School was no better. I was deep enough into the semester that the work had stopped feeling purposeful and started feeling like something to survive. The things I would normally retreat to when the pressure built (reading philosophy, chasing ideas that made me feel alive) had started to ring hollow. I had been reading Deleuze, but I was beginning to suspect that the draw was more romantic than real: I liked the feeling of being the kind of person who reads it more than I liked what it was actually giving me.

By the time I noticed what was happening, I was already in the pit. I was scrolling through nothing, watching things without watching them, sleeping too much. The decision theory sat unfinished. The philosophy sat unread. The days were passing and I could not find a reason to care.

The feeling is hard to name. Sadness is the wrong word, and so is laziness. It was more like the things I was doing had come unstuck from anything I cared about. I could still recite why they mattered if someone asked. The recitation was accurate. It also did nothing.

Malaise is a problem

What changed things was noticing something about the discomfort itself. I had been treating it as a condition: something wrong with me, a mood I needed to wait out or push through. But in earlier months I had been starting to conceptualize problems: how a problem is a drive, a pressure oriented toward something. Not a flaw. Not a sign something is wrong with you. An unresolved problem does not go away when you ignore it. It pushes.

The malaise was pushing. I did not know where, but it was not neutral. It was uncomfortable in a way that had direction, even if I could not see the direction yet.

So I opened Obsidian and started doing what I had been writing about for others: I started mapping.

Going up

The process is simple but slow. You take something you are doing, or something you want, and you ask: why does this matter to me? Then you ask again. And again. You follow the chain upward until you hit something that matters on its own, something that does not need a further reason. (I have written about this method in more practical terms.)

I started with what was closest. I had been trying to read Deleuze for weeks and bouncing off him. Why? Because I wanted to be inspired, to think in a way that felt creative and alive. Why did that matter? Because I wanted to feel the fire that had been burning before the semester ground it out. I wanted to feel.

That was real. “I want to feel” was not a performance. It was a genuine drive, and it had been active the whole time, pushing me toward the philosophy even as the philosophy was not actually delivering.

Then I did the same thing with the homework I had been avoiding. I think I need to do this assignment. Why? Because it matters for my grade, and I want a decent grade. Why? Because good grades keep options open, and I want options. Why? Because I want to live my life well. Why? Because I want to have lived a full life, caring for others and myself.

That one hit hard. I had completely lost sight of it. I had thought things like this before. Somehow I had still lost it. Somewhere under the grinding weight of the semester, the connection between “do this problem set” and “live a full life caring for others” had gone dark. The link was still there in reality. It had just atrophied out of my conscious thinking, which is exactly what I later came to call map atrophy.

The reversals

Here is the thing that surprised me most. Once the chains were laid out, the practical conclusions were the opposite of what my feelings had been telling me.

I had felt like I wanted to read Deleuze. But going up revealed that what I actually wanted was to feel alive, and Deleuze was not accomplishing that. It was a path I was clinging to out of inertia. What actually served “I want to feel” was the opposite of curling up with a book: working on Ganesha, being with people rather than reading about ideas alone, sitting with hard problems until something cracked. Deleuze was sedation dressed up as inspiration.

And I had felt like I did not want to do the homework. But going up revealed that the homework was genuinely connected to things I cared about—connected by a chain I could now literally see on the page. The resistance was not a signal that the work was pointless. It was a signal that I had forgotten why it mattered.

My map of what I wanted had been wrong. The deep things were still intact. I still wanted to feel alive, still wanted to live fully. What the map got wrong was the layer below: which actions actually served those things. Mapping corrected it. It showed me what I already wanted and let the practical conclusions fall out.

What I could not have predicted

Something else happened during this process that I did not expect.

As I followed the homework chain down to “I want to have lived a full life, caring for others and myself,” I suddenly realized something: I do not have to root all of my values in others. Even if I do nothing, I am still here. This was not a thought I set out to have. It surfaced from the mapping the way water surfaces from a well that has been uncovered.

I had known this before. But knowing it abstractly and having it click are different experiences. This time it clicked. And it changed the texture of everything else on the map. The connections were unchanged. What shifted was how much each one mattered.

I once wrote about how who we are is partly unknown to us. The self is something you discover by going further in. You don’t arrive at it. The mapping made that real. Your current thoughts about yourself (what you want, what matters, what is worth doing) are not the whole picture. The map can surface what your current state of mind is hiding from you, including things you could not have predicted.

The shift

Once the map clicked, things moved fast. The situation just looked different. The homework was no longer pointless drudgery: it was connected, visibly, to things I cared about. The philosophy I had been clinging to was no longer a lifeline: it was a habit I could set down without losing anything.

What I actually did: I went back to Ganesha. I spent more time with my brother. I stopped reading Deleuze and started working on the things that actually made me feel alive. None of this required willpower I hadn’t had the week before. The map made the actions obvious, and obvious actions are cheap.

I once tried to describe this kind of moment in a different register, all libraries and quiet and the sound of a life underneath the noise. That was the poetic version. The practical version is duller: open Obsidian, type what you are doing, type why it matters, keep going up until you hit something that doesn’t need a reason.

How to do this when nothing feels worth doing

A few things I would tell someone in the pit, if they asked.

The malaise itself is the problem in the technical sense — a drive pointing somewhere you have lost track of. The pole has gone dark. That is why it feels like emptiness.

You do not need to know where it points before you start. I didn’t. I started with the homework I was avoiding and Deleuze I was failing to read, asked why each one mattered, and let the structure show up as I wrote.

Write it down somewhere that is not your head. The reason you lost the chains in the first place is that working memory could not hold them. Obsidian, paper, the back of a syllabus, whatever. Outside your head is the requirement.

If the map only confirms what you already thought, you have not gone deep enough. The point is the reversals: the thing you were reaching for that turns out to be inert, the thing you were avoiding that turns out to be load-bearing.

And the map has to change what you do. A map that only makes you feel better is a sedative. The drives are still there, the pressure comes back, and you end up doing this again next month.

Closing

The pit narrows your access to what you care about until you can’t see it anymore. You have not changed; your map has atrophied.

Mapping does not give you new values. It shows you the ones you have been ignoring and lets you act on them again. In November that was the whole fix.

Written with the help of AI.

The homework was painful. Somewhere in the middle of it, I opened YouTube “for a quick break.” One video became three. Three became a loop I wasn’t really watching so much as letting run. When I next looked up, it was 2am. The homework was half-done. The decision theory hadn’t been touched. I felt ashamed, then angry, then the particular kind of tired that comes from having neither worked nor rested.

I have done some version of this more times than I want to count. I have tried discipline. I have tried schedules. I have tried, earnestly, telling myself that I would not do this again. The pattern barely wavered.

What eventually changed things was noticing that my attempts were trying to subtract a behavior without understanding why it was there.

Behaviors are for something

Every behavior that persists is doing something. That is not a motivational slogan, it is the natural consequence of taking behavior seriously. In earlier essays I have argued that action is driven by problems: active pressures in a system, oriented toward some pole. The system is always trying to resolve its problems. If a behavior keeps happening, some system is getting something out of it.

This makes “just stop” the wrong response. “Just stop” leaves the problem active. The behavior was the resolution: take the resolution away, and the pressure is still there, still looking for release. The behavior wasn’t the disease, it was the symptom of a system with nowhere else to put itself.

You can see this in your own attempts at suppression. You white-knuckle it for a while, then the resolution returns, often worse. The bad habit is not weakness. It is a successful answer to a question you have not asked out loud.

Worth flagging: the system doing the answering is often not the conscious one. I wrote recently about map atrophy, the way the conscious model of your situation loses information under cognitive load. The problem driving a bad habit is frequently running in your territory without being clearly present in your map. That is part of why the habit feels inexplicable from the inside: the system that is solving it is not the one that is deliberating about it.

The first move, then, is to stop asking “how do I stop doing this?” and start asking “what is this doing for me?”

What the media was doing for me

When I finally asked that question about the YouTube loop, the answer was not hard to reach, though it had been hidden in plain sight. Watching media was resolving two problems at once. When I was stressed, I wanted to relax. When I was stressed, I also wanted engagement: something in my head that was not the pain of the homework. Media did both, on demand, with no setup cost.

This matters because it reframes what a replacement has to do. If I want to stop watching, I cannot just remove the behavior. I have to find something that resolves those two problems, or the pressure will keep finding its way back to the screen.

And here is the first honest thing to say: media is probably the best possible answer to those two problems considered by themselves. It relaxes me more than most things. It engages me more than most things. On the immediate pole, it wins.

So why does it still feel wrong? Because the pole is not the whole story.

My media habit serves “relax when stressed” and “engage something stimulating.” Those are not ends in themselves. They are in service of larger aspirations: recover well enough to come back to the work I care about, keep my evenings from vanishing, protect time for things like decision theory. Looked at in isolation, media wins. Looked at in the context of those larger aspirations, it is a disaster.

This is the trick to finding good replacements. You are not looking for something that beats the bad habit on its immediate pole. You are looking for something that serves that pole well enough without trashing everything else you care about.

For me, that turned out to be podcasts. Podcasts relax me less than a video. They engage me less vividly. But they do both, adequately, and they are vastly easier to step away from. A podcast plays while I do dishes; a video pulls me in. The reason is the stimulation gap: video is so much more stimulating than nothing that the contrast between watching and not watching is sharp, and that sharpness is what makes breaking away hard. A podcast is mild enough that there is no such cliff. Stopping a podcast is a small step down. Stopping a video is a fall. Once I saw that, I could make the substitution: listen to podcasts instead of watching media. I added friction to the losing path (browser extensions capping my time) and reduced friction on the winning one (a short list of podcasts queued up for easy access).

This is the first move: swap the path while keeping the pole. Find something different that gets the job done, judged by your actual problem map and not by the pole alone.

When the pole itself is the problem

Sometimes the issue isn’t the path. It’s the pole.

Take the homework story from the start of this essay. The bad behavior was watching media. The pole it served was something like “recover from stress while doing homework.” The first move — better path, same pole — gave me podcasts. A real win.

But there is a deeper question available. Why is the parent problem (keep my evenings meaningful) being served by “recover from stress while doing homework” at all? That sub-problem only exists because the homework was stressing me out. What if the parent could be better served by a different sub-problem entirely: “do not become stressed by homework in the first place”?

When I tried this, the answer was concrete. I am much less stressed doing homework on campus than at home. Something about the environment — being around other people working, being out of the room I sleep in — keeps the homework from grinding me down the way it does at home. So a different sub-problem joined the map: “be on campus most of the day, most days.” That serves the parent better than the recovery path ever could, because the recovery path was always playing defense.

This feels like a different move from path substitution. Not “find a better path to this pole,” but “question whether this pole belongs here at all.” But it turns out these are more alike than they seem.

The two moves are the same move

These look like two moves, and they feel like two moves when you are in the middle of them. They are not. They are the same move applied at different levels of your problem map.

Here is why. “Recover from stress” sits underneath “keep my evenings meaningful”: reaching the pole of the smaller problem (being recovered) is one of the things that moves the bigger problem toward its pole. So when I ask “is there a better path to recovery than YouTube?”, I am working inside the smaller problem. When I ask “is recovering from stress even the right way to keep my evenings meaningful?”, I am asking the same shape of question one level up: is there a better path to the bigger problem’s pole, given that the smaller problem is currently part of it?

Path substitution and pole questioning are the same operation at different nodes. You can always shift which level you are working at. If you cannot find a better path to the pole in front of you, go up: maybe this pole is not pulling its weight for the problem above it. If the parent problem seems untouchable, come back down: maybe some of its sub-paths can still be improved.

The practical consequence is that your replacement does not have to serve the exact pole you started with. It has to serve whatever your actual problem map, taken as a whole, wants served. The map has slack. Use it.

Understanding is sometimes enough. Often it isn’t.

There is one more thing that determines whether a replacement will stick: whether it actually delivers.

Some bad behaviors are really failures of imagination. You order delivery every night because you never thought of microwaveable meals. The moment you see the alternative, the behavior changes. Understanding is the whole fix. These cases are real and more common than people give them credit for: a lot of what looks like a habit is just a path nobody has bothered to look for alternatives to.

But real habits and addictions are different. Understanding is necessary and not sufficient. I understood perfectly well that media was eating my evenings, for years, and kept doing it anyway. Seeing the problem did not deplete the problem.

What shifted things was that the new behavior had to actually resolve the underlying problem in a way I could feel. Not “this is theoretically better.” Not “this should work.” Delivering, in the moment, on the thing media was delivering on. If the podcast didn’t relax me at all, I would have bounced right back to the video. It had to be at least adequate, reliably, on the immediate pole. And the first few times it was, something like reinforcement happened: the new path became a real option in the system, not just a note in the map.

So when you design a replacement, design it for the in-the-moment test. The substitute has to show up when the pressure shows up. It has to work, more or less, the first time and the second time and the tenth time, or the old behavior will keep winning the comparison.

Practically, this means making the replacement actually available. If it requires setup, preparation, or thinking in the moment, the old behavior will beat it every time. I keep a short list of podcasts queued and do not decide in the moment. It also means adding a little friction to the old behavior: not enough to make yourself miserable, just enough to tilt the comparison. Browser extensions, the TV remote in another room, whatever is proportionate. And it means letting the replacement be imperfect. You are looking for good enough on the immediate pole, not best.

Closing

The behaviors you want to change are not enemies to defeat. They are solutions to problems, working as well as they can given what they have access to. Treat them as information. The fact that a behavior is stubborn is telling you something: there is a live problem behind it that your current options aren’t resolving any other way.

The move is to find that problem, look at where it sits in your map and what it serves, and then craft a replacement. Sometimes the replacement is a different path to the same pole. Sometimes it lives one level up: a different sub-problem entirely, in service of the parent. Either way, set it up to deliver in the moment, and give it enough repetitions that the system can learn the new answer.

The old behavior does not have to lose a fight. It just has to stop being the best available option.

Written with the help of AI.

The tests. I had bombed the tests because I didn’t actually understand the material. And I didn’t understand the material because when I sat down to do the homework, I had focused entirely on getting it done and submitted, not on learning anything from it.

It wasn’t that I had decided learning didn’t matter. When I started each assignment, I knew why I was doing it: to learn the material, to prepare for tests, to actually understand the concepts. But somewhere between question one and question fifteen, those reasons vanished from my thinking. The work became about completion. Finish the problem set. Submit before the deadline. Check the box.

The reasons I cared were still there (I really did want to learn, I really did care about doing well on tests), but they had disappeared from my conscious thinking. And so I acted as if they didn’t exist at all.

This happens constantly, in ways both trivial and catastrophic. You know what matters. You start working on it with the right reasons in mind. And then, mid-work, you forget. Not because you stop caring, but because your mental map of the situation atrophies under cognitive load—dropping elements even though they still matter.

