Welcome to The Subtraction Machine and installment #10 of our year-long modernization, dissection, and weekly exploration of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ.

(New to this daring experiment? Read the prologue and rules of engagement here.)

A Smooth Takeoff and a Very Bad Disembarkation

American Airlines Flight 726 en route from Dallas-Fort Worth to Philadelphia in October 2004 was predictable.

It was a mid-afternoon takeoff in early fall. As we climbed, the October Texas sky was punctuated by a few cotton-ball cumulus clouds falling away beneath us.

The flight was 80 percent full by rough estimate, and I was fortunate to grab an aisle seat.

I usually relished the view from a window, but my ingrained claustrophobia told me to forgo that pleasure in favor of immediate mobility.

When the middle seat remained empty after boarding, I was thrilled to have the extra elbow room.

Down the aisle, a beaming blonde flight attendant was already making her way toward us to take drink orders. But just as I settled into my good fortune, I felt a gentle tap on my elbow.

There she was: my soon-to-be conversational companion for the remainder of the flight. She had taken the wrong seat during takeoff and was now being ushered by an attendant to her correct assignment—aisle 12, seat B.

I fancy myself a gifted raconteur—back then as I still do today—and so my aisle mate and I opened the volley with the usual menu of topics.

“Is your daughter married? Grandkids? What’s your favorite Tex-Mex restaurant in Fort Worth? Joe T. Garcia’s, of course. And which famous Philly cheesesteak place should I hit first—Geno’s or Pat’s?”

And then she embarked on a tale of a very bad disembarkation. Or as she so eloquently phrased it in the French: mal de débarquement.

Being the gifted raconteur I mentioned earlier, I thought she was telling me she was an arborist, and so I reached for a reply and came out with an observation about incorrect methods of removing bark from a tree.

She quickly corrected me. Ships, she was referring to cruise ships.

The Phantom Motion of the Soul

Jan called it mal de débarquement—literally, the sickness of disembarking. To me, the phrase flowed beautifully, even elegantly off the tongue and past the lips.

But as I soon learned, it held no artful linguistic beauty for this woman.

For ten long years after stepping off a cruise ship and onto solid pavement, her inner ear has steadfastly refused to believe the earth isn't rolling. The land was firm, but her brain kept generating the motion it had been conditioned to expect.

Mal de débarquement is a real but fairly uncommon medical condition that afflicts roughly 150K people in the U.S. alone.

In medical summary, the condition is activated when in motion on a boat or plane.

The brain interprets the motion as the new “normal,” but fails to reset once the victim is back on solid ground.

Jan had suffered from it for more than 10 years now—the result of a surprise birthday cruise her kids had gifted her as a celebration.

As Flight 726 leveled out over Arkansas, her story made a strong and indelible impression on me. But the meaning of it didn’t hit me until years later.

She hadn’t simply given me insights on a life-altering medical condition.

She had handed me a map describing the motion sickness of our collective spiritual restlessness.

The Spiritual Vertigo of the Addition Machine

We spend a great deal of energy on The Subtraction Machine diagnosing the Addition Machine—the world and its perpetual systems of layers and complexity.

We face more metrics, more life optimization, and more noise from the technological systems that generate the bulk of it.

Many times we make a concerted effort to mitigate or escape the noise—turning off the phone, closing the laptop, keeping a journal, making an effort to live more simply and deliberately.

But the world keeps moving. It keeps adding. Our shared spinning orb doesn’t instantly transform into a peaceful planetary retreat.

Instead of serenity, you just feel dizzy.

Your stomach drops. A subtle and unexplainable anxiety sinks into your chest. And then the reason becomes clear to you:

Sitting quietly in a room, with no stream of notifications and electronic calls to action—this is the culprit. It becomes the source of your anxiety, not the cure for it.

The feeling of sanctuary you were seeking suddenly feels more like standing on the tilting deck of a ship caught in a sudden swell.

Most people quickly—and even reasonably—assume this restlessness is proof that removing the device and its stream of alerts doesn’t quite work.

And so how do we solve the problem?

Sometimes with the addition of even more distractions—a better routine, a more highly rated app, another strong cup of fair trade coffee.

Then, we jump into a new podcast, one that better optimizes our lifestyle needs. A fresh news feed, another life project—all to stop the dizziness.

Five hundred years ago, writing from a quiet monastery in the low countries, Thomas à Kempis diagnosed this exact spiritual vertigo in Book One, Chapter XI of The Imitation of Christ:

À Kempis understood that our internal chaos isn’t caused by the silence. The silence merely exposes the phantom motion.

We’re all passengers on the “cruise ships” of the modern world. We have adapted to the perpetual motion and the never-ending journey to some unnamed destination.

When you spend years riding the hyper-produced, dopamine-rocking experiences of the modern world, your soul adapts to constant motion.

You mistake agitation for purpose and stimulation for life. When you finally step off that vessel and onto solid, unmoving ground, the sudden stillness feels like a crisis.

But the anxiety you feel in quiet solitude isn’t a lack of spiritual progress—it is spiritual mal de débarquement. It is your nervous system begging for the old, familiar movement because it has forgotten what solid ground feels like.

The 7-Day Subtraction Directive: Enduring the Vertigo

The Head (Identify the Phantom Motion):
This week, pay close attention to the exact moment you step into a quiet room, sit down at an un-screened desk, or wait in line without pulling out your phone. Notice the immediate spike of internal disquiet—the sudden, inexplicable urge to check an app, open a fresh tab, or find a podcast. Name it out loud: This is not spiritual failure. This is mal de débarquement.

The Heart (Anchor the 10-Minute Baseline):
When the vertigo hits, do not reach for a “floating device” to stop the sway. Do not open a new tab or pick up the phone to soothe the anxiety. Sit in the quiet for ten uninterrupted minutes. Remind yourself that the ground beneath you is firm, and that the dizziness is merely your brain missing the artificial rocking of the Addition Machine.

The Foot (Starve the Phantom Motion):
Let the phantom motion burn itself out. As Thomas à Kempis promised, great peace arrives the moment we stop entangling ourselves in foreign cares. When you refuse to feed the internal sway, the inner ear of the soul slowly resets, and solid ground becomes solid ground once again.

Embrace the vertigo.

Stand on solid ground.

Let it be.

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To support this independent space or bring the clarity of subtraction to your own project’s philosophy, visit our foundation page.

Sponsor the Space & Hire the Pen

Welcome to The Subtraction Machine and installment #9 of our year-long modernization, dissection, and weekly exploration of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ.

(New to this daring experiment? Read the prologue and rules of engagement here.)

The Texas Brush & The Shipwrecked Royal Blueprint

If he were alive today, seventeenth-century French explorer Sieur de La Salle would stand on the salt marshes of Matagorda Bay and scream it to the wind, water, waves, and God.

History records La Salle primarily as a land explorer who traced the Mississippi River all the way from Canada until it spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in 1682.

The very next year, the newly minted national hero sailed four ships from the homeland with three hundred colonists along for the adventure.

On this voyage, however, La Salle relied on faulty maps—a catastrophic error that caused him to overshoot his destination by hundreds of miles and land instead in the salt marshes of Matagorda Bay, Texas.

King Louis XIV’s ambitions for the voyage were a high-stakes geopolitical gambit. He sought a fortified stronghold to deter the Spanish and a sprawling colony to turn a paper claim into an empire.

Instead, all four ships were shipwrecked, stranding three hundred French colonists in an unforgiving Texas wilderness.

The royal plan on paper quickly dissolved into disease, starvation, and a bloody mutiny where La Salle was executed by his own men in the brush.

It stands as a brutal historical reminder: the map is not the territory, and putting complete, unquestioning faith in a map will cause you to miss the destination entirely—or, as La Salle proved, cost you your life.

Korzybski & Our Maps of Experience

Polish-American engineer and mathematician Alfred Korzybski famously observed in 1931 that “the map is not the territory.”

On its surface, the line sounds obvious to anyone who has ever held a paper chart or followed a GPS. But Korzybski was reaching far beyond geographic navigation.

He was diagnosing a deeper human flaw: our habit of replacing external reality with internal shorthand.

Human knowledge is structurally limited by our nervous systems and the incomplete symbols of language we use to represent reality.

We do not interact with objective reality itself. Instead, we filter every experience through a heavily edited mental brochure—blueprints, mental models, slogans, processes, and menus.

The moment we mistake our internal translation for the living wilderness, the trap locks. We begin to eat the menu instead of the meal. We praise the compass while refusing to walk the mountain.

