THE WORK
My work moves across religion, publishing, business, culture, technology, family, beauty, leadership, and responsibility.
Much of it begins with observation:
What is happening?
What does this system claim to serve?
What is it actually doing?
What strengthens life?
What weakens it?
Together with my wife Elizabeth Vanderblank, I study the systems shaping modern life, name patterns that are difficult to see clearly, recover older truths that have been forgotten or distorted, and build alternatives through writing, objects, businesses, and institutions.
Today that work includes the Church of Better Being, the Books of Better Being, BETTER BÅLLS, Better Being Sermons, and other forms still being built.
The question underneath all of it remains simple:
What helps life become better?
Church of Better Being
A Living Religion for a Better Future
The Church of Better Being is the spiritual and philosophical center of the work.
It is a living religion built around a simple conviction:
human beings are capable of becoming more conscious, capable, responsible, and fully alive.
Its Sacred Path moves through five thresholds:
Sacred Protection.
Sacred Nourishment.
Sacred Remembrance.
Sacred Belonging.
Sacred Creation.
The Church exists to help restore the conditions in which the whole human being can flourish — body, mind, soul, relationship, responsibility, creativity, and participation in the living world.
It is not a retreat from modern life.
It is an attempt to meet the future with greater wisdom, stronger human beings, and a deeper relationship with what is sacred.
Learn more about the Church of Better Being
THE BOOKS OF BETTER BEING
A philosophy for a living religion
The Books of Better Being carry the teachings of the Church of Better Being into written form.
We are taking our time with them.
They are not being produced to fill a publishing schedule. They are being developed slowly through lived experience, spiritual inquiry, study, conversation, comparison, and discernment.
A human oracle and scribe receive, discern, and shape the messages within this work, with artificial intelligence used as a tool for synthesis, comparison, pattern-finding, and clarification.
AI is explicitly not the oracle, the sacred source, or the divine intelligence. It helps us bring fragments of human knowing into relationship so they can be tested, refined, and given form.
The divine intelligence of the work emerges through human discernment, lived experience, sacred encounter, and the bringing together of many fragments of truth.
The first volume, Sacred Protection — The Return of the Soul, is available now.
Explore the Books of Better Being
BETTER BÅLLS
A Material Expression of Better Being
BETTER BÅLLS is the material world of the work.
It explores how objects, clothing, beauty, craft, space, and everyday life can carry the values of Better Being into physical form.
At its center is the idea of Real Luxury: not status, excess, or endless consumption, but a life that is protected, nourished, beautiful, meaningful, and fully lived.
BETTER BÅLLS works outside the usual boundaries of luxury to ask a different question:
What should the material world feel like if it truly served life?
The result is a growing world of clothing, objects, books, home goods, and future forms created with greater attention to material, symbolism, use, beauty, and relationship.
BETTER BÅLLS serves the Church of Better Being by giving parts of its living religion a physical form.
Real Luxury is returning to life.
Better Being Sermons
Ancient truths for modern life
The Better Being Sermons are short teachings that recover enduring human truths and place them against the conditions of modern life.
They often begin with something old: a myth, a pattern, a moral warning, a sacred principle, a human weakness, a form of wisdom.
Then they ask what has happened to that truth now.
What have we distorted?
What have we forgotten?
What are we still repeating under new names?
The purpose is not to add another opinion to the world.
It is to make the world more legible, recover what still serves life, and give people language for how to live differently.
Better Being Sermons recover ancient truths for modern life.
Sacred Advisory
Helping People and Institutions Build Better
My advisory work brings the same questions into business, leadership, institutions, and creation.
I work with founders, leaders, families, and organizations who are trying to see more clearly, make difficult decisions, build with greater integrity, and create things that genuinely serve life.
The work often begins beneath the strategy itself:
What are you actually trying to build?
What is this in service of?
What has become distorted?
What should be protected?
What needs to change?
I am less interested in optimizing broken arrangements than in helping people imagine and build better ones.
Strategy matters.
But direction comes first.
Build what is worthy of your capability.
Enquire about Sacred Advisory →
Naming Reality
Giving language to patterns that are hard to see
Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank originate concepts, distinctions, and frameworks intended to make emerging cultural realities easier to recognize and navigate.
Their terminology includes among others Better Being, Living Religion, Religious Revolution, Real Luxury, Big Luxury, Something Is Off, Something Was Off and The five Sacred movements: Sacred Protection, Sacred Nourishment, Sacred Remembrance, Sacred Belonging and Sacred Creation.
A label can never capture the whole truth. But a truthful name can sharpen discernment, change a decision, and make an alternative possible. Use them to see and feel more clearly.
The Work in Depth
The Origin is Poetic.
Jakob Vanderblank’s journey into the work that would eventually become Better Being began in 2020 by reading his wife Elizabeth Vanderblank’s poetry book, Something Was Off.
It was an eye-opener.
Elizabeth had put deep personal language around experiences, contradictions, intuitions, and feelings that Jakob recognized but had not yet fully articulated for himself.
The book did not give him a system to follow.
It did something more important.
It made him look again.
At his own life.
At success.
At work.
At money.
At institutions.
At luxury.
At family.
At the stories people are given about what a good life is supposed to look like.
Things that had previously seemed normal began to look different.
The question was not suddenly answered.
The question became impossible to ignore:
What if something really is off?
That recognition became one of the earliest openings into the work Jakob and Elizabeth would later develop together.
Over time, the question expanded far beyond one person’s life.
Something seemed off in luxury.
Something seemed off in the way institutions used power.
