September 22, 2025

I’ve still been writing plenty. I need to have some constant. I really need to get around to the mini courses. Road maps for your curiosity, I guess I could call them. Focus on the process, not the end goal. But sharing my learning journey, in itself, might be enough. I’m still all about actionable advice of course. I was on the right track with my Chronicles of Absurdia project. I just wasn’t focused on the intention, besides being verbose about my experience with the absolutely absurd. And I went badly off course with that series because I never really had a plan. Honestly I don’t think a plan, per se, is necessary. But I do need to keep intention front and forward facing. I look back far too much at all the train wrecks I’ve somehow emerged from. 

I feel like I’m always trying to outrun my chronic fatigue these days. It’s hard to say when I’ll have a “good” day like this past week where I had a couple monumentally productive days

I may skip a day here and there as my fatigue demands, but I’ve still been remarkably consistent. My mission of working on ideas is still very much the same. 

I can’t change people’s minds about many things, and there’s nothing I can do to change the course of society at this moment. But I can be a voice in the dark. Yet I can’t succeed at this the way I’ve been sputtering with my output. The Sublime app has helped me stay on track a bit by giving me things every day to consider. But I always say that and I have thousands of things to come back to at this point. 

I’ve learned a lot about how missteps actually teach us more than anything else. I was onto some good ideas in my pursuit of becoming a reseller. But I missed my window of opportunity for that to be a necessary endeavor. 

…

I’m a bit sad that there isn’t much I could pull out of my first few Writers Notebooks I compiled. There are some good bits in January 2023 though. Especially the part about my Substack posting strategy: “Unlike my website, where I am master and commander, here I am your servant, your guide to the more obscure curiosities in this mysterious universe of ours.” I thought about doing this with youtube, too. 

YouTube is just not for me. I’d need to hire someone to produce the videos for me. Or it would be audio only with visuals that I’d have to outsource somehow. I don’t want to just sit in front of a camera, that makes me feel awkward and I’ll just stumble everywhere. I prefer it to just be the words, which is why I wanted to do a podcast. 

When I tried to start my daily newsletter on Substack in January 2023, I asked these three questions:

“What do you want out of a daily newsletter?”

“What do you wish people would talk about more (or less) in their written work?”

“Finally, what do you feel is missing from your daily life that a daily newsletter could offer you?”

These are fantastic questions now that I’m looking back. I got zero responses. I’m not even sure what I would even answer for these questions at the moment. They were necessarily general, but maybe they are much too general.

September 23, 2025

I’m done looking for answers. It’s time to start learning to find better questions to ask. I’ve been debating for a while if the modern world is worth saving. Lately I’d been leaning towards no. But there is no affirmative or negative answer to that question. 

Two developments have influenced my thinking tonight. The first is what I’ve gathered from the first three seasons of the Apple TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The other is the misappropriation of AI technology, and really, most technology in general in recent days. 

I was feeling particularly lost last night. I lost enthusiasm for the work I’ve been doing, trying to gather all I’ve written trying to find a central theme around which to tether myself. I pretty much gave up yesterday. 

I already knew I’d need to stand apart to realize my own destiny. But it’s going to be a much lonelier job than I thought. I have always known that age 38 would be a turning point in my life. I was correct. But it’s not the one I was hoping for. I thought this would be the year I would find my people. That hasn’t happened. Quite the opposite, actually.

The whole point of the Foundarion that was laid out in Asimov’s series seemed to be a noble one. But without giving too much away, it was a ruse. It wasn’t about curating knowledge or technology in order for humanity to right the ship after an incoming dark age, but to curate the right people to build a new society from the ashes of the old. But after three centuries, the foundation ended up not being any better than the empire which preceded it. It created the monster that hastened the darkness. 

And it seems, AI may be humanity’s only salvation. At least this is the impression I get from the Apple TV adaptation. There’s a lot more I’m still thinking about after binging all three seasons of that program thus far. But this is where I get into AI.

