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On Self Help

First Published: 2025 May 28

Draft 6: 28 May 2025

Something I’ve noticed in my writing is that early drafts hardly matter at all. I don’t know if those I interact with are the same way, but I need to write at least a full draft before I even know what I want to say in a given piece. This is true especially in this folly; I still don’t entirely know what I want it to say, but I am going to declare here that this draft will entirely just be my relationship to the self-help genre.

Self improvement is a laudable ideal. No one is perfect, and we can always strive towards betterment. In a literate society, then, it is perhaps unsurprising that self-help is such a large and profitable area to write and publish. I have read more than my fair share of self help literature, even if many of the authors I read would actively object to the label.

This past year, and these months in particular, has really changed the way I interact with the world. Part of it is obvious; I lost the fundamental touchstone of my mother. I also think that age is part of it; I am older now, and so my thoughts are better. And, I’m coming to the end of my plans; I had never really thought about what I wanted to do with my life post-being a doctor.

Despite feeling like a swimmer adrift, I am not reaching out for the lifelines of self help literature. At this point, I do not know if any self-help book can address the problems I’m facing, and that really comes down to the fact that the issues I face right now are so intrinsically personal. I cannot imagine that there are enough twenty-six year old graduate students about to finish a degree who have just lost their mother, a first-generation student who encouraged them to study for passion. Among those, I don’t know how many love to write so much, and love to love and interact so much as well.

Self-help as a concept is laudable, even though it often obscures the structural issues at play. Of course, very few people can directly change the structure of society, and so learning to work within the given system is understandable. Self-help books seem to me to struggle from the same issue as every form of education that does not take place in The Academy: impersonalization. We have known for almost 50 years now that a median student with a tutor will start to outperform ninety seven percent of their peers. I’m sure there’s literature suggesting why, but fundamentally I think it is because a one-on-one interaction with a tutor makes it far harder to ignore what you don’t know.

In short, I am grateful for the self-help books I have read, because many come with advice that, even if not helpful to me, is life-changing to someone I love. At a certain point, however, they stop being useful for self-improvement, because they cannot define the goals of my life. General career advice is great, but I would hope that me entering the job market with a Ph.D. is a very different process than someone entering the job market as a fresh college graduate. At a certain point in reading, the most helpful books shift from practical to philosophical. I’ve passed that point, and that’s ok.

Nice! Good draft me.

Draft 5: 28 May 2025

Self-help and adjacent genres all suffer from the same fundamental issue as society at large; they treat each person as interchangeable pieces in a great machine. Books I’ve read about productivity always assume that certain events can be automated away: rather than cook a meal each day, meal prep for a week in advance. No attention is paid to the more structural questions: why are you living alone, is there no one else who you can divide the labor with and why not, does cooking not have intrinsic beauty to it, why do you feel as though you need to do more? Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that a number of authors in the mindfulness and wellness spaces do not like being lumped in with self-help. After all, most of them focus on feeling enough.

And yet, even these books which can discuss social structures that limit the effectiveness of any given advice, like “you can’t self-care yourself out of oppression”, do not speak to everyone’s lived and living experience. No one is totally normative, and everyone interacts with the world differently. This is beautiful and true and good, but means that the more one sees the world differently, the more important it is that one ignore much self-help advice.

Awareness of the passage of time terrifies me at a fundamental level, and I do not hit my productive strides until I am able to fully dive into the water of a given problem or idea. The pomodoro method, which I have to assume can only work for those whose labor does not require holding large ideas while working, is therefore counter to what I do.

Obsession is my tendency: if I measure it, I will smother it in affection and attention. When coupled with the societal tendencies I’ve inherited towards certain forms of addiction and disorder, I should not track every calorie that I eat.

As someone who has read a lot of self help, I absolutely agree that it does a lot of good for a lot of people. As someone who is so different from so many others1, I absolutely need to stop trusting the advice of strangers over my own lived experience. When authors cite studies, and do so correctly, their claims tend to be much more logic based: “assuming X, literature suggests Y.” If the assumption is wrong, it’s easy to toss it aside.

I’m not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think that even the cringiest and objectively awful self-help books I’ve read have something to teach me. I just also think that at a certain point, we need to acknowledge that the field is only helpful in so much as it helps.

Was this just another ramble? Let’s read it and find out. If not, calling it here. If so, only allowed to revise.

Draft 4: 28 May 2025

Metaphor is powerful, and the superstructures of society impose metaphors on us. In today’s day and age, almost everyone I know can tell you the time to the minute with almost no effort, and has the capability to show the time to any desired degree of precision. Some people function well as cogs: the rotation of the earth for a 24 hour day, regardless of season, can be broken into externalized blocks of time. This is not meant to denigrate the cog-people2. In the society we inhabit, being able to function according to an external clock makes you happier in a very real sense: life is happier when less frictive, and not rubbing against the constraints of our societal cages keeps the sores from forming.

If I could choose to be a coglet, I would.

Unfortunately, my relationship to time is not so mechanized. Knowing I have an appointment at 11, my day is blocked for at least 40 minutes leading up to it. Because I know that I do not relate well to time, I budget an extra half hour for any drive over fifteen minutes. Look at that, even when writing, I cannot escape the capitalist metaphor for time: budgeting implies spending implies that saving can happen. I arrive places early, because I am terrified of being late.

But, the cogless3 suffer in other ways as well. Nearly every self-betterment routine assumes that blocks of time exist as interchangeable units. If I have dance for an hour before lunch, I can move that to the hour just after lunch so that there’s the extra morning hour of work, or so the claim goes. And, when dealing with external factors, this may well be true: the class lasts as long as the class-runner makes it.

