Tinkered Thinking

PAUSE is a short book on meditation. Over the years I've written around forty essays on meditation while I racked up years of practice. A few years ago, I decided to make a meditation app based on my experience.

I sampled all of the meditation apps and after a few years of figuring it out, I realized that all the apps I'd tried glossed over or completely failed to address some very basic and fundamental aspects of what getting started with meditation actually entails. I'm talking about very simple stuff, like... why do meditators sit in that unusual way? No one actually ever told me, it just occurred to me after doing it thousands of times: it's much easier to breathe in this position. Or, just the mechanics of habit. How to start a habit. What to expect. When does it get easier? How does routine fit in to habit? How does habit fit into routine?

So I set about building a meditation app. And it's basically finished. I just have to polish the audio files. However, while I was in the process of converting forty essays to a month of daily lessons, an idea occurred to me. I thought: how nice would it be to have a slim little book that could be a stand alone text on meditation? Or it could be a companion to the app. Well, why not I thought. But at the time I was busy, and I didn't exactly have the time to reread 40 essays and somehow crunch that through my mind and have a cohesive book come out the other side. I was supposed to be busy finishing a meditation app, on top of about a million other things.

It was time for an experiment. And before you read on, I should be very clear about how tight I was about the guidelines on this experiment. I wanted every sentence in the book to be written by me. So what did I do? I gave AI the entirety of my forty essays. At first I did this just to get an opinion. Hey, is there enough here to create 30 daily lesson scripts from? Hey, could this be a . . . book? The answer to both of those questions was: yes, definitely. But remember, I didn't want AI to write the book or the lessons scripts for me. I wanted it to be my ideas, my phrasing, my language. I told all this to the AI. See, unlike the insecure squawkers who will go bug-eyed over such a proposition¹I don't have the slightest shade of worry about actually writing a book. But I'd be stupid to turn down a little help when it comes to organizing my own thoughts. And plus, I was curious. In some sense it was a test. I am constantly testing AI, pushing it to its limits to see what it can do well, and where that line starts to degrade. We discussed the format of the book, the length, the thematic parts, how to filter concepts and essays into each thematic part, and how the entire arc of the book should progress. I wanted thirty chapters so that a person could read one short chapter per day and then do a session of meditation. I also wrote the introduction on a whim to set the pace of the book. Then after all of that discussion and brainstorming and seeding it with all of my original writing, I told it to take it away.

Well the damn thing did a great job. I was very explicit: Use my sentences. Do not do any original writing of your own. You may only make small grammatical changes to hook ideas and original phrases together. I printed the whole thing off, and as per my instructions, it gave me the source for everything in it. Which essay this paragraph came from, which app lesson that paragraph was derived from. I traced a few of them back to their original source and I was shocked at how well it accomplished the task. I printed the whole thing out and read it. It was good, it was really good. You have to realize that I was a bit skeptical and flustered. I noticed one paragraph that had a suspicious number of em-dashes. I went back to the AI model and criticized it. Em-dashes are a sign of AI writing, so clearly this was a mistake. Well the damn thing told me it was quoted verbatim from one of the essays and it had used the exact number of em-dashes that I had originally used — clearly, I am fond of the em-dash. I was humbled, but in a way that felt reassuring.

Most importantly the book reads exactly as I'd write it. The experience was a bit bizarre because I also had an analysis done to find out exactly how much of the text was not explicitly quoted from original sources, and the number was about 2%. Mindboggling that it took such little "extra" writing simply to string together so many ideas over such a length. So over the course of about 158 pages, less than 3 were "written" by AI, and those 3 are cut up into tiny pieces and sprinkled across the 158 pages. The bizarre / eerie part isn't the fact that AI stitched together everything I wrote — No. It's that such a coherent BOOK was hiding in a few dozen essays.

Now, another thing that's worth noting is that AI also flagged holes in the manuscript that required fresh writing. I ended up doing about three chapters worth of that. One chapter it had flagged as missing content from a thematic standpoint, and a few paragraphs throughout the rest of the book. And then I naturally ended up adding an epilogue of sorts and a postscript.

