The Wright We Get Wrong

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On genius, judgment, and the stories we choose to tell

“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright

I first encountered Frank Lloyd Wright the way a lot of people do — through the Ken Burns documentary. I was ten. I had no real context for what architecture even was, but something about Wright's presence, his spaces, his voice, stuck with me. It was a clue. A sign that there was a world out there made not just of buildings, but of ideas you could live in.

Since then, I've sought out his work whenever I've had the chance — Fallingwater, both Taliesins, Unity Temple, Florida Southern College, Hollyhock House, and a handful of homes in Oak Park and California. I've stayed in some and walked through many. Each encounter deepens the spell. These aren't just impressive buildings — they're invitations into a worldview. Rooms glow in late afternoon light. Hearths are central, not symbolic. Materials speak. Even the ceiling heights conspire to make you feel more fully yourself. And the more I see, the more I read, the more convinced I become of this strange reality: we often tell Wright's story through the least generous lens available — both then and now.

When it comes to his personal life, we judge him by Victorian moral standards — pearl-clutching over his affair with Mamah Cheney, his divorce, the tragedy at Taliesin. When it comes to his professional authority, we judge him by contemporary power dynamics — as if the very existence of a centralized vision or strong creative leadership is inherently suspect. In each case, we seem to reach for whatever frame will flatten him most effectively. And for a man whose work was built around depth, complexity, and spirit, it's a strangely shallow kind of storytelling.

This mismatch between criticism and context distorts the entire picture. We're using the harshest possible standards from two wildly different time periods to scrutinize one person, while ignoring the many ways in which he transcended both. The result is a kind of historical whiplash — a man caught between moral systems that never quite apply, judged by rules that shift depending on which aspect of his life we're examining.

The Wrong Frame at Every Turn

Wright was born in 1867. He lived through seismic shifts in American culture — from the Gilded Age through the Depression and into the postwar period. His relationship with Mamah Borthwick is often reduced to scandal. Even calling Mamah his "mistress," or referring to their relationship as an "affair," feels slightly off. Yes, it began while both were still married. But it wasn't fleeting, hidden, or unserious — it was openly lived, sustained over time, and grounded in shared ideals. Wright attempted to divorce his first wife so that he and Mamah could marry, but she refused.

What gets lost in the moral arithmetic is the intellectual partnership at the heart of their relationship. Mamah wasn't simply Wright's romantic companion — she was a translator, a feminist thinker, an advocate for women's rights who had independently studied the work of Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist whose ideas about love, marriage, and individual freedom were revolutionary for the time. She brought her own vision to their shared life at Taliesin, her own sense of what it might mean to live outside conventional social structures. This wasn't a powerful man taking advantage of a naive woman; it was two people attempting to live according to principles that most of their contemporaries found threatening. In today's context, they almost certainly would have divorced their respective spouses and remarried.

The tragedy that unfolded at Taliesin — in which Mamah, her two children, and several others were brutally murdered by a member of Wright's household staff — is often told with a tabloid tint, as if it were poetic justice for Wright's moral failings. But that's a grotesque way to view human suffering. The motive remains unclear, though some have speculated it was shaped in part by the isolating cultural judgment surrounding their relationship.

They had both been cast out, publicly shamed, and endlessly moralized. In a culture that conflated nonconformity with sin, the emotional atmosphere around Taliesin wasn't just tragic — it was charged. And that charge may very well have contributed to the horror that unfolded there. If that's true, then the moralizing that followed the affair wasn't just gossip. It was a toxin. And Wright and Mamah were among its victims.

To frame Wright as the villain of that story is not only unjust — it borders on cruelty.

The aftermath of the tragedy reveals something else worth noting: Wright's response to devastating loss. Rather than retreat into bitterness or cynicism, he rebuilt. Not just Taliesin — though he did that too, almost immediately — but his capacity for hope, for love, for creative risk. He married again, continued to push boundaries, kept designing buildings that asked people to live differently. There's something almost incomprehensible about that kind of resilience, that refusal to let trauma calcify into hardness.

Professional Authority in an Age of Suspicion

The professional critique of Wright often misses what was most radical about his practice. Yes, Taliesin operated under Wright's centralized vision. But we're not talking about forced labor or corporate exploitation. Taliesin was an elective artistic community — at its core, a philosophical community where people chose to go, many staying for decades.

What's remarkable about Taliesin, particularly for its time, was the role women played. This wasn't the conventional architecture office of the early 20th century. Marion Mahony Griffin, one of the first licensed female architects in the world, was Wright's chief draftsperson and creative partner whose artistic vision shaped how the world came to see Wright's work. Her drawings transformed architectural plans into poetry, developing the distinctive rendering style that became synonymous with Wright's early career — those flowing, organic illustrations that made buildings appear to grow from the earth itself. When Wright left for Europe in 1909, Griffin essentially ran the studio, completing major projects and maintaining the office's reputation. Her influence was so significant that some scholars argue she co-created the Prairie School aesthetic. Wright did acknowledge her role in his work — perhaps reluctantly, but more than many of his peers would have — though her contributions, like those of many women in architecture, have since faded from broader public recognition.

