A while ago I came up with the idea of Zettelblogging. That would be capturing, note taking and summarizing ideas in public. I think that anyone who tries this kind of approach finds it too disjointed to be public facing. Some of my notes are cryptic and tangential, while others are basically full book reviews and summaries. In the end, as casual as I want to be in my writing for this site, that seemed to just be taking casual blogging too far. I think the standard journaling and linking works well in the format.
Having just posted my weekly entry, Six impossible things before breakfast, I’m thinking a bit about where this is all going. This is another discussion of how to understand this contradiction between our subjective feeling of a unified, consistent identity and the fact that we can change our behavior so easily based on social context, whether we’re alone or observed, and when we engage in lying, acting or otherwise choosing to act in a way that is different from what we know to be our true selves.
I’m finding that producing a weekly post for Substack is providing complimentary tool to journaling. I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just letting topic flow into topic to find out what the effort is about. Right now I’m interested in how we define and improve ourselves, so each week I pick a topic, collect some thoughts, outline a reasonable discussion, write, edit and publish.
As you might expect, noodling around a topic in public like this is a great way to discover ideas, try them out in front of an audience and refine ideas. I’ve made progress in understanding how the brain constructs its representation of self by considering our social behavior. Probably a few more weeks to wrap up this set of ideas and get into a bit more of the nuts and bolts of brain mechanisms.
