2025-01-17 03:45:55
Hello friends,
My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires. It has been heartbreaking to see so many homes lost overnight.
While I watched footage of the devastation, my thoughts returned to a piece that had been sitting in my drafts for some time. I’ve long struggled with that word, home, and what it means. Do we get to choose where home is?
I grew up in Germany, but for a decade or so, New York clearly was home. It was not just the marriage, the job, and the apartment with my stuff (my books, really). When I stepped off the plane, I felt lighter, as if I had been unshackled of a great weight. I wanted to touch the walls and floors, make sure it was real. I would skip through the airport toward that vast and strange country. America felt like the future — like my future. I didn’t wonder what I felt unburdened of.
Visits to Germany felt like walking into a minefield of emotional triggers, like long exercises in shadow work. At first, my heart would jump. I would cherish the sight of lush hills and forests. My mouth would water at the smell of fresh bread. But with every hour I would breathe in more of its psychosphere, its Weltschmerz. My Heimat seemed stuck: anxious about the future, haunted by a poisoned past, condemned to a gloomy present.
I experienced a kind of claustrophobia: the state was less powerful but more encroaching, the people more distant but also more concerned with whether I followed the rules. The German character with its pedantry, obedience, and self-righteousness felt suffocating.1
I would wait for examples of this unbearable German-ness. Like that time Frankfurt’s airport security found drops of water in my Hydro Flask and called armed reinforcements. Or when neighbors noticed a plastic yogurt container in the wrong trash bag. More recently, I read about politicians suing their citizens over memes. How petty and insecure do you have to be?
For some time, this was my life. I did not understand America (it really is a strange place), but I could accept it. Germany I understood but could not accept. But things have become more complicated.
Last summer, I had to escape New York whose relentless energy was wearing me down. I was walking circles in my underworld and hoped for clarity and direction. But we only get to choose where we go, not what matters once we get there.
Ever since becoming spiritual, I have been paying more attention to the energy of a place, weird as that might sound. I regularly visit my grandparents’ grave when I am in the country. When I visit a new town, I try to spend a few minutes of meditation and prayer in the local church. I try to check in, for lack of a better word.
That summer I was most touched by a place that seemed utterly unremarkable: a small lake near my mother’s birthplace. My mother and I followed a wooden footbridge to the middle of the lake. It was a serenely sunny and quiet day, nothing but a breeze, birds in the distance, occasionally a fish popping to the surface. What happened was strange: not only did I feel at peace, but the world’s texture seemed to change at the edge of my eyes, in subtle ways, the more I surrendered to it. I could no longer tell if I was reacting to the place or it to me.
And I noticed that a part of me resisted. It’s so boring here, my inner American objected. We’re far away from where things happen, from the things that matter. But to me, the perfection of that afternoon seemed to contain everything that mattered.
At the end of my trip, I took a two-day detour to the town of Eschweiler near Aachen. I had experienced a strange synchronicity in New York when I bumped into the grave of an American soldier who may have shared the Eschweiler battlefield with my grandfather. I visited two military cemeteries. I sat and prayed and watched the rows of silent graves. Nothing happened.
What I remember instead are the difficult conversations with the woman running the bed and breakfast. This was shortly after a jihadist knife attack in not-too-distant Solingen. What do you say to someone who is angry, afraid, and feels like a stranger in the town they grew up in? I didn’t say much, I listened. I had a plane to catch the next day. This time, it felt like I was running away.
New York teaches its residents to have their guard up. It’s too dense and noisy and filled with too many unpredictable people. You learn to mind your own business, to put on armor against the chaotic energy. Germany was different. Germany allowed no such numbness and indifference. It slipped right underneath my skin.
I returned in December for grandma’s funeral and stuck around for Christmas. Two weeks total, a lot of family time in my book. We broke up the schedule for some alone time just so, you know, we wouldn’t accidentally stab each other or have another screaming match. On the afternoon of the 24th, I went for a long walk. I needed to be alone with the fading light.
I passed the old houses, paced along the river, out of town, toward the distant sun that clawed its way through the clouds. My hands greeted moss-covered trees. I felt the soil and the wet grass. Somehow just being there, among rocks and water, somehow that was enough. Between heaven and earth, there was a sliver of silence that held me, nourished me. It was an ancient, perfect quiet, like a silence between wars.
