcite mines, used for bomb sights at the time, with clear crystals littering the desert ground to this day. The hope was that cyanoacrylate, just as the calcite was for a different project, might be a candidate for less expensive or better performing weapon sights. Castable plastic gun-sights might be much faster and less expensive to produce than ground glass. There was one distinct problem with CA: it stuck to everything it touched. Eventually, the initial researcher put it aside in favor of more promising avenues.
Years later one of his colleagues asked for the research as he too, for whichever reason, was also experimenting with transparent plastics. The original researcher obliged but warned him not to put it in the refractometer. Doing so would permanently affix two vital parts of a tool that—at the time—cost tens of thousands of dollars. That word of caution was heeded but absentmindedly forgotten by the time he got to sample nine-hundred-ten. Damn. What a blunder. Refractometers do not grow on trees. Not unless you have a universal multi-material adhesive, and use it to stick one up there amongst the leaves and abandoned bird nests…
It was at this point, now in 1958 that the researchers were able to overcome psychological functional fixedness and realize that their work might be suitable as a glue rather than a castable plastic. Superglue, originally sold under its designation “Eastman #910” in reference to its sample number, hit the market. Superglue and its post-patent competitors represent a $2.13B annual market in 2023.
The story does not end there however. The many synthetic solids lumped under the term plastic are mainly a group of polymers, long-chain hydrocarbons that are able to link their chains in predictable ways. However, none of the plastics commonly used today are perfectly good at unlinking their chains. That is to say they do not recycle well. We found ways to cure and use nylon, polypropylene, polyester, polyethylene, and other common synthetic substances, but they degrade in very few cycles upon reuse. All of them except cyanoacrylate. It recycles perfectly. Low temperature distillation (approximately 200º C) causes the molecule to revert to its virgin state without degradation! However, we never figured out how to use it as a plastic rather than as a glue. During the age of climate change, though, there is renewed interest in exactly that. There’s legitimate hope. It could work. Cyanoacrylate could join the ranks of aluminum and glass as infinitely recyclable but with a much smaller industrial infrastructure. A story over eighty years old could be the plastic of our future.
Don’t you just love standing atop a mountain on an archipelago of legibility and looking back at the horizons others have already swum now that you know their work is possible? 19M people appreciated that context on YouTube in the first 4 weeks.
Here is another short science story: the manufacturer of the semaglutide GLP-1 drugs Ozempic and Wegovy is based out of Denmark and now makes enough money on those drugs that the company’s GDP exceeds that of its native country. That research on stabilized forms of GLP-1 proteins started in the 1970s with investigations into gila monster spit that were considered out-there and barely fundable. Years later, but still in the 20th century, initially unrelated research into the pancreases of angler fish was able to contextualize their work using the same gila monster research. The research thread was just barely starting to coalesce around a set of molecules that are key to hunger, satiety, and metabolism that exist in the human body for infinitesimal moments in the ontology of our systems. Yet, eventually again, someone started to wonder about the health and public health benefits of creating a stable version of the molecule, something that had a longer bio-available shelf-life and therefore a longer impact on health outcomes. That 50 year story about knowledge that no-one cared about, barely found funding, thought was too weird, eventually turned into something useful and massively profitable. Will all fringe exploration end with the same result? No. But the power of this story is that it is as enjoyable as it is topical.
By contrast, the retreat from this paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s did not merely signal a change in policy. It marked the unraveling of a social epistemology: a belief that slow things were worth building, even if their benefits accrued across generations. As financialization took hold, institutional patience withered. Stock buybacks became legal in 1982, as stated above, and replaced corporate R&D on financial statements. The recursive loop from board member vote to stock price was much shorter than R&D-to-market validity-to-stock price. Tenure lines constricted; adjunct professorship grew as a model, which increased the number of students able to be taught while adjuncts made non-livable wages in the hope tenure was still possible. Government R&D shifted toward defense or collapsed altogether. The National Endowment of the Arts, whose annual budget is less than a single fighter jet, no longer gives direct grants to artists (an executive order struck it from the federal budget in 2025). Billions in university research funded thorough the National Science Foundation has been frozen in 2025. The task of stewarding emergent value—once distributed across institutions, incentivized by tax code, and accepted as nationally accretive—now fell to the individual. Crowdfunding, venture capital, and influencer economies became the new “patronage,” but they lacked durability, stability, and collective intent. They recast structural risk as personal gamble.
And here the shift becomes psychological as well as economic. When patronage evaporates, the perception of, or the capacity to perceive, emergent value persists socially—we know when someone is doing meaningful work—but it becomes illegible economically. Open-source contributors, environmental advocates, speculative researchers, and small-scale inventors may be admired, but they are rarely compensated in proportion to their generative impact. They are encouraged to either abandon the work in favor of one that can pay for the lifestyle they have become accustomed to or adapt their expectations for standard of living. In the end, we applaud the maverick at arm’s length while reserving our dollars for things already complete, already optimized, already packaged — like movies about mavericks, or toothbrushes.
In this light, the 1960s were not just an anomaly of growth. They were a brief window in which the economic system aligned—however imperfectly—with the psychological needs of Adlerian meaningfulness, long-cycle recursion, and social belonging. Patronage, in this broader sense, was not a luxury good; it was the psychic infrastructure of a society still willing to absorb risk communally. The question now is not whether we can return to that precise model. We can’t. National debt levels, institutional incentive structures and perceived cultural disunity discourage it. The question is whether we can redesign for that deeper principle: to build orienting models that allow the imperfect progenitors of emergent value to be supported before they or their work is complete—if they ever are or will be—and to rediscover the courage to act as both patrons and the patronized again, both structurally and interpersonally.
All this is a contextualization of a contemporary moment in which we tend to like our stories—and our humans—already finished. Even though, today, we still tell our children and ourselves that requesting that someone “be finished” would be psychologically cancerous.
The Broken Temporality after Keynesianism and the Attenuation of Long-Term Resonance
It is important to recognize that not every historical movement produces new abstractions. After the era of high Keynesianism — when the public sector modulated the largest concentration of financial and economic power the world had ever seen — the dominant intellectual movements that followed did not extend the abstraction stack. They fractured it. Neoconservatism and neoliberalism, for all their ideological arguments about freedom, efficiency, and individual agency, did not create new scaffolds for recursive engagement. They liquidated accumulated structures, redistributing—via privatization or globalized task differentiation—the time-stored value of mid-20th century Full Employment without erecting equivalent frameworks for renewal.
This was not inherently immoral. There is real moral logic in asking why a system should hoard resources it no longer knows how to deploy, just as it is prudent a startup not raise more than its mission needs to deploy but multiplied infinite times in complexity. In that sense, the post-Keynesian redistribution resembled the butcher's logic: if the carcass is too heavy for its own legs, there is some sense in carving it. But the carving ran deeper than mere weight. As dramatized in the television show The Newsroom, there are moments when the physical assets of an institution — the cameras of a newsroom, for instance — become worth more, sold for parts, than the revenue stream they were originally built to serve. In the show, this tension becomes a dramatic arc between protagonist and antagonist. In the real world, it became a quiet, pervasive realization: the latent value stored inside mid-century public structures—directly through budgets and insurance funds and indirectly through tax policy—often exceeded their visible economic output.
The realization preceded the rationalization. Once it became apparent that these systems could be disassembled for immediate gain, thinkers such as William F. Buckley Jr. built the ideological scaffolding to justify it — not out of maliciousness, but because the systems themselves had grown too slow, too broad, and too unable to narrate their own necessity to a faster world. Thus, what followed was not a new economic abstraction for growth, something an individual rational actor could say “I can grow if I do that.” It was the harvesting, and value extraction via arbitrage, of the accumulated time structures of the Keynesian era, dressed in the language of freedom and efficiency.
In this process, the capacity for long-cycle recursion — both geographically and temporally — was quietly broken. Geographically, neoliberal supply chain differentiation fragmented production so extensively that no individual actor could easily contemplate the whole. Temporally, the legitimacy of projects whose fruits might only emerge across generations was steadily eroded. Who would now choose to be an elephant tamer, waiting a lifetime to see one and a half reproductive cycles unfold? In a culture increasingly dominated by immediacy, the disposition to steward long arcs became not just undervalued, but almost unintelligible.
Meanwhile, as financial markets became ever more liquid and detached from material production, success decreased its correlation with honest recursion and increased its fluency in systems that rewarded speed, opacity, and narrative manipulation. “Success” even conceptually flattens this correlation further; due to the magnified amounts of market capitalization in M2 and M3 sectors of the economy, a perversion of the gospel of wealth encroached upon the zeitgeist: namely that success in systems that do not necessarily even couple to honest recursion still correlate to societal value linearly. This explains the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) salesman in The Big Short equating the size of his remuneration to how much society values him. Wealth became mistaken for universal excellence, even as the underlying systems demanded less patience, less honest engagement, and less time-rootedness than ever before.
Thus, the abstraction stack I propose does not treat deregulation or financialization as new epochs of economic imagination. They are the aftershocks of a once-temporal architecture, now carved apart. The true next abstraction — the first after Keynesianism — only arrives with the Information Age: the abstraction of value through speed and universal access themselves, rather than through cumulative production or integration. High-speed trading, as an example, affected with orders of magnitude more rapidity than is experienced captures arbitrage value in microseconds before information is livably actionable. Similarly, access increased the total addressable market for some products to the whole of human population for the first time ever, which instead of ushering in a perception of endless growth as was true of previous abstractions, it instead signaled the perception that growth may inevitably end as there are no more people or lived hours with which to use those products. And it is from within that broken temporality that we must now attempt to reconstruct personal architectures of recursion and meaning.
The erosion of long-cycle recursion, the modalities of those predisposed to M0 structures, was not merely an intellectual failure, nor a moral one. It was a gradual attenuation of cultural resonance, driven by shifting incentive structures that increasingly privileged speed over duration. In domains like rail infrastructure — projects whose payoff arcs extend beyond any individual career or electoral cycle — the sheer cost profile and deferred recognition disqualify them from serious attention under contemporary conditions. Previous cost structures could have made it profitable under a single lifetime, but now, after the increasing costs of labor and materiel, its structure as hyper-efficient land transportation at a an economy of scale unequaled elsewhere only can provide returns on timescales longer than a single actor may endure. No single actor can capture enough immediate prestige, profit, or personal reward to justify the initial investment. So, privatization of Amtrak, for example, was not its salvation but its death by attenuation has has been borne out. Similarly, the changing market for single-family housing stock in post-war America until now changed the cost basis of investment in a home from being equal to two and a half years of income saved… To five years… To fifteen… Then to thirty-year mortgages. Now, to afford a home on a market-available salary in the area I grew up in I would need a mortgage longer than 45 years or the entirety of my working life in order to be able to afford the monthly payments.
