What am I doing on this website? 2026-03-15

• Log per day - 2026
• 2026-03-15
• Just had the thought of, “normally I just say ‘oh, I’ve been writing on my website this morning’”, but that’s not the like, terminal thing that I’m doing. It’s not just writing for the sake of writing. So what is it?
• Is it “doing philosophy”? That feels clunky
• So, I gave Claude the Chanda page as an example, and this prompt

Prompt

I just had this thought:

“I could describe a lot of what I do as “I’m doing philosophy”. I’m not just writing on my scrapbook, yes, that’s the action, but it’s not the terminal thing. What I’m actually doing is philosophy, trying to improve my life philosophy. ”

Are there better terms for what I’m doing, when I spend time writing about this stuff? I’ve been doing this for 80 minutes today, so clearly from a “revealed preferences” place, I’m doing something deeper than just “adding to a website for the sake of it”

Reply

This is a great question, and I think you’re right to sense that “writing on my scrapbook” undersells what’s actually happening. A few terms come to mind that might fit better than “doing philosophy,” depending on which angle resonates most.

Sensemaking is probably the closest single word. It captures the active, ongoing nature of what you’re doing — you’re not just passively consuming ideas (like Sasha’s post), you’re metabolizing them, annotating them, testing them against your own experience, and trying to arrive at something personally actionable. It’s a term used in knowledge management and complexity theory, but it also just describes what you’re literally doing: making sense of things.

Personal epistemics or applied philosophy might work if you want to emphasize the rigor side — you’re not doing armchair philosophy in the abstract, you’re trying to figure out what’s actually true about how to live well, and then live accordingly. The document you uploaded is a perfect example: you’re taking Sasha’s tanha/chanda framework, cross-referencing it with Heidegger’s ready-at-hand/present-at-hand, checking it against your own guitar-learning experience, noticing where Claude’s generated “first principles” fell flat — that’s genuinely philosophical work, just applied to your own life rather than written for a journal.

Reflective practice is another option, borrowed from education and professional development. It foregrounds the iterative loop: experience → reflection → updated model → different action → new experience.

A few more that might land depending on your mood: life engineering (which Sasha himself uses), self-authorship (you’re literally writing yourself into a more coherent worldview), or even just inquiry — simple, unpretentious, and accurate.

The 80 minutes is the tell. That’s chanda, not tanha. You’re not grinding through this because you think you should have a website. You’re pulled into the activity of clarifying your own thinking. The writing is the vehicle, but the thing you’re actually doing is something like figuring out how to live — and that’s worth naming accurately.

What to call it?

• To me, sensemaking has always felt vague and unsatisfying, as a label. It sounds somewhat pointless, and pretentious.
• Applied philosophy also sounds kinda pretentious. But honestly, I’ve been talking recently about how it feels like my problems often are downstream of my own “bad philosophy”
• Sensemaking is probably the best phrase, I just haven’t read much about it. I imagine I could read one good primer and be like “ok cool, the label ‘sensemaking’ now points at a much richer thing in my experience, and I endorse it both as a thing-to-do and as a label”
• I think for me it’s lacking the action component. It should be making sense of things, and then taking better actions.
  • “Improving my epistemics”? That might be the best phrase… sensemaking sounds too, “making sense of stuff, and then stopping”, IMO
  • Improving my epistemics (and then, better actions follow naturally)