About

The name zenzombie comes from a turbulent period of life when I first became aware of how much of my thinking happened on autopilot — shaped by habit, identity, and inherited belief.

That realization was useful, but insufficient. Noticing that these modes exist does not mean noticing when I am inside one of them. That takes effort, and it has to be renewed continually. I’ve come to understand my own life as a tension between these two modes: automatic and intentional.

I’m drawn to questions that explore the human experience at multiple levels: how perception, values, and motivation give rise to thought; how those processes are shaped by brain function and evolutionary history; and how they play out in the systems people design and inhabit. Much of what holds my attention sits at the intersection of metacognition, human behavior, and systems thinking — particularly questions of clarity of intent, aligned incentives, and the user experience of living inside complex systems.