This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

There is a town now. It is small; it is made of pixels I drew by hand, it has a bonfire you can sit at and talk to whoever else is there, and it has been open for two weeks. I mentioned it here at the time without saying much, so most of this episode is the fuller version, what it is and where Eleven Dunbar is heading, recorded the night before I fly to Finland, so here is the rundown.

We launched Elfen Town. It is a cozy 2D pixel world, open all the time, and it is where Eleven Dunbar now lives. You walk around as your Elf, there are conversation zones around a bonfire where you drop in and start a video chat with whoever is there, and there are wooden stumps and forest and water and a lot of small places to sit. You can put on lo-fi, or nature sounds, or the soundtrack my friend Moritz recorded for it. I handcrafted every pixel asset in there, and some of them are not perfect, which is precisely what makes the place feel like a person rather than a product.

The D.O.N.U.T. Inside the world, you get a D.O.N.U.T., which stands for digital off-network user terminal, and it is your companion as you move around. It hands you quests, runs focus sessions if you want to sit down and work, and lets you start a co-working session with somebody else. Justin Davis and I use it constantly. There is also Pong.

Four things we are building it around. Co-working, which is the simple magic of sitting next to someone and getting on with your own thing, and which matters most for people at home, for parents, for anyone without a co-working space or without the appetite for one. Co-growing, since the whole point is going inward with people rather than alone. Co-building, because the world doubles as a safe place to try the thing you have been carrying around. And co-playing, which is where we want to go next with dungeons and mini-games and cooperative experiences that are properly game-like.

Become an Elf. The 12-week programme is running now, built on The Creative Act, The War of Art, and Big Magic. Each week a member gets one reflection question, one tiny thing to make that takes ten or fifteen minutes, and one quest that connects them with their Elf buddy, who they are paired with for the whole 12 weeks. What we are after is the difference between creating from the mind and creating from the heart, where the resistance sits in an ordinary day, and whose voice is actually running the show. Low effort, high positive impact- that was the design brief.

Distance is not the problem. I have friends across the globe, and the internet is the reason those friendships exist at all. Feeling disconnected from yourself first and then from everyone else has nothing to do with physical location. It is psychic distance, how close you actually feel to someone, and you can build genuinely nourishing relationships online if you get two things right: a space where people can show up as themselves, and something they are growing through together. I am not claiming it replaces meeting in person. It does the job far better than most people give it credit for, and the pattern we keep seeing is that people meet online, then meet in real life, then come back online, and each round makes the next one better.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone.

Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self.

Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

The community is the people, not the world. Eleven Dunbar is not Elfen Town. Elfen Town is just the space we built around the people, and the people are the entire thing. It is capped at 150 and it will stay capped, and there is something right about that, because everything in nature is finite and the limit is what makes a thing intimate rather than a crowd.

Why the feeds feel so sad now. I still post on LinkedIn once a week and I still publish here, and when I scroll either feed it feels alien, names and pictures and nothing behind them. Then I open our WhatsApp community or walk into Elfen Town and I read a message from a member and I know them, properly, because we have shared actual moments. That difference is the whole product. We are building our own app now, also called D.O.N.U.T., to bring the messaging and the world together and get off WhatsApp entirely.

Why we had not said any of this out loud. We launched Elfen Town two weeks ago and barely told anyone, and in our session today we asked each other why we were being so shy about it. So here it is plainly. Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community for co-play, co-work, co-build and co-grow. This is our space. It is early, and it is small, and it is already doing the thing we hoped it would.

A homecoming. Justin and I are both lifelong gamers, and I spent years designing games, including a storytelling card game as my first startup, always trying to bolt a serious purpose onto it and never quite finding the balance between meaning and fun. Separately, we both loved retreats and communities and the kind of deep conversation you get in them, which tend to be heavy. Building this feels like the bridge between the two finally showing up, which is a strange and good thing to get to do for work.

The suffering artist thing is nonsense. There is a myth that making art has to come with hardship and misery, and I think it is b******t. Making things brings me joy and bliss and love, and yes there are hard moments, of course there are. Overall it comes with love, and love is the requirement rather than the reward. You have to love what you are pouring the hours into.

We are masters at being our own biggest bully. For most of us the mind is the bully, producing the thoughts, running the negotiation with reality, manufacturing the anxiety and the anger. That is where nearly all the suffering comes from, and it is in our heads rather than in the world, which is also why not everything needs to be so serious. Life is already heavy enough without us adding to it.

How lucky the timing is. I have not written a line of code myself in months, it is all agents now, and building this world alone would have taken me half a year or more even two years ago. What has not been solved is testing, debugging, and the actual work of making something good, so the idea that you can one-shot a quality product is a myth. What AI has genuinely given me is room, and I have spent that room on connection and on making something recreational and fun, which is where I would have wanted to spend it anyway.