When working alone, though, this is far from true. More than just my productivity at different hours of the day or days of the year, my need to use time changes as well. If I hold each stretch for thirty seconds, I don’t stretch some muscles enough, but I stretch others more than enough; it all depends on what is tight on a given day at a given time.

If I construct a schedule for myself that implies tasks take fixed times, I am attempting to slot myself into being a cog. Advice for those who struggle with time blindness is often tasked around finding the level of scheduling where every minute that goes by was spent well.4 As someone who knows that some of my best memories come from the untracked hours I spent talking with friends, any linear awareness of time passing prevents me from fully experiencing the moment.

I don’t quite know how to make this work for me, though. If I don’t do things hourly, I will often not do them at all; I have been known to sit at a computer unmoving for hours on end. If I stop each hour to stretch, though, a part of me is looking at the clock, counting down how much more time I have until my next motion. The world around me conforms to linear time, and so if I want to interact with the world, I have to meet it on society’s terms. When scheduling for myself, though, I think that what is most important is that I set a minimum bar of effort: if after X words or pages or stretches or scales or etc. I still don’t feel like doing a task, then I can put it off for my next set.

It was suggested to me that I try a block scheduling for my life, affirming three periods of work with meals and movement after each. I think that this might work for me, especially if I am able to spend a few minutes each day determining what my priority list is. If I spend an entire day on one task, for instance, then I spent the entire day on it. If I cycle through every task and none feel good, then I know that I absolutely need to stop and interact with the world around me somehow, especially through movement. Will this new scheduling method work for me? Maybe.

Did this get completely off topic? Yeah... Final attempt?

Draft 3: 28 May 2025

Metaphor is powerful.

The 2008 financial crisis came because mortgages were compared to human lifetimes. When I say that there is a well I pull from to write, I tell myself that waiting to recover for days is the appropriate method to stall burnout.

Self-knowledge does not mean self-mastery.

I know that I struggle to start tasks; each new occasion marks another leap into an unknown and unlit chasm. I know that I struggle to finish tasks; a phantasm of death comes to collect each time I end something. Neither of these is a moral failing, or even really a failing at all. However, I need to schedule my life with the full knowledge that I will always have to force the first drops out.

If I had to distill the entirety of useful self-help literature I’ve read into just a few pieces, I think that these are the most resonant right now. However, in most of the other drafts, I’ve ignored another key question: what is the point of self-help literature? In short, I’d argue that self-help as a genre is about noticing areas of life dissatisfaction and removing that feeling. Depending on the book, that might present as learning to accept life as it is, or it might mean taking on new hobbies and routines.

Regardless of what advice one follows, though, there’s a point that I know to be important and true even though nothing inside of me resonates with the fact: there are twenty four hours per calendar day. We cannot save the time, and it will pass regardless of how it is used. It is not spending in any real sense, as spending implies the option to save.

Every last moment of every last day is used. If I am trying to add anything to the day, that means by definition something else needs to be removed. Sometimes that’s fairly easy: I don’t like eating lunch as a break meal, and so can afford to spend an extra few minutes reading during the night. Other times it’s incredibly difficult: I want to exercise more, but going to the gym alone is a ten to twenty minute round trip. Changing into clothes is another five or so5 in each direction, and showering is another impulse of time. At the very least then, if I want to work out in the gym, I need to budget, at the absolute minimum, thirty minutes more than the amount of time I want to work out.

So, how does this help me with self-help?

Realistically, it means that I more and more am in the camp of those who believe that the goal should be self-acceptance over self-improvement. I could log my time, it is true. However, logging my time is then a task of itself, and also like I refuse to see myself as solely a cog in a machine. Scheduling, even “practice for half an hour”, implicitly says that the linear relationship with time is the correct one and that there is some fundamental ordering to reality.

Oof this got away from me a little bit. Still, I’m curious where we’re going!

I’ve written before about scheduling my life. Try as I might, I have yet to find a method that works for more than a few days. There are, however, a number of things that I know absolutely do not work for me.

I should not go days on end without just sitting down and hand-writing whatever is on my mind. In no way must what I write be even slightly coherent, the importance is solely in physicalizing the thought. I cannot ever rely on motivation: even going to a friend’s party feels hard when in the midst of any other task. I should not have any games downloaded on my computer or phone: even when I promise myself it will just be a single game, ten minutes stretches into four hours far too easily. If there’s a barrier to a task, it will go undone: if my guitar is not reachable without moving from my bed, I play it far less than if I can literally pluck it without needing to sit up.6

What else what else? I think that I might just try this again but in the form of rejecting time as authority.

Draft 2: 28 May 2025

Metaphors are powerful.

I often forget just how true this is for myself. I have spoken many times before about how my ideas and words come from a well of writing. Wells run dry, and the correct response to a well running dry is to let it refill. Therefore, when I feel as though writing is hard and the words are gone, I should stop and wait for new words to appear inside me.

This is perhaps true in some very very local sense for me, and only then. When I write more, I am more able to write even more. I refill myself by doing other forms of writing, not by avoiding writing altogether.

Metaphors are powerful, and the stories we tell are as well.

I believe that in general I am the biggest limiting factor to my success. In part, this is because I have managed to structure my life in such a way that it can tend to be true. I no longer do experimental work, and so if my calculations do not run or a paper is poorly written, it is on me. Buddhists talk about how the idea of self is an image, not reality. What does it mean for me to be my limiting factor? Looking non-religiously, what about the greater structures I find myself in? The world is more fragmented than it has ever been; labor has never been so divorced from results and compensation; workers are losing rights that were painfully clawed after for generations.

