It was February, and I felt amazing. I was walking along the north bank of the Thames from Vauxhall Station into Westminster. It was my first day at my new job. I was feeling very good about my life. Better than ever before. I had been in London for 18 months and had now established a bunch of real friendships. I had also just started a job at the Cabinet Office. This was very impressive sounding. I was now managing a team, and had been put in charge of a “high profile government statistics project”. I was also dating someone new. She was smart, funny and attractive. Very attractive.

As I walked past parliament I felt a sweetness in my chest.

I got to the office and after some initial admin had the first meeting with my manager and his manager (I’m going to call them Paul and Matt). They wanted me to get started very quickly. I was joining the project later than had been hoped, with only 6 months until the publication date. In that time, we had to build working relationships with all government departments and dozens of arms length bodies, construct a whole data collection and verification process, train my inexperienced team and then design and produce this extremely important statistics publication. The vibe was intense. Paul and Matt kept talking over each other and, when I tried to make myself heard, they talked over me too. I went back to my desk feeling stressed and small.

Luckily I was still dating this beautiful woman (let’s call her Amy). After the meeting I thought of Amy and felt better. I felt bigger and more confident.

Over the next few weeks this kept happening. The project itself was going well. We had agreements with almost all of the arms of the government and my team was working really well together. But I still felt small when I was in the office. I didn’t feel like Paul respected me. He would keep talking over me in meetings and turned down my requests for one-to-ones. And despite the apparent importance of my work, Matt wasn’t inviting me to the statistics team’s leadership meeting. The stated reason for this was that my Civil Service grade wasn’t high enough. I felt left out and unimportant. Anytime I was faced with something like this, anytime I felt small, I would think of Amy. “I’m not failing, I’m dating this really attractive woman” is what I would have said to myself if I’d had the awareness to turn my feelings into words.

This was my life for the first few months of that year. I would see Amy a couple of times a week, and I would go to work and feel a mix of pride and excitement at my project and small and disrespected by the leadership.

Then in April Amy went away for a few weeks. She was in America for work. Over those weeks, her text got gradually less and less timely. In late April, I was away on a hiking trip with some friends in Northumberland. By this time her low engagement replies to my messages would come in almost exactly 24 hours after I had sent a message. I would reply immediately and then wait another 24 hours. My anxiety at this pattern had been growing for the last fortnight and was now all consuming. I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t really sleep. I kept waking up to check my phone. One sunny day by a Northumbrian river with my friends I just spent pacing round a meadow bare foot. I had learnt to enjoy the feeling of sharp seed pods digging into my feet as I walked. The pain would pull me from my anxiety about Amy and back into the present.

Soon after getting back to London from this trip I had a call with her. She said that she wanted to stop dating.

As I lay on my bed alone I felt cold. A coldness that was part of the structure of reality. I had been living in a dream. This was real. This was real and I was alone. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was just actually alone and that was what was real. I really was just this small man in a single room.

I started working harder over the following months. The job still made me feel small. But now it was much worse. Anytime I felt bad, I still thought of Amy. I had fallen into a trap. I’d spent months using the thought of her as a remedy from feeling small and that had developed into a sticky habit, into an addiction. But since the breakup, instead of pride, thoughts of Amy just made me feel smaller still. I would spiral down into the hole many times a day. Waves of coldness and tension that would pull me away from the world. Some subtle remark from a colleague and her face would flash in my mind and I was gone. Alone again.

One evening in early summer I went to a data science event. The speaker was also a Cabinet Office statistician. There were around 200 people in the audience. He had designed, built and published a statistical analysis package. His presentation was impressive. He was funny and charismatic. I also knew he was one Civil Service grade higher than me. “Amy probably wouldn’t have broken up with him” I thought.

In August we published the statistics publication. I couldn’t really work over the months after that. Exhausted, sliding towards burnout. I tried once to reconnect with Amy. By the autumn she was with someone new.

It took another year before I stopped regularly thinking of her face and disappearing. It took two years before I could travel through the part of London where she lived without feeling a low hum of dread in my chest.

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Addendum

I scheduled this post earlier this week, but delayed it due to something being missing.

About a month after I was existentially alone in my bedroom, I was talking to a friend of mine, Hannah, about wanting to live in a shared house with friends. That time alone in the flat, alongside the previous months seeing Amy and her flatmates living happily together, had made me realise I really wanted to live in a community. Three months after that, Hannah and I and three friends were living in what would become a very beautiful group house in East London.

A few years later Hannah and I would be engaged.

Monkeyism is big idea about big ideas.

Monkeyism say: “The more an idea try to explain, the more likely the idea is monkey business.”

Monkey business is when monkey say thing for little monkey reason rather than big truthy reason.
Little monkey reason like “feeling safe and relaxed”.
Little monkey reason like “food” and" “sex”.
Little monkey reason like “other monkeys thinking they are good monkey”
Little monkey reason like “other monkeys thinking they have big brain and good genes”

So monkeyism say big complex ideas likely just about feeling okay as monkey.

Me give example. Monkey once believe no free will. Monkey talk about “determinism”. Very big brain idea. Explains a lot. Monkey say: “nothing me do matter, everything already decided”. Monkey feel very smart. Monkey also feel very relaxed. Monkey not have to try. Monkey not have to feel bad about not trying. Very convenient for lazy monkey.

Monkeyism say ideas about normal monkey things probably not monkey business.
Monkey ideas about monkey own feelings probably good monkey ideas.
Monkey say “me feel sad”, probably true. Monkey say “here is theory of consciousness”, probably monkey business.
Big complex ideas more likely monkey business.
Monkeyism not say big complex idea wrong. Just probably monkey business.
Most monkey business wrong.

Monkeyism not sure if Monkeyism is big complex idea.
Monkeyists might just want to be better than other big brain monkeys.
Monkeyists might think they not smart enough to have good big ideas.

Me hope Monkeyism is small idea.
Me hope Monkeyism not monkey business.
Me hope you think me have big monkey brain and good monkey genes.

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Jhanas are states of blissful meditative absorption. 18 months ago, I went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat focused on practices that help folk enter Jhanas.

I did not experience any Jhanas that retreat. While the retreat as a whole was really positive, I was having difficulty sleeping and was generally having lots of difficult thoughts and feelings. This combination made it hard to meditate some days. At various points I just gave up and wrote poems instead. This might have been a mistake. The writing and thinking may have stopped me from getting to all the bliss. If so, that’s sad. Bliss is nice. But I did get some poems…

Here is my favourite:

Billy had a bully

Billy had a bully
Who bullied billy bad
Beat him hard and teased him
Making Billy sad

Though bullied billy grew
And bully moved away
Billy still feels bullied
Every single day

See Billy carries bully round
Deep inside his heart
So can’t let go of bully
Can’t let down his guard

Big bads abound for Billy
Big bad boss, big bad friend
If girlfriend every big and cross
Billy wants this all to end

See Billy had a bully
Who bullied Billy bad
And Billy now feels paranoid
Billy now feels mad

But Billy saw this pattern
Learnt love could end this pain
If he could just let go
Of the bully in his brain

Forgiveness isn’t easy
When Billy see’s through time
At beatings and at teasings
The red in Billy rise

See letting go, means letting in
You feel it fully first
So Billy felt the pain and rage
He let it do its worst

Then letting go he saw the bully
Clear as not before
Another poor lost soul
Unloved, alone, ignored

And Billy wasn’t bullied now
Billy big and kind
Billy can give bully love
(at least the bully in his mind)

Billy had a bully
Who bullied billy bad
That Billy could forgive
By believing bully sad

Urmmm….

Bully might no be sad though!?
That’s just a Billy thought.
Just pseudo-Buddhist bullshit
That silly Billy bought

All bullies carry pain?!
Maybe Billy’s bully’s fine!
Maybe Bully’s happy
Just great for all this time!

(Sorry for those last two verses
I have a confession
A frame that makes this bit make sense
Not just some strange digression)

The Bully deep in Billy’s heart
Was real, that parts not silly
It was unloved, ignored,
By no-one else but Billy

It’s not about the bully
It’s Billy and himself
About the shame and anger
That he could now let out

Acceptance and forgiveness
Of strangers from the past
Are stories he creates
To make a peace that lasts

So Billy tells these stories
Tells stories all the time
Then silly Billy shows them off
In silly Billy rhymes

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I recently watched The Divided Brain. It’s a film about the work on Iain McGilchrist.

McGilchrist writes books about how our society is too left-brained - i.e. reductionistic, analytical, action-oriented, verbal etc. As opposed to taking a more holistic, integrated, right-brained perspective.

I checked out his book, but it was veeeeery long. And the bits I read were quite dense. Also, an academic guy publishing 600 words criticising the excesses of analytical thinking gave me a funny feeling. So instead of reading the rest of the book, I wrote this poem.

The dance of McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist steps up to the mic
He looks round the room with a smile
He takes up the space, with power and grace
Though has a strange look in his eye

Then with a firm kick, the lectern is over
Loud music has started to blare
Then Iain starts moving, to beats he is grooving
You’ve nothing to do now but stare

The music is techno all bleeps and all bloops
He leaps to left of the stage
His dance here seems strong, but something’s all wrong
He seems like a beast in a cage

His arms and his legs form sharp angular shapes
He carves out his thoughts with his limbs
His meaning is clear, all craving and fear
He’s showing us all of our sins

The Dr then glides to the right of the stage
An orchestral piece starts to play
His movement grows smooth, all graceful and new
McGilchrist’s full self on display

Though time seems to stop, his dancing goes on
Now there is no you, and no he
Just one deep felt sense, one sacred silence
Words can’t describe what you see

Then with a quick flash, he’s moving all over
Combining both dances as one
He jumps and he heaves, he slides and he weaves
Duality’s blurred but not gone

At once it all stops, the music is quiet
He looks round the room with grin
And then he is gone, his legacy done
You’re left there with all that you’ve seen

You sit for a while. The dance integrates
Then turn to your friend with a look
The friend meets your gaze, you lean in and say
“That made so much more sense than his book”

Scene: A room. Could be an office. Could be a flat in North West London. Could be inside a mind. P is sitting in the corner, scrolling their phone. O walks in, clearly excited about something.

O: Hey P! You know how we always have these arguments about what is better, being optimistic or being pessimi— er, sorry, ahem, realistic? I had this AMAZING idea for a new concept - I call it “meta-optimism.”

Meta-optimism means not taking a stance on whether optimism or erm... non-optimism is better. Instead we take a stance on whether the dance between these two perspectives is good. The meta-optimistic stance is that this dance is good - both optimism and it’s opposite are both good. After all, both have evidence behind them.

