W. G. Brown

Will is a writer, researcher, and thought-partner. He works primarily with academics and business leaders, helping to refine and communicate impactful ideas.

Wise Words — Will's main newsletter — explores how writing can enable us to cultivate deeper, more contemplative lives, and how it can help to clarify and enrich the work we do in the world.

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On writing oneself sane

Last week, in the 'Weekly Notes' that I send to a small number of trusted friends and acquaintances, I suggested that I would be using that newsletter to share — how I'm thinking about and navigating things like work, books, writing, gardens, technology, and the attempt to live a sane and contemplative life in an era of late capitalism and collapse. It would seem these are my 'concerns' — things which have come to attract my particular interest and attention. And it would seem that I'm...

5 days ago • 4 min read

On The Garden of Earthly Delights

We are facing a collapse of imagination in the 21st century. In so many of our workplaces, just as in our political and academic institutions, we seem to have lost the ability to exercise our imaginative capacities — to entertain genuinely alternative possibilities to business-as-usual. "We’re so busy that there’s no time for our imaginative lives", writes Rob Hopkins in an interview on the importance of imagination - "We’ve come to see imagination as a luxury." Especially over the last...

5 days ago • 5 min read

Letters from a scholar in the mountains

Some years ago, during a period of wandering in Andalucía, I made the acquaintance of a man called Lorenzo in a café in one of the remoter villages of the Sierra Nevada. After some conversation passed between us, he was kind enough to offer to host me at his cabin, situated in its own secluded valley a mile or so above the village. I accepted, and spent a week or so there with him. Lorenzo is a rare sort of individual in the modern age. He leads a genuinely meditative life dedicated to...

5 days ago • 3 min read

On play and representation

“ For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give. — Judith Butler, 'Precarious Life' “ It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. —...

5 days ago • 7 min read

On the compulsion to know

This article is an edited excerpt from the dissertation I wrote for my Masters, which was essentially an attempt to articulate the value of 'not knowing'. This excerpt gives a broad-brush account of the ways in which we have been 'compelled to know', from the Enlightenment, through the Industrial Revolution, up to the 21st century. Coherent adult practitioners must appear to know what they are saying — as though they can know something that the language they speak doesn't.— Adam Phillips,...

5 days ago • 4 min read