What stories do I tell that limit myself? One is always that I will ever want to do something. Even going to a friend’s home for Memorial Day, something that they actively expressed interest in me attending, is difficult.

If I want to accomplish something, I must either find a way to claim that it’s actually a continuation of some other task, or else grit my teeth, push through the thorns of complacency and fear, and find myself in a new grove of new tasks. If I want to finish something, I need to actively confront the spectre of death that lies in front of any accomplishment. Perhaps more importantly, though, I need to accept that neither of these are moral failings. Wanting to be better at starting and finishing tasks will not make it so, and even if there was some way for me to fix them, I do not know what it is. There’s something to be said for wishing the world was a better place, doing what I can to effect that change. However, there is also something fundamentally important about working in the current world.

Do I wish that the electoral system would represent the people and that I could vote for a candidate I passionately support? Yes. Do I know that I must vote for the candidate which I find least objectionable in almost every circumstance? Yes.

If I am comfortable with accepting that I don’t have a great political representative, why am I so opposed to accepting the parts of me that are not idealized?

At this point I must go to my meeting, but I do really feel like I’ve got a good post going, and I’m excited to finish it.7

Draft 1: 28 May 2025

8

What does it mean to be better?

This is a question I ask myself often. For many, it involves worldly success, which is often measured by money or influence. For others, it means that the boundaries they see in themselves are gradually eroded. For still others, it means learning to accept the boundaries which they have.

As someone who has consumed a large quantity of literature which could be described as self-help9, the more that a book aims to effect specific changes in behaviors or patterns, the more that it tends to assume that the reader is “normal.” What any given author means by normal is very rarely explicitly stated, and it does differ slightly between different books, even those who share an author. In general, though, they assume someone who does not have a disability, has sufficient autonomy to markedly change their life if they so chose, and is dissatisfied with the state of their experience. Most tend towards a neo-liberal idea of self and betterment,10 which assumes that we are cogs that should be constantly producing and that we can improve our lot in life solely by our own efforts.

It isn’t that I think they are intrinsically wrong. In fact, I do think that most people would benefit from knowing at least a little of the literature on how to live a life that is closer to what they want. At the very least, most of the books ask the reader to think about what they want, which I don’t think many of us do anywhere as often as we maybe should. It’s one thing to excel at the consequences of the choices we made, and it’s something far different to make sure that we’re choosing correctly.11 However, the advice is, by nature of coming from a static book, one size for all. Every person is fundamentally and wholly unique12, and no advice will work for all people in all places.

Perhaps the most impactful piece of self-betterment advice I have encountered recently came during the dissertation writing camp I attended last week. During each lunch break, the organizers brought in a speaker to talk about some aspect of the writing experience. As someone who’s consumed perhaps too much literature on producing writing, most of the advice was completely old to me: write daily, accept that early drafts are bad, make sure that things are appropriately formatted when submitting, etc. On Wednesday, however, they brought in a speaker to talk about mental health in the dissertation writing process.

I do not have a good grasp on linear time, and I have significant mental inertia: once I start on something, even and especially a break, I find it hard to stop. Standard productivity advice, like the pomodoro method, is actively harmful not just to my productivity, but to my overall sense of well-being. Despite knowing this at intuitive and intellectual levels, I still generally feel as though the fact that I cannot get through the many tasks I wish I could is a personal and therefore moral failing.

At this seminar, there were three key things that felt as though they were shining light onto a part of me that I didn’t know existed, let alone was hidden in darkness. First, there is nothing wrong with not being able to follow any given writing advice; the speaker gave the example of someone with caretaking responsibilities being unable to consistently write at the same time every day, but quickly extended it. Second, the society we live in assumes that we can do literally everything on our own and that we should be able to do so. Even more than that, though, it tells us that we must judge our every action against not just our own goals, but also the accomplishments of those around us and those who could conceivably be called peers; once I finish my Ph.D., I am nominally on an even playing field with my advisor, so I should be able to output as much work in as short of a time frame. Of course, this idea is ridiculous; I hope the explanation alone conveys that. Finally, failing at something is not a moral failing.

I don’t know why that final statement struck me so hard. It’s not as though that’s something that I’ve ever been explicitly taught, and in fact my family raised me with the opposite belief. And yet, the effects of society worm their way deep into our psyches.

Each day of camp, we were asked to make three goals: a dream goal, a reasonable but optimistic goal, and a minimum goal. In doing these, I realized that I have a fundamentally different understanding of my capabilities as the rest of the camp, and likely the normative person too. The minimum goal for me is what I know that I can accomplish given the lowest productivity that I have had over the past three weeks. The reasonable but optimistic goal assumes that I do not spiral out during the process, and the dream goal assumes that I can work without rest and at a pace where my hands are the sole limiting factor in production.

Perhaps because of this, the first two days I was barely able to meet the minimum goal. There’s something to be said for setting lower goals, because that means that it’s easier to exceed expectations. At a deep and primal level, though, I hate that idea. Lowering standards never feels like a good thing to me.

How does this relate to the self-help literature?

In general, books aimed towards improving your life assume that you do not know what your capabilities are. People tend to overestimate some aspects of themselves and underestimate their skill in other domains. I do not claim to be any different in general, but I do think that I know what I can do and what I want to do.

