I have made an application for overthinkers, procrastinators, scatterbrains, ADHDers and all other kinds of people who, like me, tend to find their brains tend to run faster than their bodies. I need up to 100 people to help me test this app.

The app is called Yggdrasil. It does four things:

1. Represents complex activities as recursive ‘to-do-trees’ that can nest as deeply as you need. Rather than trying to flatten the complexity of your thoughts, this method allows you to follow each strand to its logical conclusion so that you can see which big ideas are actually feasible, and only ever plan as much as you need for intuition to take over.

2. Represents repeated tasks/activities/commitments as ‘seeds’ which can generate treeNodes and calendar events according to user defined repetition rules. These commitments can each have a checklist for their standard-operating procedure, which are instantiated as child nodes in the resulting tree and are posted to the calendar of your choice!

3. Combines user-selected, due, and seeded activities in a focused agenda view that contains the most pressing concerns for you to focus on.

4. Integrates work and home calendars from Google, Outlook and iCloud/CalDAV servers into a single calendar view. Any tree node can be used to generate time blocks in the calendar, which link to the relevant branch of the tree when viewed in the app.

All of the data is stored on your local file system or cloud drive, so you own it forever.

As you can see, this is a fully featured app, which has already replaced my other productivity tools—that was actually my test for when this was ready to share. It is built around interoperable foundations and uses integrations with all the major providers.

If this sounds like something that could be useful for you, please fill in this google form to join the beta. The app currently works on Mac and Windows. Or at least I think it does.

There are still a few features still to be polished and some bureaucratic loops to jump through,

As such, if you sign up you should get some further correspondence from me in about 2-3 weeks detailing how you can download the beta and where to leave the feedback.

Genuinely so excited to share this with people :)

Buy me a coffee

I remember taking my shoes off in a forest clearing and just sitting there for hours. A stream trickles by, the birds tweet. Ironically, this hidden place is within about 200m of the railway line, so there would also be the occasional interruption; but that, if anything, elevated the hiddenness of the place. I found it amusing to think that there was a train containing people unaware that I was sitting here right under their noses. It was one of those small thoughts about the bigness of the world that adults aren’t supposed to have. I even did a cartwheel or two, to prove the point.

You see, what was peculiar about that time, which has been made difficult to discuss because of the very serious class disparity implicit in the idea, (the same period was deeply traumatic for a lot of people, not to be discounted,) is that it was possible for quite a large number of people to taste the unmediated reality which has been sitting under our noses the whole time. The reality obscured by assorted demiurges of work-life, of education, of the mass-entertainment monoculture, of the egregoric digital pluri-culture and so on. A life freed from growth.

Once the initial shock of the emergency had subsided, and once those non-key-working people who were able to settle into a rhythm did so, many people ended up with simpler responsibilities than anyone below the age of 65 has known since the advent of the telegraph.

You could have enough, do enough, and live with a large surplus of time and mental energy, in large part because you were actively being told to not do too much!

Enough, as in sufficient, as in not needing any more.

Of course, to get to that point there was a great deal of getting bored we had to do: Getting bored of day-drinking in pyjamas as the government scientists tried to explain virology with football metaphors, of TV in general, of video-games, of social-media. Of board-games and books. Of home yoga and meditation even.

Only once the boredom was absolute, irrepressible, utterly utterly abject; only then, when forced, did the world reveal herself to us. She’s still there, waiting for us to notice her again.

The experience of Enough is revelatory because it short-circuits everything you were indoctrinated with at school. It literally takes you back to the state of being a four-year-old again. The expectations and rules that you had taken as given, as necessary to get by in a world defined by arbitrary competition and status-seeking behaviour melt away. Like taking psychedelics but without any of the risks.

From the vantage of Enough, the whole game tends to look daft. Indeed, it rather looks like madness. The pursuit of infinite growth, of speculation, of the whole game that the world seems to be playing. Mad in the purest sense, as in ‘Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result’.

With it washes away much of the compulsion to habitual soothing (read: addictive cycles) and much of the desire to do anything which does not fit the following schema:

Good reasons to do stuff:

• For the prevention of bad consequences;

• For the creation of the conditions for good things to happen;

• For Enjoyment

Alignment; coherence; clarity—tantalisingly within reach!

…And then the world went back to normal again.

Worse, we’ve gone into a radical overdrive in the other direction. Everything is a casino now, the president of the United States is using an unjustified war in the Middle East as a vehicle to manipulate his son’s oil futures (look it up!). The madness of speculation, of Never Enough, has infected everything, its everywhere. Almost like a spectre of the unresolved feelings that people still have about That Time.

The megalomania of the cancer cell, the narcissism of the black hole, the bank accounts of the worst people in the world.

Indeed, in such an environment, it is hard to cling on to a realistic understanding of Enough. Not least because the acceleration has made everything more expensive. Because everything is more expensive, more people are frantically clamouring for your limited attention, trying to shout over one another, lying to sell you things.

The struggle is very much real, and not entirely tractable for most of us. That said, you can at least, in a limited way, assert your freedom.

The matter at the heart of the madness of the times is time itself. Specifically, the idea that there isn’t enough of it. Enough of it for what? People come up with all sorts of answers, but I want to suggest that while there may not be enough time for this or that thing in a single lifetime, there is always enough time to live in the moment.

Such is the power of doing nothing and fucking off.

It shall be thousands of hours of toil before any one of them sees the light of day. Meanwhile I shall remain just-about-managing, disagreeable; occasionally a dick to people I love very much.

I am not afraid of the outcome anymore, it does not matter to me if nobody else can see the value of my work, it does not matter if I remain poor and disagreeable, if people laugh or take pity upon the results of my labours, if I keel over dead and penniless before getting where I need to go. For that reason, although the anxiety and the fear and the tiredness are very real, I am certain that the anguish of not doing these things would be all the more damaging to my personality.

As the Psychologist Marie-Louis von Franz observed: “People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”

In every area where I have made bad decisions, this has been the motivating factor. A charge of energy that has not been able to release itself, that has been stifled by a suffocating environment. I have made as good of an environment as I can within my means. A stable home, a decent enough income, an absence of stifling social pressures. That grants me the latitude to at least be aware of my despair, which as Kierkegaard pointed out, is the necessary first step to getting right with God—yet, in that despair I am aware of the great deal of work that lays ahead. Work that for a long time shall come without any material award.

So you see, it is absolutely necessary to seek the lesser of two madnesses. The madness of becoming, which is less than the madness of self-betrayal.

My only solace is in remembering the tenacity of those who came before. Of Franz Kafka and Henri Rousseau. Of men who struggled against the sapping madness of a life in the Bureaucracy by making art for its own sake.

Kafka never achieved fame over the course of his tragically short lifetime (He died of TB at 40), and yet his outputs are some of THE defining literary works of the 20^th century. His ability to capture the alienating weirdness of modern life, be it through the weight of an ever-impending trial or the harrowing metamorphosis into a creature you do not recognise—makes his work a great sigh of relief to all who feel strangled by the onerous demands of an impersonalised social order.

If Kafka described the crushing condition of being creatively inclined in the modern world. Rousseau lived the possibility of escape.

Just last week, I was brought to tears in an art gallery. Not by a piece that was intrinsically emotional, but because the context of the painting spoke to me on some deep level.

The painting in question was the Rousseau’s ‘landscape-self-portrait’, hanging in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris—a portrait of a man who did exactly what he set out to do, however long it took him to get there.

Rousseau, also known as ‘Le Douanier’ (the Tax Collector) was a man with no formal training, who, after a career in the state bureaucracy only really started painting seriously in his forties. During his lifetime, he was ridiculed by the critics for his childlike style but his work was reasonably commercially successful and presaged the development of many trends in modernist painting. Le Banquet Rousseau—a half serious, half jokey banquet held by Picasso in 1908, cemented him as an important figure in the Avant-Garde Canon. His jungle paintings, for which he is most famous, are beguiling windows into a world of pure imagination, exotic other worlds that he could only but dream of. (He never left France and never saw a jungle.)