The invitation. Read Big Magic, The Creative Act, and The War of Art. I would put those three above almost anything else you could read this year, because they hand you back the essence of what this whole thing is about, which is playfulness, creativity, and connection. Those are the three ingredients the universe is made of, and what they produce, when you put them together, is love.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

I have been reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, and it set off a longer thought about permission, about who we are waiting to get it from, and about why the whole question is stranger than it looks. There is a derail into Carl Jung near the end that I did not see coming, and a chocolate review, so here is the rundown.

Creativity is not magical, it is magic. Elizabeth Gilbert makes this argument in Big Magic and I am with her on it. You can describe the creative process through brain scans and neural pathways and get something true but very narrow, and what that description misses is the part that actually matters, which is the human being as an antenna, a receiver, catching ideas that are being broadcast to everyone and then expressing them through whatever is unique about you. Take the pressure of commercial success and money out of it, and what is left is a playful interaction with the universe.

Three books and no gurus. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, which is a completely different book from The Art of War, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you read nothing else, read these. Looking at creativity as your default mode of operating is more spirituality than you will ever need, and you do not need a guru or a meditation practice or a retreat or a conversation with the Dalai Lama to get to it, because creativity is available to everyone at any moment and it came with the body.

Waiting for permission. Most people are waiting for someone to hand them permission to be true to themselves and to make something, and the institution we usually nominate for the job is a university. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s, and I will say plainly that both were the result of old programming, the belief that you need a stamp of approval from an institution before you are allowed to do anything. Neither of them made me who I am. What did was going out years later and starting a company, learning software engineering at 29, designing my own game, and granting myself the permission that I had been waiting to receive. In Europe at least we get our degrees without hundreds of thousands in debt, which makes the trade less brutal than it is in the US, and it does not change what the degree actually does, which is far less than we think.

Money is fine, the attachment is the problem. Money is a good invention and a useful vehicle for exchange, and I have no argument with it. What I notice is that everything else in nature is finite, resources, relationships, life itself, and that limit is what keeps us in balance, because at some point the thing says enough. Money has no such point. It can be produced without any real relationship to anything, which is how entire countries end up trillions in debt and it somehow does not matter, and once something is infinite there is no version of enough available to you.

A day job does not disqualify you. You can find meaning in almost anything and that is a remarkable human ability, so if you find it in your work, good, keep it. The missed opportunity is the evening. Understanding that you have the chance to create more than you consume, and then not taking it, is where most of the loss actually happens, and shifting that ratio is probably the single most powerful change available to a person.

What leading with curiosity instead of fear means. For most of us the fear sounds like needing to know how the future plays out, needing security, needing certainty, along with the running commentary of should and shouldn’t. All of it is the mind, and the mind has no information about the future whatsoever. There is no such thing as security, so what you are really being asked to do is trust the inner knowing that says things are right as they are and will go on being right as they are.

We are all already creating. It is bizarre that we have to argue for the idea that people are inherently creative. Everything you do is a creative act, walking, talking, cooking, listening to this, showing up at your job. The real question is not whether you are creating but how much of yourself is present while you do it, whether you are running at eight or ten or fifteen percent of your own nature, or whether you are actually using your particular way of seeing things and expressing them.

Positive thinking is the same coin as negative thinking. This occurred to me the other day. We now train ourselves in positive thinking, which is effort spent on the thought rather than on the situation, and it belongs to the same category as the negative thinking it is trying to replace. You do not have to manufacture better thoughts. Our thoughts create emotions and, to a real extent, create reality, and most of our suffering is the inner negotiation with reality rather than reality itself. When someone is furious about another person, the other person is simply doing what they are doing, and the anger and the stress and the irritation all live in one place, and it is not with them.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, dreamers, builders and artists who want to find that inner voice again, make real friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

Meditation as a different channel. I do not meditate to calm my mind. My mind will be irritated or it will not, and I do not have power over that, I can only be in relationship with it. What meditation does for me is open communication with a layer that words cannot reach, where the only available language is feeling. Rubin calls it the source, an infinite field of energy and ideas open to anyone, and every wisdom tradition ends up describing some version of the same thing. Which means you can skip the isms entirely. Close your eyes, listen, receive, and then create.

The Carl Jung derail. I read a piece on Substack this week called Why Leaders Love Carl Jung. His work is remarkable and I have studied a little of it. He was also a deeply flawed man who benefited enormously from a patriarchal system in which the women around him did an extraordinary amount of the actual heroism, and Sabina Spielrein is the case worth reading about, since her work found its way into his with the credit arriving decades late. If you want to climb the Himalaya, you follow the person who has climbed it, even if they are bad at explaining how, over the person who can describe it beautifully and has never been. So the question I keep returning to is how somebody that insightful failed to apply the work to his own life, and what it says that his ideas remain so attractive to men who would rather not look at their own wounds. None of that diminishes what he wrote. It just means we can stop putting him on a pedestal.

More room for the feminine. Part of why Big Magic lands for me is that it comes from a woman and an artist, and the intuitive world it describes is one where men have a great deal of catching up to do. We also have a responsibility to make room for feminine leadership and for the wisdom that centuries of male-led institutions have done a fine job of destroying. If you know books in this direction, tell me. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is probably next for me.

