Writing & Philosophy

I have a new book out. Let me say it again: I have a new book out. Finally!

It’s called No Such Thing as Gnomes, and it is the sequel to No Such Thing as Mermaids. If you enjoyed the first book — or even if you just tolerated it politely — this one continues the tradition of insisting that things absolutely do not exist while quietly proving the opposite.

I said at the beginning of the year that this book would be published in 2025. It is now published in 2025.

So let’s start by acknowledging that small but meaningful victory.

What I did not say at the beginning of the year was that it would take roughly twice as long to write as I thought it would. This was not a strategic decision. It was simply the familiar author experience of saying, “This should be straightforward,” and then discovering that characters have opinions, plots wander off, and apparently entire chapters insist on existing.

Somewhere along the way, the book became darker, stranger, and more stubborn than planned. Which, in retrospect, probably means it turned into the book it was supposed to be. Or at least the one that refused to let me stop writing until it was finished.

For anyone keeping score at home:

• Yes, it is a sequel.
• Yes, you probably want to read No Such Thing as Mermaids first, but you don’t have to, as it stands alone.
• No, this was not written quickly.
• Yes, it was written honestly.
• And yes, it now exists in the world, which feels slightly unreal.

Publishing a book is a strange thing. One day it’s a pile of notes and half-finished scenes, and the next day it’s a product listing with a cover and a buy button. At that point, all you can really do is nod, pretend this was the plan all along, and move on.

So here it is.
It took longer than expected.
It arrived when promised.
And it’s finally out of my head.

If you decide to read it, I hope you enjoy the time you spend there. If not, that’s fine too. Gnomes don’t exist anyway.

I’ve always been a believer that some things are just self-evident if you’re paying attention. You don’t need a pile of studies or a complicated theory. Just life experience, a little observation, and some honesty about how things tend to go.

Over the years, I’ve boiled it all down into something simple I call The Grand Seed — a kind of personal philosophy that helps me make sense of why things happen the way they do, and what seems to work when they do go right.

Reality Isn’t What We Think It Is

One of the stranger things about being human is that we don’t actually experience the world directly. Not the way we think we do. We like to believe we see the world as it is, but the truth is, there’s always a filter—an interpreter sitting between us and reality.

Think about a dog, or a bird, or any animal out in nature. When they see a tree, they’re not thinking, Ah yes, genus Quercus, possibly an oak. They don’t label it. They don’t assign extra meaning to it. They just experience the tree. They interact with it directly as part of their environment — either it’s shelter, food, a place to perch, or something to ignore. They’re plugged right into the raw data.

We, on the other hand, don’t really interact with the tree itself. We interact with the idea of the tree. We see it, sure, but almost instantly our brain slaps a label on it: “Tree.” Our minds start attaching information we’ve gathered over the years: That’s an oak; it’s about twenty years old; my grandfather had one like that in his yard; I wonder if it would make good firewood.

By the time all that processing is done, we’ve distanced ourselves from the actual experience. We’re no longer seeing the tree — we’re seeing our mental model of the tree. The symbol. The story. The shortcut our brain uses to navigate the world.

This happens with everything: people, places, even our own emotions. We interact with our symbols for them, not the raw thing itself. It’s useful — symbols help us think faster, communicate, and make decisions. But they also blind us to what’s really there.

That’s what I mean by Perceived Reality. It’s not reality itself, but our internal version of it — the version our senses, language, and experiences have filtered for us.

Meanwhile, what I call Absolute Reality — the pure data of existence — just is. It doesn’t care what labels we put on it. It’s not telling any stories. It’s just matter and energy, doing its thing.

The interesting part is, everything — including our own thoughts — is made of that same information. That’s why sometimes our thoughts can influence our experience of reality. Not because thoughts are magic, but because both thought and reality are built from the same raw stuff: information, patterns, energy.

Once you realize how much of your world is a story you’re telling yourself, you start to loosen your grip on needing those stories to be a certain way. You get a little closer to seeing things as they are. Not through the filter, but directly — or at least, as close as we humans can get.

Balance Is Everything

If there’s one rule that seems to apply across nature, society, and our own heads, it’s balance.

When something’s out of balance, systems work to restore it. That’s true whether we’re talking about ecosystems, relationships, or your own mental health. Even the conflict in your own life is often just some imbalance trying to correct itself.

And when balance isn’t restored? That’s where things start to fall apart.

The Tug-of-War Between Positive and Negative

In my mind, everything we do kind of falls into two camps.

On the positive side, you’ve got things like empathy, synergy, growth, and learning. This is where people listen to each other, help each other out, and combine their strengths. When people cooperate, they can build things none of them could have pulled off alone. That’s synergy — where one plus one doesn’t just equal two, it equals five or ten. You see it in good friendships, strong families, healthy businesses, and communities that actually work. It’s where generosity feeds back into itself. You help someone today; tomorrow, someone helps you. It snowballs.

You also see it inside yourself. When you respect yourself and trust that you’re allowed to screw up and still be a good person, you give yourself room to grow. You learn from failure instead of being crushed by it. You adjust, you adapt, and you get better. A little progress makes you stronger, and that strength makes the next step easier. Momentum builds. One good thing leads to another.

But there’s another side to all this — the negative side.

This is where good things get twisted. It’s where natural desires turn into addictions. We’re wired to enjoy food, comfort, attention, security. These are all good and necessary. But when they stop being tools for survival and start becoming ends in themselves, we get into trouble.

Comfort turns into complacency. Pleasure turns into dependency. A healthy drive for recognition turns into an obsession with approval. Before long, you’re chasing the feeling instead of living your life. And just like positive momentum snowballs, so does the negative. The more you feed those addictions, the harder it gets to break free.

