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On Succeeding at Creating

First Published: 2025 April 17

Draft 2: 17 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 1: 17 April 2025

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In specific terms, did I succeed with this post?

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

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

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

What does it even mean to create?

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

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

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

Daily Notes

  1. is?↩

  2. thanks freeman dyson for that fact just now↩

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

  4. hm I must be hungry↩

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

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

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

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

On What I Call This Writing

First Published: 2025 April 16

Draft 2: 16 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email. Eh, it’s accurate but.

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

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

Echoes could be fun, but feel too abstract.

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

Draft 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attempts?

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

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

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

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

Post Script:

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

Daily Notes

  1. yeah that resonates↩

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

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

  4. based on NaNoWriMo standards.↩

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

  6. new while writing here↩

  7. new while writing here↩

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

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

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

  11. new while writing here↩

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

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

  14. new while writing here↩

  15. new here↩

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

  17. most of the time↩

  18. new here while writing↩

  19. new here↩

  20. new here↩

  21. new here↩

  22. hopefully↩

  23. these have all been new↩

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

  25. new here↩

  26. both new here↩

  27. new here↩

  28. Nimrod is a mighty hunter in the Bible↩

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

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

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

  32. nominally, at least↩

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

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

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

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

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

  38. don’t boo me↩

  39. waves? currents?↩

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

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

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

  43. that should not be next year, ew↩

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

On Mastery

First Published: 2025 April 15

Draft 2: 2025 April 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 1: 2025 April 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 0: Meta Rambling about the Place

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

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

Daily Notes

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

  2. plectrum, if you need to feel fancy↩

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

  4. in this example↩

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

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

  7. or, ideally, unconsciously competent /s↩

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

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

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

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

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

  13. so, ignore this paragraph, basically↩

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

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

  16. because I trimmed it↩

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

  18. leftover curry rice↩

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

Some Writing Advice

First Published: 2025 April 14

Draft 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Optimal Lifting Plan

First Published: 2025 April 12

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

Draft 6: 12 April

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

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

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

Maybe!

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

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

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

Could they learn bad habits by practicing like this?

Absolutely!

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

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

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

Draft 5: 12 April

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 4: 12 April

What is the optimal lifting routine?

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

What do I want to do?

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

How does lifting help me do what I want?

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

How can I do these lifts?

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

Draft 3.1: 12 April

What is the optimal lifting routine?

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

Draft 3: 12 April

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm might be a better framing

Draft 2: 12 April

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

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

Now, why is this great advice?

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

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

That’s a legitimate question.

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

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

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

Draft 1: 12 April

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

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

Why is this the optimal weight lifting plan?

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

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

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

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

Daily Notes

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

  2. not mentally, but on the board↩

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

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

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

  6. my subgroup is far outside the societal norm↩

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

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

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

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

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

  12. especially when I can actually do them↩

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

  14. well after planning this post↩

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

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

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

  18. oof I love lists apparently↩

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

  20. absolutely my least healthy trait, I know↩

  21. obviously with exceptions↩

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

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

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

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

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

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

  28. script? Is that what people say?↩

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Published: 2025 April 11

Draft 3: 11 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 2: 9 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft 1: 9 April 2025

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

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

How does it help me?

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

However, it is obviously not my preferred way forward.

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

Daily Notes

Daily Notes 11 April 2025

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

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

  3. earth spins↩

  4. earth goes all the way around the sun↩

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

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

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

  8. and to some extent does↩

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

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

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

  12. and when generally life feels hard,↩

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

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

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

  16. which??↩

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

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

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

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

  21. memory is strange↩

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

On the Path of a Life

First Published: 2025 April 7

Draft 1: 7 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Notes

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

  1. not that this stage (other than the obvious) was bad, just that I always want better for those I care about, and I care about myself.↩

  2. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound↩

  3. end of the year?↩

  4. I don’t remember where↩

  5. note the capitalization! Fancy.↩

  6. partially because survivorship bias, partially because I am not the average person, partially because I find myself trusting other’s knowledge less and less (wow I really need to do reason and revelation already↩

  7. obviously like jumping out of a plane will impact the shape much more than like red tie versus blue tie for a day↩

  8. I think fate is not real, but the normative Catholic stance is that only humanity (and some non-corporeal beings) have free will. It’s not a large leap to say that this means the universe is predictable for any system without human connection, and I think that I’ve seen talks with that exact thesis. I don’t know where I stand on the issue, generally thinking that we should err on the side of treating animals with compassion, as they too are G-d’s creations, but↩

  9. is it a publisher for audio? I think so↩

  10. even if it’s making other parts of me tighter rather than the parts I think I’m stretching lighter.↩

  11. lifts?↩

  12. obviously↩

  13. oh duh, if I move dishes into there, at worst I end up with nice warm plates to serve my meals. Nice how thinking through things by typing helps me come to answers↩

  14. meaning a snack and 2 meals is good or three meals, etc.↩

  15. rice and bratwurst and gravy for dinner, which was shockingly good. Gravy entirely because Japanese curry starts from a roux and I forgot how much I love both making and consuming roux based sauces. Lunch was a pot pie from the local gas station chain. Breakfast was a rice krispie treat and a protein bar.↩

  16. which I think isn’t used as a term any longer. Maybe script↩

  17. right? because it’s the singular one there?↩

  18. it’s a really dystopian progression fantasy series, where the main character is poor and wants to cultivate, and ends up joining a horribly abusive fighting ring just to be able to pay off his debts. Not that I want to write more dystopic fiction (if anything, I want the reverse. I want writing to return to an era where we have hope. Society influences art and art influences society. I want to do my part to make both better), but it was enjoyable, and I’m curious if I’ll still enjoy the themes on a second read through.↩

  19. would it have been faster by a lot and also easier for everyone if I had just written it? yes. Did the undergrad necessarily want to write the script? no. Does the undergrad need to know python? no, but I think that the more tools one has, generally the better.↩

Reflections on the Gospel

First Published: 2025 April 6

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that I have only one other reflection on a Lenten gospel, since I’ve never been good at this blog in the springtime.
Note 7 April 2025: By mistake I uploaded the monthly reflection again. Whoops!