The issue for me is always starting and finishing tasks. Something deep inside of me sees every new action as a cliff that will lead to sharp rocks. Finishing any project is ending, which is a form of death, and I have a reasonable fear of causing death in others.13 Once in a space where I am working, I perform best when I am able to remove every obstacle: water should be close at hand or preferably even just lean-overable, because the way time does not pass for me means that I will otherwise forget it. Hunger, which often gnaws at me, silences itself when I find myself working deeply. Rewards do not work for me because I understand that I am not really reward motivated, I am external praise motivated.

Ok this is good, I think that the focus is really better expressed as what normative advice is and what I would advise me about. Mostly the latter, in fact.

Draft 0.5: 28 May 2025

As a musician, I was well-schooled in the idea that practicing scales and chords14 actively improves my ability to write, play, perform, and generally experience music. As a writer, then, it feels like the same should be true for typing practice; the goal of scales is to allow the instrument to become part of you15 by making the simple motions completely mindless. Typing practice lowers the barrier between thoughts existing in my mind and being put on the page. And yet, there’s nothing I’ve seen really anywhere to suggest that aspiring authors should do typing courses.

Part of it is obviously a historical precedence.16 Typewriters and computer keyboards are far, far younger than notation modern enough to make practicing scales a concept. Given how many writers still do so by hand, it is perhaps unsurprising that the advice I was given is that the analog to scales for writing is free-writing, where there is no self editing. And yet, I find that I’m better able to write now as I have done more scales.

Hmmm this is also not getting me where i want to go. DO I want to write about self-help? I don’t know actually. Let’s try one more time, and we can see where we get it.

Draft 0: 28 May 2025

Something that I realize more and more as I grow older and17 wiser is that I cannot live my life according to the standard set of optimization routines. This is not even in the “I am human not machine, and so cannot and should not be optimizing literally everything for the sake of optimization”, but also because I am not a standard human being. None of us are, which is another strike against the normative self-help literature18

Despite, or perhaps because of this, I have consumed a large number of books whose nominal goal is life and self improvement. Some of these have been explicitly self-help, and others are more theoretical or philosophical. The fact that my family reading group19 picked this genre often probably also says something about the environment I occupy. We have a family reading group, and of every book which has ever been, we tended to pick those which claimed that they could fix some broken part of us.

This could very easily spiral into a theological folly about how we cannot fix what is broken, but that being broken is fundamental to human nature. Or, I could reflect on the Buddhist books I’ve been reading lately20, and how viewing ourselves as broken is a bad story. For whatever reason, I’m instead reflecting on a book on rhetoric I read recently: “The Evolution of Mathematics”, along with the writing camp I attended last week.21 The book argues that mathematics is best thought of as a type of rhetoric, and explores how Calculus required fundamentally shifting the rhetorical framework that people used when discussing numbers. It ended with a chapter discussing the paper which caused the 2008 global financial crisis through a rhetorical lens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the derivations in the paper were mathematically valid, but made incorrect assumptions.

For some reason I’m thinking a lot about metaphor right now. There’s a metaphor I use often about how writing is a well. Sometimes the well runs dry, and that means that I need to stop writing for a time. As I experience right now, though, I think that’s fundamentally untrue.

So far as I can tell, the normal advice for self-care and self-growth involves trusting that you understand your bodies cues and listening to those cues. Recently, though, I gave someone advice which boiled down to “the only way to get through this is to just ignore the part of you that says you can’t do it.” That’s true for much, and I learned last week at writing camp that self-efficacy is better correlated with success than actual competency.

Ok wow this is spiraling fast. I don’t entirely know what I’m trying to say today, and that’s part of the issue. I haven’t been journaling by hand in a while, which is almost certainly part of it. Take two.

Daily Reflection 28 May 2025

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:

  4. Cleaning?

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:31

  7. Quaternary Goals:

Daily Reflection 27 May 2025

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:

  4. Cleaning?

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:35

  7. Quaternary Goals:

  1. if the number of hobbies I have, the Ph.D. I’m about to complete, and the fact that I’ve written 7000 words in this document alone today weren’t enough of a sign↩

  2. even if the name feels intrinsically negative↩

  3. I like coglet and cogless as descriptors↩

  4. capitalism intentional there↩

  5. this includes the whole “I have to move from entrance to locker room”↩

  6. do I need to sit up to play? yes, absolutely↩

  7. and also like I’m ok with the fact that this is not actively bringing me to my dissertation being completed. I am more than a worker and need to start reclaiming the activities which bring me life. Since I have been able to write 5000 words here without a throughline, I should accept that I have not been getting my words out↩

  8. this now makes the third draft I’ve started by calling Draft 1.↩

  9. many authors in related spaces do not like being grouped into that genre. However, they do not write my follies. I do↩

  10. thanks to the seminar I went to on writing health which talked about how society does a lot to us, not least of which is saying that we are measured by individual productivity↩

  11. can you tell that I’m born for academia?↩

  12. except maybe identical twins. The jury is out on that (joke, I know that they too have individual immortal souls, and so are their own being)↩

  13. I hate that I have to write it like that. I would love if I felt as though I had a reasonable fear of death full stop↩

  14. for polyphonic or homophonic (ooh a post about homophony in single instrumentation could be fun)↩

  15. there’s a psychology term for this and I remember reading the papers that showed that top musicians’ minds literally treat the instrument as an extension of their body↩

  16. I had a conversation with a friend today about whether that phrase is redundant. I settled on it meaning that the precedence is just age↩

