About Matt

I’m Matt Perryman. I grew up in Sweet Home Alabama before relocating to (sometimes) sunny Auckland, New Zealand.

Here’s a picture from one of the better days:

Yes, I speak with a Southern drawl that belongs to a deputy sheriff from The Dukes of Hazzard. I am possibly the only person living in New Zealand who can say that.

The tl;dr in a few bullet points

• In the running with Thomas Pynchon and Uncle Ted Kaczynski for most reclusive hermit on Earth.

• Used to drink a lot (often and amount) and spent my early twenties making a sport out of wrecking my life with terrible choices. These days I don’t drink so much so that I can make terrible choices while sober.

• Wanted to be a cop for a few years, got a degree in criminology, and met a lot of high-up Feds, cops, and VPs of corporate security while applying for cop jobs. That life-path didn’t work out and it was for the best.

• Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules are Black Sabbath’s best albums.

• Lived in the far northern tip of Australia’s Northern Territory for a couple of years. Darwin was like the tropical version of rural Alabama so I felt right at home. Australians are a very redneck-friendly people.

• Fancied myself an expert in strength training for a few years. Some people even agreed with me. I wrote a book about lifting weights and such things that turned into a low-key classic with a few hundred five-star reviews on Amazon.

• At one point I deadlifted 6 wheels (that’s 585 lbs) and weighed 225 on a skinny 5’9 frame that wants to be 160 pounds. Then a nurse told me my heart was enlarged and I was going to die so I downsized.

• Father of twin girls. No pictures, because I don’t put my kids on the hellscape that is the open internet.

• Woke up one day in 2019 and discovered that I’d earned a PhD in moral philosophy. (The Aristotelian kind of ethics that respects nature and actual human beings.) I argued myself out of my atheism and materialism and became a believer in the unseen realms of mind and spirit.

• While I’m technically “Dr. Matt” or “Matt PhD”, since I’m not a medical doctor I feel like a goober using the title outside of academic settings (and even then). I only call myself “Dr.” when I want special treatment at a hotel or restaurant.

• Farscape is the best sci-fi TV show of the last 25 years.

• Got very interested in influencing hearts and minds by words in print (aka copywriting).

• Writes emails for a good time. Mostly I’m writing about being strong, energetic, and pretty if you’re over 40 (as I am), but it wanders all over. Touch the button if you want more 👇

What am I all about and why should you care?

If you have to ask and I have to convince you, you probably shouldn’t care.

I stopped trying to argue and convert people to my beliefs a long time ago. It never works, and they just get mad at you.

If you’re curious anyway, read on.

⚠ WARNING: Matt is putting on the philosopher hat now. You’ve been told.

There’s a line from the remnant works of the Greek thinker Heraclitus that sums up everything I believe:

ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων

You can’t read Greek? Barbarian.

That says “Ethos anthropoi daimon”. In a rough and probably misleading English translation the line means

“Your character is your fate.”

Your character is the sum of your habits, your customary ways of being, and your deepest patterns of thought, desire, and behavior.

Who we are and how we are is our destiny.

I’m interested in what it means to be a human being, to live well as a human being, and how to live as a good human being ought to live.

That’s the familiar stuff of ethics and morals. But the spiritual and religious dimensions to these questions transcend the ethical issues of right choice and right conduct. The question of character runs much deeper into questions about what we are, why we’re here, and what we’re meant to be.

Everything is about identity, our sense of being who we are.

Psychology and the brain sciences, as interesting as they can be, only go so far in helping us understanding ourselves.

Each of us thinks and acts from a point of view which is hopelessly colored by our sense of what matters, what is worthy, and what is not. That viewpoint cannot be distilled down into events and processes in the living brain because it involves responses to ideal standards that make demands on us.

Observations and theories about the brain or mind do not answer questions of what is good and right, what is worth doing, or what is worth caring about. The doing of science is downstream from an ethical stance that values neutrality and objectivity. Science can’t answer these questions for us.

So how do we live well?

I’m fascinated by the ways human beings build our own prisons and make ourselves into the jailer.

There’s something in us that wants to make ourselves miserable, and then defend the misery at any cost. I’ve suffered my entire life from habits of self-sabotage, self-criticism, and self-hatred. There was no reason for the pain beyond my commitment to it and the stories I told myself about it.

People have always been self-interested and cruel in ways large and small. Rational or not, we are easily manipulated and easily fooled creatures who live by impulse and conformity. Christians say we have a fallen nature and I’m inclined to agree.

Today, under what feels like crushing stress which is only getting worse, the repressed feelings of guilt, shame, and fear that we all carry lead to envy, resentment, and explosive release of anger.

We all have our wounds and scars on the inside, but so few of us ever become conscious of them, much less face up to them.

Uplifting feelings such as gratitude, appreciation, forgiveness, love, and hope, the stuff of growth and health and natural “highs”, get the short end of the stick.

Recovering them, while escaping the hurts, is necessary for the sort of happy flourishing lives that Aristotle called εὐδαίμων (eudaimon), a life lived well because it aims at the highest human good.

Those happy lives aren’t that hard to come by.

The hard part for us is imagining them. Far easier to chase money and status, living each day in an unwanted routine so as to fit in with everybody else.

The good people we’re fortunate to have in our lives are key to good living, and maybe the only thing that ever really matters. Every encounter we have with another person is like a shot in a game of pool. We leave a lasting impact, which can either leave the other person better off or worse.

I couldn’t always appreciate that, and that failure to appreciate good people, because of lies that I told myself, led me into a lot of mistakes that I regret.

My purpose today is to help others avoid the mistakes I made.

If you made it through this mini-essay, you might want to sign up for my email list.

I know I said I write for over-40s who want to stay strong and energized. It all ties together under the idea of flourishing or well-being. What goes on inside is as important as what happens outside.

Just roll with it. Touch the button 👇