For a moment, I resisted. I did not want to like it that much. I walked with my fist raised toward the sky, shaking it at God like a crazy person. What do you want from me? But there was no denying that I truly felt of this place, one with it. There was a love in the wind that no words could erase.
I suppose that with enough money, you can call pretty much any place home. Cities like New York make it easy because so many people are in flux, always arriving or departing, rarely settled. And it’s so large and diverse that even the oddballs can find their alien tribe. Maybe L.A. is like that too, I’ve only seen it as a tourist.
But New York’s problems, and those of the US as a whole, seemed so great and chronic, that I could keep them at a distance. I could shrug at the madness. Sorry, above my paygrade. Hope someone will fix it.
By comparison, what ailed the Germans felt intimate and inescapable. Somehow, those impossibly rigid people still felt like family. When I despair at their nature, it is because I find it in myself. My heart beats faster on the soil of my birth and my blood runs with its waters. I don’t know yet what to do with that, I just pay attention when the wind whispers.
I’ve never lost my home to catastrophe and I can’t imagine what it must feel like. But I am learning that home is worth fighting for. Also, that home contains a polarity. I used to think of it as a castle, a place of protection and safety. But maybe home is not just a place of comfort but of challenge. What if home is not only what we need but where we feel needed?
Perhaps home is where even the biggest problems feel intimate, where you can’t keep your distance.
I think home is where we sense beauty underneath the ugliness, perfection underneath the flaws. It is what we want to tear down and rebuild because it tears us to pieces.
No fortune can create a bond between your heart and the soil. Money can’t lift your spirit into the clouds or merge you into the mist. If life is suffering, perhaps home is where that suffering feels worth it. Home may be our place of love, but nobody said love would be easy. Maybe home is just where the heart burns.
— Frederik
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In his book The Germans, historian and Germanophile Gordon Craig recounted his first trip to Germany in the mid-1930s. Toward the end of the trip, he met the American consul:
“I said … I found it strange that a people that had been famous for its irrepressible individualism in religion and philosophy should have made obedience to political authority so supreme a virtue.
"Oh my yes," Hathaway replied. "I live in a little village south of Munich, and the people there are hard-working and friendly and not interested in politics in general, and they and I like and respect each other. But if someone in uniform came to them and said, 'March!,' they would march. And if he said, 'Go and cut off Hathaway's head! He is a bad man!, they would reply, 'We didn't know that!' But they would cut my head off all the same.”
2025-01-12 01:08:40
I think of all of us as vessels for energy. Like a bunch of light bulbs. For us to really shine, we need to be plugged into a source of energy.
If that sounds too ‘woo’ or abstract, take a look at writer, director, and producer Taylor Sheridan. At age 38, his life looked like an episode of ‘Follow your bliss gone wrong’.
The Texan had dropped out of college and moved to LA to become an actor but struggled to get roles. Sheridan was repeatedly broke. Sometimes he camped with friends on a nearby reservation. His big break — drum roll — was a minor role on the show Sons of Anarchy.
Then his son was born and Sheridan realized he wasn’t earning enough money to support his new family. When he asked for a raise, he was told to take a hike. “They were like, buddy, you're never going to be a star,” he recalled. “This is what you're worth.”
This is what you are worth. Ouch.
But in his heart, Sheridan agreed. He no longer believed in himself as an actor. After nearly two decades of struggle, he had hit a wall. “10th on the call sheet” was the best he would ever be.
And then the “Sheridan light bulb” gets screwed into a different socket. The left column is his life as an actor. The right one is a decade of Sheridan the writer, director, producer, and dad. What? Are we sure this is the same person?
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,” Bill Gates said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Point taken. But how, Bill? How? How do I wildly underestimate my next ten years and go full-on Taylor Sheridan?
Some energy you can buy off the shelf, like a battery. Make a new year’s resolution, set a big goal, hit the gym, crush a Celsius or drop some Adderall, put on your favorite music… You can fly for a while until you crash like a cannonball. On-off bursts of energy, of optimism and despair can feel like hell, like you’re stuck wandering in Dante’s infinite loops.
Sheridan gained and sustained tremendous momentum. Trung Phan pointed out the magic of massive commitments and tight deadlines. Sheridan created a structure that forced him to succeed at speed, like a pressure cooker. There’s some truth to that. Sheridan had to support his family. But it does not explain the outpouring of creative energy — which seemed to accelerate rather than burn out.