Thomas à Kempis & The Scholastic Cartographers

Five hundred years before Korzybski issued his warnings, a 15th-century Augustinian monk—and the central focus of this series— furiously leveled the exact same warnings against the educational elite of his day.

In Book 1, Chapter 3 of The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis sent a clear message to the university scholars who had assigned themselves gatekeepers of all that is true and right:

The scholastics were spiritual mapmakers. Instead of focusing on actual contact and experience with the living Creator, they spent entire lifetimes creating, measuring, and writing in the margins of theological maps.

To them, myriad Latin definitions for grace, contrition, and sanctification were more important than experiencing the reality behind the words.

Thomas à Kempis understood that knowledge without lived experience is pure vanity—a distraction that inflates the intellectual ego while the soul starves in the desert.

Deifying the Map in the Meeting Room

Last week, in Issue #8 of this series, we introduced the Monk’s lesson via an opening scene set in a 12-step recovery meeting. This week, let’s revisit those same folding chairs for fresh insights on a new directive from à Kempis.

The Addition Machine—the worldly engine of endless “more”—has a signature maneuver. It takes a humble, hand-drawn survival guide and converts it into an unassailable Holy Text.

In 1939, Bill Wilson and the early pioneers of Alcoholics Anonymous sat down to draft the Big Book. In Chapter 11, they wrote an explicit, humble caveat:

It is a line rarely mentioned in the rooms today.

They framed their twelve steps as a hand-drawn map—a rough, experiential compass cobbled together by a few desperate men who had stumbled out of the abyss. They were pointing toward a living territory of spiritual recovery.

Decades later, look at what the institutional machinery has done with that hand-drawn sketch.

Members debate page numbers, enforce rigid orthodoxy, and elevate fellow recovering drunks into infallible high priests—treating a sponsorship hierarchy never even mentioned in the original text as holy writ.

They treat the book and the program as the destination itself.

Arguing about the map is safe. It requires no vulnerability, no total surrender of the ego, and no direct encounter with God.

It is far easier to debate page 84 in a brightly lit fluorescent meeting room than to step into the undiscovered wilderness of actual spiritual transformation.

The Biometric Map on Your Wrist

The mapmaker’s imprint is by no means tucked away exclusively in the rooms of recovery. We can see the cartography of the Addition Machine everywhere today.

Look at the modern suburban worker. Each morning—before the shower, the first cup of coffee, or the simple act of silently greeting the day—they urgently tap their smartwatch or check a phone app for their health score.

Did they sleep well? How many minutes did they snore? What was their breathing rate? How high are their stress levels?

The algorithm will let them know in no uncertain terms. They are caught in the trap of a biometric map—worshipping the data readout while wondering why they remain chronically exhausted, anxious, and disconnected from the lived experience of morning peace.

And we do the exact same thing in our spiritual and intellectual lives. We hoard reading lists, consult social media to see what others are reading, cram in a daily email devotional, and collect slogans that reinforce our worldviews.

In short, we’re forever skimming the brochure of life, admiring the glossy pictures and pithy advice, while refusing to step into the wilderness itself.

This Week’s Subtraction Directive

Sieur de La Salle shipwrecked in the Texas salt marshes because he trusted a royal parchment over the actual coastline.

Thomas à Kempis called out the 15th-century scholastics for arguing over Latin definitions of grace while their souls starved in the cloister.

The early pioneers of recovery wrote a humble, hand-drawn map that later generations turned into rigid bureaucracy.

And today, modern workers check glass screens on their wrists to see if an algorithm gives them permission to feel rested.

The pattern of the Addition Machine is always the same: whenever we elevate the brochure over the living wilderness, we trade authentic, un-mediated grace for static control.

A map is a tool for a lost traveler—it was never meant to be worshipped, framed, or eaten.

If you want to experience reality, you must set the map aside and put your boots on the bare, un-engineered ground.

Here is your three-part assignment for the week:

Identify the Map: Pick one area of your daily routine where you rely on a proxy metric, tracking app, or abstract rule to tell you how you feel or what you should think (e.g., your morning smartwatch recovery score, a digital habit tracker, or an online opinion guide).

Burn the Chart: For the next forty-eight hours, deliberately banish that substitute. Take off the smartwatch, delete the app from your home screen, or close the tracking journal. Remove the middleman standing between you and your own raw experience.

Walk the Un-Engineered Territory: Perform the actual activity without measuring, recording, or optimizing it. Take a walk without counting steps; sit in prayer or quiet reflection without timing the session; eat a meal without checking a nutritional score. Experience the meal itself rather than studying the menu.

Put the maps away.

Walk the living territory.

Let it be.

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To support this independent space or bring the clarity of subtraction to your own project’s philosophy, visit our foundation page.

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Welcome to The Subtraction Machine and installment #8 of our year-long modernization, dissection, and weekly exploration of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ.

(New to this daring experiment? Read the prologue and rules of engagement here.)

It’s 7:28 on a Thursday evening, and I’ve just walked into Portable Building #2, sequestered on the far left side of the church parking lot.

The last stragglers are entering the room, and two are still in the parking lot making sure they pull the last life out of the third pre-meeting Pall Mall menthol before rushing to join the room.

AA meetings always start precisely on time, and end exactly one hour later—to the minute. I’ve always found it a bit ironic that people who’ve managed to make such a mess of their lives are such sticklers for time.

I’m in long-term recovery from alcohol, and so I’m certainly not speaking from a perch of judgement.

But I’ve noticed a few idiosyncrasies over the years in meetings, and fastidious time management is one of them.

Swiss trains are famous for their impeccable timing, but they’ve got nothing on a room of sober drunks.

As the meeting kicks into gear and the last Styrofoam coffee cups are filled, the chair introduces the topic, delivers her opening monologue, and announces the floor is open for sharing.

We’re three shares into the meeting, and I can feel it coming, right on time. Just like the Swiss trains.

He’s roughly 40, looks wise to the ways of the world, and then he starts. The F-bombs begin rolling in like an unexpected summer squall.

I’d heard him share many times before, so I was prepared for the fusillade. I started silently counting.

Thirty seconds in, he’s already let six of them fly: two verbs, three adjectives, and one noun. He is an F-Bomb Van Gogh—an artist of the highest order, painting every part of speech with a single word.

It’s brilliant in a way—simultaneously authentic, hyper-kinetic, and grotesquely profane.

His share that evening in portable building #2 achieved just what he intended.

It demonstrated his authenticity to an audience that would immediately “get it.” They understood the pain, suffering, and utter rage at life, God, or both.

The Serenity Prayer, which is recited in unison at the beginning of every AA meeting worldwide, was penned by Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent theologians and Christian intellectuals.

Sometimes, in the darker corners of my imagination, I visualize Niebuhr sitting right there with us in Portable #2, wearing a tweed jacket and clutching a cup of lukewarm Folgers.

The eminent scholar is quietly moved that his prayer has touched so many lives—and that the recitation of his work seems to have taken on an almost sacramental role in the room.

Then suddenly, his countenance drops as the sharing starts and the profanity-laced confessionals begin.

Niebuhr’s facial expression becomes an odd mixture of puzzlement, shock, and sheer terror as members recount their latest tribulations to the group.

May God grant him serenity.

The Monk’s Case for Silence

As that meeting closes, let’s open the door to an admonishment from Thomas à Kempis, the fifteenth-century monk, in Book 1, Chapter 20 of The Imitation of Christ.

As you read it, take a look around your own life.

His instructions are in no way limited to the rooms of recovery. The same spectacle I witnessed in that AA meeting goes on in limitless subcultures across every aspect of life—albeit in many without the spotlight on profanity.

We see it everywhere—at work, in the church pew, watching a football game with friends, or sitting in a city council meeting.

Thomas à Kempis captured the phenomenon perfectly:

If the good monk were a 12-step sponsor, he would be the most sought-after one in the meeting.

Even from a distance of six hundred years, he laid his finger on the precise underlying dynamics of our modern condition, long before psychology gave it a name.

And the condition is this: Why was my friend, a fellow pilgrim in sobriety, dropping F-bombs like candy at a Fourth of July parade?

Why do we use one speech pattern in church, another in the stands, and yet another in the corporate conference room?

In short, every subculture and identity group in our lives demands an accepted code of speech.

But the answer underneath that is far more convicting: we are terrified of obscurity, and we do not love silence. This is the precise warning Kempis was issuing so many centuries ago.

To avoid the obscurity of our own quiet hearts, we put on the vocal camouflage of the room to prove we belong.

We rent verbal costumes—disguises we can easily slip on and off, depending entirely on the setting and the circumstance.

In the 12-step room, the costume is often raw, unfiltered profanity to signal unvarnished authenticity—to convey to your fellows that you’ve fully lived the experience they have and that you “identify.”

