A Behind-the-Scenes You Never Asked For
How ideas, songs, and stubbornness team up at Frequency of Reason.
Words and music, my only tools. Mother Love Bone nailed it — because at Frequency of Reason, that’s exactly how it happens. No grand plan. Just stories shaped by rhythm and reason, with a playlist humming in the background.
Imagine a place where Seneca meets synth-pop, and both agree on something. That place is Frequency of Reason. Nobody knows exactly how it works. The person writing it often pretends they do, but mostly winging it.
Is it a Substack? A journal? A self-help mixtape? The answer is yes. Also no. It’s mostly an excuse to write weirdly serious stories and smuggle in some reason, optimism, and a song that matches the mood about 54% of the time.
At Frequency of Reason, nothing gets written unless it resonates first. Could be a news story that smells like virtue. Could be a single lyric from a classic rock track nobody remembers. Sometimes inspiration comes from someone else’s Substack post. One week, it’s Marcus Aurelius. The next, it’s Cyndi Lauper or AI-obsessed bosses who mistake boldness for reason. There’s no hierarchy here — if it hits home, it counts.
The actual writing process is somewhere between part-time journalism, lyric analysis, and trying to outwit ChatGPT. Drafts get renamed eight times, from Maybe Something About Forks to Final_Final_This_One. Most sentences are cut, stitched, and rearranged like ransom notes. A paragraph might be rewritten just because it accidentally sounded like corporate wisdom. But eventually, a structure appears. Usually after snacks (often), or a flash of actual insight (rarely).
The hardest part is sneaking in jokes that don’t break the spell. Too much and it’s stand-up. Too little and it’s just a lecture. The rule is simple: no punchlines in bold. Humor should sneak past you like it’s not even there. If it leaves a grin, a chuckle, or an awkward scroll-back — perfect.
What Frequency of Reason aims for isn’t to preach — it’s to make a point, and make it well. No big truths, just sharp observations dressed in decent jokes. It’s less about teaching and more about showing: here’s a thing, it’s weird, it matters, let’s poke it together. If the story lands and the point sticks, that’s enough.
If one of these stories hits just right — or slips into conversation like a song someone forgot they loved — that’s more than enough. Frequency of Reason wasn’t built for algorithms. It was built to move quietly: person to person, thought to thought. If it finds a wider audience, great. But first, it has to resonate.