"You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

—John Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, 1979

Imagine if on the walk to the coffee-maker each morning you were directly putting your life at risk. Imagine a walk to your car including the possibility of a tiger jumping out of the bushes and attacking you. This article will operate on the assumption that no one reading this has experienced such threats, however, this was daily life for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Anxiety, in this version of life, was a good thing to have. Without it, they may not have been as diligent with checking their surroundings, paying attention to strange noises from the tall grass, or keeping their head on a swivel. In 2026, though—We’ve solved “The Tiger Problem.” So where does that anxiety go?

Solving the Tiger Problem did not rid us of anxiety, it redirected it. While I would never place anxiety into the “fun-to-feel” category, I think we sometimes look at it as something to “get rid of” or “solve,” which ends up making us feel more like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the mountain than it does making us feel Zen. Anxiety, on the whole, is a necessary and unavoidable component of the human condition, and for the sake of this article, I will separate anxiety into two camps: “survival-anxiety” and “phone-call-anxiety.”

We eat because we get hungry, yes. We also eat because we know if we don’t, we die. We work out to get in shape because it makes us look good, yes. But we also work out because at some base level we know it might extend our lifespan. Survival anxiety is at the foundation of these experiences. This is a good thing. I hope you all have some form of “survival anxiety.”

The other kind, “phone-call-anxiety,” is the redirected kind. The kind that used to be directed at tigers lurking in the woods but is now activated when a strange number calls us or we feel like we haven’t seen the latest reels our algorithm has catered for us. This is the kind that, ironically, has manifested out of the success we’ve had solving problems like tigers hunting us. We got rid of “the big one” and now we direct that feeling at so many other, non-life-threatening things. In this case, getting rid of the original problem doesn’t make the symptom go away. We didn’t solve “The Anxiety Problem,” we solved “The Tiger Problem.”

There are a few things I want you to know about this article before we continue:

1. I am trying to normalize the fact that anxiety exists in our lives. Evolutionarily, this makes sense to me. Anxiety kept many hunters alive during their hunts.

2. I am trying to provide some perspective on some of our daily anxieties, the “phone-call” kind. The anxieties that we otherwise might have some awareness like “I know this is silly, but. . . “ but still effect us all the same in some negative way.

3. What I am NOT doing is suggesting that having anxiety is baseless or silly. I have plenty of it myself. I am simply offering a new way to potentially see it. A way that approaches it with compassion, rather than beating it with a stick and calling it “the enemy.” If you’ve ever seen Inside Out 2, you know that anxiety cares about Riley deeply. Our anxieties are just trying to keep us alive (probably more so than any other emotion we have). Think about that for a second. Anxiety is fighting FOR you constantly.

Now, what is there to do with this perspective? It’s hard to say explicitly. But I think it can allow us the chance to ask a wonder question TO our anxiety:

“Is this is a tiger situation or a phone call situation?”

If it’s a tiger situation, great. You now have some data that can help guide you to what action(s) to take to provide safety. If it’s a phone call situation, great. You now have some data that can help guide your perspective on the feeling you’re experiencing. Does this make it go away? No, probably not. But it does help us approach it with more grace—a better understanding that it, for whatever reason, is being activated because it is perceiving the external world as threatening in some kind of way, no matter how small the threat.

We spend so much time trying to rid ourselves of anxiety. I hear people often use words like “cure” or “fix” when discussing their anxiousness. I totally understand that, by the way. I also wish that being anxious wasn’t such a huge aspect of our lives. But it is. And I think somewhere along the line we have demonized it as a feeling, banished it to the “bad feelings” column. Maybe anxiety isn’t so much “bad” as our relationship to it is. Maybe in our quest to rid ourselves of something so engrained in our experience we have created a whole new tension inside of us. The kind of tension occurs when we believe that the boulder won’t roll down the hill this time. The kind of tension that happens when we highlight a part of ourselves and reject it. We spend a lot of time trying to live without it. Maybe it’s time we start learning to live with it differently.