If you work in the corporate world, executives and low-level employees alike wrap themselves in words and slogans such as “synergy,” “KPIs,” “actionable plans,” and “metrics.”

Words like these create a linguistic bulletproof vest that protects the fragile ego from vulnerability.

And in the church pew, the verbal costume morphs once again.

Here, we adopt a pious cadence and punctuate our language with theological shorthand that signals to the room that we feel safe, all feel safe, and that love is the tie binding us together.

Completely different rooms. Different dialects and energy in the room. But the river of fear running beneath it all is the same.

None of us are safe in speaking until we learn to love the silence.

Active Subtraction Directive: Fasting From the Verbal Costume

This week, Thomas à Kempis isn’t asking you to take a vow of silence or spend your life in a monastery.

He is asking you to think about your speech, consider your audience and when you do speak, let the words flow from your heart.

For the next seven days, let’s practice a deliberate refrain from the verbal costume of the room. Here’s how we’ll do it:

Audit the Entrance: When you walk into the conference room at work, sit down in the church pew, or enter your next city council meeting, tune into the dialect of the room. Pay close attention to your default impulse to reach for accepted jargon, buzzwords, cadence, or the simple desire to show you’re in the know…that you belong in the room.

Embrace a Spirit of Silence: Refrain from speaking when it’s unnecessary. You’ll find your silence often communicates more than your words. Let the silence sit, and refuse to use empty noise as a protective buffer against being invisible.

Speak Only Un-Engineered Truth: When you do speak, speak strictly from your own heart and mind—not from a spirit of fitting in, and not from the pre-packaged script of the group. If you can’t say it authentically without the group’s armor, don’t say it at all.

Remember the monk’s rule: No one is safe in speaking unless they love to be silent.

Take off the costume.

Embrace the Silence.

Let it be.

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To support this independent space or bring the clarity of subtraction to your own project’s philosophy, visit our foundation page.

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Welcome to The Subtraction Machine and installment #7 of our year-long modernization, dissection, and weekly exploration of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ.

(New to this daring experiment? Read the prologue and rules of engagement here.)

Fall Saturday evenings in the late 1970s belonged to a golden era in the time-worn mind of this traveler.

Summer evenings were different, of course. In the summer, my parents allowed me to wring the last straggling but beautiful light out of the day—playing spotlight with the neighborhood kids, searching for tarantulas, and hurling one last football down Northwood Drive to the awaiting arms of a friend.

But fall, spring, and the school-year Saturday nights unfolded in a generally expected and greatly anticipated manner.

First, it was supper, and then off to the bath. A quick one, because I had a very specific agenda with my parents’ stamp of approval.

All in the Family came first. Archie Bunker and his culturally insensitive observations provided the opening act. I liked the show—who didn’t?—even if I didn’t grasp the broader societal references at eight years old. For me, it was simply a warm-up for my absolute favorite shows getting teed up in the CBS lineup.

Next was The Jeffersons or MASH, depending on the season. Either one was a smash hit with me. Who didn’t love George and Weezie? And in all honesty, I think my somewhat acerbic, sometimes jaundiced internal monologue came at least partly from Hawkeye Pierce and the rest of the 4077th MASH unit.

Next in the rotation was The Bob Newhart Show—a droll and brilliant comedic piece I would binge-watch today if I could find a solid block of episodes on streaming. By the time Bob and Suzanne Pleshette were wrapping things up in their twin beds and getting ready to turn off the lamps, I could smell them baking in the oven:

Pepperidge Farm fruit turnovers.

My favorites were the cherry ones, though I don’t ever remember turning down the apple version of baked pastry delight. My eight-year-old cognitive conditioning told me this turn of events meant the entire family was about to assemble for the most memorable family event of the week.

The Carol Burnett Show. Harvey Korman, Carol herself, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner—I loved every single skit. To an eight-year-old, Tim Conway seemed like the undisputed star of the show. I don’t remember a single skit that didn’t have me still laughing hours later as I giggled myself to sleep.

And the fruit turnover? By some miracle of childhood self-control, I managed to prolong its consumption for at least half the show.

My personal trick was peeling the flaky pastry layers back one by one, slowly, deliberately, almost meditatively working my way through each of them.

By the time Carol was dramatically descending the staircase wearing an entire set of green drapes as a dress, I had reached the bottom layer of pastry and Saturday evening nirvana.

As the curtains fell on the show, I knew the curtains on the evening were about to fall, too.

Next up was the 10:00 p.m. local news. We flipped over to ABC for that, because Channel 8 was the clear, undisputed choice in the Dallas-Fort Worth market during that era.

I was always allowed to stay up through the weather forecast—the middle segment. And if I was persuasive and plaintive enough, I made it all the way to the last segment: sports, which was all I cared about anyway.

Then it was a quick brushing of the teeth and off to bed. We had church in the morning, and I could already picture my friends and me in the Sunday school hallway, gleefully recounting the TV-land adventures from the night before.

Look closely at what made that evening holy: it had edges.

Media in 1978 was bounded. It had a beginning, a middle, and a definitive, un-negotiable end.

After the sports segment wrapped and the local news anchor signed off, the station played the National Anthem over grainy footage of jet fighters, the screen dissolved into a high-frequency test pattern and white static, and the living room went dark.

The medium itself commanded: It is over. Go to sleep. Silence was built right into the architecture.

The Modern Bounding-Box Failure

Contrast that 1978 living room with the glowing slab resting on your nightstand right now.

The Addition Machine has taken the bounded media of our youth and stripped away every test pattern, every national anthem, and every white-noise sign-off.

The glowing rectangle in your pocket never goes dark. It does not respect the curfew of the soul.

Instead, it offers a 24/7 infinite stream of chatter—podcasts, cable news hot takes, group chat debates, X/Twitter arguments, and endless commentary.

Sixty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds alike sit propped up against pillows at 11:30 p.m., pecking at the glass, trapped in a perpetual loop of digital noise.

We don’t just consume the chatter; we feel compelled to participate in it. We post our opinions, fire off our reactions, and register our world-changing opinions on every passing event under the sun—and then wonder why we wake up at 6:00 a.m. feeling spiritually exhausted, anxious, and “ill at ease.”

Six hundred years ago, long before television lineups, satellite feeds, or mobile notifications, a medieval monk picked up his quill in an Augustinian cloister and diagnosed this exact human sickness.

The Monk’s Text Fragment

In Book 1, Chapter 10 of The Imitation of Christ, titled Avoiding Idle Talk, Thomas à Kempis laid out the precise spiritual physics of why we fill every quiet gap with noise:

Again, let’s put the monk’s instructions under the modern microscope.

Why are we so addicted to digital chatter? Why do we scroll late-night comment sections and listen to three-hour podcasts while folding laundry?

À Kempis gives us the answer: we are seeking artificial consolation. We use the endless noise of the world to flee interior quiet.

When our hearts are “overburdened by various thoughts,” sitting alone in a quiet room feels terrifying. So we plug into the stream. We surround ourselves with “idle talk”—debating things we like very much or dislike exceedingly—as a cheap, synthetic buffer against our own soul’s silence.

And what is the result? À Kempis calls it: a wounded conscience.

Every time we indulge in superfluous noise, we don’t find peace. We return to silence with a fragmented mind, a depleted spirit, and a low-grade internal disquiet. The Addition Machine promised consolation, but delivered only spiritual exhaustion.

The Active Subtraction Directive: Re-Engaging the TV Test Pattern

This brings us to our collective assignment for the week ahead—an intentional, high-friction sabotage of the 24/7 noise machine. For the next seven days, you are going to restore the 1978 test pattern to your own life.

The Scope: Declare a total moratorium on late-night digital chatter and unprompted commentary for seven consecutive days.

The Mechanics: At 10:00 p.m. every evening (or 30 minutes before your bedtime), enforce a hard sign-off. Turn off the television, banish the smartphone to another room, and turn off the podcast feeds. If the twitchy urge arrives to post a comment, fire off a hot take, or check late-night sports scores or news feeds—stop. Recognize it for what à Kempis called it: a desperate search for idle consolation.

The Result: Let the living room go dark. Let the quiet static settle over your mind. You will discover that the world continues to spin without your commentary, and that true peace is not found at the bottom of an infinite feed. It is found on the un-engineered, quiet ground that was sitting beneath your feet all along.

Reclaim the evening sign-off.

Let the test pattern do its work.

Let it be.

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To support this independent space or bring the clarity of subtraction to your own project’s philosophy, visit our foundation page.

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Welcome to The Subtraction Machine and installment #6 of our year-long modernization, dissection, and weekly exploration of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ.