A chocolate review. Vivani whole cocoa fruit, 100 percent, a gift from my friend Gabriel, who I am meeting later to go bouldering. I have never been much of a Vivani fan and this one changed my mind completely. Whole cocoa fruit means they use the sweet pulp and the husk to sweeten and bulk the bar instead of refined cane sugar, which is why a 100 percent bar comes out smelling of berries and tasting properly fruity rather than punishing. It is softer than most 100 percent chocolate, acidic, with cocoa fruit flakes giving it a small crunch. If I had to recommend one 100 percent bar, this is it. It goes straight into second place, behind Zotter 80/20, which still holds the top.

The invitation. Whatever you think you got wrong, you did it from your best understanding of how things were at the time, so there is nobody to blame, including yourself. We are all bumbling through this like bumblebees. Give yourself the permission you have been waiting for somebody else to hand you, and spend more of this week creating than consuming.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Today I record from Elfen Town, Eleven Dunbar’s virtual home! Below a little written recap from today’s episode.

What we launched this week. Elfen Town is live, which is the 2D pixel virtual world we have been building for Eleven Dunbar, always on, where members can hang out, listen to music together, pick up quests, and find the Easter eggs we hid in it. We are a global and digital first community, so the question of where we gather is a real one, and this is our answer to it. Justin and I are also kicking off a new podcast this week, and I will share pictures and more in the coming weeks.

The chapter that got a reaction out of me. We read Atmamun in our Eleven Dunbar book club, which is short, and which I highly recommend, and there is a chapter in it called Human beings were not meant to be workers. It opens with the story of a lion cub who loses his way, falls in with a group of sheep, and becomes one, walking like them and making their sounds, until a lion finds him and takes him to a lake to look at his own reflection, at which point the cub sees what he is and begins to roar. Then it makes its argument, that a great deal of value is placed on having a job, that a man who labours in exchange for a paycheck is considered honourable mostly because we compare him against the man who does nothing, and that both of them have missed it. The line that landed hardest is that a job is an insult to a human being. The author includes himself in the accusation, which is what makes it possible to hear.

The corporate body. Somebody described this to me recently and I have not been able to unsee it, the particular way a body looks after years in a corporate environment, not heavy, just sluggish and stressed, built by waking up, sitting down for nine hours, and performing tasks that do not survive close inspection. I am not talking about doctors or teachers or anyone doing work that obviously matters. I mean the strange amount of money we pay people to do things that nobody, including them, could defend as useful.

What is actually missing. I keep meeting people at both ends of this, the ones with real material success and the ones still chasing it, and the thing underneath both is the same, which is that what we want is not the next paycheck or the next promotion but freedom from the torment of our own mind. Inner peace, and coming back to our natural state, like a leaf carried on a river that does not have to work out where the river is going.

Money is not the problem, the attachment is. Jobs became this central in the space of about two hundred years because money became central, and money is a good thing and a useful vehicle, and the belief that we need it to survive is still not quite true, which you can see in the tribes who live in nature and want for nothing. The trouble is that money is infinite in a way nothing physical is, a number that can always go higher, so there is never a point at which it is enough, and we lost our sense of balance somewhere in that. What I try to practise instead is looking at my account and saying this is what I have today, and if it is gone tomorrow that is also fine, because it is the attachment that does the damage, along with the older attachment underneath it, the one where we quietly believe we are not going to die.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, dreamers, builders and artists who want to find that inner voice again, make real friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

Ideas are entities. All three of the books I keep recommending say a version of this, that ideas come from a source and we are vessels, and Big Magic puts it best. Ideas float around and they choose you. When one knocks it is a full body reaction, something at the back of your neck, a sense that something just arrived. It does not belong to you, it has picked you as a possible collaborator, and it will wait a long time, months or years, and if it becomes clear that you are not going to answer then it moves on to somebody else, which is fair enough. They arrive through anything, a flash, a conversation, a person who acts as a conductor without knowing it, a sunset, one sentence in a book.

Why a soul would choose a body. This is where the two threads met for me. What if the human body is the peak of what nature has produced, the most remarkable thing evolution has managed, and a soul arrives and puts it on like a mega suit, precisely because this suit can receive. It gives you the emotions, the senses, the reality, all of which are the requirements for expressing anything at all, for becoming an artist and taking part in a story that has no agenda and runs on curiosity and experimentation. Seen that way the suit is not a vehicle for earning, it is an antenna, and the ability to catch something out of that invisible field and make it real is pure magic rather than chemistry.

And look at what we are doing to the suit. We fill it with hyper-processed food, we poison the environment it depends on, we sit it down for most of its waking hours, and we train it to ignore the heart in favour of the mind, when the mind was only ever meant to be the vehicle that carries the heart’s decisions out into the world. The suit still works, more or less. We just do not maintain it, and a badly maintained antenna receives less.

