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Updated 22 January 2026

This is the personal website of mr.dub, an autodidact, naturalist, libertarian communist, musician, programmer, and casual gamer who lives in Montana, USA. I believe that living wellDuignan, Brian. "eudaimonia". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Apr. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/eudaimonia. Accessed 15 January 2026. Eudaimonia (Greek: ευδαιμονία), "in Aristotelian ethics, the condition of human flourishing or of living well." demands that one gain an understanding of reality and then behave in congruence with that reality. Here is what I have learned thus far...

Reality is a composite of one's subjective experience, i.e. the consciousness which develops early in an individual's life and ceases upon death, and the objective history of physics, which follows the universe from a quantum-scale tangle of space-time and energy to its eventual heat death due to endless expansion and increasing entropy. We know the former because that is our lived experience (as René Descartes famously wrote, "I think, therefore I am"Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method. 1637. "Je pense, donc je suis."), and we must connect our internal being with the external world via sense data, i.e., the electronic signals sent from perceptive organs to our brain.

Sense data is not infallible, whether due to malfunctioning organs or misinterpretation of correctly conveyed information. Hence, we must properly scrutinize data before we can count it as knowledge. Intellectual disciplines such as philosophy, mathematics, and science have advanced throughout human history such that we feel confident that, excepting for small details and exotic environments, we have a robust and overall accurate understanding of reality.

One of the oldest and most fundamental scientific discplines is physics, and thanks to the work of scientists in various subdiscplines such as quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and cosmology, we have been able to construct a history of the universe (which has become its own academic subject, Big History). As it turns out, the universe didn't always exist in the same state we observe today; rather, it is a dynamic entity expanding, cooling, gaining entropy, and producing new forms of complexity. Through the course of its history, the universe has converted energy to matter, matter has coalesced under gravity, stars fused smaller elements into heavier ones, these new elements interact with each other in interesting ways, self-assembling chemicals became trapped in single-celled organisms, and organisms evolved, which explains why we find our planet the way we do.

We can draw some additional conclusions from this study of reality. The first conlusion I like to describe with the Chinese word 道 (dào), which is often translated as "way," meaning a road or path, but the Chinese language does not differentiate between nouns and verbs and thus we can also translate this word as traveling upon a path (Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall translate it as "way-making")Daodejing. Tr. Ames, Roger T. and David L. Hall. Ballantine Books. 2003.. What this means is that the universe is a dynamic entity with a history, not an absolute or permanent thing. This concept has also been given the Sanskrit name धर्मः (dharma) due to translation choices during the proliferation of Mahāyāna Buddhism from India to China around the third century BCE. The universe also lacks any intrinsic essense (Sanskrit: स्वभाव, svabhāva) that fundamentally divides phenomena: despite the variety of phenomena we observe today, we all share an ancestry to that primordial energy. This "emptiness" is called शून्यता (śūnyatā) in Sanskrit.

Goal-oriented sapient beings such as humans can learn about reality and modify their behavior to prefer certain outcomes over others. We can suggest that these beings want to live and want to live happily, i.e., providing enough labor to supply themselves with necessities and the freedom to enjoy leisure time as they see fit, assuming their activity does not impinge upon the freedom of others. Part of this includes maintaining a healthy environment, from the local to the global spheres.

The Earth is our home and should be treated with respect. It is one part of a very important system upon which our lives depend, and which I like to call Gaia (Greek: Γαία). This name is adopted from the Gaia Hypothesis, which was a scientific hypothesis developed and promoted by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and '70s. Lovelock's idea was that life on Earth helps regulate certain processes (such as atmospheric structure), whereas Margulis believed that Gaia was a mere description of "the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth's surface." I prefer to use the term more in line with Ms. Margulis, though I include more than just the Earth's surface; I think we ought to see Gaia as the entire Earth, in addition to the other entities on which our existence depends—the moon, which stabilizes Earth's revolutions and produces predictable seasons (among other things), and the Sun, which provides the vast majority of the energy we require.

We also want to structure human institutions in such a way that we maximize happiness for everyone. Societies should first recognize that all human beings deserve dignity and respect, regardless of race, class, creed, ability, etc. They should also prioritize production for the satisfaction of human need, such that the natural wealth of the Earth is not hoarded by a few, and anyone can labor in these industries instead of selling themselves to produce luxury goods that enrich private owners. Furthermore, these societies should be devolved (meaning power is held on the local, community level as opposed to a federal level) and responsive to their constituents, regardless of whether they are confederated. Humans should be permitted to actFrench: laissez-faire and travelFrench: laissez-passer as they please, except for where it conflicts with the freedom of others or endangers the community.

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