It was a really great experience. It was also very challenging. I cried – healthy tears, tears of emotions being processed – as much as I can remember crying in my entire life. Ultimately I found it a valuable, rewarding, experience, although the jhanas themselves were mostly incidental to my experience.

The retreat ran from Sunday to Sunday, with six full days of retreat in between. For me, the first three days were largely uneventful; I would describe them as “mildly positive.” I learned and practiced some techniques and experienced some mildly unusual states, but overall experienced nothing overly notable.

On the fourth day, and into the fifth, various emotions and inner parts exploded into internal tension and despair, and I had a really tough time. I was utterly beset by my inner critic and felt very hopeless and stuck and despairing, for a while.

With the help of a number of really lovely chats with several of the facilitators, I was able to process all the shit that had come up, and, as a result, felt dramatically better and more relaxed and open.

Over the final day, I felt filled with joy and love and equanimity, with greater reserves of calm, greater “resting contentment,” less reactivity, and greater access to my own emotional experiences, than I had experienced in years, perhaps ever.

The first three days

As mentioned, the first three days were uneventful. I attempted the techniques from the Jhourney retreat instructions, and I learned some things. I certainly learned, in a way I hadn’t before, that meditation can be enjoyable – I could sit for 30 minutes easily, and often an hour or longer, without really getting bored or antsy. I experienced a few notable (but relatively subtle) “altered states” through meditation, but certainly never entered a jhana.

It was, however, becoming clear to me that there was stuff going in my pysche below the surface. I had a few concrete clues I could identify, even at the time:

• I kept waking up at 5:30am in the morning with a vague knot of anxiety in my stomach, with no specific story or worry associated with it.
• When I would sit for longer sits – 60 or 90 minutes – I would notice myself gradually becoming more and more detached, and just find it really hard to access any emotions by the end. It mostly wasn’t _un_pleasant, maybe even with a mildly positive valence, but definitely a sensation of being a bit numb and checked out.
• I gradually became aware of a sense of disappointment or frustration that “nothing notable” had happened on retreat; I had the feeling of “I came here expecting something a high-amplitude experience, and when is that going to happen???”

As a slight aside, the latter, especially, was a somewhat interesting journey of mental discovery; I noticed that the feeling started appearing in my mind almost as a joke, or a wry aside – even on days 1 and 2, my mind would offer something to the effect of “man wouldn’t it be funny if you were already feeling anxious about how the retreat is almost over??” Even as this idea popped into my head, I would notice myself “shoving it away” or ignoring it, automatically and before it could even become fully-formed; I found the meditation practice helpful for noticing this pattern, and attempting to reshape it. At first, I couldn’t notice in time to stop the reflexive “shove away,” but I was able to interrupt afterwards and “invite the thought back” and attempt to relate to it differently; with practice, the “shove away” reflex also faded, a bit.

I cried, a little, during two separate sits during those first days, both times while doing forgiveness meditations. It felt good and productive, but also both times I had a sense of the tears and/or corresponding emotional energy not “flowing freely,” but instead being somewhat blocked and incompletely processed. It felt good, nonetheless, and I had a sense of having a lot more left to process.

Day four

Days four and five were when the Big Feelings hit.

Midday on day four, I took a walk and chatted with Matt, one of the lead facilitators for the week. He heard my sense of frustration or disappointment about the experience so far, and skillfully turned the question to: Well, what were you hoping to get out of this retreat? What brought you here? Chasing that thread a bit brought out the first really “freely-flowing” tears of the week, just deeply feeling and accepting a lot of the stresses and frustrations that I’d been dealing with outside the retreat.

At that point, I wasn’t sure if that was it, and that would be the breakthrough I needed, or if there was more to come. It was, it turns out, the latter.

My mood and headspace just steadily spiraled the rest of the day. I think, basically, I now felt deeply in touch with the struggles and tendencies I wanted to work with and improve on, but no better-equipped to actually address them. I spiraled into a deep psychic hole of despair and self-criticism. Reconstructing and putting it into words afterwards, I think I was caught in the midst of a narrative that went something like so:

I had come on retreat hoping it would help me deal with certain emotional and personal challenges I’d been dealing with. Upon coming to the retreat, I had been issued the Jhourney retreat instructions which – I now felt – contained all of the tools of growth and discovery necessary to deal with my challenges. I only needed to take action and implement them. Unfortunately, I was stuck and unable to do so, on account of precisely that same set of issues. The answer to all my problems was within reach – had been literally handed to me – but I was unable to benefit from it because of precisely the same problems that I needed to address.

This sensation was so strong that for a while I felt as though the entire retreat and curriculum had been specifically designed to catch specifically me (well, some class of people with comparable psyches to mine) in specifically this trap.

That night, I decided to get out my phone and give my friend Catherine a call; she’d attended a Jhourney retreat last year and had somewhat-comparable struggles, and I felt optimistic she would relate and/or have something helpful to say.

