2025-08-10
I read this really great Substack post yesterday:
- “CRANIOTOMY: Dissection of your Human Condition”
- (Discovered it thanks to a reply to this tweet)
It’s a really good bit of rhetoric
I say rhetoric because, it’s clearly written to be very persuasive, and in my new self-described Kegan 4 state, I’m wary of being immediately swayed by sexy rhetoric and diving straight into someone else’s prescriptions
So that’s why I’m here, to do a me-focused thing. What personally resonated from the first reading? How did it relate to my own life? Do I want to consider making some changes as a result of reading the post?

1. What I took away from my first reading

No one wants to waste their life

I found this section soothing and compassion-generating re: my frustration with my family

AKA the importance of, the profundity of, the flow state
Vervaeke talks about this too, in one of the early “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” posts → humans love the flow state, it feels great. It’s a profound signal of things going well. It’s actually the “success criteria” of participatory knowing. To be fully in flow, to be absorbed, to be skillfully interfacing with the affordances in your environment, to have profound agent-arena fittedness

Airpods are kind of insidious
Unlike the ipod years, where you’d have to untangle the wires and sync stuff etc. With airpods it’s very easy to use them all the time, whenever you’re making a cup of tea or going to the toilet or going on a walk, etc. They couldn’t be more convenient, truly

Wake up, check twitter, check messages, listen to a voice note, send a voice note. Put a podcast on whilst I make breakfast. Get to laptop. Flashcards, check email, check Slack. Go on twitter. Prioritise day. Multi-task, messenging apps open or a keyboard shortcut away. Refresh email, feel overwhelmed, lock in for a pomodoro. Make another cup of tea, listening to podcast. Etc etc
There’s constant micro-context-switches happening throughout the day
A thing that the Bonesaw post points to that I really like is depth of concentration, and unity of awareness. Cultivating the flow state, and protecting it.

Why do I check my emails 20 times a day, despite not wanting to reply to any of them? Why not reply to them ever 2 or 3 days, clearing the decks and then refusing to look again?
One answer is → because it’s not the default behaviour. There’s no effortless way to tell your computer “I only want to be able to access emails during email time”. Conversely, there is an easy keyboard shortcut to go to my email client, either via spotlight, or via my window manager. Multi-tasking is baked in, single-tasking, deep work, is a constant struggle

Why listen to podcasts during any down time? Why is making a cup of tea unstimulated so scary?
I’ve known for ages that the constant comedy podcast usage is probably dumb. I’ve read “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, I’ve read Infinite Jest (twice!). But, idk, I don’t have access to good in person connection, is my reasoning - why, am I supposed to be totally isolated? Surely laughs with my parasocial fake friends is better for my brain? It’s good to laugh!
- I think there’s truth in this. But there’s also truth in this - I’ve probably listened to enough comedy podcasts. I know where they lead - they don’t cumulative, there’s not that much to be gained, long term. And perhaps their value in keeping loneliness and boredom away is actually counterproductive - perhaps loneliness and boredom would be very useful. There’s an obvious way in which listening to podcasts is a rejection of the current moment - “this isn’t stimulating enough, this isn’t fun enough, I can’t just brush my teeth without being entertained, that would be a waste of time, why not multi-task?” But there’s a depth of experience in being present. And there’s a unity of experience in always single-tasking, treating the day as an unbroken sequence of events that you are fully present for (or at least, endeavouring to be fully present).

My airpods are now hidden in the shed
My apple watch is turned off
- Notifications on your wrist - why?
- Sleep tracking - why? I can tell if I’m tired or not
- Fitness tracking - I do like being able to see my cardio health. But if I work out and swim for a few months, I’ll get more fit
My iphone is downstairs
- I put my iphone in its box, and put a post-it note on the box, and wrote what time it went in the box. It went in the box at 8pm, and I got it out of the box at 9am, after waking up early and going on a walk with no technology on me at all.

I’ve been aware for a while, especially since starting at my contractor job, that I’m juggling far too much, day-to-day. Juggling a bunch of things and never really making progress on anything. Wild amounts of procrastination on certain admin-y things.
I’ve also been aware of the ridiculousness of my comedy podcast habits for months, and half-hoping for something to nudge me into giving them up
I haven’t done anything radical as a result of the rhetoric. I haven't bought hundreds of pounds worth of “minimising the pull” equipment. I’m just running some free experiments and seeing how it feels
So far, I’ve been slightly bored, dove into some aversive tasks in a flow state-y way (taxes), locked into writing this post (and linked posts, like Airpods are kind of insidious)

Make batching and solo-tasking easier
- Block messaging apps from my phone and laptop for certain hours of the day?
- Set up more ruthless entertainment blocks?
  - Currently I can only access youtube and reddit for 30 mins a day, but this keeps them as things that I think about daily. Maybe I could e.g. make them things I can only access 3 times a week, or something
- Batch and timebox more, somehow, idk how… I don’t like too much routine, like “you will always do this task at this time every day”. But perhaps some version of this is worth it?