Kafka and Rousseau both had to work on their craft while also working in boring white-collar jobs. They didn’t have the privilege of means. They had to toil for a long time, in that state of terribly uncomfortable ambiguity between the creative potential, that floating charge of energy, and that need to make a living. Rousseau worked in the tax office for nine years while he was cultivating his craft in a studio in Montparnasse. Kafka never really had the opportunity of escape.

The great difficulty in this is that one has to let go of the possibility of a conventional career progression. To let go of the idea of status altogether, because status is a goal that naturally seeks the simplest pathway, which is never to pursue art. As responsibilities accrue, the space to make use of that charge of energy gets ever sparer. From the outside this can look like a kind of selfishness, and yet it is to prevent a far deeper defect of character that would amount from not pursuing that cause. This is what I’m having to figure out right now, how to move on from the idea of trying to struggle my way up the greasy pole of a job that serves only instrumental value, how to look beyond the pull of status, to do what I’m really here to do.

Most likely, I shall never make something of the same value as either of them, however their stories leave open the possibility that with enough perseverance I can make something that is at least true to my soul. That, at least, is my hope for now.

In the same week, I also had a pleasant Easter with family, spent time lounging in the park reading short stories by Ursula K. Le Guinn, bought some new threads, got everything together for my upcoming holiday and found the time to write this post.

Contrary to the image of the burned-out software engineer, I have been able to do all of this quite comfortably, with most of my sanity intact. Indeed, I’ve managed to go about it in a relaxed, dignified, almost Victorian fashion.

—I even found the time to hand-draw the logo. Drawn, as in drawn with my actual human hand—for there is a certain right-brained chuckling glee that comes from slapping hand-drawn art onto the products of a machine super-intelligence that can’t draw for shit. It’s a similar joy to spray-painting phalluses onto those delivery robots they have in Milton Keynes. (Not saying I’ve done that, only that the thought has crossed my mind, jail me for thoughtvandalism)

The gentle pace was partially imposed by the fact that Anthropic recently tightened usage limits, giving me frequent 2-3 hour breaks when I ran out of Claude tokens, at which point the choice was between actually making sense of the deluge of post-human word-vomit I had just unleashed or going out to touch grass. Since spending too long at my computer makes me feel itchy and wrong, plenty of grass was touched, caressed, cartwheeled, rolled-around-upon, sniffled, sneezed-upon…

Oh yes… the app!

The app is called Yggdrasil, it represents projects as infinitely nest-able trees, so that you can drill down from any big idea as deep as you need to go to get to something actionable. I am already using this tool to manage the large number of projects I have on the go at any one time.

It currently looks like this:

From the perspective of conventional time management, Yggdrasil is utterly perverse. Project management software is normally designed by-and-for managers and executives: whose goal it is to flatten the complexities of reality into charts, calendars, actions and slide-decks. This is so that they can give convenient answers to the board and give orders that their subordinates will follow without asking too many questions. Compartmentalisation is an important part of teamwork, it is also why you shouldn’t endeavour to shape your entire life around your membership of the team, since it does away with the need for philosophy and the possibility of acquiring the circumspection that gives rise to wisdom.

Furthermore, if you actually like making stuff, the industry has some intrinsic worth: knuckling down and doing the work is never really the bottleneck, deciding what work to prioritise is what is really at issue. Understanding what would be involved in each task, the relative difficulty and ROI of different approaches. This is where the friction actually arises.

I had the idea for this app while I was working on a pre-seed, pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-idea startup ;P with a friend of mine, but we didn’t pursue this particular avenue because it was hard to monetise since it is hard to sell to business customers, by virtue of its individualistic kind of logic (the whole idea requires a creative person’s willingness to be selfish in the use of time). Yet, the idea stuck with me as the one thing from that discovery process that definitely ought to exist.

Not only that, it emerged as the one thing that I ought to make even if it did already exist. I wanted to have a version of this idea whose implementation was entirely my own; that I could tweak to suit my exact needs; for it allows me to do more cool stuff with the time I have available, which dwindles with every passing year.

You see, what struck me then and continues to strike me now is that a great deal of what is wrong in the world comes from the attempt to flatten the complexity of the things into a linear series of events. This may seem to be just a convenience, but really it is a performance. It is part of an artificially constructed perception of time which rejects the great—painful—breadth of possibilities that are manifest in the course of a human life. They suppose the past is the only way things could have turned out (because it saves them from regret) and that the future is predestined (which protects them from further regret,) this is not true at all. The past is one of a great many possibilities and the future is too. Besides, as Kierkegaard pointed out, regret is an inevitable and unavoidable part of life; an emotion to be processed and moved past, like ennui, nostalgia, or shame about things you said in high-school. The linear perception of time is a social malaise, a bourgeois fiction, an attempt to efface the essential agony of existence through the science of management.

To flatten and ignore is only necessary if what you are doing is meaningless. If what you are doing is worthwhile then committing to a course is easy and the rest falls away as noise. As Nietzsche said: “He who has a why can bear almost any how”.

For people who are awake, the problem is not really one of time management, it is one of selection. There is a value in seeing the pathways laid out, and seeing how far along you would like to walk each of them. If I were to lay one criticism of the above diagram it is that the future is not something that draws from a singular present moment to blossom into a single tree. It is rather more like a garden of shrubberies, with the ability to only tend to one of the plants at a time. All of them will wither and die eventually, these shrubs in the garden of life, but it is up to you to choose which ones to keep in bloom while you can.

To take better care of my garden, I decided to make a tool which could not be made in a commercial setting: one which does not try to narrow one’s mind but instead presents one with as much complexity as one needs, so that it is possible to make informed, authorial decisions about one’s own life and the direction it is heading.

And I used AI to do it.

AI is an easy to technology to denigrate and there are a great many sins involved in its development. The same was true of automobiles and microwaves and yet you are probably quite happy banking the labour-savings that those have given us, Horses and hamsters be damned!

Whatever your grand social criticisms may be, the fact is that AI allows you to make things, like Yggdrasil, that do not make commercial sense, but are of personal value.

For my part I barely know a lick of TypeScript and I hate writing front-end systems. Had I done it myself, I would have used the simplest possible toolset and taken several months. With the help of AI, I was able to use React.JS with electron (complex, production-ready tools) to make something that is sufficient for my personal use-case within a week, that will be distributable within about a month. This project was full of things that I am not good at, it had no commercial justification and no budget. This was something I felt ought to exist but would have been difficult to make just six months ago. It is now built, in action, actively making my life better. Allowing me to work on bigger things that mean even more to me.

If I can make something that works, as an unskilled, un-credentialed person in one week with an £18 Claude subscription, (between having a day job and a life,) imagine what a team of people working full-time for a year could achieve?

AI allows creative, un-optimised people to engineer complex systems that actually work. Indeed, the less optimised you are, the better, since you can steer the machine from the widest possible frame of reference. The age of the nerds is ending, the age of the vibes is beginning. This fact alone has immense revolutionary potential.

… Only… and here is the catch. This only happens as the consequence of a deeply un-optimised process, a steady cumulation over the course of a year, five years; of ruminating, pondering, procrastinating and dithering. Of discovering that which nags you when you try to go to sleep, of that possibility which you cannot process as regret. Of waiting around to Remember which ideas were still worth pursuing.

This is the role of humans in the age that is dawning now. To be the slow and steady voice, tuned in to emotions and into the power of something higher: who wander, who bicker, who do all kinds of small and big things and make mistakes: to go around being human, to identify what is really worth doing.

Behind any moment of prolific output is several years of the above. And there is no way to do it any quicker—except to do less with your time, if you can find the time to do so. Hopefully that will be easier for me now that I have Yggdrasil.

Doubt is your ultimate safety mechanism. Doubt is involuntary memory. Doubt is the smell of Proust’s Maman’s madeleines. Doubt is disquiet that sometimes doesn’t even have words until we make some up for it. Without doubt you can give yourself too easily to a cause and lose the ability to consider whether the cause is actually worthwhile. Likewise, you can get stuck in a twisted version of a good cause and completely lose yourself in that too. This is what seems to have been what happened in Silicon Valley.

