A Bio, for Daniel does not consist of what he wants people to think about him. A Bio, in Daniel’s view, is for Daniel – clarity is relevant, but not approval. Nor is it a brief snippet of personal information, designed to make a human being easy to summarize. Instead, it’s an ongoing story and ever-growing profile representing a lifelong quest for self-knowledge. It gets longer, because actual people (ideally), keep growing and evolving. The idea that it should it should fit easily on an index card instead of reading like an ever-expanding novel implies either that people are stoltifyingly simple and banal, or that they’re not really telling you much of anything about themselves. In that sense, Daniel’s site, all his web properties, and indeed all he writes, creates, and produces is part of his bio. DiGriz.com is just an ongoing precis. Whether or not it’s all easily understandable or impossible to misunderstand is less important to Daniel than whether it’s authentic.
Some people question the expedience of living so much in public, and misconstrue doing so as a failure to understand the world. But doing so allows Daniel to understand the world better than most of his peers. If he can learn the meaning of his own genuine identity in the context of the rest of the world (not merely tested against his own mind), then self-knowledge becomes the ultimate means of understanding the world as well. He learns things this way that people who take fewer “risks” never, ever do. And he prefers the trade. The “wisdom” of putting on only a publicly acceptable appearance strikes Daniel as really cowardice, shame, and expedience – not wisdom at all. Wisdom is what the world tells you when you have the sack to be naked in front of it. That’s wisdom, even when what the world is saying is wrong. Wisdom is understanding derived by facing the lion without a spear and thereby knowing who you really are and what the lion really is. Daniel had occasion to do this more literally as a child, and has kept the remembrance of it as a motif for his life.
New Bio Items:
- WRITING: Daniel writes, mainly, incomplete novels, vignettes of no avail, and frenetic excerpts of works that never actually exist. Of course, that could all change some day.
- VICE: Daniel’s approach to vice is represented by the statement, “Vanilla is just a flavoring. Chocolate is a decision to feel better.”
- THE WORLD: An example of how Daniel interacts with the world: “In the Midwest of America, when you order eggs without bacon or sausage, the waitress is usually surprised. No meat?!? I always say ‘eggs *are* meat’ and watch as they try to sort that out.”
Daniel has developed a wide variety of interests and broad experience in lots of things. He started young, continually trying on different hats and, from the very beginning, experimenting with social, cultural, intellectual, and other alternatives. He changed religions 3-4 times, before becoming (Eastern) Orthodox, but he routinely refuses to discuss religion except to raid it for examples relevant to the immediate situation or discussion. Daniel revised political attitudes 3-4 times before settling on rational anarchism, which is a kind of skeptical individualism or autarchism, yet he routinely refuses to discuss politics, and shuns electoral theater, while continually advocating social justice for whatever group it is currently fashionable to persecute, deprive, or disenfranchise.
Daniel has been on a lifelong quest to understand the world, something he says is rare but essential. He travels whenever possible, but avoids tourist areas and aims to immerse himself in daily life, believing that “to understand the world, one must go and live in it”. He lived and worked for several years in South Korea, has traveled to Japan several times, Canada, the Caribbean, throughout the US (liking New York, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago), and he is planning an upcoming month traveling throughout Europe. Daniel also insists that “to understand the world, one must be part of its communities in the most direct ways possible – financially and socially”. He is invested charitably, although in only tiny ways, in challenged communities all over the world. He aims for wide but targeted impact: West Africa: Togo, Burkina Faso, Benin. East Africa: e.g. Kenya. Mid-East: Palestine, Lebanon, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Israel. Genocide & atrocity areas: including Cambodia, Viet Nam, Armenia. Disaster Areas: China, Haiti. South American countries impacted by CIA interference: including Bolivia, Guatemala, Ecuador. Impoverished developing competitors: India, Philippines. Daniel views it as part of a responsibility, also, to try to put back some of what his own nation has taken through war and economic and ideological manipulation from the rest of the world, even if it’s a drop in the bucket and “you can’t give back a wife or a mother once we’ve shot her, starved her, or betrayed her to her enemies. You can’t make up for destroying a person. But that doesn’t change the responsibility.” He hopes to achieve more wealth to invest more in these areas and, meanwhile, is working on his own motivations for using and hoarding too much wealth.