The map is not the territory

Consider what happens when you work on any problem. You can’t hold the entire situation in your head: all the reasons something matters, all the ways it connects to what you care about, all the implications of getting it right or wrong. Instead, you work with a simplified model: a conscious sense of what you’re doing and why.

This is what I mean by working with a map rather than the territory. The territory is the full reality of your situation: your actual drives, your actual reasons, the actual state of things in the world. The map is your conscious model of that situation, the version you can think about and act on.

The problem is that maps atrophy. Under cognitive load, they compress and drop information. And when you make deliberate choices that depend on conscious reasoning (like deciding what strategy to use, or whether to keep going), you can only act based on what’s in your map. If something has fallen out of your conscious model, those deliberate choices will proceed as if it doesn’t exist, even when it’s still there in the territory, still mattering. Parts of you below conscious awareness might still respond to it (you might keep feeling vaguely dissatisfied, for instance), but your conscious strategy won’t.1

When I sat down to do homework, my initial map included multiple problems: learn the material, prepare for tests, build understanding, get a good grade. But as I worked, cognitive resources got tight. Attention narrowed. The map atrophied to just one thing: complete and submit. The other problems didn’t disappear from reality (I still cared about learning, the tests were still coming), but they disappeared from my map. And so my deliberate actions ignored them entirely.

This is different from changing your mind about what matters. I didn’t decide, halfway through problem three, that learning was unimportant. The atrophy happened below the level of conscious decision. My working memory filled with the immediate task. The broader reasons receded. And I kept working, now optimizing for the wrong thing, without noticing the shift.

When the stakes are higher

The homework example is relatively harmless: a bad grade in one class. But the same pattern shows up in situations where the consequences are severe.

During my second year of engineering school, I seriously considered switching to philosophy. I loved philosophy. I was good at it. Engineering felt, at times, genuinely terrible. Problem sets I didn’t care about, material that seemed pointless, grades that weren’t great. Philosophy felt meaningful, exciting, like the thing I was supposed to be doing.

The pull was strong enough that I asked advisors if switching was possible. I made schedules for what a philosophy major would look like. I came very close to doing it.

But there were reasons to stay in engineering that weren’t in my map during those moments of strongest temptation. Career flexibility. Keeping options open. The practical skills I’d gain. Financial stability down the line. These reasons were still there in the territory; they were real considerations that actually mattered to my future. But when I was sitting in a terrible engineering lecture, feeling miserable, they had atrophied out of my conscious thinking.

If I had acted based only on what was in my map in those moments (philosophy feels better right now, engineering feels terrible), I would have switched. And I’m fairly confident that would have been the wrong choice. Not because philosophy doesn’t matter to me (it does, deeply), but because the reasons to stay in engineering were real and important, even when I couldn’t feel them.

What brought those reasons back into my map was deliberate review. Sitting down, away from the immediate misery of a bad problem set, and explicitly asking: what do I actually care about here? What are all the reasons this matters? Making decision matrices. Talking it through with people I trusted. Forcing myself to query the territory rather than just acting on whatever was currently in my atrophied map.

The territory hadn’t changed in the relevant sense. The reasons to stay in engineering were always there. But my map had dropped them, and if I’d relied only on what I could consciously feel in the moment, I would have acted as if they didn’t exist.

Here’s the important part: if I had switched to philosophy based on that atrophied map, I wouldn’t have simply lived happily ever after in my new major. At some point, I would have realized something was off. The map would have turned out to be wrong about the territory in important ways. The career flexibility I’d given up would have started to matter. The financial stability would have become relevant. The mismatch between what my map said (this is right) and what the territory was signaling (something’s missing) would have become impossible to ignore. The atrophy would have revealed itself, eventually, through dissatisfaction I couldn’t quite explain.

Realizing that, I didn’t switch. The decision to stay in engineering is a complex one, so even now, sometimes when things get tough, my map atrophies and I don’t remember why I chose this path. I feel lost, like I might have made the wrong choice. But because I externalized it all by writing down the reasons, the tradeoffs, what actually matters, I can go over everything again and find peace. The reasons are still there. I just need to look at them.

The counterintuitive bit

Here’s what makes this confusing: it feels like “do I actually care about this?” should have a simple answer. Either you care or you don’t. Either learning matters to you or it doesn’t. Either philosophy is your calling or it isn’t.

But when you understand that you’re always working with a map that can atrophy, the question becomes more subtle. You can care about something deeply (it can be there in the territory, actively driving you, genuinely mattering) while simultaneously not being in your conscious map at the moment.

This creates a strange kind of internal conflict. You feel pulled toward one thing (finish the homework, switch to philosophy) while some other part of you knows that’s not quite right. The feeling is real; it’s in your map. But the knowing is also real; it’s in the territory, even if you can’t currently access it consciously.

Framed in terms of problems: yes, you care about learning (it’s there in the territory as an active problem, a drive toward understanding). But your map has temporarily dropped it. The caring persists whether or not you’re consciously tracking it. And because you make decisions and evaluate success based on what you care about, knowing what you care about (keeping your map reasonably aligned with territory) actually matters.

This is why you can finish a homework set and feel simultaneously satisfied (I completed the task) and dissatisfied (I didn’t actually learn anything). The satisfaction comes from resolving what was in your map. The dissatisfaction comes from the territory signaling that other problems are still unresolved.

What to do about it

The first thing to understand is that some map atrophy is inevitable. You cannot hold everything in conscious attention simultaneously. Action requires simplified models. Mid-work compression is not a personal failing. It’s a necessary feature of how cognition works under resource constraints.

But accepting that atrophy happens doesn’t mean accepting it passively. It means acting proportionally to the importance of what’s been dropped. If the problems your map has lost are trivial—like losing muscle strength in your pinky—let them stay dropped. But if they’re important—like losing strength in your legs, which you depend on constantly—you need to do what you can to restore them, even if you can’t prevent all atrophy.

The most reliable way to do this is externalization. Get your problems out of your head and into a system you can actually see. This externalized system is also a map, but it’s one that isn’t subject to the same cognitive pressures you are. It doesn’t have working memory limits. When the reasons something matters are written down explicitly, they remain visible even when your mental map atrophies. You can look at them, remember them, check whether your current actions actually serve them.

This is what going up and going down in the productivity system actually does. “Why does this matter?” is a query to the territory. It forces you to surface reasons that might have atrophied out of your map. “How might this be resolved?” generates paths while keeping the full problem visible. Regular review is the exercise that keeps your map healthy—deliberately checking whether what you’re working on still serves what you actually care about.

The practice matters more than perfection. You won’t catch every instance of atrophy. Your map will still compress mid-work. But if you’re reviewing regularly (daily, or at least weekly), you can catch the important ones before you’ve spent months optimizing for the wrong thing.

Tools can help here, though current options make this harder than it needs to be. A good system would make it easy to externalize problems, see their connections, and check whether your actions are serving them. It would help you query the territory efficiently rather than relying on what happens to be in your conscious map at the moment. Better tools for this are possible, and worth building, but even with what’s available now, the practice of deliberate review makes a difference.

One more thing worth noting: problems in the territory aren’t static. They come and go. New drives emerge, old ones fade. Sometimes you can change the territory to actually close a problem entirely—resolve it so completely it’s no longer there. But when you find yourself in conflict, pulled in multiple directions, that conflict comes from problems that are active in the territory. When I turn ninety-seven it might suddenly become my dream to die in Egypt, a problem that wasn’t there when I was born, now intensely active. The territory changes over time. At any given moment, the question is just whether your map is tracking what’s actually there.

Why this matters

You already know, in some sense, that you forget what matters. You’ve had the experience of finishing something and realizing you optimized for the wrong thing. You’ve felt the dissatisfaction that comes from resolving what was in your map while leaving what actually mattered unresolved.

What changes when you see this as map atrophy rather than simple forgetting is that you stop treating it as a personal failure. You stop thinking “I just need to focus harder” or “I should have remembered.” Instead, you build systems that compensate for the inevitable compression. You externalize. You review. You query the territory deliberately rather than trusting that important things will stay in your map on their own.

The homework is done, the grade is recorded, and you can’t go back. But you can notice when your map has dropped something important. You can build practices that catch the atrophy before it costs you a semester, or a major, or years spent working on the wrong problems.

Your reasons are still there, even when you can’t feel them. The question is whether you’re checking.

Written with the help of AI.

We find these stories compelling because we recognize something true in them. Not the drama (most of us won’t face a burning building or a dying parent to learn what we care about) but the underlying dynamic. The protagonist didn’t invent new values from scratch. They discovered ones that were already there, obscured by noise, avoidance, or simply never having been named.

Making your problems explicit, and mapping them out, is exactly that process. Less dramatic, more deliberate, but the same thing: learning to read what your life is already telling you.

What problems actually are

Consider a thermostat. It has a target temperature of, say, 70 degrees Fahrenheit. When the room drops below that, the heating kicks on. When it climbs above it, the heating shuts off. The thermostat is oriented toward a state: 70 degrees. Everything it does is in service of reaching and maintaining that state.

That target temperature is what I call a pole. The pole is the state the system is working toward. It defines what the thermostat is doing and why.

Now consider yourself on a cold morning. You wake up, feel the chill, and reach for a warmer layer. On a hot afternoon, you strip down to a t-shirt. Your body is regulating its temperature (not so differently from the thermostat) and your conscious choices are one of the ways that regulation happens. The same underlying drive, the same pole, expressing itself through cognition and behavior rather than heating coils.

So imagine you’re planning a trip. You open your suitcase and face the question: what do I pack? It seems trivial. But if you understand that choosing your clothes is itself a problem, oriented toward the pole of being comfortable in the climate you’re traveling to, then you can actually resolve it well. You look up the weather. You think about what activities you’ll be doing. You pack accordingly. Without that understanding, you’re just grabbing things that feel right and hoping for the best. With it, you’re solving the right problem on purpose.

This is what makes introspecting on problems such a direct path to what matters to you. Just as understanding the clothing problem let you pack better, understanding your deeper problems lets you live better by orienting your choices toward what actually drives you rather than toward what feels vaguely right in the moment. Your drives are already there1, already operating. The question is whether you can read them. Most of the time we can, at least partially: we feel the pull of things we want, the discomfort of things we don’t. But sometimes the reading is harder. Something can feel like it should matter while leaving you strangely cold; something else can pull at you persistently even when you’d rather it didn’t. Those gaps are informative too. For the most part, though, what drives you is what you care about—and your problems are the map of that.

Evidence for your problems arrives constantly, from everywhere. Some of it comes as discomfort: stress disrupting your sleep, a relationship that feels off, a vague dissatisfaction with work you can’t quite name. Some of it comes as desire: wanting to travel somewhere, wanting to be better at something, wanting to spend more time with someone. These are traces of the drives already operating in you. Most of it goes unprocessed. We feel it, react to it, and move on without ever turning it into something we can see clearly and work with deliberately.

Two doors into the same room

Problems show up in two forms, and it helps to recognize both.

Sometimes you encounter what I call an issue: the undesired state is front and center. “I’m sleeping poorly because of stress.” “My finances feel precarious.” “I keep procrastinating on things I care about.” Issues are entered from the negative pole: you know what you want to get rid of, but the positive vision isn’t yet clear.

Other times you encounter an aspiration: the desired state leads. “I want to write more.” “I want to be someone my friends can rely on.” “I want to understand how the world works.” Aspirations are entered from the positive pole: you know where you want to go, even if the path isn’t obvious.

These feel quite different in experience. But they are, at bottom, the same structure. Every issue implies an aspiration (where you want to be), and every aspiration implies an issue (the current gap between where you are and where you want to be). Learning to work with both and to translate between them is one of the more useful things you can do with your own mind.

The practical skill is learning to find the pole. When you encounter an issue, ask: what would the world look like if this were gone? Not just “less stressed,” but specifically—what would sleep look like, what would work look like, what would you be doing differently? That specificity turns a vague discomfort into something you can actually address. And often, when you follow an issue to its positive pole, you discover that it cashes out into several problems, each pointing somewhere different.

Problems within problems

One thing that surprises people when they first start mapping their problems seriously is how connected everything is.

Problems don’t exist in isolation. Many of them are simply found as implications of other poles not being the case, or as partial answers to “how might this be resolved?” My problem of wanting financial freedom, for instance, isn’t really about money. Instead, it’s entirely in service of other problems: wanting to live a full life, wanting to contribute something to the world, wanting to pursue work I find meaningful without the constraint of desperation. Remove financial freedom from the picture and those other problems suffer. It exists for them.

Going up—asking “why does this matter?”—reveals these connections. You start with something concrete and follow the thread until you reach something that doesn’t reduce further, something that seems to matter not because it serves something else but simply because it does. These are your intrinsic problems2, and they’re worth knowing. But intrinsic doesn’t mean closed off from further questioning, it only means the questioning no longer exhausts the problem, as it does for extrinsic problems. You can keep asking why, and find more connections, more implications, more texture.

Going down—asking “how might this be resolved?”—generates paths and sub-problems. Not all of them will be worth pursuing. Some will turn out to serve your intrinsic problems; others won’t, and you can let them go.

Doing both, continuously, provides a kind of ongoing feedback about what you actually care about and whether you’re moving toward it.

What the map revealed

For a long time, every metric I used to evaluate my days pointed in the same direction: toward work. Productivity meant hours spent on projects, tasks completed, progress made on concrete goals. Play had no place in that accounting. Rest was tolerated when necessary, not valued in itself. And so, without fully noticing it, I had built a self-image in which any time spent on enjoyment was time I should feel guilty about.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. It emerged from the metrics I was using—and the metrics felt justified because they tracked things that genuinely mattered to me.

What the problem map revealed was a gap. When I followed threads upward (Why does this project matter? Why does that skill matter? What is all of this actually for?) I kept arriving at things like: wanting to understand the world, wanting to contribute something meaningful, wanting to have financial freedom. These all made sense. They were already in the map.

But there was something missing. Gradually, through the process of mapping and living and returning to the map, something became clear that I hadn’t explicitly registered: I want to live a full life. Not just an accomplished one. A life with good books in it, and travel, and time with people I love, and food worth eating. Not as rewards for productive work, but as part of what makes a life worth living.

Once I named it and placed it in the map, several things shifted. I could see that “live a full life” wasn’t exhaustively instrumental to my other goals. It wasn’t there just because it would make me more productive. It was intrinsic. And I could see that my existing approach was entrenching it: moving away from it, not toward it, while I thought I was doing everything right.

The guilt about rest didn’t vanish immediately. But it became something I could evaluate rather than just feel. Is this actually a lapse, given what I care about? Often, the answer was no.

How to read your own evidence

You don’t need to wait for a film’s third act to find out what matters to you. The evidence is already arriving. The question is whether you’re reading it.

Start with what keeps you up at night—in either sense. The anxieties and dissatisfactions are issues asking to be followed to their poles. The things you find yourself daydreaming about, or planning without being asked to, are aspirations already in motion.