Technology can be used for good. A great deal of good, [my next post will be about the positive uses of AI as a creative] on balance I would say that I am glad to have been born in the age of the internet, for it has imparted a far wider frame of reference and opportunities upon my generation than any cohort of humans has ever experienced before. The problem is that the culture which has produced modern digital technology is built upon a fundamentally toxic premise: ‘Move fast and break things’. An adage which emphasises action above all consideration, speaking without listening and struggling without introspection. To see it laid out plainly, listen to the first couple of minutes of this recent interview with Marc Andreessen, the founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, one of the most successful VC firms in SF:

He says it straight up: “I practice very little introspection... Move forward. Go.” The interviewer points out that it is common among CEOs of all industries, but especially apposite in tech.

This is the guy who funds many of the developments which are challenging our idea of what it even means to be human. And he is completely oblivious! So long as it can become a Unicorn, Mr Andreessen is in on it.

While it is true that to get on with anything you need to silence some of your doubt and perhaps sometimes work with the darker side of your character, to efface doubt completely opens the path to the madness that has come to linger over San Francisco. The madness which says we must go all in on AI at any costs, all in on mass surveillance at any costs, all in on military technology at any costs, we must pursue anything that could become big because it can become big. Not because it is good or bad but because it can be big. We want to be important men, so we must make things that have impact! An aesthetic quality has taken over all reason and subjugated everything to it.

It is not without reason that this is so, because the existence of people like that necessitates that you too need to act quickly and ‘with agility’ for long periods of a time, manage the stress of running a massively over-leveraged start-up, deal with the hyper-competitivity that comes with a somewhat cowboy attitude to intellectual property, &c. Success in that world is not merely dangerous, it is actively maddening.

Indeed, something similar is true of the stunted development that affects most celebrities. That idea that one is frozen at the age one became famous. The inability of these people to develop ethically, the fact that almost few of them are able to maintain life-long relationships and that many of them lose themselves to drugs and other vices. The general unhealthiness and unhappiness that pervades pop culture. The Stink of something daemonic.

It is also true of the number-goes-up mentality in finance; careerism in the professions; the publish-or-perish culture in academia; influencer culture; and in the pathological risk-aversion of traditional media and publishing. Rather than doing what stands upon itself and has worth in itself: everywhere that there is status in the world today, there is an attendant corrosion of the soul, such that the people in charge do not seem to be in-charge but instead seem like the most over-worked slaves to an overbearing master.

The system has compelled these people to forget themselves for so long that even if they were, by some fluke, to develop a capacity for introspection, they would struggle to know what to do with themselves.

Kierkegaard had a good way of describing this condition: “[You] whose nature it is to conquer… are never within yourselves but always outside. When the battle is won…then there is nothing more you know, you do not know how to begin; for only then do you stand at the true beginning.” (Either/Or 1843[1992], p.464).

I envy those who are Buddha-Natured and can endlessly retreat into themselves in search of Moksha; for my soul endlessly pushes me outwards, to do something out in the world. I cannot shrink from the daemonic because the soul commands me to fight! To fight is to engage in labour, and as we established last week, labour is itself daemonic.

It is thus that those of us who have this fire must learn how to tame dragons. To take what is necessary while giving less than our whole souls to Mephistopheles. We literally have no other options.

I assert that the key to this endeavour is to decide while we are still in-touch with ourselves, what shall count as enough.

If you think about it, that is what ties together every musical biopic, every CEO back-story, every dissatisfied corporate weapon, every celebrity breakdown: There is always the absence of ‘enough’. They are not enough; their accomplishments are not enough. They do not know how to begin, to return, to remember themselves because they will not even try until they have conquered everything. But they cannot conquer everything so instead they enter cycles of burnout and self-delusion. And round and round it goes…

Those of us who are compelled to be in the world but who do not wish to sell our souls must learn to identify at each juncture in which we remember ourselves, what shall be enough for us to stop and remember ourselves again. How far must we leap before we can take a moment within ourselves, free from the externalising push to carry on?

The simple answer is to identify, from your greater goals, what is achievable within a week, or two weeks, or at most a month, and state the intention. Much like a weightlifter, it is wise to set these intention. ‘I will complete X before the month is out.’ It is usually best to go for a goal that is genuinely satisfying. Build something, complete something: ideally something that is mostly within your control, inasmuch as your field allows. Break it down into as small a series of tasks as granular as you need (nested to-do lists are a great tool for this—more on that next week...) Once the goals are set they should be followed in the simplest way possible. Let yourself follow the plan, quell some of your doubts, but don’t forget yourself completely.

At the same time, you must make sure that there are frequent instances for reflection along the way, so that you can remember yourself, handle any doubts (by way of journalling or talking or whatever works,) and get the nod from your quietest voice that you are still following the correct path.

It also helps to have a grounding practice, such as yoga or running or even just regular walks (ideally without your phone.) or some other thing where you can retreat inwards and turn it into a kind of meditation. The great thing about meditative motion is that it remains appealing to you especially when you are busy, because it feels aesthetically like you are still grinding, while deferring burnout, while at the same time offering a space where your quietest whisper can breathe along with you. Those moments of enforced quiet, necessary for preserving dwindling sanity, are also the thing that can return you from the insanity of obsession when the time to return arrives. There is a neat alignment of the aesthetic and the ethical that comes with a moving practice: that lulls the daemon in you into a false sense of security.

In both cases, the journalling and the motion practice, you are creating opportunities for involuntary memory, or for crises of despair. You must make your work amenable to doubt, should it no longer be aligned with the orders of the soul.

You should only take on new responsibilities insofar as they do not interfere with your ability to do these things.

Do not let your practices of remembrance be tangential or ‘nice-to-haves’, they must be the hook upon which everything else hangs. You may advance only as fast as you can inculcate patience. If you start letting go of these things, then you will probably be lost until next you burn out: however long that will be.

It is also useful to have people around who can snap you out of it for that reason. The stronger your bonds of community/fellowship, the more likely it is that you will know when you are deviating from the path. People who love you tell you when you’ve taken a wrong turn.

If you can retreat from the world then retreat from it because the world is sick. Either you are not ready to face the world or it is not your destiny. If, however, you feel your soul pushing you back out again to do something, then something you must do. However, the pace of what you do must be determined not by your capacity to achieve but by your capacity to remember, and your goals must be broken down into the shortest, simplest, most well-scoped possible pieces. Only then can you work as hard as a demon and yet live as a fully-cultivated, dignified human being.

Although I didn’t get any negative feedback from it, it felt off somehow.

In some way it came from a version of me that had forgotten itself.

And yet the forgetting was wholly necessary, being the bump of aggro necessary to get over a hump.

I found the answer to the plot-holes in my novel, finished writing a fully-tested software library, finally made some use of my degree at work and did a backflip!

Once the grinding was done, I found in the space remaining the opportunity to reconnect with people and saw the first glimpses of the kind of community I’ve been trying to find, through most edifying conversations with other writers. On the latter front, I have to give my thanks to Bonny, who creates the kinds of spaces in which such things can happen.

The fact of my return meant that the trip was worthwhile and the right course of action. It also means that the post that I had originally planned to release, coming from that limited frame of reference, became inappropriate.

It fell into the trap of describing an emotional process by way of its mechanical content. I was going to give a left-brained answer to a right-brained problem:

Where before I talked about the non-convergence of high learning-rates, I was going to dip into the local optimum problem and talk about how radical action enables the discovery of higher ROI areas of the solution space…

It is accurate to use mechanistic language describe the pursuit of simplicity because the simplest path forward usually involves a degree of reduction. And, in being laborious, attention must naturally narrow to what is most pertinent. There is some sense in which the pursuit of any goal, even an ethical goal that comes from our quietest whisper, makes us forget ourselves for a brief while. However, the opposite of this is not randomness, but the fruit of an intuition which is non-collapsible, which means we must describe it in more romantic terms.

