It probably goes without saying by now that one of the defining features of the world today is its polarization: we’ve got liberals and conservatives endlessly throwing virtual jabs at each other on social media, atheists blaming religious faith for the problems of the world, religious fundamentalists blaming atheism for the same thing and so on. In fact, you could probably take any belief you are certain is true about the world and find someone within a matter of seconds who is just as confident that that belief is completely false.

In terms of trying to get a handle on…

On an unassuming November day in 2017, the world abruptly suffered the loss of a creative giant whose angsty brilliance was comparable to no one before him save a scrawny, blue-eyed poet named Kurt Cobain.

It’s an ambitious comparison, I know, but not an inaccurate one: with the ease it took him to blend together the most seemingly incompatible genres, with his commitment to express his pain without even a hint of inauthenticity and with his undeniable charisma as an icon for those on the fringe who never felt like they belonged, there is no doubt in my mind that…

Now that we’ve had about a year of adapting to a weird, semi-hermitical lifestyle built around a global pandemic under our belts, you probably have a pretty good sense of what has kept you *relatively* sane so far.

And while I’m not sure how many of us are coming out the other side any wiser than we were before, there is at least something to be said for how insights that have always been taken for granted now seem to pop in radical new ways — you know, cliches like friendship is priceless or always make sure you are setting…

Chris McCandless was a young explorer who died in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 and whose life and death happens to be documented in one of the most monumental books of the past 30 years: Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.

Now if we temporarily set aside the cultural impact that we now know Into the Wild has had, it might seem surprising that a story like this would gain so much traction. After all, as sad as Chris’s fate may have been, how many other thousands of cases have there been of young travellers falling victim to the unforgiving depths…

“Oh… What do you hope to do with that?”

As any philosophy student knows, there is no question more soul-crushing than that one.

Maybe it was a concerned friend wondering how you were going to make any money when you were out of school or someone you met at a party who was not-so-subtly judging you for taking an interest in something so impractical. But whatever the context is, the question always rears its ugly head at some point. And as someone who has experienced it many times firsthand, let me tell you that man, it hurts. …

When a drunken man falls from a cart, he may be hurt but he will not be killed. His bones and joints are no different from those of other men, but the degree of harm done by the fall differs radically, for the spiritual in him forms one intact whole. Having been unaware that he was riding, he is now unaware that he is falling.

For every inspirational speech I’ve heard, every pithy Instagram caption I’ve stumbled upon and every grandiose solution to the meaning of life I’ve come across, nothing quite hits me like the quote above.

For one…

After seeing Rolling Stone’s newly released list for the 500 best albums of all time, I found myself yelling at them from my computer screen for a while for not including some of my favourite projects in it. Thinking that my energy could be better spent somewhere else, I figured that it might be a good idea to create a list of my own.

Now I should make something clear from the get go: I am in no way some music criticism savant who just knows every album ever made and can make some authoritative list about which ones are…

The Miserable Genius Hypothesis

Whenever I come across a brilliant thinker, it’s hard not to feel a little insecure.

I mean, just imagine being able to write with the same kind of dark prose of a Kafka or having even just a speck of the creativity of a van Gogh. All the while, the rest of us have to make do here on planet earth.

But usually before I drown in my own self-pity, a somewhat counter-intuitive fact jumps out at me: that the greatest minds in history have often not been able to enjoy their achievements because they otherwise had miserable lives.

Kafka…