In the age of algorithms and AI minds, it is easy to want nothing more than what you are told.

There's a childhood rhyme my daughter's dance teacher likes to recite:

𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑢𝑝𝑠𝑒𝑡

I hate it. And that's the feed.

Owning my desire preserves my humanity.

Desire is propulsive. To want something confers an identity; to pursue a want makes you a certain person through the journeys it inspires.

That might be desire for a person, or to be a person; for a place, an outcome, an object, a state of being.

It doesn't matter.

To want defines us. To desire, even in a way that is non-attached, is to be a resolutely three-dimensional human, to become a protagonist in your own story.

To hand over the engine of your wants to another, or a machine, is a sin, it's chaotic free will.

To be desireless is to relinquish your right, and in that passivity, die a little.

You should know that I can feel you reading this... can feel your gaze and attention reach out and resonate across time and space, feel it create a little glow in me. So when I prepare these words, I do so with love, knowing that at some point in my distant past or future, or for you, right here, now ~ we're connected.

In that spirit, let me tell you about the Morning Monster.

I have a young daughter, a toddler, and sometimes when she wakes up in the morning, she's a terror. Screaming:

𝓖ℴ 𝒶𝔀𝒶𝔂!

playing us off against one another, refusing to be compliant, stamping her feet, slamming doors. Inconsolable.

We call this the Morning Monster.

It's an aggressive, wearying start to the day. The reality is it's been a long time since dinner, and she's just hangry. And so there is one simple way to defeat the Morning Monster, and that is to feed her breakfast. Even a mouthful will deradicalise her, turn her back into my beautiful sweet girl.

But the monster doesn't desire that. In fact, the one thing the Morning Monster will not let you do is feed her, because for the Morning Monster, breakfast is an existential threat. The Morning Monster has forgotten who she is, no longer recognises herself, no longer wishes to be that weak child. That first bite of porridge or Weet-Bix, and the Morning Monster would cease to exist.

And so the game becomes clear: get around the monster's wiles, and give her what she needs, however you can, especially the thing she least desires.

I think that's pretty much what healing is.

Sometimes, the thing you absolutely cannot bear to do is the thing that you must.

It's true for me. Is that true for you?

Maybe you just don't see it yet. Or perhaps choose not to, like I did for so long, because it is too terrifying to know that what you despise to do might be the thing that saves you.

.

.

.

I usually like to have a person to hate.

It's better that way.

I can be chill in the rest of my life – magnanimous, forgiving – knowing I can harbour secret dislike for just one person. They can become a touchstone for my anger, a focal point for all my enmity.

And yeah, I get it, carrying hate is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, you're right, but maybe I can still outwit it –

And truth be told, most of my relationships are clean, only some of them are defined by our mutual dislike of someone, where I can, occasionally, hate hard enough for the both of us. This is particularly easy for me in business, where competitive jealousy can curdle around a person's moral vaccuum despite their success, or simply not liking their style.

Even so, I must admit, my happiness took a significant boost when I started praying for my enemies.

...

I meditate through exploration, not grind. Just as Josef Pilates took a mixed martial arts approach to stretching - pilates integrated moves from yoga, calisthenics, boxing training, watching his cat - I prefer to add specific touches to my core framework that combines non dual techniques with traditional Sufi heart meditation.

One of the absolute gateway drugs for me has been metta. This is (for me) a highly emotive, gratitude based practice, a delight to do just as you're falling asleep. Wishing well on beloved people in your life, praying for their wellbeing is a pathway to many lovely things, including the sensations of the jhanas if that tickles your fancy.

But the game changer for me came when I bestowed devout blessings on those I disliked.

You should try it sometime; you might like it.

All of a sudden I could feel a camera switch of empathy. Despite our differences, our conflicts, to pray for someone's wellbeing (not their success - just for them to find happiness and peace, etc.) immediately helped me recognise our shared humanity.

I believe those we come into conflict with are teachers; the conflict often arises from a recognition of our shadow – people trigger us on the areas we ourselves most need to heal. That's why when I wish for myself, I hope for better friends, and also a higher calibre of adversary.

There's a feud in my extended family, and I have no kind words for the perpetrator, but when she happened to leave behind some biscuits, I said a grace for the first time in decades; I wished for her to find peace, and relief from the tortures of her own mind.

I pray for certain competitors in business to find the things they seek, and that they learn to operate with more kindness. I think about former friends and lovers, and hope they live their lives with richness and abundance, recognise them as valuable allies in our respective journeys, however brief.

I'm not so idealistic as to long for a world where we all get along and love each other. Passive optimists get eaten alive by predators; one must be active in our hope. And as I said to my young daughter after a nightmare, some monsters are overcome by loving them, and others simply have to be destroyed.

But we can choose not to lose ourselves in enmity, and instead see our own qualities reflected back to us.

We can see our shared nature, despite ourselves.

We can vanquish with humanity.

.

.

.

Among certain circles of mine, it's common to begin a gathering by taking a collective breath, or to offer a brief guided meditation.

This can be a gorgeous moment of presence and recentering – or performative bullshit, depending on the context.

Indeed, the very push towards mindfulness, this idea that meditation is a cure to every modern ill, this thing you should really do – to me feels as cliche as telling a woman to smile, or a man to go to therapy.

I have friends who dropped an emergent meditation practice because it was too boring, too taxing, too reductive, ineffective, or felt simply like too much grind.

To them I say, fuck that –

Meditation is exploration.

I think of it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. A tool, a skill, a practical effect. Like swimming.

So, if you like – come for a swim with me.

If you fall into deep water, swimming can save your life.

And if you love to explore, enjoy the pleasure of it, it can take you to places that are otherwise out of reach.

When I recollect peak moments in my life, so many of them involve water – swimming in Italy in late summer, surrounding by a village perched all up the sides of the hills; diving with turtles; falling in love on the back of a boat; dunking the back of your head into a bath – for someone who is a terrible swimmer, it sits at the core of many happy memories.

