I’d like to try. The common refrain in this part of the internet is that ‘writing is thinking,’ but I’ve always found this incomplete. For one, I don’t know many people who would willingly submit a first draft as evidence of their thinking ability.

Writing forces you to spend time on a topic, sure. For that reason, it usually guarantees better insights than you’d have through talking, or sitting there thinking. But the real value comes in bootstrapping those insights, as each draft gets layered on top of the other. Writing makes your thinking explicit, but editing is where all the problems get sorted out.

This is Part I in a 3-part series on editing, which will also cover archetypes of first drafts and concrete strategies for editing. I open with a wider aperture: What even is editing? Because after dozens of conversations and a few workshops focused on this question, my answer is still kind of hand-wavey, like:

It is an emergent and mystical process that looks different with every person and every draft. What any piece becomes through editing is contingent on a constellation of factors, the most important of which is something not unlike romantic chemistry. No two people edit alike, and no writer responds — or protests — to editing in the same way. It is beautiful and torturous, sometimes critical, sometimes superfluous.

Past that, what actually happens is best approached through analogy. Here are six.

Editing as cosmetic work

This is an obvious metaphor for editing, the most superficial part of the job. Like a plastic surgeon, an editor beautifies a piece. They cut and reshape, they nip, they tuck, they smooth, they plump, they polish. At Asterisk, we use the term “facelift” when we’re happy with the structure and arguments of a piece and need to take a pass on prose.

Wordsmithing is a discovery process. Words want to sound a certain way. The best writers and editors work to find what feels right as they play with prose. As example, here are the first two paragraphs of my misophonia piece, several months part:

Every teenage boy thinks about fighting his father at some point. Usually it’s just some sort of dominance masculinity thing. For me, it was that I’d realized my dad had developed a popping in his jaw each time he chewed. A click, click, click of the cartilage slipping across his jawbone combined with every bite. This instilled me a sense of disgust and affront that rapidly suffused through my body. It overwhelmed me. It was the beginning of feeling scared that I had no control over what happened in my own head.

It’s a teenage rite of passage to explode into rage at your parents. While the usual outburst is sparked by some combination of hormones, insecurity, and authority issues, for me it was a popping sound in my father’s jaw. I first noticed it at the dinner table. Every time he took a bite, the disc of cartilage that cushioned his jawbone would slip out of place and snap back. Chew, click, chew, click. Like a drum, his mouth reverberated the sound, which changed in pitch each time he opened to take a bite. Layered beneath all of this was the wet percussion of normal chewing. The trio — jaw pop, meat squish, fork scraping teeth — became inescapable. And it drove into me, first through my chest, a surprising shock of affront and disgust that then suffused through my whole body. It was the first time I ever got scared that I wasn’t in control of what was inside my own head.

I think the second paragraph is much richer, much more immersive in the experience. But that’s me editing myself, in my own voice. I know what I want, I know what sounds like me. Editors go wrong in the same ways that plastic surgery goes wrong. It’s a question of when to stop.

I lived for several years in the Pacific Palisades, where cosmetic work is eerily normalized. If you live in any sort of normie location, it’s hard to describe how disconcerting it is to suddenly find yourself in an area where facial surgeries spread like fads. In the first few months after moving, I couldn’t stop talking to my wife about what I was seeing every time I walked through the Palisades Village: lip fillers, cheek filler, buccal fat removal. She, having lived in LA at other points in her life, had stopped registering it so strongly and just kind of nodded along.

Two years on, it stopped registering for me, too. The reason, I realized, was that everyone was getting the same work done. Every surgery made everyone look the same.

If you gave me, blinded, short selections from an assortment of New Yorker articles, I’m not confident I’d be able to tell the difference between authors, though I am confident I’d be able to tell The New Yorker from other magazines (diaeresis aside). I love the magazine, but their house style is famously consistent, easily recognizable, nearly prescriptive. You know what you’re reading will be good, but it will mostly sound the same.1

My fear is that this is how I end up editing Asterisk: that every piece sounds like it got lip fillers, that I become the person responsible for making everyone sound like a rationalist who went to Iowa Writer’s Workshop, for making Scott Alexander sound like he got the syntactical equivalent of botox.

Editing, like any sort of cosmetic work, is best when it’s judicious. Make-up goes a long way before you really want to go under the knife. A skilled editor needs to reshape and refine, while still retaining the author’s full voice.

Editing as a ouija board

Ouija boards work because of the ideomotor phenomenon: unconsciously, someone with a hand on the planchette directs it towards what they expect (or want) to see. The reason you can’t use a Ouija board alone is that it’s impossible to fool yourself that the planchette can move of its own volition. (This is also the reason that facilitated communication and the entire Telepathy Tapes phenomenon exists.)

An editor is that second hand. Often I read a draft, or a paragraph, or a sentence, and I think something is off. There’s a section that should be here, an argument that hasn’t been made, an example that might lend this sentence a symmetry. There’s some spirit in the room, a spectre haunting the argument.

Authors are sometimes aware of this too. People send drafts and hand wave at what they think is missing, or comment on a paragraph with what doesn’t feel right. But not always. When you’re caught up in the mechanics of a piece, it’s easy to lose sight of where the work itself is pulling you. Your focus is on something else and so you miss the hints.

Some writers describe their writing process as “channeling.” “Stories are found things,” says Stephen King. Before I became more attuned to the mechanics of the writing process in others, I thought this was annoying. Writing is work, effort. Now I find channeling to just be descriptively true of the microphenomenology of the creative process. It’s really not an entirely generative process, but a selective one. Writers have no say in what words or phrases or thoughts or ideas arise, only what they choose to put down. To the extent that anyone earns their writing gifts, it is by honing their taste for what to select. When you hear some author talk about how they copied Joan Didion’s sentences to learn how they worked, it’s not to learn Didion’s prescriptive rules for sentences, but to better subsume the spirit contained in them.

Editing is also a form of channeling. The way I know to prefer this word or phrase is an infinite regression using the same process of deciding what to select. The advantage editors have is that the set of work they’ve trained on is much larger. They can feel beyond the sentence level to what is wrong structurally and conceptually.

Writers can do all this on their own, of course. But it is because they are so attuned to the process of revision that they can effectively treat a first draft as something written by a stranger. Knowing something isn’t quite right, they sense where they meant to go in a previous draft. But one of the emergent properties of collaborative work — the real advantage of editing — is when writer and editor become attuned to the suggestibility of the other. The editor gets to lead the seance. They move the planchette subtly in one direction, and that’s all that was needed. Suddenly the writer understands the path it was supposed to take all along. The spirit of the piece takes ahold of you both.

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Editing as chemistry

Being edited can suck. It is intimate, uncomfortably so. You strip naked in front of someone, get asked a series of questions on a topic in which you’re more ecpert, and then get told all of the ways you could both look and sound better while doing it. It is the opposite of unconditional love; in editing you make yourself vulnerable in order to be told how you must change.

The reason that Substack is dominated by treacly emotive personal essays that read like a cross between tumblr and LinkedIn is because submitting to the editing process is so uncomfortable. At times it’s even violating. More than once an author has told me, after a piece has been published, that while they appreciated my help, and even believed I made it a stronger draft than they could have on their own, they hated the process. I came on too strong?

But this is why self-editing is so hard. To do it properly, you need to have the ability to look at your own shit without either flinching or lying to yourself. If you don’t, you’re more likely to attract a different audience than you intended, of a lower quality. You are already a better writer than you think you are if you can hold out for several rounds of revision to produce a higher quality piece. Otherwise you become the equivalent of the person who unwittingly and unconsciously attracts unhealthy partners again and again.

The degree of intimacy required between writer and editor varies across each piece. I’ve come to think of it as a spectrum, from dating to marriage, with the key ingredient something a lot like chemistry, and a successful relationship predicated on the same things as love: affect, trust, respect.

Most of my working relationships with writers are something like casual dating. It’s flirty. We talk about a few topics. We agree on some things, disagree on others. Our boundaries are up, but we’re gracious and open to what the other person says. I think this is what the majority of editing relationships should look like: separate people, respectful contributions, warm formality.

Sometimes, though, the relationship becomes more intertwined. The chemistry’s good. The ideas are fertile and of high interest to both parties, and if both parties have something to contribute, the relationship gets more serious. This takes a variety of forms. An author says “I trust you” and lets us do a heavy line-edit. I do enough research to add a paragraph or two of additional context. If two people are both working in service of an argument (and this applies more heavily to non-fiction), it even comes to look more like co-authorship.2

This, I think, is the answer to a question that Dwarkesh Patel posed to Scott Alexander: Why are there so few good bloggers? Why can Works in Progress put out so many good articles each year, yet few of those writers have their own blogs? “That could be because of the editing,” Scott said.

From having now at least a hundred first drafts that became published articles,3 I would say: It is unambiguously because of the editing. I just don’t think this is a bad thing. The average reader underestimates the extent to which most of the articles they read are edited, often heavily. I estimate that about 70% of a first draft is retained in the final draft, on average. We’ve had some pieces where we change almost nothing, and others almost everything. In many cases our articles are acts of co-creation, of entangled relationships.

The highest culmination then, is something like editing as marriage. (Often this is literal: Didion and Dunne, Henrik and Johanna…) Both parties drop regard for roles because what is being made becomes more like parenting. You are both now in service of this thing that you brought into existence. At the very end of the process you can pick out distinct features that are yours, but the whole is a function of the two.

Editing as a velociraptor hatching from an egg

I have had cemented in my memory, since I was a kid, a scene from Jurassic Park. John Hammond, owner of the park, stares down at an egg that resembles a colossal piece of Easter candy. “I insist,” says Hammond, “on being here when they’re born. An animatronic infant velociraptor delicately puts its claws through the eggshell. Eyes welling in pride, Hammond cheers on the baby dinosaur. Come on, little one, he says. Push. Push!

This, sometimes too, is the role of an editor: to be a proud supporter of a piece, someone who insists on playing a token role in a piece’s creation, but who is only there because they have the money that made all of this possible in the first place.