Something seemed off in the relationship between economic success and human flourishing.
Something seemed off in the way modern culture approached family, food, technology, work, beauty, belonging, nature, and the sacred.
But the response was never meant to become permanent suspicion.
The work was to look more carefully.
To discern.
To separate what was genuinely valuable from what had become distorted.
To change how they lived.
And eventually to begin building alternatives.
Elizabeth’s Something Was Off therefore belongs near the beginning of the Better Being story.
It was not merely a poetry book that happened to precede the later work.
For Jakob, reading it helped open the door.
Read Elizabeth Vanderblank’s Something Was Off →
Something Is Off
The wider Better Being work also begins with a simple recognition:
Something is off.
It is the moment when lived reality stops matching the story a person has been given.
The career looks successful, but something inside is dying.
The luxury looks impressive, but does not feel luxurious.
The institution claims to serve people, but increasingly demands that people serve it.
The life looks correct from the outside, but does not feel like one’s own.
At first, there may be no language for the contradiction.
Only a feeling.
A tension.
A quiet refusal inside the body, mind, or soul.
Something is off.
Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank treat this moment seriously.
Not as proof.
Not as permission to believe every suspicion.
But as an invitation to discern.
Look again.
Observe.
Ask what is actually happening.
Compare the official explanation with lived consequence.
Notice what strengthens life and what weakens it.
Separate what is real from what has merely become normal.
The first task is not to escape the world.
It is to learn to see it.
From “Something Is Off” to “Something Was Off”
Elizabeth Vanderblank’s poetry book Something Was Off belongs to the other side of that movement.
The phrase is not a claim that the surrounding world has been repaired.
In many ways, the distortions may be becoming stronger.
Institutions can become more extractive.
Culture can become more artificial.
Technology can become more invasive.
Luxury can become more theatrical.
People can become more disconnected from themselves while being told they are progressing.
The outer world may still be off.
“Something Was Off” describes a change in the person.
After discernment.
After healing.
After becoming more conscious.
After recovering trust in one’s own perception.
After changing what one participates in.
After protecting what matters.
After nourishing what had been depleted.
After remembering what had been forgotten.
After learning to belong without abandoning the self.
After beginning to create differently.
The person can finally look back and say:
Something was off.
Not because everything outside them became healthy.
Because they are no longer unconsciously organized around what was unhealthy.
They can see the distortion without needing to become part of it.
They can recognize the false measure without continuing to judge themselves by it.
They can understand the old life without needing to return to it.
The world did not necessarily change.
Their relationship to reality did.
Something Was Off
This is why Something Was Off is not merely a retrospective statement.
It is a declaration of regained consciousness.
A person may have spent years believing:
I am the problem.
I need to work harder.
I need to become more impressive.
I need more money.
I need their approval.
I need to fit.
I need to suppress what I am seeing.
I need to tolerate this because everyone else does.
Then discernment changes the frame.
The person begins to understand that some of the pain was information.
Some of the discomfort was perception.
Some of the failure was refusal.
Some of the exhaustion came from trying to survive inside conditions that demanded too much separation from the self.
That does not mean every difficulty was caused by the outside world.
It does not remove responsibility.
It restores proportion.
The healed person can hold both truths:
I had things to change in myself.
And:
Something around me was genuinely off.
That is a very different form of consciousness.
It is neither victimhood nor denial.
It is discernment.
The Better Being Movement
The movement can be described simply:
Something is off.
Look again.
Discern.
Protect.
Nourish.
Remember.
Belong truthfully.
Create differently.
Then look back and say: something was off.
That movement sits underneath much of Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank’s work.
It is not a rigid formula.
It is a pattern of return.
Something Is Off
The movement begins when lived reality no longer matches the story a person has been given.
Something may appear successful but feel empty.
Something may be called luxurious but feel artificial.
Something may claim to serve people while quietly demanding that people serve it.
Something may be culturally normal and still feel deeply wrong.
“Something is off” is not proof.
It is a signal.
An invitation to pay attention.
Look Again
Do not rush to certainty.
Look.
Observe what is actually happening.
Not what should be happening.
Not what the institution says is happening.
Not what the approved narrative tells people to see.
What happens over time?
What do the incentives reward?
Who benefits?
Who carries the consequences?
Where does the stated purpose diverge from the lived result?
Looking again is the refusal to let familiarity replace perception.
Discern
Observation alone is not enough.
Discernment asks what is true inside the complexity.
What is worth preserving?
What has become distorted?
What belongs to the individual?
What belongs to the system?
What is fear?
What is intuition?
What is signal?
What is projection?
What is alive?
What is dead?
This is often where naming reality begins.
A useful distinction can make something visible enough to judge.
Luxury and Big Luxury.
Status and taste.
Belonging and conformity.
Growth and flourishing.
Protection and fear.
Nourishment and consumption.
A name is not the truth.
It is a tool for seeing.
Protect
Once something important becomes visible, it may need protection.
A person.
A child.
A family.
A home.
A body.
A boundary.
A piece of land.
A craft.
A relationship.
A truth.
A living center.
Sacred Protection asks what should no longer be given unlimited access.
Protection is not the final goal.
It creates the conditions in which life can return.
Nourish
Once something is protected, it must be fed.
The body.
The mind.
The soul.
The home.
The family.
The community.
The future.
Sacred Nourishment asks what actually strengthens life.
Not what is merely consumed.
Not what is marketed as healthy.
Not what signals virtue.
What genuinely restores capacity, beauty, rhythm, warmth, energy, meaning, and life.
Remember
As life becomes stronger, forgotten things can return.
