The Origins of ΦPhilosophit™ and 30 years of Academic Research and Innovation
MY STORY
Birthing Myself
Spoiler alert. This story seems superficially to be about the train wreck of profound, undiagnosed ADHD (inattentive subtype). And it is. From the outside, this version of ADHD doesn’t look like anything, except a moral failure. But that is only the superficial part. It is really about how philosophical skill (what I call Phitness, clear thinking, free choosing, and energetic implementation) is what we need to get through adversity and build lives that are our own creations, on the basis of our own choices and actions. These skills allowed me to survive when I had no one in my corner. And these skills helped me repair and transform my relationships with the people in my life.
This was my second birth. What I was born out of was confusion, anger, abandonment, and incompetence, which was my first birth. It was one of those situations where you are in hell, and no one is coming to rescue you. I had to figure things out myself. What made that possible was my philosophical training.
From that experience grew much of my subsequent research, teaching, and work developing Philosophit —not as advice, but as training in personal strength
that made survival, and later flourishing, possible.
Mindset Coaching vs. Philosophit
| Mindset Coaching | Philosophit | |
| Core Focus | Identifying and reshaping limiting beliefs to create a more empowering perspective. | Transcending belief (a feeling that a thought is true) and desire (wanting a thought to be true) altogether by training in thinking and choosing clearly. |
| View of Beliefs | Beliefs are central—some limit you, others empower you. The goal is to replace limiting ones with supportive ones. | Beliefs and desires are shown to be constraints that distract from clear thinking and free choosing. |
| Primary Tools | Cognitive reframing, positive psychology, visualization, affirmations, and habit formation. | Logic and critical thinking tools to create awareness of options, and a space for free choosing. |
| Orientation | Future-oriented reframing of how clients interpret their life and challenges. | Present-oriented clearing: dismantling what clouds reasoning so one can clearly see options and act freely. |
| Energy Outcome | Builds confidence, reduces stress, improves motivation through new narratives. | Releases energy blocked by dismantling impediments to executive functioning. |
| Role of Coach | Guide who challenges self-talk, encourages growth mindset, and keeps clients accountable. | Mentor-trainer who provides philosophical “strength training” for whole-person autonomy. |
| Scope | Often focused on career, performance, or personal development goals. | Whole-person transformation: mind, body, moral resilience, and life direction. |
| Result | More adaptive mindset → improved outcomes within given frameworks. | Freedom from frameworks → the ability to generate new choices, new frameworks, and new futures. |
The story that formed around me was that I was lazy, careless, undisciplined, and self-centered—though, incongruously, people also knew me to be extremely empathetic. I could quickly see faults and gaps in proposals; I could solve problems in a flash. But I struggled immensely with basic, routine tasks. Reading, writing, practicing—anything that required steady repetition—was extraordinarily difficult. In areas that interested me, I was prodigious. Music was one such area.
I could hear melodies and reproduce them almost immediately on unfamiliar instruments. I taught myself to play drums; I could play them the very first day I got a kit. I began violin lessons at around five years old and managed not because I practiced, but because I had a good ear. As a four-year-old, I could identify classical Indian ragas in compositions without training.
Things others had to work at came naturally to me. Things that others could steadily work at, I could almost never sustain. I hated school. I hated reading, writing, practicing, and routine. Few of my teachers I liked. Most of them disliked me: to them, I was the intelligent kid who didn’t try.
From my end, confidence was not something I lacked; it was something that made no sense to have. My successes were random and unpredictable. Any time I felt like I was turning a corner, that I had reason to feel good about myself, it would be an illusion: I was the same person, with the same flaws. Belief in my abilities (or what is sometimes called a Growth Mindset, the idea that I could in time learn what I find challenging) reliably backfired. What worked instead was pressure. If I frightened myself enough and accepted inevitable doom and failure—if I pushed myself into a state of panic—I could usually make things happen. Emotional self-abuse was, perversely, effective.
What I did not realize at the time was that my philosophical education—begun seriously in my teenage years—was already cultivating a form of strength that would later save my life: the ability to evaluate explanations without becoming trapped by them.
This is Phitness.
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University: Self-Destruction = Exemplary Student
Looking back I can see how hard I was always trying to do what others asked of me. It wasn’t easy. If I just didn’t try to please others, if I justed entertained myself with diversions, daydreaming, music, or other things of interest, it would turn out badly. But if I did what I was not supposed to do, things would turn out very well. I started smoking, and reading became easier. When I was old enough to start drinking weekly, in high school, life got more manageable.
