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Monthly Reflection

First Published: 2025 May 1

Draft 1

Oh boy what a whirlwind of a month!

Five things I was looking forward to last month:

Last month I had some overarching goals. Let’s see how we did with those:

I kept a living document of daily reflection goals, which I’ve now sort of stopped. While it was helpful for me then, it was also twenty minutes out of each day that I spent filling it out. Time passes regardless of how I spend it, but I have to wonder whether it’s a good use of my time.9 I’m going to restart it, but I don’t really necessarily know where my goals might be. That’s not true, but I do suddenly have a much shorter timeline than I thought for my degree, which makes me kind of feel anxious about what all I will need to do. Still, I cannot write if I do not exist, and so let’s structure the goals from that basis.

When I reflected10 on my goals for this phase of my life11, I did come up with a tiered list of priorities. Structuring the reflection like that might not be the worst idea.12

Before making my list of daily reflections, let’s think about five things I’m excited for, five SMART13 goals, and five general themes I want to shoot for.14 Also, five great things from last month that I didn’t have as listed things last month.

April Highlights

Five things I have to look forward to in May:

Five quantized25 goals for the month:

Five amorphous ideals for the month, like last month’s “areas I want to focus”28:

Looks great!

In making my list of general priorities, family was at the top, but it’s not an ideal here. Why? I generally feel like the way I am with my family is relatively good, and so it does not need to be an area of specific focus like these other five, where I feel that I am very lacking.

So: let’s revise our daily reflection template with my ordered tiers of goals in mind. Within each numbered entry, bulleted points are nominally of about the same importance, or at least feel flexible enough that I cannot always put one above another.

Daily Reflection

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:37

  4. Cleaning?38

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:39

  7. Quaternary Goals:

  1. and a shocking number of parents. Shocking only in that I didn’t expect them to be as into the process as they were↩

  2. read: generally structured and with an explicit formula↩

  3. shocking↩

  4. something something motivation levels↩

  5. read: I exist in a community and that means that there exist obligations to others that I must fulfill↩

  6. one might say obsessive, if they wished↩

  7. give or take the off by a few days tracking error of when I started or finished a book↩

  8. good to know I’m not crazy for thinking so↩

  9. oh, actually, typing that here makes me realize that it absolutely is. On the days where I didn’t do it, I got overwhelmed with stress. That’s good to know. Let’s move to it after this↩

  10. I should really make a new post called what we don’t post and then have different notes for each folly I’ve written and then not made public↩

  11. read: until the end of summer, which is (not coincidentally) the end of my doctoral time↩

  12. took a break here in order to run through the rest of the ink within and then clean pens (see: I do hobbies) to set up for the next ink that I’m trying↩

  13. specific, measureable, achievable, relevant, time-bound↩

  14. that is, five things that are absolutely not SMART (gotta love acronymizers who make really aggressive things when taking the antonym↩

  15. in part because I was up and then started making really risky bets so that I could go home early. Ended up like 2% ahead (read: 20 cents), so tossed that in as an extra ante↩

  16. !↩

  17. I feel like I’ve almost certainly mused before about feeling unmoored from history↩

  18. and second↩

  19. exciting in the literal sense of excited like an atom, full of energy, not necessarily positive↩

  20. as far as I know, it’s not TAing when I’m not a graduate student↩

  21. note to self, remember to figure out difference between thesis, defense, dissertation, and everything else that people call this finishing of my academic striving↩

  22. it’s a wildlife preserve, I think↩

  23. this is similar to a rephrasing of the first thing↩

  24. and oop, I really need to pack for that↩

  25. I refuse to use quantifiable. Wait is there a difference between quantized and quantified? Looks like quantized is a science only word right now but. Wow I’m going to be (more) insufferable↩

  26. meaning well cited, contains all the information I think that it needs, and has the figures which are most pressing↩

  27. current front runners include: what does abortion mean, how should Catholics treat the government given its fundamentally unjust nature, punishment, the many ways that we need to ignore saints because they spoke on material reality rather than faith and morals and are therefore explicitly wrong (ok so this is also about punishment), and what it means for me to be Jewish and Catholic↩

  28. why am I using a different term? great question↩

  29. love that this is one word, curious what its origins are, guess it gets a note↩

  30. is post it a trademarked term still? probably↩

  31. and, of course, work on the friendships↩

  32. back to the 10 oz of espresso a day life↩

  33. I don’t know why the term lunch bothers me, but I think part of it is that I often have started eating something over the course of an hour or five, and it feels wrong to call a six hour meal lunch↩

  34. it is burning hot down here. Apparently there was a heater stuck to on until the other day down here↩

  35. there we go, a distinction between absence of sound and the actual goal of silence↩

  36. though tragically, not the mug I so desperately crave↩

  37. read: things that will help me with the above goals but not goals in and of themselves↩

  38. yes this one gets its own tab because I think that it’s more important that the below but less than the above↩

  39. mmmm off by N numbering↩

  40. love that sonic song↩

  41. consistent color as writing, regardless of pressure/amount put on page↩

  42. doesn’t have different hues as light hits differently↩

Another Look On Motivation

First Published: 2025 April 26

Draft 4: 26 April 2025

Today I watched a really interesting video about many things, but especially the way we dehumanize children. As I then looked for a posting, something in me resonated with the idea of motivation. In the past three drafts, I’ve attempted to find how I feel1, explore what that means2, and frame the argument3. Hopefully this fourth draft will be enough that I can lay down my metaphorical pen and experience life again.4

When I first started thinking about autotelic motivation, I thought it was a nifty idea. I even reframed my daily reflections in that form: what do I want to do for itself and what do I want to do as a means to some other purpose. In doing so, I realize that I have accepted one of the great lies in our society: intrinsic motivation.

We glorify intrinsic motivation in modern society. If a child is honest and says that they are competing solely for a trophy, we scold them, saying that they should play for the love of the game. In a sense, I have been guilty of this. I decry schooling being thought of as job training rather than the end in itself.

However, every time that I have stopped to think about it, I realize that education is not an end in an of itself. Education lets you see the world more fully, allows you to express yourself, shows you the ways that you are within the web of humanity which reaches back to our first ancestors and into the infinite void of the future. Every action echoes into eternity.5

By saying that an action is intrinsically motivated, we say that the goal of the action is its completion. Not only do we not consider what the action will effect on the world, we actively ignore the effects that our actions will have on those around us. Here I must confess that I come into this argument with a fundamental worldview that may not be true for others. I believe and try to know6 that every human life is infinitely valuable.

I mean this in a very literal sense: saying that an action is preferable to another because it will result in fewer deaths still assigns a value to human life. Infinity times 10 is still just infinity.

Maybe not as a consequence of this, but in a deep way connected to this, I also believe that we are all intrinsically bound to one another. I do not think of treating my sprained ankle as selfish, but I do occasionally worry that I only do the good I do because it makes me feel better. We are all sparks of the Divine, and we are all intimately connected to one another deeper than anything can or could ever sever. Try as society might, it cannot make us forget this fact forever.

Finally, I think that human life is uniquely priceless. Maybe this is a part of capitalism that I have yet to unlearn, but I am willing to say that many horrors can be inflicted on animals if it will save a human’s life.7 I don’t know how much I value a cow’s life, but I know that it is some finite amount. Anything finite divided by infinity is 0, so on some level anything that benefits any human is worth any amount of harm.

I am not a computer, though, and can see slippery slopes. Treating things as though they have no value inherently makes you place a value on humans. This is bad, so we should be careful with the world around us, etc etc.8

When we treat a motivation as intrinsic, we explicitly say that the action it causes is an end. When I say that each human is an end, I mean that a human’s value is entirely in being a human. Intrinsic motivations, then, say that what we want to do is as valuable as the people around us.

We forget the web that holds us together: I may love the sound of song, but that does not mean that my neighbor does too.

We ignore the consequences our actions will have: I may love playing soccer, but my loss fundamentally means my opponents lose. If one of them was relying on the win for a scholarship, my actions negatively impact his life’s trajectory.

In short, we turn humans into tools.

While I think that this is probably too in the weeds to be a fight worth having with real people in real life, I do think that I will try to discourage intrinsic motivational speak. We should always have an idea of what our greatest goals are, and when we take conscious action, we must be able to connect them to that great work.

Judaism is incredible for this.

For a Christian, the fact that Judaism has effectively no theology about what happens after we die is almost unthinkable. For a Jew, the fact that Christianity’s theology is almost entirely about what happens after we die is what makes it a death cult. To a Christian, the good in helping our neighbor is that when we die Christ will see that we did. To a Jew, the good in helping our neighbor is that it makes the world more ready for the Messiah.

In both cases, the mission is to do good. In both cases, a faithful adherent leaves the world better than they entered. In the Christian case, however, the motivation is fundamentally selfish.

“We are all one body” is a common refrain in Catholic social teaching. That is, harming others ultimately harms ourselves, and helping others helps ourselves.

Believing that every human life is infinitely valuable can almost immediately become an excuse for hedonism and self-centering. After all, “I” am infinitely valuable, so why am I limiting myself in XYZ way?

If we shouldn’t value human lives relative to one another, then how do you deal with the fact that there legitimately is not and probably never will be enough medicine to treat all ailments? Any method of treating the ill fundamentally assigns one life as more valuable, because any medicine used is gone.

I have two gut reactions to this.

First, I will never deny that we live in an imperfect world. In a perfect world, would someone refuse medication, knowing that it could go to someone else? What if everyone did that?

I really don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that we could absolutely restructure society in a way that reduces the number of illnesses and ailments people face. We know that there are so many things which cause chronic issues, and yet we boil the oceans making better autocomplete generators. The issue is not, in most cases, truly a lack of supplies. The issue is that those with power do not, have not, and refuse to see other humans.

Second, there’s the Catholic teaching of double effect. Is it just word play to say that the reason we do something is what’s important, not necessarily the outcomes? Why is it ok to give a patient a lethal dose of morphine for pain but not to just do euthanasia?

I really don’t know how to justify double effect at this point. My mind is empty from realizing how much I try to exist independently of our world, and how radical a shift it would be for even a few people to embrace our net a little more. However, the principle of double effect is, fundamentally, what I think I’ve been getting at.

Intrinsic motivation tells us that the action is all that matters. Catholic teaching reminds us that actions have consequences, but that we can weight them. Personal moral discernment tells us how to weight what.

I think that I’ve still gotten a little lost here, but I find myself unchained from my muse. Maybe that means that the words here are sufficient, that they are enough. Are they an ending?

No, because this writing, like all else, sends its echoes into infinity.

I think this has changed my beliefs, we’ll see if it changes what I know.

Draft 3: 26 April 2025

N.B. In the past I’ve said that I’m going to try not framing my follies and instead simply leap into them. I’ve tried that in the past two drafts, and I think that there is absolutely merit in doing so, especially in early drafts. In this folly, though, I am actively attempting to make an argument, and I can only think of the argument in a narrative structure. With that in mind, please bear with me as I set the scene for my views on motivation.

A common idea is that society revolves around individuals giving up some sense of autonomy in order to produce a better overall social order. The strong man may not be able to have everything he wants, but he will not lose everything when someone invents the club. At its core, this idea sees humans as individuals first and community as a production of humanity.

Instead, I want to imagine society as humanity’s default state. After all, an infant child is completely helpless. A comment I like to make when picking up a wandering toddler or redirecting a small child is “sorry little one, there are limits to your autonomy.” In this way, I mirror the default state of society: as we grow, we gradually shed our dependencies on others and become an individual and atomized unit. That is, autonomy is something that we claim for ourselves, rather than where we begin.

I am far from the first to point out that society has atomized us more than ever before.

As with most things, though, the fruits of a tree are borne only after the tree has been nurtured. Our society would not be so atomized if we had not laid the bricks and walls which separated us.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here: every action resounds into infinity. There are no final consequences, only intermediate effects. Even the word consequence shows society’s disconnect from this idea; it is intrinsically negative to believe that there is a connection between action and result. People will look at me strangely if I say that I was going to give my child consequences for their behavior, only to take them out to ice cream or otherwise reward them.

