Psychology asks how a life works.

Philosophy asks how it ought to be lived.

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I have spent years developing a framework for understanding human flourishing that draws from two disciplines that have shaped my own work: psychology and philosophy. Psychology gives us powerful ways to understand suffering, behavior, relationships, development, and change. Philosophy permits a different set of questions: What is worth wanting? What do I owe to others? What deserves my attention? What kind of person am I becoming? How ought I live?

 

These questions overlap, but they are not interchangeable. They have led me to develop two related frameworks: Lifestyle Ecology™ and the Examined Lifestyle.

 

Lifestyle Ecology begins with a simple observation: a human life does not occur in separate compartments. Sleep affects mood; work changes relationships; physical surroundings shape behavior; habits alter attention; relationships affect health; culture influences desire; meaning changes what we are willing to endure. Lifestyle Ecology examines these dimensions as parts of a living ecology rather than as isolated variables.

 

Its central concern is Coherence: the extent to which the significant dimensions of a life can coexist without chronically undermining one another and, where circumstances allow, become mutually sustaining. Coherence is not another component of life to optimize. It is a higher-order ecological property of how a life is organized.

 

The Examined Lifestyle begins where description is no longer enough. A life can function well and still leave important questions unanswered. A person may be successful at work and still wonder whether the work deserves so much of a finite life. A habit may regulate distress while gradually narrowing everything around it. A relationship may be stable without being honest. Even a coherent life does not, by virtue of its coherence, become a good one.

 

The Examined Lifestyle therefore asks a different question:

How ought I inhabit my life?

 

Its central aspiration is Participation: to consciously, intentionally, and responsibly inhabit reality in ways that shape both oneself and the world. Participation does not presume complete freedom or control. We enter lives already shaped by bodies, histories, families, cultures, obligations, accidents, and circumstances we did not choose. But within those conditions, how we repeatedly participate matters. What we attend to, practice, avoid, consume, cultivate, neglect, love, and serve changes us and contributes to the conditions under which we will participate next.

 

Lifestyle Ecology and the Examined Lifestyle therefore belong together without being the same project. Lifestyle Ecology asks what kind of life this is and how its parts are organized. The Examined Lifestyle asks what this life should be oriented toward and how one ought to participate in it. Between them lies much of what has interested me throughout my work as a psychologist, teacher, and student of philosophy.

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Why I Do This Work

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My interest in these questions began with philosophy and eventually led me into clinical psychology. Over the years, I have worked as a psychologist in private practice, corrections, addiction treatment, and the military, while continuing to study philosophy, religion, culture, food, contemplative practice, and the ordinary routines through which people construct their lives.

 

Clinical work has repeatedly shown me that suffering cannot always be understood by examining symptoms alone. A person brings an entire life into the consulting room: work, relationships, body, habits, history, surroundings, obligations, beliefs, losses, desires, and ways of spending time. Sometimes the appropriate task is psychological treatment. Sometimes the problem concerns the organization of life in which the symptoms occur. And sometimes a person is confronting a philosophical question that should not be converted into a disorder simply because it is difficult or painful.

 

That distinction has become increasingly important to my work.

Daily Three Miles and My Tiny Kitchen grew from the practical side of the same inquiry. Walking, cooking, yoga, meditation, reading, conversation, and other ordinary practices interest me not as lifestyle accessories but as forms of participation. Repeated practices organize time and attention. They establish relationships with the body, other people, places, objects, and the natural world. Over time, they help create the conditions in which a particular kind of life becomes possible.

 

This site is where I explore those connections: psychology and philosophy, health and habit, addiction and recovery, food and movement, spirituality and meaning, attention and responsibility. The subjects vary because human lives vary. The underlying inquiry remains the same: how the ways in which we repeatedly participate in life shape both the lives we have and the people we become.