Later, at Taliesin, women weren't confined to secretarial roles. They were apprentices, designers, builders. They lived and worked alongside the men as equals in the creative enterprise. For a man supposedly trapped in Victorian patriarchy, Wright's professional practice was remarkably progressive.

This context matters when we apply contemporary critiques of creative authority to Wright's world. The apprentices weren't exploited; they were initiated into a way of seeing and making that many carried forward into distinguished careers. Some hierarchies emerge from genuine expertise, from the recognition that certain people possess uncommon gifts that others can learn from. The question isn't whether Wright was the central figure at Taliesin — of course he was. The question is whether that centrality served the development of the people who chose to be there. And by most accounts, it did.

A Great Man in the Age of Skepticism

We've spent the past few decades dismantling the "great man" theory of history. And with good reason: too much has been attributed to lone geniuses, too little to context, collaboration, and culture. But in our eagerness to correct that imbalance, we've sometimes overcorrected into a kind of dogma — one that assumes any narrative of individual brilliance must be a lie, or at least a distortion.

Wright suffers under this dogma. Because he was a true original. Because his work still resonates. Because people still love him — and not just in the abstract. His buildings move people. They elevate daily life. They teach you how to see again. And in an era allergic to idolatry, maybe that's a little too much.

But Wright's greatness didn't come at the expense of others. It came through intensity of belief — and a deep, often overlooked humanism. For all his flaws, he never lost sight of the individual. He designed for the soul. And you can feel that in every corner, every overhang, every hearth.

The skepticism toward Wright often reflects a broader discomfort with the very idea of transformative individual achievement. We've become so committed to collaborative, committee-driven, consensus-based approaches to creativity that we've lost the ability to recognize when someone is genuinely operating at a different level. Wright wasn't just good at architecture — he reimagined what architecture could be. He invented a new relationship between buildings and landscape, between interior and exterior, between the sacred and the domestic.

We should be cautious when we start mistrusting the very idea that a person can change the world — or shape it, or build it.

A Humanism in Wood and Stone

I live in St. Augustine, Florida — a town with a famously charming historic core. And that core is beautiful: brick streets, coquina stone walls, vernacular architecture that feels connected to place. But just outside that boundary, new construction tells a different story. Sprawl. Styrofoam façades. Fake shutters, stubby porches, windows that don't align with the sun. These aren't just bad buildings. They're symptoms of a worldview that sees people as users, not inhabitants. They betray a quiet contempt — for beauty, for community, and for the people who will eventually call those places home.

The contrast couldn't be starker. Where Wright's architecture assumes that people deserve beauty, dignity, and careful attention to their daily needs, contemporary development assumes they'll accept whatever's cheapest and fastest to build. Where Wright designed for the full human being — someone with aesthetic sensibilities, someone who notices light and shadow, someone whose mood can be lifted by a well-proportioned room — today's builders design for the consumer, someone whose primary relationship to space is economic.

When I look at this kind of development — cheap, lifeless, indifferent — I find myself returning to Wright. For all his eccentricity, all his self-aggrandizement, he never lost sight of the human being. His architecture may have been demanding. It may have leaked. But it never treated the occupant as an afterthought. His homes were built not just to shelter, but to uplift.

Wright understood something that we've largely forgotten: that the spaces we inhabit shape us just as much as we shape them. A room with beautiful proportions makes you feel more gracious. Natural light timed to the rhythms of the day makes you more aware of the passage of time, more connected to the world beyond your walls. Materials that age well — wood, stone, brick — carry within them the promise that your home will grow more beautiful with time, not less.

Wright, for all his complexity, respected the people who would live in his buildings. Even when they couldn't afford them. Even when they weren't his clients. His work was for human flourishing. He believed — deeply — that beauty belonged in everyday life. That the domestic could be sacred. That shelter could be a form of dignity.

Even now, when I walk into one of his spaces, I feel it: the care, the intention, the belief that space could be sacred without being precious. That architecture could be modern without being mechanized. That we could live among materials that speak — and be better people for it.

Why Write This at All?

I can imagine someone asking: why bother writing this? Why add another voice to the chorus of Wright defenders, when he's already the most celebrated architect in American history?