I think I generally have something to contribute to most pieces, but not always. For some people, either because of their own talents, or because I’m unfamiliar with their field, I can take very little credit except for creating an enabling environment and a word change here or there. Everything else comes from them and from God. Writing, like life, finds a way.

Editing as Phenomenal Nature

Many writers equate their craft with sculpture. “Writing is not like painting where you add,” says Elie Wiesel. “It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible.” “Perfection is achieved,” says St. Exupery, “not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I guess? Like, yes, but this only applies to the absolute last stage of editing, the final 2% of finishing a piece, and — as many sprawling novels can attest — it isn’t actually necessary unless you’re a real prose stylist. If you hew too closely to this advice when you’re drafting, you won’t get anywhere. I was thinking about all of this one day while listening for the hundredth time to Cassandra Jenkins’ masterpiece “Hard Drive.”

A security guard stopped me to offer an overview

On phenomenal nature

She said, "sculpture is not just formed from penetration

You see, men have lost touch with the feminine"

And with her pink lipstick

And her Queens accent

She went on for a while about our president

I liked this analogy better: paring as penetration, as this masculine and reductive act. But then what is the feminine act of sculpting, and how did it connect back to writing? Trying to find an analogy, I did some searching, and along the way I learned that despite knowing every word to this song, I had never fully understood the context of one line.

I’d taken phenomenal nature to be the security guard’s neologism for a new-agey conception of gender roles. Nope. Phenomenal Nature was the name of the retrospective show of the Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, held at the Met in 2019.

Mukherjee created sculptures made of hand-dyed jute, hemp, and cotton rope. She developed her own form of macrame — half, square, and hitch knots — layered and repeated in dense fields of texture. Although she usually worked with a thin internal armature, much of the structure came from her transformation of the rope itself, which knot by knot took on fantastical but vaguely human forms. Parts loop over each other, bend back on themselves, arc in unexpected ways. Wholly unlike stone, as something to be shaped down, Mukherjee built up. “You start somewhere and let it grow,” she said.

If an editor were to conceive of a writer’s work as a block to be pared away, it would be to misunderstand entirely the possibilities of what it might become. Writing is more knotting, weaving, and coiling than sculpting: every sentence must support the next, each successive piece is shaped by the whole. Rope has memory, tension, flexibility. Words coil in specific ways too. Revision can’t be rigid, nor should it be reductive. Each sentence can only be reshaped based on the pressure of neighboring sentences, but you can (sometimes you must) untie half of everything that came before in order to build back up into the proper shape. It should only look solid; underneath it must be pliable. A good editor doesn’t say: here is what this piece must be. They feel through the knots in a piece to say, “Here is what I think I can see it growing into. This is what it can become.”

Editing as therapy

We asked Agnes Callard to write for us for the Weird Issue. She submitted a draft that argued the way most media conceives of weirdness is wrong — that it is not, as children’s literature conceives of it, a strength disguised as a weakness, but a genuine impediment to a happy life. A story parents tell to children to make themselves, not their kids, feel better.

But I can only give you that summary because I’ve read the piece so many times. That first draft was chewy and meandering. It was interspersed with personal anecdotes — Agnes wrote about her own form of weirdness: a tendency to blend people in her mind. But it also had the same criticism of kids' stories, and long digressions into philosophy. Because it operated on so many levels, it never cohered into a whole — even as I liked it, because I like Agnes, and find her brain compelling. In a way, the piece’s inaccessibility seemed to fit the theme, but we knew it was missing something. I admit, though: I was stumped. I had no idea how to edit it except to explain my reaction to it and where I think it came up short. (A less discussed challenge of editing: telling someone with much greater prestige and accomplishment than yourself how to change their piece. The most nervous I’ve ever been in this job is getting on a call with Adrian Tchaikovsky to give him some suggestions for his short story. [He was lovely. Intimidating eyebrows though.])

So Clara, my co-editor, and I got on a call with Agnes to talk it over. At first we talked about the essay — Agnes agreed there were some areas that weren’t working, that she was still in the process of figuring out what she wanted to say. We shared our reflections while reading it. I don’t remember what I said. Halfway through our call, the conversation shifted into our own experiences of being weird children, and weird adults. We talked about autism. I talked about Judith Butler, whose ideas about self-determination I thought resonated with things Agnes had said, and who Agnes happened to be reading at the time. Same with Foucault. We talked about the tropes of kids' stories and how those have evolved. At the end of an hour nothing concrete was resolved. But Agnes seemed inspired to re-draft.

A week or so later Agnes submitted that draft. Many of the core ideas of the first were preserved, but it was otherwise a very different essay — less personal, more subtle, more academic. Butler and Foucault were both there, along with the likes of Hacking and Ariès. It was one of the few pieces I’ve ever read in which deeper engagement with famously difficult writers actually helped to make a piece more clear. It went on to become one of our best performing essays. What role I played, I have no idea.

I feel mostly the same way about therapy.

There are more obvious ways that the editor is a therapist. Writing is hard, and sage counsel from someone who is accustomed to seeing works in progress can help. But it’s not always instrumental support that matters.

In my 20s, my therapist was an older man who’d dropped out of seminary to get a psychology PhD. Somewhat later in life than is normal, he had developed narcolepsy. He took prescription modafinil and drank diet mountain dew into the evening. He had asked me to wake him up if he ever dozed off. It only ever happened a handful of times, and each instance I’d just say his name loudly. He’d rouse, apologize, and tell me the last thing he remembered hearing.

One night, though, I watched his eyes gradually shut. I stopped speaking mid-sentence. He didn’t respond. Instead of waking him up, for reasons I can’t remember and can’t now explain, I kept talking. For a quarter of an hour I spoke uninterrupted, a stream of consciousness on a topic I also can’t recall. But I do remember the feeling driving home from that session: an unexpected sense of levity, like something had found its place.

All Agnes seemed to need was an audience to listen, to give her, for a few minutes, enough distance to hear herself and her own ideas more clearly. Sometimes, that, too, is the role of the editor. It didn’t necessarily matter what we said back. It may have even been enough to say nothing at all.

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For many reasons, I did not want to leave. Trial by virus had knitted our Asheville community together. I knew no one in LA. The size of it — I grew up in New Hampshire — intimidated me. At the time I worked in international development, and so the entertainment industry seemed like it had little to offer me personally. I feared living trapped in the middle of a concrete grid endless in every direction but the sea. Mostly, I’d never had the time to consider myself to be the type of person who could live in LA. Even though I’d built my understanding of just who could entirely on stereotypes.

So we found middle ground. We’d move somewhere that offered escape into wilderness, which in Los Angeles is restricted to one of the neighborhoods which hug the mountains. From our short term rental in Hollywood, we chanced upon the exactly one open apartment in the Pacific Palisades — the couple living there needed to break their lease — where K had once lived many years before. And so we moved into a 50’s-era complex with an avocado tree in the backyard a mile up the street from where Sunset meets the ocean.

Within a few weeks, I’d started to fall into a complicated kind of love.

***

The common image of the Palisades is one of affluence (median home price $4.2M), whiteness (81% to LA’s 29%) and fame (an incomplete celebrity list here). Its exclusivity extends to its geography. The town is carved out from both canyon and mountain, the latter which forms a barrier from the smog that gathers in the basin to the east. It is a long drive from most anywhere else in the city, and so it is less appreciated, because less utilized, as a place with some of the most spectacular nature access in the country. 

More than half of the town by area is designated protected land. Topanga State Park wraps around its western half on three sides – 13,000 acres of chaparral and sandstone cliffs throughout the Santa Monica Mountains. It is the largest city park in America, and part of an even larger system called the Big Wild, a 20,000 acre wilderness, accessible only by bike or foot, that stretches north into the San Fernando Valley, west to Malibu, and east, past the Getty, all the way to the 405. To the south, where the continent ends, is the beach. 

The Santa Monica Mountains are modest in height, but they are steep. Some residential roads exceed 15% grade. Trails can hit 25%. Temescal Peak, at 2,126 the highest point in the park, is just over four miles from the coastline. You can run between the two entirely on public land. 

The first mile, the only one open to cars, follows Temescal Canyon Park for a mile. On the right you pass a playground, which because built on a slope, offers a view that is half canyon, half Pacific. On its left it passes Pali High, the platonic ideal of an American high schoo, its open-air classrooms surrounding a courtyard and the filming location for everything from Carrie to an Olivia Rodrigo music video. 

A few hundred feet after crossing Sunset Boulevard, the trail drops downhill. Traffic sounds fade, replaced — if there’s been rain— by the lapping of the creek that carved the canyon. On warm days, the water is the threshold past which the fragrance of sagebrush and mugwort become prominent. Herbaceous, astringent, medicinal, there was something in it that reminded me, absurdly, of baking Creepy Crawlers as a child 

Temescal Canyon has — at least for Los Angeles — deep history. In the 1920s, the Chautauqua assemblies gathered here to host lectures and musical performances, and the small camp they built — some cabins, a dance hall, a store — remain in use to this day. The assembles are of course different now, and by and large there are a few types. The stereotypical LA hiker carries a coffee cup and wears yoga pants. There are the tow-headed kids and their moms dressed in the beige linen uniform of Topanga-core. There are the microdosers, the meditators, the inevitable VIP taking a a very important call over noise-cancelling headphones. But LA is too big, diffuse, and weird to really capture the variety on any day.

From here, the ridge trail climbs steeply out of the canyon, six hundred feet up in the first mile, through a series of sandy switchbacks before turning a sharp corner. The sage brush thins out. Turn, and there, suddenly, stretches the entire basin. Part of the attraction here is to be outside and above the city, and yet still within it. Daily life in Los Angeles takes constant effort — it is engulfing, beguiling, a city-state more than city. But 1,000 feet up in the Palisades gives it enough distance to render it approachable, dwarfed, as it appears, by the immense arc carved by Santa Monica bay.

Another mile or so up, the trail levels out as it approaches a sandstone formation known as Skull Rock, one of the few named rock formations I’ve ever seen that requires little imagination to see. It was just past here on, the morning of January 7, that the Palisades Fire ignited. For day hikers this is usually the final destination in a loop that goes back through Tesmescal Canyon. But you continue on, to an area frequented almost entirely by locals.

