Status of the wholes 2023

The “status of the wholes” is my annual review-slash-roundup. It is both a personal reflection and a summary of my activities for the relevant year. This fifth entry covers 2023—the others concerned 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. The sections:

Intro: Dissonance
Breathe
Read (Stats, Ratings, Tracks, On Intellectual Labour)
Write
Move
Play
Speak
Outro: Abundant Decisions
Appendix: On the “status of the wholes”

Intro: Dissonance

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi meditates on the unknowability of our reservoirs of strength. He says:

“No one can know how long and what torments his soul can resist before crumpling or breaking. Every human being has reserves of strength whose measure he does not know; they may be large, small, or nonexistent, but the only means of assessing them is severe adversity. Even without invoking the extreme case of the Sonderkommandos [the inmates responsible for removing corpses from the gas chambers post annihilation], we survivors commonly find that when we talk about our experience our listeners say, ‘In your place, I wouldn’t have lasted a day.’ This statement has no precise meaning; you are never in someone else’s place. Each individual is an object so complex that it is useless to try to predict behaviour, especially in extreme situations; we cannot even predict our own behaviour.”

2023 held no holocausts for me; I was not subject to the catastrophes and the suffering that others were compelled to endure during the same period. Yet my strength was tested. It was a year both love-kissed and Hood-touched. It contained one of the best days of my life—I married the person in this world that I love most—as well as some of the most challenging stretches of my three-ish decades of sentience.

In the personal and the professional realm, there were moments of high consequence and decisions of much import. Yet those isolated moments spread across disparate domains are not what I consider to be the hallmark of my 2023. Rather, it is the whirling, cacophonous whole that they formed, the dissonance that they collectively elicited within me, that stands out. Even now, as I attempt to untangle and follow the threads back to some source of insight or profundity after the fact, I feel the labyrinthian embrace of the year reaching out and reeling me in. So forgive me as I constrain the thematic retrospective of 2023 to the following assertion: there was dissonance and it was endured.

Breathe

“Breathe” became a significant whole for me following a sustained entanglement with contemplative traditions and practices several years ago. Its focus is explicitly the breath, without any especial regard for any specific protocol, school, discipline, ideology or culture. This is because, as Bhante Gunaratana notes in Mindfulness in Plain English, the breath is always there, ever present as a refuge and available as a foundation to return to. Unfortunately, I have not done much returning.

In Being-Time, Shinshu Roberts highlights how Zen requires a consistent practice, guidance from a teacher, and envelopment in a larger community. In 2023, I had neither practice nor teacher nor community, for Zen, generic breathwork or otherwise. This is not a new phenomena—in both 2021 and 2022‘s Status of the Whole’s there’s intent to initiate-maintain-refactor breath-related practices and laments for my inability to do so. 2023 is no different. But what’s different is that the year’s peculiarly dissonant expanse reaffirmed something: the power of the breath.

On my wedding day, as the ceremony began and my partner made her entrance, I was overwhelmed. I was struck dumb and numb. The thing that brought me back to life—that enlivened me and allowed me to experience the moment in all its glorious fullness—was a breath. A deliberate inhale and exhale grounded me in that special moment and helped me to, truly, be where I was.

At the other end of the spectrum, the year held numerous moments of tense, near-adversarial interpersonal encounters, as well as great sorrow. I do not enjoy such scenarios, yet alone thrive in them. But it was the breath—amongst other things, naturally—that helped me navigate them.

In between those extremes, the leverage the breath has during day-to-day exertion was asserted. When engaged in intellectual labour, I am able to detect a difference in the quality of my process and any subsequent outcomes when I am breathing well versus when I am not. When engaged in physical activity of differing intensities—from plain ol’ sleeping to hard Brazilian jiu-jitsu sparring—I notice the difference between breathing well and breathing not-so-well.

If exercise is the ultimate everybody pill then the breath should be considered a close contender. Nevertheless, for 2024 I don’t have grand expectations for anything concerning it. In fact, I intend only two things. The first is to keep the practice of providing love cards to my partner. This I see as the kernel of metta, a contemplative practice focused on loving-kindness. The second is to take a 3-5 day span and attend some form of retreat, seminar, workshop or collective experience focused on the breath. Neither of these are easy, but neither are as hard as they first seem. If I manage both, I will be content.

