Living Energy

Life is the seemingly impossible emergence of order from chaos — self-organizing systems I call Living Energy. This newsletter investigates the forces unraveling them.

We built a civilization out of physics we didn’t fully understand. When researchers started documenting the harm, it was easier to discredit the science than redesign the infrastructure. The damage is real, measurable, and documented, but it’s built into the system — a default state we no longer notice. The institutions that should have caught it were shaped by the same economic forces that built it.

I spent over twenty years in my tech career building this infrastructure and another decade tracing what it did to my body. This newsletter is where that investigation goes public — the biology, the culture it shapes, and the systems that refuse to look at either.

This work grew out of personal necessity. Born prematurely in 1975, I spent my first three weeks under fluorescent lighting in Stanford’s NICU. As I grew up I progressively sought out more artificial light stimulation. I first developed insomnia at age 7, and would wait until everyone was asleep, then turn on the overhead light and stare at it to settle my nervous system. As a teenager I inverted my sleep schedule entirely, going to bed at dawn, obsessed with coding late into the night (“hacking”, as we called it back then). That pattern followed me into a career in technology, continuing the light abuse for decades and eventually building wireless networking hardware. By my late thirties I’d accumulated health problems conventional medicine couldn’t diagnose, let alone fix. I eventually reversed most of it through mitochondrial optimization and control of my light and EMF environment, reaching better health in my late forties than I’d had at twenty. If recovery is possible after the kind of exposure I accumulated, it’s possible for almost anyone, but getting there required understanding why it worked. Once I understood that, the question became: why did the institutions whose job it was to know this fail to prevent it… or refuse to?

In journalism, a source tells you what they want you to know. A document tells you what was actually decided, measured, filed, or admitted — including what was left out. I.F. Stone spent decades proving that institutions reveal more than they intend to, if their own records are read carefully enough — what amounts to adversarial document reading. The method here is the same, applied to three overlapping layers: what the science is permitted to find, shaped by the grant politics and career incentives that determine what gets studied; what the policy built on that science chose to see; and what both layers omit. The gaps are as evidentiary as the text. Stone called them significant trifles — the small admissions that expose the larger structure. Reading all three layers against each other is the primary method this newsletter operates from.

The biophysical framework underneath the reporting runs from sub-atomic to cosmic. Electron tunneling in mitochondrial respiratory proteins. Voltage-gated calcium channels opening in neurons under RF exposure. Schumann resonances as the electromagnetic cavity the human nervous system evolved alongside for 200,000 years. Cosmic rays from dying stars contributing to glacial and interglacial cycles on Earth — and flipping bits in hard drives. The same physics that explains a 49ers linebacker’s Achilles tear connects — not metaphorically, but physically — to ionospheric dynamics.

Institutional failure runs deeper than any single agency. The medicine that can’t see electromagnetic damage is the same medicine that prescribes tetracycline or Accutane for routine teenage acne — both mitochondrial toxins. Acne driven by circadian disruption from blue-enriched artificial light, treated with drugs that compound the underlying damage. Resolving the symptom while creating structural problems as a “side-effect”. FCC exposure limits written in 1996, calibrated for thermal effects only — determined by heating monkeys with wireless radiation until they no longer responded to the offering of a banana by eating it — is the regulatory expression of that same blindness: institutions optimizing for one measurable variable while remaining structurally unable to see everything outside the model.

I don’t mean to frame technology as the enemy here. Millions of people are already outsourcing their emotional lives to an AI chat interface, hosted on a pulsed microwave device that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t tire, and has no stake in their wellbeing. That same tool is also, right now, allowing a self-taught high school dropout to engage with primary scientific literature, as if working with a personal team of PhD researchers, on equal footing with credentialed institutions that spent decades controlling access to it. Both things can be true. The question this newsletter will keep returning to is the same one every powerful technology demands: are we using it, or is it using us?

None of this is new knowledge. The Celts built passage tombs aligned to the cross-quarter days so the returning light would illuminate the interior chamber, and inspire them to prepare for the coming of Spring. Ayurvedic medicine organized daily and seasonal rhythms around solar timing — dinacharya and ritucharya as applied circadian biology, arrived at millennia before the vocabulary existed. Chinese medicine mapped organ clocks to the hours of the day. Traditional cultures ate what grew locally in season, which meant their metabolic biology shifted with the light. These practices precise calibrations to the electromagnetic and light environment the body evolved inside. Modern reductionism didn’t disprove those traditions, it just created regulatory standards that ignored them and stopped measuring, and we collectively forgot.

Two years into my recovery, at peak physical health, I developed intractable insomnia with no biological explanation. The better my health got, the longer I lay awake — windows of wakefulness in the middle of the night that stretched further with each passing week. That is where the study of mechanism hits its limit. There is no material solution to a spiritual problem. Health shapes quality of life, but the inverse is equally true — resolution at the soul level can shift things that biology alone cannot. I enjoy exploring these questions down to the quantum level, but I’ve come to believe there is equal value in surrendering to the mystery. We can’t understand everything, and we don’t need to.

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