Applications
The ideas presented here are not intended to remain at the level of theory.
They are ways of seeing that can be applied to real situations—how we understand ourselves, how we relate to others, how we make decisions, and how we respond to the challenges we encounter.
Life Telos as First Principle is not a method or a set of techniques. It is an orientation. And like any orientation, its value becomes clear in use.
When applied, it can help bring different aspects of a situation into view—biological, psychological, social, and environmental—and clarify where alignment may be present or where it may have been lost.
What follows are a selection of areas in which this perspective can be applied. Each includes a brief description and a link to videos that explore the topic in more depth.
This is a work in progress.
What is presented here reflects what I have been able to think through so far. It is not complete, and it is likely to evolve over time. New areas of application will likely emerge, and existing ones may be revised or reorganised.
This is in keeping with the perspective itself. If life is understood as an ongoing process, then our understanding of it must also remain open, responsive, and capable of change.
Self-Regulation
Many of the difficulties we face are not simply problems in the world around us, but reflect how we relate to ourselves.
We can become caught in patterns of behaviour that offer immediate relief while gradually undermining our longer-term stability and wellbeing. At other times, the difficulty is less obvious but no less significant—a sense of disconnection, restlessness, or being out of step with our own lives.
From the perspective of life telos, these experiences can be understood as forms of misalignment. Behaviour becomes organised around short-term comfort or pleasure rather than the more challenging task that support life.
The following videos explore how these patterns develop, how they are maintained, and what it might mean to move back into alignment.
How it Feels to be In or Out of Sync with Life- and Why
Here I I talk about the felt experience—the physical, emotional, and existential signals that tell us whether we’re living in tune with life’s natural rhythms, or drifting away from them.
Life Telo, Addiction, and the Pursuit of Pleasure
In this video I explore how our pursuit of pleasure can derail our deeper biological and emotional needs.
Additction and Avoiding the Pain of Life
I focus on the avoidance of pain—how it contributes to addiction and disconnects us from the purposes for which life gave us the capacity to feel pain in the first place.
Life Telo, Addiction, and the Path to Recovery
In this video, I explore what recovery really involves: not just abstinence, but realignment with what life asks of us.
Meaning and Purpose
Questions of meaning and purpose are often approached as abstract or philosophical concerns. They are also practical. How we answer them shapes how we live.
In the absence of a clear orientation, it is easy to drift—to pursue what is immediately rewarding, socially reinforced, or conceptually appealing, without a deeper sense of direction. Or to despair that life has no intrinsic meaning or purpose at all.
Life Telos as First Principle offers a different starting point. It rejects the idea that life is ultimately void of meaning or purpose. Rather than adopting grand abstract beliefs, it invites a personal discovery of meaning and purpose. The guide for this discovery is not abstract contemplation alone. It looks to life itself—how it is organised, and what it requires—as a grounding for meaning.
From this perspective, meaning and purpose are not invented in a void. They grow naturally through recognition of and participation with their presence and expression in the life all around us. They grow through recognising and participating in the patterns and processes of life around us.
The following videos explore how meaning and purpose can be understood in these terms, and how this orientation can be lived.
Life Telos and What Existentialism Got Wrong About Sisyphus
In this video, I revisit the myth of Sisyphus and offer a reinterpretation through the lens of life telos—the idea that life has an inherent direction toward growth, relationship, and integration.
Life Telos: The First Principle of Human Purpose
Here I take a deep dive into purpose from multiple perspectives — clinical, biological, psychological, cultural, and philosophical.
Relationships
Human life is lived in relationship.
Much of what we experience—connection, conflict, intimacy, misunderstanding—arises in how we relate to others. These dynamics are shaped by our biological inheritance, our psychological development, and the social and cultural environments we are part of.
In recent times, many of the structures that once organised relationships have changed or weakened. This has created both greater freedom and greater uncertainty. Expectations are less clear. Roles are less defined. And the conditions for stable, meaningful connection are often harder to establish and maintain.
From the perspective of life telos, relationships can be understood as part of the processes that support life—through bonding, cooperation, development, and the raising of the next generation. When these processes are disrupted or misunderstood, difficulties tend to arise.
The following videos explore some of these challenges, including the dynamics between men and women, the impact of changing social conditions, and the question of how we remain connected to one another in a more fragmented world.
