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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Leave work before 1900

      Not yesterday, but I wasn’t working at 1900, so I’m going to say that’s ok

    • Write the thesis

      Not anywhere near as much as I would have liked to have been, but I think that taking the breaks my mind and body demand is probably good

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

    • Start citation tracking

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Silence

      Generally decently, I think. Then again, I have gotten most of the way through the month long backlog of videos that I had wanted to consume, so maybe not so much.

    • Typing practice.

      There’s a tower defense game on Steam that is typing based, and I can definitely feel the way that all the typing I’ve been doing helped with there. Still, it’s not the same  level of intense focus as actually focusing on a single letter. It was, however, much more fun, and I found myself working on typing for an hour. With that in mind, I’m going to try one or two more.

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      Nope!

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      ...

    • Stretch in the morning

      Not really at all this week, which is not great, especially since I also haven’t really been stretching at night either.

    • Read at night

      Not really, I read about half a book on Wednesday night, and then have been really tired upon bed time the past two nights.

    • Poetry at night

      A few times! I feel like I need to systematize it again, because that’s the only way that I’ve ever been able to stick to a routine. I think a sonnet a day can once again be fun, because they do kind of just flow off after a while.

    • Clean the home

      Spent a little over an hour this morning, and that was great, and my home is markedly cleaner as a result. It is still far from what I’d like, but I’m doing everything in my power to not let perfect become the enemy of good.

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      Not a ton for stretching or standing. Not enough for drinking water, which I don’t love either. I have a water bottle sitting next to me, though, so this will help me to drink a little more.

    • Posture

      I think generally decent. I still slouch far too much when sitting, but standing seems easier by the day. Of course, it is made leagues and fathoms²⁸ easier when I am stretching appropriately.

    • No wasted time

      I generally think that I’m doing ok here. As I see more and more often, though, I need to remember that I cannot optimize my life fully. I spent about half of yesterday playing a game while getting through the youtube backlog²⁹, but I was also feeling so worn down that it might not have been helpful to work harder.

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      I think so? I have vague memories of eating food the past few days, even if that might be all that I have.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Delivered the one letter, second one I don’t think has been received.

      Also received a letter from a friend! That was really exciting.

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      Something about lower case letters in print really amplifies any imperfections in my writing, which I find really interesting.

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      I will now go to do my five minutes of assigned typing to see what the speed is today. All letters were above 4 per second which is kind of wild to me. Now the goal is 4.5.

      I think that once I get all of the letters above 5 characters per second³⁰

      Oh gosh, my top is only 90 words per minute, and my average is around 60. I don’t know why that feels horribly slow, except that I know so many people with over 100 wpm times. Then again, they tend to do them in more natural settings, where words flow from each other in some sensible manner. I’m happy with the progress, but going to keep it in CPS for the future.

      Since they define one word as five characters³¹, only when all of my letters are at or above 60 wpm³² will I start to worry about capitalization and punctuation.

    • Reading, do more of it

      I got an ARC of a book that seems interesting, and have otherwise been trying to finish the audiobook I’m listening to.

    • Blogging, do it

      Eh, haven’t been great about this, which is probably a sign, at least somewhat, of the fact that I have been nearing burnout. Then again, the fact that I’ve also been struggling to come up with my daily list of five things also could have told me that.

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      I wrote the short story for my web novel for the week,³³ and it was generally well received.

    • Guitar, play it.

      Not a ton, but I am at least strumming it most mornings and nights, which is still progress of a sort!

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Leave work before 1900

      Woo! I left at approximately 1730, but am now at a journal club, where I’ve signed up to write an article for the summer.

    • Write the thesis

      Spent a good few hours on it today! Woo.

      Since my boss told me today that she would like to see something as soon as it’s ready, I do think that I should focus on a lower hanging fruit, so writing part of the thesis which doesn’t actively require me to do large swaths of derivations is probably best for me. Or, I suppose that equally valid would simply be not doing the derivations right now and having them come into a later draft.

      Let’s stet that as the next writing goal: any time that there is something which requires me to pause for math, I skip it, until I have at least a solid and working set of text that I can add the math to later.⁵

    • Revise the thesis

      Also somewhat! Realized that some of the things I do in my program are different now and so changed them to be more accurate. Also realized that I have some math that is not necessarily accurate, which I don’t so much love.

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      Woo! Spent a good few hours on this today, and made a presentation to give to the group on Friday, where I will hopefully be able to better highlight what things I do and do not know right now.

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

    • Start citation tracking

      Document continues to grow, I continue to not annotate it.

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

      Strummed my guitar for a few moments this morning. I really need to get back into things sooner than later.

  • Self:

    • Silence

      I found the silence painful at points today, so good on me!

    • Typing practice.