That call was a great idea. She was very helpful, steadfastly (and correctly, in my judgment) refusing to engage on the object level, and instead saying something like:

I say this with much love and affection but: yep, this is what you went on retreat to find. You went on a meditation retreat to help deal with your shit, and, congratulations, you have found your shit. You’re in it now. Be kind to yourself, and I for one am optimistic you’ll find a productive path out of it.

At the end of that call I still didn’t feel good, but I was also simultaneously giggling somewhat uncontrollably at how ridiculous I was being. Later that evening I ran into Jenny, the other lead facilitator, in the hallway. I must have looked like a bit of a mess because she asked “Are you okay?” or some form that question, which I was promptly completely unable to answer. I did, however, reply with some version of “Well, as my friend just said: I have found the shit, and I am dealing with my shit,” while giggling the whole sentence.

Day five

The turning point

The next morning I took a long hike in the sunshine, which helped a bit. I was still in a rough place mentally, though, and I walked out of the morning one-hour silent group sit, because it just wasn’t working for me. Walking back to my room, I again happened to cross paths with Jenny, and this time, after a bit of conversation, she offered to find time to do a bit of parts work with me later that day, an offer I gladly accepted.

We ended up finding time at noon, and spent at least 45 minutes in a very Jhourney/meditation-flavored IFS session, which was just stunningly powerful and effective for me. It’s difficult to describe the substance and the specific parts and emotions that came up, in part because there’s just not that much content there when described literally; but the depth and range of emotions I was able to feel and process, and the comparative ease of teasing apart my experience into different parts and emotional notes and their relationships, was just absolutely unprecedented for me and felt like a magical and transformative, experience.

After that session I ate lunch and took another hike in the woods; I was mentally and physically moving slowly and delicately and felt like I was slowly re-integrating and re-coalescing into a coherent individual, to which I felt able to bring a lot of tenderness and patience.

Breathwork

That afternoon, we had our final breathwork session, hosted by a local practitioner and teacher from the Santa Cruz area. I decided I would attend and just take it easy, and listen to my body and mind and feel into what felt good. Midway through the breathwork session, I discovered that I was feeling very relaxed and content, and, mostly without any intention or plan, discovered I was mentally hanging out with the intense love and gratitude I felt for a handful of named individuals in my life (including, but not limited to, my wife Kate!). Over time, that experience was much absorbing than the breathwork session, and I stopped following the breathwork practice instructions, and just sank deeper and deeper into that feeling of love and gratitude, and into the feeling of just how good it felt to feel that much love and gratitude.

Triangulating from others’ descriptions and from some conversations afterwards, I’m pretty sure at this point I slipped into a jhana, probably J2.

The experience was really fascinating and hard to talk about. With hindsight, I was definitely in a distinctive altered state, but the actual experience of it was somehow simultaneously all-encompassing and powerful, but simultaneously it felt very continuous and relatively gradual. I had a definite awareness of having crossed some sort of mental “phase change”: there was a sense of the experience of love and gratitude having “stabilized,” such that it was a strong “default,” and a sense that this default was stable and would persist, barring disruption. The analogy my brain offered was something like sitting inside an (unusually thick-walled) soap bubble; there was a sense that I could mentally “push” at the walls and they might shift but would tend to bounce back and resume their rest state, but also that if I pushed too dramatically or made a too-sudden movement, it could all collapse.

As part of the breathwork practice, the facilitators were circulating among the participants, and would periodically offer touch in ways they judged would be supportive – to help someone to relax or to move energy, to physically shift them into a more comfortable position, that sort of thing.

While I was in (presumptive) J2, I felt one of them offer me a hand on my head, gently adjusting the alignment of my neck and spine (I had tweaked one of my neck muscles during the retreat and I’m sure I was somewhat contorted trying to placate it).

This touch turned out to be a really interesting experience for me! First, I noticed a fairly forceful negative reaction to the touch – rendered into words, it would be something like “Hey I’m tripping on pure love and gratitude over here and your hand is cold and distracting and unnecessary. I’m doing just fine, thank you.”

However, instead of jolting me out of my jhanic state, I had the experience of being able to watch that feeling arise, from within the calm and stability of my bubble of love, and both deeply feel it and also choose to not react or sink into that feeling; instead I was able to acknowledge the feeling, but also make the deliberate choice to move or expand the all-encompassing sense of love I was feeling to encompass the touch and the teacher who was offering it, and relax into it; this worked, and I was able to lovingly observe and experience as she helped me realign my neck and feel the release of a small amount of tension I hadn’t noticed my neck was carrying.

Tonglen

That evening, we did one final group session, where we practiced a form of compassion meditation known as “tonglen.” The practice, in short, involves envisioning drawing in suffering on the in-breath – potentially the suffering of a specific individual or group, or of the world more broadly, or many other forms – and then envisioning it being transmuted within you, effortlessly, into a sense of ease and compassion, and then breathing that sense of ease and compassion back out into the world on the out-breath.