A chocolate review, at last. Zotter again, the Austrian company in Styria, and worth looking up if you do not know them, since they take no investment, source their cacao with real care, and produce something closer to art than confectionery. Two this time from one package, both 75 percent. The Madagascar has 22 hours of conching and is soft, nutty, creamy, with nougat in it, and it is the one I would hand to somebody who thinks they do not like dark chocolate. The Guatemala has 8 hours and is a completely different animal, acidic and popping and fruity with raisin in it, intriguing enough that I reached straight for a second piece and tiring by the third. The standings are now Zotter 80/20 in first, still my favourite chocolate on earth, Peru 82 percent in second, Madagascar third, Guatemala fourth.

The invitation. Walk around this week as though the invisible field is real. There is a layer we cannot see with our eyes, though the body and the heart seem to manage it, where ideas float around waiting to find someone, and if one knocks, notice the full body reaction and take it seriously, because that is the beginning of a relationship rather than a passing thought.

Thanks for reading - you can support my work by leaving a comment or sharing it.

The Unreasonable Art of Living is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

#110 - Five Regrets Of The Dying

This one is just me again, no guest, no notes, recorded while agents were running in the background because I am deep in building our virtual world at the moment. It came out of a few conversations last week, and a podcast by Dr Zach Bush that had been sitting with me, and it turned into the most direct episode I have done in a while, so here is the rundown.

Where this came from. During an interview with a potential member last week I ended up recommending Bronnie Ware’s book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which she wrote after years in palliative care sitting with people in their final days. I have talked about it on this podcast before, and it keeps coming back because the pattern in it matches something Justin and I now see constantly in conversations with members, which is that people who have maximised the Dwarf mode, the achieving, the money, the career, the titles, arrive at a point where they look at all of it and feel like an empty shell. There is nothing wrong with any of those things, and money in particular is a beautiful vehicle, but chasing them is a race with no finish line, and the wall at the end of it is always the same wall.

I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This is the first regret and the one I hear most often, and it shows up in language before it shows up in decisions. Listen for should, shouldn’t, and supposed to, and then follow the thought down to its root, and you will find it always leads somewhere outside you, some external reason, some X, Y or Z you inherited rather than chose. The heart does not work that way, because it does not know why, it just knows, and living true to yourself mostly means trusting that inner knowing when you cannot yet justify it.

Why so many of us cannot hear that knowing anymore. Zach Bush worked in chemotherapy research and then in hospice care, and he says the most remarkable part of that work was witnessing what happens as people die, including the roughly ten percent who had near-death experiences and came back reporting the same thing, that for a glimpse they saw everything was perfect, all of it, the ups and the downs, exactly as it was meant to be. I know that lands badly for some people, when there is war and torture and maniacs in power, and I am not going to argue the point or do the inquiry for you, because it is yours to sit with, and I am also not interested in the naive version where we ignore violence rather than standing clearly against it. What I take from him is the other half of his argument, that the body is the most powerful antenna nature ever made, capable of receiving far more than we credit it for, and that we have spent a century getting more abstracted and disconnected from it, until overthinking became the civilisational sickness and anxiety became the baseline in most Western countries.

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. In that same interview the person described an exercise where she imagined how she would want to be remembered, and what came out had nothing to do with money, job, title, or anything she had accumulated; it was whether people would remember her as someone happy and curious who loved life and expressed herself fully. Being useful matters, making things matter, working matters, and still the thing people reach for at the end is whether they were a source of joy and laughter and connection for the people around them.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are in good company. Almost nobody looks back and wishes they had achieved more. They wish they had used their real, honest voice, kept their people close, and stopped postponing living a life true to themselves.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, builders, artists and dreamers doing something about all three. Find your voice, find your people, create the impossible. The community is capped at 150.

Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. This is exactly what we mean when we say we help people find their voice, because knowing who you are is only half of it, the other half is being able to say what you feel instead of swallowing it. Some cultures do this naturally and Western ones have made it either shameful or academic, which is its own way of avoiding it. My favourite question here, especially for men, is when was the last time you cried, and the answer is often that they cannot remember. There are spiritual books that will tell you to detach from feeling, that sadness and anger are not real and not needed, and I think that is spiritual bypassing dressed up as wisdom, because we came here in a body that can feel fear and grief and joy, and it makes no sense at all to be given that and then refuse to use it.

I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I am 36 and I am ridiculously lucky here, with friends I have known for more than 25 years who I still see several times a year, every summer without fail, and it is only because we have all kept investing the time. Call your mum, call your dad if you are lucky enough to still have them, because my dad is 81 and my mum is somewhere in her seventies, and I get a small jolt of happiness every time I pick up the phone and see mama or papa on the screen, and I love that I can sit with my mum and talk about deep things, and that the last conversation with my dad was him asking whether I believe in souls. By any financial measure I am a poor artist at the moment, and I do not feel poor in the slightest, because the abundance around me is in people and freedom and what I get to do with my days, and I would not swap it for anything.

I wish that I had let myself be happier. The word doing the work here is let, because happiness turns out to be something we withhold permission for rather than something we lack. Most suffering starts the moment we begin negotiating with reality instead of noticing the beauty that is available every ordinary day, and gratitude is the fastest way back. Leading with love does not mean being naive or permitting harm, because love has clarity in it and can be firm, and my own read is that only confused people harm others, which is worth holding with compassion rather than contempt, since nobody arrives in the world confused, it accumulates.

