working notes

Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual underground 

May 31, 2026 8:17 am

When the hammer works, it disappears. You just hammer. The tool recedes into pure function. Then it breaks. Snaps, slips, refuses. Suddenly, the hammer has an inside. A being separate from its use.

Heidegger noticed this first. But he left the human at the centre of the story. The hammer becomes visible when it fails because we stop using it and start examining it. The human is still the measure. Graham Harman says: that’s not what’s happening. The hammer was always more than its function. It withholds something from every object it encounters, not just from us. When two billiard balls collide, neither ball fully accesses what the other is. There is always a remainder. A depth that no encounter exhausts.

Object-oriented ontology builds from this: everything that exists has equal ontological status. Rocks, corporations, poems, electrons, the smell of rain, a fictional character, a memory, a hyperlink. None of these is more real than any other. None requires a mind to exist.

The philosophical name for what this pushes against is correlationism. The assumption baked so deep into post-Kantian thought that it barely gets named: reality is always the correlation between mind and world. We can only know things as they appear to us, never as they are in themselves. The human sits at the centre of ontology by default. OOO breaks the circuit. The world was real before minds arrived in it. It will be real after.

Timothy Morton added hyperobjects: things so massively distributed in time and space that they cannot be localised. Climate change. The internet. The totality of all plastic ever manufactured. You never encounter the hyperobject. You encounter manifestations of it. A heatwave, a thread, a bottle cap on a beach. The totality exceeds any contact. Which is true of smaller objects, too. Every object exceeds every encounter. The withdrawal is total, and it is everywhere.

What this does to the text is what pulls me.

If texts are objects, and they are, then a text withdraws. The essay you write is more than you intended. It has a life in other readers, other moments, other contexts that exceed your authorship completely. It interacts with other objects in ways you did not put there and cannot predict. The meaning that arrives is not the meaning you sent. This is not a failure of communication. It is the nature of objects.

Which might be the deepest reason the fragment is a legitimate form. Not because the essay demands too much, or because attention is scarce. But because the fragment enacts withdrawal. It offers itself incompletely, deliberately. The reader’s contact produces something that was not in the fragment alone. The encounter is the meaning. The text plus whatever it touches when it arrives.

Posthumanism needed this. It was always arguing for the decentering of the human. OOO performs that decentering at the level of ontology. The human occupies no special category. We are objects among objects. No more withdrawn from full access than anything else.

Humbling and liberating. And the two don’t need to be reconciled.

May 30, 2026 8:53 am

I love a good samurai film.

Not for the swordplay, but for what happens when an absolute code meets a world that doesn’t care about your code.

The best ones are philosophical texts in motion. Honour as ontology. Discipline as worldview. Violence as the moment when the story you’ve been living inside reveals whether it can hold.

Yojimbo. Seven Samurai. Harakiri. They’re all asking the same question: what do you do when the system that gave you meaning stops working, and walking away would require becoming someone you don’t know how to be?

The samurai doesn’t get therapy. He gets a choice that doesn’t feel like a choice.

That tension is what makes them still worth watching. The cage is beautiful. The cage is also a cage. And the film won’t tell you which matters more.

https://www.imdb.com/spotlight/samurai-cinema-crash-course/?from_app=ios&ref_=ext_shr_lnk

May 29, 2026 9:09 am

Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke, he wasn’t sure if he was a man who’d dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was a man.

What gets missed is what comes after. He doesn’t resolve it. He doesn’t land on an answer. He names the gap between the two states and sits with it. The transition. Not a man or a butterfly. The passing between.

The Western self wants resolution. It wants to know which one you are. It wants a coherent story and defendable borders. The Zhuangzian insight is that the wanting is what exhausts you. Fixed identity isn’t a discovery. It’s a project. It requires constant maintenance, constant defence against everything that would complicate the story.

What becomes available when you stop maintaining it isn’t emptiness.

It’s honesty.