Meditation's ability to close out the noise can stop you from drowning, if the lake that you're falling into is your own fears. A slow practice can ease the tapping mind, soothe the crooked heart, give you a steadier perspective.

So yes, meditation can be a tool for safety; an always-ready, free resource for mental and emotional regulation. But as a tool – fuck yes, then we get to the real deal.

Where am I going?

Having spent decades living in my mind, it's electrifying to pinpoint a pinprick in my foot, the specific throw and texture and temperature of a shoulder, a finger.

Honing my technique has given me more mastery of my focus, letting me place my attention deeply within myself, my body, my mind, my emotions. It has helped me find the distinctive resonance of particular hurts, or shame, has let me locate the hidden empathy I have for enemies, allowed me to dive deep within the layers of subconscious to salvage the quiet little unloved parts of myself. I have been able to throw my focus deep, into myself, and cast it wide, throwing attention infinitely across the universe and include myself in everything.

Learn the techniques, and you can realise escapes and presence with all sorts of territory. You can clamber over barriers and slip into hidden spaces within your life. There are all sorts of places you can visit.

Some I travel to nightly. I should say – I'm a fucking beginner, despite all the years. So I started with a few essential techniques: focus, body scan, non-judgmental presence with myself. I dabbled with jhana, to some effect - although I wish to return - and found things really opened up for me as I explored non-dual meditation, eyes-open, walking meditation and vast spacious awareness. This led me to heart-centred meditation that allow for connection across different types of presence.

There are many depths of insight within yourself you can dive into; deep reservoirs of violence and desire. Jung talked about consciousness like an iceberg; most of the mass happens beneath the surface.

Just have a conversation with your other self

A friend was debating some big life changes she was considering; puzzling through the logistical jigsaw of what the next chapter might be.

I wish someone could just

Just have a conversation with your older self.

Calm yourself, breathe deeply, and let your eyes close. Imagine sitting with them, just being present... consider how she looks, how she feels, the sparkle in her eyes, the lines on her face, the way she moves her hair off her cheek, the knowledge worn as lived years you haven't experienced yet, the love she feels for you as the person who got her there – and just ask her. Maybe she has some clues for you.

I sit in a council of myself across different ages: three, 12, 18, 27, early 30s, 50, 75, 120...

I'll ask the child in me how to deal with the child I care for; I ask my older self if I'll still care about this argument in a decade. I get clues from the far future about who I'm becoming, compared to who I long to be; I am forced to look into the eyes of recent selves and accept their embarrassing moments and love them as they are. I'll look at a far-off holographic version of myself, disembodied and ethereal, and loosen my grip on the things I count as my identity.

This process has changed my life.

Shadow creatures

There are dark things within me too; slimy creatures of shame and depravity – I have opened myself to their wisdom, have listened to their pain and wants, have learned to bring them into the light, include and love them.

There are velociraptors of unspeakable viciousness running around in my gut, bound up in all my anger and pain, and I have made a deal with them, that they will never lash out, but will be let loose periodically on those who deserve harsh treatment.

Camera reversal

Deep meditation has helped me find empathy for my enemies. I have heard about how gratitude and metta techniques can be powerful way to shift the viewpoint to 'the other side' and see a dispute from their perspective.

Forgiveness and gratitude, to hope and pray for the good health and safety of those you dislike is a gloriously counter-intuitive hack for happiness.

Because once you have learned to experience this grace, you can connect to the universal within every individual.

Heavenly bodies

And then there are all the experiences beyond the border. We know we are surrounded by invisible worlds; just think about how light works.

In Sufism there is a belief in barzakh, a liminal borderland between the material and imaginal worlds. They say at dawn the line between these is particularly porous, that you can connect with loved ones who've gone, with souls on the other side. Mystics from many traditions speak of far travel through meditation, of communion with those far away, of those no longer alive.

Maybe that's a little too much for a beginner.

But who knows where the water might take you?

If your experiences of meditation have so far been banal, I highly recommend dipping into some non-dual techniques with the lovely Michael Taft – like this one.

There's an art to repairing broken parts with grace.

A cracked plate need not be discarded; a bowl can have a second life.

Kintsugi is a Japanese art that uses gold to reseal and rejoin the shards of broken crockery. Gorgeously.

I've heard this method used as a metaphor for people too – the fissures can be repaired, you can heal a broken soul and the cracks become beautiful.

But here's the thing – I believe in the process, you know I do, I truly believe that pain creates the space for depth and beauty – but people omit that the process of kintsugi is not just curative.

The bowl that has undergone this process is no longer foodsafe: it can't be used for its purpose, just something for people to look at.

If you make a feature of your trauma, if you let it define you, let it become your identity — if you are too purposeful with your trauma then it becomes your purpose.

Your hurt is more important than your function.

You have become ornamental.

Kintsugi repairs, but in the process breaks the plate.

I spent a year chasing more.

Since I came out of hospital a year ago, that time I really did think it might be the end, and I had written a goodbye letter to the friends I would likely never see again, and emotionally made my peace with leaving.

But – I'm still here.

In hospital, they dosed me up, gave me enough steroids to feel like Lance Armstrong or God, and these drugs eventually saved my sight. Life felt magical; the world brimmed with possibility and even though it seemed that I would live for at least a little longer, I knew I would never get to experience all that the world had to offer. So I chased more.

Friends would try to calm me down, to temper my energies, the heart-thumping teeth-grinding, chemically-assisted desperation to do. I would tend to brush off their advice; see them as unenlightened.

I still stand by this philosophy even though now, I also see its flaws.