The view extends out on both sides: the steep hills in Topanga to the West, the rest of the city to the east. The Hollywood sign appears as a smudge of white across the hills. Most days there are few people out here. Some days there are none. It’s trafficked little enough that you can catch rattlesnakes warming themselves mid-trail. Once, in thick fog, I turned a corner on a pack of five coyotes. This high up the drama of the city feels small. On days when the marine layer stretches over the beach towns, here it remains sunny. The knowledge that such an escape existed less than an hour’s walk from my door is what made the city feel sustainable. 

And yet you live with constant reminders that it may not be. In the time I lived here, just past the group of homes carved deepest into the mountains, the hills appeared charred and denuded. In May of 2021, an arsonist set fire to brush off the trail that circumnavigates Santa Ynez canyon — home to one of the few waterfalls in Southern California, namesake of the reservoir now infamous for being out of operation.

The blaze immolated 1,200 acres before firefighters contained it. Absent any moisture — 2021 was a drought year — it loomed for over a year a black scar, dead and unchanging, until the rains finally fell, hard, in winter of 2022. That February, oatgrass, foxtail brome, chamise, and fire-poppies finally began to poke through the darkened soil, though only in patches. With sufficient moisture, chaparral recovers quickly, unless, of course, it burns again.

You continue on, winding in between the base of smaller peaks, until one appears in the distance, recognizable for a pole that sometimes carries an American flag. Temescal Peak is high enough that it affords a 360 degree view: north down into the valley, south all the way to Catalina Island. In the dozens of times I ran here, I saw other people only a handful, and so it took on a personal quality: it was my spot. 

I never expected to fall so hard for this the physicality of this place. Los Angeles is a place known for making art, not being among beauty. I have lived in several remarkable cities — San Francisco chief among them — and traveled through many more, but none has stayed with me with the vibrancy like the Palisades. San Francisco’s pallette is a chiaroscuro of sun and fog, blue and grey and yellow. Asheville is ten thousand shades of green. I scroll my photos from LA — I took over 10,000 in two years here — and am struck above all by its range: by its density of views, nearly all of which encompass mountain and sea; by a century’s worth of some of the country’s most innovative architecture, much of it now lost; by an environment in which nearly anything can grow, fruit, and flower.

***

The social life, on the other hand, required some adaptation.

Los Angeles is more famous for beautiful people than beautiful views.Until you live here it’s difficult to grasp exactly what this means. I assumed it was simply the place where some beautiful people end up, but this is wrong. Beauty goes so far here as to create a distribution shift in attractiveness. Take the normal curve in America and move it right a standard deviation, and now you are in Los Angeles.

It is the most socially perplexing place I’ve ever lived — and that includes other countries. As in San Francisco, the currency of Los Angeles is attention, but while the Bay optimizes for screen time, LA measures success by how many heads you turn in a room. Combined with the city’s wealth, the dynamics alter people’s behavior in emergent ways. It is a city full of insane people, in the best and worst ways, a confluence of creative brilliance and pathological self-absorption. As a result it is never, ever boring.

Larry David and I had an awkward moment in a bathroom. Anza once stepped on Jennifer Garner’s shoes. While in line at Erewhon, Kate Hudson walked in wearing a black dress. We made eye contact, she smiled at me (I assume my mouth was agape), and twenty years of hard-fought self-composure dropped down through my stomach and out my knees, which buckled. It was all happening. In Los Angeles it always was.

Yet I always felt at some remove from the Palisades, socially. Part of this was undeniably class. In a zip code where the median home price exceeds $4M there is an inevitable social gradient between the average person and the couple in the 2BR apartment. When I first moved I worked in international development, and the cultural capital I derived from that and a PhD meant little to nothing. But I found it, somehow, a valuable experience: it forced me to develop deeper curiosity in others; it also revealed some of the personality distortions of wealth.

Once you get used to the sceneyness of it all, though, it is undeniably a charming place to live. It’s small and dense enough that many kids can walk home from school. It goes all out for the Fourth of July, feeling then more than any other time like the former home of Ronald Reagan it once was. It’s where Clara and I first met, and where Asterisk was in some sense born.

The heart of the town — physically, not spiritually — is the Palisades Village, the outdoor mall built by Rick Caruso, billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate. Designed to look like a classic American main street, the village is more often described as ersatz, stepfordy, or sterile. LED screens in the parking garage advertise upcoming movies. It has VIP parking, and above the shops — Brunello Cucinelli, Diptyque, Saint Laurent — there are luxury apartments. Locals call it Carusoville. It is almost always playing Frank Sinatra.

It’s easy to ridicule, yet somehow hard to avoid. I went there multiple times a week —to yoga, for coffee, because Anza loved getting recognition. Most especially I loved the Erewhon. Around 2022 the grocery store exploded in popularity, fueled by TikToks both adulatory and exasperated. In this it is a metaphor for the Palisades itself: shockingly expensive and still worth every cent. So what if half the products they carry come labeled with nutrition misinformation. I have never found a grocery store with better produce. I’ve never loved a coconut cake so much. 

It has a small town feel for LA, but it still retains an air of exclusivity, a hesitancy to be warm outside of your immediate neighborhood. That changed, though, when the drought finally broke in 2022. I remember, in the middle of that first rain, passing a runner who had stopped to stretch his hands out to the sky. “It’s raining!” he said to me. “It’s raining!” I said back, like we were passing the peace. 

Until it rains, you can’t fully appreciate the way that the aridity of Los Angeles bears down you in ways small and large. Small, in that you unconsciously accustom to the constant brittleness of your skin and throat. Large, in that somewhere deep within your nervous system, there is a sense that the threat of fire continues to grow.

Over the following weeks the grass turned from straw to pale green, the plants stood up straighter, and everyone seemed happier. Moisture was all anyone could speak about. A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.

***

This winter, there has been no rain.

I was in the middle of a bike when I first saw news of the fire. I’d opened up Strava, of all places, to check a map, and saw a video, posted by a fellow cyclist, of flames writhing down the ridge a hundred meters behind his house. I kept riding. I tried to put it out of mind.

In December, the Franklin Fire ripped through 4,000 acres of Malibu, destroyed 20 structures, and taunted Pepperdine students sheltering in the library. I’d posted about it, fearful and sentimental — I spent as much time on my bike in Malibu as I did in the Palisades, and it was painful to watch I place I knew so intimately go up in flames. But after the fact I felt embarrassed: the fires had nothing to do with me other than my memory, it seemed attention-seeking, and my reaction appeared, in retrospect, overblown. I hoped, naively, the Palisades might be the same. 

It wasn’t until I was home and saw the wind forecast that I realized possible scale of the catastrophe that lay ahead. Before I moved to Los Angeles, my knowledge of the Santa Anas drew entirely from this scene in the Holiday, in which Jack Black sweetly removes a piece of dust that the wind has carried into Kate Winslet’s eye. “Legend has it,” he tells her, “that when the Santa Anas blow, all bets are off.” 

It’s an absurd scene. There is nothing romantic about the Santa Anas, and I never heard anyone romanticize them that way. Even when they do not bring fire, they carry into the city an undeniable aura of disquiet. The air crackles. Asthma exacerbates. Humidity drops as low as 10%, sometimes even lower. Skin chaps, lips split, the grass grows increasingly desiccated. 

On the day the fires began, humidity at the Malibu weather station dropped from 93%  to 27% in three hours. Santa Anas take moisture wherever it can, and that morning it took it with extraordinary swiftness. No conversation about these fires can even begin without an acknowledgement of that severity. “What you’re talking about here is probably less than 1% of all the fires that we respond to in Southern California,” the Chief of the Orange County Fire Authority told the LA Times. “You could have put a 10-lane freeway in front of that fire and it would not have slowed it one bit.”

In most of the reckonings published, it remains the factor most absent. 

Before we’d reached even 1% containment, blame was put on California’s failure to carry out prescribed burns, despite there being no evidence that prescribed burns are effective at preventing fires in chapparal. Yes, we need to burn more at substantial scale throughout the state to prevent future fires, and yes, regulations have made this all but impossible to do. If the Palisades fire is the impetus for change statewide, all the better. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking such a policy would have been the difference in the Palisades. The fire started, as best as we can tell, in an area which already burned on New Years Day. While it subsequently spread along a ridge of chaparral, by and large its predominant fuel source was entirely man-made: our homes. 

Rick Caruso kicked off his 2026 mayoral campaign by blaming the lack of water in the hydrants squarely on Karen Bass. But the reality is that no municipal water system anywhere in the country is designed to handle the load — 400% of normal — asked of the scores of engines tapped into every hydrant available. We could of course prepare better for this, so long as we are willing to invest in the cost of designing and installing an entirely new municipal water system.

Right now the most egregious failures appear to be the lack of operationality at the Santa Ynez Reservoir, and the inadequate response in both the hours immediately after ignition and the days that followed. But while this may have spared some houses, it would not have stopped the fire in its tracks, and would not have prevented more than a fraction of the destruction. It is an outrage clear that a lack of water availability led to the burning of homes after the main fire had passed, but the catastrophe writ largewas not caused by lack of water.

In the long list of conceivable failures, the fact that a lesbian directs the Los Angeles Fire Department surely ranks dead last in importance. I am glad that VCs and founders feel they’re finally able to speak their minds, if only because it reveals those who have nothing valuable to say.

Disaster serves as a collective Rorschach. It reveals, in the blame we place, the stories we tell ourselves about power, responsibility, and control. Glaringly few in the days that followed were nuanced efforts at truth-seeking.1 The truth is that if there is fault, it is collective fault, beginning with those in the 1920s with the audacity to carve a town out of a fire-prone hillside. There are many lessons to be taken from this — chief among them better ways to build fire-resistant housing, and why in a place of such wealth, we chose not to harden our homes in the first place. But it is hard not to see in the finger pointing a way to displace our anxiety that — despite everything which in an ideal world could and should have been done — we may still live at the mercy of the gods and the catastrophic winds they conjure. 