      Did some yesterday, will be doing more now.

      Woo! Just got all of my letters above 3.5 characters per second, which means that now the goal is to get all of them above 4 per second. In time I will become a good typist. Unfortunately, the part of me which is opposed to cheating by just restarting lessons just lost me the one hundred and fifty seven lesson streak of over 95 percent accuracy.

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      I did that today! It was great, and I actually felt rested in the morning.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      No, sadly.

    • Stretch in the morning

      I did this morning! It was great, and I felt better today for having done so.

    • Read at night

      I did not yesterday, I don’t think? I don’t entirely recall, though.

    • Poetry at night

      SHOOT! Tonight it will! I will remind myself.

    • Clean the home

      Small steps forward yesterday and today!

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      I got notified multiple times today that I had been stationary and sedentary for an entire hour, so clearly not. I also don’t think that I needed to refill my water bottle, which also suggests that I did not drink water appropriately.

    • Posture

      Generally decent, though I did see myself in a window with incredibly slouched shoulders.

    • No wasted time

      I think generally doing an ok job of this!

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      I did that yesterday I think! After posting the post I ate more.

      This day, however, I had breakfast? I think? Don’t entirely recall.

      I did eat lunch, and was invited somewhere for dinner, and so had to eat. Tragically this means that I did miss my weekly Wednesday appointment, but it’s probably good for me.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      I wrote two letters yesterday! I posted one of them and forgot about the other.⁶

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      I still don’t entirely know how I feel about lower case letters, but wow.

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      Finally broke 3.5 on everything!!

    • Reading, do more of it

      I’ve been listening to the audiobook, and so will be moving on from that hopefully.

    • Blogging, do it

      Look at this! Twoish for two! I’m going to post this one before night’s end, even if it does end up being half baked, because I hope that it will encourage me to do more returning to older posts.

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      I don’t think that I’ve done really any of this! I guess the letters, and the morning journalling that I do also probably helps.

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      Tragically little progress

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      Decent amount! Right now I have some computations running and I’m relatively hopeful that they will come out well. In retrospect, I probably don’t need to be using huge numbers of iterations right now when I’m really just trying to figure out if stuff works

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

    • Start citation tracking

      Working on it! For the paper I’m working on right now, I think that I have all the citations that I reference.

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Silence

      Way too comfortable. I don’t like not wanting to listen to things.

    • Typing practice.

      I’ve done literally none for a long time, and I don’t know if that is going to change. I guess it should, so let’s go ahead and throw five minutes on. It happened! I’m starting to get into a bad²⁸ habit of restarting lessons at the first mistake I make. While this does mean I get more practice on trouble words, it does also distort my writing accuracy. Looking at the two photos of my average typing speeds, it does really look like I’ve made progress, which is both really cool and kind of shocking, because it doesn’t really feel like I’ve gotten any better at this.

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      Not at all and WOW it needs to start living outside my room. I read a book for a few hours this morning²⁹ and that really screwed me up for the energy of the day.

    • Stretch in the morning

      Nope! Let’s get a little bit of this right now, at least like a front fold.

    • Read at night

      I think so, the fun book, though, not any of the goal books. Still, reading is reading.

    • Poetry at night

      Oh shoot I have completely spaced this.

    • Clean the home

      I have fallen behind here, and that is a reflection on the way I am feeling.

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      Eh, I suppose so, especially the water. Still not as much as I would like, but.

    • Posture

      Nope! Wow I’ve been letting my shoulders slouch. Also wow I need to stretch my shoulders again, they are so tight.

    • No wasted time

      I think so? I have been in the office until 9 pm every day this week, and that probably isn’t the healthiest choice. I also have to believe that my productivity is lower for those last hours, especially given what it looks like in the morning. For the rest of the week, what would it look like to leave work before 6pm every night? That would give us sufficient evening time to do things!

      Overall, though, I’ve felt like I’m not getting enough rest breaks. It kind of feels like I have been going from activity to activity without having time to stop. I know that’s partially untrue, but an hour is truly an awkward amount of time when the two activities I have are both twenty minutes from home and less than four from each other.

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      I have a very firm memory of doing really well at this yesterday! Today, I had a bagel for breakfast, and some carrots for lunch.³⁰ I’m planning to go grocery shopping tonight, though, so that should be a good place to get some more calories in.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      I’m going to give myself some grace here, because it was literally Easter on Sunday. Tomorrow, I think that I might try to avoid the office for the morning and just work in a few different locations. If that makes me more productive, great! I know to avoid the office. If not, also great, and then I know that those locations are not winners for me.

      All this to say, tomorrow I’m planning on spending some time in my cage, and I think that it could be nice to write another letter or two. Probably just one, but I would also like to read the etiquette books to know what goes in them. Looking at the website for one of the guides³¹, it seems like generally one is just supposed to know what to put in a letter? Eh, I’ll try something out and see how it goes.

