the spiral

There have been times in my life where I’ve felt stuck in the rat race, constrained by the looming walls of societal demands and capitalism. Times where the days seem to blur together and you realise all you’re doing is what’s necessary, and you find yourself wondering if this is really how you’re meant to be spending your time. It feels like wasting your life away. I felt that during a long stint of unemployment, constrained by the need for money just to survive and the pressure that puts you under. And lately I’ve started feeling that way again - eat, sleep, work, repeat. Every day is exactly the same, Monday blurs into Friday and before you know it it’s Monday again.

The difference, I think, is that now I’ve tasted that on both sides of the fence. It might not be a particularly nice feeling, but it’s worth questioning whether fighting for something else is worthwhile or even valid. Realistically I’m coming to think that, no matter what hand life deals you, no matter how well you’re doing in life or how much you’re struggling, the days are going to blur together. Even if you spend every day doing something you enjoy, even if you don’t have to work for your money, even if you have the freedom of choice over your entire routine - there will still naturally be a routine. In fact, to compose a life utterly devoid of routine I think would be somewhat disorienting. I don’t think it’s the green pastures it appears to be. Ultimately I think this feeling is a natural consequence of having some sort of routine.

Perhaps there is something to be said there for holding some kind of balance between routine and novelty, and I definitely think that’s a potentially very rewarding goal - one undoubtedly restricted by the confines of financial situation. So I’m not saying this dreaded feeling of wasted days isn’t pushing towards something valuable; I just don’t think it warrants the extreme pivot that it seems to point towards.

One thing worth pushing on though: novelty has a limit and a cost. Coming up with new things to do every day, in a way that breaks the routine meaningfully, requires time and energy thinking of ideas and planning them out. At some point that organisation itself becomes part of your routine. And there’s only so many novel things you can do before you start spending silly money. Even if you held a hundred things in rotation, they would naturally organise into a routine anyway - beach, hike, paint, write, visit X, visit Y, … some day coming back round to beach, hike, paint. Even if you randomise it, it’s still locking you into a strict schedule with no room for choice. Yet if you leave it up to choice - the most rewarding option - then no doubt the options will be far smaller, and no doubt many days will be spent doing not very much, or hyperfixating on one particular hobby.

The bottom line is: the feeling of routine is inevitable. Days blurring together is inevitable. Translating those feelings into the conclusion that you’re wasting your life, however, is not a logical one. In every possible scenario, a balance must be struck between routine and novelty - optimising for mental health lands you somewhere in the middle, ultimately choosing the optimum trade-off of blurred days and disorientation, neither of which are good. Either way, that feeling of routine is unavoidable. No matter your lifestyle or circumstance, this is just what life is. What matters, therefore, isn’t aiming to escape the rat race, but to focus small amounts of time on something that gives you a feeling of enjoyment or achievement. Life cannot be perfect, but understanding what life is - and what it isn’t - is an important step in finding a good balance.

Thinking about the effects of tool use. Tools can be incredibly useful, there’s no doubting that - it’s their intended purpose. To allow someone to carry out something that would otherwise be difficult or time consuming. This frees up time and resources for other things and therefore increases productivity. There’s no difficulty seeing the benefits: spending hours on a single task, lowering the capacity for total tasks done, means some tasks end up neglected. Historically this may well have been a matter of survival. It’s no wonder humans survived so well by forming social bonds whereby tasks could be distributed and resources shared to the benefit of the entire group. A win-win, a no-brainer.

But even the best ideas show unintended consequences when allowed to run a long course. Humanity is in some ways characterised by the use of tools, and by extension, the concept of productivity. Even in a society as modern as ours, very little is done without tools. Technology is no exception - in fact it may be the heaviest reliance we have on tools. Technically the computers themselves are tools, so we’ve found ourselves in a somewhat meta situation of using and building tools for tools, sometimes involving a long dependency chain. Tools all the way down.

But take a step back and think about what tools have cost us. Adoption of a tool comes at the cost of knowledge. A tool short circuits the process, often making even the theoretical knowledge redundant. People don’t need to know how or why, only that if X happens, use Y. The more tools we use, and the wider and more consistent that usage is, the more knowledge we lose in the process.