“True behavior change is identity change,” wrote James Clear. Sheridan didn’t change his identity as much as he re-discovered it, re-committed to it. He stopped pretending and took off his mask. Change rippled through his life like a tsunami from the core.
2025-01-08 06:15:07
In the summer of 2023, I paid $140 to breathe. Technically to over-breathe. I found myself on my mat in a spacious Brooklyn venue, surrounded by maybe two or three hundred others, each with his little island of pillows, blankets, and water bottles. Our teacher was Witalij Martynow, a late-twenties Eastern European who “believes that the majority of sickness both mental, physical and spiritual comes from the stuck and unprocessed energy.”
Witalij promotes his events with intense clips on Instagram that show participants moving that energy — screaming, laughing, crying, and convulsing. I had done lots of breathwork before but never seen someone go on tour with it. Witalij and his team traveled from city to city to facilitate and he told us he had worked with “more than 80,000 people.” Breath has become a respectable business.
His style was ‘spiritual bro’ — sneakers, baseball cap, prayer beads, a loose-knit kaftan, an influencer at home at both the DJ deck and drone flute. He talked about his own journey of trying to heal a basketball injury. Once he talked about traveling to Latin America and his new mission to share the tools, my inner ‘ayahuasca’ bell began to ring.
Our journey began with sharp in-breaths. An hour or two later, I was roaring.
I had done intense breathwork before, but never this long, never in such a large group, never this loud. It was a masterfully orchestrated rollercoaster that took the room through waves of energy — anger and sorrow, laughter and love, yearning and bliss. I had never been this loud in my life, ever. And then it was over.
We had run over time and the blissful peace began to fray. Some people began to pack their stuff while Witalij and his team asked people to share. The group was far too big for a sharing circle. Instead, the crew walked around with cameras and microphones. Content for future ads.
My breathwork journeys tend to be highly emotional and this one was no exception. I often ‘meet’ the energy or memory of people I’ve lost — grandparents, women I’ve loved. But this felt like the opposite of my moment in the forest. I had no interest in bearing my heart for a viral clip. Because I had been noticeably loud during the session, the mic still found me. I uttered a thank you and something about the intensity of the experience — a string of words forgotten as soon as they left my mouth.
That’s what stuck with me as I lay awake hours later. I thought about all the people dispersing into New York’s noisy neon night, about moments of catharsis that didn’t lead to connection, about going deep in a space that didn’t offer intimacy. A highly effective practice lacking a strong container. (My friend Tom Morgan discussed the issue of ‘leaky’ containers in his excellent piece Where's all the Money in Personal Transformation?)
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“Everything is a room,” a friend once told me. What she meant was that the world appeared to her as a fractal series of spaces. (We may or may not have been staring at the sky high on acid.)
There are physical rooms: the universe, the sky, the country, city, and finally the ‘room’ we are in. But relationships too are rooms: being a lover, friend, child, or parent means sharing a space with someone. Also, media: in a way, this piece is a room you enter, a space of experience and relationship.
You always either offer a room or enter one, you create or participate in space (or perhaps co-create).
2024-12-31 23:43:58
Most years feel like they rush by. This year moved like molasses.
As I wrote in My Greatest Fear, I spent a lot of time trying to integrate experience, stabilize myself, and find direction. The first half of the year especially was wobbly and plagued by insomnia, visions, asthma, and the most spaced-out dreams.
I truly understood the downside of running your own shop. Doesn’t matter whether your interests shift, whether your attention is shot, whether sleep is a roller coaster ride through lands of cosmic symbols — you live and die (economically) by whether you can deliver. If you destabilize yourself too much, you let everyone down.
once explained newsletters to me as a continuum between personality and information. I like the idea of being an expert and I wanted this to be about something — my perspective on markets, investors, money, or what have you. That seemed like a sure way to scale, to money, and to feel and look smart. But that never worked.
The only answer for me, it seems, is to write as honestly as possible about whatever feels alive right now. We’ll see where that takes us. Right now, I feel grateful that I resisted the urge to shut it all down when it seemed like I could not possibly ever write anything interesting again.
My 2023 reflection showed me the value of going through my publication spreadsheet. I am always surprised by how much happened and how much I’ve written — good and bad. Frankly, it’s a reminder to myself that in the blur of the days there were gems. It’s a reminder to keep moving, no matter what comes our way.
See you in the new year!
— Frederik
What does it mean to leave a legacy that endures over millennia? What games do we play to avoid thinking of death? In Search of Ozymandias was my reflection on a world in which the rich and powerful seem to have lost their ability to dream.