We did a short group meditation, and then paired up with a partner, spending 10 minutes in each direction of one partner relating suffering they’d been dealing with recently, and the other one listening silently and compassionately while doing the meditation.

I found it a really fascinating experience. I felt, at that moment, just profoundly content and compassionate and at peace, and felt deeply able to summon the feeling of compassion and care in the face of the idea of someone else’s suffering, or of my partner’s telling of their struggles, and feel empathy for them and sadness but deeply without it “getting to” me in any way. As my partner was relating their story, I experienced feeling so full of love and care and compassion that I felt as if I was grinning like a maniac with how much love I felt – and then felt deeply weird about listening to someone pour their heart out while grinning silently at them (My partner thankfully reported afterwards that they mostly just experienced me as deeply equanimous).

The final day

The final day of retreat was really lovely. I felt, for the first time all week, deeply calm and unhurried, and able to take the day to meditate playfully and with a sense of exploration and curiosity-without-expectation that I more-or-less hadn’t experienced all week. I experienced no more jhanas, and very little particularly unusual, but it was nonetheless a really lovely day.

One story, though, which I think is probably telling about my psyche. Due to some quirks of the schedule, on the last day I ended up with a ~6h block of totally-unscheduled meditation time, which was by far the most all week in a single block. I was excited to meditate for most of the block, with a few specific topics or approaches I wanted to explore or revisit.

Instead, 30 minutes into my first sit, I found myself just hopelessly distracted from meditating, in a way I hadn’t been all week. In particular, it became clear that the thing my brain really, really, really wanted to do was to compose an entire goddamn essay, riffing off the somewhat notorious piece of writing advice, “kill your darlings.” The essay had started unspooling during a hike, but then during this sit I simply could not move off of it.

I tried welcoming in the part of my mind which kept drafting the essay. I tried offering it all the lovingkindness I could muster. I tried sitting quietly with it, just holding space for it. I tried arguing with it. I tried arguing with it with lovingkindness. I tried forgiving it. Nothing worked – the voice in my head just kept. composing. the essay.

So I stopped the sit, sat down at a table in the sun, and wrote down an entire draft of the essay, start to finish, longhand in my notebook. Then, I returned to meditating, and meditated for close to four hours straight, with no more substantial distractions – I shifted a few times, moving to a different spot, or from sitting to lying down, but didn’t substantially exit the “meditating” headspace.

(Here’s the essay, if you want to read even more of my words, today).

The weeks after

I feel very unsure how much lasting effect the retreat has had and will have had. I felt very different for the 24-48h afterwards; I had a very strong sense of “resting contentment” and happiness, and felt that I was feeling my emotions and feelings much more strongly, and also being less reactive about them. I felt a fair amount more assertive and confident about speaking or acting up for myself; much less likely to notice some slight desire or preference, and then just quash it because acting on it seemed too awkward or challenging or overwhelming.

It also felt like the acute, really notable effects, crashed hard into a wall with a return to work and parenting and a normal over-busy life, and my emotional state is almost entirely back to baseline. I’ve definitely retained a bit of the increased sensitivity and awareness and proactiveness, but the difference feels subtle. I feel glad I went, and also, so far, slightly underwhelmed about the lasting impact, relative to how rare and expensive it feels to take a full week away from “default life” and especially Kate and Nick. We will see, though; the lingering effects feel subtle, but also very real and generally positive.

Thoughts on Jhourney

I found the retreat very powerful and valuable, and I’m glad I went. I am, as mentioned, a bit unsure about how much of a lasting effect I’ve been able to bring with me, and also feel a bit confused about what I think about their pedagogy and retreat format.

I have heard reports of people who, more-or-less, experienced a retreat as something like “Go on retreat. Follow instructions. Achieve jhana. Find experience very valuable.” I, personally, cannot imagine having an experience remotely that simple, with the materials and program as presently constituted, but I also find it very hard to tell to what extent that’s a fact about my own psyche and traumas and neuroses, versus a fact about their material and approach.

I will say: arguably the main form of instruction at Jhourney is the “retreat instructions,” a spiral-bound 100-page book participants are issued on arrival, and instructed to read certain sections of by certain points over the first 48h or so (and then recommended to read and revisit all of).

I found the book certainly helpful and to some extent informative, but I also found it essentially impossible not to relate to it as something like “this is a textbook and I am studying for the test.” The book explicitly and repeatedly warns you against that stance, but just by virtue of being a large tome of text, which is very structured and relatively dry, I found it impossible to expunge that part of my mind. I was, of course, self-aware that this was unproductive, and that contradiction was a major contributor to some of my mental spiraling mid-retreat.

Again, this is, in large part, “a me problem,” and something I needed (and still need) to work through. But I also do wonder whether it’s also an unforced error, and another approach might have helped me learn more of the skills and techniques they actually wanted to teach, and done less “shoving my own bullshit at me and grinding my face into it.” But on the third hand, maybe that’s just what I needed, and if they had managed to sidestep it, that would have been ultimately less helpful. I really don’t know.

