BreathCube
A breathing exercise built on Minimal Viable Design. A white 3D cube floats in black space, rotating to reveal breathing instructions on each face. The cube's physical rotation creates a meditative rhythm.
Digital hygiene, mindfulness, and inner life tools. Tend Your Inner Life.
A breathing exercise built on Minimal Viable Design. A white 3D cube floats in black space, rotating to reveal breathing instructions on each face. The cube's physical rotation creates a meditative rhythm.
Most people live smaller than they have to. The marathon never gets run. The album never gets recorded. Unicorn Kick closes the gap between who you are and who you could become.
A mindfulness app offering desk-bound users genuine encounters with specific natural entities and phenomena. Every session focuses on a real, specific thing—never generic ambience. Ready to enter the Clearing?
A private digital sanctuary for noticing and preserving what makes you feel alive. Not social media. Not a gamified gratitude journal. A quiet, beautiful space to capture fleeting moments.
The journal that never erases. Write your life again and again on the same board. The old layers stay underneath. You just keep making the next version stronger.
Most adults operate with a five-word emotional vocabulary. Emotional granularity—the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between feelings—is trainable. Begin your Attunement.
Thriving isn't a feeling, it's a Practice. A daily practice for cultivating character, grounded in classical philosophy.
Watches your AI tools, lets you literally walk away, and pings your phone the instant the job's done—or needs a 10-second nudge. You hit 'run,' you stand up, stretch, grab coffee, do yoga, breathe.
By Justin Neuman
Over the last decade, "happiness" became one of higher education's most overproduced subjects. Millions enrolled in courses promising optimization, habit-hacking, and positivity training. All well and good. But what these courses largely avoid is, well… real life… with its heartbreaks, griefs, failures, and the long consequences of loving other people. A happiness course seemed like Dessert-mode education: pleasurable, affirming, and easily consumable.
But real life is not dessert.
I'm a professor of literary studies. For years I taught the standard curriculum... Modernist Poetry, the Epic Tradition, disciplinary courses designed to reproduce the PhD and survey courses designed to push content coverage. Then my university cut the lecture courses I had taught for years, and I faced a choice: mourn the old model or build something better.
I chose to build.
I returned to first principles. What do students actually need? Not more content delivery. They need tools for living through difficulty. They need language for desire, loss, meaning, and connection. They need what the Greeks called eudaimonia... not happiness as feeling, but happiness as flourishing, the good life lived in full awareness of mortality and constraint.
If a course doesn't help students figure out how to live, what's it for… and if we can't explain how it might change a student's life, why are we teaching it?
The course I created, Heartbreak and Happiness, made me change my pedagogy. And it changed my students' lives. It braids ancient philosophy with contemporary science, poetry with empirical research, personal formation with civic imagination. It treats literature as our most sophisticated technology for exploring consciousness... as a mirror to regard ourselves, a window onto distant worlds, and an anvil on which to forge meaning from pain.
The empirical research is unequivocal: relationships are the key to happiness. They also break our hearts. This app and this reading list holds both truths together.
We are living through a strange inversion. Artificial intelligence has driven the value of quick answers toward zero. Machines summarize, paraphrase, and analyze faster than any student. What remains scarce... and therefore valuable... are judgment, taste, ethical reasoning, lived memory, moral accountability, and the capacity to live inside unresolved questions.
Those are not defects in a humanities education. They are its core competencies.
As work stops supplying meaning by default, people must generate it elsewhere: in art, community, contact with the natural world, and the rhythms of everyday life. The humanities are no longer merely career-adjacent. They become life-centric. Humanist, with a capital H. They train people to orient themselves when external scripts collapse.
Confusing answers for meaning is the mistake at the center of both the crisis in the humanities and the panic over AI. When someone asks a chatbot "What is the meaning of life?" the system responds fluently. But it does not produce meaning on a boring Tuesday afternoon, or during grief, or in a moment of moral pressure. Meaning emerges through repetition, commitment, consequence, and revision... over time, and in relationship with others.
You cannot live in a deconstructed house, and you cannot be sustained if you never grow things. We have to plant something. An orchard is not a metaphor for critique. It is a metaphor for faith in the future. Cultivation presumes tomorrow.
This app is an orchard.
HappyHumanist offers two ways in. The Course: ten weeks of guided exploration through texts that will break you apart and build you back. The Practice: daily journaling, study of the classical virtues and their Greek roots, reflection exercises drawn from centuries of wisdom about character formation.
Both paths are free. Friction is not the bug of a good life. It is the curriculum. Welcome. Choose your path.
By Justin Neuman
I started learning to code because I wanted to build this app.
Not because I saw a market opportunity. Not because I wanted to disrupt anything. Because I wanted something that didn't exist, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.
My kids have been growing up fast. And lately I've been noticing how much I wish I'd been better at capturing the little moments... our son holding a purple plush hippo in his purple long underwear, the way our daughter's hand looked holding a dandelion before the seed-pod blew away. Or even the wonders of my own daily life... light slanting through the pines on my trail run last Wednesday afternoon. Things I know I'll forget. Not the big moments. Those get photographed, celebrated, posted. The small ones. The ones that make a life feel like a life.
I wanted a place to catch them. Not to advertise them or analyze them. Just to hold them for a while and maybe share them with someone I love. I wanted something like what Instagram almost was... before attention became something to be harvested rather than cultivated.
So I built Ephemerality.
It helps you capture moments that matter... a few words, a photo, and a prompt for reflection. These are Ephemeron. The app saves them to your phone and helps you cultivate attention on what really matters.
The ancient Stoics and Epicureans understood something we've mostly forgotten: the good life isn't about accumulation. It's about attention. About being present to what's actually happening, right now, before it passes.
We live in an attention economy that wants more. More of your time, your data, your money. Ephemerality wants less.
The app is free. Not freemium... free. No subscription unlocks. No premium tier. I'm not interested in monetizing your memories. Eventually, if people want printed books of their ephemera, I'll offer that. A physical object made from moments you chose to notice. That feels right. But the app itself is a gift.
I mean that literally. Ephemerality's the second app I've released this way... the first was Unicorn Kick, built to help people achieve their dreams. I believe some things should just exist because they're good, and people might want them, and because I want to make them.
This is the app I wish I'd used when my kids were kids. It's the app I'm going to use from now on, because life is passing. And I want to seize it.