At various points in my past, I’ve wanted to be a philosopher, therapist, teacher, pastor, and technical guru.
This desire for wisdom is from a journey where I’ve lost the destination. I’d prefer everyone live in harmony, happily working together in their own way, having the grace to accept each other. Somewhere along the path of trying to find answers, I think I’ve forgotten what it means to live simply.
My renewed purpose in life is to draw people to the only place that gives meaning and answers. I believe it only comes through submitting to Jesus Christ.
- Without it, we are simply all in a protracted state of denying and awaiting death.
- I still haven’t figured out precisely how this implements, though, and am still seeking it.
I don’t care if I make money off what I make. My goal is maximum effectiveness and reach. It means I’m too dogmatic to become billionaire entrepreneurship material.
This attitude excludes me from the American aristocracy. I happily see it as worth selling my labor or renting out my brain.
Why I Write
I write, but probably not for the same reason most people do it.
1: My understanding
I deeply value wisdom, and that drives most of my purposes in life:
- I believe we should treat ideas with the rigor and attention of math or law: with precision and delicacy.
- At the same time, I always pursue understanding everything so I can explain it in plain English to a 12-year-old.
- Therefore, beyond actual understanding, I want to feel like I understand, which is setting a far higher bar for myself.
Without exaggeration, I have consumed thousands of elements of crap from the internet, mostly nonfiction:
- Hundreds of books and book summaries
- Hundreds of TED Talks
- ~10,000 Hacker News articles
- Hundreds of online videos.
I would have better used my time touching grass and watching sunsets.
I have a crippling fear of impostor syndrome. This drives me to understand something deeply to know how best to decide and act. Jargon is often shorthand for otherwise simple ideas, though it can be useful for specificity. We frequently engage so heavily in our craft that we forget this.
While all ideas come from other ideas circling back to nature, most in-depth concepts sit in an abstracted logic vacuum. If I can connect those ideas to more practical things, I can understand how the best minds understand it.
I’m very trend-resistant because I hate learning useless information. I’ve noticed most implementations move around every few months or years, but their abstractions frequently don’t change at all.
Thus, I write to make sense of things, which becomes more difficult as aging unveils the truth’s complexities.
2: Others’ understanding
I know what I make can’t compare to the absolute brilliance present in the smartest minds of our time. I’m a less visual and less talented creator imitating Up Goer Five and Reddit’s ELI5. This entire approach is a long-distance variant on Whole Brain Teaching.
All I’m good at is keeping things precise while summarizing and simplifying.
A huge portion of my past writing is a failed attempt. I’ve downgraded most of that content to a simple and dynamic public commonplacing.
All that consuming, though, isn’t a total waste, and some of my opinions do matter. I act knowing God will capitalize on those opinions, and hope that history will forget my former text-based blather.
3: My fear of the Unknown
I’ve neglected to place the following in front of every assertion I make:
- “I believe…”
- “I don’t entirely know 100%, but…”
- “I’m convinced of this, but I can’t prove entirely that…”
- “From what I understand…”
- “I’ve read something that said…”
When I speak certainty into existence, I have power over it.
I also don’t have the confidence I used to, though. Every logic implementation is a slice, and some logic slices the wrong place. I’ve made some severe mistakes, and am now more afraid to carry that certainty into the future.
Even then, my purpose isn’t always clear:
- Starting in 2014, I had identified as the Philosopher Accountant, but I gave up on that sometime around 2018.
- I once tried to fight the over-information age, but 2024-2025 has broken me, and that purpose has died with it.
My story is still unveiling itself as I go, so I’m not sure what to live for at this point. I may just be wasting your time. These days, everyone has a podcast, so I recommend you explore someone else if they’re more interesting than me.