***

In 2023, K’s start-up folded and she went remote. Almost since we had moved in, we had been considering moving apartments. The floors in our complex leaked every sound louder than a mumble. We lived above two young girls parented by a single father prone to rages — at them, and with everyone else in his orbit. Now, geographically untethered, it forced the question of whether to stay in the city at all.

At the end of our street sat an empty lot. Years ago, heavy rains had caused a slide and destroyed the house built there. Now it was home to an Indian Laurel Fig that gave shade to a wooden bench which looked out over the bluffs, across the Palisades Bowl, a mobile home paradise a literal stone’s throw from the beach, and beyond that to the ocean and Palos Verdes. On Google Maps, locals had named it The View, and like all views it was a popular place to think. It was there one day we made the decision to move back to the Bay.

It’s not that we had to. We loved so much of the city after all. But in spite of everything, the hassle of everyday life — the price, the traffic, the lack of safety — had started to grind us down. The apparent ease of Los Angeles life is an illusion, and we couldn’t deny that we’d grown to feel constantly on the edge.

And yet — I question that decision all the time. At least once a month one of us turns to the other and groans about our longing for something that can only be had in LA: to walk down to the beach at the close of the day and lay in warm sand; to order a stupid $21 smoothie from Erewhon; to go to a party where people are fun, free, don’t talk about AI; the summer camp atmosphere; the aliveness and never, ever, boringness of it all. The city worked its way under my skin and into my bones in such a way that I pang for it less with my heart than with my body.

It seems in some ways preposterous that in the wake of such destruction, the predominant question has not been “Will we rebuild?” but “How can we make rebuilding easier?” Why, when we know with certainty, that five, or ten, or fifty years from now, the winds will blow with ferocity and meet the right spark once again? If I had never lived there, I would be asking the same question. But I have, and so I understand. What else is Los Angeles, but the place where you risk it all to live the dream? 

But it will be years before that dream can take form again, even in the faintest way. A few days after the fires began, a first responder friend attached to the Palisades sent us a video as he drove through our neighborhood loop. Barely anything recognizable remained: a few chimneys, charred trees, a car, torched, stripped entirely of color. In some places, the fire burned hot enough to melt steel shingles. So altered had it become that it took a minute to figure out where he was filming. And then we saw the bench, somehow, miraculously, untouched. In the background, the shapes remained as we knew them: the slope of the bluffs, the spine of the jetties, the Santa Monica pier and the arc of the bay. Everything else had become ash. 

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You follow the practice, and because you are on retreat, you let go of any desire to understand it rationally, scientifically, or historically. And it works. Things happen, and then some: you have a few deeply profound, and moving, and cathartic experiences.

A week later, you leave the retreat and feel that — though you will have an extremely difficult time articulating exactly what or how — everything is different. The way you inhabit the world feels altered and new. You’ve seen, maybe not clearly, but surely, and for the first time, that the reality you took for granted as objective is a reality that you had partially constructed. It’s not like a mystical realization, really, although it can be if you left it. It’s more — for me at least — like realizing that experience is more like a multistable perception than something solid. You have a choice of what to focus on — you just have to see other angle first.

The challenge is that you lack any cultural or intellectual scaffolding for what you’ve experienced. And so you come home and search desperately for something that can help you integrate what you’ve learned.

It feels weird, but an obvious place to start is where jhana practice originates: in Buddhist scripture.1 You learn, in fact, that the Buddha himself practiced and taught the jhanas as a path to enlightenment. The Satipatthana Sutra, which dates to ~20 BCE describes (albeit in anachronistic metaphor) your experience in jhana precisely.

Would it not seem acceptable to convert on the spot? Imagine: you read a >2000 year old text that described self-induced altered states that no one outside of a weird Bay Area circle has ever talked about but which map directly onto your experience? The Christian equivalent would be of witnessing a long-haired man walk across water and restore sight to the blind, and then going home to read the New Testament for the first time.

That I left my retreat feeling fundamentally changed wasn’t a possibility I’d entertained prior to it. I had not seriously considered that one week could offer something so profound as an alteration in how I experienced the world. But that some 2000 year old texts accurately described some of the things I was experiencing precipitated an ontological and intellectual shock that I’ve been trying to settle since.

So I fell back on my oldest habit: to read as much as I could. Except I had no idea, really, where to start. Any time I saw a book mentioned or referenced, I ordered it. These are most of the dharma(ish) books I’ve read in the past year.

Here are five that stuck with me the most.

Buddha, by Karen Armstrong

I grew up without religion. My reactions to it tend to be knee-jerk skeptical or dismissive. If I was going to dedicate any part of my life to teachings that supposedly originate with a man who lived some two and a half millennia ago, I wanted to know who he was. The challenge is that there isn’t any sort of central text in Buddhism. The Pali canon, the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, contains over 10,000 sutras. In Mahayana, the corpus is larger and more complex still. Many claim to relay the Buddha’s own words, and from this you can glimpse aspects of his life, but there exists nothing like a cohesive narrative of the Buddha’s life.

This book is a historian’s take, assembled from modern scholarship of the scriptures, triangulated with the record of contemporaneous religions (e.g. Jains) and everything else we knew historically of the time. We are (reasonably) confident that Siddhata Gotama did exist. But there is nothing in his life story we can affirm to be historically true. And so this book is something of the definitive legend — the stories that appear most frequently, or are most likely to be true based on what we know of other historical events.

This book could not have been easy to assemble. The scriptures are maddeningly diffuse. Armstrong’s accomplishment here is to pare down the interpretations, elaborations, and flourishes of scriptural texts into the core of Buddha’s story: an at first self-abnegating search for enlightenment through asceticism; his remembrance of the first jhana as a child and subsequent discovery of later jhanas, which were key to his own enlightenment; the teaching methods he developed (its possible the Buddha and Socrates were contemporaries, and though they would not have known each other, the methods they employ are sometimes strikingly similar2), and the community that arose around him in the years that followed.

Maybe the most interesting aspects of the history is the degree to which scriptures are aligned on the Buddha’s approach being that of the Pali term ehipassiko, or to come and see for yourself. The sangha that arose around Buddha did so not because of any proselytization, but because the Buddha welcomed people to simply try.

I have dabbled with reading sutras, but I find practice a far more valuable use of time. Still, I wanted to know something about what the tradition I was entering, and I highly recommend this books as a fast and comprehensive place to start — especially for my non-meditator friends. (I also alluded to this above, but it was a profound experience to go from zero meditation experience to fluency with jhanas 1-4 to reading about the centrality of jhana to the Buddha’s own teaching, all within ~a month. I’m sometimes surprised Buddhism has a few converts as it does. Where Christianity requires lifelong faith, Buddhism required — at least for me — one week of sitting quietly thinking happy thoughts.)

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield

The ostensible focus of this book — the task of integrating some of the peak experiences of spiritual practice into the mundanity of our day-to-day lives — doesn’t fully capture the expansiveness of this book.

Jack Kornfield interviewed dozens of practitioners, each with decades of experience. He quotes them at length about the paths and stages of insight, the outcomes of practice, the stepping stones — and detours — along the way.

For me — I came into meditation without an understanding of where I was supposed to aim — it was extremely useful. What is the goal? Is there a goal? What does progress actually entail? How long does change take? Is it the same for everyone?

This isn’t an instruction manual. One way to think of it is as a sampling of what L.A. Paul calls “transformative experiences.” Her argument is that certain life experiences are both epistemically and personally transformative in ways that make it impossible to rationally decide whether to undertake them — using standard decision theory, you can’t actually know what values to assign. So-called awakening or enlightenment seems something like that too. I’ve been practicing for an hour a day, on average, since my retreat. And I was lucky that I had very early proof that meditation worked. Still, there is an element of faith. I have friends who have resisted psychedelics not out of fear of the experience but out of fear of the transformation: how can I know who I’ll become?

This book can’t answer that for anyone, individually. But I think it is one way to know how to update. And as a new practitioner, that update was useful for me.

I look forward to reading it again. I expect I could do so yearly and find something new in it every time.

In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov

This book comes highly lauded by some of the most notable people in the dharma community. From the front cover alone:

“This book has the potential to change the reader’s life forever.” — George Saunders

“One of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read.” — Pema Chödrön

It has a 4.7 on Amazon. Everyone seems to love it. I felt…deeply conflicted by it?

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was born into what is essentially Tibetan Buddhist royalty: his mother is a descendant of two Tibetan kings; his father is Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, under whom many Western teachers — including Loch Kelly and Sam Harris — studied.

As royalty, Mingyur Rinpoche grows up deeply sheltered, sequestered from the world and permitted to enter into it only under the eye of a guardians. He has the first genuine independent experience of his life at the age of 36, after he leaves farewell letter describing his intention to go on a traditional wandering meditation of four years.

It’s a moving book. It captures interiority with delicacy and precision. But it’s that that I find off-putting.

The book is co-written with Helen Tworkov, the founding editor of Tricycle Magazine. She’s studied with Mingyur Rinpoche since 2006, and as the editor of America’s only Buddhist magazine, makes sense as a co-writer (he asked her). And I think she did a wonderful job. It has vulnerable narrations of Mingyur Rinpoche’s confusion, for instance, at how the class system in India works, the stress and self-consciousness of navigating independently for the first time, the discomfort and demanded — at first — of a mendicant: asking for alms, begging for food, finding a place to sleep.

I’m stuck because I’m not sure where Mingyur Rinpoche stops and Tworkov begins. Mingyur Rinpoche is not fluent in English. He speaks it well enough to teach, but in a limited capacity. I haven’t found details on the translation of this book, but Tworkov did write about translating another of his books, Turning Confusion into Clarity:

During the retreat Mingyur Rinpoche asked for my help in putting together a chapbook on the foundational practices for his non-Tibetan students. This modest request became a 350-page book, Turning Confusion into Clarity: A Guide to the Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism. My role as co-writer entailed translating Mingyur’s broken English and maintaining his animated explanations while restructuring the grammar of every sentence.