N.B. Oof this one got rambly and also weirdly aggressive and uses second person more than usual. To any and all of my readers, I promise that the you in the writing is the generic you, not you specifically.

Draft 2: 6 April 2025

“Has no one condemned you?”

She replied, “No one, sir.”

Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”

Of the lines in the Bible, I don’t really know why this one doesn’t get the same sort of, if you’ll pardon the pun, religious fanatacism that others like John 3:16 gets. What better encapsulates Church teaching than Christ’s final line there?

We are a faith of hope, of belief, of love. G-d does not condemn anyone to hell, nor does he condemn anyone generally. We choose hell.

However, this is not free license to act how we please. We are also commanded to sin no further.

Who has the authority to make such statements?

The Lord, the G-d of Abraham and Isaac, the voice of the burning bush, the soft call on the wind.

I cannot understand why the beauty of this line is not commented on more often.

I do, however, understand why so many non-and non-practicing1 Christians use this as a cudgel. I have primarily seen it used in reference to homosexuality and abortion, the two hot button topics of the era for believers.

When the crowd is gone, and the woman is standing alone in front of her Creator, as we all will do, He asks if anyone condemns her. If she had been wracked with guilt over her actions, she could still have condemned herself. She does not, however. Looking around, and seeing the space empty of herself and Love Himself, she responds that no one does.

While the crowd arrives and ultimately leaves, Christ is writing in the sand. Folk legend says that he was writing the sins of everyone in the crowd, which, even if I do not agree with on principle, points so something we too often forget. In the parables that find themselves recreated in our lives, we are not Him. We are not the father from last week, gladly welcoming his son back. Most often, we are not even the prodigal son. We are the other son, the one feeling jilted because his father is celebrating the return of his wayward son.

I think that we should all take part in a thought exercise. Imagine the worst person who has ever lived. Pray for them.

That’s not the exercise, but it is a good reminder. The exercise works just as well with a fictional person, assuming that you can still bring yourself to feel the same level of disgust and horror at the actions of the person. Imagine that when you die, and the Heavenly Father receives you into his warm embrace, you find yourself face to face with this person. I am not asking how the you of then would feel, I am asking how the you of right now would feel.

Or, take it a few steps closer to home. Think of everyone in your life, repentant sinner trying their best, person flaunting their sin, the annoying person who always takes forever to order their coffee. Would you be happy spending an eternity in heaven with all of them? Would you be happy spending an eternity in heaven if the two of you alone were saved? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you do not have the heart that Christ demands.

Too often, people who claim to be Christian will speak of justice when they mean retribution. We need to remember, all sin is public sin, because we are all one body. You cannot harm one part of yourself without harming the whole. If, in the gym, one arm gave out before the other, you2 would not shame the arm. You would give it the extra attention that it needs in order to be as strong as the other.

The Church does not teach equality, but equity. “To whom much has been given, much is expected”, reminds us that those who have been blessed with more or seemingly greater3 gifts are expected to give more to the world around them. In direct opposition to Calvinism, the Church teaches that those who have received more from the Lord are actively sinful if they notice someone suffering. St. Basil, one of the early Church Fathers4 put it so strikingly. We would condemn someone stealing the coat from a homeless man’s back. What then, is the coat that we do not wear?

As with every Gospel passage, it can return to love of neighbor. However, this passage is specifically about justice.

One argument people use for retributive “justice” is that it works as a deterrent. If you cut of thieves’ hands, then you will have less theft. If you kill the murderer, others will not lash out in anger. This is not, however, a matter of faith and morals. This is a matter of fact and evidence.

The research is resoundingly clear that retributive justice does not work for anything except causing suffering.5 All punishment should be oriented towards the salvation of a person’s soul and the souls of all in the world.

An argument for life in prison or capital punishment is that a country may be unable to keep someone effectively detained. If a murderer escapes and kills a dozen people, wouldn’t it have been better to have killed him to prevent that? The Church is incredibly clear on that point.

No.

The Church rejects any way of quantifying the value of human life, as to put a price on something of infinite glory is to inherently devalue it. We are crafted, lovingly and individually, in the image and likeness of the source of all good. By saying that twenty lives is worth more than a life, or a thousand, or any number, you are inherently saying that there is a worth to human life. One life is worth one life.

Something mathematics has right is the idea of infinity. What is infinity plus one? Or, getting to the direct thrust, what is infinity times twenty, or a million?

Infinity remains infinity.

There is more to be said. One could speak about how jury nullification, at its best, deals with the fact that laws are black and white but circumstances rarely are. One could speak about how we can never know the state of another’s soul. One could speak about how kings had, or at least claimed, a divine right to rule, which gave them the power of choosing death. One could speak about how, if the goal is to cow a populace into not murdering, it is truly less relevant who is hung, as long as a body swings from the rope.