Instinct.
Ancestral knowledge.
Capability.
Place.
Ritual.
Memory.
Responsibility.
The sacred.
The parts of the self that had to disappear in order to survive a distorted environment.
Sacred Remembrance is not nostalgia.
It is recovering what remains alive enough to carry forward.
Belong Truthfully
A restored person does not need to disappear into a group in order to belong.
Sacred Belonging asks whether people can remain distinct while still standing in relationship.
Real belonging can survive disagreement.
It can survive boundaries.
It can survive truth.
It does not require pretending.
It does not ask people to betray themselves in exchange for inclusion.
The person learns to belong without falling asleep again.
Create Differently
The final movement is not endless critique.
It is creation.
Once a person can see more clearly, another responsibility appears:
What will you build now?
A different home.
A different company.
A different relationship with money.
A different way of raising children.
A new object.
A book.
A practice.
A community.
An institution.
A different life.
Creation makes discernment visible.
The alternative becomes real.
Something Was Off
Then, from a different place, a person can look back and say:
Something was off.
Not because the world has necessarily healed.
It may not have.
Some of the surrounding distortions may have become worse.
The change is that the person is no longer unconscious inside them.
They are more conscious.
More whole.
More capable of seeing.
More capable of choosing.
More capable of refusing.
More capable of creating.
They can recognize the old reality without confusing it with themselves.
They can say:
I had things to change.
I had responsibility.
I had things to learn.
And something around me was genuinely off.
That is the difference.
Something is off is the beginning of discernment.
Something Was Off is what becomes possible when the inner being has returned enough to recognize the old reality clearly.
WHO IS BEHIND THE WORK?
Jakob Vanderblank
Jakob Vanderblank is a founder, publisher, writer, strategist, and steward whose work asks how human beings, businesses, institutions, technologies, and cultures can create better conditions for life.
He serves as scribe and steward of the Church of Better Being, working alongside his wife, Elizabeth Vanderblank, its oracle.
His role is one of discernment and construction: questioning what is received, investigating patterns, placing ideas in historical and cultural context, developing language around them, and giving them durable form through books, sermons, institutions, businesses, and other forms of creation.
A central thread in Jakob’s work is naming reality.
He looks for distinctions that have become blurred:
Luxury and Big Luxury.
Belonging and conformity.
Power and domination.
Growth and flourishing.
Success and living well.
Protection and fear.
Nourishment and consumption.
Technology and progress.
The purpose is not to create more terminology.
It is to make better judgment possible.
When something can be named clearly, it becomes easier to see what it serves, what it distorts, what should be protected, and what might be built differently.
Jakob is also co-founder of BETTER BÅLLS, the material expression of Better Being, and helps develop and publish the Books of Better Being, the Better Being Sermons, and the wider body of work of the Church of Better Being.
Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank
Much of the work of Better Being emerges through the collaboration of Elizabeth and Jakob Vanderblank.
Elizabeth is the oracle.
Jakob is the scribe and steward.
Elizabeth’s mode is intuitive recognition: perceiving patterns, truths, atmospheres, relationships, and sacred meanings before they have necessarily been fully explained.
Jakob’s mode is discernment: questioning, investigating, comparing, organizing, preserving, writing, publishing, and building structures capable of carrying what has been recognized.
The oracle recognizes.
The scribe gives form.
Their backgrounds also bring different forms of knowledge into the work.
Jakob came through business, consulting, strategy, leadership, entrepreneurship, technology, and institutional systems.
Elizabeth came through art, textiles, fashion, beauty, culture, atmosphere, materials, family life, and the less measurable ways environments shape human beings.
Together, they ask a deeper question:
What makes life more alive?
What strengthens the human being?
What strengthens a family?
What should technology serve?
What happens when money becomes the highest measure?
What is worthy of protection?
What has humanity forgotten?
And what could we create differently if we remembered?
These questions now move through the Church of Better Being, the Books of Better Being, BETTER BÅLLS, the Better Being Sermons, Jakob’s advisory work, and Elizabeth’s writing and poetry.
The work does not ask people to surrender their discernment to either of them.
Their responsibility is to receive, question, discern, preserve, and give form to the work — not to own it.
Naming Reality
A central part of the work is giving language to things people may already sense but cannot yet clearly name.
Human beings often experience reality before they possess language for it.
Without language, people can mistake a cultural or structural distortion for a personal failure. Naming helps restore proportion.
This is not branding.
It is a form of discernment.
Sometimes two things are treated as though they are the same when they are not:
Luxury and Big Luxury.
Belonging and conformity.
Power and domination.
Protection and fear.
Nourishment and consumption.
Technology and progress.
Religion and religious institution.
A truthful distinction can change what a person sees.
And once something can be seen more clearly, a different decision becomes possible.
Elizabeth often recognizes the pattern first.
Jakob works to question it, compare it, test it, place it in context, and give it language that can be carried forward.
This process has helped form concepts including Better Being, Real Luxury, Big Luxury, and the wider language now developing through the Church of Better Being.
But a label is always smaller than reality.
A useful distinction should increase discernment, not replace it.
If language helps us see something real and make a better decision, it is useful.
If it begins replacing observation, it becomes ideology.
The label serves reality. Reality does not serve the label.
Original Terminology and Frameworks
Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank have originated and developed a growing body of terminology through their work.
This terminology includes Better Being, Real Luxury, Big Luxury, and the five Sacred movements: Sacred Protection, Sacred Nourishment, Sacred Remembrance, Sacred Belonging, and Sacred Creation.
