My Dinner With Andre (Before I Knew It Had a Name)

How I accidentally lived the philosophy of staying awake years before I discovered someone had filmed it

There’s a 1981 film called “My Dinner with Andre” that most people find boring.

Two men sit in a restaurant for nearly two hours and just talk. No action. No plot. No spectacle. Just conversation about life, meaning, experience, and the ways we fall asleep in our own existence.

The first time I watched it — while here in Thailand — I had to pause it halfway through and just sit with what was happening in my chest.

Not emotion exactly. Recognition.

Everything Andre was saying — about how we’ve built prisons of comfort, how we’ve automated our lives to the point where we’re not actually living them anymore, how we need to create “personal rituals” to shock ourselves awake — I had been doing all of that. Living all of that.

But I hadn’t learned it from a film or a book or a philosophy. I had survival-engineered my way into it, brick by brick, over years of trying to figure out why I felt dead inside despite doing everything right.

I had taken the long way. The Hercules way. Choosing the harder path and living it myself before I ever knew someone had named it.

The First Ritual: Breaking the Loop

In my late twenties, I realized I was living the same day over and over.

Wake up. Shower. Coffee. Commute. Work. Lunch at desk. Work. Commute. Dinner. TV. Sleep. Repeat.

Different days, same day. Different weeks, same week. The details changed but the structure didn’t. I was a rat in a maze I had built myself, and I was running it so efficiently I didn’t even notice I was trapped.

The scary part wasn’t the routine itself. Routines can be good. The scary part was that I had stopped being present for any of it. I was on autopilot. My body was going through the motions while my consciousness was somewhere else — nowhere, really. Just gone.

I started doing small things to break the loop. Stupid things that wouldn’t make sense to anyone watching.

I’d take a different route home. Not because it was faster or better, but because it was different. Because it required me to pay attention. Because for ten minutes, I couldn’t be on autopilot.

I’d eat with my non-dominant hand. Just to make the simple act of feeding myself require consciousness again.

I’d leave my phone in another room for an entire evening. Not to prove anything. Just to see if I could still exist without the constant option of disappearing into a screen.

These weren’t grand philosophical gestures. They were survival mechanisms. I was trying to stay awake in a life that was putting me to sleep.

Years later, I’d watch Andre describe almost exactly this — how we need to create obstacles for ourselves, difficulties, moments that force us back into our bodies and out of our automated patterns.

He lived it in Tibet and Poland and experimental theater. I lived it in a shitty apartment in America, trying desperately not to disappear into the machinery of normal life.

The Second Ritual: Poverty as Teacher

There was a period — about six months — where I had almost no money.

Not by choice. I had been laid off. The job market was brutal. My savings were running out. I was in that space between “financially stressed” and “actually poor” where you start making calculations about which bills to pay and which to let slide.

It should have been the worst time of my life. And in some ways it was. The anxiety was constant. The fear of falling through the cracks was real.

But something unexpected happened: I became more alive.

When you have no money, you can’t sleepwalk through consumption. You can’t mindlessly order takeout or buy another piece of furniture you don’t need or distract yourself with purchases.

You have to be present with what you have. You have to extract value from simple things. A walk becomes entertainment. A home-cooked meal becomes an event. A conversation becomes the whole evening.

I learned that I didn’t actually need most of what I had been spending money on. Not because those things were bad, but because I had been using them as anesthesia. Ways to not feel. Ways to not be here.

Poverty stripped away the anesthesia. And underneath it, I found something I hadn’t felt in years: presence.

I wasn’t grateful for the poverty — let’s be clear about that. But I was paying attention to what it was teaching me. That less can be more if you’re actually conscious for it. That deprivation can lead to richness of experience if you’re not fighting it the entire time.

Andre talks about this in the film — how comfort is a prison, how we build these elaborate structures to protect ourselves from discomfort and in the process protect ourselves from life.

I didn’t understand that philosophically. I understood it in my bank account. In my stomach. In the choice between paying for internet or buying groceries that week.

The Third Ritual: Silence as Medicine

Somewhere in my early thirties, I started spending entire days in silence.