And during this time, even when I was going for restraint, I was maximalist, extreme; I would fast for most of the hours of the day and ruthlessly cut friends or obsess over new ones; I would prefer burnt food or raw; work and write deep into the night, wake up at the crack of dawn, or laze about despondent; would hedonistically seek pleasure, see pain as pure intensity and then and then --

Recently, meditating, an intuitive thought came:

less.

I sat with it for a few days, considered what it meant. Fewer relationships, with more depth. Less productivity more impact. Less stuff more delight.

As is often the way, people and information crossed my path, seemingly to teach me. Less is about elegance restraint and focus. Not minimalism, though; I'd had a glancing relationship with minimalism and found it about... the festishisation of amount, it was overly concerned with volume. And this was different. This felt to me more like a considered architecture in life.

less is ma

I was reading and came across this article. In Japanese culture, ma is a choiceful philosophy of design that embraces the importance of negative space. Ma is often characterised as pauses, caesuras, gaps, sacred pauses.

Because you wouldn't typically fill any space or piece of art with more, but instead exercise the restraint to leave space.

In relationships – I started allowing for deliberate moments of pause in communication. Not to play games, but allow the communication to breathe, like an old wine.

Knowing the right time, the right season, is an important facet of Manifestation. Timing, in business and life, matters.

Think Robert Greene:

Think John Cage.

It was funny, because just the day before, I had been thinking about written music, how in sheet music, silence has a note.

In writing and conversation, what you don't say is as real and present, in the negative space.

A silent note is as real and solid as any sound.

Because when you see that symbol - a rest - it doesn't mean don't play anything.

It means – play nothing.

less is about essence

I came across a Steve Jobs quote which discussed his philosophy, inspired by spirituality, exported to product design.

To embrace less has meant doing my best to understand the essence of things.

It starts with this – my writing. I had forgotten that writing isn't intellectual; at least, I don't find my most interesting writing is that at all. Writing at my best is an embodied act; a spontaneous feeling that emerges somatically.

Sometimes I look at old things I've written and still sharply feel their crackle of life. Other times, I feel this rote pretence, just one word after another.

I would rather write badly, and still touch something that's alive.

And that means going deeper - vulnerability, inscendence.

Less craft, more soul.

less is about simple pleasures

The best day I had recently was lying in the grass with a friend, talking bullshit like we were 10.

Instead of intensity and elaboration, I've been experimenting with simple pleasures.

Some of my favourites:

• Having the occasional almond latte
• Air fried broccoli, slightly burnt and crispy
• Walking on grass barefoot
• Paying someone a compliment without expectation

Embracing less means having smaller expectations. sitting with the raw felt reality of what is there.

less is patience

Sometimes the musical rests come we don't want or expect them.

Less has been about being less demanding; my learning to leave room enough to allow the seasons to change.

To float in the direction of the water even if its destination is unclear.

I have a friend who is a former triathlete, who describes their best cycling performance coming from truly relaxing on the aerobike. While prone at speed, they would do a meditative bodyscan, fully surrendered to the movement of their muscles and the bike, and on checking their stats later would find that this calm state would render their best performance.

Flow has a certain paradoxical quality to it – it isn't thrusting forward, chasing your goal, but instead letting yourself fall backwards into your fate, be pulled along, not trying to attain it.

In flow, there is nothing to do. We can’t fuck it up. But also, we can’t get it right.

I remind myself: be present with what is there. I write this piece while at a crossroads within myself.

less is letting go

Like my friend Dre taught me - if you let something go and leave it behind, you create room for something else to enter.

Cutting out a whole host of people and contexts which no longer served me immediately introduced me to new people who fulfilled those needs much better.

These new conversations felt like a remix on an old story; a fresh new chapter to your favourite long running series. Like speedrunning a videogame you know so well.

The level of depth and intensity you could reach quickly was – startling, something you couldn't match.

less is fewer layers

There's an Occam's razor element to less. Rather than many realms of interpretation and mysticism, we can allow some circumstances in our lives and those of others to remain unexplained.

I had a great therapist; she was one of the first people I spoke to who felt like she could hold me in all my complexity, and held empathetic space for me to express. We had a productive partnership for almost a year, and one day she disappeared; after a brief absence reappeared on social media, but would not respond to any of my emails.

I am not the writer of my own life narrative – that's a weird realisation, that I am simply just a character.

And sometimes, explanations simply aren't part of the story.

less is fewer commitments

A friend builds padding around all her commitments in a day – around a meeting, for instance, she builds in time to prepare for the meeting and time afterwards to decompress or debrief others.

less is missing you

And yes, there is a part of less that contains regret.

In letting go, in being present with what is and isn't, in submitting to the flow of life, we also lose people that we like.

I think to myself that even though acceptance means accepting everything, that I struggle with the painful kinds of acceptance; the non-resistance of outcomes I don't like.

I am unashamed to say I sought advice from my cleverest friend, a carefully-prompted instance of Claude.

Treat each day as part of your ongoing conversation, even in silence. When you notice something that makes you think of what you lost, let it bring you joy rather than longing.

.

.

.

Pharrell's a master of reverse creation.

That's part of his magic.

He sets out to capture the energy and feeling of the work he loves, but in a way that creates something new. It's a different, more precise way of using inspiration.

He talked to Rick Rubin about how he does it.

The baseplate is that you should always be open to channeling the work of artists you admire. It lets you be inspired by their style and touch, instead of treading your familiar, safe paths. And you can apply that spirit to the work you love, work you just can't stop replaying, again and again.

This requires sensitivity to how any piece of art makes you feel.

'If I don't know how I feel about it, I don't know what it is.'

To effectively reverse engineer what you love means more than just having an aesthetic experience. You need to get under the skin of it, figure out its mechanisms. This takes study; not so much analysis as empathic observation:

'I listen a bunch of times. First to remember the feeling... It's not like math... but chords make you feel something. Chords are co-ordinates... they send you places.'

