The Soil Must Be Worked
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.