I've been devoting myself for a while now to an approach to thinking that seems along the lines of Grothendieck's project (as described in the blog), where difficulty should only come in defining the framework to work within, while work within the framework is easy.

In defining a framework, fundamentally you are coming up with a set of types and describing how things of these types are able to interact with one another; if it's a framework that's easy to work with, the number of types, relations, and operations is small (relative to other formulations). If this framework is concise, but the universe of things described by it is large, then the types must be very general. Therefore, using an approach of finding an elegant framework, rather than mastering the complexity of an inelegant framework, relies heavily on one's ability to generalize.

My issue with spending a lot of time thinking this way is that it gives me a sort of uneasy feeling... What are these super abstract generalizations? From what I can tell, this mostly comes from wondering whether with all this 'zooming out' we are getting closer to truths about the universe, or our own minds—and the latter possibility feels a little suffocating.

Anyone know any books, essays, whatever taking up that issue?