No, this framing is wrong. HMm.

Draft 2: 26 April 2025

N.B. I find that I’m much more willing to rewrite sentences in Draft 2. Just putting that out there so I remember if I ever go here again.

In my first post on motivation, I was mostly complaining about the judgement I received for using extrinsic motivation as my primary source of reasoning. At the time, I felt like there was something unfulfilling in intrinsic motivation, but could not quite place my finger on what it was. With the wisdom of the past six years9, I think that I have a few potential answers.

Fundamentally, I think that there is not just an issue with the way that society and socialization act to try to prioritize intrinsic motivation. The issue is not just with actions which are intrinsically motivated being seen as good. My issue is the world view which makes intrinsically motivated action possible to be seen as anything but evil.10

Actions can only be their own ends in a worldview where we are a sole agent. If I do something only for how it will benefit me, then I fall into the deepest form of solipsism, not only ignoring the way that everything I do affects others, but actively trying to disconnect myself from the consequences of actions. Honestly, the fact that consequence is used almost exclusively as a pejorative is itself proof of this rot.

At my core, I truly believe11 and attempt to know12 that every other human is just as impossibly valuable as myself.13 People are not means to whatever end I enact, people are themselves full ends in and of themselves. When I reduce someone to nothing more than the instrument of my will, I am killing them, in my own mind if not reality.14

Actions, by contrast, are not alive. I’m not going to get into the deep dive of what I think an action is, because ultimately my goal today is very much not to play word games. Each human life is infinitely and incomparably valuable: priceless. Even by saying “this will kill X lives but save X+N”, you are assigning a price to the life. Infinity plus infinity is the same sized infinity.

Why am I going on so much about the value of humanity in a writing nominally about motivation?

Society today, modern capitalism more generally, the underpinnings of Protestantism15 even more broadly, and even Christianity itself16 to some extent fundamentally atomize the human experience. Going from widest to narrowest, the Church claims to teach that we are to see Christ in everyone, which is why we do good. And yet, that statement is based entirely on the Gospel passage where Christ says that when we die, we will be judged by how we treat those lesser than us. Christianity as a faith is fundamentally focused on death, and the death of the individual more than anything else. We cannot save any other soul, only our own, after all.

Protestantism takes this a step further. The Church emphasizes that all theology needs to be connected to those who came before, and that personal interpretation and experience matters far less than historic doctrine. Protestantism, by contrast, explicitly centers the personal and lived realities of its believers. Is there something far more empowering in the idea that you have your own independent relationship with the Divine?

Absolutely.

Does that same empowerment also fundamentally divorce you from your fellow human?

Absolutely.

Protestantism leads to Calvinism leads to prosperity gospel leads to modern capitalism. I do not know that it had to, but this is not a “for want of a horseshoe” story. It did, and we can see the effects of this everywhere we look.

In modern capitalism, a common critique is that everything has value entirely based on what monetary worth can be assigned to it. That is not actually entirely accurate though. After all, who assigns worth? What is money?

Again, I’m not trying to fall into wordplay.17

People will speak of “the market” or “consensus” as though either of these exist in actuality. There are not markets like there are humans. There is not consensus without humanity.

If everything has value only in monetary worth, then we must profane the sacred. We must say that there is a level of financial hardship past which it is better to let a child die. There are the countless stories of companies accepting that a number of people will die, knowing that the cost of a recall is greater than the expected value of payouts they will need to give to their grieving families. At a deeper level, though, it infects all discourse.

It is not worth pumping money into a child whose life expectancy measures in weeks, because those resources could be better spent elsewhere. There are a limited number of donor organs, so those who are less likely to abuse their bodies deserve what few there are more. We pump billions of dollars into machine learning, actively burning the earth and sea. People will argue against this, saying “it’s cheaper to just hire human labor.”

That is, everything in modern society is framed in costs and benefits. Society lionizes those who do whatever it takes to succeed. I alone matter.

In a sea of endless hordes, I alone have the spark of the Divine.

How does this relate to intrinsic motivation?18

Intrinsic motivation tells us that our actions are their own end. I want to be clear, this is not me making an argument right now, this is just me stating what the term means. When we make actions an end, we make humans, the only true ends, means. This is my argument.

When I went to the wikipedia page for motivation, I was shown an image of two soccer players. One is thinking about all the things that winning the game might bring him, and the other is simply focused on the love of the sport. No one will support the first person, and rightly so. Personal glory is fundamentally a hollow and empty motivation.

The second, however, is doing something far more insidious.

“I want to win this so that the cute person will notice me” still gives the cute person a sense of agency. “I want to win this so that I get the trophy” assumes, on some level, that an external agent determines what it means to win and values that.

“I want to play because I enjoy soccer,” on the other hand, completely ignores everyone around. Soccer is a team sport; it requires coaches and referees, teammates and opponents, space and someone to maintain it, equipment and people to make it. Playing the sport for its own sake is saying, on a fundamental level, that every single one of those people and objects exists solely for your pleasure.

When I play a song for the beauty of the music of the moment, I ignore my connection to the rest of humanity. The neighbor who doesn’t want to hear my music pumping, the energy that my speakers use, the disconnect of listening to a song alone, rather than live with my family: all of these are consequences that intrinsic actions ignore.

Rereading these last two paragraphs, even I find myself bristling slightly. Just because an end is directed, doesn’t mean that there are no other considerations. However, I ask: what value does our enjoyment have?

I am not asking as an economist, who might find the exact dollar amount, pain you would endure, or harm you would be willing to inflict as a function of some arbitrary metric. I ask legitimately.

I said it at the beginning of this draft, and I will reiterate it here: every human life is infinitely precious and priceless.

Anything divided by infinity is 0. Any time that we assign value to something in a way that gives humans a value, we are explicitly saying that the humans are not priceless. The value of anything compared to a human life is nothing.

Here one might make a very fair point: we do not live in a vacuum. If I use all of my antibiotics on a chronically ill elderly man, then we will not have that medicine for the sick child. I agree, but even that framing belies the issue: we see ourselves as fundamentally separate.

Humans have a value intrinsic to our very nature. Humans also, though, exist as a social creature. In a very real sense, there is no “you” and “me”.

Many philosophical traditions find their way to this truth. The Church has the idea that “all sin is social sin because we are one body.” Hinduism has the belief in karma: all actions resound into infinity. Buddhism teaches that the idea of “I” as a distinct entity is fundamentally foolish.

Even common sense teaches us this, when we stop to think.

We would condemn someone who drove through a children’s soccer game because they wanted to get to the parking lot across the field. I’ve seen many argue that this is our willingness to give up some of our own autonomy in order to enact order. I’d argue it’s the opposite. We only claim autonomy, not have it on its own.

A baby is dependent, utterly and totally, on those around it. Is that a better way for me to frame the argument, maybe?

Start with “there is no autonomy”, then go to “every action is, by its very nature, consequential”, which brings us to “not considering consequences is choosing to dehumanize”? That seems reasonable, on to draft 3.

Draft 1: 26 April 2025

One of the initial goals of this site was that, by having noted drafts with dates, I would be able to revisit old musings19 and add new drafts as my life changed or my views did. I’m still not sure how I feel about that concept, though I think that at the very least, the reminder that most of the time what I post here is a raw and unedited first draft serves me well when I want to cringe at the writing I do.20

Still, even if I was going to write new drafts of topics in the same url as the old, I don’t know if I would put this folly on top of the old one. In that post, I focused21 on my own internal versus external loci for motivation and why I thought that it was fine for me to have a mainly externalized locus of motivation. My goal today is somewhat different.

In one of the early posts of this iteration of the site22, I made comments about motivation. Why do we do things, and what not. I got really into the idea of autotelic motivation, doing things as their own ends.

And, in general, I find that I’m thinking more and more about the ways that we as a society really do treat everything as a means and nothing as an end. I don’t want that to be the case, and I’m finding myself aligning more and more with Catholic social morality23, which constantly rails against this treatment.

However, the Church does, in many ways, still direct our actions to have a purpose outside of themselves. There’s an image in C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce” that struck me the first time I read it and every time since. An artist is being given the chance to enter heaven, he just needs to remember the fact that his art started as a way to glorify G-d and only then became about the love of the art itself. Every time I think about it, I find a deep part of me recoiling from this thought.

I think part of it might be the Jewish morality that I’ve inherited. While the Christian goal is to bring people to heaven, the Jewish social mission is to make the world as heaven Catholics try to get to the Messiah, which Jews try to make a world fit for a Messiah. And so, the beauty of color and how it interfaces with light is good in an of itself.

This is a number of words to say that I don’t really know how I feel about motivation. So much of what I do has the clear end that it is a means for. I play guitar so that I can be ready for a friend’s wedding. I do try to do kindnesses in order to align myself more with the Divine Will.

And yet, as a friend’s mother pointed out recently, there’s something inherently selfish in her motivation to make people smile. She feels better when the people around her are happy,24 and so doing kindnesses benefits herself. Part of this disconnect has to do with the atomization of society, I more and more realize. When we see ourselves as independent agents, then helping someone else feels lessened if we benefit. If, instead, we see the web of interconnectedness and mutual obligation that we share with one another, then the benefit is in fact part of the help. I take antibiotics when I have infections, and I feed the hungry where they are.25

I’m wondering if this atomization idea can help me think about my own motivation. What does it mean to do something for its own sake?

I realize that I might just have a philosophical and epistemological framework which precludes autotelic motivation from being a thing. Platonists certainly wouldn’t believe in it, and while I don’t know how much I agree with the idea of a hidden realm of forms, I do still think that we can reflect deeper truths with shallow works.

Instrumental versus Intrinsic value was coined to describe a sociologist’s way of separating people’s reasons for doing good. To him,26 and many thinkers after, intrinsic motivation is fundamentally ridiculous as a concept. Trying to divorce an action from its consequences is not just an effort in absurdism, it is itself wrong.

Why, then, do we spend so much energy as a society trying to convince especially our youth about the inherent superiority of judging actions as being their own ends?

This could quickly spiral into a diatribe about how capitalism as it exists now is fundamentally incapable of thinking about the future, and so everything’s value is its value at this exact moment. It could also spiral into a commentary on the fact that treating things as their own ends closes us off from one another, reducing anyone we are with to mere instruments. Soccer, a prime example of what we are told to enjoy for its own sake, requires teammates and opponents, referees and coaches. If I do it solely for enjoyment, then the value of those around me is solely in how they can help me reach my aims.

Is society really so transactional that it has taken me until now to realize the fact that intrinsic motivation is itself a form of viewing the rest of the world as means rather than ends?

More so, why do I take issues with actions being ends but not people?

Well, as soon as I write that, I see the difference. I do fundamentally believe in the inherent value of all human life. A person has value by virtue of nothing more than the word vir applying.27 Actions, on the other hand, have value by how they affect the world around us.

Cool, let’s redraft this now that we know where we’re going.