When you encounter either, try to articulate it. Write it down imprecisely if you must, since precision can come later, through use. Then follow it in both directions. Going up: why does this matter? Keep asking until you can’t go further. Going down: how might this be resolved? What would actually need to change?

Notice, as you do this, that problems have different relationships to your current situation. Some are being actively worked on, i.e. they’re resolving. Some are being neglected or made worse, i.e. they’re entrenching. Some have reached a point where they’re stable enough that you’re not actively worried about them, i.e. they’re resolved for now, even if not permanently closed. Keeping a sense of these statuses isn’t about creating a perfect system. It’s about seeing your life honestly: what you’re actually moving toward, and what you’re leaving behind.

The map you build this way isn’t a to-do list. It isn’t a vision board. It’s closer to what the protagonist finds at the end of a good film—not a completely new self, but a deep realization of the self that was already there: its drives made visible, its commitments named, and for the first time, actually workable.

Written with the help of AI.

The idea behind expected utility is simple. For any action you might take, you estimate the probability that it leads to an outcome, and you estimate how good that outcome would be (its “utility”). Multiply them together and you get the expected utility of that action—a number representing how much value you can expect to gain from doing it. Do this for every task, rank by the numbers, and work from the top.

I was proud of it. It felt rigorous.

Then I missed Thermodynamics Homework 4.

The assignment had been on my list all week. But its expected utility score was low—my software had no good way to represent urgency, so deadline pressure didn’t factor in. Meanwhile, tasks tied to bigger projects kept floating to the top. Homework 4 stayed buried until it was too late.

After that, I scrapped the software. And the failure forced me to ask a question I hadn’t taken seriously: What should I actually be optimizing for?

The answer I found wasn’t just a fix for the software. It changed how I think about every day.

The flaw in expected utility

The issue with my software wasn’t the math. Expected utility is a perfectly good framework. The issue was what I was feeding into it.

Assigning utility to tasks turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. How much utility is a homework assignment worth? How does that compare to an hour on a long-term project? I was essentially guessing—and my guesses reflected importance (big projects felt important) while completely ignoring urgency (deadlines didn’t register as “utility” the way they should). So the software optimized for importance and ignored time. Which is how a major assignment sat quietly at the bottom of my list while I worked on things that felt significant.

The lesson wasn’t “don’t use decision theory.” It was: you’re optimizing for the wrong variable.

What urgency actually means

That failure taught me how important urgency is. But besides a measure of a deadline, what is it?

Urgency is the degree to which time elapsing makes a problem unresolvable.

Think about what “missing Thermodynamics Homework 4” actually meant. Not just a missed assignment, but a worse grade in the class, which threatened my ability to pass, which threatened my bachelors degree, which I need for everything else I’m working toward. The longer I waited past the deadline, the more of those downstream aspirations got damaged. After a certain point, no amount of work could fix it.

That’s what urgency measures: how quickly options close.

This reframing matters because it connects urgency directly to your problem map. Every task you have serves some problem, some aspiration. An urgent task is one where delay causes irreversible damage to those aspirations. Not just inconvenience, but damage that can’t be undone.

Given that time is the resource I’m always short on, this makes urgency the right primary signal to follow. It’s not arbitrary stress. It’s the system telling you where time pressure is actively threatening what you care about.

There’s also a reasonable assumption baked in: urgent things tend to matter. A homework deadline damages my degree. A project deadline damages a relationship or a commitment. Urgency and importance aren’t perfectly correlated, but they’re correlated enough that urgency is a good first filter.

So the heuristic I use now is simple: if I think I can get everything done on time, I work on whatever is next. If I can’t get everything done on time, I focus on the most important among the urgent things, and accept that some less important things won’t happen.

Where urgency alone breaks down

But pure urgency has a failure mode that’s easy to miss until it’s too late.

Some of the most important things I’m working on have no natural deadline. Ganesha (the app I’m building) doesn’t have a ship date that anyone is holding me to. Learning to think and learn better has no due date. These things matter enormously for where I want to be in five years. But in a pure urgency system, they never rise to the top. Homework and commitments and agreements keep winning, week after week.

The issue isn’t that those urgent things are wrong to work on. It’s that a system driven entirely by urgency will let the important-but-not-urgent things drift indefinitely. Not catastrophically—it’s rarely “too late” in an absolute sense. But later than optimal, which compounds. A week of not working on Ganesha becomes a month. Aspirations that needed time to incubate—ideas that need to be slept on—don’t get that time.

The fix isn’t a separate “importance” metric that competes with urgency in some formula. Incorporating importance properly is the hard part—assigning it correctly, weighing it against urgency without double-counting, keeping it from swamping everything else—and getting it wrong is exactly what sank my software in the first place. The fix is something simpler: artificially creating urgency for important things before they drift too long.

What this looks like in practice: I have a recurring weekly task to work on Ganesha. Not because anyone is waiting on it, but because I decided it was important enough to protect with a regular commitment. Same with reviewing what I’m learning and how I’m learning it. The deadline is artificial—but it works the same way as a real one.

The deeper version of this is a regular review of your aspirations. Not just a quick glance at your task list, but actually going back to the problems you care about and asking: What matters most that I’m not currently working on? This isn’t a separate question you bolt onto your day. It’s the aspirations review I described in the last essay, now serving double duty—not just keeping the map current, but actively surfacing the things that urgency alone would leave buried.

I do this every morning. It takes a few minutes. But it’s what keeps Ganesha on my list alongside Thermodynamics.

What this looks like in practice

The full picture, then, is two things working together.

Day to day, follow urgency. Work on what’s due soonest, weighted by how much it matters. If you can do everything, do the next thing and enjoy the breathing room. If you can’t do everything, triage by importance among the urgent.

Regularly—ideally daily, at minimum weekly—review your aspirations top down. Not to second-guess every task, but to check: are the things that matter most actually getting time? If not, create artificial urgency. Give them a recurring slot, a self-imposed deadline, something that makes them show up in your urgency calculus.

This isn’t a perfect system. Expected utility, done correctly, would be better—it would let you make principled tradeoffs between urgent tasks and important-but-not-urgent ones, accounting for time and probability and the full downstream effects on your aspirations. That’s what I’m trying to build with Ganesha. But building it properly is hard, and I’m not done yet.

Until then, urgency is the best available heuristic. Not because it’s ideal, but because it’s the right variable to track given the constraint I’m always operating under: time. The urgent things are the places where time is actively threatening what I care about. Follow those first, protect the important ones with artificial deadlines, and review the whole picture regularly enough that nothing critical gets lost.

None of this works, though, without the problem map underneath it. Urgency without knowing your aspirations is stressful in a bad way because it feels that things are pressing without any sense of what they’re pressing toward. The aspirations review only means something if you’ve done the work of mapping what you care about and why. The heuristic is simple. What makes it useful is everything it sits on top of.

Written with the help of AI.

Fair question. The conceptual shift is one thing. Building a system that makes it natural is another.

This essay is that system. Not a productivity app or an elaborate framework—just a practical method for organizing your work around the problems you care about. You can start with paper and pen. You can do it this afternoon.

I’ll show you exactly how.

The Core Structure

Start simple. Grab paper or open a blank note. Pick one problem you’re currently facing—something concrete, like “I’m anxious about my career direction” or “I want to get better at French.”

Write it down.

Now you’re going to do two things: go up and go down.

• Going up means asking “why does this matter?” What larger aspiration does this problem serve? Draw an arrow from your problem to that aspiration. Then ask again: why does that matter? Keep going until you hit something fundamental—something you can’t really justify further because it just feels like a core part of what you want from life.

• Going down means asking “how might this be resolved?” List possible paths. Don’t filter yet—just generate options. Then evaluate them. Which ones actually serve the larger aspirations you found when going up? Cross out the ones that don’t. The ones that remain become more specific problems or concrete tasks.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

A friend of mine was anxious about his career. We sat down with paper and pencil. He wrote: “I understand what I want to do for my career.”

Going up, we drew arrows: Why does this matter? “Because I want to have a career.” Why does that matter? “Because I want financial stability.” “Because I don’t want to be stressed all the time.” We kept drawing connections, boxing the things that felt fundamental.

Going down, we asked: How might you figure out what you want?

• “Talk to people in different fields.”

• “Try different projects.”

• “Reflect on what energizes me vs drains me.”

Some options got crossed out as we talked through them. Others became concrete next steps.

The page got messy—arrows everywhere, crossed-out text, boxes around core aspirations. That’s good. The messiness means you’re thinking, not just organizing.

He’s been returning to it when anxiety strikes or when he feels inspired. Each time, he adds new connections, crosses out paths that didn’t work, clarifies what matters. The system evolves as he learns.

This is the foundation. Everything else builds on this.

Making It Live

A static diagram on paper helps you think. But problems don’t sit still—they evolve, new ones emerge, circumstances change. You need a system that stays current with your actual life.

Here’s how I make it work:

Regular Review

This is where the real work happens. Regularly—I aim for daily, but at minimum weekly—I review my aspirations and explore the paths down.

I go through my aspirations, looking at the paths I’ve already identified. For each one, I ask: “Is this still the best way to resolve this problem?” Sometimes the answer is yes and nothing changes. Sometimes I realize a path isn’t working and needs to be crossed out. Sometimes I see a better option I hadn’t considered before.

When I find aspirations that don’t have clear paths yet, I’ll ask “How might this be resolved?” and generate options. But most of the time, I’m evaluating and refining what’s already there, not starting from scratch.

I also refine the “up” direction. As I go through my aspirations, I’ll occasionally add a dot next to ones that seem to serve more purposes than I’ve captured—there are probably more “why”s I haven’t articulated yet. Then, regularly, I’ll go through these dotted aspirations and try to remove the dots by actually adding those reasons, drawing more arrows upward.

Sometimes I realize that some aspect of an aspiration feels fundamental—it doesn’t serve anything else, it just matters on its own. I’ll box that. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to figure out. Even fundamental aspirations can have auxiliary “why”s that connect them to other parts of what I care about.

Let me show you how this works in practice.

I had the problem: “I want to have proof of my sufficient French level.” Going up: this served “I want to get a philosophy degree in France,” which served “I want to know where to specialize in research.”

Going down from French, I had: “I want to pass the B2 exam.” Down from there: “I want to reach B2 level French.” But I didn’t know what that meant, so I created: “I understand what it means to have B2 level French.”

Task: “Look through B2 exams and identify each skill I need.” I did that, which generated more specific aspirations: improve French writing, speaking, presenting arguments, listening, reading.

Now I could evaluate options: Daily AI tutoring? French class? French club? Practice exams? Podcasts? Music? Books?

Music wasn’t helpful—I already had enough passive exposure. French class would stress me out and wouldn’t be tailored to my needs. I crossed those out.

What remained: Join French club (I really needed spoken practice). Daily tasks for chatting and flashcards. Reading practice. Biweekly practice exams.

Each of these became concrete tasks with due dates. “Attend club crawl to meet French club members.” “Add first French club meeting to calendar.” “Complete practice exam by Sunday.”

This process took maybe 20 minutes total, spread over a few sessions. But now I had a clear path forward, grounded in what I actually needed, evaluated against what else mattered in my life.

When I work on these tasks, I know exactly why they matter and how they fit into the larger picture. That’s the difference between task-thinking and problem-thinking made concrete.

The Improvement Loop

Here’s one more practice that’s been transformative: every day, I ask myself “If I could redo yesterday, what would I do differently?”

Then I create a task that would improve my chances of that happening.

This is how the system improves itself. Maybe you realize you’re always rushing in the morning. Task: “Create a morning routine checklist.” Maybe you keep forgetting to review your aspirations. Task: “Set up weekly reminder.”

The system grows with you. It’s not static—it’s a living structure that evolves as you learn what works.

Common Mistakes

Two mistakes I see people make when starting (I made them both):

Mistake 1: Treating your first draft as final

You write down “I want to be successful” as a fundamental aspiration and immediately think: “Wait, that’s too vague. What does ‘success’ even mean? I need to be more precise before I write anything down.”

I’ve learned it’s better to just write it down. You can refine it later—and you will. The act of writing imprecise things and working with them is how you discover what you actually mean.

I’ve seen people spend an hour trying to craft the perfect problem statement and never actually start building the system. Better to get something on paper and iterate as you go.

Mistake 2: Never radically reconsidering

The opposite mistake: you map out your aspirations, work through some paths, and then… never fundamentally rethink them.

You treat the structure as settled. “I figured out my fundamental aspirations six months ago, so those must still be right.”

But your fundamental aspirations can change. Should change, as you learn and grow. The world changes. You change. Your understanding of what matters shifts.

The system should reflect that. I try to periodically—maybe every few months—go back to my fundamental aspirations and ask: “Do I still care about this? Does this still capture what matters to me?”

Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes you discover you’ve been optimizing for something you don’t actually want anymore.

Both mistakes come from the same root: thinking the system is supposed to represent some perfect, eternal truth about what you want. It’s not. It’s a working model that gets refined through use.

Starting Today

You don’t need special tools for this. Paper works. A simple notes app works. I started with Obsidian, moved to Tana, and I’m building something more sophisticated because I want features those don’t have. But the core system—the going up and down, the capture and review—works regardless of tools.

Here’s the minimum viable version:

1. Take 15 minutes. Write down one problem you’re facing.

2. Go up: draw arrows to what it serves, keep going until you hit something fundamental.

3. Go down: list ways it might be resolved, evaluate them, generate tasks.

4. Tomorrow: spend 5 minutes reviewing what you captured yesterday. Add it to your tree.

5. This week: spend 15 minutes reviewing your aspirations and exploring paths down.

That’s it. You now have a productivity system organized around problems instead of tasks.

I’ll be honest: it will probably feel strange at first. Maybe even uncomfortable. You might feel resistance, uncertainty, confusion about whether you’re doing it “right.”

What I’ve found is that pushing through that initial discomfort is worth it. Give it 15 minutes past the point where you want to stop. The discomfort is your brain adjusting to a new way of thinking. It passes.

What you’re building is more than a task list. You’re externalizing your thinking—taking the messy, implicit reasoning about what matters and making it explicit, visible, improvable.

When you write down a problem, connect it to larger aspirations, and trace paths to resolution, you’re no longer trying to hold everything in your head. The system holds it. You can see it, critique it, improve it.

This is how you operationalize “start with problems instead of tasks.” Not as a philosophy, but as a daily practice with a clear structure.

As you work with it, you’ll discover what needs refinement. Maybe you need better ways to surface relevant problems at the right time. Maybe you need to track which paths you’ve tried and abandoned. Maybe you want to visualize the connections more clearly.

That’s natural. Let the system evolve. I’m building tools to make this easier—to make the capture more seamless, the review more intelligent, the connections more visible. But the core stays the same: problems up, problems down, tasks emerge.

Start simple. Start today. The sophistication comes from use, not from setup.

Your productivity system is no longer a list of tasks you hope will add up to something meaningful. It’s a map of the problems you care about and the paths you’re taking to resolve them.

