Scratchpad

• Most criticism hardly engages with foundational premises

• Extreme intensity does not equal instability

  • Despite my writing, I am quite content and okay with life, and I feel stable.
  • I do have moments of intense spiritual and personal crisis, but I always emerge from being fractured more whole. Likewise, I have a good job, maintain friendships, go outside, etc.
  • It is why I can write "Lightning In My Veins".
  • This implosion and reconstruction has happened to me at least 30+ times now, so I am not bothered by it.
• We must confront criticism on its own with rigor and empathy, because it does come from a good place (mostly).

• Well-meaning criticism holds incredible latent value; logical errors, inconsistencies, etc.

  • The undertones are more valuable than the surface-level criticism.
• I must be willing to discard my thoughts, even those crafted over decades (if such come to be), without a care. Seneca would silently approve.
• If someone wishes to construct criticism for the sake of doing so, they will create imaginary problems regardless of rigor.

• There are undoubtedly many mental illnesses that do destroy a person and their ability to function. But sometimes it feels like any healthy deviation from normal is considered unhealthy and must be fixed. Surely this is a fallacy and we may find balance?
• I care for people above all as the guiding principle of my life. But some people I see cast away as ill just make wonder if they see the world more clearly than I do. I can hold this thought against wanting to provide mental health support to those that need it.
• Clarity and dysfunction sometimes coexist
• Have you noticed everything I write in this post justifies my own existence as it currently is? We are the most unreliable narrators.

• To be whole in modern life is either a secret or a miracle.
• Urgent things are scarcely urgent outside of government obligations.
• Survival is common; living is rare. But how does anyone know if they are living?
• Maybe living is nothing more than knowing that surviving is not enough.
• Paradox is not contradiction, and to be human is to be breathe paradox. This is humanity.
• Knowing the frequency of our wrongs precedes living.
• Death is a fiction of the future tense.
• Philosophy is centered around application to life, not abstract ideas.

• Network calls require reluctant acceptance. The portals to hell.
• I must bonk any junior engineer who argues we should introduce a network dependency rather than using an in-process tool, especially for our small scale of operations…
• Corporate engineering is 99% maintaining facades, 1% technical skill
• The bar for interviews is in heaven, the bar for avoiding termination in hell.
• I believe state is a constructed idea, and that we are missing a programming language that is truly event sourced at its core. OTP enables event-based architecture, but what about event sourcing in the language itself?

• We should love difficult people, for they are human.
• Sometimes the manifestation of love is distance.
• If you must go no contact with family to molt into yourself, do it with love and care and grace, even if only in mind and spirit.

• We demand deviations from the normal to reduce themselves while alive

• Yet we romanticize these same figures when dead

  • Nietzsche
  • Weil
• Dead figures can not challenge hierarchies and structures
• The distinction of genius and madness is of physical, mental, and moral distance
• Society commodifies the neutralized

• Most try to hide behind palatable ideas, avoiding discourse
• The most influential are those who, sometimes unfortunately, are bold and decisive with their ideas. Courage.
• Are you willing to die for your ideas? If not, why do you have them?

• Power is creation, the will to incarnate a new reality
• What is mistaken for power - military force, oppression - is a process, not the output

• There is no restoration to the original state of things in the face of affliction
• Only grace is the antidote.

• Clarity is the highest human good
• To attend to something in stillness is the most pure form of love. This could be for another human, a subject, a book, etc.

• P1. If a person reveals they are capable of deeply violating emotional safety, they are now unsafe.
• P2. If a person is unsafe, then openness is no longer possible.
• P3. If a person denies their harm or fails to show deep remorse, they are likely to repeat the behavior.
• P4. If I continue to engage with a person who may repeat harm, I am placing myself in unnecessary danger.
• P5. Safety is a prerequisite for love, vulnerability, and continued connection.
• P6. Most people do not possess the introspective or ethical depth to genuinely transform after harm.
• P7. If someone reveals their inner structure (e.g., by lashing out, saying something cruel, or projecting frustration), that reveals what they are fundamentally capable of.
• P8. I cannot unknow or unsee what someone has shown me they are capable of.
• P9. Apologies do not reverse capability.

Someone performs an action A that harms me.

I analyze A to determine whether it reveals fundamental information about that person’s moral architecture.

If A reveals cruelty, dehumanization, dishonesty, or emotional volatility, then:

• R1. That person is now unsafe (from P1)
• R2. They are now lower in my internal trust ranking

I attempt to determine if the harm was accidental, superficial, or reparable.

• R3. If they are unable to express sincere, reflective remorse, I infer they will likely do it again (from

Because I cannot unsee what they’ve revealed, and I no longer feel emotionally safe, I must exit. (from P8 + P4)

Silence is chosen not to punish, but to preserve safety and truth. (From P2 + P5)

• C1. I withdraw emotionally and socially from that person.
• C2. I do not express forgiveness unless I actually feel it.
• C3. I may remain cordial or polite, but inner access is closed.
• C4. I accept that I will likely never trust that person again, even if I wish I could.
• C5. I no longer express unfiltered emotional or intellectual vulnerability with them.
• C6. I do not try to convince them or fix them. They have shown me what they are.

• H(x) = x harms me

• U(x) = x is unsafe

• T(x) = x cannot be trusted

• R(x) = x shows remorse

• S(x) = I stay silent toward x

• W(x) = I withdraw from x

• F(x) = I forgive x

Then:

1. ∀x: H(x) → U(x) (from P1)
2. ∀x: U(x) → ¬T(x) (from P2)
3. ∀x: ¬R(x) → likely(H(x) again) (from P3)
4. ∀x: H(x) ∧ ¬R(x) → W(x) (from P4, P8)
5. ∀x: W(x) → S(x) ∧ ¬F(x) (from P5, P6, P9)

• The fervor of darkness, the joy of the corrupted whom corrupt
• Philosophy and contemplation is the preparation to die rightly

• I'm not sure why I am so consumed by the idea of people turned into things - degraded from their humanity
• Even before I read Weil, I wrote an essay in my English Comp 2 class describing how the way Grendel was portrayed in Beowulf, his connection to Cain of the Christian bible, appealed to emotional and theological biases. And that this reduced Grendel into less than a sentient thing, opening the gates of justifying eradication, a requirement of genocide.