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      I’m enjoying working with lower case letters again! I do still kind of feel like I don’t have enough control to make each letter look identical and be spaced the same, and I do catch myself often going into cursive for a few letters or back to all capitals on a difficult word.

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      I like having this in two places because it means that I get two chances to remind myself. I don’t think that I want to spend another five minutes practicing, but I do have some typing games that could be fun when I finish with work.

    • Reading, do more of it

      I finished the series I was reading. I forgot how it just never gets brighter.

    • Blogging, do it.

      Well, in my defense, there has been a lot going on.

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      I’ve been doing ok about keeping a hand written journal equivalent these past few days. Not entirely sure if it’s the best use of my time but I enjoy it and I think that any time I spend on trying to figure myself and my priorities out is generally time well spent.

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      I made progress here today! Wild how recentering myself does that.

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      A little bit! At the very least, talked with a group mate about some stuff I hadn’t really thought of, which helped. Also ambushed a friend and got their help with some coding questions.

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

    • Start citation tracking

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Silence

      I worry that I might be getting too comfortable with silence, but that might be a ridiculous fear.

    • Typing practice.

      I’m going to do it as soon as we finish this daily note

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      Nope, but I was also up for hours in the middle of the night last night, so being able to read was nice.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      Too eepy, sadly.

    • Stretch in the morning

      ...

    • Read at night

      Not the book I meant, but a book!

    • Poetry at night

    • Clean the home

      Yes!

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      Drinking water, at least. It’s nice to start being more hydrated.

    • Posture

      Eh, I think so.

    • No wasted time

      I think still doing well here, no aimless scrolling, watching videos is occurring only as background noise, if even then.⁸

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      I think so! Both yesterday and soon to be today!

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Nope!

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      Day two of hand journaling as a way to use up ink went well! I am really finding that forcing myself to use a fude tip does really quickly actually make writing with it enjoyable. I think that the penmanship is still a work in progress, and I’m wondering if a more looping print might still be preferable?

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      Right after notes here!

      I want to work on getting more accuracy right now, I think. The issue with that is that I don’t really have a great idea how to only type correctly in a way that also improves my typing speed. I guess that being conscious of each keystroke is probably the best way to do that, but I don’t know that for certain.

    • Reading, do more of it

      Yes! I am really enjoying this book series, and I think that I might have just forgotten to enjoy reading recently.

    • Blogging, do it

      WOo!

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      Eh, debatable. The morning journals have mostly been for me to recenter my ideas about work, but.

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.

• Broadsides. Because like the old printing

• Impulse driver. Because I’m causing things, and science

• Waveform. Because, like a reflection, has a specific shape

• Wave generator. General idea of make waves.

• Genesis. Creation.

• Creation, because I made it.

• Things I made

• Mades

• Crafts

• Things I found

• Relics

• Unburying myself

• Clawing my way out of the earth

• Ideas which take me hostage

• Fixations

• Negotiation

• Argument

• Agreement

• Chat

• Fireside

• Recipe

• Algorithm

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      Realized I’ve been really slacking on this, and so made some efforts to try to figure out how it might be better for me if I set up my schedule differently. Unfortunately, it does more and more seem like I can only use each system for a few days or weeks before it stops working for me. I guess that I have also only today woken up early enough to do my ideal morning routine, so that might also have something to do with it.

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      It took me until I was lying⁴⁰ in bed last night to realize one of the very silly mistakes I’ve been making. I have a bunch of systems of equations which interrelate variables. I’d been solving them by hand.

      As it turns out, and as I had literally used during an early version of this project, Python has a package which will solve symbolic systems of equations. When fully reduced, it turns out that I was not doing the best of jobs in terms of algebra.⁴¹ Then again, given the fact that the numbers are very small, it’s entirely possible that I’m just hitting up against the floating point limits at times.⁴² So, I’m now spending the much shorter amount of time that it takes to resolve the different numbers in terms of each other.

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

      One of these days I’ll get better about this. That day, however, is not today.

    • Start citation tracking

      I’m at least citing within my notes, though that does mean that I’ll have to page through the book, reading through the only partially coherent ramblings of a madman.

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

      Really need to get on this one, especially since I also really need to learn and write some guitar music.

      I do also have a wedding coming up early 2026⁴³ that I have a commission for, so should look at this.

  • Self:

    • Silence

      Doing really well at this one, but I don’t know if it’s silence in a good way, if that makes any sense at all.

    • Typing practice.

      Shoot! Anyways, I’m unsure if I’ll get to it today, since wow the time flies.

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      Nope! But I did generally find that it wasn’t too horrible in the morning, and I set it down without much of an issue at all, so the end goal was still accomplished.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      I did! It went well, and I think helped me set myself up for success.

