I have been doing a lot of metacognition, AKA “thinking about thinking”, AKA banging on about personal wikis, lately.

I have really enjoyed reflecting on my wiki setup and how I can use it to learn and to create things. I also love a good bit of tinkering, so it’s been a lot of fun playing with org-roam and hacking on it a bit.

I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress with my tools for thought. About 2 years ago I felt like I wanted to produce more and consume less, but struggled to find a rhythm with it, perhaps partly friction in the tools, but also just not confident that I had anything useful to say. Now I’m feeling at a place where I am very well set to seek, sense and share on the things I am interested in.

So I’m feeling a hankering to get learning and writing about other things. The adventures in mental omphaloskepsis (navel-gazing, thanks Wikipedia) probably won’t stop, because I’m enjoying that immensely, but I feel like applying some of the fruits of the current deep-dive.

Back to life, back to reality

Plus, we are going through likely the defining moment of our generation, and the societal, political, economic (and likely technological) ramifications of this current point of history are likely to be pretty huge. Can’t not think about that.

While it wasn’t conscious or deliberate, I noticed that I have been avoiding much of the bigger picture discussion around coronavirus – just following enough to know what is and isn’t safe to do for me and those close to me. Interestingly, in A Text Renaissance Venkatesh Rao talks about some of these tools as being for extended universe building and escaped reality construction. Perhaps this metacognitive rabbit hole has been a subconscious way of diverting myself from what’s actually going on.

I don’t feel I have a particular burning thesis I want to share with the world right now. But I’ll try to return a bit more to writing about the various topics in my strapline (technology, politics, nature, culture) again.