A Personal Note
Over the past nine months, many of you have probably sensed a quiet shift in these newsletters. We have explored the misuse of power, collective psychosis, Wetiko, grift, artificial intellect, and the growing incoherence of the modern world. Those conversations remain important. But increasingly I’ve found myself asking a different question:What am I actually building?
Nearly ten years ago, I stepped away from what many would have called the pinnacle of my career. What followed was a decade that I often jokingly describe as my spiritual laundromat – books, teachers, ceremonies, retreats, a few heartbreaks, reinvention, and an endless dismantling of who I thought I was. Looking back, I can see that Life was never trying to make me more spiritual. It was trying to make me more whole. This decade or so was rich and profoundly fruitful, except not by any of the typical things we measure success by in the material world.
The past year accelerated that process in ways I could never have anticipated. Two heart surgeries within five months have a way of clarifying what matters and exposing what doesn’t. They also have a way of reminding you that Life is not a rehearsal.
Somewhere during that season, a realization crystallized.
I find myself increasingly less interested in spending my energy critiquing the world. What has quietly come alive this last year instead is a deep desire to help build the new one.
That realization has led me back into business, not because I’ve abandoned spirituality, but because spirituality ultimately finds its highest expression through what we create and how we bring it into the world. Business, leadership, architecture, finance, building communities, and entrepreneurship are every bit as spiritual as meditation cushions and retreat centers. The real work has never been escaping the world. It has always been transforming it.
That conviction is what led me to recently join the founder of a $300 million regenerative real estate project in Nosara, Costa Rica as a Venture Partner. Together, we’re attempting to create something I’ve spent years writing about: communities intentionally designed to help people become more fully alive. Less extraction. More regeneration. Less transaction. More transformation.
Around the same time, I quietly deactivated my social media accounts. And, if you’ve visited my website recently, you’ve probably noticed a simple message:
“I am on an analog walkabout.”
People have asked me what that means.
The simplest answer is this: Life is analog.
Not digital.
An analog signal is continuous, alive, dynamic, and infinitely nuanced. A digital signal, no matter how sophisticated, is ultimately a series of binary approximations attempting to represent that living continuity. The more advanced our technology becomes, the better those approximations become, but they remain approximations nonetheless.
The same is true of Life itself.
You can watch a thousand sunsets on YouTube.
None of them is a sunset.
You can generate a love poem with Artificial Intelligence.
It cannot fall in love for you.
You can scroll through thousands of photographs of a mountain.
None of them is the experience of standing on its summit with the wind on your face.
The things that make Life worth living are, and always will be, analog.
Love is analog.
Friendship is analog.
Wonder is analog.
Belonging analog.
Beauty is analog.
Presence is analog.
Making love is analog.
They arise as lived experiences within consciousness itself. They cannot be downloaded, outsourced, or synthesized. Technology can help us organize our lives, increase our productivity, and free us from countless mundane tasks. But it cannot live our lives for us.
It cannot become “soulfuller” for us, a word I’ve come to love so much I purchased the domain.
For years I’ve said that the most valuable things in Life are all the things money can’t buy. I would now add something else.
The most valuable things in Life are also all the things the digital world can never produce.
That insight sits at the heart of a new chapter for me.
At the end of summer, I’ll be releasing my sixth book:A Small of The All.
It is, in many ways, the culmination of the last decade of inquiry and the philosophical foundation beneath everything I’ve been writing. If these newsletters have largely explored what is breaking down in the world, the book is devoted to something far more enduring: remembering what has never truly been lost.
You’ll notice that same transition reflected in the Love+Truth Newsletter going forward. We’ll still hold up a mirror when necessary. But increasingly, our attention will turn toward building, creating, remembering, and participating in the world we wish to inhabit.
Because I’ve come to the realization that one regenerative community, one meaningful friendship, one great love story, one conscious business, one beautiful home, one loving family, and one deeply lived Life may ultimately change the world far more than a thousand opinions, posts, or reels ever could.
In the lexicon ofLove+Truth, the spiritual Poet in me has decided to go full circle and reenter the world of business. Not to prove that business and spirituality can coexist, but to demonstrate that they were never separate to begin with.
This new chapter has been underway for some time, but its revelation begins now.
Once you see, you cannot unsee.
Love+Truth,
Robert +AI
