ABOUT, LOVE & WORK
Backstory
Mitch Anthony, photo by First Last.
I'm Mitch Anthony. Born in 1953, I came of age during a brief period in American history when being a hippie felt like a legitimate career option.
Mass media outlets like Life Magazine featured communes on their covers. People wore buttons that said, "Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out." Books like The Greening of America examined the failures of the "Corporate State" and the systemic causes behind them. According to a growing alternative media movement, cultural renewal wouldn’t come from institutional reform or violent revolution—it would emerge through profound shifts in individual and collective consciousness.
When I was 17, I had two experiences that would shape the course of my life.
I took LSD. From that moment on, I saw that everything—ecosystems, people, economies, organizations, cells, molecules—was interconnected. I began to understand life not as a series of isolated events or linear chains of cause and effect, but as a dynamic web of relationships, patterns, and systems.
I also discovered The Whole Earth Catalog. In the words of its founder, Stewart Brand, the oversized quarterly “aimed to provide education and inspiration in the form of curated tools, ideas, and books that could help people take control of their lives and participate in shaping the future.”
Between then and now, I’ve lived a lot of stories. My friends often urge me to write them down, and I will. But this page is about a particular project: The Love & Work Catalog. What’s relevant here is that for most of my life, I’ve worked as a communications and organizational development consultant.
I began writing a weekly newsletter in [month] of [year] as a way to stay connected with my own community. The catalyst was a reader who once asked Austin Kleon why he didn’t write a post about self-promotion. His answer was a single sentence: “Write something that you yourself would want to read.”
Well, I know what I want to read. I want to read about tools, ideas, and books that help people take control of their lives and actively shape the future.
Over time, I realized that the newsletter format had its limitations. As a medium, it lacks staying power—most ideas vanish from memory just days after publication.
So, I built this website as a 21st-century catalog: a curated, evolving resource of tools, ideas, and books that endure.