If you can’t spot Ozymandias the idea in immortal stone, you may find Ozymandias the tyrant staring back at you in your bathroom mirror. One seeks to inspire you. The other will make you his slave.”
What does a dark night of the soul feel like? In Night Season I wrestled with finding alien eggs in the caverns of my unconscious. How do you show up for work when the world keeps melting and refuses to find a steady shape?
“You make a thing until you can make the thing you want to make.
That’s what I’m here for. To express what I see with my heart. Life’s too damn short to do it any other way.
I am not going back. I am moving forward. In circles. If you’re convinced you’re staring at the ramblings of a madman, you’re right.”
In The Birds and the Wasteland I worried about living in a dying culture in which our attention is swallowed and churned by the algorithm and its addictive one minute videos.
“The answer to a dead culture starts with the song of birds and the beating of our hearts. The answer to a dead culture emerges when you realize how truly and deeply alive you can be. Then you start walking.”
In The River and the Silence I reflected on my long silent walks in nature that helped me move forward after losing my job during COVID.
“In a wasteland of noise, silence is as precious as gold. Once lost, we forget what treasures wait in its depths.
Life is not a competition. Not for money, status, or power. Not to be the wisest, not to have the most intense experiences, not to be the most loved. It’s not even a competition to quote the most sages or spend the most time listening to birds and gazing at rivers.
That’s why I meditate. Not for enlightenment, but to be lighter.”
I spent a weekend at a Zen monastery (thank you ) and explored in The Skillfulness of Stillness how different kinds of stillness had been invaluable to great investors.
“Moving to a point of stillness is about approaching attention with intention. It’s too easy to get bogged down turning over rocks and miss what is flowing your way already — whether it’s a seismic shift in markets or a beautiful forest to be enjoyed.”
My father, money, writing — why does it all have to be so difficult? What does it mean to Search for True Words?
“I wanted money, yes. But what I really wanted was what money represented. I wanted to be released from the inner demons I didn’t dare to look at. I wanted to relinquish the emotional debt buried in my depths.
I couldn’t do any of that until I started the search for true words. That’s what I still hope to do here: Find a few true words and explore the mysteries of money and meaning, one true sentence at a time.”
Lessons from the Ultra-Wealthy was reflection on my years in the family office world, the “inner sanctum of real wealth.”
“The lawyers always get paid.
Invest in people first.
Don’t delegate what gives your life meaning.”
Berkshire’s annual meeting prompted my Search for Secular Cathedrals. Where do the ‘spiritual but not religious’ find community and meaning? Is it a mistake to look to business and technology for answers?
“By its very nature, the space of sacred community is not for sale. It comes at the price of making an offering from our hearts, not our wallets.”
Nothing defined Berkshire like the partnership of Buffett and Munger. In How to Find a Partner like Charlie Munger I pondered how to re-create such an enduring relationship.
“Imagine if Munger had been looking for his own sidekick, another Munger. Imagine if his ego had prevented him from becoming number two at the world’s most successful investment enterprise. Maybe don’t look for a Munger but for a Buffett.”
After his death, I looked at The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons's Success.
“It took many years of learning, experimenting, and building relationships before Simons had the most valuable secret sauce on Wall Street. Importantly, Simons couldn’t have predicted that there even would be a secret sauce. He needed other smart people to compound his own curiosity.”
How can investors improve at using their intuition? Start by applying the midwit framework, The Meme Every Investor Needs to Grasp.
“What makes the journey so frustrating is that the relationship between effort and return inverts. … the middle is where luck goes to die. People in the middle don’t want to get lucky, they want to be right.”
Nobody likes to lose money, but what if an early “cathartic experience” of loss is a necessary ingredient to success? In Why Losses Make Legends I looked at the evidence.
“If you hire people to deal with money, remember to ask them if they know how legends are made.
A good way of measuring burnout: there’s not a piece I wrote in June that seems worth re-sharing!
After watching Dune 2, I could not stop thinking about the metaphor of Paul’s Way South. This story and Dante Alighieri’s journey to the very center of help kept whispering: keep going. Take the leap.
“Hell is thinking you want to change but avoiding the uncomfortable truths of your condition, the ones keeping you chained. In that sense, being in hell is a choice.”