But that's precisely the point. It's not the work I'm defending. It's the man — and more specifically, the way we talk about him. Wright's architecture continues to be studied, emulated, derided, repaired, and endlessly discussed. But his personal life is almost always relegated to a few shallow asides — tossed into the tour as spicy trivia or moral caution. And I find those asides grating. They feel rote, unexamined, reflexively judgmental. They reduce a life of tremendous complexity to one-dimensional folklore.

The stories we tell about historical figures often say more about us than about them. In Wright's case, the eagerness to moralize, to flatten, to control the narrative — all of it seems to reveal an anxiety about genius itself. And maybe about Americanness, too. Because Wright wasn't just an icon. He was our icon. Restless, bold, flawed, visionary. The kind of figure that democratic societies are supposed to produce but that democratic societies also find troubling.

Perhaps our discomfort with Wright reflects a deeper ambivalence about individual achievement in a culture that claims to value equality above all else. We want our heroes to be humble, collaborative, unassuming. Wright was none of those things. He was grandiose, self-promoting, utterly convinced of his own importance. And he was also, undeniably, a genius whose work continues to teach us how to live.

Toward a Fair Reading

We don't need to sanctify Wright. But we do need to stop reducing him. He was a man of his time — but not only of it. He trusted women when most men didn't. He respected beauty when others were chasing scale — and believed in the power of one vision to elevate a life. In many ways, he was radically modern: in his inclusion of women in architectural practice, in his embrace of unconventional relationships, and in his profound respect for the individual spirit.

I'm not trying to turn Wright into a feminist icon, or overlook his very real shortcomings — including the emotional distance and neglect many of his children experienced. He could be self-absorbed, volatile, and deeply flawed in his personal life. But I do think it's possible — and necessary — to hold that alongside the radical humanism of his work. To see him clearly, not as a symbol or cautionary tale, but as a man who lived and created with intensity and contradiction.

The most honest assessment of Wright might be this: he was someone who understood, better than almost anyone before or since, how to make spaces that honor human dignity. That knowledge came at a cost — to him, to the people around him, to the neat moral categories we use to organize our understanding of the past. But it also produced something irreplaceable: buildings that continue to teach us what it means to live with intention, to surround ourselves with beauty, to believe that the everyday can be transformed into something sacred.

Frank Lloyd Wright did change the world. And perhaps that's the most revealing truth of all: we still don't quite know what to do with people who do.

What does it mean to be remembered? Who decides the terms? In Wright's case, we've chosen to remember him through the narrowest possible lens — Victorian moralist or contemporary power critic, depending on which aspect of his life we're examining. But memory is a choice. And the stories we tell about our icons reveal as much about our limitations as theirs.

Wright built something that lasts: not just buildings, but a way of seeing. A belief that beauty belongs in everyday life. That we deserve spaces that honor our full humanity. In an age of disposable architecture and diminished expectations, maybe that's what makes us uncomfortable. Not his flaws, but his uncompromising faith that we could live better than we do.

The Love That Reveals Itself

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A note not about children, but about timing, trajectory, and the quiet shape of adulthood

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.

I didn’t know what I wanted, exactly. But I knew what I didn’t want: a script. I didn’t want to mimic my upbringing just because it was familiar. So I delayed. My partner and I stayed together for over a decade unmarried—not out of ambivalence, but because I couldn’t quite face the emotional tangle of what marriage meant in the world I’d left. I couldn’t imagine asking my father to officiate a ceremony stripped of God. It felt like a betrayal. So instead, I made the bigger mistake: I waited too long. I didn’t get married until months after he died.

He knew we were legally married before he passed. He met our daughter.

But I still regret the delay. Not because we needed the ceremony, but because he did. Because I couldn’t find the words—or the courage—to tell him the truth in a way that also honored him.

That’s the background.

And it matters. Because when I say that I wasn’t sure about having kids, it wasn’t that I quietly longed for it but resisted. The truth is I genuinely didn’t know. I felt ambivalent—not because I lacked feeling, but because I lacked clarity about how to trust what I felt. My reaction to the world I came from was so strong, so early, that it formed the architecture of my adult life. But reaction isn’t resolution. A pendulum doesn’t stop at its furthest point—it swings until it finds center. And the tension is, while that pendulum is swinging, another clock is ticking. You don’t get infinite time to sort it out.

I think I sensed, intuitively, that my vision was distorted. That I couldn’t yet separate my own instincts from what I was pushing against. I saw family weaponized, used as a symbol of righteousness rather than a living reality. That made me suspicious. But suspicion doesn’t create clarity. It just delays it.

So I waited.

And as I built a life mostly separate from that world—through school, through design, through the slow construction of a worldview that felt earned—I found myself surrounded by people who also hadn’t chosen that path. Most of my friends didn’t have children. Many still don’t. Some are younger than me now, which explains part of it. But the truth is: the environment around me subtly affirmed my delay. Children were rarely the norm. Freedom was. Optionality was.

