Shifting Focus

I'm moving from a paid to a free subscription model

A note to my paid subscribers

I want to be transparent with you about something I’ve been thinking through for a while.

I’m converting this publication to a free Substack.

If you’re a paid subscriber, your subscription will be canceled, and you won’t be charged going forward. I’m genuinely grateful for your support. You paid for my thinking at a time when most people don’t pay for anything they read online, and that has meant something real to me.

Here’s what’s actually happening: my work has shifted. I’m deep into a new book project, Your Aesthetic Instinct: The Psychology of Visual Identity, based on IRB-approved research I conducted on the relationship between instinctual drives and aesthetic preferences. It has pulled my focus in a direction I find genuinely compelling in a way I haven’t felt about a project in years, and I write more consistently there than I do here right now.

I’m not closing this space. The questions that I wrestle with here are core to me as a human being, researcher, and seeker. Topics about narcissism, empathy, ethics, and the philosophical dimensions of human behavior are questions I care deeply about and will return to when the work moves me to do so. But I can’t, in good conscience, continue charging for a publication I’m writing for less consistently.

If you’re curious about where my head is these days, I write regularly at Visual Grammar, my Substack on the psychology of aesthetic identity, where the instinct framework I’ve spent years developing meets color, design, and the visual worlds we build around ourselves: visualgrammar.substack.com. It’s slightly lighter work, but no less important in my mind, to what makes human beings who they are.

Thank you for being here. And feel free to follow my new Substack for some lighter fare, alongside the deeper psychospiritual work here.

Sterlin