I never saw a good student who was a party animal. But the more I drank and partied on the weekends, my academic performance only improved.
This was my procedure during my undergraduate years when I was completing my BA in philosophy. I would drink heavily on weekends, on purpose, to get a very bad hangover. The hangovers were glorious moments of rest. They were a period of calm that allowed me to sit still long enough to read, write, and think. As that calm wore off after a few days, I would start getting agitated and repeat the cycle.
From my second semester onward, I was consistently on the Dean’s List (that requires a minimum A- average). After my first year, my grades were trending towards As (not A minuses). And the grades only increased with the drinking. These days, the accomplishments might seem normal: grade inflation is a problem, especially at expensive private institutions in the US where universities are incentivized to give out glowing grades for high tuition. But in Canada public universities are generally stricter about grades, and at the time, this was not the typical student’s transcript.
I knew the strategy was self-destructive.
But really, I didn’t see any other way of going about life. With it, I became exemplary. I finished my fourth year of my undergraduate degree with an A+ in every course. At any rate, I was young. I could handle it. And for a time, the narrative flipped. I went from being an unreliable quantity to a model of success. All of a sudden, the people who had once been critical of me were pleased. My peers and professors were generally in awe of me. And I was predictably, reliably successful.
And all the while, I was learning a lot of philosophy. And that was mostly on my own, in my room, throwing myself at Augustin, Kant or Quine. They are all horrible writers. And yet, I could usually find the argument, pull it out, and make sense of the noise.
Crash and Misdiagnosis
So while I didn’t mind being a drunk all the time at first, it started to get old pretty fast. With every year, I needed more rest and more recovery. It was harder to sustain the party life. It was also getting boring. Moreover, it also stopped doing the trick. When I was in my MA for philosophy, it wasn’t just enough to get through the material. I had to have something to contribute. And I didn’t know what that could be. It was as though I had spent so much time running through the hopes of explicating all of this philosophy that I didn’t understand what my contribution was supposed to be.
So I put off going into a PhD program and instead chose to do a second MA in South Asian Studies.
Then I crashed. There were lots of toxic elements of South Asian Studies (Indology) that I ended up critically writing about. But at the time, it was overwhelming.
I sought medical help and was referred to a psychiatrist at a prestigious mental health research hospital in Toronto (now CAMH).
I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and placed on escalating doses of antidepressants.
The treatment made everything worse. I felt detached, unreal, and unable to function. All the reasons I had for drinking intensified. I would stare at walls for hours unless I drank—at which point some clarity returned. When I told the doctor that the treatment wasn’t working, I was told I was being impatient. Eventually, the doses of several psychiatric medications for depression and anxiety were maxed out. By then, I was drinking constantly (not just on the weekends) just to focus. And so, the psychiatrist terminated me as a patient—for drinking. (That’s in part why I came in for help.)
At the same time, my personal life unraveled. A long-term relationship ended. I burned bridges. Family criticism intensified. But no one, NO ONE, had any actually useful advice for me to act on. I tried doing what the doctor prescribed. Things only got worse. I was done already trying to be a good boy my parents and teachers wanted: they only liked me when I was bad. They claimed they wanted me sober. But they only liked me drunk. It’s hard to describe the anger I was feeling at people who never had any useful advice for me to follow but were very critical when things didn’t go well but also seemed pleased with me when I was being self-destructive. It seemed that the people who claimed to love me were actually bent on my destruction. I had no friends, no one on my side.
I was terribly lonely. I wanted to be in the company of others. But I was impossible. And drinking and medication (treating something I didn’t have, it turns out) were taking a toll on my body and ability to eat.
Philosophy Bootcamp
My philosophy education had been a Phitness bootcamp. I learned that thinking is a skill—not an attitude, a mindset, or a belief in myself. These are impediments to clarity. People fail to benefit from philosophy when they use it as an opportunity to defend their beliefs or to make up their minds prematurely.
For me, the work was learning to get over my need to understand everything through my outlook so I could learn about new ways of looking at things, new arguments, and new theories. That made me exceptionally good at philosophy: I could study and learn from any tradition. It turns out that was unusual.
