Why subscribe?
(Because your self-love is an unreliable narrator.)
Modern culture is drowning in toxic positivity. We are under constant, grinding pressure to look entirely pure, selfless, and effortlessly optimized. It’s exhausting, and it isn’t working.
I am an online philosophy professor with over two decades of experience watching human nature adapt to the digital age. I launched this newsletter to offer a rigorous, text-based alternative to the standard self-help script. Here, we treat history’s most brutal cynic—the 17th-century French duke François de La Rochefoucauld—as the radically honest friend we all desperately need.
When you subscribe, you aren’t signing up for empty lifestyle hacks. You are entering an intellectual arena. Every Thursday, we use the Duke’s sharpest maxims to dismantle our performative delusions, own our inherent self-interest, and discover the immense liberation that comes with letting go of the impossible need to be perfect.
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(Ancient shade delivered directly to your inbox.)
You don’t have to waste your time scrolling through algorithmic social feeds or dealing with performative online posturing to find us.
Every Thursday morning, a fresh, unadulterated dose of psychological reality will bypass the noise and land straight in your inbox. No spam, no marketing ploys, and no demands for your forced optimism. Just clean, sharp essays translating 17th-century French court philosophy into a practical survival guide for 21st-century anxieties. Oh, get the Substack app too.
Join the crew
(An alliance of beautifully flawed humans.)
La Rochefoucauld famously noted that human connections are often just transactional social arrangements. We aren’t going to pretend otherwise.
By subscribing, you are joining a quiet community of readers, thinkers, and professionals who are collectively over the corporate jargon and the lifestyle gurus. We don’t expect each other to be flawless saints. We are here to read deep text, engage in honest reflection, and play the social game fairly.
Welcome to the dark side. It’s much more relaxing over here.
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