    • Stretch in the morning

      I did! Wild that I can almost touch my palms to the ground, and equally wild that the same parts of me continue to feel the tightest.

    • Read at night

    • Poetry at night

    • Clean the home

      Woo!

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      Nope! OOf I am perpetually dehydrated right now. That’s a good goal for today: get through the water bottle.

    • Posture

      Decently, again, I continue to catch myself more and more frequently. The shoulders do have a tendency to slump in, but I also don’t want to go too far in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, most advice about posture assumes it’s the spine that’s the issue, not the shoulders, so I’m not sure which part of the shoulder should touch the wall.

    • No wasted time

      Only existentially! I did not, as it turns out, need to solve for the different commutation relationships that were derived in the paper. I’m glad that I did, just because it means that I can trust parts of my code more, but.

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      I think so! I ate oats for breakfast, an apple, and curry rice! Woo, go me.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Playing with inks has been nice.

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      I’ve decided that, since some amount of ink stays in the nib⁴⁴ when I empty it, journaling in an analog sense could be useful each morning

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

    • Reading, do more of it

    • Blogging, do it

      Woo!

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      Journal in the morning!

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      Found out from someone else yesterday that my boss has officially announced that I’m defending in the fall, so that’s exciting.

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

      Reading through one of the books yesterday was actually really helpful!! It is, as far as I can tell, also the initial place where one of the ways to simplify the math was introduced, which is wild.

    • Start citation tracking

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Silence

      I did it! On the walk home and then the walk to work today. It’s weird, and I do find that my mind goes into so many more places when I let myself have time to just be.

    • Typing practice.

      Today!

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      I did! It was somewhat nice, though I did wake up to far more messages than I had expected. I did also check it much earlier than I would otherwise like.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      Nope!

    • Stretch in the morning

      Nope! Last night I could almost put my palms on the ground though, which felt absolutely fantastic.

    • Read at night

      My candle is now too dim for this, and so I might have to either figure out how to make it brighter, read before turning off the lights, or find some third solution. Ope, it’s dimmer because the wick is shorter¹⁶. It was less flickery, if only slightly. I do also have a candle I know burns brightly, so I could probably just switch to that one as well.

    • Poetry at night

      I did! I had a line that hit me before night time stretching, which felt really nice.

    • Clean the home

      I was home exactly long enough to go through my night time routine last night.

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      Stretched last night! Stood nowhere near enough, drank probably not enough water.

    • Posture

      It’s becoming more and more unconscious, at least when standing. I also think that it’s getting slightly better when I’m sitting, though that’s much further from good still.

    • No wasted time

      I think that I did ok with this yesterday! I do struggle with spending time on non-productive tasks¹⁷

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      Oof I ate so little yesterday. Today’s goal is to actually consume the oats that are sitting next to me, the lunch that I packed¹⁸, and then something for dinner.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Nope! I did find some inks that I absolutely love though!

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      I did a little bit, just to get the inks flowing.

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      Shoot! I never ended up doing this yesterday. Welp, that’s ok, I am finding that my time is still being well used.

    • Reading, do more of it

      Listened to a little bit of the book I’m going through while cleaning this morning.

    • Blogging, do it

      Look at this!

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      I got the new inks! And so I played around with four or five different colors and saw what they all looked like! There were some pretty ones, and I may not be as into green ink as I had initially thought. I was shockingly into the sheen inks (and honestly, the shimmer inks), and so now I know that for the next time I go to make an ink purchase.¹⁹

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      I did not, but I did spend some time talking with people about the Thesis.

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      I did some Gedankenexperiments, which might help me. It does feel weird to call ideas for running code Gedankenexperiments, but I think that’s how it works.

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

      Have the book, and will read after writing time.

    • Start citation tracking

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Silence

      I walked to work in silence today, and it was nice. I think that I just need to stop finding enjoyable content, and then the not listening becomes easier. I do need to also make time this week for music walks, though. That’s like a form of silence.

    • Typing practice.

      I did none yesterday, but yesterday was also just such a travel day, so I’m really ok with that fact. After writing with my partner today, I will again go back to practice before starting work for the day.

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      No, but I was finishing a podcast, so I’m somewhat ok with that.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      I was so very behind this morning, and forgot that I had an actual scheduled event. Whoops! I did go to two seders this past weekend, though, which was also very prayer filled.⁷

    • Stretch in the morning

    • Read at night

      Finished the podcast that I was advised to listen to. That was fun!

    • Poetry at night

      I have not, but also now that I will soon have another fountain pen, this would be more doable perhaps.

    • Clean the home

      Nope!

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      I drank so little water this weekend and I can really feel it.