I could not be happier with how this book turned out. It started off as an experiment and a "oh that would be cool to have" and I dare say, of the three books now available on the website — despite the other two being fiction — it's probably the best book so far. I'm soft launching it ahead of the app simply because it's ready.

If you have any interest in meditation, I think you'll love it.

LATTICES & EDDIES

August 24th, 2026

If you look closely¹ you may notice something different about Tinkered Thinking. I'll give you exactly one paragraph to see if you can spot it.

Splicing a vein from the last post: the details can really make something come alive. Aesthetics are often all about the details, and they affect everyone — even those who say they have no sense of design or style at all. A handwritten postcard is a great example. Anyone can instantly pick it out in a stack of mail they thumb through. And it's because the details leap out from the pile of mass produced, perfect-print font stamped into all the other envelopes and advertisements. A simple example, but an obvious one. A subtler one might be when the first T-shirt company decided to sell shirts without that annoying tag in the collar. They decided to print the wash instructions directly onto the inside of the shirt. Brilliant, and simple, but subtle. Not something you see. It's something you feel. Such details are like easter eggs in a video game. It's a subtle nod between the creator who came up with it, and the person who eventually experiences it. There's that handshake across time and space, a nod. Nice.

By now, you might notice² that in the bottom left hand corner of your screen, there's a subtle pattern tracing itself out. It's a lattice of sorts, composed of triangles that eddy. If you're curious about where the pattern came from, check out the Tinkered Thinking Bookstore. The growing pattern is there too.

There's some symbolism behind it, which I'll get to in a moment, but before that I think it's worth saying that nothing on the internet should be ugly anymore. If you have even an iota of experience when it comes to coding, you know that AI has taken this field by storm, and an apt programmer can leverage it to enormous benefit these days. This little growing pattern, for example, is something I've wanted to do for years. But, the ROI on it is horrible. It would have taken me a LONG time to get this working if I'd coded it by hand. And then, you know.. what exactly is the point of all that effort? Of course I'd like to do it, and like so many things, if I was locked in a room and given no other option, I'd not only do it, I'd really enjoy it. Unfortunately there's a lot of things that fall into that category, and then there's a whole other category of things I should do that have much higher ROI. So, for a long time it just remained a quaint idea. And then AI came along and got good enough so I could get this up and running in no time at all. (took some time to polish it and get it just to my liking, but altogether the time I spend on it was a tiny fraction of what it would have taken had I done it by hand.) Most won't care, and some might even find it annoying, which is fine. But for those who have enjoyed Tinkered Thinking, I like to think you might smile and chuckle for a brief moment. Nice.

So what does the lattice mean? It's fair to say that in the beginning it didn't really mean anything. I like triangles, and then a lot of reasoning about it followed after. For example, a circle is technically a polygon with infinite sides of equal length. If you reverse the direction of that definition, then a triangle is the lowest dimensional representation of a circle. When I was writing the first couple hundred essays, my thinking really started to hone in on this notion of vicious and virtuous cycles — feedback loops that self-amplify. Bad habits become vicious cycles³ and good habits can become virtuous cycles. So then the triangles grew into a trio of vectors, swirling around. Then the triangle of vectors became nested, implying a spiral. I think of vicious cycles as downward spirals and virtuous cycles as upward spirals. It feels fairly intuitive... each turn of a spiral is an identical version of the previous turn, just intensified, zoomed out. And triangles naturally have a fractal nature when stacked together. This recursive, fractal, spiralling concept felt apt for many of the concepts I was weaving together. And so when it came time to design the cover of my first book, it was as though this design was already in my head — conceptually. Translating it to a design didn't really require any kind of thought at all. And their growth — now properly animated in the way I've always imagined — is properly reminiscent of the way that neurons grow and search and connect. All of it together made sense to me, symbolically. Neurons growing like tiny streams of water searching downhill, finding little pockets and curving round into an eddy. Like the topics of Tinkered Thinking: an aimless wandering curiosity, constantly wrapping around this or that thought or observation or insight, circling it for a few hundred or thousand words, and then branching off again in search of some new little obsession.