“Success is not about the destination but the beginning. If walking seemed impossible yesterday, taking the first step is a victory already. … Our second life begins when we stop waiting for clarity, put faith in our hearts to guide us, feel the sun on our faces, and walk.”
David Milch’s memoir opened my eyes to the Alchemy of Writing. The stories we carry and encounter are filled with transformative potential.
“We are endowed with talents yet burdened by wounds. At their intersection, where our highest potential mirrors our darkest depths, we have a chance to practice alchemy.”
I later wrote about David Milch’s Favorite Writing Exercise (try it, it was a wild experience for me) and How to See Yourself Like a Writer.
“The richness of your character rests in its contradictions. It is your complexity that uniquely breaks the light and lets you shine.”
I spent August around family and explored how the people we love are like an emotionally resonant mirror — they show us how to Tell Air from Glass. They can guide us to growth.
“The path to the garden is flow. If life feels like pushing against glass, look for ways to make it visible. Look for perspective. In my experience, nobody does it better than the people we love, whose buzzing and bumping we can recognize as our own.”
Money began to emerge as a theme, a force both ubiquitous and mysterious. It seemed to touch every life in surprising ways. The Eighty-One Dollars Made Lyndon Johnson showed me that small amounts can change the course of history.
“When we work hard and save money, we think we do it for ourselves. We worry about retirement, we plan to buy a house, we want to feel secure. But the most rewarding ways to use this energy will be opportunities that benefit others — the most gratifying investments will be the ones in people.”
In Why Fortunes Are Lost I further explored the connection between our inner world and money.
“It is important to understand these rules of the game, but it is more important to study ourselves. We are the one factor they all interact with.”
I later found a potent example in Al Pacino and the Weight of Wealth.
“There is no hiding from how we really feel about money.”
Attention-hacking Youtuber Mr. Beast and biographer Robert Caro may seem like opposites, but both gave me A Lesson in Obsession.
“To succeed in the worlds of business and media, study Mr. Beast.
To leave a legacy, study Robert Caro.
To perfect your craft, learn from both.”
What do investors, journalists, scientists, and comedians have in common? They are Truth Sifters looking for “the gap that reveals a story, an investment idea, a punchline.”
“If you meet every person and situation as a vessel of hidden truths, the world will remain infinitely fascinating. Every day contains the potential of revelation.”
When I rewatched True Detective, I “found a deeper layer, a story within the story” — its supernatural dimension. I found The Prophecy of Rust Cohle. “Two detectives uncovering a conspiracy and chasing a killer? That’s surface-level stuff.”
“His story is the tragedy of an awakened soul trapped in the mind of a rational modern man. Rust could have been a Bodhicitta but instead turns into a Bodhicynic: awake to the suffering of the world and participating in it, but not joyfully.”
I think of money as having Three Realities: lack, affluence, and abundance. At each level, the nature of money changes. At each level, it asks us a different question.
“Can I solve my money problems; can I separate reality from illusion, need from want; what does having fortune reveal about me?”
Leonard Cohen was another artist who struggled with money. I argued it was a Blessing in Disguise that prompted him to rise to new heights.
“Cohen used every setback as an opportunity to evolve and grow. The only path forward was to share more of his gift. He alchemized failures into blessings, embarrassment into victory, and pain into words of healing and inspiration.”
What was The Moment that Made Louis C.K.'s Career? The moment that he began to speak his truth. The moment he faced his fears.
“I thought, okay, when you're done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, what do you got left? You can only dig deeper. You start talking about your feelings and who you are. … Then you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares … And then you start going into just weird shit.”
Why do some investors play past retirement while others burn out? In The Price of Passion I imagined life as a jar of marbles, each able to either block or refract the light we receive.
“It’s possible to pick up every marble — every game and role we play, every relationship and activity — and ask how it directionally affects the richness of our life experience.”
“Excellence demands passion. We can expect it to last if the heart is starved.”
And that’s it. We’ve made it through another year!
Why write? Why do anything., To fill the world with more of what we love. Write as an act of faith, to create the world you want. … Write like the world depends on it. Maybe it does.
“Money asks us millions of questions. Only we don’t have time to listen. We are too busy making and spending it.”
“The reward for tears of grief, I’ve found, are tears of joy and gratitude.”
“Destiny is not a place to reach but a path to walk. Destiny is a direction, not a destination.”
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If you are looking for an impulse into 2025:
Take more risks with your curiosity! Escape The Midwit Trap in your information diet. Filter the noise through networks, track what smart people do on the weekend, and look for lindy pyramids.
