New Year’s Resolutions 2024

Last year, I did pretty well, keeping my New Year’s resolutions. I feel that I did increase my fitness – I made 10,000 steps almost every day of the year. I started a strength routine that — while patchy — showed me that strength training is important to my well-being. I achieved my Kayak levels …

Finding reality in a world of representations

We live in a world of images. It wasn’t always so. I am 49 years old. I turn 50 in late January. When I was a kid, I had a fairly simple life, immersed in the “real”. While I was born in North York, a northern suburb of Toronto, I grew up in far-flung development …

You will have a Lifelong AI Friend

I think that artificial intelligence is going to have a totalizing impact on anything digital in our economy and society. This will lead to a rapid transformation of our culture and sense of self. We see the precursors to this transformation in the effects of social and digital media on people. Individual and social cognition, …

Categories of reality

We think we need to categorize in order to appreciate or understand something. This is reductive, eroding that ability to appreciate the ineffable which is our true genius. Understanding comes not in labels, categories, but in an appreciation of reality in its depth and elegance, in the moment and across time in the past and …

On the Queen as an example of duty

We have heard many opinions about Queen Elizabeth II, ranging from fawning admirers to resentful critics. For me, this range of commentary, coming out of ideological commitment is of little interest. Ideological thinking is inherently unreasoned, therefore of little value if we wish to speak of any profound human truth. Ideological thinking is a reductive …

Dr. Paul Bates has died. A life in search of the Good.

We live in a world of clichés and ideologues. In this internet age, we are surrounded by glass-eyed people, robots who chase their ideas and have forgotten their humanity. And yet, in this madness there remain those who are unabashedly committed to putting aside ideological vanity and instead let themselves be guided by the old …

Becoming fit, staying fit, while staying happy

This is a short narrative about my up-and-down fitness journey, how it has affected my happiness, and how I have tried to manage it. I was quite the athlete as a kid and as a young man. I swam a lot, played ice hockey until I was 17 and then fenced sabre competitively into my …

7 things I do to stay creative and keep writing

This blog post has seven tips for you on how I try to be a productive writer. I hope you find them useful. I am in the midst of writing a book with Martin Waxman on how public relations, marketing and the other strategic creative professions can take charge in the emerging new world of …