A purposeful selection of regular activities so you feel more connected to yourself, to other people, and to the world.
Think of it like caring for a garden rather than a single houseplant. One plant can be beautiful, but a garden stays healthy because different plants balance and support one another.
There is no single practice that does it all. Cultivating wisdom requires the whole person—body as well as mind, movement as well as stillness, solitude as well as community, spontaneous creativity as well as methodical reasoning. We are complex beings, and finding balance requires a living system of complementary practices that offset our biases and hold our perspectives in tension.
Ancient cultures understood this intuitively. They carefully cultivated ecologies of practices. Rituals, contemplative traditions, communal gatherings, and embodied disciplines were woven together into coherent ways of life. Somewhere along the way, this wisdom was lost. What was once absorbed through osmosis now requires intention. But the practices themselves remain available. It's still possible to cultivate your own ecology.
Gaps everywhere. Little connection to nature. Mental activity, but mostly passive consumption. Community reduced to texting. Bodies sit at desks. The great conversation narrowed to feeds and takes.
The very processes that make you intelligently adaptive also make you susceptible to self-deception and self-destructive behavior. And these processes are complex, dynamic, multi-layered, and self-organizing. You can't simply shut them off—they're too useful. You have to work with them. One-shot interventions don't work. You need a living system of practices that intervene in coordinated ways.
Where do you go for information? Easy—the internet. Where do you go for knowledge? Science, universities. But where do you go for wisdom? Most people have no answer.
People no longer host parties, attend social events, or meet regularly with friends. Religious attendance has collapsed, taking with it the rituals and communities that once anchored people to something beyond themselves. Deep reading and conversation have been replaced by short-form videos and 140-character comments. People increasingly spend their days staring at glowing rectangular screens.
We're more prone to self-deception than ever, more in need of wisdom than ever, and yet our culture provides no clear path to it. Science can give us theories of gravity, light, and evolution but not a deep sense of meaning or how to live. As a result, modern life incrasingly feels meaningless to most people.
But this can change. The practices that once cultivated wisdom haven't disappeared. You can still start practicing them today.
When people begin practicing in an area they've long neglected, they often feel something unlock. There's a feeling of coming alive, of finally accessing a part of themselves that had gone dormant.
But there is always a risk of overindexing when this happens. People discover meditation, become obsessed with it, and risk experiencing the Dark Night of the Soul. They find weightlifting and make it their entire identity. The mistake is treating one practice as the whole answer rather than one voice in a larger chorus.
These are like the three axes of a space—the space of meaning. An ecology of practices cultivates all three.
Each domain has practices for both hemispheres: the right hemisphere (participation, presence, receptivity) and the left hemisphere (representation, understanding, analysis).
Below is an illustrative catalog of practices touching on different areas.
Left Hemisphere
Right Hemisphere
Left Hemisphere
Right Hemisphere
Left Hemisphere
Right Hemisphere
Left Hemisphere
Right Hemisphere
Left Hemisphere
Right Hemisphere