Bio

• My name is Jared Way. I was born in rural Far Northern California (Humboldt County), and became an “adoptive” Minnesotan when I went off to college.
• Besides Humboldt Country and Minnesota, I have lived in many other places: Mexico City, Valdivia (Chile), Philadelphia, Southeast Alaska, Los Angeles. For the most recent 11 years, I was an expatriate living in South Korea.
• In the summer of 2018, I made another huge change, and relocated to Southeast Alaska, which is my uncle’s home.
• For many years I was a database programmer, with a background in Linguistics and Spanish Literature. In Korea, worked as an EFL teacher.
• In June, 2013, while I was in Ilsan in South Korea, I was diagnosed with cancer, and underwent successful treatment. That changed my life pretty radically.
• Currently, you could say I’m “between jobs,” somewhat caretaking my uncle (to the extent he tolerates that) and getting adapted to life in rural Alaska after so many years as an urban dweller.
• If you’re curious about me, there is a great deal of me online. I believe in what I call “opaque transparency” – you can learn almost everything about me if you want, but it’s not immediately easy to find.
• A distillation of my personal philosophy (at least on good days):
  I have made the realization that happiness is not a mental state. It is not something that is given to you, or that you find, or that you can lose, or that can be taken from you. Happiness is something that you do. And like most things that you do, it is volitional. You can choose to do happiness, or not. You have complete freedom with respect to the matter.
• “Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.” – Gilles Deleuze (writing about Spinoza).