(New to this daring experiment? Read the prologue and rules of engagement here.)

You know them. They’re easy to spot.

The stylized Hollywood villain ruthlessly raiding corporations only to break them up and sell them off for an unholy fortune. “Greed is good,” they tell us from a penthouse balcony.

Or maybe it’s an elaborate Ponzi scheme designed to bilk retirees out of their hard-won life savings.

These stereotypical celluloid hucksters are written into the scripts to make us feel better about ourselves.

We aren’t raiding companies or gutting pension funds. We’re just hard-working, ordinary folks putting in long hours at the accounting firm, running a plumbing business, or driving Uber on the weekends to make ends meet.

But the truth is, most of us are trapped in the exact same loop of endless acquisition.

It’s the garage stuffed with high-end tools we’ll never touch. The kitchen with more Ninja-branded gadgets than a team of chefs at the French Laundry would know what to do with.

It’s the late-night scroll on Facebook Marketplace, hunting for a deal on something—anything. Amazon has over 25,000 categories, so surely there’s something in there we can’t live without. A new juicer. Compression running shorts. A laser golf rangefinder.

Acquiring the next thing we ‘must have’ is exhausting—and frankly, it never ends. In fact, our algorithmic feeds and the endless expansion of ‘niches’ ensure the cycle never stops.

In Book 1, Chapter 6 of The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis makes no distinction between Wall Street avarice and suburban micro-acquisition. He doesn’t care about the size of the ledger—he cares about the temperature of the soul.

And his diagnosis is brutal: “When a man desires a thing too much, he at once becomes ill at ease.”

The Monk’s Text Fragment

Six centuries ago, in a quiet, lamp-lit cell, Thomas à Kempis took a quill to sheepskin parchment and diagnosed this very same human restlessness and desire for endless acquisition.

He didn’t have Amazon Prime, Facebook Marketplace, or Ninja air-fryers, but he understood the physics of the human heart better than any modern algorithm.

In Chapter 6 of Book 1, titled Unbridled Affections, he laid out the exact spiritual mechanics of what happens when we let our desires run wild:

Look closely at the trap the wise monk describes.

When you chase an unordered desire, you become “ill at ease”—that baseline feeling of low-grade anxiety that tells you happiness is just one purchase away.

But here is the tragic loop: even when you satisfy the desire, “remorse of conscience overwhelms him because he followed his passions and they did not lead to the peace he sought.”

It’s the dopamine hangover. The box arrives on the porch, the tape is ripped open, the new tool or gadget is placed on the shelf, and thirty minutes later, the quiet hollowness returns.

The Addition Machine promised satisfaction, but delivered only secondary remorse. And the endless desire to do it all again.

The Confession: Notes From a Spiritual Seeker

I’m a subtractionist at heart. I hate to use the word “ascetic” because that sounds high-minded and haughty, quite frankly.

But in my heart, I’ve always felt a deep disdain for what I see as the needless collection of “things”—whatever that thing might be.

Kitchen gadgets, cigar humidifiers, Native American pottery curated to demonstrate one’s cultural sensitivity.

The list is endless.

But I have an admission to make. I have my own sickness.

No, I’m not obsessed with gaining material objects. In fact, I’ve often honestly expressed that I’d like to leave this world with nothing more than what can fit in my backpack.

What I am obsessed with, however, is the constant—and often needless—accumulation of ideas, and the tools that support the collection and organization of those ideas.

I collect information of every variety—from tectonic plate shifting to the rise of organized labor.

I collect software. I hoard note-taking systems, theological frameworks, and digital tools—telling myself that if I just find the right stack, I’ll finally create a frictionless interface with the Divine.

In my very first essay on The Subtraction Machine, I wrote about an abandoned, rotting barn in an open Texas field.

I was only six years old, viewing it from half a mile away across the plowed blackland clay. But even then—framed in solitary silence against a perfect azure sky—I intuitively knew it was a living embodiment of unadorned grace.

It represented pure subtraction from the signal interference of worldly systems.

And yet, here I am, clogging my digital horizon with tools to analyze the silence instead of just sitting in it.

It is the exact same unbridled desire, dressed up in a monastic robe.

I stand as guilty as the next person—the one collecting antique salt shakers and pepper grinders.

I fell for the refined chute. The Addition Machine realized I didn’t care about status cars or kitchen appliances, so it painted its traps in intellectual colors.

It sold me the tools about the journey rather than letting me simply walk the road. It tricked me into spiritual hoarding.

The Active Subtraction Directive: The Acquisition Fast

This brings us to our collective assignment for the week ahead—a highly intentional throttling of our own often insatiable appetite for acquisition. For the next seven days, we are going to practice The Acquisition Fast.

The Scope: For seven days, declare a total moratorium on non-essential acquisitions—both material and digital. (Baseline groceries and routine maintenance supplies are allowed; dopamine-driven collecting is not.) No new Amazon orders, no Facebook Marketplace browsing, no buying books, and no downloading new software, note-taking apps, or productivity stacks.

The Mechanics: When the familiar itch arrives—the urge to buy, download, or collect something to soothe a Tuesday afternoon restlessness—stop. Recognize it for what à Kempis called it: an unbridled desire making you “ill at ease.” Instead of feeding the itch, sit with the discomfort for ten minutes. Let the urge evaporate on its own baseline.

The Result: You will discover that true peace is not found at the bottom of a shipping box or inside an optimized software stack. It is found on the un-engineered, un-monetized ground that was sitting beneath your feet the whole time.

Step off the slide. Delete the cart.

Protect the sanctity of the soul.

Let it be.

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Welcome to The Subtraction Machine and installment #5 of our year-long modernization, dissection, and weekly exploration of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ.

(New to this daring experiment? Read the prologue and rules of engagement here.)

Saturday morning. 9:56 a.m., and the parking lot of the local Costco was humming with activity.

I kept a keen eye out for the first spot and then aggressively secured the space with a textbook move designed to avoid being cut off by an over-eager minivan eyeing the same prize.

And then I saw her.

She was in her late 30s, attractive in an earthy way, and headed straight for her newer-model Subaru Outback—a nice, pearl-white one with an attached bike rack.

Of course, I’d never met the woman. But I knew her.

My cognitive software ran a quick diagnostic, and here is the summary report it delivered on the subject at hand:

• The Bags: Canvas, organic, environmentally friendly.

• The Boots: $220 Danner hiking boots, heavily laced.

• The Shirt: A faded, green REI-branded cotton t-shirt.

• The Bumper: A faded Bernie Sanders campaign sticker.

Hmmm… but what did the data mean?

I already knew her profile, and thus her entire life story, politics, and personal ethos, by her choice of car, the bike rack, the boots, and the bumper sticker.

In just a fraction of a second, the software in my head compiled the data, sorted the results, and delivered a neatly typed 11-page, single-spaced summary of her life.

I knew her personal philosophy, how she votes, where she vacations, and the exact list of left-leaning populist biographies she pores over while sipping fair-trade organic coffee.

And then the final drop completed her Costco parking-lot dossier.

As she squeezed behind the Subaru’s wheel, two books fell from her canvas bag and hit the damp asphalt.

One was T. Harry Williams’s massive biography of populist hero and Depression-era Louisiana governor Huey P. Long.

Exhibit A.

The other was Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

For the unwashed, the tome compiled by Robin Wall Kimmerer is the holy scripture of the Subaru-driving, reusable-tote crowd from coast to coast.

Case closed.

My brain filed her away with a summary description:

She is a left-leaning populist who eats organic quinoa porridge for breakfast, laments the death of the small family farm, and secretly wishes “The Kingfish” was running for senate in her district.

As I closed the file out on this complete stranger and headed for the entrance, a thought hit me hard.

And it stung with irony: I actually liked her.

A hardline libertarian, I hold little to no faith in government that reaches beyond road construction and the Library of Congress. I have even less in creeping corporate control of our lives.

Call me old fashioned, but I believe the individual - the solitary man or woman - is the most sacred, uncompromised unit of existence.

And yet here I was, betraying my deepest convictions. I was treating this free and beautiful woman with no more thought than the barcoded boxes of detergents and mixed nuts I would soon load into the back of my car.

My cognitive software flashed the warning message, “Warning! You’re from different tribes. Caution!”

My human instinct told me the opposite, however. Beneath the handy labels, I suspected she was educated, thoughtful and most likely open to deep and winding conversations about the things that really matter.

Upon reflection, I would have gladly shared communion and a cup of coffee with her at the local diner.

Honestly, I’d buy Karl Marx breakfast if only to spend an hour exploring the architecture of his mind.