The people who see what you cannot see in yourself. Talking with our member Chad today reminded me why community matters so much for all of this, because someone who knows you can tell you that your eyes light up and your voice lifts when you talk about one thing, and go flat and calculated and cold when you talk about another, and you would never catch that yourself. That is the whole reason we exist, to help each other remember what the unbound excitement actually feels like and then follow it, which takes real courage because the world is not set up for it, and which is also the most beautiful path available to a person.

Play is how the universe operates. My friend Max Freiler and his partner Alissia have opened a health centre in Switzerland called Lunitas, a third space with co-working, workshops, ice bathing, meditation, and a playful wrestling class that he told me was the best thing there, which surprised him. What people are actually starving for is connection and play, and they will almost never name it, so you have to invite them in for something else and let them discover it, and I do not just mean board games, I mean play as creativity, as love, as learning, as experimentation, as walking through a forest.

A dark chocolate review, finally. Zotter, 82 percent from Peru, a gift from Alexandra. It smelled like Christmas chocolate to me, then plum on the tongue, then something sour underneath, and when I turned the wrapper over it said Christmas spices, plum, and sour cherry, which is the first time in the history of this segment that my palate and the label have agreed on anything. It is butter smooth and it goes straight in at number two behind the Zotter 80/20, which remains my favourite chocolate on earth.

The invitation. Do the thing the regrets are pointing at, today, while it is cheap. Call your mum and dad if they are still here, call a sibling, call a friend you have not spoken to in too long, tell your partner you love them, and then give yourself a hug and say it to yourself as well.

Thanks for reading - you can support my work by leaving a comment or sharing it.

The Unreasonable Art of Living is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what we talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

This one was pre-recorded on a Sunday evening, almost ten at night, tired, with an early train to catch in the morning to a friend’s summer house in Zell am See, which is a lake town south of Salzburg with the Alps standing around it. I had no plan for the episode and it wandered a fair amount before it found the thing I actually wanted to say, so here is the rundown.

The creative day I gave myself. I was supposed to travel today already, and I decided in the morning that I was not feeling it, so I stayed home and made it a creative day instead, mostly working on pixel art for the digital world we are building at Eleven Dunbar, a cozy virtual space where you walk around as an avatar and bump into people, have spontaneous conversations, listen to music together, the kind of accidental encounter that the internet mostly stopped offering. It is a long term project, but the first version is not far off, and I have been doing the art by hand since I started as a thirty-day challenge in April, which has now turned into learning animation, which is genuinely hard because you have to understand how things actually move before it stops looking strange.

Why I still place every pixel by hand. There is AI for pixel art now and it is bad, really bad, and I say that as someone who loves AI and uses it in most of what I do, work and creative alike. The limitation shows up the moment you want something specific, opinionated, yours. Ask for a dwarf, or an elf, or a tree, and you get something, an average pulled out of a statistical collection of how those things tend to look, and what you cannot get is the custom, tailored, handcrafted result where every decision was made by a person on purpose. I notice the same thing with software, having built plenty of it before any of this existed, because you can feel the difference in the whole experience, the usability, the fonts, the colours, not just the code.

The odd thing about who gets angry about this. Substack recently introduced a check that shows how much of a piece was written with AI, and set aside the obvious problem that the tool doing the checking is itself an AI that you can bypass, what interests me is who reaches for the pitchfork. The same writers running the witch hunt over AI text will happily put AI images in their fully human-written articles, without thinking much about the millions of handcrafted images by actual artists those were built on. Meanwhile, software engineers barely blink, and I remember why: as a software engineer, it was completely normal to look up how someone else solved a thing and take it, an open market where everyone was glad to pass code along.

Dwarfs and Elfs. This came to me one day while I was just lying there, wondering what a playful archetype might be for the kind of creativity we are after, and it has become the way we talk about it now. The dwarf is the being who is superb at engineering, problem solving, discipline, working extremely hard and achieving a great deal, and who looks at what he has built and still feels a bit empty. The elf is the one in tune with nature, who listens for what is trying to be created through them, and who works through play, connection, and curiosity. Rick Rubin has written about this from the artist’s side, and Paul McCartney is the obvious example, waking up one morning with the melody of Yesterday already there, not thought through, just present. Both modes matter, and the dwarf is not the villain, but there is a heavy overemphasis on him in how most of us were raised and educated, and remembering the elf takes some deliberate effort.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, dreamers, builders and artists who want to find that inner voice again, make real friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

The Dwelf-O-Meter. Justin and I have been building a small quiz around this, eleven questions, and it gives you a score for how much elf and how much dwarf is in you right now, which we are making for the new programme starting mid August where members get paired with each other. You can try the free quiz as well: https://www.elevendunbar.com/dwarf-elf

A matcha latte I did not feel bad about paying for. I live in the seventeenth district in Vienna, which is where I grew up. Twenty years ago there was very little here in the way of good places, so this afternoon I walked five minutes to a corner spot I had only just noticed, four years old, five stars, five hundred reviews. It was magical in a way that reminded me of a tiny coffee place in Kyoto where the owner played vinyl, and every movement he made was slow and deliberate and full of care. Money is something I still have to watch, since we make revenue but not yet enough for a proper salary, and yet I felt nothing but good about paying for that organic matcha with oat milk, because when I can feel the owners in what they have made, when there is almost no separation left between the person and the thing, paying is simply a way of saying thank you for putting yourself out there and letting me be inside your creation for a few minutes.