But now, something has shifted.

Not in ideology, but in sensation. I see people my age—and older—still living like they did in their twenties. Same structures. Same rhythms. Just lightly reskinned with wellness or moderation. And for the first time, that life doesn’t seem expansive. It seems… stuck. Like a beautiful house with no foundation beneath it.

And I’ve come to realize something hard to say:

What once looked like conformity—starting a family young—now sometimes looks like courage. And what once felt like rebellion—prolonged autonomy—can start to resemble avoidance dressed up as freedom.

I don’t mean that universally. Not everyone should have children. Some shouldn’t. Some can’t. And knowing that is its own form of grace. But I am speaking to the version of myself that could have kept drifting—not because I was unsure, but because I had built a life whose only safety came from non-commitment.

That version of me would have confused openness with growth, and risked missing the one thing that actually deepens a life: being bound to something you can’t easily leave.

I’ve come to realize something else too:

The decision to have children young, especially in your early twenties, isn’t necessarily more virtuous—or more reckless. It’s just made under different conditions. When you’re young, life is already unknown. Choosing parenthood then is stepping into one unknown from inside another. You don’t yet know the life you’re giving up, because you haven’t lived it. In that sense, it’s both a leap of faith and a form of unknowing momentum.

But later in life, that decision is different. It’s not leaping from the unknown. It’s stepping out of a known world you’ve built—a structure of autonomy, rhythm, and identity. To have a child later is to reverse course in some ways. And that takes its own kind of courage.

There’s benefit to that: maturity, financial stability, emotional clarity. That’s certainly been true in my case. If we’d had a child much earlier, we might’ve missed the window to build the foundation we now stand on—not just materially, but mentally. The comfort we’ve created isn’t just about money. It’s about peace of mind.

So no, I don’t regret the path we took.

If anything, I feel like we timed it right—maybe a couple years late, but not so late that I lost the thread.

It’s hard to describe love for a child without flattening it. It’s too large, too strange, too lopsided in its shape. But I can name this: early on, I sometimes found myself resisting the bedtime routine—trading off with my partner, peeling away from guests to tend to a baby who, for all her wonder, couldn’t yet offer much back. It was work.

But somewhere in the last year, that resistance faded. Not just because the routine got easier, but because she did. Her personhood came into view—her humor, her rhythms, her tiny philosophies—and I realized that I was no longer leaving the interesting part of the night. I was walking toward it.

These days, I don’t mind stepping away from a conversation to be with her. In fact, I often prefer it. Because now she talks. She thinks out loud. She says something strange or beautiful as she’s falling asleep, and I find myself more filled by those moments than by almost any adult gathering.

And maybe that’s the deepest truth I can name: when you’re raising a child, you don’t yet know who they are. You’re committed to someone who hasn’t fully revealed themselves. It’s not like any other relationship. It begins with love, yes—but also with mystery. And what unfolds over time—the emergence of a self, the revealing of a mind—is the most astonishing experience I’ve ever known.

What I do feel, though, is a kind of retrospective horror when I imagine what might have happened had I listened too closely to the voices that made me question whether it was ever the right step. The ones that spoke of lost freedom, or diminished selfhood, or the permanent burden of children. Had I let those fears shape my path—had I postponed it into oblivion—I would have missed the most overwhelming, unimaginable thing: the love I have for my daughter.

It is a love I didn’t know was possible.

And when I picture a life without her in it, it’s not regret I feel.

It’s dread.

The dread of an alternate life I almost chose.

A life that might have been peaceful, productive, even fulfilling on paper—but which, compared to this one, now feels hollow. A beautiful room without warmth. A structure without a center.

So no, I’m not offering conclusions. I’m not advocating a model. I’m just describing the view from here. A point on the map I might have never reached. And I’m leaving a mark for anyone else who might be navigating by intuition, mistrust, or fear.

Because some paths look like freedom until you walk them long enough to realize they were just circles.

And some paths look like sacrifice, until you take the first step—and discover they’re the way out of yourself, and into something you never could have built alone

The Soil Must Be Worked

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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.

Not as a dramatic act, but as an ongoing one. A continuous, quiet shaping of the self. The way you’d return to a garden. The way a craftsperson sands and adjusts.

There’s a certain disappointment I feel—sometimes mild, sometimes sharp—when I encounter someone whose worldview seems frozen in the shape it took during college, or whose aesthetic palette stopped evolving in 2011. It’s not that I expect reinvention for its own sake. But I do believe there’s something ethically hollow about refusing to revisit your structures. When your taste, your politics, your musical sensibilities, your beliefs, your opinions—when all of these have been downloaded wholesale, and never questioned or customized—it feels like something is missing. It feels like a kind of negligence.

We don’t talk much about this. Not in moral terms. But maybe we should.

