As I sat at edge of Toronto's Harbourfront looking onto Lake Ontario, the grandfatherly words of Alan Watts entered my thoughts:

The point of life... is to be alive.. that's it.

I had heard this and numerous bits of wisdom like it before: koans, proverbs, dictum; all of which I yearned to live authentically by, automatically even, but never quite feel them at times. There is a superficial level of understanding, an intellectual grasp of a concept, but its another to really know and understand something deep down.

If the point of being alive, is to be alive.

I thought to myself,

We only know what life means by knowing what it is to die.

I continued.

I tell people I lost my heart in Ericeira. The ocean swept up my recklessness one June morning as I leapt forward into the freezing water—missing the icebaths back home. Exiting the freezing Atlantic to the crisp breeze of Portugal’s coastal surf town, I lost something without realizing it. 

Grief struck later, searching the mirror with a phantom touch to a beloved Malachite necklace, missing; the accommodation quiet with guests already out surfing the coastline. It was only my first month into travel, and here I stood, alone in a hostel built like the 70s. 

https://robertxworld.com/i-lost-my-heart-in-ericeira/

Is programming a way to avoid making art, or a strange way of making it anyway? Drawing on Julia Cameron's concept of the "shadow artist," this essay traces Robert's path into software, past the AI hype, the technical debt, the algorithm interviews, toward Turing's original insight: that almost anything can be symbolic manipulation, including, maybe, creativity itself.

I’m sitting on a worn-out, low, crimson couch cushion.

Around me are multi-dimensional prisms, astrology books, tarot cards, and metaphysical conjectures by philosophers and lunatics alike.

Ahead, the corner holds a crew of three: a young man and two women volunteering to serve tea.

Pure volunteerism runs this teahouse, an unassuming backyard basement. I do not know who owns it or pulls a profit (or loss) from it.

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I watched the teenager pull a copy of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus from the shelf and glance it over with passive interest. Front to back, back to front, then opening a section in the middle to inspect if it sparked any curiosity. I always enjoyed this part of visiting a bookstore, people watching as a cursory delight; It was the complimentary champagne offered at the entry hall reception before a great banquet. The joy comes from observing what ignites imagination and intrigue in others. Watching someone discover a book from the shelf that I’ve read, and wondering to myself: what did I feel, think, and not know before reading that title, what drew me to that book, what point in their life are they at?

He closed the title and proceeded to attempt re-shelving it. Surprised, I felt the need to intervene. I interjected, rather rudely, as a condescending voice attempting to guide one towards a particular path.

“It’s a good one.”

Naturally, I was referring to Camus’ striking opening paragraph that hit me like an iced bucket of water years prior:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games;

The Myth of Sisyphus, A. Camus (1942)

There is a simple way of looking at life. You feel joy, and call it joy. You see a sign and read the letters as they are written. There is a second way of viewing life which asks, what is this sentence hiding from itself. The second way is known by Ricoeur as The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.

On the Eastern edge of Bali, a few hours from the bustling draw of Ubud is the small rural area of Sidemen.

A population of 39,000 split across 10 villages, some people say that Sidemen reflects Bali from 20 years ago. A place before the influx of investment capital into hospitality to support the growing tourism surge on the island.

A place of massive rice fields, subsistence farming and the classic Balinese gentleness that captures the heart of travellers.

Comparing this to the developed Canggu, flush with people, non-stop activities, and, for me, a fear of God in driving anything with more than two wheels down the small streets, I feel as though I've gone back in time in Sidemen. It's a peaceful place, a feeling of serenity.

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A quiet afternoon DJing in Golden Gate Park took an unexpected turn when a park ranger approached me—triggering a wave of immigration anxiety, panic over losing my visa, and an unexpected dive into legal philosophy.

In this video essay, I share a personal narrative about playing music along JFK Drive in San Francisco and how a brief encounter sparked a deeper realization about the "spirit of the law," regulation, and why human discretion keeps what you might assume is a rigid legal code habitable.

To do a plank..

Correctly..

Is a hard thing to do.