It's good that I've now essentially automated this design task, because, tbh, it was tedious to do it all by hand, and it is just one of a dozen tedious reasons why The Lucilius Parables Vol III is not out⁴. There's a few more things I'd like to automate, but all of it is in service of the core purpose of Tinkered Thinking: to just give me the space to write and play with words.

THE LITTLE THINGS

August 19th, 2026

They say it's the little things in life: the moment when your mind clears and you notice the way sunlight dances on a leaf as it wavers in the morning breeze, the way a child quietly walks up to you with arms spread out, wanting a hug, the way the milk rises back up to the surface in your coffee, spinning in eddies.

It's the little things in life that make it worth living.

The wisdom behind the quaint statement is that it has a dark side. The little things can make life miserable. The pet peeves a partner has, the long commute, the sink always filled with dirty dishes, the empty fridge after a long day, the unmade bed, the bad sleep, the annoying coworker. They're endless, and while none of them on their own are all that impactful or even worth thinking about, the aggregated effect can be more than demoralizing: it can make for a bad life. Death by a thousand papercuts is the dark side of a coin shared by: it's the little things. . .

There's certainly something to be said for cultivating and practicing a muscle of equanimity that can generate serenity, no matter the situation or annoying facet of reality. Churchill had a great quote to this effect and it shines a light on the connection between the endless papercuts of life and our reaction to them:

A person is about as big as the things that make them angry.

All truisms gloss over some variety of nuance, no matter how perfect they might ring. Consider the source of things. If a total stranger does something annoying, like some buffoon on the road who can't seem to drive perfectly — it's an absolute waste of time and energy to give such an occurrence any thought.¹ If you do, you're automatically living a miserable life: Do you pay attention to the silver linings in life? Or are you too focused on the clouds to notice?

But, if the source is something you care about, this is where the nuance comes in — this is where things get a little murky. If a beloved and much adored partner is perpetually annoyed with something you genuinely don't think is important at all. Well, to ignore it with a sense of serenity is to invite an aggravated elevation of the issue. And what does it mean to live a life that is bound to the pathways dictated by someone else's pet peeves? Well, love is compromise, right?

Love is treated as a foundation. Something to rely on, but after my own experience and a lot of observation, I think this might be a very big mistake. In my experience, love is quite fragile. I think it's no mistake that we give flowers as an expression of love: flowers are fragile, they require a very specific environment to flourish and look their best, otherwise they wilt and die, or they never even sprout. If the environment that gives rise to love isn't the constant priority, then the love will suffer. It's like the difference explored with the perennial question: Do you live to work or do you work to live? Everyone wants it to be the latter. That's what it should be. But the truth is most people live lives that are completely devoted to their job, either out of necessity and desperation, a lack of options, a lack of creativity, or pressure from obligations. In many families, the family itself becomes the pressure that creates an intense focus away from the family, and then the environment for that "love" that created the family in the first place. . . starts to degrade.

A gardener pays attention to tiny details — the little things. The gardener gets dirty, knowing there's a specific kind of mess²
An orderly garden with beautiful roses might not seem like a mess, but if you teleported that orderly garden into say... your living room, then you'd definitely call it a mess. Like everything, whether something is messy or not is dependent on context. Always be careful of the context. Ah, but a garden does not belong in the living room! You say. . . True, we grow them elsewhere, cut them, kill them, and bring them into the home. So what is to be said if you want to grow something beautiful in your home? Or let's put it another way: does anything 'grow' in a museum? No museums are mausoleums, where beauty was grown elsewhere —in that messy artist's studio— then harvested (framed) and brought into the pristine museum. But hey! Museums sure are clean!
that gives rise to something beautiful: The pH of the soil, the fertilizer, the amount of sun that hits the garden, the amount of water. All of it is a delicate balance of small variables that together either give rise to a beautiful bloom, or...not. Neglecting one of them can have a huge impact. Like never really being present and listening when that increasingly frustrated family member speaks. Likewise, concentrating on the wrong details can be just as disastrous: drenching everything in pesticides so there are no bugs, failing to realize that some bugs aren't just beneficial, they are necessary.³ Everything adds up over time. For better or worse. Everything compounds. For better or worse. The gardener with those beautiful blooms knows: it's not just all about the little things, it's about giving time and attention to the little things that actually make a difference. The real question is whether that difference adds up to a beautiful life or, one that makes the beauty too difficult to see.