“How much money, time, and energy can you afford to invest in your curiosity? I don’t know the right answer, but it’s not zero.”
Pursue mastery over money and climb Maslow's Lighthouse.
“The intensity required for mastery can’t be faked. The things that money can buy are fine. But what fills our hearts, what brings out the best in us and others, lies beyond.”
Mentorship has been crucial to many careers. We're Not Mozart — it’s good to ask for help if you’re doing the work. Buffett understood this as well as anyone.
“The best way to get a mentor is to deserve one. Real talent is always in short supply and a great mentor would be a fool to let it pass by.”
2024-12-30 22:52:09
Our experience with money doesn’t change gradually but in steps — Nick Maggiulli once compared it to climbing a ladder. When we reach a new level, it’s important to pause before making big decisions. It’s like stepping into a room with bright lights and giving our eyes time to adjust.
Ben Graham is known as the founder of the conservative value approach to investing, but in 1928, he was one of the first young hot-shot hedge fund managers. That year, he made 60% for his investors, and plans for another, much larger fund were in the works.
His family had struggled with money after his father’s early death. Now he was finally flying high and it was time to live the good life.
Graham and his wife picked a new home, a lavish duplex in a brand new “thirty-story apartment building of ultimate luxury” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The place had “ten rooms and Lord knows how many baths” on the 18th and 19th floors. Plus a terrace. This, Graham wrote in his memoirs, this was “what the high-flying Grahams wanted.”
The building was the Beresford whose distinctive shape is familiar to anyone strolling through Central Park.
Rent was $11,000 a year, “small figures” compared to the $600,000 Graham had earned that year before taxes. (Inflation adjusted by about 18x, that’s about ~$200,000 in rent.) Graham signed a ten-year lease before heading to Palm Beach for a Christmas vacation. “What a Wunderkind I was,” he quipped decades later.
The Grahams moved into their “regal duplex” in October 1929, “just when the holocaust in Wall Street was at its height.”
2024-12-26 00:16:43
This has been a difficult piece to write. Everything has been for the past few months. It was all stuckness and straining, fighting and grinding, no flow and no ease. I can finish this now, I think, because I feel some light. Faith has returned.
Back in October, I spent a weekend solving puzzles and fighting with foam swords in the forest of Connecticut (role-play that was not a LARP but kind of LARP-y). On the second day, we sat in a clearing with a group of elders when one of them asked: “What is your greatest fear?”
That hit me like a train. I felt an electric shiver across the back of my skull, my signal to be still and listen to my intuition. If I could let myself relax, if I could drop the urge to look smart in front of everyone, there would be space for a deeper truth to emerge. I focused on my breath while the question made its way around the circle.
“My greatest fear is that I don’t do what I am here to do,” I heard myself say. Surprise.
I used to think very differently about life.
There seemed to be nothing “to do” in the sense of destiny or purpose. We are born, we do things, we die. We’re here to have children, amuse ourselves, and suffer. Humanity, as Rust Cohle put it, looked like a tragically self-aware species trapped in a “giant gutter in outer space.” The point of life then, I reasoned with my college roommate on a drunk night, must be to experience more pleasure than pain. But those were hollow words stitched together like a tablecloth to cover my deep unease.
Some six years ago, my then-girlfriend accidentally exposed the void underneath the cover. “How would you feel if you died tomorrow?” she asked.
“I think I’d be okay with it,” she said. I understood why. That woman was a badass. She had escaped the bonds of a strict religious community and arranged marriage, moved to another country, and was building two businesses. Her life was neither easy nor perfect, but she was the main character of her story.
I on the other hand felt paralyzed by the question, like a rabbit staring at a snake. I had reached my early thirties, but it felt as if my real life had not even begun. If life was like going to the movies, I was still watching trailers. I was moving from job to job (and, if I’m being honest, from relationship to relationship) looking for an answer to the gravitational pull of inner emptiness.
Søren Kierkegaard called this ‘unconscious despair’, the despair of a self unaware of its spiritual nature. But spirituality meant nothing to me and neither did Kierkegaard. All I knew was that I had no answers and didn’t know what questions to ask. Then I stumbled right into it.
During COVID, I bumped into a muse, the living embodiment of my secret creative yearning (and a future tragicomic love story). In our brief time together, she opened a tiny crack in the door to the other realm. And once you know there even is a door, it’s hard not to keep going.