I do have two more-specific thoughts or ponderings, though.

First, and riffing on the “textbook” analogy: The retreat instructions are very, very, clear that “playfulness” will be on the test, and that you should study up and bring your best sense of play to the final exam. They are not particularly, themselves, playful. I wish the instructions, themselves, had demonstrated more of a sense of play or discovery or lightheartedness, of the kind that’s necessary in this practice, and I really didn’t find them to do so. I’m not completely certain what it would look like for them to do so, but I think it would be worthy experiment.

Then, in a similar vein but more broadly: I wanted more poetry.

I’m thinking, here, of a saying that came up a number of times on retreat: “Before, it sounds like poetry; afterwards, it sounds like a technical manual.” I can’t find the source on a quick search, but it’s intended as a descriptor for a fairly broad class of content – experience reports and instructions, both – about “advanced” meditative states or practices, including the jhanas; all attempts to describe these states or techniques sound very abstract or florid or overly-metaphorical before you’ve experienced them, but once you achieve the described state, they have a tendency to “snap into focus” and you understand precisely what was meant, and sometimes even what you need to do to advance the practice; the florid, preposterous, rhetoric really does just precisely describe whatever you just experienced.

I get the sense that Jhourney is, in some sense, scared of writing or sharing poetry. Their written material aims to sound like a technical manual even before you start. I think there’s a lot of value to that kind of material, but it would be improved by also leaning into the “poetry” aspect, and offering the more abstract-sounding or poetic advice, in order to give participants more directions to triangulate from. Certainly I think I find some amount of that style or approach helpful, and I also find it embodies a “you can’t think your way through this” mindset, which is very helpful since that’s so much my default stance.

Author’s note: I recently attended a 7-day meditation retreat with Jhourney.

On the last day of retreat, I had a long – 6h or so – completely unscheduled block of time, the longest by far of the retreat. I was excited to meditate for most of it, to play with various techniques or listen to one or two guided tracks I hadn’t made it to yet.

I sat down for my first sit, and, within 30 minutes, it became clear that the thing my brain really, really, really wanted to do was to compose an entire goddamn essay on the famous piece of writing advice, “kill your darlings.” It had started doing so on a hike this morning, then gone mostly quiet, but during this sit it would. not. shut. up. about this essay.

My sits had been generally quite distraction-free over the week, so this was a quite unusual and somewhat confusing experience. I tried welcoming in that voice, I tried showing it some lovingkindness, I tried sitting quietly with it, I tried arguing with it, I tried arguing with it with loving kindness, I tried forgiving it, I tried every trick I had learned that week or had brought with me, and it just kept. composing. the essay.

So I stopped the sit, say down at a table, and wrote the entire goddamn essay, start to finish, in a very-close-to-final draft, longhand in my notebook. Then, I returned to meditating, and sat for more-or-less four hours straight with virtually no feelings of distraction, and only ~3 brief pauses about once an hour, to change posture or do a few minutes of walking meditation.

This is that essay.

The phrase “kill your darlings,” I find, sticks in my memory. It’s short and quippy, and just the right kind of shocking. I also have a sense that it’s entered the language and pops up again periodically, no doubt re-introducing it into my awareness. I think there’s a book or a movie of some note by that name?

I’m pretty sure, though – although I couldn’t be more specific off the top of my head – that it originates as a piece of writing advice, probably first uttered by some famous author.

I am, on occasion at least, a decent writer. Insofar as I am, though, it’s a very intuitive craft for me. I practice in the sense that I write a moderate amount (on my various blogs, but also at work and in personal contexts) and I make a point of writing, and stochastically get feedback for doing so. I do not, however, engage in “deliberate practice,” or work much specifically on the craft of writing. I don’t have an editor, I don’t do much seeking out and engaging with critique or feedback, I only rarely share early drafts, I’ve never taken a writing class, and so on. Probably I could be a better writer if I did, but that’s not my practice.

What I do have – and what I suspect all good writers must have, regardless of the rest of their practice – is two things.

First, I have a definite sense of “taste,” or an “ear” for what lands with me, or what doesn’t, be that at the level of an entire piece, or just a sentence or a paragraph, even if I can’t always explain why. And, second, I have an internal instinctive internal “voice” in my head that’s decent – far from perfect, but good enough – at producing text and ideas that the internal sense of taste likes.

Pick a topic. Generate some words on instinct. Review them listening for what “works” – for what lands, and what doesn’t, for that internal critic. Keep what works, try again with the parts that don’t. Repeat until the critic is satisfied (rare), until a deadline, or until you’re just so fed up with the process that you hit “publish.” That’s it, that’s nearly the entire craft of writing, at least as I practice it.

Sometimes, during this process, I land on a decision that I just fall in love with. Maybe it’s a quip that I find just hilarious, or an opening line, or a whole sentence, or something more abstract like a framing conceit for a piece. Sometimes I’m not even certain if it’s “good,” but it somehow grabs me. My inner critic just latches on. And I’ve learned to mostly trust that voice; it’s in precisely those choices and those moments that my own distinctive “voice” is formed. Also, writing can be a thankless, grueling task, and landing on something you just really love feels good, and I have to lean into those moments to keep up the practice.