Read

2023 was, in retrospect, a superb reading year. Let’s dive into it.

Stats

Here’s a high level overview for the year.

92 total books logged in 2023
94 books read, including two began in 2023 and continued into 2024
9 ebooks, 23 hardcovers and 62 paperbacks
Only one book quit (The Top Five Regrets of the Dying)
37 fiction and 57 non-fiction reads
92+ unique authors (inc. illustrators, not inc. textbook roll calls)
63 male, 19 females and 2 various/unspecified authors (analysis executed by ChatGPT 4)
Shortest read times were 9 comics (all read in under one day)
Beyond that, shortest read time was 2 days (Playing Software, Department of Truth Vol. 1)
Longest read time was 81 days (Physical Biology of the Cell, Children of Memory)
Average read time was 17.3 days
Shortest books were numerous single issue comics
Longest books: Physical Biology of the Cell and The Complete Liveship Traders Trilogy
Minimum page count was 20 (comics)
Maximum page count was 2,500 (Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy)
Average page count was 370ish (analysis executed by ChatGPT 4)

I didn’t do a genre/type or subject/topic breakdown because effort (plus, it’s slightly redundant given the tracks described below). What I am intending is a mega-thread of all the books I read over on Warpcast—in chronological order, I will cite the book and a link and provide an off-the-cuff impression. I’ve begun already. Divine from that total array of reads what you will.

Ratings

Each book I read gets a quantitative rating. There’s five categories and the increments are 0.5. Warning: the rating given is quite arbitrary, rather than being the result of a lengthy, involved and structured evaluation. These are also vulnerable to the same biases as other ratings systems. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ve never rated a book less than a four on any criteria. Still, it is a reflection of how I feel about the text. The rating is simple for fiction books—it just mirrors how I decompose a story when I author fiction:

Character: the cast of beings
World: the world the cast inhabits
Events: what happens in the world, to the cast
Narration: how what happens in the world, to the cast, is described
Authorial intent: purity and potency of the author’s purpose

Non-fiction poses a greater challenge. I settled on these five categories:

Authorial intent: purity and potency of the author’s purpose
Style: quality of the prose
Rhetoric: persuasiveness of logic, argument or narrative
Density: research, thought or experience communicated per page
Salience: a book’s individual rightness and its impact upon myself or society

Here are the top-rated books for each of those criteria:

Non-fiction; authorial intent: The Matter with Things Vol. 2, Iain McGilchrist (9)
Non-fiction; style: Underland, Robert Macfarlane (9)
Non-fiction; rhetoric: a nine-way tie (8.5)
- Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
- Ways of Being, James Bridle
- The Matter with Things Vol. 2, Iain McGilchrist
- What Remains?, Rupert Callender
- Everything Flows, Daniel J. Nicholson, John Dupre
- Behaviour and Culture in One Dimension, Dennis P. Waters
- Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson
- Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Frans Osinga
- The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering, Sanjoy Mahajan
Non-fiction; density: The Matter with Things Vol. 2, Iain McGilchrist (9.5)
Non-fiction; salience: What Remains?, Rupert Callender (9.5)
Fiction; character: a three-way tie (9.5)
- Deadhouse Gates (Malazan II), Steven Erikson
- Gardens of the Moon (Malazan I), Steven Erikson
- Watchmen (12 Issue Collection), Alan Moore
Fiction; world: Deadhouse Gates (Malazan II) and Gardens of the Moon (Malazan I), Steven Erikson (10)
Fiction; event: Deadhouse Gates (Malazan II), Steven Erikson (9)
Fiction; narration: Gardens of the Moon (Malazan I), Steven Erikson (9.5)
Fiction; authorial intent: Deadhouse Gates (Malazan II), Steven Erikson (9)

The top-rated non-fiction overall were:

