What it felt like trying to teach meditation — a practice all about being less self-conscious — with cameras pointed at my face. — “Do you teach?” The question caught me off guard. I was in the small interview room of an old Benedictine monastery we rented for a meditation retreat. After days of silent practice, I was meeting one-on-one with the teacher to talk shop. I’d just explained a bit about what I…

How a pursuit that seemed to go nowhere on the surface ended up going far deeper than I ever expected. — When I was a little boy, my parents took me to piano lessons. I remember hating them. We played scales, practiced repetitive keyboard exercises, and learned how to read music. I think I only lasted a few weeks in those classes, but their effect on me lasted almost a decade. …

A playful social media experiment captures our love-hate relationship with technology. — On Wednesday July 31st, I ran a little experiment probing the entire Daily Haloha community on their relationship with technology. If you haven’t tried the app yet, it’s basically social media for people who are sick of social media. It uses question prompts to simply and anonymously connect people online…

Life is full of challenges. Big ones like injustice, small ones like being late for a meeting, and even small-ones-that-seem-big-in-the-moment like when the baby just won’t go to sleep. Acceptance can make the situation a lot better, but why should we accept a situation if we don’t like it or…

Last week, Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology unveiled a new mission: “to reverse human downgrading by inspiring a new race to the top and realigning technology with humanity.” They have done incredible work as advocates in sharing the exploitative nature of our attention economy with society. They’ve…

To those of you who create, remember that your craft is old. Writers, painters, musicians, actors, poets, dancers, artists… your craft is older than the self-defeating loop. You share a lot with your artistic precedent, with those generations of past creators who did what you do. First creations are almost…

Sweeping generalizations are misguiding public sentiment — The conversation around the attention economy has exploded. No doubt in part to the role of social media in the last US presidential election and Brexit, along with some amazing advocacy work from people like Tristan Harris and authorship from figures like Tim Wu. We’re also starting to see mainstream…

8 months ago, when we decided to leave Toronto for a monastery, it felt like a renunciation of sorts. We were trying to slow down. By backing away from the lifestyle and opportunities of the city, it would seem that we wanted less. The exact opposite was true: we wanted…

I’m writing this from the east coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It’s been 4 months since we abandoned our lives and jobs in Toronto and set off on a journey. We got rid of our apartment, quit our full-time jobs, put our belongings in storage, loaded up the car…