Merry Christmas

And a gift.

Dec 23, 2024

Merry Christmas if you are celebrating, and if you are not, I hope you are having a great day anyway.

I wanted to take this chance to express my great appreciation for you and your support. It truly means the world to me, and I am thrilled with how Rewilding Philosophy has evolved over the past year. This is really, even at the risk of sounding cliché, thanks to you.

It’s been 15 months that these letters have been send to inboxes every Monday morning, and I plan to keep on sending them for a long time to come.

Having said that, my intentions for Rewilding Philosophy 2025 are:

I would love to make these letters more accessible to people “on the outside”—those who may not currently engage with philosophy but could greatly benefit from it.
While there is room for intellectual writing in this world, I also really want my writing to be useful—to help others (and myself) make sense of and find meaning in our lives.
I want to avoid any intellectual status signaling.
I believe what I do is not unique; it's the oldest philosophical ambition: I want to help us live good lives. Where I believe I can add value is through the approach I am taking. My ways of knowing, being, and doing are informed by our times of the Anthropocene and by relational, animistic, posthuman, indigenous, and process philosophies and sciences (such as quantum physics, information theory, systems science, epigenetics, etc.). In my own life, this has changed who I am on many levels, and I have missed out many opportunities to share this perspective over the past year.
I would also like to share more about the spiritual part of practical philosophy. It’s something that plays a huge part in my personal life, but that I hardly share, because it feels very vulnerable. I like how
Tom Morgan
from The Leading Edge starts all his article with a “Woo rating”. I might copy that.

In short, I want Rewilding Philosophy to become more applicable and useful to real life. It’s meant to be the mouthpiece of IPeP to help fulfil its goal of mainstreaming the significance of ekoPhilosophical health in addressing the underlying causes of the metacrisis.

My greatest fear is that by writing “less intellectual” it might alienate those of you who appreciate more academically inclined writing. If that's you, you will find my academic work published in academic journals.

If I were to say whom I want these letters to be for, it would be those who (like me) feel a sense of existential lostness in the Anthropocene. They are also for people who don’t want to fall into spiritual or worldly bypassing but wish to engage deeply with the world, participating in how this collapse unfolds while simultaneously having a great, even the best, life. I believe there is potential in this seeming paradox. I also think there is lot’s of room for improvement to address this through my writing.

For Christmas, my gift to you is that my paywall is down for a week. Until January 1st, you can read the entire archive for free. I really hope this does not discourage paying subscribers from maintaining their subscriptions. It not only means the world to me that you are subscribed but also allows me to continue doing this work.

If you're unsure where to start, here are five letters that I consider key pieces of Rewilding Philosophy: