Augmenting Accountability

Many of us try to use digital technology to extend the fullest version of ourselves into the world — but this inevitably fails, because the fullest version of ourselves cannot be encapsulated in the digital realm, and in the process of trying to make it fit, we pay attention to the wrong things.

When we try to make social media accounts that most accurately represent ourselves, the biases in that technology end up entrapping (rather than liberating) our multitudes. This is often because those biases have been used to sow a battle field—advertisers constantly battling for our attention—rather than a verdant field, a soon-to-be-bustling biome.

Maybe this is because the technology needed to extend the clearest version of ourselves into the world is not a digital technology but rather a much simpler tool: the written word.

This technology can only be approached with reverence, because that is what liberates you to use the written word not as a tool for something grand and majestic and mysterious such as communicating the fully actualized self — but for the richest experience of reality, a continual and yearning approach toward heavens within us all.

Thing about the blog is that I try to make it as freewheeling as possible, without going back and making too many edits.

Sometimes though you have to ask yourself if what you’re putting out into the world is actually even worth the readers’ time and attention.

So there is this constant back and forth between whether my words will be important to explain an idea of extraneous and actually hindering my goal.

For me, this dilemma is most pronounced when I think about ways in which I can help myself blog more regularly.

An Individual Account

I think we it might be helpful to make ourselves more accountable for our inner lives. This might be best achieved by writing as much as possible about how we’re thinking and feeling — and then organizing that information and striving to analyze these inner complexities emergent tools as they become available.

Think back on some of the biggest decisions you’ve ever made in your life — what if you could identify a few trends in your own thinking that had simply steered you wrong? I believe this is what we can arrive at if we are able to interpret the reasonings behind our decisions, which entails writing about how we remember them.

Maybe this is because we remember these things the way our mind lets us remember them, which is often a function of what was most important for us to think about at the time. When we think back on decisions where we felt we chose wrong, we are guided by an inner voice that is on the right track. The way that we can come to reconcile these things is to write about them, directing our attention inward to that same inner voice, which is a manifestation of oneself.

What if in order to manifest as oneself, you must be able to harness multitudes?

Say these multitudes are all the voices that you subconsciously hear telling you to think or act or behave in different ways. These are the tools that our mind uses to make sense of the world — but in today’s world, we are too accustomed to interpreting the multitudes of others, because that is all that our social platforms are geared toward. This is because our multitudes, when revealed to each other on Twitter or Instagram, are discordant and deceiving. They are helpful for driving chaos and outrage and attention — but in giving our attention to voices constructed in this manner, we tend toward failure.

A healthier way to interact with technology might involve a restoration of the primacy of the written word as a cultural form, and a renewed appreciation for the vibrancy of digital maximalism that one can find in video games. At least, this is what worked for me. I’m sure there are many other ways to restore this sense of oneself; indeed, every religious awakening we’ve ever experienced in the U.S. could be interpreted through the lens of man’s evolving relationship to spirituality and technology.

The spirituality that I ascribe to tends to see the inner human life as something of a force of nature, something that cannot be controlled any more than it can be salvaged. Critical to maintaining this force of nature is to keep account of one’s multitudes, continually fashioning them into a sense of oneself — and this involves writing constantly in order to keep track with how this same spiritual dimension in manifesting in the outer world.

This is the context in which I understand accounting. There are plenty of tools that can help with this cultivation, many of which we are just now discovering. Graph-based note taking is something that I feel deep down will be crucially important for these ends, because it has helped me sort out my own misplaced virtues as well. I just need to go back and write out my ideas in the graph to untangle the misplaced importance applied to the wrong places.

To Account for Oneself

Most foundationally, I’m someone who has fallen victim to the curse of the contrarian, being too overly skeptical about my own inner voice to trust it.

For me, the thinking had always been that the inner voice telling you do to something was in fact just an illusion — and so it shouldn’t be listened to, or at least it was often wrong. I felt this viscerally when I did listen to this voice and wrote about my environmental passion as a college freshman. When I didn’t receive the feedback from the universe that I thought I would—I felt alone because I had isolated myself in trying to identify what I wanted to say—I ended up silencing that voice in order to learn how to best communicate with the world.

It took a complete and utter failure on my own terms, an explosion of my professional life and an alienation of all my friends, in order for me to recognize what was right in front of me: That I simply needed to write. I’m a writer. Any time I try to do something else, I am going to be destined to fail — at least until I foremost write about my experience, so as to explain to others how to learn about and experience the world in a manner similarly.

It’s in this context that I seek to apply reverence to all of life through my pursuit of writing so much every day. I’m striving to communicate life in a way that has this reverence — but it is with a knowing understanding of the limitations of human knowledge that I’m able to do so. There is no limit to the sorts of things you can write about because only so much can be explained in language — but that does not diminish language as a means through which you can write.

To do this from the heart, in this day and age of digital technology, I believe you really need to simplify and let the words flow through you as authentically as possible, otherwise you end up talking over oneself in questing for a certain audience or another. For me, digital minimalism is something that is foundationally spiritual then, because it involves placing restraints on how you interact with the digital world, as a form of self care for yourself. But it must also be balanced by an equal appreciation for the bounty of the written word, and that is what I try to communicate on my personal blog.

I believe that this is the thing that many people feel similarly in their professional lives: That there is no way to apply the passion you have for life to the passion you have for business or technology, because in those arenas you have people who have no understanding of your life, and have a very limited sense for how to interact with you. The written word can make things as expansive as precise, and it’s how we direct attention inward, to discover ourselves and in the process connect with the rest of the universe, eternally in a similar process of discovery.