Modern society has solved many “Tiger-like” problems. It has also created (seemingly) double what it has solved. I am not sure the way around this, but I think it can be helpful to just recognize it. A lot of newly-introduced anxieties to the human experience we have are not life-threatening. But they sure can feel that way in the moment. At the very least, I would encourage an examination of the ones that are life-threatening and the ones that feel like it. Remember, in both cases, your anxiety is just trying to help you survive.

I am grateful, dear reader, that we no longer need to fear death walking to work in the same way our ancestors did. But we need to be aware that the tigers have not gone away, they’ve just changed their stripes (not overnight, might I add). Maybe if we validate that little orange creature inside of us, it can tell us how exactly it is trying to protect us. And maybe if we can understand how it is trying to protect us, we can learn to help it identify a tiger from a phone call.

Stay curious.

Connor

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“You don’t drown by falling in water; you drown by staying there.”

—Zig Ziglar

Anxiety seems to have increased, on the whole, over the past decade or two—or at the very least, humanity’s willingness to talk about it has grown. This is a good thing in a lot of ways, but it has also seemingly reduced the nature of anxiety to a problem that a self-help Instagram reel can help you solve. It is my belief that we are often conceptualizing anxiety wrong from the jump, and the path we think we are taking to manage it often ends up being a path of just describing it. If we can learn to explain it better (i.e., understand why it’s happening), maybe we can learn to manage it better.

An idea I find fascinating and ascribe to fully is the idea that science is masterful at describing how and when, but completely ill-equipped to answer why. This is not throwing shade at science, by the way, but how and why are not the same question. We need science. Science is necessary for our understanding of the world, but I think if we can be charitable to this view for even just a second, we can realize that describing what gravity is and how gravity is does not answer why gravity is.

In 1687, Isaac Newton introduced the law of universal gravitation, which explained that the same invisible force that guides an apple from a tree branch to the ground is the same invisible force that dictates the orbit of the planets and the moon. He explains that gravity pulls, never re-pushes. That mass of the objects affects the pull between them, and that the distance between them also has an inverse affect on force. This is all wonderful information for humans to have. It allows us to predict future events, which has led to countless other scientific advances. . . But it still has not even begun to remotely answer the question why gravity exists. We know how it operates and what is happening, not why it is happening. The same is often true of our communication of anxiety—we sometimes mistake our journey of describing anxiety for a journey of explaining it.

Think about a time you have been anxious or about a time you’ve listened to a friend communicate their anxiety to you. We could reductively map out that conversation to something like:

“I am feeling anxious.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel like people are judging me."

or

“Because I feel like I am going to fail that exam.”

or

“Because I feel like my friend doesn’t actually like me.”

Okay, let’s pause here for a second. These answers are good and necessary for further understanding of the anxiety, and maybe in a lot of ways do a perfectly fine job at explaining what is happening for day-to-day use—Feeling anxious because you believe you might fail the test is completely understandable and intelligible. There is a subtle piece that they are all missing, however; a piece that, I think, gives us a better map to recognizing what it is we can do to actually process through the feeling and work with future versions of it: It’s neglecting why those explanations matter to you. Why does failing that exam matter? Why do we find such discomfort believing people are judging us? What narrative are we creating by believing our friend doesn’t actually like us? These questions are approaching something different than the mere explanation of the context. These questions are more closely aimed at our relationship to the consequences we might experience should this anxiety be “right.” Another way to phrase it: these questions are shining a light on the story we are telling ourself about what is happening or has yet to happen.

I believe, what are we really trying to communicate when we express the thought “I am anxious because I feel like I might fail the exam,” is something more like:

“I am anxious because if I fail the exam tomorrow, it might impact my GPA, which could impact my graduate school application acceptance, which could impact how smart people perceive me to be, which could impact my self-esteem and how I view myself.”