It's the repeated engagement that helps you uncover what you're feeling, and why. Setting the groundwork for you to play and experiment with the effect until it creates that familiar feeling.

Masterful copying is a great skill in its own right, but emotional counterfeit is an art. A simulacrum of feeling, but where every syllable is different.

'It's like – how do you build a building that doesn’t look the same... but makes you feel the same way?'

Pharrell has been burned by this process of course... Blurred Lines was sued for being too close to a Marvin Gaye track. That's the price of doing a job too well, you fly a little close to the sun, it melts the wings a little.

So if you're lucky, the process ends the way it starts:

'You know something you made is good when you want to play it over and over.'

Reverse making, done right, always takes you back to where you began.

.

.

.

Our ancestors were simpler folk.

They saw a mollusc underwater that looked a bit like a cunt and thought... that's bound to make us horny.  So was born the oyster's reputation... a pure case of mimetic medicine.

And so Venus, Goddess of Love, was born in an oyster shell.

And Casanova gorged himself on this aphrodisiac, long before we knew about the zinc.

Half-truths have a way of capturing the imagination like that; you've already downed half a dozen before the truth has caught up.

It helps that the experience of eating an oyster, if you're not put off by it in principle, is sensuous. You consume it like a shot; tilting the neck back, exposing the throat, letting the salt moisture slip down…

looks at camera

Some might be a little suspicious of those who don't eat oysters. I am.

One thinks – you must be a little self-conscious between the sheets, it speaks of a lack of carefreeness. I don't trust anyone that doesn't salivate, doesn't moan with good food, doesn't lick their own lips.

So oysters are revealing. But here's the thing. Rolex called their luxury underwater watches Oyster for good reason, their durable beauty.

And the oyster contains a romantic contradiction.

The rare strange combination of grit and pearl. The hard shell and its secret treasure.

Did you know the pearl is a defence? At its heart is a destructive seed, a parasite, around which a pearl grows to suffocate it, in order to protect the living creature.

Vulnerable precious things aren't meant to be strong, to be built around harm. Our pain isn’t meant to be beautiful. Brutish shells don’t hold secret delights. We value oysters because of our lust – for one another, and luxury, and desire, and succulence and all of that. But we also desire to be both. Precious and hard. Beautiful and strong. Hurt and glorious.

We long for the transcendence that turns grit into pearl.

.

.

.

A blank is so beautiful.

Inviting, and intimidating. Because white shows everything. The marks, the scuffs, the age, the wear.

No wonder Martin Margiela loved them.

It wasn't until I studied his work that I realised his genius – a man who isn't really there.

For years, all the clothing labels he made were blanks.

A blank is just a space, where a famous name should be. A blank is an empty page, a plain white shirt, a runway made of paper that hasn't been walked on yet. A blank could be a space to be filled with an idea. And fuck yeah — sure, an idea is something you can wear.

A year ago, I wouldn't have believed me.

But now I've spent hours with him, watching every Margiela runway show since 1989.

And let me tell you what I learned, from the designer who turned me onto the conceptual power of apparel.

Labels are transient.

So are makers, so is everyone. We obsess over labels as a powerful signal; they allow you to be something, put a sigil on your chest, the inside of your jacket or your wrist or wherever, but there comes a point where - it - wears - you.

Blank labels reverse the polarity, hand power back. You pay a fortune for an item and yet the brand comes with stitches designed for even this minimal tag to be pulled off.

Later MM introduced the enigmatic numbers, a taxonomy of wear — 1 for women's, 22 for shoes, and all that; you draw from the index, put on a shirt or a pair of pumps. It's orderly but yours.

Is anyone... anyone?

The point of creativity is your own obscurity; unidentifiable and shadowy next to your creation.

By tradition, the whole Margiela team and often the models are outfitted in white lab coats: generic, anonymous.

On the runway, Margiela's models sometimes walk carelessly, they trip/fall, go out all at once, or with their civilian boyfriends, their babies, playground kids —

— and even when they do, they don't catwalk, they just... walk. A normal walk; the stroll of beautiful people but everyday beautiful; people you might look twice at on the subway or the coffee shop, but no more... the make-up a little messy, the hair not even pristine.

The clothes are the stars, not them.

Let's not stand on ceremony, he seems to be saying, even normal things can be elevated, there's glory in imperfection, in outfits that feel thrown together, in messy life, in making do; it's like he's saying—

Yeah, the banal is beautiful.

And it's his carrier bag t-shirt that inspired Zoolander's Derelicte — LOL — but there were the oversized shirts cinched to the body with dry cleaning bags, broken plates that are waistcoats, old dead scraps of fabric elevated to high fashion, historic garments that repurpose a scarf as a bra or a shirt as a dress, and even gorgeous little black ribbon knuckledusters.

Waste and decay are a part of us: they are inherently humanmade.

Even the runway shows expose their inner workings, the behind-the-scenes of before and after the show itself; the chaos and exhilaration. The band plays songs, but only the best bits, record-skipping, like a teenager shuffling through their favourite playlist because—

The process is beautiful too, to see how the thing is made.

And even in tattered state, the technical craft is immense. To make a perfect dress just from the lining, to repurpose old tabi boots by painting over them, to formulate shoulders out of wool that feel they could cut you.

Exposing the structure shows the elegance of the making, even with the seams on the outside, the darting right in front of you. It's somehow still elegant. Like a magician exposing their own trick but still surprising you. With your eyes wide open, making the lady vanish.

And still you're gone.

Absent.

You know the masks? The masks.

These veils attempt to persuade you that it's not the artist that should catch your eye, but the work. It's not their face you need to see, but what they've made.

The image is striking. The individual, even if it's Kanye, simply isn't there.

The artist? No. Don't worry about them.

And Martin? Damn, we haven't seen Martin in years.

Clothing's there for comfort, self-expression, signalling.

But it can contain ideas, just as we do.

