That’s an interesting contrast, and linguistically you’re pointing at two attitudes that can look similar on the surface but feel very different in spirit.
Equanimity
Equanimity means calmness and balance of mind, especially in difficult situations. It implies awareness and control.
You feel things.
You understand what’s happening.
But you remain steady and composed.
Philosophically, it’s admired in traditions like Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism—the idea of being inwardly stable regardless of circumstance.
It has a moral beauty to it because it suggests discipline, depth, and presence.
Nonchalance
Nonchalance means appearing casually indifferent or unconcerned.
It often implies detachment without care.
Sometimes even apathy or dismissiveness.
The key difference is that nonchalance often pretends nothing matters, whereas equanimity knows things matter but remains steady anyway.
(切ない / setsunai) is a Japanese word that describes a bittersweet, aching emotional feeling.
It’s difficult to translate perfectly into English, but it usually means something like:
A painful kind of nostalgia
Longing for something you cannot have
A tender sadness
Melancholy mixed with beauty
It’s the feeling when something is beautiful but also slightly heartbreaking.
Simple examples
Watching someone walk away that you love.
Seeing a childhood place that no longer exists.
A quiet moment at sunset that makes you feel both peaceful and sad.
In Japanese aesthetics
The idea overlaps with other Japanese emotional concepts like:
Mono no aware – awareness of the impermanence of things
Wabi-sabi – beauty in imperfection and transience
So “setsunai” is the emotional sensation of that impermanence.
Why it appears in Provoke
The photographers and writers around the Provoke movement often tried to express raw emotional tension and fleeting reality in their work.
A photograph that feels unresolved, imperfect, fleeting, and emotionally charged could easily be described as setsunai.
It’s not clean beauty. It’s beauty with a wound in it.
Interestingly, Dante, the mood of setsunai actually fits a lot of your high-contrast monochrome diary photography—that feeling of walking alone, noticing small moments in the city, where something ordinary suddenly feels poignant and transient.
“Once Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakably Zhuangzi.
But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.”
What the Story Means
Daoist philosophers used this story to question the nature of reality and identity.
Main ideas:
Reality is fluid — what we think is solid may not be.
The boundary between dream and waking life may be illusory.
Identity is not fixed — “Zhuangzi” and “butterfly” are transformations of the same underlying Dao.
In Daoism this relates to the concept of Dao, the underlying flow of reality where all forms continuously transform into one another.
The Daoist Insight
The deeper point isn’t just about dreams.
It suggests:
Humans cling too tightly to fixed categories (self vs world, dream vs reality).
But existence is really continuous transformation.
In Daoist language, this is often called “the transformation of things.”
A One-Sentence Version
A very simple way people summarize it:
“Am I a man dreaming I’m a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I’m a man?”
Interestingly, Dante, this idea fits your Flux philosophy almost perfectly — the notion that things are always in transformation, just like Heraclitus’ idea that you can’t step in the same river twice.
The other day, I was basking in the glory of the sun. Thank God for spring is here. Just chilling on the corner, catching the sunset, what a beautiful scene. Children playing in the fountain, that is empty, and soon will be filled, couples, hand-in-hand, locals laying in the grass, people sitting in the park on the benches, reading, birds, chirping, and that annoying guy who is playing the flute that pollutes the park with sounds that pierce your ears.
And then, as I was photographing on this particular day, and it seems like whenever the sun comes out, especially during the winter time, in the city these days, groups of masked protesters emerge from the shadows, with frankly tired looking bodies and faces full of anger and bitterness. Like ghouls exiting from the cave, they emerge as slaves to information and media that is fed upon their screens. They scream and chant “drop bombs on Tel Aviv.”
A strange looking woman with a peculiar smirk on her face comes up to me and asks, “do you like what you’re hearing and seeing? Want to learn more?” With a communist “socialist revolution” newspaper with the hammer and sickle icon, pamphlet in hand.
And so who in their right mind would like what they hear, when it involves death, destruction, and war? Since when has it become normalized to be full of hatred, bitterness, and ugliness of the soul?
Things are getting weird. My theory is, media, photographs, television, videos, basically all of this visual, audio, information that people are indulging in, is enslaving people’s minds at scale. It’s not just a meme or some little thing to brush off that you need to stop using your phone, or go touch grass or something. Considering a simple flicker of a shadow casted upon a wall can move the physical body of mass amounts of people, despite whether the outcome of their actions is good or bad is baffling to me. The influence of this media is now getting to a point where people will inwardly destroy themselves and everything beautiful around them.
