I wanted to offer a few notes from the outset. If you feel you are pressed for time, or you have read an essay before, I have highlighted key thoughts in bold, giving you a quick way of scanning the text for critical pieces first, allowing you to subsequently delve into whatever resonates with you as important.

Before getting into the weeds, I believe it is helpful to consider a few aspects about The Well in the Desert. I hope that this will make my essays a more enjoyable read and give you some minimal guidance with how to possibly approach any sense of frustration or unease that may at times come up for you. I appreciate that several of my ideas are likely to be controversial, or at least not easy to look at as useful. I would like for you to remain aware of — and be able to hold — your disagreement, without necessarily stopping you from considering what I would like to share.

The first aspect I would like to address could go under a “who is this website for?” heading. Naturally, I might be tempted to say, everyone! I do recognize however, that what I am trying to convey will leave quite a few people skeptical, if not downright irritated, or even with a deep sense of wanting to reject my hypotheses as dangerous.

My essays may be most enjoyable and helpful for people who consider themselves as being on a journey of exploration and growth. The way I use these terms, I am thinking of an attitude of openness, coming with both a desire to learn, and a willingness to consider alternatives to whatever you have come to believe about yourself and other people. That is, you believe and have experienced that there is merit to updating how you look at the world, because every model is flawed — including, of course, the one I am laying out in this book.

Over the years, I have found that a reasonably good proxy for this attitude is if you can relate to the experience of falling in love with another person, and then finding yourself highly motivated to learn pretty much everything about them. There is a feeling of thirsting, and of genuinely enjoying the sensation of having your worldview change, as a consequence of the insights you gain from understanding how the other person sees things differently from your own, current perspective.

I do, in addition, also hope that the thoughts I share will be of use for people who feel that they are stuck or that they are not in control of their lives, and who want to leave behind the nagging sense that they are being manipulated. Unfortunately, I have a potentially difficult message for this second group: the desire of being in control is part of what I believe gives life an at times bitter flavor — of finding yourself not being in control, of wanting to be in control and, deep down, realizing that you are not.

The upshot is to consider that this desire — as much as it is part of how life itself has come about and grows — cannot be fulfilled completely. There are situations in which the lack of control leads to a tightening of experience. And when few good options are available, the attempt to exert control by force is often making life a living hell of sorts.

A second aspect I would want to mention is maybe for whom this site might be particularly difficult to enjoy. And I am not doing so with the intention that, should you recognize yourself in the following description, you have to leave immediately. I still believe that reading my essays may provide some value. For one, you might gain insight into people you have difficulty connecting with, whose presence is not easy for you to enjoy. You may understand a bit more how they see life.

And naturally, this description is derived from my observations and perspective, followed by my interpretation and hypotheses as to what makes this kind of approach appealing in the first place. So if this is something you experience as capturing some part of how you feel about life, please note that I do not believe that you are making any mistake. Rather, I suspect that you might be carrying a lot of extra weight that life places on people’s shoulders. The thought of looking directly at that weight comes with a sense that it is maybe a better approach to focus on the positives.

In short, I imagine this website to be somewhat less useful for people who feel hesitant or see little value to consider taking a much closer look at the sources of their own bad feelings. The image I have in mind is of someone who might think of life as some sort of race: if you stay ahead of the pain and suffering — for instance by always having a plan or some good answer to problems — then you do not have to feel so bad about things. On some level, I experience this approach as running from pain.

It seems to me a consequence of the natural desire to live a life that is, as much as possible, filled with happiness and joy. And saying it like that sounds great, even to me. I do, however, believe that some of the sources of misery people encounter throughout their lives cannot be ignored forever. And I believe that there is value in becoming sufficiently acquainted with those sources, in order for their presence later in life not to become a form of confusion and torment.

I am also thinking of people who hold a view of the world that says something like, “every problem has a right answer, and as long as I find that right answer, all I need to do is implement it.” From my own observations, such a view often seems to be accompanied by a certain amount of rigidity when it comes to all sorts of issues. For many simple situations, especially those that do not involve other people and their behavior, this approach can also be incredibly successful. So I do not wish to suggest that this is taking a poor default position. In my experience, however, it makes it more difficult to resolve a genuine problem that exists, at least in part, precisely because of the people in the situation taking this approach.

If some of this applies to you, what I would caution against is the idea of learning something from my writing that will help you to control other people, while making it harder to be controlled yourself. My experience of several books from a loose category of self-help is that they presume that taking an approach of being the better manipulator is actually helping people. From what I can tell, this in itself contributes to a kind of arms race we are witnessing, where everyone is getting more and more exhausted from the added pressure that comes from people applying more and more sophistication to this kind of thinking.

