The Motivation guide (sample)
[Standfirst placeholder] Everything on the Motivation page in one guide to read at your own pace.
Exploring metamodernism (sample)
[Standfirst placeholder] A longer essay on the cultural moment after postmodernism, and what it asks of motivation.
Where the self runs out
Telic resonance
Why incentives stop working
[Standfirst placeholder] Incentives can start effort, but they rarely sustain it. Six minutes on why, and on what does.
The Silent Handover: How Your Brain Was Colonised — and How to Take It Back
There’s a thought experiment worth sitting with before we begin. Tomorrow morning, when you wake up and start running through your day — the to-do list, the anxieties, the ambitions — whose voice is that, exactly? Is it yours? Or is it a script you inherited, so seamlessly installed that you’ve never once questioned whether you chose it?
Is neuroscience a force for good?
Neuroscience is one of the most exciting and consequential fields of our time. The ability to map the living brain, to trace the neural pathways of emotion, decision, and meaning — this feels, to many of us, like the long-awaited key to understanding what it means to be human. And the promise is enormous. If we can understand the brain well enough, surely we can understand why we suffer, why we self-destruct, why we can’t seem to close the gap between our values and our actions.
Attention Isn’t Enough: The Missing Layer in Iain McGilchrist’s Divided Brain
Iain McGilchrist changed the conversation. His account of the divided brain — the emissary overthrowing the master, the left hemisphere’s narrow utilitarian grip tightening around Western culture — gave many of us the most precise description we had ever encountered of something we already knew in our bones. It named the problem. It located it. And for a lot of people, it felt like the diagnosis we had been waiting for.
Culture has a hidden operation system: AI is about to lock it in
In this episode, we confront one of the most unsettling paradoxes of our time: we have more data, more technology, and more well-meaning people than at any point in human history — and yet global emissions keep rising, inequality accelerates, and a pervasive sense of despair deepens. Something is going wrong inside the machine. But what?
Beyond worldviews: the limits of Meta-Theory
In this episode, we explore a central assumption in contemporary thought: that meaningful change comes from shifting worldviews. From cultural theory to systems thinking, many approaches suggest that if we can construct better narratives about reality, we can transform how we act within it.
