What I Did
FRONT-END:
I’ve done more in the last couple weeks than the four months before that.
My writing has been a blur of activity, and I have pushed out a shedload of content:
- TechSplained
- NotaGenius
- AdequateLife
- TheoLogos
- this site
- Made a dated list of my projections, which I only intend to strikethrough if I failed at guessing (unlike some people…)
- Updated my page about who I am.
BACK-END:
I’ve rearranged my organization system a few times. Right now, I was able to create a foldering mechanism inspired by Johnny.Decimal. This will eventually become my Modes-Cycles Productivity System, but not yet.
What I Learned
ABSTRACT:
We must decide and do things to find any sort of meaning.
But, on any given day, you will have 10 things you’ll want to do, and only time for 1. If you’re not particularly creative/intelligent you’ll have 5 things, or if you’re a genius it’ll be 15 or 20.
This represents a difficult thing, since most of the things you want to do will never get done.
Sure, you can try to thematically bind and do those desires day-over-day that are most consistent:
- Day 1 – Desires A, B, C, D, E – do Desire A
- Day 2 – Desires B, F, G, H, I – do Desire B
- Day 3 – Desires D, E, H, J, K – do Desire D
…but you’ll face a major problem: the desires never stop. Once you’ve gotten satisfied with one thing, you’ll immediately transition to another, and another.
I can’t vouch for everyone, but here’s what’s worked for me:
- Rein in expectations – you want to do things, so stop overthinking and just do whatever comes to mind.
- Relish the victories – you’re not going to get everything done, so shut up and find comfort/joy in what has transpired.
- Stop living in the past or the future – the past technically only exists as a referential state that implies the present came from it, and the future is an even more transient compilation of imagination, hopes, and fears. You have today, this hour.
PERSONAL:
Emotionally, I’m an absolute mess. I haven’t bothered to write down in an easily codified list all the events that have happened to me through my life, but here are a few highlights:
- I was a high-functioning autistic kid who was never diagnosed until adulthood. My family blamed me for most of my idiosyncrasies, and blamed symptoms of their rocky marriage on me as well. They also moved about once every 3-5 years during my formative stages, and changing environments are difficult for an autistic child.
- My wings had been clipped, then I was thrown out the window. My professional career went through approximately 30 or 40 jobs (depending how you qualify that word) until I slowed everything down about 4 years ago. Did I mention that change is difficult for me?
- Unemployment makes living difficult. While I became a pro at managing money, it wasn’t very easy for me to find the necessary stability to thrive.
- Human culture is essentially the mechanism of habits, spread across people, and often reinforced into traditions across time. When you put these people together, they conform to these arbitrary standards (because why not?) and then they all make that part of the unspoken kabuki dance to create an in-group/out-group identification. While I can make plenty of friends everywhere I go, I’ve never really found a group that I naturally fit into.
- My spirituality suffers spectacularly from the above. I’ve seen too much to not acknowledge God’s involvement in my life through repeated improbabilities, but it doesn’t change the severity of the suffering or the fact that I utterly can’t stand the hollow, useless noise that constitutes most of what we call “civilization” and “society”. Now that I’ve been reading across the lens of history, this will never really change, so my ambition toward what I know as an ideal is a present-tense lost cause.
- I’ve been in this trauma state for a long time, and my recent experiences in jail have magnified this situation to unprecedented levels. At one point, I believed in Virtue and Justice for its own sake, but I now see it is merely a shadow and image of those ideals. The domains of Image!Virtue and Image!Justice, without any God to guide them, a hollow presence.
For that reason, I now see my existence is a blight upon most common social standards. Everywhere I go, I disrupt and change things. I have no hope to conform into the fabric of existence, wherever I go, so I don’t want to anymore.
Maybe if I followed my natural design when I was young, I would have had a thriving career as a software developer by now, or maybe the world would have been more favorable to me if I had done ABC thing at XYZ time, but I refuse to play the endless, useless “what about/coulda/shoulda/wanted to” game.
My attempts to wrestle reality down to the ground and make it submit create a phenomenological hydra problem. I can look back and reflect on the pathetic kid I once was that I barely remember, but that’s not good enough. I haven’t distanced myself enough from him to stop now.
I fight daily with this. Everyone likes to imply that the suffering will be worth it, but the valley often runs farther than you expect, and the struggles are often not easily demarcated.
Thankfully, this doesn’t affect those around me too materially much. My wife is handling this experience well enough, and my children continue to enjoy their life, so I guess I can throw that on top of my pile of trophies.
But, I’m not happy with the present state of things. I now know who I am: obsessively driven and partially lobotomized. The things I’ve written (AdequateLife, GainedInSite, NotaGenius, TheoLogos, TechSplained) are my greatest accomplishments so far. I know I have 2 small children, but any parent who claims their younger-than-adolescent children are an accomplishment seriously misunderstands biology (i.e., fertility and willpower have little to do with one another).
I’m going to revisit AL/GIS/NAG/TL, and then I can move my career and life into TS properly to claim what I should have done 20 years ago in a perfect world. I’m not doing it for Other People, nor am I doing it for Myself, or for Grand Success. Truthfully, I’m doing it for the Art of it all.
What I’m Doing
I’m presently sharpening up my Magnum Opus. I’ve decided to concisely distill and thematically unify all of my creative works:
- First, I’m tidying up edits all over AdequateLife:
- Some housekeeping and organizing before I plow into it
- A practical analysis of habits
- Awareness
- Happiness
- Success
- Money
- People
- Taking an aside to make a special page on overcoming severe hardship
- Mind improvement
- People skills
- Home improvement
- Romantic relationships
- Parenting
- Jobs
- Taking an aside to build out the TechSplained-specific parts of of jobs
- Body management
- Fun improvement
- Handling death
- Disaster prep
- Adequate data
- Then, moving to GainedInSite:
- Philosodata
- Make a new list of cognitive biases
- Make a phenomenological analysis of myths and legends
- Make an analysis/list of monopolies
- Meta-concepts
- Facts
- Animal parts of the human psyche
- Subconscious impulses
- An abstracted analysis of habits
- Conscious
- Processed thoughts
- Make a summation of math mixed between GainedInSite and NotaGenius (at least through Algebra)
- Decisions
- Break down an essay of the Big 5 personality traits
- Actions/consequences
- Interpersonal
- Social groups
- Large social
- Philosodata
- A venture into TheoLogos:
- Universal Christian facts
- Christian disciplines
- Christ’s influence
- Christ and society
- A breakdown of what constitutes a cult
- Christ and the future
- Alternative Christian perspectives
- My potential heresy
- Spiritual data
- And, finally, to the latest creation of NotaGenius:
- Human messiness
- Engineering (though there won’t be much)
- Law
- Building a list of legal doctrines and principles
- Make an analysis of how business contracts are framed
- Business
- Break out the Entrepreneurship pages I once made and wasn’t satisfied with (along with a TechSplained spinoff)
- Break out the Management pages I once made and wasn’t satisfied with (along with a TechSplained spinoff)
- Nature
- Wrap up my math education
- Possessions
- Finally, after all this, I will feel sufficiently ready to plow heavily into TechSplained.