That map is never finished. It shouldn’t be. But having it—being able to see what matters and how you’re moving toward it—changes everything.

Written with the help of AI.

Something had to be wrong with me, right? Normal people didn’t feel guilty about an hour of Netflix after so much work. So I tried to find a fix.

First came the todo apps: Things, Todoist, anything that promised to help me “get things done.” Then automatic schedulers. Then elaborate note-taking systems where I’d link tasks to projects to areas of life. I even built a custom app to mathematically calculate which tasks were most valuable based on impact and urgency.1

Each system worked for a few weeks. Then the old feeling would creep back: busy but not productive, working hard but going nowhere.

The breakthrough came when I realized I wasn’t asking the right question. The question wasn’t “How do I get more done?” The question was “What problems am I actually trying to resolve?”

Until I answered that, no system could help me.

The Problem With Task-Based Thinking

There’s a hidden assumption in my old ways: that the tasks themselves are the right things to be doing. That if you just execute well enough, you’ll be productive.

This assumption is wrong.

I’d complete twenty tasks in a day and still feel unproductive. Not because I was being irrational, but because most of those tasks weren’t actually serving any problems I cared about. I was optimizing for task completion when I should have been optimizing for problem resolution.

Here's what my task list used to look like on a typical day:

1. Do all the readings for philosophy seminar

2. Respond to group project messages

3. Go to gym

4. Attend club meeting

5. Work on problem set

6. Review notes from yesterday

7. Research for next paper

I’d get through maybe fifteen of twenty tasks and feel behind. But here’s what I couldn’t see: most of these tasks existed for the wrong reasons.

“Go to gym” was on the list because “working out is something people do” and “I should probably stay fit.” But it was disconnected from anything real. Just a floating obligation that generated guilt when I skipped it.

“Do all the readings for Philosophy seminar” was there because they were assigned. I never asked if reading every page would actually help me understand the concepts or if I could learn more effectively another way.

“Attend club meeting” was there because I’d joined the club. I never asked if being there served any purpose beyond avoiding the guilt of not showing up.

I was doing things because they felt like obligations, not because they served any actual purpose. And when I did try to justify them, it was always backward: “I’m doing this problem set because it’s assigned, which affects my grade, which affects my GPA, which helps me get a job, which helps me... survive? Be successful? I guess?”

The chain of justification could stretch back far enough, but it was always after the fact. I was never asking the critical question upfront: Is this the best way to resolve the problems I actually care about?

The Shift: Start With Problems, Not Tasks

When I reframed my thinking this way, everything changed.

I want to stay healthy and capable. That’s a problem—an aspiration I’m working toward. It requires ongoing work. It never fully “resolves” but it can be actively worked on or neglected.

I want to understand ideas deeply enough to use them. That’s a problem. It shapes what I do in my classes and how I spend my time.

I want to build things people find meaningful. Another problem. It determines what projects I take on.

Exercise stopped being a floating task. It became a direct step toward resolving a problem I actually cared about—staying healthy and capable. When I miss a workout now, I don’t see a character flaw. I see a practical question: What got in the way? How do I structure things better?

That Philosophy seminar reading? I started asking: Does reading every page serve the problem of understanding these ideas deeply?

• Sometimes yes: the reading is dense and I need to work through it carefully.

• Sometimes no: I can skim for the main argument and spend my time thinking through the implications instead.

The club meeting? Does attending this serve any problem I care about?

• Sometimes yes: I’m building relationships or working on projects that matter to me.

• Sometimes no: I’m there out of obligation, and I can leave the club or just skip meetings that don’t serve my goals.

The difference is subtle but everything downstream changes.

• Before: I’d look at a task and ask: “Should I do this?” Then I’d try to build a justification chain backward to something meaningful. Since I can justify anything, I end up doing it or feeling guilty.

• Now: I look at a problem I care about and ask: “What’s the best way to resolve this?” Then I create tasks that serve that purpose. Sometimes the answer is “none of the tasks I had in mind.” Sometimes I realize I’m working on things that actively detract from my real problems.

This is top-down thinking versus bottom-up thinking. Bottom-up: start with tasks, justify them afterward. Top-down: start with problems, create tasks to serve them.

Bottom-up gives you a fragmented picture. You can connect individual tasks to immediate goals, but you can’t see the whole. You don’t know if you’re working on the right things. You can’t tell if there’s a better path.

Top-down lets you actually choose. You’re not just justifying what you’re already doing. You’re asking what you should be doing in the first place.

What My Days Look Like Now

Here’s what changed practically:

I stopped doing a lot of things. Things I thought I “should” be doing but that weren’t serving my actual problems. The guilt disappeared because I could see clearly: these weren’t helping.

I started doing things I’d been avoiding, like exercise, because I could see clearly: these directly resolve problems I care about.

I started skipping readings that didn’t serve my learning. Some professors assign readings to have students get the scope. The effort and time spent reading every single text doesn’t serve my real aim of getting insight, it’s just a time sink. Instead I read through summaries and discuss with friends.

I stopped trying to complete every assignment perfectly. Some assignments serve the problem of understanding concepts deeply. Others are just boxes to check for a grade. I can tell the difference now, and I allocate my effort accordingly.

My task list got shorter. On a typical day now:

• Work through problem set for Fluid Mechanics (serves: understand fluid engineering physics sufficiently)

• Run (serves: stay healthy and capable)

• Discussion with professor about a reading (serves: resolve confusion about arguments from last week)

• Revise the draft for my next essay (serves: build things people find meaningful)

Four tasks instead of twenty. But I can tell you exactly why each one is there and what problem it serves.

Most importantly, I can now tell if I’m being productive. Before, it was a vague feeling, easily destroyed by an hour of TV. Now it’s concrete: Did I work on resolving the problems that matter to me? Then the day was productive. Doesn’t matter if I worked three hours instead of fifteen.

Those fifteen-hour days that felt empty? They were full of tasks that weren’t serving my problems. I was busy. I wasn’t productive.

The Hard Part No System Can Solve

I need to address the obvious objection: “But I DO know what I care about, and I still can’t get things done.”

If that’s you, I’d ask: Do you know what problems you’re trying to resolve in concrete terms, or in vague ones?

“Do well in school” is vague. “Understand statistical thinking well enough to read research papers critically” is concrete.

“Stay healthy” is vague. “Maintain enough strength and energy to do the activities I enjoy without pain or limitation” is concrete.

“Be successful” is vague. “Build skills in X domain so I can work on Y type of problem” is concrete.

The vague version can’t guide your tasks because it doesn’t tell you what success looks like. The concrete version can.

This is the work no simple productivity system can do for you2. You have to ask: What problems am I actually trying to resolve? What does resolution look like in specific terms?

These questions don’t have packaged answers. You have to think them through yourself. And it’s uncomfortable because you might realize you’ve been working toward problems you don’t actually care about—problems you inherited from parents, or peers, or some vague sense of what you’re “supposed” to want.

What This Means For You

If you’ve tried multiple productivity systems and they keep failing, the problem probably isn’t execution. You don’t need a better app or more discipline.

The problem is conceptual. You’re trying to optimize task completion when what you need is clarity on what problems you’re trying to resolve.

I’ll detail how to build a system around this in a followup essay, but the conceptual shift has to come at some point. No system will make you productive until you’re clear on what problems you’re actually trying to resolve.

For now, try this: Look at your task list. For each task, ask: “What problem does this resolve?” If you can’t answer clearly, or if the answer is “I’m supposed to do this” or “it would feel bad not to,” that’s a sign the task might not belong there.

Then flip it: Look at the problems you actually care about. Ask: “What tasks would best resolve this problem this week?” You might find that the tasks you generate are completely different from what’s on your list.

The tools are simple—just a calendar and a notes doc. The real work is conceptual: getting clear on what problems matter and building everything else around that.

Your version will look different because what matters to you is particular to you. But the core shift is the same: stop starting with tasks. Start with problems.

Productivity isn’t about completing tasks efficiently. It’s about resolving the problems you actually care about.

Once you understand that, the systems finally work. And those fifteen-hour days that felt empty? They become three-hour days that feel productive—because you can finally see that the work you’re doing actually matters.

Written with the help of AI.

Huh? Philosophy? If you have any idea about what philosophers do today, you might scoff at this claim, alongside 23% of adults in the US in 20192. Rightly so, when the fuss is about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin3. The debate around such a question strikes us as useless and nonsensical:

• Useless because it doesn’t help us do anything, unlike a debate on socialized healthcare

• Nonsensical because argumentation can continue forever without making any ground, unlike arguments in physics which can be resolved by experiment

Moreover, you might think that all debates in philosophy are similarly useless and nonsensical. I disagree because there is also much genuine philosophizing in that tradition, discipline, and body of knowledge. Take a historical look:

• Socialized healthcare comes from ‘moral philosophers’ concerned with the role of the state. Only with time did political theorists and scientists get separated from philosophy.

• Physics began as a part of ‘natural philosophy’, and only eventually came to be a distinct endeavor.

All this said, I only find philosophy enriching when it helps with philosophizing. This is crucial. I don’t find most of philosophy useful; my point here is not to convince you to engage with philosophy. Instead, it is to urge you to care about philosophizing well, because philosophizing well is key to achieving your goals. Let me explain.

Goals are problems. Your New Year’s resolution to decrease time spent with screens, a goal, is equivalent to the problem of spending too much time with screens. But that’s quite negative, so why look at things that way?

The reason is that problems help us understand what goals are at a deeper level, one where we can understand what philosophizing is, what engineering is, how we can accomplish our goals, and more. (Just so you know, I will tackle engineering in a later essay, not this one.)

So, what is a problem? A problem is some part of the world that someone wants to get rid of. In the case of your New Year’s resolution, you spend too much time with screens. Since you want to get rid of that aspect of reality, it poses a problem. We know it is a problem because you keep getting bothered by it; it is problematic. When you work towards that goal and reduce your screen time, the problem resolves and stops bothering you. In a sense, problems are self-destructive, but that wording may lead to misunderstanding.

Since problems push you to get rid of them, they are actually constructive. They help change the world, usually creating many more problems in the process! When you reduce your screen time, for instance, you might regain enough time to want to learn the piano. This ambition technically poses a new problem that calls for change, for getting rid of itself. However, problems may never end: since you could always get better at playing the piano, the problem will never fully resolve. Instead, it will subtly transform as you resolve sub-problems such as not knowing how to play scales, chords, or pieces.

Another example of a problem: when I was drafting this essay, I ran into quite a few issues:

1. I had some idea of what I wanted to write, but getting words onto the page was crucifying. What’s more, when the words were finally written, they felt utterly inadequate.

2. I strongly desired to get rid of that feeling of inadequacy, which meant releasing a good essay written in a good way.

3. I resolved the problem by philosophizing, which is to say, by engaging in conceptual problematic exploration.

When you look online for ways to reduce your screen time, you are exploring different ways you could go about resolving the problem. In other words, you are exploring the problem, or engaging in problematic exploration. Philosophizing is just problematic exploration where the problems and/or explorations are conceptual. It might help to continue my example:

1. When I faced my problem of writing, I brought myself to understand the problem more conceptually: “I want to write this well, but I’m not.”

2. From there, I explored ways I might think about the whole project. It occurred to me that I could get clarity by thinking about what it means to write well.

3. Next, I kept thinking through questions that came to me—in the manner I have written about in a previous essay—until I had made a list of steps I could take to create what you are reading now.

This understanding of philosophizing is quite broad since it extends quite further from what is accepted as philosophy. That’s not an accident. Philosophizing occurs all the time in the hard, social, and interdisciplinary sciences, as well as the humanities, engineering, business, and countless other endeavors. Whenever you encounter problems and wrestle with them conceptually, you are philosophizing.

Furthermore, it should be clear how practical my philosophizing was. Philosophizing is always practical since it is always about the problems you actually encounter4. As such, philosophizing is about exploring meanings, possibilities, realities, and how one might live.

Moreover, since problems don’t always resolve cleanly, philosophizing doesn’t always come to an end. If you want to understand what it means to be a citizen, you might constantly be on the hunt for insights, developing your understanding as the very definition of your chase changes constantly. Philosophizing is not always problem solving, but always problem exploring. Even though problems are conceptualized negatively, they are at heart constructive and productive.

Cool. But I still haven’t explained why you need to care so much about it. Can’t others philosophize, while you focus on applying what they figure out?

You need to care because philosophizing is always particular. The problems that bug you are always particular problems which must be resolved particularly each time. Even if somebody already found a solution to your problem, you must think the solution again if you are to actually have your problem resolved. You cannot let anybody else do it for you.

For example, I have been greatly influenced by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I would not be surprised if, in his book What is philosophy?5, he wrote about all the problems I tackle in this essay. Yet, I could never let Deleuze philosophize for me. I can only use his thinking and his problems when I find them problematic myself.6

The particularity of philosophizing is especially clear in my problem with writing. I have read many books and articles on writing, but in the end it is up to me to find what works for me. Here’s writer William Zinsser’s summary in his book On Writing Well:

there isn’t any “right” way to do such personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

You can only learn which method is right for you by trying different methods out.

One last thing: you must philosophize well to achieve your goals. Philosophizing well means resolving your problems by reasoning and creating concepts. It involves making sense of things and holding yourself to the standards you and your problems set. If you do all that already, you already philosophize! Just imagine how much you could achieve if you worked at it more deliberately, improving it skillfully.

I won’t pretend to have mastered the art and science of philosophizing, but I think it is my strong suit. The philosophizing I did was essential to writing this essay satisfactorily. I know this to be true because I followed proven reasoning methods and saw through the problem by making concepts where there were none before. I continue to notice problems and philosophize about them, getting better and better each time.

The Immanent Essays I write are products of genuine philosophizing. With each essay I hope to help people philosophize well by showing how to explore problems, how to reason, and how to create concepts. Beyond placing tools in toolboxes, I also aim to provide sources of philosophizing which inspire philosophizing along similar lines, letting people find new paths through their own problems.

If you would like to better achieve your goals, please come back in the following weeks! I will release essays on how you can set yourself up to utilize problems on your journey through them.

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Are you left with problems and questions? Please share in a comment, email, or even a whole essay! Philosophizing well is an essential skill that requires practice to hone.

I leave you with some problems and questions of my own:

• How should we balance 1) digesting philosophical artifacts7 without much motivation and 2) philosophizing on our own?

• How important is philosophizing outside of philosophy?

• What might engineering be in terms of problems?

• What are the key differences between goals and problems?

• There are many respects in which philosophy education gets in the way of philosophizing, yet I feel that philosophizing should take center stage. Argh!

• Since philosophizing is particular, how are we able to build from our previous events of philosophizing, or even philosophical artifacts of others?

Some if not all of these will be addressed in future essays.

Thanks to Alex and Daniel for their most helpful feedback on earlier drafts!