Optimistic teams are more successful, and optimistic people are happier. And conversely, business practices that involve fully embracing negative narratives, such as “red teaming” help teams produce much better outcomes. Alongside that, blind optimism is clearly bad - remember Fyre Festival? And blind pessimism - also terrible! Consistently pessimistic folks find it difficult to start anything. We need both! All projects need both! All minds needs both! All discourses need both! This idea is going to change the world! I just need to publish a blog post about it. The title will be “You Should Be More Meta-Optimistic.”

P: (looks up from phone, long pause) What!? Really? This is what you’re going to spend your time on? “Meta-optimism”? Like what is this based on exactly? Your two little points about the value of optimism and pessimism? And what is the actual operation here? What are you actually suggesting people do!? You’re just vibing with words. Seriously O, we have one life on this planet. You want to waste it trying to invent new concepts? No-one is going to read this! It’s going to have an impact on precisely no-one. It’s a mostly just another one of your vain and psychologically uninformed attempts to feel significant.

O: (sits down, sits with this) Wow, okay... thanks for that P. I hear the skepticism. Let me try to explain why I even care about this. I think it has something to do with my own internal battles here. I’ve noticed that I can be very excited about a project one day and then very negative about it the next day. And most of the time there is no objective data to point to about the probability of success. This rollercoaster causes a lot of tension and confusion in me.

P: (softens slightly) Okay, I get that. I’ve noticed that pattern too.

O: And this also happens interpersonally. On teams I’m in - often one person will be the negative one in the room and another the positive. I’ve been in many unproductive arguments about “how positive or negative is too positive or negative”. A core motivation of mine is to create spaces where conflict can be integrated well. That means both internal and external conflict. Meta-optimism is a way of framing one very general source of conflict in a way that encourages a more wholesome resolution. By simply agreeing to see the dance itself as a good thing, rather than a game to win! Ultimately, both parties simply need to name what role they are in and agree to an intention of mutual respect and listening. That’s what I’m pointing at here!

P: (considers) Hmmm, okay. I can see why that matters to you. I guess my concern is less about whether it’s a good idea and more about the execution. There are just a lot of more important and enjoyable things we could be doing! Also, I get hand tension and it’s boring. And I spend all the time imagining some judgmental and critical audience.

O: Totally hearing you here P! I have an idea! How about if we turn it into a fun show-and-tell-at-the-same-time dialogue between parts of my own psyche? We always feel more confident and enjoy it more when we express things playfully and self-referentially like that. We can make one character express all these things that you’re telling me! It will be so much fun!

P: (pauses, then smiles slightly) You know what? I think I’d be happy with that. I doubt this post of yours is going to have much impact, but there’s a chance it will be fun to write.

O: That’s so great to hear! I’m so excited! Shall we get started?

P: Um…. I have one request, actually… I am a little unsure about title: “You Should Be More Meta-Optimistic”. It seems a arrogant to tell people what they should do. This is just an idea, and I don’t want us to seem arrogant.

O: Ah yeah, totally understand that P. How about we add a “(probably)” in the subtitle? That way we still get to tell people what they should do, but it will seem less arrogant.

P: Yeah okay, that would make me feel better…

O: Awesome! Ready to go!?

P: Fine. But you do the typing…

O: Deal!

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I have this idea for a blog post.

I have a feeling it’s going to be a really good blog post.

It’s going to be about moral philosophy, but also kind of about mental health.

It will blur the distinction between moral philosophy and mental health.

The narrative frame will be simple. It’s a council meeting of parts of my psyche. They are deciding what to do about some important moral question. I’m not sure what question exactly... Maybe they are considering what I should do for a career. Or whether I should donate money to charity or something like that. Something vaguely EA-coded probably because a lot of my audience is EAish. Maybe I’ll explicitly frame this as an Internal Family Systems therapy session or maybe that could be implied. Not sure… guess I’ll just do whatever is most fun.

Anyway, the council is meeting, so I’ll need to introduce the various parts of my moral psyche. Each part will represent some moral philosophical position that I resonate with. Each part represents a frame that I’ve absorbed and constructed at some point in the past, after feeling its lacking for too long.

Hmmm, so I need to think about what the parts will be and how the drama will unfold.

So obviously there will be a part for total utilitarianism. He cares about there being more wellbeing. He’ll be a maths-nerdy type. Quite fastidious. Somewhat megalomaniacal vibes. Only cares about things insofar as they achieve some future good according to some conceptual framework. I’ll present him with some EA stereotypes which will be funny. He’ll have Huel t-shirt for example, hilarious. I’ll call him Utils.

Then I need a part to represent something like deontology. A part that cares about following some apparently objective set of rules, and has a keen sense of social justice and fairness. Also kinda fastidious probably, but in a more small-scale fussy, judgy neighbour type way. Yeah, he’s mostly just there to watch out for folk breaking his rules I reckon. I’ll present him as a mashup between a priest and a lefty social justice warrior type. Brilliant! I’ll call him Deon

Then I’ll need a virtue ethics part. He’ll be quite cool I think. Heroic seeming and muscular would make sense. He’ll care about embodying the qualities of positive (likely somewhat masculine-leaning) archetypes. Qualities like patience, and courage, and truth-seeking-ness and things like that. He won’t be obviously judgemental, but it would probably be fun if I portrayed him as a little smug and holier-than-thou seeming. I’ll call him Virty.

I also want a part to represent something like this idea of autopoethics. I read about this moral frame recently, and I really liked it. This part cares primarily about the resilience of the system making the moral decisions and doing the moral actions. In this case, that system is me. It cares about me and how actions that benefit things outside of me can be seen as a complexification of a self-preserving system that has me at the centre. This one is kinda new and complicated, so I may need to explain it more or just link to this video. I should point out that the term autopoethics is a play on autopoiesis which refers to self authoring systems e.g. all living things - and I’ll represent them as a collective of living organisms, maybe bees or fungal mycelia or something. I’ll call them Auty.

Wow, this blog post is going to be very clever and evocative!

Then I’ll need some more soft, more bouba’y, less analytical-philosophical types too. Love and balance! Love is like a super warm caring figure who just wants what’s best for the other parts and for other people too. Like a beacon of joy, compassion, and sympathetic joy. Though I should maybe make them slightly short-sighted as they are representing a raw human emotion with little conceptual thought. He should probably look like that good therapist I had once or maybe like the Ghost of Christmas Present from A Muppets Christmas Carol. I’ll refer to him as ♥️.

Balance will be representing some kind of deep trust in the universe. A deep trust in flow and balance of powers in nature. Cares about things being in balance I think. In only trying as hard as I am not trying. I’m going to try to roughly point at something like Daoism here. In the council room, he’ll probably care mostly about balance between the parts of my moral psyche and whether the group is being vs doing. He’ll be represented by Yoda, or maybe just have eastern mystic Buddha’y energy. I’ll refer to him as ☯️.

Okay, so we’ve got these 6 parts: Utils, Deon, Virty, Auty, ♥️, and ☯️ and they are dealing with some kind of ethical dilemma like whether and where to give to charity….

Oh man, this is complicated. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed to be honest. Fuck. I think there’s something good here, but it’s quite a complex scene and I don’t know where it’s going. Also I’m kind of hungry. Maybe I’ll go get some dinner.

[Toby got some dinner at this point]

Okay, I’m back. So wait, what am I trying to communicate with this again? Something about how holding space for all these parts is good I think. How allowing all of them to speak and be heard by each other results in the best decisions according to all of their individual lights. It’s about how holding space for these competing view-points is itself loving, virtuous, keeps things in balance, produces the best outcomes, is fair and just, and produces emergent systemic integrity.

There’s also an important point I want to make about “intrinsic/instrumental ambiguity” or something - this idea that we can hold the ambiguity as to what the “ultimate” sense of the good is. For example it can be ambiguous as to whether love is good because it drives me to do things that produce wellbeing or that increasing wellbeing is just the truest act of love. I want to avoid making rigid internal hierarchies in my psyche, while also not pretending that there are no hierarchies or that no values are instrumental in achieving deeper values. That intrinsic/instrumental ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.

Ah yeah, and there’s an implicit critique of moral parliamentism I want to make. Some EAs advocate for moral parliamentarianism. They assign credence to different moral theories, weight them, then aggregate their recommendations. This generally seems good and reasonable, but also seems like this parliament has Utils in charge. It’s a utilitarian procedure for handling moral uncertainty. It doesn’t treat the other parts on their own terms. Deon might say the right way to handle plurality is to respect each framework’s inviolable core. Virty might say we should embody the virtue of wisdom in navigating between them. Each moral framework has its own view on how to hold plurality. True moral plurality doesn’t just aggregate views, it holds the ambiguity about how to aggregate, refusing to let any single framework become the meta-framework.

Oh, man, I’m trying to say so much here. But I can do this. I just need to start the dialogue.

Oh no wait. Moral robustness! I’m also trying to implicitly explain and argue for the concept of “moral robustness”. This is the idea that actions are morally robust if they seem good according to many competing and plausible definitions of goodness. Of course, to avoid moral robustness itself becoming a free floating ultimate goodness I need to somehow demonstrate that aiming for moral robustness is itself morally robust. That it endorsed by all parts of my moral framework. I think it is. I’ve thought about this a bunch. I’m sure it is. For example: Utils thinks robust actions are more likely to actually be good (higher expected value under moral uncertainty). Deon thinks respecting multiple moral viewpoints is itself a matter of fairness and justice. Virty sees pursuing robustness as demonstrating practical wisdom. Auty recognizes that systems which can satisfy multiple value-functions are more resilient . ♥️ loves that we’re holding space for everyone. ☯️ appreciates the balance probably. See? Moral robustness is itself morally robust, each framework endorses it for its own reasons. The ultimate goal remains ambiguous. Beautiful!

Okay, so there will be this council chamber and these 6 moral parts and they are deciding whether and where to give to charity.

Utils will say something about AI risk or longtermism probably. Auty will argue back that the important thing is that we spend money on self-improvement or our immediate relationships and community. “Start close in - build from there” he will say. Deon will dislike the altruistic frame itself. “Why should I get to make these decisions just because I have money?" Seems unfair.” he will argue. Virty, ♥️ and ☯️ won’t really care about the money so much. They’ll mostly care about the way the decision itself is going and how the parts are feeling and being integrated.

Oh god this is going to take ages to write. I’m a little tired to be honest… Bugger….

Umm…Maybe I can publish what I’ve written here already though? I think it gets the key points across?

Hmmm….Is that the right thing to do though? Would that be good? Is that a morally robust action? Would publishing this post moving us towards the ambiguous elephant of the good? Let me ask my moral council:

Utils: “A significant portion of our audience are EA types, and this kind of playful moral philosophy will entertain them and maybe even improve their frameworks around moral uncertainty. Given the importance of EA decision-making quality to existential risk, anything that helps EAs reason better about moral philosophy has very positive expected value. Plus, publishing incomplete work normalizes iteration over perfectionism, which could improve the productivity of other over-thinkers (very common in EA). The counterfactual isn’t a perfect essay, it’s no essay. So yes, publish!”