  17. presumably and hopefully↩

  18. at this point I realized that the folly I had intended to write about paper and how I hold it was really better served as a thing about self help literature. Not sure if paper is going to be covered, so it’s going in the unborn folly page↩

  19. which is currently on an indefinite hiatus/ is likely never coming back↩

  20. does it say something that almost every author I can think of in the emotional intelligence/mindfulness space is Buddhist? Probably. I think I saw somewhere that there was a Catholic Buddhist monk, but I don’t know if that’s true, and that’s too off topic for now↩

  21. which also absolutely needs to be a folly. I should do that tomorrow↩

  22. which is so crunchy, wow. I love that deep fried sounds are either an intentional choice or evidence that the world has in fact made progress on recording technologies in the past few generations.↩

  23. SSC, AAT, if any vib states were good, what happened to the computations, etc↩

  24. See my post about that↩

  25. this is not a non sequitor I promise. Recently someone expressed horror at my current organization strategy (many folders with hole punched loose leaf pages, each folder having a cover page and otherwise by and large being hand-written), to which a friend responded that my previous life organization was loose pages in my backpack. I didn’t think that they were right, but everyone else in my life agreed, and I have been realizing that, while it’s never my only method, it is one I always have. It’s nice being able to not have to damage or destroy books (codexes, I guess (codicies?)), and people in my life need a single piece of scratch paper fairly often (wow this is such a long footnote)↩

  26. I’m told this job is just a bunch of tests, and there’s very little I excel at so much as standardized tests↩

  27. do I need to plot my life out forever every week in order to not go insane? maybe? I’ll ask an expert about that today and see what they think about that. I’d love to think that there’s another way for me to not feel panicked, or maybe the panic is healthy↩

  28. have an appointment at 11 a few miles from here, and I think that it is actually about equal timing between walking the mile each way to my home and driving the car to the appointment versus taking the busses. That’s wild, but I care about the earth a little bit↩

  29. Even though spell check here hates it, I think that it remains a valid word, even if I’m not necessarily using it correctly↩

  30. and, more importantly, the bride-to-be, but I don’t know her, so I have no idea if that’s relevant or if she even wants music at the wedding↩

  31. mmmm off by N numbering. No I’m never deleting this footnote, because it brings me a large spark of joy literally every time that I read it↩

  32. trilogy?↩

  33. is this how to refer to a child of a dear friend?↩

  34. SSC, AAT, if any vib states were good, what happened to the computations, etc↩

  35. mmmm off by N numbering↩

What We Don’t Post

First Published: 2025 May 23 (because forgot to hit post)

Draft 2: 28 May 2025

Of the many things that I do not post, things that I worry may negatively impact my future career aspirations are high on the list. As a child, I was always advised1 to never willingly incriminate myself, and even though there is nothing objectively objectionable in what I deleted, I don’t know if it is necessarily a good look. There is a question to be had about whether it’s incriminating to describe that I have not posted something incriminating, but I think that I just don’t like being embarrassed by what I put out in the world.

Draft 1: 21 May 2025

I have, not infrequently, written an entire blog post only to realize that it had no place on this site. That can happen for various reasons, and I’ve more recently started thinking about how I can still reference that I did do writing even if I’m not posting the results. So, with that in mind, let’s talk about what we don’t post.

Most often, what I don’t post is either overly political or overly personal. That which is overly personal often includes vulnerability that does not feel appropriate2, and more often than not these days focuses around my mother. From here on out, I’d like to make a new draft of this with each post that I don’t make.

Yesterday I got most of the way through a reflection about morality and the role of women in the Church, before realizing that I didn’t really care about it any more. More than that, though, I think that I forgot what I wanted to say in the post at all. I hadn’t, and haven’t, reflected about the meta-reasoning behind each folly, and don’t really know if this is the space I want to use for to do so.3

Anyways, all this to say, there is much that I do not post, even though this is something that I will

Daily Reflection: 21 May 2025

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:

  4. Cleaning?

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:8

  7. Quaternary Goals:

  1. yes, I knew a bunch of lawyers as a child, how did you know?↩

  2. see the daily reflections!↩

  3. if only because I’m at writing camp and am currently at a weird mental and physical space where I both feel productive but also as though there’s nothing I want to do. It’s a really nice stage, because my thoughts feel like they’re under my command, which is not something that I am at all used to.

    Turns out it was a prelude to feeling tired, which I guess makes sense.↩

  4. SSC, AAT, if any vib states were good, what happened to the computations, etc↩

  5. or other things, as needed, I guess↩

  6. going from A to B is the same as B to A in reverse, give or take↩

  7. read: this is what I need to do in order to have the content for the talk which satisfies each of the sets of goals↩

  8. mmmm off by N numbering↩

On Melody and Harmony

First Published: 2025 May 7

Draft 3: 2025 May 7

The previous drafts have been a lot more meandering than I’m used to lately, and I think that part of the reason is that this post was really amorphous in my mind. Rather than the standard folly, where I have something I know I want to express and find the way to do so, I don’t know if I ever really knew what I was trying to express in the previous drafts. Thankfully, whatever net I cast still managed to bring back something worthwhile to gnaw on.1

Like many people, I struggle with imposter syndrome at times. These days, I find it happening almost exclusively in musical realms, and almost entirely when it comes to performance. In many regards, I can acknowledge the feeling as ridiculous. I am not trying to make a living doing music, so of course I am not as good as those who do. I know what would help my ear, and I actively choose not to do it.2

If I was just generally not as great as music as I wanted, I think that I would be more comfortable. However, I do also have some amount of pride3 in my ability to compose, which I think is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. Every professional composer I’ve spoken to is pretty clear about the necessity of not just being able to hear the harmonies and melodies one writes as they enter the page, but of being able to hear the absent harmonies.4 I can, at least most of the time, relatively accurately hear any individual melodic line in my writing. I can, however, almost never hear the harmonies.