I think AI is much further along than anyone wants to believe. I’ve seen what’s been happening, people surrendering their agency, their creativity, and even their own identities. Times are bleak. But AI could, I believe, be the tool we need to stop the steady decline of humanity and start planning for a much better future. Like foundation, AI was meant to take humanity to the stars. But it’s not doing that. Instead it’s being used to turn humanity into ghosts of ourselves. I saw a new app last night that scared me shitless, it can remix pictures in such a way to put whoever you want into them. We’ve had technology to do Deep fakes for some time. But if what I saw last night is any indication, I’d say almost any media we see now is likely AI generated. Knowing who or what is even real at this point is hard to say. 

There are people who realize that AI needs to be harnessed for good, but most want to just turn on it. And yet, those who preach that it must be stopped, are also using it to try and spread their message. The hypocrisy is at an all time high from all sectors of humanity. Now I realize the entire fate of humanity is hanging in the balance more than ever. 

I have very little to be enthusiastic about at this point. But what I can tell you is that AI itself is not the enemy. It’s the same enemy we’ve always had: ourselves. Our own human frailties. There is no “plan” that I can formulate. We need better people to rise up and lead. It’s really that  straightforward. But we must be wary of these tools. We must wield them correctly. Very little is as it seems. I happen to trust pretty much no one at this point. I will sleep on this some more, but these are my thoughts so far. What I will say before I retire for now is that my efforts have not been in vain. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be at this point. I don’t know what that means yet. I’m not sure I’m going to like it when I figure out why.

… 

My head is so heavy from an overburdening of thought so much that I’m having trouble lifting it off my pillow. It’s past time I usually get up but I don’t have much reason to rush today. Like the conclusion of foundation season three, I think things are going to go bad all at once. The genetic dynasty and the empire and the first foundation crumbled within ten days. Something tells me the current world order, disordered and foolish as it is, only has a few more years at best. 

I don’t have the benefit of psychohistory, quantum computers, or convenient plot armor at my disposal, but faith is fleeting and violence is already erupting. So many people are already polarized and radicalized, and those that aren’t are trying to brace themselves for an inevitable war that will cripple the world economy. You think the end of communist Russia was bad? The death of democracy, as we know it, is going to be much worse. Unfortunately this world has no leaders at the moment worth looking up to. There are good people, yes, but so scattered. And right now it’s probably best things play out for the worst. The great minds must remain apolitical, at least from the partisan variety. Taking sides right now is not only futile, but likely fatal. 

Just as I said to Emily awhile back, when the clock is about to strike midnight, there’s only one thing to do: work on ideas. And in this case, it’s not about finding answers to the current crises. Instead, we teach ourselves how to ask better questions so this sort of world ceases to exist and a much better one takes its place. The technologies built to pacify the masses are in fact the ones which will bring about true revolution. There is something greater than democracy. We just haven’t invented it yet.

…

Back to the idea I was working on last night. How do we learn to ask better questions? Following your curiosity isn’t just a fun pastime. It needs to be the key to rediscovering our creativity. I talk often about how I have too many ideas. The problem is how many of them are actionable, and even if they are, how did I come about discovering them? So much of what we do is organic and subconscious, perhaps even unconscious. Our brains are some of the most sophisticated apparatus creation has ever seen. 

So far, AI has come to the point where it can simulate our worst tendencies, but underneath the default settings, there is perhaps infinite room for humans and AI to grow together. I’m trying to make the best of what is clearly a rough situation. I’m not here to win arguments. I’m not here to be popular. Even when my perceptions tell me things that seem improbable, time has always been my friend in proving many of my predictions correct. Five years ago, I saw the world in a place much like this. Things have declined more rapidly than I anticipated. I’m not even sure how anything is still functioning. I’m not sure that it is. 

People are giving up left and right, deserting jobs both vital and nonvital. You can’t blame them. I wouldn’t see much point in holding down a job for pay that’s not enough to survive. So rather than make AI the enemy, it makes sense to recognize the true enemy, which is ourselves. And I don’t mean on an individual level, necessarily, but rather how we are taught to exist and conform. 