TIME ON PROJECT

August 11th, 2026

Time dilates in strange ways. I once wrote this: if you want to slow down time, concentrate on the moment. If you want to speed up time, concentrate on the task.

The only real problem with this, is if your task is part of a big project, and you stop that task and neglect the project, time still moves swiftly.

Without a constant source of input, projects stagnate, dead in the water. Unless it's hit some sort of escape velocity, like a business project making money with a flywheel structure, it can feel like it's still working. But further improvements? All stagnate.

I have several projects that are multi-year, and it always shocks me when the carousel finally turns to reveal a slot of time to work on one of those projects and I ask: when was the last time I worked on this? Where was I in the process? The answer is always quickly followed by a: holy shit, how have I neglected this for so long.

Relationships can be like this too. Only that which gets constant love and nurturing grows. All else atrophies, and eventually, dies. You can see this in personal projects, relationships, even governments and civilizations. Unfortunately there is no golden plateau to hit where things magically coast, as if on golden rails that extend into the future, piercing eternity with stability.

It's just like riding a bicycle! Is genuinely a subversive concept. People never seem to lose the ability to ride a bicycle despite not riding for years, because in the meantime, everyone is practicing the art of balancing their body as they move and walk. But rarely, if ever, do such elemental tasks that we 'practice' everyday transfer to projects and skills that we neglect for weeks and months and years.

When I look back at Tinkered Thinking as a project, I marvel: how was I able to sustain that output? A thousand essays and a couple hundred short stories in just a few short years. Seems insane. It might seem like a haughty thing to point out, but in those short few years, I wrote more than most people do in a lifetime. That doesn't seem possible, and yet, it was just an artifact of a very simple rule: write and post something everyday.

Luckily I was quite shameless about it because I didn't really give a shit if anyone read what I was writing. And beyond that, I didn't really think anyone would read anything I wrote. Why would they? And, honestly, why would I care?¹

In an effort to keep this stack of words from wandering too far from my initial point, I —luckily— have these embedded notes where I can entertain a tangential rabbit hole musing till it exhausts itself. So. Why would I not care if anyone reads this stuff? Well, in this age of 'content', I think most people have lost sight of what writing is about. Or, even more likely, they still haven't discovered what it's about. No offense, dear reader, but I think the reader doesn't matter at all while writing. And to give much if any thought to a reader while writing is like being a good person because God might spank you when you die and you have to answer for you sins. i think it's a hollow reason to be a good person. Being a good person should be the reward unto itself. Writing for an audience honestly isn't much different than being a prostitute who wears lingerie and costumes most desired by the customers. And I mean it that harshly. To write is, fundamentally a selfish act. Or at least, it should be, and if it's not, the writing is cheapened by the imagined gaze of others. The whole universe be damned, these words exist not for it, but for the effect they have on my brain and the way they shape the person that I will be as I move through life having written these words. So why post it online? Well, to be honest, I did that because I was teaching myself how to code and I just happened to be working through the exercise of building a blog to understand how CRUD apps work. I had a bunch that I'd written and just plopped it in for shits and giggles. Progressing from that was more out of curiosity than anything. Tinkered Thinking became an exercise in creating the environment to foster and explore something that I genuinely loved doing: playing with words. That it's lead to far more than I imagined is kind of funny to me. Self published books, a legit published book, even Award Finalist recognition. While a younger, desperately ambitious and insecure version of myself who sought to be a writer would have salivated like a starved wolf coming across deer with a broken leg hearing of such things in his future, to me now, these developments strike me as . . . cute. I nod, and chuckle, and move on. Luckily I'd put in the time before those things happen so they don't have any of the soul-altering gravity that they would have had for a younger, insecure writer. Am I great writer? Eh, no. could I be? Sure, if I had the ability to devote the needed time. And believe me, if I could spend 6-12 hours a day writing and editing and playing with these funny, slippery little units we call words, I absolutely would. But unfortunately, as things stand right now, life requires more.

