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Waterways for flooding states of mind

June 2nd, 2025

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⚘ Branch thought from The kingdom that is an identity

⚘Branches: Poets are subjects of the ineffable – Constellations and the human mind (as above, so below)

The mind is like a tide. The stream overflows its banks and floods the land surrounding it.

We need to learn to build canals for this flow. We develop an art akin to water engineering, keeping the waters pure, understanding their cycles, preparing the soil accordingly. We learn to send each current to its purpose: fountains, mills, palaces, irrigation.

The water courses down from the highlands, and the rain swells the river. This process has always stood as a parallel to our minds. As the river’s waters surge and submerge the plains around them, so too can our minds flood their narrow, chaotic vessel with racing thoughts: viscous, unarticulated half-ideas that easily dissolve into oblivion. They are absorbed back into the soil, awaiting the next water surge.

This is why reshape the world so it resembles our minds. With every flooding season, our minds must overflow their boundaries, spilling their contents into the world. We cannot help it. We create things that reflect our souls, a way to witness our thoughts as they escape the restless, merciless drift of our thinking. These are the things that make all other tools and techniques, designed for specific functions, have a purpose beyond utility: they ensure that we remain undisturbed by drudgery, so that we may keep on creating ever greater shards of mirrors for our souls, reflections that in turn help us grow into true sources of vitality, meaning, and enchantment to the world, ourselves, and those around us.

What canals are we building so that the waters do not submerge the land into an undifferentiated mire? What fertile soil of enthusiasm are we nurturing? We dig these canals by repeatedly attempting to concretise something of our identity: imperfect, provisional, not so representative in the beginning, perhaps unlovely. But even with these first crude networks, we’ll have some initial order in our ugly little land, so that the rising tide does not wash away our work each time it returns.

We watch the water follow the clumsy course of these makeshift waterways, and our land becomes irrigated, acceptably enough. From there we can observe what is good, what serves us, and what is not fitting to what we are trying to discover. And then, we plunge our hands back into the soil to shape our water system anew, and prepare for the next surge. And so, we repeat the process. (if it is not clear by now, this surge is inspiration, a form of thought inseparable from its emotional charge, real thought born from real lived reality, infused with a feeling of enthusiasm, of something latent in you momentarily poking its head out, ready to be addressed).

Now, when we are dealing with the ocean, that is another story. This is the perspective of eternity, of the eternal flux of reality. We can circle around it, find refuge in orbiting its vastness as we try to be as reasonable as possible in our observations, but we never reach its core. We will always be building castles in the sand.
Modern apps and old files – inconvenient entries and easy interiors

May 30th, 2025

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⚘Branch thought from Shaping paradise into existence – or: “a website is real estate”
Table of Contents
Modern apps – easy entry, inconvenient interior

Modern apps convinced us that the standard mode of interaction with software must involve easy entry, but a demanding existence inside. We are being continuously asked for our cookies, our IDs and secret phrases, our time to fill out surveys and review products, our consent to stay “up to date” with offers. We are shown ads, nudged to skip terms of service, invited to upgrade our membership, to explore the most recent updates, to have to adapt to constant interface changes and new features we never asked for. We are told to subscribe, to sign in, to be online, to link our email accounts to every single service, and on and on.

The entry fee seems like a bargain: we simply download the program from the app store, and minutes later we are enjoying its broad range of features. We walk past the gates of a beautiful hotel without much fuss; the concierge welcomes us with a wide smile and gestures us into the elegant lobby. We feel privileged, and we found this hotel almost instantly, just as soon as we decided to take the trip. It felt too good a deal to pass up.

However, once inside, we realise that nothing is truly free. We cannot simply exist in this hotel; everything we want to do comes with a fee and some form of paperwork. The staff hovers constantly offering their services for a tip, or urging us to try out this or that premium class, and it goes on. We sigh as we wave them away, longing to retreat into our rooms and lock ourselves in until the end of our stay. It is far from ideal. We have already spent our money on the reservation and now we begin to wonder what the alternative looks like. But we are already midway through our trip, so. we try to enjoy it as much as we can.

Old apps – inconvenient entry, easy interior

Days after the trip we hear of an alternative that had been right under our noses all along. It is hard to find this private residence. It is tucked away on a hill behind the rows of towering modern hotels, surrounded by a knot of labyrinthine narrow streets. You have to ask around to find it, and it has long vanished from the GPS map. Once you reach the gate, you must clap or whistle for the bright-eyed old guard to let you in. His venerable bloodhound will be intrigued, sniffing you all over, curious and thorough, leaving strings of saliva on you and your companions.

Old programs, back when they were still just “files” rather than “apps”, might seem cumbersome to access by today’s standards. There was no cloud, no app store to download them from. But once we acquired them, they asked nothing else from us. We merely had to open them and enjoy their functions, no strings attached.

