What is this blog about?

Writing this first post was a real struggle. All my attempts felt wrong. I got used to staying on the surface when talking about my projects and my life, never really getting to the essence. Over time, I’ve buried the truth so deep that even I struggle to find it.

After discarding what must have been my fifth draft, I remembered Jordan Peterson’s advice on why to speak the truth:

“You have to make a decision of faith. You can either use your language to manipulate the world and make it do what you want. Or you can use your language to try to articulate the truth as carefully as you possibly can. And then you can see what happens. You have to let go of your desire for the consequences that you want. You have to assume that if you speak the truth the results are the best that is possible under the circumstances.”

So I decided to try that. Practice writing just a few sentences of truth. The result is this post.

A few years ago I experienced several weeks of unexplainable lucidity and comprehension. Somehow reality felt more real. On one hand, it was filled with positive experiences and meaning—work and social life all flowed perfectly. I thought I had reached a state of peak performance[*]. On the other hand, it was filled with insight of immense weight that I struggled to put into words, and the experience weighed heavily on me. After that period my everyday life felt like a mist in comparison. The further I went, the more it all seemed like a dream. But the impressions of insight stuck around, and I’ve been trying to understand them ever since. I half-doubted they were real, and I didn’t have the words to describe them anyway.

What I did was build software. A painter would paint, a mathematician would be working out the math, but I’m a software developer, so I tried to approach these inner images indirectly by building personal productivity tools—tools for thought. Engaging in a process called insight through making I progressively gained some small understanding of what the insight was about. I want to develop this understanding further by writing this blog, and discussing it with others. In this way, I hope it will take on a clearer shape.

The ideas I’ll be writing about will start with a framework I’ve been designing recently, a way of defining concepts we use in knowledge work (session, project, task, etc.) in mathematical terms. I’ll start to outline it in the following post, and would love your input on what makes sense and what doesn’t.

[*]: Much later, I learned that these experiences are quite common—they’re called noetic experiences.