The Hard Problems
Generated via Stable Diffusion using DiffusionBee, the Openjourney model, and this prompt:
mdjrny-v4 style, a symbolic fugue on time, space, design, technology, and the occult, by Terese Nielsen
The hardest problem is learning how to live towards death - determining how to spend your finite time towards achieving your life goals.
Setting your life goals is on you - I won't pry - but how to go about achieving them is something I can discuss. How will you have confidence that you are going about achieving those goals efficiently or satisfactorily? If you are sincere about achieving your goals, you cannot afford to be aimless. You must chart a course. This is a tractable problem.
This is also a non-trivial problem. The challenge is the deluge of information without good tools for sifting through it. If you start looking for advice on being a great writer, you'll find enough information to consume years of your life. We can only navigate the expansive sea of knowledge by intuition.
I call this The Problem of Profusion. It can be broken into four interrelated sub-problems:
- The Problem of Discovery: What are my options?
- The Problem of Curation: Which options might I personally prefer?
- The Problem of Synopsis: How do I quickly understand whether or not I'd like to pursue a given option?
- The Problem of Memory: Have I inspected this option or something similar in the past, and if so what was my impression?
I find myself obsessed with the topic, partly because it confronts me every time I have to make a decision about how to spend time, but it is also quintessential yak-shaving – I have great goals, and in order to achieve them I must first architect a life-path, and before I can do that I must learn life architecture... I'm making an apple pie from scratch.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
A primary interest of this blog will be an exploration of these problems and their solutions. The final result will be a personal knowledge management application of vast temporal scope, to help manage these concerns across a lifetime.