Recurring obsessions
A small set of questions wide enough for decades of work and narrow enough to be one mind's signature: where knowledge sits, how life and work are one, what AI changes, what judgment is, and what nature has already solved.
I do not try to write about everything. Public thinking is more useful when it returns, again and again, to a small set of preoccupations that a reader can eventually recognise as the same mind circling something that will not let it go. Those preoccupations are wide enough to feed decades of work and narrow enough that the body of writing can still feel like one argument rather than a magazine.
The first is expertise in the wrong rooms: the fact that consequential knowledge so often lives with people whose titles do not announce it, and that the people who actually know things frequently do not write, so the standard discourse of a field can be systematically missing its own centre. The second is the unity of life and work. I do not believe in a clean split between private values and organisational rules; failures of companies and institutions are often downstream of how people are living, deciding, and avoiding responsibility in the rest of their hours. The third is the geography of knowledge in the AI era: what becomes cheap when surfaces can be generated on demand, what reprices upward, and where judgment still lives when documents and decks are no longer scarce. The fourth is the difference between information and knowledge, between what can be written down and what can only be held in a person under pressure, between rooms where work actually happens and the summaries that later claim to represent it. The fifth is what nature has already solved about distributed order, form under constraint, and resilience without the fantasy of perfect central control.
I am building a body of work, not a content feed. Individual pieces matter, but the accumulated corpus, with its recurring questions and its refusals, is the actual asset. Pieces should connect to prior pieces; cases should be returned to; the trajectory of how the thinking has changed should remain visible, because the trajectory is part of the thinking. After enough years, what should remain is something unrepeatable: one person’s careful engagement with a worldview, expressed across enough work that the whole is more than any single essay.