Think about it like this: what is the stated aim of the productivity industry but to bring you into that state of being that we call the flow state? A state in which every other distraction falls away and we focus our attention completely upon one thing: A state in which there is nothing but the task. Attention narrows, the self subsides, so that we can get on with the business of doing.

By dialectic, think also about the nature of the wellness industry, which emphasises the notion that you are a ‘human-being’ and not merely a ‘human-doing’. The purpose is a return, to find yourself, to rediscover, to reignite, to reform. Lots of other words beginning with Re–. Speaking from experience, yoga is like a kind of exorcism; It is a means by which the daemonic in you is terminated, permitting the quietest whisper to take over once again.

High functioning people in the present-day generally make some use of these two sets of products, to forget themselves and remember themselves whenever it seems appropriate.

Implicit in this behavioural pattern is some sense in which to work is to forget yourself, to live is to remember what you have forgotten. One can go as far as to say that all labour is daemonic, even worthy labour, yet it is frequently necessary to be possessed by something in order to Become that which we are called to be.

n.b. In this context, Daemon can simultaneously refer to: any supernatural force regardless of moral content [Greek], an evil demon [Christian] or a background subprocess [secular; computing]: it is my intention to leave these three meanings somewhat confused, since to be possessed by any one of these things is remarkably similar in the moment and the mechanism of release seems to be the same.

That is why across the whole world the holy men were lazy and yet the holy men were regarded as the highest caste; above even warriors and kings. Brahmins above Kshatriyas; Pope above King; Emperor above Shogun. Even in modern constitutional states, like Britain, Ireland, Japan, Germany: there is a distinction between the dignified and efficient components of power; the king/President as the national figurehead who enjoys ceremony without business, and the Prime Minister as the De-facto ruler who must undertake business without ceremony. There is some sense in which the embodiment of power is considered to be best employed when separate from the exercise of power.

To be holy one must be above work, to be called to work makes you less than holy.

Most of us have to work by virtue of material necessity. We are shackled by our situations. We do what we must to secure our food and shelter; and suffer the rest.

As such, the real bifurcation in callings comes when material needs are met and we must decide on our own terms what we must do with the rare surplus.

One supposes that there are three options: leisure, further labour, and contemplation.

Leisure is a kind of dreamless sleep, an absence of work and also an absence of being. Necessary as rest, but insufficient in itself. It is in some ways a continuation of the state of stress-arousal that characterises the avoidance of work—the ‘flight’ response stuck on repeat.

Likewise, to pursue labour in excess of what is strictly necessary (out of raw ambition) is a kind of self-destruction since it prevents you from remembering yourself. It may result in a superficial sort of success, a greater security for oneself which makes it preferable to leisure. Nonetheless, it is a pathological addiction to the ‘fight’ response of stress-arousal.

Contemplation, by contrast, is what happens naturally once the externalising influence of stress is exorcised, once the daemonic will has left your body, and you are left to embody what you have become.

Some people who arrive in this state find a pull towards enlightenment, a drawing inwards.

I did for a while, although only insofar as it permitted me to build security and confidence; to heal and adjust the nervous system, to calibrate. Perhaps those who are more Buddha-natured carry on this way; withdrawing ever further inward until they become of-something-else.

Others of us, myself included, find instead a strong energetic pull to go back out again: Vocation, Kundalini activation, übermenschen will. I particularly like Kierkegaard’s expression of the call to ethical action: “What good is it to get a new sword… if only to thrust it back into its scabbard!”

If the use of a weapon to describe the self is unusually bellicose for Kierkegaard, I think it speaks to the fact that this state of awakening is a site of inner violence whose nature contains an inherent tension: between a desire to act because our quietest whisper compels it; while knowing full well that the exercise of that will shall bring us into the daemonic noisiness of the world, away from the divinity that provoked us to pursue it.

Put in a more friendly way: The call to ethical action is the call to adventure, those who hear it must go out into the world and adventure for a bit in order to return home, like Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the Hero.

This is the realm of radical action. The place for people who have gone beyond happiness and comfort, and beyond the pursuit of immediate success. This is the point where values and enterprises can be entered into on their own merit beyond necessity. This is the point at which we can bounce free of the constraints of our current life-order and impose a new reality!

It is also the point at which one must choose which Daemons are worth bargaining with, in order to commence the transformation that the soul demands. Everyone outgoing is at least a little Faustian.

As was the case for me last week, there were a number of things which needed that push and so it made sense to give myself over to the spirit of an dumb Ox, to plow through everything that must be plowed. ‘To totally send it, bruh.’

That said, I left numerous checkpoints throughout the week where it was possible to exorcise the ox if I was ready.

For the first half of the week I had to struggle through a couple of non-relaxing yoga classes and fruitless meditations. The Ox was still plowing.

It was only on Thursday, once everything was done, that my daily morning walk offered the pleasant company of two grandmothers who small-talked with me beneath the slowly drifting almond blossoms.

Now, yes, they did turn out to be Jehovah’s witnesses trying to proseletyse, but their genuinely calming presence was still the key that finally broke the spell of the Ox. They provided the pause, the exit-code, so that I could stand firm upon my accomplishments, ready to listen once again.

In the next part we will discuss how to choose your daemons wisely, so that you don’t lose yourself forever. Subscribe so as not to miss it.

You see, even long after letting go of the kind of perfectionism that most people talk about, the sort where you never start anything because you’re afraid it won’t be perfect, it is possible to be guilty of a second-order perfectionism in which nothing is ever finished because there is always a better way to do it. This is what the historian Peter Burke referred to as Leonardo Syndrome, after Da Vinci, who famously left a lot of unfinished work.

This is worse than ordinary perfectionism and worse than not having any ideas at all; from the subjective point of view. (of course such people can still accomplish much, the disease is literally named after Leonardo Da Vinci!, what I mean is that this way of living is not pleasant or sustainable)

At least an uninspired person saves their time, mental energy and physical energy and gets to enjoy a simple life; and the ordinary perfectionist, although mentally tortured, should have a surplus of physical energy since they never do anything! By contrast, the iterative perfectionist is always working and yet never satisfied; extending themselves in several directions at once, in search of an ephemeral something that always seems out of reach. It is both a waste of time and a waste of energy, rather than just a waste of time or the bliss of ignorance.

Moreover, it is self defeating. Trying to be too clever, to improve too quickly, can actually produce worse outcomes than being stupid!

This is actually an essential concept in the field of machine learning; it is one of those funny little insights we can glean from teaching the computers that actually reflects back onto us in an interesting way.

When you iteratively train a computational model, from simple statistical regression models all the way up to Claude, there is a concept called the learning rate. The learning rate is what we call a hyper-parameter (a parameter that helps us tune other parameters) whose job is to define how much the machine adapts its model parameters after making a mistake. You can think of this as setting how quickly a dog is able to learn a new trick. The lower the learning rate, the older the dog.

To explain the intuition behind this, imagine a ball rolling down into a valley. If the ball is only allowed to move really slowly (I guess it is made of a sticky material or something) then it will take a longer time for it to roll down to the bottom of the valley. If you allow it to move a little bit faster, then it will obviously get there in less time. If, however, you were to strap some kind of propulsion device to this ball, so that it could move at a great speed (like the snitch in Harry Potter), then all of a sudden there is no guarantee that the ball will ever reach the bottom of the valley because it is bouncing around all over the place.

This is what happens when you set the learning rate of any iterative model. Too slow gives you the right answer but at a higher cost, just right gets you the right answer as quickly and cheaply as possible. Too fast, too much adaptivity, and the system becomes chaotically divergent and fails to find the optimal solution .

This means that there is a very real mathematical sense in which in any iterative learning process it is better to be a little bit slow than to be too smart. Stupidity remains convergent to the (local) optimum, overcomplicating does not. If we are working towards the right goal, then there is such a thing as adapting too quickly.

As such, if you are fairly sure that the endeavour you are setting upon is worthwhile, it is actively a bad idea to look for the absolute ‘best’ or ‘most correct’ way to pursue it. You are actually more likely to accomplish something if you have a go at making something that is kind of dumb and janky and iterating it from there. It may be more physically exhausting to go through those additional iterations but you can take mental rest in the certainty that you will get there eventually.