In earlier epochs, such long-term commitments were not necessarily seen more clearly, but they were often embraced with a kind of civic faith — a quasi-religious trust in the ontology that building slow, durable systems was self-evidently good, even when immediate opportunities for M1 success provided a countervailing example. The dismantling of the mid-century economic architecture, and the rise of liquidity and speed as dominant virtues, gradually unstitched that faith. Not through argument, but through structural gravity: slow things simply stopped singing as loudly in the economic soul. Fast things in M2 and M3 not only cost less perceptibly, but returned far more it seemed.
Today, even those predisposed to love long arcs often find themselves culturally invalidated unless they move faster, scale bigger, and monetize sooner. Or are fired en masse when governmental institutions meet the chainsaw of political incentive structures measured in four years not 100. It is not that the case for long-term recursion has been disproven. It is that the very temporal field we inhabit no longer amplifies its music. And the result is a society increasingly unable to hear, let alone build, the kinds of infrastructures — literal and figurative — upon which lasting civilizations depend.
Carrying Cost Capacity: A Personal Inflection Against Distributed Collapse
The Keynesian synthesis created, however briefly, a constructive interference between labor and capital—returns that were, for a generation, not only mutual but mutually legitimating. But as recursive validation became harder to sustain—due to institutional overextension, speculative drift, and the accelerating pace of legibility—the project unraveled. James C. Scott Seeing Like A State (1998) is the historiographer of the subsequent epistemic terrain and how its birth needed the Keynesian synthesis described here to be dismembered. He cited four intertwined realities of late 20th Century political economy that undermined the previous synthesis.
The exposed failure of high-modernist projects:
Scott shows how grandiose schemes based on "high modernism" — a blind faith in scientific planning, technical expertise, and the supposed superiority of centralized rationality — often failed catastrophically. Examples include Soviet collectivization, Brasilia’s city planning, or huge agricultural schemes like the Tanzanian ujamaa villages. These failures discredited the hubris of state-led mega-projects, at least in liberal democracies.Rise of civil society and public resistance:
By the late 20th century, the public in many Western countries had become more skeptical of top-down control. Grassroots movements, environmental groups, indigenous rights activists, and local communities pushed back against massive interventions that ignored local knowledge and disrupted people's lives.Shift toward decentralization and complexity:
There was a growing recognition in the West that bottom-up knowledge — "metis" (Scott’s key term for local, practical knowledge) — mattered. Instead of imposing top-down designs, more institutions began to value incremental improvements, feedback loops, and adaptive governance. Scott argues that Western states, recognizing the cost of large failures and facing more pluralistic politics, pivoted toward smaller, less domineering interventions.Economic and political changes:
Neoliberalism, beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, shifted state roles from grand planner to market facilitator. Governments increasingly outsourced services, privatized industries, and shrank their direct control over massive projects — not necessarily out of wisdom, but out of ideological and fiscal pressures.
Yet Scott’s argument, while potent, stops short of capturing a quieter but equally consequential retreat: not only from projects of monumental scale, but from the more humble, everyday infrastructures whose maintenance once bound communities together.
What followed wasn’t just fragmentation. It was the reassertion of familiar tools—capital, policy, labor—that kept using the same names but carried different meanings. They lost their recursive backbone. “Full employment” became rhetoric, not shared aim. “Work” became discipline, not ballast. “Freedom” became deregulation, not sovereignty. Patronage as a structure collapsed—and as a social grammar. You’re not just describing an economic shift; you’re describing the collapse of a recursive syntax. So Scott, in that light, is not a historian of failure. He’s a cartographer of the post-synthesis epistemic terrain. His attention to state legibility doesn’t just document institutional overreach—it points to a deeper abandonment of trust in lived recursion, replaced by imposed mostly linear schemas that were still coded the same.
So what we are doing here is personal epistemology that feels what it means to live after that grand convergence—and to try to reconstruct livability from fragments, without expecting the convergence to return.
Consider the story of Maumee, Ohio as a case study. In 2024, it won an award from the Strong Towns organization—a group advocating for sustainable urbanism. Yet that same year, perhaps catalyzed by the attention it gained for being responsible, the town informed the EPA that its wastewater discharge into the local river was beginning to exceed regulatory limits. Rather than commend their foresight, the EPA issued an unfunded mandate: a $220 million overhaul of a deep sewer system originally built with federal largesse, but long maintained with crossed fingers and deferred budgetary line items. It is a nearly universal story in the expanse between the Midwest and the beaches of California — the area of the country most changed by another 1950’s invention, the interstate highway system, the westward migration it facilitated, and the pro-growth policies those populations spurred.
Meanwhile, as another recursive datapoint that acknowledges how difficult deep sewer systems are, the Gates Foundation has launched open competitions to design alternatives to deep sewers—acknowledging, implicitly, that the geographical and financial conditions that once made such deep systems feasible were never practical for one third of the world’s population. It highlights how fantastically expensive these systems are to build on a per capita basis, but the competition itself doesn’t imply that the richest countries in the world, where these systems were universalized, would retreat from that cost and say something like “If you defecate, it’s your responsibility.” The Gates Foundation competition was not calibrated for the idea that even in the United States what was once considered baseline infrastructure—expensive but essential—is now often viewed as extravagant unless you can pay for it yourself.
Strong Towns frames this pattern as a collective preference for the glamour of growth over the humility of maintenance. That is resonant, but it is only part of the pattern and it, in not so many words, puts perhaps too unexplained emphasis on non-structural incentives—like the vanity of groundbreaking ceremonies—as a reason politicians will fund growth but not maintenance. Beneath it lies a deeper story: the slow dismantling not merely of infrastructure, but of the institutional architectures capable of sustaining it. The postwar high-Keynesian state—with its 90% marginal tax rates and its ethos of reinvestment—built momentum less by velocity than by mass. You kept your profits, but only if you kept paying them forward. It was an economic model that privileged slow accumulation over immediate liquidity—a structure that reinvested into what could endure physically and what it could endure epistemologically.
But, like the civic religion we alluded to earlier—where M0 recursion operated before M2 and M3 ever existed and was seen as the bedrock of 19th century M1 creation, for example—the logic of long-term stewardship had never been tested against the scale of returns that the 20th and 21st centuries would unleash on the psyche.
The first structural precondition for the Keynesian moment was a major change in public finance: the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913, granting Congress the power to levy an income tax. Initially effecting less than one percent of the population, it laid the groundwork for a steadily expanding fiscal base. This base, still modest on the eve of World War I, became the vital artery through which American mobilization for two world wars, mass industrialization, and postwar reconstruction would flow.
With this foundation, a hybrid momentum emerged: labor and capital abstractions from our abstraction stack operated in high synthesis, each reinforcing the other. The goal of Full Employment, a proper noun, introduced a modality of constructive interference in which the growth curves of both labor and capital merged as everyone, worker, entrepreneur and CEO alike, was funneled into a fourier system of accelerating, but still grounded, real–world growth. Growth was not merely faster than any other time or place in the history of humanity; it was thick, infrastructural, anchored by reciprocal investment and civic commitment. In this structure, recursive accumulation was valorized—not yet displaced by the liquidity and reach that would later define economic success.
Yet even as M0 undergirded this expansion, the first signs of overreach began to accumulate. Actors in long-cycle return organizations used the dual momentum of industrial management at scale and the fervor of the Cold War to start racking up, as Scott points out, public and expensive failures. Misadventures and wastes of materiale were the best-case characterization of mega agricultural projects or social engineering that failed. They were bellicose disasters when they sprawled into actual warfare and mass death in the case of our entry into Vietnam. This era began a reckoning. Alternating stories of apex achievements and nadir were both on the evening news. For every Green Revolution—literally saving a billion lives through state and university synthesis—there emerged parallel chronicles of M0 actors failing at unprecedented scales. The USDA regulated pesticide industries against fraud prior to 1962 for example, not for poisonous aggregate effect. Therefore, the government was liable for not anticipating the problems with DEET as outlined in Silent Spring, for example. As Scott would later crystallize, a systemic sense of drift—of centralized recursion over-reaching past its own responsiveness to local, lived realities—began to take hold.
This slow unraveling gained ideological momentum in the 1970s, eventually announcing itself as a deregulating world order by the early 1980s. Simultaneously, the first major work on market positioning, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1980), offers a convenient marker for the beginning of the M2 economy—where value addition migrated from the manufacturer to the brand owner.
By 2025, M0 logics have contended with the higher returns of M2 narrative management and M3 financial abstraction for nearly half a century. Manufacturing, once seen as a national anchor, is increasingly subordinated to the risk calculus of brand equity and asset liquidity. During this time banking also became America’s largest industry by value.
The civic religion that once trusted the intrinsic value of long-cycle recursion stands closer to rupture than ever before. Across all levels of government, hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs this year alone—whether through direct cuts, funding reallocations, forced retirement or the trickle-down constriction of civic infrastructure. The act is framed as efficiency. But what is really being amputated is the ballast that once allowed meaning, patience, and public recursion to coexist with ambition in the public sphere. Today, it is treated as vestigial. Unnecessary.
And thus we return to where this essay began: parsing the chasm between efficiency and meaningfulness—and asking what architectures, if any, might remain.
As I worked toward clarifying these ideas, it became clear that I was still missing something at the macro scale. A concept not of personal iteration or imaginative recursion, but of systemic constraint. The closest metaphor I have found is ecological: a carrying capacity. To that end, I offer a provisional idea—carrying cost capacity.
It describes the maximum cumulative burden or maximum amount of nonrecursive nonsense—across financial, psychological, and material dimensions—that a system can bear before qualitative collapse becomes inevitable. This is not the same as societal collapse. It has nothing to do with technological reversion or governmental abdication. It might more closely correlate with the roughly generational-timescale occurrence when the solutions of the previous generation need to be re-examined. This can happen as a felt reality even when financial abstraction defers visibility or diffuses financial effects. There can be malaise without recession. The underlying psychological load of an overaccumulation of nonsense does not disappear. It waits.
Carrying cost capacity, if it holds any real value beyond metaphor, holds it here: as a way for individuals to sense and respond to invisible limits before those limits assert themselves through collapse. It creates the possibility that someone could choose, not through catastrophe, not through regulatory compulsion, but through a self-trusted recursion approximating conviction in form, to act as the inflection point to do something when something does not feel right. To say, “This is far enough.”