It is a lot like physical fitness training. You engage a challenge until you are fatigued, rest, and then return to the challenge. In this process, you become sharper and stronger because you are constantly getting rid of the fragility that prevents learning something new. I had devoted the past six years of my life to being a philosopher. And when I was in an extreme crisis, that training was there to back me up.
This training taught me about reductio ad absurdum: the refutation of a proposal by showing it results in an absurd conclusion. And what I could observe was that I was living an absurdity. I had put my trust in doctors and had given in to the kind of expectations my elders had of me, and I turned out into a person drugged and drunk.
This training taught me about ad hoc explanations: stories invented to protect a theory from evidence. The idea that the problem was my character and laziness, rather than a failure of diagnosis, was an ad hoc story. What people (my elders and doctors) wanted to be able to say was that they knew what was good for me, and that if I did as I was told, things would work out well. I did what I was told and things never worked out well. If they were sensitive to the evidence, they would have had to revise their theory of my predicament. Creating a story about my defective character protected their theory about me, at the expense of the evidence.
Philosophical training is training in evaluating evidence. These skills also help make sense of research. I started reading the scientific literature. Even while heavily medicated and drunk all the time, I searched for diagnoses and studies that would fit my history. I diagnosed myself with ADD (now ADHD, inattentive subtype). At the time, adult ADHD was controversial, and no psychiatrist in town would treat or diagnose an adult with ADD. I tracked down the leading adult ADD expert, read his work, sought assessment, traveled to another city and country to see him, and received confirmation of my diagnosis. In the end, I did the work that the psychiatrists should have been doing.
The truth is that we are all quirky and unique. Life is filled with people who try to give us a one-size-fits-all explanation of how we should be living, and what we should value. But that ignores the reality of our unique circumstances and challenges.
My somewhat unique context was my ADHD. It explains paradoxical experiences of this kind. ADHD brains are understimulated, and attempts to calm them down can intensify distress. Add what others find stressful or stimulating, and these brains can come into equilibrium. Because inattentive ADHD does not manifest as outward hyperactivity—a common compensatory form of stimulation—its effects can be profound and easily misread. This also means that the harder a person tries to follow “normal” advice for self-regulation, the worse their regulation and behavior may become. And ironically, what looks like a refusal to self-regulate can be a strenuous attempt to self-regulate by bad advice that would work on everyone else.
But the universalizable lesson is this. The advice we receive is rarely made for us. Coaches, elders, and spiritual leaders often present a narrative in which they possess the cure for what ails you: all you need to do is follow their instructions. To make such advice appear authoritative, it is frequently anchored to some external source—God, tradition, science, or an influencer. But the real challenge of living is coming to terms with ourselves as agents who must do the living ourselves. Someone else’s advice cannot do that work for us, any more than someone else lecturing you to eat or sleep can help when you cannot eat or sleep. Philosophical skill is the one add-on we need to make ourselves into a source of guidance for ourselves.
What I Learned: Five Common Confusions
In a way, the universe flipped. I went from being the person who “couldn’t get it together” to being the only person in my orbit who was thinking clearly. I was angry, bitter, and damaged from a year of the wrong medication and constant drinking. I was difficult to be around. Where I once tried to be deferential, I was no longer willing to humor others. And yet, I figured out what was plaguing me, and I also clearly saw, all at once, everyone else’s flaws.
First, people cling to their outlook as an explanation
even when that outlook makes them miserable because it fails to produce the outcomes they want. I found this remarkable. No one was happy with me. But no one was willing to change their theory about me to try to get a different outcome. That I couldn’t be managed according to their expectations should have been evidence that their theory about me was wrong. But even the psychiatrist found it easier to blame me than rethink the diagnosis and treatment.
Second, most people do not know why they are successful, and yet, their success provides them confidence in giving advice.
If someone truly knows how they achieved success, they should be able to explain it in a way that others could replicate. Most extremely successful people cannot do this, which is why they are often the worst sources of advice. Ask a self-made billionaire how to do what they did and try to follow that advice—it will not be replicable. If it were, everyone such a billionaire advised would become a billionaire. The reason most people do not know why they are successful is that their success is a lucky coincidence of genetic endowment, material conditions, and circumstance.
Third, people routinely mistake symptoms for causes.