The instructor announced as we listened on the veranda of a steamy Costa Rican morning in San Jose.

Often, it looks easy to do from the outside...

Because we do not see the effort required,

From the inside.

Immediately, a Tibetan singing bowl was struck in the background: an elongated ringing followed by a trailing silence circling off into eternity - we held planking on our big toes. 

The quiet voice in my head hummed along as I walked.

Notice the “I” and the “Me”.

Pay attention to the "Me"

In a dream-like state, the sound of my footsteps down Fillmore street filled my ears with a predicable click and clack noise providing a background note for the inward process that was taking place. A process in which I found myself catching each and every thought that the mind attempted to race after, having sprung free like a jailbroken convict.

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Introduction & What is Climate Adaptation?

00:03:15 The Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation

00:07:15 Insurance Trends as a Climate Risk Proxy

00:15:30 How Flooding Impacts the Housing Market

00:21:07 Home-Level Flood Protection for $0, $250, $250+; Municipalities offering $3K+ in subsidies to prevent flood

00:26:52 Extreme Weather Risks Across Canada

00:34:08 Corporate Risk & Financial Exposure

00:40:20 The real ROI for Adaptation: $2-10B / yr?

00:46:02 Dawn River and Central Waterfront Project

00:54:29 Global vs. Local Action

00:58:28 Community-Level Actions & Listener Resources

Extreme weather is driving catastrophic insurable losses in Canada, evidenced by record multi-billion-dollar damage and significant drops in flood-prone housing valuations.

In this podcast, Kathryn Bakos, Managing Director of Finance and Resilience at the Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation talks about Canada's pivot from climate research to the practical, localized implementation of climate adaptation strategies.

In the Climate Centre's research, proactive risk reduction offers a massive return on investment, saving $2B to $10B in avoided costs for every dollar spent over a decade.

Bakos advocates for individual, zero-cost home maintenance to avoid flooding with major municipal infrastructure projects, corporate physical risk disclosures, and community-driven action, demonstrating that while global emissions mitigation remains vital, building true resilience requires immediate, hands-on intervention at the local level.

Reports from the Intact Finance Centre for Climate Adaptation:

Climate-Ready Guides: https://www.intactcentreclimateadaptation.ca/climate-ready-infographics/

Reports:

https://www.intactcentreclimateadaptation.ca/recent-reports/

Treading Water: Impact of Catastrophic Flooding on Canada's Housing Market

https://www.intactcentreclimateadaptation.ca/treading-water-impact-of-catastrophic-flooding-on-canadas-housing-market/

Transitioning from Rhetoric to Action: Integrating Physical Climate

https://www.intactcentreclimateadaptation.ca/integrating-physical-climate-change-risk-into-institutional-investing/

Change and Extreme Weather Risk into Institutional Investing

https://www.intactcentreclimateadaptation.ca/integrating-physical-climate-change-risk-into-institutional-investing/

Municipal Flood Risk Check-Up: https://www.intactcentreclimateadaptation.ca/municipal-flood-risk-check-up/

My heart felt just about ready to explode out of my chest.

But, before I could catch my breath, Kru Top ran to the push sled.

Standing on top of it and yelled out to me:

TAXI !

I pushed the 75kg fighter across the gym and back in genuine difficulty, as I gasped for air.

But, Kru Top’s amusement from his taxi trip was short lived.

Despite being one of the more brutal striking sports in martial arts, Muay Thai possesses a deeply transformative and spiritual dimension.

If we can look beyond the fighting of combat sports, we uncover a sacred, transformative architecture shared by most martial arts across the globe (from the Zen philosophy of Karate and the "gentle way" of Judo, to the ego-stripping rituals of Western boxing).

In doing so, we can see the martial arts is about much more than competition; instead it is an act of perfecting the self.

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https://robertxworld.com

What reason is there, really, to do all this writing you ask?