Rather than trying to make a masterpiece, think of the simplest, most manual, least efficient but still functional way to start building what you want to build and just start doing it. The Goofiest Viable Product, if you will.

It will be inefficient, it will be an imperfect way of going about it, but at least you won’t overshoot. You will almost certainly find ways to improve on your plan as you go along, and those improvements will not be wild speculations on the basis of minor negative signals but actually concrete improvements to a process you’ve already undertaken, with a clear intuition about the value of the saving that you have in some way embodied by all of the grunt work you have had to take to get there.

n.b. That’s actually why I started this blog, to start producing complete pieces of writing that I had to push out on a regular deadline. To get into a better habit so that I could be more disciplined and less clever with my book, so that thing has a hope of seeing the light of day, sooner or later. Sure enough, most of the plot-holes have already to started to fill themselves in, so I should be able to stitch together an answer from the best of my drafts fairly soon.

If there is something that you feel you ought to do with your life, it is better that you did it imperfectly than didn’t do it at all because you were constantly trying to find ‘the best way’ to do it. There is no best way, or if there is, you cannot guarantee that you’ll get there by swinging wildly. Instead you have to get there gradually, by pursuing smaller problems that you reckon you can handle, building up small bits and pieces that you can use to make something bigger.

Yes, it may be that there are other people out there who are smarter, who are faster, who are doing all that and seeming to make it work. However, if you go to an actual networking event (as I sometimes do, working with tech) you will find that these people are never the most brilliant people in the room. They are often markedly average. They have got fast and lean and agile by having spent plenty of time not being those things, making steady improvement and learning as they go. I also suppose that’s why the 10x engineers never make their own unicorns; The Wozniaks need a Jobs to kind of slow them down, tether them to Earth a bit, keep them constrained within on a more limited problem-space that doesn’t completely throw them off the rails.

For those of us who wish to make some kind of positive impact in the world this is especially important. It is important to recognise that our actions will not always be perfect, that we may even make mistakes and cause problems just like everyone else. However, if we constantly try to leap to the absolute optimum, we will probably just overshoot and cause more problems than we solve.

If you know the problem you want to solve, don’t overthink it, just find the shortest path that will work, make a commitment and fulfil the commitment before introspecting further. Be like a river burrowing its way through the silt, steadily optimising for the shortest route (which mathematically is very similar to training a neural net btw).

If, however, you are unsure of the problem you wish to solve, that is where introspection, doubt and concern have their valor. This post will be followed up next week with a piece on just that. Stay subbed for more.

Become unreachable, become a ghost. Cease to exist as a bunch of 1s and 0s for a few hours and revert to your pre-2012 state. Become an un-augmented mammal for a bit—while you still can.

Go somewhere interesting or go nowhere in particular. It doesn’t really matter. The point is to just hang out and exist in the absence of most of the penetrative external signal that assaults you daily. The first step to finding your innermost voice is reducing the volume of the loudest external voices.

You didn’t evolve to be aware of every bad thing happening in the world right as it hits the news-wire; nor did you evolve an ability to take on endless marketing messages or doomscrolling feeds or podcasts; or even to listen to infinite live-streams of music. You certainly didn’t evolve to send timely responses to a multitude of emails. Even when you don’t respond to it, the buzz in your pocket calls out like a siren at sea.

This much was obvious to your grandparents, (Although, one imagines that old people in the 1930s used to complain about “those damn youngsters, rotting their brains with those gosh-darned crystal sets!”;) to their grandparents; to the 300,000 years of grandparents preceding; to the hundreds of millions of years of non-human grandparents preceding them. It was obvious to everyone until about 2002, when the Blackberry came out. It was still obvious to most people until about 2015, when most people had had a smart-phone for a few years. It has only been for the last 10 years or so that it hasn’t been obvious.

You’ve probably even forgotten the terms of the bargain, of how you were seduced. How you were tricked into spending your whole waking life jacked into an infinite nightmare feed! (which is a description that applies equally well to broadcast newsmedia as well as algorithmic media.)

I recall the bargain had something to do with making it easier to keep in touch. To allow you to keep touch with globally distributed friends, to facilitate faster and more responsive communication. To make making and keeping friends easier. To remove a lot of the friction in interpersonal relationships.

Convenience is practically the absence of friction. Friction is the main enemy of capital. Capital optimises for efficiency, which in many cases means the removal of friction. However, in order to get you on board with a new effort to reduce friction (i.e. a technological innovation,) this has to be marketed as convenience, which seems to be a short-term benefit to the consumer. However, this deliberately short-term framing ignores the long term commercial incentives which drive technological change.

Removing Friction is not about reducing the amount of things you need to do, it is about reducing two other things: the amount of downtime between each thing you need to do, and the amount of time it takes to do a thing. The fact that this change can save time in the short run is a cover for the fact that it will increase the amount of stuff you need to do in the long run. It’s the same game that has been played by the forces of capital since the very first Industrial Revolution. “Oh trust me, these steam engines will make life easier for everyone—its not like we are going to force armies of children to handle dangerous machinery for 15 hours-a-day, six days-a-week or anything!”—a.k.a. Jevon’s paradox.

This isn’t even the first time it has happened in our lifetimes. I remember hearing my dad and his friends talking like this about email when I was a kid in the early 2000s. People back then thought that the ability to send emails rather than writing actual memos would lead to fewer mixups and speed-up communication, meaning that work gets done quicker. In actual fact, the loss of friction meant that the system invented more work to keep the office drones busy, while giving them the ability to send each-other grumpy, soul-draining emails at 22:30PM. If anything white-collar office life got worse as a result of email, because it removed some of the boundary between home and work. Email didn’t free the salaryman, it just meant that more labour can be extracted from each person with less downtime over a wider range of tasks.

The consequence is that each person ends up with less time to be proactive and follow their calling, since they are spending more and more time having to react to an ever-growing stream of noise.

Aside from not actually making your life any better in the medium-term, (even where the long-term macro-economic gains are real,) the elimination of friction actually makes life more stressful by increasing the number of threads you need to juggle in order to stay afloat. A low-friction life, in terms of the number of processes running in parallel (in a computational sense,) is able to be more complex than a high-friction life. If there is more friction to navigate, you are simply forced to have fewer things going on.

Moreover, when nothing works properly you often find yourself lost or stranded somewhere and forced to actually inhabit your own thoughts, your own intuitions and your own ways of relating to people; which may differ from what you normally consider ‘proper’.

As such, there is worth in sometimes throwing a spanner in the works. Not in such a way that it causes harm or makes people worry about you. Just, sometimes it is good to let things happen a little slower than they absolutely could be. Ask yourself, what difference does it make if I know the news now versus in two hours time?

Put another way, unless you are actively on duty, you can ask yourself what are the odds of A: learning something life-changing in the few hours and B: the odds that you would be able to do something about it in that amount of time, given A?

p(A) is a very small number, unless there is some news that you have been credibly expecting. p(A) * p(B|A) is by definition an even smaller number. Sure, it could happen, but the risk is really quite tiny. Much smaller than the risk you take every-time you get in the car.

It almost feels slightly silly to put it in those terms, because what we are talking about is such a natural and obvious thing. And yet many of my friends track each-other with location sharing and cannot go anywhere without somebody knowing exactly where they are. I am certainly not alone in feeling as though we have become so conditioned to be afraid of missing out, that we seem to think, superstitiously perhaps, that there is a danger in even going to the corner shop without a tracking device in our pocket.

That is why there is a sense in which making yourself unreachable has become a rebellious act. A very small act of rebellion perhaps, one which even sounds a little cringe when couched in those terms. And yet it is precisely the first step to taking bigger acts, because it affords you the opportunity to listen once again to your quiet inner truth, which has perhaps been suppressed for 15 years. To be absent of any inbound signals except for those which occur as part of a coherent nonfragmented environment. Not interrupted with screens, which are like portals to alien dimensions. Unmediated; in some way complete.