Men and Women: Our Deep Past and a New Orientation
In this video, I look at our evolutionary and historical past to better understand why men and women relate to one another the way they do, and how a series of cultural, technological, and moral shifts — from the Enlightenment, to the Industrial Revolution, to contraception and modern individualism — have quietly reshaped our expectations of intimacy, commitment, and partnership.
Equality and Difference: The Tragic Tension Between Men and Women
In this video, I explore what I believe is one of the deepest tensions shaping relationships between men and women today: the tension between equality and difference. We care deeply about justice, fairness, and equality. At the same time, men and women are shaped by real biological, psychological, and relational differences that bring with them unequal capacities, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities. When these differences are denied, moralised, or treated as mere social constructions, resentment often follows.
Sexual Selection and the Evolution of Desire
In this video, I explore sexual selection and the evolution of desire as a way of understanding persistent patterns of attraction, conflict, and confusion between men and women.
Masculine and Feminine: Healthy Traits Turn Toxic
Masculine and feminine can be understood as life-serving modes of perception, action, and power that evolved because they helped human beings cooperate, survive, and build stable societies. In this video I talk about how they can become toxic.
Parenting in a Fractured World: A Historical Perspective
In this video, I step back to take a historical perspective on parenting: how it has changed over time, how our cultural shifts have shaped the expectations we place on parents, and what we may have lost along the way. From traditional societies to the pressures of modern life, I explore the forces that have disrupted our shared narratives, weakened communal structures, and left many parents feeling isolated, overwhelmed, or unsure of how to raise resilient, grounded human beings.
Love: It’s Complicated
This video explores intimate relationships at a deeper level than most popular discussions.
Making Sense of the World
Making sense of the world is something we are doing all the time, whether we are aware of it or not.
Human beings have a remarkable capacity for reflection, interpretation, and analysis. This allows us to make sense of complex situations, but it also creates the possibility of distortion.
We are subject to biases, emotional investments, and pressures toward certainty and closure. These can narrow our attention, simplify our understanding, and lead us to adopt views that feel coherent but fail to reflect the full complexity of reality.
At the same time, our capacity for self-reflection allows us to step back from our immediate reactions and examine how we are thinking. This creates the possibility of greater flexibility, accuracy, and responsiveness.
From the perspective of life telos, thinking is most effective when it remains in contact with the conditions it is trying to understand. When it becomes detached—organised more by internal coherence than by feedback from life—it can contribute to misalignment.
The following videos explore how these processes unfold, and how we might develop ways of thinking that remain open, grounded, and responsive.
Embodied Intelligence: How We Know Before We Think
Much of modern life treats intelligence as something that happens primarily in thought, language, and abstract reasoning. But biologically and developmentally, intelligence begins much earlier than that. Long before we could think conceptually, we learned how to sense, orient, and respond to the world through our bodies.
Embodied Intelligence in an Abstract World
We often think of intelligence as something that happens in our heads — thinking, reasoning, manipulating ideas and symbols. But human intelligence did not evolve in abstract systems. It evolved in bodies. In relationships. In landscapes. In continuous feedback with other people and the living world. In this video, I explore what I’m calling embodied intelligence — the form of intelligence that operates before concepts and language, and continues to operate beneath and alongside them. This is the intelligence through which we sense, feel, orient, coordinate, and respond to life directly.
The Necessity and Fallibility of Knowledge: Why Ultimate Certainty Isn’t Coming
We can’t live without knowledge—but none of our knowledge is ever complete or entirely correct. In this video, I explore a shared human predicament: we need maps, narratives, theories, and belief systems to navigate the world, yet every one of them contains errors and leaves things out.
When Truth Becomes Dangerous
In this video, I explore how partial truths—when mistaken for the whole truth—can lead to distortion, division, and even harm. Drawing on examples from biology, history, and contemporary culture, I show that life itself offers a model for holding truth: through balance, proportion, and dynamic relationship, not through absolutism.
Narratives: How They Make Meaning and How They Trap Us
We live inside narratives — stories about who we are, what the world is like, who is good or bad, and what the future holds. These stories help us organise experience, orient morally, and act with purpose. Without them, life would feel chaotic and overwhelming. But narratives also have liabilities. When they become rigid, unexamined, or totalised, they can shrink reality, flatten people into roles, polarise moral vision, and quietly detach us from life itself. We begin serving our stories rather than allowing our stories to serve life.