Daily Notes

  1. Draft 1↩

  2. Draft 2↩

  3. Draft 3↩

  4. I yearn for inspiration and then when it comes it binds me tighter than any chain↩

  5. this is not the place for “fields are just consequences of information having a travel speed”, but wow do I wish it was↩

  6. see footnotes in one of the earlier drafts↩

  7. drug testing, etc.↩

  8. can you tell that I’ve circled around this for 4900 words already?↩

  9. oof time is ever sprinting onwards↩

  10. how’s that for a strong start? Legitimate q↩

  11. intellectually↩

  12. in the sense of my actions being actively guided↩

  13. I like the idea of treating belief and knowledge opposite of the standard usage, and might start trying to do so more. Knowledge must compel action, or else it is mere trivia. Belief should motivate action, but beliefs can be contradictory. Knowledge cannot contradict Knowledge, which means my worldview and every action I take is, by very nature of being an action I take, enacted by what I know. (oof this is going to be a whole series of follies itself isn’t it?)↩

  14. something something, horrors of war where generals send kids to die↩

  15. oof I do have to go here, but hate that this becomes attacking the faiths I don’t like↩

  16. there we go↩

  17. this is a reminder for myself to pull the reins back on the charging horse that is my thoughts right now↩

  18. oof this is winding. Three drafter day for sure↩

  19. as I thought of them at the time↩

  20. remember, don’t kill the cringe, kill the part of you that cringes↩

  21. in what little I can call the few rambling words a focus↩

  22. read: basically any time that I take more than a week or two off↩

  23. not that this is a bad thing, just that it’s going from “I trust the people who formulated it and it seems vaguely good” to “wow I think that even someone who absolutely despised the Church should agree with this stuff”↩

  24. as I would hope most everyone does↩

  25. aspirationally in both cases, of course↩

  26. based on my understanding of reading a single paragraph of a Wikipedia article↩

  27. no I am not being sexist here, just that hominue is not in the common parlance and I wanted to make the pun↩

  28. I don’t know why old measurements are speaking to me right now but↩

  29. yes, I’m aware there’s something intrinsically not sane about listening to audio at 3x speed while playing a fast paced action game.↩

  30. I forget what the conversion from cps to wpm is, but let’s double check.↩

  31. which is apparently standardized↩

  32. which feels weird, rifght??↩

  33. I forget if I mentioned that here, but I’m trying to get back into it, but slowly, and so edging in by setting vignettes in the broader world↩

On Fugue and Flow States

First Published: 2025 April 23

Draft 1

Today I’d like to explore the difference between fugue and flow. Flow states are apparently great, but a quick google search also tells me that ADHD and autism havers often have trouble differentiating flow from hyperfocus. I assume that I use fugue like they use hyperfocus, and even if neither explicit diagnosis applies to me, I think some of the experiences are shared.

One article seems to say that the difference is in intensity, where a flow state has you still aware of the outside world. However, the author then goes on to describe the difference in a cleaning example. The hyperfocused person will clean long past the normal level of cleanliness. It did have the great advice of only picking rest activities which are short term.1

It seems also as though the site is opposed to hyperfocus because it is directed towards something unhelpful, like youtube. Apparently I should set break times and follow the mandatory breaks.

Oh cool! Next article then says that there’s academic research claiming that the difference is all in framing.

So, now that we’ve done our small literature review, let’s get on to what I think about them.

Flow is something that’s allegedly really desireable. My family immediately fell in love with the concept, which I think is only in part because the originator of the concept is a professor at my parents’ alma mater. In general, it seems like I’ve been running into the term more and more often in the years since the pandemic took over.2 Many are now writing and speaking about how one consequence of our low focus world is that we are less and less able to fall into flow states.

And so, it’s interesting to me that states of fugue, or hyperfocus, depending on the nomenclature one uses, are considered negative while flow states are positive. There’s tons of literature3 on flow, and it’s been the object of a lot of research. Fugue, on the other hand, has a number of meanings. Most often, it refers to a very intricate and rigid musical form. However, it can also be used to refer to a state where one forgets who and where they are and sets out wandering. Finally, we have the definition I tend to imply, which is an almost dreamlike state of consciousness.

What do I mean by that?

When I am in the midst of a dream, I cannot tell you the passage of linear time. What few clocks I remember are never in sync with the real world.4 When I start working on something, I also lose track of time.

In the peak of my fuguing, It was difficult for someone to get my attention. For better and worse, I am now distractable enough that I can be broken from the task at hand.

When is it for the better?

I have many obligations in life, and being called to them is good. Sometimes my body has needs that I’m ignoring, and being forced out of the state makes me aware of the fact. And, finally, sometimes the fugue is not helpful.

Many can relate to the experience of scrolling for hours, not out of any real interest, but simply because that’s what’s happening. In what feels similar, I can fall down the hole of fixing issues of issues of issues. As an example, I think that I spent forty minutes one day trying to figure out how to download an unlisted tex package. Why?

It had a way of formatting a specific equation that was unique to it. Why did I need that?

I was trying to copy a derivation from a paper. Why was I doing that?

I was trying to see if my project could leverage some other mathematical concepts. Why?

Honestly at this point we just get to the perfectionism inherent to me.

So, I guess the moral here is that I will call it flow when it serves me and fugue when it does not. I have to imagine that there’s a connection between the fugue state and musical form, because it does truly feel like I would need to be in one to write one. Who can say, though?

Daily Notes

  1. such as spending time in the winter air↩

  2. It’s so strange to me that our book club existed before the pandemic, because it feels like it just started, even realizing that we haven’t done it in more than a calendar year. Anyways↩

  3. if you print it out, I assume that’s literally true↩

  4. even though I’m getting better at guessing the time when I wake up, which is weird↩

  5. Ah gotta love how effective reflection is↩

  6. sorry friend↩

Shapenote, Sacred Music, and the Second Vatican Council

First Published: 2025 April 22

Draft 2: 22 April 2025

One of my hotter liturgical takes is that we should not sing almost any hymns. The Church is clear that its preference is for, all else being equal, Gregorian chant over polyphony1 over other Catholic music over the sacred music of the region. I note, at least, that nowhere in there is the singing of songs which are only ever Lutheran.

I’ve long been a believer that intent matters, especially in art. The fact that we sing hymns written by Martin Luther, who is uncontroversially not a Catholic in good standing, is always ridiculous to me. Even when the hymns aren’t being written by active apostates2, they are still written, especially the older ones, by a group fundamentally opposed to the Church.

I’ve also, like the Church, long been a believer that ends do not justify means. We cannot effect an evil now in order to cause some future good. Hymnody is, at the very heart of its creation, evil.3

Many critique the Church for its art and beauty. Money spent on art, they argue, could be better spent on the needy. I agree with this take in some regards, though I do also absolutely agree with the argument that we should not have joyless existence. Also, much of the art being actively critiqued is old. The Church is not actively spending money on“at least much of. Preservation is its own thing, but I’m willing to say that preserving beauty is a worthwhile goal” the works, and selling them would only grant money once. More than that, though, the Church recognizes that when we see beauty, we are oriented towards Beauty. When we learn truth, we are oriented towards Truth. When we see light, we orient towards the Light of the World.

That is, having beautiful art, especially in the location where masses are held, is itself a way to help the congregation pray. Without getting into the debate about how literate the average person was in the age of Martin Luther, the church still taught that beauty is helpful, even and especially when it is hard to understand. Luther, among his many evils4, introduced hymnody because he did not believe that peasants would understand the beauty of counterpoint. Instead, he took popular drinking songs and set them to sacred text.5 Polyphony, in his eyes, was to be reserved for the elites.

Returning to the title of this folly, though, it is not enough to simply argue against hymnody.6 After all, I do not also argue in favor of Gregorian chant and polyphony.7 Why should we sing shapenote?

The Church is clear in the Second Vatican Council that the musical traditions from outside the Latin Church, especially in mission areas, are to be encouraged. America is not and has never been a Catholic country.8 More than that, the Church is in crisis. We need to bring the lost sheep back into the fold, and bring the people who never had a home with Mother Church in.

The sacred musics of the United States are shapenote and spiritual/gospel.9 There are a number of considerations I have when advocating for music. Our country’s long history of oppression towards the Black population, especially10 in regards to music, should not be ignored. I sing in primarily if not exclusively white choirs, and suggesting that we take the sacred music of a group that has been explicitly othered since before American was an identity feels complicated.11 Shapenote, though, is not a wholly or even supermajority Black genre.

Shapenote singing from every level is designed to make it easy for the congregation to join in. Even outside of that, every shapenote song that are in hymnals are incredibly popular amongst the people. The goal is to get the congregation singing and to make the non-Catholic feel called home.

I do not know any choirs that sing Gregorian chant correctly, and I know few that do polyphony well.12 All else is not equal.

Draft 1: 22 April 2025

Something I think about a lot is music. Something else I think a lot about is the place of music in the liturgy. In one of my recent attempts at a post13, I realized that song and prayer are intrinsically tied in my mind.

In thinking a little longer, I realize that there is also something almost contradictory in the way that I view music. On the one hand, I think that all music is, at least in part, a connection to the Divine. “The Lord of the Dance”, for all its apparent theological faults14, has always had a special place in my heart for that reason. From this general love of music, I think that it tracks that I hate the idea of banning any genre. I have friends whose parents would not let them listen to rock music growing up. It feels the same as any other form of censorship.15

In the document from the Second Vatican Council, Musicam Sacram, we hear the Church once again reaffirm its commitment to music and music in the liturgy. There have been any number of documents with at least some amount of Church authority behind them on how music should be performed in the Mass. I personally abhor Pope Saint Pius X’s tra le sollecitudini16, which is generally pointed to as the first modern Church writing on music. However, as the schismatic group implies, Pope St. Pius X has a devoted fan club. Anyways, not to get into the argument I’m having more and more with the normal Catholic part of me17 about so much of the things that we claim to be Church teachings actually being matters of rational inquiry, and therefore outside the purview of the Church, but I hate the disdain that practically drips from the document towards so called “popular music.”

Returning to Musicam Sacram, it is as far as I can tell, the last document from the Vatican that has the full weight of a Council behind it. There’s a question deep within me about the places where it disagrees with the Council of Trent on music, but this is also not the place for that. Throughout the document, it is very clear that the Church wants the congregation to sing. I’m just going to go through the easiest to skim ones to make a list before restarting.

From paragraph 4 we learn that any music composed for the liturgy is sacred, as well as any sacred popular music. Paragraph 5 reminds us that the liturgy is better when sung. Paragraph 7 gives the advice of what to pick when adding music: start with the most important, which is usually dialogue between the priest and the congregation.18 Paragraph 8 has the general Catholic take of “if you have a choice, pick the best singer, especially if it’s being recorded”.19 Paragraph 9 says that any sacred music can be acceptable in the Mass, and that the capabilities of the people must be taken into account.20

It cites Sacrosantum Concilium p 116 which itself cites p60 of itself. In 116 we get the notorious “other things being equal, it (Gregorian chant) should be given pride of place in liturgical services.” Now, I have many feelings about Gregorian chant, and having gone to a Seder recently, they are only amplified. As far as any scholarly source I have seen claims, Gregorian chant is meant to be sung at the cadence we would read the words. I have never once been in a Catholic Mass where I heard chant done at that clip.

More than that, Gregorian chant is fundamentally not the music that people know. Paragraph 30 of SC21 reminds us that the people should be encouraged to participate, especially through song. I’m going to quickly read through Chapter 6 of SC, since it also concerns sacred music.

Gotta love the opening, which says “The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art”22. It quickly reminds us that language choice is important, and I have many feelings about the people who say that the documents say more of the mass should still be in Latin. There is no effort to make the layperson understand Latin. From 114: “bishops and other pastors of souls must be at pains to ensure that, whenever the sacred action is to be celebrated with song, the whole body of the faithful may be able to contribute that active participation which is rightly theirs”. Composers are to be given special training, which I agree with, though don’t necessarily agree when it comes to the “especially boys” line. As far as I know, there are an equal number of Doctors of the Church who are men and women Only other notable things are the love of the pipe organ23 and the fact that, especially in mission countries, we need to make special efforts to match our sacred music to the traditions of the people we speak to.

I’ve seen so much writing about how the world is post-Christian, and so can’t help but feel like we need to take from the sacred traditions where we are, to get the people back.

Back to MS.

P11 reminds us that ornate music is not always better. P16: “One cannot find anything more religious and more joyful in sacred celebrations than a whole congregation expressing its faith and devotion in song.” In particular, 16B: “Through suitable instruction and practices, the people should be gradually led to a fuller—indeed, to a complete—participation in those parts of the singing which pertain to them.” That is, we should be making the choirs and people able to sing along with everything. Choirs should not sing alone.

Part C feels like it walks that back a little, but.

We are reminded that sacred silence is also important.24

18 once again reminds us that the Church needs to start teaching people to sing from a young age. Far less than half of my Catholic friends sing in Mass, almost all of whom because they do not think they are good enough at singing. If true, it is a gross failing on the side of Mother Church.