    • Posture

      I’ve been doing better and better about this! I think that others are beginning to tell too, because there’s definitely a different energy I’m getting from people lately.

    • No wasted time

      Nope! But, I generally was ok with relaxing this weekend. Now that the week has begun, we’re onto the grind season.

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      ... Sure! We’ll say that happened.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Not so much, though I did realize that I have a few more people’s addresses than I thought. I didn’t remember to read the books on etiquette over the weekend, but if I do so today, that might be helpful.

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      Thought about it a little last night. I realized that my signature might be a great place to start, because I don’t really need it to be a single swooping line, and figuring out how I want my letters to look there might also be great.

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      Spent a fair amount of time the other day, and am trying to spend some effort here writing with proper finger placement. I have hopes that this will in time become faster, but I have to wonder when I’m supposed to use each different shift key.

    • Reading, do more of it

      Read a fair amount while at home! I do really love Street Cultivation, for all that it is just such a dark series. Very much it believes in the kind of world where power concentrates and abuses.

    • Blogging, do it

      Look at this!

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      Well, not everything can be a winner. I am planning to start a pen journal, and that should be fun. I’ve also been doing better about reaching out to friends which is fun!

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      I’m debating whether or not I should be working on this this weekend. On the side of yes: I should always be working, and I do actually feel some level of motivation. On the side of no, I’m visiting home, told myself that I would be taking a break, and am generally feeling low motivation while at work.

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      I think that I found a textbook that actually explicitly lists the matrix formation that I need. However, I’m more and more realizing that I probably do, in reality, need to solve the matrix myself, which does require understanding the basis function. That won’t be fun, even if it is important.

      Boss also thinks it’s good to list out what assumptions each thing makes.

      Also, there have in fact, been advances in the field since the 1960s, so I should really read the newer theory papers, if only because they might be more understandable in terms of the math they use.²²

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

      See above for the book I’m to read. Also, since one of the underclassmen is preparing for a preliminary exam, I had an impromptu lecture to the group yesterday about representations and reductions. I’m not entirely sure if what I said was accurate or helpful, so wow do I need to get that in more detail. On the plus side, I noticed one major error with what I was doing in my fancy new code, so we’ll see if fixing that fixes the issue.

    • Start citation tracking

      Continuing to load papers into the citation manager. I should start making annotated bibliography, because that’s something that many people use for some reason.²³

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Silence

      None at all, but I also don’t know how good silence is for driving. As I type that, I realize that the answer is “incredibly”, but I still don’t really love it.

      I’m also realizing that GameLit audio books tend to be narrated with the assumption that you’ll listen at well above single speed, if the fact that I can listen to other content at single speed far less painfully is any indication. Also, pauses which sound stilted and unnatural at single speed feel almost correct at the maximum speed. Then again, since many consumers in the field also buy books by length²⁴, there might also just be the motivation to read as slowly as possible.

    • Typing practice.

      Oops! Forgot to do that yesterday. I’m sitting in a really awkward position right now²⁵, but if I can type like this for writing, I can type like this for learning to type. I’m already able to feel how much faster and smoother my typing is, especially since I’m making far fewer mistakes. Punctuation is still awkward for me, which makes sense, since none of the drills I’ve been doing have punctuation in them. All this to say, I’ll go practice typing once i finish this reflection.²⁶

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

    • Stretch in the morning

    • Read at night

      I did! It wasn’t the book that I told myself to read, but I restarted the book series that I wanted to read. I forgot how incredibly bleak it is, wow.

    • Poetry at night

    • Clean the home

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

    • Posture

    • No wasted time

      I think that I did ok with this, especially because I’m doing less scrolling and more reading. Then again, I have spent probably three hours in the past day and a half looking at pens and pen inks, and I do not need more of either right now.²⁷

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      I had cake, lunch, and dinner last night! Woo, go me.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Nope!

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      Realized today that yes, I do really want to do cursive. That’s great, but does mean that I have to really make an effort if I want my hand²⁸ to be distinct and pretty and legible.²⁹

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      Soon!

      Wow that was fun, I didn’t realize that there was a speed chart in the settings which shows how fast each letter is. Turns out A and N are my fastest, both at over 7 characters per second, which is kind of wild to me. A I guess makes sense, since I don’t use that many z or q, but the fact that N is so fast when none of the other right index letters³⁰ are anywhere near as fast is strange to me. I don’t know if I made much progress today, but looking at the graph of all my speeds, I do need to remind myself that only recently did I start focusing on form and making sure that each letter is pressed by the correct key with minimal errors. I’m positive that slows me down, and that’s ok for now, especially since it’s in practice time.

      Does it carry over to my actual typing?