But here’s the thing. Sometimes, later, one of those little decisions, one of the ones I’ve fallen in love with, stops working. Or maybe it never worked, but it’s only gradually become apparent. Maybe I’ve written more of the piece, and there’s just not actually anywhere it fits. Maybe it’s redundant with another paragraph, and that other paragraph does not quite spark joy in the same way, but fits infinitely better into the flow of the piece. Or I get repeated feedback that it’s not landing with readers, or even confusing them or leading them astray.

And sometimes, I can fix it. Rewrite something, move some paragraphs around, whatever.

But sometimes – perhaps more often, once you’ve noticed the pattern – the skillful move, for the sake of the entire piece, is to take that decision, the one you’ve fallen in love, with the one that your inner reader is clinging to, the one that feels like it is, in itself, why you write, and leave it on the cutting room floor.

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually looked up the original context of “kill your darlings,” or how it was originally meant. This move, though, is what it’s come to mean to me.

Almost by definition, it’s nearly the only move in the game of writing that I can’t do on instinct. The move where I have to pause, fall back to deliberative decision-making, and make a tough call. It doesn’t come up that frequently, but it can save a piece of writing when it does.

Reflecting on this conversation – and on my own relationship to the “POSIWID” meme, especially as it sometimes pops up on Twitter, Mastodon and their ilk – I’ve noticed (at least) two distinct sentiments that the POSIWID meme can denote, and that these dual meanings can result in people talking past each other, and causing (some) of the confusion and/or ill will in these fights. These meanings certainly draw on overlapping ideas and frames of analysis, but, importantly, they also serve very different social functions, which I think contributes to the hostility.

This note is an attempt to name and articulate both of these ideas, with the hope of maybe helping someone, somewhere, to stop talking past their interlocutor.

One interpretation

The first meaning I see goes something like so;

When trying to reason about a system, especially a complex system containing many interacting subsystems, you must understand it, and its subsystems, in terms of their actual behavior, and not the behavior someone intends or believes them to have.

This sentiment is the one I personally most-associated with the “POSIWID” idea, and is the one I’m probably trying to invoke if and when I reference it¹.

To me, this sentiment is almost a truism, but one that serves as a useful reminder to stay close to reality, and to be skeptical of our and others’ preconceptions about a system, especially when dealing with complex or unexpected behavior. “When the message enters subsystem Y, does Y actually log it, or is it just supposed to log it?” is a flavor of question that is often very useful when debugging thorny software issues, and I expect similar logic applies in any engineering domain.

In my mind, this sentiment is related to the injunction against speaking of “root causes” of many systems thinkers; both point at the fundamentally multi-causal and complex nature of systems interactions and behaviors, and warn (in different ways) away from trying to condense reality into overly-simplistic linear chains of cause and effect.

I have not extensively read Stafford Beer’s work, but I have the vague sense that this meaning is roughly compatible with how he used the idea. For instance, Wikipedia quotes a speech in which Beer explains:

According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

To me, “It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding …” sounds like a very similar sentiment to the one I articulated above.

Using similar words to “POSIWID,” but attempting to be a bit more explicit, I might summarize this interpretation as “Don’t worry about a system’s (alleged) purposes; analyze what it actually does.”

A second meaning

There’s a second interpretation of POSIWID, though, that I see (implicitly) bandied about in online discourse. This one, I think, is largely the meaning behind this other response post which I’ve seen going around. I’d summarize this reading as something like:

When you see a system persistently exhibiting some harmful behavior, consider whether the designers or operators of the system actually intend for it to behave that way, no matter what they claim. If the pattern is persistent enough, you may consider the pattern to be prima facie evidence of hidden intent.

In this frame, “POSIWID” is less a tool for understanding behaviors as for inferring motive.

To my mind, this reading is a useful heuristic, but definitely just a heuristic, which must be balanced against other evidence and against the details of any given situation. It’s useful, but can be overused.

Importantly, as well, while the first reading aims to be relatively value-neutral – the Beer quote above sets aside or minimizes questions of “good intent” or “moral judgment” – this reading is extremely value-laden, and steers directly for moral territory. It is a tool for assigning blame or inferring motive, and is thus largely a tool of social or political analysis, more so than engineering or technical analysis. That’s not intended as a criticism or a dismissal, to be clear – social and political analysis and argument are worthy goals – but it’s just worth being clear which lens we’re using and which argument we’re making.

I might summarize this interpretation as “If a system [persistently] does something, assume that its creators [or operators] intend that to be its purpose.”

In closing

As I said, I think my first interpretation is close to a truism, but a very useful reminder, especially to engineers and designers of complex systems. The second meaning, meanwhile, has value as an interpretative heuristic, but is much more or conditional or context-dependent. Importantly, they also speak to somewhat different domains or levels of analysis; the first meaning is (relatively speaking) “just technical advice,” but the second is a tool for social or political analysis and inferring intent.

