About Practiced Principles
Practiced Principles is a publication about the relationship between the ideas we hold and the lives we lead.
An idea can seem convincing in reflection and become more complicated when we try to live by it. Commitments compete, circumstances change, and what once seemed important can lose its hold on us. Everyday life gives us opportunities to examine what we believe and discover what those beliefs ask of us.
These essays explore that relationship through questions of attention, judgment, practice, and care. What is our effort serving? How do we sustain something worthwhile? When should we persist, and when should we reconsider? What might become possible if we recognised that we already had enough?
The aim is for readers to leave with an idea they can carry into their own lives, with room to decide what it means in their particular circumstances.
About Dylan
I’m Dylan Simons, the writer behind Practiced Principles.
I’ve long been interested in questions about what matters, what we believe, and how we choose to live. After working in hospitality, I pursued those interests through a degree in Philosophy and Economics, followed by a master’s in Epistemology, Ethics, and Mind at the University of Edinburgh.
During my studies, I became increasingly interested in how philosophical thinking could find expression in everyday life. I wanted a vocation that would let me explore difficult questions and make those conversations accessible to people outside the university.
Finding a way to do that took time. I worked in physical labour, insurance, and banking while trying to understand how my education and interests might become work I could sustain. Those experiences gave me further questions to consider: about the purposes our work serves, the demands it places on us, and the choices available when earning a living and living according to our values feel difficult to reconcile.
Practiced Principles has grown out of that search. It is a place to bring philosophical reflection into conversation with ordinary experience, in language that invites people to participate.
Alongside writing, daily meditation and a growing commitment to yoga have deepened my interest in how understanding develops through practice. Having recently left banking, I’m preparing to train as a yoga teacher at Kripalu. Writing and teaching are becoming connected ways of pursuing the questions that have interested me for years.