the soul under siege
For thousands of years, to be human meant having an inside. It's the last frontier — and it's under siege.
the Garden: a place to take your soul back
They mapped the oceans. They mapped the genome. They mapped Mars.
And now they’re mapping you — your thoughts, your moods, the very substance of your soul. This is the final frontier, and they’re already claiming dominion, for power and profit.
So we built a Garden — a naming and cultivation commons, with over 10,000 new words for what lives inside. A place to take your soul back, one word at a time.
Here on Substack we share previews and gather for chats. To plant your own seeds, and create your own wellgorithms, enter the Garden here →
The siege on our souls comes on three fronts — the loss of navigation, the loss of agency, and the loss of words. Here's how the Garden answers each:
Navigation: when predictions fail, look within
Nobody can see what’s coming anymore — not even the people building AI. When you can’t predict the world outside, learning to navigate the inner world is essential.
Agency: a new angst is emerging — FOLA
Every day the machine thinks a little more for you, names a little more for you, decides a little more for you. We call the dread of it FOLA — the Fear of Losing Agency. In the Garden, you take it back.
Wellgorithms: a new language of the soul
What you cannot name, you cannot perceive — and what you cannot perceive, someone else will name and sell back to you. So we mint our own, giving each a name and a face. We call them wellgorithms.
My story: they named my pain; I took it back
Sick in a wheelchair at 112 pounds, I was told to write my will. They named my suffering for me — and got it wrong. Taking my own words back became the mission of my life →
The Garden: 31 years of digging for lost words
Dig past the apps, the diagnoses, the noise, and you hit bedrock: there are almost no words to make sense of the times. We’ve mapped Mars and lost the language of the heart. So we started minting words. Thousands of them →
