People often ask me what I write about.

Artificial intelligence? Travel?  Philosophy?  Language?  Neurodivergence?  Ageing?  Humanity?  Science?  Culture?

The honest answer?

All of those things.

And none of them.

The subjects may appear to constantly change, but my fascination never does.

For as long as I can remember, I have been captivated by one question above all others: what does it mean to be human?

Not just biologically or historically, but experientially. 

How do we think? Why do we perceive the world so differently? How does language shape our understanding? What invisible structures connect seemingly unrelated ideas? What exists around us that we simply haven’t yet developed the tools, or perhaps the vocabulary, to perceive?

Those questions have fascinated and followed me my entire life.

Long before I travelled.

Long before artificial intelligence.

Long before I knew words like intertwingularity or sonder.

I think it’s important to clarify that travel didn’t create my humanity curiosity.

It helped to actualize and fulfilled it.

I never wanted to collect passport stamps or simply say I had “been somewhere.” I wanted to stand where history unfolded. I wanted to hear languages I couldn’t yet understand, experience the many cultures that I had deeply researched about, and witness humanity and decipher societal narratives with my own eyes instead of solely through someone else’s interpretation or teachings.

I’ve never truly trusted accountabilities from knowledge that is not complimented with experience.

That is why my writing moves so freely between biology, anthropology, archaeology, language, psychology, philosophy, travel and technology. To me they have never existed as boxed in, separated disciplines. They are different windows looking out onto the same extraordinary mystery.

That’s probably also why I have never felt like I comfortably fit inside neat little boxes.

I don’t naturally think in categories.

I naturally think in relationships.

One idea flows to another. A conversation about dolphins becomes a reflection on communication. Communication becomes language. Language becomes artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence becomes interpretation. Interpretation becomes philosophy. Philosophy inevitably circles back to humanity.

To me, none of that is a distraction. It is how my mind explores. It quite excites me to feel a natural deep dive coming on.

For much of my life I wondered whether there was something unusual about the way I thought. Today, I know that it is my way of seeing and interpreting this amazing world.

Over the years, I’ve also come to notice that we confuse a great many things in our culture. 

• We mistake self-observation for self-absorption. 
• We mistake introspection for narcissism. 
• We mistake confidence for arrogance. 
• We mistake curiosity for eccentricity. 

They are not the same thing.

Maybe that is why writing about myself has occasionally been misunderstood by some. I’m not writing because I believe I am the most fascinating person on Earth (however, I have had some pretty extraordinary experiences). I’m writing because I am literally the only consciousness (to date, who knows what is to come in the future!) that I will ever experience completely from the inside. 

Your life is just as rich. 

It is just as complex. 

And definitely just as worthy of exploration. 

But there’s only one problem, I simply don’t have direct access to it.

I can observe humanity through history, science, culture, travel and thousands of conversations, but my deepest and longest-running field study has always been the one life I inhabit every single day. If my understanding one human being a little better helps illuminate something about all of us, then I think that is a perfectly reasonable place to begin.

People often assume that because I write conversationally, that I can’t write academically.

The truth is actually quite the contrary, I can do both. Academic and essay writing is where I excelled prior to 2013 and this blog.

I have written formally enough to be exempted from college-level academic writing courses in 2 separate degree programs a decade apart, and I have spent years writing professionally in other contexts. 

So when it comes to my writing call it what you will but choosing a more conversational voice is an intentional choice.

In many ways, for me specifically, I think it is actually the harder discipline.

It is one thing to explain a complex idea to a group of specialists already fluent in the language of a subject. It is quite another to express complex ideas in a way that almost anyone can follow without stripping away their richness.

Ironically, teaching English (ESL) has actually helped to strengthen that ability in me more than almost anything else.

I had the privilege of raising my kiddos from infancy, contributing and watching them build their understanding of the world one word at a time. It was incredible to explore through games and intentional language learning processes. 

Years later I found myself teaching adults from every corner of the globe, which required an entirely different skillset. Children don’t need ideas simplified; they need ideas built. Adult learners often need those same ideas translated into language that connects with what they already know. Every language has different rules and patterns.

