I've been working on something I’m really excited about and I can finally share it with you.

It’s called The Living Museum, and it’s an active, idea-driven, digital space built around How to Live. It’s an experiment in intellectual exchange among intuitive, psychologically minded people.

The newsletter offers a deep dive on one idea, topic, person or story, every week. The Living Museum is where people can engage more deeply into the multi-disciplinary nature of living.

We’ll invent names for experiences and emotions that lack them; build a community commonplace book; share articles, marginalia, research objects, and discoveries from psychological history, like the jacket Agnes Richter embroidered with her own words inside a 19th-century asylum; pass along book recommendations that left us looking at and living in the world differently; make up, share, and take on event scores and experiments that take us out of our lives long enough to see them just a bit more clearly; and go to art shows, movies, and unfamiliar neighborhoods together.

But most importantly, we’ll build this together. Want to add a new floor to the museum? Share your ideas in the lobby and we’ll try out the ones that get the most enthusiasm. We have digital air rights, we can scale up and out, to our hearts content.

I’m so excited about it.

Here’s what’s waiting…

Lobby. Everyone’s welcome in the lobby. Introduce yourself, stay awhile and chat, engage more deeply with specific articles from the newsletter and, if you're up for it, tell us what would be on your floor if you could design one.

The Department of Unnamed Experiences. Bring the feeling you've never been able to name. See who else has felt it. Maybe they have a name for it. Maybe we'll come up with one. I have a long list of feelings I've never been able to name, and I want to see yours. I’ve taken the inspiration for this floor from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig offers a compendium of new words for emotions that have none. For example:

Siso - n, a solitary experience you wish you could have shared with someone else—having dinner in a romantic setting, reaching the summit after an arduous climb, having a run-in with a crazy stranger that nobody’s going to believe—which makes you look around for confirmation that it even happened at all.

Experiments in Living. Share or take on event scores, short instructions for an experience. You read it, you do it, and whatever happens is the result. Spend a day noticing every time you apologize. Walk somewhere new without your phone. Or, do as Peter Hujar did and keep track of your entire day. Then come back and tell us what happened.

Or, try this one from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit.

The Cabinet of Curiosities. Hidden histories of the human mind: digital archives, articles, marginalia, and other rarities. Ever seen 18th century Tarot cards? Curious about the work of Outsider Artist Bobby Baker?

The Reading Room. Books whose sentences you love, or that resonated in ways you want to share with everyone.

The Commonplace Book. Our collection of observations, wisdoms, insights, research, quotes, and passages that bring us joy, keep us company, and reminds us how to live.

Field Trips. Instead of promoting your own events, use this space to invite others along to things you're already planning to do. Whether it's an art show, a movie, or a new neighborhood you want to wander through, post it and see who wants to join.

The Complaints Department. For your petty grievances about being human. All complaints will be heard, none will be resolved (unless requested).

The Gift Shop. Buy How to Live merch, signed copies of my books, and other curated goodies.

Bulletin Board. Looking for work, have a stoop sale coming up, need an intern? Hang it on this digital bulletin board.

Everyone starts in the Lobby and has access to the Complaints Department.

Paid Members access every floor and help decide what we build next.

I can't wait to see you there.

Enter the Living Museum →