But the Addition Machine’s sorting system cannot allow communion. It thrives on division.

It doesn’t want us sitting in harmony at the local diner table, looking past the labels to explore the naked, unfiltered humanity sitting beside us. Instead, it mandates us to categorize, demonize, and build up walls.

In his classic poem, Robert Frost’s neighbor stubbornly insists, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

But Frost notes that his neighbor moves in a kind of darkness, blindly repeating an inherited script while carrying stones to build a wall that doesn’t need to exist.

The Addition Machine weaponizes those very walls and fences—our tribal silos, our digital bubbles—to ensure we never have to look each other in the eye.

Six centuries ago - Thomas à Kempis, a quiet German-Dutch monk, sat hunched over sheepskin parchment in a lamp-lit stone cell. He was carrying the weight of the same philosophical stones we carry still today.

He likely wouldn’t understand the infinite lifestyle and social labels we apply to each other. He certainly wouldn’t grasp the social currency of Costco vs Sam’s Club or driving a Ford truck vs a Volvo.

The labels he fought to dismantle in his era involved academic credentials, ecclesiastical lanyards and internecine theological squabbles.

Yet his diagnostic warning in Book 1, Chapter 5 of The Imitation of Christ strikes straight through the center of my Saturday morning Costco parking-lot audit:

Read the monk’s admonition again carefully. He’s calling for a radical dis-armament—the active laying down of our ideological arms.

He’s telling us that our obsession with “credentials” is a trap, a clever trick that obscures the quest for truth by focusing our gaze entirely on the person delivering the message.

His message is stark: identity is vanity.

And the prestige, position, or pedigree of the speaker is often the very thing standing in the way of the truth.

The Confession: Notes from the Construction Site

I bore the burden of youth at the time and so I’d like to use this as a handy existential excuse—a personal mulligan, if you will.

But the monk’s warning hits me with a particular, cold weight. I spent my own early career operating inside the very factory floors where these credentialed illusions are built.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked as a marketing and high-tech writer for Texas Instruments. I was surrounded by credentials. And the badges didn’t only convey name, department and years of service.

These were brilliant men and women with PhDs from Stanford, MIT and other ivy-covered palaces of enlightenment.

I not only respected them, I passed them in the hallways with quiet veneration.

These were the scientists and engineers inscribing the future of human potential on software and silicon.

To the outside world, and certainly in my imagination, these were the high priests heralding a brave new world.

Yet during our design and marketing reviews, I watched a strange, silent blindness unfold. It seemed to me that despite the staggering brilliance on display, there was a pervasive unawareness of the spiritual cages they were constructing.

It’s true, the algorithmic dopamine delivery system we carry in our pockets today is primarily expressed in software.

But the hardware developers I worked with then were actively laying the concrete foundations of the prison—inscribing it onto silicon, a million integrated components at a time.

They were engineering the very brains that would serve as the silicon superhighways, transporting us straight into the lobby of a 24/7 behaviorist casino—where our souls are the ante on the table.

The engineers I worked with back then had the pedigree and good intentions to match.

That’s what engineers do—most of them anyway. They use their natural instincts and technical training to make lives better, more efficient and free from drudgery.

So, if the quiet Augustinian monk could step out of the shadows of his lamp-lit cell and look over our shoulders, what warning would he whisper?

Of course, I can’t say for sure. But I think he might advise us to perform some fairly radical updates on the ways we assign value to the message and the messengers we receive.

As you scroll through your feed today, your thumb goes on auto-pilot, scanning for badges of authority. You check the follower count. You audit the verified checkmark. You glance at the comma-laden list of self-important titles in the bio.

You do this because the Addition Machine has trained us to believe that the name on a badge or a multi-degreed pedigree is a seal of approval.

We note who is speaking because we are terrified to evaluate the words on their own. We have traded naked, simple truth for the comforting delusion of the world’s approval.

If we ever hope to hear truth’s transmission again, we must follow the monk’s advice and refuse “to be swayed by the authority of the writer.”

The Active Subtraction Directive: The Pedigree Fast

This brings us to our collective assignment for the week ahead—an intentional dismantling of our own sorting software. For the next seven days, we are going to practice The Pedigree Fast.

The Trigger: When you engage a piece of writing, an article, a video, or an opinion online.

The Mechanics: Before you read the first sentence, explicitly refuse to look at the author’s bio, their subscriber count, their credentials, or their name. And if your thumb is tempted to wander up the scroll, simply stop. Let the urge to verify their “tribe” or their “social standing” sit alone.

You most likely didn’t know their name when you woke up. Knowing it now won’t change your day. Force your mind to evaluate the message itself with no thought of the author.

The Result: You—we all—will discover that truth does not require a badge. And often, the quietest, most “insignificant” voice is the one carrying life-sustaining insights.

Hold the questions. Strip the labels.

Protect the sanctity of your soul.

Let it be.

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Welcome to The Subtraction Machine and installment #4 of our year-long modernization, dissection, and weekly exploration of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ.

(New to this daring experiment? Read the prologue and rules of engagement here.)

The Augustinian monk penned his masterpiece on radical subtraction and Godly submission set against a backdrop of unimaginable tragedy. Outside the walls of his monastery, the gears of a violent, catastrophic century ground medieval Europe to dust.

The Hundred Years’ War raged across the continent, leaving blood and futility in its wake. Meanwhile, rolling waves of a relentless, rat-borne infestation—Yersinia pestis—extinguished the lives of millions worldwide.

It’s hard to imagine a more jarring and tragic backdrop as the setting for such a contemplative and aspirational body of work—modeling the life and actions of Jesus Christ.

The Monk’s Text Fragment

For today’s installment, we’re returning our modern microscope to Book 1, Chapter 1 of The Imitation of Christ. We’ll focus on the good Monk’s admonishment against the accumulation of knowledge as the ultimate spiritual hustle.

His pronouncement hits more like a theological hammer than it does a gentle nudge.

Thomas à Kempis drops his anvil right on the doorstep of the academic elite—the same self-inflating university scholars of the era who spent their lives bickering over arcane doctrinal positions:

The monk’s observation is both simple and deeply profound. The Addition Machine—the world and its frantic metrics of accumulation—endlessly hectors us to stack up data points disguised as true knowledge.

And yet, the monk’s fifteenth-century warning was itself a direct echo of an even older, more primary source: the Apostle James.

The apostle was speaking into the same metaphysical microphone when he famously warned against being idle “hearers only, and not doers.”

Here’s the full text from James:

The core of the Apostle’s directive is clear: The Addition Machine wants us to believe the timeless lie that consuming information is the same as undergoing a fundamental spiritual transformation.

The Subtraction Machine demands that we step out of the gallery and into the quiet field of lived experience.

The Eyewitness Confession: The Substack Paradox

Dear reader, I am on this long journey with you—and I have an embarrassing admission to proffer.

I set The Subtraction Machine in motion to build a sanctuary of intentional reduction, a space to silence the noisy signals of the world.

Yet, like all short-sighted pilgrims, I regularly forget to look at the map.

The unvarnished truth is that I am a data addict. I routinely find myself caught in the seductive analytics traps of this very forum.

How many new subscribers? (Never enough!) How many likes, shares, and page views?

The early Spanish conquistadors dreamed of the mythical golden city of El Dorado; they died in the mud of the rain-drenched Amazon jungle chasing their delusion.

In my own compromised imagination, that glittering mirage takes the precise shape of 10,214 hungry subscribers, each of them hanging on my every word.

Vanity.

The Time-Traveling Monk

If Thomas à Kempis were to step through a tear in time and walk directly into our modern workplaces, living rooms, and coffee shops, he wouldn’t need a single course in Software as a Service models, cloud computing, or algorithmic tracking.

What he would immediately and intuitively recognize is our ancient pathology: an obsession with accumulating the “right” knowledge, a desperate worship of measurements, and our frantic attention to the passing debris of the day.

If he caught us staring at our social media analytics dashboards, our corporate KPIs, or our hyper-curated reading lists, his advice would be as stark as his stone cell:

Stop studying the glass. Drop the metrics.

He would tell us to turn our undivided attention away from the digital scoreboards and face the raw, transformative weight of a life actually lived in the Spirit.

The Weekly Assignment: Put Passing Knowledge in Its Place

This brings us to our collective assignment for the week—an active, conscious focus on lived experience and an intentional sidelining of the endless parade of ephemeral data.

Our world spins on metrics. Let’s put them in their place for the next seven days.

Here is how we will do it:

The Trigger: When you feel the familiar, twitchy urge to check your metrics—whether that means opening your Substack analytics, refreshing your social media views, tracking your portfolio valuation, or counting the unread books on your bedside table.