As I write a piece for a dear friend’s wedding, I am finding the absolute limits of my ability to compose without paper. The frets of the guitar are welcoming and encourage certain harmonies and melodies. When I am away from it, though, I can still think about where my fingers and hand will need to be in order to make notes. So, I guess that the takeaway is that I need to accept that I cannot compose without paper, even though that hurts to admit. When composing for choir, I need an active audio playback.

Draft 2: 2025 May 6

When I was going into my senior year of college, I was debating different career options. Because I was formed for academia5, I knew that meant I wanted to go to graduate school next. Being a major in music with a love for composition and chemistry with a love for quantum and analytical, I asked professors what I was missing to be a good applicant to graduate school and generally successful in the industry. When we had visiting musicians, I did the same.6

I don’t remember what I was missing to be a good chemist, other than I think literal information. There was probably something like “be better at your lab notebook”, which I have not really done, but.

To be a successful composer, though, every professor and visiting musician I talked to had the exact same answer: a better ear was essential. Even outside of composing, the different performance based professors I worked with were often shocked at just how bad my pitch memory was.7 My ear is not great, and I have no real desire to do the work essential to training it. Back in college, before I had matured and learned the value of suffering8, I was even less willing.

And so, two futures of mine diverged and I took the one of least resistance.9 That spring, I then won a composition award from the music department. As it turns out, even though I do not have an emotional idea of what each interval is, nor can I play 11 notes on a piano and say which one is missing,10 I can still write music that makes the academy happy. Given the general reception to the songs I’ve written since then, I can also write music that makes the average person happy too. The only issue is that I cannot do it without a pencil and paper.

I can improvise lyric if I need to, and can figure out what should come next if given parts of a line. Given a melodic fragment, though, I cannot put the end on a guitar.

As I write a piece for my friend’s wedding, this is coming up constantly. I am nearly positive that what I want is just some scalar walking between different chords, but don’t have an idea in my hands or head how to do that when looking at the fretboard. What little I have been able to do past the moment of inspiration has been because I actively paused and reminded myself what chords were what scalar11 distances from each other and how I could walk between them. Still, the more I did that, the less the new parts felt like something good.

I’m sure that if and when I go and put the notes in my sheet music editor, I will immediately know what I can do to make the song last forever. I love programmatic music, and especially for something which is meant to be somewhat ambient, having a number of touch points with transitions is great.12 I can easily string a bunch of riffs or licks together, but need to have them first.

What was the point of this folly?

Really mostly me coming to terms with the fact that I don’t intuit musical instruments like I do sheet paper. That does, in my heart of hearts, make me feel like less of a musician, but it probably isn’t something horrible and worthy of despair. I don’t think that I value the skills of composing on an instrument enough to work on them, so I guess it would behoove13 me to internalize that I am ok with this fact.

I don’t know how I feel about this musing right now, so may revisit it before posting tonight. With two minutes until the end of the hour, I’ll call it here, though. On to the thesis.

Draft 1: 2025 May 6

While writing with my dear friend this morning, they commented that I have not been posting here lately. That’s not incorrect.

Part of me feels like any writing I do here is writing that would otherwise be done on my thesis, which is not totally incorrect. There are only so many thoughts my brain can capture, break in, and pin to the page in a given day. However, I also know that I feel more grounded if I do these follies, and that being grounded lets me capture more thoughts. With that in mind, I’m going to consciously choose to spend the remainder of this working hour14 writing this. If it doesn’t get me to the point that I want, I’ll try to return to it later.

So, what do I want to say about melody and harmony?

I was talking with a friend this weekend about how we write music. She has a great intuition and ear, and just sings what feels natural. I am so far from that, at least in general.

Sure, most of my songs begin with randomly singing a line or even just a few bars. However, what comes next is that I have to painfully figure out exactly what relative and absolute pitches I sang15. Even then, I only have a single line of music.

What comes next is the part of composition that I have always found easiest: composition on the staff. I am a product of the modern era, and really love having automatic playback. However, if I am away from my computer, I can write more pleasing melodic lines simply by using a staff than I tend to be able to do without the paper in front of me. I don’t know what about me is well trained to write music.

Having written that sentence, I do realize that’s untrue. I have spent a lot of time in my life explicitly and actively studying the melodies that I enjoy or dislike. Almost all of that study has been score study, which means that I have, at the absolute minimum, a good internal intuition of what a melody should look like on the page. Add to that the fact that I have internalized the formal rules that people have written over the ages for melodies that sound good16, and I guess that it should be no surprise that I can quickly jot down something that I like for a single voice.

Harmony is always something that comes later to me, which I attribute in equal parts to my high school choral experience and general love of early music. Both of these sources center melody, and have harmony fall out as a consequence, rather than the reverse, as is more common to the academic composer.

In playing guitar, though, most of what I’ve learned is various folk and folk adjacent17 songs by looking at chord sheets. I have mostly internalized standard variations on the 145 progression, which is certainly not bad, especially since most of what I write is folk and folk adjacent. Right now, though, I’m trying to write a piece for solo guitar for a friend’s wedding.