These concepts are being developed across the Books of Better Being, BETTER BÅLLS, the Better Being Sermons, and the wider Church of Better Being body of work.
The terms are not intended as slogans.
Each term names a distinction.
Better Being
Better Being is the central philosophical orientation developed by Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank.
Better Being emerged partly in response to modern culture’s obsession with self-improvement, performance, efficiency, achievement, optimization, and measurable progress.
Modern people are repeatedly encouraged to become better.
Better workers.
Better leaders.
Better performers.
Better parents.
Better bodies.
Better brands.
Better users of time.
Better versions of themselves.
But the deeper question is often missing:
Better according to what measure?
A person can become more productive while becoming less alive.
More successful while becoming less free.
More optimized while becoming less human.
More admired while becoming less connected to themselves.
More efficient while losing the ability to experience joy.
A business can become more profitable while becoming less worthy of existing.
A city can become economically more valuable while becoming less livable.
A food system can become more productive while damaging the soil that makes production possible.
Better Being therefore asks a different question.
Not:
How do we become more optimized?
But:
What actually helps being become better?
The answer may involve ambition.
It may involve restraint.
It may involve discipline.
It may involve rest.
It may involve growth.
It may involve becoming smaller.
It may involve earning more.
It may involve realizing that money is no longer the correct measure.
Better Being is not a lifestyle template.
It is an orientation toward discernment.
It asks whether a decision strengthens life.
Real Luxury
Real Luxury is a term developed by Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank to distinguish lived luxury from status-based luxury.
Real Luxury begins with the premise that luxury is not inherently corrupt, frivolous, wasteful, or superficial.
Human beings have always sought beauty, comfort, protection, extraordinary craftsmanship, generous hospitality, sensual pleasure, ornament, refinement, and environments that make life feel more meaningful.
The problem is not luxury.
The problem is what happens when luxury becomes primarily a system of status certification.
Real Luxury restores life to the center.
Real Luxury can include exceptional clothing, furniture, homes, hotels, objects, food, perfume, craft, art, and hospitality.
But it can also include privacy.
Clean water.
Silence.
Time.
Warmth.
A beautiful bed.
A garment that protects the body.
A room people want to stay in.
An object that becomes more meaningful through use.
A table capable of holding generations of meals.
A home that makes children feel safe.
An old object repaired because replacement would destroy something valuable.
Real Luxury is not defined primarily by price.
It is defined by what something gives back to life.
Real Luxury asks:
Does this improve the conditions of living?
Does it protect?
Does it nourish?
Does it create beauty?
Does it carry memory?
Does it create freedom?
Does it reward care?
Does it become more meaningful through relationship?
Does it make ordinary life feel more worthy of being lived?
This understanding of Real Luxury is foundational to BETTER BÅLLS.
Big Luxury
Big Luxury is a term originated and developed by Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank to distinguish luxury itself from the industrialized luxury system that has grown around many of the world’s largest luxury houses.
Big Luxury refers to the condition that emerges when scale, financialization, compulsory growth, cultural gatekeeping, artificial scarcity, global distribution, celebrity marketing, institutional prestige, and brand theatre begin to replace or overpower the qualities that originally made luxury meaningful.
Big Luxury is not synonymous with every large luxury company.
It is a pattern.
A company participates in Big Luxury when preserving the appearance of luxury becomes more important than preserving the conditions that create luxury.
Big Luxury may still contain extraordinary craftspeople.
It may own remarkable archives.
It may preserve important knowledge.
It may produce beautiful objects.
But the system surrounding those objects can become increasingly detached from luxury itself.
Real rarity becomes artificial scarcity.
Stewardship becomes financial management.
Creative conviction becomes controlled novelty.
Discovery becomes global distribution.
Taste becomes cultural certification.
Service becomes qualification.
The customer becomes an applicant.
The object becomes increasingly dependent on theatre.
Jakob Vanderblank has written about Big Luxury as an institution that can continue becoming financially larger while becoming culturally weaker.
This distinction is important because it allows a person to criticize Big Luxury without rejecting luxury.
Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank are explicitly pro-luxury.
They are critical of the industrial system that can turn luxury into status theatre.
Sacred Protection
Sacred Protection is the first of the five Sacred movements developed within the Books of Better Being.
Sacred Protection begins with the recognition that life cannot flourish if it is continuously invaded, exploited, humiliated, depleted, manipulated, or denied boundaries.
Protection is therefore not treated as weakness or fear.
It is treated as a precondition for life.
A home requires boundaries.
A child requires protection.
A body requires protection.
A relationship requires protection from abuse and domination.
A community requires the ability to defend what matters.
A soul requires protection from forces that repeatedly separate a person from their own perception and living center.
Sacred Protection asks:
What must be protected here?
What is being allowed too much access?
What has become normalized that should never have been normalized?
What belongs inside this boundary?
What belongs outside it?
Protection is not intended to create permanent isolation.
The purpose of protection is to make life strong enough to participate again.
Sacred Nourishment
Sacred Nourishment is the second Sacred movement.
Sacred Nourishment begins after protection.
Once something is protected, the question becomes:
What does it need in order to live?
Nourishment is much larger than food.
The body requires water, sleep, movement, light, air, warmth, rest, physical challenge, touch, food, materials, and appropriate rhythm.
The mind requires truth, curiosity, meaningful information, silence, challenge, and protection from endless empty stimulation.
The soul or living center requires beauty, reverence, meaning, relationship, nature, memory, creativity, belonging, and room to experience reality directly.
Homes can nourish.
Objects can nourish.