You are more contingent, more provisional, and more interesting than the fixed story allows.

May 29, 2026 8:57 am

I’ve been working at the intersection of text and ontology long enough to know when something maps the territory I’m standing in. These seven propositions aren’t philosophy about text. They’re operating instructions.

Text is not a record of thought. Text is thought. The distinction collapses the moment you stop treating writing as transcription. You don’t capture ideas in language. You constitute them. The thought doesn’t exist before the sentence that makes it possible.

The map shapes what territory you can see. We pretend the map is secondary. It isn’t. The frameworks you inherit determine what becomes visible. Most of what you think is perception is actually prior categorisation. You’re seeing through someone else’s taxonomy and calling it reality.

Every label is a spell. Language doesn’t describe. It summons. The act of naming changes what it names. This is chaos magick’s insight and also basic semiotics. Words are instructions to the nervous system. Cast carefully.

The archive is the self. What you’ve written, read, saved, and annotated — that distributed textual body is not a representation of you. It is you, extended across time and surface. The self is not the biological container. It’s the pattern that persists in everything you’ve touched.

Reading and writing are the same practice from opposite ends. One is assembly, the other is disassembly. You write to think. You read to see how someone else thought. Both are the mind tracing structure in language. The direction doesn’t matter. The motion does.

Hypertext is not a technology. It is an epistemology. The link is not a convenience. It’s a claim about how knowledge is actually structured — recursive, associative, without a single entry point or linear path. The web didn’t add this. It made it visible.

The fragment is complete. The book emerges from accumulation, not planning. You don’t need the whole argument to begin. You need one true sentence, then another. The structure reveals itself in the pile. This is how thought actually moves when you stop pretending it needs an outline first.

These seven theses describe the practice I’ve been in for years without naming it this cleanly. Text-based ontology is building reality with the only substrate that scales across minds. The work is writing. The writing is the work.

May 28, 2026 5:20 pm

I was in the bookstore just browsing when a couple of thoughts passed through my mind.

The first one was: there’s just so much competition for your eyes.

Thousands of books sitting there, all trying in their own quiet way to get picked. Some have famous names on the cover. Some have those bold, clever designs that practically shout from the table. Others are just spine-out on a shelf, waiting for somebody to happen along and notice them.

And I kept thinking, how does a book even get found?

Most of the books I picked up I’d never heard of. I probably never would’ve heard of them if I hadn’t been in that bookstore, at that particular time, wandering down that particular aisle. Sure, there are the classics. There are the books everybody’s talking about. There are the ones that have already made their way into the wider conversation.

But most of them are just there.

Which made me think about my own stuff. My blog. My website. The things I write and put out into the world.

How do you make yourself known among all these other voices?

Then the second thought came in.

A book is such a static thing.

I don’t mean that in a bad way. I love books. I love holding them, flipping through them, seeing how someone has gathered all their thinking into one object. But standing there, picking up book after book, they started to feel strangely still to me. Finished. Closed. Like little sealed rooms.

And that made me want the web again.

The website. The blog. The living archive.

A blog doesn’t have to be finished in the same way a book does. It can keep moving. You can write something today, link it to something from three years ago, come back later and add another thread. A post can become a fragment. A fragment can grow into an essay. An essay can point back to the thing that started it all.

It’s not a book on a shelf. It’s more like a path through the woods. You make it by walking it.

But then, of course, the same problem comes back.

There are millions of websites. Millions of blogs. Millions of people making things, writing things, posting things, trying to be seen. The web might be alive, but it’s also crowded. A book can disappear on a shelf. A blog can disappear in the feed.

So maybe making the thing is only half of it.

You’ve got to make the stuff. You’ve got to follow the thread, keep showing up, keep doing the work. But you’ve also got to wave now and then. You’ve got to let people know you’re there.

You’ve got to stand at the edge of the forest and say, I’m over here. I’ve made a small fire. Come sit for a while if you want.

Because otherwise, how would anyone know you’re around?