The analogous thing in non-Cantorian set theory is to choose the new set a as a nonconstructible set, then to generate a new model N consisting of all sets obtained by the operations of restricted set theory applied to a and to the sets in M.1

This is the first sentence of a random paragraph of a random page of a random book on my shelf. In particular, this comes from a wonderful book called The Mathematical Experience. Other non-fiction books, and some fiction books, are full of words and phrases that are not immediately accessible to general readers.

In this mathematical case, it is unlikely that you know what is meant by “non-Cantorian” or “set theory” or “nonconstructible,” and so on. It is precisely this (un)likelihood that makes the terms specialized: they are not general terms that a randomly selected person would know. Rather, they are terms frequently employed by people in specific domains. In this case, mathematics.

Jargon is a synonym for specialized vocabulary, but carries a negative connotation. If you spoke to a non-mathematician exactly as the quote reads, they might ask you to “repeat that without jargon,” or “in simple terms.” Now let’s see what happens when we do so:

The analogous thing in mathematical theories of groups of things without repeating any of those things that reject the notion that a group of things without repetition can be made of one thing in the groups that are things in any group without repetition of groups without repetition, and where there is at least one thing in each of those groups, is to choose the new group of things without repeating any, call it …

That slog is the result of ‘translating’ “The analogous thing in non-Cantorian set theory is to choose the new set ”. While you may not have understood the sentence with specialized vocabulary, at least you had a chance. After learning the vocabulary, you could understand it with ease. In contrast, this ‘translation’ is unwieldy and unclear. There are bad aspects of specialized vocabulary, but there are good aspects as well.

This is the first of a series of essays in which I examine the ways by which we can and should relate to specialized vocabulary. Ultimately, how we treat specialized vocabulary depends on the context of its use. This time, I write about how specialized vocabulary helps in growing knowledge.

Specialized Vocabulary and Growing Knowledge

Even though bad practices sometimes endure the passage of time, in general, good practices prevail. In the phenomenon of evolution, ‘good’ adaptions end up proliferating in organisms while the ‘bad’ adaptions end up dying out—unless, by a stroke of luck, some other factor helps maintain that adaption.

Given that people with special knowledge tend to use specialized vocabulary, we should expect its use to have some positive consequences. We can expect specialized vocabulary to be ‘good’ adaptions. Indeed, specialized vocabulary is an important factor in growing knowledge embedded in layers of context.

You can see this context on display in my translation of the excerpt from The Mathematical Experience. I had to find non-specialized terms for non-Cantorian set theory, and in doing so, drew back the layers of concepts upon concepts. These layers make up the context in which non-Cantorian set theory is embedded, allowing the phrase to make sense to those with that specialized knowledge.

There are two important ways in which specialized vocabulary enables not just knowledge but the growth of knowledge in these knowledge domains. The first is that specialized vocabulary permits finer communication, and the second is that specialized vocabulary enables deeper understanding.

Specialized vocabulary helps in precise communication2. Even though I could replace every instance of ‘set’ with “group of things without any of those things repeating,” it is not very precise. For instance, within mathematics, ‘set’ is a concept distinct from ‘collection,’ and “group of things…” could apply to either.

Another benefit of the precision afforded by specialized vocabulary is the clarity and perspective it brings. When people have to work with a lot of different and complex layers of concepts, specialized vocabulary is gradually created to make handling the concepts easier. Once they are easier to handle, they can be brought together in different ways. Re-organizing concepts can reveal new patterns, furthering the understanding even deeper within a knowledge domain.

Sometimes, this ‘shortcut’ into a concept is a nice phrase rather than a word. In some contexts of writing or thinking, where precision is guaranteed in some other ways, you can get away with whatever text you would like, so long as there is a link between what you handle (word, phrase, sentence) and what you refer to (complex concept network).

In a Zettelkasten, you can treat individual notes as referents.3 As I refer to concepts within my Zettelkasten, I quite literally link some text to another note. It does not matter whether the note I am linking to is some thoughts I had about decision theory, whether it was a small note I recorded while on the bus, or this very essay. The cherry on top is that I do not have to scratch my brain to remember what a specific term is, or what “what I thought on May 6th” means. I can simply follow the link and read the note I had written.

Specialized vocabulary is clearly important. There are instances, like the quote from the Mathematical Experience, where it is required. It plays a key factor in building deep understanding. However, it might play an equally important role in preventing us from growing knowledge. Next time, I will take a look at how specialized vocabulary can get in the way of attempts at clarity and understanding.

Interested not only in feeling, but also conceptualizing, I ask “What is art?” This question interests me because it allows me to explore what art means, both to me and to others, and also because it allows me to explore what art could mean that it does not yet.

I have come to understand art as a source of currents that flow into people non-conceptually. Listening to Toward the Sea, a work of art by Tōru Takemitsu, something within me changes—I do not know what, I do not know why, but I know that. The music leads me, through its currents, to experiment (perhaps in effort to understand), to imagine, and to act, even though I do not conceptualize it.

The same can be said of paintings, of installations, of poetry, of sculpture, cuisine, and so many more forms of art. However, each of these works of art have media through which the art-form is registered by the senses. Toward the Sea, for example, can be accessed by listening (sense) to musicians perform (media) the piece (form) as designed by Takemitsu.

Interested not only in sensation, but also conceptualizing, I ask “What about purely conceptual art?” This question interests me because it allows me to explore possibilities of art beyond those usually understood, and also because as it allows me to bring art into new domains that I find enthralling.

Conceptual art, as a term, is already employed. It refers to artworks that have interesting conceptual bases which are implemented through various media. What I am interested in here is purely conceptual artworks, which use concepts as their medium.

Without any examples to think about, such an artwork could seem impossible. One piece, which I give the tentative name Virus, is the concept that propagates through minds, perhaps alike a concept that invades the mental capacity of people. The content of the thought is self-reflective: it is this very thought that thinks about itself as the thought that it is, and also thinks about its capability of being replicated in other minds. When I describe this thought to you, the reader, you may find yourself with this very same thought, which now occupies even more minds!

I do not think it is unfathomable to view Virus as a piece of art. Perhaps not a particularly great one (though I quite enjoy it). I have specified its form, and the medium is thought. What is different is that there does not seem to be any “essential” relation with the senses, like paintings have with vision, or music with hearing.

Now, poetry can be seen as coming close to purely conceptual art. Both involve bringing something to mind, particularly language. But where the medium of purely conceptual art is concepts, the medium of poetry is language. You cannot reword a poem and have the same poem, but you can reword a conceptual artwork and have the same piece.

Another example, tentatively titled Point Vanishing, is quite a perplexing one. First, take a moment to feel the piece, as the more you read on, the less you will be able to access it. The concept this time is the non-conceptualization of itself. As soon as you have the concept in mind, you are not witnessing it as itself as an artwork. But when you are not conceptualizing it, you witness it—though in what sense I do not quite know.

These two pieces might strike you as interesting “thought experiments.” But there is a crucial difference: thought experiments, in philosophy, are conducted in order to test intuitions and logical consequences for a productive end, whereas these examples do not aim toward any kind of productivity. When I create purely conceptual art, I engage in play.

All of this discussion makes my initial claim of art suspicious, that artworks are sources of currents that flow non-conceptually. How could “purely conceptual art flow non-conceptually?” However, I do not think that purely conceptual artworks are exceptions to this claim. While initially conceptual, the ways in which purely conceptual artworks create currents are the same as those present in other art forms. The flow is not based on comprehension of ‘why’ some fact is the case, like, for instance, why every number has a prime factorization. That kind of understanding creates currents of number theory that are conceptual in nature. The currents of purely conceptual artworks inspire are different, and are gained through inspiration, perplexity, and beauty. They are not founded in comprehension.

My point in bringing up purely conceptual art is not to establish it as a revolutionary art form. It is not to demonstrate how versatile art can be, nor how far expression can extend. It is to pose questions that are relevant to the conditions of existence and see where they lead—the unknown.

The title of the album is Decomposition: Fox on a Highway. The tracks of the album are titled to describe the happenings of a decomposing fox: worms enter its body, its body bloats, cars pass by, until finally the worms exit the body—rather, what used to be a body.

If you let this prolonged event infiltrate your awareness—which you will naturally avoid doing—you will experience revulsion. You might feel queasy, nauseous, unsettled.

What you will feel is called “Animal-Reminder Disgust”, which is elicited by an identification of the self as an animal. Unconsciously, you are reminded of how you are the same as the fox. If things had been different, it could be you on the highway—Worms In, Bloat, Everyone Passing, and finally Worms Out.

The natural response to this disgust is to reinforce the self as distinct from animals. We are better than animals. We are special.

But what are we, if not animals?

Self-Subjectivity

Turning to the natural sciences will help answer this question, but they can only describe the objective aspects of our selves. They emphasize our animal-nature, making even our subjective experience animal. The natural-scientific picture is not complete.

Turn instead to your own experience of self. How does it feel? How does it change depending on what you are doing? Do you lose it sometimes?

Personally, I lose it frequently. When I am engrossed in conversation, work, exercising, and watching something online, the sense of “I” seems to disappear. Remarkably, this disappearance of the “I” is only determined when it returns, when I take a look at my body and come to the flabbergasting realization—perhaps decision—that “I am Louis, nothing more than this chunk of flesh and thought.”

Even though there is no self-consciousness while the self is lost, this immersed-self still seems to be, somehow, part of our ‘grander’ self. On the other hand, the experience of oneself as an individual-self along the lines of “oh, this was me the whole time,” also seems to be part of who we are.

But this individual-self is not the only one of which I become conscious. There are times that, instead of the individual-self, the “I” transforms into something larger-than-life. To understand what I mean, think about the sheer magnitude of human history. Try to feel how long ago the pharaoh Ramses II lived, how much happened since then… and that even human history is minuscule compared to the timescale of life on Earth, and the Earth to the universe as a whole. Sometimes, somehow, I identify not with Louis, but with this vast situation which encompasses countless lives and countless deaths, including my own. I, Louis, will die. But I am more than Louis, I am an eternal-self.

Self-Simulation

From the point of view of the eternal-self, my everyday affairs, both immersive and individual, do not feel real. They are fictive, created simply to keep the processes of the world moving. “Is this who I am? Somebody who takes a bus or rides a bicycle to sit in a room and listen to someone talk for hours, somebody who enjoys eating but cannot stand Natto, somebody who could be hit by a car and decompose on the road?”

Any terms I assign to myself—“student,” “foodie,” “mortal”—all become roles that Louis acts out while engaging with the world. The self, marked by “self-knowledge,” is simulation, where knowledge of the self is identifying roles that are simulated by the self.

What then is the “true”-self, beyond simulation? What are we, at a deeper level than simulation? Perhaps we are simply, truly, the eternal-self—except that the eternal-self is too impersonal to be me, myself. Additionally, this eternal-self is not truly deeper than simulations. It merely assembles a cast of characters together and observes the theater unfold.

Abstrusity

The true-self is abstruse: some parts known, and some parts unknown. It is not complete knowledge, for that is simulation. It is not complete unknown, for then there is no self at all. The true-self is not found through self-knowledge, but abstrusity.

When people suffer from existential anxiety, from being unsure of themselves, they expect self-knowledge of something that is fundamentally abstruse, fundamentally marred with the unknown. Inner peace does not come from self-knowledge, but from understanding the self as unknowable.

Another complexity arises. If your true self is how you are at any moment, does it really capture everything about you? You can never be your true self, you can only become it. Being true to yourself, or rather your true-self, is about becoming something new through a mixture of the known and the unknown. It is being unsettled, or rather rejecting permanent settlement.

This rejecting of permanent settlement, this self-nomadism, realizes the true-self. Practically, it means experimenting, diving head-first into the unknown. We are not held back by simulations, by pre-existing knowledge of what we are. We re-create ourselves experimentally and find our true-selves as we become unknown.

Resources

The amazing album Decomposition: Fox on a Highway is by Saapato and collaborators.

My understanding of Animal-Reminder Disgust comes from the section “Animal-Nature Disgust” of Chapter 10 of the open access textbook Psychology of Human Emotion.

Many of the ideas are not from, but influenced by my premature understanding of the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Often it is from recognizing interesting terms like ‘nomadology’ and running away with them.

My notion of abstrusity developed from running away with ideas while reading selections from the Daodejing, translated by Edmund Ryden. It is influenced by some cursory reading I had done of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.

My understanding of experimental is influenced by a passage from John Cage’s Silence, as reported by the Emergent Futures Lab website.

All artwork is by Paul Klee.

But I do not go to the courts because it is exercise, even though it is. Nor do I go because it helps me get closer to my friends or because it passes the time. It is play, which is done for its own sake.

Play might be defined as any activity that, being done for its own sake, involves the expression of the player(s). Play is not even done for the sake of fun—it just happens to be fun.

Activities where you partake for the sake of some emotional stimulus, and, perhaps also themselves, include watching TV, scrolling through social media. These are not play. And what I find most distinctive between those activities and play is expression. Watching TV is an act of passive consumption, wheras playing badminton involves developing character and actively creating a personal style of play.

Another form of play I partake in is growing knowledge. Among my fellow aspiring intellectuals, research and writing are often seen as tasks, even if enjoyable. I see it as a fundamentally different activity.

And this approach has important consequences on people who do not work directly with knowledge, opening possibilities for more people. See, you may think of my knowledge growth as a luxury I am particularly fortunate to afford, but I disagree.1 In reality, the affordable form of growing knowledge is when it is play.

Interestingly, the key to all of this is not very difficult to understand or put into practice—the key is the Zettelkasten.

Accessibly Growing Knowledge

Some people in the world are fortunate enough to be able to devote most of their time to growing their knowledge. They read and write books and papers, attend conferences to listen to and give talks.

Most people are not like them. But the difference those fortunate few and the majority is not capability or interest, but simply the ability to devote time. That affordability is often one of circumstance and luck, which is very unfortunate—I believe that growing knowledge should be a possibility for everybody, not just those with ample time to do so.

Furthermore, the traditional conception of growing knowledge involves sitting down at a desk for an extended period of time, writing, reading pondering. Sometimes, it is going down to a lab to conduct some heavy-duty experiments. This is simply not possible for most people.

Thankfully, for those who cannot afford to devote such lengths of time or such mental energy, the traditional picture can be set aside. The alternative uses the Zettelkasten emphasizing its ability to grow knowledge ambiently.

Ambient Knowledge Growth

Taking notes without a Zettelkasten, you might have different notebooks for different projects, or maybe different school subjects. To grow knowledge, you write in these notebooks and read from them afterwards. Some sections of a notebook might become blog posts, and others might be practice for intense conversations.

But this requires some time to sit, study, and write. Many people never look back through their notes, and as a result their knowledge does not grow. And for this approach to taking notes, projects are crucial—without a project in mind, all the notes would be rigidly classified, unable to cross-polinate. You could not know which projects you might have in the future would benefit from some knowledge you' have picked up!

The Zettelkasten structure, by making all the knowledge immanent, places the emphasis not on projects but on the pieces of knowledge and their connections.