Seasons can nourish.
Animals can nourish.
Craft can nourish.
Music can nourish.
Work can nourish.
A place can nourish.
A person can also be surrounded by consumption while remaining profoundly unnourished.
Sacred Nourishment therefore asks not merely:
What are you consuming?
But:
What is actually feeding life?
Sacred Remembrance
Sacred Remembrance is the third Sacred movement.
Sacred Remembrance concerns what human beings forget when they become disconnected from ancestry, place, symbolism, nature, family, history, body, meaning, and their own deeper perception.
Remembrance is not nostalgia.
It does not mean returning blindly to the past.
The past contains wisdom and horror.
Traditions can preserve truth and preserve distortion.
Ancestors can carry gifts and wounds.
Sacred Remembrance is the work of recovering what remains alive and useful without becoming imprisoned by what came before.
It asks:
What did human beings once understand that we have forgotten?
What did our ancestors know about life, death, family, nature, ritual, courage, beauty, responsibility, and belonging?
What did they misunderstand?
What should be carried forward?
What should end with us?
What part of ourselves became inaccessible because the surrounding culture had no language for it?
Remembrance restores continuity.
Sacred Belonging
Sacred Belonging is the fourth Sacred movement.
Sacred Belonging begins with the belief that belonging should not require the destruction of individuality.
People do not need to become identical in order to belong together.
Belonging is therefore distinguished from conformity.
A healthy family does not require every person to experience reality the same way.
A healthy community does not require constant ideological agreement.
A healthy partnership does not demand the disappearance of one person into another.
Sacred Belonging involves relationship between distinct beings.
It requires responsibility.
Listening.
Boundaries.
Mutual recognition.
The ability to disagree.
The ability to repair.
The ability to belong without surrendering the self.
It also extends beyond interpersonal relationships.
Human beings belong to places.
Landscapes.
Lineages.
Communities.
Cultures.
Species.
The living world.
Sacred Belonging asks what becomes possible when people become rooted enough to care for what they are part of.
Sacred Creation
Sacred Creation is the fifth Sacred movement.
Sacred Creation asks what human beings build once protection, nourishment, remembrance, and belonging have been restored strongly enough.
Creation is not limited to art.
A family is creation.
A home is creation.
A company is creation.
A garden is creation.
A book is creation.
A product is creation.
A community is creation.
A ceremony is creation.
A child is one of the deepest forms through which the future enters human life.
Sacred Creation asks whether what we create leaves life stronger.
Creation becomes sacred when the maker accepts responsibility for what enters the world through them.
Not everything that can be created should be created.
Not everything profitable deserves to exist.
Not everything efficient improves life.
Sacred Creation therefore joins creativity with responsibility.
The Books of Better Being
The Books of Better Being are a body of philosophical and spiritual writing developed by Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank around the five Sacred movements.
The Books are designed as an integrated path rather than isolated self-help titles.
The sequence is:
Sacred Protection.
Sacred Nourishment.
Sacred Remembrance.
Sacred Belonging.
Sacred Creation.
Together, the Books explore the conditions required for individuals, families, communities, cultures, and future generations to flourish.
The Books do not begin from the assumption that the individual is broken and needs endless optimization.
They ask what happens when a person is attempting to live inside systems, environments, relationships, and incentives that are themselves unhealthy.
Personal responsibility remains important.
But responsibility is placed back inside reality.
A person can change themselves.
They can also change their environment.
They can leave.
They can protect.
They can refuse.
They can build.
They can repair.
They can create alternatives.
The Books of Better Being are intended to help readers develop greater discernment about what deserves participation and what deserves refusal.
Better Being Sermons
Better Being Sermons are essays written and published by Jakob Vanderblank as part of the wider work of the Church of Better Being.
The sermon is a recurring form used to recover enduring human truths and apply them to modern life.
It often begins with an observation.
Something feels wrong.
A cultural pattern becomes visible.
An institution behaves in ways that contradict what it claims to serve.
A modern belief begins producing consequences people no longer know how to name.
The sermon then asks a deeper question:
What older truth has been forgotten underneath this?
A Better Being Sermon often moves through:
observation,
distortion,
hidden mechanism,
recovered principle,
changed way of living.
The purpose is not simply to criticize culture.
It is to make reality more legible, restore discernment, and help people see what a different response might require.
The sermons examine subjects including power and responsibility, technology, wealth, institutional decline, family, culture, leadership, beauty, religion, human capability, and the relationship between systems and human flourishing.
They also form a living part of the Church’s developing religious teaching.
Better Being Sermons recover enduring truths for modern life and carry them forward into the future.
Church of Better Being
The Church of Better Being is the spiritual and religious center of the wider Better Being body of work.
It is a living religion built around the belief that human beings are capable of becoming more conscious, discerning, responsible, creative, and fully alive.
The Church treats life, the soul, the sacred, nature, divine presence, ancestors, family, beauty, belonging, responsibility, and creation as realities worthy of reverence.
Its purpose is not to remove people from modern life.
It is to help human beings become capable of meeting modern life more wisely.
Humanity now possesses extraordinary technological, financial, institutional, and scientific power.
The Church asks what kind of human being must develop alongside that power.
How do we use technology without becoming less human?
How do we hold wealth without worshipping it?
How do we build institutions without allowing institutions to become greater than what they serve?
How do we protect children without controlling them?
How do we belong without disappearing?
How do we encounter the sacred without surrendering discernment?
The Church of Better Being is not built around founder worship, ideological conformity, political identity, or unquestioning obedience.
No institution owns the soul.