In the last few years, I went deeper — with psychedelics, meditation, sound, breathwork, and other practices. I cried, shook, roared, and floated in blissful silence. The deepest moments were selfless and timeless, yet also deeply alive. I felt centered and in harmony, congruent as if all shapes of me had collapsed into one. I had been worried about being swallowed by the void, but now I fell into it, through it, beyond it. I realized the void was just as much ‘home’ as the rest of my life.
One night, I took off my mask to the sound of distant rain and singing bowls and bumped into something. It took me a while to realize that I returned as a believer.
At first, it felt like an intrusion, an embarrassment even. I couldn’t explain what had happened or what I believed. Everything felt beyond the reach of words. But sometimes, especially around trees and water, I could still feel the subtle tapestry connecting me with all things. If God is real, what do they want, I asked a friend.
“Things are more integrated than they seem, they are better than they seem, and they are more mysterious than they seem,” Huston Smith wrote about the shared ideas across religious traditions in The World’s Religions. That matched my experience. The world had become more mysterious, more alive, and more connected.
But as the world took on a gentle holy glow, my life came unglued. Everything felt misaligned and out of place. I fell out of life. The city seemed absurdly noisy, and I became sensitive to people’s moods in ways I had never experienced. I spent even more time alone, pondering and wandering.
Work was bad. Ideas that had interested me died in my hands. The only thing holding my fascination seemed to be the inner journey. I had blown the doors of perception wide open and walked right into a dark night of the soul.
Also, my fear changed shape. Gone was the despair over a meaningless universe. But what if, I wondered, what if I have a fate but fail to meet it? This fear felt a lot more intense. “The more consciousness, the more the despair,” as Kierkegaard put it.
I obsessed over time. Had I discovered the secret of life too late? “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” Shakespeare’s deposed King Richard II laments his fate. I rushed from one experience to the next, desperate for more knowledge and guidance, determined to catch up. I jumped into the void until I destabilized myself enough, I couldn’t tell a bad dream from a vision or ‘visitation.’ I was stumbling through a newly fluid and porous reality.
When I stopped chasing experiences, I was left with a pile of clues but no map, no further guidance, no comforting visions. What if I never found my path South? What if I forgot my precious fragments of truth and fell back asleep? What if I lost myself in the maze of entertaining distractions? The trailers were over, the movie was running — and I still could not figure out what role I was supposed to play?
The many faces of fear converged into one: a fear of failing to act, of remaining still like the rabbit. My greatest fear was falling prey to fear itself.
Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is a tough read and I am grateful that David Milch guided me to its key idea. The answer to despair, Kierkegaard wrote, was for the self to rest in faith, to “rest transparently in the power that established it.” To rest — not to strain or complain, not to argue, fight, and gripe.
This echoed my deepest experiences, moments of stillness, timelessness, and selflessness. But I found it almost impossible to follow.
Resting in faith means dropping all expectations, all ideas of what life should be like. It’s a goodbye to old desires and designs, a kind of tiny death. I don’t know how things are supposed to unfold. Thy will be done.
I anchor my days with meditation and prayer. I wait for a glimpse of timeless connection and wholeness. I express gratitude and ask for guidance. “I don’t know how things are supposed to unfold.” All I get is this moment and the choice of how I show up.
I try to listen, to be present, to share, to be of service. When I struggle to get it right, as inevitably happens, I hope for another chance to do better.
“Man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time,” C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters, “it all comes to him by pure gift.”
Every day is a chance — the only chance — to receive and share the gift.
Every day offers a chance to experience that “our sense of separateness in every fundamental way is an illusion” as David Milch put it.
Every day presents a choice of acting from a place of fear or faith, of letting the mind create a world of despair or glory.
“The human opportunity, the religions tell us,” Smith wrote, “is to transform our flashes of insight into abiding light.” Once life turns from a meaningless slog into a mysterious (and miraculous) journey of utmost importance, the real work begins.
Destiny is not a place to reach but a path to walk. Destiny is a direction, not a destination.
— Frederik
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Instead of “How would you feel if you died tomorrow?” ask yourself: “What would I do if I had two to five years left?”
Pick a time frame long enough to do something difficult, ambitious, and meaningful, but too short to avoid making a choice. No multi-tasking. What one thing would you focus on?
If you could leave the world with one more meaningful contribution, what would be the scariest thing to attempt?
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