Why I'm (finally) starting a Substack
A quick welcome—and what you can expect here
Hey there, I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan. Welcome to my Substack.
I’m a sociologist who studies how culture shapes human flourishing in the domains of business, science, and religion. My research covers disparate themes and topics—workplace culture, science and religion, institutional trust, beauty, spirituality, mental health, innovation.
A couple of years ago, I started a podcast and YouTube channel focused on beauty, currently housed on Ghost at beautyatwork.net. I’m in the process of migrating that content over, and it will continue as a separate section here.
But this Substack will cover more than just beauty. I’d like to use this space as a public notebook to share my ongoing research and also to work through and to tie together what I’m learning—which I think at its core has to do with what I’m calling our “horizons of worth.”
This is an idea inspired by philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor talks about "horizons of significance" as the shared backgrounds and frameworks we use to make sense of who we are and what matters to us—the reference points we rely on to evaluate different actions, identities, and ways of life. My interest is more in how we (at personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels) determine what has worth and why, how our collective choices shape what we come to regard as worthy or unworthy, and how we navigate conflicts between differing conceptions of worth.
I approach these issues more as a social scientist than a philosopher, but these questions form a thread that runs all the way from my childhood through the past couple of decades of my research, continuing today in the various empirical projects I’m working on.
In this Substack, I'll share not only ideas-in-progress, essays, and reflections based on my research, but also more personal and biographical explorations related to themes such as:
Where do we derive our sense of worth from? On what basis do we assign worth to things, to ourselves, and to others? And how are our conceptions of worth changing in a technology-driven age?
What are institutions? Why do we need them? What does it take for them to flourish rather than flounder?
Why do experiences of beauty matter so deeply to us—and what can we learn from them?
What is “innovation” and why has it become a key indicator of worth in our times, across diverse domains? To what extent is it a helpful lens through which to study religious and spiritual change?
I'm excited to think through these ideas together with you, and would be grateful for your comments and feedback.
Great to have you here!