May 16, 2026 10:46 am

The Text Hacker Self-Portrait

I keep returning to this image: myself hunched over a keyboard in the dark, manipulating text to alter reality. Reframing ideas until they yield something new. It arrived this morning in hypnagogic space, and it’s more accurate than anything I’ve deliberately constructed about myself.

The connection between “text-based ontologist” and “mind hacker” is legitimate, not decorative. The original hacker ethos, before it got reduced to security breaches, was about finding unexpected entry points in a system. Where do the rules break down. Where does the architecture reveal its own seams. Applied to consciousness and language, that’s exactly what reframing does. It locates the hidden load-bearing assumption in a way of seeing something, and then shifts it. The reality doesn’t change but the map does. And for most people, the map is the territory.

There’s a lineage here that almost no one is explicitly connecting. Leary’s metaprogramming concept is the most direct ancestor: the brain as biocomputer, consciousness as programmable, language as the interface. Burroughs took it further with the cut-up as decompilation, attempting to surface the subliminal code underneath normal syntax. Wilson’s reality tunnels are another version of the same insight. Korzybski underneath all of it with general semantics. And then chaos magick sits exactly at this intersection. The sigil works, to the extent it works, because it exploits the gap between conscious attention and deeper processing. That’s a hack.

What distinguishes my version is the emphasis on text specifically. If text is the universal substrate, then working at the level of text means something close to root access. The legal document, the scripture, the line of code, the spell in the grimoire. All alter states of the world through their textual existence. “Stories are code. Let’s write better spells.” I intuited this years ago. The text-based ontologist framing just makes explicit what was already implied.

The image itself is a character worth developing. It has a specific aesthetic register. The console cowboy. The cryptographer. The monastic scribe who understood that copying a text was an act of power. Something slightly fugitive about it too, which suits the chaos magick lineage. Not performing transformation publicly. Working it out in the dark, at the terminal, and the results appear in the world.

That’s a more interesting and more accurate self-portrait than “blogger.”

seed note — knowledge garden

May 5, 2026 10:12 am

The answer I got back from the question I carried this morning…

Tuesday. Early morning walk. The question I carried out with me was this:

What is already true in me that I’ve been pretending I don’t know?

The answer came fast. That’s how you know it’s the real one. You ask and the thing just stands up.

I’m not a niche-down person.

I’ve known this for years. And I keep learning it again, which means I haven’t quite accepted it yet. The Narrative Alchemy pivot was the latest version of the same story: find the through-line, package it, make it easy for people to classify. There’s a real idea underneath Narrative Alchemy. I believe in it. But when I turned the whole blog toward it, something happened that I should have caught earlier. I got bored. Not mildly bored. Bored in that way where the writing goes hollow because the person writing it has quietly left the room.

I was posting because I was supposed to be posting.

You can always tell. The blog knows the difference and apparently so does the traffic, eventually.

Michael Moorcock‘s first novel is called The Golden Barge. A man leaves his village to chase it. He glimpses it on the river, something in him recognises it, he drops everything. And the whole of his life becomes the pursuit. Every time he draws close, the barge rounds a bend and disappears. He keeps going. More adventures, more distance from where he started, always the barge ahead of him, just out of reach.

The fact that this novel has surfaced again — the title itself, not just the metaphor — feels like something worth noting. Not coincidence exactly. More like the kind of thing that happens when you’re paying the right quality of attention.

I’ve thought about that image for years. This morning I walked with it again.

Narrative Alchemy was the latest bend. I came close enough to almost touch it. I could see the gilding on the hull. And then it went around the corner, as it does. As it always does.

The strange thing is I don’t feel defeated by that. I feel something more like recognition. Like the barge is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

The question beneath the question is always: what function am I actually here to perform?

I’ve been a warrior. West Point, the Army, the whole formation in that tradition. That chapter is done. I came out of it and moved into the healer work — coaching, mindset, and helping people with their inner landscape. That was real, that mattered. But underneath both of those there has always been something else. Something I’ve given less oxygen.