20 reminds us again that, even when you have a killer choir, you still have to let people in.

I find it fun that any choral voicing is acceptable, even “if there is a genuine case for it, of women only”. I see references to boys but not girls, which is a little confusing to me.

Now we get to the really fun parts: the order that music should be added! More important than the Kyrie, Gloria, Agnus Dei, Creed, Alleluia, or Psalm is that the Our Father be sung. The Gospel acclimation, entrance and exit rites, and prayer after communion are all also in this first degree. I don’t know whether the enumerated items within each degree are sorted, but even if not, the Alleluia is in the third degree, among the least important of what is to be sung. It is in the same place as the standard places hymns go.

The people cannot be totally excluded from the Ordinary of the mass.25 I feel like every choir director I know treats this as a “in general” not “in every case” kind of rule.26

Oh interesting, we should be, when singing Gregorian chant, be singing the original settings, not random ones from people.

The line I have always found the most important: “Adapting sacred music for those regions which possess a musical tradition of their own, especially mission areas,[42] will require a very specialized preparation by the experts. It will be a question in fact of how to harmonize the sense of the sacred with the spirit, traditions and characteristic expressions proper to each of these peoples. Those who work in this field should have a sufficient knowledge both of the liturgy and musical tradition of the Church, and of the language, popular songs and other characteristic expressions of the people for whose benefit they are working.”27 I do not think that America is generally considered a mission area, but we absolutely have a musical tradition outside of the Church. I’d argue America has two sacred music traditions unique to it: shapenote and gospel/spiritual.

Arguing that the primarily if not exclusively white choirs I sing in should sing more music which comes from Black oppression feels somewhat difficult, especially when remembering the way that so much of the popular music in America was actively stolen from Black composers and performers. However, shapenote singing lacks a lot of that cultural baggage. And, I’d argue just as importantly, every shapenote song in the hymnals I use is a song the congregation actively participates in. If the goal is to get the people to sing, we need to meet them where they are.

I find paragraph 63 fascinating. What does it mean for an instrument to only be appropriate for secular usage? Is not the great mission to go and make all Catholic?

67 reminds us that improv is cool and we should do it more.

Alrighty, let’s restart.

Daily Notes

  1. especially from the original polyphonic era↩

  2. ooh gotta love a good word↩

  3. hmm I’m not feeling laid back today, am I?↩

  4. he was incredibly Jew hating, even for people at the time↩

  5. and yes, I do get incredibly upset when anyone who advocates the use of hymns in Mass complains about music being too secular in its origins↩

  6. though I do absolutely think we should be railing more against it. None of the ancestors I can point to would have sung them, so far as I know. It is just inarguably not a part of my own musical history↩

  7. that’s a bit of a lie, I do generally think that polyphony is fun. I’m generally opposed to choral music at mass, though, but if we’re going to do it, we should at least do it right. Also, again, polyphony is fun↩

  8. the fact that the highest ranking nominal Catholics in the government were actively and publicly fighting with the Holy Father is its own thing↩

  9. I’m not going to argue for whether the two are one genre or two.↩

  10. only because I’m talking music here↩

  11. why yes, I do also have feelings about all the Jewish tunes we stole↩

  12. yes, I do have a major chip on my shoulder about early music, how did you know?↩

  13. look at that gotcha moment↩

  14. I personally cannot tell where it blames all Jewish people for killing Christ, but I must defer to the bishopric (is that the word?, ah episcopacy)↩

  15. that is, I think that the government shouldn’t be allowed to and that in general parents shouldn’t↩

  16. which, for some reason, is not available in English on the Vatican’s site↩

  17. read: the parts of me that don’t overthink everything and generally tries to go with the flow↩

  18. i.e. we should all be singing the Our Father more often↩

  19. side note: love that they put that so early on in the document↩

  20. hold on to this one, we’ll get back to shapenote↩

  21. I will use abbreviations as I see fit↩

  22. p112↩

  23. which is fine, in my eyes↩

  24. need to muse about how silence is not the default state of music, but static.↩

  25. P34↩

  26. i promise I’m not writing this to subtweet (rip) my current or any prior directors, I just want to get my thoughts on the page↩

  27. 61↩

  28. potentially↩

  29. two am is morning right?↩

  30. hmm that’s not a full meal is it?↩

  31. wild, can I just say. It feels very like 2020s aesthetic and then I read the content and it’s fresh out of the mid 1900s↩

On Succeeding at Creating

First Published: 2025 April 17

Draft 2: 17 April 2025

In a wondrous display of kismet, for my break I started reading what I had thought was one of the very easy books of science I had checked out. Instead, it was1 a collection of essays from top scientists and mathematicians writing against reductionism. I’m struggling to articulate exactly what about that helped me with the sense of creating, but I think that I will do better here.

Science is, depending on the activity, a creative endeavor. There is minimal creativity involved in measuring a molecule, sure, but the knowledge that gives means that new questions can be asked. And, of course, measuring may not be so simple.

Einstein famously derided the parts of his relativity that suggested the existence of black holes.2 It is now seen as one of the greater proofs of general relativity. Without getting into the quagmire I have with regards to knowledge, teaching, and revelation, I think that there is something to be said for the fact that we are terrible judges of ourselves.

Having written that line, I now realize that it sums up my feelings on succeeding at creating. I cannot know how something I craft will change the world, both because the future is unknowable and also because I am too close to it. Einstein saw errors when his math showed black holes; I know that there are other instances, but again, my mind runs dry.

So, I guess that what I should consider when judging the success or failure of anything I create is less whether the audience I intended is receptive to it, and more whether what I created can inspire something new. General relativity is a successful creation not in spite of its unexpected consequences, but in fact because of it. If what I make causes no new questions, leads to no new joy or inspiration, then it is a failure.

I think that is an answer I can accept. To succeed at creation is to create something which catalyzes another creation.

Catalysts are themselves something interesting that I should consider talking about at another time. They seem so strange, because they neither destabilize the starting material nor stabilize the product, nor even provide energy directly to a reaction. Instead, they simply make the changes easier to occur. Where does the effort to change go?3

If life is a chemical system, then the energy needed to overcome inertia and move to an easier path should go somewhere itself. To succeed at creating something, somehow that must make creation easier in a general sense. If ideas are in the ether, a plane separate from our own, is each act of creation a cracking of the window separating the two?

Draft 1: 17 April 2025

The goal of today’s folly is to figure out what, exactly, it means to me to be successful at a creative endeavor. A better question might be why I think that it’s important to succeed, but I don’t really think so. After all, success just means accomplishing goals. There should be a goal behind the act of creation, at least in my mind. Now that I’m ok with the fact that I’m going to be thinking of creation as an endeavor one can succeed or fail at, let’s think about what that means.

In this society, success is incredibly easy to define: fame. Some might argue for wealth, and I wouldn’t fight them on that point4, but it would not be my personal truth. So, should I judge the success of something I create based on how famous it makes me, or at the very least how much it improves my bank account?

No.

That’s an easy enough answer. I don’t want my life to be commodified. The harder question is whether or not I do judge success from that metric.

There is also the question of the professional creative. If my income comes5 from painting, then the world’s willingness to pay for a painting is a metric of its success. Of course, that then means that we run into the locus of control issue. It’s a famous and well known truth that very few artists are appreciated in their time. I don’t think that it’s reasonable to say that a work suddenly became successful hundreds of years after its makers death because someone decided to spend lifetimes of an average worker’s income on it.

I guess what I’m trying to play with here is the idea of intent. That is, is success defined as how well you accomplished what you set out to accomplish?

What if you have multiple goals? What if you didn’t think about what every goal was at the beginning of the project? What if your goals change?

So, if I don’t think that we should judge success from external metrics and doubt our ability to judge it fairly from internal ones, where does that leave us? I’m not entirely sure. In the initial formulation for this folly, I was thinking about audience reception, how well your message was conveyed to the audience, and stuff of that nature. However, even just a little work in thinking shows me how all metrics fall short.

What are some ways that I could look at a work and judge it a success? Finishing something is a form of success all its own. Then again, what does it mean to finish a project?

If I make something for someone and they like it, is it a success? If they don’t like anything on the day I gave it to them, but on a normal day they would, is that a success? If I make something perfectly according to a template but the receiver hates the template, would that be a success?

I don’t know if my mind is working slower than normal, but I cannot seem to come up with answers, only more questions. Perhaps it is something of a self fulfilling prophecy: I said that this site was full of follies and now find myself unable to say anything of meaning.

In specific terms, did I succeed with this post?

I wrote it, which is one of my goals, and it will be finished soon, which is a form of success. I explored how I felt, even if only lightly. I tried to connect my new thoughts to my future actions, and I think that I did a decent job there.

Is there perhaps just minimal utility to judging success of an endeavor? Nearly everything I have done which felt judged or as a success thing was inherently comparative. Comparison does nothing to the work except harm it.6

A professor emeritus told me that the goal of every conversation should be setting up the possibility of a future conversation. So, is the success of a creative endeavor in how much it orients you to continue creating? We are not lone figures, though; is the success of creation how much it net orients the world to that craft? No exercise exists in isolation; is success how much it orients the world to creation?

What does it even mean to create?

I cannot enact any cause without the sum of the forces which have acted on me, regardless of how indirect. I cannot create any new energy,7 so is everything I do just rearranging? When I make music, it dies away seconds after I finish. What does it mean to create something so ephemeral?

Ozymandus reminds us that in the eyes of even just the human race, anything about us becomes ephemera.

Let’s see if we can’t reign this energy in. I don’t know about another draft, but at the very least I want to see what stepping away for a bit does for me. I think that it helps me to take time away from writing, and I have another hour before my scheduled time comes to an end.

Daily Notes

  1. is?↩

  2. thanks freeman dyson for that fact just now↩

  3. not in a literal, physical sense, in the metaphorical. I have faith that I could, if so desired, map energy flows↩

  4. hm I must be hungry↩

  5. oh, income like in and come, like it comes in↩

  6. it can help with creation of a future work, but that’s not the question↩

  7. matter is questionable, because of the whole interconversion of matter to energy↩

  8. which is part of why I’m worrying I might be too comfortable with silence↩

On What I Call This Writing

First Published: 2025 April 16

Draft 2: 16 April 2025

Immediately after posting the first draft, one of my readers brainstormed some ideas with me, so I’m going to run through all of them and say what I think of them.

Explorations. I don’t really love this one, because I don’t think of this site as being focused around discovery, which I consider a large part of exploration. It also has a weird feeling associated when I think of describing it to others. Sadly, I think reflections has this one beat.

Expressions. I like expressions as a word, and there is the whole fun bit about like genes get expressed, emotions get expressed, etc. that I’m having trouble connecting to right now. In terms of relating it to these writings, though, I think that it feels a little off. I think that I want to think of this as a form of expression, rather than expression itself.1

Impressions. I do so much love the inner outer divide. There could be something fun about having impressions and expressions as the concept for what I write, because it does point out that I, rightly, am not just responding to material (impression) but that the response itself motivates action (expression). However, “want to read my expressions and impressions” feels wrong, and more importantly, ordering them would cause me so much pain.

Screaming into the void. I think that I’ve made comments here about my writing going into the void when I felt like no one read. There’s something kind of fun about asking someone if they’ve read my screams.2 However, reading screams parses badly to me.

Sending into the ether. In the post I’m still working on, I talk about the ether in what I understand to be a premodern sense. Since I haven’t finished it yet, though, I don’t think that it would be good for me to attach the label just yet.

Messages. A message is a unit of information, which most of the dictionaries describe as short. While that may have been historically accurate to me, these writings3 are consistently getting into the multiple thousand words. That is, over the course of a month, I am approaching the length of a full novel.4,5 I have trouble calling 4 percent of a novel a short unit of information. I am also not going to address whether there is, in fact, information in these digital pages.