Daniel thinks globally and locally, but not nationally or ethnically. Being Orthodox, Daniel is free to commune in any country in the world – with the Australian Orthodox, the Orthodox of the ancient Jerusalem Patriarchate, the Japanese Orthodox Church, those of Macedonia or Serbia, Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Egypt, throughout Africa, Asia, and the UK, and the list goes on. Daniel credits being in “the original worldwide and multi-cultural catholic church, not a merely ‘Roman’ one”, for helping feed and sustain a human outlook over a merely ethnic, Western, or national one. He says “cultural understanding comes in part from literally and physically taking another culture into yourself, whether through intermarriage or by eating the food or by communing together”, and that an Orthodox outlook therefore contributes to his comfort in for instance “eating sushi and wasabe, hummus and baba ghanoush, fish cake soup and kimchi, instead of only European brats and beer, or macaroni and gravy”. Daniel has developed a distinct distaste for small-mindedness, imperialism, and racism, which he says you can find as easily in “a Walmart in Alabama as in Uganda and Zimbabwe or the past 67 years of war conducted by the US, UK, and their corporate partners”.
Daniel has three degrees- including a Master of Education in Instructional Technology – though he prefers to leave such contrivances in a drawer along with the deed to that postage-stamp-sized patch of Florida or the Moon (he can’t remember which) that he bought out of the back of a comic book as a kid. Daniel ran a landscaping company for many years, while in school. He then spent a lot of years as a corporate sales trainer, technology trainer, instructional designer, top B2B sales pro, and teaching in the US and elsewhere, before he decided that he is simply built and designed to run his own show and work with other creative innovators who run their own show. Uncomfortable with the slow pace and modest output, cultural homogeneity and personality driven environment, and the emphasis on power structures over new ideas one finds among the constraints and limitations of corporate life, Daniel returned to entrepreneurship and self-employment, but also began collaboration with other like-minded people. Daniel resists control, shuns power, and focuses on brilliance of contribution, exploration, and freedom in his choice of work, colleagues, and business activities.
After the US financial avalanche that started in 2003, Daniel began writing about the changing cultural movement surrounding work, including a blog about work and work culture, called The Rules of Work, one of several self-authored manuals for his life. Daniel is currently President of Market Moose, a small business that helps other small businesses grow through business development, business process development, and internet marketing. He serves as Marketing Director and a co-founder of Free Agent Source, a California-based company that helps provide alternative ways to work, build startups, and equip companies with talent. He is Business Manager and co-founder of a business owned by his lovely wife, and he is invested in several other businesses as well. Likewise, Daniel writes prolifically, and has done so almost non-stop for about 28-years, under a variety of pen names, and in multiple venues, mediums, and genres.
Daniel finds the most consistently produced results of experimental living have been, for him, self-employment, writing, Orthodoxy, cultural diversity, commitment to logic, social ethics, and political skepticism. Sometimes people have dismissed Daniel’s experimental approach to life as evidence of having no direction, but Daniel finds that “direction without adequate thought or trying alternatives is mere inertia, borrowed from someone else’s attitudes, and is not a self-initiated life at all”. In actuality he comes to long lasting conclusions all the time and regards the course of his life as self-correcting and definitely going somewhere. Daniel simply refuses to hold any thought as absolute, or go along with things merely because they are what he sees everyone else doing. Instead, he thinks about everything, utilizes logic and experimentation (reason and empiricism) to continually challenge his own conclusions, and takes a tentative approach to any results. “If you don’t come to any conclusions, you can’t grow or live. If you don’t maintain a conviction that you’re fallible, you can’t learn, and you become a bigot.” Daniel has found that living an experimental life has rewarded him with more diverse and unusual experiences than anyone he knows. They have not always been pleasant experiences, but they have always been worth it, in that the rewards have far outweighed the penalties for creative living.