And so now those who are spending their time under fluorescent lights in the darkness, trapped in the four corners of their room indoors, scrolling on their scrying devices are receiving their revelations from the fallen angels they sought, and are now full of hatred and ugliness, moving in the direction of chaos and destruction.
And so what is the antidote to this modern degradation of the human spirit? Creating beautiful images through the power of media and art. An absolute fuck yes to life, waking up in the morning with insatiable love for life and curiosity, with pure physiological vitality after getting a good night of sleep, after breaking your fast and eating clean whole foods and red meat, being so full of power after lifting heavy weights and pulling the weight of your body up on a bar. Having balanced hormones, taking cold showers, regulating your nervous system, and spending time under the sunlight in nature away from the screen. And so when you are so radically healthy, so full of love, physical strength, testosterone, and power, the overwhelming joy that you feel can never kill your love for life.
And so the radical approach forward in the face of degeneracy and ressentiment is not wearing a mask and spreading hatred— it’s allowing the sun to kiss the skin of your face and meet God.
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An asymptote is a line that a curve gets closer and closer to but never actually touches.
In mathematics (especially graphs and calculus), it describes the behavior of a function as it approaches infinity or some boundary.
Simple idea
Imagine a curve that keeps approaching a line forever but never quite reaches it. That line is the asymptote.
Example
The function:y=x1
has two asymptotes:
Vertical asymptote: x=0
Horizontal asymptote: y=0
The graph gets infinitely close to these lines but never touches them.
Types of asymptotes
Horizontal asymptote – the function approaches a constant value as x goes to infinity.
Vertical asymptote – the function blows up toward infinity near a certain x-value.
Oblique (slant) asymptote – the function approaches a diagonal line.
Simple metaphor
Think of an asymptote like chasing perfection—you can get closer and closer forever, but never fully reach it.
If you’re curious, I can also show you why the word “asymptote” literally means “not falling together” in Greek, which is kind of beautiful philosophically.
Today I want to talk about light in photography, and look at some photographs recently made with the Ricoh GR IV monochrome. Later down in the slideshow, we’ll look at some photos made with the GR III. Everything was made with high-contrast black and white, small JPEG files, cranked to the max, point-and-shoot automatic mode.
Photography Is Drawing With Light
The thought about light is interesting.
When I think about photography—phos meaning light, graphe meaning writing or drawing—we’re drawing with light, we’re writing with light. And when I make a photograph, I’m merely curious about light.
I’m curious about the way that light goes through the lens and touches the sensor, and how an image is rendered in my camera at the end of the day. As much as I’m looking at reality in front of me, underlying all of that, I’m actually curious about how reality is interpreted through the camera—through the way that light refracts through the lens, touches the sensor, and creates the image.
I’m not only curious about life. I’m curious about how light interprets life through the camera.
Experimenting in Philadelphia
Recently, I’ve been experimenting and tinkering in the Reading Terminal Market here in my hometown, Philadelphia. I’ve been photographing at 1/4 of a second, using slow shutter speeds as a way to push the boundaries in my own personal practice.
By experimenting, tinkering, and trying new things, I remain more curious about life, and ultimately I keep practicing my photography daily.
It’s important for me to remain curious. My ultimate aim, my ultimate orientation, is to increase my curiosity by 1% each day.
Stripping Photography Down to Its Essence
By stripping the medium bare—to a Ricoh GR monochrome, automatic settings, point-and-shoot, pure instinct, light and shadow, high contrast—I’m becoming infinitely curious about how light is interpreted through my camera.
Ultimately, light is my underlying interest with photography.
As much as I am photographing life, my deeper curiosity lies in the way that light renders upon life, and how my camera interprets the world.
A More Prolific Way of Working
When I walk around and photograph, I’m photographing loosely. I’m photographing more prolifically than I ever have in my life since adopting this streamlined workflow.
Honestly, I’m finding infinite novelty in the world through photography and the way that my curiosity guides me. It has to do with the way that I’m seeing the world and interpreting life through the camera, and it has to do with my return to light.
When I throw my camera into a chaotic scene and photograph something, I’m not necessarily trying to photograph life as it is, but what it could be through my own personal, subjective interpretation of reality.
At the end of the day, I’m merely curious about how reality will manifest in a photograph.
Surprise in the Frame
When I’m photographing and tinkering, I like putting my camera up to a surface where I don’t know what I will find.
These days, I sometimes find myself photographing the reflections on cars. I think the reason why is because cars have these peculiar shapes, and when the light is bouncing across those surfaces, and you move your camera around them, there’s just a surprise in the frame.