Page is an interesting option.6 I like that it refers to both a leaf in a book as well as an errandboy. Then again, I don’t know quite what that means, and so will move on from it as well.

Scripts.7 There’s the joke that the greatest perk of a Ph.D. is that any time a package arrives, you get to say “ah, just what the doctor ordered.” Scripts also imply, at least to me, the exact font or hand that people write in. It’s long been known and believed8 that handwriting is informative. I also cannot help but feel like the tone of my writing says things about me.9 Scripts also have the connection to actors, and in general have some sort of a prescriptive10 element to them. I fear and love the idea that what exists here effects change on the world.

Scripts lack a little bit of immediate ease in understanding, though. While musings and essays and even reflections seem like something I could say to a stranger and expect them to parse my meaning, I have to imagine that if someone heard I wrote a script a day that I was either a really slow pharmacist or an incredibly prolific stagewriter. Still, all words only get meaning in as much as they are used, and so scripts are definitely up there.

On a similar note, manuscript.11 Manuscripts, as the breakdown of its parts might imply, are generally implied to be hand written. However, there is an argument to be made for this work as not being printed, and therefor12 belonging as one, along with the idea that the original version is a manuscript. This site is certainly the original version of most of these thoughts in my mind, though the fact that there are drafts might make that untrue in some valid and fundamental sense. After all, a draft is, by its very meaning, derivative.13

Opus and opera.14 I mean these are, by most definitions, works. However, I think that, again, people might misunderstand when they say I add to my opera daily. I also really hate that we call musical pieces by work and then number, even if I can’t quite justify why. I think that it has something to do with the fact that they’re both functionally just numbering schemes, and there doesn’t seem to be consistent which is the super and sub heading.

Works15. I do kind of love this. “look at what I have wrought”, I might say.16 However, this is not really labor, in most senses of the word. I receive no compensation, and I do not struggle to do this.17 It also feels intellectually dishonest, because I do still associate work with labor with physical exertion. That’s something to consider.

Labors18. I love this, because writings are often described as children, the output of labor in the childrearing sense is a child, and it hearkens to epic times. However, laborious is what we turn the word into, and I don’t really love that, because I want this writing to remain fun. Labors of love are, after all, labors.

Folios.19 Folio can mean a few interrelated things, which is great, because what’s one more. It does generally imply that the document is folded, though, and there aren’t any folds in digital scrolling. It also comes from the Latin for leaf, and I do like thinking of my writing as life-oriented, just like leaves. I think this might be the current winner, because it’s also a fun word to say.

Paper.20 White papers are a common way to quickly represent information, often in an informal context. In general, I think that no one really has issues abstracting papers into something digital, though I feel like most still imply some sort of pagination in a printer friendly way. It also feels somewhat confusing to the eavesdropper, since I exist near academia. Still, another close one.

Illuminations.21 Wow I’m really digging deep into book lore. I would like to think that my writings shine light on something, but it feels pretentious to assume that they would. In an ideal world, I would be writing illuminations, but that does not mean I would refer to them as such.

Incunable or cradle. The first refers to early printings in England, and the second is the English of the term. Honestly, I do kind of like calling this a cradle. This is a place for new ideas to be birthed, or at least cared for. What does that make each writing, though? Or, is each writing a cradle, and the overall effect is the nursery? I don’t know if I like cradle, because it feels too abstract. Incunable is fun, though, and does refer to the fact that22 these writings are the beginnings of my career. It’s a little difficult for me to say and spell though.

Type. Eh, doesn’t resonate. Moving on.

Parchment. I do love the idea of taking a word which has a very specific (if often misused) meaning and using it intentionally in a different context. Also, I do kind of love the visceral nature of parchment. Something about turning an animal into the substrate for ideas resonates within a deep part of me. Parchment is winning out for now, I guess.

Vellum is indistinguishable from parchment, and so modern scholars use the term membrane. Ooh membrane is almost better. It points out that there is an inherent barrier, both between my mind and the keys, but also between the words and the reader. Still, both are again a little too obscure.23

Returning to the actual list, we have letters. This makes me think of the biblical24 books, which are at least somewhat public facing, and generally directed towards an explicit end. That’s true here. Letters are winning.

Characters is where my mind went from letters, since I do find it strange that we have a word which refers to both the individual glyph and the string of them together. Character, number, and glyph, however, are all a little too far from common usage for my tastes.

Writing glyphs just now made me think of the word arcana, and its singular arcanum.25 I would argue that this is specialized, and accessible only to a select few. I do like “I’m working on my arcane website”, and I like thinking of the writings as self contained.

Arcana brings me to esoterica and eldritch.26 Esoterica is a great word, and generally refers to the impractical or at least obscure. Obscura, though, implies some level of intentional obscurement. Eldritch originally comes from elf, and is therefore bad. Esoterica is a fun winner right now, though there isn’t a singular form of the word, I don’t think? I am ok referring to my work each day as an esoteric, though.

From esoteric, one can easily move to follies.27 I feel like I remember watching a show called follies as a child, and I have to assume it was looney tunes, giving an inverse Nimrod effect.28 It feels a little self denigrating to refer to these works as foolish, though it isn’t necessarily inaccurate. Time spent here, after all, is time not spent elsewhere.

Email. Eh, it’s accurate but.

Moving to the more abstract, I have yarns, spilled ink, thread, and stitch. Spilled ink is a fun one, but might be better as the title for the blog than a specific post. It feels strange at a deep level to message someone “what’d you think of my latest spilled ink?”

Rants or Ragings both imply more anger than I want to bring.

Echoes could be fun, but feel too abstract.

My mind, like the well it is, has run dry now, and so I present a list of the remaining options so one might peruse at their leisure.

Draft 1

I don’t know what to refer to these writings as.

The obvious answer is to call it a blog, but since blog comes from web log, meaning a log on the internet, I’m not sure that it’s the best term. After all, these posts are, at least hopefully, less a factual recounting of elapsed time and more a series of explorations into ideas.

My father, who I copy so much of this site from, calls his writings musings. Trawling through his site, I eventually saw that, as I see in the early posts, he initially called the posts essays. A commenter pointed out that not all of his posts are, technically speaking, essays.29 Since he frequently refers to his muse in the writings, calling the writings musings became a next step. As far as I can tell, that’s the extent of his reasoning.30 To muse is to contemplate or think deeply, and so there’s something to be said for the idea that, if I am thinking deeply, then I am musing.

Essay, being his initial title, is another way to refer to what I’m writing. This has the benefit of sounding a lot more pretentious31. It comes from the French for “to attempt”, and initially were32 used as a way to “attempt” to put thoughts into writing.33 I don’t really know if this is so much about me attempting to put thoughts into writing as it is developing thoughts through writing, but it’s still something to consider.

Post is another easy option, since it’s sort of the default thing that most social media34 uses. It, as far as I can guess and tell from three seconds of research, refers to the fact that when you wanted to distribute information broadly,35 you could affix writing to a physical post. I don’t love it, and I think that most of it is just that I don’t like the way that the word feels in my mouth. It’s also vague and not impressive sounding, so that doesn’t help its case.

Experiments could be a fun name, especially since I am a scientist. I’m experimenting to figure out answers, even if I’m not using the classical scientific method. That just feels overly pretentious though.

Attempts?

Let’s see how that feels, “in today’s attempt, I want to think about how I feel about”. I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it enough to be comfortable forcing those in my life to accept it as part of my idiolect.36

Interestingly, it appears that the Latin word for “to try”37 comes from the word for either stretching or having. I’m going to guess it’s the grasping one. So, how do I feel about words like grasp or containing? Eh.

If we return to musing, we get contemplations and reflections. My word processor doesn’t like making contemplation plural, so reflections is probably good. There’s an argument to be made that I am not reflecting, I’m emitting,38 since the information almost always basically goes out, rather than going in both directions. Still, it is about looking for the after effects of thoughts that I’ve had and encountered. In that regard, ripples could be good.39 I’m reading a book right now which says fields are just a consequence of information having a limited speed. I don’t know how that relates here, though.

I think that I’m happiest with reflections for now, even as I solicit more feedback.

Post Script:

Unlike my father, I do not feel the need to dedicate part of the naming to rants, because few enough of my writings are based in anger

Daily Notes

  1. yeah that resonates↩

  2. yes, I do ask my friends if they’ve read my blog, and no, I do not feel ashamed of that fact↩

  3. no I will not let them be called writings at the end, because that feels wrong. Scripts? Maybe, I’ll consider that one next↩

  4. based on NaNoWriMo standards.↩

  5. oh, I wonder if this might be part of why I’m struggling to write a paper↩

  6. new while writing here↩

  7. new while writing here↩

  8. depending on which side of the debate you fall under↩

  9. hopefully complimentary, though I don’t know if that is always true↩

  10. wow how have I never noticed that prescriptive is root word script↩

  11. new while writing here↩

  12. oh, journaling isn’t a word but therefor is??↩

  13. and no, I will not be entertaining the idea of any calculus based names↩

  14. new while writing here↩

  15. new here↩

  16. wild, it’s the past tense generally of work↩

  17. most of the time↩

  18. new here while writing↩

  19. new here↩

  20. new here↩

  21. new here↩

  22. hopefully↩

  23. these have all been new↩

  24. does bible really just mean books? yes. I hate language↩

  25. new here↩

  26. both new here↩

  27. new here↩

  28. Nimrod is a mighty hunter in the Bible↩

  29. I don’t know if I agree with that commenter, but, lacking context, I’ll trust taht the common usage at least might differ↩

  30. is this bait to see if he still reads this? maybe↩

  31. for example, “Oh, yeah, I’m working on a series of essays” versus “Oh, yeah, I have a blog”↩

  32. nominally, at least↩

  33. it was here I took a forced three hour break↩

  34. I hate that we’ve turned this plural into both the plural and singular↩

  35. I really hope that broadside comes from this and not vice versa↩

  36. which is, unfortunately, a big detterent I realize upon writing that↩

  37. tentare, though interestingly, seems like Wikipedia lists words and forms from first person singular, not infinitive, weird.↩

  38. don’t boo me↩

  39. waves? currents?↩

  40. laying? I guess in this case either way works because I can act on myself or just act↩

  41. read: the numbers disagreed depending on the system I used↩

  42. fixed point arithmetic (feels like it should be arithmatic because mat is math right?) might be useful, but I refuse on principle↩

  43. that should not be next year, ew↩

  44. honestly, a shocking amount. I think that I can write three full pages↩

On Mastery

First Published: 2025 April 15

Draft 2: 2025 April 15

This post comes with four goals: explaining why I like the “four stages of competence” model of mastery, explaining how they work, justifying the utility1 of the model, and reflecting on ways that I can better incorporate it into my life. One thing I realized while writing the last draft is that I think of each skill as consisting of two elements: the result and the method. When strumming a guitar, for instance, there is both the way that the pick2 needs to move up and down the strings and also the way that your entire body moves to do make the pick move like that. Both are important to mastery, but mean very different things, and in my experience, at least, do not develop at the same pace. Pedagogically, I think that many explicitly teach a “bad” initial method, because the perfect efficiency and smoothness of an expert require so many small systems working in tandem. By breaking that down into the parts, you lay the groundwork for becoming skilled, not just when looking at the final product, but also when watching.

Why do I like the four levels of mastery? First, it has my favorite of things: binary options where you go through each combination. A learner progresses through all four combinations of incompetence versus competence and unconscious versus consciousness. Second, it only flips one sign at a time: a learner is unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, consciously competent, and finally unconsciously competent. Third, it has the nice feature of using different negations for the two words, meaning that one could, in theory, abbreviate it as ui, ci, cc, and uc. Finally, it’s generally easy for others to understand. Unlike the other mental models I use to guide my life, the four stages tend to be relatively simple for people to immediately grasp, as soon as I tell them what the stages are.