Miscellaneous:
- Friendships: Daniel focuses on having few friends but strong relationships. He considers all friendships an investment – one contributes (if one can’t, it’s not friendship), and one reaps returns (if one doesn’t, it isn’t friendship). Daniel shares Rand’s view that the ethical basis of any human relationship is trade. If we’re not helping each other create life, improve life, or pursue life experiments, we’re “wasting life capital”. Daniel doesn’t care if you don’t like him, isn’t motivated by popularity or the crowd, and isn’t susceptible to peer pressure, embarrassment, or group think. You must either have something to contribute and are just as open to contribution (if not, it’s control), or must want something that you are willing to contribute value for in return (if not, it’s theft), or else it’s fluff. Daniel lives a necessarily lean, mobile, and agile lifestyle, and doesn’t have room or time for fluff – he thinks that a considered life involves being selective – and he’s seeks out innovators and people who genuinely want to grow, because they are potential peers, partners, or contributors. He thinks that, with such friends, all parties are likely to be more successful at achieving their own ends and in producing more beneficial effects for the world than individuals can alone.
- Technology: Daniel is a tribal member of the Google nation, with deep cultural affection for Amazon and Netflix. He also has some Apple sympathies, but is still a ways from dual citizenship.
- Ethics: Daniel is concerned primarily with the orphaned, the poor, prisoners and those charged with crimes, the unhealthy, strangers and immigrants, the vulnerable, those who are exploited, enslaved, kidnapped, downtrodden, abused, deprived, mistreated, and neglected, those who lack opportunities to pursue their maximum vocational fulfillment, and with animals and living things, the ecology and the cosmos. He has no truck at all with those who get angry or defensive when the world expects them to following the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ (precisely to care for all such people), and he sees social and geopolitical conservatism therefore as hypocrisy and a betrayal of the liberal tradition of Jefferson, the economic tradition of the Austrian School, and the moral tradition of historic Christianity. Daniel is concerned with ethical consumerism – what one buys, where it is sourced, who is selling it, what is profiting, etc. Daniel regards money as the primary locus of ethical activity – “money is the test of one’s belief or the proof of disbelief”.
- Health: Daniel is focused on healthy living as an ethical activity. He regards unhealthy choices as the equivalent of slow self-murder (suicide), and correlates unhealthy lifestyles with cultures that produce violence and aggression, imperialism, bigotry, and ethical nihilism. Daniel considers health (being as healthy as possible) a primary ethical and cultural responsibility (“one’s commentary on the value of human life must begin with one’s own”) and opposes sedentary lifestyles, car culture, harsh cooking methods, and excess meat, corn, and sugar consumption. In terms of culture and health, Daniel likes to point out that anyone claiming to believe in Heaven must likewise acknowledge that it’s full of fruitarians, like Adam and Eve since, in Paradise, there can be no more suffering or death. “There are no after-worship steakhouse buffet lines in Paradise. So maybe giving up the pork rinds or considering a plant-centered diet is more Christian that waddling back to the table with that extra helping of ham and sleeping it off later. Heaven, traditionally, is an active place, a place of fulfilling work, not the physical and mental stasis of the couch and the big screen TV, the squinting prayer and passive sermon of the auditorium, or hanging onto the job we hate until we drop dead and don’t have to take it anymore. In some sense, those who believe in Heaven at all are working to the degree they can on living in it right now.” Following Orthodox tradition, Daniel correlates excess meat consumption with the passions - those tendencies toward jealousy, anger, range, pride, fear, impatience, indifference, and pettiness that Christ, in saving a person from Death, is helping that person to overcome. It is the source of most food-born disease, food poisoning, and the most significant combatant among foods against longevity. While meat isn’t forbidden, Daniel notes that the general Christian pattern of fasting from animal products “half of our days, at a minimum, and for lengthy periods to overcome their effects”, suggests that our culture of emphasis on meat at every meal and mass livestock slaughter will necessarily be “more bigoted, aggressive, and warlike than any sane, Christian people would otherwise be”. Daniel even theorizes a correlation of red and blue states to livestock consumption as well as religious homogeneity that favors gluttony over fasting.
