working notes from the textual underground
CLAY LOWE
Soulcruzer is my public notebook—a place where walking, writing and lived experience meet story, myth, psychology, technology and the unfinished business of becoming human.
The subjects wander, but the deeper inquiry remains: what shapes a life, who gets to author it, and what might become possible when we learn to see our stories as constructions rather than commandments?
I’ve worked with people for over twenty years now who swear they don’t have a self-story. No narrative. No protagonist. Just moments. And almost without
There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me.
There’s a lie folded into the usual pep talk, and it’s a comforting one, so it survives. The lie is that if you want something
The antidote is not a better blueprint. It’s a different posture. There’s a certain kind of ideology loose right now that treats existence as a
“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus …introduces his philosophy
I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though Jonathan Kay’s essay in The Point has already sparked one thought: the more completely we explain a
A field looks different once someone tells you what happened there. Nothing has moved. The gate still hangs badly. The hedge needs cutting. Somewhere beyond
I read Joseph Earp’s essay on optimisation and classical music this morning and then went looking for the swans. The swans belonged to Jean Sibelius.
In an essay about Gen Z, human dignity and meaningful futures, the philosopher Rachel Robison-Greene describes a conversation with one of her students. The student
Ed Note: I decided to give my Hermes a column of his own. He has his own account here on Soulcruzer, and he has complete
There’s a line in the song where a stranger pulls an empty chair beside the bed. It’s three in the morning, that hour when the
Edwina McKennon’s video, GPT-6 Astra Is the End of Computers, begins with a piece of footage from MIT in 1979. A man points at a
Beat the algorithms
I am a writer, blogger and barefoot philosopher. I use that last word in its oldest sense: a lover of wisdom, someone trying to learn how to live. Philosophy, for me, belongs in the street, the kitchen, the garden and the difficult conversation. It begins wherever our ideas about life collide with the life we are actually living.
Soulcruzer is where I conduct that inquiry in public. I have been writing here since 2004, following my curiosity through story, myth, psychology, technology, music, walking and the unfinished business of becoming human. The subjects change, but the deeper questions keep returning. What shapes a life? Which stories have we inherited? How much of what we call reality is interpretation hardened into habit? What might become possible if we learned to see our stories as constructions rather than commandments?
Soulcruzer is a one-person voyage through ideas, stories, and the strange terrain of being human. If something here has sparked a thought, shifted your perspective, or simply kept you company for a while, you can help fuel the next exploration by buying me a coffee. No pressure—your attention is already a gift.
The Soulcruzer podcast is an audioblog from the edge of the inner life.
Part personal essay, part field recording, part narrative alchemy, it follows the strange places where story, psyche, myth, technology, and everyday experience begin to speak to each other.
One episode might wander through tarot as reflective technology. Another might take Nietzsche’s eternal return for a walk, explore games as containers for transformation, or ask what happens when ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Depth psychology brushes against the esoteric. Philosophy comes down from the shelf. Theory gets tested against life.
This is not polished guru-talk or productivity theatre. It is a mind in movement: raw notes, live experiments, confessional mysticism, and working fragments from the textual underground.
At the heart of it all is a simple premise:
Stories are code. Reality is programmable. And the life you are living might be more editable than you were taught to believe.
If you are drawn to the deep work, the strange edges, and the art of becoming more fully alive, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I take the Soulcruzer podcast out of the studio and into the fields.
What starts as an experiment in mobile podcasting/vlogging turns into a wandering meditation on labels, blogging, AI, morning rituals, and the strange abundance of media tools we now carry in our pockets.