This, to me, does a better job at explaining why that anxious thought is so stressful or unsettling. This doesn’t simply describe a circumstance that is activating this anxious feeling, it is seeking to try to explain why that circumstance is so unnerving. It communicates the possible consequences that we are fearful of and want to avoid. It is telling you something about the narrative you have created for yourself.

To drive this home, let’s examine one of the other examples. When you express an anxiety about your friend maybe not liking you, what you are really saying is something more like:

“I am anxious because if my friend doesn’t actually like me, then that could mean they have been lying to me for a long time, which could mean other people are lying to me, which could mean maybe I’m not as lovable of a person as I thought I was.”

Whatever the conclusion we might arrive at is, the point is that the expression of being anxious about something happening is the same thing as our desire to avoid what could possibly follow if that thing happens.

What power does this give us, then?

Hopefully, over time, it can give us permission to question the narrative we have authored. When you read those purple block quotes above, you’re effectively reading a story. A story that has not happened yet, but a story that your anxiety is latching itself to, as if it were true. A story underneath the explanation we give when we say “I am anxious I might fail that test.”

We can’t always make anxiety go away, and in fact, I think it’s a bad way to phrase the goal in the first place. Some anxiety is necessary and even helpful. I am addressing the excessive anxiety that interferes with our functioning and relationships. The kind of anxiety that has created a narrative that, if questioned, can be seen for what it is:

A feeling. Not fact.

A fear. Not truth.

A desire to avoid something in the future. Not what is happening now.

Assessing the narrative in this way can allow us to approach the road to managing it differently. Maybe instead of trying to cram more and more information about the test material at the last second, we can question why we’re so doubtful in our ability to succeed. Maybe instead of excessively asking our friend if they really like us as a person, we can challenge the belief that we don’t deserve to be loved. Maybe instead of trying to be Mr. or Mrs. Perfect to everyone we meet to avoid being judged, we can try to investigate why we feel so inadequate being ourselves.

These roads lead to healing. These roads lead to inquiries and explorations that will help manage future experiences of the same anxiety. Asking your friend over and over again if they really like you might give us a quick dose of dopamine in the moment when they answer “yes,” but it does not feed the monstrous belief inside us that we feel unlovable for who we are. There are no amount of “yes’s” to that question that will satiate that beast. Hearing that 100th “yes” temporarily satisfies the “yes or no” description we seek, but it does not address why we keep asking it.

Let us be cautious, and aware, of the narrative we are creating, or even worse, blindly following. If we’re unaware that we’re following a script that we didn’t necessarily, and intentionally, write (or at the very least, analyze a little), then I fear we will constantly find ourselves at conclusions that, even if untrue, will feel true.

Narratives very quickly become autopilot, driving us into passages we otherwise wouldn’t choose to take ourselves. It’s good to every now and then bust into the cockpit and check the credentials of the pilot. Who knows, maybe they’ve been reading the wrong map.

Stay curious.

Connor

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“The moment is not found by seeking it, but by ceasing to escape from it.”

—James Pierce,

Spoiler Alert: You are probably in a version of “The Golden Years” right now.

Spoiler Alert 2: It probably doesn’t feel like it.

Rosy Retrospection is a form of cognitive bias that states we frequently recall past experiences, periods, and events being more positive or enjoyable than they were as we were experiencing them. With some introspection and honesty, I think we can observe how often we do this. I also hope we can see the paradox that emerges when we fail to question it.

The above picture was taken near Mount Rogers during my Appalachian Trail thru hike in 2018. When I think back on my experience walking from Georgia to Maine (which I do every day), I can separate experiences into two camps:

1. Type 1 Fun - Fun in the moment, fun to look back on.

2. Type 2 Fun - Not fun in the moment, fun to look back on.

If you asked me to tell you the story of the day that photo was taken, I would tell you about the singular most difficult day I had out there. The day that truly almost broke me. I also will proudly tell you it is now one of my fondest memories of that entire hike. Myself and the guys that were with me during this time refer to the evening of that photo as “The Massie Gap Incident.” In short, it was the culmination of days of freezing weather, frozen shoes, and walking conditions I can only describe as “maddening.” It was, without a doubt, Type 2 Fun.

