Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

One of the big conceptual losses for a post-Copernican worldview is the figure of the Heavens. The Heavens appear in both Eastern and Western philosophy as a figure of ideal, abstract frictionless energy and direction. And thus the Heavens can provide a warrant to speak of metaphysical processes that are fundamentally unmotivated by, and unresponsive to, terrestrial concerns. The obvious conclusion must be that humans only access one mutable and mortal aspect of energy and intelligence.

I think the version of GTD that I'd really love would be Tao instead of Zen.

I'm not a samurai with an elegant and seamless integration of purpose and energy.

I'm a mossy rock disintegrating under a waterfall and my spontaneous inconsistency is the authentic source of my mossy genius.

What I'm suggesting is that there should be a gentler gradieny for adoption of some personal mgmt stuff.

Let me use one for 3 weeks to plan a kid's bday party without having to learn the arcana of the entire system.

Let me give this thing a road test without first handing over the keys to my entire life!

I think a useful approach woukd be to have a systemic backend, a recommendation engine serving up suggestions, and a lifehack-y frontend, or something like Oblique Stratagems.

I think it's kind of a shame that personal mgmt systems seem to be packaged in 2 forms: it's either "lifehack" micro-level stuff like Pomodoro or "systemic" macro-level stuff like GTD. The micro feels like trying to survive on hors d'oeuvres, and the macro feels like being recruited into a timeshare.

I haven't looked very much into Personal Scrum or "Atomic Habits," but it seems to me a virtue if they can be tested as systems on an incremental basis.

I think that the voices that will prioritize the uni-stream are most committed to having automated recall, like automatic reminders, and who are most skeptical about human memory.
You know the old line from Emerson? "Every observation about the world is a confession of one's character."
As for myself, I hate being minded by digital systems and I'm doing pretty great with my meat memory. I'm not an execrable sinner held over the flames of ADHD by the acausal robot god-calender.

To my undrstanding "Getting Things Done" transforms problems into a request for one of these 3 inner resources:

1. Choice - which is no more than working your way through the decision tree
2. Courage - which is no more or less than engaging at any moment with the present task
3. Memory - which is no more than writing things down and reading them later

As far as record-keeping, I think it's been overstated how much GTD relies on a single stream of evidence and documentation. I believe that if you're a functional adult, you can probably read and write into two or three different "area" notebooks and recall from there effectively.

One thing I think I've misunderstood about "Getting Things Done" is the expectation that it asks for uni-stream task management. That may be something that the official materials demand, and that may be accurate to the system as it is practiced, but I don't really believe it's necessary to the essentials of GTD.

GTD must have reference to a "uni-stream" in relation to time and that's basically it. Everything must all come out of the same extension of lifetime that's available to you.

I'm going to start adding in the phrase "Regenerate response" at the end of my messages to get people to wonder whether they're talking to ChatGPT when they talk to me.

GTD stinks but I think that someone needs to make a GTD alternative that has a similarly high-level overview and doesn't require me to lock my entire workflow into your app.

It's dawning on me with sickening intensity that everything could be close to utopia if everyone followed their conscience for like 10 years.

The genius is the source of his own indeterminacy and the gods' necessity.

Mere necessity and sublime nonsense are both paths to Delphi.

In practice, I think this nicely sets up both postromantic projects of observational science (esp. in the Humboldt-Schiller tradition) and high criticism (genealogical criticism esp).
In pithy terms the cash-value advice for these is:
1. Wherever your freedom is crushed by economic necessity, there is the allure of the muses.
2. Wherever your sense-making decoheres into nonsense, there divine Pletho sits on your lips.

This is an inversion of what is normally considered a healthy and an unhealthy mind.
A normal view of a healthy mind might demand that one arrive at conclusions by reason based on the best evidence available.
But compared with the totally of evidence, or the infinity of time to be spent in reason, normal human conclusions are less than even a spark of insight. They are crude approximations.
This neo-romantic view says that humans must avail themselves of the perspectives that have infinity.

Both involve the transformation of the human self into a mirror.
The pastoral poet must make himself into an absolute mirror of the need everywhere around him. As the gods assign needs to the world, they will draw the Logos out of his plaintive song.
The Socratic madman must make himself into a mirror of language itself. As the gods gift language to the world so that they can selectively hear their praises, they will draw the Logos out of his schizoid discourses.

The theme to both is that the gods require the obliteration of everyday sense-making, because human reason stands in the way of divine Logos.
Pastoral creativity -- such as in the rude songs of the Shepheardes Calender -- comes on the condition of penury. Spenser could write because he was a "scholarship boy" and died "for want of bread."
Socratic creativity -- exemplified by Kierkegaard -- involves the acceptance of unreason, contradiction, &c with the faith that the gods will draw forth Logos.

Ya boi fell asleep thinking about Negative Capability and woke up with a neo-romantic theory of creativity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability
So here's what came to me in my dream. Creativity doesn't strive after mere "content," like the Library of Babel. Creativity strives after the highest levels of Truth. The problem for humans is that Truth is divine: it is the Logos.
The gods make humans votaries of Logos under 2 conditions: the Pastoral and the Socratic.

It's worth mentioning that I virtually never feel competitive. I feel competitive about really important adversarial situations in my personal life but basically I can't be bothered to invest in anything else. I don't play video games, I don't play cards, etc. I have my own athletics but those are for me. I think that playing for anyone else's interests is basically a giant bummer and ruins the sense of play.