In short, this website is not meant for “management”. If I have written my essays skillfully enough, they will not leave any backdoors into the minds and hearts of you and other readers, at least not among people in the first group, through which some clever marketing or branding campaign could come back in, and subdue them once again.

In that regard, I want to stress that the idea of managing people itself — of learning about the psychological mechanisms behind punishments and rewards, and how to apply them so thoroughly that people behave in ways you want them to, often without even knowing that they are not doing what they would choose to do freely — is roughly as interesting to me as becoming a member of the mafia. Both management and mafia share a disdain for the idea that the people on the other side could have something to offer that requires them to be free, first and foremost.

And in my mind this also applies to self-management, at least if understood as the art of suppressing some of your thoughts and feelings in order for you to be more efficient or free from certain habits. If you are among the people who believe that some of the thoughts and feelings which humans experience are too inconvenient to express or too dangerous to consider, that the only way to live a good life is to somehow control if not eradicate those parts, my immediate request would be for you to imagine that each of these parts has their own desire to exist and be recognized. And by attempting to suppress them, it creates a perpetual cycle of winning and losing, requiring those parts to successfully rebel against the control imposed on them.

I firmly believe that humans are about to discover, no matter whether the ideas of this website will find an audience and acceptance, that the spirit of life that says something like, “here I am in all my glory, and you cannot control me!” will always reassert itself. And whatever humans devise as a plan for alleviating their own fear of chaos and disorder cannot work if it does not allow for sufficient freedom of all forms of life that consistently demonstrate an unwillingness to be extinguished.

The third and last aspect I want to get out of the way before jumping into the trenches is that of responsibility and accountability. It is a very tempting idea to think about “who is to blame?” As much as possible, I would like to invite you, the reader, to consider that this question, while having some kind of natural attraction, is — at least when asked from a perspective of “who is to be punished for what happened?” — linked to notions of control.

Several years ago, I came across the process called Nonviolent Communication. I believe its creator, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, had many brilliant insights into how human life can become much more enjoyable as a consequence of living from a spirit of choice. If a person can become aware that (almost) everything they experience is, at least in part, amenable to choice — not wanting to live a life of suffering, for one — it can be tremendously helpful in improving the relationships that people have with one another.

Unfortunately, Rosenberg also believed that “humans got into the habit of applying punishments and rewards over the last 10,000 years or so.” That is, he believed that someone, somewhere, started the game of controlling others — or maybe more of wanting to control others. It is my firm belief that thinking of human intentions as the source of suffering is not helpful.

The Big Picture

Over the past few years, I have deduced — from what I have learned, read, heard, and thought about — that life itself requires, both in its infancy as well as on the level of its constituent building blocks, the establishment of fairly strict rules. That is to say, before life can become truly free and be put into the position of transforming the mess from which it arises into something beautiful and habitable through forms of play, it must go through a phase of quite brutal order and structuring. During this phase, it must implement some sort of mechanism by which — at the very least a slight but significant — surplus of order (over chaos) is selected for. In consequence, through what is called natural selection, this comes with an experience of rewarding order for the agents that manifest life.

This pattern — the experience of reward for and clinging to order so as to preserve the security of resources which life has gained some agency over, while still carrying the scars stemming from the painful potential of chaos — is repeated on all levels of life, possibly down to molecules, atoms, and sub-nuclear particles. Only once a sufficient amount of order is achieved does life explore the luxury of freedom.

In the biggest pictures I can paint, the thoughts of dying, of dissolving into background noise and no longer existing, of having wasted one’s time, of not having made an impact, of not mattering in the final analysis can be and often are excruciatingly painful. Imagine looking at your life from a perspective of wanting to achieve something that still lies in your future: you have plans for things still to come. Suddenly, you learn that you have a terminal illness and very little time left. It then seems very understandable to me that a person might experience many unpleasant states, including panic, desperation, hopelessness, and maybe wanting to kick and scream at everyone that comes into their path — especially people they see as related to taking away any remaining freedoms and potential.