- Work: Daniel regards one’s unique work, the work one is meant to do, one’s vocation, as the primary font of meaning in one’s life. Finding and doing one’s work is what “salvation” means to Daniel. It is the primary religious activity assigned to man. Because of this, Daniel works all the time, and his focus is almost always on work. He has no hobbies, does nothing merely for fun, but always looks to receive work value from every activity and to ensure that every activity furthers his vocation. He refers to this as “vocational singlemindedness and operational multitasking” – every action must contribute more than one benefit and serve more than one purpose. Always try to kill two birds with one stone. People who are less certain of their vocation can find this attitude manipulative, because Daniel is always thinking about how what someone is doing can further their goals and his own, but Daniel thinks that when your own goals are clear and important enough to you, you don’t have time for things that contribute nothing. He modifies the words in Bruce Pandolfini’s book title, “Every Move Must Have a Purpose”, saying “every move must have more than one purpose, or it’s not efficient enough.”
- Philosophy: Daniel regards as bankrupt any philosophy that cannot genuinely address the total condition of non-white, non-affluent, exploited people. “If it’s crap to the Thai girl sold by her parents into child prostitution for the pleasure of US, European, and Asian men, deprived of education, psychologically shaped around dependency, fear, slavery, torture, violence, and bondage, with no prospect for the future, no hope of getting out, slim chance of surviving, and no conception of a world of possible comfort or wonder beyond, then it’s crap for me and for everyone else, too. It’s just crap. Worse than that, it’s an abomination, a lie, and an evil philosophy. Telling her that if she just comes to the right realizations, has the right attitude, or adopts the right philosophical precept, life will OK, even barely OK, is worse than giving her a hand grenade. And my own philosophical failings are always open to that, too – I always have to challenge them to see if they become fluff in the face of real humans living the real lives of suffering we inflict on them. Sorry, but that’s how little respect I have for the pretense of most philosophies, religious, intellectual, motivational, or otherwise. It doesn’t remove our responsibility for concern or to keep thinking or keep trying to change the world, but it does engender a healthy disdain for the results you and I have achieved so far, and the little koens we like to play with like moral marbles, as if the world is merely a playground.” Daniel is sometimes considered ethically heavy handed or morally judgmental but, in every such case, he is merely either a) saying we should stop hurting someone or some thing, or b) that he’s not a believer in the prevalent philosophy that pretends to eliminate harm or suffering. He finds moralizing about other people’s sexual preferences, for instance, far more obnoxious than refusing to purchase chocolate created by child slavery in Ghana and Ivory Coast.
- Religion: Daniel breaks religion into two directions – power-based and ascetic. Power based religion seeks to make other people stop doing things we don’t approve of. It is characterized by people who “call your phone and record threats, because you don’t want to have to say the Pledge of Allegiance, or try to seize the reigns of politics to prevent the ‘wrong’ kind of people from enjoying the same freedoms as themselves”. Ascetic religion is about saving oneself – overcoming the passions of violence, anger, and pettiness, a healthy skepticism about one’s own success at moral endeavours, a corresponding disinclination to try, condemn, or seize power over other people, and the conviction of personal fallibility. Power-based religion is out to recruit you, fix you, or punish you. Ascetic religion isn’t focused on you – it’s you focused on fixing yourself. Daniel regards almost all belief systems he encounters as surrogates for religion, of one type or another. Daniel generally refuses religious debates, but will occasionally point out historical errors or logical fallacies by those who want to convert him or turn religion into a sharp stick, “beating their plowshares into swords of salvation”.