If you had interviewed me the night we slept in the Wise Shelter (which was about two miles north of Massie Gap), I probably would have gotten angry if you had told me I would one day look back on this admiration or laughter. Why though? I’ve grown fascinated about the gap (pun intended) between the in-real-time suffering of an experience and the possible fond reflection of it later, and more specifically, why it is so difficult to recognize this possibility in the moment.

That story is just a crude example to explain the purpose of the meditation of this article. Let’s bring it to more real-life examples.

In 2026, when I look back on 2014, for instance, I can see it as a time of exploration, mistakes, learning, and the seeds of future growth. But if I really sat here and recalled the specifics of that year, I would find limitless feelings of despair, confusion, and feeling lost. Feeling like I was “doing it wrong.” Feeling like I would never have anything figured out. I doubt I ever, at that time, had the thought: “I bet one day I’ll look back on this gratitude.”

There is probably a couple years of your life you look back on with a sort of detached admiration that you made it through it, maybe even with a smile on your face as you recall them to a friend at a party. Like a mix of “yikes” and “that was wild.” I almost guarantee you that you wouldn’t actively choose to go back in time and relive the specific difficulties and heartache and misery you experienced during that time if we are being honest and realistic with how difficult, heartbreaking, and miserable some of those experiences were then. How can both of these things be true? Because as we distance ourself from past struggles, we tend to color them with rose-colored filters and understand that what we really got from those experiences were lessons. Growth moments. Data for the future that we have likely used with some success. Those past experiences are now tools for us to use now. We might sometimes even say we are “better” for it.

Think about that for a second. Sometimes, in the present, we think “I am better now for having gone through X or Y suffering then.” Imagine telling yourself that back then. I bet then-you would have found it frustrating, and maybe even offensive, to suggest that this difficult time would one day be “useful” or dare I say, “funny.”

How is this disconnect possible? Why does it happen over and over again? Why am I aware of this principle and still, whenever I’m suffering in the present, have a feeling like “no, this time is different.”

You might hear someone say, “man, those were the days,” when referencing high school, college, their first job, etc. What they are leaving out, and understandably so, is all feelings and trouble and misery that accompanied those times. We are able to look back on the year of our first break-up (for instance) as a defining year of sorts and as something we got through and otherwise learned a lot from. But if I teleported you back in time right now to the moment of that break-up, it would probably shatter you. It’s almost like distance-from and perspective has the power to, at least sometimes, literally change our past experience of something. I can look back on getting in trouble in 8th grade as a time of exploration, “scraped knees,” adrenaline, and learning. But if I had to go relive that trouble right now, the anxiety I know I had during that time would bring me to the floor.

Here’s my point: I am trying to bring an awareness to the paradox of “The Golden Years” as a way to challenge us to try to practice being more mindful of the present and the possible beauty that’s around it. A way to practice this is asking yourself:

“What might I really miss or appreciate about this time in 5 years?”

“In 10 years, when I look back on this experience, what lesson do I as the spectator have that the character in the show doesn’t?”

Doing this won’t remove the suffering, but if there’s an acknowledgment that it’s at least possible for this present suffering to mean something beautiful to us one day, maybe it’s possible to understand in real-time: “No, this won’t break me and maybe there’s some roses I’m failing to notice.” The retrospection you will have one day about today’s suffering doesn’t change what happened. . . It just changes your perspective on it. What you experienced is the same; what you remember is the difference. Maybe this can give us permission to occasionally realize that “The Golden Years” only exist in the past because they at one point existed in the present.

Stay curious.

Connor

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"There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments."

