btrmt. | Betterment

ideologies you choose.

About

betterment

noun

making or becoming better;

ideology

noun

rituals of thought, feeling, and action;
the science of ideas;

btrmt. is about the ideologies you choose. The primary role of the brain is to map the predictable structure of the world to predictable patterns of thinking and behaving. These rituals of thought, feeling, and action are protective—graceful solutions to an impossibly complex world. Yet, they leave us only half awake; following patterns laid for us, not by us. btrmt. is about discovering the tools to explore them so we can choose instead.

Projects

Analects

analects

Analects are a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings. A funny kind of word that dresses up the sharing of ideologies in a facade of respectability. These are mine. With a background in brain science and the sciences of mind, I explore how ideas become ideologies become action, for better or worse. Here, you'll find links to all the content I produce for any of the btrmt. projects, but organised around the credenda: ideologies I've chosen.

Missives

missives

The Missives are the newsletter and the changelog: my notes to you so that you can keep track of what's happened since you were last here. Of course, you can get the newsletter in your inbox too, or get everything in the RSS feed.

Curricula

curricula

Many of our existing ideologies are filtered through an economy of shame, outrage, yearning, and terror while what narratives of growth we have left are increasingly superficial. The scholastic enterprise has gone a bit funny too: a thousand proliferating disciplines, showering us with knowledge split into a million isolated fragments until "we know more and more about less and less". The curricula are my attempt to make something rather more useful. A collection of heuristics, or frames, through which we make some of the chaos into meaning while accepting that in doing so, we are choosing to make some meaning into chaos.

The Armchair Collective

armchr

The Armchair Collective is the membership community of btrmt. You see, humans, of all the animals, have the greatest capacity for nurture. Our capacity to thrive is due to our ability to adapt, and our ability to adapt is merely a reflection of our ability to come together and share ideas. The Armchair Collective is a place to do just that.

Latest

Latest Newsletter


Changelog

January 11, 2024

Published article on active listening.

Updated article on rejection sensitivity since google is spruiking that for some reason.


December 21, 2023

Just a little note to say that I'm still here. You might have noticed that I'm still publishing at least one article each month, I'm just not sending out the newsletter or updating the changelog, nor am I as quick to reply to emails as usual. It's been a rough year. Here's to a smoother year to come. Happy holidays all.

In the spirit, I also updated Science of Discontent. Take heart.


There are over 2000 of us. Get the newsletter.
Contribute to the site's upkeep by donating.