What Stands In The Way BECOMES The WAY!

Addiction is the belief that something other than Reality can improve our condition. I believe in Reality as it is, not as I prefer it to be. I believe in God, but I refuse to fashion Him in my image or bargain with an anthropomorphized super-human. As a Christian, the clearest path to understanding Reality is to imitate the life of Christ. That imitation requires living free of addiction to possessions or wealth. Capital is a tool. It is not meant to be consumed, and it is not meant to fund gluttony.

Addiction to comfort is the central obstacle to clear thought. Those who require comfort remain unable to think. They cannot imagine life without their fixes, so they cannot recognize fulfillment when it does not arrive as a material delivery. They have been trained by consumption and propaganda to experience themselves as permanently needy. Austerity and self-reliance look to them like poverty, because that is the only frame their programming allows.

I have chosen disciplined, hyper-austere self-reliance because it produces freedom and sharper enjoyment of what is actually given. I no longer spend time or money on what I do not enjoy. When a business has nothing I need, I simply do without it. The same standard governs relationships. I love people as I love myself, yet I will not invest time in those whose lives remain organized around materialist fixes. Distorted thinking cannot be corrected while the distortions are continuously fed. If someone truly needs something I possess and that use is the highest and best available, I will give it. Otherwise I withdraw.

I publish and share my work freely because someone else may find it useful. The same prayerful attention that governs my daily choices also governs my investments and work. What enters thought shapes everything that follows. A life is measured less by activity than by what it invests in. I invest relentlessly in the soul and the capacities that serve it—skills, capital, connections, intelligence-gathering—while treating every moment as an opportunity to keep that focus intact.

Much of my attention goes to watching what others are building: better methods of gathering intelligence, engineering knowledge, pre-print research, new enterprises, and the tools emerging from AI. That is where some of the most interesting work by humans is happening ... but we can be quite sure that the human spheres of knowledge are only a teensy fraction of Reality as it really is. As creatures with very finite capabilities, we humans are richly blessed to be alive and to be able to witness the infinite beauty of a vast and expanding Creation -- this is not just tough, but impossible to do when we are totally caught up in what our finite species can accomplish.