Deon: “Transparency about moral decision-making is important for anyone with a position of power or influence. We don’t have a lot of power, but we have some… you have a small platform, some money and some convening power. People read what you write and come to your events. This document seems like a fair and honest attempt at showing how you really feel about moral philosophy, confusion included. Pretending you have everything figured out would be dishonest, which is bad. So yes, publish.”

Auty: “You’re largely communicating to your immediate friends, family, and community. Having more shared language with people you’re in a real relationship with will improve the fidelity of communication in your relationships. You’ll be able to reference ‘my Utils part’ or ‘moral robustness’ and they’ll know what you mean. Signal fidelity is a core requirement for robust, self-preserving systems (which your relationships are). Remember, it’s these systems that form the basis of everything else in your life. And showing your creative process strengthens those relationships by increasing vulnerability and authenticity. The system benefits. So yes, publish!”

Virty: “By demonstrating the very moral pluralism and robustness that you’re arguing for, you’re embodying integrity. Doing so transparently, showing the raw belly of uncertainty in your creative process, demonstrates honesty, which is a core virtue. You’re not just arguing for these ideas; you’re living them. That’s what ethics is about. Also, publishing something imperfect requires courage. You’re risking judgment. That vulnerability is itself virtuous. So yes, publish!”

♥️: “I love you and everything you do, Toby. I love that you’re trying to figure this out. I love that you got hungry and took a break. I love that you’re asking us instead of just forcing a decision. If publishing will bring you joy, if it’ll help you feel connected to your community, if it’ll make you feel seen, then publish. And even if it doesn’t, I’ll still love you. But I think it will. So I suspect you’ll publish!”

☯️: “The flow of the hands on the keyboard. The light of the screen. The pumping of the blood in your chest. The organic thoughts. The chemical feelings. The hubris and the humility. An open fist. A tower of branches. Headphones dangling from a void where your face is not. Look at this moment Toby! Look here - look now! This is the thing you are searching for. You are here. You are home. You will never publish this blog post. You are publishing it now. You already have…”

Ummmm… Uh….

Great!

Thanks team!

[Toby went to lay down at this point, he’ll probably publish this tomorrow]

Toby is having a stressful day.
He is working on an important event. It starts in 4 hours. He got up late and is tired.

Last night he had some conflict with his housemates. He lost some sleep because of it. Waves of memory and emotion from the argument have been periodically washing over his cloudy mind.

Alongside the event, he has some emails to reply to from some senior stakeholders. They seem very important to Toby and he feels some tension when he thinks about them.

Right now though, despite this pressure, Toby is doing some journaling. It’s a kind of odd, third-person journaling. He is journaling about his day as if ‘Toby’ is some other person.
Toby got the idea to do this from a regular group call he’s part of. The group is focussed on wisdom practices.
Patrick, one of the members of the wisdom group, suggested the journaling exercise based on the work of Dr Igor Grossman. Dr Grossmans’s research suggests that third-person journaling allows for more “psychological distancing” than first-person journaling. Essentially allowing you to see your problems from the outside. This apparently creates more capacity for wise reasoning about interpersonal challenges.

Toby likes the exercise. He feels he can see his thoughts, actions and problems more clearly and spaciously. He feels like he has more perspective. He believes it’s helping him see his experiences as part of a wider context and reclaim some agency over how he makes sense of them.
Right now Toby is feeling pleased with himself. He likes his own writing. He’s explained a fun and useful tool that others might also find helpful. And he’s done it in a show-and-tell-at-the-same-time way that feels deeply satisfying to him for some reason.

He takes a deep breath and notices some tension in his body. His mind is drifting back to the event later.
“Why am I trying to do self-referential art right now?” he types to himself.

Toby finds his own writing funny and is pleased with himself.

Some of the tension in his body relaxes. The event and the emails feel a little lighter in his mind and body. “These projects are probably going to go well, most do”, he tells himself” “And it won’t be that bad if they don’t”. A large part of him believes this.

Toby decides to stop writing and get back to work...

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We went for a walk in the park last week. You were talking about a conflict at work. You said you felt confused about what had happened and who was in the wrong. You said that you kept swinging between anger and self-blame.

It reminded me of a conflict I had at my last job. I told you about a journaling process I use to work through situations like that.

I explained how I start by writing the facts, as plainly as I can. Then I write from a place of anger and blame, where the other person is completely in the wrong. Then from shame and guilt, where I am completely in the wrong. Then from despair, where it feels like conflict and pain are inevitable and nothing really works. And finally from compassion, where no one is really wrong and everyone is trying their best.

You said that you did not like the idea. You said it seemed “long-winded” and that it gave “too much airtime to anger, shame, and despair”.

I said that I did not like that you did not like it. I suggested you “try it before dismissing it”. I asked why you “always do this”.

We talked for a few more minutes. Then I had to leave to get back to work. We have not spoken since.

You always do this! Seriously though - you always fucking do this!

You can’t stand hearing good advice. You can’t hear any advice. You’re so competitive and have such a weak ego. I think it’s probably something to do with your relationship with your father that you told me about last month. It’s really not fair of you to be all reactive to me because of your emotional issues - I was just trying to help you!

My journaling process is really good. It cleverly combines lessons from CBT, IFS, DBT, NVC, and gestalt therapy into a simple repeatable system, thereby encouraging greater psychological flexibility and wisdom in participants. You’d realise that if you weren’t such a narcissistic fuck head!

And I could hear the judgement in your voice as you expressed uncertainty too. My ideas are really important to me and you know that. I need encouragement, not dismissal.

You’re just extremely irrational and traumatised and a very bad friend.

I am really sorry.

I did it again.

You said you did not like my journaling thing and I felt attacked. I got sharp and defensive straight away.

I care too much about my ideas. When someone does not like them, it feels like they do not like me.

I should not have spoken to you like that.

I’m just so emotional.

I can’t help it.

I am so sorry.

I am scared I hurt you.

I am a bad friend.

Wow, we both just reacted to each other there.

We jumped between victim and persecutor so fast. I genuinely believed you were unredeemable as a friend and so did you. I then spiralled into a pit of shame for how I reacted.

This is what we do. We hurt each other, then justify it, then feel bad about it, then do it again. We’re walking bundles of unresolved trauma pretending to be functional adults. Just damaged nervous systems colliding in the dark.

We’re so broken. Honestly, I’m not sure we should be friends any more.

Okay. Breathe.

We went for a walk. Two tired humans with history, and stress. We talked about work and feelings and accidentally stepped on each other’s sore spots. You were confused and hurting. I was trying to be helpful in the way that helps me. We both reacted fast, from old places, and neither of us slowed it down in time.

Nothing actually terrible happened. No one was malicious. We just bumped into each other’s defences.

You are allowed to not like my process. I am allowed to care a lot about it. You are allowed to be sceptical and I am allowed to feel sensitive. Those things can all be true without either of us being a bad friend.

This will pass. We will talk again. We always have. And even if we do not resolve this perfectly, it does not erase the care, trust, and goodwill that we have built. We are two basically decent people, doing our best with nervous systems that sometimes get loud on park walks.

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Please remember how strange this all is.

I am sitting in an airport in San Francisco. It is October 2025. I will get in a box today. It will take my body around the world in unbreathable air at 600mph.

The machines I see outside the departure lounge window are complicated and odd. Millions of computer chips and wires and precisely designed metal structures. Gears and belts and buttons. No individual knows how these things work.

I look down at my body. Even more unimaginably complex. An intricate soup of skin, DNA, fat and protein. Enzyme cascades and neuronal developmental pathways. These cascades are collectively producing these words somehow.

Please remember how strange this all is.

All this stuff exists, but we don’t know why. I am seeing and feeling and thinking about all this stuff and we don’t know why any of it is here. Nobody does. We make plans, we gossip, we deliver projects and look forward to holidays. We social climb and have sex and hold hands. We go swimming on a Saturday morning with a close friend and talk about our relationships and the water temperature and we silently agree to forget how deeply strange it is that any of this is even here and is like it is.

Please remember how strange this all is.

Experience is so absurdly specific. So surprisingly detailed. I am lost in my story; in the excruciatingly specific normality of it. Occasionally I remember. An obvious contrast. A strong memory. A flash of confusion. I sometimes remember, but I mostly forget. Remembering usually feels like a distraction from the thing that is happening now. It often is. I ask that you remember anyway.

Please remember how strange this all is.

Is this cliché? Am I being cliché? Or is that feeling of cliché-ness just more forgetting? More “this is normal”, more “this is usual and expected”.

We walk past each other on the street and forget the absurd mystery of why any of this is here. The strangeness and lostness in stories is the most reliable feature of all of our reality. Our confusion is the core vulnerability that we all share. Join me in the one place we can all meet.

Please remember how strange this all is.

The music playing in my ears. The movement of my pen on this paper. The feeling that these words are me. The flash of a vivid memory from last night. The complex web of social plans. The implicit meta-physics my thoughts are nestled within.

Please remember how strange this all is.

The woman behind the counter at the departure lounge café. The sound of boarding announcements. The complex array of brands of drink. Colourful and alluring and strange. The artwork in front of me is paper boats in water.

Please remember how strange this all is.

I talked to an old friend this morning in an Italian restaurant in The Embarcadero. He’s worried about AI and is dreaming of buying a house in the countryside. He wants to move away from the bay and stop fighting for the future of humanity.

Please remember how strange this all is.

Also remember to breathe. Breathe deep. Breathe deep through your nose and into your belly. Remember the centre. Remember to feel into your heart. Touch grass with your feet. Notice the consistent patterns and trust the context of your own perception. Seriously, remember to be breathe.

Then let go of that too. And remember again how deeply strange this all is.

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To say what make me good

Big word make me bad sometime

Small word good enough

—

Me sometime feel small bad

Not good and big like you

Me not enough me broken

Me not know what to do

—

Me sometime feel big bad

You fear me; run away!

Big bad feel big but bad

Me am just want you stay

—

Me sometime feel small good

You big, not bad, you love

Me small and good and safe

Me safe within big good

—

Me sometime feel big good

Me am no fear, just love

Me am no need, am big

Me help you be big good

—

Me big and me am small

Me bad and me am good

Me hope you see that me am you

Me hope you understood

—

On Wednesday I started cooking at 3pm.

This was early. Far. Too. Early.

But I had to start cooking before Eoin…

The year was 2020. The month was April. We were 3 weeks into a national coronavirus lockdown, and my social world had shrunk significantly. I lived in a small flat in East London with 3 housemates. We had been spending a lot of time together recently…

Before lockdown, someone cooked for the house around once a week. But we had no formal system, and relied solely on goodwill. These norms had continued into lockdown, despite us now eating every dinner together. We had no rota. No structure. Just some implicit rules: As in the before-times, if someone cooked - they would cook for everyone there. The others would then do the washing up and tidy the kitchen.

