The infamous Hacker News. It’s rss-like tech news aggregation format and community of software engineers, project managers, and other tech-adjacent commenters offers an experience lacking in most social media platforms. In some cases your browsing experience can leave you with some rare insight from a hardened industry veteran. More often than not, you end up reading some of the most insane takes from the dumbest smart people you could ever imagine. Just off the cuff, one article about math led to an argument about the semantics of zen spirituality and peeling potatoes. Honestly it’s just stunning to read what incredible insights our best and brightest knowledge workers have on life:

If you are peeling the potatoes and have a bit of whole-hearted potato peeling and then immediately go off “wow, I was really focused there, what Zen potato peeling!” for a minute, well, those thoughts are not Zen spirituality. It’s a common problem with reading or listening to stories about whole-hearted activity - one fills up with “Zen thoughts” for a while.

Is this person correct? It doesn’t matter. Every article posted to Hacker News is filled with banal arguments with varying levels of humor.

One topic that is posted on Hacker News weekly is “Zettelkasten” a note taking technique where notes relate and link to each other. I can’t help mentioning one of the more psychotic systems I found in one of these posts: a template for a “Personal CRM” where you list out every contact you know, their relations, status, last contact, and what the last contact contained. Whoever wrote this article should really reconsider what they’re trying to accomplish here. It cannot be healthy to compartmentalize relationships like this. People are not data points on a spreadsheet to keep track of.

There was one positive thing out of all these note taking articles. Not the note taking system itself, but a comment that really made me reflect on many areas of my life. It was a reply to a criticism behind the intent of the system itself:

People love doing things that feel like work, but aren’t.

I’m terrified of picking up new systems like this without having a purpose. I could spend hours building out a graph, admiring all of MY knowledge, but not really have any intended use for it other than telling others about it and how I’m going to use it someday.

The reply was as follows:

You’re in a perceptive loop concerning this particular object (systems like this) then. You see future-self behaving as past-self did.

You can keep doing that, looping. People who are natural contingency planners do this all the time–they map their past onto future-self. Flexing this muscle because it’s strongest.

However this is also a good way of preventing yourself from re-exploring new objects through a different lens.

Or asking people, “here’s what I tried–what are you doing differently?”

If you can treat it as a skill with unlimited outcomes per-experience, rather than a forced repetition of past-self, you get a huge mental plasticity bonus. Once you’ve gotten to that point you can also find yourself building your own tech with fewer crippling concerns about future outcomes. It’s a great unlocking method.

While I’m skeptical about the validity of this comment, especially that last paragraph, it made me consider the concept of “looping.” Age regression is a well-documented case of “looping,” or coming back to what the mind and body know as comfortable. We make fun of freud all the time for pointing this out, but “looping” is an insidious trap in almost every areas of life. In the professional world, it manifests itself in a sort of “solidified seniority,” where veterans in the field are prone to missing things because they think they’ve seen it all.

In my eyes, the only antidote to looping is acknowledgement. Without a clear awareness that you are regressing, you will never escape your arrested development. Alternatively, embrace the warmth that walking the treadmill of knowing holds.