All essays
6 pieces, newest first. Every one of them is a thought I walked with until it held.
What the Wanting Asks For
This summer I wanted a motorbike licence and a camera at the same time. Neither was a need. I stalled for three weeks on one and could not stop researching the other, and the difference between them turned out to be the only useful thing I have learned about desire in years.
Middle Powers and the New Non-Alignment
India, the Gulf and ASEAN are not choosing sides. They are pricing both. Hedging has quietly become grand strategy, and the next two decades belong to whoever prices it best.
A Second Brain That Argues Back
A notes app stores what you said. The system worth building holds competing hypotheses about you, weighs the evidence and revises its beliefs. Memory as dialectic, not archive.
The Householder's Dharma
The renunciate gets all the press. The harder discipline belongs to the householder, who holds a career, a mortgage, two small sons and a mind that wants to build things, and must treat the whole arrangement as the path rather than the obstacle to it.
The Psychology of the Long Game
Twenty year plans fail at year two because the self who writes the plan is never the self who must live it. Durable goals are the ones designed to survive their own author's revisions.
Walking as an Operating System
The camera is an excuse. The walk is where the week's problems get reordered without my permission. I have learned to trust legs over lists.