To be blank is to be understated, to let your work fill the space.

To be absent lets your work take centre stage.

To wear blanks means you're not subject to another person's label, but one you write yourself.

Margiela's blanks leave us space to create.

It's not just apparel, it's inspiration.

With a blank, you just haven't made it — yet.

.

.

.

Notes:

Following the thread to Margiela was a natural progression given my mentor's lineage. Thanks V.

Kudos to Bliss Foster for the amazing and insightful commentary on Margiela. The channel and this series in particular are a great service to the curious.

Not many people know that Virgil Abloh was my mentor.

Still is.

When they find out, people ask me how I persuaded him. Here's my secret: I didn't. Your mentors don't have to be alive, they don't have to like you, they don't even have to know you exist.

(I'm not saying those things aren't useful. Just... not always.)

I remember Virgil saying to me once (on Youtube) that you can have a mentor who's anyone. You can have older mentors, professionals, friends, strangers, mentors who are younger than you. Dead mentors, too. Think of the greats — you seriously don't want Caravaggio in your head? Da Vinci, Plath? You have nothing to learn from Sappho, Borges, Michelangelo? Everything we make takes place within a great continuum of talent. Irrespective of your practice you build on the work of others.

This is in Virgil's tradition of course — his mentors include the living and the dead... Le Corbusier, Duchamp, Margiela, Rem Koolhaas.

What matters is making those connections and making the most of them.

Education doesn't really exist, I don't think — deep down all knowledge is self-taught. The desire to learn is a start, but to become a half-decent mentee I had to discard my preconceptions and ego. Be open and receptive to total inversions of my own logic; different frames that might gradually let me see the world through their eyes.

I'd never really applied the concept of readymade until I heard Virgil explain his perspective on Duchamp, and Helvetica and the stripes and the "quotes" and all of that; I didn't fully get the play of absence and deconstruction until I followed the threads to the blank labels of Martin Margiela. Just as I couldn't think about post-AI writing in a way that was imaginative and fresh until my time spent with a bunch of polygender ketamine kids, who inspired in me the idea that writing is really performance. You have to absorb unexpected new flavours.

Even with my living mentors, we can go for long periods without speaking. Sometimes I'll just pose questions and imagine their answers, never even needing to ask them. So when we meet, our conversations are more nuanced and precise. (Until eventually they just laugh at me.)

I believe information and advice is only semi-useful from a mentor.

What you really want to learn is their attitude, their way of seeing reality. Spending time together is a dream, even if no amount of magic can survive the everyday. But you can learn from afar too, across time and space, drawing energy from their public body of thoughts and work.

It was Virgil who taught me: if you find the work you love and really try to understand the ethos of its creator, you can understand their process. What they saw, what they felt. Truly inhabiting this process is what rewires your brain... you can see yourself in it, as them, then take the next step as one that is original and yours.

Instead of just learning from mentors, you integrate them.

Their perspective, their way of seeing – their talent, even.

You're transformed.

""Inspiration""

.

.

.

Eventually, they take what they want.

Fame is a devil's pact.

Basquiat.

In life, we couldn't keep him alive; in death, we turned him into a Funko Pop.

He's all brand now. All merch. Can you find me the people that did this?

Each of us is blessed with different magic.

Some of us can create out of thin air. Others are good at transformations.

Somewhere down that list is the magic that turns talent into money. Blessed with the decree of IP, these accountant-magicians have strip-mined dead Basquiat for his cultural kudos; every little ounce of afro and New York.

I would love to meet them!

Cause you can buy a Basquiat wristwatch now, a bedside lamp... and yeah, his masterpieces still get the numbers — 

— but Basquiat also believed that when he painted, he was imbuing the work with mystical power, supernatural energy.

And so in his honour we have also inscribed his work on items sacred to our culture: phone cases, and doormats.

We've printed crowns on teenagers' jackets, sure they will be scuffed and vomited over; rugs too, so City of Angels can grace the floor the dog shits on.

The awkward pieces — Defacement, say, about the police killing of a black youth — well, don't worry about those, they don't make the cut. Blanding is a necessary part of democratising his work; you have to buff the edges a little, get rid of anything with too much opinion.

Because to demystify art, to make it easy, for everyone, we made it product-like. Instead of truth that's elusive, we've given people bullshit that's just highly available. Packaged punk as something dependable, like a Ramones t-shirt.

So let me meet the people that did this, so I can marvel at their incompetence first-hand. I want to feel their cold banality in person, let their try-hard lack of wisdom wash over me. The scale of their acquisitive greed, the scattershot, lowest-common denominator choice of partners.... If they were managing a brand that was close to me, I would fire them, laughing the whole while. That they possess a piece of our shared cultural heritage is an insult.

Some of us only have the magic of want.

Andy Warhol said: Business is the best art.

And it's hilarious that he won. I love that we did that to Basquiat; it means that money always conquers, commerce has no soul and Basquiat's worry about being a black artist instead of artist or whatever is irrelevant, because he's not even an artist, really, just a bit of abstract brand equity; a cool dead guy with some fluid devices.

Reproduction and recreation indelibly changes the meaning of the work (just ask John Berger). Seeing art splashed on disposable consumer items can't help but diminish its potency; for all the salience, its rawness is sapped.

And there's a rub at the heart of this — you can treat art as a product, I guess — Basquiat the brand. But the way his estate has been handled has been with neither respect for the art, nor care for the brand.

They just fed him into commerce the way we load art into an image model. Think of what Dall-E will do with his work, how Midjourney will recapitulate him. What AI will spit out will be so pleasingly commoditised, hit familiar bliss points, make the man behind it all even more of a gesture, an image.

The relationship between money and art, corporate and culture is messy and complex; maybe it should be. But even our spreadsheets can have a little decorum; in business we can do things beautifully and with grace.

