Making things better by making better things

Our innovation, ingenuity and ability to harness our divergent capabilities in a focussed manner have brought us to this crossroads moment in history. 

We are now at a very important time in our time as THE tentpole species on this planet. 

We’ve unlocked unprecedented levels of abundance, comfort, convenience and communication. Information flows through our societies and their constituent sub-structures at a rate that would have been impossible to even conceive of just a few decades ago. 

And yet, things are not all rosy for us by most accounts. There is a lot of pessimism, concern and divisiveness going around. Indeed, there are a lot of us who seem to believe that things are worse for us now than ever before. This apparent contradiction is of great interest to us. 

We’ve become too big for our own good. As a global civilization, we’ve become so large and unwieldy that our ability as a species to self-regulate, as it were, has been utterly overrun. 

To put it another way, we’re like a lumbering giant that has a million moving parts and terrifying brilliance coded in but a brain that’s not developed enough to co-ordinate them smoothly. We seem to have sacrificed wisdom at the altar of technological genius. 

“To build the machine is genius. To ask whether the machine should exist at all—that’s wisdom”

NOUS as a magazine is interested in both, as it were - the moving parts and the co-ordination. The operational and conceptual nous (oh come on!) as well as the common sense that is required to make sure the innovations that we design don’t create unintended consequences that are harmful to us and our world. 

 Nous exists to explore how we can organize knowledge, systems, and tools so that what we build actually serves human and planetary well-being.

We look for projects that deliver their intended benefits without unintended harm — and for ideas that help us live with more clarity, livability, and joy.

So we decided to translate that into a few touchstone statements that we wish to hold ourselves to.

• Clarity over noise
• Better design, better outcomes
• Cross-disciplinary thinking
• Practical optimism

In short, common sense will be the throughline that connects the seemingly disparate threads that we will talk about. 

It simply means that we are

What does that mean?

It means we’re not here to add to the intellectual clutter or the techno-spiritual noise.
We’re here to cut through it.

Clarity over noise means we privilege signal — the ideas, systems, and patterns that actually move the needle — over fashionable jargon, ideological fog, or pseudo-complexity masquerading as depth.

Better design, better outcomes means we believe most problems are design failures, not destiny. If you redesign the inputs — the incentives, the tools, the environments — the outputs will follow. Better design is better ethics.

Cross-disciplinary thinking means we refuse the silos that keep solutions shallow. Neuroscience informs sociology. Technology informs ecology. Yoga informs psychology. Systems thinking informs everything.
The world is interconnected — so our thinking should be too.

Practical optimism means we’re not cheerleading nor catastrophizing.
We’re not in the “everything is amazing” camp or the “everything is doomed” camp.
We believe in solutions that actually work — optimism with a spine.

Put simply:

Nous is about cultivating the kind of intelligence that builds things worth building — and knows when not to build.

It is the marriage of genius and wisdom, of invention and discernment.
It’s common sense practiced at a civilizational scale.