Steyn Viljoen

However, as I crossed the threshold, excitement gave way to disappointment. Instead of feeling connected to the natural world, I found myself strangely isolated within the confines of the glass walls. The minimalist aesthetic that I had admired from afar now felt cold and impersonal up close.

moments defined not by their grandeur, but by their authenticity, by the genuine connection they foster.

We create the garden as a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning.

Define Your Way of Life

"But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life."

This is my favorite insight from the letter: Identify how you want to live, not what you want to achieve.

So often people focus all their energy on the summits—but

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There is an urgency to achieve, and no matter how big your life gets, that horrible itch to achieve remains. For people like us, it’s impossible to define what success even means.

The uninterrupted continuousness is critical. As soon as you get in a car or hop on a train, the strange spell of the walk is broken. The point of the continuous uninterrupted walk is to be ensorcelled by its strangeness, to fully inhabit the walk and engage with what the walk delivers, good and bad.

We know that if you’re starving, lonely, or in pain, you’ll probably get happier if you get food, friends, and relief. After that, the returns diminish very quickly. You could read all the positive psychology you want, take the online version of The Science of Wellbeing ("Yale’s Most Popular Course Ever!”), read my post on hacking the hedonic... See more

Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can... See more

The lush atmospheric setting Ocean stages invites the listener to build on it with even more connections and associations from their own experiences and to find their own feelings in the images that arise. Some might call this concatenation of elements a “vibe”: something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose... See more