defining moving thought
an ethos, thesis, and nexus
But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2017 Nobel Lecture in Literature
moving thought is…
An incompressible expression of my identity, ethos, and interests.
A thesis for increasing human flourishing.
A nexus that connects projects which express these ideas with the world.
An incompressible expression of my identity, ethos, and interests.
Let me briefly describe every facet of myself at full resolution so you fully understand me. Just kidding. But shit, where the hell do even I begin?
I guess we can start with the training arc. This describes the progression of stories where the protagonist first encounters their main adversary and gets utterly defeated, enters a period of deep reflection and physical & spiritual training, then finally returns to prevail. What the protagonist really discovers through the training arc is their agency.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I live by the training arc, and that I’m obsessed with the training part of it.
People first discover the serenity that comes from completing a training arc in many ways. It’s being told you’re dumb, gruellingly reading the textbook cover to cover, and finally acing the test. It’s realizing that the career ladder was a substitute for self-worth, unwinding your traumas and forgiving yourself, and moving forwards with a lighter soul. It’s daring to be authentic and getting overlooked, quietly putting in the work for years, and reemerging on a different level of Maslow’s hierarchy.
For me, the training arc manifested most through feeling like a prisoner of my body, realizing that through knowledge, compassion, and peace that I could sculpt it differently, then becoming better friends with myself.
You might think this is overly dramatic. But this isn’t merely dressing up concepts to puff up obvious facts. It’s a deeper appreciation of how powerful your agency is when applied against reality.
So, how do I compress these ideas in a memorable and shareable way?
moving is meant to represent progression through the training arc, but also: change, fluidity, adaptability, physicality, rebirth, and agency. When you move through the world, good things tend to happen.
thought is meant to represent living an examined life. Because moving through the world isn’t enough - as things change and you respond to that change, you need to reflect on it to make sense of things. You’re like a silhouette trying to figure out your own shape and texture by bumping into things and thinking about it.
You need the motion and the thought together. Motion without thought is merely existing and doing gestures. Thought without motion is being trapped in an ivory tower of what-ifs, of replayed memories, forever spiralling in the past.
So — moving thought. That’s the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel that way to you?
A thesis for increasing human flourishing.
Humanity has a lot of technical problems it wants to solve. My hot take is that humanity must solve its communication problems before it can solve its technical problems. The reasoning for this is along the lines of: you can only understand something as well as you understand yourself, which involves effective communication - first with yourself, then with others.
And we sure as shit need to understand a lot more if we want to solve all our technical problems and get to the flourishing part.
So, communication is key. What prevents someone from communicating effectively with themselves and others? I believe this represents the dependency graph:
knowledge → compassion → peace → communication → understanding → flourishing
Knowledge about the world and the multitude of mechanisms that duly & unduly influences a person’s behaviour leads to Compassion because you learn how people are fallible due to causes they didn’t bring upon themselves, that perpetrators are often victims, and that scared people can do terrible things. Yes, this includes you.
Compassion for yourself and others leads to Peace because you see how you are fundamentally connected to everyone else so that all harm is self-harm, that your troubles on this pale blue dot are ultimately but quibbles, and you realize how your bad luck has often saved you from even worse luck.
Peace leads to Communication because you perceive things clearly without judgment, are able to play with ideas and inhabit perspectives without becoming a slave to them, and you have the headspace to stop and lend a hand to someone earlier on in the path.
Communication leads to Understanding because you let the other person speak for themselves instead of speaking for them in your head and so actually hear what they have to say, and you realize you are non-fungible through seeing the diversity of humanity.
Understanding leads to Flourishing because we operate in alignment and avoid the overhead, we optimize for the long time horizons needed to solve difficult problems by not exploiting each other for short-term gains, and we incorporate humanity’s collective multitude of goals instead of a few select individuals’.
Aight, cool — where does moving thought come into this?
The stuff before was long so let’s move quick here:
moving generates the knowledge to kick things off and thought builds the bridge between steps.
A nexus that connects projects which express these ideas with the world.
To be honest, I don’t want want to say much here, because I want to show not tell. But you’re reading the labor of one such project right now. So let’s just blur it out for now!
Below are descriptions of each project that are very difficult to see:
Every medium, be it text, audio, visual, software, or hardware makes some tradeoffs, so you can only express part of yourself through any given one. So to attempt to build a complete expression, I guess you need the intersection of it all. I also just have many interests and don’t feel the need to choose anymore.
moving thought is a single repository that connects all these projects back to their common ethos. Because each alone is fragile. In bringing them together, they are nurtured and strengthened. The whole greater than the sum of its parts.
To build this all means acquiring a ton of skills and producing a ton of output. Consuming a ton of content and remixing it. Skill issue. A lot of time & energy. Ars longa, vita brevis.
I have lots in the works and this time it feels different. But it still might not pan out. Didn’t I chicken out last time? Yet… I feel I’ve discovered a strength here - that I’m able to start over. I’m able to look myself in the mirror and keep coming back.
And if I do, I hope to see you there.
Spencer