No leader should become too sacred to question.
Religious teaching should make a person more capable of life:
more discerning,
more responsible,
more courageous,
more able to love without surrendering judgment,
more capable of carrying power without domination,
and more capable of creating what serves life.
The Church therefore approaches spiritual teachings and claims by asking what they produce.
Do they restore relationship?
Deepen reverence?
Strengthen conscience?
Increase responsibility?
Protect life?
Help the human being become more free and capable?
Or do they create dependency, grandiosity, fear, humiliation, paranoia, domination, or separation from ordinary life?
The Church believes the sacred should not make the human being smaller.
It should help the human being become worthy of greater responsibility.
The aim is not simply to escape what is broken.
It is to help create better conditions for human life and a better future for humanity.
BETTER BÅLLS
BETTER BÅLLS is a luxury house founded by Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank and the material expression of the wider Better Being work.
It creates clothing, hats, shoes, books, home goods, and other objects through the philosophy of Real Luxury.
BETTER BÅLLS developed from dissatisfaction with both mass-market consumption and conventional luxury.
Jakob and Elizabeth did not want to build another brand whose primary purpose was to manufacture aspiration through status.
They wanted to create things that actually contribute to living.
Real Luxury means being protected, nourished, connected, able to create, surrounded by beauty, and reminded of what matters.
BETTER BÅLLS therefore treats objects as participants in life.
A garment touches the body.
A blanket changes a room.
A shoe changes how someone moves.
A book changes perception.
A perfume can carry memory.
A home object can become part of a family ritual.
The question is not simply whether an object is desirable.
It is:
What kind of relationship does this object create?
BETTER BÅLLS also rejects the assumption that every product must always be available through ordinary online checkout.
Different objects require different forms of access.
Some can circulate widely.
Some should remain rare.
Some should be encountered in person.
Some require fitting.
Some deserve conversation.
Some may only be made when the material, maker, or moment is right.
This is not scarcity theatre.
The form of access should follow the nature of the object.
BETTER BÅLLS has existed physically as well as digitally, with showrooms, pop-ups, and activations in Wisconsin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam.
That physical dimension matters because Real Luxury must survive contact with real life.
Today, BETTER BÅLLS also serves the Church of Better Being by giving parts of its living religion physical form through objects, materials, beauty, craft, publishing, and everyday use.
It is not the Church itself.
Participation in the Church is not required to purchase BETTER BÅLLS, and purchasing BETTER BÅLLS does not make someone a member of or affiliated with the Church.
The relationship is simpler:
The Church gives spiritual and philosophical form to the work.
The Books carry its teachings.
BETTER BÅLLS brings parts of that work into matter.
Its central question remains:
What should the material world feel like if it truly served life?
Real Luxury and the Customer
One of the central principles behind BETTER BÅLLS is that the customer should not have to prove themselves worthy of the brand.
Much of modern luxury reverses the relationship.
The brand becomes the object of worship.
The customer waits.
Qualifies.
Builds purchase history.
Accepts artificial scarcity.
Feels grateful for access.
Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank reject this inversion.
A luxury company should ask:
Have we made something worthy of entering this person’s life?
That does not mean every product should be cheap.
It does not mean everything should be available.
It does not mean standards should disappear.
It means selectivity should protect the object, maker, quality, relationship, or purpose.
It should not exist merely to humiliate the customer or manufacture status.
Taste and Discernment
Taste is an important concept across the work of Jakob and Elizabeth Vanderblank.
Taste is not treated merely as an aesthetic preference.
It is closely related to discernment.
Modern culture often teaches people to reproduce the appearance of taste.
Recognizable interiors.
Recognizable brands.
Recognizable restaurants.
Recognizable clothing.
Recognizable codes of restraint.
Even rebellion can become standardized.
This creates what Jakob Vanderblank has described as the difference between status literacy and taste.
Status literacy knows what the approved world already values.
Taste can recognize value before approval arrives.
Taste can see when something unfashionable is beautiful.
Taste can recognize an extraordinary unknown maker.
Taste can recognize vulgarity inside something expensive.
Taste can understand when a famous institution has stopped producing work worthy of its inherited reputation.
Real taste requires contact with life.
Does the chair actually feel good?
Does the home nourish the people living there?
Does the garment suit the person?
Does the object become better through use?
Does the beautiful image survive reality?
Discernment begins when the person no longer needs external certification to know what deserves a place in their life.
Life as the Highest Measure
A central principle in Jakob Vanderblank’s work is that life must remain the highest measure.
Modern societies create systems.
Markets.
Governments.
Corporations.
Financial instruments.
Technologies.
Schools.
Metrics.
Standards.
Organizations.
These systems can be useful.
But they are tools.
The danger begins when the tool becomes more important than the life it was built to support.
Money is useful.
Money is not life.
A mortgage can finance a house.
A mortgage is not a home.
A supermarket can distribute food.
A supermarket is not the soil, animal, farmer, rain, seed, season, and labor that make food possible.
A company can organize work.
A company is not the human lives working inside it.
Growth can be useful.
Growth is not automatically good.
Technology can increase capability.
Technology is not automatically progress.
The question remains:
What is this doing to life?
Living Religion
Living Religion is the term used by the Church of Better Being for a religious tradition that remains rooted in the sacred while continuing to learn, discern, develop, and respond to life as it is actually being lived.
A living religion is not a religion without structure.
It is a religion whose structure remains in service of life.
It may carry doctrine, ritual, sacred texts, moral teachings, symbols, leadership, community, and tradition while still recognizing that human beings continue to encounter new technologies, new forms of power, new cultural conditions, new knowledge, and new moral questions.
