A sketch of 3 Mission Statements

Mission statements can be fluid things. The mission itself can be a process of discovery. Here is a sketch of 3 mission statements and an attempt to elaborate on them so each of the statement’s words becomes fully charged with meaning. After all, it’s a sensible practice to ask oneself and tell others “What am I actually doing?”. And maybe someone else can find a few ideas to borrow to help them reflect upon their own statements.

Balance between abstract and concrete application -> action

Everything that I express here comes from a desire to learn and discuss ideas from a point of view as grounded in reality as possible. This means that if I for example were to bring up already existing concepts, I would carry this out with great caution, because many times the various notions that make up these concepts do not all apply to the present reality too well, or they require a forceful moulding of reality in order to make them work.

My belief is that if a great moulding of reality is required to make them work, then it’s necessary to break the concept down in its individual ingredients in order to think about the concept in disaggregated terms. In other words, to me ideas grounded in reality mean that they originate from observing the actual reality that we are living in today. We are not using pre-existing concepts to make sense of it, which many times means having to force some parts of reality into preordained slots. If I were to use pre-existing concepts, the reality would necessarily effect change in the concept itself, at the calculated risk of it becoming something else, so that it represents what is happening more usefully. There is of course a second risk of missing the mark, as once you break down a well thought out concept to apply it to something new, you might end up tearing down its whole structure and make it a false thing, useless for interpreting reality.

In the same vein, even if sometimes it takes long paragraphs to develop an idea, the aim is to maintain everything as clear and effective as possible. Clarity means that the choice of words strike the right balance between exactitude and simplicity: if the most precise word happens to be a very arcane term, sometimes I prefer to spend two sentences explaining the idea with simpler words than using that term. Furthermore, with effectivity I mean that what is written is not meant as an intellectual exercise or born out out an intention to sell something. The goal is that the ideas can translate into action, be it by adding something to the reader’s perspective of things, which affects how they make decisions and interpret their experiences, or by clearing the path to doing or building things that they deep down feel they would like to do but the conceptual path to actually carrying them out is still inexistent or too toilsome and confusing. I would like to contribute to charting these paths, both for readers and for me, because I believe that many people wish to do better in this world and manifest their true intentions in ways that the conceptual structures that are the most accessible today don’t adequately support.

Developing thoughts that are the product of temporary perspectives that are born from the cognitive input that I gained in the past days.

I believe that a good deal of all the worthwhile ideas that spontaneously come to our minds as we go about our days are the product of some kind of sporadical, context-dependent brain-alchemy. As we perform our daily activities we talk to people, we hear conversations, we experience events and we consume information. All of that becomes cognitive input. It enters the orderly chaos where all of our existing thoughts and predispositions mix with this new input in order to spark new ideas and realisations. In fact, in my experience the ideas that one recently consumed converge into a sort of temporary lens through which we interpret or find meaning in what we observe and experience in our daily lives. It’s something akin to how a particularly vivid dream can colour the rest of your day in a subtle manner.

While it’s amazing that our brains can somehow ‘do the work for us’ and churn out these ideas by some unconscious process, there is a flip-side. Amidst the barrage of information that we consume in modern life, much of it gets pushed out by new information and forgotten, or filtered out so to speak. We just don’t possess the memory-capacity to store all of it in a way that makes sense (ie. becoming a part of a pre-existing web of meaning in our minds). Consequently, what happens is that much valuable information gets lost in this selection process that we are compelled to undertake, where our unconscious information-processing priorities (whether actually beneficial to us or not) only allow a portion of this information to enter our intellect. Where it enters is the area reserved for all the long-term, useful, and actively recalled memory.

Consequently, by following this reasoning many valuable ideas that an accidental brain-alchemy produces happen while all recent cognitive input from the past few days is still warm and fresh in our heads, that is, before it is filtered out. The paradigmatic example of this spontaneous brain-alchemy can be none other than shower thoughts, or long-walk thoughts.

And because many of them are filtered out, it doesn’t mean that they are less useful than others and that their disappearance is just a process of ‘natural selection’. Think about it from these two premises. The first one is that if we are voracious readers, curious people, or that we make a choice of what to read, listen and watch through a reasonably premeditated decision-making process, we will be taking in much more info than we are capable of properly absorbing and acting upon. Following from this, the second premise is that if we are inclined to use information for something else than just passively consuming it, we need to acknowledge that much of the information that we consume could still be very useful in some more opportune moment in the future. Sadly, much of it will fade out in the information noise that surrounds this filtering process that I described above.

I think that if one is on the lookout for these ideas, to foster a place where we can store them and develop them is not a bad measure to take. This is one of this space’s missions: if the idea is interesting enough, I can develop it into a logically reasoned sequence and lay it out on a text in a more or less intelligible form. Then, if the idea turns out to be worthwhile, there will be future opportunities to polish it further, simplify it, apply it to concrete cases and make it more actionable. In other words, in due time and through an iterative process it will be distilled down to its most essential effectiveness.

Reappropriating marginal ideas if they are any good and making them accessible

This is connected to the second mission statement. If we choose to maintain a diverse information diet, we will be exposed to ideas not only of what is considered ‘canonical’ nowadays, but also to less known or widespread ideas. In the Internet there are legions of people that consume and analyse lesser known ideas and publish these texts online or discuss them. I think that this is a positive practice and I intend to continue doing it as well.

Although the online space is too broad to realistically have an effect on general discourse with a few texts (consequently it’s not very productive to aim so high), what is really important is that marginal ideas, if they are any good, continue being revisited and repackaged. This is because I think that in the history of thought many incredibly useful ideas have been posited and developed, but they have fallen into obscurity because they weren’t born in the right context, ‘right’ language (big quotation marks here), packaged in the right way or included in the right structure of ideas so it could fulfil its potential. Again, a core problem that I see in our present is that our actions do not reflect the wealth of thought that is circulating, or the depth of our innermost intentions. We are somehow stuck in patterns of behaviour that only hover around the most accessible, loud ideas, as low-quality as they might actually be.

✵