I imagine this book goes farther than mere restructuring. Translating teaching seems very different to me than translating internal experience. I struggle to articulate my own experience in the subtleties of meditation. My meditation log sometimes consists of hand-wavey descriptions and metaphors that I only recognize because I lived them.

The events of the book take place in the first few weeks of Mingyur Rinpoche’s first few weeks of a four-year meditation period, but they are described in sometimes hour-by-hour detail. Meditation is supposed to sharpen your memory, and Tworkov interviewed Mingyur Rinpoche in between 2016 and 2018 multiple times, but it is hard to think that so much of the detail is fully accurate. It does not, in other words, feel completely true.

I was also challenged by the subject of the last quarter of the book. Only a week or so after he has left on his wandering retreat, Mingyur Rinpoche gets sick. What began as a travel narrative turns gradually into a feverish meditation — literally — on his slow descent into severe enteric infection and confrontation of what it means to die.

Some sections are didactic, Mingyur Rinpoche’s ostensible reflections on traditional Tibetan teachings as he contemplates mortality:

We cannot attain unborn deathless reality until we accept death. The bardo texts describe this as mother and child union. The air element inside our bodies dissolves into space; space dissolves into itself; into spacious awareness. Individuated spaciousness is like the contents of an empty cup. Space exists within the cup but does not belong to the cup. When the cup breaks, the contained space joins the space that has no edges, that is not contained. In the bardo texts, the cup-space is called child luminosity and boundless space is called mother luminosity. At the time of dying, with now shadow of conceptual mind-left intact, child luminosity gravitates towards its mother, as if coming home, and mother can prevent this reunion.

At some point he fully admits of his own impending death and is paralyzed by indecision over what to do: seek help, or accept his fate with awareness.

By midday the indecision was driving me crazy. I knew that my family members, and the nuns and monks under my guidance, and friends around the world would miss me, and they would miss the benefits of my physical body. Yet I have trained in awareness and in bardo practices my entire life. I did not know that I would need them so early on. Nonetheless, I believe in my own experience, in the words of my father, and other teachers, that awareness is deathless, that it will never die, that I will never die.

He never does decide. Instead, he passes out as he gets up to go to fetch water and use the bathroom. He wakes up in a hospital on an IV drip, brought there by a stranger —who turned out to be wealthy novice practitioner — he had befriended earlier in the book.

I recognize that death contemplation and meditation play an essential role in some areas of Buddhism. And I can — with a large leap of faith — understand how Mingyur Rinpoche could choose to witness the process over acting on it. But it would not be the decision I would make.

So why was it nonetheless useful? It’s still a beautiful book. But beyond that, there’s clearly something here I don’t understand, and my reaction (of anger, disgust, confusion?) seems useful to witness. That people such as Saunders, Chödrön, and Jack Kornfield would fight it so insightful suggests to me that there is something there I have not grasped, some deeper lesson in what appears to me on the surface like obdurateness and ignorance. Sometimes books have useful lessons to impart. Sometimes they show you what you still have yet to understand.

Focused and Fearless by Shaila Catherine

The Experience of Samadhi by Richard Shankman

Practicing the Jhanas, by Stephen Snyder and Tina Rasmussen

Okay, three books, all on jhanas. Here’s why. There are only a handful of books specific to jhana practice. By far the most commonly read is Leigh Brasington’s Right Concentration, followed (I think) by David Johnson’s Path to Nibbana. These were the two books that were most useful to me in my practice, and I would recommend both over the three listed above.

But I think that the three cited here were all valuable as a way to expand and deepen my practice around its edges.

Focused and Fearless is an underratedly good manual. Brasington’s’s is somewhat more beginner friendly, but Catherine writes with a different energy: an archetypal wise woman to Brasington’s southern stoner elf.

Reading a variety of jhana books helps to triangulate the subtleties of experience in the practice. For example, Catherine says that first jhana can sometimes be so subtle that you may slip into unnoticed. This contradicts most every other teacher I’ve read. I remember finding it odd. Only months later, during a slump in my practice that felt very low resolution, I realized I found myself entering into jhana in a way similar to what Catherine describe. Some sits J1 feels like cannonballing into a pool. Others, you dip your toe into it, and slowly follow your toe down.

Practicing the Jhanas by Snyder and Rasmussen details the practice as taught by Pa Auk Sayadaw. There’s lots of “debate” in the “jhana community” about the proper depth of jhana practice — “real jhanas.”. This book teaches the unquestionable deep end. (In more ways than one; it takes iddhi, Buddhist psychic powers, as being if not real then at least not not real.)

I think there’s not as much discussion about jhanas as taught by Pa Auk. Where Jhourney is a jhana speed run, Snyder and Rasmussen describe the traditional progression. You don’t move from J1 to J2 until you’ve mastered the ability to stay in J1 for 3 hours, and then J2 for 3 hours, and so on. This is worth reading to better understand what is possible at the deeper end of practice.

The Experience of Samadhi is a strange book. The first half explains the jhanas as described in the Pali sutras. Actually, all of them do, but most tend to translate that in their own words. The descriptions here are so by the book that they read at times less like a guide than an academic paper. It is impersonal as to feel doctrinal. I had the experience of wondering whether Shankman had ever himself experienced jhana.

But the second half is brilliant — interviews on samadhi (concentration) practice and jhana with Jack Kornfield, Ajaan Thanissaro, Sharon Salzburg, and Pa Auk Sayadaw, among others. It’s useful to see the range of idiosyncratic beliefs here: on whether there is a distinction between mindfulness and concentration practice (Thanissaro says no, for instance), on where insights come in jhana practice (Ajahn Brahmavanso says while coming out of jhana, but not after), and in general on how much disagreement there is between teachers over a wide range of questions that the sutras leave up to interpretation.

Seeing that Frees

I started listening to Burbea’s retreat talks right after my Jhourney retreat. So it’s hard to say how much my impression of him is informed by the ecstasy of that first week back. I hear him speak and am immediately dropped into a place of calm and comfort. His voice is like a weighted blanket made manifest in an ASMR recording.

I knew that Burbea was highly regarded within dharma circles, and he seems to occupy a special place within Bay Area/tpot meditators. His retreat talks go a long way towards explaining why.

But it wasn’t until a few months of trying to break into Seeing That Frees that I felt like I really got it. Rob’s gift is that he was able to create something I think is genuinely new: not just an adaptation of Buddhist practice to a Western audience, but a fusion of Western thought — including some aspects of it, like certain corners of depth psychology, that sometimes arrived independently at Buddhist conclusions — with contemplative practice.

A core of the book is on the idea of dependent origination, which is central to most Buddhist schools: if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist. This isn’t the hardest teaching to grasp, and I think it’s been expressed many times by many different people. See John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Burbea shows how you can make this insight your practice, and as such, open up space to see your life, your actions, your reality, as dependent on the way you look at them.

The book is dense, and a lot of it is practice-based. I couldn’t find a way into it until a month or two after I got home from my retreat — it felt too advanced for me. I’ve wanted to give it more time, and there is some sense in which I haven’t felt like I have sufficient space to give it the attention it seems to deserve. It deserves, I think, its own review.

I will also say this, though I don’t really know what to make of it, only that I think it is true: I find something about this book holy.

I don’t really know how to explain what space Burbea occupies in my head at the moment. I feel a deep sadness at his death from pancreatic cancer in 2021. I have cried multiple times — still working on the death thing — thinking about it as I listen to him. There is a sense in which discovering meditation three years after his passing feels to me akin to discovering music after the dissolution of the Beatles. Yes, the recordings are still there, but oh, to have felt his presence.

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GLP-1s are a miracle drug. In 2023, the US obesity rate fell for the first time in decades — from 41.9% in 2020 to 40.3%.1 That’s 4.2 million fewer obese Americans, likely, at least in a part, a result of the more widespread adoption of drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Zepbound.

The miracle — I’m sure you’re aware — only begins at obesity. Increasing research shows GLP-1s are effective against many chronic diseases that are downstream of excess weight: stroke, heart disease, and kidney disease to name a few. Whether those effects are entirely attributable to weight reductions isn’t yet clear, but the likely answer is: there’s more going on.

They also appear to treat, probably by dampening the brain’s reward system, drug addiction and alcoholism. And new studies are coming out all the time highlighting the drugs’ efficacy across a wider range of conditions. One from November of this year showed GLP-1s reduced knee arthritis pain in overweight adults — and that effect appeared to be independent of weight loss, probably because of reductions in inflammation.

So: It is not a stretch to say we shouldn’t even refer to these as “weight loss drugs,” at least exclusively. And I would not be surprised if, as more people get on them, we continue to see surprising byproduct effects, especially via reduction of compulsive behavior pathways, on things that aren’t even in the conversation: doomscrolling, workaholism, etc. etc.

More to the point: As GLP-1s become more common, I think it’s likely that premature deaths from a variety of causes begin to decrease in the US — possibly even in the next few years, definitely in the medium-term.

And they will become more common. The Biden administration recently proposed covering GLP-1s for people with cardiovascular disease on Medicare. That’s good. They should expand it to obesity too — although there needs to be a federal approval to remove Medicare’s restriction on anti-obesity drugs for coverage to be even wider, and ideally they’d do that before RFK takes the helm.

This is, let’s be clear, a monumental public health victory. GLP-1s should be offered as first line treatment option for anyone with obesity — and probably for other conditions too. They should be cheaper. They should be widely accessible. They should be celebrated.

And they are, all the time, on my feed.

But I sometimes think my timeline is too progress-pilled, too techno-optimist to acknowledge the unsettling fact that the current state of the art treatment for obesity is:

• a drug that acts on the brain

• costs a lot of money

• has to be taken for life

• likely to have hugely inequitable distribution for the foreseeable future

• and does not work for everyone

My argument is not that we need to course correct.

My argument is that the discourse needs a little more nuance, because:

1. GLP-1 supply is not going to meet demand for years, and possibly for a decade or more. Even when it does, there will still be tens of millions of Americans — and hundreds of millions of people around the world — who either do not respond or cannot tolerate GLP-1s. We need to do a better job of considering them now.

