September 30, 2024: The “story” half of this book, inspired by a vivid dream I had one night last spring, has a futuristic, sci-fi aspect to it. When I woke up, I knew I had to try to write about what the dream wanted to say. It ended up as sort a personal meditation on some of the things that have animated my thinking, lately and over the course of my life, about human affairs in general, as they proceed on both an organizational level (a philosophy of leadership, if you will) and a personal level (a philosophy of life and how best to live it). It uses the discourses of quantum mechanics and capitalism as tropes to examine both the awful path Western culture traverses toward its own demise and to proffer alternative ways of imagining a better one. One friend suggested that the next revision step should be to “write yourself out” of it, which got me thinking about my lifetime of “writing myself in” to everything I made and teaching others to do that as well. That culminated in an essay called “Writing Myself In,” now the other (first) half of the book.