The Mechanics: Pause. Instead of feeding the digital meter, turn away from the screen or the stack. Treat the data-gluttony like a low-ranking gear grinding away in an empty room. Let the impulse to track, measure, and score your life sit quietly until it evaporates—which it will.

The Result: We will discover that our worth does not fluctuate with the shifting math of human approval. By refusing to tally the mirror, we intentionally collapse the hustle—and step back out into the open field of a life actually lived.

Take your eyes off the dashboard. Let the tracking software run silently and unmonitored in the background.

And as we closed segments two and three:

Let it be.

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Welcome to Installment #3 of our year-long excavation of Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century monastic masterpiece, The Imitation of Christ.

If you are new to this series or need to refresh yourself on the project, you can read the Prologue to the series here.

The good monk à Kempis was a fascinating, devout figure who spent decades penning his spiritual reflections onto parchment within an Augustinian cell—all set against a backdrop of the tragedy and turmoil that engulfed his era.

He wrote while secondary and tertiary waves of the Black Death decimated Western Europe—all as the Hundred Years’ War raged across western Europe and a bitter Papal schism cleaved Christendom cleanly in half.

Yet, from the epicenter of a world on fire, à Kempis chose to write about radical interior quiet, humility, and intentional submission before God.

Today, our week-by-week serial turns to Book 1, Chapter 4: “Prudence in Action.”

Specifically, we are putting the monk’s dire warning against vanity and our natural human obsession with being “right” under the modern microscope—what à Kempis diagnoses as “the spiritual trap of clinging obstinately to one’s opinion.”

If we were to pull the old Augustinian from his quiet cloister and seat him directly in front of our glowing glass screens, he wouldn’t need a single lesson in social media or smart phone 101 to understand what we’ve built.

He would look straight past the silicon and scrolling videos, peer into our frantic, defensive eyes, and instantly recognize the ancient architecture of the trap.

He would identify the disease—a culture engineered for infinitesimal division, identity warfare, and hyper-fragmentation.

Millions of humans cordoned off into algorithmic factions, all bellowing into glowing rectangles, all convinced of their absolute, unyielding righteousness.

Before we examine how the Addition Machine monetizes that endless friction, allow me a brief, nostalgic side trip: Jackson Browne’s 1978 classic, Running on Empty—a timeless exploration of speed, perspective, and the blur of passing years.

The Architecture of Being Right

Before the Addition Machine monetized my political, spiritual and cultural certainties, it demanded my attention to the written word.

In 1985, I was sixteen years old, and Jackson Browne was my high priest. To my teenage mind, Browne was the ultimate message bearer of sensitivity and self-reflection—running shirt off, running blind, chasing some poetic phantom into the sun.

At sixteen, I didn’t care about deep theological dogmas or complex metaphysical frameworks. But I possessed a fierce, unyielding certainty about art.

As a budding writer, I was entirely convinced I knew the precise shades of language, how sentences ought to be assembled, and—more importantly—how everyone else was getting it wrong.

By twenty-five, my need to be right had been educated, hired, credentialed, and given a corporate desk at Texas Instruments.

I found myself sitting in a required continuing-education seminar taught by a Harvard professor—the esteemed, undisputed authority on the exacting science of direct marketing.

We were standing right on the precipice of all content going digital, yet he was still lecturing us on optimizing the engagement metrics of paper direct-mail cards.

Long before that room, in the early 1960s, David Ogilvy—the father of modern advertising—had already begun preaching the strict gospel of measurement and direct response.

Before Ogilvy, advertising was mostly “brand awareness,” a gentle, pervasive bid for premium real estate in the consumer’s mind.

Ogilvy demanded math. He demanded tracking.

He insisted that every ad produce a measurable, testable human reaction. The science was already in place.

The Addition Machine was simply waiting for the birthing of the digital infrastructure to unleash its dark diagnostics of our every click, scroll and tap.

When the world flipped digital, those crude paper metrics exploded into real-time behavioral tracking.

Every human thought, every micro-interaction, every modern micro-habit became a living, breathing organism of its own—something to be indexed, measured, interpreted, and acted upon to create deterministic channels of monetization.

Looking back today from age fifty-seven, I see the whole game for what it was.

The sixteen-year-old critic defending his syntax, the 1960s ad prophet scrutinizing the housewife’s coupon clips, and the twenty-five-year-old marketer optimizing direct mail were all feeding the exact same engine.

Today, I no longer care to hold the hill. The need to win the argument, prove my superiority, or defend my ideological turf has evaporated, replaced by the quiet, internal space of questions and more questions.

The Text Fragment: The Monk’s Sieve

Now, let’s turn down the blaring volume on the day. Look closely at the monk’s simple, uncompromising instruction written six centuries ago from an Augustinian cell:

The Division Engine

When Thomas à Kempis warned us “not to cling obstinately to one’s opinion,” he was addressing the ancient spiritual disease of human pride. But today, the Addition Machine has weaponized that flaw into an infinite and extremely lucrative business model.

Division is profitable; unity is not. A peaceful, unified population standing together on a shared bedrock generates zero ad impressions, zero outrage clicks, zero campaign contributions, and zero engagement metrics.

The news feeds of the modern internet do not sell content; they monetize moral panic.

If an algorithm presents your neighbor as a decent human being who simply holds a different view on municipal bonds, you close the app and go water your lawn.

The Machine makes zero revenue on a peaceful citizen.

But if the algorithm convinces you that your neighbor’s vote makes them evil incarnate, your nervous system instantly floods with cortisol and dread.

You stay on the screen for three hours, refreshing the feed to track the enemy’s next move. You share the outrage bait, amplify the talebearers, and retreat deeper into your ideological fortress.

That is the cold, commercial logic of the Addition Machine: peace generates no engagement, but demonization is an eternal revenue stream.

When à Kempis tells us not to believe every talebearer, not to yield to every impulse, and not to cling obstinately to our opinions, he isn’t offering polite ethical advice. He is handing us a wire-cutter to snip our dogmatic leash.

The Weekly Assignment: The Opinion Fast

Your assignment—our assignment—for the week ahead strikes directly at both ideological idolatry and our individual and collective outrage.

For the next seven days, let us refrain from the entanglements of offering opinions or engaging in divisive positions.

The Trigger: When a controversial headline, political argument, or cultural hot-take enters your orbit—whether at the dinner table, in the breakroom, or online—you will actively choose not to chime in.

The Mechanics: Let the urge to correct someone, defend your position, or prove your intelligence sit quietly. Then, let it naturally evaporate from your mind and heart. Your ego wants to be heard, but let’s give it the day off.

The Result: We will discover that the world continues to spin without our commentary, and that stepping out of the argument is the only way to protect the quiet sanctuary of the soul.

Hold the questions. Let the noise pass by.

And as we concluded last week’s segment, let it be.

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The Addition Machine—that ageless system of “always more”—has pulled off its greatest deception: convincing us that the endless accumulation of inputs leads to a life of depth.

It has turned the human mind into a constantly reprogrammable flash memory device, overwritten daily by a never-ceasing flow of static, all while leaving the soul starving for the un-engineered connections it actually desires.

The Historical Blueprint

If you are new to this site and this series, welcome. This is the second installment of a 52-week deep and revealing exploration of 15th-century monk Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.

For those of you just climbing aboard this slow-moving thought train, à Kempis’s Christian classic and decade-long exploration of simplicity is the second best-selling Christian work of all time—right next to the Bible itself.

His earthly life and work collided head-on with the impending invention of Gutenberg’s printing press—the hardware that launched Information Age 1.0 and gave à Kempis’s work a worldwide audience as the presses roared to life.

(If you missed it, go here to read the prologue to the series).

He was born into a grim and violent world rife with global pandemics, Papal schisms, and the seemingly interminable Hundred Years’ War that ravaged the continent.

It leaves the reader pondering how a man standing in the middle of such catastrophically tragic turmoil managed to write with utter focus on removing oneself from the noise of the world and building spiritual clarity through simplicity and humbleness before God.

The Monk’s Text Fragment

The Eyewitness Confession: The Knowledge Junkie

The good monk à Kempis would have a field day measuring me up against his admonitions on information gluttony—and even vanity through the accumulation of knowledge.

I stand guilty as charged.

I just turned 57, and I have been collecting, pocketing, and hoarding information since I was a very small boy. In retrospect, it didn’t particularly matter what the information was.

The history of Cincinnati, varieties of fish in the Amazon, the manufacturing process for concrete, etymology one moment, entomology the next—bugs, words, industries, rivers, plant species in the Nightshade family—it all felt like pure and essential fuel for my young mind.