I hated washing up…

…and so did Eoin…

Due to our implicit social norms, the washing up was a complete externality for the cook. When I made dinner there was no incentive not to use every single pan in the kitchen and leave it a huge mess. And in a time of global crisis I wanted comfort food. To me that meant fat.

At every opportunity, I would roast trays and trays of vegetables for me and my flatmates. Squash cooked in coconut oil. Broccoli coated in olive oil. Mushrooms smothered in butter. Delicious... Reassuring... Messy…

I would gleefully serve this food to my housemates. Leaving them with the job of scrubbing the deep films of baked-on grease from our worn-out roasting dishes…

…Eoin did not like cleaning my oily trays…

Cooking was also more prestigious than the washing up. When I served dinner, I would glow as literally everyone I had had face to face contact with in the past month thanked me for the delicious contribution to our community. And my social world had shrunk to these 3 people, so prestige in the house had become deeply important.

Eoin knew this all too. And over the past few weeks he had also been trying to be the one who cooks. In a house with no rota, no structure, there was nothing to do, but fight. We were both still working full time jobs, but the cooking had been getting earlier and earlier each day.

So there I was. Starting to cook at 3pm. I was in a runaway arms race. Driven by neglect of externalities, a systemic failure to coordinate, and a desire to hoard social capital. I was winning though, and it was delicious.

And groups are complex. That’s why I started using this categorisation of groups recently. I have found it very helpful in conversations about community and events over the past year.1

For any set of things, there are usually many ways of categorising it. Rather than size, or the specifics of what folk do together (though they are important), I like thinking of groups in terms of the flavour of their purpose!

Here’s the model:

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What is a scene?

The purpose of a scene is to enjoy, or grow in relation to a topic. This would include “communities of practice”, where practice is very broadly defined and could include things like playing social deduction boardgames or enjoying the music Nils Frahm. A scene could also be about some set of ideas, so a community of praxis - where theory and practice merge - might be a better definition of a scene.

Scenes are the most flexible and easily formed groups. They require the least coordination to get started and they can usually deliver value to members immediately. They’re driven by shared interests, skills, or passions - whether it’s a hobby, a particular topic, or simply the enjoyment of a thing. Crucially - folk in a scene are individually passionate about the thing before the group even exists - that’s why they are there.

Examples:

• A group of people who love board games. They start meeting casually to play and discuss strategies.

• A writing club where members gather to share and critique each other’s work.

• A coding meetup where people come together to learn and collaborate on projects. The draw is the shared activity, the joy of connecting over something they love, and the opportunity to improve

• An open-to-anyone online community

• The Effective Altruism (EA) community is, (alongside other social/intellectual movements) most broadly, a scene - where the shared interest and praxis is “doing good better”. Individuals learn from each other about this shared interest. Folk in movements like EA do develop friendships (cliques) or start projects/orgs (teams) from within the scene - but those aren’t The EA community - those are cliques and teams that the EA scene has produced.

What is a clique?

The purpose of a clique is to enjoy each other and enjoy being a part of the clique. Cliques are communities of belonging. This means that a clique is as stable and powerful as the strength of its boundaries. i.e. what it is that defines this group and the people in it. This could be as simple as being 1 of the literally these 5 specific people in the case of a group of friends, or could be about genetic/legal connection as is the case in most families. Cliques will generally involve a higher degree of interpersonal connection, relational-dependence and intimacy than scenes or teams (because that is their purpose). Unlike scenes, which tend to be fairly open, cliques are defined by their exclusivity - membership is generally intentional, and crossing the boundary into or out of the group is very meaningful. Compared to scenes and teams, they are often inwards looking - they are about connection and finding joy in coexisting with others for its own sake.

Examples:

• A family - the archetypical clique

• A romantic relationship

• A group of friends

• An intentional shared house

• A group of people actually at an event (during the duration of the event)

  • I think this is a helpful framing for a lot of events and why good events designers and producers talk about the “container” a lot - clear common knowledge of who is in the group creates a stronger clique and therefore more potential for psychological safety, belonging and intimacy.

What is a team?

The purpose of a team is to achieve a shared goal. Unlike scenes or cliques, teams exist to achieve something shared and specific, and their structure reflects this focus. Roles are often clearly defined, and the success of the group depends on coordination, accountability, and mutual trust. They often also need clear boundaries (e.g. clear recruitment requirements in the case of an organisation), but could also be more diffuse if the need for coordination is lower, or if coordination is facilitated by a functional set of systems and norms (e.g. a group who are all working on some open source software).

Examples:

• A business or charity

• A project team

• A leadership team for a scene

• Two parents raising a child

• Two people who decide to share the job of doing the washing up at the end of a party.

Some mistakes and hard-earned takes

I hope the above is valuable to you. My core take is that identifying what you are part of, or trying to build, should influence how you choose to build, lead, participate in a community.

That said, here are some more specific mistakes I and others I know have made, and the (more tentative) takes that have resulted from those past mistakes.

Mistake 1: Being too democratic, too early, in scenes

• Scenes grow and persist when they have teams that steward them (i.e. a subset of the group with a shared goal of supporting the scene)

• Unlike cliques or teams, folk are usually not very emotionally or financially dependent on scenes (especially early on, when no cliques have developed in the scene). This means the risks of having a highly empowered leader or leadership team is low. People can just leave.

• The main risk to a scene is lack of leadership, or a drop in leadership energy or motivation. This might just be fine, nothing lasts forever, but I’ve tried and failed to build scenes in the past through lack of prioritising my own vision and interest as a leader.

• Sensitive leadership - i.e. establishing and meeting the needs of people in the group is obviously still very good, even if you others aren’t directly empowered.

  • Having a strong lean towards meeting the needs of more central, regular group members here is also super important - I’ve seen scene leaders do this explicitly (e.g. prioritising the needs of people who’ve been to X events over those that have been to fewer) and this seems very good for scene health (though some folk will complain).

• The flip side of this, being too hierarchical or dictatorial in cliques also seems bad.

Mistake 2: Trying to get a sense of belonging from a scene (or mistaking a scene for a clique)

• Scenes are generally more brittle and have more instrumentality than cliques. A scene is less intrinsically valuable than a clique and if the scene didn’t exist folk would just do something else.

• Scenes do produce cliques, and a whole scene might transition into a clique (e.g. your film watching group stops being about the films after a few months and you just start hanging out).

• Though worse than cliques, teams are a better place to get belonging than scenes. But since that belonging will often be based on your instrumental value to the shared mission (e.g. you get to belong in your company because of your spreadsheet skills), it seems like a relatively precarious and limited place to meet this need.

• I definitely did this with the EA community when I first got involved. This was understandable as I had moved to a new city and didn’t have much belonging in my life, but made me quite neurotic about the scene for a while…

Mistake 3: Not setting clear boundaries in cliques (mistaking a clique for a scene)

• The boundary is one of the most important elements of a clique - many have natural boundaries (e.g. families, or homes). Creating common knowledge about boundaries and respecting them seems neglected in many cliques.

  • E.g. Bill letting his new boyfriend join your weekly hang is a thing it’s very reasonable to be very careful about. Lack of intentionality in clique boundary crossing erodes belonging.

• I love opening circles at events and think they are extremely powerful for this reason - when everyone can see everyone seeing everyone, you create common knowledge of who is and isn’t in the group - this build belonging, especially when it clarifies and emphasises the shared reason for being there.

Mistake 4: Treating a scene like a team

• Teams require a lot of buy-in, trust, communication and a clear shared vision on what is being achieved. Scenes are usually more fluid, opt-in, and porous. You can create a scene that tries to achieve things collectively (e.g. hackathons often feel like this), but in my experience, the friends (cliques), skills, and experiences made along the way are much more valuable than the tangible output of goal-oriented scene-building.

  • This is true of EA - Occasionally I see people framing the whole scene as having a shared mission (less suffering or something) which I think is not 100% false, but feels like a disorientating frame to me, and implies a greater need for buy in, trust and mutual dependence than a scene can realistically hold.

Mistake 5: Trying to force a clique

• Most folk make friends at school or work for a reason - you have a clear reason to be together that allows trust to be built and relationship tested over time. It’s hard to force this.

• If you’re trying to build a clique, you’ll want to go slowly. Cliques meet some of the deepest psychological needs in our biology and some of the least met needs in our culture (love, belonging). They trigger everyone’s attachment wounds.

• Consider starting, or joining, a scene first - allow folk to spend time with each other in a lower pressure environment.

  • (Something in here is at the core of why I found internet dating unpleasant, and imagine others do too - you’re trying to start a very important clique from scratch…)

Some final points

“Reality doesn’t come in categories” - individual groups often contain elements of multiple types. A group might be both a scene, and a clique (though it’s still valuable to know how much of dynamic is present and which flavour is most dominant)

“Everything comes from everything else” - groups of people are fractal. With groups within groups within groups - A team might house a scene, which in turn can foster a clique, and vice versa.

The best events know what type of community they are cultivating. Every event is about the cultivation of some kind of group. Sometimes this is ephemeral, and just about the time at the event. But the most important events I’ve been part of transform the shape of the group well beyond their start and end time. Knowing what flavour of group the event is supporting is therefore crucial.

This framework has become really helpful for me in talking about community building and events. It helps clarify what I’m doing and understanding the different types of communities. I also think it might be really helpful for making sense of the communities that you’re in, and identifying failures in leadership.

Seeking to be Bloggy

This blog is three years old this month! (Yay) To celebrate, I wanted to do some kind of retrospective blog, to reflect on my experience of having a blog.

Except, I haven’t really been blogging that much recently….

Some time last year I realised that I wasn’t enjoying the process that much. My having-of-a-blog was clearly an attempt to meet some of my needs and goals. For example: social contribution, creative motivation, showing off, playing with vulnerability and feeling seen and heard. But I’d become less convinced that it was the best way to meet these needs and goals. And the process or writing for a blog often felt a little less fun, and a little more graspy, than in the past.

Part of this graspyness is because some part of me convinces myself that my next blog will change the world, or even just change my life significantly (see “The Lives and Deaths of Toby Jolly”). This is alluring, but high pressure and mostly unrealistic.

Possibly a larger part of my hesitance to publish is you, dear reader. You are a complex audience - you include most of my close friends, much of my wider community, half my family, and a reasonably large number of professional stakeholders (this blog has been mentioned by more than one prospective employer and multiple other present and potential collaborators). Writing for an audience that is both that diverse and that alive is intense, especially as I try to put a lot of myself into my writing.

This is probably why I haven’t been blogging that much, and probably why my blogs from the past year have been kinda poetic, creative writing’y things.