This Lenten season, I invite you and myself to truly think on the meaning of Christ’s passion. He willingly died for each and every one of us and our sins. My sin and my sin alone condemns Christ to the Cross.

But, as Lent becomes Easter, so too does Christ rise from the dead, showing the path forward. We should not condemn those around us, but in all things should strive to love everyone as Christ loves us. After all, just as two infinities is the same as one, half an infinity is as much too. Loving any fraction of the amount that Christ does means having an infinite well of love.

Draft 1: 6 April 2025

Wow, sing of an age past but not forgotten Sunday!6 It has been ages since the Gospel really spoke to me like it did today. With that in mind, I’m going to reflect on it.

Today’s Gospel is probably one of the more commonly7 cited passages of the Bible, especially by non believers. In it, a woman is caught in the act of adultery. The crowd,8 seeing an opportunity to entrap The Lord, ask Him what they should do. Obviously Mosaic Law says that she is to be stoned, but something something, Roman government said that Jews can’t do their own capital punishment or something.

Christ does not respond at first, instead writing9 on the ground. They repeat he question, and he says that the one without sin should cast the first stone.

In the Catholic joke version of this parable, a stone flies through the air and Christ exclaims “Mom! I told you not to come today!”

In the Biblical10 account, the crowd leaves one by one, until it is only the woman and Christ standing there. He asks if any condemn her, and she says no. Christ says that he, then, will also not, and tells her to go forth and sin no further.

Now, there’s a lot that I want to unpack here.

First, something I don’t know if I have ever seen is that Christ implicitly is asking the woman if she condemns herself or her actions. I feel like there’s something really important there, especially in the context of how people use the passage. However, I’m not sure what it is yet, so I’ll try to figure out by the end of this reflection.11

Second, there is a popular Catholic belief that Christ was writing the sins of the crowd on the ground, and that is what caused them to leave. I think that this is a bad faith reading. I do not know a single person who would be able to confidently state that they were perfect and without blame, especially in the context of explicit entrapment. Too, there is the point to remember that they asked Him this to cause trouble. I do not think that they would have stoned her even if He had said that all must follow the Mosaic Law.

In this reading, it is simply a waiting game. At some point, the provocateurs get bored or have other obligations, and are so forced to leave. Christ, waiting patiently12, does not address the woman until the entirety of the crowd leaves. I also don’t know what to make of this, except that we should never make choices about judgement and punishment rashly.

If I had been attempting to goad someone I thought of as a false prophet into choosing between two terrible choices and he just didn’t give a real answer, I think that I would be relatively patient. I surely would believe that he would become uncomfortable with a crowd looming over him, anxiously awaiting an answer, far before I would have reason to leave. I don’t know if that’s true, but, if the leaders had that belief, they would have been proven entirely wrong.

Third,13 there is something really interesting to me about the way that the Law is fundamentally changed in that instance. Nothing in the Mosaic Law, so far as I am aware, requires the dispensers of judgement to themselves be pure.

In Catholic teaching, sacraments are effective “ex opere operandi”; the holiness of the one providing the sacrament has no effect on the efficacy of the sacrament. There’s something really interesting to me about the fact that we have decided that expecting perfection from those who have been called and chosen to lead the people of G-d14, and yet Christ seems to be demanding that we be perfect in order to enact justice. Regardless of whether we feel it is merited, the crowd was correct that the explicit punishment laid out in the Law was death by stoning. Again, I don’t know what to do with this thought, so I will leave it for a little as well.

Moving to the more immediately applicable interpreting, this passage is often thrown by non-believers15 when Christians attempt to enact policy or seek punishment for violations, especially moral violations. The common response is that Christ said that she was to sin no more, and so telling people to stop bad actions is still ok or something. My most charitable reading of the Christian response is that the Christian legitimately believed that the other person was unaware that they were violating moral law, and out of perfect love and charity were simply informing them of a new Truth.16

Of course, we know that is not the case. Especially in the context of homosexuality, where I feel like the verse was most popularly used, no one is unaware that the standard belief in Christian society has been that homosexuality is inherently sinful.17 I think that, truly, this is an example of just how much Christian morality on justice is nonexistent among nominal believers.18

What is the goal of a punishment? To me, the answer is simple: as with literally everything that we do, the end goal of a punishment should be to bring the entire world to G-d and Christ. What does that mean in this context, though?

Generally, it means that reform based punishments should be seen as objectively better than retribution based punishment.19 The Church, in “Fides et Ratio”, was very clear that religious and scientific truth do not disagree. The idea that anyone has the right to end another’s life, whether explicitly by capital punishment or implicitly by life sentences, comes from the belief that Church Fathers had that deterrence was an effective way to reduce crime.

That is not a question of faith and morals.

Deterrence’s effect on crime rates lies exactly in the camp of a question that rational20 thought can answer. Even the federal government, whose recent administration is explicitly in favor of retribution based punishment, still acknowledges that harsh punishments do not reduce crime. So, then, how can a Catholic support retribution based punishment?

This is not a rhetorical question, for all that its presence in my writing makes it inherently rhetorical.21 I legitimately do not know of an argument for retribution based punishment that does not rely on the argument of “the Church Fathers said it was ok.” The Church Fathers are often wrong. Aquinas, the argumentative Catholic’s favorite cudgel, famously did not believe in the immaculate conception. We don’t question the validity of this.