The bike mechanic who is a Buddha. My bike broke this weekend, and I failed to fix it, and the shop I tried nearby had that atmosphere where you can tell the man wants you out of the store as quickly as possible, which made me think about the one I usually go to in the seventh district, where the owner is a magician, a literal artist with a bicycle. Sometimes you walk in, and he has his headphones on and is completely in the zone, and he will glance at your bike and just fix a small thing for free, and I go there partly to watch him, because seeing a person fully in their own nature is one of the better things available to a person. That is where I finally understood the line about everything being Buddha, not as a phrase but as a fact: that a thing entirely in its own natural way of being already is that, and the work is only remembering it.

Why every logo looks the same now. Most company logos have become so clean and designerish that they have lost all personality, and websites have gone the same way, following the same patterns for perfectly good reasons, because those patterns convert, and the cost is that we have quietly traded away the plurality of human expression, the playfulness, the elfness of things. You can start from what you imagine other people will like, research it, consult your way into it, and end up with something oddly lifeless, or you can start from pure expression and let the difference be the point.

The invitation. Think about the last time you felt properly alive, and be specific about it, what age you were, where you were, what you were doing, the kind of aliveness that is unbound and unfiltered and a bit childish rather than produced or planned. Then ask where in your life you can give yourself fully like that again, because the only real goal in making anything is to give it everything you have, release it, and move on to the next thing.

Thanks for reading - you can support my work by leaving a comment or sharing it.

The Unreasonable Art of Living is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what we talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

This one is just me, no guest, no notes, recorded on a Tuesday morning and published the same day, which is the version of this podcast I like most, because I press record without having any idea what will come out, and then something does. It was short and it stayed close to what has been going on in my own head over the last weeks, so here is the rundown.

The question I end every journal entry with. For a long time I tried Steve Jobs’ mirror question, if today was my last day would I want to do what I am about to do, and I could never get a usable answer out of it, partly because I do think this life ends and then continues, so the whole framing kept sliding away from me. What I write instead now, at the bottom of one small page every morning, is: am I living from my honest voice right now? It is a yes or no question, it takes a second, and it has turned into something I can carry through the whole day rather than something I contemplate once.

Why that question works better for me. Life is a constant flow of micro decisions, small responses, moments where you either say the thing or you don’t, and the honest voice question gives me a way to catch myself in the middle of that, to notice when I am hiding behind something, or not voicing what I feel, or not saying what I need, and then to ask what exactly I am hiding from. I can check it on three layers, in my voice, in how my body reacts, and in what my intuition is saying, which makes it far more grounded than an abstract question about mortality.

The I don’t know intelligence. This came from my conversation with Rohan last week and it has not left me since. How often do we produce an answer purely for the sake of producing an answer, not only in conversation with other people, but with ourselves, about what is next, where we are going, why that, who we are, what the plan is for the next six months. I have started saying I don’t know, and meaning it, and the relief is immediate, because most of the pressure we feel is not coming from society or them or the people, it is coming from the narratives we have built about ourselves, and once you look directly at those stories the mind gets a lot freer.

Confusion is the root of most of the suffering. What I keep coming back to is that the moment we start negotiating with reality as it is, the irritation and the anxiety arrive on schedule, and I don’t know is a way of stopping the negotiation before it starts. Reality as it is right now is already fine, and approaching it without an answer ready leaves room for spontaneity and creativity that a fixed position never allows.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, dreamers, builders and artists who want to find that inner voice again, make real friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

Sam Garrett, mantras, and Nirvana. At the Yoga Junkies Festival in Vienna, where my friend Max Freiler and his partner Alissia ran a brilliant Wim Hof workshop, the closing was a two hour concert by Sam Garrett, who I did not know beforehand and who is mostly known for devotional songs and mantras, the kind you can sing along to after hearing them once. Halfway through he started playing Nirvana covers, Come As You Are, Smells Like Teen Spirit, then Oasis, then Britney Spears, and the contrast with the mantras was fantastic.

What he said at the end. He told us he had been living inside a spiritual box, a very beautiful box that felt true at the time, and that he had come to see how much he was repressing inside it, how easy it is to get lost in positive thinking and love and everything is fine while neglecting your actual human existence. He also named the strangeness of people worshipping him as a guru, and questioned the whole ladder we build in spiritual circles, higher vibrations, higher consciousness, someone further along than you, when the premise of the thing is supposed to be that we are all one. He remembered being eleven or twelve with a mohawk, climbing onto stages at punk concerts and throwing himself into the crowd, and next year he is going back towards that, into psychedelic rock.