Those experiences along with many others taught me that language is far more than communication.

Language actually shapes thought itself.

My interactions with LLM’s and artificial intelligence has reinforced that lesson in unexpected ways. Not because it tells me what to think, but because it has made me even more aware of the extraordinary relationship between words, meaning and interpretation. 

Change a single word and an entire paragraph can shift. 

Change a metaphor and an entirely different way of seeing the world emerges.

Perhaps that is why I find language so endlessly fascinating.

There weren’t suddenly more stars in the sky than we had anticipated when humanity invented the telescope. We simply developed the ability to perceive and quantify what had always been there.

I often wonder whether language works in much the same way.

Perhaps many of the ideas we struggle to describe already exist around us, waiting patiently until we develop the words capable of revealing them. Reality often remains exactly the same. What changes is our ability to perceive it and properly define and describe it.

That possibility excites me more than almost anything else.

There is another word that I would say also applies to my writing and has become increasingly important to me over the years: congruence.

My confidence has never come from believing I know more than everyone or anyone else or even wanting to. It doesn’t come from titles, credentials or the need to convince people that I am right. However, both are equally important to me so I actively pursue both.

So the confidence comes from knowing that I have lived in alignment with the questions that have fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

I have remained curious and questioning.

I have taken risks. Oh boy have I.

I have immersed myself in the world not only as an of observer witnessing it safely from a distance. I often think of myself as an immersed observer, someone who participates fully in life while trying to never lose the ability to step back, reflect, and ask, What does this reveal about us?

I have raised eight children. I have worked in funeral services, accompanying people through one of life’s greatest transitions. I have loss and end of life transitions in my personal life. I have travelled across dozens of countries, not to collect destinations but to better understand humanity through witnessing its cultures, histories and people. I have spent over 4000 thousand hours in one-to-one conversations alone through my ESL sessions with individuals from every imaginable background, from a few beginners learning English to professors, researchers, executives, engineers, artists, entrepreneurs and retirees.

Those experiences may be credentials. It’s definitely a broader than usual perspective or collective.

But they are most certainly are observations.

However, I still remain the one human being whose inner experience I can observe continuously throughout an entire lifetime. In many ways, I am my own longest-running field study, not because I believe I am uniquely important, but because I am the only consciousness I will ever truly know from the inside. And I am aware of the areas that I choose to explore and follow.

That congruence is what gives me confidence.

Not because it makes me right.

But because when I write, my words are not borrowed.

They are researched and they are lived.

People sometimes ask whether I want to persuade them.

Not really.

Honestly, agreement has never been my objective.

Neither has fame, not even legacy or becoming an authority.

If those things arrive, I will accept them with absolute gratitude, but they have never been the driving force behind why I write.

Curiosity has.

My greatest hope is not that someone finishes one of my pieces of writing necessarily agreeing with me.

It is that they might close the laptop, and continue thinking, or notice something they had never noticed before, or begin asking questions they hadn’t thought to ask prior.

Maybe they’ll read about a subject they had never considered or perhaps they’ll look differently at another human being. Possibly they’ll become just a little more curious than they were prior.

If that happens, then for me, the writing has already done exactly what I was intending it to do.

When I first started blogging more than a decade ago, I wrote that I wanted readers to discover who I was through my writing rather than through a standard generic “About Me” page.

Looking back now, I realise something has quietly changed along the way.

I no longer hope readers discover me. I hope they discover themselves.

Because I believe that writing isn’t ultimately about transferring information.

It is about awakening attention. Not gaining attention.

If my words encourage someone to experience this extraordinary planet, to become more curious about our species, to think more deeply, or simply to remain open to wonder, then I have that is contributing to something worthwhile.

At the end of my life, if I am asked what I did with the precious time I was given as a human on earth, I hope my answer is a simple one.

I lived fully.

I paid attention.

I loved deeply.

I explored as much of this remarkable planet and its people as I possibly could.

And I NEVER stopped asking questions.