We don’t22 question that daytime is bright because of the sun, as Augustine did. So then why is it that we question the Holy Father, who, seeing this, recently reminded all Catholics that we cannot support the death penalty. I have seen that some say that we still should allow it because we may not be able to keep someone imprisoned. Why is someone being imprisoned?

In the Christian ethical framework, we are punished only in so far as it is beneficial towards leading us to the Gospel. If we believe that crime is bad for getting all souls to heaven23, then we should work to stop crime in whatever way is most effective. The data show that means catching people, and giving them ways to rehabilitate.

If a murderer escapes custody and kills again, this is not somehow worse than killing them. If a murderer escapes and kills a thousand people, it is still no worse than killing them. All lives are infinitely precious.

Despite what we may have thought as children, infinity times one thousand is still infinity.

Of course, this line of thought quickly leads to pure pacifism.

Unfortunately, I now have a meeting with a friend, and so cannot finish the thought. That’s probably fine, since I am on a huge tangent right now.

Daily Reflection: 6 April 2025)

I’m realizing that the way that these goals is structured is not entirely what I want right now. It kind of came up in yesterday’s musing, but, while I don’t think that today is going to be the day that I work to fix it24, I think that it’s still probably worth thinking about. Right now I’m kind of leaning towards obligations25, growth, both autotelic26 and means27, and how to improve in some other regard.28

Anyways

  1. Because once baptized always baptized, etc↩

  2. hopefully↩

  3. remembering that the only greatness in heaven is He Who Is. All that we do on earth is just in attempt to model ourselves after Him↩

  4. since for some reason there are people who think that those born centuries ago have wisdom that we lack by virtue of coming later↩

  5. which, I will admit, is some people’s stated goal↩

  6. unlike wayback wednesday or throwback thursday or flashback friday (I’m going to start playing with capitalization, I think. I’m thinking about how to change my handwriting again, and capitalization is a thing that I play with a lot there so may as well do here), I don’t know of any pithy ways to say that for satur or sundays. If you know of one, please let me know↩

  7. intentionally. I know that we all have tons of Biblical allusions in everyday speech that go completely unnoted↩

  8. wow I realize what Jewish authors mean by the New Testament being really Jew Hatey (I’m no longer using antisemitism, because we should call it what it is) more and more lately↩

  9. I swear I’ve seen versions that say drawing↩

  10. read, more likely to be what happened↩

  11. something something, if I had more time I would have written less↩

  12. and who among us hasn’t whittled a day away writing on the nearest available form?↩

  13. both the first and third points here are things that I didn’t think about until I started writing here. Wild how consciously taking time to consider something makes it easier to consider↩

  14. who, remember, are told it would be better that they have a millstone tied around their neck and be cast into the sea than to mislead↩

  15. or believers in something else. I’m not totally sure that it’s a fair way to characterize someone. Non-Christians? Hmm↩

  16. see my future musing on truth, reason, and revelation↩

  17. Though I did recently encounter an interesting argument that says more or less that the anti-homosexual stance the Church has taken is relatively modern. The Bible is more than okay with slavery, but we banned it when society said that we must. Even in America, the Jesuits (ugh I need to muse about my issues feeling called to Ignatian spirituality) owned, bought, and sold enslaved people as chattel. Something something, cultural norms aren’t always right, especially arguments which are entirely “well we kind of always felt like this”. Like yes there are a few Biblical passages which explicitly decry homosexual actions, but those are also generally surrounded by any number of admonitions that we no longer follow. I should think on this longer↩

  18. nominal here because there’s the whole Catholic thing of “faith without works is dead”, so if you don’t change how you act based on information, do you really believe it?↩

  19. I say punishment not justice here, because starting here I mean Justice as a fundamental and independent of human belief thing, not simply what we have agreed as a society↩

  20. since it’s faith and reason, I’m using reason and rationality↩

  21. because there’s no way for another to respond in the moment.↩

  22. or, at least, I hope that we don’t. Given how much people hate the ratio part of fides et ratio lately, I’m not confident↩

  23. which I don’t think anyone explicitly states, but it is frequently assumed↩

  24. because I have far more obligations than I thought that I did↩

  25. things that some external source expects from me. E.g. my thesis, the guitar with a friend↩

  26. things that I want to get better at for their own sake. (I say this having yet to write the post about intrinsic motivation), but like composing, I want to be better at for its own sake, and I guess singing or guitar, etc↩

  27. things that I want to get better at to help with something else. E.g. I want to be faster at typing mostly so that I can get back to having my brain be the rate limiting step in my writing, rather than my keys, as it is right now. The site I’m training on helpfully lets you express speed in characters per second or minute, which makes far more sense to me than words per minute for a specific letter, even though I intellectually know that they’re just linear conversions↩

  28. e.g. eat better, write letters, etc. I guess those go in self improvement, but... (you see why I have this issue)↩

  29. wait that’s such an easy fix since I have some 3 inch binders now. Woo gerbil hour is slightly more back. Issue is now that in order to have water bottle in good place, I also have to have hands in bad place. I really need a split keyboard, and then water can just go in the middle.↩

  30. I realize now, and am very comfortable with↩

On Feeding Myself

First Published 5 April 2025

Draft 1: 5 April 2025

A potentially concerning percentage of the posts1 I’ve been writing are about food. I want to be feeding myself, and I want that feeding to go quickly and healthily.

I did realize today, though, that I want this post to encompass more than simply feeding my stomach. I want to make sure that all parts of me, body, mind, and soul, are being fed. Still, I’m going to start with feeding the body.

