By Tae-Sik
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July 6, 2025
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~6 min read
The other day, I was chatting with some friends, middle-aged, like me, with kids and businesses to juggle. I asked them what keeps them up at night as they move forward in life. Was it their children? Their business? Their health? Their personal future, or maybe their wives? What’s the biggest worry on a daily […]
By Tae-Sik
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July 3, 2020
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~8 min read
We associate a bureaucracy with words like stodgy, slow, formal, inefficient, procedural, wasteful, and expensive. Where do we find bureaucracies? Usually in large companies and organizations. In government offices on a local, city, county, state and federal level. There may be less obtrusive bureaucracies in smaller establishments. What do bureaucrats and bureaucracies do? They have […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 22, 2020
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~3 min read
Democracy. The system and idea that individual citizens of a nation or state has a direct influence on the rules, laws and systems that govern their way of life. The idea that everyone may participate in casting their vote for a policy or politician. One person, one vote. The history of voting rights in America […]
By Tae-Sik
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July 6, 2025
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~6 min read
The connections we form in early life, whether with family or friends, carry a profound weight, shaped by biology, culture, and the innocence of our youth. The ties that bind us to others, through blood, friendship, or shared experience, leave an imprint that is both deep and mysterious. From the moment we enter the world, […]
By Tae-Sik
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May 29, 2022
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~11 min read
In the beginning was energy. Maybe it was matter, or something else. For simplicity, let's assume we started with energy. The universe experienced the Big Bang. Energy is converted into matter, or at least a lot of it was. Energy becomes matter. Energy is matter and matter is energy. E=MC2, So the science goes. The […]
By Tae-Sik
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May 14, 2025
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~5 min read
I'm sitting at a restaurant and notice a gentleman having lunch with his children. He's disheveled, middle aged and the kids appear to be about 8yrs old. If we were introduced, I wouldn't hesitate to address him as "sir", and use honorifics. Then it dawns on me: I could actually be older than him. It's […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 7, 2022
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~8 min read
There is a tolerance for life on Earth to proliferate, evolve, and multiply. The partiality for living things to stay alive is its primary imperitive, its number one self programmed instruction set. If there’s any single driving force for living...
By Milan Ji
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December 4, 2025
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~9 min read
From Blood and Soil to Contracts and Code: The Great Substitution For almost the entirety of human existence, the primary social glue was biological and territorial. Societies cohered through extended kinship networks; clans, villages, tribes, and the literal soil that contained the bones of their ancestors. In traditional societies across Asia, Europe, the Americas and […]
By Milan Ji
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February 9, 2026
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~3 min read
The nature of relationships and friendships can be elucidated through the metaphor of patronage in retail settings, including large-scale discount outlets, online platforms, or comprehensive department stores. The preference for centralizing the acquisition of all necessities at a single location, such as a major online retailer, a vast discount store, or a single department store, […]
By Milan Ji
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June 23, 2026
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~7 min read
The Irreplaceable Currency and the Vanishing Light of Youth King or slave, the tax is paid. Time, in its indomitable nature, underlies all of life. It is the invisible backdrop upon which every event unfolds, the medium through which consciousness is experienced and existence becomes real. Every thought, every decision, every achievement, every regret, every […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 23, 2020
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~3 min read
We are taught to be winners. We are told that we can overcome anything. Set your mind to it, and you can do it. Losing feels tragic. The truth is that most of us are losers. We just don't want to acknowledge it. Life is hard. Life is, as they say, suffering. Losing is the […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 24, 2020
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~3 min read
You find yourself in a mysterious world. The sapiens around you are recent acquaintances. Your mission unknown. Your adventure lies ahead… Your tool is the physical capacity of your mind and body. Your mission, be the best version of yourself and complete your adventure. Imagine being dropped in a place unknown. You are given a […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 26, 2020
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~3 min read
A most mysterious phenomenon of human nature is the self-awarness of one's own consciousness. To know that one is alive. Present. Locally aware. Finite in space and time. Embodied in a physical nature. It is a most mysterious thing. To be confined within, behind the eyes, between the ears, above a torso, and within the […]
By Tae-Sik
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December 6, 2019
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~4 min read
Self Consciousness is the Highest Form of Evolution We often think of IQ and intelligence to be the highest attribute of human beings. I would argue that it's the degree to which we are "self conscious". Self Consciousness, more than anything else sets us apart from every other living animal on the planet. What is […]
By Tae-Sik
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August 4, 2023
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~5 min read
The 7 Pillars of Life Seven Pillars represent the structural foundations of a substantive and meaningful human life. A careful reflection into these seven domains which support and substantiate a mindful human existence, in harmony with our nature and knowing self awareness. This is a meditation and exploration. These seven domains are foundational to a […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 19, 2020