—Janet Kilburn Phillips

Thoughts from the Garden will be a series of shorter reflection essays, hopefully always tied to a gardening analogy or imagery. Plus, it gives me a good excuse to publicly post a picture of some of our plants.

I’ve been gardening for about a year now and have found a lot of solace and joy in watching things grow. There is a lot to learn from these multi-colored, sometimes edible creatures. For an organism that cannot speak, they sure do make great teachers.

We planted two hydrangeas a few weeks ago in our back yard. We like them because they are pretty, can change colors based on the nutrients they get (inspiration for another essay maybe?), and are easy to take care of, supposedly. We have grown (pun alert) to disagree with the latter. While we’ve revived one of them decently enough, the other one has proven very challenging to keep alive. The truth is, both struggled, despite following care instructions almost perfectly. Two hydrangeas fighting for their lives in a sea of thriving plants.

One of the questions now seems to be: “Am I a bad gardener or did I have bad plants?”

Surely there are times where the gardener makes a decision that doesn’t lead to fruiting bulbs and surely there are times where the plant is diseased in a way we couldn’t have known or predicted. But maybe sometimes the answer is neither. Maybe sometimes chaos theory is rearing its menacing, but beautiful, head. Maybe sometimes we do all we can do and still the plant just. . . dies. Maybe sometimes the outcome isn’t so much a reflection of our attention or care nor is it a reflection of the plant’s ability, but rather a moment to challenge the idea that high input always yields high output. And that’s okay. Frustrating, but okay.

Sometimes things work out because we put the effort in and do the research and practice practice practice and make good decisions. And sometimes things do not work out despite our best intentions and care. Shoot, sometimes things work out when we didn’t plan for or put attention to the input at all. I cannot tell you how many plants I’ve forgotten about over the course of their infancy that have still, despite all odds, managed to grow and bear fruit.

We need to be careful with what conclusions we draw. Would it be logical to call myself a “bad gardener” because a hydrangea dies? Doesn’t seem so. Am I the world’s best gardener because of my thriving cucumbers? Doesn’t seem reasonable. Maybe these are simply bad questions. Maybe a better question is:

“How can I be gentle with myself as I navigate unpredictability?”

or

“What has this experiment taught me about myself and hydrangeas?”

We are all first-time humans. And no matter how long you have been gardening, you are still a first-time caretaker of that plant at that moment.

Stay curious.

Connor

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“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”

—Olin Miller, 1936

I bet a reader of two down the line will feel a little charged seeing the word “arrogance” in the subtitle. No, I am not calling you arrogant. But I do think our arrogance supercharges our anxiety by convincing us people are thinking about us when they are, in fact, also worried you are thinking about them.

Think about what we are really saying when we are worrying about other people thinking about us at the grocery store or at a party. It’s something like:

“Despite all their unique experiences and thoughts, despite all the complexity their lives hold and all the problems they likely have, they are choosing to, in this moment, think about me in the worst way.”

Or something like:

“I am so important that the only thing that makes sense for them to be thinking about is how I look right now.”

Again, I don’t believe anyone is thinking in these terms literally. But if feelings were houses, the basement of this anxiety is arrogance. The type that hides behind fear. The type that would rather make the other person judgmental than realize we are the ones assuming something. This does not make us arrogant people. It makes us human. But maybe if we’re aware of what’s in the basement, we can be motivated to tidy it up a bit. Maybe just accepting that arrogance is down there can allow us to let go enough to relax a little the next time we’re ordering a coffee during busy hours.

It’s a relief not being as important in other people’s thoughts as we sometimes think. It’s liberation. It’s freedom-from. It's license to let go. It’s permission to decompress and unwind a little. Other people aren’t the judgmental monsters we subconsciously make them out to be—They’re just trying to get through their day too.

So no, the barista is not thinking about your haircut or how you jumbled your words while ordering. They probably didn’t even notice. But they are probably judging the 20 pumps of caramel syrup you asked for.

