Podcaster. Writer. 👋 Hello, I want us to go from simply having conversations, to actively creating better conversations — https://craigconstantine.com/ has more about me, and my ongoing projects.
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The opposite of striving
What if, any time we’re conscious, the default state is perfect serenity — and all the striving is just disturbing ourselves out of it? That reframe, borrowed from several major religions that have been trying to say exactly this, sits alongside a discovery that catastrophe does not end in ‘-y’ (it does not!) which immediately…
Purpose and connection
Saint-Exupéry’s instruction — teach people to long for the endless immensity of the sea, not to collect wood — arrives exactly when a calling to teach is crystallizing from something new: not passing on what’s been learned as an intermediary, but striking out to find those ready to go somewhere together. Writing did the integration…
Gifts to myself
We can’t predict who we’ll be in the future any better than we can fully explain who we were ten years ago — so why do we assume future-me will appreciate what today-me hopes? The issue turns that into a quiet act of compassion: giving to your future self the same generous uncertainty you’d extend…
Permission to continue
A friend has died unexpectedly, and the question that follows is: what exactly made them inspirational? The issue works through that honestly — arriving at the thought that inspiration might be the thing that illuminates connections you already had, snapping them into clarity. Jack London’s instruction to light out after it with a club arrives…
One thing
Curly had it right: the secret to life is one thing — and everything else don’t mean shit. The issue sits honestly with not yet having found it, while circling the best current candidate: creating better conversation, and sharing it to turn on a light for someone else. A chef talking about Lucio Fontana, Nick…
On rising from the ashes
Everyone talks about the phoenix rising from the ashes — but first the phoenix burns to death. That reframe opens an issue about the fine line between being organized to achieve something and simply being in love with your own systems, and the daily evidence from journals that we are not, in fact, stable and…
Waiting for cephalopods
Octopuses had 55 million years before vertebrate fish came along and wrecked it for them — and here we are, humans strutting around for precisely one blink on the geologic timescale, keeping the seat warm between peaks of cephalopod civilization. The issue works back from that cosmic vantage point to a simple insight: the resistance…
Writing matters
Nick Cave won’t call himself a songwriter unless he sits down and picks up the pen — because the songs come in whispers, and only when he’s at work. That principle threads through an issue about the gap between a thought and the words that can hold it, Alain de Botton’s frosted window between us…
Anthropocentric
The “shit happens” hypothesis of microbiology arrives to remind us that not everything unfolding around us is about us — pathogens evolve their own narratives, and we’re sometimes just caught in them. The issue pivots from there to the LLM question: it insists it has no mind, but treating it as if it did turns…
Help thyself
The beloved popcorn maker went in the trash; a rowing machine took its place. Now when the urge strikes, past-Craig has already made the choice for today-Craig. That’s the whole mechanism in miniature — discipline as the accumulated small decisions that quietly steer a large ship with a small rudder. Werner Herzog, asked if he…