Hopefully we will very soon reach a point where navigating these “labyrinthine narrow streets” that lead to old-fashioned software (the detours one must take to find them as we are continuously being funneled toward the standard, all-absorbing gateways of app store search functions and SEO-optimised search results) becomes the public preference by default.

Perhaps one day soon, taking the scenic route through the back alleys of the internet to find old-fashioned software will no longer feel like resistance, but the obvious choice.

Indie software that isn’t built upon the predominant “big hotel” business model described above would be easier to find. And it would be more prominent in the public consciousness, where more talented creatives could craft modest digital tools that simply do the job, with no caveats, so that people can indeed get the job done and move on with their lives and projects. No more wasting time and cognitive energy wading through the bloated suite of features of big hotel apps just to find a single function, or pushing against their subscription-model agendas.

To extend this utopian vision further: what if creating your own simple software became a demystified, everyday pursuit? The conditions for this fantasy to take shape are becoming increasingly foreseeable.

The interior is spacious yet simple. It gets the job done, and you are free to add your own touches to give it a bit of your own flavour. The owners are discreet; they seem to run this place for the pleasure of hosting polite guests rather than for profit. Their home is just down the road: a charming and modest house that shares the same sublime view of the coast extending beyond the hill.

Behind you, in the opposite direction and in the distance, the hulking outlines of the hotels still loom in the distance, their countless balconies like a rigid grid, severely printed upon a massive fossilised husk. The soaring aroma of fire being lit for the neighbourhood barbecue reaches your nostrils.

Easy entry and inconvenient interiors, or inconvenient entry and easy interiors? It was hard to reach this place, but from here on out, it is going to be smooth sailing.

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The problem of predicted ethical frameworks

May 29th, 2025

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We always operate under the assumption that the other’s actions follow an ethical framework, however rudimentary it may be. And as it may turn out, that framework may end up seeming quite foreign to us.

Still, this framework could actually be better at producing the very effects we hope our own would achieve (that is, the intended effects).

We won’t know whether this is the case unless we talk to them in an attempt to unravel this doubt. This is all provided that they are even conscious enough of their framework to succeed in explaining it to us.

As with many of us, ethical frameworks can become so deeply internalised that we apply them intuitively, prompted by a perceived incongruence akin to flinching at a misplaced note in a piece of music. Perception overtakes analysis; identification over explanation.

We perceive in the other’s framework an incongruence with ours, and we assume bad faith before witnessing the outcomes of their actions. But somehow, in the end, their actions achieve the results we were seeking. The difference is the path they took toward the result, the series of decisions that led them there, is different.

This is not another case of “the end justifies the means”. I’m pointing to the sheer strangeness of the other’s ethical framework. It does not inflict any more harm than the path we would have chosen; it simply follows different principles that lead to different decisions, eventually resulting in the intended result that our own framework failed to deliver.

Well-intended unconventionality is indeed a tricky thing to interpret. How do we approach it? Not by assuming we will always hit the mark with our assessment. That is a losing battle. Instead, we may start by sharpening our understanding of our own ethical framework, improving our ability to read the unexpected ethics behind others’ actions, and —possibly most importantly— becoming better at talking about them.
Why learn History #1 Protecting institutions for what they do vs. for what they are

May 27th, 2025

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⚘ Branches: Scavenging the word “bourgeois”

Learning about History means understanding that we can choose to protect institutions either for for what they do or for what they are.

Everything that exists today as a product of humanity has its roots in particular intentions. Even human-caused phenomena that came into being accidentally can often be traced back to the the cascading effects of a particular intention, like kicking a pebble down a hill.

When it comes to the institutions that govern our ways of being in the world together (whether political, social, or cultural), none of them descended from the sky as if God-given. They all emerged from coordinated human decisions and actions.

Before any institution became firmly established in a society’s collective consciousness, it first had to justify its existence by proving its effectiveness in accomplishing what it was meant to do. If we study the history of the idea of democracy, we understand that it emerged at a specific moment and place, from the minds of individuals who discussed it and sought to realise it by articulating it to their fellow Athenians and persuading them it was a good idea.

The institution of democracy might be an extreme example, made more complex by its disappearance in ancient times and its resurgence in the modern age. But the underlying point remains that today it is wise to ask ourselves whether we defend something because of its name’s weight or because of what it actually does.

The worse choice is to fiercely protect it for what it is without even knowing what it is supposed to do (or was meant to do in its design). In most cases, form and function were synchronised at its inception, diverging courses over time as events gradually distorted its capabilities (or its intention) to manifest its original purpose.

Hence, when we protect an institution for what it is, we might be diverting our attention from making what it was supposed to do, but no longer quite does, happen. We might need to realise its original purpose through other means, often by transferring the heart of these primary purposes into the pulp of new institutions, born from people in the here and now.