The Matter with Things Vol. 2, Iain McGilchrist (44)
Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter (42.5)
Underland, Robert Macfarlane (42)
Ways of Being, James Bridle (42)
Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake (41)
Operating Systems: Three Easy Steps, Remzi H. and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau (41)
What Remains?, Rupert Callender (41)
The Art of Gig Vol. 2: Superstructures, Venkatesh Rao (41)
Everything Flows, Daniel J. Nicholson, John Dupre (40.5)
The Pattern on the Stone, W. Daniel Hillis (40)
Oral Histories of the Internet and the Web, Niels Brugger, Gerard Goggin (40)
Chip War, Chris Miller (40)
Health Communism, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant (40)
Nomadland, Jessica Bruder (40)
Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain, Stephen Grossberg (40)
Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Frans Osinga (40)
Behaviour and Culture in One Dimension, Dennis P. Waters (40)
The Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur (40)

The top-rated fiction overall were:

Deadhouse Gates (Malazan II), Steven Erikson (46.5)
Gardens of the Moon (Malazan I), Steven Erikson (45)
Watchmen (12 Issue Collection), Alan Moore (42.5)
Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons and Dragons (Deluxe Edition), Patrick Rothfuss, Jim Zub, Troy Little (42.5)
Saga: Compendium One, Brian K. Vaughan / Fiona Staples (42)
The Complete Liveship Traders Trilogy, Robin Hobb (41.5)
Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons and Dragons (Issue 1), Patrick Rothfuss, Jim Zub, Troy Little (41.5)
The Sandman: Book Two (DC Black Label), Neil Gaiman et. al (40.5)
The Complete Maus, Art Speigelman (40)
The Sandman: Book One (DC Black Label), Neil Gaiman et. al (40)
Fool’s Fate (The Tawny Man III), Robin Hobb (40)

Finally, here are some texts that stood out for intangible reasons as I reviewed the year’s reads. These contain both fiction and non-fiction.

The Self-Assembling Brain, Peter Robin Hiesinger
Chaos Kings, Scott Patterson
The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering, Sanjoy Mahajan
Extrastatecraft, Keller Easterling
Spaced Out, Mike Prada
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Box Set), Hayao Miyazaki
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
Underbug, Lisa Margonelli
Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo, Shinshu Roberts
Blockchain Chicken Farm, Xiawei Wang

Tracks

In case you didn’t know, I read continuously and in parallel. I’m a moody reader and reading multiple texts simply increases the probability that there’s always something I’m excited to read at a particular moment. I accomplish this by having defined tracks that act as attentional braces, and it’s a stance that applies to both fiction and non-fiction.

The non-fiction reading tracks from 2022 persisted for 2023. They’re related to my research into kinocomputing (more on that later). I have them defined as follows:

Motion: the study of motion as an abstract phenomena (flows, folds and fields) and as an applied concept (flows, folds and fields in different domains)
Computing: the study of computing across the entire range of the technological stack, from the boring edge to the bleeding edge and from established paradigms to alternative, adjacent possible, truncated ones
Intelligence: the study of how one—a person, an animal, an entity, a system, agents, sub-agents, or super-agents—situates themselves in the world, constructs realities, makes decisions and embodies actions

This gave me a lot of autonomy to choose reading materials for 2023 and it will have the same effect for 2024—these tracks are sticking around.

My consumption of fiction reads for 2023 was a continued effort to gain familiarity with “sequential art”, with graphic novels and comics. There were two exceptions to this, however. First exception: because of some long-haul travel in February 2023 I switched back to normal fiction via ebooks for what turned out to be a six to eight week stretch. Second exception: towards the end of 2023, some comics took longer than anticipated to arrive. Simultaneously, I managed to convince my partner to read my beloved Malazan Book of the Fallen. The result: I ended up re-reading Malazan whilst awaiting sequential art arrival.

For 2024, the fiction tracks will be consumption of various comics and graphic novels alongside the continued re-read of Malazan. Once I finish Malazan, however, I’ll likely evaluate whether I want to continue the sequential art immersion or tone it down a little. I’ll probably return to a previous stance and segment my fiction reads as follows:

1 x fantasy read
1 x sci-fi read
1 x comic or graphic novel
1 x contemporary or classic read (optional)

The other alternative for fiction tracks is to introduce a new narrative medium: the video game. The resulting array of narrative consumption would then probably shift to one novel, one comic or graphic novel and one video game in rotation at all times.