A Triad of Integrity

Over time, I’ve come to understand that the values I hold most closely form a kind of triad:

• Ethics — How we live

• Aesthetics — How that living feels and appears

• Intellect — How we reason, and how we revise

They’re not separate domains. They loop into each other. An ugly space can create psychic stagnation. A lazy thought can lead to aesthetic flattening. A person who hasn’t updated their operating system in years is likely outsourcing their deepest sense of what’s true to something that was handed to them.

This is not a new idea. Versions of this triad have appeared for centuries—in theology (truth, beauty, goodness), in classical philosophy, even in design thinking (viability, feasibility, desirability). But for me, it’s not a framework. It’s a felt reality. A life lived with coherence needs all three.

When one leg goes slack, the whole thing tilts.

This is why I resist the notion that taste is superficial, or that design is a luxury. Form expresses values. A well-composed room says something about attention. A shapeless argument reveals something about one’s moral posture. And a person who hasn’t revised their view of the world in a decade probably isn’t thinking anymore—they’re performing.

Template Thinking vs. Epistemic Craftsmanship

There’s a pattern I’ve seen, and I suspect many others have too. It often looks like this: someone holds a strong position—political, philosophical, cultural—and then, at some point, reverses entirely. They swing from one pole to the other. Not gradually. Not thoughtfully. Suddenly. As if they’ve traded in one ready-made ideology for its mirror opposite.

What’s unsettling in these moments isn’t the change. Change is good. Necessary, even.

What feels hollow is the prefab quality of it all—the sense that no real internal reckoning took place. No unglamorous wrestling. No rebuilding. Just a hard reset, a switch from one off-the-shelf template to another.

There may be coherent themes—disillusionment, populism, spiritual yearning—but too often these shifts feel like brand reassignments, not philosophical evolution. I don’t object to changing your mind. I object to skipping the craftsmanship required to make the change real.

This is what I mean by epistemic craftsmanship.

It’s the process of actually building your beliefs. Testing them. Sanding the edges. Throwing parts out and starting over. Holding nothing so tightly that you can’t take it apart again.

Good design doesn’t start with a template. It starts with contact—with context, with use, with principle. So does good thinking.

Ideas Have Shape

This may be partly how my mind works. I often see ideas in physical terms:

• Some are brittle, ready to snap

• Some have elegant internal tension

• Some are lopsided, warped, or poorly joined

When something is true, it often feels like it clicks—not just logically, but structurally. It holds.

And when something’s off—when it’s too easy, too loud, too eager to signal allegiance—it usually is.

On Aging and the Risk of Calcification

I sometimes wonder if this entire framework—this need to work the soil, to revise the self—is a form of resistance to death. Or at least to the spiritual death that can happen long before the physical one.

I’ve always felt an acute awareness of mortality. Even in my twenties, the thought of death wasn’t abstract. It was vivid—sometimes painfully so. I envied friends who didn’t seem to feel it as strongly. One in particular lived slowly, simply. He was present in a way I admired, even as I was building furiously, chasing clarity, laying down future foundations. At times, it seemed like we had chosen opposite paths: spiritual quiet versus practical ambition. But that dichotomy never felt quite right to me.

I don’t believe that striving and presence are mutually exclusive.

I’ve come to see that tending to what you’ve set in motion can itself be a form of presence. There is an education in building, in caring, in staying with complexity. It’s not inherently capitalist or corrupt. It’s a question of posture. Are you running from life, or working your way more deeply into it?

As I age, what I fear most isn’t just the body breaking down. It’s the mind setting like cement. It’s the slow closing of the self to new inputs. The quiet decision to stop reexamining, to stop being available. I don’t want to become one of those people who at 38—or 48, or 58—has already settled into a worldview and simply refined it into dogma. I want to stay porous. I want to leave the gate unlatched.

A Note on Self-Improvement

I should probably be clear: none of this is coming from a place of self-optimization, or gamified improvement. I’m not a system tinkerer. I don’t have the newest productivity software or the perfect morning routine. If anything, I’m temperamentally suspicious of the whole genre.

There’s a certain style of modern life where “working on yourself” becomes its own form of entertainment—an endless loop of performance tweaks, self-tracking, bullet journals, and inbox-zero rituals. That’s not what I’m describing here. What I’m after isn’t efficiency. It’s integrity.

I’m not trying to be a better version of myself in a quantified sense. I’m trying to be a more coherent one. Someone whose beliefs and actions still speak to each other. Someone who is still open to change, but not addicted to novelty. Someone who is aging, yes—but not stiffening.

When I read something like Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, I resonate with his resistance to that kind of optimization treadmill. Not because I came from his world of productivity obsession, but because I’ve always felt something quieter and heavier tugging at the same problem: that we are not here to get our inboxes to zero. We are here to stay awake to the lives we are living.