On my eighth birthday, my parents poured gasoline on a fire that was already glowing hot.

I can still smell and feel the glossy, polished pages and the sharp edges of the golden gilding: the 1977 World Book Encyclopedia set.

With deep chocolate hardback covers and gold letter markings on the spines, I felt I had finally arrived at the palace of wisdom William Blake either warned us about or encouraged us to travel.

I was never quite sure which he was suggesting.

My daily routine during those scorching Texas summers was simple.

I would grab a volume at random from the shelf and take a seat on the bright green shag carpet in our converted garage—the room my family affectionately and appropriately called the “Green Room.”

What hooked me wasn’t just the raw volume of facts, but the hidden architecture within the text.

Long before Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first line of HTML, the editors of World Book had constructed a physical, paper-bound hyperlink network.

At the end of an entry on Mark Twain, a small list of cross-references invited me to jump to the entry for the State of Missouri.

From Missouri, a bolded cross-reference led to the history of steamships.

From steamships, I was routed directly to the thermodynamics of steam engines, which bumped me to the physiology of heat stroke, which routed me directly to the St. Louis Cardinals.

These were purely analog hyperlinks that magically transported my insatiable young mind to the next irresistible destination in one of the set’s 22 volumes.

I would pore over the pages for hours, endlessly chasing more data I could squirrel away for some grand but unknown future purpose.

Decades later, when my wife had me take an Enneagram assessment, the result surprised no one: “The Investigator.”

In the 1980s, I picked up John Naisbitt’s bestselling Megatrends and read his prediction of a world in transition from an industrial economy into an “information society.”

I remember being highly intrigued by the prediction, but too young to grasp its terrifying scale.

But over the next thirty years—working inside the technical industry apparatus, writing for Texas Instruments, and sitting across from early social web pioneers—I watched Naisbitt’s prediction solidify into a global Skinner Box: a deterministic cage of social engineering algorithms built by Silicon Valley.

Our Psychological Armor

Here’s the bitter truth I’ve had to confront in my own journey: the never-ending task of collecting facts can easily morph into an invisible armor to protect ourselves from the vagaries and vulnerabilities of a true spiritual quest and authentic relationships.

I’ve always treasured the ability to “plug into any conversation in any room.” Whether the audience consists of engineers, plumbers, or accountants, there’s always a handy data point or observation to be offered.

And yet subtly, all of the information can become a deep source of vanity.

Ultimately, it allows us to use generalist expertise to shield ourselves from the quiet and the solitude of our own minds and spirits—and the inherent frailty of our humanness.

Data surrounds us. We are drowning in it, yet our souls remain completely malnourished.

Let’s remember the good monk’s warning:

“Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars.”

The Active Subtraction Directive: The Anonymous Input

Your assignment for the week ahead strikes directly at the heart of personal branding, status-seeking, and validation loops.

For the next seven days—together—let’s focus on executing The Anonymous Input.

Your Mission: Engage deeply in one significant act of deep learning, creative production, or quiet service this week. Read a difficult chapter, write a private reflection, or help someone in secret.

The Blackout: Let’s focus on anonymity—the ultimate tool for subduing the ego. Don’t tweet what you’ve done. Don’t post it on social media. And don’t use it in conversation to appear holy, wise or learned.

The Result: Let the knowledge and experience sit quietly in your mind, un-monetized and unexpressed to the world. You’ll find—we’ll find—that we don’t need the network’s approval to validate our existence.

Let it be.

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This is the first drop, the first serialized issue of our year-long experiment in subtraction. Here is the blueprint.

We are taking a drop-by-drop, and sometimes line-by-line, deep dive into Thomas à Kempis’s Christian classic, The Imitation of Christ. If you have read any of the previous thought exercises on this new and intimate forum, The Subtraction Machine, you will recognize the theme.

This quiet, small destination is an intentional and systematic exploration of reducing the “noise” and signal interference in our lives.

We are attempting to build a more unpolluted and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI)—to borrow a term from the world of technology—with the Divine.

If you have not read the prologue, you can find it here. It introduces the remarkable times and life of à Kempis, detailing the grim and violent era in which this medieval, 15th-century monk spent decades crafting his ideas on radical simplicity—blueprints for a fulfilling and faithful life.

But for now, let us proceed with the experiment. Read on for the first installment of what we sincerely hope will be an epic and transformative journey for you—and us.

The Monk’s First Radical Challenge

Behind this introduction sits the absolute bedrock. What follows are the opening lines of Book 1, Chapter 1 of The Imitation of Christ—the precise thematic center for this first installment of our 52-week experiment.

This is Thomas à Kempis’s definitive thesis statement, a radical instruction on narrowing the human focus. It represents the singular, uncompromised anchor of a mammoth spiritual instruction manual work he spent decades scratching onto parchment.

Turn the volume down. Look closely at his simple instructions for enlightenment:

“He that followeth Me, walketh not in darkness, saith the Lord. These are the words of Christ, by which we are admonished how we ought to imitate His life and manners, if we will be truly enlightened, and be delivered from all blindness of heart. Let therefore our chief endeavor be to meditate upon the life of Jesus Christ.”

Jesus Christ: The Original Act of Subtraction

Again, let’s allow the monk’s last line from the passage to sink deeply into our thoughts about the week ahead of us—a week certain to be steeped in the noisy signal interference of our busy world:

”Let therefore our chief endeavor be to meditate upon the life of Jesus Christ.”

To understand what it means to truly imitate His life and manners, we must look past the soft, sanitized, and therapeutic versions of Christ handed down by modern consumer culture.

Within the landscape of first-century Judea, Jesus was the ultimate cultural and spiritual subtractor.

He declared in John 14:6:

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Here, Jesus was executing an act of institutional demolition. With a single sentence, He completely obliterated the oppressive, labyrinthine grid of laws kept and watched over by the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the religious gatekeepers of the day.

By asserting that He alone was the way, the truth, and the life, Jesus positioned Himself as the ultimate reductionist. The massive curtain of the Temple—the physical barrier symbolizing the ultimate separation between humanity and God—was torn wide open.

Let’s explore some of the religious mandates and requirements Jesus was completely tearing out of the religious machinery of the day.

And let’s not forget the life-changing power embedded in His words. Jesus was telling the reader of the era that He—not endless adherence to seemingly infinite religious laws—was the gateway to salvation, the solitary bridge to God, the Father.

The Labyrinth of Religious Addition

First-century religious culture was an absolute fortress of “Addition.” The ruling scholars had constructed an incredibly complex, transactional machine of righteousness, adding thousands of granular rules and metrics to dictate every spec of human behavior:

• The Oral Law (Halakhah): Over centuries, scribes created an endless web of oral traditions designed to ensure ordinary people did not accidentally trip over the written commandments of the Torah. It turned daily life into a minefield.

• The Purity Trap: Exorbitant rules governed ritual uncleanness. Contact with the sick, outcasts, or certain animals required immediate isolation, complex purification baths, and waiting periods.

• The Sabbath Cage: The beautiful, horizontal requirement to rest was warped into hundreds of rigid, hair-splitting restrictions. Carrying a minor object, tying a common knot, or walking a few paces too far were codified as “sins against God.”

• The Metric Obsession: Religious elites demanded tithing down to the literal spices in a kitchen garden—painstakingly counting out every tenth leaf of mint, dill, and cumin. Normal meals were transformed into demanding, legalistic rituals of ceremonial handwashing and vessel-scrubbing.

The Pharisees didn’t just create laws; they built a rigid behavioral registry. They transformed the vast, living mystery of faith into a standardized index of behavioral code—laying out every allowable movement to ensure the observant believer never had to think, feel, or look at the horizon of their lives.

What the keepers of the law insisted they were absolutely required to do was to focus on the legalistic minutiae of the right here and now.

The Radical Baseline

Jesus didn’t try to reform their checklists, optimize their enforcement, or adjust their metrics. He threw them out.

He democratized holiness by declaring that physical contact with the “unclean” cannot pollute a human; defilement comes only from an unexamined interior life and refusal to submit to God.

He bypassed their institutional mediation entirely, offering direct, un-entangled access to the Father in secret. Finally, He collapsed their mountain of 613 laws into a singular, beautiful directive from Matthew 22:37-39:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

A Modernized Interpretation from The Subtraction Machine

“If you actively follow Me, you will no longer stagger through the blindness of the dark,” says the Architect of Salvation, Jesus Christ.”

These are the direct instructions of Jesus—and they carry no promise of an easy, optimized life. Christ is not offering a therapeutic trick to lower the background noise or calm your daily schedule.

