Alex Dobrenko

I know I know. That sounds dumb and unrealistic. I thought the same thing. The truth is people DID tell me this. There were the Instagurus, the Michael Singer and Eckhart Tolle books, the friend who left the grind years ago and never looked back. Intellectually, I could see that it was possible. In practice, I couldn’t get close enough to touch it.

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There’s something fascinating about how people cling to structure in ways they don’t always recognize. We create arbitrary rhythms and rely on rituals of religion, culture, routines, and even superstitions, from morning prayers to knocking on wood to avoid jinxes. Sometimes they’re product of ocd, anxiety, or something else altogether but these... See more

Jules Evans defined a religion as a system that binds us in religio: a kind of sacredness, obligation, faith and “cosmic certainty” towards a particular set of precepts. Those outside the religio are framed as “existential threats”, with a strong in-out dynamic bound by a common transcendent ideal.

Looking at other men is a somewhat novel experience for me. In my former life as a non-father, if I took any notice of another man in the same room, it was probably to appraise him physically, on the off chance that we were to become locked in some form of primitive combat. (Would I be able to beat him in a race? How easy would it be for him to... See more

When I was growing up my parents used a Curta calculator to balance their ‘budget book’. Don’t ask me how it works.

New users often wanted to slot us into “note taking” or “sketchbook/whiteboarding” neither of which were a great fit for the problem we wanted to solve.