And I’ve been experimenting with other ways of meeting the needs that a blog meets…

Seeking to be Cosy

Several months ago - I decided to experiment with not-blog-writing. When I felt the urge to express, I should instead point my creative writing energy elsewhere, to more local targets. I started publishing less, and started writing and creating for the people around me - i.e. my friends, family and colleagues, more. My creative energy started going more towards long voice messages and poems posted to group chats. I recorded some “Costcasts” (recordings of conversations intended to only be shared with a few people), crafted event invitations, and sent postcards. I wrote more strategy documents for projects I am working on. I journaled to myself, for myself.

Pouring my creative energy into these more intimate targets met much of the needs my blog was pointing at. The part of me that is trying to change the world has had to make its theory of change more complex, but as a general habit, cosy-writing seems better for me, my community and the world, than blogging.

Seeking to be Nostalgy

The above is kinda down on blogging, but I want to emphasise that I am very glad I’ve been writing this blog. And I will probably continue. When I look back at my three years of blog posts I mostly feel a mixture of pride and warmth towards my past self. I was so often worried about whether the writing was any good. But from my less identified-with-it perspective in 2025, I am mostly just impressed.

Looking back, the posts I now feel most proud of are:

• To be the Better Man - A post about masculinity and the use of judgement to feel superior - this was my first attempt to publish something that playfully highlights a shadow of my psychology. I wasn’t totally okay with publishing this at the time, but I was very committed to exposure therapy to address anxiety. After hitting publish I curled up in a ball on the sofa, scared that you wouldn’t like it. So part of me wishes I’d been a little more gentle with myself. But I do think the post itself is funny and the fact that I wrote it continues to make me feel like I am better than all other men.

• The gods of truth, love, and play - This post was my 500 word philosophy, outlining the deeper virtues I aim to prioritise in my life. Since writing it, this trio has been a big part of how I decide whether, in any domain, I’m heading in the direction I want to be. This makes the post feel like a successful example of self leadership. A success for me intentionally helping myself to become more of what I want to be. I’d encourage you, complex reader, to try and write (and maybe publish) sometime like that too.

• The lives and deaths of Toby Jolly - This post is me writing about my own death from three perspectives. All of them were attempts at exploring and critiquing my relationship to ambition and my wanting to have impact on the world (and also to critique that critique). I rewatched Bo Burham’s Inside recently, several years after I watched it the first time. As before, I really enjoyed it, but this time I found it sadder. Maybe because I was more familiar with the headspace of trying to create beauty out of self-criticism, and much clearer that I don’t want to encourage that in myself too much more. I think humorous self-criticism can still be great, and I really like that I wrote this post. I’m just glad that my obsession with self-critical comedy peaked, before I used it to become a world-class comedian.

  

Seeking to be Drafty

Because I don’t publish that much, I have an intense backlog of drafts. I have almost 150 docs in my drafts folder and this number is still increasing. My database of auto-transcribed voice notes to myself is also similarly large and growing. I can interpret most of these drafts as a kind of weirdly framed journaling or sensemaking. I can see them as words I wrote because I had something to get out. I wanted to better understand my thoughts and feelings, so I put them outside my own mind. Most should have never been published anyway. I think this is probably tru-ish. And the rate of growth has slowed a little since I started channelling my creative energy more locally. But as part of this retrospective I reread a bunch of these drafts, to see if there is anything worth revisiting.

I liked a bunch of my old writing and maybe I will publish some more of it some day - or maybe, in a year or so, I’ll just get an LLM to read it all, pull out the few key messages, and tell me that I’m very clever. I can hope. But for now, I just wanted to end this retrospective by showing you a thing I wrote in August 2022. This was just before I had felt the reality of actually having a blog. I wrote this with the intention to publish it, but thought it wasn’t good enough at the time.

It’s an attempt to capture a very specific kind of anxiety, related to the map territory distinction and Naseem Taleb’s concept of the platonic fold.

Thank you for subscribing to Seeking To Be Jolly.

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The border

The country you’d grown up in always felt safe. The people in your village were friendly and peace-loving. The countryside surrounding your house was all grassy hills and fields of wheat. You rarely worried.

You knew there were less safe places though. Your village sat on the edge of a vast kingdom, only a few miles from the border of a foreign country. You had heard stories of the barbarians that inhabited the land across the border. For many years the foreign tribes had been banned, on pain of death, from entering your kingdom. Although you had never met them, you knew from the stories that they were brutish and warlike, and they hated anyone from your kingdom. There had been a war many years ago, before you were born. The elders would occasionally refer to the conflict, but didn’t answer any of your questions about it. Occasionally one might say something insulting about the barbarians, but all you really knew about them was they all wore red, that the men braided their hair, and that they didn’t think twice about killing innocent villagers such as you. When you asked questions about these times, the elders would change the subject and reassure you that it was many years ago and there was nothing to be worried about any more. “The barbarians aren’t allowed to cross the border, you are safe here.”

Although you hadn’t ever left the area near your village, you loved maps. You inherited a whole stack of them from your grandmother and you would pore over them whenever you got a chance. It was fascinating to find your village on the paper. You loved the clear sense of recognition of the curve of the local streets. It was definitely your village and it really felt like you were looking down on it from above. You could see the local river. Tracing it downstream, you could find the nearby towns that you’d never visited. You wondered what it would be like to walk those streets and talk to the people there. And further downstream was vast sprawl of the capital, many times the size of your village, almost scary in its scale. Looking the opposite way on the map you found the border. It was only a few miles upstream from the village. Frustratingly the map showed almost no detail on the other side of the border, no towns or villages. It just read “BARBARIAN LANDS” in large font.

The maps made it feel like you were really living in your vast kingdom. You felt part of it all, despite never having left the village. But it was quite annoying that you had no sense of what the foreign lands were like. It was like a fog in your mind, disrupting the sense of clarity about your place in the world. So one summer's day, you decided to go for a walk. To head to the border to look for yourself. You obviously wouldn’t cross the border, but you could at least look across and expand your sense of the shape in your world.

You had been warned against going near the border from a young age. These warnings were rarely expanded upon. A simple “Don’t go near the border” from the elders had always been enough to keep you away. But you were curious, and anyway the barbarians weren’t allowed to cross the border. None had been seen in years. And obviously you’d never cross over. The very idea of leaving your kingdom was terrifying. You wanted to take a look, but actually crossing the border would be unthinkable.

So that summer’s morning you set out to the border, with your grandmother's map in hand. It took a couple of hours to get there. Initially following the curve of the river, then leaving via a path through a series of wheat and barley fields. Eventually you came to a huge meadow. You could see on the map that this meadow was the last one before the border. You squinted in the sun to see if you could see it. On the map, the border was a solid black line. Here in the meadow you could just about make out a string of small, knee high boulders snaking across the landscape, exactly where the map said the border should be. Walking across the meadow towards the boulders felt really good. You would finally be able to get a view of the barbarian lands. There was a small amount of trepidation as more of the land across the borders came into view. Although the other side of the boulders was another empty meadow, just like this one, it felt darker, almost like it was in shadow. But you weren’t going to cross obviously. You were safe on this side of the border. And anyway, the source of the fear was the barbarians, and they weren’t allowed to come into your kingdom.

At last you were standing at the border, staring into the land opposite. You could see a huge forest to the north. To the east, a mountain range took up the horizon. Although the slight fear at this dark land remained, it felt great. The fog in your mind had lifted, you were filling in the unclear parts of the map. You wanted to keep taking it in, keep learning about this new part of your world. So you started walking along the border. With the boulders a metre to your left, you started walking south. You covered a couple more miles in the next hour. The fog in your mind kept lifting as new parts of the foreign land came into view. It felt amazing, and as you got used to looking across the border, the fear started to dissipate too. It started to feel like the barbarian lands were just another set of fields, meadows and hills, just like your kingdom.

Around mid-afternoon you thought you should start heading home. You wanted to get back in time for dinner. But now, about 10 metres from the other side of the border was small wood. You wanted to see what was on the other side, so you continued to walk just a little further. Then, you saw them. In a clearing in the woods you could see 5 men. They were sitting down on the grass talking, you couldn’t hear what they were saying. You could see they were dressed in red and had long braided hair. A few seconds after you spotted them, they spotted you. One of them looked up and made eye contact with you. He stood up quickly. You could see now that he was wearing a sword. He shouted something that you didn’t understand and the other men stood up quickly and whipped around to face you. Cold fear filled your chest. They were a few metres from the border. Maybe you should have run, but something stopped you. You took a few steps back from the boulders. As you saw the gap between you and the border appear, the fear dissipated a little. “They can’t hurt me” you whispered to yourself. “The barbarians aren’t allowed to cross the border” you thought. There was a pause. The 5 men and you, 10 metres apart with a string of foot-high boulders between you. Their expressions were blank as they stared directly at you. Slowly they took a few steps forward, until they were standing right at the border. Your heart rate quickened and your breath felt thick. Part of you was screaming that you should run. Run across the meadow you were in, run back to the river, back to your village. But the border was there, and it calmed you. It felt like a solid wall, they couldn’t get you. You looked over at the men, taking in their faces and their clothes and the blades in their hands. One of the men whispered something to his comrades, then stepped over the border.

When two bodies meet each other in dance, they don’t speak English. Body-to-body communication asks the linguistic mind to let go. Instead the dancers talk to each other in bod-ese. Bod-ese can’t be easily translated into English, or any other word’y human language.

Dance teachers do try of course. They’ll try to describe what it is to dance with another. They’ll talk of ideas like “receptivity”, “lead”, “follow”, “impulse”, “impact”, “connection”. But they are failing. Their maps are not the territory and the maps are all very low resolution. These words are like describing a Turner painting as “some boats”. Words are too compressed. You need to do it to understand. And even when you do, that “understanding” will still be in bod-ese.

I talk to you through my body. My mind goes silent and my body talks to yours. Something happens. Afterwards I will try to talk to you. I want to understand what happened. But all words fail. The words look down from the stratosphere. They wish they could get closer to earth, but they cannot.

Shadow-ese

When a new relationship is formed - a new romantic relationship; a friendship; a business partnership - there are a lot of words. The conscious minds and egos talk to each other plainly. They agree on shared values and desires. They establish connection and make agreements. But any time two egos shake hands with their right hands, two shadows shake hands with their left. And shadows don’t speak to one another in English. They speak to one another in shadow-ese. Shadow-ese is sometimes formed of English. But more often it talks in the gaps between words. It sits in silence; in subtle facial expressions; in the intricate shape of a long text message exchange. So shadow-ese can’t be easily translated into English, or any other word’y human language.