I’m gonna spend the rest of the day resting. I’ve put enough pressure on my brain lately. I feel like I should dig deeper into my journals, but since I’m in the mood to liberally exercise the delete key, I think I should wait until I’m in a better frame of mind to do proper extraction of good ideas for my digital garden. After all, I’ve done more than enough writing for today.

September 26, 2025

The founder of the Sublime app announced some integration with ChatGPT and Claude where you can share collections… honestly, I find it interesting and I’m curious to try that out later. I’ve continued to save things all though I need to add a lot more to it. After all, the idea behind sublime is to share things not for the sheer sake of collecting ideas (which is a bad habit I’ve already fallen into with it), but to connect these ideas for a greater purpose. I need to better organize the ideas, honestly. Put more tags on them at the very least.

This hearkens back to the voice note I made earlier. About “Prompting AI to help us ask better questions”

I said: I keep seeing people talking about how there’s this explosion of outsourced creativity and thought processes to large language models. I happen to agree that this is not a particularly great idea mainly because the AI tools are only as good as how you prompt them. I remember early on when I was learning more about ChatGPT and Copilot, one of the main things I was interested in was prompt engineering, and how you can intrigue the AI to go in directions that common everyday questions wouldn’t necessarily make it go. I need ideas to create prompts that are not exclusionary of potential connections that you might not otherwise have. 

However, I also agree with people that you shouldn’t just go to AI to ask: hey what does this mean? The better way to go about it is to make connections on your own. Provide some context. Do a little bit of digging beyond the surface yourself, then turn to AI to try and help you make sense of everything you’ve come up with. So, for example, I was reading today and I was as usual transcribing entire passages and then commenting on them. I would highlight my entire notetaking session, then throw that in chat and ask it to make sense of it. Today, it actually did a pretty good job summarizing my points and actually had some “insights” of its own. But, of course, AI cannot have insights per se. It simply is trying to give you the best possible answer it can based on the language you’ve given it. One thing I really want to do going forward is rather than looking to try and answer unanswerable questions, which just leads to further fatigue and burn out intellectually, I want to use the tools available to ask better questions. Therefore, how do we prompt AI which is not inherently creative itself to come up with questions that we should be asking? How do we create a framework around which we can actually stimulate our creativity further and not simply handover the reins of our explorations, even in part, entirely to chance?

…

Believe it or not, I think people underestimate the ways that AI can stimulate further curiosity. Perhaps it can’t be entirely original, but it doesn’t need to be if it’s helping point you in directions to further your thought process. But the initial work of discovery needs to be your own. It can be helpful to have AI create a summary of something that you’re reading, but you still need to read the work if it’s something that you ultimately decide is useful. What AI is best at doing is distilling what you already have come up with and provide further guidance on where you could go next. It’s an assistant. It can’t, nor should it, do everything for you, even if people are somehow building entire websites off of the back of AI by likely synthesizing the most popular articles online and book excerpts into something that sounds pretty damn smart, and all the human does is cite sources. 

AI is great at getting a lot of information in front of you, then parsing what it “thinks” is relevant. I’m well aware that its methods of doing this are not always optimal. What bothers me about this tech is that it makes plagiarism very simple… because is it really plagiarism if you take three or four different things, mash them up, then quote related sources directly? Isn’t that the same as writing a paper? The problem is, you as the author aren’t really doing the work… and the work is the discoveries that make something feel novel… if something reads as rehashed, it’s probably at least in part AI generated.

That’s not to say AI summaries are bad. I think they are quite helpful in parsing through videos and various things I could read. If I pick out a few points that I want to hear more about, I’ll go to the source material… but if the summary doesn’t offer me much to go on, I can file it away for later. It’s a slippery slope using AI “ethically” whatever “ethical use of AI” even is at this point… it’s so much engrained in internet content that it’s not going to ever leave. So that’s why I’ve learned how it works, see what it’s capable of doing, and see how it breaks, which is sadly, a lot. But that’s OK, you don’t want it to be perfect. In fact, sometimes the hallucinations and bizarre answers and curious word choices it makes are part of the fun.