You can simply collect information you find interesting and make connections with other pieces of information. Notice that any information you find interesting has vast potential of future connections—you are not limited by the scope of a project. Instead, over time, scoped groups of connections appear organically that can be converted into fully-formed projects.

Also, with this approach, even if you work from within a project, the insights can be taken out of context and into other contexts, other projects, so that research for any project is research done for any number of any other potential projects.

In other words, the work you do is not merely directed towards individual projects, but rather ambiently growing knowledge from which multiple projects can emerge.

Ambience and Accessibility

This property of ambience also results in a greater accessibility.

Since your efforts grow the garden ambiently, you do not have to work in the context of strict broundaries. You do not have to sit and stomach an entire book over months, eventually forgetting much of the context of a project. Instead, you can pick up what is interesting, and save it as an investment into a future connection.

If you have 15 minutes to spare, you could read a few pages of a book and take some short notes. Sometime in the future, you might look at those notes and make connections with some others. You might use your notes you put together a short paragraph about a subject. A few more of those, and you could have an essay published.

That is at the core of how I work with my Zettelkasten: When something feels right to dig into, when it is interesting or convenient, I can make valuable connections and grow my knowledge. It seems awfully playful, and that is because it is!

Playfully Growing Knowledge

For an activity to be play, according to my definition earlier, it must be done for its own sake. When working with projects in mind, research is done with the research question in mind—a sake other than itself. But in the Zettelkasten, where research can be done ambiently, sources are explored and connections are made on the basis of themselves being interesting—their own sake.

Another required aspect of play, as I mentioned, is expression. It is not difficult to realize how expressive and personal note making is. Note making is about incorporating yourself, since every connection you make is a result of your entire life.

Growing your knowledge does not have to be some elusive activity that could only be possible in another life. It is something you can grow slowly, ambiently, and in the time between your larger commitments. While growing in this way, you engage in a profound act of personal expression, and find an extremely rewarding mode of play.

Resources

There are more thoughts on ambient knowledge growth from Andy Matuschak’s ‘Executable strategy for writing’ note, under the name ‘undirected’. I highly recommend his notes for deep practical and theoretical insights into knowledge growth.

Some of my thoughts on the accessibility that Zettelkasten provides come from the so-so book Digital Zettelkasten Principles, Methods, & Examples and the fantastic book Where Good Ideas Come From. Where Good Ideas Come From is an amazing source to begin taking notes on, since it details creativity, problem solving, science, and much more.

There are more resources on getting started with Zettelkasten on my introductory post.

You can read more about Deleuze from my introductory essay, How Might One Live.

Among Deleuze’s many concepts1 is the rhizome, a structure that allows mapping, itself another Deleuzian concept. The understanding of a Zettelkasten as a rhizome, and thus as a knowledge structure that allows for mapping, makes it ideal for ‘immanent knowledge growth,’ an insight of my own.2

Rhizome

The easiest way to make the rhizome intuitive is to compare it to its antithesis: the arborescent. If you know your way around English words, you will notice a hint of ‘tree’ in ‘arborescent.’

Indeed, appealing to trees is the best way to explain arborescent structure: the structure involves a trunk which splits into multiple branches. Then, those branches split further into branches, and on it goes. Every branch can be traced down to the trunk.

While trees might best represent arborescent structure, the structure is present elsewhere. Many non-Zettelkasten note-taking approaches have arborescent structure: organize your files into where they belong, keep them in the right notebook, and categorize new ideas into their correct spot.

But our ideas are not necessarily correct, but often experimental.

The word “experimental” is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown. (John Cage, Silence p.13)3

As experimental, our ideas are unknown. How could we know the implications of radically new thoughts before thinking them through and letting them grow? And given how the best ideas are often those that cross disciplines, the arborescent structure, disallowing such crossing, inhibits creativity.

The alternative structure archetype is rhizomatic, where nodes (in our case notes) are not placed into any intrinsic hierarchy. To picture a rhizome, imagine cutting each branch of a tree. With the pile of sticks that is left, you can build anything you would like by creating connections where otherwise they would be impossible.

Zettelkasten as Rhizome

That ‘cutting’ visualization is not an accident. We only realize new connections, and therefore new constructions, when we separate ideas from their context.

This is key to the Zettelkasten’s claim of being rhizomatic. Continuing the terminology from Growing Knowledge with a Zettelkasten, we can tap into the power of rhizomatic structures only when we interact with small, individual pieces of knowledge. That is just what Zettelkasten enables.

But is the Zettelkasten, as a rhizomatic structure, really more creative than a non-rhizomatic knowledge structure? The answer is yes, because it enables mapping.

Mapping

Where the rhizomatic structure can be explained in contrast to the arborescent structure, mapping can be explained in contrast to tracing.

Like you would expect, tracing involves replication and representation. Something traced is judged by its deviations from what was traced; by the quality of representation. That much is obvious, but what is less obvious is that arborescent structures encourage tracing.

Consider one of the biggest knowledge trees around, Wikipedia. Wikipedia serves to represent the knowledge of the world, replicating it into the various languages of its articles. Articles are judged by factual accuracy, not by ‘creativity’ or ‘originality.’

In fact, creative work on Wikipedia is removed.4 This is a result of the arborescent structure of Wikipedia, where there is an effort to represent and be ‘correct.’

The antithesis to tracing is mapping, which involves creativity. Or, more illustratively put, creation.

Take two artists, both drawing the same scene. A passing art critic notices that one artist’s drawing “looks photographic” and the other’s “is completely unreal.” The other artist’s artwork is a product of mapping, where new possibilities are discovered—and where genius often lies.

And where tracing is arborescent, mapping is rhizomatic. This can be demonstrated by highlighting the mapping in Zettelkasten.

Mapping with Zettelkasten

See, working with a Zettelkasten is all about mapping. It is imperative to understand that a Zettelkasten is not an encyclopedia; and it is not meant to merely trace the world, but also create it.

Rather than trying to represent reality objectively, a Zettelkasten involves highly personal work. It might be said that a Zettelkasten is essentially personal, and as such requires you to think for yourself.

Whenever you make your own understanding of some material, you take note of it in your Zettelkasten. Whenever you come up with your own intriguing ideas, you make note of it in your Zettelkasten. Beyond being a place to keep your existing knowledge, it is a space for your new, experimental, creative understanding.

But something is lacking here between the ideas of mapping and rhizome. Bridging the two is immanence.

Immanence

Immanent structures are those where everything interacts at the same level.

To illustrate: Working on various projects often means separating concerns between the projects. You might be working towards a report, assembling materials for the report, and keeping them distinct from your hobbies. Many people even put completed projects behind them.

But it is easy to recognize that some knowledge of materials science, economics, or medicine, earned in some professional context, can play a role in becoming a better tennis player, a completely different context. When knowledge is immanent, the boundaries that projects create are broken down.

And where boundaries are broken, tracing is impossible. Instead, knowledge is mapped out and becomes resources for even more potential connections. And these connections, relating relevant materials, consistently creates relevant connections. This is the immanence of which I am interested.

This structural quality of immanence is present in the rhizome, which thrives with immanence. Naturally, so does the Zettelkasten.

Immanent Zettelkasten

Knowledge in the Zettelkasten is immanent. It is a rhizomatic vehicle of mapping, letting insights appear when they are relevant. Thus, the knowledge created with a Zettelkasten is consistently meaningful, consistently able to effect relevant people at their relevant levels.

You may have noticed that the name of my publication is Immanent Essays. The sense of ‘immanence’ is the same as described here,5 where everything is at the same level: meaningful and relevant.

Further, one of my goals with Immanent Essays is to write accessibly, such that it is capable of moving people of diverse walks of life. Ideally, the only prerequisite to learn from the essays is interest, not background.

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Resources

My understanding of rhizomatic and arborescent structures, as well as mapping and tracing, are mostly due to the great video Explaining Deleuze with Drum Machines. It is accessible and highly recommended.

There has been prior interest in the connections between Zettelkasten and Deleuze’s thought. Zettelkasten, Rhizomes, and You is a great article exploring the connections.

My understanding of immanence is influenced by Gilles Deleuze; an Introduction. I continue to enjoy this book as much as I learn from it, so I strongly recommend it to those with great interest in Deleuze.

I recommended a few Zettelkasten resources in my essay Growing Knowledge with a Zettelkasten. Rather than recommending more, I urge you devote more time to doing real work with your Zettelkasten!

These people have been accumulating knowledge for a while, often years, hopeful to grow it and share it with others. They write notes in their notebooks, on looseleaf paper, in Google Docs, or other ways they have seen work decently well.

Often they will see a graph of my notes and become curious about what I am doing.

They ask about what software I use, and I tell them about it. “The software I use is called Obsidian, but really the important thing is that I am maintaining a Zettelkasten.”

I guide them through some of the main ideas of the system, and they try it out excitedly. Some time later, they lament their time not growing a Zettelkasten.

This essay, the first of a few to come, will help you get started growing knowledge with a Zettelkasten. The focus will not be on specific software or paper, though I do highly recommend Obsidian.

Growing Knowledge

Firstly, it is important to clarify what I mean by ‘growing knowledge.’ There are essentially three parts to growing knowledge. And since growing is, to me, most clear in plants, I will use them in analogy: growing knowledge is like growing plants, from 1) getting seeds, 2) letting the seeds develop into plants, and 3) sharing the seeds you create.

Thus, in terms of knowledge, growth involves 1) picking up interesting information, 2) guiding the information to develop into new insights, and 3) sharing your insights with the world.

In this sense, the growth is not just personal, but also interpersonal. Often, by growing knowledge for yourself, you help others grow knowledge too.

And since you might have a garden to keep your various plants, you also have a space to keep and grow your knowledge. Many students take their notes in notebooks, in Google documents, in Apple notes, in Notion, or in Obsidian. When people stop being students, they often halt their note-taking completely. This is a shame, I think. I do not believe that a thirst for knowledge is lost upon donning a graduation cap.

In any case, there are various tools which can serve as places to keep your knowledge. But more important than the brand of notebook or software is the structure of the knowledge. Also, the most important consideration is whether you will actually use whatever you decide to use. I prefer some apps to others, but it would not matter if I did not use either!

Zettelkasten

The knowledge structure that I strongly recommend to everybody is the Zettelkasten. The term, in German, refers to boxes of paper slips, but what I take it to refer to is a specific structure. This structure involves every slip of paper, each with an individual piece of knowledge, standing on their own. In this way, each slip is a peer with every other slip. As every slip of paper, every note in Obsidian and Apple Notes, ideally contains an individual piece of knowledge, I will refer to the pieces of knowledge themselves being peers in the structure.

The note in the image is such an example:

From reading How to Take Smart Notes a bit over a year ago, I extracted this insight.1 Creating a Zettelkasten is just as easy; you just need to create notes that stand as peers in a structure like this.

But if every piece of knowledge is a peer with others, it would be difficult to find that specific fact from among thousands of others. Imagine having to find a specific dot on the graph image from earlier.

Other approaches resolve this problem by categorizing notes into different folders or boxes, embedding some within others. Categories might be like “Philosophy” where all the notes on philosophy would go, and “Mathematics” where all the notes on mathematics would go, and so on.

The Zettelkasten has a very different solution: linking. Notes refer to each-other, allowing you to connect notes not by shared topics but by specific, meaningful connections.

The specificity of connections is important here: I have quite a lot of notes on Zettelkasten, but I am able to access specific ideas related to a note by navigating its links.

So, when writing your notes, make sure to link to and from any individual note.

But what is the point of this? Linking enables you to maintain the various notes without strict hierarchy. Everything is simply a ‘piece of knowledge,’ ready to make connections and insights.

It is in this way that working with a Zettelkasten helps grow knowledge.

In fact, it also mirrors the aspects of growing knowledge mentioned earlier:

1. The knowledge you get from others become pieces of knowledge in the Zettelkasten, like my “systems with feedback are more likely to be engaged” note.

2. When you have insights, those insights are captured in the Zettelkasten as well, like “Zettelkasten allow for ambient productivity”.

3. And when you would like to share your knowledge with others, you have the Zettelkasten to turn to.

For that last bit, see for example this list of links from this essay’s note:

Pieces of Knowledge

Among the many elements of the Zettelkasten, the treatment of knowledge as individual pieces is crucial.

See, when I read books and find interesting information, I capture it in my Zettelkasten. I do the same with lectures and with conversations. I might end up with a very long file after some time taking notes. But what I do afterward is something quite unique to the Zettelkasten: I break up the longer notes into their individual pieces of knowledge, with the aim of having each note contain exactly one idea or concept.

This practice is key to the success of the structure, and it works because breaking up the context of ideas invites further creation. Without doing so, by keeping your notes in notebooks, for example, your notes on a lecture may be associated across a few pages, bundled together. How will the ideas from that lecture spread throughout the network of your understanding as a whole?

If you used index cards instead, you could split up your understanding of the lecture into various self-contained and cross-referencing cards. You would be able to arrange them in new ways, and with other index cards, gaining insights from the new arrangements.

The Zettelkasten structure, by keeping knowledge in these smaller pieces, makes cross-category growth of knowledge possible. That much, I hope, is clear. But it also lets knowledge from quite different points in time interact.

Every few days I encounter a piece of knowledge I had a few years ago. Recalling that past insight, I am able to create new connections between the current ideas in my mind and the wealth of knowledge from my past.

Such re-surfacing of ideas is often an afterthought of other systems. If you do not extract your notes from your notebooks, the best you can do is deciding to re-read old notebooks on a whim.

And this is why people are often so regretful of not starting sooner: maintaining a Zettelkasten is investing the current knowledge you have for exponential returns in the future. If you are interested in growing your knowledge, seriously think about starting a Zettelkasten. The best time to do so was yesterday, and the second best is now.

Further Resources

For a great example of Zettelkasten and insight into its inner workings, I recommend browsing and taking notes on Andy Matuschak’s working notes.

I often recommend this video by Odysseas to people who ask about the Obsidian software. I think it can help you get started, but keep in mind that the organization and methodology is very personal: I work quite differently from how he sets up his system. Alternatively, you might prefer this video where he goes through the process of his workflow.

A wealth of knowledge can be gained from the Zettelkasten.de site, both the blog posts and forum.

The book A System for Writing is a very accessible and practical guide to getting set up with a Zettelkasten.

With all these resources listed, you might be tempted to dive into each of them. But keep in mind that it is more important to get started and experiment than to carefully analyze how to ‘best’ get going.

After months of exploration and experimentation, you have pinned down a great philosophical theory.

You are itching to tell somebody about it, and it so happens that you are meeting with two philosophically interested friends in the evening—at your favorite restaurant, no less!

You arrive late to your friends already seated. They are in mid-conversation, but gesture upon noticing you.

“Glad you could make it,” one says.

“The pleasure is all mine,” you reply. “How have you two been?”

As much as you would like to jump straight into elaborating your theory, you know that your friends might have something to say too. In any case, you are curious about them.