      Certainly at least a little! I definitely need to look at the keyboard less right now, though wow is it hard to type with my eyes closed.³¹

    • Reading, do more of it

      Why is reading a means and not an end? Oh right, because I really meant that I wanted to read the research books. Well, I brought the books on etiquette home, so I can at least start on those!

    • Blogging, do it

      Look at this! I need to make sure that I have both low and high effort posts³²

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      I cannot believe that I’ve written almost one thousand words in the past fifteen minutes, but wow. I did spend a few hours today going through literally every single ink seller in the country, and found my new favorite brand.³³

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

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      Doing so badly here. I have an idea for what happened to my motivation.¹⁵

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      Gave up on my new and cool and novel search algorithm for one who¹⁶ works. It hurts but I suppose that it’s probably for the best.¹⁷

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

    • Start citation tracking

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

      Remembered to bring the book home, but did not do much else.

  • Self:

    • Silence

      None at all.

    • Typing practice.

      Unlocked another letter or two, which is great. Also sent it to a friend¹⁸

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      I did not, but I also did not scroll. I did, however, start catching up on videos, because, as mentioned before, I lack comfortable seating in my home.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      ...

    • Stretch in the morning

    • Read at night

    • Poetry at night

    • Clean the home

      Did minimal yesterday, but minimal is not none!

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      Ehhh. I did ok on drinking water, if not good. That’s about it though.

    • Posture

      Decent! Still weird to me how uncomfortable it is to have flat feet on the ground. Also like wow my legs only want to exist crossed when I lie down.

    • No wasted time

      I did not have this, which is a bit of a shame.

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      Made curry last night! And I had it over rice for dinner. It was really good, and wow I need to use cumin more.¹⁹

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Eh I got new ink, which will hopefully help to motivate me

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      No real progress, but see above

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      My mind is empty today for some reason, and so I have spent much of the past hour working on my typing. Upon rereading the site, I saw that they recommend starting at a very low speed and only increasing the character per second goal when all letters reach the barrier. I decided that half character per second increments would be ideal, and then only after breaking three and a half characters per second on all letters did I realize that I should really be focusing on accuracy of both letter choice and finger use over speed right now. After all, when I practice my scales, what is important is getting the best possible tone, fingering, and note. After that, the goal is to get rhythm right, and I am not entirely sure how that connects here.

      I guess that ideally, each letter would be typed at exactly the same pace, and I would sound perfect.

    • Reading, do more of it

      I finished the book yesterday, and am making my way through the audiobook. Unfortunately, I also need to find time tonight to walk for an hour as I listen to the All Night Vigil again.

    • Blogging, do it

      I didn’t post yesterday’s and I think there are two reasons. First, I want to make the post better before I release it. Second, I was out of energy.

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      Practicing touch typing is like writing!

Daily Notes 11 April 2025

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis: Making progress!

    • Revise the thesis

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis.

      Oh boy is it fun to deal with Government agencies. Also, wild that some people pick their phones up before a single ring. I didn’t even know data sent that fast.

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

      I got another one today! Woo.

    • Start citation tracking

      Slowly making a gigantic Zotero folder, which is close.

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Silence

      Absolutely none. I want to finish this book.

    • Typing practice.

      I didn’t do it yesterday, but I would like to do it today.

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      Nope! Hopefully after this weekend.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

    • Stretch in the morning

    • Read at night

    • Poetry at night

    • Clean the home

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

    • Posture

      Decently! Not stretching enough, which isn’t great.

    • No wasted time

      Yesterday was a blur, and I should not have gone on the field trip to the book sale.

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day

      I think so! In that I ate a giant bowl of oats, a heart of lettuce,²⁰ and some rice with curry. Was the curry rice a full meal? Great question, moving on.

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more.

      I just picked up all the etiquette books that I was considering reading, so now I can read them. Also! The pen set I’m ordering with a friend is being shipped, so soon I will be able to play with more inks. I do find it interesting how much nicer the pens that are more finicky seem like they’re writing. I don’t know if that is just a function of the ink that I’m using or what, but I do love how it looks.

      The pen I’m using right now is a little high flowing, which is maybe not the best. I do love the way that the wet ink looks on the page.

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      I tried something to the extreme of print, with incredibly sharp lines. I realized how much I hate it, and have been doing some cursive now as I take notes. I remembered or was reminded²¹ that cursive comes from running, and it is so nice just sliding my pen. Might just give up on the part of me that prefers print and commit to making more people learn cursive.

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      Whoop! Will do at some point, hopefully.

    • Reading, do more of it

      Still listening to the book!