But that reshuffle is a little ways off; no commitments there, yet.

On Intellectual Labour

Naval Ravikant once quipped: “read what you love until you love to read”. For years now, I have been firmly in the “love to read” state. And 2023’s dissonance reaffirmed its value to me. It is always there; a reliable gateway to a calm and immersive joy. It is always there; an anchor for my soul in the storms of life. It is always there; a sail that enables one to traverse the seas of experience. Never have I had a more subtle appreciation for those early morning and evening hours (and sometimes, those afternoons) during which I can commune with the textual and appreciate the velocity of being.

Matthew Crawford argues for the importance of physical labour, of embodied action, in The Case For Working With Your Hands. I would argue that reading is intellectual labour, and that it is of similar significance. Saturating oneself with diverse texts, folding pages, scrawling marginalia, masticating characters and words and sentences and paragraphs and pages—this is work of the purest form, play of the highest degree.

On the “seminal reads” section of my hub site I state: “Much of the goodness in my life has—and continues to—emerge from reading.” This is true, an understatement, and unlikely to change anytime soon.

Write

2023 was a fairly intense year for writing.

Most of the water drawn from my writing well was winched up in a professional context—it’s my job to synthesise information about the capabilities and positioning of various B2B software products, and that takes up much of my capacity for words. There were some miscellaneous writing-related outcomes outside of Day Job, though:

I penned the intro to the Yak Collective’s Governance Studies Sequence (stalled out; RIP)
I continued The Tinker’s Tale over at Sonya Mann’s site (P1 done; P2/3 unpublished for now)
I produced another year (52 editions) of the Magnificent Seven (Mag7: > reading, < writing)

In November 2023, I also began what I’ve termed the Third Era of Swell and Cut. There’s more detail about that on the About page, but here’s a snippet:

“…the emergent miscellanea featured here are adjacent (and at least minimally entangled) with some or all of the above [a list of things I’m doing]. Some ways to characterise the atomic units of Swell and Cut’s third era?

As conceptual exhaust, “waste” downstream of engine operation

As intellectual offcuts, strange pieces of fabric too misshapen for use in production

As winded seeds, units of thought benevolently distributed

As psycho-activators, supplements that accelerate my thoughts, ideas and energy

As sketches with inappropriate fidelity, being too fuzzy or too sharp to fit elsewhere”

At time of writing, the burgeoning Third Era has passed as a proof of concept on the production side. I’m fifteen posts deep (which worked out as 1-2 per week) and I’m now evaluating some tweaks, optimisations and tactics before restarting the publishing engine in earnest again in late springtime. Here’s my favourites from those fifteen:

The other significant writing-like thing I’ve been configuring and preparing for launch is my permissionless research project into what I’ve called “kinocomputing“. I won’t say much more about it than what’s available on the linked site—sorry not sorry.

I will say this, though. The kinocomputing project itself is a combination of reading, writing and play. The writing activities will manifest in two ways. First, as regular (ideally daily) commits to a knowledge graph. Think of adding a notecard or three to an existing knowledge base, deepening it, making connections, adding generative potential. Second, as less regular outputs—for example, a longform essay assembled out of the regularly committed pseudo-notecards and sculpted into a cohesive, compelling argument or exploration. I would like to think I’ll be able to kick this off in late springtime, too, but that’s not guaranteed.

The final writing-related aspect concerning 2023 that I want to call out was triggered by my work on Sonya Mann’s Wanderverse project (see the link above). Authoring that narrative really reminded me how much joy there is in writing fiction.

For 2024, my writing capacity will likely be spread across Swell and Cut’s Third Era, the kinocomputing project, Mag7, and the continued leverage of my word capacity in a professional context. But what I would love-love-love is just a little more time and energy—just enough—to pursue some fiction. I have designs for a larger narrative enterprise that will likely see no progression in 2024, but I will be keeping my eyes open for moments that allow me to spin some cute yarns and get back to the practice of storytelling.

