Behind Lifelook 

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Lifelook explores values, presence, and the art of living as awareness. Essays, reflections, and gentle questions for readers curious about the nature of experience. 

I’m Isaiah Behnke, a curious human who’s been drawn to existential questions since before I could reach the second shelf, and definitely before I knew the word existential. At eight, somewhere between slinging newspapers with my brother on frostbitten Wisconsin mornings and dodging summer sprinkler spray, I found myself wondering not just what I was doing—but how I knew I was doing it. I became aware that I was aware. Not just awake, but somehow inside the moment, watching it unfold from within.

That moment of a deeper sense of being aware stayed with me, and settled in slowly, like something I'd later uncover from Kafka: "You are free, and that is why you are lost."¹ So, while I wasn’t lost exactly, nor unsettled, I did start watching myself watch. My freedom felt less like losing my way and more like tracking it from above and within.  Expanding that mystery remains quietly riveting and inspires my life's purpose.

That single snowy question grew into two decades of informal and formal inquiry, eventually steering me through a degree in history & politics, a museum basement of hieroglyphs, and an MBA devoted to human-scale leadership. 

I studied History and Political Science at Richmond, The American International University in London, where I chaired the Philosophical Society and hosted debates on mortality and meaning. I co-led the Historical and International Relations Society where I organized museum and battlefield tours, and roundtables with politicians and diplomats on both sides of the Channel and Atlantic who wrestled with real-time ethical dilemmas—my first taste of values-in-action. I deliberately intersected interests across philosophy, history, politics, and international relations circles. 

That real-world engagement with ethics led me inward too—into buried archives, ancient rituals, and questions that predate politics. As an intern at the British Museum, I spent time in the underbelly of Ancient Egypt and Sudan—literally—researching field terminology for the Nebamun Gallery. What struck me wasn’t just the history, but the spectrum of meanings hidden behind seemingly shared words—well, as common as Anglicized Egyptian hieroglyphs can be for anyone who didn’t study Egyptian history. Some visitors were casually curious, others reverent, and many encountering these ideas for the first time. 

That same curiosity shapes how we speak about our inner worlds. We use shared language—values, stillness, and the elbow room of purpose—but each of us carries different meanings. I wanted to know why deeper attention to the inner world so often showed up as steadiness in the outer one, even when things spiraled sideways—as they did early in my career.

An MBA in my late twenties guided me deeper into higher-ed leadership where I scale spreadsheets for humans and help students, colleagues, and myself translate administrative hieroglyphs into human stories.

Still, beneath all of that, I’ve spent my life sketching out the internal shape of a conscious integration of values, attention, and aware action—a perspective I call lifelook. 

That season in the British Museum, my training in history and business, and lifelong attraction to the unknown taught me to translate and break down dense ideas into something digestible and approachable at any level of understanding—a habit I now aim at the process of living with awareness.  

Far from an expert, I write Lifelook as a fellow participant, as someone trying to live with attention, values, and maybe a little less friction. This project reflects years of historical and philosophical wanderings—Stoic, Taoist, and Existential alike. The rest? Dishwashing reflection. My rinse cycle philosophy lab. The best hypotheses crash-test somewhere between bedtime stories and rinse cycles.

I write for the curious. For those of us who sense the strangeness of being alive and want to greet it with thoughtfulness, some humor, and the kind of attention that feels less like effort and more like participation.

I interrogate these ideas from Virginia’s Blue Ridge foothills, raising two small humans who specialize in interrupting epiphanies. 

The first Lifelook book arrives in the coming year(s). Essays and musings land every month or so. If one of them meets you where you are, that’s the whole point. 

Stay for the essays and—soon—the books. You'll carry portable insights: pocket-sized moment-work for the office, the kitchen, or the pause before school drop-off, coffee-length reflections on our finest missteps, and a reminder that philosophy begins beneath your feet.  

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 ¹ Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991).

Well, I'm not sure exactly, and while I search for meaning and try my hand at living an examined life, I geographically live in Crozet, VA with my spouse, two young humans, and a golden retriever, all nestled in the humbling and invigorating Blue Ridge Mountains.