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~4 min read
We live in a modern civilization. Organized. Structured. Peaceful. Productive. There is very little want. We should all be so lucky to be alive in this epoch. Civilization wasn't built in a day. It's taken thousands, if not millions of years, for humanity to reach today's precipice. We can easily take this for granted. Feel […]
By Milan Ji
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June 22, 2026
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~9 min read
The Emotional Compression of Knowledge and Experience There is an overlooked simplicity in how life organizes itself. Across biological, cultural, and psychological systems, complexity appears to move in a single direction: toward compression. What begins as sprawling experience, distributed information, and layered understanding gradually condenses into something smaller, more immediate, and more usable. Not simpler […]
By Tae-Sik
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January 2, 2024
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~4 min read
For a person of youth, what you see is their unlimited potential, their bright future and the boundless possibilities that life holds. There is an exaggerated estimation of their aptitudes. We tend to draw a straight line from their birth to youth, and extrapolate the same trajectory indefinitely into the future. The lens of youth […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 28, 2020
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~3 min read
Why Being Self-Interested is for the Collective Good. Through the collective interest of individuals. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The majority of our interactions lie with other people. Our relationship with associates, family and friends. It is rare to contend with wild animals or the forces of nature. We have […]
By Milan Ji
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December 2, 2025
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~6 min read
A young man’s value is self-evident and largely unearned. He walks into a room trailing decades of future productivity, like an invisible credit line, like a shadow ready to emerge. Society reads him the way venture capitalists read a Series A deck: high upside, tolerable risk, and, above all, a gloriously long runway. His mind […]
By Milan Ji
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November 20, 2025
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~4 min read
One of the most challenging realities of aging is the shortening runway. When you’re young, time stretches out like a long, open field, you have a long runway. You can run hard, build speed, take risks, and trust that you have enough distance to get airborne. Youth gives you the margin for error: time to […]
By Tae-Sik
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February 4, 2024
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~6 min read
Ancient explorers bravely ventured into uncharted territories with rudimentary tools and an adventurous spirit. Some were fortunate to have primitive maps inherited from previous explorers, perhaps even an indigenous guide who knew the land by heart and sight. The expedition was fraught with danger and the unknown. As the journey progressed, charts were updated, redrawn, […]
By Milan Ji
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April 23, 2026
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~7 min read
Humans tell stories of empire, power, and destiny. We frame our ambitions as a search for love, security, or the service of God and nation. Yet beneath these lofty ideals lies a more practical transaction: we are biological traders, relentlessly negotiating for our next payout of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Every goal we set […]
By Tae-Sik
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May 17, 2024
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~3 min read
The passage of time is a fascinating perception of reality. The way our mind interprets the "experience" of time is truly mysterious. Our perception of time's passage is not a constant, but a flexible construct shaped by our unconscious engagement. Your brain is a recording device. When experiencing novel stimuli, like those encountered during travel, […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 23, 2023
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~12 min read
Human beings have birthrights and entitlements, unlike any other living creature. In democratic and free market nations, we have private property rights, the right to vote, the right to life, the freedom of speech, the freedom of movement, the freedom to work and pursue happiness. We have freedoms and liberties given to us by "default". […]
By Milan Ji
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October 3, 2025
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~4 min read
There comes a moment in life when a person begins to sense his or her own disappearance—not the biological one, but the social one. It is the quiet vanishing of relevance. You leave a job, you sell a business, you step back from the arena of competition, and suddenly, the world looks past you as […]
By Tae-Sik
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December 10, 2020
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~3 min read
We live in a virtual world today. What we need physically are provided for by machines and a few humans. All basic human needs are fairly inexpensive and easy to acquire. We spend most of our day in front of computers, glued to our phones, talking to dots & colors on computer screens and phone […]
By Tae-Sik
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June 17, 2020
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~2 min read
A nation is great, when its citizens are free to be their best. A nation is great when it frees its people to think freely, move freely, speak freely, and live freely. The pillars of a great nation require restraint. The foundations of a great nation is trust. Trust amongst the citizenry, its leaders, communities, […]
By Milan Ji
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November 4, 2025
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~7 min read
In the theater of a single life, where the curtains rise on boundless vitality and fall on quiet acceptance, there unfolds a profound arc shaped by the interplay of energy, time, and fortune. Youth arrives as a lavish subsidy from the universe, a non-renewable gift of effortless abundance, where every sensation is amplified, every risk […]