Anxiety and depression were treated as my problem, rather than as signals of something else. My inability to sit still and see projects through was treated as the problem. It wasn’t. It was a symptom. This confusion—mistaking correlation for causation—is widespread. It also generalizes. Take poverty. It can look as though the lack of money is the problem, when it is often a symptom of deeper structural causes. If those causes are not addressed, nothing changes. And blaming people when advice fails is simply a repetition of the first error.
Fourth, doctors, healthcare workers, therapists, coaches, and naïve seekers of help from seemingly qualified professionals are, with rare exceptions, guilty of the Ecological Fallacy. It is so common, it is easier to count the exceptions than those guilty of this.
This is a version of the fallacy of division: moving from a statistical generalization about a group to conclusions about an individual. It is an invalid inference. This occurs whenever a professional points to a study showing that a treatment has, say, an 80% success rate and infers that there is a very good chance (80%) that it will work for the person in front of them. Much contemporary science-based self-help relies on this mistake. And even when such advice is genuinely evidence-based, it does not follow that it will help the individual seeking help. What gets celebrated are averages and successes. What gets ignored—or blamed—are the outliers, the individuals. It’s important to notice this is not a criticism of public health measures, like vaccine policies. The motivation for that is population-based and not really about the individual.
With respect to treating ailments, this fallacy of division works to create an uncritical acceptance of the state of the art in medicine and related health care fields. It’s also unscientific. Science is a work in progress. It erases the reality of the partial and statistical nature of scientific findings and solutions. The reality is, even if a course of treatment is successful and it works for you, there’s no causal connection between the evidence at trial and it working in your case.
Fifth, people often claim, in the face of these criticisms that "they were doing the best they can." That’s almost always false. They could have just not interpreted.
The one commonality to all of these errors is that they are all versions of interpretation. They all rely upon some view of the world, often supported by some evidence, that is then offered as an explanation. And the flip side of these errors is that they don’t make room for individuals to have their agency supported. The agent disappears against the backdrop of these imposed expectations. The more the interpretation is applied, the worse off the agent is.
With respect to people doing the interpreting, it creates a false sense of helplessness. Once they’ve chosen to explain in terms of their outlook, they can’t appreciate any alternative, and they also tend to feel frustrated that life is not turning out as they wish. But they could have always done one better. They could have decided not to use their perspective as a way to understand the possibilities.
Investing in Phitness Pulled Me Through Psychosis
The catatonia was a new problem that correlated with the antidepressants. Nothing else in my schedule, habits, environment, or workload had changed. So I concluded that it was to blame.
Once I had the correct diagnosis of ADHD, I also had an explanation for the alcohol use. It was no longer needed. For the same reason, it was clear that the antidepressants were inappropriate: they were aimed at a condition I did not have. On that basis, I decided to stop both.
I did something precipitous: I quit drinking and medication cold-turkey.
Had I known what was to follow, I might have made a different choice, though perhaps it was the most expeditious way to get on with my life. Once I went cold-turkey, I had to weather a year psychosis—hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions. It didn’t help that I had already come to believe that everyone was conspiring against me with their incompetence and bad advice.
Here again, being a philosopher and having these Phitness skills saved me. One of the first things philosophical training teaches is that conviction is not evidence. A common unphilosophical move is to treat the fact that one is convinced of something as a reason for believing it. That is a form of begging the question: using a conclusion as its own support.
My psychosis, complete with delusions and narratives of paranoia, was just another set of convictions. The philosophical task was to determine whether there were reasons to take those convictions seriously, apart from how compelling they felt. There were none. Anything that looked like evidence turned out to be an entailment of the delusions themselves, which is not evidence at all. On that basis, I was able to walk myself back from them—slowly.
In the process, I repaired my relationship with my family and began new ones. These experiences were terrifying, but I had already been through hell of the wrong medication for a year, social isolation, and abandonment, and I survived. And this was an opportunity for me to work on my empathy, which was eaten up by my anger. Empathy is mistakenly characterized as an emotional capacity. It’s not. It’s a rational capacity to understand other people’s reasons for their conclusions, and then with that insight in place, to appreciate the limitations and challenges that such propositional commitments bring with them. If empathy was about emotions, my anger and bitterness would have prevented me from connecting with others. But it didn’t as I worked on it. And with this self-guided recovery, made possible by my philosophy education, it was easier for me to be compassionate with myself and others.