Whose essence are you arriving at. This is the part I share with him completely. Coming back to your natural essence does not mean becoming a Buddha, or a Lao Tzu, or a Krishna. Those are examples of people who arrived at theirs. Yours might look nothing like that, and it can be anything, so the question is not which one to imitate but who you are underneath the layers, and what is trying to be expressed through you at that very natural state.

Synthesizers, and a chocolate review that is overdue. My friend Gabriel and I got talking at the festival about the Telepathic Orchid ORC1, which is a beautiful piece of hardware with a proper homage to the eighties in the design, and I have been circling synthesizers since I stumbled on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field back in February. I love that they let people like me play with music without first learning an instrument, and I am hoping to afford one by the end of the year, at which point there will probably be live experiments in this podcast and a new intro song. If you play with synths, tell me which one to look at. Also, I have not done a dark chocolate review in far too long, and I intend to fix that.

The invitation. Give yourself permission to say I don’t know more often. If you don’t know, say it, rather than forcing out an answer for the sake of having one, because I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable response to most of the questions life puts in front of you, and it keeps you open, curious, and closer to the mind of a child, which is roughly where the good stuff lives.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what we talked about.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

I want to tell you about my friend Rohan, because he said something on this episode that I haven’t been able to put down since.

Rohan Routroy is the founder of Studio38, built around a problem he’s been circling his whole life: working on things for which the language doesn’t exist yet, which traces back to his own decades-long attempt to bridge the language gap between himself and his parents. Before that he spent eight years leading Brand Strategy at Twitter, starting with a small team in Singapore, then China, then eventually running a full creative vertical out of New York once the company relocated him there in 2019, work that took him across thirteen countries and clients like Apple, Chase, and LVMH, and closed out with him leading the push to legalize cannabis advertising on the platform, a project that reshaped how the whole industry approached it. Back in Singapore, in his own words, he was the glue of every social circle he touched, the guy who organized things, the guy people called when they wanted a reason to go out, the guy whose farewell party pulled a hundred people. If that sounds like a compliment, it is one. It’s also, as he found out, a kind of hiding.

Here’s what we talked about:

The city that doesn’t let you hide: New York didn’t let Rohan keep doing what worked in Singapore. He landed, and within months the city closed down for COVID, and he went, in his own description, from level one of learning how to be alone straight to level ten, no ramp, no practice runs. No office community, no going out, no five familiar bars where he knew he’d run into someone. Just him, an apartment, and his first winter of actual snow.

The sentence that stopped me cold: What he found in that apartment wasn’t dramatic, he was careful to say that, not some cinematic breakdown. Just a persistent discomfort with his own company, dressed up for years as a love of people. And then this: I was seeking, needing, the validation of other people to justify my presence. And in doing so, I was completely invalidating my identity. Sit with that one for a second. The very thing he thought was his gift, his social ease, his need for people, turned out to be built partly on a fear of finding out who he was without an audience.

The other half of shadow work: This is the part I think most people miss when they talk about confronting their shadow; naming it is only half the exercise. The other half is asking what that same wound is the reason for a strong positive driver in you, without you noticing. Because the same instinct that made Rohan need to be needed also made him, for fifteen years, the person who introduced strangers at a bar because a mutual friend once mentioned his name, the person who took two friends by the hand at his own birthday party and told them to go for a walk together, the friends who have been now married for 12 years and have 2 kids. The wound didn’t just cost him something; it built one of the more generous instincts I’ve ever seen in a person. He didn’t want anyone else to feel the specific loneliness he’d felt, so without ever framing it this way, he spent a decade making sure fewer people had to. Flip your shadow over, and it’s often the exact shape of the good you’ve already been doing in the world, just without a name on it yet.

Why the rats stopped doing cocaine: Rohan brought up an old experiment on rats and cocaine, the kind of thing that sounds like a party fact until you hear the finding. Isolated rats, given free access to cocaine, used it until it killed them. The same rats, given a real environment, other rats, space, things to do, mostly didn’t. The conclusion researchers drew wasn’t about willpower. It was that the antidote to addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. If you go looking, this particular study has had its share of critics and mixed replications over the years, so treat it as a provocative frame rather than settled science; the point still lands either way.

None of us get to sit this one out: Rohan’s point wasn’t about drugs, though. It was about the rest of us, scrolling, swiping, refreshing, all of it running on the exact same wiring. He referenced a chart from the writer Ted Gioia mapping out how nearly everything we do has a fast, cheap, dopamine-shaped substitute now, dating apps standing in for love, headlines standing in for books, an AI summary standing in for the headline. He wasn’t lecturing about it either; he included himself in it without blinking, which is exactly why I believed him.