Breakfast and lunch, at least during the work week, are getting better and better. Breakfast of oats with berries is a great breakfast,2 and I’ve generally been eating a decent lunch. Dinner remains a mixed bag, though, which isn’t great.

I think that there are a few interwoven parts to that. For one, I still have some part of me that really thinks that dinner should be a production, or at least something effortful. I don’t really know what that means, and interrogating the idea isn’t really giving me anything either. However, I guess it is good for me to know that I have that gut instinct, so that I can start confronting it. I think that the other main issue with dinner is that I do not have a schedule, which makes scheduling exactly when I will be eating what in my home more difficult.

Still, I’ve done any number of hard things, and this isn’t as hard as that.

Third issue is that I don’t have a microwave, so anything I want for dinner kind of has to be stove or oven meal, which also adds some time to the prep.

Potential solutions:

I guess there’s also the tertiary consideration, which is that I can also just keep more easily consumed food at home. If I do that, then I can just grab like a handful of peanuts when I feel hungry, rather than needing to either just suffer or make something effortful.

Ok with my thoughts laid out like this, I think that I have my answer for now. Night before, I will cook dinner for the following day. If, for whatever reason, I am not able to get the meal done, then I’ll just grab two lunches to work, and eat one for dinner.4

I’ll also get some peanuts the next time I go shopping and then have a snack that I can consume at home. Goal part two of feeding my body is explicitly getting some, if not recipes, then at least food things that I can do, knowing that a past me has found their macro profiles to at least resemble something decent.

(N.B. I wrote everything from here until the start of the list after the second entry, because I realized that I want to do the back of the envelope protein content for what I’m getting from breakfast and lunch).

Assuming that I eat my oats and box lunch like a good child, I should be getting about5 my entire daily need for protein in the first two meals I eat, so I can go entirely based on vibes!

Ok cool, I do love japanese curry, and I have been wanting an excuse to buy potatoes.15 So, the to do list is:

One thing that I know about myself is that I cannot rely on weekends for cooking. I can rely on it for shopping, which is maybe strange, but. I guess there’s also the fact that I will have an incredibly different schedule in a little over a month17, and will be visiting friends18 over the summer, so I guess I know that it won’t be a forever thing. Still, probably good to give myself the bare bones of how I would feed myself going forward.

So:

Ok cool, that’s everything I eat I think? Oats and frozen fruit I of course need to buy as I run low, but they last forever, and so don’t need to be considered in terms of perishables.

So, I’m going to be making Japanese inspired curry on Tuesday.26 Oh wait, I do also want to get through my beans.

Um.

Ok so for now let’s try curry beans and rice, as much as that’s not really a thing. I’m still going to be doing potato, carrot, and onion, since those are all delicious and my heritage yearns for me to eat more potato. This means my shopping list is carrot27, onion28, potato, curry block, fruit29, and crunchy green30.

I’ll also inventory my fridge and freezer and toss the expired and rotten food.31 What food is not expired, I will also attempt to eat quickly, in such a way as to get rid of it.

Great!

Now, about feeding the rest of me.

I want to get back into typing practice I think. Two of the rate limiting factors for me right now are legitimately my typing speed and accuracy. That feeds three things: the part of me that loves quantifying growth, the part of me that is writing a bunch, and the part of me that likes being good at things.32 On weekdays, I think that this will mean that I spend the five minutes immediately after daily reflection doing typing practice. Goal in that space is of course accuracy and correct finger placement.33 Actually, if I start with the practice, then I will be primed to get the finger choices and placements correct, so five minutes before doing the reflection are to be spent on the practice.

What else am I trying to feed?

I absolutely need to do guitar every day and work out every day. A forty minute workout in the morning is a lot, but forty minutes is forty minutes, and I’m no longer finding that I am only productive in the morning. If anything, it kind of feels like I’m having the waking version of the previous me’s experience with alarms.34

Five minutes of stretching at night and five minutes of guitar in morning and evening means that in total I’m scheduling less than an hour of my life right now. I’m debating whether or not I should let myself catch up on content during the morning stretch, but am leaning towards no. I’ll absolutely get more workouts in if I only let myself catch up on content when being stretching or cleaning, especially because I do want to keep up with content.

I want to read more. If I just say that I’ll read each night, will I? One issue is that I very much cannot read or write by candlelight, at least with it as flickery as it is. Apparently trimming the wick can help with that.35 I think that I will! But, I also don’t want my nights to be filled with a number of activities, even if they are nominally restful. I think that reading analog nonfiction will help me to bed, as will writing poetry.

As the end to the previous sentence implies, I also want to write more poetry. Doing so after reading might actually be the best, because it gives me a space to process what I read and get my final thoughts for the day onto the page.

Woo! Look at this, I have plans for how I will feed myself. Now I just have to actually go to the store, get the food, clean the fridge, make the food, and keep to the schedule. Basically nothing!

Draft 0.5: 4 April 2025

I’ve mused more than a few times about how I would like to improve my mental and physical health, especially in context of food. In the past, I’ve focused more on the higher level concerns, like the overall macro and micronutrient profiles that I should aim for. The other posts have generally been focused on individual recipes that I made a single time, mostly so that I would have a point of reference in the future when I forgot what I did. However, the most important part of keeping myself eating healithily is actually having a sustainable way of feeding myself. With that in mind, this post is focused on how I’m getting nutrients now, how I’d like to be, how I think that I should be, and what the differences are.