2. That we haven’t figured out a better solution to the obesity epidemic is sad, reflects our near-total inability to control diet-related negative externalities on people’s health. It needs to be acknowledged for what it is: a little dystopian. To be clear: we don’t really have other options that work.2 But I think it’s worth lingering on why coordination on this problem is so hard because right now we’re at risk of polarizing it.

3. More to the point: we aren’t fully aware of the trade-offs we’re making. Yes, we have long-term data on GLP-1s and diabetes — they appear relatively safe. But I don’t see enough people considering even the small possibility that having a huge portion of the population on GLP-1 drugs long-term, may have unintended consequences — if not for them, almost certainly for society, and maybe in weird and unpredictable ways. Some of these, for instance plummeting ultra-processed food sales, might be good. But I want to seriously consider that while this is a cheap lunch, it is not a free lunch.

Supply

GLP-1s are miracles — for 80% of the population

Last week, everyone seemed to jump on the AP for this headline:

Yea, the media is negative. But I feel fine taking the contrarian bait here: 1 out of 5 is a lot!

We’ve been talking, often breathlessly, about the efficacy of GLP-1s for over a year. Emerging research from real-world settings suggests that our expectations of weight loss in real-world settings should be titrated compared to early clinical trials. A September JAMA article for instance found when prescribed for weight loss the mean weight reduction for both semaglutide and liraglutide in one year was -5.9%.3 Tirzepatide and other pipeline treatments may be more effective, but I would expect the overall trend of lower real-world effectiveness to stand.

As a corrective to the media frenzy of the past year, and as a way to dampen expectations that might actually need to be dampened, I think the headline is…fine?

GLP-1s don’t work for everyone for two different reasons:

1. Somewhere between 10-15% of people are non-responders. Some people have genetic variations in their GLP-1 receptors that affect how well they bind to the medication. Some people develop compensatory mechanisms and don’t actually eat much less. For whatever reason, some people do not lose weight.

2. GLP-1s have low adherence rates. While some of this is an artifact of inconsistent supply, it is mostly due to side-effects. The most severe, medically, are inflammation in the pancreas, paralysis of the stomach muscles, and bowel obstructions. But many people also report nausea so bad they discontinue, extremely low energy levels, extreme muscle loss, and other degradations in quality of life that are — I’d like to emphasize — so severe they are, by revealed preference, worse than obesity.

Many side effects do appear to abate over time. However, since the first people to get them are likely to be the those who are also more skilled at managing them, we might expect the trends on this to get worse, not better. The good news here is that we are learning more and more about why GLP-1s lead to side-effects, and in the future may be to develop even more targeted treatments. It is far more common to hear people describe these drugs as life-changing, and I don’t want to short-change that.

But you don’t have to dig far to find examples of people who describe their experience as hell. If I can correct anything, it is the underlying optimistic assumption that GLP-1s are a win-win-win. For the most part, I think the quality of life of being a normal weight far outweighs even any long-term side effects. But that isn’t true of everyone.

All this, of course, assumes people can access them.

Supply is constrained

The best piece of media I’ve consumed related to GLP-1s is Acquired’s history of Novo Nordisk. It was the first inkling I had of how wide-reaching they might be — the line they used was “miracle drug for humanity,” and I think that isn’t an exaggeration.

But when the podcast talked a lot about supply constraints, I realized we had no solid numbers. So I reached out to Greg Justice, a forecaster with Samotsvety, to understand just how constrained we were.

What became his Asterisk piece landed on I think a surprising and under-discussed number. By 2030, we’re likely to have sufficient GLP-1 supply for just 23 million Americans — about 4x as many are now taking it, but still far, far short of the 100 million obese people — to say nothing of overweight —- who might benefit.

Greg’s estimate could very well be off. For one, he didn’t factor compounding into his estimates — at the time it was unclear how widespread this was happening, whereas now even Hims is selling compounded semaglutide. Still, I have yet to see any convincing arguments to the contrary. Even if we assume supply is double Greg’s projection, we’re facing supply constraints for the foreseeable future.

After 2030, I’m not sure what to think, and much of that will depend on how strong demand remains over the next five years, a function of, among other things, insurance approvals, further research, discontinuation rates, and a bunch of things that fall under the nebulous bucket of “culture.” But it remains more likely than not in medium-term, millions of people who might benefit from GLP-1s will be unable to get them.

I’m worried here, one, about stigma. We are already in a place where obese people are deeply shamed for a perceived lack of self-control. It seems a likely possibility that this stigma grows over time. We should have a little more empathy for people who have tried GLP-1s and bounced off.

What I’m more worried about is that in the enthusiasm to embrace GLP-1s, we’ve over-corrected into not caring enough about the upstream determinants of why people become obese in the first place. The right seems to be in-fighting about this right now, and I think it’s worth considering why.

New worlds

Imagine a world where we created an anti-depressant/anti-anxiolytic that was vastly superior to SSRIs, NDRIs, MAOIs, etc. It’s good for work productivity. In low doses it can calm your nerves. In moderate doses it affects euphoria. People take it before parties. In fact, if you want to trip with it in high doses, you can. Doctors prescribe it freely, insurance covers it without question, supervisors encourage it for workplace use. There are no side effects. It’s almost entirely free of stigma — people talk about their doses at dinner parties. The government, in fact, subtly encourages its use. It is basically a win-win-win-win.

This is of course the plot of Brave New World. That people find GLP-1s a little dystopian, that they push back, shouldn’t be surprising. If Ozempic appeared in a book 50 years ago, it would be a dystopian novel, and it would have been lambasted for ripping off Huxley. Its theme would be that there is something rotten with the system and culture that is so eager to embrace techno-fixes as it turns its eyes away from the root cause — however complex — of its problems.

GLP-1s aren’t a perfect analogy to soma. Under any sane cost-benefit analysis, GLP-1s come out extremely positive. But there are costs, even if those costs are difficult to quantify. And one of those is that we’re even less likely now to figure out the coordination problems that have led to the obesity epidemic in the first place.

I spent a chunk of my PhD research various forms of regulation of the food environment, from proposed pigouvian taxes to mandatory labeling schemes to consumer education. When they work, which isn’t often, the effect is usually incredibly small.4 But by and large, this is because more heavy-handed regulation hasn’t been attempted in any way.

This is when everyone chimes in with their this doesn’t work, libertarian, Oreos have positive utility by making people happy, everyone needs to eat, what about food deserts counter-arguments. Almost everyone I know has thrown up their hands on regulating the food environment. We’re happy to hype GLP-1s because diet, education, exercise programs, etc. etc. didn’t work. Stephan Guyenet, pretty much the smartest person I know on this topic, is on the record saying to Ezra Klein that it’s hard not to see a technological solution to the obesity crisis. I agree.

But I still want to linger on that, because I think it suggests there is a range of problems — say total fertility rate — that are individual-level choices influenced by macro-level policy choices that are extremely hard to control. It should give us pause that we never figured out how to create a healthy food environment.

There is a pyrrhic nature to the success of GLP-1s. There is something unsettling in the fact that rather than regulate the food environment, the winning approach is for either individuals or governments to spend thousands of dollars a year on an injectable that affects changes in your brain.

Thomas Chatterton Williams got ratioed for this, probably more deservedly than not.5 “Deservedly” because we really don’t have good evidence of effective weight loss interventions, and his proposal changes little. But “not” because the idea that GLP-1s are suboptimal has weirdly, quickly, become controversial?

The degree to which this has become polarized is concerning. We’re in the weird timeline where both left and right have rejected policy-level solutions in favor of individual responsibility. In one you are responsible for finding and paying for a drug you will take once a week for the rest of your life. In the other, healthy food and exercise, and maybe no red dyes or corn syrup, I guess.

Lots of people are assholes on Twitter about this. We’ve already experienced enough polarization with obesity. I would so much prefer if GLP-1-stans approached this with civility rather than scorn, and stopped trying to shove progress-pills down everyone’s throats.

Trade-offs

And so mostly I’m asking for a little bit more humility.

These drugs seem really special. I spent seven years of my life in a PhD program looking at obesity trends and feeling deeply pessimistic about progress. That’s now changed.

But the same humility that makes us acknowledge these drugs' apparently magical effects should also make us watch carefully for delayed side effects or complications we haven't predicted. Real medicine usually involves tradeoffs - for GLP-1s to be truly different would be extraordinary. We have been here before. The entire reason that Medicare doesn’t cover obesity treatment is that historically, weight loss drugs that proved effective at reducing body mass also caused serious issues In the 1990s, Fen-phen was withdrawn after causing heart valve damage. Similarly, Meridia (sibutramine) was taken off the market in 2010 due to increased risk of cardiovascular events including strokes.

We have more long-term data on GLP-1s, and the data on long-term use suggests nothing on this scale is of concern. But there may be as yet unpredicted consequences. Maybe we'll find out that constantly signaling satiety has downsides we haven't discovered yet. Maybe real-world effectiveness diminishes compare to clinical trials. Or maybe we really have stumbled onto a biochemical lever that modern life pulled too far in one direction, and these drugs just push it back.

The next decade will tell us which story is right. But in the interim it’s worth remembering that we haven’t yet arrived — and won’t for many years — at obesity as a solved problem.

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1

It might have fallen earlier, but NHANES, where the data comes from is intermittent. We won’t get the next data until 2026. It remains to be seen whether the trend continues. While we can’t for sure pinpoint drugs like Ozempic as the reason, the timing coincides with their rise, and the reversal trend is stronger among college-educated and therefore more likely to afford GLP-1s.

Everything was fine. Everything had always been fine. Everything would always be fine. 

It wasn’t a thought. I knew it. And I still know it. In the months leading up to that moment, I’d been writing on development of the mystical experience scales used in psilocybin trials. I’d gotten curious about them because while my own psychedelic use had been profound, strange, beautiful, and useful, it had never been — psychometrically speaking — “mystical.”1 

It was fun. I got to do personal integration while I wrote a piece. And I learned some stuff — about science but also myself. Several people I talked to seemed to want to nudge me into opening towards mystical experience. Bill Richards, the head guide for the early psilocybin trials at Hopkins, corrected me multiple times when I explained that I hadn’t had one — “yet.” 