But there is also a case to be made for protecting an institution for what it is today, even if it has drifted from the function that once earned its venerated reputation. In such cases, we are protecting its slot within the larger system of institutions that govern a society. We protect that role and keep its designated space undisputed until a better use for that role gradually develops.

It’s like the idea of a nation, or a tradition, or a political party. People pay attention to it. They unify under its banner, and protect it simply because it is what it is, even when doing so might be to their detriment. That slot it occupies serves as a rallying point, a gravitational force for attention, granted massive amounts of benefit of the doubt.

Institutions can be as vast as a system of government, and as small as a monthly neighbourhood ritual. We are constantly handling this instability between what they are and what they do, especially when weighing whether we want a change, and how much of it. Too much change might very well revive its original utility, but it might also erode the trust and rallying power that its name carries.

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The tragicomedy of ethical realisations

May 26th, 2025

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When we experience an ethical realisation, we are discovering that an ethical principle (or a more specific principle that is meant to be an expression of it) that we hold has lost its congruence with who we are.

Being a realisation, this can occur almost instantly, an experience not unlike the flick of a switch turning a light on.

The implementation though, resembles more a winding path than a sudden switch. To implement ethical realisations, we need to keep an eye on our habits and gradually change them as they arise, especially they reveal their incongruity with our evolving sense of ethics.

Perhaps the term moral sense is more appropriate here, given its link to the Latin word for habit or custom (’mos’), from which the English word mores is derived. At the heart of this relation is the idea of repeated action, of a habit. We translate ethical realisations to more concrete moral applications through an ongoing assessment of our habits (how we typically act in certain situations or react to them).

So we draw our habitual responses to the world back into the surface and away from their normally subconscious state. Our intention is to evaluate whether they still align with our evolved sense of ethics. After all, habits are meant to unburden our minds from the effort of repeated decision-making in familiar situations. They are relegated to the subconscious while our conscious decision-making can save resources for other less predictable situations.

It is far from a linear process. At times, the incongruence of a habit might be flashing in front of our faces and we still might fail to see it, even though we would be infinitely grateful if we could.

So, again we transgress the very ethical principles that we wish we could honour. And in the eyes of others, we are tragicomically left to apologise for our mistakes, promising them that this is not who we really are.
Modular Progress

May 25th, 2025

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⚘Branch thought from Three kinds of progress

Modular parts are not interdependent. Rather, they are compatible and can be recombined. They feature openings that allow one to receive the other. While they are separable, they are not impervious to one another. That is, they are not isolated from each other as in the case of the widely studied fragmentation of modern identity, where it is not uncommon that one’s progress through a professional career is detached, and mostly inconsequential (or consequential but to a limited degree), to other pursuits such as what falls under the category of hobbies.

This is because independence differs from isolation: modular parts are independent in that their inner mechanisms interact to form a self-sufficient system, but they also possess a few predesignated channels through which they can connect, or collaborate, with other modules. And owing to this internal coherence, no module can enter the internal sphere of another by means other than these predesignated pathways without causing significant disruption.

The inclusion of a modular part adds to the whole without making the whole dependent on it. It contributes to it but is not characterised by doing so incrementally, in the sense that all parts interact synergetically (i.e., through reciprocal amplification). Modular parts reinforce each other in an additive matter, not in a multiplying one. As such, connections within modular parts can be dense and interdependent, but connections between these modular parts, conceived as clearly delimited, self-sufficient entities, are not. These connections are in fact limited, because modular parts need to be separable by design, without compromising their own integrity, and that of the others, in the process.

Concisely put, modular progress is about combinations of well-developed, well-defined, purpose-specific, and internally coherent parts. We divide our time between developing independent modules and finding the best combinations between them. We never rely exclusively on any single module, and progress in one will not significantly alter the other others. In most cases, mutual reinforcement will happen indirectly, as we will develop meta-skills —general and abstract enough to be applicable across the board, and thus transferable— through the construction and refinement of each module.

Modular progress is a stimulating and flexible kind of progress. It may lack the swiftness to achieve a single purpose as lean progress, nor the broad, ever-green foundations of pyramidal progress, and certainly not the power for purpose perfecting, unearthing, and recalibration of multiscopic progress. Yet it is the most apt for exercising exploration over exploitation. Modular progress is inferior in serving a few deliberately selected organising purposes, but it is superior in enabling us to move between several purposes, all while developing our own solid, internally coherent, and combinable resources along the way.

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Waterways for flooding states of mind

Modern apps and old files – inconvenient entries and easy interiors

Table of Contents

Modern apps – easy entry, inconvenient interior

Old apps – inconvenient entry, easy interior

The problem of predicted ethical frameworks

Why learn History #1 Protecting institutions for what they do vs. for what they are

The tragicomedy of ethical realisations

Modular Progress

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