Move

My go-to strength guru and all-around Good Guy, Dan John, often talks about hunting one’s gaps and plugging one’s weaknesses. In 2023, I found a seminal gap of my own: my glutes.

In early 2023 I was again hit with lower back pain. On the road to recovery, I took up dedicated glute training. Simple things, such as introducing banded hip thrusts and trialling banded birddogs during every session warm-up, were transformative. And that is no understatement.

Despite my decent training history, I realised I’d never really experienced the power and effect of strong, activated glutes. See, they affect every movement. Not just hinge movements, like kettlebell swings and deadlifts. But pushes, pulls, squats, carries and everything in between. Plus—like training pulls or hanging a lot—they have a compounding effect on one’s posture. It turns out that a stronger butt enforces a healthier pelvic posture, thus eliminating the sort of chronic, recurring lower back insults that I’ve often struggled with.

Another gap I plugged in 2023 was lower intensity loaded carries. In tandem with my glute work, I picked up some plates—a 20kg, 10kg and 5kg array—and began to ruck. This didn’t require any extra, dedicated training. I simply slung on my decade-plus old “military assault” pack with a plate or two stuffed in thy hydration pouch section, and walked where and when I would normally walk. Usually, that meant rucking a few times a week when I walked our dogs. Occasionally, I’d adjust my normal training and opt for a nice ruck instead of a trad training session. But that was more exception than rule. Like the glute work, rucking was a simple addition and one that had a near instantaneous effect. There was a tangible gain in both my capacity and in the constitution of my “inner tube“.

The final gap I plugged in 2023 was an activity type: Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I, finally, returned to the practice of the gentle art. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a really joyous activity for me and one that I am now trying to approach with a more deliberate attention and sincere intent to learn. Thanks to Mike Casey’s hosting of the Warpcast /grappling channel, I’ve started to keep BJJ training logs— which is a practice that mandates attention and learning—and a few competitions are on the cards for 2024. I’m excited to be back grappling and I’m already scheming about how to shoehorn more mat time into my life. I’m still keeping up my weekly indoor climbing, too, which is turning out to be a great complement to grappling across all characteristics; mentally, physically and technically.

The other disciplines and movement practices that snuck into 2023?

Surfing is one. On our mini-moon, my partner and I tried some surfing. I loved it and wish I could explore it more. Hiking made a brief appearance, too, culminating in some midnight orienteering on the moors during a named storm and a night’s sleep wedged in a rocky outcrop. I managed a few ambling, afternoon cycles, as well, though less in volume than I would perhaps like.

Overall, 2023 was a fantastic year of movement and it really solidified my own motivating ideal: sustainability.

Movement hasn’t been a numbers game for me for a long time. Nor has it been a pursuit of any especial vanity. Both approaches are useful as guides, as standards, but now I find myself running every movement-related choice through a different prismatic question: will insert thing make it more or less likely that I’ll be a spry, energetic 50/60/70/80+ year old man? Fortunately, I’m starting to find answers and ways forward that affirm that possibility.

For 2024, that spirit will remain and I will likely also hunt a few more gaps. As well as my regular training, my practice of BJJ, weekly climbing, and some nutritious movement habits, I’ll probably be looking to bolster my aerobic base—yes, the much-hyped zones schtick—and to build my pressing capacities. The latter is an obvious gap. I can manage a Turkish getup with a 40kg dumbell. But I definitely cannot press a 40kg dumbell. That disparity should probably be diminished. And as for the former, my aerobic base? It’s decent already. But as I eye up high performance for BJJ, I suspect that it’ll need to be better. Like much of my life, there is ample room for intensification.

Play

As described in previous reviews, play has enveloped a lot of my activities. Perceiving moments and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years as an infinite game is perilously close to a default stance. From the personal to the professional, from the whimsical and inconsequential to the salient and strategic; play matters and influences my actions.

