Templates and Scripts
March 25, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: The Alternative by Nick Romeo
Listening: Running/Planning by CMAT
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
New Work
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the Cuban Oil Blockade
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Cognitive Shuffling & the pod is about the Region-Beta Paradox
I’ve also recent completed an update of all my iOS/macOS apps, if you’re interested in checking out the Truly Simple Tools portfolio :)
Templates and Scripts
I have a general sense that—wherever we end up next, however our technologies and politics evolve, and whatever shapes our communities and systems and social norms and economic realities are nudged into as a consequence of those evolutions—it’ll still be beneficial to have a keen sense of self-knowledge.
By self-knowledge I mean an understanding of who we are, what we want, what we care about, our relative advantages and disadvantages in different spheres of life, a rough comprehension of our capacity to suffer and sacrifice and love and give and gracefully receive, and the priorities (and variables) that underpin and inform all of these things.
Beyond providing us with a more thorough awareness and appreciation of our own uniqueness (and consequently, that of everyone else on the planet), self-knowledge also contributes to our capacity for self-expression.
As our self-understanding grows, so does our ability to share that cognizance via conversations with our partners and friends, through our votes and other efforts to influence society, law, and governance, through our art, and even through what we’re willing to do to pay the bills (and the nature of the entities we’re willing to do those things for).
Going deeper than the superficial on this can require a fair bit of work, in part because much of what we think we believe or care about, what we consider to be “us,” isn’t actually fundamental to who we are. Throughout our lives, all sorts of (often well-meaning) entities give us templates and scripts to work from, and we adopt these beliefs, rationales, and routines because, well, why not? What’s the alternative? This lending of philosophical motivation starts young and never really stops.
Peeling off those outer layers to figure out what’s beneath them can be the effort of a lifetime, and it can be disorienting making progress, because rather than discovering some latent, long-suffocated belief system or portfolio of goals underneath all those inherited worldviews, many of us will instead discover a whole lot of nothing, not second, complete and more perfect self that’s been hidden away, waiting for us to uncover it.
From there, our second effort of a lifetime is to fill that nothing with something; but this time, we ideally opt for something more us-shaped.
I think a lot of people, by adulthood, has at least a shadowy sense of this undertaking, and has probably even taken a few steps toward figuring out who they are, sans all those external doctrines and dogmas.
Something that I’ve personally found to be helpful in this effort is semi-regularly stepping back and imagining that the forces that shape my life, my decisions, my sense of the possible and impossible, today, are no longer there.
Money is gone, politics have become unrecognizable (or unnecessary). Maybe we no longer need our bodies, or we’ve discovered other intelligent life that maybe has some answers (about the big questions) for us. Maybe we’ve achieved world peace and post-scarcity and now we just have to figure out what to do with all our free time.
If things were to be shaken up in fundamental ways, who would I be? What causes, what goals would be important enough to me that I would want to invest myself in them? What would shape my actions, my overall trajectory, for the balance of my life?
Then, stepping back to now, to this reality: what does that tell me about who I actually am, what I should actually be doing, and what I should actually be working toward?
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What Else
I’m heading back out to Seattle in about a week and a half, and I’m already preparing for that, which mostly means doing double the normal amount of work so that I can really be there while I’m there, with as few deadlines and external responsibilities pulling me away from family time as possible.
I do have some fun meetups and other little social get-togethers between now and my departure, though, which should serve as nice pressure valves on what might otherwise be a too-aggressive work schedule.
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