In a stroke of inspiration late one night, I found a riff I really liked. The warm light of morning showed me it was just a walk up from A to D in tenths, which made figuring out some next options easy enough. However, because I do so little work with melody on guitar, I find that nothing I’m doing feels particularly natural. I’ve practiced enough scales that I can look at a tab and follow it, but apparently not enough to have internalized it.

So, what does this mean for me?

I want to work on transcribing it, because I feel like it will help with getting the progression through. Right now I feel like what I have is alternating melody and fingerpicked harmony, which is not necessarily a problem. Ideally, though, I think that I’d like there to be more of a melodic line throughout, if only because that is familiar.

Draft 0: 2025 May 5

I’ve talked a fair amount in the past about how I write music, and especially how I’m writing a piece for a friend’s wedding. While lying in bed late one night, I awoke with inspiration for the hook for the piece I’m going to play this fall. Figuring out what comes next, though, has really been a struggle.

Daily Reflection 5/7

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:

  4. Cleaning?

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:

  7. Quaternary Goals:

Daily Reflection 5/6

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:

  4. Cleaning?

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:32

  7. Quaternary Goals:

Daily Reflection 5/5

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:

  4. Cleaning?

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:54

  7. Quaternary Goals:

  1. I love the viscerality of the word gnaw↩

  2. ear training is just so low on the list of priorities I have↩

  3. which the emotion book says is a good thing, recognition of actual accomplishment. Catholic me still says not to use it, but also hubris and pride are two separate words for a reason↩

  4. e.g. “if you play 11 notes on a piano, you should be able to hear which one you didn’t play”↩

  5. I can justify this statement if anyone doesn’t immediately agree↩

  6. I interacted far more with the visiting musicians than chemistry professors for some reason, probably the size of departments and the fact that the visiting musicians did far more interactive activities?↩

  7. I was a junior in college before the idea of remembering what pitch I had been singing was even a concept in my mind↩

  8. read: I now practice regularly↩

  9. the fact that it’s generally agreed Chemistry is more profitable than music wasn’t hurting the choice either↩

  10. both of these were things that are essential, according to most of the composers↩

  11. I love using math music words in ambiguous contexts↩

  12. mmmm graphs↩

  13. ooh apparently this word is archaic now, comes directly from an Old English word that means the same! Not even like a “add this part to this part”. wild↩

  14. currently 1122, final five minutes of an hour always reserved for stretching↩

  15. absolute because many times I sing it not near my guitar and need to know whether to figure out a different chord pattern or if I can shift the song itself↩

  16. read: I know what normative melody is, which sounds good at the very least by virtue of being familiar to the listener’s ears and is singable at the very least by virtue of being in the shape my throat recognizes (throat? is that where the song comes from?)↩

  17. read: early rock and a lot of punk↩

  18. want to and am working up the motivation to↩

  19. note to self: that’s something we can put in the paper “look, even if we have X times more data, linear increase not quadratic or whatnot”↩

  20. SSC, AAT, if any vib states were good, what happened to the computations, etc↩

  21. as it turns out, I don’t really love doing it with my web novel↩

  22. yes, I do in fact reward myself for reading by going to a burger joint.↩

  23. meaning that like none of the books I keep on my phone are dragging me in, and otherwise I don’t keep books nearby enough↩

  24. the more times I type it, the fewer attempts it takes to spell correctly. Also, yes I’m hoping that the repetition makes me actually get it↩

  25. another advantage of bulletin board is that I can quickly shift things around. Then again, the same is true of floor time. Might need to have floor time, especially if I finish this post earlier than expected↩

  26. I’m currently operating under “if a part of me is easily forgotten, it’s probably not an issue right now” school of recovery↩

  27. in addition to footnotes, I think that I’m also going to have a list of tasks for a day? I don’t really know what I need to do to make my life ordered and functional, short of maybe like getting a secretary.↩

  28. why was that a parenthetical and not a footnote? great question. Do I think that my boss will accept the footnotes that I’m leaving in my drafts for now? Probably not. Am I going to continue adding them until she explicitly tells me to remove them? Also yes↩

  29. I’m trying to consider tasks by urgency and overall importance when prioritizing. Unfortunately, everything is kind of either yes urgent or no urgent (is that just how my mind works?), so that’s not super helpful, because the yes urgents are almost always yes important↩

  30. SSC, AAT, if any vib states were good, what happened to the computations, etc↩

  31. I often comment things like “alas I do not have my backpack” as a way of externalizing that I need to get the backpack at some point. Friend just got the backpack, which I think felt bad to me because it made me feel like I was being passive aggressive?↩

  32. mmmm off by N numbering↩

  33. read: the time flies by in some ineffable way. How has it been more than an hour that I’ve been working and yet only 30 minutes on this document?↩

  34. how do I distinguish them, you might ask? Really it’s that I’m willing to break meter and flow and anything else much more if it’s for a song, especially if I think that the melody or harmony requires it (probably will be in this musing)↩

  35. read: rest is not sleep↩

  36. as it turns out, when walking all day, one needs to consume more, not less, liquid↩

  37. time for a post it↩

  38. am I using this as my way of also getting things onto a page so that it’s easier for me when it comes time to post it? Yes, absolutely. Am I also using this as a form of productive procrastination? Yes, absolutely. Is this also incredibly grounding after a long weekend? So absolutely and incredibly yes↩

  39. After writing the next two lines, realized that I hadn’t capitalized↩

  40. had to look up the term I’ve been using real quick. Saying diagram instead of plot or graph makes more sense to me↩

  41. does this need to be capitalized? Who can say?↩

  42. that phrasing feels fundamentally wrong in some hard to pin down way↩

  43. which I’m going to shift all useful things into after making sure that I have good BibTeX keys for all of them↩