    • Blogging, do it

      Oof, I haven’t posted in a few days, which is not something I love. Time just completely escaped me, and last night I somehow lost the hours between 5 and 8 working on derivations.²²

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

On the Path of a Life

First Published: 2025 April 7

Draft 1: 7 April 2025

I think a lot about the way that my life is and will be, especially these past few months. In part, I am absolutely sure that this is because dealing with a death, even one which is far from sudden, makes anyone think about the way that they’re spending their own time on the earth. In part, I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m closing a chapter of my life. Before I turn to the next section, I would like to think that it will be a better one.¹

I remember watching a video a few years ago that really changed the way that I view a lot of the goals I set. I am well aware of the SMART² method, but I find that a lot of the things I want to do are fundamentally not either of the first, and as a result, hard to know the achievability or timeline for. When life doesn’t work with a plan, one can either change the plan or the life. Since goal setting is to help me live, I want the goals to reflect my life, and not the other way around.

I think that the video was initially set about new year’s resolutions, and it talked about how, at the end of the day³, most of these goals, even when framed as SMART ones, are not really the actual goal. A goal to stop eating sweets, for instance, is more likely the method to meet some real goal, such as improving health or managing blood sugar. As someone pointed out once⁴, a measure stops being effective when it becomes a goal. We see this all the time, such as how standardized tests effectively became the curriculum taught in public schools. The goal of a standardized test was to see children’s general knowledge. Instead, it becomes about how well a student has been prepared for the specific exam.

Also, especially with New Year’s Resolutions⁵, life circumstances change rapidly in a way that makes SMART goals bad. If I twist my ankle on the fifteenth with a goal of running daily, then I’ll have to stop. If, instead, the goal was something broader, like improving my physical fitness, I can instead start rowing or swimming or anything else. In general, the author stated confidently, themes can be the answer to your life.

As I’ve grown, I find myself trusting common wisdom about change less and less.⁶ While I have not had much luck with themes, something he said was very impactful.

Butchering the metaphor, as is my right as an author, think of your life as a road. We cannot change the path we have taken. And, in general, any choice we make does not truly diverge us that much.⁷ However, each choice we make turns us slightly more into the kind of person who makes those kinds of choices. Every time we eat a salad, our brains are a little more tuned to eating salads. Every time that we do a kindness for no reason save itself, we become slightly kinder.

Is that a particularly deep or profound metaphor? Maybe not to the average reader. However, I find it far more helpful to me than thinking about goals. I do not really want to be a runner, so practicing running doesn’t make a lot of sense. I do, however, want to be an older person who is described as “shockingly, almost horrifyingly spry”, and so want to practice the exercises that will both lead me to being spry today as well as lay a good foundation for me to age.

A habit is, by most definitions, something we do without conscious thought. That is, it is when we follow the twists in the road without consideration. A metaphor I used in my web novel was the river of fate.⁸ We are all riding rafts down a stream which never ends. Following the path set for you is not just easy, it is effortless.

Like any other source of flowing water, though, the more you wish to diverge from the main flow, the more effort it takes. Rerouting the river itself is nearly impossible, especially the wider and stronger the river is. The metaphor gets a bit strained here, because each action we take is making the riverbed ahead of us, so I suppose that a better analogy might be a river shrouded in mist. We get to decide what comes next, but rivers tend to flow a specific way.

All this to say, not making choices is the default way people go through the world. Better habits lead to better lives because choosing the good is difficult, not because of the word good, but because of the word choose. All choices take effort, and so the goal for me is less any individual good habit or virtuous thing and much more about shifting who I am to become the sort of person who does not have to think about doing good. Everything yearns to rest, and so making the good easier is the best thing that I can do.

Hmm, I’m not super happy with this, because I don’t really think that I said anything that meaningful, and what shreds of meaning may have made their way in are obscured by the filler of my stream of consciousness. Still, it is also important to accept what is, rather than what I wish would be.

Daily Notes

The astute reader might note that this has changed. I don’t think that spending twenty minutes a day on the daily goals is necessarily serving me well right now, so I tried to pare it down. I will likely pare down even further before the time is through

• Obligations:

  • Professional

    • Write the thesis

      I tried to spend some time on this yesterday, but got far too into the musing.

    • Revise the thesis

      See above.

    • Edit the thesis

    • Research for the thesis

      See above

    • Read the books that might be useful for the thesis

    • Start citation tracking

  • Personal

    • Learn the songs for to jam

  • Self:

    • Typing practice.

      Did my time today!

      Averaged just under 6.2 characters a second, unlocked letters through “u”, and generally felt like I was doing ok. Interestingly, my average speed decreased through the lessons on almost every letter. Wonder what that’s about. I don’t get new letters until I’m at 5 characters per second on the previous letters, which I really like as a system, because 5 is just about where it stops feeling like something that I need to think about at all. There’s something to be said for more incremental changes to be sure, especially since the default goal is less than three characters per second. Still, once I’m at 5 per second in all letters, I think that I’ll start working on punctuation and capitalization. If I can get all of that together up to 5 per second, then it’s on to six, and so on until I either give up, die, or max out the program.