However, this prioritisation of play, as you may have guessed from the tone of the introduction, was tested in 2023. Fortunately, I think it survived the assault. Even more fortunately, I think I came through with a more subtle appreciation of the manifestation of play in my life, and its criticality. So let me attempt to share that appreciation in a playful way, as directives for not playing. An anti-playbook, of sorts; a guide to how not to play:

Don’t engage with new people and do new things
Don’t flirt with novel tools, different techniques or unprecedented constraints
Don’t take any action without a sufficiently rationalised motive or broad teleology
Don’t leverage participatory structures and see others as part of the in-group
Don’t ask questions that threaten, shift or point outside the Overton window
Don’t risk being perceived as low status or doing something reputationally inappropriate
Don’t notice the embodied resonances that actions, decisions, people and places provoke
Don’t make distinctions between the ontology and the epistemology of the self
Don’t give anything without a definite expectation of an equivalent or greater return
Don’t permit intense lived experiences to manifest in any external form
Don’t slow down, pause, de-noise, rest or reflect for too long, too often

That, to me, is a guide for a remarkably un-playful life. And though it’s not the sort of life I intend on adopting, now or in the future, I do suspect that these anti-play directives will turn out to be useful for encouraging and calibrating one’s play state. I certainly needed to remind myself of these things in 2023; I expect I’ll have to do the same in 2024.

Speak

I’m a few years deep into my fourth decade, and one of the things that is becoming increasingly apparent is the power of speech. Not “power” in the sense of control but “power” in the sense of speech’s impact on the what, when, where, who, why and how of a life’s emergent unfolding. In 2023—more than in any year thus far—it’s become easier to recognise that power and to intra-act with it (“easier”, not “easy”).

Such intra-action is collective. It takes place within friendships, with colleagues, with a spouse, with nuclear and extended families, with the barista making one’s americano, with the stranger one greets on the street on a sunny morning. In all these collective entanglements there is the option of the Hirschman trichotomy: voice, exit, loyalty. There is also the opportunity to exercise agency.

Naturally, speaking is intertwined with the V of the VELA set. Less obviously, speaking has an uncanny influence on any exit, loyalty or agency options exercised. One’s capacity for speech—which I’m defining here as some mixture of compassion, communicative ability and truth-sensing, instead of mere words or gestures—and one’s courage to speak can, it seems to me, be the decisive factor when enacting a voice, exit, loyalty or agency option.

I’ve previously noted five canonical elements of a story: character, world, events, narration and authorial intent. The latter I defined as:

“…something akin to Proust’s “reflecting power”, but it includes something different, too. Authorial intent is a quality whose potency is felt on some non-conscious level by an audience member. It has to do with the purity of an executed vision. It is what makes a seemingly mediocre story—in terms of it characters, world, events and narration—strike right through to the soul. Its absence is what makes a story with incredible characters, an immersive world, an ingenious plot and deft narration feel limp and lifeless on a deep level.”

Speech is the authorial intent to the voice-exit-loyalty-agency set. It is capable of multiplying (or dividing) one’s collective intra-actions.

Outro: Abundant Decisions

One consequence of my dissonance-rich 2023 is that, heading into 2024, I feel a little more comfortable interrogating and making complex decisions. “Complex” in the sense that they have emergent, a priori unknowable consequences but also “complex” in the sense that the actual experience of making the decision is fraught with conflicting signals, modulating intent and see-sawing impression of scarcity and abundance.

In Singing the Blues, Scott Alexander describes how set points could influence and reinforce depression. He says:

“We know that if we make depressed people stop doing these things, they feel happier. This is the principle behind behavioral activation, opposite action, three of the most powerful therapies for depression. If you depression tells you to do something, do the opposite. Go on a nice walk in the park! Listen to happy music! Spend time with your friends! If you do these things, your depression is pretty likely to go away. The problem isn’t that they don’t work, the problem is that it’s like a feverish person trying to take an ice bath, or an anorexic trying to eat a big meal – all their instincts are telling them not to do it. And if your depression tries to get you to think in a specific way, think in a different way. When it tells you that you should still feel bad for that embarrassing thing you did in third grade, tell it that makes no sense, and that you’ve done plenty of things you’re proud of since then. Again, this often works if you do it. It’s just really hard.”