The shaman.

Not as a label. I’m wary of the labels right now; the cards said so this morning, and I feel it. But as a description of a function: part healer, part explorer, part storyteller, and part magician. Someone who wanders. Who is always in between villages, carrying stories from one place to the next, arriving somewhere and people making way because they want to hear what’s been seen out there in the world. Some want a story. Some want something more. In exchange, a meal. A place to sleep. And then gone again.

I’ve been domesticated. Robert Anton Wilson’s phrase: the domesticated primate. I became one and didn’t fully notice. Or noticed and didn’t do anything about it.

The shaman doesn’t stay in one village long enough to build a personal brand.

There’s a war going on online about AI and I’ve been caught in it sideways.

You can see the sides forming from a long way off. On one side: the people who are in it, building with it, finding what’s possible. On the other hand, the people who have the pitchforks out, who call it slop, who unfollow when they catch you using it. Underneath both positions is the same existential anxiety, expressed differently.

I find myself softening my enthusiasm when I can see the pitchfork crowd gathering. Which is a bad habit. Because honestly, I think AI is the closest thing to the Library of Alexandria I’m ever going to touch. I grew up living in libraries. That was always the dream. And now the library fits in a conversation window and knows which shelf to start on. That’s not nothing.

But I also don’t want to be a missionary for it. I just want to use it. The way I use my phone. Without a manifesto.

What I’m trying to get clear on is the difference between using a tool and playing a platform’s game. They look the same from the outside, but they feel completely different from the inside. When I was optimising Narrative Alchemy content for the algorithm, I was playing the game. When I’m on a wisdom walk and the thing that happens to capture it best is a voice note that goes through Claude, that’s just the atelier working.

Document, don’t perform. There’s the line.

The cards pulled the Queen of Cups this morning. Re-listen. Reawaken. Not: plan more, build the system, write the manifesto and post it on a Tuesday. Just listen.

So that is the instruction for now. Not silence. Not inaction. But a particular quality of attention. The pathfinder doesn’t plan the path from the kitchen table. He walks.

I’ve been spending too much energy on the architecture. WordPress, Typefully, the IndieWeb connectors, and the workflow that syndicates the thing to the right places. That’s all real, and I’ll figure it out. But the error is when the system becomes the thing you’re working on instead of the thing you’re working through.

Stop optimising the net. Get in the water.

The philosopher is back at the root. Everything else — writer, teacher, healer, magician — is still there, still running. They know what they’re doing. But the root function is clear again, clearer than it’s been in a while.

What is already true in me that I’ve been pretending I don’t know?

This. This is.

May 4, 2026 6:26 am

“10:46 — Fell into an internet blackhole again. Back to work.”

Something honest in that line. Not a confession: a sighting. The kind of thing you’d never write in an end-of-day journal because by then the story has been tidied up. You worked hard. You made progress. A few distractions, sure, but nothing worth dwelling on.

The interstitial journal catches you before the rationalisation kicks in.

Tony Stubblebine named the practice. The idea is simple: every time you take a break, write a few lines and timestamp them. That’s it.

10:04 Going to finish the first draft.
10:46 Fell into a internet blackhole again. Back to work.
11:45 Good progress. Need to prep for the Charlie meeting.
11:49 Feeling a bit anxious, but it’ll be fine.

Look at what’s in there. Goals, self-awareness, self-review, action items, and emotional honesty all tangled together the way they actually are in the flow of the day. There’s no need to categorise or edit it into something coherent or brilliant.

Most productivity systems capture what you planned and what you did. They skip the inner weather. The forty-two minutes that vanished. The low-grade anxiety you didn’t name until you were forced to write something down.

This does the opposite. It catches the texture of the day while it’s still happening.

There’s a quiet self-accountability built in too. Once you’ve trained yourself to timestamp every break, you become slightly less willing to drift. You don’t want to write “fell into a Twitter blackhole again” for the third time before noon. The log witnesses you, and that is enough.