What I hope to offer with my essays is not so much a manual. If you are looking for a very concrete guide for “what steps do I have to take to no longer feel desperate?”, you may be disappointed. I do hope to offer a guide that, similar to a person you fall in love with, gives you a sense of how to reach the kind of state you would like to experience as much as possible. Similar to a person you fall in love with, who provides a fresh perspective, and who “makes you feel full of bliss,” it will however remain your responsibility to learn how to live in that state on your own. One of the dangers I see in and have experienced coming from romantic love is the notion that the other person is the source of salvation, rather than being a pointer toward it. Instead of giving specific instructions — like a website focused on meditation or on how to spend your time or money — I primarily would like you to consider two things:

First, if you are willing to look at, to accept, to understand, to integrate, and then to carry the weight that life has put on your shoulders — the weight that comes from the recognition that life is characterized by many intrinsic motivations and desires, and no matter how you try to make them come true, there will always be an obstacle in your path that seems insurmountable (until it no longer is!) — you do not have to live in a state of perpetual fear of not being able to manage it. That perpetual obstacle is a universal experience of all forms of life after all.

And secondly, even though life will never be free of the experience of pain or immense effort and the tiredness that comes from exerting it, life can be relatively free from the experience that it is not worth that effort. Quite the opposite: if I am successful, you can walk away from reading essays on this site with a sense of hope — the hope that, if you accept the pain which you feel as your teacher, and the effort you exert as a willing contribution to the process of life discovering itself, then you will feel that everything IS worth it. All the pain and effort are in service of something much, much bigger.

Core Principles

To make my thoughts more accessible, I have decided to publish them as a series of essays on this website, each of which can stand on its own. The order in which I am presenting them primarily reflects how I imagine a reader who isn’t familiar with any of the experiences and concepts I describe might find it easiest to learn about them. At the same time, if a post title catches your interest, please take this as an invitation to roam freely. One major wish I have for humanity is that people will take more risks in their choice making. Without the willingness to make mistakes, life would not be possible…

I am drawing primarily from first-hand experiences as well as from observing others in my close environment — and from what I have in consequence deduced about how life succeeds best. That naturally means that, at times, some of the examples I give will not be immediately applicable to whatever challenges you are facing. For each aspect I describe, I have done my best to find a description from which principles can be gleaned, which can then be applied and translated to a variety of situations.

While I find it difficult to find completely abstract (i.e., derive purely propositional) formulations of these principles, I have given it a try, which I hope can help primarily as handles, moniker, or memes to help you remember the broader, more narrative nature of these principles:

• The tightness that comes from the experience of threat is a mechanism built into (human) psychology through evolutionary processes, and is neither good nor bad in itself, but has in the past contributed to our successfully surviving as a species until today.
• One, if not the, primary pathway of overcoming the desperation stemming from this tightness is its full acceptance as a part of life itself — by integrating the experience of tightness into our awareness as a feeling-representation of our aliveness, what would otherwise be difficult to be present with becomes not only bearable, but a source of joy and strength.
• Through reverse engineering, we are now in a position of attempting to apply psychological mechanisms on each other’s experience to elicit desirable behaviors, creating pressures evolution did not anticipate, since they did not exist prior to humans using the scientific method on our own psychology, starting with Greek philosophy in my reading.
• Given that these mechanisms are particularly useful in situations of great scarcity — they force people to collaborate at the expense of bad feelings, fomenting resentment and anger in exchange for survival benefits — now that humans have transformed the environment into a relatively more resource-rich world, the resentment is finally coming home, hitting us all like a boomerang.
• If we want to avoid being hit smack in the face by this weapon that evolution and natural selection have implanted in our hearts, we need to become conscious of its existence, of its former utility, in order to forgive people who keep wielding it against us, and make the conscious effort of no longer wielding it against ourselves and others.
• This weapon is built into our own psychology, and the way it operates is that it becomes triggered or activated — habitually and initially outside of our control — whenever signals of risk or scarcity are present in our awareness.
• To the extent that we can become aware that, in reality, we live in a world of much greater abundance than humans have ever lived in, and we can also become aware that our lives could be much better, more pleasant, and most importantly safer and more secure going forward if we left this weapon behind, we are put into the position of no longer being triggered, and also of no longer wishing to trigger it in other people.
• This opens up choice, the experience of being free to follow a path that satisfies all of the hopes and desires you carry, not just the desire for survival and safety.
• From this opening, you can still choose to restrict others’ freedoms — putting people into prison for instance — if that does, indeed, improve everyone’s experience on a collective level, but it will not be done from a stance of having to put people into prisons as a means to correct their behavior against their will, or to signal to them that they are unworthy of our attention.

If you have made it this far, I hope you feel intrigued about what I have to offer. Thank you very much for exploring this important topic with me.