Stay curious.

Connor

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“We all have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we only have one.”

—Anonymous, often attributed to Confucius

When I was in high school, people started saying “YOLO!,” short for “you only live once,” as a way to playfully justify doing something somewhat dangerous, out of character, or new and exciting. It was a goofy cultural expression that, as I’ve gotten older, believe was trying to communicate something quite profound. It was basically people saying, “I am aware I only have one of these moments, I want to make this one count.” I hate, though, that it seemed to only be used for silly moments. We were so close to embodying our inner-Confucius for good, but I fear we mostly used it to defend our decision to skip class or go to that concert we couldn’t afford.

Let’s take a second to appreciate the gravity of something only existing once or happening once. You only get to be 21 once. You only get to be 34 once. You only get this Monday one time. You only have one month of May in 2026. Of all the things we cannot control, time is most elusive. I think a good way to spend it is by giving the little things a little more love.

If you’ve ever been to a wedding or been married, you likely know the attention to detail required to plan the evening. A wedding day is a big day, but it’s comprised of a million little things the couple painstakingly plans: who sits where and with who, color schemes for the bridal party dresses, gifts for the groomsmen, which restaurant will cater (and will it be buffet style or serve to table?), are you inviting that childhood friend you’ve loosely kept in touch with, what drink choices will be available, the list goes on. All of the attention people give these components (i.e., the little things) of the big day serves a purpose: it’s to make the most out the day the they know they only have one of. There’s a recognition that if all the little things are beautiful and go well, the transitive property states the big day will go well and be beautiful too.

It seems we put this kind of effort and intentionality into big events of our lives like weddings, a kid’s birthday party, graduation celebrations, first dates, etc., but what about the little things within the little moments? We put so much effort into the Saturday we turn 21, but what about last Tuesday? What about next Monday? Our lives are mostly formed by ordinary Wednesdays and Thursdays. An overwhelming majority of our time on earth is spent within a day that milestones don’t give us the excuse to really, truly celebrate. Most days are ordinary Tuesdays.

I am not advocating for throwing a party every day of the week, nor am I saying that every Wednesday is going to be the best day of our lives. I am, however, encouraging us to acknowledge that we do have the choice to make those average Thursdays more intentional. Trying to navigate these ordinary days more mindfully, with an awareness that we only get one of them.

The alternative? Most of the days of our lives just become waiting rooms.

Stay curious.

Connor

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“[…] happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen [and] you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

—Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946

Somewhere along the way, we have seemingly been conditioned to view things like happiness, success, healing, and stability as finish lines. As destinations. As a state of being that is somewhere over there, not here. As a reward for doing X, Y, or Z (or doing less of A, B, or C). As something we cannot access here in this moment. I hope we can appreciate the irony of this framework: By continuously playing this way, the criteria of the thing you are after will change as you arrive at each checkpoint, or, “destination.”

There are two reasons, I think, why we fall into this never-ending cat-and-mouse game of chasing happiness: (1) Thinking about it this way makes the process feel black-and-white, which is often easier than navigating the gray. (2) It provides comfort because it relieves us from doing the real work, which allows us to continue to pursue the easy-to-see, input-driven actions that we think will get us to the end of the rainbow.

The black-and-white is more comfortable to explore than nuance and ambiguity (the gray). Black-and-white means it’s either this or that. Good or bad. Healthy or unhealthy. I have it or I don’t. The problem here is twofold: It’s boring and not how life actually works. Any screenwriter or author knows how boring black and white characters are. Darth Vader is compelling because he’s complicated. He’s the bad guy, yes, but he’s also, until the very end, continuously pulled toward the Light Side, making it a little harder to call him “pure evil.” This challenges the viewer and forces them to wrestle with nuance. It’s more fun trying to sort through how you feel about Darth Vader than it is to be told he is evil, end of story. If you’ve ever played Red Dead Redemption 2, you’ve probably wrestled with how you really feel about Arthur Morgan, the main character you play as. He’s sort of a hero, sort of a villain, sort of a admirable guy, sort of despicable. He’s gray. This kind of reflection in movies and games and books is fun, but it’s not always as fun in real life when we’re examining our pursuit of happiness.