Now consider this. In Please Don’t Get Off My Lawn: Abundance, Scarcity and Problem Solving, John Romkey says:

“Instead of complaining about how things have changed, I want to emphasize how important it is to choose the right priorities for the problem you’re trying to solve and to adjust your mindset over time so that you’re open to new ways of solving problems.

When computers were highly resource constrained, it made a lot of sense to prioritize resource use over programmer time. These constraints shaped our thinking, and decades later the instinct of many developers from those days is still to solve problems as if computers were small, slow and had poor connectivity.

Today, with fewer constraints we can focus on other priorities: easing the tech knowledge needed to work with systems, protecting developer time, improving software correctness and reliability.

Of course, there are still plenty of opportunities for computer work in a resource scarce environment: try programming an tiny micro-controller sometime. And of course we still have resource constraints… consider how easy it is to write a web page that overwhelms your browser.

Having priorities appropriate to the context in which we’re solving problems opens up entirely new solution spaces for us.”

For most of us—me included—complex decisions are approached from a set point of scarcity. “Big decisions” compel us to focus on big risks and thus we marginalise some of our most important aspects; our ambition, our desires, our very values. This is well-intentioned and often in the name of a real and very appropriate pragmatism. However, there is a set of decisions that should definitely not be made through a prism of scarcity. “Fear is the mind killer,” as the litany goes, and scarcity-based decisions block many possible paths to a rich and joyous life.

How does one make abundance-based decisions, though? Quite simply, actually. Scarcity often evokes an embodied reaction—heart rate increases, feelings of anxiety, sweating, and so on. First, notice these things occurring. Second, steer yourself in the direction that most amplifies and compounds them. That will likely be the “right” decision to make.

Heading into 2024, that is something I am trying to practice: finding decisions I’m inclined to make out of scarcity, inverting their essence and making the abundant decision instead.

Appendix: On the “status of the wholes”

As described at the head of this post, the “status of the wholes” is my annual review-slash-roundup. The structure that has emerged consists of an introduction that tackles what I perceive to be the broad theme or motif for the year and a six-part survey of my activities.

The origin story of the six-part structure utilised is as follows:

26/03/16: I combined three ideas—80/20, Parkinson’s Law and minimum effective dose—to create a daily standard for myself. Shorthand, it looks like: Br / Re / Wr / Mo / Pl. Breathe, read, write, move and play.
25/02/18: After learning about Josh Waitzkin’s method for compressing rituals (“making smaller circles”), I changed the daily standard into a scalable loop. The standard could be compressed, extended and performed multiple times, and different components could be emphasised or even omitted.
Sometime in 2019: a sixth element was added: “speak”. Its meaning was first relationship focused—talking to my friends and family. But it also included attempts to pick up some rudimentary French.

These days, I no longer enforce the standard or utilise the scalable loop day-to-day. However, Br / Re / Wr / Mo / Pl / Sp is still used as an organising paradigm for how I think about myself and my actions, both on a day-to-day basis and over the longer term.

Another salient thing is the use of the word “wholes”. It is deliberate and important.

A while back, Joe Norman penned an essay called Generating Wholes. He said:

“In living systems the whole generates the parts. The parts do not exist a priori. In each step of this process we can see that both wholes and parts come from existing wholes. They are not constructed in the usual sense—they are not manufactured. They are synthesized via an unbroken chain of wholes, extending back to the beginning.”

I see each of the six elements—breathe, read, write, move, play, speak—as a whole. “I contain multitudes”, as the saying goes, and these are some of the headliners. I also see these elements as vehicles of practice.

In When Things Fall Apart Pema Chodron describes samaya bonds. These are sacred vows, an unconditional commitment that a teacher and a student make to one another.

“If the student accepts and trusts the teacher completely and the teacher accepts the student, they can enter into the unconditional relationship called samaya. The teacher will never give up on the student no matter how mixed up he or she might be, and the student will also never leave the teacher, no matter what.”

Breathing, reading, writing, moving, playing and speaking are teachers; I remain their student.