The recognition itself of carrying cost capacity becomes a kind of internal ballast—a stabilizing force strong enough to resist short-term incentives even if the system at large does not yet compel such a choice. It also acknowledges that systemic thresholds, like those glimpsed and overstated in Ehrlich’s work on human carrying capacity, may not always arrive on the timeline we expect. But they could always arrive. Their eventual arrival is not negated by delay. It frames voluntary constraint in the name of topics as diverse as climate change not as loss, but as lucidity for that particular person. As meaningful engagement, rather than worthless asceticism or self-binding.
If anything, carrying cost capacity becomes more vital in a system complex enough to diffuse collapse itself. Not just like the signals of collapse. Like a polyploid organism—where genetic damage can be distributed silently across redundant copies rather than repaired—modern systems absorb structural failures into overlapping adjacencies, preserving the outward appearance of intactness even as internal coherence erodes. I write immediately after over one hundred people died in flash floods in Texas (July 2025). Buildings were not just built in the floodplain but in the floodway, which is the flood equivalent of building in a dry lake bed rather than the shore of a dry lake. When asked whether anything could have been done, the complex response is distilled to “when everyone is responsible, no one is.” A parallel analysis of financial systems shows something similar: that securitization disperses not only financial risk but also moral responsibility; each adjacent actor can claim their portion held, and together they rebuild the shape of the system without acknowledging the underlying fracture. In healthy biological systems, accumulated damage eventually triggers apoptosis: a form of programmed collapse, where failure is acknowledged and metabolized. In polyploid systems, by contrast, that apoptotic signaling can be delayed or muted. Mutation builds up quietly, metastasis replaces rupture, and decay proceeds not through spectacular breakdown, but through attrition disguised as continuity.
The financial crisis of 2008 offered what should have been a paradigmatic test: a collapse vast enough, visible enough to compel systemic recalibration. Instead, it became a template for preservation through intervention. Risk was socialized; culpability was diffused; accountability was deferred. Institutions too complex to fail were not restructured toward resilience, but fortified against correction. Even the post-crisis regulatory architectures, conceived as safeguards, were hollowed out within a generation. Collapse, rather than catalyzing a return to functional constraint, was integrated into the logic of inertia. In the aftermath, systemic risk did not diminish—it was securitized once more, embedded into new layers of abstraction. Collapse itself no longer functions as a feedback mechanism. It becomes, instead, an extension of the problem it once threatened to resolve.
In this environment, honoring carrying cost capacity at a personal level becomes not merely a form of prudence, but a deliberate form of design. It requires recognizing that meaning-making, if it is to survive systems that mask failure rather than metabolize it, must develop its own internal metrics—ones that are not predicated on visible collapse, public consensus, or institutional validation. It demands living as if thresholds of coherence matter even when they are no longer reliably enforced from the outside.
It is a pioneer act, not of frontier expansion, but of frontier stabilization: to build ways of living that respect carrying cost capacity before collapse arrives to demand it. To treat personal ballast—the quiet, self-imposed limits that hold space for coherence—not as eccentricity or asceticism, but as a form of invisible architecture. A resistance against erosion. A refusal to let collapse become the only teacher still left standing.
Honesty-Accuracy-Honesty
Now that we have articulated the logic of carrying cost capacity at the personal level, I want to extrapolate its architecture—briefly—to the institutional, as a thought experiment. This is not a policy argument. I will present a potential policy proposal late in Section V where we discuss implementation. This is a psychological weight test:
Earlier in this essay, we discussed Dr. Anna Lembke’s contribution to the Mobius Method: her framing of honesty not as moral virtue but as diagnostic necessity. During individual inventory phases, that honesty becomes the connective tissue between subjective lived experience and the dopaminergic realities of our continually recursive lives. Without it, the loops we set out on are not assured to have a sustainable foundational logic.
At the institutional scale, “honesty” tends to give way to “accuracy.” Accuracy sets aside the moral undertones of the former and instead refers to what is measurable and demonstrable. It denotes objectivity without intent. Whether we are measuring the right things is a different question—one that accuracy, as a term, doesn’t ask.
Yet as we outlined earlier, the higher up one moves in the stack of mediated value—particularly in M2 and M3 segments—the more decoupled the outputs become from the implicit recursiveness of material synthesis. There are fewer direct feedback loops. There are more mediating proxies between the thing being made and the test of whether it “works,” whether it’s “useful,” “durable,” or “beautiful.” A weld in steel answers its own question. A financial instrument does not. It requires a series of engineered tests: predictive modeling, user behavior tracking, delayed feedback, interpretive framing, and usually, further abstraction. The knowledge work required to validate it recursively generates more knowledge work.
This is where securitized risk most commonly encroaches on carrying cost capacity. We don’t just witness deferred or socialized catastrophe occasionally. We witness the everyday psychological effects of institutions that do not need to conduct their inventory or integration steps accurately in order to be rewarded, to grow, or to mature. Entire ecosystems arise in which the recursion of whether the work is vital becomes someone else’s responsibility. It is socialized inventory and integration rather than the more common economic terminology of risk and exposure.
In 2008, banks did not prioritize the inventory and integration of their bankers; ratings agencies did not prioritize the inventory and integration of the instruments they rated; and bankers, collectively, held a monopsony position against a duopoly in the ratings agencies, who sold advantageous ratings for fees. Every node was almost doing their jobs appropriately. Almost.
Most often, that responsibility falls to the consumer—who is expected to opt out of products or services that don’t serve their needs. The quiet discernment of one person is pitted against a $456 billion marketing industry (US Statistics, 2025). That’s not accountability. It’s asymmetry.
Yet each institution, like each abstraction, is composed of people. And every person is still subject to the same diagnostic honesty in their own Mobius loop: whether their work provides the time, resources, recognition, or space to test its own coherence. In this way, personal recursive honesty becomes a pressure test—not just for the self, but for the structures built around us. It is not moral purity. It is epistemic integrity.
This piece is not written to suggest that “the world would be a better place if we were all honest.” Nor is it a psychological extension of Bullshit Jobs (2018) by David Graeber. My estimation is that a more modest three-part loop better captures the friction:
M2 and M3 segments represent some of the most seductive value propositions the world has ever seen—so their returns are difficult to resist or it is difficult to resist insinuating their scale is directly proportional to their meaning.
The absence of integration is most often felt not during collapse, but in the ambient absurdity that people are getting rich—or attempting to—doing work that appears structurally meaningless.
And because our sense of loss is more psychologically acute than our sense of gain, the idea that any honest recursion could jeopardize one’s participation in that economy is often enough to disincentivize recursion at all. Put another way: our fear that we won’t get to pull the lever stops inventory on whether the casino is serving us.
This leads to another extension of ballast in reaction to carrying cost capacity. It is not just resilience in the face of collapse, like a prepper uncle. Its function is more mundane: a kind of economic mindfulness that lets nonsense pass without absorption.
“I am not the nonsense.”
You can say goosfraba if you want. Like everything in this essay, that’s personal.
Should others fund our imagination?
We previously created a recursive definition of imagination. We then invoked the idea of ballast as a nuanced form of resilience. One that is reframes it as engagement rather than resignation or opposition. But when, if ever, is imagination worthy of funding?
Imagination swims through life. It is not infallible. I think of it similarly to a corollary to Sherry Turkle’s thesis in Alone Together. In Turkle’s framing we, meaning other people, are the generalized and universal object among all possible things that disappoints other human beings the most often. However, we, those very same beings, may also be the only ones who can exceed our expectations as well. Her book uses investigations of the ways in which we seek reductive but more predictable versions of common interactions to reach an emotionally safer “good enough” state. She characterizes robots, games, low-friction reductive versions of accomplishment, gamified software, and others systems in a way that has fewer “Fuck yeahs!” but also fewer feelings of sympathetic embarrassment. Imagination, in this parallel, is statistically more likely to be ungrounded than practical; it has a higher probability of being wacky than cogent; wacky not actionable; irrelevant vs relevant; dissonant rather than important. But, imagination when it lands, for all its likelihood to disappoint, may similarly be the only capacity that can exceed expectations.
Imagination then gives us two irreconcilable truths in one package: it is probably useless and might be one of the unadulterated good things in the human experience.
Should we expect other people to pay us for ours? The contemporary moment unequivocally says no.
And returning to Rutger Bregman (The Interview: Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives” cited earlier) he relayed a statistic that 20% of people currently self-report that they do not think that their jobs convey any social importance to the world. In other words, that their jobs do not matter and they would not do them if someone else had not already determined that they were willing to pay someone for it. Again, unlike Bregman, I do not think that one’s personal economics, their grammar for justification, needs to reconcile the implicit contradiction between
life costing money,
culture currently not paying people to enact their imaginations, and
20% of jobs perhaps are best reframed as case studies that employers are willing to patronize their own imaginations, not the employees.
That reframing gives us a rough gauge of how common it is for a person to structure their patronage around a non-recursive object in the current system.
Self Patronage Beyond Poverty
Now is a good time to clarify that self-patronage is not limited to poverty as a precondition. Self-patronage arises whenever the individual has taken sufficient inventory to be able to enact recursion and their Mobius Method in their own economic lives.
My path to self-patronage is entrepreneurial, we will see. But, it does not have to be for everyone. It is the most blank canvas for orienting the effort of finding out how to be accurate to yourself via the Mobius Method. It is not the only one. We will see in the next section that I am working on making it so entrepreneurialism does not require all or nothing cycling. Yer it still has risks that not everyone can bear.
Both you and I can continue to enact the Mobius Method if we make low, medium, or high amounts of remuneration. As long as our sense of repetition, inventory, and integration—the lost skills—remain intact, then there is no cap on how much or how little income the Mobius Method requires. Recursion still benefits from the silver lining we discussed before: our own subjective limitations means recursion does not scale with compensation. So our meaning and our wellbeing can be intact at any level.
Enough
Enough is a circle. Not a line.
There is a petite tragedy at the heart of how we now use the word “enough.” It has been flattened, miscast as a static condition, when it should have remained a dynamic question. Once, perhaps, it was a living inquiry—a metric as intimate as having a pulse. But as we disassembled the social architectures that once protected interiority, we also de-skilled ourselves from the ability to intuit enough from the inside. In its place, we installed proxies: income thresholds, square footage, the right job title, the proper sheen of legitimacy. And in doing so, we confused abundance with affirmation.
The tragedy is not just that our interiority doesn’t scale. It’s that we’ve stopped recognizing that this is one of its greatest strengths. In a world obsessed with scale—where market cap, followers, and growth rates define success—our inner life remains blessedly, stubbornly finite. No matter how many zeros get added to the coping strategies, the subjective architecture of being human remains constant. I’ve heard this from bookkeepers and entrepreneurs, from overwhelmed parents and ultra-high-net-worth heirs. One man, whose inheritance exceeded a hundred million dollars, told me he envied the middle class—not for the simplicity, but for the quiet coherence of a life where the mechanisms of self didn’t get drowned out by the machinery of everyone else’s expectations.