So this is not a call to revamp your calendar or your tools.

It’s just a call to keep tending—slowly, sometimes clumsily, but deliberately.

The Ache of the Unfinished

There’s one more piece I can’t leave out.

In a life shaped by many interests, slow-built projects, and deliberately untemplated paths, I’ve found that there’s almost never a moment where I can step back and say: There. I did it. I’ve crossed the threshold. Now I rest.

That kind of finality—the email inbox emptied, the project launched, the sabbatical begun—is elusive. It’s one of the things I most envy in people with traditional jobs. Not because their work is easier, but because the edges are clearer. “I’m on vacation.” “I’m off the clock.” “I’ve earned my time.”

That kind of clarity is a gift. And while I’ve built a life I wouldn’t trade, it often lacks that gift.

Living with self-directed complexity means the field is never fully tilled. The to-do list is never clean. And sometimes, that feels like failure. But I’ve come to see it differently.

If you are only ever satisfied when everything is done, it may mean you’ve kept your scope tight enough to contain.

That isn’t always a bad thing. But it also shouldn’t be mistaken for a virtue—at least not the kind that signals having reached the full horizon of your capacity. It’s a kind of finish that may simply reflect the boundaries you’ve set, not the totality of what you could have shaped.

Why Put This Into Words?

I’m not sure this is for public persuasion. I’m not trying to build a brand around it or even argue for its superiority. But if I had found this written by someone else, I know I would have felt a kind of quiet camaraderie. A sense of kinship.

Maybe that’s enough.

So here it is: a personal note, a compass, a gentle refusal to let the soil go fallow.

Postscript: Working Principles

• Truth should be earned, not downloaded

• Taste is not frivolous—it is a form of care

• Revisiting your assumptions is not instability—it is integrity

• If your worldview hasn’t changed in a decade, ask yourself why

• Templates are for starting—not stopping

• The self is a structure. It deserves maintenance.

• The soil must be worked. Again. And again.

The Vanishing World: On Architecture, Legacy, and the Quiet Rebellion of Care

Photo by Rachel Gant - Liljestrand House, 2012

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“Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Not long after walking in, I heard someone ask if it was a teardown. The question hit me like a slap. Because to me, this wasn’t just a house. It was evidence. Proof that someone once had the means, the time, and the freedom to leave a mark that was entirely their own.

Driving home, I kept thinking about what that home represented. It felt like a kind of cultural artifact—an emblem from a moment in time when it still seemed possible for someone in their 30s to shape a space so thoroughly that it became something more than shelter. It became identity.

Today, that feels nearly out of reach. Most people my age are lucky just to find a basic ranch home with intact plumbing. And even when they do, they’re not starting with a blank slate. They’re inheriting decades of half-fixes and resale-minded renovations. The gesture now is smaller: a painted accent wall, a well-placed thrift find, a moment of personality in a space that was never meant to hold one. Sometimes these gestures cohere. Often, they feel like a whisper inside someone else’s idea of a home.

Money plays a role, no question. But it’s not the only factor. The broader shift is cultural. Mass developers, HOA restrictions, building codes optimized for speed and cost—all of it nudges us toward sameness. Toward the repeatable. Toward safety. Even most architects today couldn’t afford to build the kinds of homes they once imagined in school.

And yet, it wasn’t easy in the 1970s either. Materials were harder to source. Tools were less refined. But maybe the world hadn’t yet fully decided that uniqueness was a liability. Maybe care hadn’t been priced out. Maybe a person could still make something ambitious without being treated as eccentric, or irresponsible.

That’s the generational mirror: once, someone in their 30s could build a world. Now, we inherit those worlds secondhand—glimpsed briefly at estate sales, often misunderstood, often mistaken for something disposable. We try to recreate the feeling through small-scale gestures. Sometimes we succeed. Often we don’t.

But the answer isn’t to romanticize the past. Nor is it to resign ourselves to some story of generational decline. The forces working against individual expression—standardization, economic pressure, the algorithmic flattening of taste—are real. But so is our ability to push back. The greater danger is not that building with distinction is harder now. It’s that we might start to believe it’s no longer possible.

And that just isn’t true.

It takes stubbornness. Vision. The willingness to reject every safe, resale-friendly surface the world tries to hand you. But homes—real homes—are still being made. Worlds are still being built. They might not stretch across 6,000 square feet, but they can still hold a voice, a perspective, a soul.

We don’t have to build for the lowest common denominator. We can build for ourselves—for the people we are, and for the ones we hope will one day stand in the space and feel it. That’s the quiet rebellion still available to us: not just preserving beauty, but creating it. Not because the world rewards it—but because it’s worth doing anyway.