“I’ve been OK,” one says, “but…”

“I haven’t,” says the other. “Rasha died on Sunday.”

“Oh no. I am sorry for your loss.”

At this point, it becomes clear that tonight is very likely not the right one to tell your friends of your discovery.

But how?

The answer lies in currents, parameters that cause effects.

Currents: Cause and Effect

There were many different ways you could have acted that evening. Instead of asking your friends how they were, you could have started explaining your theory right away.

While that was a possibility, it was not how it really happened. This distinction between possibility and reality is important in understanding currents. Generally, possibilities are the ontologies that are allowed under certain constraints. Think of an ‘ontology’ as a list of facts. In a game of Go, for instance, the placement of all the stones, and whose turn it is, are part of its ontology. The possibilities of your next turn are the stone placements and other factors that are allowed by the rules of the game.

Furthermore, possibilities are realized, which, for my purposes here, simply means that they become real. What it means to be real is not something I try to answer here. Nevertheless, there is one effect that I think is worth mentioning: both the real ontology and possible ontologies change. When you actually play your game turn, the state of the board changes, and so do the possibilities. For instance, it is impossible, according to the rules, to repeat the move you have just played.

But if all the moves are equally possible, why play one move rather than another? Most people prefer moves because they view them as more likely to win them the game. More specifically, the current board state determines where certain moves would be more valuable than others. On top of that, experience and knowledge factor in evaluating board state and exploring potential avenues of victory.

All of those factors are currents, the various parameters that determine which possibilities realize, and which do not.

Returning to the example, the fact that Rasha died on Sunday is one current that determined what really happened: if Rasha did not die, the evening would have gone quite differently.

But there is more to the story than that—if nobody told you that Rasha had died, you might have gone on to lecture about your theory. How could you have known not to? We can deduce that your friends telling you about Rasha must have been a current. But even then, you might not have had the sensibility to hold back on explaining. As a result, your sensibility is a current we can add to the model.

And between your friends telling you all this and your sensibilities, you must have had some sort of understanding about what "Rasha died on Sunday" means. Another current. And for you to understand anything, you must have some sort of mind. Another current. And for you to have a mind, you must exist! Another current—

This easily becomes very chaotic. Let us turn to some more concepts to organize this model better…

Current Ontologies

Recall that possibilities are ontologies, which can be thought of as lists of facts.

In a physical ontology, there may be electrons, fields, and forces, among other things. In a metaphysical ontology, which has to do with existence more abstractly, there may be cats,1 philosophy, and friendship, among other things. In an epistemological ontology, which relates to knowledge and understanding, there may be beliefs, concepts, and desires, among other things.

The important principle to understand here is that ontologies play out on their own terms. Take a few examples: electrons create electric fields, which are currents in physical ontologies. People may become friends by doing philosophy together. Those happenings are part of metaphysical ontologies. And desires may turn into beliefs, the dynamics of which can be understood in epistemological ontologies.

Yet, we can understand our states of mind, perhaps belonging to epistemological ontologies, by investigating our brains, which might be said to be part of some neurological ontology. The reason why this works is that we can pull the two into some other ontology, say, a metaphysical one. As interesting as this problem is, it is not the main point of my essay, so I leave it for now.

The important point here is that physical currents play in physical ontologies, epistemic currents play in epistemic ontologies, and so on. To better understand the dynamics of the evening, it will be best to investigate it in some particular ontology.

Let us continue with an epistemic one, and bring our search to a close with simulation.

Simulation

When you hold back from talking about your philosophical discovery, you do so partly because you expect doing so to result in effects you would not like.

In essence, you simulate the scenario. You consider the various epistemic currents people have, like their receptivity to your position, their stress levels, their various beliefs, and so on.

When your friend told you of the passing of Rasha, you ‘updated’ your epistemic ontology, not with the fact that Rasha died on Sunday, but with various beliefs about Rasha, about your friend’s mental condition, about Sunday, and so on. The epistemic currents you assign to other people are updated as well.

As a result, simulating your talking about your philosophy predicts undesirable effects. Talking about your philosophy, then, become very undesirable, so you end up not doing so.

Simulation plays an important role in social interactions. It will be interesting to understand simulation in terms of currents.

In virtue of understanding such social interactions in this way, we gain tools that allow us to navigate social interactions and understand people through their behavior.

And since our simulation is itself effected by various currents we ourselves have, it shines light into the currents we ourselves might be.

Today, I would like to share with you one of the most influential currents in my thought: meaning.

What is the Meaning of Life?

“What is the meaning of life?”

This question is, more often than not, the setup to a punchline. “42!” The question lends itself well to humor, I think, because it is often overly abstract. But the question is of vital importance, and demands concrete answers.

The question, for example, is “what is the point of all of your suffering?” Solid answers to the question help you get through hardship.

Another aspect of the question places the focus more immediately: “why are you doing what you are doing right now?” Fail to consider the question at this scope, and you may find yourself in hard times.

Just like lack of water makes the body deteriorate, lack of thought in this matter can result in a deterioration of selfhood. Indeed, this question is asked most by those in need of an answer, those who have lost touch with who they are.

All of this to say—in what sense could we ask, let alone answer, the question—without understanding what meaning is?

What is Meaning?

My favorite definition of meaning needs some warming up to. First, please consider this scenario:

You are planning a party for 6pm the next day, and you want your friend to come early. “Meet me at my place at 5,” you say.

The next day, you jolt awake to the sound of knocking from the door—it’s your friend.

“What are you doing here so early?”

“What do you mean? You told me to be here at 5.”

“I didn’t mean 5 in the morning! I meant 5 PM!”

Haha. Now, I will change the dialogue just a little bit, but in a way that will not change the meaning of the phrases spoken:

“What are you doing here so early?”

“What did you want to happen? You told me to be here at 5.”

“I didn’t want you to arrive at 5 in the morning! I wanted you to arrive at 5 PM!”

More long-winded and robotic, there are clearly some differences between the two versions of the conversation. Even still, each line means the same thing. How?

Desired Effect

Meaning is the same as desired effect. When your friend asked you what you meant by what you said, they asked you what effects you desired to result from your speech.

Think of effects as the events that took place as a result of some action. Eating a watermelon (92% water), for example, results in the effects of empty watermelon shell and full stomach. And to best understand what I mean by desire, avoid associating it with personality: a lotus plant, without personality, desires water and sunlight.

With that in mind, it is clear that both versions of the example dialogue mean the same, since they both have the same desired effects: your friend, learning why you are mad; and you, having your friend leave and return later.

Now, let us apply this definition of meaning to the question of this essay: What is the meaning of life?

Desiring Life

If meaning is desired effect, “What is the meaning of life?” becomes “What are the desired effects of life?” Phrased in this way, however, meaning as desired effect becomes difficult to accept. Nor is the question clarified very much.

To clarify, let me distinguish between two senses in which the question may be asked.

The first sense of the question is that of purpose. “Why am I alive?” “To what end is my life directed?” This sense of the question has to do with reason for existence, which is to say, with intent, which is to say, with desire.

The second sense is as a different way to ask about what life consists of. Imagine people who would answer the question with, for example, “living, supporting a family, dying.” For these people, the question of the meaning of life is about how one might live.

Yet, while exploring how one might live, people discover the possibilities of life in front of them. They begin to position themselves with respect to the first sense of the question of meaning: “Now that I know I can be free, my purpose is liberty.”

What is the Point?

If you believe in God, a meaning of life is right in front of you: God’s will. Your life is meaningful as the desired effect of God.

I do not believe in God, but I do believe in my meaning of life. Since meaning is desire, I can make my life meaningful by desiring my life in certain ways. I can do so myself; I need not appeal to some external power. Any being who desires themselves creates their own life meaning.

That is the true power of this view of meaning—you are who you want to be. Yet, this is undoubtedly abstract. There is one more point that makes the concept concrete:

The meaning we give to entities in the world influence the ways we see the world, alongside (and especially) the ways we act.

One great example of this influence is the in-group favoritism bias shown in minimal groups. Experiments have shown that people favor other people in the same groups as them, even if the groups are completely arbitrary.1 That is to say, people give more money to certain people just because they perceive them as being ‘on the same team’ as them.

By shaping who you want to be, by shaping how you want the world around you to be, you create ways of seeing the world in new ways. Seeing the world in new ways, new possibilities of action and new currents of action begin to flow.

The meaning of life is whatever you want it to be.

I hope to positively influence those of you who engage with my work. And since your interaction with my work is my desired effect, you are the meaning of my life.

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Imagine what would happen if you discovered that everything was illusory. Having this insight might significantly reduce your suffering, as it does with many Buddhists.

Now, if a waiter asked you what you wanted to eat for breakfast, to be completely truthful, you would have to say “nothing, there is no such thing.” But then you would get hungry. A concerned friend might ask if you are OK, and you would have no choice but to remark that “there is no self to be OK or not OK.”

How silly! Unless you wanted to share your revelatory insight at the cost of your satiety, you should have answered in a way that at least gets you some food. Sure, it would be fitting to write that insight down in a philosophical treatise. But at the restaurant, your waiter does not want to hear it!

Clearly, just because something is true, does not mean it is applicable. You might have truthfully answered the waiter’s question, but did you do so in the way you ultimately would have liked?

This pain-point is the motivation for prompt criteria. If you have been thinking actively, asking and answering questions in the way I recommended, you might have found that same pain-point: some of your answers to individual questions might completely miss the greater point.

Say you were interested in exploring the many avenues in front of you, thinking about the implications of a consequential decision. Wanting to think actively, you wrote down “what is the meaning of life?”

Then, you find an answer that is immediately truthful: “It depends.”

…

So much for your inquiry. While this example is clearly contrived, I have sometimes written down an interesting question only to, a few months later, ignore it because the answer was something obvious along the lines of “it depends.”

To ensure that your questions get the answers you want out of them, keep track of the criteria you will hold various answers to. If your criteria for the waiter’s question was that your answer had to be on the menu, then at the very least, you would not be starving.

I often use Obsidian’s Canvas as a thinking tool. Expect a step-by-step guide sometime, but for now I will use it to visually demonstrate criteria:

Notice the box at the center. It states the problem I had, the prompt at the center of the whole inquiry. In this case, I realized that my understanding of behavior had incompatibilities, so I set out to settle it.

Connected to that central box is a purple box labelled ‘Criteria.’ Within that box are a collection of statements that describe the ideal situation after my thinking is done. Here, I wanted to synthesize the two understandings into a singular view.

While coming up with further questions and answering them, I keep those criteria in mind. They serve as context to which my thinking is directed, making sure that everything is more applicable.

Criteria can really help guide your thinking, but do not treat them as permanent and eternal. It is normal that thinking through something shines light onto what the answer would ideally look like, and criteria in those cases might be too strict.

Unfortunately, criteria take up quite a bit of space. When thinking on chalkboards, I tend to use less criteria because they would not fit. They also take some time, so when I am flooded with ideas I often ignore writing them.

It takes time and practice to discover what works for you, so please think for yourself! Try using criteria in your own thinking, and let me know how it turns out.

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I close my eyes. Opening my awareness, the droning hum of the quiet library makes itself present.

Every quiet has its own sound. This one was interrupted, and I wrote the interruption down. Hearing quiet out is difficult business.

I wonder what my quiet sounds like. Never am I quiet. At least, never to myself. Whenever I talk, I become the elephant in the room. I can feel the blind man gazing uncomfortably, so I tend not to talk. Yet, even when I do not talk, my voice can be heard, tormenting me when I need it least.

A few times a year I remember the quiet-sound of the children’s section of the old Scarsdale public library. I can no longer hear it, and this perhaps makes it quite loud.

Sometimes I hear my quiet. It is a life-affirming sound. Marvelous, tranquil. But it is not really my quiet, is it? It is in any case ungrateful—always is it fleeing when I tell it to stay.

“Music is really life changing,” I notice to myself. “Yes, but in every moment,” I cannot help but clarify.

I can see, when certain tunes play, an island of complete bliss. Sometimes the sound of bliss reaches me, but it might be a siren’s call. In any case, it is a wonderland of pure possibility. Pure, without any actuality.

With this land in my sights, I continue my craft meticulously. Abundantly clear is landing inbound. Yet, inevitably, my creation fails me, and the land too it flees. Oh, so very loud.

It is not surprising to me that God is dead. On too many occasions have I recognized how intricate and masterfully-crafted my own creations are—especially those I fabricated in a hurry.

Have you heard the Ouroboros? You would know what I mean if you have. Who am I kidding, you probably have. Life, after all, is predictable.

“Sacred buildings must have sacred architects,” I think to myself. “Yes, and you know how that makes me feel.” I do. I am beginning to hear my quiet-sound.

Tōru Takemitsu is a great composer. Have you heard Toward the Sea? You would know what I mean if you have. Maybe you have! Life, after all, is full of surprises. And surprises come from the most surprising places.

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In the not-so-distant past, people would think about things, on their own, all the time. If they wanted to know how much time it would take to get to the other side of town, they would not look it up. There was no way to look it up! Instead, they would pull out the maps, contemplate about the methods of transport, make some estimates, and assemble themselves an answer.

Today, you just open Google Maps, set a destination, and read out the time it projects to get there.

This is a good thing. It makes sense to look up facts like the height of the Eiffel Tower. It is simply inefficient and unimportant to calculate those kinds of things yourself. And sometimes it can be harmful if there is too much uncertainty or error in judgement.

But when you seek the answers to questions that have no definite answers, like “what should I do with my life,” what can you do? They are not questions with ‘the correct answer’ available online. The only thing you can do is think for yourself! Of course, you could ask others for guidance as well, but ultimately the hard work falls upon your shoulders.

It is for similar reasons that I, for the past few years, have been increasing the amount of thinking I do for myself. It is surprisingly simple, and I will show you how I do it. But however easy it is to do, it is also astonishingly easy not to do.

Passive Thinking

Many people do not think for themselves. Even in my philosophy classes, congregations of people you would expect to think quite deeply, many people merely read assigned texts and seek to understand the material.

Once they have solid understanding, they regurgitate the written ideas in their predefined orders. In other words, they follow established trails but do not venture into unknown territories nor make their own maps. But this is understandable: thinking for yourself is difficult and painful, so your brain naturally avoids it.

The brain is all about optimizing its efficiency. Since thinking hard uses a lot of energy, it is discouraged if it does not seem worthwhile. Even more disagreeable is the discomfort of uncertainty. We like to have certainty since it comes with safety. Thus, for as long as we are thinking about something, we do not have an answer, we do not have certainty, and we do not have comfort.

So instead of investing all that energy, we usually think passively. Walking around town, I might passively notice a good smell or wonder why a shop is closed. Passive thinking is effortless, unconscious, and without a clear goal in mind. Since it is effortless, it does not require much energy, and as a result it is not discouraged by the brain.

However, while passive thinking is important, thinking for yourself begins with active thinking.