So, let’s start with what I’m doing right now.

My breakfast for weekdays is a bowl of oatmeal with frozen36 berries, usually blueberries but sometimes mixed berries. These days, my lunch on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday are a block of pork37 and cheese38, along with a romaine heart and one or two apples or pears, depending on what I got at the store that week. Dinner, on the other hand, has no regularity

Daily Reflection: 4 April 2025)

Daily Reflection: 5 April 2025)

  1. interesting that I’m more and more using post instead of blog or musing or anything that others I know use. Worth thinking about, so onto the pile (list of things to write) I have↩

  2. accusations of it being horse food aside↩

  3. ok that isn’t true, I do also literally have the small countertop oven that I brought into the office a few years ago.↩

  4. I should really get through the bag of rice that I brought in at some point↩

  5. ok so one ounce of oats dry is apparently 120 calories, which is about 5 grams. Another site has it as cups of prepared, which is weird to me, because that’s entirely based on the amount of water I add, and (unfortunately for my diet and fortunately for basically everything else) the water I consume is not appreciably protein filled. Still, I think I probably eat 2-4 ounces of oats a day, so 10 to 20 grams of protein. Probably about 50 grams from the 200 grams of pork I’m now eating a day (I was still hungy after eating the 100 gram bits, so). I’ll assume the cheese that I’m eating right now is fairly representative, and so I’m getting like 25 grams from that. Oh Wild, I don’t actually need protein at dinner! Cool↩

  6. because wow I should be cycling through them↩

  7. read: measure cayenne with your heart↩

  8. as I kind of have to do, especially if I’m going to be using dry. I guess there’s nothing actively making me cook the entire bag at once, but let’s be real. I will not cook a half bag when it is no extra work to cook a full one.↩

  9. don’t ask me how I know that the stages of a bean dish left in the fridge tend to stall out at the fermentation step, rather than ever molding.↩

  10. double checking that this isn’t offensive↩

  11. yet another option over rice↩

  12. Japanese curry block over rice↩

  13. I won’t because I don’t really care that much about palm oil, but it is still good to know. Then again, if I do something resembling a block, I can instead keep roux blocks and spice mix ready to go in my freezer, which is also fun! Let’s plan on that when I get an afternoon, since I like being able to completely choose my flavor profile. Does mean I would have to splurge for dry mushrooms, but.↩

  14. which is true↩

  15. they spoil at nearly normal vegetable pace, but I treat them like onions (indefinitely good) or apples (also good forever if u do it right). Maybe I just need to treat them better?↩

  16. read: get rid of the food which is clearly bad and or that I know I will not eat. Food waste is bad, but it’s a smaller sin than self harm, which not feeding myself is at least a passive version of↩

  17. read, no longer have most of the demands on my time that I have right now↩

  18. hopefully. I do need to schedule that!↩

  19. on Wednesdays I often treat myself to a bagel and on Fridays I don’t eat meat, which means that I do kind of need to feed myself differently because of the missing seventy five grams from the two pieces. Then again, it’s ok if one day a week is protein deficient↩

  20. and, despite my reservations about food restriction, I think that it’s still probably better for me to follow the guidance of abstinence on Fridays↩

  21. ok I do realize that 200 grams of meat a day is not, by almost any American definition, a high meat diet. It feels high, though, because I’m eating meat daily, and usually as a block of its own. If I put it in curry, I suppose that would make it more spread out. Off topic though, return↩

  22. there’s the ever available and expensive option of simply adding gelatin↩

  23. oof that back of the envelope math feels like XKCD’s joke, but it also is probably true in the end. Back of envelopes here, not precision↩

  24. holdable in my hand, fittable in my mouth, crunchy, generally dense↩

  25. am I currently literally googling (using it for brand dilution) “things like lettuce”? yes. Yay! I can eat chard still, but it’s a little bitter. Collard greens are also very bitter when raw. And tragically, they like so many of the remaining leafy greens are related to mustard, which I have an allergy (allegedly) to. Ugh.

    Endive!! Not super bitter! Not a mustard!  Escarole is like endive, and also an option.

    Iceberg lettuce is always a popular choice for a reason, though I tend to find that it’s too flavorless (no I will not consider dressing)↩

  26. I honestly think that Tuesdays could be a good food prep day of the week for me, though it does mean that Mondays are the old day. Also depends on shopping day. If I shop on the weekend, waiting a few days to cook is fine↩

  27. assuming (likely accurately) that the ones I have aren’t great. They’re also a decent choice for the munching sensation of romaine, but different enough that I don’t think interchangeable↩

  28. assuming (with who knows what level of accuracy) that they aren’t good↩

  29. read: apple or pear unless something calls to me↩

  30. lettuce or endive probably, though chard is an option. Leek? That’s almost certainly wayyy too oniony↩

  31. please don’t judge my life. If it helps, the rotten food is often like homemade pickles that I was curious the lifespan of (and forgot to eat)↩

  32. two of those are the same, so how can we break it into something else? I don’t really know, honestly. Uhhhh what was the third thing initially?↩

  33. how useful is working for a few minutes a day when I spend the rest of the day teaching myself bad habits? Great question.↩

  34. roughly speaking, for every minute earlier I wanted to leave the house, the alarm had to go two minutes earlier. So, getting up and being ready an hour before normal meant the alarm was two hours. These days that is not super true, but I do find that my productivity crashes when I feel like I’ve done a task and spent a decent amount of time. If I do it right, that break happens at lunch which restores me to work again.↩

