The Philosopher Who Diagnosed Everyone But Himself

4,000 Weeks. Parks and Recreation. Paul Rudd. Codex Tinkering. Zedd. iTerm. Cardiac Cardinals. Philosophy. The Black Notebooks.

Howdy, kind reader. I’m flipping the script for this edition. Not because I’m being inconsistent; rather, I’m taking a break from the regularly scheduled programming. Why? Well, I read this great book by Oliver Burkeman—more on that later—and he wrote a casual aside about Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher. This short diatribe made me think. And so, I researched and ran with it, which led to a 3,500-word essay. However, anything that epic requires a small token of appreciation. So I’m flipping the script and putting my usual experiments and book recommendations up front, with an article for paid subscribers at the end. Don’t worry though, I’ll be back with the usual format next time. It’s another epic piece that didn’t need a sequel, but events have led me to revisit it as someone stole my idea again. The darned NY Times; they did it again. Sigh. Until next time, here we go.

What I’m Listening To (Morning Run Edition):

Amy Poehler pulled off a Parks and Recreation Reunion Tour with Jon Hamm; I found myself laughing out loud on my morning run. Who knew Paul Rudd went to KU? Hey, I thought I knew this guy—caught all three Ant-Man movies in the theater. Watched the last one in 3-D glasses. Ugh. I’m hoping there is a Dorian Gray–style painting in his closet wearing a tattered Jayhawk T-shirt. Go Tigers.

Fun fact: Oscar Wilde only wrote one full-length novel. Granted, it became so culturally dominant that it tends to eclipse his plays and prison writings.

What I’m Tinkering With (OpenAI, Focused Again):

OpenAI hasn’t had a great couple of weeks. The trial of 2026 is showcasing a management team in disarray, and everyone looks a bit petty. Then, there is Elon; he pushes for the jury and then admits to copyright infringement while on the stand. A wow moment in the world of blatant theft. But that’s the legal process. Kudos to Satya Nadella—he knows how not to leave a paper trail. Pages of text. A call to get him on the phone. And nothing... That’s solid corporate legal training.All that being said, Codex and GPT-5.5 are having a moment. It’s Claude Code and CoWork rolled into a single application that runs at a fraction of the cost. My product of 2025 was Cursor, which I used to rebuild a CMS that manages my website. This month, I dropped the subscription, switched tools, and I’ve been off and running with Zed and the old-fashioned command line. We’ll see if it holds as memory prices are through the roof, helium supplies are dwindling (those memory and chips require the same stuff that powered the Hindenburg), and Anthropic’s capacity is waning. But a competitive market is a good thing, even at hyperscale. Give it a try; Codex doesn’t have OpenClaw hype but is improving through constant updates. Who knows, next month I’ll be tinkering with the next great thing. The world moves fast.

Here’s to Hope (The Redbirds are Barking):

Thanks to this year’s edition of the Cardiac Cardinals, my preseason prediction is looking like a miss. And that’s an incredibly awesome turn of events. No, Jordan Walker hitting over .320 wasn’t on my bingo card. Now, they’re jumping around the dugout, high-fiving, and sharing a dawg pound necklace after each homer. Too early to make any model adjustments. It’s a long season.

What I’m Reading (Time Management for Mortals):

Four Thousand Weeks is a book about time, but not in the airport-bookstore sense. Not hacks. Not inbox zero. Not the perfect calendar system that finally turns life into a solved machine. Burkeman’s argument is harder: the average human life is absurdly short, and most productivity culture is a dodge. Few want to face the simple facts. We keep trying to master time because accepting the limit feels like abject failure.

But the limit is the point.

You cannot do it all. You cannot keep every option open. You cannot optimize your way out of being finite. Sounds bleak, I know.

The book’s strongest takeaway is how it flips productivity upside down. The question is not how to fit more into life. The question is what deserves the weeks you have at your disposal. Email, errands, ambitions, family, books, trips, projects, friendships, maintenance, and all the nonsense—the growing list will always exceed the container. Think how a goldfish grows to fit the surroundings. So the move is not perfect efficiency. It is choosing. And making peace with neglected possibilities.

Read the book. Its spine is Heidegger’s concepts. Still, the practical lesson is simple: stop treating life like a queue to be cleared. Pick the projects, people, and rituals that would still matter if you admitted a finite clock ticks. Think fewer open loops, more deliberate abandonment, and a better relationship with boredom, patience, and limits. What’s rare about Four Thousand Weeks is that it’s not saying to get more done. The pages want us to stop pretending done is a prize to be won.

Heidegger: The Philosopher Who Diagnosed Everyone But Himself

Profound thoughts—these are hard. One man believed Western philosophy spent 2,500 years asking the wrong questions. What is justice? Plato. Knowledge? That Aristotle guy refined it. What is considered good? Oh, if my Philosophy 1 class taught me anything that’s Kant. The entire tradition revolves around definitions. Causality. Truth. Duty. Beauty. Even art. Yet, nobody stopped to ask what existence itself means. That wasn’t until Martin Heidegger came along in the 1920s.