Recent content on Mark Ayers
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. Douglas Adams in The…
Finished in 2026 A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros (2014) The Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton (1999) Weaveworld by Clive Barker (1987) Ravenwood by Nathan Lowell (2011) Storythinking by Angus Fletcher (2023) Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletcher (2025) The Rise of the Dragon by George R. R. Martin (2022) Story Grid by Shawn Coyne (2015) A Monastery Within by Gil Fronsdal (2010)…
Chance governs the scale of a life more than choice does. Choice governs its shape. The century, country, parents, body and brain a person receives before making any decision will often matter more than anything decided later. Place of birth helps determine income, health and education. Recession can cripple a generation’s earnings. War can take its young. A gene may declare itself in middle…
Governments have always lied; the deeper danger was that power might damage the means by which a lie could be exposed, leaving citizens without enough common reality to argue about what should be done. Bush v. Gore offers a useful, if imperfect, starting point for the American version of that decline. The Supreme Court intervened, ending the Florida recount and settling the presidency, but it did…
Twenty minutes outside town is where the regional food lives. It’s the tamale stand operating out of a converted garage, the smoker in someone’s front yard with a hand-painted plywood sign, the farm stand selling whatever came up this week alongside jarred preserves with handwritten labels. The restaurant in town has a menu and a health inspection grade and a Yelp page. Twenty minutes…
A question is an offer, which is why curiosity carries a loneliness that no appetite for facts would explain. Curiosity reaches outward. It offers a question or an unfinished thought and waits for someone else to take it up. When the offer is returned with another question, both people enter ground that neither occupied before. When it meets a shrug, a joke or a quick change of subject, a bid for…
The backup club enjoys one profound advantage: it is not currently disappointing us. A golfer buys Driver A. It performs well. Confidence grows and good shots follow. Then come a few poor rounds: a slice into the trees, a snap hook on a narrow hole, a string of drives that desert their owner at precisely the wrong moment. Faith erodes. Fortunately, Driver B is waiting in the garage. Driver B is…
The creator made a world simple enough to serve its purpose. Into it he placed us, free to live as we chose. He also planted a tree whose fruit would awaken the need to understand. We ate, and innocence ended. What had been enough no longer was. We began to ask why, then what lay beneath the answer, then what lay beneath that. The creator answered by enlarging the world. Each question made new…
The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood. Children do not judge the worlds into which they are born. They adapt to them. A child in a house where conflict is avoided may learn that disagreement threatens love. A child in a chaotic home may learn that constant watchfulness keeps danger at bay. These responses are not defects. They are intelligent…
SPECULATIVE MACHINES, “Bios O.S.” “Our biochemical instructions are there for the taking. Like a choice James Brown sample, our DNA will be re-sampled, recycled, glitched, chopped and screwed.” Genetic engineering usually speaks the language of Prometheus or the laboratory: hubris, precision, designer babies and optimization. “Bios O.S.” replaces the god and the…
Being trapped in an inherited world is alienating. Being unable to see how anyone changes it is worse. The first condition limits your power; the second hides where power might begin. Economic structures, political institutions and social norms were already running when you arrived. Their rules were written, their offices occupied and their advantages distributed. No single person designed the…
No contract you did not sign can bind you. The objection has real force. Contract law, from which the social contract borrows its moral weight, asks for offer, acceptance and consideration, freely given by competent parties—and no one alive ever gave any of the three. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all knew this. The contract was always a fiction, a device for explaining why submission to authority…
Where am I At home in Greater Grand Rapids, Michigan What am I reading There is No Antimemetics Division by Qntm (2025) Derai by E. C. Tubb (1968) Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill (1914) Primal Intelligence by Agnus Fletcher (2025) What am I focused on Establishing fresh, healthy routines Reestablishing a running routine Returning to golf What I’m looking forward to Roadtripping to…
What I use day to day. Updated when reality changes — not aspirations, not everything I’ve tried. Hardware Desk: Mac Mini (M4 Pro), LG 34" Ultra-Wide QHD monitor Portable: MacBook Air (M4), iPad Pro (M4) with Pencil Pro Pocket: iPhone Air Wearable: Whoop, Apple Watch Series 10, AirPods Pro 3 Software Editor: Visual Studio Code Languages: Go (primary), occasional TypeScript Notes: Obsidian…
There is a familiar intuition that fairness comes at the expense of prosperity. Compress the rewards a society offers, the reasoning goes, and you dull the motive to innovate, to take risks, to outwork the next person; aggregate output falls. This is Okun’s leaky bucket: redistribution spills some of what it carries, and smoothing outcomes taxes the engine that produces them. The intuition…
How long a vacation should last isn’t a matter of preference so much as arithmetic against transit. The more of your trip that goes to getting there and recovering, the more days on the ground you need before the trip justifies its cost in leave and fatigue. Two floors and a target: Minimum days at destination Single-day travel: 5 Long-haul travel: 10 Optimal: about 23 days Below the…