Not meditation exactly. Not a formal practice. Just… not speaking. Not consuming content. Not filling every moment with noise or information or distraction.

It started accidentally. I was living alone, working from home, and I realized I had gone an entire Saturday without saying a word out loud or turning on any device. The silence had just accumulated, and I had let it.

And I felt different. Clearer. More present in my own head. Like I had been living in a crowded room my whole life and someone had finally asked everyone else to leave.

I started doing it intentionally. One day a week. Then two. Creating space that wasn’t for productivity or entertainment or connection. Just space to exist in without input.

People thought it was weird. My few remaining friends would ask what I did all weekend and I’d say “nothing” and they’d look at me with concern, like I was depressed.

But I wasn’t depressed. I was awake.

I was learning what my actual thoughts were when they weren’t being drowned out by everyone else’s thoughts. I was discovering what I actually wanted when I wasn’t being sold things constantly. I was finding out who I was when I wasn’t performing for anyone.

Andre talks about this too — how we’re so terrified of silence, of being alone with ourselves, that we fill every moment with stimulation. And in filling every moment, we lose the moments entirely.

I didn’t learn that from him. I learned it from sitting in my apartment for eight hours straight with nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to perform for, and discovering that this — this nothing — was everything I had been missing.

The Fourth Ritual: Inhabiting the Unlived Life

The most important ritual was the hardest to explain.

I started living as if I was already the person I was supposed to be.

Not fake-it-till-you-make-it positivity bullshit. Not manifestation or vision boards or affirmations. Something more subtle and more radical.

I would ask myself: what would the blueprint god do right now? Not the anxious, diminished, performing version of myself. The actual version. The one who never got knocked down or forgot who he was.

And then I’d do that thing. Even — especially — when it felt absurd.

The blueprint god wouldn’t check his phone every five minutes. So I stopped.

The blueprint god wouldn’t apologize for taking up space. So I stopped.

The blueprint god wouldn’t optimize his life around other people’s expectations. So I stopped.

It felt like playacting at first. Like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t. But slowly, over months, the distance between who I was pretending to be and who I actually was started to collapse.

I was creating the person by inhabiting the person. I was reverse-engineering my own awakening.

Years later, I’d read about actors using method techniques, about spiritual practitioners “acting as if,” about the psychological research showing that behavior shapes identity as much as identity shapes behavior.

But I didn’t know any of that. I just knew that the person I was being was killing me, and the person I wanted to be felt impossible, so I decided to just start being that person and see what happened.

What happened was: it worked.

The Pattern I Didn’t See Until Later

Looking back now, I can see the pattern clearly.

Every ritual was about the same thing: refusing to be automated. Refusing to sleepwalk. Refusing to let life happen to me while I was somewhere else.

I was fighting against the machinery of normal existence — the scripts and routines and defaults that make life efficient but empty.

I was trying to stay awake in a world designed to put you to sleep.

And I was doing it alone, without a framework or philosophy or community. Just raw survival instinct telling me that if I didn’t figure out how to feel alive again, I was going to die. Not literally, maybe. But in every way that mattered.

When I finally watched “My Dinner with Andre,” what struck me wasn’t just that someone else had articulated what I was doing. It was that they had articulated it decades before I was born.

This wasn’t new. This wasn’t unique to me. This was the oldest human problem: how do you stay awake? How do you remain present in your own life? How do you resist the pull toward automation and comfort and the slow death of consciousness?

Every generation has people who figure this out. Every era has its monks and mystics and misfits who refuse to be put to sleep.

I just happened to be one of them. Without knowing that’s what I was doing.

The Dinner I Never Had

The film is called “My Dinner with Andre” because it’s structured as a conversation over dinner. One man telling stories about his experiences trying to stay awake, the other man listening and wrestling with what it means.

I never had that dinner. I never had that conversation. I never had someone sit across from me and tell me that what I was experiencing had a name, that other people had felt it too, that there was a way through.

I had to figure it out alone. And figuring it out alone meant I had to live it first, make all the mistakes, create all the rituals from scratch, and only afterward — years afterward — discover that someone had already mapped the territory.