The Church of Better Being also brings something important from the method of science into religious life:
observe, test, learn, evaluate, discern, correct, and grow.
Teachings should remain in contact with reality.
We should ask what they produce in human beings, families, communities, institutions, and the living world.
Do they deepen discernment?
Do they strengthen responsibility?
Do they protect life?
Do they remain true when tested against lived experience?
And when something proves incomplete, distorted, or harmful, a living religion must be capable of learning from that reality.
But the Church of Better Being does not believe that everything real can be reduced to what science can currently measure or explain.
Human beings continue to encounter mystery.
Questions of soul, meaning, sacred presence, intuition, beauty, divine relationship, consciousness, death, purpose, and the deeper order of life are not always exhausted by material explanation.
Where science can investigate, we should investigate.
Where evidence can clarify, we should use it.
Where something can be tested, we should test it.
But where reality exceeds our present tools of measurement, we should not automatically declare it unreal.
There must also remain room for divine inquiry.
For prayer.
For sacred encounter.
For intuition.
For revelation.
For symbolic understanding.
For the possibility that some answers are received through relationship with the divine before they can be fully explained by existing human knowledge.
This does not remove discernment.
It makes discernment more important.
A spiritual answer should still be questioned, tested against life, compared with other forms of knowing, observed through its consequences, and held with enough humility to change when deeper understanding arrives.
A living religion should be capable of saying:
We learned something.
We were incomplete.
We must look again.
And also:
We do not yet understand this fully.
But we will not deny the mystery simply because our instruments cannot contain it.
Living Religion therefore stands between two failures:
religion that refuses to learn,
and materialism that refuses to recognize anything beyond what it can presently measure.
It remembers without becoming trapped by the past.
It investigates without reducing the sacred to data.
It evolves without abandoning what is sacred.
And it allows humanity to use both disciplined inquiry and divine relationship in the continuing search for truth.
Alive enough to test.
Alive enough to receive.
Alive enough to correct itself.
Alive enough to grow.
Religious Revolution
Religious Revolution is the term used by the Church of Better Being for a deeper transformation in humanity’s relationship with the sacred.
It does not mean replacing one dominant religion with another.
It does not mean conquest, forced conversion, or a single spiritual system for everyone.
It means recognizing that religion still shapes human life even when a culture claims to have outgrown it.
Human beings still organize themselves around meaning, morality, belonging, sacrifice, authority, ritual, identity, hope, fear, and what they consider worthy of devotion.
When traditional religion weakens, these functions do not disappear.
They are often absorbed by money, politics, technology, ideology, status, markets, institutions, media, or algorithms.
The religious revolution begins by making this visible.
It asks:
What do we actually worship now?
What receives our attention?
What determines our values?
What do we sacrifice our time, bodies, families, privacy, land, and future to?
What has become sacred without admitting that it is sacred?
And what would change if life itself returned to the center?
The Church of Better Being does not believe humanity needs less religion.
It believes humanity needs religion capable of meeting reality as it exists now.
A religion that can learn.
A religion that can test.
A religion that can discern.
A religion that can change when reality reveals that something is incomplete.
A religion that can use the disciplined methods of inquiry without reducing reality to only what can currently be measured.
A religion that can also remain open to soul, mystery, revelation, intuition, divine presence, sacred encounter, and forms of knowing that science may not yet be able to explain.
This is part of what makes the religious revolution necessary.
Humanity has gained extraordinary technological, scientific, financial, and institutional power.
But greater capability does not automatically produce greater wisdom.
We can build more before we know what should be built.
We can measure more before we know what matters.
We can connect more while belonging less.
We can become more powerful while becoming less capable of carrying power responsibly.
The religious revolution asks humanity to develop inwardly alongside what it develops outwardly.
More consciousness with more technology.
More responsibility with more power.
More discernment with more information.
More reverence with more capability.
More sacred restraint with more freedom to act.
It also asks religion itself to mature.
Tradition should carry memory without becoming imprisoned by memory.
Doctrine should orient without becoming impossible to question.
Leadership should serve without demanding surrender.
Spiritual experience should deepen relationship with life rather than remove people from it.
The sacred should not be used to make human beings smaller, more frightened, more obedient, or more dependent.
It should help human beings become more capable of truth, responsibility, love, courage, discernment, and creation
The revolution is therefore not political.
Politics operates downstream from deeper beliefs about what matters.
The religious revolution begins earlier.
With what we believe life is for.
What we consider sacred.
What we refuse to commodify.
What we believe power is responsible for.
What we owe children and future generations.
What kind of human being we are trying to become.
And what kind of world those human beings might create.
The goal is not one religion ruling and dictating humanity.
It is a more conscious religious future: different peoples, cultures, traditions, and communities remaining distinct while becoming more capable of living in right relationship with one another and with life.
The religious revolution is not about taking the world over.
It is about changing what the world is organized around.
Power Creates Responsibility
Another recurring principle in Jakob Vanderblank’s work is:
Power creates responsibility.
Power itself is not inherently wrong.
Parents possess power.
Leaders possess power.
Governments possess power.
Companies possess power.
Teachers possess power.
Media organizations possess power.
Technology platforms possess power.
Institutions possess power.
The moral question is what responsibility accompanies that power.
Modern systems often allow power and consequence to become separated.
A decision can affect thousands or millions of people while the people making it remain personally distant from the result.
An institution can impose costs without carrying them.
A landlord can treat a home entirely as an asset.
