This project came from a conversation I had with a friend about how to properly use written notes and Google Docs to amplify the thought process, and the ways in which the appearance of organization, clarity, and infinite space can deceive and hurt us.
I’ve recently found myself benefitting dramatically by writing very large documents that expand through all possible thought for a given idea or large decision, yet still, somewhat scared of it. The degree to which writing things in a document in a ‘clean way’ seems to calm my feeling of confusion, ambiguity, or doubt is frightening: is this clarity or only the feeling of it?
There are many times in which sitting down, closing your eyes, and thinking about the problem in your own mind is extremely important. I’ve found myself occasionally going to the Archimedes Banya (of which I would strongly recommend) and sitting for hours in the various steam rooms and pools thinking about important questions.
While indubitably productive, I found myself frustrated with the amount of “RAM” I had in my head, feeling like I couldn’t process the thoughts that weren’t purely subconscious, finding myself repeating things in my head and attempting to almost auto-regressively process them (and feeling like I was just a big organic language model).
This is an experiment in trying to provide the great benefit of mental tools like typing out thoughts or sketching on a whiteboard, without offering the often misleading nature of such, whether infinitely branching different ideas without penalty, leaning on visual structure and organization as a substitute for true clarity, or the danger of accidentally only copying down instead of thinking.