This flattening—of enough, of selfhood, of poverty—pervades our cultural reproduction. It’s visible in the most intimate places. In conversations with friends who share my fears and values but still treat deviation from market norms as a personal failing. In the way we conflate financial constriction with personal diminishment, unless that constriction comes with the legibility of formal study. In the fact that no one taught me how to build CNC-style robotics or design computer vision capture devices, and yet no one considers this kind of autodidactic immersion “education” because it wasn’t paid for or proctored.
We say to our children, “You can be anything,” and mean it. But we say to ourselves, “Don’t fall behind.” We tell them their precocity is a gift and their curiosity a compass. But we ask each other to justify deviation, to defend experimentation, to land things perfectly or not try at all. We find witnessing another person’s awe exhausting; wishing that compatibility was not just shared values but shared overlap in what we have pushed through the lossy format algorithm of our lives into the realm of the “no longer worth questioning”. It’s no wonder that our economic choices feel less like growth and more like performance. Even within households, even among friends, the moment of deviation is met with concern. And concern becomes pressure.
This is why ballast matters. Not as resignation or retreat, but as a stabilizing architecture—something that lets us experiment imperfectly with how we live. I’ve said that recursion without financialization is one of the only paths left for exploring real freedom. But I should be clearer: ballast is what makes that recursion survivable. It is the metabolic capacity to hold the uncertainty that comes with sustained self-inquiry. It is how we make self-experimentation possible again—not the optimized A/B testing of the self in search of a better résumé, but the quiet willingness to live as if we are not yet finished. Because we aren’t. No matter what our adult lives say.
And this is the hinge. This is the point where “enough” begins to regain its weight. Not because we’ve landed the perfect budget or accepted a life of principled austerity. Not because we’ve moralized scarcity or romanticized hardship. But because, after enough ballast has been built, “enough” becomes visible. It is no longer a projection. It is a resonance that we trust. It is felt as a rhythm. And it no longer has to be defended.
This is why I want to be explicit that self-patronage, as I have construed it here, is not synonymous with poverty. Poverty was simply the clearest signal through the noise. The easiest condition under which to see the shape of the recursion. But if your imagination, your Adlerian lifestyle, your community feeling—if all of that is met within the forms of institutional or interpersonal patronage you already inhabit—then this framework does not ask you to leave it. It asks only that you live inside it more consciously. That you treat your interiority as a vital organ, not a remnant. That you remain, in the deepest way, unfixed.
And now, having spoken of enough as a recursive condition rather than a static threshold, I want to point forward. Because enough is not the endpoint of this work. It is its beginning. I have built what I call strand businesses—small, recursive units of imagination that begin with personal fascination and move, without demanding permission, toward materialization. None of them are large enough, on their own, to fund a life. But together, they form an ecosystem. An experimental field. A geometry of engagement. One might thrive, several might stall, and yet the sense of enough I carry into each is not predicated on outcome. Each of them is an answer to the question: what might I build, if I built from joy rather than obligation?
This, then, is what I offer as I turn toward lived experience. A personal economy that does not scale in the traditional sense. That does not require scale to justify itself. Where recursion is not just the method, but the product. And where enough is not a number, but a fidelity to the shape of one’s own life, held intact—even in experimentation, even in imperfection—by the ballast that makes it possible to begin.
Part V - The Conditions for Continuing and Personal Implementation
Before this essay turns to lived design, we must clarify one final axis: the interior architecture that allows meaning to remain sustainable even in the absence of external validation. This means naming the conditions under which we experience dignity and sovereignty—not as existent states, but as recursive, inhabitable psychological terrains.
Dignity, in this framing, is not pride, affirmation, or esteem. It is the absence of a specific kind of fear: the fear of exile—social, institutional, or relational. To feel dignified is not to feel superior or empowered. It is to not be haunted by the preemptive shame of being cast out for one’s vulnerability, deviance, or illegibility. It is a quiet structural condition under which other emotions may arise, but which itself is not reducible to any emotion at all. Dignity is not presence—it is insulation from expulsion.
Sovereignty is the interior condition that makes that insulation credible. It is not autonomy in the libertarian sense. Not control. Not dominance. Sovereignty, as used here, is the subjective atmosphere in which one can feel at home in themselves without requiring continuous outside affirmation to stabilize that sense of belonging. It is the internal version of what Alfred Adler called community feeling: not a fixed possession, but a psychological landscape one can enter or fall out of, depending on structure, support, and belief. Sovereignty is the internal condition where dignity can breathe.
Sovereignty Feeling (mirroring the implications of Adler’s Community Feeling): a psychological object that is the result of pattern recognition of acts of self-reliance. It is a metaphorical state that one can traipse into like community feeling rather than the fictitiously attainable state of sovereignty derived from largesse or toolsets.
While the contours of self-reliance more closely mirror the natural scale of our inner monologues and conception of self, that seeming familiarity belies the unattainability of sovereignty as it is normally described — removing the self or fully insulating it from its context. Sweatpants are a quotidian example of how it is impossible to remove oneself from a totalizing system. You can wear them to signal that you are “just not doing fashion today,” but fashion is a totalizing system. You can not opt out. You can only opt to engage less by wearing lowest common denominator fashion. Social hardwiring in our evolutionary psychology or the idea that there is always a bigger fish confine the idea of sovereignty to a named pattern recognition, not an absolute state.
The relationship is recursive. Dignity is what you feel when you are not afraid you’ll be cast out. Sovereignty is what makes that lack of fear believable. Without sovereignty, dignity becomes brittle—reliant on others’ continued recognition. But with sovereignty, dignity becomes steady. Not impervious to rejection, but buffered from the survival panic of being unheld.
This distinction matters because it provides a framework for understanding what is lost when systems of support are severed—and what must be built internally when connection cannot be bought or expected. Acts of sovereignty—like resisting a subscription that subtly implies you owe someone your comfort, or designing a slower form of care when fast therapy becomes economically unlivable—are not just lifestyle tweaks. They are infrastructural. They contribute to your felt terrain of sovereignty the way letters, calls, or rituals contribute to the sensation of community.
And just as community feeling emerges from iterative gestures of care, sovereignty emerges from recursive self-design: from structures that preserve your rhythm, your coherence, your place in the world even when no one else affirms it. These aren’t luxuries. They are necessary scaffolds for continuing meaning-making.
Which brings us to ballast.
In earlier sections, I described the financial and meaning-making structures as twin towers, each bearing weight in their own way. Economics was the space between—the grammar of justification. Ballast, then, is the mass that stabilizes each structure. It is not cash or certainty. It is the accumulation of trust—in your resilience, your recursiveness, your fit. And that trust is always time-bound. It decays unless renewed. It has a half-life. You must live inside it to replenish it.
This is especially true of financial ballast, where the perception of sustainability can be undermined by both over-modeling and literal inflation. To the risk of over-modeling as a form of sustainability theater: budgets can outpace lived confidence. A rising savings rate can still coincide with a collapsing sense of freedom if your subjective architecture hasn’t caught up. A startup can have a $50K burn rate, so you only feel safe if you make $100K per month even though you do not yet know how to. Conversely, meaning-based ballast—which is slower to quantify—can be shattered by the abrupt loss of a meaningful connection. Severance of care, even when financially justified, disrupts not just the relationship—it disrupts your inner terrain. It collapses sovereignty, and with it, dignity.
This is why the final part of this essay must transition into the lived: not because philosophy has ended, but because only experience can replenish trust in the frameworks we’ve built. Only through inhabiting the recursive loop—through small acts, sustaining gestures, and practical design—can we ensure that our definitions of sovereignty and dignity are not just ideas, but environments.
Here’s where I started living inside that loop—without knowing it yet.
Where I Started: I Do Not Accept That Burnout is Inevitable
I didn’t begin this inquiry in silence or with a plan. I began it walking. Aimlessly. Inside a business park.
I did something biblical.
No. I have not begat anyone.
If one were to wander around a desert for a year, searching for whatever one searches for, the feat would have an outside chance of being canonized. People take far less notice, however, if your sojourn is entirely inside of a 7,000 sq ft. industrial flex building in Vista, California.
My full year of walking, miles stacking upon miles but with no new horizons, went unnoticed behind the austere walls of a concrete tilt-up built in 1987. No mandate from God charged me with crossing the Sinai. Some people did walk with me. Employees. A co-founder. Investors from time to time. But, altogether we were more typified by our mutual confusions, about all manner of things, than by any supposed certainty. Our forge-welded common goal to afford living was our climbers’ rope and the grotesque humor that adulthood was not a magical repository of answers were our carabiners. They bound us as we walked and walked, together.
The business park, really the entire planning zone, was an odd collection of cuboids. They are architecturally designed to hybridize the unsynthesizable - the rewards of business (that is the making of a lot of money) and the cheap.
The cumulative result is the architectural equivalent of an assemblage of dioramas of businesses. Many quiet. Many beige.
The mornings puddle with cars, only to ebb in the late afternoons, like a stop-motion, talent-show interpretation of Mont-San-Michel. The streets are lined with popsicle stick benches and felt trees; they are built with all the moral depth and overt punctiliousness of book report on livable spaces. Decomposed granite sand is hot glued to pathways between construction paper lawns no one is invited to use but everyone is invited to fund through Common Area Maintenance charges.
Twitching dolls impersonate business men and women on the way to the unsigned office park deli, their bodies animated by cams on 9V motors. Their slouch while eating pickles is more resigned than the strident, purposeful models that the architectural rendering once used to sell this built environment to the city and the first generation of tenants alike. So vague are these structures in their effect on you that your psyche learns not to see them, like a lossy-format compression algorithm for buildings.
Even so the total vacancy rate (the percent of units available to rent vs. already rented) was less than 2% state-wide. Decisions by city planners one or two generations ago caused a constellation of common boxes so rare that we’re fighting each other to shove our dreams into them. All of us who imagined we could start a certain type of business made compromises to be there. We built a social code, and built social meaning through ritualized commiseration with each other. Similar to the Friday-night shrug to “how was your week?” We dealt with the imperfections, the cost, and the bad habits our buildings caused.
I got a smart watch. I got it to see whether the effects of sedentariness or self-medication could be read on my wrist. One grandfather died in his fifties. At the time I hoped a wearable would decipher the inscrutable code of my genetics and epigenetics. Perhaps it would tell me a tragic tale that I was middle aged even though my friends were having quarter life crises around me. Or maybe it would tell me an ironic comedy in some fashion. The damn thing.
