Exile Lifestyle

I started running again recently. Back in my college years I ran five to ten miles per day as part of my intercollegiate Ultimate Frisbee workout routine. That continued to a lesser degree, just a few miles a day, when…

There’s something to be said for a Stoic response to difficult or uncomfortable situations. To be more specific, it’s nice to be able to step back and assess things from a mental distance. To recognize and acknowledge what’s happening, but…

Why did I just do that? This is a question I try to ask myself regularly. Being conscious of the reasons behind our actions isn’t something most of us are taught to make time for, but I find it’s an…

There’s something wrong with the fire detection system in my apartment building. In the five months since I moved to Memphis, we’ve had probably twenty false-alarms, the siren in the hallway just outside my flat blaring an enduring, ear-shattering sonic…

Milestones are valuable tools. They’re endpoints that aren’t real in the sense that a rock is real—there’s no physical law stating that the approximate end of a journey around the sun starting from an arbitrary point we happen to use…

There’s a superficial level to every discussion. If you follow this conceptual thread far enough, you’ll find that language itself is just a coded analogy that allows us to approximate meaning to each other, verbally and with written glyphs. But…

One of the major challenges we face as an increasingly interconnected, globe-straddling species, is in how we organize ourselves even as our traditional distinctions dissipate. It’s easy to look around at the surging waves nationalism and assume that this isn’t…

At two months old, babies understand the fundamentals of physics. Which isn’t to say they could tell you the equations underpinning concepts like entropy or explain how mass informs gravity. But at two months they do have a tacit understanding…

There’s a difference between money made doing work that drains you and money made doing work that fills you with passion and joy. It’s difficult to quantify that difference, however. A dollar is a dollar, however you earn it. The…

I was probably five or six years old the first time I thought I was going to die. The exact context of what happened is fuzzy, as I was just a little kid, but I know I was at a…