Originally Published in Aeon
I was 10 when Frank Lloyd Wright first entered my consciousness. I was sitting cross-legged on the beige carpet of my bedroom in a tract house in Melbourne, Florida, watching a Ken Burns documentary about Wright on PBS. Both my parents were schoolteachers, interested in history and travel, but architecture belonged to another planet entirely. Then there was Wright, whose buildings felt impossibly different from anything I had seen. His rooms were not rectangles to be filled but worlds unto themselves—shadows, stone, light pouring in sideways. His spaces, at once intimate and vast, were shaped by ideas I had no words for, yet immediately recognised. His work reached backwards and forwards simultaneously: primitive shelter reimagined with an aesthetic that felt both timeless and unmistakably American.

I grew up in a world where the shape of a life was pre-drawn.

You got married young—usually to your high school sweetheart. You saved sex for marriage. You had children early. You didn’t drift. You didn’t doubt. And God was at the center of everything.

My dad was a pastor.

The community I grew up in was conservative, evangelical, and totalizing. Family formation wasn’t just expected—it was morally mandated, the only righteous path. So by the time I reached my twenties, my response wasn’t clarity. It was resistance.

A personal reflection on aesthetics, ethics, and epistemic craftsmanship

There are people who change, and there are people who calcify.

I don’t say that with judgment—at least not entirely. But I’ve come to see that some inner force compels me, quietly but persistently, to keep moving. To revisit old positions, rework familiar materials, and shape a life that feels made, not inherited.

This isn’t about novelty or restlessness. It’s about staying in contact with the ground beneath you. Ideas, preferences, identities—they don’t just spring up and remain vital. Like soil, they require tending. Without oxygen and motion, they compact. They harden. They die.

I believe in the moral necessity of reexamination.

I visited an estate sale the other day. The house, built in the mid-1970s and designed by an architect, had that rare quality of becoming a world unto itself. It wasn’t just a structure—it was an environment, a philosophy rendered in wood and glass. Floor-to-ceiling windows, tabby concrete, a small prayer room tucked by the entry, and custom doors carved with a repeating motif that echoed through the trim work and furnishings. Everywhere, you felt the presence of a singular vision—intent carried across 6,000 square feet.

Growing up in Melbourne, Florida, just an hour from Disney World, I spent more time than most kids wandering through visions of the future. My grandparents would generously gift us annual passes, so we went often. And while Magic Kingdom had the spectacle, it was Epcot that really hooked me.

Even as a kid in the early ’90s, I could tell Epcot’s future was outdated. But it was a cool kind of outdated—sleek monorails, geodesic domes, fountains synchronized to synthesizer-heavy anthems. Music coming out of rocks. It didn’t look like anything else I saw in real life, and that was part of the appeal. Epcot made a bold promise: the future would be coherent, designed, joyful. A place worth arriving at.

Everyone wants to dream. Fewer want to own. Fewer still want to operate.
But somewhere between vision and exit strategy lies the unglamorous, enduring work of keeping things going. That work—rarely spotlighted—is where I’ve learned the most.

When my wife and I bought our first house in 2015, we were 27, broke, and all-in. We did nearly everything ourselves. We got flooded. We rebuilt. And in the process, we found something larger than homeownership: a break from abstraction. From desk work. From the mental churn. A chance to move, to make, to solve. It wasn’t a side hobby. It was the beginning of something deeper.

Tyler Cowen, the economist known for his intellectual omnivory, has argued that every thinker and artist is, in some essential way, a philosopher of place. That is, where we come from—our geography, our culture, our soil—shapes how we think. The air, the architecture, the rhythm of local life all leave marks on our inner logic. And he’s right. The intellectual soil of Paris yields a different worldview than the arid sprawl of Texas.