In fact, the path requires total preparation for a life of friction: you are explicitly warned that to walk this out is to invite the intense persecution of an Addition Machine—which is the world and its institutions—that despises His name.

The monk is not teaching us how to manage our distractions. He is making a brutal observation: Christ—and exclusive, relentless meditation upon His life, manners and sacrifice—is the solitary gateway to Salvation, the only functioning bridge to the Father.

*Turning off the world’s static is not the destination; it is simply the mandatory clearing of the lens so that your entire existence can be fiercely re-anchored to the Person who stands at the door.

They are an explicit warning that if we want to see the floorboards of our own lives clearly—if we want to cure the deep deafness that makes us mistake institutional static for authentic truth—we have to stop managing the background noise and start imitating the actual texture and contours of His days.

To imitate Him is not an exercise in passive, sanitized piety.

It is a calculated, day-by-day refusal of the crowd’s momentum. It means studying the manners of God incarnated as a man who walked away from the bureaucratic checklists of religious elites, bypassed the political funnels of His era, and routinely slipped away into the absolute silence of the lonely places to stand in solitude before the Father.

Therefore, our primary work—our main act of resistance—must be to slow down long enough to examine the quiet, uncompromised geometry of that specific life. This opening salvo to à Kempis’s master work embeds the central theme the monk would explore for all of his days.

The Message from the Cloister

This is not romantic nostalgia. It is a mental and spiritual reclamation.

Modern clinical trials validating total digital subtraction show that when humans aggressively block the digital network, 91 percent experience an immediate, massive surge in mental well-being.

More shockingly, the removal of that digital noise reverses the equivalent of 10 years of attention decline.

If this is true of our mental well-being, then ponder for a moment what it will do for our spiritual health. What the monk discovered in the cell, the lab has verified in the scanner: subtraction is the only path back to a functional mind and soul.

The Active Subtraction Directive

And now on to this week’s spiritual assignment. For the next seven days, you are to become entirely undivided for the first 15 to 30 minutes of your morning.

Before the smart gadget is touched, and before the noise of the century enters your eyes, you will sit in the quiet with a blank sheet of paper.

Meditate on the life of Christ, and physically write down what you are choosing not to care about today.

Protect the firewall of the morning cell.

The transmission will re-open for Chapter 2 next week.

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Thomas à Kempis did not write from a quiet room.

History remembers him as a fifteenth-century German-Dutch monk, deeply rooted in the counter-cultural Devotio Moderna (Modern Devotion) movement - a religious “revival” of sorts that exhorted the believer to extreme personal humility, obedience and simplicity in their faith walk.

He is the author of The Imitation of Christ—a spiritual masterpiece that remains the second best-selling Christian book in history, surpassed only by the Bible.

Yet, à Kempis did not enter the world in a peaceful time or place. Instead, he stepped into a Western Europe that looked like the absolute end of the world.

For perspective and context, consider our recent memory.

The COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world and gripped the global consciousness in the early 2020s took an estimated 7 million lives.

The Black Death, by conservative historical consensus, extinguished 75 to 200 million lives worldwide in a brief four-year span from 1347 to 1351.

À Kempis began his earthly stay shortly after the peak of that initial terror.

Yet secondary and tertiary waves of related pandemics continued to obliterate millions over the span of his long life—an incredible ninety-two years of continuous crisis.

And the carnage wasn’t limited to the rat-borne bacterium Yersinia pestis. Outside his monastery walls, the impending bloodbath of the Hundred Years’ War was actively staining the continent’s soil red.

Inside the institutional church, things were no better—a deep, bitter Papal schism had fractured Christendom down the middle.

Of course, there were no 24-hour, infinitely updated newsfeeds at the time, but from our modern vantage point, today’s news cycles look fairly rosy by comparison.

By any estimation, à Kempis’s century was completely saturated by grim, catastrophic tragedies.

And to top it off, a massive, destabilizing technological shift was looming just over the horizon: the printing press was about to fundamentally and forever change how the human animal accessed, consumed, and distributed information.

And here lies a bit of intriguing irony in our story.

À Kempis wrote his manuscript to pull people out of the distractions of the day—to encourage the common soul to subtract the clutter of the world and sit in intentional, undistracted, quiet meditation before God.

Yet, the moment Johannes Gutenberg’s mechanized press roared to life, the Addition Machine claimed the monk’s work as its first premium fuel.

The Imitation of Christ was rapidly duplicated by the thousands, becoming one of the most mass-produced, widely distributed printed titles in the Western world, second only to the Bible itself.

The very text engineered to preach absolute quiet was instantly transformed into a high-volume product of the brand-new information industry. The monk’s pure signal was immediately weaponized by the machinery of addition.

So a 15th-Century Monk Walks into a Coffee Bar…

Imagine the old Augustinian monk stepping through a tear in time and walking into a modern coffee bar in Any Town, USA.

What would he see?

He would look at the rows of tables filled with humans staring intently yet blankly into buzzing, glowing rectangles.

He wouldn’t understand the silicon, the microchips, the high-speed fiber-optics, or how to connect to the free Wi-Fi.

Yet in that regard, he wouldn’t be much different than most of us—who rarely, if ever, consider the infrastructure behind our next shot of digitally-delivered dopamine.

But within ten seconds, he would recognize the exact spiritual state of the room.

He would see that the human mind was doing precisely what it did in 1420: fleeing inward quiet to accumulate meaningless cognitive candy.

He would realize that we are fighting the exact same battle he fought along the Rhine Valley—a war against the constant accumulation of “noise” in our mental loops.

Because à Kempis saw something darker than a literal plague. He looked at the human inclination to look outward—to constantly consume, debate, and tinker—and realized the real battlefield wasn’t outside the monastery walls.

It was inside the human heart, mind and soul.

The Machinery of Faith

To fully comprehend why a fifteenth-century monk would spend decades scratching a massive, uncompromising blueprint for human simplicity onto parchment, we must look at the specific institutional rot he was trying to outrun.

Thomas à Kempis looked at the cultural architecture of his day and saw three distinct additions cluttering the airwaves:

• Academic arrogance,

• Institutional vanity,

• And a massive wall erected between everyday folks and the divine.

The universities of Western Europe had become factories of useless intellectual posturing and chaos.

Brilliant men spent their entire lives engaged in hyper-complex, pedantic theological debates—arguing over abstract doctrines while their actual attitudes remained transactional, vain and impersonal.

The church structure itself had transformed into a massive machine of materialism, where spirituality was treated as a commodity to be bought, sold, and institutionalized.

À Kempis witnessed this vain intellectual parade and chose a radical path of subtraction. His solution was a quiet, devastating rejection of the elite status quo.

He bypassed the complicated academic debates entirely.

He argued that it is infinitely better to feel contrition in your heart than to be able to define it to a room full of nodding scholars.

And, in a move that would inadvertently lay the groundwork for a massive historical shift called the Protestant Reformation decades later, he insisted that this quiet, inner path belonged entirely to the laity.

These, of course, were the everyday commoners, the ordinary souls who didn’t speak Latin or hold university degrees.

He was telling the everyday man and woman that the kingdom of heaven wasn’t hidden behind an expensive institutional paywall or a dense thicket of vocabulary.

It was sitting quietly in their own rooms, waiting to be claimed.

The Fifty-Two Week Experiment

And that brings us to the business at hand.

Beginning next week, The Subtraction Machine is embarking on a year-long diagnostic experiment.

We are taking Thomas à Kempis’s five-hundred-year-old guide to radical interior survival, stripping away the archaic medieval syntax, and translating its brutal, beautiful core principles into a language our modern cognitive machines can actually process.

This will not be an exercise in academic theology, nor will it be a collection of comforting, bite-sized daily devotionals designed to help you self-actualize. It is a systematic roadmap for subtraction.

The rules of this experiment are simple, though deliberately out of step with the times:

• One Chapter a Week: The Addition Machine demands infinite scrolling and rapid consumption. We will do the opposite. We will take one single, compressed theme every seven days and let it sit on the workbench of your mind.

• Zero Clutter: No algorithmic tracking, no sensational headlines, and no toxic social feeds. Just the text, the hand-drawn blueprints, and a quiet, deliberate space for community reflection.

  

We are building a small, intentional sanctuary away from the relentless din of digital noise—a patron-supported corner of the internet for those who suspect that the modern world’s constant accumulation is actually a slow, gentle form of spiritual bankruptcy.

Turn down the volume on your dashboard. Put the glowing rectangle flat on the desk.

The introductory remarks are officially concluded. Let us step out of the noise of the century, open the door to the inner room, and begin.

Installment #1 drops next week.

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