The Barbell Strategy

On reintroducing this project, the importance of writing as thinking, and noticing birds in the world of intelligent machines

I saw a friend this weekend and she said “I haven’t seen any of your writing recently”, and it’s true, it’s been a while.

I got caught up in the day to day. New challenges at work, additional cognitive load, news cycles I think we need to stay on top of, kids who need shuttling, events that need attending. At the margins, in the spare minutes, I’d pull out my phone. Check texts, check messages, check twitter, check instagram, repeat.

You know the feeling when your attention has started to fragment, when you can’t focus on the book you’re trying to read, when you can’t articulate the idea you’re trying to convey, even to yourself.

You know the vibes, and you know it isn’t good.

So I’m back here, trying to take the mess inside my head into something coherent, trying to make sense of what it means to be human in a time of rapid, escalating change. You don’t realize how much you’re not thinking until you stop making yourself do it on the page.

Legendary Strong Man George Sandow

A refrain on this site has long been how to work and live in an age of intelligent machines. I’ve been refining my own barbell strategy that heavily weights two sides of the dichotomy of the modern world. Trying to make sure I’m using the models as best I can, while resisting the siren song of using them for everything. I’ve been having Claude teach me about using agents, but I’m also wary of overreliance. Part of my resistance to the outsourcing of my thinking is to return to writing as thinking here. If you’re going to lean into the automation of some of your work, you need to lean in at least as hard into thinking and doing things for yourself. Otherwise, you are entering the world of dragons where you lose yourself to the machine.

Out there in the world I’ll continue to notice birds, stepping away from the screen and staying present in the actual, real, living world. That means time with friends and family in the park, time by myself hiking the mountains of the north east, and time literally watching birds.

But that alone doesn’t suffice to protect my ability to think. For me to understand who I am and what I think I need to write it down. I need the struggle of working it out on paper. I’ve done this my whole life, from journals and zines, to Maximum RocknRoll and Livejournal to here where I will continue to write essays on ancient texts, trying to work through what the book of Samuel still has to tell about living a moral life.

Hope you’ll stick around, it’ll stay weird.