They do share a common core, however: both interpretations advise you to set aside claimed or documented purposes, and to primarily consider the observed behaviors of a system.

However, they take you in different directions, or highlight different aspects of what you do with those observed behaviors, and. In particular, one (sometimes implicitly) jumps more-or-less straight to assigning blame, while the other mostly stops there and lets the user decide how to interpret those behaviors, and whether or how to assign them meaning.

It seems clear to me that some amount of the disagreement and fighting over the usefulness or the role of “POSIWID” comes from readers and users intending different interpretations, and thus talking past and misunderstanding each other. Of course, some of it also comes from people being smug assholes on Twitter; sometimes being a dick is, indeed, the purpose.

It arrived, we looked at the instructions, decided it would be mildly annoying and time-consuming to install, and hired a handyman we’d worked with before to mount it to the door (parenting really steeply shifts your willingness to trade money for time).

He did the install while I was out of the house at work. The moment I interacted with the gate, it became clear it annoyed me, and seemed shoddily designed and/or constructed. The latch was fiddly and hard to open in inconsistent ways – above and beyond the normal fiddliness I expect from any object that aims to be child-resistant and yet also usable by adults. It was a nuisance and an annoyance every time I entered or exited the nursery. I complained about it to Kate, but she thought it was fine and she didn’t have any complaint.

I noticed that a few bolts on it seemed to be loose. I got my toolbox, and tightened them down properly. I noticed another joint that had a bit of play, and was a bit out of alignment, so I loosened it, realigned it, and tightened it down properly.

The gate now no longer latches.

It turns out, our handyman had vertically misaligned the brackets screwed into the opposing sides of the doorframe, by perhaps ⅛ to ¼ of an inch. Then, he had managed to make the gate latch regardless, by leaving the other bolts just so slightly loose and/or out of true, exploiting just a little bit of play in the system in order to get it to latch – ⅛" is not a lot of distance to make up across the width of a door. By fixing the frustrating play I had noticed in the system, I broke his kludge, and the gate no longer functions to spec.

I intend to remove one of the brackets, and shift it by an eighth of an inch or so. That’s comparable to the diameter of the existing screw holes, so I expect I will first have to patch those with wood putty. Once they dry, I can re-align it, using the other part of the gate as a jig, and (carefully) drill new holes and re-hang it. This is all quite straightforward, but also mildly fiddly and annoying and time-consuming.

Here’s the thing: The gate worked. Kate hadn’t noticed anything wrong with it. I could, in principle, undo the fixes I have made, and continue using it that way.

But … I can’t/won’t. It’s wrong. It’s wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that would frustrate and annoys me, daily, for years, and which I know how to fix. I couldn’t avoid noticing the problem, and now that I understand it, I definitely can’t un-see it.

Here’s the other thing: Why? Why did I notice this? I really don’t think of myself as much of a woodworker, or one particularly handy, or mechanically inclined. I live in front of a computer all day. This isn’t a domain where I feel like I have particularly trained my perception or my judgment.

Some have described the skill or habit of noticing details like this, and caring, as “having taste.” I think of taste as something you cultivate, something learned from experience. I think of it as something like an aesthetic preference. I have, to some extent, taste in coffee. I can detect the differences between different roasters and different blends and different preparations, and I know what I like. I acquired that taste, gradually, over many years.

This gate thing, this doesn’t feel like that. It’s a different thing, one that seems to happen to me all the time: some object, some pattern of the built or social environment, some tool or practice, just appears to me, obviously and straightforwardly, from the very start, to be poorly executed and not fit for purpose. But no one around me seems to notice, or care. If they do notice, they shrug, acknowledge it as sub-par, and move on with their day; but instead, it infuriates me, distracts me, sticks in my mind, does not permit to interact with it without continually spending attention and cognitive effort trying to understand why it’s so bad, and how you would fix it.

Some people would say it’s a gift. It’s undoubtedly a sort of meta-skill that’s been useful to me, professionally; it drives a lot of my obsessive behavior around software engineering, and trying to build systems that are Good, Actually, and trying to deeply understand. I can’t and won’t deny that.

But also: Now the goddamn gate won’t latch. Now I am going to spend my time fixing it, even though it “worked just fine” before. Now I am going to do this thing and be grumpy about it, because I don’t know how else to ensure it gets fixed in a way that won’t annoy me.

Which is to say: I am attempting to write this note to convey to you that “having taste” or “being discerning;” it may be a blessing, but it’s also a goddamn curse.

There’s a classic rule of military analysis¹ that observes that the relative strength of two melee units is linear in headcount, but for units with ranged weapons, effective combat strength goes as the square of unit count.

Fundamentally, in hand-to-hand combat, units face off approximately one-on-one and thus the larger force can’t actually bring its additional units to the front. Thus, in each unit of time each force produces comparable output and sustains a comparable number of casualties, but the larger force can last linearly longer.