I don’t think happiness is a finish line we reach after completing a series of tasks. As Viktor Frankl posited, as well as John Stuart Mill, it is something that can only be pursued indirectly. Like how you stumble across the best thrifting finds when you’re not out shopping for them specifically, or how you find the NPC side quests in RDR2 when you’re just out exploring the map. The harder you look for it directly, the harder it will be to find. It’s not over there. It’s not necessarily five months away. It’s here. Now. Just on the other side of the things you are passionate about or love. It’s somewhere in the process. It’s everywhere and nowhere specific. It’s somewhere in the chaos of the gray.

Imagine you are really excited for an upcoming concert (bonus points if you’re actually excited for an actual upcoming concert). Imagine you’re one week out. Three days out. The show is tomorrow. You’re two hours away from doors. They come on in 15 minutes. The show is over. Thinking about happiness as a finish line is like saying the best part of that sequence is the show being over. The waiting sometimes feels torturous but I think that’s where the real magic is: in the anticipation of the journey. It’s not something you get after doing X, Y, or Z, its the experience of doing X, Y, and Z. Finish lines are black-and-white. The route you take to get there is the gray zone.

This claim is a tough pill to swallow, maybe. I like Chris Williamson’s idea that he’s calling the “Input / Output Delusion.” It proposes three types of productivity: input-driven, output-driven, and outcome-driven:

1. Input-driven productivity is measured by how much effort you put into something (e.g., going to the gym five times per week).

2. Output-driven productivity is measured by how much work you did (e.g., completing every workout you had planned for the week—maybe even an extra set or two).

3. Outcome-driven productivity is measured by real-world results (e.g., adding 15 lbs. to your bench press).

I am suggesting that maybe we are mistaken in how we view our journey. It’s easy to get lost in our checklists and optimization frenzies, but I don’t think happiness, for instance, works this way. If happiness is to be pursued indirectly, then maybe it can be found during our input, not being measured by it. Maybe it’s actually being proud of yourself for completing all your workouts for the week, instead of being at the end of some arbitrary number of weeks of going to the gym. Maybe it’s found in the gratitude or realization that you are now stronger than you were five weeks ago. Maybe when we redefine what the main quest is, we learn to appreciate the side quests more.

Look, I wish happiness was the reward you received after earning your first million, or after going to the gym for a year straight, or after you land that job or that relationship, but can we see how the one guarantee that lies at the finish line is that the checkered ribbon will be moved back further? I encourage anybody to try to take a step back and realize what the real work is here. The real work is sinking into the process as much as you can and learning to appreciate the lead up to the concert. It’s understanding that the pursuit itself is the good part. It’s realizing that joy can be found in the dumbbells just as much as it can be found in the mirror after achieving your desired weight. It’s recognizing that if you continue to push the goalposts back, you’ll never reach the thing you’re after. The real work is letting go of the idea that happiness is something that for whatever reason doesn’t exist where you are now. It does, you’ve just probably been rushing the side quests.

And maybe we need to redefine what happiness even is. But that’s for another day.

Stay curious.

Connor

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“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

—Plato, attributed to Socrates in Apology, c. 399 BCE

My name is Connor, I’m a private practice Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Georgia. My practice is called “Examined Life,” named after the above quote. Socrates, as dramatic as always, was trying to promote turning off auto-pilot in an attempt to live more intentionally. One way I’m trying to turn off auto-pilot is by writing.