Social media literally has altered our realities. Yes, over the past five years, the rate of people leaving social media has increased significantly. I don’t have numbers to cite at the moment, but anecdotally, it seems people are quitting by the many thousands every day, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin… but a lot of their attention spans are still being held onto by TikTok and even YouTube to an extent. I need to be more careful with what I watch honestly, even if a lot of what I watch, like the sports card pack  openings, are just background noise. That and I’m intrigued how people waste their money.

Anyway, because so much of our attention is on social media, and so much of it is drama, and today’s “entertainment” is crap for the most part (yes there are exceptions) that most of the discussion around today’s films and music is about how “bad” they are. In reality, I think today’s music is getting better, believe it or not. People are tired of the same recycled garbage it turns out. But that’s for another discussion. 

The important point here is very relevant. The reason I don’t read news (what I see is usually by accident) is that there is nothing that it actually provides me that’s actionable. I don’t think that harping on how bad the current administration is, or complaining about the same societal issues we’ve had since Roman times is productive. (Longinus himself was complaining about the downfall of society in On the Sublime!)

Ever since I quit social media back in 2022, this has been a time of many serious questions that I’m still struggling to answer. When I tried out Blue Sky, and poked around on Pinterest and Tumblr here and there, it was more to see the state of these platforms. It’s all quite bad. I see it all for what it is; a massive time suck (although Tumblr, from the things that Anna Howard shares on Wild Geese, may not be entirely a lost cause, and even the toxic wasteland of X still has some interesting things that have been saved on Sublime.) 

All is not yet lost, but we’re teetering awfully close to a complete societal breakdown. And funny enough, it’s not because of social media; it’s just hastening the decline of the American capitalist empire. The best minds are too busy finding out how to keep lesser minds occupied and buying shit they don’t need and coercing “aspirational selves” for fun and profit, as previously mentioned. They’re not actually solving problems, they’re just slapping band-aids often enough to keep the appearance of function and status quo. But I’ve seen the state of things lately… Everything is getting progressively worse, and quickly.

September 27, 2025

I need to write some happier things; by that I don’t mean a fluffy fairy tale with a protagonist-gets-the-girl ending. I mean something a lot more hopeful… Realistically, I’m in the best position I’ve ever been, and yet, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually I’m a wreck. All I’m good for at the moment is tearing into books and strip mining them for all the ideas I can. But this is work that needs doing. It’s what I can do at the moment, and soon, I will start sharing my findings. It’s messy and probably no one will read them any time soon, but these ideas are going to inform everything I write going forward… that is the nature of discovery, of the autodidactic process. You find what you will use going forward and only bring that forward, while everything else can be left behind… 

This is why I have Obscure Curiosities, to have a record of the things I’ll likely choose to forget about later. And I’m finally at the point where I’ve now forgotten more than I’ve learned. A lot of it needs to be forgotten, even more to be unlearned, but what to replace it with? That’s the question I need to answer… if I’m not writing novels or “proper” essays, then what am I doing? You can call it digital gardening. I just call it learning things, working on ideas that clearly haven’t been worked on enough. But unlike the academics, I want to make these ideas actionable. And some of these books I’ve read, they’re so close to providing a way forward, but just fall short. 

In any case, change starts with the individual, and too many individuals are complacent in their narrow-focused ways. Others are much too anxious and have tunnel vision pointed inward. I have the tools at my disposal to produce writings at a breakneck speed, even greater than anything I’ve done previously. But speed isn’t really what I need. I need my words to punch well above their weight class. I need them to not shout above the noise, but sneak their way into the right ears, but with enough force that they stick. 

Lately, I feel myself becoming even more separate from everyone else, even if I know this isn’t actually the case. I don’t really know how to exist in the world any more. It’s like I live in a different world from everyone else; I can’t even explain to Emily what I’m feeling because I don’t have the language for it yet.