And so, I thought, sitting there in the grass feeling the deepest equanimity I’d ever experienced, here it was. 

Now I’m less sure. I think what I experienced was equally interpretable as something like a jhana.2 

—

My understanding of the jhanas prior to the retreat had come mostly from reading Twitter out of the corner of my eye. I followed Nick, I’d read Scott’s posts, and I’d done some light googling. But I was not a meditator. In retrospect, I was actually pretty ignorant about meditation. (I took an 8-week Compassion Cultivation Training course back in 2015 and had sat ~20 hours but did not develop a practice.) Jhanas were intriguing, but I was also a bit skeptical, and since I was not equipped to investigate that skepticism, I didn’t pay close attention.

Then in January, Nadia pitched what would become her Asterisk piece. Her initial idea had been to focus on the jhana scene: who are these people allegedly finding bliss in their bedrooms, what are they, actually doing and where do they fit into San Francisco’s long history as a playground of hedonistic self-experimentation? That changed after Nadia went on a Jhourney retreat and her piece evolved from social scienceish to a personal narrative of her (at times profound) experience. Which convinced me to sign up too.

I’m now about a month back. I gave it some time to settle. While this was very true on the first day back, it remains true today: I feel — I say this carefully, and somewhat hesitantly — changed. 

Which I didn’t totally expect. I realize now that I went into the retreat with a lot of gaps: on what the jhanas are, how they fit into the broader meditation landscape, and what you’re supposed to do with them. I want to fill in some of those gaps. 

The first gap is how you enter jhana. Most of what I’d read about this was from experienced meditators, save Nadia, and she was basically gifted them, so that didn’t help. (While I started drafting this piece, Nadia wrote a guide, which is very useful. I won’t replicate it, just add my personal experience.) The process is important. It might be more important than the jhanas.

The second is that the common shorthand of jhanas=bliss is good marketing, but it’s a synecdoche that’s unrepresentative of the spectrum of experience. I think its usefulness is going to end soon as more people learn, practice, and write about these states.

And the last gap is what you’re supposed to do with the jhanas once you find them. 

You should read this as a novice’s retreat report. I’m a meditation baby. There are lots of things I don’t understand, context I absolutely don’t have, likely things I’ve gotten wrong, and I have soo many questions. But I did figure out how to access jhana in two days. And hopefully my freshness will be useful. 

Getting in

Here’s the mental model I started with: 

Step 1: Become extraordinarily concentrated on a single point, like a monk, like Buddha

Step 2: ?????

Step 3: Bliss on demand 

I did enough research while editing Nadia’s piece to dispel some but not all of that. In particular, what her piece didn’t answer for me — what nothing I read really did — is what steps you need to take to do step one, and what actually happens in step two.

This is a feature more than a bug. Jhourney’s line, borrowing from Romeo Stevens, is that until you’ve entered a jhana, the instructions to do so read like poetry. After, they read like an instruction manual. But a lot of subjective experience is in fact like this. You don’t learn how to ride a bike by reading about it. 

Here is how Leigh Brasington, author of Right Concentration, describes the process:

“The move from access concentration [a state where you are fully with your object of meditation and background noise, if it’s there, is wispy at its strongest] is to shift your attention to a pleasant sensation and stay with that as your object of attention, ignoring any background thinking. If you can stay with your undistracted attention on the pleasant sensation, then pīti [glee, rapture, the main characteristic of the first jhana] will arise.” 

Brasington teaches jhanas through focus on the breath. After you’ve built up strong enough concentration, you switch your attention to a “pleasant sensation” and center on that until it subsumes your entire focus. There’s only a handful of popular books on jhana,3 but the majority teach it this way.

Jhourney teaches this differently. They skip the shift to the pleasant sensation and start with it — through a combination of relaxation and mettā,4 or lovingkindness meditation (as Nadia’s description suggests, any positive or pleasant emotion will work here). Their core instructions boil down to:

• Cultivate enjoyment/mettā

• Cultivate relaxation

• Observe the process

There is more verbal instruction, there’s details in the practice book, and there’s plenty of time for Q&A + a few practice interviews, but by and large, that’s it. This is the trick. This is the discovery that pre-dates Buddha, the secret locked behind monastery walls, the alchemical feat attainable by one monk in a million, what everyone on your feed is doing before they seem to be tapping into ecstatic pleasure. You get to jhana by relaxing, finding pleasure, paying close attention to that process, and allowing it to amplify as you do.5 

Here’s how I got to the point where that makes sense.

I’d tried metta during the course I took in grad school, and it didn’t click for me. It felt false to (as I thought of it) “conjure” feelings. When Jhourney introduced this as the week’s practice, I felt a similar feeling as when I’m asked by some effervescent facilitator I just met to do a group icebreaker. 

I resolved to try, with the assumption that I could change course if things weren’t working. Jhourney encourages experimentation and fast failure.

I didn’t really enjoy my first day. I spent a lot of it on the lawn. It was nice in the way that lying in the sun and not working is usually nice. I found that after some initial resistance to starting metta, it did feel, yea, okay, pleasant to think happy thoughts about people. But I struggled to sit for more than 45 minutes, and I still didn’t understand how any of this got to jhana. My reflection from that day describes feeling unfocused, confused, and discouraged. 

I realized, in fast succession, two things I was doing wrong. The first was not relaxing deeply enough. We did a relaxation meditation on the second morning. This, I realized, rhymed with yin yoga practice. In yin, you hold each pose for several minutes. With enough attention on where you hold tension, there always a way to release a little more. Every second of the pose feels like a different pose. The meditation equivalent of that is almost exactly the same. I scanned my body for tension, I relaxed it. 

The second thing I realized was that I was creating too much internal mental tension in the process. (Weirdly, the CCT class I took never covered this. I wish they had, because I might have enjoyed myself more.) There’s a subtle difference between recognizing and pushing aside a distracting thought, and acknowledging and releasing a distracting thought. One leads to tension and tightening -- not now, stop thinking. The other is like watching an object pass by through a car window. With close enough attention, I started to feel this.

This is (I’m assuming) a novice meditation move, but here’s how I worked with that for the first few days. There’s an illustration from The Mind Illuminated that gets at this distinction. 

Every time a thought arose, I greeted it, and asked it to line up with the other cats. I literally conceptualized each of my thoughts as cats. When does this work? A cat. My hips are tight. Cat. Why does Andrew Huberman annoy me so much?6 Cat. This was like, cute and kinda dumb, enough that it stopped stressing me out about thinking so much. It worked. What began as a parade slowed to a few strays. 

Pause just to emphasize: that’s the mental architecture I was working with before I hit jhana. No extraordinary focus. Relaxation and some cats.

Continue: On the afternoon on the second day — probably my tenth hour of practice — I switched from a long relaxation body scan to metta. I’d been hopping around in my object of attention: an old friend I haven’t seen for a decade, a wedding I’d just attended, some fleeting memories of summer camp. Then I switched to thinking of my partner and my dog, images of a day we spent laugh-crying in hysterics at Baker Beach. I took that feeling and I made that feeling my focus. I stayed with it for a few minutes. 

Then a tingle, a buzz, a levity appeared at a point just above my eyes. My breathing became deeper and more rapid. I noticed the buzz, and as I did it did traced a circle around the crown of my head. I turned my attention towards it — I actually physically rolled my eyes up to meet it — and then I was lifted up into what felt like a wholly different plane. I felt a rush of euphoria centered around my skull, humming and electric, wash up and down my back. 

Analogies that describe the jhanas are only slant rhymes. The experience for me was both like what I’d read about the first jhana but still qualitatively distinct. And the experience of each jhana is also different each time. If I had to describe this first experience it’s something like: edging is to orgasm as that shiver you get from ASMR is to the first jhana. Like, you know how the thing about ASMR (or those scalp massagers) is that it always feels like the experience wants to evolve into something more complete and all encompassing? First jhana feels like it’s something like that. But that only captures the physical pleasure. The emotional component is equally strong.

After that, my retreat shifted entirely. I could let myself relax what I realized I’d been carrying: an internal pressure to achieve. Liberated and lighter, I got excited that I had five more days to continue exploring. I hit J1 a second and third time. 

I started to think of getting into jhana a little like the verse-jumping headsets in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Relax sufficiently enough, focus deeply enough, and the green light on the bluetooth headset turned on. (This analogy works on a couple of levels. There are also times when access into jhana feels like it’s flickering. Move towards it too early and you don’t get anywhere, and will need to re-center again. This is the yellow light that gets you into the universe with hot dog hands.)

I had a practice interview the morning of Day 3. The main instruction I got was to notice where I still held tension or resistance in the jhana, to relax it, and to refocus on the subtlety of the experience. With that instruction — I re-interpreted it similar to the canonical psychedelic guidance to let yourself float down the river — I found J2 and J3 in succession. 

The third day was also when I had my first inclination that the practice was deeper than simply accessing nice feelings on tap. One of my sits in J3 ended imagining the deep contentment of lying with my daughter on my chest. But I’m not a parent yet. My partner and I have been debating when to have kids for years, finding lots of financial and logistical reasons to delay. But the resistance, if I’m being honest, is much stronger on my end. I am nervous about parenthood, about the change it brings, the usual stuff. While in jhana, my emotional resistance felt lessened, like something I could actually grapple with. The experience, in fact, if I was to pay attention to what I was feeling, seemed like something that might actually lead to deep contentment.

Jhanas one through three varied in degree and intensity and texture each time, but they were also analogous enough to experiences in my own life to feel familiar. I’ve had joy (J1), happiness (J2), and contentment (J3). The jhanas felt like those just of a different kind: distilled, essence of happiness, or pure, uninterrupted contentment.7

Then I sank down into fourth jhana. Everyone seems to have some kind of mind-blowing shout it from the rooftops moment in jhana. For most people that seems to happen in the first jhana. For me it’s the fourth. This is me shouting from the roof top:

The fourth jhana is to experience what noise-canceling headphones are to sound. It is climbing into bed on the first day of vacation after you’ve wrapped a months-long project. It is sitting down in the grass after finishing a marathon. It is the nothing that is not there and nothing that is. It’s the air conditioner in your brain shutting off — and you hadn’t realized it was on. It’s adderall in a float tank, a xanax in zero gravity. Take the equanimity and stillness you find in each of these, then put it through a sieve. It is looking up from your yoga mat at the trees and knowing: everything is fine, everything has always been fine, everything will always be fine. 