  35. which can’t hurt to try?↩

  36. read: they are frozen initially, they thaw out as I mix them with the oats↩

  37. approximately 200 grams↩

  38. approximately 150 grams of a semi hard. I apparently don’t like Jarlsberg, which makes sense because I have more and more found that I dislike swiss cheeses as I grow older.↩

  39. oof the agonizing pain of grief hurts so very very much↩

  40. as evidenced by my sleeping all the way until the overly generous alarm I set.↩

  41. note to self, you are not allowed to work on derivations until you’re finished with the day’s work and completely caught up.↩

  42. honestly, that’s got promise for a musing. What is the difference between a fugue and a flow state?↩

  43. Is to have been written is I think the construction I need for agenda’s construction in Latin, but I may be wrong, since it has been the better part of a decade (oof I’m old) since I took the class and learned that content↩

  44. to get to anything resembling the goal I have for the length of my thesis, I need to be writing thousands of words a day every single day. While I have absolutely had periods of doing that, I don’t know if they’re the pace I have right now. Also, like I guess the thesis is a higher priority than almost any other research I would be doing, so that should leave me more space for writing, especially once the term ends↩

  45. at least one more reason↩

  46. this is not me being data shy or coy, I just don’t entirely have in my working memory right now what the two ideas are.↩

  47. I think that about half the functions I wrote in the code aren’t actually called anymore.↩

  48. because I have the goal of getting work done, and I still don’t let myself work at home.↩

  49. I really feel like that’s a word, but my editor assures me that it is not. Weird↩

  50. oof, I wrote the rest of my home at first. I promise that I do not live in my office nor mentally think of the office as my home↩

  51. see: me constantly kvetching about the amount of writing that I am to do↩

  52. things I think or hope will be in my thesis, popscience, actual philosophy, and books I thought might be popsci but look to be much lower reading level than I thought↩

  53. I keep wanting to animize or anthropomorphize my guitar. Is it better to say she? he? they? xi? Great question. I think it is still good for now, because i still know it is not↩

Time Discounts and a Better Me

First Published: 2025 April 3

Draft 3: 3 April 2025

Anything in the future is worth less than having it now. For all that the previous sentence feels like the rantings of a child, they really underpin a lot of modern economic thought.1 In economic terms, most everything either appreciates or depreciates, and most do so in some sort of exponential fashion.

In retirement advice, this is usually used as a way to encourage 20 and 30 somethings to enjoy their lives a little less.2 In this post, however, I’m going to use it as the way of encouraging me to become slightly better.

I think that I can improve as a person. Even though I do agree that the exponential growth implied by most basic theories of compounding are unrealistic or unsustainable3, there is still something to be said for compounding generally. Every day that I go forth with a skill is a day that I can improve the lives of those around me through that skill. Since I live in a society with capital requirements, I also have a chance to use any skill for a profit.

It’s far more than that, though.

There’s an old interview my grandmother once had, where she debated someone about whether or not everyone should get a liberal arts degree. As you might expect from everything about me, she argued very much in favor of universal liberal arts education. In her mind, and as a partial consequence, my mind, education is an inherently positive thing.4 We are changed by everything we experience, and education helps any such change to be positive. When we learn facts, we are able to connect events and realities. When we learn theories and heuristics, we are better able to make sense of the world. And, more than anything, I think that learning is about finding joy in the world.

The Almighty created the heavens and the earth for humanity.5 We are called to seek the Divine, and are given the wonder of the universe to better understand Divinity. We are given talents and seeds for growth and asked to plant and nurture them in ourselves and others.

Through all of this, there’s something to be said for laying groundwork today for a better tomorrow.

The nearer term the future and the greater the expectation of gains, the more I should be willing to give now. That feels reasonable. If spending two hours on a project makes me feel marginally better for the following hour, I’m not sure if it’s worth it. If spending two hours is supposed to me feel marginally better for an hour in three weeks, I know that it’s not.

There’s also the cost to be considered. Something that takes minimal effort is worth doing, even if the expected gain is low. I know that after stretching I feel better in the moments to follow, the rest of the day, and the following days. I even tend to feel better during it.

The initial premise of this post was self improvement. What can I do to make myself better, and how much is bettering myself worth?

I’m reading a book right now called Radical Acceptance, and one of its key points is that only after accepting the realities of ourselves can we change any of them. The author is pretty clear that the goal is not attempting to change things, but I can take from books what I want. Still, there’s a large difference between accepting reality and settling for reality.

How do I want to improve? Let’s spend a minute and think.

I want to be more productive. I want to be more in shape. I want to be more kind to myself and others. I want to learn how to be vulnerable. I want to write, just so very very many words for my thesis. I want to experience the world around me, highs and lows.

Wow that went all over the place.

Ok so, writing and being productive obviously go hand in hand, since the productivity I’m searching for is generally writing right now.6 Being in shape is probably not a great goal as an end in itself, and wanting to be in shape for how I look is also not a good goal, since bodies change and I should never strive for a bodily ideal that absolutely is not sustainable for the rest of my life. I do, however, want to be able to experience the world around me.

When a friend asks if I want to go for a run, I’d like to be able to keep up. I don’t want to be winded when I’m walking somewhere or going up stairs. I want to be able to move my body into different poses. I want to be able to pick stuff up.

When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to experience the world. When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to be kind. When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to accept weakness, and therefore show vulnerability.