However, with sufficiently capable ranged weapons, the larger force is able to bring all of its combat power to bear, since all of its units can fire simultaneously. Now, in unit of time, the larger force is producing linearly more output, and also has the same linearly-increased staying power as before.

This law thus provides a principled theoretical basis for my contention that low-cost echoes with ranged capability – such as pigs with boomerangs (once Tri reaches level four) – are the most effective combat summons in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

This post is a spruced-up transcription of a verbal assertion I produced mostly-spontaneously for Kate while she was watching me play Echoes of Wisdom. This is just how my mind works.

In particular, taking on the role of a character was typically a fairly intellectual or “analytic” exercise for me; I could read a character sheet and internalize a character’s motivations and character traits, and attempt to behave in the ways I believed that character would behave, but it typically involved a moderately-explicit internal thought process of “Okay, how would this character behave? What are their salient motivations or backstory here? How does that influence them?” In contrast, I got the sense from talking to friends that they were often “becoming” their characters in a somewhat deeper sense: actually feeling (to some degree) that character’s emotions or feelings, internalizing them, and assuming that persona to some greater extent where they could “just act” and be acting with that character’s identity to a larger degree.

This was all very much my inferences and interpretations of the ways others described their experiences; I cannot attest that I am faithfully describing anyone else’s experiences in the way they would or that they would necessarily endorse.

Because I am who I am, I sometimes likened this in my mind to “emulation” vs “virtualization”; I was “emulating” the characters I was playing more-explicitly by modeling them explicitly in my head, while (I got the impression that) others were modeling their character by mapping larger fractions of their decision-making and mental and emotional states directly onto their own cognitive hardware, in a way reminisicent of “virtualizing” a guest machine by executing most instructions directly.

Over the last few years I’ve been reading more about Internal Family Systems, or IFS, on the weight of numerous recommendations from friends. To vastly oversimplify, IFS models individuals’ psyches as containing multiple different “parts,” each of which can be viewed as a somewhat-independent actor with their own goals and motivations, and which interact and inform our experience and emotions in various ways. IFS asks us to get to know our parts, and learn what goals they are working in service of, or what traumas they are reacting to, and so on.

IFS literature often conceptualizes this as an internal conversation between your “Self” and a part, in which you will ask the part questions, listen to its answers, and otherwise mentally “be with” the part in various ways.

I have found IFS often very insighful and informative about my own experiences and struggles; the models and paradigms I see in IFS books often resonate and have provided me with useful insights or perspectives. In my judgment, experienced IFS practitioners appear to understand important true things about the range of human experience that are not always well-captured by other sources.

At the same time, the “core conceit” of IFS, of accessing a part, and conceptualizing it as another entity inside your head, often including identifying facts like what age it is, or how it is behaving or presenting itself, have fallen almost entirely flat to me. I have maybe once had the experience of “accessing a part” in a way that seem recognizable to me from the vignettes in (say) Self-Therapy.

But the framework has nonetheless often been very useful to me, as an analytical tool! I have certainly identified emotions or narratives within me, conceptualized them as a “part” of me that is a component of but distinct from the whole, and expressed curiosity about its origins and motivations and function, and sometimes found it useful. But when I do so it feels much more like an intellectual detective game, thinking about my experience and my life and the circumstances under which I have felt a given feeling. I can ask questions like “Given what I understand aobut that part, what might make it feel more heard, or safer? When would I expect it to be triggered?” and arrive at useful answers.

… which, finally, brings me to my long-winded point and the connection I am trying to draw. This experience reminds me a lot of my relationship with LARPing a character, except that this time it is a part of myself I am attempting to understand or role-play. My reading leads me to believe that authors expect me to “inhabit” the part in some fuller way, to draw on my own emotional capacity and experiential abilities to “have a conversation” with the part and “ask it questions” in such a way that the answers to those questions appear to “just arrive” from that part, instead of from a considered analysis of “what that pat would say.” But instead, my experience is not that, but is one where I arrive at at-least-somewhat-similar results, but via a much more laborious and analytical path; and in which I find the results useful, but also less … mystical(?) … than I am lead to believe.

This may all be a long-winded way of saying that I am an overly-intellectualizing nerd with somewhat-stunted emotional development and access to or awareness of my own feelings and emotional experiences. That’s certainly true, although it’s something I’ve made immense progress on over the last 5-10 years. And I have noticed that as I’ve done so, I’ve gained marginally more access to “the experiences I understand other people to be saying they are having” in both domains. But it doesn’t feel like the only thing going on here, to me, as best as I can discern, albeit with low confidence.

We finished two acts in about 5h, putting us in welllll above the “60-90 min/act” estimate on the box. The second act was much faster as we found our groove and got practice, and probably came in inside of that range.

On the whole I enjoyed the experience! I think it exceeded my expectations and I would play it again, which didn’t seem certain going in.