The Futures We Inherited

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Why we kept the limits of the past, but lost its imagination

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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.
It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I learned about the park’s real history—and the utopian ambition behind what was supposed to be a city of tomorrow.

That early exposure imprinted something deep in me. And I suppose I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
Buckminster Fuller. The Venus Project. Genesis. Wings. Even now, music from that time feels as—or more—current to me than most of what’s made today.
Where some people find the aesthetic and sonic trappings of that era off-putting, I feel like I’m stepping back into a future that never quite happened—but maybe still could.

And yet, for all my emotional connection to that world, I’ve had to reckon with the intellectual baggage it carried.

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The Hangover from the ’70s

In 2012, while working on my MBA at California College of the Arts, I took a course called Strategic Foresight & Futures. The instructor, Stuart Candy, was smart, inventive, and had studied under the influential futurist Jim Dator at the University of Hawaiʻi. I was genuinely excited to dig into frameworks for thinking critically about the future.

But as the course unfolded, I started to notice something odd. We spent a lot of time revisiting concepts from the 1970s—overpopulation, resource scarcity, collapse scenarios. It felt like we were teaching directly from The Population Bomb or Limits to Growth, often without acknowledging just how much the data, the context, and our capacity to solve problems had changed.

At the time, I brushed it off as academic momentum. But over the years, I began to see it in more places—architecture, environmentalism, even food culture. Brilliant people, creatively engaged, still operating on outdated assumptions. As if we were still in 1974, still waiting for the whole thing to fall apart.

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We Kept the Limits, Not the Vision

This is the part that haunts me:
We seem to have carried forward all the fears of that era—but none of its aesthetic courage.

We’re still suspicious of nuclear power, even though it’s among the safest and cleanest energy sources we have.
We’re still clinging to restrictive zoning laws born of 1970s panic about sprawl and disorder.
We’re still invoking overpopulation, despite the demographic collapse unfolding in much of the developed world.

And yet, the buildings we’re constructing today are largely soulless. The urban spaces we create are risk-averse. The dominant aesthetic is neutral, minimalist, efficient—and utterly forgettable. It’s as if we traded visionary mistakes for banal stagnation.

For all its shag carpet and mansard roofs, the ’70s also gave us some of the boldest design experiments of the 20th century. Domes. Modular houses. Visionary megastructures. It wasn’t cohesive, but it was trying.

We forgot how to dream. And we’re still afraid to build.

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The Split I Can’t Unsee

This tension plays out in my own life constantly. I eat entirely vegetarian, more by instinct than ideology, and have always been drawn to the natural-living ethos that largely emerged in the ’60s and ’70s. But I also believe deeply in modern agriculture’s role in feeding the world. I agree with economists like Bryan Caplan on the need for density and deregulation—but I wouldn’t want him designing my city.

The people with the clearest, most current ideas often have no aesthetic vision. The people with the richest aesthetic instincts often haven’t updated their thinking since the Carter administration.

What I find myself yearning for is a marriage that rarely happens:
The emotional ambition of retrofuturism, paired with the clarity and pragmatism of present-day progress.

Not just domes for nostalgia’s sake. But domes that work.
Not just vegetarianism as identity. But food systems that scale.
Not just cities as museums. But cities that are beautiful and expansive.

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Reclaiming a Future Worth Building

This isn’t about nostalgia. I don’t want to rewind the tape. I want to ask: what did that era get right emotionally? What design values and imaginative courage have we lost? And what would it look like to bring those forward—without the deadweight of its dated ideas?

We don’t need to recreate Epcot. But we might need to steal its spirit.

Because the future, as it’s currently being built, doesn’t seem to believe in itself. It’s careful, narrow, and under-designed. What we need now is a bolder synthesis—one that’s not afraid to look weird, sound lush, and dream bigger than the algorithm would prefer.

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If the 1970s gave us bad ideas in beautiful forms, the present seems determined to flip the formula.

We’ve got better models now—clearer data, sharper thinking, more tools.

But the defaults haven’t caught up.
The vibe is gone. The frameworks linger.

It’s the future, allegedly. But it still runs like a legacy system.

On Owning and Operating Things

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The fantasy of freedom, the reality of stewardship

Palmer House I, 2020

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We celebrate vision. We celebrate exits.
But in between is the slow, often overlooked work of actually keeping something alive. That’s the part no one talks about—and the part that’s taught me 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.

By 2019, we bought our first two investment properties and started what became a full-fledged portfolio. I was still working full-time at YIELD, the design company we had co-founded—deskbound and drained. Getting to peel off for a day or two each week to move, to fix, to build felt like freedom. The work was tangible. Embodied. And it gave me something I didn’t realize I was missing: control.