I use the Obsidian daily note with timestamps. I can keep a running thread of my thoughts alongside my task list. I like using Obsidian because it captures something true about how thinking and working actually happen. What it tracks is not really your productivity. It’s more like your actual self, moving space and time.

May 1, 2026 9:31 am

The happiness paradox: why being good is harder than you think

Most of us think goodness should make us happy.

Be kind. Be generous. Tell the truth. Do the right thing. Surely that should bring peace.

But here’s the paradox: being good often makes life harder before it makes it better.

Because goodness asks something from you.

It asks you to tell the truth when a lie would protect your image. It asks you to be generous when your ego wants applause. It asks you to forgive when resentment still feels delicious. It asks you to act with integrity when nobody is watching and nobody is going to reward you.

Goodness is not the soft option. It is not moral decoration. It is a discipline.

The happy person is not someone who avoids difficulty. The happy person is someone whose inner life is not constantly divided against itself.

That is why goodness matters.

Not because it guarantees comfort, praise, or success.

But because every time you act against your deeper values, you split yourself a little. And every time you act in alignment with them, even when it costs you, you become more whole.

The paradox is this:

Being good may not make you happy in the shallow sense.

But it may be the only path to the deeper kind of happiness — the kind that comes from being able to live with yourself.

April 24, 2026 6:18 am

I just read this piece on Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less…basically force your LLM to keep each reasoning step under 5 words. Same accuracy. 7% of the tokens. And token management is a big deal.

Turns out most of what we mistake for thinking is the model apologising for existing: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18600

April 18, 2026 7:07 pm

testing the micropublish web app.

April 15, 2026 2:52 pm

Leary’s 8 Circuits of Development: A Mythic Map of Human Becoming

Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model is one of those strange, half-wild frameworks that refuses to die because, scientific or not, it touches something real in the imagination. On the surface, it is a speculative map of human consciousness: eight layers or “circuits” through which awareness develops, from basic survival all the way to transpersonal and cosmic states. But read through a mythic lens, it becomes something more interesting than theory. It becomes a map of initiation.

The first four circuits describe the construction of the social self. First, survival: is the world safe or dangerous? Then territory: where do I stand in the pecking order? Then language and meaning: how do I explain reality? Then social identity: who must I become to belong here? In other words, the early circuits are not just developmental stages. They are the architecture of the mask. They shape the ordinary self most of us mistake for who we really are.

Then the model opens. The fifth circuit returns us to the body as a field of sensation, pleasure, presence, and aliveness. The sixth opens into archetype and ancestral patterning, where myth stops being mere story and starts feeling like a living grammar beneath experience. The seventh is the one that matters most to me: meta-programming. This is where consciousness begins to see its own conditioning as conditioning. The script becomes visible. The operating narrative reveals itself. And once you can see the code, you can begin (carefully, imperfectly) to rewrite it.

That is where Leary’s model brushes up against narrative alchemy. The first four circuits are the inherited story. The upper circuits are what happens when the story cracks, and soul starts leaking back in. Whether or not Leary got the neuroscience right is, to me, beside the point. As a symbolic framework, it offers a powerful reminder: much of what we call identity is patterned response, tribal imprint, and repeated interpretation. The self is not always essence. Often, it is installation.

The real question is not whether there are literally eight circuits hidden in the nervous system. The real question is whether you can begin to notice the reality tunnel you are living inside. Can you tell when survival fear is running the show? When status anxiety is speaking in your voice? When old social scripts are masquerading as destiny? And can you, through practice, imagination, and attention, begin to loosen the narrative?

Maybe that is the enduring value of Leary’s strange map. It suggests that development is not just growing up. It is waking up inside the story you were handed, and deciding whether to keep living by it.