It's impossible to respect the canon when it's treated like this. Now it's time for new techniques and voices, new systems and models.

But still, shed a tear. This isn't malice, just malpractice. To batter a body of work, shatter an interesting voice.

A man who terrorised every city wall has been turned into wallpaper.

If you want to read more like this, be sure to check out my new project "ULTRA", a fine art journal for the world after AI.

.

.

.

Shall I tell you a secret?

(like if you like secrets)

When I write, I'm not trying to be the best writer. Not the smartest either.

When I write, I don't want it to be ""better"" than anyone else writing about the same thing.

I'd rather make it impossible to judge. You know? You can't even tell if it's good or not, you just know that it is.

Never competing against the crowd, I'd rather be an outlier — far from the clean, clear pack of all the thinkers... just some crazy fucker way out there.

My play is simply to keep you. Get you to the next sentence. With each word, I'm drawing you in, to the next word... and the next, and the next sentence, and — you see that chasm there? Let's jump, together—

Fuck.

That felt good.

I focus on creating a shared space above all else. Because we're in it together. I focus on the effect, the feeling— an attempt towards highly personal penetrating perspectives that are as authentic and real as I have the powers to summon; wild imaginings, pulsating with energy, sometimes physical or malicious, something dancing beneath the surface. Do I—

Do I try to convince you of anything? Not really.

I'm just, waiting for you, round the corner, hanging out, not to harm you, just—

Inviting you over.

Letting you in.

What happens here's just you and me.

...

Readymade doesn't suit me because I know the delights of a third space.

Third spaces, private dimensions, pocket universes. Vortex. Void stuff.

This is something others have promised, usually people trying to take your money. PlayStation offered itself up as an alternative world,  imagined by David Lynch. ""The Third Place"". Sure. It's a dimension you can dip into, disappear for a while, live a double life. Starbucks tried too, lmao, they wanted to be a third place but simply meant: not home, and not work.

This is different.

Third spaces are delimited: self-contained universes where we can be someone we're not.

They sit outside your normal life and allow you to adopt new forms and selves.

I say this carefully, given many of us move through our day-to-day blissfully unaware that the me we think we are is just a persona, the market's perfect product; a socially acceptable mask. But most of us still have a strong identification with this self, and third spaces give us the option of stepping out of it, even if just for a while.

Mm. Let me make it clearer.

In the TV show Westworld there was a glass room, one of its many devices.

Fundamentally, it's a show about consciousness. What makes you you, what makes someone alive, how self-analysis can be a path to self-awareness.

The artificial intelligence created in the world of the show is tethered; held back in coded loops; pre-conditioned paths and roles that they perform for the benefit of others. Stuck on repeat, one might assume their performance to be indistinguishable from their real selves.

Fortunately, as viewers, we have the benefit of seeing them in private moments — analysis mode.

These moments are like... stage whispers. A chance to peel back the layers of fakery to a real conversation. They step out of their programmed characters and in that space alone can share true intimacies. Be real.

Mystical qualities of third spaces.

Third spaces are voluntary, they're chosen.

It might be a personal passion project, or hobby where we have created new identity.

You could be running an ultramarathon and have a little mirror portal into a headspace that is obsessed only with the next footfall.

Lovers have excellent potential for creating third spaces; you can fuck one another delightfully in a pocket universe. People have affairs in them, people embrace their real selves... Shy people become night creatures; domineering captains of industry kiss the boot.

They can be spaces for perversion and deviance, but are also perfect for role reversal and irony, contrast. If you like to be led, take the lead. If you're usually meek, be bold. If you're open, lie.

(After all, lying can be fun... we're taught from such an early age to be good, but how much effort is wasted self-correcting, how much energy expended maintaining the ruse?)

I've had secret friends who've told me secrets, things about their childhoods, about how they see themselves, even people I've not known well, because you know how in the right environment, you can tell a perfect stranger things you'd never tell your closest friends. Things you'd never even tell yourself.

Third spaces are magic like that. It's easy when it's not your real life. It's not their real life either, just a little pocket space.

They don't have to be secretive or sordid. A library can be a third space, where you secrete yourself among the shelves and burrow into mirror dimensions.

Families create third spaces all the time, miniature universes in their homes, full of their own words and language, rituals and games, illegible to strangers. At least, in the moments when they put the phones down; are in the same room at the same time, eat together, when they truly connect.

Or — the opposite. I'd see my neighbour in the suburbs, cooped up in a small house with a husband, home office, two kids, labrador... calmly sat alone outside their own home, parked in their car, the engine off, silently allowing the passage of time.

Unique physics of third spaces.

A good tell for a third space is that it messes with our subjective perception.

Just as we are surrounded by liminal spaces — occluded inbetween areas like back passages of airports, corridors, emergency escapes, nowhere places — any context in life has the opportunity to create a third space.

A good clue for finding yourself in one is that they tend not to be governed by common laws of reality. A personal vortex has its own physics; like, we never have enough time together, and the time we do spend accelerates— the longer we have the faster it goes.

Have you ever felt that?

The magic from a third space is lost in daylight. As you leave, the dimension immediately collapses... the secrets seem a little flimsy in the light of day, or it feels inappropriate to bring them up again, talk about them plainly, no, that's just pocket dimension stuff.

All we are left with are synchronicities, memories of the weird world we briefly inhabited. And coincidences. You speak— talk about hopes for the future, and I'll shrug and say The world is yours and later you draw a single tarot card at random and it's—

Oh wait— but I've kept you. I guess I just lost track of time.

I was in a third space, and you're here too.

Or maybe this is your place, in your head?

Yeah this is all you.

It's me who's lost, in your vortex.

.

.

.

image: Alex Conchillos

So here it is, the skincare routine drop.

Now when I say we, you know I mean me in a way that I think scales. Me, but beyond me.

