The Dao of Living Well

8 min read You've ticked the boxes, hit the targets, and kept up with the pace. So why does it still feel like you're one bad quarter away from becoming nobody? This post draws on the third-century Chinese philosopher Guo Xiang and Christian theology to show why outsourcing your sense of worth to external judges is exhausting, and what to do instead. Life in 2026 feels like a permanent audition. Whether you're a millennial trying to navigate a shifting job market or just someone trying to keep up with the digital noise, the pressure is real. We live in a world governed by metrics. You check your phone for likes, your bank account for worth, and your LinkedIn profile for identity. It's exhausting, because it feels like you aren't legitimate until someone else says you are. Picture this: you spend your week working on a project you're genuinely proud of, but if your boss doesn't mention it in the team meeting, or if it doesn't get engagement online, you fe...

  8 min read You've ticked every box worth ticking, and yet, somewhere between the morning routine and the Slack notifications, you've lost track of who's actually living your life. Drawing on the forgotten philosophy of Ji Kang, a third-century Chinese thinker, and the Stoic tradition, this post explores why so many high-achieving adults feel hollow, and what ancient wisdom tells us about breaking free from the 'net' of performance. Do you ever feel like you're living your life for an audience that doesn't quite exist? Most of us wake up and immediately start performing. We check emails to see who needs something from us. We scroll through social media to calibrate how we should dress, what we should eat, and which opinions are currently safe to hold. We get to work and put on a professional mask that feels nothing like who we are at 11 PM on a Tuesday. This is what we might call  Performative Identity Syndrome . We've become expert at optimising our id...