April 15, 2026 2:20 pm

The Baffler on AI and cognition: nothing about this trajectory is inevitable. The future isn’t fixed. It’s being written by people with very particular interests. The piece is quiet but the point lands hard.

April 13, 2026 9:10 am

I have been thinking about the vocabulary we use for the inner life. How much of it actually belongs to us.

Most of the words we reach for when we try to describe what is happening inside, sadness, anxiety, frustration, and fear, were handed to us. By language. By family. By the culture we were born into. We use them because we have them. Not because they are precise.

There is a practice gaining attention in psychology circles: inventing your own terms for emotional states that standard language doesn’t quite reach. Coining something private, personal, exact.

I think this practice is more significant than it sounds. Because the words you use for your inner states are not just descriptive. They are partly constitutive. The word shapes the internal representation. It makes certain moves available and closes off others. An approximate word gives you an approximate relationship with what is actually happening.

NLP calls this making a distinction. When you can name something specifically, you have cut it out from the blur around it. You can see its edges. Anything you can see the edges of, you can begin to choose something about.

The map is not the territory. But more importantly, someone else’s map of your territory is especially not the territory.

March 31, 2026 1:02 pm

The danger of romanticising your own life is that you eventually stop living it. You start performing it instead. You become a spectator of your own experience, constantly checking to see if the lighting is right and if the dialogue sounds profound. You begin to curate moments instead of inhabiting them. Even your struggles start to feel like scenes, and your pain becomes something to frame, to narrate, to make meaningful before it has actually been lived through.

There’s a subtle split that happens here. Part of you is in the moment, but another part is already outside of it, watching, editing, and translating it into a story. You’re no longer fully present. You’re managing perception. You’re shaping how this will look, or how it will sound when told later, or how it fits into the identity you are trying to maintain.

And the cost of that split is contact.

Because real life doesn’t arrive pre-shaped. It’s awkward. It’s inconvenient. It refuses to resolve cleanly. Other people don’t deliver their lines on cue. They interrupt your narrative. They misunderstand you. They bring their own weather into the moment. And they complicate everything.

When you’re performing your life, that complexity becomes a problem to manage rather than a reality to engage with.

You start filtering for what fits the story.

You lean into the moments that reinforce the identity you prefer. You avoid the conversations that would disrupt it. You subtly steer interactions toward outcomes that make narrative sense. And over time, without realising it, you begin to live inside an aesthetic rather than a life.

It can look beautiful from the outside.

It can even feel meaningful from the inside.

But it’s a controlled meaning. A closed-loop meaning. A meaning that has been curated rather than discovered through contact with something that resists you.

This is why it becomes lonely.

Not the obvious kind of loneliness, where you are physically alone, but a more refined version. You can be surrounded by people and still feel it. Because you’re not actually with them. You’re with your interpretation of them. You’re relating to your own narrative about the interaction rather than the interaction itself.

And people can feel that.

They may not have the language for it, but they can sense when they’re being experienced as part of a performance rather than as a person. They can feel when the space is already occupied by your story. And when that happens, something in them withdraws. They become smaller, quieter, more careful. Or they push back in ways that seem disproportionate but are actually attempts to reclaim their own reality.

This is the point where Narrative Alchemy either deepens or collapses.

If you treat story as something to impose on life, you end up here. Performing, curating, controlling. But if you treat story as something that emerges from contact, from friction, from the unpredictable meeting of different perspectives, then it becomes something else entirely.

It becomes relational.

You can’t turn lead into gold in a vacuum. You need the catalyst of the other. You need the stories of the people around you to challenge, refine, and occasionally dismantle your own. Not as an attack, but as a necessary disruption that keeps your narrative from closing in on itself.

The goal is not to be the main character of a small, controlled story.

The goal is to remain permeable to a larger one.

To stay in contact with a reality that exceeds your ability to script it. To allow other people to surprise you, to contradict you, to exist in ways that don’t serve your identity but expand your perception.