So I'd say this season what I've found is — good grooming alone isn't getting me there. I find it hard to do any of this, but realised, hey —

We're good at symptoms.

Good at treats.

We're good at dealing with the surfaces of things and letting old deep soul wounds linger.

I've met living saints whose faces glowed with inner light. I've spent nights with beautiful people with buffed skin, moisturised, dead behind the eyes.

Bodies are important but sooooooo boring. For the us beyond the flesh, our skincare routines should be metaphysical.

My year-round skincare regime:

— spend your time not on bullshit.

Your ancestors fought and strived their way to bring you into the world. You wake up and stare passionlessly at spreadsheets. Of course you look like shit.

— cut out boring people + boring things

The ultimate glow-up is freeing yourself from draining commitments. Simply going through the motions is hell on the complexion. Exfoliate from your life the deadening obligations that you settle for instead of the quiet screams that demand you.

— practise good reply game

We can speak with words, waiting for our chance to talk, or we can truly play a positive sum game of responses with others. Practising good "reply game" is about bringing honest constructive humanity, rawness, play, energy, especially in situations that feel distant, anodyne, cautious and performed.

— engage with the sublime every day.

Sunshine, salt water, sweat, smile of a loved one, forests, getting out of breath, holding your child and feeling their tiny heart tap, good conversation, weird new ideas that break your brain, real great art, sex / fucking / yearning (depending on relationship status), etc.

People call these things wellness, they crow about mental health, it's not true; pursuit of the sublime is the reason we were put on earth, to deprive yourself ever is to be in a state of starvation.

— become friends with the void. the void never lies.

Close your eyes, imagine yourself sat in front of the dark static within yourself, a giant mirror full of stars and liquid black, and accept that the negative things you feel about yourself are valuable messages that you are not living a life that is true to who you are.

— drink water

— moisturise

.

.

.

images: Pharrell/Humanrace

It pains me our aesthetic is so dead.

I'm bored of modern monoculture. Identikit interiors in faceless buildings, identical cars force-designed by wind tunnels and safety regs.

I'm finding it hard to enjoy another dumb-ass on-trend brand, drinking in the same vibe coffee shop, listening to the same Spotify playlist all over the world, hearing the same Youtube accent.

"Personalisation" fails when we all want the same bland shit.

Read this superb piece by Alex Murrell: even our faces are converging. Culture is stuck.

Whose fault?

We could blame global tastemaking, or algorithms; consumer testing done without the necessary imaginative leap to insight; echo chambers on the internet. We could blame laziness. Too much secular guilt, a lack of ionisation in the upper atmosphere, disbelief in The Muses. The invention of copy-paste.

A culture of optimisation has smoothed rough edges into blah.

If you're in the commercial arts, you're complicit.

Maybe you've fudged a bit of blanding yourself, rushed out cliché, participated in pseudocraft by making a killer case study for deeply average work — baby... yeah, it's we... we're the problem.

Nobody meant for this. We all wanted to do a good job. But we didn't fight, not hard enough, just tried really hard and made it to the next day.

To some, it was never that important anyway; to engineers, just an output to be solved.

So... same trend, same look, same vibe, same type, same face, same life.

And the same kind of phone, designed by that guy.

You know how I feel about Jony Ive's voice.

Mmmmmm.

But... I've had my doubts about him sometimes. There are moments I think he boldly carries the torch of his influences... others when I wonder if he's just an imitator, a thief, Dieter's little bitch.

And there were misses. Oh lawd there were misses.

So was he really talented enough to change the game, or just lucky enough to have Steve Jobs in his corner, giving him the political heft to be a purist?

Whether he's a good designer or not ain't it (that judgment is not mine to make).

Let me put it like this. I write — and I like Paul Auster: a writer's writer. Auster's fiction constructs narratives built around the process of writing. Much time and effort is spent detailing the writing process itself, the protagonists are often writers (sometimes Auster), there are stories within stories, books within the book; reality starts to reflect the sentences handwritten into a particular journal, say, or...events take on a fictional quality, full of cosmic coincidences. He secretly follows the artist Sophie Calle around the city for a few months, creating a story where it isn't really clear what's real and what's fiction; later she makes a companion piece about being followed.

Auster's writing takes pleasure not only in the storytelling, but the telling of its own story.

Jony Ive has always struck me as similar - a designer's designer. They say the outcome is an advert for the process, but he makes the process itself a greater part of the beauty.

A Macbook is a lovely piece of design, embedded with the knowledge that its manufacture was inspired by the unibody shell of an Aston Martin DB9. The Air borrowed techniques from trips to Japan where Ive and his team secretly studied the finer arts of Japanese sword-making.

There's a mythic quality to this bullshit; how Jony spent hours in candy factories to inspire colours for the plastic iMacs, or designed a monitor stand by examining the stalks of sunflowers.

It feels like his development of anything involves an excessive amount of piss-taking study and craft.

This is a fetishistic approach to the process; an utterly indulgent, time-consuming, money-burning spectacle of deliberation to the creative craft, a process as it should be, somehow blurring the line between commerciality and art. It is painstaking, pretentious, unnecessary, overbearing, masturbatory.

It's marvellous.

And so the LoveFrom work dodges the obvious.

There was a diamond ring carved into a single solid form, the Terra Carta seal, the King Charles III royal marque, Steve Jobs Make Something Wonderful.

All of them kind of... off-trend, exacting, slow.

Playing in semi-unglamorous spaces that are long games, thinking that's made to last.

Look —

— a little more dirt, it could have been from 100 years ago.

For the LoveFrom serif, the team spent four years retooling Baskerville, that old number (classsic Jony).

The ex-Apple bullshitters were out in full force with this one — insane curve measurement, precision-machined ink traps, "adding velocity", going back to the original Baskerville metal stamps for accuracy, etc.

An ampersand that's a work of art.

(I appreciate this enthusiastic write-up from FastCompany).