This kind of imbalance shows up everywhere — not just in individuals, but in entire cultures. Look around, and you’ll see societies that once thrived now buckling under the weight of their own excess. People get more, but feel less satisfied. Instead of gratitude, there’s emptiness. Instead of community, isolation. It’s the same pattern on a bigger scale.

The mental version of this is just as destructive. Negative thought feeds itself like a fire that never runs out of fuel. You tell yourself you’re not good enough, and every little setback becomes proof. Failure piles onto failure, not because you’re doomed, but because you stop believing you can change course. You stop trying. The loop closes in on itself.

But the good news — and this is important — is that both sides work the same way. Just like negativity can spiral downward, positivity can spiral upward. A small shift in how you think can lead to a small change in how you act. That small change creates a better result, which makes you a little more confident, which encourages you to try again. Over time, that becomes a habit. And habits become your life.

So you have a choice. You can let the negative spiral run your life. Or you can catch it, interrupt it, and start building the positive spiral instead.

One builds life. The other breaks it down.

The Seed

At the heart of all this is what I call The Seed Idea:

Self-respect and a positive mindset are the key ingredients for success.

Not success as in “get rich and famous.” Success as in: a life that works. A life that feels good to live.

If you respect yourself, and you approach things with the intent of benefiting both yourself and others, you set yourself up for real growth. You create synergy. And you move toward balance — which is where everything wants to be anyway.

That’s The Grand Seed. Simple. Not always easy. But simple.

Don’t Preach, Just Live It

The tricky part — and maybe the most important part — is that you don’t lecture people about this stuff. You live it. You show it. You let others see it in action.

People don’t learn from being told what to do. They learn from seeing what works.

That’s the kind of seed that actually grows.

At the end of the day, it’s not about trying to control everything. It’s about understanding how things work, staying aware of balance, and choosing positive over negative when you can. The rest tends to take care of itself.

I’ve never really been drawn to the usual list of vices. No thrill-seeking stunts, no dark alley temptations, nothing that comes with a warning label. But there’s one thing I’ve definitely wrestled with—something just as powerful, but a lot harder to spot.

Approval.

Not the kind where someone appreciates your work or thanks you for something—that’s fine. I mean the kind of approval you start needing like oxygen. The kind that starts calling the shots. That kind.

It starts small. Maybe you do something and someone says, “That was great.” You feel good. You want more of that. So next time, you do it a little differently, maybe not how you would’ve done it, but how you think they’d like it. Before long, you’re doing more of what you think people will clap for and less of what actually means something to you. You stop living from the inside out. You become a mirror—just reflecting back what you think other people want to see.

And here’s the trap: people’s approval feels like connection, but it’s not. Not really. It’s more like applause at a show you don’t even want to be in. You’re performing for a crowd that might not even be paying attention, and even if they are, it doesn’t feel like love. It feels like relief. Temporary relief from the fear that maybe you’re not enough unless someone says so.

The problem is, when you start outsourcing your self-worth, you can’t stop. Because the high never lasts. One compliment wears off and you go looking for the next one. A new face, a new room, a new platform. Chasing smiles like they’re currency. And all the while, you lose track of your own voice.

It took me a long time to realize this. And I still catch myself slipping into old habits. Writing something and wondering, “Will people like this?” before I even ask, “Do I?”

But I’m learning—slowly, messily—that the real freedom isn’t in getting everyone to approve of you. It’s in not needing them to. It’s in knowing who you are, what you value, and being okay with the fact that not everyone’s going to clap.

You can’t live a real life if you’re always auditioning.

So these days, I try to catch myself when I start reaching for that old fix. I take a breath. I remember what it felt like to be a kid drawing spaceships just because I liked drawing spaceships—not because anyone was watching. And I remind myself that I’m allowed to live like that again.

No audience. No applause. Just real life, unfolding on its own terms.

As the Red Hot Chili Peppers put it: “Choose not a life of imitation.”

You don’t have to become what the world expects. You just have to be who you already are.

There’s this weird thing I do when I’m anxious. I sit still and try to think my way out of it. Like maybe if I just analyze the hell out of whatever’s got me tied up in knots, I’ll eventually think the anxiety into submission.

Spoiler: it never works.

Anxiety, for me, is like being haunted by a ghost that only shows up when I stop moving. The moment I sit down to think, it drags a chair up beside me and starts whispering worst-case scenarios into my ear. It’s not even creative about it—just your standard issue fears dressed up in different costumes: failure, embarrassment, regret. The usual suspects, and sometimes they hit so hard they make me jump, like I’m startled.

Am I the only one that happens to?

However, something shifts when I get up and do something. And by something, I mean anything. Even if it’s just washing the dishes or walking outside. It’s like moving my body gives my brain a break from itself. And the ghost? It doesn’t seem to know how to keep up. It lingers for a bit, maybe tries one last whisper, then wanders off in search of someone who’s just sitting there thinking too hard.

I’ve come to realize that anxiety thrives in the abstract. It feeds on questions like “What if?” and “What does this mean?” and for me, especially, “What will they think?” But action lives in the concrete. When you’re actually doing something—editing a photo, sending the email, petting a cat—it’s harder for your mind to conjure all those imaginary disasters. It’s too busy dealing with the real world, right here, right now.

Don’t get me wrong—action doesn’t magically fix everything. It doesn’t guarantee a happy ending or make the risk go away. But it changes the texture of the moment. It cuts through the fog. It’s like flipping on the headlights during a stormy night drive—not because the road suddenly becomes safer, but because you can actually see where you’re going.

So now, when I feel that ghost creeping in, I try not to think my way out of it. I just move. I write the thing. I take the picture. I screw it up and learn something. Because no matter how badly it goes, it’s better than being stuck in my head with all the lights off.

And maybe that’s all action really is. Not the opposite of fear, but the light switch we reach for in the dark.