The puckish little assistant living on my wrist told me—with the “dinging” and dignity of a modern court jester—that I was both out of shape and walking around way more than I thought possible. Records of what had been unwritten were being transposed. Charts too! They had data visualization. The UX engineers of my life were telling me that I was fat, walking tons, going nowhere, and still with terrible cardiovascular scores.
It was as if an unmemorable draft of a low-talent Homeric contemporary had started dictating a tale to a lowly intern-level scribe, the only one who needed the cuneiform experience for his resume. And the result? An admittedly choppy transcription of a pedestrian tale about going nowhere but working really hard at it.
I was accidentally walking 5-8 miles per day. My resulting resentment? I will discuss that in a moment.
May I add some perspective for the reader? My walking pace is just over 3 MPH. Therefore I was walking between 1H40M and 2H40M per day. Would you or your boss have issues if you were away from your desk, during undesignated periods, for that long each day? Whether or not you are walking to work, bouncing from vital task to task, it’s undeniably a lot.
People on actual pilgrimages do it by the same rhythm. They don’t walk 24-7. They walk for goodly parts of their waking hours. One tenth of my age, measured in 24/7 hours, 365 days, between the age of 23 and 33 was spent walking in circles. Warehouse pickers, the marginalized marathon runners of the mega-supply-chain-era walk more, but CEO’s? Without a walking pad and a stand-up desk?
Why did I do it? It was an accident. Odious as it was. I was usually looking for something mundane in my disorganized warehouse. What, though, consistently changed. A screwdriver that was not left in the toolbox. A setup I left assembled purposefully but that another had cannibalized into a different project. A document needed by an official could have been another example.
All the while, a sense of entrapment developed. Not being able to change this paradigm over the course of years was as constant and bleak as the pale-green light of the aged warehouse fluorescents illuminating my concrete treadmill. My insanity percolated proportionally to how often I talked to myself. It was constant. l practiced the righteous speech I would give. Endlessly. The lesson I would bestow. Iteratively. The system I would implement that would increase organization and end my ineffective meander. Repeatedly. The small slip of my rubber soles—a mix of gummy whisper and soft rasp of agglomerated dust—was the metronome setting the tempo of my grave but profound rhetorical flourishes. Many differential diagnoses in the DSM V list uncontrollable rumination as a qualifying characterization.
Like other Potemkin generals… I never got to give the speech. I just wandered like Ozymandius’s dumb cousin looking for a hammer.
What is Burnout?
I will not try to give a denotative definition this time. I am still not capable. I am well along. But not yet done metabolizing the experience.
I am well enough that I have started to have to re-pathologize myself to my therapist to keep up therapy. But, that fails to take into account that impressive acts, or acts of independence, are often poorly deciphered waypoints in social wellness. The very acts of getting better—the ability to do something impressive again—are too often deciphered as lack of need for the connection that got us there. What I am talking about is the opposite of the integrated independence that might let one feel connected without the ongoing need for performative acts of (co)dependence as the currency of modern connection. Without the need for performing like you are broken as the only viable way of demonstrating that you need company at all.
I am getting better. I see clarity in the offing. I no longer lose every day to anxiety. I only lose one or two full days per month and maybe a week’s worth of evenings.
If flowery, or expansive metaphor is the hallmark of loose writing, which in turn might be indicative of new exposure to a complex topic; then a definition, even an alternative one like Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary or Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, are the well-deciphered lived experiences that come well after the author’s initial literary digestion. Tight and chorded metaphors, like muscle, come well after inventory and integration. I am past the cud stage of mastication on burnout. Not yet at the point of reconstituting the amino acids of it into my fully firing neurons and limbs yet either.
Burnout and the metaphor of the addict’s rock bottom are similar. The former didn’t need drugs to constitute a sense of helplessness. The closing down of peripheral perception sometimes to literal tunnel vision did not need shady dealers or Victorian ideas of you voluntarily passing through the semipermeable membrane demarcating polite society and the depraved. You ask the silence around you, “How did I get here? How do I survive this?” as your heart rate is up without physical activity and your ability to focus has been aberrated from the inside — like someone took a cigarette lighter to an early 2000s plastic transparency, but the crinkling is in your mind. You do not know if this state was done to you or whether you were the person who volunteered.
But my therapist has forgiven me for not knowing how to pick the right business partner for me at the age of 23 like Robin William’s character in Good Will Hunting. The third largest investor on our cap table has said, “It was not. It was not your fault,” and “You’re one of my favorite founders I have ever worked with.” And I have forgiven myself enough to be thankful for the experience. But, that does not mean I was done learning from burnout and learning how to prevent it. I do not think it must be essential.
What is the solution to burnout?
That’s where this essay began—as protozoal-scale healing inside a brain, hidden just inches behind a twenty-yard stare.
The solution to burnout is not merely time. It is not just the passive healing of our autonomic selves, as with a treated wound left to close. Though that machinery does hum to life, it is not enough. The solution to burnout is the development of a set of rules.
The solution to acute burnout is the creation of a personal economy—a grammar of justification you can live inside without shame or collapse. One that connects your sense of meaning and finances in a manner that is livable.
Personal economics offers a lifeline—proof that the feeling of life closing in is not inevitable. It reminds you that your interiority is not condemned to the careening physics or economics of someone else’s ride. Not fated to ride a Tilt-a-Whirl operated by a caricature whose greasy industrial switches screech with deferred maintenance. If that metaphor feels overwrought, that’s because it was my reality.
That is the mental terrain where my twenty-year journey to understand meaning, adult dignity, and economics collided with my lived need. There was a moment I did not know how to process at the time. I passed my last business’s final, epistemologically-fraught “finish line” with my last gasp. I got to pitch my business to the largest publicly traded company in my sector for purchase via strategic trade-sale. They did not say yes before I collapsed. But, I had learned that I had tripped over a kind of epistemological divide, like the kind that divides to watersheds. On the previous one I oriented around what I wanted to achieve. On the new side I oriented around what I wanted to maintain.
Where I’m Going: Entrepreneurialism Doesn’t Have to Be an Existential Bet
I began this series with a modest goal: to write an introductory arc for my Substack. Episode eight—this one—was meant to synthesize why I want to move to the desert. To do that properly, I had to imagine the move as if it had already happened.
I realized that what I truly needed was not a manifesto or a plan, but a permission structure.
At first, I believed that unless I had everything figured out—my long-term income, my business model, my future scalability—then the move would be imprudent, invalidated by its incompleteness. But I came to the same conclusion that many explorers have before me: even though a well-staged deployment requires work, sometimes to begin is enough.
So rather than delay this essay until everything is solved, I’m offering what I’ve determined might work as a post-burnout approach to earning a living. It is deliberately small, deliberately humane. Its primary design constraint is livability. And while its outward results may look modest, that’s the point. As we have discussed, human interiority does not scale. It may be wise to build systems that don’t outpace the self before they’ve even started.
What follows is a strategy for entrepreneurship that resists the cultural expectation to hustle or scale at all costs. Not because it has given up, but because it has been intentionally structured to never require jumping the chasm from early adopters to the early majority. Its viability does not hinge on convincing everyone. It only has to work for those who already resonate with it.
That doesn’t mean one can’t scale later—if the project grows or if you're ready. But the model I propose doesn't demand that you mortgage your entire identity to justify your effort. It doesn’t require that you sacrifice your relationships, your evenings, or your health just to gain legibility in a system that equates scale with validity.
Too often, entrepreneurship is framed as either a "side hustle" or an all-in identity gamble—your sole path to worth in a financialized world. But those extremes flatten what’s possible. They turn livelihood into existential performance. I believe there’s another way.
This is the model on which the businesses I am building will be constructed.
Exploratory Shopping, Inexpensive Sourcing
Explore AliExpress. It has some of the trappings of the extremely loud direct-from-China platforms that gathered so much political ire recently. However, it is older, quieter, and tied to the world’s largest online manufacturing sourcing platform - Alibaba.com. The neoliberal supply chain has weird quirks that you deserve to understand in real and not abstract ways. We were promised greater consumer choice and therefore lower prices, but the informational overload of shopping today causes us to try fewer consumer options to see if they work for us rather than more. Brand equity and markup on their products went up rather than costs going down when we had too many options.
Remember: tariffs are not an embargo. It is okay to purchase things from china that you were going to buy more expensively that were still from China. If politics are schizophrenic enough to promote both the Trans Pacific Partnership and Neo-McKinleyism within 9 years, you have permission to try the neo-liberal world order global forces have given you.
Low-value-add inputs are the lowest hanging fruit here. If you can start a slow-shopping list of things you always like to have in stock, then the three week delivery duration is really manageable. Even with current tariff levels machine screws average $0.01-0.03 cents each, delivered internationally to your door. My local Ace Hardware sells the same commodified input, also from China, for $0.67. More than 20x more.
Higher-value-add inputs in ultra-mature markets are also possible. However, you must budget your shopping in a way that is more akin to a commercial purchasing manager than you might in your personal life. Save up and order multiple of the class of product you are trying to purchase the first time in order to test them. This is like a purchasing manager might get multiple bottles for a new product or multiple samples for a new project. I ordered 10 pairs of wireless earpods for example. I found one that uses the same audio driver and acoustic chamber of my $300 pair and it cost $3.00. However, its secondary engineering systems like battery management were less refined. I did not find my perfect pair, but I am confident that I will find a suitable supplier in the $10-30 range rather than $300. I spent $30 on the first experiment. I may spend $80 for a second experiment. Taking the time to experiment will save me $190. The work was not just to get new headphones, where I now have 15 when I only wanted one that worked. It is a project to know if I ever lose my earbuds I will no longer feel they are so sacred I can’t afford to replace them. The next pair will be 90-95% less than the brand-name replacement.
This slow excavation of reducing the variable cost of your current systems reduces the psychologically confining sense of irreplaceability when you do choose to make larger strategic purchases elsewhere. That two part mechanism can make you feel more free.
Structural Becoming
The zeitgeist currently insinuates that a financially incomplete person is failing. Today’s political-economic moment casts those in need of help as people who must prove their worth—often through rigid work requirements. Clichés about “basement dwellers” abound. Meanwhile, the expansion and contraction of the social safety net continues to buffet precisely those who most need consistency, undermining the very ballast that makes economic planning—and personal scaling—possible.
But there is one kind of person who is allowed to remain indefinitely in a state of becoming: the corporate person.
