2025-12-07

Now that I'm doing my own thing, I've got more time on my hands to explore interesting posts, videos, books, etc. I've also resolved to put more of my thoughts here in this blog instead of on a variety of disparate networks.

A few days ago I came across a fellow by the name of Sylvan Franklin. I identify a lot with what his recent journey appears to be, but that story is for another time.

This post is prompted by The Addiction that hides in plain slight. In this post, I'll casually mix the target I am writing to.

One point Sylvan brings up is that many of us may have an addiction to information. I certainly do. I noticed this a few months ago, when I realized I would hesitate to start house chores or cooking until I found something interesting to listen to on my Bluetooth headphones.

One day, on a podcast I don't remember, I heard someone ask the rhetorical question, "how much information is enough?" The context implied the full question was, "how much information is enough to equip you to do what you think you need to do?"

I opened that question up more and realized the next implication, that I didn't actually have an agenda with any of that information. I didn't want to do anything with what I was "learning." In fact I told myself I was learning, but in reality I just wanted to be entertained. Learning is evidenced by a change in behavior, but I wasn't changing much. The gotcha was that every now and then I would consume something that resonated deeply with me--made me feel understood--or did change the way I thought and lived. What I became addicted to was the next revelation. But there is no promise of when or where this will come, much like there is no promise of when you may see something actually transformative while doomscrolling, be it a social media feed or a collection of proverbs.

In the end, I was just saturating my brain, hardly giving anything enough time and thought to personalize it.

You can tell when you've personalized something when you can communicate it to others without referencing anyone or anything else, that is, by appealing to personal experience and not authority, without saying, "the Senior Architect said...," or, "The Meditations say..." Now, let us not plaigarize, and if you want to cite the source, that's fine, but you haven't personalized something if you appeal to the source. One of the things I appreciate in Sylvan's recent videos I've seen is his self-awareness about his journey being personal.

"what I have to do is, do the hard work of coding everyday, or working on the math everyday, or reading philosophers everyday and thinking about them"

You already know the path forward! But perhaps you are not convinced yet. I'll elaborate below, but in the end, only you can convince yourself.

"What got you out of information consumption? I'm looking for the One Trick (tm)."

If you only look externally, you will be searching unsatisfied forever. As you say, it's like climbing a mountain. Looking externally has its benefits, but ultimately you will see others' techniques that worked for them. The catch is that the mountain you climb is your mountain. You can see their mountains from your mountain, or sometimes at least imagine their mountains. Your terrain might look like their terrain at times, but ultimately it is not their terrain.

The trick is to know who you are and where you are going. Knowing this in itself is a journey, and unless you concern yourself with cosmology, is perhaps the journey.

Who you are means understanding yourself--your nature, your past, your desires, etc. Consuming information externally is useful for bootstrapping your search. For example, Zen--as you've also discovered--and the "noting" meditation technique worked well for me, and understanding this and that about behavioral psychology was also useful. The trigger to look inward was looking outward for answers to questions about myself until I realized I am the only one who knows me. That, and after having asked {God|the Universe|whatever}, "what is my purpose," for so long, only to realize I am actually being asked that question and the asker is just waiting for my response. Coming to know who you are is often a long journey, perhaps never-ending, depending on your definition of finished. However, answers to who I am have brought me peace from mind, the mind being all I was trying to appease by some new toy theory to juggle, programming language to learn, or other distraction to concentrate on.

Where you are going, as a question, is, "what is your current goal?" If you have this agitation that your goals are distractions or are perhaps meaningless, also ask yourself, "why," regarding what your current goal is. Iterate on that until you've found something meaningful and satisfying to you and then go with it. Where you are going will naturally change over time, sometimes multiple times a year, sometimes once every 5 or 10 years, unless you are the rare type who pursues a lifelong mission that outlives you. But even then, you will likely have milestones along the way.

When we know who we are and where we are going, we can return to the deluge of information, but this time with a natural filter. We're here with a direction and a purpose. We take what is useful, we're thankful for all else but are not distracted by it or {time|compute}-enslaved to it. It's worth noting, it's useful to allow ourselves time to play and wander periodically (the search part of search-exploit, if you will). It's not about always filtering but rather about having the filter and the awareness to apply it as necessary.

The fact that you are already looking means that it is only a matter of time, so travel with a peaceful mind, fellow sailor!

Given what I understand about you so far, if you have not already read The Beginning of Infinity (David Deutsch), please do so if you're looking for any bootstrapping.

Aside:

"You program long enough and the patterns emerge, and you start to see things."

I hadn't heard of the Gang of 4 book until years into my software engineering career. When I read it, everything in the book I actually cared about was already familiar. I had developed it myself via the Feynman Algorithm. And I don't say this boastfully--I'm no genius. I just had problems and thought hard about how to solve them well until I solved them. One amusing thing I noticed, was that because I had derived the designs myself in-context, it stood out to me immediately when a peer appealed to the Gang of 4 in a, "well, I don't know, but these guys say..." way. Which is not The Way (tm).

Godspeed.