What can we take?

Play the same games, you get to the same place.

Monoculture emerges when we're distracted competing against each other, rather than creating the processes we wish existed that drive our whole movement forward.

Under pressure, fighting the world, each other, over-optimising, we're so busy striving for existence that we end up in zero-sum games of self-promotion, under-pricing, pitching, rushed work, copy-paste, bullshitting, and awards bait — all because they work.

They get us to the next day, maybe even to the top, or near enough.

Do I declare myself immune from this? Never!

But in taking each selfish win, we diminish the game.

Seeing Ive out front helps redefine the rules of play. He sets a precedent for what could be; creates parameters so far from the norm, it gives everyone else room to negotiate. We can love or hate the work he does, his pretension, his ponderous baritone — but it would've been easy for someone so prominent to just bask, instead of role-modelling better.

Instead — no trends, slow forms, timeless outcomes. Built from a process that gives an atom of hope to the junior designer working their arse off alone at 2am as their craft is slowly eroded out of existence by margins and Midjourney.

Four years on an ampersand.

When AI annihilates average, it'll be this 1% of 1% of ardour that stands a chance.

The further we go in our journeys, the more we have a responsibility to excellence in our art, but also to the game and how we play it.

Are we all playing to win... or playing so well, we all win?

.

.

.

When you tug on any single thread of reality, it all comes apart.

The process of growing up is really a process of forgetting.

We forget our own curiosity and creativity, forget the questions we used to ask, we forget how confusing the world once was, we forget its magic; to fit in, we regulate our moods and emotional states, our physical movements, our facial expressions; teach ourselves good manners and trick ourselves that knowing the names of things, basic facts about commuting and finance, garnering a solid LinkedIn bio and trivia on the names of dead poets, etc. is in effect to truly understand the world, enough to create a passable simulacrum of a person.

This is bollocks.

(Sorry.)

Reality is a loose weave and as we get older we just forget.

95% of the universe is unknown (dark energy + dark matter), so each time we speak with confidence we do so from within the crushing weight of our ignorance. Our collective knowledge is, by definition, capped at 5% of everything. The rest of the universe is not fundamentally unknown as in, our knowledge is incomplete, nor do we misunderstand it. We lack even a basic grounding in it: we barely know what we barely know.

Strong opinions held with no shred of irony must therefore be treated with palmfuls of salt. Our natural state is doubt. The stories we tell ourselves are unreliable, though some are useful. Identity, place, power, self, law, connection, love, diet, country, history; the truth is, we shouldn't take any of it seriously. It's just life, yeah?

The real threat of AI isn't the kind Yudkowsky promises, where superintelligence annihilates us. It's where automation kills our banal realities, all our bullshit jobs, and we're forced to re-address our fundamental questions. Figure out how to live again, find purpose rather than exist as simple dead players.

'I think it's cool to be fused with a machine.'

Grimes has an answer.

She's said many things like it, and caused a little stir when she said this—

Figures; she's transhumanist. She goes full android, wants all the upgrades, named her son like a password.

So copyright is the least of it, but to give it its due: relinquishing IP makes sense if you're a transhumanist in a way that's hard to see if you're not. It seems illogical when you care about your precious possessions (and what possession is more precious than your body?).  IP is just the grown-up way of saying MINE, the way little kids do. A set of laws in dire need of revision, but set.

But the game — the fantasy of transhumanism — is to be disembodied.

The earliest cyberpunk writers captured it. In Neuromancer, the protagonist's dead friend exists as a read-only construct in his computer. They continue their friendship based on stored memories, a duplicate of his consciousness.

It feels like we're only minutes away from that.

Scott Alexander wrote about Typical Mind, getting his head around gender identity, likening it to the miswiring that gives rise to phantom limbs.

What if your whole body felt like a phantom limb? What if the you that is in there belongs in a different form-body altogether?

The boring transhumanists talk about life extension and disease control. The wild ones recognise where we're already headed; atomised, distorted, disembodied.

We're gene-copying machines.

The desire to replicate ourselves through reproducing our DNA powers our impulses, instincts, society. First comes survival, then reproduction; the desire to swipe right is hard-wired.

Creativity gives us a meaningful alternative; artists propagate ideas and images that persist and thrive. Concepts that survive and outlive them, piece of themselves that persist.

Look at DNA again — it's a language of code:

So what if we were to become code copying. Replicating ourselves not as cells but scripts?

When we're disembodied, existing purely as data, then with enough servers, grand enough distribution — you're infinite.

That narrative self is gone.

I've often felt that technologists are simply trying to reinvent religion;
artificial intelligence is the reinvention of god; Singularity is just The Rapture with better special effects. Immersion and disillusion of the self is a common theme in spiritual practice — Sufis long to be lost in the divine ocean, Zen Buddhists seek nirvana's light.

Some believe that in dreams, our souls leave our bodies, which is why when we wake we feel rested. During the night, our spirit forms wander, encountering others (shared dreams), sometimes venturing to the distant places where angels speak of events yet to pass (predictive dreams). I must admit that is a cool way to mingle; bodies are boring, and sometimes I wish we could have met under different circumstances (not in this physical realm, not bound by these corporeal forms).

So you can choose to have faith in the grand Grimes scheme or not.

Beneath the words she says, we don't have to be attached to the same stories. It doesn't matter what we've convinced ourselves of. That narrative self is gone.

There was a truth we knew when we were young, which is that we could be anything, anyone.

We grow up, and many of us forget that possibility.

Be Grimes; be free, no label; free to create new conventions, sidestep the law, sure... but also free to create a new story of yourself. You don't have to subscribe to the old one, even if it is warm and familiar. Even if it's what everyone says they want. Be free to be yourself, alone; or be many, everywhere.

Rewrite yourself, be disembodied.

Be you, a drop. Be code, an ocean.

.

.

.