It wasn’t the exact same feeling as that moment in the lawn. That experience still feels mystical to me. But it was similar enough that I got a flavor of the extent to which all of these experiences — mystical, psychedelic, jhanic — converge on a shared set of mental phenomenona. I think we’re in the very early days of elucidating this, and I think academia is actually going to get a lot more fun over the next decade, like the past two decades of psychology have basically been what behaviorism was to animal science.

Once I’d learned the fourth jhana, if I didn’t exert effort to stay with the first three, I would fall quickly into the fourth, like a magnet snapping to its pole. That’s remained true since I’ve been home, and it’s something I’m still trying to figure out. 

Getting out: the formless jhanas

Jhanas five through eight, the “formless” jhanas, involve, uh, transcending material form and entering realms of infinite space (5), infinite consciousness (6), “no-thingness” (7), and neither perception nor non-perception (8).8 I only accessed the higher jhanas twice. I haven’t been able to access them since being home, so my familiarity with them is as theoretical as experiential. I’m not even going to name where I went in the text (supposition in footnote) because there appears to be a lot of discussion over to what extent people exaggerate their own “achievements” in jhana. For me the value I found speaks for itself. 

You can either volitionally move through jhanas, or you can relax deeper and deeper into the experience and allow them to evolve. Different teachers give different instructions for deliberate passage. To move from the fourth to the fifth, for instance, you can contemplate space and notice that your perception has no edges, or alternatively to find a hole in what you see and expand it, or alternatively to extend compassion outward until it becomes literally boundless.  

But none of these fully clicked for me while in jhana four (I think because there was too much effort involved on my my end.) So instead I simply hung out and practiced looking with ever more subtlety. I tried not to try.

By the fifth day, I’d stopped setting timers. I set an intention to spend as much time as I could between lunch and dinner in meditation. I ran through the first and fourth in about an hour, confident, now, that I could track the distinctive features of each. From four, I waited to see where to go next. 

The formless jhanas have some of the ineffability of psychedelic experience, but where a trip can’t be put into words because of its dream logic phantasmagoria, for jhana it’s like trying to describe the shape of an object while blindfolded, and if you speak too loud it disappears . There are distinctive features everyone seems to agree on9, but most people who write about them devote a lot less wordspace relative to the first four. 

So: I left the fourth jhana. But I did not get to any place that had hallmarks of the fifth. At some point, after seeming to float in still space for a while, the idea came to me unbidden that it was no longer necessary for me to be there. It was comical, actually, that I was there at all. Sometimes, on a trip, you’re given an option: to persist in your own ego or to let it dissolve. Not knowing what to do, I followed my own trip logic and gave up the idea of holding onto my consciousness. And I touched here the sense of a unitive consciousness — or even a mystical other — though only briefly. I felt freedom, a lifting, but incomplete, like an interrupted sneeze. What was left of I continued to observe. 

Once, on five grams of psilocybin, I experienced the dissolution of everything. Kaleidoscopic colors that had comprised my trip faded first to black. The sound in my headphones disappeared entirely. The black then turned to white. My sense of my body disappeared entirely. Then even the white was gone, until whatever was left of me arrived at a place absent of color, physicality, and self. There were no things anywhere at all. 

During this sit, I spent some time in a place extremely similar to this.10 The seventh jhana is known as “the realm of nothingness” or (better) “no-thingness.” I don’t know if this was that. It felt like I dreamed in and of a place with no-things.11 

Still the experience evolved. I don’t really know what to say about what happened next. Images I can’t remember appeared in my consciousness. It felt like I was lucid dreaming from inside Plato’s cave. That’s all I’ve got.

And then I found myself, without trying to go there, back in J4. I became conscious, suddenly, of not knowing where to go. I could have opened my eyes. Instead, still feeling focused, I stayed.

I knew for sure that I hadn’t experienced the fifth jhana, and decided to try and go there again. One of the instructions we worked with for fifth jhana was to expand compassion outward. Resolved to that, I realized I didn’t really know what the difference between metta and compassion was supposed to be. I didn’t know who to feel compassion for. I reached, and my school photo from first grade is what I caught. 

I had (maybe we all had) an emotionally turbulent childhood. From this place of deep equanimity, I suddenly felt this intensely. Remembered, somatically, the experience of being a kid, and yet experienced it as my adult self, which grieved over years of emotional dysregulation. But that feeling was simultaneously matched by — or maybe even better, contained within — an overwhelming sense of gratitude: for the way my life has unfolded, for the things I’ve been able to, for the person I became. I cried, lightly, feeling both sorrow and pride. And then I heaved for a minute through some autonomic belly sobs.

I opened my eyes. I laid there staring at the ceiling for a few minutes. And then — let me stress how unusual this is, but it felt like the exact right thing to do at the time — I put on a song and danced.12 

When I looked at the clock, three and a half hours had passed. 

—

Jhanas are sometimes discussed as peak experiences. That never made sense to me. Daily jhana practice can’t, by definition, stand out. But that sit did. I felt all the catharsis of a trip without having to first take a ride on Willy Wonka’s wondrous boat ride to get to the inventing room. Jhana practice felt in comparison like a lazy river. 

By the end of the retreat, my time to access jhana had dropped to minutes. And — coming back to Everything, Everywhere — I realized that I didn’t need a headset or green light to get there. I could access the first four jhanas while walking. I would stare up at the sky, conjure some joy, kick myself into first, then come down into the fourth. The experience was lighter, like holding holding a stretch for seconds instead of minutes, and I could keep it only a quarter mile or so at a time. On the last morning, I ran with headphones for the first time. Music had taken on new resonance. Emotions were coming through with greater clarity. Some songs were moving me in between jhanas as I ran.

What do I do with all this joy I’m getting?

There were some immediate tangible benefits. My first week home absolutely sparkled. I’m more social. My smile is always under the surface, not something I need to work towards. I went from 3-4 drinks a week to none. I’m waking up around 5:30 every day without an alarm, and though I’m sleeping less, my HRV has gone up. 

I’d find my attention snapping away from my screen to birdsong, or just the simple sensations of my body moving through space. For a day or two I thought I’d tuned into the vibration of the universe. Then I realized: I have tinnitus.

It’s been a few weeks now, and that experience has leveled out. But my baseline happiness and delight seems to have stabilized quite a few notches above where I began. Maybe more noticeable is that the low-running existential dread I seemed to be always carrying in the background has mostly faded away. Are EA-ish engineers attracted to jhanas because of the way their brain works, or because they’re all desperate to ease the angst of AGI?

Why did I have a relatively easy time accessing jhana, despite having no meditation practice to speak of? I can point to a few things. Brasington, a self-described former pothead who still seems to come alive when hallucinogens are mentioned in his vicinity, has said he can tell someone’s previous drug use by their ease accessing jhana.

I also think that my yoga practice carried over. And I think that Nadia broke for the four-minute mile. I spent many hours with her piece, and maybe more importantly, saw her change in understanding, that I had a good sense of what was on tap. And like Nadia, my day-to-day happiness was already quite high. I think a lot of this may also just be genetic. Give it a few years and we’ll know more.

My hunch is that jhanas are about to explode into mainstream. Oshan’s article gestures at that (while also facilitating it). More pieces are coming. Nadia’s primer appears to have gotten several people into jhana (possibly formless jhanas) within hours. Jhourney has been scaling access faster than probably all teachers in the past. 

But now we’re starting to enter territory where jhanas are going to spread through network effects. Does that come with risks, compunctions with respect to tradition, possible misunderstandings etc. etc.? Yes, of course, and we should be cognizant of ways to scale support. But we should also be excited about the potential.

A year and a half ago, one of the talking point about jhana was whether they were addictive. From the other side, this now seems comical, a little like the way D.A.R.E programs liked to talk about cannabis as the gateway drug to heroin. On their website, Jhourney still describes jhanas as “non-addictive.” Nick and Stephen use a water analogy: even if you begin ravenously thirsty, you no longer crave water after you’ve had your fill. That’s a fine way to think about it, but I think you can push it further. Jhanas are how you realize that you’ve been standing knee-deep in water the whole time.

This is how growing up, evolving, learning, always seem to feel, at least to me. I’ve spent so much time — through therapy and self-enquiry and whatever form of analytical thought — looking for answers to questions that plague me, but when I look back at my own growth, it was never inspired by finding an answer or identifying some Freudian root. I just learned, through whatever grace, to drop the question.

Jhanas are one way to drop the questions. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that my experience on the lawn happened after I’d been trying to intellectually understand mysticism. I had to let analysis go before feeling could arise. Jhanas feel like a way to fast track this understanding. That underneath the thinking brain, I have everything I already need. 

It was strange at first to have picked up an “advanced meditative skill” without having any meditation practice. It felt a little like I learned to make hollandaise sauce without having any idea how to poach an egg — or for that matter, to toast bread. But the answer was obviously not keep spoon-feeding myself the hollandaise. It seems obvious that if I missed jhana, I missed a lot of other stuff along the path. 

So I’ve been exploring other techniques. I recently switched from metta to breath meditation and found my way into the jhanas from there. I’ve been using jhana practice as a jumping off point for non-dual practice. And most of my free time has been spent learning: more about jhana, but also other traditions. The important thing here is that I doubt I would have ever gotten interested in the path except through a Jhourney retreat. I went from not meditating at all to practicing consistently for at least an hour a day. 

Independent of the jhanas, what I learned on retreat was deeply rewarding. Metta (and forgiveness meditations) impacted my affect first subtly, and then all at once. But jhanas were undoubtedly an accelerant to insight into my conscious experience. It’s not that I learned a new way to slake my thirst. Jhanas aren’t actually the water. The water’s been there the whole time.

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