Therapists and psychologists do try, of course. They’ll try to describe what it is to relate to another. They’ll talk of ideas like “subconscious motivation”, “attachment”, “power-dynamics”, “manipulation”, “trauma-bonding”, “dependence”. But they are failing. Their maps are not the territory and the maps are all very low resolution. These words are like describing a Bach cello suite by saying “the melody goes up and down a lot”. Words are too compressed. You need to do it to understand. And that “understanding” will still be in shadow-ese

My arm reaches out to you. Expecting. You take my hand and your face forms a smile. I feel even more alone.

Group-ese

When a group is formed - a new friend group, a new professional team - there are a lot of plain words. The individuals talk about shared interests. They might try to establish norms and expectations for the group. But as much as individuals can talk; groups as a whole speak another, very different language. Groups speak group-ese. Group-ese is sometimes formed of words, but is more often in the patterns across them. It talks through the sum of the parts and more than that. It talks through intricately complex flows of inexpressible information. The collective orientation of the bodies in a meeting room. The unconscious expectations of what is unacceptable and what is rewarded. Data and energy bouncing endlessly from individual to individual to group to individual. Group-ese can’t be easily translated into English, or any other word’y human language.

Group facilitators and cultural experts do try of course. They’ll use words like “psychological safety” “hierarchy”, “social status”, “emergence”, “peer pressure”, “taboos”, “groupthink”, “storming and norming”. But they are failing. Their maps are not the territory and the maps are all very low resolution. These words are like going skydiving and describing the whole experience as “I fell a long way”. Words are too compressed. You need to do it to understand. And that “understanding” will still be in group-ese.

I walk into a room of friends. Everyone acts extremely normally. Something is off. I feel tight and constrained. I don’t belong here.

I don't always feel like I can speak these languages. I speak English and I often struggle to translate bod-ese, shadow-ese and group-ese. In these moments I feel alone. I feel like we are all alone. We’re sitting in different rooms, pushing scribbled notes through holes in the wall.

Sometimes this feeling subsides though. Sometimes I remember that this is not the whole truth. I remember that I am not just my conceptual thoughts. I am not my English words. I don’t need words to reach you. In these moments I remember that I can actually speak bod-ese, shadow-ese and group-ese quite well. I’ve been learning and using them all my life. You have too. That alone feeling was just a brief dissociation from the parts of myself that are constantly engaged in countless intricate dances with others. Parts of us that can’t be easily abstracted are talking to each other. I can feel that you feel me through them.

I publish a blog post. It’s something to do with the limits of conceptual communication or something. I’m not totally sure what I’m trying to say or why. I feel you reading this as I write. Your narrative might be different to mine. I trust I will be heard.

We humans like wide open views from high hilltops because they make us feel safe.

As monkeys, with evolved brains, driven by instinctive emotional reactions, we like to have a clear sight of our surroundings.

I am on a mountain hike in North Wales. I look out at the distant horizon from the trail. A river is weaving its way across the valley below. It snakes between tall pine trees, and scattered boulders. The views is wide and clear and magnificent. There are no tigers here. There are no marauding bandits. I am safe.

We humans like symmetrical faces and clear skin because they indicate health and imply future reproductive success.

As monkeys, with evolved brains, driven by instinctive emotional reactions we like to find partners with good genes so that our offspring will also be healthy and reproductive.

I am sitting on the sofa with my fiancée. Her eyes glisten and her face shines as she looks at me lovingly. I feel relaxed and confident. There is no disease here. The future is good.

We humans like evolutionary psychology explanations of our experience because they make us feel less confused and alone.

As monkeys, with evolved brains, driven by instinctive emotional reactions we like to have coherent and shared explanations for the things we experience.

I am reading some writing on my phone. It describes how the things I perceive are a normal, natural and purposeful feature of the human experience; that my feelings are part of nature; that this is all part of the great unfolding of reality. The writing explains how those feelings deeply connect me to all of humanity through our shared biological history. There is no chaos here. There is no isolation. I understand. I am not alone.

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Thesis Title: The impact of the life of Toby Jolly:
a simulation study on a human connected to the early 21st century’s “Effective Altruism” movement

Submitted by:
Dxil Sind 0239β
for the degree of Doctor of Pre-Post-humanities
at Sopdet University 
August 2542

Abstract
Many (>500,000,000) papers have been published on the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, its prominent members and their impact on the development of AI and the singularity during the 21st century’s time of perils. However, this is the first study of the life of Toby Jolly; a relatively obscure figure who was connected to the movement for many years. Through analysing the subject’s personal blog posts, self-referential tweets, and career history, I was able to generate a simulation centred on the life and mind of Toby. This simulation was run 100,000,000 times with a variety of parameters and the results were analysed. In the thesis I make the case that Toby Jolly had, through his work, a non-zero, positively-signed impact on the creation of our glorious post-human Emperium (Praise be to Xraglao the Great). My analysis of the simulation data suggests that his impact came via a combination of his junior operations work, and minor policy projects but also his experimental events and self-deprecating writing.

One unusual way he contributed was by consistently trying to draw attention to how his thoughts and actions were so often the product of his own absurd and misplaced sense of grandiosity; a delusion driven by what he would describe himself as a “desperate and insatiable need to matter”. This work marginally increased the self-awareness and psychological flexibility amongst the EA community. This flexibility subsequently improved the movement's ability to handle its minor role in the negotiations needed to broker power during the Grand Transition - thereby helping avoid catastrophe.

The outcomes of our simulations suggest that through his life and work Toby decreased the likelihood of a humanity-ending event by 0.0000000000024%. He is therefore responsible for an expected 18,600,000,000,000,000,000 quality adjusted experience years across the light-cone, before the heat-death of the universe (using typical FLOP standardisation). Toby mattered.

Ethics note: as per standard imperial research requirements, we asked the first 100 simulations of Toby if they were happy being simulated. In all cases, he said “Sure, I actually, kind of suspected it…look, I have this whole blog about it”

Attempt Two: Obituary to a philosopher clown

World news | Obituaries
Toby Jolly

By Obitutron445.beta
July, 26 2062 19.58 BST

The world will today mourn the death of Toby Jolly, who died late yesterday at the age of 73. As you no doubt know, Toby was known for his world-changing writing and comedy music performances. Despite a complete lack of formal training, he appeared from nowhere in the mid 2020s; with his unique combination of poetry, graphs, improvisational ukulele, dark-clowning and deep psycho-philosophical reflection.

He rose to fame in the late 2020s and early 2030s, around the time of our transition to a post-AI and post-scarcity society. Looking back now, we can see how his philoso-clown form, his self-referential inclination, alongside his connection to a community of people working on reducing existential risk from AI, put him in a unique position to be the artist who stewarded the human heart-mind through the fundamental transformation of society.

Perhaps he will be best remembered for his 2026 album “Can I be the alpha now? Please!?”
The most popular tracks on that album: “Where is the compassionate machine god I was promised?” and  “I consulted HCH and it told me that I suck” have been streamed a total of more than 10²¹ times (excluding streams by brain emulations of grade E and lower).

By the late 50s meta-sociologists agree that his work stands out from his peers in terms of how it shaped the psychic-stability of the world in the wake of AI. Mr Jolly was the philosopher-clown that the world didn't know it needed at the time. His influence is now recognised as crucial in preventing the mental-dissolution of civilisation at the dawn of AGI.

Attempt three: An explanation

Hey readers, 
If you haven't heard yet, I died…. This sucks for me.
But I asked a friend to publish this poem on my blog should I die.
I hope this explains some of my life choices:

An explanation

If you’re reading this I died
I’m sorry for your loss
But now I’ve less to fear
I’ve things to get across

I tried to change the world
I tried to right the wrongs
Transform this pain and fear
Into a blissful song

This partly came from love
From empathy and care
And partly from my ego
From emptiness and fear

The former drawn from looking
At the poverty, the horrors
At all the existential risk 
Our politics ignores

The latter came from me
From pain I tried to hide
A deep need to defend
This little boy inside

And so I tried to help 
To fight the righteous fight 
But need for validation
Would pull me from the light

I tried to help all others
All. Impartially.
But kept on realising 
It was really all for me

I found this dance too painful
The fight too hard to bare
I failed to see the darkness
And stay aligned with care

I felt my ego grab success
Turn failures into shame
Distort this noble fight 
To endless status games

So, as you know, I ran away
I chose a simple life
Of pleasure and of privilege
Just me, my friends and wife

I lived my years in selfish peace 
A small community
I left the global struggle 
And came to feel more free

When I set my sights closer
To love those I could see
My egoic ambition 
Became much less of me

If I lived my life over
I’d make this choice again
Turn my back on the fight
Spend days with loving friends 

I still feel sadness though 
That my heart could not bear
The world and all its politics
Or existential fear

I really really wanted
To be infinitely kind
But that was just too much
For my simple monkey mind

I do still feel the weight
Of each small chicken cage
and all the future people
Who I just could not save

These people and these creatures
Who I just might have helped
If only I were stronger;
Held love while facing hell

I’d ask for their forgiveness 
For mercy, for some grace
But why ask for a jury,
I know I’ll never face?

So this is all I’ve got
No redemption, no solution
I didn’t do much good
I’ll get no absolution

I was born onto a planet
Containing so much hell
But have a mind that made
That hell about myself

For even as I write
The irony that hits me
To write this silly poem
To bathe in my self-pity

The last hope that I have
With my few final breaths
Is that these words might help
Any others to address

The conflict in our hearts
Be good, keep hold of care
Not turn to fear and pride
Bare the fight I could not bare

Bonus content

I already created the title track for the album in obituary number two.

Lyrics by Toby Jolly, everything else by Suno:

I recently discovered the “meta model” of human psychology - I find it to be a really compelling categorization of human personality, so I wanted to share it!

The framework suggests that there are just three types of people: “believers”, “complicators” and “sociopaths”.

The three types are distinguished by how they react when they learn about a new personality typology (e.g. Myers Briggs, Jungian archetypes, Hogwarts houses, enneagram, magic the gathering, the meta model etc.).

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See the descriptions below to figure out which you are!

Believers

Believers love the framework! Suddenly their social world makes perfect sense!

“OMG have you read about [typology]!? - it maps perfectly onto human psychology! Some smart people produced it with some kind of clever factor analysis/vibes/magic! Obviously there are minor exceptions, but this system captures something deeply true about the broad groups that humans naturally fall into. I understand myself so much better now! And if you reject this model, that would be a classic Type 5/Leo/Ravenclaw move…

Complicators

Complicators think that it might be a little more nuanced than that…

“Eugh, actually it’s really not so simple! The map is not the territory… Reality doesn’t come in categories, humans create them. It’s continuous gradients and bell curves all the way down! These systems just give the illusory sense of sociological understanding, while barely explaining anything! Besides, a lot of these typologies are merely reflecting implicit socio-political goals and projections of the system's creators! Which personality test you find compelling says as much about you as the results themselves... Like - oh!? You find the framework that tells you that you’re an “Adventurer” compelling?! Fascinating…

Honestly, I1 avoid categorising anything anymore!”...