  44. are these the same? probably not, though from a flirtation standpoint, I feel like generally better to err on the side of more, not less↩

  45. oof that’s rough to say↩

  46. read: straighter↩

  47. should here meaning think that I would benefit and enjoy more↩

  48. opening a tab for that now, even though it does not get a post it↩

  49. read: the note will say figure out what is needed to apply for a lecturing job and make a timeline of when jobs are closing. Ok that’s two notes↩

  50. read, the one that ends the 10 hour↩

  51. ooh I guess post its don’t have to go in the binder, I can keep them by me so I know what I said I was going to do when! Maybe? or hmmm idk.↩

  52. entirely because I’m just noodling around a chord progression and understand melody lines better on a score than on the guitar (a musing? Today’s musing? yeah ok↩

  53. read: message the team and ask what they’re looking for↩

  54. mmmm off by N numbering↩

  55. she also mostly does Christian music, and I have never really done music that connects to my faith, so that will probably be reallly helpful for me.↩

Monthly Reflection

First Published: 2025 May 1

Draft 1

Oh boy what a whirlwind of a month!

Five things I was looking forward to last month:

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

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

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

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

April Highlights

Five things I have to look forward to in May:

Five quantized25 goals for the month:

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

Looks great!

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

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

Daily Reflection

  1. Top Priorities:

  2. Secondary Priorities:

  3. Adjacent to Primary and Secondary:37

  4. Cleaning?38

  5. External Obligations:

  6. Tertiary Goals:39

  7. Quaternary Goals:

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

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

  3. shocking↩

  4. something something motivation levels↩

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

  6. one might say obsessive, if they wished↩

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  16. !↩

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

  18. and second↩

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  39. mmmm off by N numbering↩

  40. love that sonic song↩

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

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

Another Look On Motivation

First Published: 2025 April 26

Draft 4: 26 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short, we turn humans into tools.

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

Judaism is incredible for this.

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

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

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

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

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

I have two gut reactions to this.

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

I really don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 3: 26 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, this framing is wrong. HMm.

Draft 2: 26 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this relate to intrinsic motivation?18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 1: 26 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Notes

  1. Draft 1↩

  2. Draft 2↩

  3. Draft 3↩

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

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

  6. see footnotes in one of the earlier drafts↩

  7. drug testing, etc.↩

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

  9. oof time is ever sprinting onwards↩

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

  11. intellectually↩

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

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

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

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

  16. there we go↩

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

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

  19. as I thought of them at the time↩

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

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

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

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

  24. as I would hope most everyone does↩

  25. aspirationally in both cases, of course↩

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

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

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

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

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

  31. which is apparently standardized↩

  32. which feels weird, rifght??↩

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

On Fugue and Flow States

First Published: 2025 April 23

Draft 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do I mean by that?

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

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

When is it for the better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Notes

  1. such as spending time in the winter air↩

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

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

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

  5. Ah gotta love how effective reflection is↩

  6. sorry friend↩

Shapenote, Sacred Music, and the Second Vatican Council

First Published: 2025 April 22

Draft 2: 22 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 1: 22 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to MS.

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

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

We are reminded that sacred silence is also important.24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alrighty, let’s restart.

Daily Notes

  1. especially from the original polyphonic era↩

  2. ooh gotta love a good word↩

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  10. only because I’m talking music here↩

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

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

  13. look at that gotcha moment↩

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  21. I will use abbreviations as I see fit↩

  22. p112↩

  23. which is fine, in my eyes↩

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

  25. P34↩

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

  27. 61↩

  28. potentially↩

  29. two am is morning right?↩

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

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

On Succeeding at Creating

First Published: 2025 April 17

Draft 2: 17 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 1: 17 April 2025

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In specific terms, did I succeed with this post?

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

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

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

What does it even mean to create?

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

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

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

Daily Notes

  1. is?↩

  2. thanks freeman dyson for that fact just now↩

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

  4. hm I must be hungry↩

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

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

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

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

On What I Call This Writing

First Published: 2025 April 16

Draft 2: 16 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email. Eh, it’s accurate but.

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

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

Echoes could be fun, but feel too abstract.

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

Draft 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attempts?

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

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

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

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

Post Script:

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

Daily Notes

  1. yeah that resonates↩

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

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

  4. based on NaNoWriMo standards.↩

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

  6. new while writing here↩

  7. new while writing here↩

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

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

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

  11. new while writing here↩

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

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

  14. new while writing here↩

  15. new here↩

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

  17. most of the time↩

  18. new here while writing↩

  19. new here↩

  20. new here↩

  21. new here↩

  22. hopefully↩

  23. these have all been new↩

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

  25. new here↩

  26. both new here↩

  27. new here↩

  28. Nimrod is a mighty hunter in the Bible↩

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

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

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

  32. nominally, at least↩

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

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

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

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

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

  38. don’t boo me↩

  39. waves? currents?↩

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

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

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

  43. that should not be next year, ew↩

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

On Mastery

First Published: 2025 April 15

Draft 2: 2025 April 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 1: 2025 April 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 0: Meta Rambling about the Place

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

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

Daily Notes

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

  2. plectrum, if you need to feel fancy↩

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

  4. in this example↩

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

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

  7. or, ideally, unconsciously competent /s↩

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

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

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

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

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

  13. so, ignore this paragraph, basically↩

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

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

  16. because I trimmed it↩

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

  18. leftover curry rice↩

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

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