A Living Work

This is my best current understanding of things.

That's an important distinction.

I don't consider anything you'll find here a finished philosophy, a belief system you're supposed to adopt, or my attempt to explain reality once and for all.

It's simply what has survived my experience so far.

Years of living, questioning, fucking things up, changing my mind, helping other people untangle their problems, trying to untangle my own, and occasionally discovering that something I was extremely confident about wasn't quite as brilliant as I thought.

Turns out reality is useful like that.

So I leave room for it.

I Expect This Work to Change

Some ideas will become clearer.

Some will expand.

Some will get simpler.

Some will probably get thrown directly into the fucking trash.

Good.

I'd rather build something capable of becoming more accurate than spend the rest of my life defending something simply because I said it first.

That's why you'll see version numbers throughout my work.

They're not there to make everything look like software.

They're a reminder:

This is a snapshot.

It's the best version I can currently make.

Then I keep living.

The Basic Idea

Underneath everything I create is a fairly simple assumption:

Reality exists whether we understand it correctly or not.

Unfortunately, none of us gets to experience it without a lens.

We bring our memories, emotions, beliefs, culture, language, fears, desires, experiences, relationships, assumptions and whatever other weird shit we've collected along the way.

That doesn't make our perspective worthless.

It makes it incomplete.

So I try to look again.

What actually happened?

What am I assuming?

What am I feeling?

What might I be missing?

What does this look like from another perspective?

What does this choice actually cost?

Do I need more information—or am I avoiding making a decision?

And eventually:

What am I going to do?

Because thinking is useful.

But eventually you have to leave the workshop.

A Few Things I Currently Believe

Perspective is powerful—and incomplete.
Your first interpretation might be right. Look around anyway.

Emotion is information, not authority.
Feel it. Listen to it. Don't automatically hand it the steering wheel.

Clarity doesn't require certainty.
Sometimes understanding what you don't know is enough to make the next reasonable decision.

Contradictions deserve investigation.
Two apparently opposing things can sometimes contain truth at the same time.

Thinking is a tool, not a hiding place.
Prepare. Think. Question. Then eventually, for the love of God, fucking move.

Experience teaches things thinking cannot.
You can study the mountain from base camp. Eventually you have to climb it.

Knowing the cost helps you choose.
The goal isn't to avoid difficult paths. It's to understand more of what you're signing up for before you commit yourself to one.

Changing your mind can be evidence that the process worked.
Better information should be allowed to change you.

And perhaps the simplest principle underneath everything:

Learn to solve more of your own problems.

Use teachers. Ask for help. Borrow experience. Listen to people farther down the road.

But don't permanently outsource your judgment.

Don't Believe Me

Seriously.

That's not the assignment.

Take an idea.

Turn it around.

Compare it against your own experience.

Look for where it breaks.

See whether another perspective changes it.

Take it into reality.

Reality gets a vote.

If something I built helps you see more clearly, use it.

If you find a hole in it, question it.

If you eventually outgrow it, good.

The goal was never to make you increasingly dependent on my conclusions.

If this work succeeds, you should eventually need me less.

That's Why It's Living

I'm still figuring things out too.

You'll see that in my articles.

You'll see it in The Mental Workshop.

You'll see it when an idea changes between versions.

You'll occasionally get to watch me confidently walk toward a conclusion before realizing I've been heading down the wrong fucking hallway.

I'm leaving that in.

Because I don't think useful thinking requires pretending you've finished thinking.

So this page will change.

The tools will change.

My philosophy will change.

Hopefully they'll become clearer, simpler, and more useful as they do.

Previous versions weren't necessarily failures.

They were snapshots.

This one is too.

So walk around.

Question the walls.

Use whatever helps.

And if something here doesn't survive contact with reality?

We'll move the fucking wall.