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 explore what makes people, ideas, and living systems come alive, rather than fall apart.
For fifteen years, I did this in academia, researching and teaching how we learn and develop judgement. These days, I point philosophy at the life people are actually living.
Syntropise
A practice run with Dr David Priestley for leaders carrying decisions with public consequences and private weight.
Syntropology
Substack notes and essays on what helps people and systems thrive or decay.
Books
The ones with my name on the spine. I’m currently writing the sequel to The Syntropist.
Academic work
Fifteen years of research on thinking, learning, judgement, and reflection.
Talk Doesn’t Cook Rice
Podcast conversations on 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
The Syntropist
In a grey city run by a machine that has forgotten its own purpose, a seventeen-year-old tinkerer unearths a forbidden question: 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 quietly stops living. This novel explores why a life that can’t end isn’t a life that’s been saved.
Syntropology essays
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 deliberately small diary of one-to-one clients.
They arrive with something worth thinking seriously about, and what they need is somewhere to think.
I provide a space to do exactly that without being managed, diagnosed, flattered, optimised, or quietly steered towards somebody else’s answer.
Paintings
Some of my favourite thinkers, painted by me. None of them sat still for it.
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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.