Projects are like alternate dimensions. They wait for you, and when you step through that portal and get into the flow, time drains from both realities. But when you return to life, time still drains, but the project stands still.

And I'm not really sure what it takes to stick the two part landing required: commitment and discipline.²I just decided one day to post everyday because no other cadence seemed to make much sense. It's like breathing. You can't do all your breathing on Mondays and Thursdays and be set for the rest of the week. Everything atrophies way too fast. Time on project needs to have a constant rhythm, otherwise the organs of creation rot.

In some sense I'm writing this as a reminder to myself: I already know all of this, but I'm marring this blank page to make sure my mind confronts it. You know this! But just to make sure it stings and leaves a mark: read it! Read what you just wrote! Time on project. Either you love it and nurture it, or it dies. If you're not growing, you're digging a grave. Reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite movies:

"Get busy living, or get busy dying."³
From The ShawShank Redemption, in case you couldn't place it.

CREATIVITY & OPTIMIZATION

August 6th, 2026

Having done a fair amount of woodworking, I've had the pleasure to visit and sometimes use some really nice woodshops and there's something pretty demoralizing that I realized. People who get good at woodworking start optimizing the process — which is good, don't get me wrong. They constantly acquire more and more equipment, and the number of specialized jigs¹ pile up.

I remember I was sailing up the Columbia river in Washington and I needed to have some serving mallets made in order to make some repairs to rigging. After asking around a small town, one guy said his father had an amazing woodshop and could help me out for a couple of bucks.

This old timer's woodshop was unbelievable. Easily half a million dollars worth of equipment in this space — a space mind you that was bigger than his actual house. He was full of stories and took a lot of joy in showing off all his toys. But when he finally showed me some stuff that he'd built, I was very underwhelmed. He'd used a lathe to cut some strange shapes and when you cut them in half you'd see like... a dolphin, or a frog or something. A cool demonstration of skill, but . . . a little disappointing considering the beast of a workshop he had.

Reminding myself of the often elaborate preparations that writers "need" in order to work, I wonder if it's an elaborate form of procrastination? Shifting focus to optimization instead of the harder work: being creative.

So where do we draw the line between optimization and those necessary constraints that benefit creativity?

One might argue that creativity shouldn't be optimized at all.

But whatever form and medium creativity takes, there's always some degree of . . . tedium(?) interwoven into the process. For some this tedium is ritualistic, or otherwise beneficially meditative. And for others it becomes the sole purpose as one shifts from novel creation to optimizing the tools of creation.

There is a balance to strike, and the human spirit can run off the road in a variety of ways. Taking time away from the actual creative process to build tools for it can create genuine improvements. For example, I'm now writing this on a custom composer that I built into Tinkered Thinking. Previously, since Tinkered Thinking was my first project, it was pretty janky. I would write something in a word document and then copy and paste that into a html converter and then enter the whole thing into a database row that I managed through SequelAce. An abysmal process. I did that for over a thousand entries if you can believe it.

And then the world of AI coding came along and I realized I could use those new powers to revitalize my old projects. And so I built this composer, and it's great, I'm actually starting to write more, and more often. The old habit is sloughing dust and gaining inertia. And I think that is the real north star of optimization. If the creation of a new tool or an optimization of an existing process adds speed and momentum to the original purpose, then it was worth the time. Of course it's always very difficult to gauge whether a detour will be worth the distraction or whether it'll just end up as time wasted.

I'm currently building some tools to make the blog->book process more efficient. I think it'll be worth the effort, because I've got at least 3 more books worth of writing that I can put out and on the store.

Regardless of personal vagaries, the lesson was clear a long time ago: you don't want to die with a pristine workshop capable of anything and nothing to show for all that effort.

Likewise you don't want to be so hampered by inefficiencies and friction that you never get around to producing anything. There's a balance. And it's better to be lopsided on the side of creation, but it's worth it to take a step back from time to time and wonder: how can I make this easier for myself?

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PAUSE

August 26th, 2026