Your essays gallops like that feral horse you invoke, unbridled, muscular, and, refreshingly, uninterested in show-jumping over someone else’s standards. Yet as I read, a mischievous question kept nipping at the reins: what if our culture’s obsession with “evidence” didn’t merely muffle our feelings, but re-wired the very nervous system that detects them?
Neuroscientists call it interoception: the brain’s moment-to-moment reading of heartbeat, breath, gut, skin. When we strap every pulse of experience to an external metrics (likes, KPIs, bio-trackers) we outsource this native sixth sense to the cult of quantification. The result is a kind of emotional proprioception deficit disorder… we can no longer tell, from the inside, where our own joy is anatomically located. We need a dashboard.
So here’s my pragmatic add-on to your liberating thesis: practice senseless feeling the way musicians practice scales, daily, pointlessly, ten minutes at a time. Close every screen, stand barefoot on the kitchen tiles, and audit nothing. Let temperature, gravity, and that un-Instagrammable hum behind the sternum improvise together. This isn’t self-care; it’s self-calibration. Do it often enough and the next board-meeting triumph or romantic setback will register not as cause of feeling but as harmonic over-tone, music the body was already playing.
Our species also needs communal feelings, shared grief, collective awe, righteous anger, in order to weave social fabric. Evidence can matter there, not to justify emotion but to synchronise it. A protest without facts devolves into noise; a symphony requires a key signature. “Love without evidence” need not mean “love without consonance”. We can tune to each other without turning ourselves into tuning forks for external approval.
Thank you, Asacker, for reminding us that the horse runs because it is running. My addition is simply that we must keep the stable lights dim and the Fitbits off if we want to hear the thunder of hooves at all. And once we’ve relearned that inner rhythm, we can choose, deliberately, mischievously, when to let evidence amplify the chorus, and when to let silence prove everything.
This is stunning. Thank you. You didn’t just respond; you expanded the piece into something more textured, more embodied. “Emotional proprioception deficit disorder”—what a phrase. It captures the disorientation I was circling, though it also raises a question for me.
Do we actually want that kind of inward feedback system? Part of me wonders if the goal isn’t better interoception, but less self-monitoring altogether. Like children, maybe we’re meant to feel freely, not track those feelings with heightened awareness. Picasso said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” I think of that often when it comes to emotional life too—maybe the work isn’t refinement, but return.
That said, your call to “audit nothing” is exactly the kind of practice that nudges us there. And your reframing of evidence—not as justification, but as a tool for emotional harmony—feels deeply right. A protest still needs a key signature.
Honestly, this felt less like a comment and more like a companion piece. Grateful you took the time to write it—and curious where else your thinking is galloping off to.
Such an important post for me, Tom. Very resonant with what else I am reading. Thank you for perfectly articulating some ideas that are very hard to get across. It's so valuable for us to adopt the inside-out perspective, as the old world falls and the new Earth has not started yet.
Love the depth of this one. It somehow reminds me of Neville Goddard's work. He said. "As you capture the feeling of an imagined thought , you are relieved of the effort to make it so, for it already is so."
Thanks, Tom. I’ve been wrestling with this idea lately, and I wonder if, like Walter Mitty, there’s a fine line between transformative imagination and escapist fantasy.
Goddard suggests that capturing the feeling of an imagined thought relieves us of effort because “it already is so,” but Mitty also captured vivid feelings in his fantasies of being a heroic pilot or commander. The difference seems to be that Mitty used his imagination as compensation for feelings of inadequacy, creating a psychological escape that actually prevented real growth.
Perhaps the key distinction is whether our imagined thoughts inspire us toward aligned action or substitute for it. Goddard’s approach seems to require living from the assumption of fulfillment, while Mitty lived in dissociation from his actual circumstances. One transforms reality, the other avoids it.
Your essays gallops like that feral horse you invoke, unbridled, muscular, and, refreshingly, uninterested in show-jumping over someone else’s standards. Yet as I read, a mischievous question kept nipping at the reins: what if our culture’s obsession with “evidence” didn’t merely muffle our feelings, but re-wired the very nervous system that detects them?
Neuroscientists call it interoception: the brain’s moment-to-moment reading of heartbeat, breath, gut, skin. When we strap every pulse of experience to an external metrics (likes, KPIs, bio-trackers) we outsource this native sixth sense to the cult of quantification. The result is a kind of emotional proprioception deficit disorder… we can no longer tell, from the inside, where our own joy is anatomically located. We need a dashboard.
So here’s my pragmatic add-on to your liberating thesis: practice senseless feeling the way musicians practice scales, daily, pointlessly, ten minutes at a time. Close every screen, stand barefoot on the kitchen tiles, and audit nothing. Let temperature, gravity, and that un-Instagrammable hum behind the sternum improvise together. This isn’t self-care; it’s self-calibration. Do it often enough and the next board-meeting triumph or romantic setback will register not as cause of feeling but as harmonic over-tone, music the body was already playing.
Our species also needs communal feelings, shared grief, collective awe, righteous anger, in order to weave social fabric. Evidence can matter there, not to justify emotion but to synchronise it. A protest without facts devolves into noise; a symphony requires a key signature. “Love without evidence” need not mean “love without consonance”. We can tune to each other without turning ourselves into tuning forks for external approval.
Thank you, Asacker, for reminding us that the horse runs because it is running. My addition is simply that we must keep the stable lights dim and the Fitbits off if we want to hear the thunder of hooves at all. And once we’ve relearned that inner rhythm, we can choose, deliberately, mischievously, when to let evidence amplify the chorus, and when to let silence prove everything.
This is stunning. Thank you. You didn’t just respond; you expanded the piece into something more textured, more embodied. “Emotional proprioception deficit disorder”—what a phrase. It captures the disorientation I was circling, though it also raises a question for me.
Do we actually want that kind of inward feedback system? Part of me wonders if the goal isn’t better interoception, but less self-monitoring altogether. Like children, maybe we’re meant to feel freely, not track those feelings with heightened awareness. Picasso said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” I think of that often when it comes to emotional life too—maybe the work isn’t refinement, but return.
That said, your call to “audit nothing” is exactly the kind of practice that nudges us there. And your reframing of evidence—not as justification, but as a tool for emotional harmony—feels deeply right. A protest still needs a key signature.
Honestly, this felt less like a comment and more like a companion piece. Grateful you took the time to write it—and curious where else your thinking is galloping off to.
Such an important post for me, Tom. Very resonant with what else I am reading. Thank you for perfectly articulating some ideas that are very hard to get across. It's so valuable for us to adopt the inside-out perspective, as the old world falls and the new Earth has not started yet.
Thank you very much, Brian.
Love the depth of this one. It somehow reminds me of Neville Goddard's work. He said. "As you capture the feeling of an imagined thought , you are relieved of the effort to make it so, for it already is so."
Thanks, Tom. I’ve been wrestling with this idea lately, and I wonder if, like Walter Mitty, there’s a fine line between transformative imagination and escapist fantasy.
Goddard suggests that capturing the feeling of an imagined thought relieves us of effort because “it already is so,” but Mitty also captured vivid feelings in his fantasies of being a heroic pilot or commander. The difference seems to be that Mitty used his imagination as compensation for feelings of inadequacy, creating a psychological escape that actually prevented real growth.
Perhaps the key distinction is whether our imagined thoughts inspire us toward aligned action or substitute for it. Goddard’s approach seems to require living from the assumption of fulfillment, while Mitty lived in dissociation from his actual circumstances. One transforms reality, the other avoids it.