In the absence of those loud external voices clamouring for your attention, many of the strange delusions by which you have been preoccupied are revealed to be ridiculous at the quiet insistence of your innermost self. You pay closer attention to things: which flowers are in season and what insects are currently active. You are also much much more likely to strike up conversations with strangers and meet cute babies and dogs. I’ve also noticed that cats are a lot friendlier. I don’t know if that’s a vibes thing or if they can pick up some hypersonic noise from electrical devices or something—probably the former. The joy of this tiny rebellion is in recognising these small things; precisely because there are no louder, bigger things trying to steal your attention. The monster is at home, buzzing away on your desk.

In that relative quiet, the quiet of real (unmediated) life, you can start thinking again. You can listen to that quiet Whisper from within. You can start to remember who you were and what mattered to you when you were last available to enjoy a moment like this. You are able to re-align yourself towards things that actually matter to you.

You may, ironically, start to find that you actually become more productive.

—Though if that happens, don’t deliver your work too quickly and definitely don’t let your boss catch on!

Sometimes we see it in people who do not see it in themselves. Sometimes they see it in us when we seem to have lost it. It is found everywhere, if you look for it. Not only in people but in nature, in the world too, in the coherence of all things which are not reducible to their definitions.

The Whisper makes everything make sense. It brings us into that ephemeral state of being we call The Moment, when all that is false washes away and the path becomes improbably clear. Bhakti, the Holy Spirit, Satori, Flow, The Light Side of the Force, the inner child, (or just the parasympathetic nervous system doing its thing,) from where it comes from doesn’t matter. Where it takes us is what matters…

From the vantage of The Moment, from where we see the spark in all things; that all things are in some way, if only by the smallest bit greater than themselves; we see in-turn that we are a reflection of something greater. This does not come from perfect understanding or having the correct philosophy but by being open to possibility without trying to collapse everything into Theory. The path cannot be described, it can only be walked.

Yet in spite of its glorious power, the calling to the correct path is so very very quiet. In fact, it may well be the quietest voice of all. My absence over the last year has in large part been the result of me trying and failing to find a consistent way to listen to this Whisper. All too often I’ve ended up amplifying something else instead.

You see, anyone who has a voice can serve as an amplifier for any of the signals that swirl around and make up the universe. All of us, including myself, will have amplified false callings at some point or another. To do so is a natural part of growing up, particularly when you live in a forgetful Lifeworld and everyone around you is suffering so.

Yet, it seems inappropriate to keep doing that just because it is what everyone else seems to be doing. No, It seems incumbent upon each of us then to correct our past errors and amplify the Whisper instead.

We must each become a gentle reminder to the world that there is Something Greater.

Even after nihilist post-modernity has swept everything away, this ‘minimum viable dogma’ seems to be the only thing that remains steady and unwavering. A simple assertion that can be supported and reproduced by anyone who just takes some time to experience the world unmediated. The simple fact that you cannot describe everything opens the door again to the possibility of Something Greater and makes it damn near impossible to close it again.

Because the world so easily forgets itself, I view the existence of this possibility; this tiny, ajar possibility; to be the mustard seed which provides a path out of our current malaise.

There is much work to be done in getting the world to remember itself. There are two areas where the calling has become particularly loud for me: Embodiment and Amplification. Embodiment is the inner struggle to crowd out the louder voices and nurture, kindle, the spark of the quietest Whisper. Amplification is the practise of living boldly according to the will of that Whisper; becoming a loud reminder of that which resides within you; one who calls others to the path.

Embodiment is basically the foundation of the modern wellness industry, but I think that amplification is a more unique area that is perhaps less well covered because it places upon us a set of obligations and duties which are not necessarily, in the consumerist sense, conducive to good mental health. i.e. it is much harder to sell to desperate people. Embodying practices are nevertheless important, and it is worth banging-on about them to the point of sounding like a broken record. That said, embodiment, I have started to find, is only half the equation.

Finding stillness and quiet is a means to an end but not an end in itself. The closest I’ve ever come to enlightenment comes from the dancing. From moving in tune with the calling, not according to your own will but according to that higher will within you.

By articulating and ‘actualising’ the power, we can make it more real for others to see, we encourage and ennoble others by it. We should build things not to glorify ourselves, but to reveal the possibility of glory in a world that seems to have forgotten it. We should dance our embodied truth in order to extend it into the world.

Talking from my own experience, this makes it a lot easier to stay with The Moment and keep up a strong and committed practice. After all, it has never made sense to me to be an ascetic, when the path to The Moment is always shifting.

Think in your own life about the rare instances where you have touched upon it. Think upon how fleeting they always are! The moment of bliss and the despair at its loss. Accompanying every Moment is an attendant pain which can sometimes make it painful to remember ourselves. It is almost as if The Moment hides from you if you seek it too eagerly.

Thus, it seems that we are more likely to return to The Moment in the midst of a dance than in the darkness of a remote cave. It has the habit of striking at the most inopportune time! Learning how to dance this dance, how to embody the calling, is perhaps the most important thing we can do.

I have become reasonably adept at dancing and still it remains much too easy for me to forget. It is incredible how even the most trivial bits of business can do it to us!

It is with that weakness in mind that I should like to find fellowship. A community of ‘Reminders’ who live to nurture this something greater in everything they touch. A community who work together to remember themselves and one another, without any grander pretensions or doctrines.

This publication, which I am relaunching now, is an instrument to building that end. It is an amplifier of sorts, it is also a way to find and connect with other amplifiers; to try and get a positive feedback loop going.

In the meantime, while I get used to posting regularly, there will be a free weekly post that will go out on Saturday Mornings, which is the time when it is easiest to remember.

These will be ‘reminders’ in quite a literal sense, that contain some kind of exercise or encouragement which you can employ to step back into your true calling. Rather than writing detailed academic essays (of which there are plenty enough on the internet) the idea is to provide reproducible experiments which you can repeat for yourself or link back to your own experiences.

Short and punchy and practical, a brimful of Asha to set you right.

I’m not here to tell you your truth, but I can certainly prod you to go out and find it for yourself. That, at least, is my intention.

Once this thing is established. I will start providing more in-depth content, probably in about 2-3 months time. A good chunk of which will focus on building that community, and will really be a kind of enterprise where we try and find new ways to really amplify our Whispers at scale.

No algorithm recommended The Lonely Londoners to me and I hadn't heard about it before. I simply saw it on a bookshelf without any advertising and it spoke to me in a way that a good book ought to do. When I started reading it, I knew that there was nothing else I should to be doing instead. For someone raised in the cradle of the internet, this simple moment of serendipity was a rare and powerful thing—after years of being spoon-fed a simulacra of such a moment by a bunch of for-profit computer systems, to feel the real thing again felt like a sure step out of Plato's cave.

Algorithms fake serendipity. They make it seem as if the informational diet you are consuming has been curated "For You" when it is actually the product of a commercial exercise to extract as much attention from you as possible. They want to feed you as much crap as you can stomach without switching off. It would be tempting to assume that when good recommendations are made it is purely by luck, but the system is designed to trickle them at the rates that are most likely to keep you hooked. "Serendipity" is a utility that the platforms can turn on at will through various design choices. These algorithms could provide you with better recommendations but there is no guarantee that these would be the most profitable content for advertisers. They could also become 100% slop (like Instagram reels) if the people in charge believe the audience to be credulous enough. Either extreme is usually suboptimal, so they give you something like 95% slop with 5% good stuff. That good stuff seems sort of like good luck, like resonance, like serendipity but it is not. It is controlled and it is rationed for no other reason than to enrich the platform owners. This gradually tends to get worse over time, leading to a gradual Enshittification of the platform.

One wonders, how many quietly fulfilling moments have been silenced by the unending cacophony of this digital taste-mill? How many little discoveries have been quashed and replaced by some flat replica of the feeling? Of all the ways that the internet has flattened us, this one struck me as rather sad. Yes, other things like the transactionalisation of dating and the Dickensian gig economy are substantially more evil; but the simplest losses are perhaps the easiest to get your head around. To have lost little moments of emergent happening is a more weighty sting to the individual than any grand economic disruption. It is like how when you are writing about something heavy, the small details and little gestures are what actually hit the reader—especially when the events themselves feel impenetrable and incomprehensible.