In computer science, this has led to an interesting situation in cyber security. A meaningful share of attacks are carried out simply by running tools - there’s a term, “script kiddies”, to describe such people. Tooling makes hacking more accessible and more prevalent, albeit mostly at the level of lower hanging fruit. Nonetheless the risk is real, and it enables someone to commit a crime without much prerequisite knowledge that would otherwise have served as something of a gatekeeper. In this circumstance, tools are harmful - they allow more people to carry out crime than there otherwise would be.

The flip side is that those who do have the requisite technical knowledge can do potentially even more harm than otherwise, since the focus shifts to the higher risk, wider attack surface covered by the tools. Without tooling, security would be less tight and more lower hanging fruit available, so less incentive for defenders to learn more in depth - which puts the ball back in the attackers’ court. Although this is still a cat and mouse game, and at some point we’d likely end up in the same position we’re in now regardless, so perhaps this angle is less of a concern.

We have now, however, entered the age of AI, and its usage is so widespread it’s concerning. On the one hand, being able to hand off boring or time consuming tasks is a classic example of what has historically made tools so paramount to humanity’s success. AI usage also cuts out much of the time spent trawling the web for elusive answers to tricky problems. There was a time I wished I could just ask Google a question straight and get the exact answer instead of spending possibly hours hunting. If in the end you’re going to copy paste from Stack Overflow, using AI for that task only cuts out time, with the added benefit of asking for a detailed explanation of why that particular solution works. In that way, surely it can only be a positive? But reliance is a slippery slope. In some ways, friction itself is motivating and better facilitates learning than simply being handed the answer - founded in psychology, in that experiences with higher emotional weight are more easily stored, hence frustration in solving a problem naturally leads to better retention of the solution. The more reliance on AI, the more effort we have to put into learning to compensate for that, otherwise skills stagnate at best and regress at worst.

What’s even more concerning is that AI usage and reliance is being encouraged in many workplaces, which will no doubt have knock-on effects on expectations - removing our choice in using it within that environment, lest we have to answer to slower turnaround times. The burden of learning and maintaining skills is therefore pushed to personal time, which for many is incredibly limited.

Been thinking about strange loops. The idea at first was to write a hidden entry - it seemed to fit in with existing thoughts in that realm. That entry is yet to be written. Instead the train of thought landed on the Journey series, which I hadn’t expected to touch again for a good while yet.

I’d assumed that if a strange loop showed up in the paintings it would be in the colour, or in the obvious circularity - the series following the hero’s journey, which is already a loop. After some thinking on the matter, it seems incorporating it into the serpents is the way to go. That way they’re more deeply symbolic than previously planned: the demons drawn not as something wrapped around the figure, effectively reading as ornamental, but as an extension of the figure - with the series traversing the coalescing of the two.

The hope now is that this enables some more precise planning on the compositions. Where previously I only had the disk and figure in mind, and their interaction, that left a lot of empty space I didn’t quite know how to fill in a meaningful way. Now the series is more illustrative than descriptive, which I think works much better as artwork.

Something I’ve noticed recently: the process of falling asleep is inherently stressful to me. Not dramatically, but more of a mild stress response, and I think it’s responsible for much of my troubles with insomnia.

The obvious and oft-recommended approaches have never worked. “Just relax” is not a strategy. It’s an instruction with no implementation. And trying anything involves some degree of effort by definition, which is precisely the wrong state to be inducing. There’s something almost paradoxical about it. You can’t strive your way to rest. The striving is the problem.

I’ve been thinking about this from a systems angle, as I tend to do with most things. When a computer is idle, it isn’t empty. The CPU drops to a low-power state, but the interrupt controller stays live. The system isn’t generating work — it’s in a listening posture, receptive to whatever arrives. The difference is directional. Normal operation is the processor reaching out. Idle is the processor waiting for something to reach it. It hasn’t shut down. It’s just stopped being the source.

It seems the mind has an equivalent of the opposite of this - the default mode network, which runs when you’re ostensibly doing nothing. It’s generative. It simulates futures, rehearses conversations, chews on unresolved problems. That’s not idle. That’s a background process running unsupervised at full utilisation. Trying to sleep on top of that is trying to context-switch out while the queue is still being actively populated.

