Existentialism in the Corporate versus Entrepreneurial Age

Everything about corporate life is about time. time. time. 

“Do you have time to type up this memo?”

“What time can you be here tomorrow?”

"Hurry up! We're on borrowed time!"

“Not on company time.” 

Nothing makes you question your own existence quite like watching the hands on a clock make their slow rotations around and around until you can check out. 

If corporate life is about time, then entrepreneurship is about distance. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about taking an idea and running with it. How far can you take it? How well can an idea be developed? What kind of team can you build in order to go the distance? How much benefit can you have to society? How can you scale your product or service to positively affect the greatest amount of people?

Festival Culture and The Hero's Journey

Like Medieval Pilgrims, we chart our course towards festivals like Further Future and Burning Man, searching for something--anything--that will deliver us from the doldrums of daily life and awaken us to the possibility of what lies beyond.

With hearts worn on our sleeves we arrive in caravans, waiting to cross the threshold into this heterotopic liminal zone where interpsychic experience is made manifest in physical space.

We know full-well that this psychedelic playground will change us profoundly. So we raise our white flags as we march gallantly towards our impending ego death.  It is only through this act of courageous surrender that we achieve the transcendence of spiritual rebirth.

Suddenly we are overcome with sublime feelings of euphoria and ecstasy! The doors of our perception have been unhinged and we have been given a small glimpse into an alternate reality in which people value cooperation over competition.

And as the week draws to a close, we depart this brave new world saturated in the light of our own self-love and understanding. As the heroes of our own shamanic journeys, we return to our default world better equipped to heal and transform with our love and our kindness.

Go forth. Do good work. Be kind to others. And above all, love yourself.

Words of Love

In order to convey the concept of silence, one must use words. It’s funny that one must make noise to describe the hushed vacuum of complete and utter noiselessness. In that regard, sometimes I wish that words were less descriptive and more evocative...

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The Conundrum of Human Experience

In a universe empowered by a benevolent and unconditionally loving God, can we justify our belief in fate or destiny? If our higher power is completely detached from the outcome of any decision we could ever possibly make, then we must stop the absurd quest to find what the cosmos want for us.

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Love is the Promise of Life After Death

I recently attended the Further Future festival, where for a 15 hour period of time, I felt less like an individuation--less like a fraction of humanity--and more like a conscious contributor to the whole: to the community of free-thinkers, futurists, and oneironauts that surrounded me.

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Land of the Rising Sun: Excerpts from the Lookbook

From a very young age, I’ve felt a profound distinction between religion and spirituality. Religion provides an important bridge to our past, in that it teaches us about where we came from. Spirituality, on the other hand, helps to propel us forward: it can provide a roadmap for transformation, and self-realization.

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In Order to Form a More Perfect Union

As the ecstatic poet, Rumi, once said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”  A similar point can be made for seeking a more perfect union: Let us not seek to be more unified, but rather, seek to dismantle the outdated institutions, systems, and beliefs that perpetuate a paradigm of disconnection and isolation, and replace them with policies that foster compassion, empathy, and macro awareness.

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Finding Disneyland

As a little girl I had many lofty goals-- one of which was to convert the overgrown, underdeveloped land around my neighborhood into Disneyland. I remember my adorably naïve 6-year-old thought-process vividly:

"If Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, and people were able to live in Disneyland, those people would always be happy."

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Person Versus Process

Wave-particle theory teaches us that the very act of measuring a particle can dictate how it behaves. If you measure the particle as matter, it will display a certain physical mass, and act accordingly. However, if you measure the particle as energy, it displays a frequency and acts as a wave of potential. As the sum of all my parts, I humbly ask: Am I a person, or a process? 

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How to Survive when Nobody is on your Level

With my iphone, I have infinite wisdom at my fingertips. I no longer need to possess all of the knowledge I once did; I can finally allow my brain to function as a processor, and not as a hard drive. Forget about being the smartest man in the room. These days, I'm more interested in speaking with the most empathetic person in the room. I no longer see intellect as the most important or appealing quality in another human being; rather, I look for emotional intelligence.

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Self Identity versus Brand Identity in the Digital Age

We are pioneers of a digital age in which technology is a measure of self-awareness. We use our smart phones to record videos and snap and filter photographs so that we can understand ourselves more completely. What we choose to post is an extension of who we are.

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Love and the Validation of Existence

I've been giving a lot of thought about that Into The Wild quote where, upon achieving his ultimate dream of escaping to Alaska, Christopher McCandless reflects, "Happiness is only real when shared."  It's no wonder that we look to others to validate our own existence, for how can we possibly know if our perspective is real unless there's somebody else who can confirm its validity? 

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The Sick Pleasure of Unrequited Love

We’ve all been there; we meet someone who lights our world on fire, and for a brief moment, our weary heart’s pain and suffering melt away in the glow of hope that love will save us. But it doesn’t quite pan out, and we’re left utterly alone, grasping at the leftovers of our original inkling of infatuation: that instant where all potential outcomes for eternal happiness were possible.

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The Ecstasy of Communication

I am a hopeless romantic, a certified love junkie; I long to be carried away in a riptide of amorous transcendence. The last time I fell in love, I was 24. I was so fresh and pure and untainted by the fickle whims of irresponsible lovers, that I felt free to express the entirety of my glorious self. The boy I fell in love with flipped my switch; he illuminated me. And during the short period of time that we spent together, I opened for him like a morning glory in the glow of dawn's breaking light; I blossomed into the magnificent person that had been buried beneath dark, cold layers of “what ifs” and “if onlys.”

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