So, how does one go through them? At first, you do not know that you do not know a skill. Imagine cutting an onion for stew. Before learning that professional chefs cut their onions into completely precise squares of a given size, I at least just kind of cut the onion into some random size. I had no clue that there was a benefit to perfectly even pieces.3 The result portion of the skill is far easier to progress out of this stage than the process, as one simply requires noticing what went wrong after the fact, while the other requires observation during the skill.

As you realize that your onions are not perfect little 4 millimeter chunks, you move into the conscious incompetence stage. Here, you know what you need to do, but cannot make it happen. When watching a chef, you might also notice that they hold and move the knife differently than you. As you try to model that behavior, the process portion can move here as well.

When you can finally get those perfect little dices, but it takes painstaking effort, you’ve moved into conscious competence. Someone calling your name while you cut makes you create larger chunks, but as long as you ignore it, you’re fine. In this stage, while you focus, you can move the knife at a rapid and smooth clip, but only while you focus on it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is incredibly difficult to get both portions of a skill to this point at the same time.

I liken it to learning piano. I can play the left hand of a piano decently,4 and the right hand as well. Playing both at once, however, results in my brain moving in far too many directions.

It is also regression into this stage that causes players to freeze, such as when taking free point shots or kicking field goals.

When watching the TV chef, they can chat while blazing through pounds of onions. This is because they have reached that final stage of mastery: unconscious competence. You do not need to think of the skill and stages to achieve it, you just do it.

I find that I tend to need to bring either the method or result to this stage before I can get the other to conscious competence. In general, most people I’ve seen suggest that you bring results up first, because, unsurprisingly, most people care about results.

Now, then, why should you use this model? How is it useful?

I find it useful, because it reminds me that I will obviously be bad at a skill. Also, the conscious competence phase is so painful for so many people, because it is when you finally realize just how terrible you are. Because I can now point to that not just as a necessary component of learning, but an active step forward, it becomes far more motivating. Rather than evidence that I have no skill, my failures become evidence that I am finally able to start learning.

It also lets me know when I can stop working on a skill. When entering that last stage of mastery, it can become hard to focus on the skill in question, which can make progress stall. After all, the whole point of it is that the skill becomes unconscious. Conscious effort is what creates growth.

So, when I find myself zoning out while practicing, I find it useful to take a look at the result. If it ends up looking like what I want, then I tend to trust that I have the skill at the level that I want it. Therefore, my time can be spent working to develop something new.

I should really do that more often, which is how this can help me in the future.

Draft 1: 2025 April 15

I have N goals here today.5 First, I want to explain why I really like the “four stages of competence” model of mastery. Second, I want to explain what each form means, both in the abstract and in the specific in my lived experience. Third, I want to explain why this framework is useful.6 And finally, I want to reflect on how I can be more conscious7 about the framework

I like the four stages of competence model of mastery in large part because it does my favorite thing in lists: create a set of binaries and then go through each combination. In this case, the two binaries are unconscious versus conscious and competence versus incompetence. The method also has the nice thing of the different levels shifting a single vector direction in the matrix at a time.

As much as I love the method for the way that it functions linguistically, I do also like it for the way that it helps me understand my experiences, but that’s the third subsection. I also like the method for the fact that it is relatively simple to understand. Much as8 I love other mental models that I use, many of them require a fair level of explanation. The names of the four levels themselves are usually enough to get people to understand what they mean.

So, what are the four stages of competence or mastery, and what do they mean?9

First comes unconscious incompetence.10 In this stage, you don’t know what you don’t know. This is the default state of humanity towards any task. Before I pick up a violin, I have no idea what, if anything, it means to play it well.

Even once starting, however, this stage does not immediately disappear. The first few days of playing a violin, I may be aware of some of the issues, but be missing bigger picture problems or other small areas. It’s for this reason that so many people recommend finding a teacher for a new skill, because they can help you move out of this stage as quickly as possible.

When you finally internalize the many things you need to do in order to be good at a skill, you have moved to what can be the most painful and disheartening part of learning a skill: conscious incompetence. In this stage, you are aware of the many things that you do wrong, and nonetheless are unable to perform the task. When learning to dice an onion in a semi-professional manner, for instance, you might know that you need to make cuts every centimeter exactly. Knowing that this will result in perfect squares, however, does not suddenly grant you the muscle control and focus needed to move your hand exactly enough.

In the second half of this stage11, you can cut the onion into perfect little squares. However, when watching a professional chef, it still seems as though you are moving at the most glacial of paces. You can do the action, but not with the speed needed to call yourself skilled.

As your speed slowly increases, you slowly shift into the third stage, conscious competence. In this stage, you can cut the onion quickly and precisely, but it takes significant concentration. If you let your concentration slip, then, even if your pace remains the same, your cuts become less even.12 Or, your cuts are great, but as your concentration wanes, so too does your pace.

With hundreds of pounds of onions cut, you finally move into the true mastery of a skill: unconscious competence. At this point, you are able to just dice an onion. It ceases to be a set of instructions and starts to be a single task in itself. Professional chefs who can chat along with someone while blazing through onions demonstrate this perfectly.

This is, of course, also a dangerous place to find yourself as a teacher. When you have fully internalized the motions and methods for any skill, it can be incredibly easy to forget any single part of them. It can be just as easy to forget even more. A way that many computer science professors love to point this out is to have someone explain how to tie your shoes, without using any physical motions. It’s shockingly difficult, especially if you haven’t had reason to attempt to do so in a long time.

Since I realized that I want to break skills into two kinds (see footnotes), I’m going to restart here.

Draft 0: Meta Rambling about the Place

I’m realizing more and more that I very much have a method for how these blog posts are written. I start with a story that’s only related to the premise of the post by virtue of me making it so, and then connect it to what I actually want to talk about. With that in mind, today I think that I want to try just jumping into the content, rather than finding my way to it.13

I don’t know where I first heard it, but I’ve really liked the idea that there are four levels of mastery: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. A quick search seems to imply it was invented at a business school in 196014, and that does kind of track with the framing. My goal here is to do two things15

Daily Notes

  1. how do you, dear reader, use utility and usefulness differently? The first feels more like something I do, while the second is the possibility? I’m not sure though, that feels unsatisfying↩

  2. plectrum, if you need to feel fancy↩

  3. though, of course, I now know that there’s a benefit to cutting into non-even pieces, but that’s a conversation for another time↩

  4. in this example↩

  5. I tend to start with a number, realize the number was wrong, and then change to N and back to the final number, which somehow is often the initial number↩

  6. how is this different than why I like it? You’ll see↩

  7. or, ideally, unconsciously competent /s↩

  8. wow look at me not using As much as twice in the same paragraph↩

  9. yes, I realize that directly above this I said that the levels were self explanatory. I like putting words down, though, because the site I use rewards me for doing so↩

  10. Oh, I do also love that it uses two different negation forms, because then you can shorten to un/in, /in, /, un/↩

  11. yes, I do subdivide the levels of incompetence, because I find that a helpful division. I don’t know if mechanical and facility (ease? speed? smoothness?) is a good division for all four stages, but so far it sure has been↩

  12. hmm how do I do ease versus mechanical here? Physical process of doing the skill and fluidity! There it is, so then each skill can be broken, not just into what it is, but into mechanical and fluidic (I think that would be the right form of the word). To get through the stages, you need to be able to do both at the appropriate level, and they can be at different stages! Aha↩

  13. so, ignore this paragraph, basically↩

  14. somewhat surprisingly, “four levels of mastery” popped it up quickly, though the actual article on Wikipedia calls it the four stages of competence, which makes more sense.↩

  15. I think that starting with “goal of post is” might make it better?↩

  16. because I trimmed it↩

  17. read: I felt really guilty spending an hour this morning trying out the new inks that I got with my writing buddy.↩

  18. leftover curry rice↩

  19. which should really happen only after I finish all of these inks↩

Some Writing Advice

First Published: 2025 April 14

Draft 1

I’ve written more than a few posts here about writing. Having just skimmed a few of them, it is really interesting to see the way that my own writing has developed in the years that I’ve been writing this blog. But, more importantly, I’ve realized that I have internalized a lot of writing advice that I find helpful at different times and places. Since I’m being asked about advice for writing more lately, an also because I’m writing more, it feels like it would be good to get it al down in one place. After all, extended memory is far better for me.

There are a variety of ways I could structure the advice, depending on whether my goal is prose or being used as a quick reference. If I wanted it to be reference, a list of some sort is probably the ideal. However, I think that part of what’s important is also taking time, and not everything needs to be optimized for time efficiency. With that in mind, I’ll be doing it as flowing prose.

It’s hard for me to say what the most important piece of writing advice I have received or could give is. It does depend a lot on what the barrier to writing is. In general, I tend to hear that the biggest problem people have is starting, and so in general, advice on starting is the best.

More or less every book of prose advice I’ve read reminds its readers that no writing comes forth perfect from the pen or mind of a writer.1 This is similar to the advice that nearly every doctoral student needs to be told at least once, though slightly different, “the greatest enemy of goodness is perfection.” That is, the idea that what we put on the page needs to be perfect can and often does mean that we are stuck in a hell of our own creation, unable to get anything on the page. And so, the first piece of advice is to remember that you cannot revise an empty page. Closely related, any writing is better than no writing.

I hope it’s clear why these two are so essential. In more or less every situation where I find myself in need of writing, having literally anything on a page is preferable to having a blank page. I can think of a few places where it is not true, but even those situations, writing still needs to be produced eventually.

However, knowing that the writing needs to be done might not be enough to silence the voice in one’s head assuring that the words we write will never be good enough. Different authors use different metaphors, but most involve consciously acknowledging2 the inner critic we have, and then moving past it. For some, this means putting the critic in a jail cell. For others, it involves killing the editor. In all cases, though, the advice can be boiled down to an acceptance that the writing we produce will not be good.

I’ve seen the extreme version of this advice from a writer I follow on social media. Not only should you accept that the writing will be bad, they say, you should explicitly write at the top of the document that you are intentionally writing something bad. Then, if the writing that you produce ends up being terrible, you were right. If, as it turns out, the writing was fine, then you have ended up with what was ultimately the goal.

The next piece of crucial writing advice moves past the specific project, and into the advice of becoming a better writer more generally. As I talked about the other day, there’s something to be said for making sure that you want to be the kind of person who has a specific hobby. If you want to be a writer, it is important to write. And so, a great piece of advice for being able to write better is simply to write more.

I know that there’s this idea ingrained in so many of us3 that we practice like we play. That is, mediocre practice results in poor habits and therefore poor final results. To some extent, I think that is true. If you never put forth effort on a drill, you’re likely to not be able to put forth effort in the real situation. However, I think that, especially for creative tasks, it is important to remember what it means to have good practice.

There’s an XKCD4 about this very concept. Simply by writing more, you improve the parts of you that write. If you text your friend how you are feeling, you get better in touch with describing emotion. If you text your friend what you ate for dinner, you get better at conveying emotion through narrative, narrative, and descriptive writing. And so, the essential piece of writing advice is, quite simply, write more. Try some dumb writing prompt, rant about the dumbest movie you were forced to watch, pen the overly sentimental and soppy5 love note that you could never in a million years actually send to the object of your desires.

Close to this, most advice on prose will also focus on the importance of consuming media as well. Top athletes point out the same. To improve at a craft, it is often very helpful to not just practice, but to also watch those who are good at what they do. So, if there’s a genre or area you want to write in, reading in that area will help.6

Moving from the broad back to the specific, structuring longer documents, especially longer stories, is often difficult. I’ve seen a variety of advices, which are really specific to the kind of writer that someone is. However, regardless of how much or little one enjoys planning books, there are likely to be scenes which are a struggle to think about. I’ve seen the advice of planning books as though they are road trips. That is, it’s often good to simply know that you need to go from point to another without thinking about the exact path you may use. The path can be figured out later on. I’ve also seen the advice of starting from the very end of the book and working backwards. I hear that it makes the entire book much more fun, because you know exactly what you are working towards.