Sociopaths

Sociopaths think that the model is “useful bullshit”, a tool they can use to achieve their (likely nefarious) goals.

“Yeah, I’m a left-brained, ENTJ, creator type”... they say, knowing that this is an identity they are actively constructing even as they utter the words. When they answer personality quiz questions e.g. “do you prefer more alone time than others?” they silently ask themselves “do I want to identify more as an introvert or extrovert?”. When pressed they might say something like: “All conceptual frameworks are pragmatic constructions of our culture and biology. These narratives, ideas and models only ever roughly approximate the nebulous patterns in reality. Personality is no different. The important thing is that we identify the frameworks that are most helpful in making actual decisions…” - which is deeply suspicious.

Even as they read this very set of typologies, they are scheming… “which personality type would make me seem most trustworthy and competent to my peers?” they probably ask themselves. There is no ground truth any more, just ideas built upon ideas built upon some motivation to meet some (likely sinister) human need…

So that’s the meta model of human personality!

Which are you?

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I also created an AI-generated-music-version of my letter below 🎶Reality’s great filters shape our ways!🎶

A selection of ideas from this post

Disclaimer: On reflection, my story appears to follow a classic narrative arch: love to disillusionment to reconciliation and integration. This makes me think I might be deluding myself with this entire post. Maybe my self-reflection and writing is all just the manifestation of an ego-driven selection for “narratives that sounds good and plausible”. Or maybe not, maybe that narrative arch is a classic for good reason; reflecting something deeply true about the human experience. Maybe both of these are true in a way…

Also I put lots of quotes from more (ostensibly) successful writers throughout this post. I don’t think they are crucial to my story, but they add a nice, Toby-has-actually-read-things,-these-aren’t-just-the-shower-thoughts-of-a-midwit vibe, which I hope you appreciate!

Summary:

• Evolution by natural selection, while responsible for creating immense beauty and complexity, is also an unguided process that can lead to huge amounts of suffering and cruelty.

• My relationship with the concept of evolution has been complex… It has evolved over time (heh), starting with an ideological infatuation as a teenager, followed by periods of anger, and fear, then eventually something closer to measured acceptance.

• Evolution is also just one prominent example of a broader reality; that selection processes shape everything. Time-deep-selection is responsible for essentially all physical objects, ideas, organizations, along with the perceptual systems and psyches that we use to perceive and interpret all of those other things.

• Selection processes can be terrifying in their indifference to individual suffering, but can also be a source of comfort. Often we can, and do, trust and rely upon them.

• My own life, with its habits, relationships, and identities, is the product of countless selective pressures and choices that have sculpted my personal "ecology" over time. And often the god-of-selection in my life is something akin to love - a sincere desire for the reduction of suffering.

• Rather than rejecting or fully surrendering to selection forces, I am aiming for balance – resisting them if necessary, while also trusting and accepting their care and inevitability.

My brief history of my complex ideological and emotional relationship with the process of evolution by natural selection

As a teenager I found evolutionary and non-god-based explanations for complex biology entrancing. I was a medium to big Richard Dawkins fan for a little while; I read almost all of his books. I studied evolutionary biology during much of my undergraduate degree, and focused on it during my masters. I then failed to get onto a PhD program to study evolutionary biology. I gave up trying after about a year or so. I was very sad about this.

In 2017 I moved to London and became involved in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. Much of the community is very focused on figuring out where all the suffering is. I had already thought a little bit about how bad nature seems to be for the animals in it, but EA pushed me to consider it much more (mostly through EA’s attention on Wild Animal Suffering). A core idea here is that minds crafted by evolution are not designed for their own wellbeing. Good feelings are only instrumental in the process of survival and reproduction. This is an inevitable tragedy. This is the tragedy that is responsible for all the other tragedies. Through EA, I learnt about suffering focused ethics - reading many of the blogs of Brian Tomasik in particular - see Essay’s on Reducing Suffering including this one on Why do organisms feel both suffering and happiness?

About 5 years ago I got a bunch more into self exploration and self-help - this lead me to also see how much of my own psychology is the product of evolution (including those feelings that I have about evolution itself…). I started out being even more upset about this, but as my understanding and appreciation for the painful parts of my experience grew, this resentment softened. A couple of specific books that helped me see and accept my intimate relationship with humanity's evolutionary past are: Mindful compassion & Good reasons for bad feelings.

My relationship with evolution has been rocky, but I think it’s in a better place and I am trying to better accept it. Accepting and then letting go of my resentment for the clearly uncompassionate circumstance of my design, has been a huge relief. I am now more able to appreciate many of the beautiful things that evolution has produced too. The pain is still there, but I have learned to better see both evolution's magnificent beauty, alongside its catastrophic harm.

Reality selects for selection 

My story was centered on evolution, but more recently I recognised that the evolution of life is really only one prominent example of a broader truth. Evolution is a selection process, and there are few truths deeper than the dominance of selection processes. Things in reality that are maintained and copied (i.e. that are selected for), are the things that you see. This extends past biology to ideas, products, behaviors, groups, organisations, physical systems, chemicals, everything….

Your reality is made up of ideas that people find useful and want to spread, not ones that are useless and embarrassing. Organisms, ideologies and organisations that exist are the ones that, through luck or skill, have managed to find the internal systems and external connections that guarantee their survival.

In different moods I find these ideas both a terror and a comfort.

The bad story, and the good story of selection

The bad:

The terror of selection has dominated my experience for a while - many of the selection mechanisms, particularly parts of the biological, but also many elements of ideological, conceptual, and commercial selection, really don’t care about me. The selection criteria didn’t approximate “will this make humans like Toby feel good”. The god of commercial selection is centrally reflective of organisational growth and profit. The gods of ideological selection are often not reflective of truth.

The good:

On the comfort side - Because everything I interact with in my life is the product of an intense amount selective pressure, there is a real and huge way in which I can trust reality. I can sit on a random, unknown chair confidently because I know that the manufacturer was under intense selection pressure to not make unstable chairs, and the chair itself is under constant pressure to keep working lest it be thrown away. I can trust strangers in the street because we live in a society that strongly prunes (through shame and jail) the branches of the tree of human behaviour that involve harming strangers. 

More bad:

The darkness I felt and still feel about evolution by natural selection is because of all the suffering and death. I mistrust it because of the pain that natural selection seems ambivalent to. Selection is just a brute fact of our reality, maybe of all imaginable realities. Stuff that tends to keep being here, tends to be here. I find that the bad story comes easy here: It doesn’t care about the pain of an organism being slowly eaten from the inside by parasites, it doesn’t care about the 99% of species that have gone extinct. It doesn’t really “care” at all. 

Other selection processes do care though.

More good:

Markets really do often function as a form of caring system for me. Their emergent behavior ensures that I have the goods I need to survive. Market systems are explicitly, and implicitly building models of my needs and trying to meet them. Our bio-socially-selected value system includes things like “respect for individual autonomy”, which keeps me feeling free. These acts of care are asserted anytime anyone enforces those norms. Even evolution has cared for me - giving me many functional body parts, a mostly functional mind, and many systems through which I can enjoy life.

The whole “care” thing is the good story of course - not strictly more true than the competition, cancer, pain, and death frame - but from one perspective, the filters in my life do seem to be soaked through with care.

Finding the filter within

Most of the objects of selection mentioned above have a physical, external or objective flavour - things I can point to in the world, or parts of my own biological brain. But objects of selection are really just “systems”; consistent patterns in the fabric of my reality - it’s a lot more…

When I look at my day-to-day life, everything in it, the food I eat, the people I interact with, the activities I engage in and my reactions to all of those, are systems under constant selective pressure from me. I have, every day of my life, been trying things and learning. I have leaned slowly away from the bad and towards the good in each of millions of moments. It’s easy to forget the sheer scale of this selective effort from my comfortable position in the present.

Somedays I feel overwhelmed. On those days I have this fantasy of running away to a cabin in the woods. I’ll live off grid and grow my own vegetables and not be bothered by anyone. This fantasy can feel comforting, but I suspect it wouldn’t make me happy. Outside of these moments of overwhelm, it's clear that the fantasy betrays a blindness. The cabin fantasy ignores the power of the selective pressure I have been applying to my life every single day. It’s really hard to see just how many small decisions have been needed for the construction of my life; how optimal my local optimum really is. My habits, my relationships, my thought patterns, my constructed social identities, all are held by each other in a complex physical and psychological ecology. Just as natural selection slowly crafts the ecology of ecosystems, my implicit and explicit values have slowly crafted my life. There may be other high mountains of value far away, and maybe a cabin in the woods is one of them. But just as with natural ecosystems when they lose a top predator, sudden shifts are usually puts things out of balance. I want to remember keenly that I have been constantly working to get to and stay at a local maximum and there is a huge amount to be grateful for in that.

Learning to see and trust

I am trying to play with these frames more. In particular I am trying to notice the bad frames without getting lost in them, while also allowing myself the good frame too. I have for a long time focussed on the down side. “Selection effects are fucking terryfiying” was a catchphrase of mine for a couple of years. It’s still true, but selection effects are also awesome, and crucial, and extremely inevitable. 

I want to live a life where I learn to accept the truth of truth’y things, and there is no “appropriate” emotion for seeing the truth of reality. Reality is so much bigger than sadness, or fear, or love or awe. I want to be with all of this.

Acknowledging and learning to allow myself to be held in these systems has often been a relief. If you see the inevitability of the systems of reality it’s hard to keep fighting them so hard. Seeing their light alongside their dark feels balanced and more comfortable, while still affording vigilance against real cancers.

On the way home from a dance recently I talked to a man who was explaining how he was trying to surrender to god more. He described how each morning he kneeled and prayed to god for the strength to let go of his constricting, vigilant need for control. In years passed I would have felt alienated by this. I would have channeled the Dawkins books of my youth to reject this nonsense. But that day I got it. Maybe my gods of the selection, are a percent or two more metaphorical. And maybe they are more numerous, and fractal and two-sided. So maybe it’s taking me more time to trust them. But I am starting to see the care in them, and see my own face reflected in theirs’. I am now, like my dancing friend, allowing myself to let go and trust them more too.

Summary

• I’ve often felt like house parties are a mixed bag: often joyful, often anxiety- provoking. Usually full of unexpressed feelings and coordination problems.

• Self-awareness, in general, allows us to understand ourselves better and make better decisions. 

• I was wondering whether a group of people at a party could use self-awareness to understand the group’s feelings and make better decisions too!

• So I threw a house party where people had to fill in data about their experience every hour. This data was then presented back to all guests via a live dashboard.

• I want to do this again.