THE FOLLOWING IS NOT LEGAL OR FINANCIAL ADVICE. CONSULT LICENSED ATTORNEYS, TAX PREPARERS, OR OTHER PROFESSIONALS BEFORE TAKING ACTION. ALL STATEMENTS HEREIN ARE FROM A LAYPERSON, INTENDED FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
Corporations are allowed to be chronically in debt and still be considered valuable. They can be unprofitable indefinitely. They deduct expenses from revenue before taxes. They’re even rewarded with tax credits just for trying things that might make money.
Meanwhile, individuals are moralized for spending more than they earn. They’re steered toward payday lenders and 30% APR credit cards — products whose employees literally say, “Pay us more, more often” when you try to follow personal finance columns that advise calling for a lower rate. They pay taxes on their gross income, not on what’s left after the cost of being alive. They’re offered occasional carveouts—like the mortgage interest deduction—if they happen to align with the priorities of lawmakers. And if they dare to experiment, to try something they're not yet good at, they're told to quit the hobby and “get serious.”
Founders are exempt employees. They’re not subject to minimum wage laws. They can pay themselves nothing, and book their time as deferred compensation—an option not legally available to even their first hires. I've had to lay off early employees in a cash crunch, even as I myself continued building, unpaid. That is not heroic. It is structural.
Incorporating—filing for an EIN and setting your own wages—can function as documentation for work requirements tied to public assistance. If one is willing to:
create a traditional C-Corp and,
Act as an “economist of one,”—my tongue in cheek term for someone managing personal finances with the rigor of a central bank—apply the logic of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty),
Then one could—in theory—create a personal system that disincentivizes income extraction and incentivizes reinvestment. One could voluntarily impose their own 90% top-line tax rate—at the corporate level—to allow savings and legitimacy to accumulate inside the business while still generating the paperwork that proves “work.”
This is not an endorsement of fraud. But I will say: ten years of running a struggling business has taught me that there is no law against being bad at business. The legal distinction between failure and fraud often comes down to a slippery epistemology. Do you believe it might work? If you do—and you don’t take on obligations you can’t service—the system, in most cases, takes your declaration of profit-seeking intent at face value. Corporations are legible as economic actors. Individuals, because they are multifaceted, are harder to pin down.
If legitimacy is a matter of legibility, and legibility requires only a little paperwork and a small fee, then maybe the first step isn’t becoming—it’s simply documenting your becoming in a way the system prefers.
And if, say, you pay yourself federal minimum wage in your proof of work documentation—just to demonstrate how unlivable that figure is—that would be your prerogative. A darkly humorous prerogative. But still yours.
To be clear: I do not like this suggestion. It feels less like sleight-of-hand than incorporating a church when you don’t believe. But it feels like the kind of act that should be unnecessary. Yet, this can be done today without needing to wait for a midterm or needing your existential hope to redline. We are constantly told our lives only have value if we make money, so the truthful declaration that “this is how I make money” is not that far of a leap.
If Uber can burn cash for a decade and be worth billions… if Amazon can pay no taxes and still be a trillion-dollar behemoth… if Cargill can label some of its divisions “family farms” and run Feeding America as a tax advantaged structure (that you donate to when the closely held family behind it could financially feed its operating budget)... If Walmart can outsource its payroll to the same social safety net—then yes, you can incorporate and receive Medicaid. If you determine that is what you need.
If there is any dignity left in this economy, you are entitled to claim it.
Compound Businesses
Compound Business is a term I am coining for an intentional entrepreneurial model that reconciles personal exploration with financial sustainability.
The compound business is a double-entendre meant to be denotatively evocative of multiple business threads simultaneously and connotatively evocative of an architectural compound or campus, which is defined not just as individual buildings but as a system of discrete and shared systems that is neither too small to justify nor too complex to conceive of.
Their key synthesis is that they resemble a petite holding company with diversified revenue streams being tended by a central shared infrastructure, yet their diversified revenue streams were not designed with artificial scarcity as a marketing tactic but with real scarcity as a feature of their existence that ripples into all of their systems. Real scarcity in a compound business is not a gimmick—it emerges naturally from the material, the production method, and the deliberate ceiling on scale. The goal is not to drive demand through exclusivity but to sustain a system that supports meaningful, iterative work, or the meaningful ability to step away from it without inducing a failure condition.
The following are common refrains that seem antithetical to each other:
Diversification of risk is a net positive, and in aggregate diversified risk diminishes total risk rather than accumulating it.
Entrepreneurialism requires all-encompassing commitment or else it will not succeed.
The logical combination of these two business cliches is that anyone who starts too many businesses or is unfocused will fail. Even if the meta-sophistication of diversification applies to financialized assets, it does not apply to business creation.
The individual business units within a compound business are strand businesses—interwoven, structurally independent, yet mutually reinforcing. Like the strands of a cable, each one contributes to overall resilience while maintaining flexibility. The goal is diversification with structural coherence—not opportunism disguised as agility.
Each term does real work in distinguishing macro-structure (the compound) from micro-structure (the strands). It mirrors the emphasis on integration rather than aggregation. It is not a pile up of businesses; it is a structure that is intentionally interwoven yet discrete.
Two important corollaries emerge from this idea:
That a business designed not to scale will require early adopters to be found surgically not statistically. It seems most small businesses are encouraged to design for the early majority, or whatever amount of customer base will wholly sustain their function, and then call their first customers “early adopters” whether or not any of the populations that showed up first matched their hypothesized demographics or not. A compound business reaches maximum yield still within the early adopter tier, which in theory should make marketing and sustained existence easier because you are only dealing with people who “just get it.” But it also forces the entrepreneur to invest in the ability to choose business models and systems that orthoscopically pair with early adopters or else revenue maximization cannot be achieved.
A compound business must manage its time well. That is not simply productivity increases by way of greater output over shorter time intervals. It can also be purposefully lower productivity that is still meaningful. Let me illustrate: if a business only needs to sell four units per day by design, then a system that takes a week to produce 30 units but only requires one hour of active intervention, where the rest of the week is passive, is more aligned with the goals of a compound business than a process that creates 30 units in four hours of work. Process fidelity and stacking passive processes can be as attractive as traditional productivity gains.
My first strand business built for remote work
My first strand business, M0-M1 Consulting, is a referral-only grant writing service for nonprofits and early-stage startups. It’s designed to be quiet, efficient, and fundamentally unscalable—both because that suits my working rhythms and because it allows me to provide real complexity consulting without diluting attention across too many clients. I state on my site that I only take two to four clients per year with an expectation that we work together for six months from proposal to due date. This lets me metabolize and expand on the founders’ vision as well as metabolize and expand on my own work on their grant application. I purposefully undercharge compared to my market value because I want to work with clients that are “making solidity out of pure wind” rather than larger clients. My one page website that is hosted for free rather than via a more expensive host with slicker development tools because of the smaller demands on its marketing funnel.
The business provides me with periodic but sufficient infusions of cashflow. Those inflows are not designed to be sustaining revenue. They juxtapose with other consistent revenue streams from other strand businesses. The larger infusions serve the purpose of micro-windfalls to advance larger projects whereas the sustaining revenue gives me sense I can incrementally meet daily expenses without the sense of risk associated with businesses models akin to big game hunting. Often the hunter goes unrewarded.
My second strand business built for the desert
The second strand business, Apple of Earth, is the opposite in visibility and premise: a handcrafted ceramic jewelry line built on fragile margins and low expectations. I chose it not because I thought it would succeed, but because I needed a proving ground where narrative density and recursive coherence could be tested without the crutches of trend or capital. Put more plainly: I could only test and refine my methods of orthoscopically finding early adopters with a business that should be a dud. Between the two, I’m not trying to win at business like a grown business boy—I’m trying to model something rarer: a framework of livability that holds its shape across different economic environments. These aren’t ventures; they’re recursive trials with money.
Apple of Earth is a narrative jewelry brand. It uses local wild clay, which is something I will look for and test before selecting my desert location. That wild clay fires that into terracotta. And I use fresnel lenses to solar vitrify the terracotta into a luxurious black puddling glass I call “solar obsidian.” The hardware is built from electro-transmogrified copper pipes that pulled the material atom by atom from the hardware and turned it into jewelry. It is sold in intricate hardwood and copper boxes to elevate the customer experience. The jewelry then leverages the delta between its cost value (nearly $0) and synthetic value (~$100), meaning the perceived and symbolic value it accumulates through process and narrative, to enter the saturated retail market on consignment—not as a fallback, but as a feature of its design.
Apple of Earth’s custom point of sale (POS) display was designed with the constraints of getting it to market via flat-rate, two-day shipping. But beyond its design for getting to market the POS has the internal circuitry and control logic needed to test market fit in situ rather than deploying inventory with blind hope. Its pricing model is built around the skepticism that most retailers feel about placing a new product and the gratitude they feel when they can get a non-performing product out of inventory. The physical unit combines walnut, brass, white concrete, and copper visual layers with underlighting, lithium ion cells, USB rechargeability, and an internet of things (IoT) enabled load-cell that can broadcast a single numerical string daily as a proxy for in-field inventory management, even in low-bandwidth or off-grid internet environments. That way I do not have to either over-commit to inventory check-ins or let inventory die in the field.
It comes with a textual piece written in ball-point pen on high quality paper:
This is not nostalgia. It is not a longing for simpler times or a state of nature.
This is about design. About finding what fits the needs of now, not by chasing the newest materials or processes, but by reconsidering the ones we’ve overlooked. Wild clay, pewter, copper—these materials are not relics. They are tools, perfectly suited, from time to time, to the challenges we face today.
Take pewter: endlessly recyclable, not at massive scales, but at the scale of a home. In an age defined by the need for circularity, it offers a design parameter that aluminum, with its brittleness and industrial demands, cannot match. Or wild clay, gathered locally, shaped and fired without shipping it across oceans. These materials embody a contemporary ideal: sustainability not as a slogan, but as a property embedded in the object itself.
Apple of Earth is an invitation to rediscover this portfolio of materials and methods—not because they are old, but because they are right. Because they meet our needs in ways the highest-tech solutions cannot always accomplish. Because they challenge us to think beyond obsolescence, to design for care, for repair, and for a sense of permanence.
This is not about rejecting modern tools. CNC machines, lasers, and 3D printers are as integral to this vision as the clay and copper they shape. But they are in service of a different goal—not performance for performance’s sake, but purpose. Not the high-speed churn of production and waste, but the quiet pursuit of objects that endure.
This necklace is a gesture of that philosophy:
What would you make, if you designed it to last?
What would you keep, if it were worth repairing?What would you value, if you couldn’t outsource storage to the landfill once it broke?
What could you build, if sustainability were your first design parameter?Apple of Earth is not an answer. It is a provocation, a challenge, and a reminder: that good design begins not with what is newest, but with what is necessary.