So the approaches that are often recommended — emptying the mind, forcing quiet — are the wrong frame entirely. You can’t drain a queue that’s still being written to. And you can’t force idle; you can only stop generating. Which suggests a different approach to experiment with: instead of trying to clear or suppress, change orientation. Not “stop thinking” but “only listening”. Shift from generative to receptive — the interrupt-listening posture. Observe what arrives rather than producing what to process. The thought appears, it’s registered, no thread is spawned in response. Log and return to idle. This is adjacent to what meditation traditions call witness consciousness, and it’s what I think they might actually mean by it - not emptiness, but a change in directional relationship to mental content. The instruction isn’t “have no thoughts.” It’s “stop reaching.”

There are other angles worth exploring. The queue management problem - not emptying before sleep but triaging: some things can be killed outright (a conscious decision that something doesn’t need to run tonight), others swapped to disk (written down, state fully preserved, released from RAM).

For now the experiment is simple: at sleep onset, consciously adopt the listening posture rather than attempting to clear or suppress. Not trying to sleep. Not trying to think. Just receptive. See what happens when the system stops reaching. Admittedly, I have recently been implementing a write-to-disk type approach by noting down any threads that feel particularly urgent or interesting enough that they can’t be terminated otherwise, which has had notable success, so the idle emulation experiment will build on that rather than replace it.

Definitely more thinking to do on this topic, I suspect there may be other possible avenues to explore…

Started reading exhalation by ted chiang, which got me thinking about the correlations between human memory and computer memory. The thread turned into a few directions, ultimately relating back to the black box problem, so that’s a pretty interesting development.

Thought threads recently do seem to be turning into more of fringes than individual threads, so it’s a bit challenging to find the time and mental energy to flesh these all out and keep the hidden section up to date with everything. Settling for at least the main ons or at least the most interesting and fleshed out ideas. The hope is the others will come up again when the time is right and the spiral returns to that place once again.

Hoping to get more development work done on Valknir soon, it’s bugging me that it’s still so rudimentary. The problem is getting the time to focus on practical applications to the point of some degree of proficiency. Admittedly, it’s also taken some time to figure out the best workflow for that but current thinking is to look at CTF write ups and practice.

Unfortunately, time available to dedicate to practical things it’s extremely limited right now, so doing what I can with regards to reading, writing, and thinking. Admittedly, this is quite the bottlneck and not nearly as fun…

Looking at some potential reading material. Rationalistic pantheism came up and seems worth exploring further when there’s time — curious to see where it sits relative to my own ideas. The perennial philosophy also seems to approach familiar territory.

A longer list formed: The Character of Physical Law, The Tao of Physics, Laws of Form, Complexity by Mitchell, Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Too much to read at once, so it will resolve itself — follow whichever thread has the strongest pull when there’s actually time to sit with it. Feynman feels like the most natural starting point. Conversational rather than dense, likely to catalyse rather than just inform. The Tao of Physics is directly in my territory but may end up being more validating than revelatory — which could go either way. Laws of Form is genuinely unusual, Spencer-Brown deriving logic from the single act of distinction, directly relevant to the loop and circularity thinking — but demanding, probably not first. Mitchell’s Complexity fits well alongside the emergence thinking.

But it might be Exhalation first. Fiction sometimes lands deeper than the direct approach — not because it argues a position but because it creates conditions. I’d rather have thoughts that are my own but sparked by something not even trying to make a point.

Will see what has the strongest pull when there’s actually space to think.

There’s something unexpectedly satisfying about having 7thmagpie up and being added to. Hard to articulate exactly why — it’s just genuinely nice to have my own small piece of the internet that belongs to no one else. Not under the ownership of a platform, not subject to an algorithm, not contingent on engagement. Mine. There’s a particular kind of catharsis in getting thoughts down somewhere they might some day find the right person.

Motherhood is incredibly tiring.

Kairos has made unexpected progress and is approaching proof of concept — ahead of plan, which is what happens when you follow the interest thread rather than the schedule. I can’t test it myself; any free moment I have is either occupied by the baby or immediately claimed by something else. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for the right time. A friend has agreed to test for a week, and if it goes well, possibly longer. I might bring in a couple of course mates at a later phase.

Valknir is moving slowly. Deliberately so — I don’t want development to outpace understanding. It’s not enough to complete an exercise; I have to know I’ve truly got it before moving on, which means going over the same ground repeatedly until it’s mine rather than memorised. The knowledge will compound. Right now it’s just painfully slow. I’ve found some writeups that should help on the practical side.