So, what can I change to be more productive, in shape, centered, and grounded? Luckily, the answers are all the same: be more mindful and work out more.

Draft 2: 3 April 2025

A common idea in economics, especially modern economics, is that a dollar tomorrow is worth less than one today. There are plenty of arguments for this7, but most boil down to the obvious that it’s always better to have than to not have. When you combine this with general ideas of compounding interest8, you get some ideas about saving like “any dollar you spend today is the same as spending two dollars in ten years or four dollars in twenty or etc etc.”9 I don’t really love that argument, because like a guitar that costs five hundred dollars today, even if it wouldn’t be worth 2000 to me in twenty years if I was to buy it then, could very well emotionally be worth that amount then. Also, as I talked about in the previous draft, I can only ever experience the present.

I’m now realizing that previous sentence is really the issue underlying a lot of my failure to self care. Any time that I spend doing something unpleasurable now with hopes of it paying dividends in the future is fundamentally happening to an alien me. I have no idea what I will be like even tomorrow, at least on an emotional level. However, much as I can think through choices in ways like “doing this will likely harm someone in another country”, or “this will have bad effects in fifty years”, I think that I can trust that I will always want to be supporting the future me. A future me who turns to a life of crime is likely having a harder time than I am now, and deserves all the help I can give.

So, then, what is the right way to do self care knowing that money spent now is money gone forever, anything gained now will either depreciate10 or compound11, and any action I do is ultimately laying another brick in the road of my life.12

I’m just now rereading the initial prompting, and it was not about self care at all!.

Draft 1: 3 April 2025

In economics, there’s an idea of time discount. In short, it’s the idea that money today is worth more than money tomorrow. For whatever reason, I’ve taken at least a few surveys that ask questions on the nature of “would you rather one hundred dollars at X point in the future or fifty dollars today?” And, in general, I think that I generally have a fairly low time discount, if only because I have a decent understanding of general inflation rates and a pretty low acute need for 50 dollars.

Like most economic theories, this can be immediately applied to absolutely everything, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to treat taking care of myself as a time discount problem. The me of the future will reap a large number of gains for any number of small inconveniences now. Getting a degree, especially an advanced degree, is very often posited in the language of a time discount. “It’s worthwhile to get paid peanuts now,” they say, “because in the future you will make far more!”

Still, my goal here is not to think about how things are worth less to me in the future generally, but to specifically try to reframe the things that I do to take care of myself in this way. At the easiest, let’s take eating.

I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I feel better on the day after I ate well than the day after I ate minimally or generally poorly.13 I have faith in the medical science that tells me that setting up habits now will make the me of the future healthier. I have no difficulties in putting into practice ideas of saving for the future, and yet I do not put the effort to make sure that the future I fund will be enjoyable by the me of then.

I do know that I have more faith in money, being external to me, than my own health, which is dependent on so much. Still, even in the short term, I know that I am happier, better able to handle life’s struggles, look better, and feel more energized for less sleep when I spend more time working out. I even find that I am more productive, I think even when taking into account the hours spent not working or doing other hobby. However, on any given day, I am almost always more productive when I do not work out.

I don’t really know what else I’m actually trying to say here, other that like when I think about actions that I want to do or want to want to do14, I should really stop framing the present me as much.

There is, of course, the counter argument to a lot of saving. After all, the age of your life when you are most able to take life by the horns15 is the age when you’re most encouraged to be planning for the future. In some regards, this is obviously a holdover from when society was more Christian, though I’m not sure if it’s initially a Catholic or Calvinist way of doing the world. However, there is also research saying bad events are more meaningful than good. All that this paragraph is to say: I don’t want to let my aspirations for the future prevent me from experiencing the present.

That’s applicable in finance and self care, even if I think that they take up different spheres.

Draft 0: 2 April 2025

Wow, look at me, writing parts of drafts before the day I post. Anyways

There’s a concept in economics called time discount. I know that on at least a few occasions I’ve been asked a series of questions that starts with something like “would you rather have 100 dollars today or 50 dollars today?”. This has an obvious and correct answer. After choosing 100, I am then prompted between 50 today or 100 tomorrow.

Daily Reflection: 3 April 2025)

  1. though, given the state of the economic world, maybe it’s entirely appropriate that it sounds like a child having a tantrum↩

  2. wow I’ve gotten steadily more cynical over the drafts↩

  3. see: planet↩

  4. ugh having all the posts I want to write keep coming up in the posts I do write is getting frustrated. Curse of knowledge rises a few more slots↩

  5. oof this may be a heresy↩

  6. gotta love homonyms↩

  7. inflation, uhhhh not being able to do stuff with it?↩

  8. generally assume that the stock market returns 8 percent per year on average↩

  9. there’s the fun “if you divide 72 by whatever percentage per time you have compounding interest, you get about the doubling time” fact that I always enjoy↩

  10. e.g. you lose some huge percentage of the worth of a new car just by driving it off the lot↩

  11. my degree, for instance, will do many things for me, not least is potentially shield me if I need to flee a country↩

  12. see the post overmorrow↩

  13. of course, what poorly means is entirely context dependent, but really this is just saying present me affects future me↩

  14. I think that I have mused about this in the past. seems like the closest, though even this is less of that.↩

  15. I think that life is a bull right?↩

  16. which, I know, does not need to be a multitasked event↩

  17. read: mid 1900s↩

  18. it’s on a Wednesday, so not totally sure what to call it↩

  19. or was it twenty minutes?↩

  20. miss you↩

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