I only hope to manufacture and sell four units per day at various sales outlets and price points. That includes a “Pay what you can” model on my website rather than in-field retail. The pay what you want model only requires you sign and and your name to a receipt that states “I agree this piece is worth $100 and I would pay that for it if I could.” That preserves the signal I was looking for as a meaning-oriented entrepreneur: that there was a customer base willing to find value in the close at hand rather than the rare or exotic. They can signal their belief in that value even if it does not match their ability to transact for it at this time.
Potential revenue at that level of scale is between $65,000 and $146,000. It will take me a while to grow sales to 4 units per day. But, it is also not an infinitely scaled sales figure either. That makes it more plausible to achieve. Once deployed the business is designed and optimized to take one hour of my day per weekday on average—including sales, marketing, and customer service requirements—which gives me the chance to implement other strand businesses that share its digital and automation infrastructure.
This project will not be complete without every aspect of this business coming online before launch. It could be a jewelry brand before the IoT functionality was complete. It could be a jewelry brand before I developed a visual brand hierarchy. It could be a jewelry brand before I had a cogent retail strategy. It could be a jewelry brand before I accounted for my desire to move to a rural location. However, I would need to live with the unintegrated consequences that any customers I developed through in–person sales would not relocate with the business. At every turn I will have opportunities to say to myself, “The efficient thing is to get started making money.” Every such turn also invites the risk of accidentally designing a money-generating business that did not integrate with my other iterative processes.
If I filled all seven other hours of my day with similar systems and levels of revenue, then my total annual income could grow from the $65,000-$146,000 range to the $520K-$1.1M range. But that is only necessary if my life requires it—not because the system demands it.
Desert Appropriate Dreams
After ten years of entrepreneurial experience I am able to come up with a business model in minutes. But, that makes no discernment as to whether I should pursue it.
I have come up with hundreds of business ideas in the last two years. Perhaps 20 have been filed as worth thinking about again someday — once I have used another business model to build out a keystone system that fleshes out the latter idea. But, it took two years to come up with a plan that checked the following boxes:
Has a cost of inventory near zero.
Can be made from low-cost inputs that I can both get where I am now and where I will be in the desert.
Has its sales systems designed from day zero to work without direct or hand selling.
Is evocative of what I believe in so that my very first business after collapse I can use the simple transactional nature of business as an accumulating talley for my own ballast of meaning. My customers don’t need to be my friends, but I will engineer my business from the beginning so that each purchase is fairly judged—not just intuitively—as being purchased because the customer believes what I believe.
There is no way to translate my complex desires as an entrepreneur into a mass-market product as mass-market appeal usually requires the entrepreneur to seek a generic version of their original or the market creates a generic out of their original for them. Either way I cannot get what I need from the entrepreneurial experience post-burnout with market successful genericism as the goal. So if my need for income cannot be met through the contours of successful entrepreneurialism as defined by others, then I needed to find another way.
Material Experiments with Moral Stakes
I’ve already laid out two strand business and the values that shaped it. But it’s not the only thing I want to build. I plan to work. To design. To test ideas that matter to me. These are not distractions. They’re part of the structure I’m building my life around.
What follows are not side projects. They’re infrastructure—personal, philosophical, and ecological.
Each system I’m developing meets three overlapping needs:
Recursive utility – Once built, these tools and methods can be re-used across future work without additional marginal cost. That makes them durable in a literal and economic sense.
Moral engagement – As I explained in the introduction, I believe that human-induced climate change is the most morally interesting challenge of our time. Not just because it’s existential, but because it’s entangled with the very forces that created the greatest increase in living standards in human history. The same ingenuity that lifted billions also left behind massive externalities. Addressing those externalities isn’t a betrayal of human exceptionalism—it’s the dignified confirmation of it. It’s the coda that completes the most generous chapter in the human story.
Personal alignment – These projects give me a way to structure meaning when I’m alone. They create community feeling through rhythm and engagement. And frankly, they interest me more than spending all my time working to afford a drywall box in a Southern California dingbat just to eat at restaurants that erode my financial ballast and destabilize the dopaminergic balance I’ve spent two years learning to care about.
What follows is a working inventory—engineering projects I intend to build not to pass the time, but to recover it.
Mobile Kitchen
A modular, solar-powered kitchen that travels slowly between desert workstations. Allows low-active, high-nutrition cooking near the point of work without the cognitive or logistical cost of returning to a central kitchen.
Rammed Earth Pavers
Testing modular pavers as a means of low-energy roadbuilding across workspace nodes, integrating site-sourced soil and emphasizing recyclability via a computer vision system for assessing wear and reuse.
Modular Air Conditioning
Designing mobile, solar-fed air conditioning units that can move between spaces to provide comfort without relying on fixed HVAC or overbuilt infrastructure.
Autonomous Workbenches
Line-following robot benches with onboard batteries and e-bike motors that roll out from a container, serve a purpose, and return to charge. Designed to reduce setup friction and make deployment repeatable and light.
Selective Hydroponics & Larder
Creating a distributed food system centered around reliable daily crops (e.g. potatoes) with onsite biogas reclamation. Emphasizes freshness, variety, and predictability in food supply.
Hybrid Solar Thermal Kiln
Combining a Fresnel lens with electric backup to sinter local clays and materials. Enables sustainable fabrication of tiles, components, and test artifacts using solar energy as the primary input.
Solar Sintered Sand Infrastructure
Exploring the viability of turning desert sand into structural components (like sand fences or site markers) using direct sintering and aligning a sun-based aesthetic with bifacial solar for productive, shaded spaces.
Self-Hosting Infrastructure
Local-first services like Jellyfin, an AI-indexed personal wiki, drone-based security, and a personal digitization pipeline (book scanner, document archive). Designed for full autonomy.
Evaporative Ceramic Water Coolers
Upgrading traditional ollas with minimal electronics to reduce water loss and maintain potable temperature. A test of combining vernacular design with simple monitoring loops.
Triple Layer Cement-Filled Pipe Rails
Slow deployment of rail infrastructure across rammed earth pylons to move equipment and materials. Designed to avoid over-engineered driveways while extending mobility in long-term phases.
Flexible, Non-Financialized Housing Units
Designing sub-1,200 sq ft modular housing prototypes that respond to both thermal mass and passive solar cues, optimized for being owner-built without requiring permanent mortgage encumbrance or long-term permitting dependency.
Integrated Book Scanner & Digital Larder
A personal digitization workflow that unifies intellectual and food independence: scanning books for AI-indexed referencing while tracking stored bulk goods and perishables in an open-source system.
AI-Coordinated Maintenance Scheduler
A scheduling system that integrates environmental data, equipment feedback, and energy forecasting to provide nudges or alerts for distributed maintenance across water, power, food, and tool systems.
Desert-Aged Vernacular Library
A materials and form archive that actively weathers under desert conditions—wood, metal, stone, clay—all cataloged and photographed over time to inform future design choices based on lived weathering.
Reversible Fenestration for Heat Pumps
Prototyping aesthetically pleasing, reversible window mountings for standard unidirectional AC units, enabling bi-directional heat pump use. Achieves greater delta-T using modest power (e.g., 300W from lithium-ion storage), outperforming resistive heating while maintaining low infrastructure cost.
Hybrid Prototyping with Vernacular Materials
Using modern fabrication tools—3D printing, CNCs, waterjets—for prototyping with traditional materials like clay and compressed earth. Aims to combine the repeatability of modern tooling with the sustainability and locality of historical matter. Similar to work at many design labs.
I don’t expect all of these to succeed on the first attempt. that’s not the point. Each one is a structure I can return to—something that carries meaning because I shaped it, and because it shapes me back. They’re not meant to scale, but they are designed with enough restraint that a later generation could. They’re meant to last; not because they are indestructible, but because their maintenance was taken into account. They are designed to create ballast I can walk around in. To give form to a life where engagement is the reward, not the byproduct.
This is what I mean when I say I want to move to the desert.
The Potential for Recursive Institutions
Carrying cost capacity, as discussed in Section IV, has implications beyond individual life design. It suggests a structural limit to how much recursive load any one person can bear—shaped by predisposition, life architecture, and sometimes immutable cognitive scaffolding. Education may deepen someone’s context, but it cannot always retrofit their capacity for recursive dwell time. The idea that each person’s capacity for dwell time may be fixed reframes our current sense of institutional failures. It may not simply be as a crisis of siloed expertise, or empathy education campaigns that are poorly timed to political cycled. It might be an issue of siloed recursion modeling instead.
What we need are institutions that distribute recursive load horizontally rather than rather than by horizontal distribution of domain expertise. Imagine a Congressional Budget Office not as a subservient analytical wing, but as a fourth estate of epistemic inventory: a civic institution tasked not with authority but with sense-making. Imagine how the senate parliamentarian that can strike provisions during reconciliation if they do not meet certain rules. What if that function was not rare but purposefully distributed around bureaucracy rather than characterizing the bureaucracy itself as an incapable structure. Integration, inventory, cognitive load-shedding, and repetition phases should each have institutional counterparts—not because recursion needs bureaucracy, but because livability does.
What if the check and balances in our system took into account the dual imperatives
that progress (and its complexity) has made a material difference in the standard of living, so therefore should not be cast aside for a pre-material past;
and, we held space for the idea that the solution to complexity for most people cannot be the education on subjects of more complexity?
Recursion could be the answer. Wherein the mechanisms by which we deployed power were not siloed by topic but by trust architecture. The public’s trust in the soon to be defunct Department of Education would be less important than the public’s trust that our country’s inventory processes directly fed into our deep work, which fed into our integration or results, which fed into our sense of return and grounding. We wouldn’t need trust architecture as expectation that each individual need to read every FOIA request to know what is going on. Conspiracy theorists would be neutered of their performative “do your research” lines. And distributed failure could transmute to actual failure where institutions would non-catastrophically but truly fail if they were the one that severed the recursive loop. Governing coalitions faltering or non-confidence votes in parliamentary systems are examples of non-catastrophic failures in different political systems. I am not grafting a parliamentary system onto the US. But I want to everything is working if everything looks like its working, and that something has actually failed when it seems like it has. That stands in stark contrast with the institutions we have now whose structure is byzantine enough that recursive rupture is expected, that the institution’s persistence and high incumbency is proof positive that nothing is working. I would prefer something that broke.
To be clear, what I’m describing isn’t a novel invention of recursion, but a reframing—an attempt to revalorize the interior scaffolds that existed long before institutional expertise exteriorized meaning. Human beings recur naturally. Through story, repetition, caretaking, ritual, complaint. The recursive stages I map here don’t supplant that—they try to name and support it, especially where those capacities are unevenly distributed or structurally denied. So while a re-architecture of institutions around recursive function is one pathway, it should stand alongside more familiar proposals—like expanding the House of Representatives or increasing civic representation per capita. These are not separate strategies. Both are ways of acknowledging that meaning, sense-making, and civic coherence must match the density and texture of the lives they’re meant to serve.
