For a long time, I’ve been dogged by a seemingly simple question: Why aren’t we better at making ourselves happy?

This question overlaps with my longstanding interest in human systems, especially the economic ones that govern how we define, store, and trade what we value.

In many ways, the modern world is a collection of irony. On the one hand, we have greater ability to manipulate our physical world than we’ve ever had. We have more knowledge, ability to connect, and, at least on paper, wealth. Yet, most of us feel disconnected, anxious, financially insecure, and are struggling to find a stable sense of meaning that extends beyond whatever tribe has come to define our identity.

I started out simply enough, with a comfortable existence in the bucolic leafy suburb of Lincoln, Massachusetts, though calling it a suburb hardly does justice to land that, despite existing only 12 miles west of downtown Boston, feels closer, in both aesthetic and spirit, to 1760 than 2026. My upbringing was peripheral to great amounts of wealth in a way that made its holders real humans.

In college, I studied long-form journalism (along with most anything else I could get my hands on), because I felt that, unlike other subjects, I did not know where it would lead.

Where it led was tech, specifically a venture-capital-backed FinTech company serving the private equity market, which, in my mind, is about as much of a fractal of the modern world as you can get. The experience was validating in many ways — for the most part, I enjoyed the people I worked with, and my intellectual curiosity began to be rewarded with both status and discretionary income.

When the pandemic happened, I moved from Austin, TX (where I’d been living since college) to the San Francisco Bay Area. Since then, I’ve spent the last six years marinating myself in nature, the scale of which dwarfs human concern, whether that’s biking up and down the coastal ranges, surfing NorCal’s cold and sharky waters, rediscovering my love for snow in the Sierra, wandering barefoot through redwood forests, or any number of activities I could rattle off.

In 2022, I stumbled into the local Baptiste yoga studio, a magical basement amongst the towering Monterey cypress trees of San Francisco’s Presidio. There, I began to find an answer — maybe — to that question that has baffled me for so long.

Why is it so hard for us humans to make ourselves happy?

Where I’ve gotten so far: It starts in our bodies, specifically with learning how to deescalate the way our survival programming has been scrambled by modernity. The only way I know to do that is to consciously retrain them — through practice — to exist in reality without the need to act. Crucially, if we are all to actually inhabit the same world, this is not a solo pursuit. It occurs in community.

Today, I’m focused on the intersection of our individual internal experiences, what the best practices of how we make money today do and do not capture, the art of what it means to have wealth, and how we build community that nourishes us.

Practically, that looks like teaching and facilitating, finding ways to spread practice through various business models, and deepening my relationships with myself, other human beings, and nature.