They tried to bury us. Little did they know that we were seeds.

~ Mexican Proverb

Every now and then you feel a pull or a draw that’s so strong but you continue to resist. Why? Because life, responsibilities, fear and insecurities. Then one day, you are slapped in the face, forced to sit down and confront that phantasm. Instead you find yourself staring at yourself, and your children and everyone and everything you cared about. What’s going on?

A reckoning.

Maybe you cannot escape what you’re meant to do and life has a way of pushing you towards it? Or maybe someone like me cannot live a life without meaning, purpose, impact or legacy (call it what you may) and have found some way to justify why I need to do this.

What is it that I need to do- call bullshit to well the bullshit that is conventional wisdom and the world that we’ve built. The world as we know it, as we’ve built is broken. From basics of human development such as knowledge and education, ideas on health, happiness, medicine and ageing, to core values of our international system and society and the scarcity mentality that underpins it.

Consider that anything between 75-90% of what we accept as a given and conventional wisdom may be wrong. And that it is ok for it to be wrong as long as we’re not closed off to questioning it, pushing to unravel it and build something better. But are we questioning it, and when we do push for change, do we feel helpless?

A superpower.

Why me and why now? If there was ever a superpower I possessed it would be a combination of 3 things- 1) an ability to see patterns amidst seeming chaos, 2) a humility to recognise the limits of my knowledge and understanding but be able procure and supplement with the wisdom of others, 3) a frankness. I’ve always seen myself as an inexpert, but have observed others with much less proliferating their ideas – often half baked and self serving. There is a lot of junk out there masquerading as wisdom because it gives itself a semblance of legitimacy by being housed under formal media publications or think tanks. There is a lot of institutional interest that is being masked as science and truth.

Yet, there is a new wave of knowledge channel that inspires me- the likes of podcasters, bloggers, Redditters who liberalises information flow and opens up real discussions. My self interest in this is to build up my knowledge and understanding so that the lives of those I care about can be better from it. This does not come easy to me. The way I accrued knowledge over time has been through structured institutions- I only learnt how to learn while at university. So this is also an attempt for me to teach myself how to learn, and I hope you will come on this journey with me.

What shall we research and write about?

• Our approach to wellbeing is deeply flawed and serves the interest of institutions. Given my current headspace I hope health, fitness longevity and ageing is a core component.
• Learning, thinking, education- the art of figuring things out. I believe our industrial structures have caged and we’re losing this core skill.
• Technology, and the myopia towards its potential but also implications, and the lack of consideration on externalities.
• Our international values systems- particularly the tensions between abundance and scarcity, and how the vast majority of the world is excluded from defining their own world.

This is a pure pet project, for myself and for those I care about. More importantly it’s my sanity project. Some days I look at the world and can’t believe how deeply flawed it is, even as the seeds for hope and growth are abundant.