A piece of writing advice I think I saw from Ernest Hemmingway was to intentionally stop writing before all the words are gone. In doing so, you both avoid burn out and start to train your brain to want to write more often, because leaving desires frustrated is a great way to increase desire. It’s closely related to another piece, which is that it’s essential to also avoid burnout. While it may feel bad to write, sometimes that’s just initial activation. Different authors set different thresholds, but most will say that, if after 500 words, it still feels bad, simply give up on writing for then.

And almost finally, it’s often recommended, especially when editing and revising, to try your best to put yourself in the mind of the character. Do they react to stimuli the way that they should? If not, either change their reaction or change the character.

Finally, it can be fun to write multiple endings to a book simply to see how and where the plot would need to diverge in order for the new ending to be equally satisfying. I think that I’ve failed with that here.

Daily Notes

  1. different prose books put the act of creation at different points. The more poetic tend to say it comes from the act of writing, while the more practical tend to say it comes from the person creating.↩

  2. can you tell that I’ve been learning a bit about zen Buddhism? Also wow the three kinds of Buddhism seem really cool and different in fun ways, and I should explore them (as with all things, once I have my Ph.D. and once again have time to exist as an individual, of course)↩

  3. or, at least, ingrained in me from my time in high school football↩

  4. wow the old internet joke that there’s an XKCD for everything really does feel truer the more I write↩

  5. sappy? no cool soppy is also a word, I do have a vocabulary, wild↩

  6. and now I am to help my undergrad with coding. Where was I?↩

  7. and probably something to think about, the way that my different heritages celebrate and exist and etc.↩

On the Optimal Lifting Plan

First Published: 2025 April 12

N.B. I know this says six drafts. Really what it means is that I spent a lot of today just figuring out how I wanted to frame the advice. The advice is simple: “lift weight”. The meaning it has to me, however, applies far more broadly, and I wanted to find the framing which best expressed my thoughts, to say nothing of finding out exactly what my thoughts were. As a result, the drafts circle the same content, but often approach it from vastly different angles.

Draft 6: 12 April

Maybe because of how I look or act, I have been asked more than once for advice on getting into lifting. Probably because I talk about music a lot, I’ve been asked about learning music a fair number of times. In both cases, I’ve imagined being asked far more than I have been asked, and yet I don’t know if I’ve ever given the correct advice.

The best way to start lifting is to find something heavy, pick it up, and then set it down. After repeating this exercise as many times as one can, record the number, and walk away. The following day, repeat.

What anyone who has never lifted before will almost certainly learn is that the number of repetitions they can do will increase steadily for a while.1 Could they potentially grow that number more quickly by hyper targeting specific muscle groups or even specific muscles?

Maybe!

I don’t really think so, though. Or, at least, the extra time that it takes to find out exactly what muscles can be targeted by what lift, learning the proper form to isolate the muscle group without harming oneself, and then setting up the specific lifts is almost certainly better spent simply lifting. When progress slows, or they notice something in particular holding them back, it’s more than sensible to start crafting a more in depth routine.

If someone asked me how to learn guitar, I’d ask if there are any classic rock songs that they can listen to all day long. Why classic rock, and why does it need to be repeatable? Most classic rock songs have a pretty simple guitar pattern, and the guitar in them tends to be a major enough part of the orchestration that practicing it alone will still give the effect.

If they have a song, I’d tell them to learn the chords for it, and then just play until their fingers hurt day after day. If they don’t, I’d tell them to do anything as long as they’re fretting2 notes until their fingers hurt. Having a metronome is only helpful when one can play notes long enough to correct themselves. Getting proper tone requires being able to hold fingers in the proper way, which requires nothing so much as practice.

Could they learn bad habits by practicing like this?

Absolutely!

However, if they play guitar daily to exhaustion, they can get sufficient calluses to play for a long time within a few weeks. Any bad habits that can be built up in that time can also be unlearned. And, a few weeks is enough time to know if one wants to become a person who plays guitar. If one is, then finding instruction becomes useful.

If you can play notes for fifteen minutes at a time, then spending five of them making sure that you seamlessly switch between chords is time well spent. Spending time with a metronome, if you are like any standard musician, will always pay great dividends. However, both require you be able to play.

That is the other part of why the advice is so good. Doing things is always harder than not doing them. Learning to lift or play guitar or anything else is easy to fantasize about. Realizing that, if you want to be able to improvise a killer metal riff, you need to know your scales on a fundamental level is far less fantastic. Before trying the grunt work of an activity, one can never know how they feel about it.3

Draft 5: 12 April

The best piece of advice for figuring out a lifting routine I’ve ever gotten was: “put your computer away, find something heavy, and pick it up. Set it back down, then lift it again.”

If I want to improve at a skill, I must do the skill. Until I am nearing the peak of my ability in something, almost any practice will improve me. The further from the peak I am, the less difference any practice will make.

For whatever reason, music remains the skill that I can best relate to.4 If someone has never played an instrument, and they start just strumming a guitar aimlessly, they will become better at it. If they tried to follow the routine of an expert, they would almost certainly quit immediately. They lack the calluses on their fingers, the unconscious competence of doing many things at once, and the love of the instrument.

Similarly, if someone is newly embarking on a lifting journey, the most important thing is that the lifts they do will not injure them. As far as I know, almost every adult has picked something up without injuring themselves. They have likely even picked up something they consider heavy.

Our muscles grow when they are challenged. Picking up something heavy day after day will gradually make it feel lighter.

A fitness plan which hypertargets individual muscles, or even one which targets broad muscle groups, is not as useful as simply lifting. The more time we spend planning, the less time we spend doing, after all. If someone finds that after lifting something heavy for a few weeks, they’re starting to see their progress slow, then starting to atomize the workouts can become useful.

But, I think that I need to remind myself more and more, when trying to learn a skill, I should stop looking up how to do it and start doing it. As my progress wanes, I can learn from the masters, but I need to be able to love the instrument for itself first. If I need my fingers to be callused, the calluses will grow just as fast from scales as from playing twelve bar blues as from noodling about. Ok this is good but should really be a slightly different framing.

Draft 4: 12 April

What is the optimal lifting routine?

It is not some specific set of lifts. Nor is it some specific set of focused and targeted groups of lifts. The optimal lifting routine is the routine that makes you most able to do the motions in life that you want to do. This requires three things: knowing what one wants to do, knowing how lifting can help with that, and actually lifting.5

What do I want to do?

In short, I want to be unbound. Of course, there are any number of physical, mental, social, societal6, and emotional limits that preclude many actions.7 That doesn’t change my desire to be able to do what I will.8

How does lifting help me do what I want?

Since I want to be able to effect my will onto the world, any lifting plan I pursue should help me with this goal. My will is rarely to be in the gym for its own sake9, and so a plan which has me spending less time is probably preferable to one which has me spending more time.10 If my body fails me, then, as many say, “the spirit is willing but the body is weak”. More often than not, my body being the impediment to my will comes from endurance, rather than brute force. That being said, I am sure that I would be less constrained if I were better able to move weight.

How can I do these lifts?

Eh, basically what I’ve said here is that I don’t need to lift, I need to do cardio. This isn’t the lifting advice from above, though, which is fine. Final draft should be that though, so one last chance.

Draft 3.1: 12 April

What is the optimal lifting routine?

There are any number of answers to this question. Some swear by the weekly routine of “push, pull, legs”, others by some constantly evolving set of lifts, doing dozens at a time. However, there should only really be one correct answer: the optimal lifting routine is the one which most frees you.11

Draft 3: 12 April

Since the Industrial Revolution, society has told us that we are interchangeable cogs in a greater machine. As a partial result, advice towards self betterment tends to focus on man as machine. We can and should seek to improve anything by working on atomistic parts. If I want to be stronger, that means that I need better biceps, triceps, quadriceps, abdominals, etc.

And, of course, this is not entirely incorrect advice. There are many things that we can treat atomistically. If my nose is clogged, I can blow it.

A greater consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the enshrinement of schedules. A week has no fundamental meaning to the world. Unlike the day, which, prior to artificial light’s conquering of the world, controlled when we could see, the week does not have any fixed meaning. We chose seven days, in part, because it has some relation as division to the lunar month.

It takes about a fortnight to go from new moon to full moon and from full moon to new moon. However, this desyncs very quickly. One can tell this by simply looking at a calendar which lists the full moons.

And yet, almost all workout routines I’ve seen are based on the idea that we should repeat some set of workouts weekly, or at least some general kind of lifts. Since we must live in this society, making our workouts work around the weekly schedules we must have is not the worst idea. Still, why do we break things into push, pull, legs?

Spending any time talking to physical trainers or reading up on the literature shows that these lifting routines, while often optimized to improve our ability to do the lifts at higher and higher weights, are often far from optimized in terms of getting us to be able to live a better life. And so, we get to the truly optimal lifting plan: pick up an object and set it back down.

Exercises which target a specific muscle group are fantastic for ego lifting. For functional strength, though, they are only really needed in rare circumstances. After all, I do not know a single time that I have needed to isolate a single leg’s calf muscles while lifting or moving. Training one’s body to lift heavy weights with good motor form means that the behavior becomes more innate.

And, of course, only by doing something can we learn how we feel doing it. I know now that, while running may be a healthy exercise, I don’t really like it at all. I really enjoy yoga and most meditative forms of workouts. I even prefer core workouts12 to running. Almost all benefits that any given workout has are shared amongst any workout.

Hmm might be a better framing

Draft 2: 12 April

One of the best pieces of workout advice I ever received was about how to start a lifting program:

“Pick the weight up.
Set it down.
Repeat.
Grab a heavier weight when you stop feeling the pain”

Now, why is this great advice?

For me, at least, the primary goal of lifting is to be able to lift heavy things when I’m in my day to day life. By reframing the entire lifting plan into just getting weights moved, I can remember that, when choosing between the lift that looks cool or the lift that looks ridiculous but will help me more, I should pick the latter.

I have had lifting plans for ages, and so I know the proper form for a lot of lifts, how slight modifications to them can focus on different muscle groups, and what lifts generally target what things. However, I also have done far more lifting than most people I know, and even I fear doing the appropriate weight to train back squats to failure.13 Why do people back squat?

That’s a legitimate question.

As far as I can tell, it’s because squatting is generally a motion people do a lot, and should do in a lot of settings. It’s almost always healthier to pick up something heavy by squatting first, rather than just bending over or doing a lift which focuses on one’s back. Still, that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to do them, despite what almost every lifting plan will suggest.

In fact, almost none of the most popular lifts that people do are really the best for most people, at least as far as I’ve seen. We squat and bench and do bicep curls because they are what we have been told to do, and because, when doing an incredibly high level program, they are among the more effective for getting the last optimizations out of a lifting plan. For most of us, any lifting plan is an increase.

In general, advice since the Industrial Revolution has treated people as though they are interchangeable cogs, and as though the week is a fundamentally meaningful division of time. Oh that’s a much better framing, let’s start over with that.

Draft 1: 12 April

I saw something really recently14 that struck me pretty deeply. I don’t remember exactly what it said15, but the general gist16 of it was that we cannot live optimally. No matter how hard we try, we will have days that we do nothing, days where we will not be the shining and perfect light to the world. For some reason, that was really helpful to me, and, despite the fact that it’s sort of opposite this post, it felt relevant to bring up here.

I forget where I initially saw the best lifting plan I’ve ever seen, but I think that it was probably a screencap of some old greentext.17 It is equally probable that I saw it with some random video.. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I consume a lot content that is at least somewhat adjacent to life optimization. In either case, the advice was “just pick up something heavy and then put it down. Repeat that, lifting heavier things when it gets too easy”.

Why is this the optimal weight lifting plan?

First,18 it’s important to remember why we are lifting. For me, the most important benefit lifting gives me is the ability to pick up heavy objects in my day to day life, ideally without showing any struggle.19 Next in importance is the fact that it’s generally allegedly healthy to lift weights. I like looking well muscled, and lifting does help with that. And finally, I like showing people up in the gym.20

I would like to think that at least the first three of these are pretty common goals for most people who want to get into lifting. So, why is it better to just pick up weights, rather than finding some optimal program? For me, any efforts that I spend towards optimization feel similar to actually working on a problem. I know that I am not alone in this sentiment, and so saying “the weight goes up and the weight goes down” means that I have nothing else to look up.