Active Thinking

Active thinking is effortful, conscious, and intentional. Whenever you work on answering a specific question, you partake in active thinking. Recall working on a complicated math problem, and it should be clear that working through such a problem is an effortful and conscious attempt to find answers.

Now, when I urged you to recall working on math problems, you might have recalled getting distracted. Since active thinking is difficult and discouraged by the brain, it is natural to lose concentration and wander off. Then, those passive thoughts take center stage, and active thinking halts.

Many times have I been thinking about something only to wander off in tangent trains of thought. Sometimes that is great, and I have fun with those meanderings. But it is important to stay on topic. A great way to maintain active thinking is to express the thinking.

Thinking through expression, such as writing down a train of thought as it arises, helps in many important ways. Of note, expression creates an artifact of work. Just like building something with your hands, writing thoughts down provides feedback that encourages more work. The feedback loop of adding something and feeling proud of your addition keeps the process going.

And if you get distracted or just cannot keep everything in mind, the artifact can easily bring you up to speed as a base from which to continue.

Below is a real artifact of my active thinking for this essay:

Personally, I always do my active thinking through writing. Most often I write on chalkboards or whiteboards, but sometimes in notes and through writing essays. What is important is to find a method of expression that works for you. After all, thinking for yourself is a highly personal act.

The same flexibility is true of the method I will present to you. I will show you how I think, but you must find out how to make it work for yourself.

Even if you turn it upside down, however, I doubt you will change the fact that it all begins with a concern.

The Method

At the beginning of the method is a concern. To think actively about something, you need something to think actively about. Are you feeling unfulfilled? Do you want to decide whether you should attend an event or not? Would you like to develop a unified theory of everything?

The first step of the method is to express that concern as a question.1 “How can I feel fulfilled?” “Should I attend that event?” “What is the unified theory of everything?”

Putting concerns into words can be very difficult. Do not be discouraged if it does not come naturally at first. It is a skill, so you will get better at it with practice.

Once you have formulated a question, take some time—but not very much time—to let an answer come to you.

This is the stage of the method that takes the most amount of energy and effort. On top of that, since often you will not have an answer, it can be discouraging. It is best to spend very little time here, but this varies from person to person and question to question. I have gotten to the point where I decide whether I have an answer or not while writing down the question.

If an answer came to you, perfect! You have the answer to the question. If not, then begin a miniature version of the method, formulating questions you think might advance the overall question. If your overall question is “what should I eat tonight,” your sub-concern might develop into questions like “what ingredients do I have.” And once you know your ingredients, you will be in a better place to decide what to eat.

At any point where you have an answer to a question, mark that question as done and indicate the answer. Sooner or later, the answer will be in your hands!

To illustrate the method in progress, here is an example I made with Obsidian’s Canvas:

As you can see, I wrote down a few words about my problem. Then, I formulated a question—the box in orange. No answer came to me immediately, so I posed a question I thought might help give me direction. I had an immediate answer, but this also prompted a further question. The cycle continued until I found some answer to the problem in that case, but I did not end up investing enough effort to resolve the original prompt.

The Methodology

There are going to be some aspects of the method I shared that do not work for you. You might find some element missing, or maybe the way I have everything structured does not suit your thinking patterns. Any problem you find, however, is an opportunity for you to figure out a solution for yourself.

See, this is when thinking for yourself becomes important. Everybody is different, and it is the personal particularities that make all the difference. My method will not work perfectly for you. As a result, you must think, not just to find some objective answer that is universally agreed to, but toward a subjective answer. You must think not for anybody else, but for yourself in particular.

With the rise of generative AI, people outsource their thinking more and more. See, before GenAI you would only get the answers you were looking for if they were available online, or if somebody responded to you. After GenAI, and as it continues to improve, on the other hand, you can get an answer to anything you could think to ask.

So it is a valid question to ask: with the advent of GenAI, would it still be worthwhile to think for yourself? The answer is yes, especially since the most important questions, those like How Might One Live, are only meaningful in the sense that a person struggles to work out their personal answers for themselves.

Since ancient times, we humans have distinguished ourselves from other animals through our ability to think. And as we learned that some animals were capable of reason, we maintained our distinction through the quality of our thought.

In a sense, without the ability to think on your own, and without the practice of thinking for yourself, you lose your personality and your particularity. You lose what makes you human and become an animal.

Maintain your humanity by thinking for yourself. It is easy, and I have shown you how.

September 30th, 2023.

A deep exhale. I place the book on the nightstand and fall onto my bed. My eyes look at the ceiling, but I am gazing into another world. Awestruck and giddy, my mind races across pure possibility.

I have just finished reading a life-changing book. This was my third attempt at reading a book throughout the year. The others—bestselling novels—failed to capture my imagination.

The book is Hackett’s Five Dialogues by Plato, the ancient philosopher. I picked it up a month ago, by chance, when I recognized the author’s name on my parents’ bookshelves.

Five Dialogues is a collection of five conversations involving Socrates, Plato’s teacher. It explores concepts of piety, of society, of morality, and of knowledge. But to me, it explored something deeper than any one of those subjects alone.

What I got from this book was an introduction, or rather a re-introduction: this book captivated me more than any novel, not because it brought me into another world, introducing me to its flora, but because it brought me deeper into my own, re-introducing me to the things most familiar.

Crossroads and Connections

Ever since I started coding in elementary school, I was certain that I would be a software engineer. And not just any software engineer, for I would use my programming skills to change the world. In middle school, I made messaging applications. In high school, I built a platform for developers to construct integrated programs. Now that I am in university, I am pursuing a degree in engineering. In other words, I have always been certain of my future.

On September 30th, 2023, I felt an overwhelming urge to drop everything and dive into the wonderful new world that Five Dialogues made possible to explore.

“What if I changed my degree to philosophy?”

The very conceptualization of this possibility drove me insane.

Every minute of my engineering coursework was painfully slow. To me, it was all moot and meaningless, as it seemed that none of it served any real purpose. Compared to my exploration of philosophy in my free time, studying engineering was crossing the Sahara without any water. No, it was even worse than that—I had water, and I could drink it. I was the only one keeping myself from quenching my thirst; I was the only one keeping myself from changing my degree. But at the same time, engineering had always been the plan. Was I about to sever it?

The 19th century philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard must have had my situation in mind when he wrote that

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

This anxiety is a sign of the importance of freedom, of considering how one might live.

Over the past few months, I have been exploring the realm of philosophy in a particular way. I have been interested in the history of philosophy and the various questions people had sought to solve. For the longest time, philosophy could not be regarded as anything other than practical.

Now, however, the public laughs at philosophers. They laugh either because they do not know that ‘philosopher’ is an occupation, or because they have become people who have become aloof in the towers of universities. To me, that is a problem. If philosophy cannot impact the lives of ‘everyday’ people, can it even be called philosophy?

As I developed these concerns, I explored the realm of concepts and their connections to everyday life.

If you are so inclined, you can even track my thinking—Mind as a Figment of Yours is something I wrote while struggling with what exactly philosophy is and with what its purpose might be.

Throughout my thinking and research into these concerns, I realized that one philosopher had already reached many of the same insights I had: Gilles Deleuze.

Deleuze was a complex and complicated thinker. His style of thought was so distinct from others that I needed some sort of introduction to orient myself. So, before diving into his works, I picked up philosopher Todd May’s book Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction.

In his first chapter, May addresses my questions about philosophy and its purpose. He describes Deleuze’s emphasis on philosophy as exploring a question: how might one live?

The Big Question

“How might one live?”

The question, once understood, is clearly an important one. What, after all, is more important to a human being—something that lives—than life?

And by ‘life,’ I do not mean merely the binary condition of being alive or being dead. By ‘life’ I mean our very existence, what we do with it, and its effects on other lives. And I am certain that there are a variety of other aspects that still need to be discovered, analyzed, and lived!

All I’ve said so far is very abstract. What is key is that at the core of the question is its practical manifestation, the one that brings about anxiety. At the core of the question is freedom, as Kierkegaard highlighted. At the core of the question is possibility.

I am sure you, the reader, can relate to Kierkegaard’s sentiment. Let me spell it out with my own case:

My anxiety is caused by my future possibilities of life. If I become an engineer, will I have enough time to read, to think, and to write? Would I be fulfilled?

On the other hand, if I get a degree in philosophy, what will my employment prospects be like down the line? And if I do not find myself a secure job, will I constantly worry about finances?

I am anxious because I am aware of the stakes corresponding to the varying paths in front of me.

But is this anxiety really something to be avoided? Perhaps not!

See, a key point to note is that exploring diverse ways of life broadens horizons. It is exploring the various possibilities of living. Had I not noticed, for example, that there are professors who do philosophy full-time, I would have never considered a route in academia.

In other words, the question “how might one live?” is important.

Indeed, it is so important that it is often the central consideration for the people who change lives. Inventors and entrepreneurs imagine how people might live if some aspect of everyday lives were different, and with those considerations enact the differences through their inventions and products. A human’s life, for example, has completely changed since the invention of smartphones.

On the other side of the same coin, writers and teachers communicate how people might live so that others may explore their own possibilities and strive to fulfill them. Writers might share these paths through creating characters of inspiration, and teachers through demonstrating interesting skills. I learned of my interest in writing, for example, when a kind teacher encouraged me to write in a way I found valuable.

Similarly, philosophers explore how people might live. But what makes them so different from others? After all, many people of other occupations explore the same question, as shown. What sets philosophers apart is that they explore the question itself.

See, if philosophers are very good at one thing, it is questioning the premises of questions! If you ask them whether you should be eating animal products or not, chances are that they will ask you what you mean by “should.”

Yes, the constant questioning can be an annoying trait, I understand. Plato writes about how it even got his teacher, Socrates, killed! But it is also important. Philosophers want to be right about things, at least to the extent they can be. Isn’t that the right thing to do, when somebody genuinely asks for advice?

Philosophers, therefore, question the question of how one might live, revealing that to understand which possibilities are livable, we need to explore what life might consist of.

The story of the Buddha’s path to enlightenment will be a good example here. I present my own rendition:

The Buddha’s Story

Siddhārtha Gautama, the man to eventually become Buddha, was son to King Śuddhodhana. Upon Prince Siddhartha’s birth somewhere between the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.E, his father the king asked an astrologer to predict Siddhartha’s destiny.

Rejoice! Your son, the prince Siddhārtha, is destined to greatness! But the form of this greatness presents itself in one of two opposite ways. For, your majesty, Siddhartha will either become king of the lands as far as the eye can see, or he will become a great spiritual teacher with many followers.

The king, desiring his son to become an even greater king than he was, sheltered his son from the outside world. He kept Siddhartha in a grand palace, with anything he could ever want. If the prince was hungry, the world’s greatest chefs were to at once prepare a grand banquet. If the prince was bored, the best singers and dancers would at once sing and dance.

Over time, however, the prince became unsatisfied. The riches and splendor became old. Eventually, the prince got curious about the world outside his palace walls. How might those people live?

“Bring me into the village, let me make merry with my people,” he told his personal guard. Instructed by the king not to do such a thing, the guard refused. But as the prince pushed and pushed, the guard relented, and they went out to the village.

The prince absorbed the village sights from his carriage. Children at play, young men engaging in discussion, and… a frail figure, limping along the road with the assistance of a cane.

“Guard, who is this man? Why does he behave so?”

“That is an old man, my prince. Age has caught up to him, and has made his body weak.”

“Does age catch up to everybody in this same way?”

“Yes, my prince. Everybody, even you.”

The prince was disturbed by this, but even more curious about what else he could discover in the village.

Not long after passing the old man, the prince saw somebody surrounded by flies and covered in bumps.

“And this person? Guard, what is this person’s condition?”

“That is a sick person, my prince. Sickness has gotten to him and has taken from him his health.”

“Does everybody become sick?”

“Yes, my prince. Everybody, even you.”

This disturbed the prince even more. But, fueled by his curiosity, he ventured further through the village.

When he reached the village outskirts, the prince noticed an immobile figure on the ground.

“Guard, see this person here. Why are they not moving?”

“This is a dead man, my prince. His life is gone, taken away by death.”

“Does everybody die?”

“Yes, my prince. Everybody, even you.”

With this, the prince’s worldview had been transformed. But as much as he was disturbed, he had also made an important discovery: suffering is an inevitable part of life.

“What Is” and “What Might Be”

From this insight into human life, the prince sought after the solutions to suffering. Through further experiences and realizations, the prince understood the solution out of suffering and became the Buddha. His teachings, Buddhism, became the foundational materials for a new possibility of life.

These kinds of realizations are, to me, at the heart of philosophy. When philosophers are not directly exploring how one might live, chances are that their research explores the various elements of living. Philosophy is thus an avenue to investigate questions about what life consists of, unfolding how one might live, and what livable possibilities might be.

A different, but similar aspect of concern for what life consists of is exploring one’s current circumstances. After all, the possibilities that are open for you to live depend greatly on where you are at right now.

But the philosophers are relentless with their questioning! There is one last aspect of the question, yet another aspect that is also vitally important. Exploring what one’s life might consist of involves exploring what that ‘one’ might be. “What is this thing that lives?”

For example, one of the Buddha’s other core insights into existence, one that allows his possibilities of life, is one about what human beings are. Or more precisely, what the self is.

When exploring what one might be, the Buddha realized that there is no enduring self at all; the self is an illusion. However impossible that may seem, this view led the Buddha to revolutionize the way he thought about what people’s lives consisted of. In turn, this realization influenced his advice on how to live; and therefore, on livable possibilities.

Exploring “what is” helps explore “what might be.”

This maxim extends into the realm of other ‘ones’ in our lives. It is not limited to an exploration of yourself as the ‘one,’ or human beings as ‘ones.’ When futurists think about what AI is, for example, their insights inform what they predict the future of AI might hold.

And since our dependence on AI is increasing day-by-day, how we might live in the future is informed by what AI is now. In general, considering what the things around us are helps establish the relationships between those things and our future lives.

For example, if you are an artist or an art lover, your life and possibilities are intertwined with what art is and what its possibilities are. “How might art live?” Is art supposed to be pleasing? Perhaps intriguing? Does a duct-taped banana qualify as art? What are the effects of art on life? It is questions such as these that philosophy seeks to answer.

But what is the big picture here? It is that all of these elements of life, intertwined and interrelating, become our individual lives. Exploring life means exploring these elements.

This sprawling world, teeming with life, is the world into which I was introduced by Plato’s book. The various elements and considerations have always been there, but never before have I actually looked upon them. In this same yet new world, I could see compassion, listen to virtue, and feel reason in my hands. The invisible forces at play in our world are expressed in full color through philosophy.

I call this world the world of “immanence.” Through Immanent Essays, I will be your tour guide through this kaleidoscopic world, showing you the various landmarks that influence my own journey and may influence yours.

The question of the essay, “How might one live,” does not have a definite answer. There is no conclusion, nothing that resolves the question “once and for all.” All that we can do in response to the question is explore and keep on exploring.

It is my hope and pleasure that you will join me in this journey of exploration.

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