michael-ax

I can learn like that, without any thinking at all!

We can only learn anchored in feedback, and if you can give yourself the feedback while writing, talking out loud alone, or better yet, with a listener, then you get feedback that keeps you thinking.

Verbalization and conversation maybe media, but writing, coding, sketching definitely are places where I notice my thinking.. What other 'media' did you have in mind?

Keeping stuff in your head while thinking with the stuff in your head changes it. The same with memories. If you have not noticed this, please challenge the statement: Keeping stuff in your head does not work; you need to externalize in order to use your differential engine, aka brain in order to 'think.'

Having said all this, I think because I am. not the other way 'round! everything else that you may think is thinking, maybe emotional/felt or aesthetic judging, would come from deeper down the stack.

Anyway, tell me about these other media.. and show me how you're not driving complex symbolic insights with them!

its all reasoning by analogy for us anyway :)

I have seen so many play-things in the note-space that I want to give just a few stats from my 6yo personal emacs setup:

I capture and refile into 14 .orgs indexed at varying depth using the agenda ag and helm for search as needed.

grep "\\" bmarks/*.org |wc etc say there are 5669 notes, 62652 lines 437644 words 3,663,683 bytes total.

since 3/14 I have annotated 111 pdfs, linked many more, captured 508 images. 300+ days logged before switching to a weekly format 201 weeks ago.

I can attest to the sentiment that there is actual communication going on between creator and such a system. :) a multi-media key takes me into capture and either a line-oriented popup for 'jots', a floating window or a full-screen distraction free mode where i can quickly see, that the great thing i discovered yesterday slipped from my mind 5 years ago.

The most important improvement to my note taking was realizing that, like Luhmann, I wasn't taking notes but curating an exo-brain.

I had seen emacs as a rinky-dink over-complicated under-documented religious thing -- and not as the low-stress 'does everything except long-lines really well and never crashes' thing that is now at the heart of my computing life. So.. to continue learning emacs for the next 30 years is definitely on my agenda because its worth it for the quality without a name .. absent elsewhere.

It was cool to see how his manual linking (not just tags) would force him to review the neighborhood he would place his cards in. I neglect that sometimes and so the epiphanies and understanding I get from integrating content have to sometimes wait a cycle or two or come when i check things in or close out the day.

Anyway? My point? Invest yourself into org-mode and take notes for a few years to learn how to take better notes while building something that can last you a whole life long. it worked for me. ty!

Go back some years to where you last re-wrote your self-definition and take out anything that's not real. This kind of struggle is one where you are going to have to extricate yourself from your thoughts and ideas, otherwise known as illusions, about life, and become an actual self-reliant/psychological adult .. which is supposed to happen at this stage/age.

If you can manage to keep your work connection as a means of everyday grounding, by all means do that while you mourn the end of childhood.

Anyhow, you wrote in the comments: Now that it's done, I feel like I can relax a bit and also accept that things can go poorly and it doesn't have to be devastating.

And that's the truth. I would underline it. Remember it while your emotions suggest that you should feel like shit. Then it will pass. Its not fair, its not easy, but adulthood is worth it.

so, that question is a no go because the thing has a transcendent dimension, it puts you at the heart of the storm, the center of computing where you commune with the gods of our field in perfect calm.

once you slay the dragons. best of luck!

Martin Fischer's Translation of Baltasar Gracian's "The Art of Worldly Wisdom". (Amazon seems to have a few)

Quoth Nietzsche: "Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety."

As simply sitting with one of these birds will quickly convince you that they aren't just smart but have a lot of control, I'm moved to think that they simply explored the inefficiencies of mechanized training approaches.

its not the disagreements you know you have - leadership takes care of those - its the one's people won't acknowledge that take you down .. and to spot those, you need to be quite a selective listener, no?

if so, you'd be quite vulnerable the next time someone offers you a double bind.

Since then I've been able to forge 20 years of references, scans, pdfs, application-code!, shell scripts, photos, glyphs, graphs, fonts into an exo-brain (a nice word from the cool kids) that not only includes journals, time & billing, ledgers, feeds, project and resource planning, play-books & checklists for my own debriefing

into something version controlled that boots from a chroot and can transfer to android devices. i can now find, use and profit from clusters of notes, generate html and latex, read, write and code, interface with and even capture just about anything that life has thrown at me since i started re-tooling myself.

I've got a reminder/drill mechanism which picks high-level topics things for me to review and i just go with that to remember and refine old stuff as i go. Its a seething mess of useful.

In essence .. i tag, sort, sift, condense and categorize like everyone else. In under a gig of ram, and, as it happens, at the speed of thought via a consistent user-interface.

And yeah, of course i use a browser. I can capture/convert html to plain text & drag images into files knowing that everything will always be hyperlinked by not-too-obnoxious uuids.

For some reason I had to hold my nose delving into emacs after ignoring it for 20 years. It seemed so weird. Now that I've gotten used to working with software that enables general purpose computing, I'm experiencing Ataraxia.

Anyhow, to the OP, check your net-present-value figures. Are you expecting to be a knowledge worker for a while? Have you ever chosen a slightly harder path to make things easier?

If so, just take this note as a hint for what's possible when you're seriously looking to answer your own question :)