Second, focusing lifting on the idea of picking up and setting down progressively heavier weights means that one can remove some of the stigma behind what workout plan we might have. If we start with a low weight, we can make sure that we lift with proper form before raising the weight. If, instead, we were to start with bench press as the specific lift of the day, we might focus on just getting a heavy weight.

And, in general, I think that this is a good advice for much of life. If I’m wanting to learn something or do something, I should just do it.21

Daily Notes

  1. ignoring the noise of day to day fluctuations in ability, of course↩

  2. not mentally, but on the board↩

  3. this isn’t the “how do you know you don’t like X”. If you have never eaten something green, then yeah you should try lettuce. If you know that you dislike kale, broccoli, and cauliflower, then cabbage probably won’t be for you.↩

  4. ok, specifically, learning to play a specific instrument when growing up in an encultured way where they understand music but consider it something that only some do↩

  5. In many regards, this is similar to the way algorithms work, which makes sense because my mind is one track in the regard of never truly letting go of research↩

  6. my subgroup is far outside the societal norm↩

  7. And, I am of course aware of the fact that failing to limit myself in one way is itself limiting. That is, committing to any particular path of action precludes doing any other act. However, failing to commit to a path closes off any other act just as much. By going for my Ph.D., I cannot travel the world and explore the unique art styles, learning how they were influenced by and influenced the peoples who made them. If I had chosen to do neither, though, I would not have done either. Basically, commitment is needed. (P.S. this was not initially a footnote, but I woudl really actually like to have a nice clean main text here)↩

  8. and, of course, what I think that the Almighty wills. Ideally these are one and the same, practically, who can say?↩

  9. ah gotta love considering means and ends a bunch. I get more and more why people say that philosophers should go touch grass↩

  10. I’m not main texting this but, I am better able to get people to do what I want when I am more conventionally attractive. Lifting can make my body more toned and my muscles larger.↩

  11. ok so that’s a framing I should really interrogate myself about. I wanted to have some answer, but then remembered that all things should lead to sanctification, then had makes you strongest, but even that is a vague term↩

  12. especially when I can actually do them↩

  13. I just fear failing that lift orders of magnitude more than any other lift↩

  14. well after planning this post↩

  15. and no, there is no real correlation within myself between what I remember and how important it is to me, and yes, I do really wish that there was.↩

  16. why do I feel like jist should also be acceptable? probably because jel and gel are both words that I’ve used in the NYtimes crossword↩

  17. if you don’t know what greentext is, your life is better for it↩

  18. oof I love lists apparently↩

  19. yes, I do have an issue where I hate showing any forms of weakness how did you know↩

  20. absolutely my least healthy trait, I know↩

  21. obviously with exceptions↩

  22. it remains a bother to me that the brits say maths↩

  23. why? Eh could be a fun appendix “here’s the list of things that someone learning rotational spectroscopy should actually read and what they should get from it”, since like each textbook cites at least 500 different articles (and a shocking number of other textbooks, gotta love that the research in the field actually happens and is published in textbooks (or at least did, back in the good old days when the field was being actively advanced)). I’ve definitely found that each of them has complementary information, and I would save myself a headache by noting down what each one has at different points.↩

  24. and I am beginning to be one of them, much to my own (only now realized) dismay↩

  25. read, functionally laying down with my head propped up↩

  26. and therefore before I start on the blog of the day↩

  27. especially since I have an order coming in soon↩

  28. script? Is that what people say?↩

  29. I know that isn’t the same order that I listed before↩

  30. also, how did I just now notice that I type p with my pinkie? Also, am I supposed to use both shifts, because I only use left shift. Probably something to ask someone at some point↩

  31. shockingly, that entire sentence had only a single error in it, even though I know that I did mispress a few keys. Oh well. Might be good practice for me to write with my eyes closed more, so that I have to really focus on making sure that each letter is being typed by the correct finger.↩

  32. that might not be the right framing. Deep and shallow? Basically things that I can really dig into and things that I can quickly get my thoughts on the page. First is good for revising and structuring thesis and writing as a whole. Second is good because I want to be able to craft something compelling without having to revise and revise and revise. It does mean that the shallow posts might have to be written slightly less stream of consciousness, but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make↩

  33. I am a simple, simple man. Also, I’m nearly positive that at some point in the not far off future, I am going to end up making my own inks from scratch↩

The Only Way Out is Through. The Only Way Through is Forward

First Published: 2025 April 11

Draft 3: 11 April 2025

One of the weirdest things to think about in physics, for me at least, is how important a frame of reference is. In general, we tend to treat the earth as our fixed reference. Of course, the earth, as we generally know from science, effectively moves around the sun.1

A part of me wants to go off here about the way that I have lost my own fixed reference. However, the words are failing me, which is always a shame. The point of this framing was initially about how the earth is opposite the sun halfway through the year. In that respect, I’m as far away from my mom as I can ever be.

Anyways, I’d rather not focus on that, if only because I don’t want to start crying. Why is that relevant to this musing in particular, though?

While my mother was suffering from cancer, she told me that she really found relief while reading my web serial. On days when I struggled to start writing the day’s chapter, I would start by typing the title out. Getting the words on the page was almost always enough to get started with the chapter, and the reminder that what I was doing something not just for myself, but for someone I cared about helped me to finish it. As time has progressed, I’ve grown to use the phrase more and more, and the meaning it has for me has deepened and grown.

I have seen the first half of this expression at least somewhat often, and I feel like I’ve seen the second half as well. I don’t know if I see them together, though. It’s very important to me that the two are linked, at least in terms of motivating myself.

I often know that I want out of whatever place I am. Usually that’s in a metaphorical or emotional sense, in which case it’s far truer that I have to get through whatever I’m in. In a physical sense, I can usually simply run away, rather than going through whatever experience I have.

Why, then, is it important to remember that the only way through is forward?

To start, I cannot go backwards in time. Even though time doesn’t feel particularly linear, the arrow does always face the same direction. More, though, I also find it important to remember that I cannot passively move through whatever I experience. If I want my situation to change, I must make efforts.

And, right now, I find myself realizing I should start explicitly saying this more often. It could be a fun way to practice or play with my penmanship.

Draft 2: 9 April 2025

Before the most recent total solar eclipse in the continental United States, I found myself giving a number of talks about how eclipses worked.2 In the standard version of these talks, I explained how a day is relatively easy to describe based on the motion of the earth relative to the sun.3 A year, likewise, is relatively simple.4 A month, by contrast, is far harder.

The standard Western calendar these days is almost completely decoupled from any historically informed meaning of a month. In general, months have historically5 been defined by the moon. There are generally two ways of describing a month with the moon, one based on the time to return to a certain phase and one based on when the moon realigns with the far off stars.6

Why am I talking about months and how arbitrary they are?

Yesterday, I was reminded that it had been six months since I lost my mother.

Six months, in my mind, should be exactly half a year, always and forever. In this case, it just about is.

When the earth was in the opposite point of its orbit, my mother passed from this life into the arms of the Lord.

In a very real sense, I am just about as far away from her as ever I can be. Space and time come together into a four dimensional reality, but what is time to man? As my memories fade, what will it mean to have lost my mother? Already, I find it harder and harder to remember the sound of her voice or the feeling of hugging her.

Even though she breathed her last half an orbit ago, I do really feel like I lost her slightly earlier. She had been growing steadily less lucid and wakeful in the weeks leading up to her death. I do not remember the last words we said to each other, but I am nearly positive the last words she would remember saying to me are that she loves me. I would hope that the last words she would remember me saying to her were that I love her. Even the morning that I woke up to my father’s call, informing me that our vigil was over, I could not remember the exact time of our last words.

How, though, does this relate to the title of the post?

As my mother’s cancer progressed, and she began dealing with the symptoms of both the disease and its treatment, I found myself in the same position that so many others have. I watched someone who had cared so deeply for me suffering, and could not find a way to take the suffering onto myself. However, she told me that she enjoyed reading the web novel that I had been writing. In retrospect, I think that she mostly just enjoyed being able to support me in my creative acts, but at the time I took her at face value.

Opening the blank document which would become the next chapter,7 I would find myself staring at it. Like staring at a perfect marble block, knowing that anything can come from it, but that anything I made would preclude making something else, I found myself frozen with indecision. And, feeling generally down about things, I found it hard to write the fundamentally upbeat story that I had started. I knew that my mother enjoyed having something lighthearted, and so felt that I needed to keep the book positive.

And so, knowing that writing was a way that I could deal with my feelings and ameliorate suffering, the first words I would type would be “the only way out is through. The only way through is forward.”

As I think about the phrase and its usage, I realize that I cannot separate it from my mother.

How did8 this set of phrases or sentences or clauses or whatever else you want to call them9 help me, and what did it mean?

I cannot separate the meaning I have with them now from the meaning I once had. However, I don’t think that they’re significantly different, and most of the difference is probably me better recognizing what it meant.10

Draft 1: 9 April 2025

I have mentioned somewhere before11 that I have a phrase I use fairly often to motivate myself. Like so many others, a blank page terrifies some primal part of me. As a result,12 I found it really helpful to simply remind myself that “the only way out is through and the only way through is forward.” At first, I only used the beginning half, but I found that it did not do enough for me. So, what does it mean?

Honestly, I feel like the meaning is fairly self-evident. If I want to exit any situation I’m in, be it not having a draft finished or feeling a certain way, I have to work through whatever is keeping me from it. And, since I have yet to learn how to experience the arrow of time in more than one direction, that means that the only way to get through the issue is resolving it. That is, while it might have been better for me to not find myself falling from a plane, once in the air, that is not a useful thought.

How does it help me?

Truthfully, I find that it helps me most because it reminds me that, like all things, whatever issue I face is transient.13 Also, since I tend to use the phrase mostly when facing something that I apparently feel conflicted about doing14 something, it reminds me that I am the agent in control. One way forward is giving up a project, after all.

However, it is obviously not my preferred way forward.

The phrase is also a good reminder that, much as I might wish otherwise, I must deal with anything holding me back before I can be free. If there are chains of doubt weighing me down, I have to unlatch them.

Daily Notes

Daily Notes 11 April 2025

  1. yes, yes, all orbiting objects orbit each other↩

  2. found myself is such a fun way to describe anything I’ve done, because it does so much to decenter my own agency↩

  3. earth spins↩

  4. earth goes all the way around the sun↩

  5. and in most non-Julian or Gregorian systems, still are↩

  6. because moon lighting is based on position of earth to sun, and so when moon gets back to same spot relative to earth as viewed from above, the earth has moved, and so it isn’t the same phase↩

  7. Yes, I do use a separate file for each chapter of the book, and yes, I tended to write each chapter without any real consideration for an overall plot↩

  8. and to some extent does↩

  9. that is probably really meant to be a footnote↩

  10. n.b. at this point I had to leave for an appointment, and planned to have continued the draft after returning home↩

  11. potentially only in the list of musings to write and the post about why I stopped with my web novel↩

  12. and when generally life feels hard,↩

  13. I have an idea for a reflection about how “remember you are dust and to dust you will return” can be, rather than simply humbling, also words of encouragement.↩

  14. else I either would just do it or wouldn’t want to do it at all↩

  15. I write this before the text of the day, which is sort of opposite of how I assume it’s consumed.↩

  16. which??↩

  17. honestly, I have no idea if that’s true. Ran two samples last night, one with new and one with old↩

  18. idk how to describe some of the people in my life. Friend is clearly the wrong word because we’ve only interacted in professional environments but like we both smile at each other when we run into each other (in a way that is more happy/genuine than the standard greeting a known↩

  19. if only because I bought a large bottle of it↩

  20. why does lettuce only have a head and a heart? Where’s the leg?↩

  21. memory is strange↩

  22. see, as always “derivations are dangerous for me”↩

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