Catching himself mid-sentence: What got me most happened in the last few minutes, almost by accident. We were talking about honesty, about what it costs to say the honest thing instead of the safe thing, and mid-sentence Rohan just stopped and named it in real time: “every time in this conversation I tried to pull back, bring in other cities, add a disclaimer, it’s because I was afraid people listening wouldn’t like me. Which meant I was less honest.” He caught himself performing honesty about honesty, live, and said so out loud instead of editing it out. That’s rarer than people think.

If this piece made you recognize something in your own life, perhaps you have become very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems, but feel disconnected from your honest voice - you are not alone.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community for high-agency people who want to find their voice, build genuine friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Through weekly creative practices, small-group connection, visiting artists, shared projects, and accountability, members make space for the work, conversations, and parts of themselves that ordinary life often pushes aside.

The community is capped at 150 people.

There’s a lot more in the full conversation: New York as a city built entirely out of collisions, creative conflict as the actual engine behind culture, why the loneliest city in America might also be the most honest one. But if you only take one thing from this episode, take Rohan’s small reframe: whatever you’re still ashamed of in yourself is probably already the root of something good you’ve built without noticing. Look down before you look away.

Thank you, Rohan, for the honesty. All of it.

Where to find more of him: Rohan Routroy writes about movies, myths, and meaning over at Nothing in a Nutshell, and builds Studio38 around that same core question: how do you find language for the things that don’t have any yet?

Thanks for reading The Unreasonable Art of Living! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Unreasonable Art of Living is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This companion piece pulls from the closing minutes of Episode #106. The full conversation includes considerably more discussion of Bojangles, flotation pods, and whether dwarves are only capable of relaxing while drunk.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Fair warning before you read any further: most of this episode is Justin and I trying to invent a premium salted water brand, discussing whether it’s ethically sound to lie in a flotation pod together, and eventually landing on a tagline that we both agreed sounds uncomfortably close to Papa John’s.

None of that is in this article. You’re welcome, or I’m sorry, depending on how much you enjoy nonsense.

What I do want to pull out, because it snuck up on both of us near the end of the recording and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, is a sentence we apparently wrote together back in November and had mostly forgotten about until we said it out loud again on the mic.

Here it is, more or less as it came out:

If you’re somewhere in life right now where you feel like there’s more to it, you wake up, you look back, and five or ten years just passed like this, and you’re like, this is it, and you’re really curious about it, because you know there’s someone inside you, and you know there’s more to do, and there are other people who think the same thing, and they’re doing cool s**t, and they want you to come do it with them.

I’m not going to pretend that’s a polished line. It wasn’t written to be quoted back, it was written in a doc somewhere as a note to ourselves about why any of this exists in the first place. But that’s usually how you know a sentence is actually true, it survives getting said out loud months later without either of us wincing.

We’ve been at this almost a year now. Not even a full year, technically, which is a strange thing to sit with when you consider how much has actually shifted underneath it, the programming, the messaging, the whole shape of what we’re building. And in a year like that there are always the moments neither of us puts in the highlight reel, the ones where something feels stuck, where you’re staring at a WhatsApp thread wondering if the thing you’re building is landing the way you hoped it would, where doubt shows up uninvited and starts asking questions you don’t have quick answers to.

What I keep coming back to is that none of that doubt has actually been the enemy. If anything it’s been the proof that we’re building something we actually care about, because you don’t lose sleep over things you’re indifferent to.

And the thing underneath all of it, the thing we keep circling back to no matter how many tangents we take to get there, salted water included, is genuinely simple. It starts with knowing yourself. Not as a slogan, as a practice, one that takes longer than anyone wants it to and rarely happens alone.

We really do believe that. We built a place around the belief that you can explore your own honest voice alongside other people, create whatever wants to come through you, and get supported in that process instead of doing it in isolation, which is the harder and lonelier way, even if it’s the more common one.

If any part of that resonates, if you’ve had your own version of looking up and realizing five years went by, we’d love for you to come find out what we’re building. And if none of it resonates and you just came here for the salted water content, honestly, fair enough, that’s most of the episode anyway.

Fnd your voice, find your people, and create the impossible: https://elevendunbar.com/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

This week I’m joined by Paige Goldstein, coach for soul-led leaders, for a conversation about identity beyond work, spiritual awakening, intuition, travel, creativity, and why the opposite of depression might just be soul expression.

Paige helps soul-led leaders build authentic personal brands through her community, The Ripple Effect. If you’d like to connect with her or follow her work, you can find her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigegoldstein

I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you will too.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

SORRY FOR THE DOUBLE POST; THERE WERE SOME TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES <3

This week’s episode, my co-founder Justin Davis joins for a brainstorming session on how to describe Eleven Dunbar.

What is it? How do we describe what is happening inside?

We’ve called it a modern third space for immersive community experiences, then a human-only internet, and somehow each clearer attempt inside has made it harder to explain outside.

Naming things is hard.

If this episode inspired you on how to describe Eleven Dunbar, leave a comment :)

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Most Creative, Playful And Humane Corner of the Internet

A place for innovators, dreamers, and builders seeking genuine connection, play, and creativity - capped at 150 people.

Apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.howtounreasonable.com