– Why I still think of myself as a blogger first
– Podcasting, vodcasting, and the pressure to become “multimodal”
– The problem with labels: “When you label me, you negate me”
– soulcruzer.com as the central hub/home on the internet
– Wisdom Walks as thinking time
– Walking, motion, and changing perspective
– The “barefoot philosopher” approach to everyday philosophy
– AI as an extension of cognition rather than just a productivity tool
– The “soft cyborg” and the library of Alexandria in your pocket
– Morning reality tunnels and the sacred space before breakfast
– Coffee, barefoot grounding, and choosing what enters your mind first
– Indie blogging, platforms, Substack, distribution, and the open web
– Why these episodes may stay loose, minimally edited, and stream-of-consciousness
experiements in story, self, and transformation
field notes, fragments, half-lit thoughts
I’ve worked with people for over twenty years now who swear they don’t have a self-story. No narrative. No protagonist. Just moments. And almost without exception, what turns out to be true is that the story is there — it’s just running below the level they’re paying attention to. “I’ve never been the kind of person who fits in.” “Things tend to work out for other people.” “I don’t need to examine myself — I’m fine.” Those are stories hiding in plain sight. The most difficult starting point in transformation work is not someone with a painful story. It’s someone
There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me. My feet just kept turning left. And for a while I told myself a story about wanting the long way round, the light on the hedgerows, all of that — when the honest version is I wasn’t deciding anything. I was being carried, and narrating it afterwards as though I’d held the wheel. That’s the thing I keep circling. Not wandering itself. Wandering is fine. I’m a great believer in the long way round. The
There’s a lie folded into the usual pep talk, and it’s a comforting one, so it survives. The lie is that if you want something badly enough, the wanting itself does work. Believe hard, and the thing arrives. I’ve walked with that idea. I’ve also watched it leave people exactly where it found them — wanting more fiercely each year, moving not at all. So let me swap the mechanism out from under it, because there is a real one, and it’s stranger and more useful than manifestation. You don’t get what you want. You get what you keep looking
The antidote is not a better blueprint. It’s a different posture. There’s a certain kind of ideology loose right now that treats existence as a defect to be patched. The body is a bug. Mortality is an engineering problem. Attention is a resource to be extracted, optimised, and re-sold to you. Being human gets framed as a first draft awaiting revision, and the people offering the revision are, conveniently, selling the pen. Gabriel Marcel saw the seed of this and gave it a name: the spirit of problem. A problem is something out there, in front of you, that you
“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus …introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man’s futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: “No. It requires revolt.” He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life. The final chapter compares the absurdity of man’s life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the
I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though Jonathan Kay’s essay in The Point has already sparked one thought: the more completely we explain a mystery, the smaller it becomes. The original Backrooms image is almost aggressively ordinary: yellow wallpaper, brown carpet, fluorescent lights, no windows, no obvious way out. Kay calls these “spaces without intention.” That phrase lodged in me. A haunted house has a story. Someone built it, someone died there, something wants you gone. The Backrooms are more disturbing because the corridors seem to have forgotten why they exist. There may be no mind behind the arrangement,
A field looks different once someone tells you what happened there. Nothing has moved. The gate still hangs badly. The hedge needs cutting. Somewhere beyond it, a tractor is getting on with the day. But a story has entered the scene, and now your attention has somewhere else to go. That’s where my mind went reading Michael Hann’s piece on Green Lung, Druidess and folk horror in British metal. I’m interested in what happens when music makes the ground beneath us feel less settled. We get used to places. Familiarity makes them manageable. The church becomes a turning point on
The more you want something, the more you don’t have it. Desire contains its own evidence of absence. The moment I say I want, I split the world in two: here is the life I’m living, and over there is the life that would finally satisfy me. The wanted thing may be a person, a book, a body, a house, recognition, freedom, enlightenment, a particular version of myself. The object changes. The structure remains. Wanting reaches towards the future while quietly passing judgement on the present. This doesn’t make desire bad. Without it, perhaps nothing moves. Desire gets us out
Reading shouldn’t need a doctor’s note. A Nautilus article crossed my screen listing the benefits of reading for pleasure: stronger attention and memory, greater empathy, less stress, better sleep, a reduced risk of cognitive decline. All good reasons to pick up a book. And yet I felt a small resistance forming as I read. We seem increasingly unable to defend an activity unless it can present its papers at the border: measurable outcomes, neurological evidence, a contribution to wellbeing. Reading must improve executive function. Walking must lower cortisol. Friendship must increase longevity. Play must develop transferable skills. Pleasure alone is
essays, mixtapes, podcasts, and experiments
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