Building a life of meaning in the 21st century
This blog explores the basic elements of building a purposeful life, drawn from more than 30 years of reading, practice, and teaching. It combines personal experience and professional insight to offer a clear, usable framework you can apply — whether you’re sorting daily choices, shaping long-term goals, or running workshops.
The framework we’ll explore builds upward: Lifeskills → Ethics + Physics + Logic → Practical Philosophy → Life of Meaning. Each section shows how the previous one supports the next, so small habits and clearer beliefs lead to wiser decisions and, ultimately, a life with purpose. Running through all of it is joie de vivre — the enjoyment of living — not a reward waiting at the top, but a current to be kept flowing at every step. Like anything of value, it doesn’t look after itself: a life lived consciously asks to be actively balanced, the long term against the short, day after day.
I’m looking forward to taking this journey together.
Start here
The Start Here Sequence
Latest Posts
- How and Whether
Some questions ask how. Some ask whether. Both can be assisted — by a teacher, a book, a machine — but neither can be handed over, because what gets built while you answer them is not the answer. It is you. - The Compass in Your Pocket
You are, most likely, an accidental philosopher — living by principles you never chose to examine. This essay is about the compass already in your pocket: how to take it out, check the course it holds, and find out whether that course is truly yours. - An Integrated Life – A Method
Anyone can pick up a violin and make a sound. Making the music you actually hoped for is another matter — it asks that you first learn to play. A life is the same. This is a method for building one you would want to live inside.