Why We Defend Our Beliefs: Bias, Dissonance, Closure
Human beings often like to imagine that we are rational creatures who simply follow the evidence wherever it leads. But a closer look at how the mind actually works tells a different story.
The Collective
Human life does not unfold only at the level of individuals and relationships. It is also shaped by the larger systems we participate in—cultural norms, institutions, technologies, infrastructures, and forms of social organisation.
These systems are, in part, products of human intelligence and cooperation. They allow for coordination at scale and have made many aspects of modern life possible. At the same time, they can take on a life of their own—continuing to operate even when they become misaligned with the conditions that support human flourishing.
In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, it can become difficult to see how these systems are shaping our perceptions, our behaviour, and our interactions with one another. Simplified narratives, amplified through media and technology, can further distort our understanding and contribute to division and conflict.
From the perspective of life telos, systems can be understood as extensions of life that must remain responsive to the conditions they depend on. When feedback is ignored or overridden, misalignment tends to grow—often with unintended consequences.
The following videos explore how these dynamics appear in contemporary culture, including the role of ideology, the attention economy, and the ways in which systems can drift away from lived reality.
Hooked on Outrage: How the Attention Economy Captures Us
In this video, I explore how the attention economy increasingly relies on outrage to capture and hold our focus. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, and cultural analysis, I look at what happens in the nervous system when we encounter something that provokes us, why outrage can feel rewarding, and how this creates a powerful feedback loop. I also introduce the idea of libidinal capitalism—a system that doesn’t just compete for our attention, but for our emotional energy, our desires, and our sense of identity.
When Everything Feels Ideological
Many people today feel pressured to have strong opinions, to pick a side, and to signal certainty — even when things feel complex, confusing, or unresolved. This video is an invitation to slow down. Rather than arguing for a position or offering ready-made answers, I explore what it might mean to tolerate uncertainty long enough to think and feel more carefully — and to look for a deeper orientation that isn’t just another borrowed belief.
Men and Women: Something Feels Off
In this video I explore the growing feeling of tension and mistrust between men and women these days and how changing cultural norms have played a part.
Tools and Emerging Challenges
Human beings continuously develop tools that extend our capacities.
Some of these tools are conceptual—ways of thinking that help us organise experience, make decisions, and act more effectively. Others are technological, allowing us to interact with the world in new and increasingly powerful ways.
These developments can be profoundly beneficial. At the same time, they can introduce new forms of disconnection. Tools that are meant to serve us can begin to shape how we think, what we attend to, and how we relate to ourselves and others.
Emerging technologies, in particular, raise questions about how we maintain a connection to embodied, relational, and environmental forms of intelligence while increasingly engaging with mediated and abstract systems.
From the perspective of life telos, tools are most useful when they remain in service of life—supporting its processes rather than replacing or distorting them.
The following videos explore some of these questions, including the use of conceptual tools and the impact of new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
The Miracle and the Dangerous Trap of Language
In this video I talk about the amazing human invention of language and how it has allowed us to communicate in complex ways that have facilitated great connection, cooperation, and the creation of civilization. But it has also given us the power to veer away from what life requires, which entails great costs, both individually and collectively. I propose that these problems stem from our tendency to reify and totalize concepts via language. I explore this in terms of 4 dimensions: 1) Psychological 2)Embodied/Behavioural 3) Cultural and 4) Communication infrastructure. We are hypnotized by language and we don’t even notice it.
Are You Chained to the Clock?
We live in a world ruled by the clock and calendar. Precise timekeeping has given us trains that run on schedule, global collaboration, and the marvels of modern civilization. But what has it cost us? In this video, I explore how living by the rigid ticking of the clock can pull us out of sync with the biological rhythms that have guided life for millions of years — from our daily circadian cycles to the longer tides of seasons, lunar phases, and our own inner clocks.
Why Humans Invented Self, God, Heaven, and Hell
In this video I explore four of humanity’s most powerful symbolic inventions—Self, God, Heaven, and Hell—and how they evolved to serve life itself. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and moral philosophy, I trace how these ideas emerged from biology, how they organized cooperation in early societies, and how they later became tools of domination and control.
The Wild Side of AI No One is Talking About (Yet)
Artificial intelligence is evolving fast—and so are its effects on our minds, relationships, and identities. In this video, we go beyond the usual headlines to explore the hidden and often unsettling ways AI is reshaping what it means to be human.
If you’d like to explore the full body of work, the complete Life Telos as First Principle series can be found here:
