There is a certain type of thinking I'm quite prone to falling into. It's sort of a "thinking about thinking" track that feels productive, but I think it's actually directly counterproductive. It's not uncommon, but I have recently been shocked by *how much* of my thinking looks this way, so I'm gonna spend a moment discussing it. The cArEfUl reader will note that this actually is the "thinking about thinking" happening in real time, but I often find that the best way to move through it is to do it directly and with awareness. Usually one can move on after. A quick description: The other day I was meditating and as part of the practice I was visualizing and analyzing an ideal version of myself. In this practice I was sort of imagining my current self as a slice of Swiss cheese. Universe-energy comes through on one end, and only small streams can escape through the holes. Most of it is absorbed or blocked or reflected back at the universe. It's not good this way, but as a human being, likely inevitable to some extent. The "ideal" version of myself was more like a bubble. A literal bubble. Like a soap bubble. Actually, you know how you can get those kits at the store that let you wave a wand and make some HUGE one? Like one of those bubbles. In that idealized version, universe-energy passes through me completely, although I still have a boundary and I still modulate the waves that pass through. A bubble is unique in that it is transparent, mostly empty space, but the thin soapy membrane is enough to distort and refract light that passes through it in a unique way. I like thinking of the "platonic ideal of self" to be somewhat like this bubble. Anywho, when imaging my future bubble-self, I was sort of asking the question internally, "What is this bubble thinking about?" Or rather, "Where is that bubble directing it's light?". Okay, concretely, "What do the shapes of my thoughts look like?" I was imagining myself, in the future, thinking about important concrete human problems. Questions of AI, philosophy, relationships to technology, physical health, studying history. Directly cutting to the core of interests and learning directly. It obviously struck me that I could just do that right now. But it seems to be safer to think about these things at a distance. There is clearly a part of me that wants to be working towards this shit but prefers to do it through the mind of someone else, a future me, that is more capable and somehow has the prerequisite knowledge to actually make progress. This is interesting because getting from here to there requires me to at some point learn the prerequisite knowledge I suspect I need and eventually transition the quality of my attention towards concrete questions, both of which are historically difficult. Well, the obvious next question was that of interest. Perhaps I'm not actually that interested in these big questions I so desperately seem to want to get it. Maybe I'm infatuated with the idea of someone who truly does care about the world of things beyond my own experience that I just supplant the concrete components with whatever the current zeitgeist lifts to my experience. I think that could be true. But it's unfortunate. I essentially want to become a different person. To be fair, I've come far along this path. I used to be far more dedicated to fully insular things and my thoughts never really trended towards things beyond my internal life. That has changed. I'm a bit more interested than I used to be, but nowhere near interested enough to making directly confronting the questions not feel laborious. It definitely still feels like work to think about anything other than thinking. There are sort of two ways to go at this point: 1. Continue indulging the meta cognition and masturbatory processing under the idea that "what is natural is what is right". Perhaps that is my path. Going so deep on an insular reflexive thought pattern that I genuinely create new knowledge from deep within the void. Maybe. 2. Work on this directly via resharpening my attention. The assumption here is that by getting my physical health and tangible aspects of my attention more well-calibrated, it's likely there won't be any interesting insular issues to solve, and naturally I'll subconsciously recognize this and things will shift external. Maybe. I'm not sure. The current path I'm going to take is the one that sounds more interesting. "Become a new person about the problem" In bed recently, right before falling asleep, I've had this interesting experience where I'm just close enough to dreaming that when I think about "Marshall" I can actually see the full picture of what I am from some critical distance that feels more objective. Maybe how God sees me. What's interesting is that I feel no relationship to that image "Marshall". It feels fluid, like I can just immediately kill him and wake up as a new person. This identity fluidity usually sticks around for the first hour of the morning as well, but I pick up the old habits quickly before I even know it's happening. I'm inspired by this whole thing and the idea of an ever-shifting self that I can pull and push at more frequently. I do feel that it's time for an overhaul of who I consider myself to be. What's the impetus for this? Partially it is wealth. I think the person that I am now has a ceiling and I'm beginning to feel its pressure on my skull. I'd like to expand myself and the room I'm {metaphorically} in to allow for richer experience, more wealth, creation, destruction, scale, deeper cognitive ability, deeper art. This has been happening already without much effort, but I do think applying a bit of skilled force could move things along. Concretely, this means once again having to re-engage a contemplative practice, which will take some time. I'm annoyed, but these things take time. I also just need to spend a lot more time trying to poke at the outlines, or the walls, of the room I feel that I'm in and begin drawing the one I'd like to expand into. I haven't been doing this enough recently, and that's frustrating. Time moves so fast now. But yeah that's really it. Essentially, I'm choosing the path *out* of meta-analysis and seeing what happens if I begin to poke around at my identity a bit more directly with the explicit hope of expanding into a new one that feels much deeper with more opportunity in front of me. Exciting!