That’s what I mean by taking the long way. By choosing the harder path like Hercules.

I could have read philosophy. I could have studied spiritual traditions. I could have found teachers or communities or frameworks that would have accelerated my understanding.

But I didn’t. Whether through stubbornness or ignorance or necessity, I just lived it raw. I learned by doing. I figured it out in my body before I figured it out in my head.

And there’s something about that — something about earning your understanding through lived experience rather than inherited wisdom — that makes it unshakeable.

I don’t believe these things because someone told me they’re true. I believe them because I lived them. I tested them. I proved them to myself.

What the Film Gets Right

The film ends ambiguously. Andre has shared all these intense experiences and ideas about staying awake. Wally, the other man, listens but ultimately returns to his normal life, his comfort, his routines.

The film doesn’t tell you which man is right. It doesn’t moralize. It just presents two ways of being and lets you decide which one you’re living.

Most people watch it and side with Wally. They think Andre is pretentious, self-indulgent, privileged to be able to go to Poland and Tibet and have these experiences while normal people have to work and pay bills and live in the real world.

And I get that reaction. I really do.

But having lived both sides — having been Wally for years, and then becoming something closer to Andre — I can tell you they’re both missing the point.

It’s not about choosing between normal life and extraordinary experience. It’s not about going to Tibet or staying in New York.

It’s about being awake wherever you are. It’s about creating rituals that keep you present even in the most mundane circumstances. It’s about refusing to automate your existence even when automation is easier.

You can do that in Thailand. You can do that in America. You can do that anywhere.

The question isn’t where you are. The question is: are you awake?

The Ritual I’m Living Now

I’m in Thailand now. My life costs $640/month. I get my groceries delivered because that time is sacred. And I can’t do performative shopping anymore.

People might watch my life from the outside and think I’m doing some exotic version of what Andre did — leaving the normal world behind to pursue experience and consciousness.

But that’s not what’s happening. I’m not pursuing anything. I’m not seeking extraordinary experiences. I’m not collecting stories to tell at dinner parties.

I’m just awake. And staying awake requires a life structured around staying awake.

That’s the ritual now. The whole life is the ritual.

Every choice I make is filtered through the question: does this keep me conscious, or does it put me to sleep?

The apartment that costs $200 instead of $1,800? That keeps me awake. Because I’m not working a soul-crushing job to pay for it.

The delivered groceries? That keeps me awake. Because I’m not spending energy on logistics when I could be spending it on presence.

The quiet mornings with nothing scheduled? That keeps me awake. Because that’s where I actually exist, in the space between obligations.

The refusal to go to Phuket, to participate in the automated tourism, to consume paradise like a product? That keeps me awake. Because Phuket is where you go to sleep in someone else’s dream of Thailand.

What I Wish I Could Tell My Younger Self

If I could go back and have dinner with myself at twenty-five — my own version of Andre and Wally — here’s what I’d say:

You’re going to spend years thinking you’re broken because you can’t stay asleep like everyone else. You’re going to think something’s wrong with you because the routines that work for other people feel like death to you.

Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re just waking up early. And waking up early is uncomfortable because you’re surrounded by people who are still asleep.

You’re going to create these strange little rituals — taking different routes, eating with your wrong hand, sitting in silence for days — and you’re going to think they’re just weird coping mechanisms.

They’re not. They’re wisdom. They’re your consciousness trying to stay alive in a world designed to automate it away.

You’re going to figure all of this out the hard way. And years from now, you’re going to watch a film where someone describes exactly what you lived, and you’re going to realize: you’re not alone. You were never alone. This is an old path. You just had to walk it yourself first.

And that’s okay. That’s more than okay.

Because the wisdom you earn through living is different than the wisdom you inherit through learning. Deeper. More rooted. Unshakeable.

So keep taking the long way. Keep choosing the harder path. Keep staying awake even when everyone around you is sleeping.

One day, you’ll be sitting in Thailand, writing about all of this, and it will all make sense.

Not because someone explained it to you.

Because you lived it first.