I’m starting this Substack for a few reasons: One, I hope it can serve as a sort of professional diary for myself. If zero people end up reading any of this, I’ll still have a record of my thoughts that will far outlive me. Two, I hope it can serve as an extra tool for my clients (or other readers) to use outside of the therapy room—After all, the purpose of therapy is to practice what you learn in therapy in “the real world.” Three, I hope it can allow clients (or prospective clients) to understand me better and get to know me through these words. The client-therapist relationship has always been viewed as exclusively one-sided; the therapist learns as much as they can about the client, and the client is deprived of knowing almost anything about the therapist that they do not disclose through immediate experience. I also believe the relationship should be one-sided, by the way, however, I think these entries could serve as a way to broach an even more intimate professional relationship by providing an out-of-session reference of my engagement with relevant material. I know I’ve at least had a couple clients before that would have appreciated such a thing. The one thing that all these intents have in common is that I hope this helps someone, even if that someone is me. I don’t pretend to know everything and I’m not deluded enough to think that my words are going to be the words that change someone’s life. Maybe that happens occasionally, but I’m guessing that has more to do with our relationship, not what I say. Maybe it’s a mix of both.

I don’t plan to do much editing, outside of catching as many grammatical errors as I can. I don’t plan to have a set schedule for posts, either; I want this to feel more like a stream-of-consciousness than a newsletter. Another reason, and probably the main reason, I’m not going to put much pressure on releasing articles (he says that now) is because too often have I had “great ideas” and even greater motivation to execute them that have ultimately faded as quick as they came. I’m starting to think that happens because I tend to put the pressure of a year’s worth of work and deadlines on myself to tackle in the first five minutes. With this project, I want to approach it differently (he says that now) and more intentionally, in attempt to keep it fun. My work is with my clients in the therapy space. This? This is supplementary. A passion project. A journey, not a destination. A process, not an outcome. I’m sure I’ll need reminding of this paragraph in a few months.

The content of this Substack will vary, but ultimately everything could be thrown under the umbrellas of ”Philosophy” and “Psychology.” I studied Philosophy as an undergraduate and it fundamentally changed my life, often for the better (thank you Existentialism!), and sometimes, I feel, for the worse (again, thank you Existentialism!). But I wouldn’t change it for anything. That said, I think it has really helped energize and inform my therapy work, more so than if I were to have received an undergraduate degree in Psychology (I say that without having received an undergraduate degree in Psychology). People always joke about how “the only thing you can do with a Philosophy degree is frame it!” (a joke that has maintained its humor for me because I still have not framed my degree), but I disagree. I think it’s made me a great communicator in certain spaces, made me more comfortable with risk and ambiguity, opened up thought webs that otherwise would have been gatekept by Nietzsche, Camus, or Dostoevsky (due to me not having read them if it were not assigned to me in college), made me an unbearable person to argue with at parties (I have relaxed on this a lot in recent years), but probably most importantly, it has made me voraciously curious. Above all else, all the articles posted to this page will have originated in some sort of curiosity.

It is also worth saying up top that I do not consider myself an expert in these topics. I’ve had plenty of trainings and plenty of experience with them, yes, but I think it’s dangerous for therapists to develop a belief they are “an expert.” The only version of “expert” I believe in is the one located >80% of the way down the Dunning-Kruger curve. This is the kind of expert that understands that there is no such thing as a true, unbridled “expert;” there are only those that become more confident in their understanding and more confident in the fact that they do not have all the answers. All of this to say, I encourage your own exploration of the ideas written here. Form your own opinions about them. Your own conclusions. Your own extractions and reflections. I’m just a messenger, and as we know, messengers don’t need to be shot.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. It means the world to me. I plan to have my first article posted within the week, by the time I get my Private Practice website set up. Well look at that, here I go with expectations and deadlines already. See? I didn’t even make it a few minutes. Being human is fun. In an attempt to stay congruent with my plan, I’ll leave us with this:

I will post my first article soon and I promise that I will have fun doing it.

Stay curious.

Connor

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