The game is a remarkably faithful reproduction of the computer game, with some necessary simplifications and tweaks for the format. Joe and I consulted on more-or-less every card pick for every player and found our video-game-trained intuition continued to be very strong; we spent essentially the whole game clearly well ahead of the power curve. That’s probably to be expected, since we were playing on A0; the board game also has an unlock and ascension system closely paralleling the computer game.

Implementing the mechanics in cardboard is in fact fiddly. There was a lot of bookkeeping and different tokens and phases/steps for a fight, and keeping everyone in synch and executing the rules with fidelity was hard, especially trying to do so across four players operating semi-independently during fights, and while attempting to move relatively quickly.

When you play with >1 player, each player takes a different character, and all N (four for us) characters climb the Spire as a group. For hallway combats you draw one monster per character; bosses and elites instead scale in some way with N, although may also summon minions \propto N.

The basic structure of the battle is N “rows”, with each player occupying one row, and each enemy existing in a row; players may target any enemy they want with attacks, and enemies mostly only target their own row (but sometimes do AoE to all players). This leads to – at times – strategy to coordinate to burst down one player’s foes early, e.g. to save a player who cannot block enough, or for one player to turtle (often this was me, playing the Defect with a copy of Glacier) while we whittled down the other rows first.

You play fights with open hands and simultaneous player turns, although in practice there are so many cards on the board and the situation is sufficiently overwhelming that instead of looking at anyone else’s hand, you communicate verbally – “I’ve got four additional damage I can deal, does that help anyone?” etc.

As an aside, my favorite moment of the game:

Each player draws a relic reward independently after e.g. elites. The player with no StS experience at all was playing Ironclad, since we judged that to be the most straightforward. He had been building into a decent set of Exhaust synergies, as you do – he had Feel no Pain and Juggernaut and a True Grit.

He draws a card from the relic deck and looks at it before showing it to us. He says, out loud, kind of tentatively … “It’s … a stick?? Is that good?”

Joe and I just break out laughing uncontrollably in disbelief in unison.

(Dead Branch is nerfed *substantially in the board game – the text reads something like “Once per combat, draw a number of cards equal to the number of cards in your exhaust pile” – but it’s still quite strong and still synergizes well with the Ironclad’s exhaust shenanigans)

I’ve been meditating with varying levels of consistency for maybe 6 or 7 years now. I started with Headspace and 10% Happier and their guided meditations, but for the last few years I’ve been mostly just doing a 15m timer and sitting with whatever is present, commonly focusing on the breath as an anchor. These days I’m pretty consistent about it and have built it into my morning routine.

I’ve definitely noticed that, when I am consistently meditating every morning, it has a real observable effect for me. My mood/headspace/orientation to the world is generally a bit better; I’m a bit calmer, a bit more observant – especially about myself and my own emotions and needs; I’m a bit less reactive, I’ve got a bit more grace and equanimity in general. It’s not a huge effect but I’m pretty convinced it’s one I can detect in myself.

It’s just … weird to me this is true?? Like, I think in some sense it’s completely unsurprising if you’ve read anything at all about meditation or talked with a single experienced meditator. But also it feels somehow super counterintuitive to me, and I feel like I totally a lack anything resembling a “good theory” that would predict this.

Some specific aspects of my experience:

• It feels like very much some sort of moving average, more so than something as simple as “on days I meditate I get the benefit.” Somehow that’s weird to me – I think of the brain/mind as having effects with characteristic timescales of minutes or hours, and there are clearly long-run ones on timescales of years, but with meditation it feels like something in me is effectively doing a moving average over the last few days, and that hing is sensitive to spending c. 1% of that time in this particular mental space.
• If it’s so good for me [which, again, both “everyone” and my own experience agree on], why is it, like, mildly aversive on average to actually sit down and do it? Why have neither evolution nor some sort of experiental learning loop made that connection? This feels somehow related to the timescale thing, to me – somehow the “behavior” -> “outcome” connection is too decoupled in time to be easily learnable by my lizard-brain and so I have to actually Do Cognition to make the connection.
• To that point: I have managed to meditate consistently primarily by building it into my morning routine; every morning, I do (roughly) the same sequence of activities in the same order, one of which is my 15 minute sit, and the force of habit and repetition suffices to make me Actually Do The Thing.
  • But when I’m traveling, I lose my usual structure, and I almost always stop meditating entirely or almost-entirely while on the road
  • … and that gives me another opportunity to notice the cumulative effect: I very often notice that, after a trip where I’ve dropped the habit, getting back into it is is hard. The first two days back, the 15 minute timer lasts subjectively forever and I can just feel myself rebelling – I notice myself getting bored and antsy, I notice myself wondering “is this doooone yet,” I notice my attention wandering all over the place, etc. I even notice myself procrastinating the meditation – I’ll get more-easily sucked into just tapping things on my phone, catching up on the internet, etc, instead of just sitting down and starting my timer.
  • … but gradually over a few days, I observe myself get back into it, and sitting quietly for 15m becomes easy, even pleasant.