Reclaiming these moments is simple—you just have to switch off. Cast aside your earphones and leave your laptop at home. Go rummage, go ramble, go wandering off. Follow leads spontaneously. It really is that simple. You may be wary at first but the anxiety fades quite fast. For more on how to be rid of that, I'd point you to my prior piece on the value of a certain kind of learnt Naivete.

Those little moments are radicalising, little sparks that make you realise how much of your life they have taken and just how much of it is left for you to live. It is natural to resent it because it is risible that you have been enclosed like that. However, it is hard to stay angry for too long when you find yourself in a cafe, reading a good book that came without a recommendation.

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Hurtling toward the trampoline, my grown-up, sensible mind is telling me to back down. "That way is painful," it says, "when have you ever managed to do something like that without hurting yourself"—I try to silence it with a huff of my breath, although it's true—I haven't done something like that without hurting myself... "Remember when you came home from school crying because you were the kid who couldn't do a forward roll..." No, enough of that. I am learning that only by ignoring that voice can I be safe from its warnings of sudden doom. If I think, then I get hurt. If I stop thinking, euphoria. One foot grazes the floor in a skip, I leave the floor, flying, flying, landing, not landing. The spongy slackness of the trampoline gives a feeling of falling and floating simultaneously. Hands hit the ground, legs fly almost out of control, and I land... That was almost a handspring. Not quite, but better than my previous attempt. Unprompted and contrary to all conscious reasoning, I am learning. Others can see my progress too and they cheer me on...

I don't know how I found myself in the world of non-competitive adult gymnastics and nor, it seems, do most of the people I do it with. It seems to be an almost illicit impulse that causes people to find a slightly-shady-looking railway arch in East London and do things that they haven't done since they were six-or-seven years old. When they get there, suitably for the sketchy surrounds, they find an addiction—a rush like no other form of exercise. I suppose that it is the rush that comes from experiencing the development of self-knowledge in real time. You cannot reason on it, you cannot really analyse in words what it is that you are learning, but you are learning. Every time you get slightly closer to a new skill, every time you feel yourself flying, in the process of wiring new reflexes you didn't know you could have, you feel euphoric—like your whole nervous system is fizzing with new connections.

The people help. A diverse bunch unified by that same impulse. Sometimes they try and intellectualise their reasons for coming, try, like my conscious mind in the example above, to talk about something something body-issues, or having done it as teenagers or something. Then they go "ha, nah, nevermind. I'm here because I it seemed... like... kinda childlike and kinda fun."

Childlike. That is the word that everyone comes to. Why must it be childlike? What is the appeal of that? The main association between gymnastics and childhood for most people is with the utterly miserable experience of school PE lessons in padded torture rooms that smell like feet. If it were their actual association that drew them in then it would suggest a perverse kind of sadism. These people do not seem perverse. On the contrary, they tend to skew quite friendly and self-assured. If adults can do these things (and, I heard from an instructor once that they can often learn considerably quicker,) why do you never see grown men spinning cartwheels in public?

I suppose that it is because that wouldn't be very sensible. Of the many things that our culture tends to emphasise, one of the most endemic is the sensible-ness of adults. This is not so much a total aversion to risk but more of a bourgeois attitude that says that any risks we take have to be set against the benefits. Only if the risk of an activity can be quantified and seen to be less than the tangible benefits is that activity considered sensible. In most people's minds, the idea of adult gymnastics is not very sensible: It is not as thorough a cardiovascular workout as going for a run, doesn't build muscle as quickly as the gym (although it is a fabulous way to build calisthenic strength) and incurs a higher risk of injury than most sports except skiing. Skiing is also not very sensible, but gets away with it by being a status thing. Rich people have less need to be sensible than the middle classes, for various reasons.

Sensible people don't try to do fly-springs in their late-twenties because it doesn't make sense. You are more likely to sprain your wrist than prepare yourself for any practical situation you may encounter. I posit though that this is precisely the reason to do it. The sport demands a degree of courage that comes from squishing all thoughts about consequence, it demands a juvenile kind of ignorance. It demands Naïveté.

This got me thinking about creativity and consciousness and the ways in which our current social values distract us from the human core of these things so much of the time.

I've grown up in a world that tells me that things are good if they can be rationalised and bad if they are irrational. To which point, I say "what is the point of art?" How do I explain the stirring within that comes from looking at a Turner? Or make sense of a Van Gogh? How do I explain the strange, ineffable feeling I got when I saw an aboriginal dot painting and it hit me with a profound emotion despite coming from a cultural vernacular I know (astonishingly) little about?

Why is it that an orchestra sounds so much better live? So too with theatre, and especially with dance? More-so than mere fidelity I think it has to do with the intractable parts of being real—the sounds of creaking floorboards and shoes, the coughs from the audience, the lengthy periods of nothing that can happen on a live stage while busy hands change things around behind the curtain. There is no intelligible reason why these things bring immense pleasure, they just do.

So too in life as in art, the present mind finds unintelligible resonance in all sorts of places—in the elegant orchestration of the forest, the ambient techno of the city, the unintentional lyricism of people's half formed thoughts; points of view, like photographs, which catch the light briefly before fading forever from view.

What I am realising, through the stimulus of my almost-gymnastics, is that much knowledge, or maybe even most knowledge is not known, it is felt. The whole nervous system is alive with thoughts of varying levels of sophistication. Far from being at the top of Aristotle's hierarchy of sentience, we are simultaneously living across all levels of it—as higher and lower creatures both. With the consciousness of an amoeboid and that of something else; with that of a dog and of something else; with that of a chimp and of something else. Our conscious wisdom is but one part of a recursive tree of conscious experience—some of it our own and the rest genetic.

Even skills we would typically think of as 'intelligent' are at least partially beyond this pale. In addition to wonky round-offs, I am also figuring out how to build a software application and reaching the point where I can no longer possibly keep a conscious record of all of the moving parts in the system. When I was reorganising the source files the other day, I couldn't think of a sensible way to do it that would cover all bases. I couldn't represent the model of it I had in my head in terms of files and folders. My unconscious map of the system is far more nuanced than any I can articulate in any diagram or design documentation, whichever way I did it felt reductionist. However, when I work on the app I can see what the likely consequences of a change will be and see the structure of the system evolve in my head as I make those changes. Of all the cogs turning in my brain, the chain of reasoning that gives me the rational answers to my problems are but a small part.

When I realised this, I felt freed. Us programmers tend to avoid complexity where we can but this can sometimes lead to a sort of inertia where we don't want to tackle problems that will necessarily have somewhat complex solutions (particularly on the first try). I realised that if I stopped thinking about the consequences too much I could build something that mostly works now and tidy it up it later, allowing myself to make something slightly suboptimal that works rather than sitting on a cleanly polished, well organised thing that doesn't do what it is supposed to.

If a large part of one's learnt knowledge is not reason and is not even reasonable, then the idea that you should only prefer to do things that have articulated benefits becomes (ironically) absurd. On the contrary, in many cases, it feels like joy and skill both come from the freedom of being able to act without the constraints of sense. Naïveté is, to some extents, a virtue. Reason can give you a nudge, it can help you figure out what you need to do when you get stuck—but it is one small faculty in the whole tree of sentience that resides within us.

I'll leave you with a moment of resonance I found in a surprising place. As I engaged in the postmodern pastime of watching a Michelin-starred chef cook something nice while I reheat yesterday's leftovers, I heard something remarkable. Midway through skewering a non-orthodox souvlaki, maniacal alchemist/chef Heston Blumenthal reached out and grabbed me with his herby, chicken-y hands and said "People think creativity is something you learn. It's not, it is the absence of the fear of failure". You see, creativity is an absence of blockages rather than a skill in itself. It grows in the absence of limits. In addition to fear, the sensible attempt to rationalise the world is another thing that can stand in your way. To actualise your talents, you have to stop trying to make sense of them.

