In which Sett starts a notebook.
I'm starting this notebook to capture and publish incomplete, unpolished thoughts and musings. I already have a blog that's very rarely updated and a big part of why is that it presents a large commitment I'm unable to keep often.
For one, I simply don't write often enough. This is something I'd like to improve on, as I'm discovering it lately as a form of mental hygiene (sometimes known as therapy), especially writing on paper. A bigger reason is that I have a lot of anxiety around being public, being wrong in public, or somehow polluting the world with my inanities.
I also worry about the mismatch between my expertise, knowledge and proficiency in a subject and my desire to be seen as proficient, expert and knowledgable. I know that I oscillate quite rapidly between Dunning-Kruger and imposter syndrome. When I say that I'm a dilettante, I mean it both a sincere apology and a facetious rejection of responsibility. But my hope is that a higher rate of sampling will result in a higher quality of posts on the average.
Paradoxically, this means I ought to lower the barrier to writing more by removing all expectations of quality, coherence, subject matter and scope. This doesn't mean I'll be posting stream-of-consciousness jazz or ee cummings style poetry per se, but I won't take those off the table.
So, what can you expect? Well, I have a backlog of illegible scribbles on paper-y surfaces and nonsensical phrases in half a dozen note-taking apps and productivity tools. The subjects seem to range from software engineering and programming to self-help, moral philosophy and sociology. Most of it reads as shallow insights, written more for their tweetablility than quality, which fill me with dread and embarrassment. I want to write more often and on paper so I'm going to try it and transcribe with minimal editing.
So I'll thank you in advance, dear Reader (and tacit therapist), for your time and apologise for any harm or inconvenience this may cause. I hope that you will not judge me too harshly by the persona this notebook exudes – nor any other persona of mine, for that matter. And so, much like jumping into cold water as a way to acclimatise quickly, here's one of those embarrassing, illegible scribbles I found:
The human condition can be seen as a result of the combinatorial accretion of random flukes over aeons. Our anxieties, hopes and fundamental way of being, for better or worse, determined by this strangely mechanistic process. But when viewed from afar, it is a very dynamic, conversational force between our nature and the environment...