It’s good to be back at work. Nerd time. Conversations that aren’t about motherhood. I love my son more than anything — he’s my favourite thing in the world — but mothers are people too, and it’s good to have time to be my own person. I’m grateful I get paid for at least some of that.

Thoughts have been thin lately. I’m not sure if that’s because the site now gives them somewhere to go rather than queuing up indefinitely, or whether it’s simply that there’s no time to sit, breathe, or take anything in. Possibly both.

There’s a way of moving through life that works better than fighting it. It’s a way I’ve tried (and continue trying) to follow and to actively learn from so I can follow it more truly. That way is what I call leaning in, and it has never yet led me astray.

Recently I ran a thought experiment on myself to see if I could lean in to the constant generative thoughts that is the ADHD experience. To fight it is to try to stop the thoughts, to long for silence and focus on whatever seems most practical. Instead I aimed only to slow it down — to promise to give the thoughts the attention they deserve for as long as they last. There were only two constraints: one thought at a time and no overlapping. The usual busy, chaotic, stressful mind instead slowed, allowed space for breath, and felt somewhat peaceful for once — so much so that I fell asleep. I was honestly quite shocked at how easy it was.

Not too long before that, I ran another experiment on leaning in — instead of trying to do housework under some established structure or in whatever way it seems is adopted by others, I instead allowed the ADHD to lead. Instead of trying to finish a room to completion before moving on, I allowed myself to follow a thread. I let that distracted little squirrel mind lead the way: starting from fixing something of annoyance around me, then noticing something else that needs done, and letting myself zip all around the house. I did, of course, have constraints here too — lest I run the risk of giving myself more work to do. I didn’t allow anything that would be destructive (so no pulling apart an entire room) so that, should I lose interest halfway, the room would still be in a better state than when I started. And I did try to commit to a task a little — I wouldn’t go downstairs just to take one piece of rubbish, but I’d hoard a small pile until it seemed like a good moment to switch. Again, I was shocked at how well this worked. Sure, no entire room got finished, but I achieved at least three times as much as if I’d tried a more conventional approach, and I didn’t feel so drained afterwards. It seemed like fighting myself drained more energy than I’d noticed — or perhaps leaning in was energising in itself.

It wasn’t always this way. For a long time the default was resistance — to circumstances, to self, to what wasn’t working. I was trying to play by rules set out by society, or whatever worked for other people, despite struggling greatly with those very same things. It was a recipe for disaster in every aspect. I was unemployed, depressed, and stuck in a relationship with someone I resented. It was, by every account, the polar opposite to the situation I find myself in today.

Three years ago I quit what, by all accounts, seemed to be a very good career prospect. I had devoted three years of my life to work and study towards a career I’d spent more than three times that longing for. At the final moment, however, everything seemed to push against me. I had to redo courses multiple times due to difficulty meeting attendance requirements for weather and medical reasons, then got bullied by one of the teachers. I struggled to motivate myself to study for oral exams. So I quit — with nothing else lined up and £10k of debt to my name. As soon as I quit, my interest in programming returned and I felt in my bones that that was what I wanted to pursue, despite very sparse experience and no qualifications. I figured I’d take any job in the meantime while I worked out how to break into that career. Less than three months later I started working in software development — gaining work experience and a degree at the same time. It’s the best outcome that could have happened, and three years on I’m still not burnt out, and more passionate about computer science than ever.

These ideas aren’t unique to my own personal philosophy. Taoism has the concept of wu wei — effortless action. Like water following the path of least resistance, slowly shaping the rock, we too can find a path best suited to us by leaning in rather than fighting resistance. Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Marcus Aurelius touched on similar ideas, while Jung coined the term individuation for working with the unconscious rather than against it. He even claimed that the act of pushing against resistance amplifies it — something I can’t help but feel is perfectly exemplified by my own experience.

Leaning in isn’t to be confused with passivity or giving up. It’s the active pursuit of ease and attention to the flow of things — very much easier said than done sometimes, particularly when it comes to identifying where the resistance actually is. We’ve been so conditioned to put up with unease that it fades to background noise, a constant hindrance we stop noticing. At times it takes a genuine leap of faith. But sometimes it’s worth asking what you truly have to lose, compared to what you will lose by continuing against the grain.