But there’s a strange arc to building things. In the early days, you’re at the wheel, doing everything you can to get the vehicle moving. And then, at some point, you look up and realize you’re not driving anymore—you’re being dragged behind the thing, flailing, trying to climb back in.

I’d felt that way with YIELD and I soon found myself feeling the same way towards the property work: a reluctant landlord, a jack-of-all-trades juggling AC units, water heaters, roof leaks, guests, tenants, inspectors. What once felt like creative release now felt like a weight I couldn’t put down.

So we tried to outsource the burden. We hired a high-end property management firm promising a turnkey solution: maintenance, guest communication, tax compliance—everything. The pitch was seductive: automation, scale, freedom.

The reality? Less so. And honestly, I don’t blame them. The problem wasn’t their execution—it was the structure itself. The incentives were misaligned, and the added layers made things slower, more expensive, more impersonal.

I still found myself pulled into decisions I’d hoped to avoid. And worse, I started to feel foolish. Why am I paying someone to mismanage what I could do faster, cheaper, and better? Why am I handing over authority to someone who has no skin in the game—no real stake in the outcome?

Eventually, we pulled the plug. Because here’s the hard-earned truth:
There’s no such thing as a self-sustaining system. Not when you actually care.

Third parties can handle tasks. But they can’t replace presence.
They can’t replicate judgment.
And they can’t teach you what the thing is trying to tell you.

The fantasy of freedom through outsourcing is everywhere.
“Set it and forget it.”
“Build systems, not jobs.”
“Don’t work in the business—work on it.”
It’s the gospel of scale, and I get the appeal. But the deeper I’ve gone—first in our design business, then in real estate—the more I’ve come to believe that some weight is worth carrying. Being close to the work—close to the thing you’ve made—keeps you honest.

No, I don’t do every repair. I’m not a martyr, or a total control freak. But I know this: when an issue arises late on a Saturday night, I can usually tell whether it’s a nuisance or a real emergency—because I know the space. I know the systems. I know what we’ve built.

There’s a dignity in operation that gets lost in our obsession with vision.
We celebrate founders, not stewards. But the long-term health of anything—a business, a building, a marriage—depends not just on how well it was imagined, but on how well it’s tended.

That’s the difference. Operating isn’t about control.
It’s about care.

We’re now in the process of lightening the load—selling one property, listing another. It’s not defeat. It’s clarity. Owning and operating things isn’t about hoarding responsibility. It’s about taking seriously the things you choose to keep.

We don’t need to own everything.
But the things we do own—the spaces we shape, the teams we lead, the tools we build—we’d do well to stay close to them.

To understand them.
To tend them.
To stay in the driver’s seat, even if the road gets rough.

It’s easy to dream up a system that runs without you.
Harder to build one that deserves your presence.
The trick is knowing the difference.

When Shapes Us

Photo by Rachel Gant—Sweden, 2012

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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.

But while place is powerful, it’s not the only force shaping us.

We are also philosophers of time.

Our age—both the historical era we live through and the stage of life we occupy—quietly conditions our worldview. Much of what we perceive as “our” insight, or “our” attitude, is often just the product of when we’re looking.

This becomes increasingly clear with age. When I was in college, I saw people in their 30s and 40s as dull, uncurious, preoccupied with families and finances. I chalked up many of their life circumstances to wealth or privilege: the house, the career, the sense of security. What I didn’t yet understand was that time itself is a kind of privilege.

To someone who grew up without a financial safety net, the world of comfort and cushion can seem otherworldly—like others are gliding smoothly above the terrain while you’re grinding your way through it, low to the ground, one missed step away from collapse. I sometimes picture it like this: some people move through life in a well-insulated vehicle; others are in a Star Wars-style landspeeder, just hovering above the dirt, every rock and gust of wind felt in the bones.

And yet, many of the trappings I once resented—home ownership, stable income, even emotional calm—weren’t necessarily markers of wealth. They were markers of time. You don’t see that when you’re 20 and struggling and exhausted. You see distance. You see difference. But what you’re really seeing, more often than not, is just age. You haven’t yet had the time to grow into those circumstances.

Of course, privilege exists. Wealth exists. So does luck. But we rarely account for the compound interest of time—how simply staying in the game, year after year, changes the terrain. Assets accumulate. Skills compound. Life softens in some areas and hardens in others.

This may all sound obvious to older readers. But to younger ones—especially those coming from modest backgrounds—it may feel like a kind of betrayal. How could the people ahead of you not have been born on third base? How could they possibly understand your precarious footing?

The answer is: many of them do. They were once where you are. They just had time to climb.

So yes, we’re shaped by where we’re from. But we’re just as shaped by when. The perspective of any given person is not fixed—it’s unfolding. Contextual. Temporary.

The question isn’t just where we’re coming from.
It’s when we’re seeing from.