Is it perhaps because on the empty pages one can, as Robert Johnson puts, in the domain of the psychological unconscious,

“Clothe the invisible forces [unseen and] to make [them] visible.”​​Inner Work p. 21

That is, one can make apparent the continuous inward monologue of the skull and enliven it to reality. But surely it is not only this. You see, in the white spaces of empty lines one can be the most truthful with oneself, and in this truth the self can really be seen. The individual, to some degree, prays earnestly that one day he or she will really be seen and taken in full. But equally, within this, there is a complete terror as to the vulnerable position it puts one in.

https://robertxworld.com

I’m standing alone in a University Community Center basement classroom. Beige, brown and black tiled, dull, and lifeless walls enclose the space with a cast of around 18 empty chairs and tables.

Overhead, a projector scatters light onto a white screen with a PowerPoint presentation reading “Expect The Unexpected” in black font to an orange background (apparently I failed the Intro to Perfect PowerPoint Presentations 101 class).

It’s intensely quiet, only the sound of my inner monologue and what I have to do holds next. It’s around 7PM in the evening, not many students are on campus, voluntarily. It’s the third time I’ve run through my speech, enunciating the words and accentuating the tone and points.

I practice my walk. I practice my pacing. I practice a confident grin and pause held before I drop the next devastating idea. #siliconvalley #ambition #personalessay #selfmythology

Who are you when you stop becoming?

It is common in social groups to give a role to a given person.

A role is a box. A safe, bounded, predictable box.

The mind is a sophisticated categorizing, perimeter and box constructing machine.

It draws divisions on the continuous to create order, logic and reason.

Once a box is drawn around something or someone, the mind is set at ease.

It no longer says: “What is this?”

Instead it says: “I know”.

Everything today seems to come with a number attached.

Followers, likes, watch time, sentiment scores, even influence itself, quantified and ranked.

What would happen if we took all of that away?

This episode is an open inquiry into a world that has learned to measure almost everything, told through verse, and what the implications may be.

The story of a decade long, still unresolved fight to quit social media, from deleting Facebook in university to running Instagram ads for a DJ business years later. A honest look at notification loops, comparison, and what it actually costs to live inside the attention economy, even when you know exactly how it works.

Several months ago I became a bit obsessed with understanding Human Design (HD), a neo-typology that has emerged in the last 40 years combining Jewish Kabbalah with the Chinese I Ching and Vedic Astrology.

While I do wonder if it was an immaculate conception born of counter culture in the bohemian refuge of 1970s Ibiza (the founder “Ra Uru Hu” lived there during his “revelation”), it has stimulated me into trying to live in a more embodied way.

That is, to make decisions with an additional body level awareness rather than exclusively from the mind. Through my explorations, I discovered Jenna Zoe’s podcast “Align” where she shared a fascinating tool for decision making that I wanted to share with you today.

Jung personified that place, the Shadow, which Robert Johnson playfully describes as: “[the] unconscious dumping ground for undesirable characteristics of a personality”

As a collective, we’ve developed different sanctioned places for those parts of ourselves, and for me, that’s always been fitness and performance training. The gym has always been the place to find comfort in breaking myself down and vocalizing parts of myself that I don’t often express.

From long distance running to Olympic Weightlifting, yoga and later martial arts, I think most physical practices I’ve experimented with seriously, belong in some way, shape or form to a place in my psyche I call “The Ministry of Self Improvement”; it’s run by my favourite little tyrant: the silhouette that clings to my feet, and matches my every step.

I laid on the floor in a heavy state as a dark wave of depressive fatigue and heaviness washed over me.

A massive pressure weighed on my head, and that characteristic optimism telling me there is always a way out, reframe or way to step back to see the bigger picture, seemed to be failing me. I didn’t see a way out of what was happening to me: the seeming hell of a mind viciously swirling in an anxious and disturbed spiral; the same hell that Vipassana meditations had so kindly reacquainted me to several months prior in Koh Phangan.

Yet, I was frozen and encroaching into deeper and darker psychological ground. Luckily, having been introduced to Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, I had a new vocabulary for these occasional emotional overloads; at this very moment, I was firmly in the grips of a firefighter shutdown.