michael-dean-k/

Something about hyper-logging (capturing your mind in prose) feels desacralized when I see it as the grown-up development/extension of my AIM bio, or my original Facebook bio (which had a whole series of categories, like favorite movies, books, etc.). Why keep an extremely detailed and public log of my self and thoughts? I guess I see it like a change log of my evolving identity. That was sort of Montaigne's whole thing (perpetually in transit). I imagine the norm is to burrow into your shell of self for as long as possible, to avoid the confusion of drift, but I try to harbor a non-static self. I feel a cringe in sharing this self-congratulations. There's the tension.

I think I'm doing an irregular thing by obsessively documenting thoughts, and from my own perspective it does feel like I'm continuously evolving, but an outer perspective might see this as nothing more than a frivolous blog. It's likely that my whole arc is illegible. Some degree of it comes to surface, like my ever-shifting "career," but most of how any of us feel, think, and change is illegible to each other, except in extreme rare cases of friendship, and so the more idiosyncratic your path, the less anyone can understand you.

I suppose my logs could function as a private journal, but it would lose an important quality. While, there are some consequences of writing in public (a subtle self-censorship), there's something more important you gain: the stakes of knowing that your work could be read in the future, if not by a friend or stranger, then at least a future version of yourself. Whoever it is, if they care to spend the time to read, they would understand you more than probably anyone in your life. That slight pressure snaps me into a mode where I try to be coherent, articulate, and sometimes expressive. When I look back at my old chicken scratch journals, I almost always skim and skip and hate it. But when there's a slight care in crafting the language of my thoughts, it becomes something that outlives the moment.

And so if public writing comes with self-censorship, and private writing comes with a lack of stakes, then the way to go is semi-public publishing. It gives you both freedom and stakes. You won't grow your audience this way, but I think you will forge a sense of self and voice that you can bring with you when you try to build an audience, but that's really secondary. It's the self and voice that matters.

I have some neat prototypes for a personal website, but now I actually want to build a stable backend, one that can serve me for 5-10 years, or more (100-year hosting would be ideal), and persist among many different UI or platform changes. This means I’m trying to think forward to where the Internet could be by then. This involves extrapolating a current trend to its extremes, and even if you don’t know for sure it will happen, it’s good to have comfort in knowing you’re protected from extreme edge cases.

The one top of mind is the death of the open Internet. This goes way further than “the dead Internet theory” which only covers the proliferation of bots and slop. This is about bad actors being so leveraged that it becomes dangerous to have any public content of yourself, in text, image, video, or audio. ie: Any hacker or frenemy can clone you and do what they will. Or maybe a rogue government can analyze your psyche and determine your "loyalty score" is only 35% and shadow ban you from getting a mortgage. I will not get into specifics here of the likelihood of different cloning, phishing, or surveillance schemes, because all that does little but bring you to madness, but my point is that if you want your website to be a 5 million word 1:1 representation of your mind (in all it's vulnerability), it's worth designing for the most paranoid future possible (like how engineers design bridges for earthquakes that will likely never happen).

One response to all this is cyber-defense. At the absolute minimum, this means locking most things behind a gate where only the approved can get through. A more clever, technical solution is to share encrypted “coordinates” that represent the semantic nature of an essay, and then let people surf through prompting and approval gates. An even more extreme idea is a mostly-private site with a kill switch, which involves (a) signing in once per month to mark "I'm alive," and also (b) giving my wife a secret key to type in when I die, which then releases all private material. Obviously this throttles reach, but isn’t there psychological value to limiting your audience anyway? Montaigne wrote alone in a tower for a decade, and so if the approach is to use writing to steer you life and mind, at the detriment of audience growth, then this might be the way to go: a literary labyrinth accessible to maybe your 30 closest friends and anyone else via application who can prove they are not a ghoul.

The other alternative is to embrace the weirdness, that no matter what, we will all be rendered through a schizophrenia filter, with no choice but to relinquish control over the non-canonical or rogue versions of ourselves.