Why Phitness Is Different: Compassionate Instruction, Validated In Action
I could have been crushed. But I wasn’t. I finished my MA in South Asian Studies, writing a thesis that became my first book. I undertook a PhD, began the work that would shape my career, and met a remarkable woman who would become my wife. Over time, my life stabilized. We built a family, had a wonderful human son and a border collie daughter, and I went on to a career in academia and then into entrepreneurship, coaching, and public philosophy. I have written books and scholarly articles, and the work keeps expanding.
And along the way I am able to be of help to others.
What Phitness by my philosophy education allowed me was the one life skill that was not about conforming to others’ oppressive expectations. It was a practice of developing my own agency that allowed me to responsibly sort through information in difficult times, choose freely, and then, with decluttered internal resistance, see these choices through.
What I learned through my Phitness training is that the usual advice of being positive or having a strong mind is nonsense as a general rule. (This is sometimes known as having a growth mindset, derived from the work of Carol S. Dweck. See her, "Can Personality Be Changed?: The Role of Beliefs in Personality and Change" in Current Directions in Psychological Science 2008.) Not every challenge is a result of learned helplessness that a pep talk can fix. The idea that you can over come difficulties because you believe you can endows beliefs (which are just attitudes that certain thoughts are true) with enormous, supernatural powers they lack. Plying that snake oil requires the ecological fallacy at best. But it probably involves all sorts of failures that confuse positive attitude, which is correlated with success (of course when things are going well, we will feel good about our abilities), with the cause of such success. Actually growing means getting through difficulties and the real ones involve, at turns, coming to terms with loss, failure, grief, and the futility of some endeavors. No amount of optimism in your learning capacities, personal effort, or feedback from others will help you overrun a hard limit in your life. But, you can do something better: work on your Phitness, and in times of crises, you can get yourself out of a hole and start excelling by your own standards.
Also, even as I came to appreciate that the feel-good, you-can-do-it, positive-thinking folks were out to lunch, so too are the Stoics. One main implication of Stoicism especially from Epictetus, is that we ought to focus on what we control and relinquish concern for what we do not. What we have under our control is our minds, not our bodies. Of course, the possibility of neurology throws this distinction out the window: our minds are aspects of our bodies. Moreover, what my Phitness taught me was that what I have control over depends in large measure on choices. What may seem out of our sphere of influence given a certain set of choices can fall into our influence when we make different choices. My capacity to concentrate, for instance, was one such factor. I couldn’t control it when I didn’t know I had ADHD, and I didn’t understand the underlying pathology. But I made a choice to learn, and that led to a series of other choices that allowed me to control what I couldn’t control before. And this lesson has profound implications for life. We probably could have more influence over our lives if we made different choices, and those choices require learning and moving beyond our narrow outlook, conditioned by choices, that create intransigent problems that disappear given another set of choices.
What Phitness allows you to do is turn your place of failure into the place you settle down to do your work. What these skills allow us to do is to change a challenge into an opportunity to build our strength. But that has to be engaged responsibly, over time, and in ways that permit recovery. It’s not something one can activate all of a sudden when things get bad. Perhaps the single reason that people run away from philosophy is that they don’t know what to tackle first, how much to take on, and how much there is to learn. They think it’s a quick return. It’s not. Dabbling a bit in this work can either scare people off or give them a false sense of their capacities. I think of this whenever I see irrational people trying to justify their actions by high-sounding ideas.
Certainly, Phitness has to do with clarity of thinking. But we do not think in abstraction. We think with brains, nervous systems, and bodies. When Phitness is cultivated, we change how we relate to ourselves in our own skin and to others in a common social world. It is not a practice that requires that we be virtuous, strong, good people. It’s something we start when we are weak, less than virtuous, and full of potential, just as physical fitness training begins before we’re fully developed athletes. And just like physical fitness training, Phitness training, when vigorous, feels like hell. What you experience are your limitations. But what you are actually gaining is strength. And there is a remarkable reward to such well-earned discomfort.
Over time, this understanding became the foundation of my scholarly work and my teaching. As I taught these skills, students consistently reported changes not in belief, but in capacity: greater stamina, clearer decision-making, and an increased ability to translate understanding into action. In all cases they displayed increased courage to deal with difficult and neglected corners of their life. And they always reported victories. They came to me to study philosophy. What they were left with was themselves and a practice that unlocked themselves. (Click here to return to the next part of the About page to continue your philosophy adventure.)