    • Keep the phone out of the room for bed

      Did not do this, and started a new audio book, which I am enjoying. I’m listening to it at single speed, and I’m more and more thinking that this publisher⁹ records books with the assumption that they’ll be listened to at greater than single times speed. Still, there’s nothing that I really gain from listening faster, especially since there are no other books that I’m trying to consume right now. Learning to go slower is almost never a bad thing.

    • Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning

      I did not do this today or yesterday, which isn’t great.

    • Stretch in the morning

      I did that today, though certainly not for an hour. I think that I should have time tonight to do so, though, which will hopefully help me. I found that I was incredibly tight in the front of my chest today, so I have confidence that stretching is doing something.¹⁰ My back also seized when I bent over suddenly, which I don’t like. Might be good to start some lower back stretches.¹¹

    • Read at night

      Nope.

    • Poetry at night

      Nope.

    • Clean the home

      Spent time this morning! Realized, as I tend to, that one of the big issues in my life is storage. I’ve been keeping spices above the stove, but¹² that area gets fairly hot, which is not good for spice storage. It’s really not good for most storage, but I think that I have enough things that are non-consumable that I can make it work.¹³

    • Stretching, standing, drinking water

      I did kind of ok with this yesterday, other than the time period where I left my water at primary location and moved to secondary. Stretching, generally not as much as I’d like.

    • Posture

      So I have realized that I instinctively cross my legs, which is weird, and a habit I think that I would like to break. I catch myself doing it so often, though. Even lying in bed, my right foot goes over the left.

    • No wasted time

      Generally decently, although I did spend a while yesterday looking for pen ink, I enjoy writing enough that I’m willing to call that time decently, if not well, spent.

    • Eat more than 2 meals a day¹⁴

      I ate two and a bit yesterday!¹⁵

• Goals and Growth:

  • Ends:

    • Letter writing, get into more

      Did Not write yesterday, will not write today or likely tomorrow or the rest of the week. I need to lower the barrier to going to my jail cell in the library, or else I should just be honest with myself and take the letters elsewhere. Hard to decide either way.

    • Handwriting, pick and make the new one

      In reading the book about gentlemanly etiquette, I was reminded that the primary goal of any hand¹⁶ should be legibility. A secondary consideration is normally speed, but I think that my personal priority list puts that at the end of the list. For my new hand, I’m prioritizing legibility first, as anything I write I want to be read, and read easily. Next I have uniqueness.

      I know that it’s ridiculous to want my handwriting to be different just for the sake of being different, but I have a few justifications. First, it makes it slightly harder for someone to falsify something as having been written by me, even if that is unlikely. Second, it makes life more fun to look at something fun. It doesn’t have to be unique in the sense of never seen, just in the sense of not commonly seen today.

      The next priority is beauty. Beauty is not necessarily quantifiable, but for anything practical, it does have elements of both form and function. Anything which passes the first criterion¹⁷ will satisfy the functional element. If it is also unique, I find it unlikely that I will not find the writing beautiful. However, if I have to choose any specific character’s beauty or originality, it is good to remember the priorities I have set.

      Finally, I want to consider speed. Although I do not ever really need to write quickly by hand, I am not hoping for calligraphy. My writing needs to be done at a writing pace, which means that, by and large, extraneous strokes and flourishes don’t get to exist. Finding a hand that satisfies all of these criteria is difficult, to be sure, but most of the fun in getting a script is playing with options. I think I might go letter by letter, if only because that way I can really focus to make sure I’m able to reproduce the exact thing I want.

      Also, cursive script is sadly out, because so many people these days cannot read it. Even though I can and think that more people should be able to, I want my writing to be able to be read by anyone.

      Oh, I guess it’s an unstated thing before this, but I want the handwriting to scale. That is, I want to be able to draw the same shapes on a small note, a notebook, and a whiteboard or blackboard and have it look fine, if not good. Why? Because why go through the effort of making beauty if I do not commit to it?

  • Means:

    • Typing speed, improve it.

      As mentioned above, I have been working on that.

    • Reading, do more of it

      Yesterday, while spending time with the friend, we had a fair amount of downtime where conversation did not need to occur. I kept reading the book I started a few months ago when I was reading more, and I forgot how much I enjoy it. I do also want to reread one series, which I’m not letting myself do at least until I finish this book.¹⁸

    • Blogging, do it

      Look at this! Of the seven days of the month, I think that I have done at least 5!

    • Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do

      I wrote some reflections about the reading before blogging yesterday, which somewhat counts, and I’ve done a bit of scheduling for things. I also spent most of the late morning and early afternoon helping my undergrad to write a script to do some data analysis.¹⁹