Here's a list of what I'm reading through May. The strategy is to gather a bunch of well-written anthologies and textbooks across different fields, read them on Kindle, highlight a lot, and then get into conversations with them (that part of the process is TBD):

• Alan Ryan, On Politics: introduction + chapters on Hobbes/Locke
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: Introduction + chapter on Montaigne
• Plutarch's Lives: introduction + chapters on Thesseus/Romulus and their comparison
• Russel Brand, A History of Western Philosophy: Introduction, Pythagoras, Liberalism, Locke, Hegel
• How to Read a Book: Part One (Ch 1-5)
• Collins Dictionary: The letter A (TBD, I only have this physical, but want to get back into language)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essais Vol 1-3: Starting with the abridged translation by Screech and then backfilling)
• Alexis de Tocqueville: introduction + Vol 2.1 Ch 1-3, 17; Vol 2.4 Ch 1-4,8,13,20; Vol 2.4 Ch 6-8

In addition to building a "classical" syllabus that I read, I figure my audio diet should be of a different nature, one that's as modern as possible. I'm going with the Moonshots podcast, with Peter Diamandis. This group of guys are probably more anchored in the future than anyone else I've found. It feels adjacent to the All In podcast format, but less business-focused, and more centered on futurism. There is a certainty among them that we are in the singularity, accelerating to a techno-optimist future, which is antithetical to the Neo-Romantic essayists (it is rare to find an essayist who is both a humanist and a technologist).

I do have to be skeptical of their worldview, however, for they are schmoozing among the elites building this stuff, and so they're likely to have a rosy-eyed view on how this might all fare well for millionaires, without realistically focusing on or caring about how it effects the daily lives. They do seem to harbor a certain fetishism about technology and progress, and a boyish fascination with going to space and uploading our consciousness, for maybe the simple fact that it's a science fiction dream beyond our current life. There's a Faustian sin in summoning the future for future's sake.

They also very openly want to live enough to live forever; if they can survive another 15-years, they are rich enough to have access to anti-aging technology. The whole premise of technologically cheating death is also a philosophy that feels disconnected from our history. But I wonder if you could make the claim that Montaigne didn't have the luxury of philosophizing about life extension. If we make shape our philosophies to justify our situation, then is our whole canon on "the importance of dying" only stemming from pains and fears of a low-tech society? I guess, intuitively, from a child's perspective, the idea of not wanting to die is a natural one, and to embrace it is the wisdom of an adult, but I suppose we're nearing a flood of new cultural debates stemming from a new reality where the immortality choice isn't theoretical, but real, which changes the whole calculus.

So the point of listening to a group like this that is openly "transhumanist" is to model the future, hear them out, but then take it one step further, and truly consider the moral and ethical implications of where all this is heading.

I want to be in conversation with my books. This was Montaigne’s whole thing. He did this for 10 years. I can’t help but think that Kindle/eBooks/digital reading is a better format for this. If I were only reading, ie: if I were retreating into a tower to retire and die, then I’d see the appeal of doing it all by hand. But this is maybe a 3rd of 5th or realistically 10th priority. I’m called to it, but given the range of things I’m juggling, efficiency actually does matter here. I know efficiency does bring invisible amputations, but also, if I’m not efficient here, I might just not do it in the first place. Since all my highlights sync to Obsidian, I can build a writing app that loads in highlights and then let’s me write directly to them.

I suppose the counter-argument is that I am juggling too many things. If I were really to choose, to pick the project I’d have to do, it would probably be to focus on building my business to support my family, but that also cuts me off from soul and spontaneity in the first place, and so this whole reading/writing for leisure thing is a healthy counter-balance.

