Being Well
A sporting life asks everything of you and then, one day, ends. This is what existential philosophy has to say about living that life well, on the field and long after you leave it.
Royalties go to the MND Association.
About me.
I’m not a huge fan of talking about myself, so the thought of a personal website is a bit cringe. But here we are.
People usually find me when something that used to make sense no longer does: a career, a decision, an identity, a way of working, or sometimes an entire version of their life.
I spent fifteen years in academia, researching how people learn, think, reflect, and develop judgement. These days I point philosophy at the life people are actually living, mostly through Syntropise, the practice I run with my friend David Priestley.
Away from the desk you’ll usually find me on my allotment, battling the Cumbrian elements in pursuit of perfect fruit and veg.
I’m less interested in giving people answers than in helping them see what their usual answers have been hiding.
Most of my working lifeSyntropise
Six ways I spend my time.
Syntropology
Notes and essays about what helps people and living systems come alive, or fall apart.
Published books
The ones with my name on the spine. I’m currently writing the sequel to The Syntropist.
Academic work
Fifteen years of research into how people learn, reflect, and develop judgement.
Talk Doesn’t Cook Rice
Conversations about concepts that rarely fit into a meeting agenda.
DJ mixes
When the thinking’s done, tunes. Not everything worth doing needs a thesis.
Paintings
Some of my favourite thinkers, painted by me. None of them sat still for it.
Books.
Two out in the world, one on its way.
The Syntropist
In a grey city run by a machine that has forgotten its own purpose, a seventeen-year-old tinkerer pulls a living seed from the guts of a dead pump. It asks her the question no one in Vithra has been allowed to ask for three hundred years: what do you want to become?
Royalties go to Hospice at Home.
The Clearing
A people who can no longer die have nothing left to risk, and whatever risks nothing has quietly stopped living. The second Vithra novel is the story of a man who must learn that a life which can’t end isn’t a life that’s been saved.
Recent essays.
I write at Syntropology, about what helps people and living systems come alive, or fall apart.
A forgotten Hungarian philosopher on imagination as a faculty for perceiving what is really there, rather than a machine for making things up.
Read →
Two traditions, separated by two thousand years and half a world, arriving at strikingly similar conclusions about letting things be what they are.
Read →
What a biologist working on metabolism understood about change, and why becoming anything at all costs more energy than we tend to admit.
Read →Work with me.
Alongside Syntropise I keep a small diary of one-to-one clients. People tend to arrive with something worth thinking seriously about: a decision, a transition, a piece of work, an old identity that no longer fits, or simply the feeling that the life they’ve built deserves a closer look.
The work is part philosophy, part conversation, part old-fashioned tutoring. I bring thinkers and ideas you probably wouldn’t encounter on your own and we see what they illuminate. I’m not there to give you my answer. The point is to help you see enough to arrive at your own.
Mixes.
When the thinking’s done, tunes. Not everything worth doing needs a thesis.
Paintings.
Some of my favourite thinkers, painted by me. None of them sat still for it.
-
Lao Tzu -
Heraclitus -
William Blake -
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Friedrich Nietzsche -
Henri Bergson -
Alfred North Whitehead -
Rudolf Steiner -
Ernst Bloch -
Martin Heidegger -
Owen Barfield -
Hannah Arendt -
Clare Graves -
Ray Peat -
Mae-Wan Ho -
Iain McGilchrist
Lao Tzu
Also, some memes
Philosophy doesn’t have to be humourless. Drag the top one away, or just tap it.