A corporation can restructure a community through a spreadsheet.
A technology platform can shape human attention at enormous scale.
A government can create rules that outlive the people who made them.
As distance from consequence increases, moral responsibility must become stronger rather than weaker.
Power without responsibility becomes domination.
Institutions Must Serve Life
Jakob Vanderblank’s work is not anti-institution.
Human beings need institutions.
Institutions preserve knowledge.
Coordinate complex activity.
Create continuity.
Protect standards.
Carry traditions beyond a single lifetime.
The problem begins when institutions forget what they were created to serve.
Then the hospital serves the bureaucracy.
The university serves the credential system.
The company serves the financial metric.
The luxury house serves the growth target.
The government serves the institution.
The technology serves engagement.
The system becomes self-preserving.
Better Being therefore asks institutions to return to moral responsibility at the core.
Not merely language.
Not branding.
Not compliance performance.
Not mission statements.
The structure itself must be answerable to life.
Growth Is Not the Highest Good
Modern institutions are frequently organized around growth.
More customers.
More revenue.
More scale.
More reach.
More valuation.
More engagement.
More productivity.
But growth is not automatically evidence of health.
Cancer grows.
Debt grows.
Bureaucracy grows.
Waste grows.
A system can expand while destroying the conditions required for its own future.
Better Being distinguishes between growth and flourishing.
Flourishing asks whether what is growing remains in relationship with the life supporting it.
Some things should grow.
Some should mature.
Some should remain small.
Some should end.
Some should be repaired rather than expanded.
Some should never have been built.
A mature culture must be able to tell the difference.
Building Alternatives
Jakob Vanderblank’s work is not primarily concerned with persuading old institutions to admit that they are wrong.
Critique matters.
But critique alone creates dependence on the thing being criticized.
The deeper work is building alternatives.
A person can spend a lifetime fighting a system and remain psychologically organized around that system.
Better Being asks a different question:
What happens when we stop feeding what no longer serves life and begin building what does?
This can mean withdrawing attention.
Changing purchasing behavior.
Starting a company.
Building a family culture.
Creating a different school.
Repairing a home.
Writing a book.
Developing a new institution.
Supporting a maker.
Leaving a destructive environment.
Creating a new form of leadership.
The goal is not merely resistance.
It is replacement through creation.
Why the Work Crosses So Many Categories
At first glance, luxury, religion, spirituality, business strategy, parenting, institutions, food, leadership, architecture, objects, family, culture, technology, and environmental questions may appear unrelated.
They are not.
They are all places where human beings decide what matters.
A company reveals its values through what it rewards.
A home reveals its values through how people are treated inside it.
A luxury object reveals values through material, labor, price, use, repair, beauty, and status.
A school reveals values through what it teaches children to become.
A government reveals values through what it protects, permits, and prioritizes.
A family reveals values through how love, authority, responsibility, freedom, and care are carried.
An institution reveals its real values most clearly when its incentives conflict with its stated principles.
The categories change.
The underlying question remains:
What does this serve?
Does it serve life?
Does it protect what is vulnerable?
Does it nourish?
Does it deepen belonging?
Does it increase human capability?
Does it preserve beauty, dignity, responsibility, and freedom?
Or has the system itself become more important than the life it was created to support?
This is why the work crosses categories.
The subject may be luxury one day and parenting the next.
The deeper work is the same.
It is the study of what strengthens life, what distorts it, and what becomes possible when we learn to tell the difference.
What Is the Goal?
The goal is not to create another ideology.
It is not to persuade everyone to live the same way.
It is not to replace one rigid system with another.
It is not to tell people what to think.
It is not to create a new status hierarchy around who is more conscious, more spiritual, more tasteful, more ethical, or more awake.
The goal is simpler and harder:
To help people become capable of seeing reality more clearly and living in greater relationship with life.
To recognize what strengthens.
What weakens.
What protects.
What nourishes.
What deserves remembrance.
Where belonging is real.
What should be refused.
What should be repaired.
What is worth creating.
Better Being does not assume that every problem begins inside the individual.
Sometimes the person needs to change.
Sometimes the environment needs to change.
Sometimes a relationship needs to end.
Sometimes an institution has become corrupted.
Sometimes a system is rewarding the wrong thing.
Sometimes the belief itself is false.
Discernment means becoming capable of telling the difference.
The goal is not perfect certainty.
Human beings will always misunderstand things.
We will misjudge.
We will inherit wounds.
We will carry blind spots.
We will change our minds.
But we can become more conscious of what we participate in.
More responsible for what we create.
More protective of what is vulnerable.
More capable of recognizing beauty.
More able to belong without disappearing.
More willing to refuse what diminishes life.
More willing to build when the existing options are not good enough.
The wider work asks one question again and again:
What does this serve?
Does it serve money?
Status?
Control?
Fear?
Institutional survival?
Appearance?
Or does it ultimately serve life?
The goal is not to escape the world.
It is to participate in it differently.
To move from unconscious participation toward conscious relationship.
From imitation toward discernment.
From consumption toward nourishment.
From conformity toward belonging.
From criticism toward creation.
From feeling that something is off—
to understanding why,
changing what can be changed,
healing what can be healed,
building what is missing,
and eventually being able to look back and say:
Something was off.
The world may still be imperfect.
It may even be more distorted than before.
But the person is no longer asleep inside the distortion.
They can see.
They can choose.
They can refuse.
They can protect.
They can nourish.
They can remember.
They can belong truthfully.
They can create differently.
That is the goal of Better Being: not a perfect world, but human beings awake enough to help make life better.