A conclusion I’ve been sitting with recently is the very real idea of possibility that there is no eternal Heaven. I’ve known this rationally, but it’s always come with a, “yeah but there’s a DMT-adjacent afterlife as part of dying, where the 3 minutes pre-death feels like 300 years. That may be true, conditional, or false, but in the end we all end in blackness, back to dust. Yet, I’ve also now reconciled this with Christian theology; “The Orthodox Way” has gotten me to believe that this eternity thing is a massive unchecked axiom, and almost obviously a pacifier. ie: The existence of an eternal soul is something you have to build into your foundation, because without that comfort there would be an unbearable existential anxiety. But recently I've found comfort in the idea of dying, specifically, because if you can really accept the permanent end of everything, it brings a presence to the life you have. Maybe this is heaven. In any case, the point of a theology/cosmology is to properly attune yourself to your situation, and so if the lack of eternity brings you peace, doesn't that sort of accomplish the mission?

The value in a theology should be the direct effect it has on your character and being. The idea of a heavenly body prevents a boyish, primal, universal anxiety of our annihilation, but what good does it bring? ie: Is heaven a catalyst or xanax? What I mean is, if you accept Nothing, and really try to hold nothing in every frame of your being, and to realize the sadness of it all, but to not see it as sadness, but as a reminder, a shock for life and vitality and spirit and spontaneity, then doesn’t Nothing bring out a fuller you? One that will not wait to say what has to be said? And the whole DMT thing, does that not also demand courage and virtue of you? For if every frame of that Odyssey (and Odyssey really is the perfect word for it) is determined by the seeds sowed of your lived moments, then every moment is consequential. If the afterlife is not an eternal heaven, but a DMT Odyssey that mirrors your soul, then sin is consequential! It's hard threshold to cross, and requires a lot of work. The Christian eternity, alternatively, has a bunch of easy thresholds. Are you baptized? Are you generally a good person? (ie: have you not stolen or murdered?) Good, you’re set for eternity. These are weak standards! Think of Montaigne’s scrutiny. We are all wicked beasts, self-deceiving, and we flounder daily, multiple times, and we scrounge our potential, and we shy away from glory and courage and such, and are those all not damnations? Should we not see them as damnations? Should we not expect greatness within ourself, and see that not as shame, but as a call to personal glory? I suppose the greatest call to adventure is to be a hero, to “save” the Other, whether it is your family, or community, or however large a concentric ring you aspire to help, and is to be a saviour not the Hellenistic pre-Judeau name, “Christ?” Should we not aim to be a Christ to the extent that we can? I find the more I withdrawn from Christianity, the more I am drawn to Christ.

I think I’m close to making a breakthrough here, but to follow through would be something like a rupture in my charisma and actions. And through writing, I can do it. I think years 1-17 were a phase of coddling. puberty and ego. From 18-35, I went through my initial Maslovian initiation (lol sry, refers to "Abraham Maslow," a psychologist). But from 36 on, this could be another era, one where I strive to be radically aware and honest and beholden of the true nature of reality, that this all really is a fleeting dream, that death brings Nothing, a true annihilation of Ego, but I am not I, as in, the true I is not the self contained within small Michael, but a parcel of the greatest It, the universe, and I welt melt into a dust that is eternally churning, recycled into food for worm swarms for millions of years until I aid in the ascension from the Earth into some other marvelous species. The fact that I am a human, now, in this very moment, IS, heaven. This is the pinnacle, the is the realization to carry from room to room.

(Edit: To synthesize all this, I find comfort not in the eternal Ego, but in the eternal Engine, as in, some force outside our universe that continuously generates new space-time fabrics and all life within it. To realize that you are not separate from the Engine, but are one with it, and even on the its cutting edge of its biological complexity, is to appreciate and identify with the whole enterprise of Life. Knowing that life will continue, despite the extermination of species and the heat death of this particular universe, is a better kind of immortality.)

On reading Montaigne, I want my writing to be far more honest. As in, in the face of death, it really does feel worthwhile to capture the edges of your soul and psyche onto the page, the things not brewed into your public-facing personality, because then you die with yourself trapped, and it’s as if the inner you never really lived.