July 2025 The honeymoon is over. The first draft was a thrill. Now, it's a tombstone in the ‘review’ folder. Here’s how you ship: 1. Slay the Enemy. Your enemy is fear. You feel it now. A tightness…

Staring into the Void - by Myles Marino

Buoyancy is the property of a system to keep it afloat while supporting its contents. If the system becomes heavier than what it supports, the system and its contents will either collapse or become…

A few days ago I read a piece in Existential Espresso about the need to have a personal myth in the age of AI. The opening line was good: "I can focus for 12 hours per day because I'm…

When critiquing my own work it’s tempting to compare it unfavourably with something good. But almost all early drafts need improvement. For example, here’s the final version of a…

I grew up sad. I was a sad, depressed kid. There was no one to teach me how to snap out of it and how to redirect my thoughts or how to not let it run on a loop in my head and how to not…

Brayden Holt-Weissmann woke up at six in the morning because that is what founders do, and Brayden was still, technically, a founder, in the same way that a man standing in the ruins of a bakery is…

Self- help is not a good genre to read. If you are someone living a normal life without any external metrics (otherwise provided by self help books), you are able to grow and transform with time ,…

Stewart Brand was on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He’s well into his eighties, and he said: “Looking into the things that you’re not good…

My last post was a labour of love toward one of my then-present mind spirals and, while I'm super proud of it, I'm left struggling with how I want to approach a new one. Life has been monotonous for…

Breaking from management to meaning Read “Prompting vs. Perceiving” at joeldueck.com…

I am not lonely because I am unloved. I want to be clear about that. My parents, my close friends, I can see the love, I am grateful for it. This isn't about that. This is about the love I have to…

There's a phenomenon at the intersection of self-selection bias and XKCD 2501 I've noticed in my own thoughts about my hobbies. Let's call it "enthusiast's bias." If you are interested in improving…

The modern self, when confronted with formation problems, instinctively constructs solutions by shopping and assembling practices from multiple sources, but everything within reach is already…

A post about creating in the age of AI

Does contemporary technology lack dimension?

I'm not good at planning out these confession articles. At most I start with some kind of semi-witty or insightful introductory idea from which to painstakingly draw a somewhat cogent line through my…

Full post on the site

A living brain has to decide what is worth paying attention to.It might seem obvious, but it's actually a stranger sentence than it first appears. We tend to imagine perception as a kind of…

“Where are you from?” can be the most difficult question to answer. I come from a Russian family, but I was born in Latvia. When I went to study in the US for a year, I felt very Russian there.…

Does this phrase strike a chord with you? Apparently, it first appeared in Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, but I came across it quoted in Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s moving memoir Portrait of…

From my travels on the small web to Steven Pressfield's theory of creative Resistance, this month's Field Notes is about people who create things because they care – not to chase clout, acclaim, or…

Naming the corporate mode of perception Read “Oomphalism” at joeldueck.com…

For too long, I mistook difficulty for a hint of value. I have to remind myself repeatedly that there are demands that leave you with nothing except having become a little more obedient. I might…

Creating something can be an easy target for the day when you find it hard to follow a purpose at the moment. We decide what purpose to follow because we want to and it is easier to live with one.…

versión española acá 🏡 🏡 🏡 🏡 🏡 🏡 🏡 🏡 A few weeks ago, I read a blog post about Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz’s idea of ‘the provisional life.’ It’s this belief that the current life…

When thinking runs out of roadOn using tarot as a reflective tool, and why it has nothing to do with predicting the future I should say this at the outset: I don't think the cards know anything I…

English translate of the chinese blogSo this is a blog in Chinese. I haven’t written in Chinese for a long time, so I just wanted to try writing again.It’s probably been three or four…

Short one this week, because I’ve a.) finally started work, for real, and need brain space for that b.) have been writing a thousand words a day (give or take) as I race to complete my latest…

Today, one of my final papers came back. I got a grade that I am really happy about. The only issue my professor had was that I did not italicize the title of the newspaper that I was writing about…

The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but machines. Louis De Bonald I’m currently reading Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth…

A reflection on how nihilism can make values personal, flexible, and freeing.

You think you know me based on text on a screen. Within the context of a few blog posts, you believe to know my life history, my presumed entitlement, my naivety, my background, and my sum total of…

by tricky.

That is the name my grandma gave me when I was born. It means hero or someone of great accomplishments. Perhaps, that is why I have always been drawn to the main characters in shows and books. I have…

I was taught, by my parents, by my friends and other family, by the art I've consumed, by films and books and stories– to contend with life. To engage, wrestle with, work through. To relish the…

Amongst the abundance of knowing and understanding what, who, when, where, why, how,... Why is definitely my favourite Wh. Thinking back to my childhood, understanding the why had always helped me…

Oh, you’ve seen it previously, as much as I have too… No, can do it! I can’t do it (translates as: I won’t do it), because I don’t know how to do it, it is… too…

when i was little, the world was very large and people tell me: "that is because you were very small" but i do not think that's the reason the world seemed large i was not even that small

In Hollywood movies, heroes at the climax close their eyes or fall off a cliff to say something along the lines of “let go.” This is often the moment when the character discovers her true potential…

There’s a popular thought experiment that makes the rounds on the internet, but the arguments presented are a false dichotomy between logic and empathy. The best rationale should use both.

I’ve been refining this blog’s design for two decades now. With each new version, I get a little better at knowing what I want. Turns out, my designs tend to get simpler with time. At this point,…

Reflecting on a month of shipping a lot, but with a noticable trade off to understanding.

Lately, I have been dreaming of loss.

We became readable. What stays unread is the work.

A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is…

death of partialization in the LLM age