At various points in my past, I’ve wanted to be a philosopher, therapist, teacher, pastor, and technical guru.
My goal is maximum effectiveness and reach. It means I’m too dogmatic to become billionaire entrepreneurship material, and this attitude also excludes me from the American aristocracy. I happily see it as worth renting out my labor or brain.
These days, everyone has a podcast and many people find meaning in generating worthless noise on social media. I’m grateful and honored that you value what I’m offering, and would appreciate any value you can give.
Why I Write
I write, but probably not for the same reason most people do it.
1: My understanding
I deeply value wisdom, and that drives most of my purposes in life:
- I believe we should treat ideas with the rigor and attention of math or law: with precision and delicacy.
- At the same time, I always pursue understanding everything so I can explain it in plain English to a 12-year-old.
- Therefore, beyond actual understanding, I want to feel like I understand, which is setting a far higher bar for myself.
Without exaggeration, I have consumed thousands of elements of crap from the internet, mostly nonfiction:
- Hundreds of books and book summaries
- Hundreds of TED Talks
- ~10,000 Hacker News articles
- Hundreds of online videos.
I would have better used my time touching grass and watching sunsets.
I have a crippling fear of impostor syndrome. This drives me to understand something deeply to know how best to decide and act. Jargon is often shorthand for otherwise simple ideas, though it can be useful for specificity. We frequently engage so heavily in our craft that we forget this.
While all ideas come from other ideas circling back to nature, most in-depth concepts sit in an abstracted logic vacuum. If I can connect those ideas to more practical things, I can understand how the best minds understand it.
I’m very trend-resistant because I hate learning useless information. I’ve noticed most implementations move around every few months or years, but their abstractions frequently don’t change at all.
Thus, I write to make sense of things, which becomes more difficult as aging unveils the truth’s complexities.
2: Others’ understanding
I know what I make can’t compare to the absolute brilliance present in the smartest minds of our time. I’m a less visual and less talented creator imitating Up Goer Five and Reddit’s ELI5. This entire approach is a long-distance variant on Whole Brain Teaching.
All I’m good at is keeping things precise while summarizing and simplifying.
A huge portion of my past writing is a failed attempt. I’ve downgraded most of that content to a simple and dynamic public commonplace book.
All that consuming, though, isn’t a total waste, and some of my opinions do matter. I act knowing God will capitalize on those opinions, and hope that history will forget my former text-based blather.
3: My fear of the Unknown
I’ve neglected to place the following in front of every assertion I make:
- “I believe…”
- “I don’t entirely know 100%, but…”
- “I’m convinced of this, but I can’t prove entirely that…”
- “From what I understand…”
- “I’ve read something that said…”
When I speak certainty into existence, I have power over it.
I also don’t have the confidence I used to, though. Every logic implementation is a slice, and some logic slices the wrong place. I’ve made some severe mistakes, and am now more afraid to carry that certainty into the future.
Even then, my purpose isn’t always clear:
- Starting in 2014, I had identified as the Philosopher Accountant, but I gave up on that sometime around 2018.
- I once tried to fight the over-information age, but 2024-2025 has broken me, and that purpose has died with it.
Why I use social media
The social context of most social media has all the depth of being in a crowded room. But, 5-20% of the people are distracting everyone else with attention-grabbing tricks. And, the room’s event planners are shining spotlights on whoever they feel like.
The reason I spend time on social media, both in my videos and posts, is to broaden my reach. I also like the process of recording and editing videos.
However, everyone actually making a difference in this world is not spending lots of time on social media. They’re off doing important things instead, and I limit my engagement to prevent the same pointlessness for myself.
I also don’t know much anymore
My only cogent purpose in life has been to draw people to meaning and answers. I want everyone to live harmoniously, working for the collective good, with grace that accepts each other unconditionally.
3-10% of the people on this planet are truly awful, and therefore this desire of mine is a pipe dream.
That desire, however drove me to seek wisdom with all my essence. In that pursuit of the True, I abandoned the Good and, by consequence, the Beautiful.
Without beauty, my sense of identity became only what I can create, and never in myself. I lost any vision of what my destination was, and my journey had languished from it.
Somewhere along the path of trying to find answers, I’ve forgotten what it means to live well. I have now been re-learning what I should have mastered by age 6.
Still keeping my faith
In all this, I still believe the only answers with staying power come through an ego death in Jesus Christ. Without it, we all simply maintain a hopeless and protracted state of denying and stalling death.
I still haven’t figured out precisely how a Christian life implements, though. I am now skeptical of people claiming to living like Christ. Many of those allegations are either lies or delusion.
To be continued
My story is still unveiling itself as I go. Like all life stories, it will persist until a major organ fails. My hope is to dramatically improve others’ lives for at least some decades afterward. We’ll see if I actually succeed at that.
Again, if you want to contribute to this marginally grandiose ambition, here’s a link to how.