Substrate

Experience becomes real when consolidated. I think this mainly stems from knowing how to ask the right questions that are expressly intended to cause a perception shift and require the consolidation of experience. Things such as: “What’s the most frequent anti-pattern that you see in our team’s work?” or “What types of work do we do that have the highest outcome leverage, and why, and how can we do it better?”

The grab-bag style is really interesting, where I just list out ideas and links to things that were interesting to me throughout the week. It’s essentially a forcing function for my attention. You have to to notice the things that you’re reading and thinking about, that are actually important, if you want to have any hope of pulling together enough interesting atoms for a functional structure.

I typically engage students in this model by asking them to draw their own Comfort/Chaos Circle. This is a great activity to get students to check with themselves and communicate where they are with me.

but then life happened as it tends to do but not quite in the way that any of us could expect–except bill gates? ​ now it’s a company that you can still enumerate with 2 hands but then have to reuse those same hands about 30 times.

If you had told me four years ago today that someone would eventually get a Blackbox tattoo I never would have believed you…

I co-wrote a book I’m quite proud of and from what I hear it has helped many people learn what they wanted to learn and get started writing Haskell

The problem is that if you’re not reflecting, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, it’s quite easy to get stuck or to find you’re working on the wrong thing. Reflection is like sleep—you need it but you tend to only appreciate it after you’ve had it. You could poll everyone, but honestly it’s easier to just pick a date and see what happens.

That thought — Do I like who I am while I’m doing this? — has visited me a few times a year ever since, and I’m finally seeing how crucial a question it is. ​ Years can pass before you notice something’s wrong ​ This deficit only intensifies the need for comfort and gratification, and you gravitate towards more of it, when what you really need is more of the alternative. ​ We all have those moments where we feel like we’ve gotten away from our best selves. We might not know what’s gone wrong, but it’s clear something’s gone off, and we know we have to step back and reassess what’s important. ​ Self-esteem seems inextricably linked to the specific feelings of identity we get from the activities that make up our days. ​ Often, the healthy, fulfilling things we’ve drifted away from are things whose significance probably wouldn’t occur to us, until we start doing them again and see how much they contributed to our well-being ​ Compared to admonishing yourself to smarten up or try harder, this is like navigating life with a map and compass, rather than simply moving toward whatever terrain looks most inviting from where you are.

instead what seemed required was a kind of ironic disavowal of disavowal with regard to our online presentation: The tone foregrounds the idea that we all must put on an act that fools no one. ​ Among the historical antecedents, ​ They reinforce the idea that people should always be working by providing another arena for invidious comparison, self-branding, and optimization. But something more subtle may be happening as well. Social media platforms, like all technologies that mediate the self, “heighten consciousness,” in media scholar Walter Ong’s words. But if earlier technological developments, like writing, heightened consciousness to extend the self, newer technologies may heighten it to a point where it no longer sustains the self but undermines it. ​ writing — the “technologizing of the word,” as Ong described it — distanced us from the flux of immediate experience and expanded consciousness into space and across time. The diary could be considered paradigmatic: It makes subjectivity an object of reflection, both in the moment of composition and for future readers as well. ​ is to see at least some aspect of yourself suspended in time and space. ​ The audience’s resulting dispersal through space and time leads to a sporadic and unpredictable set of interactions, which can anchor habits of continual checking or an intensified susceptibility to push notifications (part of how platforms try to elicit compulsive engagement). The result is that we can’t help but be aware of ourselves through these platforms as continual performers, moment by moment. ​ What kind of self derives from this condition? Imagine a wedding photographer who circulates, trying to capture candid images of spontaneous or unscripted moments. “Act naturally,” they might joke, before encouraging everyone to “pretend I’m not here,” ironically vocalizing the impossible possibility to diffuse some of the pressure of doing as they say. Now imagine that you are that photographer, but that it is also your wedding. And imagine also that the wedding never ends. ​ To borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s terminology, broadcasting on social media amounts to a substantial expansion of what he called our “front stage,” where we are consciously and continually involved in the work of impression management ​ But they have really mastered the art of transforming the backstage into another front stage. ​ We can understand backstage experience, then, as a respite not only from the gaze of an audience but also the gaze we must fix on ourselves to pull off our performances. ​ The algorithms that ostensibly reveal what your “true” or “authentic” self would choose for itself feed off the very exhaustion that the platforms generate, offering refuge from the burden of identity work in the automation of the will. ​ Life needs the protection of nonawareness.