Conclusion: Why I Needed a Missing Net
Twenty years later, I find myself reflecting on the most discordant advice I was ever given. I was a recent graduate, just having completed my design-it-yourself major in M0-M1 agricultural development. I moved to DC because I wanted to pursue my dreams without being as illegible to my parents as I would have been if I had moved in-country to a project in Anglophone East Africa. A referral allowed me to get an informational interview with the lead financier of the World Bank. He had left Wall Street ten ten years before after “he and his wife had made more money than God.” Without moral tinge he warned me that one of the problems of working in International Development is that—by his estimation—it sets up a hard break; someday you will awake and decide you don’t want to be “living in the mud anymore”.
Fifteen years later, with me closer to 40 now compared to 21 then, I know that there wasn’t a hard break in my imagination. Rather, that conversation was a postponement. I want to build my entire house out of compressed mud. It is what I always wanted.
Being out of phase is not a death sentence. It feels like it could be though. At times your breath is balled up smaller than your heart for the helplessness you feel. It feels as sensorily true as Raymond Chandler’s line: “Dead bodies are heavier even than broken hearts.” But it's for times when your joy and the dominant stories about how to live are not in sync rather than a murder mystery. How do you reconcile it? Your finite nature, the rarity of joy, its purity, and what people seem to expect of you?
I enjoy writing in long form in a time when AI could do that for most of us, and many of us don’t prioritize reading.
I dream of M0 solutions to economic problems in a time when USAID has been abolished, and the zeitgeist is antagonistic to any economic timescale that is not quarterly.
I studied economic development in a time when most people wished “economics” meant “finance,” so they wanted a money manager, not an adult still asking “why do we do that?”
To be dulled to someone else’s perpetual awe is a gift of adulthood—one I recognize was never trained into me, nor awe trained out of me. And so, I exhaust people, even when no one is doing anything wrong.
I have been unable and unwilling to hide my logophilia even when it is used as a cudgel against me.
I estimate my eideticism at a seven out of ten—and it quietly separates me from how most people move through and describe the world.
And I think about things for a really long time.
As I said in the beginning: this piece is in part my own guide on how to survive, navigate, and thrive without a reliable net catching all of us in meaningful employment. Whether or not I would have also conflated money-making and meaning-making in my own life, had I been afforded the opportunity, is moot at this point. I was not afforded that chance. And still needed to be alive… In a time when 62% of Americans fear retirement more than dying.
The best recommendation I can give in that light:
Go outside. Go inside your own mind. Go anywhere. Explore. Carve out enough room to explore wherein you're at least five percent uncomfortable. That five percent is measured by a feeling in the back of your mind that urges you to dismiss what you've just done as small, unimportant; yet five percent is still small enough that you never actually say the apology out loud to either yourself or someone else. Keep triangulating on that five percent exploration that matters to you. Keep carving it out. Keep using this as a framework for legitimacy. Keep it.
When you find someone who seems enlightened in this way already, do not mysticize them. They simply started this a little bit earlier than you. If they're doing it right, they'll welcome you as if you're walking the exact same mile marker as they are.
Then, finally, give yourself or find the grace needed, to move your scarce resources around the chess board of your life. Engage. It is the thing itself.
The Intellectual Echo Chamber Isn’t Empty
I used to worry that thinking like this—recursively, slowly, with the permission to accumulate insight instead of extract it—meant I was out of step with the world. That I was circling a track no one else seemed to run. But it turns out the echo chamber wasn’t empty. It was just wide. People like Vico, Adler, Ratzinger, and Crawford weren’t signaling from my same location, but they were moving through the same terrain: trying to articulate what happens when meaning is no longer a birthright but a build. When coherence must be stitched from the inside out, even if the outer world no longer demands it. Or even recognizes it.
The Recursion Was the Point
If there’s a thread to what I’ve written here—about imagination, economic design, daily ritual, and belief—it’s not that we should reject linearity. Linearity is useful. It’s elegant. It’s powerful. But the mistake was ever letting it become sovereign. Letting it name itself as the only path forward, when forward itself is a metaphor borrowed from walking. Yet, that is another grafting of lines onto loops in the lived experience, because the majority of one's walks both start and end at home. When someone asks me, “Where do you walk every day?” I respond, “I walk in circles. The only thing that changes is the size.”
The Mobius Method doesn’t exist to disprove anything. It’s not a protest. It’s a re-binding. A small, repeatable loop that makes staying possible. Staying with the thing you care about. Staying through the cycles. Staying through the not-knowing. Through the desire to fracture. Through the desire to flee. Engagement, not because it’s dramatic or noble, but because it feels like yours. Because it’s what returns.
The Desert Is Not the End of the World
I didn’t write this to convince you to move to the desert. But I needed to find a landscape where recursion wasn’t a flaw. Where meaning didn’t have to justify itself through growth. Where forward could mean returning to the same stretch of ground and seeing it newly. Where repetition didn’t mean stasis—but deepening. Without a dream of another wanting to buy it in the future, turning my design for self into a plan for progress. A place where watching the road runners and gila monsters, following the snake tracks, or digging in the clay between the black bush is mine without an ongoing logic of justification being bone-grafted onto my peace. The desert, for me, is not the end of the world. It’s the opposite. It’s where the loop touches down. It’s where engagement lands. Not to escape, but to stay.
My imagination recursively propagates the following ideas:
That I need to be able to engage in specific acts of sovereignty for individual ballast.
These include acts of spatial design, “architecting” around my habits, and engineering projects.
That I like big sky country. I dream of getting an electric paraglider and taking my walk-abouts into the clouds.
That a non-over-enveloping biome without flora always having to be fought back fits my rhythms for maintenance and allows method of loci like mental clarity without need for a lawnmower or a machete. Clean. Like T.E. Lawrence said.
And when I want to be dirty and dig for clay or see the geologic timescale or feel the presence of the Milky Way for existential context, there won’t be anything in my way.
Practically endless amounts of solar energy is a desirable design constraint.
I love 115º F dry heat if safety and modulation are available to me.
A 113 year legacy of knowing about human-precipitated climate change leads me to want to experiment on the edges of livability. I have said three times that this path created the largest increase in the standard of living for the most people in the history of humanity. Facing its externalities with dignity seems like the syntactically rhythmic next step.
The desert works perfectly for me. Why would I go anywhere else? The fact that it's cheaper is, frankly, awesome for me. The local news in San Diego just ran with a story that outlined the following: your household would need to be making $250,000 per year (implying marriage because the average mid-career salary in the area is half of that), that your household would need to save for 29 years to afford the downpayment on a thirty year mortgage. Therefore you would need to account for 59 years worth of work, which is 12 years longer than the stipulated 18-65 career in order to afford a house in an area that meets none of the above desert-loving criteria. To do so would be to effectively spend my entire finite life working towards financing goals I do not want. Not by prejudice or laziness. Just that my recursive imagination points elsewhere.
It remains an open question whether carrying cost capacity, honored at the personal level, can scale into new forms of shared life. In Adlerian terms, personal recursion alone does not guarantee friendship, love, or community—it simply establishes the conditions under which they might become possible. Stabilization via ballast precedes growth, but does not compel it. In a world where society-wide financial collapse no longer acts as a reliable feedback mechanism, and where distributed failure often disguises itself as continuity, it may be that new forms of community will arise not around expansion, but around restraint: a shared ethos of ballast rather than velocity or shared predilections against common forms of nonsense.
Such communities, if they emerge, will not be engineered by external mandate. They will arise in the quieter spaces left open by individuals who chose to recognize thresholds—who carried ballast even when collapse did not appear imminent, who treated stability not as a constraint on freedom but as its precondition. In this sense, carrying cost capacity is not just a personal discipline. It is also a potential ecological groundwork for belonging: a way of living that invites others plurality without demanding anything from them, and offers the dignity of listening without conquest. Or without flattening. Or summary. Or Tl;DR shrugs.
A scene from Spotlight (2015) has stuck with me ever since I watched it. Michael Keaton’s character turns to an acquaintance and asks, “This is how it happens? A guy leans on a guy?” The line came back to me unexpectedly after a long conversation with an old friend. It didn’t end in acrimony, but it didn’t end gracefully either. It made me realize: cultural reproduction doesn’t need to be delicate to be refined. They only need to be familiar.
We began by trading empathy about our experiences with depression and anxiety. We both noted how even our most “successful” friends and acquaintances carry a quiet sense of failure. There was warmth and recognition in our memories—of Europe, of movable feasts, of joie de vivre. But when I said I didn’t want to follow a traditional career path—when I referenced the contours of a strand business, when I talked about my anxiety around hiring managers—something shifted. “Wouldn’t you be withholding your own growth if you don’t face this fear?” he asked.
In that moment, I didn’t have a pitch-able summary of this essay. I didn’t have a crisp counter-narrative that could convert doubt into affirmation. What I had was ballast—but ballast doesn’t translate well over FaceTime. He made clear he wasn’t looking for rhetorical flourish or parry. He cared. Yet what I felt was that deviation—from a path toward becoming a marketing professional at a major bank, as he is—is still framed as fear, not philosophy. He gave me room to debate it, if I wished. I had just stepped away from working on this piece in order to speak with him, and I didn’t have the energy.
The offer to debate implies a toll: that I owed proof that what I’m doing isn’t just avoidance in disguise.
And that’s how it happens, isn’t it? A guy leans on a guy. The same incandescent friend who could have been a distinguished professor of anthropology but who now works in the marketing department of a major bank was asking me if I was letting myself down by not doing the same.
I didn’t expect this essay to be so much about ballast. I thought I was writing about a place. But place, I see now, is just a proxy for structure—an invitation to reconstitute meaning in the absence of a net. That’s what the desert is for me. Not exile. Not escape. Just space enough to keep working on the kind of life where you don’t have to explain yourself to get to stay. The professorship may be gone. But I still believe in myself. I still believe in my friends. And I still believe in building places worth catching each other in.
Further, after a five-minute passive period, I can re-enter the same thought loop for another 55-minute/5-minute duty cycle indefinitely. This is how I have revisited the same intellectual topics repeatedly without re-anchoring for upwards of 15 years.
How many of you found a portion of your built environment and said out loud “Why the hell did they do that?” even as you know you will never personally pay to change it.
Dictionary.com. “Imagination.” Last modified date unknown. Accessed March 15, 2025. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/imagination.