Suppose the mind were the kind of thing that could leave the body—that it lived two lives on incompatible terms. Awake, it inhabits the standard world that holds the body in space and time, threaded onto sequence and pinned to a place. Asleep, it slips that frame: consciousness joins with the subconscious and unconscious somewhere outside space and time, then is drawn back into the body, where it…
I came to three productivity systems in turn, each as it arrived: Franklin Covey, then Getting Things Done, then the Bullet Journal. Each was sold to me, and I bought it, as the one that would finally make the others unnecessary. Each failed to do that, though none failed completely. The way I work now is what was left after I stopped believing any of them whole, keeping only the parts that earned…
To picture wheels within wheels that drive the gears of the celestial spheres, each a Planck quantum distance from the next, grinding eternity into moments , is to weld together two cosmologies that stand some four centuries and a complete conceptual revolution apart. The celestial spheres belong to the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian world, the nested crystalline shells carrying the planets in their…
From the Archives of Canopus: Survey Document 31572-B Agent Johor, Colonial Service Third Assessment: Terminal Phase of Experiment It is with necessary detachment that I record these observations on the species of Sol-3 (local designation: Earth). As representatives of Canopus, we are charged with monitoring the evolutionary developments of various planetary experiments. This one appears to be…
The utm query-string pattern originated with Urchin Software Corporation’s web analytics product. Urchin introduced a set of URL parameters in the early 2000s as part of the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) to track where web traffic came from and how marketing campaigns performed. Google acquired Urchin in 2005, integrated its technology into what became Google Analytics, and kept the utm_…
A republic is the kind of thing that has to be kept. Anniversaries resist that idea. They reach for permanence—enduring, robust, exceptional, providential—and a 250th birthday invites the grandest version of the reflex: we have arrived, the founding is secure, the inheritance complete. The truer description runs the other way. The American order is fragile: it has had to be kept intact. Continuity…
HOMO·HOMINIS·ESSE COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·ENUNTIA PERCIPE·STRUE·EFFICE This is where I think in public. I am interested in one question more than any other: how should a curious person live? Not merely what to believe, but how to think—and how to notice, connect ideas that seem unrelated, and build tools, habits, and language that make the world a little more intelligible. I write about whatever…
Recognizing that selfhood and free will are illusions does not diminish agency. It clarifies what agency was always doing. The shift is from control to influence. The conventional model demands authorship of one’s own thoughts and actions, weighed from some sovereign perch outside the causal flow. The naturalistic alternative grants no such perch, only a grip on probabilities. We can shape…
When an industry says it only gives people what they want, ask who, in the whole chain of human persons, ever wrote the request. Agribusiness mouthpieces say it is consumer demand, but no consumer asked that farmed Atlantic salmon be camouflaged to look like healthy wild-caught Pacific salmon—and the gap between those two assertions is exactly where the rhetoric of market sovereignty collapses.…
We were not people who noticed the ground. In the city the ground was settled law, something decided long ago by someone else and paved over twice. We walked on it the way we walked on arguments we’d already won—without looking down, without wondering what was underneath. The ground was gray and level and it held our weight and that was the end of our relationship with it. We had opinions…
The probability of relationship stability correlates with communication balance: $$ P(\text{stability}) = 1 - \frac{|C_1 - C_2|}{C_1 + C_2} \times (1-D) $$ Where: $C_1, C_2$ = communication investment by each party $D$ = depth of mutual understanding (0–1) assume $C_1 + C_2 > 0$ (otherwise define $P(\text{stability}) = 0$) Insights: This formula captures three relationship dynamics: Balance…
Language influences what we can think, not just how we express it. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its weak form is well-supported: the words and frames available to us bias the conclusions we reach. This is why public language carries such power. The press, public relations professionals, and government spokespersons don’t merely report; they manufacture the conceptual vocabulary through…
Near-silence is the riskiest opening a sequence can choose, because it stakes the next 90 minutes on a promise of patience the listener has not yet agreed to keep. Dustin O’Halloran’s “An Ending, A Beginning,” clipped to two minutes, makes the promise almost too lightly to notice: a handful of piano figures suspended in reverb, the title equating arrival and departure so…
They convene without a formal call. Someone—probably Madison—circulated a letter. The room is smaller than Philadelphia. There is no gallery, and no one has thought to bring a clerk. Madison speaks first, because he has been writing and cannot stop. He begins with a confession rather than a thesis. He once believed two failures could not coincide in the same republic. He now believes they have,…
The can promises a Mai Tai. It says so on the label, alongside “real rum,” and the rum is real: Cutwater distills its own, and there is no asterisk hiding a malt base or a neutral-spirit dodge. That is the trick. The rum is the one ingredient on the can that does not need a chemical understudy, and it is doing the work of vouching for everything that does. Because a Mai Tai is not rum.…
To grasp something and to carry it through are separate powers, and the distance between them is wider than we admit. The mind can hold a complete picture of what should be done while the will produces nothing, or a beginning that never arrives. Starting and finishing are two different failures bundled together. Some people never begin, stalled at the threshold by the friction of the first move.…
After Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad? The malady had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was my sense of dread acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how…
The most honest starting point is that animism isn’t a belief you install but a perceptual habit you cultivate. It is not about adopting propositions like “rocks are alive”; it is about relaxing the habit that treats everything non-human as inert backdrop. There are several entry paths, none of them mutually exclusive, and the work is a kind of training. The first is simple…
A theory of linguistic change is compressed into a single claim: that language changes through its use by those who took no care to understand what the words they use meant to others who had previously used those words. It identifies a mechanism—imperfect transmission between generations of speakers—and at once assigns something close to blame. “Took no care” frames the result as a…
In 1972, I was ten years old—old enough to listen carefully to song lyrics and young enough to believe I understood them. One song caught my ear that year: Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man.” Its cheerful melody was everywhere, on the radio, on television, leaking from transistor speakers in neighborhood yards. Most kids were singing along and thinking about chocolate bars and…
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. We never encounter reality directly, only reality as filtered through our tools, theories, and approaches. Heisenberg, working in quantum mechanics where measuring inevitably disturbs the system, recognized that our methods of inquiry shape what we can discover. In physics, the observer effect shows different…
What is this Antifa that some in power see as dangerous? An anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-worker community defense organization committed to active resistance to the corrosive and destructive social effects of white supremacy, sexism, bigotry, and economic exploitation. Hmm?
“Strong opinions, weakly held” captures the tension between acting decisively and adapting. This phrase, popularized by venture capitalist Paul Saffo, describes an approach where you form definitive positions based on available evidence while maintaining readiness to abandon those positions when better information emerges. The statement operates on two levels. The “strong…
“You are, unfortunately, embedded in your thinking” is more unsettling than it first appears. On first read, it describes a common cognitive trap: someone so fused with their own mental models that they can’t see past them. “Embedded” does real work here. It’s not “stuck in” or “limited by,” which imply a container you might climb out of.…
Optimistic Nihilism embraces the meaninglessness of existence as liberating rather than depressing. The universe lacks inherent meaning or purpose. That absence frees us to create our own significance and joy. It’s like saying “Nothing matters ultimately, so I’m free to find happiness and create meaning on my own terms.” Nihilistic Optimism, though similar-sounding,…
Most of mental life happens unobserved. Not the dramatic moments of decision or creativity—those announce themselves and get cataloged. The default operations: rumination, fantasy, worry, rehearsal of conversations, replay of memories, mental wandering. These unfold beneath external scrutiny, and they take up most of the available hours. These are habits, in the strict sense—patterns developed…
When facing circumstances that feel unbearable, three options exist: departure, transformation, or acceptance. This framework, rooted in Stoic philosophy and echoed in modern cognitive therapy, offers a deceptively simple map of suffering. Intolerable means the situation generates sustained distress that exceeds your capacity to function or undermines core values. Leaving withdraws you from the…
The Paradox of Tolerance presents a tension in liberal societies: unlimited tolerance destroys tolerance itself. Popper argued that tolerant societies must be intolerant of intolerance to preserve their tolerance. If a society tolerates all viewpoints and behaviors, it inevitably accommodates those who would eliminate tolerance entirely. These intolerant forces can exploit the very openness that…
Summary of Mise-en-Place for Knowledge Workers: 6 Practices for Working Clean . Four practices stand out: Decide the order Perform background tasks before immersive tasks Use placeholders Have a finishing mindset Decide the order is about strategic sequencing—like a chef knowing they need the sauce reduction started before the main dish. In knowledge work, this means deliberately planning which…
The old man sat by the river. The water was good. It was clear and moved well over the stones. He had fished this river for forty years. Maybe more. He did not keep count anymore. His son sat beside him. The boy was thirty-six and not a boy. But to the old man he was still the boy. “Do you remember the big brown trout?” the old man said. “The one under the fallen oak.”
Trump’s presidency is a stress test. Guardrails everyone assumed were solid turn out to be conventions. The press, the courts, federalism—forced into open defense by a single administration’s pressure. People understand their values when threatened. So do societies. Stability hides decay; disruption exposes it. But gains born of reaction depend on memory and follow-through. The same…
by Mark Ayers, 2025 Hearken now to Thought’s great saga, How Mind’s wheel forever turns, Grinding memory to powder, Each turn erasing what was learned. Óðinn watched from heights of Hliðskjálf, Counting failures, counting wins, Seeking patterns in the turnings, Wisdom’s price: what might have been. Past and future, twin-faced Janus, Steal the now from mortal grasp.…
Lead or conform. The two look like types of people but work as modes of action, and most of us move between them without noticing. To lead is to act first, set direction, and accept the friction of going against the settled order. To conform is to follow the norms already in place and preserve the cohesion they produce. Neither is a virtue on its own. Leading without cause is vanity; conforming…