I am Nuclear Fusion Alex now (2025-05-11)

• Archiving older things

Hello! Long time no post!

I’m planning on maybe doing a post a day for a week with my friend Simmo - feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t want to be spammed. (My friend Delia also started a Substack recently because of me, hehe. (My point here is that I have friends)).

So, (apropos of nothing), my first Online Alex™️ incarnation, the first thing I had a web presence for, was my love of “learning how to learn”. In November 2021 I made a very basic GitHub Pages blog with some posts based on my experience for a few years using Anki (the spaced repetition flashcard software) and a few other tools (Obsidian, Miro for visual notes, etc).

Because the universe is wonderful and insane, this project led to me getting a job that changed my life. I posted about my blog and “teaching you how to learn” tutoring on the Effective Altruism forum, ended up having some calls with a lovely guy called Ethan, who then went on to co-found the biotech startup Alvea and bring me along for the ride.

~1 year later, FTX’s collapse led to Alvea’s wind-down, and I took my severance money and embarked on a chaotic odyssey across multiple continents in a ~2 year span and ended up stumbling into Sasha Chapin’s deep okayness (as I wrote about here). (It’s been over a year and my baseline is still very different from how it used to be - I’ve been warned not to say this as it might piss off some Buddhists, but I think it was a “kensho” experience, a “taste of enlightenment”, also potentially AKA “stream entry”).

Anyway, my point is this — there was a time, which I call my “nuclear fission” era, where I was very “productive”. I was very into “self-improvement”, and systems like Anki flashcards, a “second brain” system, timeboxing, using Beeminder, etc etc. I call it nuclear fission because I was very productive, I learned a lot, it landed me my amazing job at Alvea, but it was also definitely kind of toxic (fission nuclear reactors use toxic fuel and create toxic waste; fusion nuclear reactors do not have this problem). Very left-hemisphere-captured (to invoke Ian McGhilchrist), very alexithymic, very “eeee there’s something wrong with me and I must work diligently to fix it by becoming Very Effective”.

With the end of Alvea also came the end of my ~9 year relationship, and from the rubble emerged an exhausted herald, holding a big sign that said “this way of living sucks dude!”. It became clear that the nuclear fission approach was no good, I was a workaholic, hiding from my crippling social anxiety, subterranean self esteem, and a desperately underdeveloped sense of self.

Attempting to cut a long story short, I then had a ~2 year era of “solar power”. I fully decommissioned the nuclear fission reactor and had to discover how to operate based on my own internal preferences, as opposed to workaholism and a desperate desire to prove that I am Okay. Consensus-ism pt1 was written in this time, where this way of living was starting to click (but still as a foregrounded, “I have to intentionally remember to do this” thing).

The thing about moving from toxic fuel to healthy fuel is that you will be much less productive for a while, and as an enneagram 3w4 (“The Professional”, YUCK), I found this very disorienting and fairly unpleasant. But I also had a very strong sense of “I’m not fuckin’ turning that reactor back on”.

So yes anyway, my solar power infrastructure gradually improved to the point where I could do good work at Refract, an IFS startup, and I soaked up lots of learnings by my engagement with the post-rationalist space, carved out a self-concept, became more of an adult, etc. It was great.

BUT GUESS WHAT THE POINT OF THIS POST IS THAT I’M NOW NUCLEAR FUSION ALEX NOW WAHOOOO

At the start of 2025 I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing with my life anymore. My interest in the post-rationalist “healing” space massively waned when I realised that I was absolutely “healed” enough (more than my wildest dreams!) post-kensho. I’d just spent ~3 months making ~50 youtube videos including ~23 original songs, which I stopped doing when I got a lovely fan email and realised that actually I don’t care about making songs or having people be moved by them (I was exploring the hypothesis of “maybe I should have been a creative” and what I think I’ve landed on is “no it turns out that my nerdiness and love of being useful massively trumps my desire for self-expression).

Really trying to be concise now. 2025 → I did a personal values sprint to determine some foundational values that I could orient towards (I’ve never really had clear long term plans). I discovered “I want to be a high-impact leader” as a potential north star. I did a rationality sprint. I did a strategy sprint. I applied for some awesome jobs (currently waiting to see if I got the job that I did an in-person work trial for next week). I surrounded myself (digitally, admittedly) with lovely supportive friends.

So basically the point of this post is this — now that the toxic waste has been processed, and a “grand national strategy” has been sketched out, and now that the Prime Minister or Supreme Leader or whatever I am in this janky analogy has some foundational values and self-knowledge, it’s actually safe to re-enter the overgrown land where the now-rusty fission reactor has remained, and say “you know what, there was a lot of great stuff in that nuclear fission reactor. Let’s retrofit it to work with cleaner fuel, and not have the toxic byproducts”.

(I think key retrofitting ingredients include: (1) know yourself and know what you enjoy and want to do (2) have clearly elucidated values and a mission statement (3) operate from a consensus-ism-y place where you only do things when you genuinely want to (vs self coercion), etc. (Have tried and failed at enough things that you know have a better sense of what you genuinely want to do, too, it’s interesting how I feel kind of “old” and “wise” now, lol))

So basically, I’m now being hyper-productive, learning an insane amount, super excited and agentic, super ready for the next chapter, really feeling like I’m poised for some amazing things. That’s the point of this post - fusion Alex, it’s great, I’m very excited.

The original point of this was going to be “here’s what I’ve been learning recently”, hence the thing at the start about how I first had an internet presence about learning how to learn. Because the point is that I threw away pretty much all of my systems during my solar power era, and it feels really amazing to return to them now with more wisdom, more vision, more agency, etc.

I want to write about what I’ve been learning, partly to help me make sure that I’ve really grokked the shits. But this post is long so I will leave it there.

Until next time

Ya boi

Alex