As a computer, your brain is complicated and slow, a modern CPU is in the order of billions of times faster. (Based on recent research that puts the human neuron at a clock speed of 10 bits/second). That you are complicated is what makes you cleverer than the machines, able to simulate virtually any scenario that could possibly exist and a lot of fictional scenarios besides; but your slowness means that you often generate these possibilities at a faster rate than you can evaluate them!

When you have lots of ideas being generated in your brain faster than your ability to acknowledge those ideas, a steadily increasing proportion of your neural capital gets tied up in potentially unproductive or even harmful lines of thought, your behaviour is split between them and you cannot make sense of the new sensory experiences coming in. Eventually, your internal model cannot keep up with the ever changing present and you crash, overwhelmed.

Everyone can experience this to some degree, but those of us who are more neurotic or who have sensory and cognitive differences like Autism or ADHD experience them more frequently. In the former case we burnout because we are inclined to generate more possibilities to cover more of the potential scenarios that may affect us in the future. In the latter case because we have more complicated relationships between our sensory experiences and our internal understanding of them, our understanding of the situation is more likely to be more erratic and our internal model is likely to take up more neural capital. This means that we experience a mismatch between reality and our understanding more frequently and we hit our cognitive limits more quickly. On the flip side, this may be why it is precisely neurotic, autistic people who tend to be geniuses: they are generating a large variety of nuanced ideas and have a greater need to approach those with some degree of self criticism, given their higher tendency to get things confused.

We can all experience overwhelm but there are certain types of people who are especially vulnerable to it. So, particularly for those of us who are vulnerable, what should we do about it? Well, logically, if the problem is that we are producing more thoughts than we are processing and ‘deciding what to do with’ we have to either increase our decision making capacity or decrease the inflow of information until we finish processing the cognitive backlog. If you are overwhelmed, there is not really much you can do to increase your cognitive ability in the short term except rest. If you are overwhelmed, you won’t be in the mood for Dr Kawashima’s brain training. Likewise, rest also provides a way to limit the inflow of information, giving you the space to go through your thoughts and sort out which ones are relevant and which ones you can discard.

Thus, the cure to overwhelm is *rest*.

Specifically, rest in a low-information environment. Sensory deprivation tanks are ideal but expensive and you can get most of the benefits with an eye mask and some ear muffs. For overwhelmed people, watching the TV is not rest, listening to music is not rest, even reading books is not rest. So long as more content is entering your brain you are not resting. All forms of passive or active media consumption stand as an impairment to rest — even the network sitcoms and Netflix background shows which are designed for low attention spans. This is because any media for human consumption provides more varied information than would be in any ambient environment. If you decide to rest actively then go on a familiar walk without your headphones or take a gentle yoga class where they play ambient music. Ambient music is okay, precisely because, as Brian Eno said, it aims to be “as interesting as it is ignorable” - it is designed not to overpower the environment. Crafting or creating is also restful, unless you are still learning how to use that medium and have to read, watch or listen to something in order to get started. — overwhelm is not a good time for new hobbies, take them up when you feel better!

The simplest, purest and most reliable sort of rest is sleep. Albert Einstein slept 10 hours a day, taking frequent naps. His was a mind that could fathom extremely complex understandings of the universe, creating models which still inform a lot of our astronomical and cosmological knowledge 100 years later. There was a lot on his mind and he managed it using sleep.

This strategy should be familiar to anyone in an engineering or managerial profession who gets stuck on a problem, sleeps on it and miraculously knows the answer the next morning — your brain has probably already found the solution but your subconscious is yet to acknowledge it, the rest is precisely what unlocks the answer you “knew all along.”

Rest is not merely necessary for the economic reasons of energy consumption and homeostasis but for the informatic reason of needing to handle the imbalance between the human brain’s high capacity for idea generation and relatively slow executive processing to handle those ideas. It is a simple production bottleneck arising from the network dynamics of a highly parallel, complex mind.

The solution qua rest is straightforward but it leaves an obvious question which is particularly acute for the neuro-atypical:

“How do I know I am overwhelmed?”

If you cannot entirely trust your internal sensory systems to be accurate and functional then this becomes a challenging question which might take a while to feed through into any sort of intuition. In high functioning people, this could mean weeks or months or even years of silent suffering and elevated stress until it suddenly becomes overwhelming and often physically sickening.

Such people generally need a simplified protocol, a deliberate habit to tell them what their mind ought to make obvious. “Am I overwhelmed?”

As with many problems it is sometimes easier to pose an awkward question in terms of its contrapositive:

Am I in on top of everything?

This should do one of two things. In a person who is generally in control they should be able to issue at least a weak affirmative without too much effort: “I think so” or “just about”. A person who isn’t actually on top of things may try to mask by saying something similar, but the effort in doing so will only make them more stressed. If asked frequently, this will become increasingly untenable. A person who has a developed understanding of their limits will quickly admit that they are not in control and make plans to take rest, proper rest, until they have processed their many thoughts.

If you are yet to develop an accurate understanding of your cognitive limits, it is better to be triggered by seemingly impertinent questions and forced to admit that you may need to pull back, rather than try to soldier on for weeks or months at a time. Been there done that, it screws your physical and mental health in ways that take a while to recover from!

The key part here is accountability. People who know themselves keep themselves accountable; people who don’t generally need someone else to keep them accountable. Ideally you would have an authoritative loved one who is willing to bear that strain and ask you, repeatedly, perhaps daily, if you are on top of everything.* Whether or not you have anyone who will be able to deal with that, especially if you anticipate being tetchy, then you need to start taking accountability for your own energy levels.

* Long term, I can see this being a good use-case for generative AI: providing a personal counsellor agent that maybe phones or texts you daily to have a catch up, helping you take stock of your energy levels, for a fraction of the cost of a human therapist.

How do you do that? Well, if your mind is a black box, it is better to look for the environmental signs: dirty dishes, untidy rooms, unanswered messages. You may also notice physical signs of stress before the emotional: fingernail biting, compulsive itching, forgetting to shave or brush your teeth, various nervous tics and stims. I have known myself to have odd aches and pains and even rashes which miraculously go away when I finally conjure the will to handle something that I’ve been putting off for ages - as if my brain is sending the signal out any which way it can that this needs doing — although if these are serious, go and see a doctor as they could be real physical issues.

If you notice yourself or your environment becoming more dishevelled, it may be a sign that you are overwhelmed and need to rest. However, these are only the reactive signs. They only tell you need to rest when it is too late, when you may be already embroiled in matters that demand prolonged attention. This reactive stage is, at least for those who struggle with this sort of thing, a necessary but painful step on the way to the more proactive approach which requires self knowledge that takes time to accrue:

For those who know themselves well enough to recognise the emotional state of overwhelming – which are closely related to the physical signs mentioned above, there is a simpler question that covers most cases:

What am I feeling but not confronting?

This one question can do something quite magical if you are able to meditate or journal on it regularly. You can mostly avoid overwhelm and act with levels of energy for prolonged periods that seem almost superhuman. By taking the time to acknowledge thoughts and feelings without judgement, passing over the ones that are of little value and taking note of the good ones, you can accelerate your burn down of the cognitive backlog. Rest is still necessary, but you might find yourself needing less of it to stay on top of things.

There is only one catch, a growing sense of emotional intelligence makes it harder to pretend to be interested in things you don’t actually value. In becoming more effective you may lose superficial markers of social status such as that managerial promotion that doesn’t actually suit your passions or you may find yourself quitting the rat race to do something altogether different. Sometimes self-honesty leads to more hardship than what you leave behind, although Nietzsche pointed out, it is the sort of hardship that may make you feel better than a life of comfort because you know why you undertake it.

To get to this point takes time, and great effort, and many other things that cannot be kept in one blog post. Subscribe for more insights, I guess!

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The important thing with all of these things is to reject the ego, such that you may be guided by another, or by the signs of your body and space, or by the actual processing of thoughts without judgment. You are an observer, study yourself as a specimen, see the signs. Learn to associate thoughts to feelings and feelings to habits. Remember that you may already have the answers to what ails you, you just need the rest to let them bloom into consciousness.