And I think it’s really that surprise that keeps me out there photographing.
It’s the surprise in the frame that keeps me out there.
You Can Photograph Anywhere
A lot of the time, when you’re out there walking and observing life, it seems like people are just moving from point A to point B. There’s nothing to photograph. Maybe you’re walking around your hometown and don’t feel like you can find anything interesting. Maybe you live in a rural area and don’t feel yourself becoming more interested in the life around you.
But when I strip photography down to its essence, and I’m simply curious about light, it no longer matters where I’m located in the world.
It doesn’t matter if I’m in a small town or a bustling city. Ultimately, I can look up at the clouds in the sky and watch as the light peers through and touches my sensor. Then when I come home and look at the result, I have something. I’m curious about something there.
There’s something about the way I’m shooting these days that keeps me infinitely curious about the mundane.
Light Makes the Mundane Interesting
I’ll see a bus roll by on a seemingly boring day in my city, make a photograph in harsh light, and get a surprise back in the frame. I’m just curious about the way the light casts upon things, and how it etches shape and form into surfaces.
I’m snapshotting throughout the day. I’m almost like a human camera.
I ran into a street performer yesterday on the street—shout out to Red—and he was like, “Man, you’re a fiend. You’re always out here shooting.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m the most prolific photographer in the city.”
I’m literally like a human camera, marching through the streets every single day, just curious, in the spirit of play, wondering:
How is this going to look photographed?
How is that going to look photographed?
That’s what I’m doing.
I’m not hunting for a banger picture, a decisive moment, or something the street photography community will appreciate in my frames. I’m curious about the way that light renders upon my sensor.
Light Is What Guides Me
That’s really what keeps me out there—this insatiable lust for light, and of course my love for life. But really, it’s light that guides me.
Whether it’s a cloudy day, a sunny day, harsh light, or golden light, I find that the way light casts upon the world creates infinite possibility through photography.
And that’s the essence of the medium. It’s light itself.
You think about a painter using paint, or somebody drawing with charcoal. We use light.
That’s why photography is so infinitely fascinating to me. We work in embodied reality, out there in the physical world, using light as our medium. And at the end of the day, we don’t necessarily have to state a fact in the frames we make. We have the ability to interpret the world subjectively.
How Will Life Look Photographed?
When I’m out there photographing, I’m not trying to make a great photograph. I’m simply curious about how life looks photographed.
And so I encourage you to think more critically about the way that you can use light as a way to remain curious about life.
That’s my underlying curiosity these days:
How will life look photographed? How will light be interpreted by the sensor on my camera?
And so yeah, those are my thoughts for the day.
Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about this notion of Kleos—fame, the ancient Greek idea, the pursuit of glory. I think it’s normal to find yourself striving and seeking and wishing to achieve greatness in this life of ours. We all have that inner divine force that guides us to move in the morning.
Although, I suppose going forward, we may reach a point where the majority of the population just enjoys the yummy foods, the Uber Eats, the Netflix, the social media, and sits back and consumes instead of pursuing anything, given the world of abundance that we are currently living in and moving towards.
And so when I consider fame, I think about the temporary nature and the transient nature of life. And so, when it comes to the day that you die, will you be seeking and striving to be admired by your peers while you’re gone? Or will you recognize that your body will soon become biodegradable organic matter and the flame within you has ultimately come to its end?
And so then the thought is:
Why pursue fame, worldly renown, and your name to be remembered?
Self-Deprivation
There’s certainly a reason why ancient traditions, spiritual schools, and religions promote fasting.
When you’re fasted, with no food, let’s say for 72 hours, and you’re in a forest, and there’s no food around you, and you have no shelter—at that point, when you’re deprived of the basic needs to survive, where is it that you’re going to be grasping?
Are you going to just try to find some more acorns and scrounge? I suppose so. We can scrape and dig and seek and search for the nourishment that our body needs.
But I think that ultimately, when in that deprived state of being, the only place that you will look is within.
And within you find the flame.
And so from that deprived state, alone in a forest with no food or shelter—let’s say weeks go by—and it is inevitable that you’re going to die. Are you going to simply wallow and realistically succumb to the mind, that you are merely a biodegradable flesh suit that will and must die?
Or will you have the conviction and affirmation that you are divine, and that the inner spark of flame within you doesn’t die?
Freedom
So once you have that knowledge, you are no longer a slave to the world.
You no longer give a fuck whether or not your name is remembered.
Because the only fame we’re seeking is from God.
And so maybe the only war worth fighting, the only opponent truly worthy of waking up and wrestling every morning, is God.