Meaning is made, not found. But it’s not made in isolation. It’s made in the charged space between perspectives, in the tension between different interpretations of the same moment, and in the ongoing negotiation of what is real between people who refuse to collapse each other into roles.

If you occupy all the space with your own protagonist energy, there is no room for that process to happen.

There is no friction. No update. No emergence.

You’re left with something that looks like a life, reads like a life, and even feels like a life when you narrate it back to yourself.

But underneath, it’s hollow.

A perfectly polished, entirely empty chronicle of your own experience.

March 30, 2026 5:49 pm

Your brain doesn’t store memories, it reconstructs them every time you recall them.

So when you say “This is who I am,” you’re not describing reality. You’re editing it in real time.

This isn’t a bug. It’s the mechanism.

Every time you remember something, your brain rebuilds it from fragments: sensory details, emotional tags, narrative threads, gaps filled in with current context. The memory you access today is different from the one you accessed last year. Not because the past changed. Because you did.

Which means identity is not a fixed thing you discover. It’s a story you keep revising whether you mean to or not.

Most people think “rewriting your story” is some kind of self-help fantasy. Positive thinking. Fake it till you make it.

But here’s what they miss: you’re already rewriting it. Every single time you recall who you are, what you’re capable of, what happened to you, why you are the way you are.

The question isn’t whether you’re editing the story. You are. The question is whether you’re doing it on purpose.

Because if you’re not directing the edit, the old pattern is. The story you inherited. The one that was assembled when you were younger, less capable, more afraid, or just operating with different information.

That story is still running. Still shaping what you notice, what you attempt, what you believe is possible. And every time you recall it without challenging it, you reinforce it.

This is why insight alone doesn’t change anything. You can know the story is outdated and still live inside it. Because knowing isn’t enough. The story has to be actively reconstructed differently.

That’s the work.

Not fighting your brain. Not pretending the past didn’t happen. Not manufacturing a prettier version.

Directing the reconstruction. Choosing which details to foreground. Asking what else was true. Recognizing that the story you’ve been telling is one edit among many possible edits, and the most recent one doesn’t have to be the final one.

You’re not discovering who you are. You’re deciding.

March 30, 2026 9:00 am

What wants to happen?

It’s a simple question. Four words. But ask it at the right moment in a coaching conversation and it changes the whole room.

Most questions we bring to coaching are ego-questions. What do I want? What should I do? What am I afraid of? The conscious self answers these from inside its own story. And if the story’s a limiting one, it shapes the answers accordingly. You get back a version of what the story already contains.

“What wants to happen?” is different in kind, not just in degree.

It doesn’t ask the ego to generate an answer. It asks the person to listen. That shift from generating to listening is where a lot of the actual work lives.

There’s a Daoist dimension to this. Wu wei isn’t non-action — it’s action congruent with what’s already moving. The river doesn’t force its way around the rock; it finds the course the terrain is offering. “What wants to happen?” is that kind of question. Perceive the terrain rather than impose a map onto it.

The alchemical framing works here too. You don’t force the transformation. You create the conditions, you watch. The material has its own intelligence. The alchemist’s job is to pay attention to what’s already trying to become.

In narrative alchemy terms: if stories are code, then the question is asking what’s trying to run that your current story is blocking. The presenting narrative is usually defensive in some way. It’s holding a particular shape in place. The question isn’t an attack on that shape. It’s an invitation to notice what’s pressing against it from the inside.

One more thing. The question requires genuine presence to land. Ask it as a technique and it falls flat. It works when the coach is actually curious about the answer. Which makes it a useful indicator of where a coach is in their own development. If you can ask it and mean it, something has already shifted in how you understand what this work is.

March 27, 2026 8:06 pm

i guess it’s officially the weekend now.

March 27, 2026 7:47 pm

Rewire your brain. Reprogram your thinking. Hack your habits.

March 27, 2026 5:01 pm

All right, this note-poster app seems to finally be working, both just for regular notes and also being able to upload an image. Now let me test adding a link. 

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