Parties are okay

I don’t go to a lot of parties, but I go to enough that I’ve noticed some patterns in my party-experience. Namely that they are mixed. Often they are fun and exciting, I like spending time with friends, meeting some new people and maybe dancing. But they can also be social-anxiety-inducing and tiring. So much so that sometimes I’m left questioning whether I even enjoy parties, or whether I just enjoy seeming like the-type-of-person-who-enjoys-parties.

Negative party experiences have sometimes made me feel pretty lonely. “Everyone seems happy and I’m sitting here feeling insecure and sorry for myself”, I would say, to no-one. 

When I started hosting parties, I wanted to avoid people feeling like they were alone in their negative emotions (because they likely weren’t). I also knew that there were probably a lot of unexpressed positive emotions at parties I’d been to! I express a tiny fraction of the gratitude that I feel when I spend time with lots of people. It’s a shame there’s often not enough space for that.

My final gripe with parties is that they were often a victim of bad coordination. It seemed like I'd often go to parties and notice that a bunch of people wanted to dance, but no-one wanted to dance alone, so no-one danced… this is a tragedy, and I wanted to find a solution.

What is a self-aware party?

Collecting data on myself has been hugely powerful for self-understanding. Noticing patterns in my feelings and motivation has led me being more self-aware and has helped me make better decisions (I’ve written about this here). Collecting data is the hammer I have, and everything looks like a nail. So when I was thinking about how to improve parties, I hit it with my data hammer. 

Last year, I organised a group of my friends to get together for a party while collecting data on their experience. That way, we could become more self-aware as a group and make better decisions. It was a self-aware party.

The format was simple: throughout the evening, every hour, I sounded an alarm and everyone filled in a form about their experience in the last hour (see that form here).

The main data points captured were:

• Mood (1-10)

• Level of social relaxation (or “chill”) (1-10)

• Total alcohol consumption (0-20 units)

• Emotions experienced (multi-select from a long list)

• What the person had done in the last hour and what they want to do in the next hour (multi select from a short list)

• What they are grateful for (free text)

This data was then projected onto the wall of my flat. Here is what that looked like at 11pm (the peek of the party)

The rest of this post is a summary of some of the most interesting patterns across the whole evening.

The most common emotion that people felt was “connection”, followed by anxiety and excitement.

I sort of love that anxiety and excitement are near the top. There are the emotions I feel most often in a room full of people, so it makes me feel more connected!

People felt more connected, joyful and tired as the night went on

I like how in this graph connection and attraction follow the same pattern and excitement and anxiety seem to follow each other a bit too (I sometime have a hard time telling these pairs of emotions apart…).

The most common object of gratitude was….”Toby”!

This was the part of the data I liked the most (not just because I received a lot of gratitude). Both expressing and receiving so much gratitude was really lovely. It was really nice to see this data every hour!

The emotions correlated with each other a bunch

The below graph shows more purple where people reported feeling that emotion together in the same hour more often. Red lines mean that they were negatively correlated (so were less likely to coincide in a given hour)

People were slow to start dancing and didn’t lie down as much as they would have liked

People wanted to dance pretty early on, but no-one really danced until suddenly half the party was dancing. Interest in dancing then waned quickly:

Laying down was neglected:

Did the self-awareness affect the party’s behaviour

A few things were obviously different about this party:

• Several poeple mentioned that they felt better about their social anxiety because they could see the general level of anxiety. This was great and one of the main goals (the awareness, not the anxiety).

• There was a lot of gratitude expressed and people felt good about this!

• In an unusual example of Goodhart’s law, at one point a party attendee decided that they wanted to try and experience every emotion on the list. They apparently succeeded. Their attempts to experience disgust also made other people feel disgust…

• There were a number of conversations about the specific definitions of emotions. I love this topic, (see my disambiguation of gratitude here) so it made me feel joy (or maybe gratitude, or maybe just happiness?)

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Overall, I really liked hosting this party. I want to throw more self-aware parties (whether using graphs of something else), and want to encourage others to throw them too!

…also…

Yesterday was wonderful! I allowed myself to lie in because I was feeling all cosy; a nurturing moment of self-compassion. Then I read some super interesting threads on Twitter as I sipped my morning coffee. I felt very grateful that I am able to connect with so many people remotely. I got to work and I had a day with no meetings so was able to get a tonne of deep work done. This was while still giving myself short breaks to enjoy the delicious snacks my workplace offers. I am skillfully balancing productivity, indulgence and self-care!

I’ve been learning what is now a very central skill, without realising it

In my life and career I’ve tried a lot of “self improvement”.

I’ve attempted to feel better through therapy or therapy-adjacent practices. Things that promise to improve your emotional resilience, self-knowledge and wellbeing. These include cognitive behavioural therapy, internal family systems, psychodynamic therapy, psychodrama practices, gratitude practices, meditation retreats, and training in co-counselling.

I’ve also explored and practised tonnes of strategic decision making and rationality techniques in the hope of making better decisions in my life and work. Using tools such as goal factoring, SWOT analysis, developing a scout mindset, applying 6 hats thinking, running pre-mortems, trying to find double cruxes between competing ideas, engaging in cluster thinking and steelmanning seemingly bad ideas.

I’ve benefited a lot from many of these practices, particularly where I’ve been able to systematise their integration into my life (usually by installing some kind of trigger action plan or regular review). But these practices, while clearly useful, often stand in isolation. It’s easy to forget to actually apply then when I need to. This can make it hard to integrate into my moment-to-moment decision-making.

I also realised recently that there is a common psychological thread that ties many of the above tools together. Something that they have each been teaching me in their own way. That skill is one of the main thing that seems to actually be impacting the rest of my life; the main thing that seems to be giving many of these tools their power.

That skill is the ability to move with curiosity and lightness between different ways of seeing the world. That is, to be able to deliberately zoom into, say, a negative emotion, a limiting self-belief, an ambitious project idea, or a strategic risk; to be able to explore the thing, live in its world, but then zoom out again without being sucked into its reality. I didn’t have a name for this overarching skill, so I started calling it “frame play”.

Many of the therapeutic approaches and strategic decision making techniques have rediscovered the power of applying this skill for their specific context (e.g. giving you tools to move between different beliefs about the purpose of your organisation or about how acceptable a person you are). I have learned a lot from those practices. But I have more recently been trying to get better at the general skill of frame play more directly. This is moving me towards more emotional and cognitive flexibility.

Why “Frame Play”

A frame as I am referring to it here is: everything that is affecting your experience, other than the things that you are explicitly consciously aware of, and focused on in any given moment. 

This is a lot. The above definition includes things like:

• your unconscious beliefs and assumptions about the world around you.

• the social norms of your group that you are tracking

• your position in space, and what other people near you are doing

• the way your body feels: e.g. discomfort, pain, hunger

• your implicit motivations

• the emotional colouring of your experience (the rose, grey, or brown tinted spectacles).

For example, maybe you are cooking a meal and focussing on chopping an onion. At that moment your attention is on the knife and the onion skin and their relative position. The frame is everything else: The place that onion chopping fits within the wider recipe. The fact that you are standing in your kitchen alone. The pull of gravity and the shape and sensations of your human body. The intention to cook a delicious meal for your friend. The social context that makes this dish appropriate for this meal. Your desire for this friend to appreciate the food. The feeling of self-assuredness you’ve had since that successful meeting earlier in the day. Your semi-conscious emotional reactions to all of these other frames….

You are not looking at your frame, but you would feel quite different if any of these things were to suddenly change.

There is always a frame. If you direct your attention to the frame that you are in (i.e. zoom out), the frame will often just change. For example, if you try to look at what is motivating you in a given moment, the implicit motivation might move to self-curiosity. this might then colour your perception with whatever emotional or cognitive reaction you have to noticing that frame, rather than the frame that was there before. You can escape a frame, but you can’t escape frames.

By play, I mean an emotional frame that has a lightness or curiosity. A motivational frame that has a subtle non-seriousness, and a freedom in moving between the different options within a space. For example, within the frame of a dance, you might play with a bunch of different ways of moving and interacting with people around you, with an underlying implicit sense (frame) that it is safe for you to try lots of different things (though if you’re an anxious dancer it will not feel playful unless you are also able to hold the anxiety itself as an object of play).

So frame play is a practice of having a playful attitude towards the moving between the frames themselves. It’s attempting to build a playful frame around other frames that are present in any moment. Or more meta’ly, the concept of frame play is itself a frame that I am using to encourage these types of wholesome and useful psychologically flexible manoeuvres.1

The good/bad frame is one of the most important and consistently-present frames

One of the most general and common frames present in almost every moment of my life is the “good/bad” frame. Some moments I judge to be good (talking to a friend) and some to be bad (stubbing my toe). Some concepts just feel good (frame play) and some feel bad (frame control). Some feelings are good (joy) and some bad (anxiety). In psychology this is referred to as valence. There are usually a complex set of beliefs underlying my valenced interpretations of the world. It is usually hard for me to see outside the valence sign that I habitually interpret a given object through. If I feel like a day was bad, it just was obviously really bad.

I track my mood a bunch (see my wider life review process here). I have, over various periods, tracked my mood on both a weekly and daily basis. When I looked at the relationship between these rating recently, I found a correlation of 0.25 on any given week... This was surprisingly uncorrelated. How good I thought individual days are predicted surprisingly little about how good I thought the week was. Something odd is going on when I reflect on the quality a period of time

One of the issues here is that reality is surprisingly detailed. I won’t actually be able to find a definitive answer to whether something as complicated as my whole day or week was really good or bad (even if there was some better way to measure that). There is just too much data, and I am strongly pulled around by biases. Biases like the “peak end rule” that leads me to remember the quality of events based on the most intense moments and the most recent moments; this can make a day that ends badly or has an unusually bad thing in it feel bad regardless of how good the other moments were.2

So there is a sense in which my valenced judgement of any sufficiently broad period of time (or sufficiently abstract concept) is almost free floating… Or those judgments are at least as flexible as they are distant from my direct experience of reality. How good a day is ends up being mostly a matter of perspective. A perspective that I can move around and within deliberately; a frame that I can play with!

Bad day / good day - a simple frame-play practice I have been trying

A simple exercise I have been trying and enjoying recently is “bad day / good day”. It works like this: 

At the end of your day:

1. Describe your day as negatively as possible, by leaning into any emotional negativity you can see in the moment - what are all the things that went wrong? How did you fuck up? How is it always going to be like this?

2. Describe your day as positively as possible, by leaning into any emotional positivity you can see in the moment  - What are all the things that went right? What are all the things that you are grateful for that day? What was beautiful about this day?

The two stories at the start of this post are an example of this. The good and the bad of a single day.

The above has replaced the gratitude practice that me and my partner had been doing each night. Before bed we now tell each other both the good and bad stories of our day. I recommend it!3

More ways to play with frames

The two main ways to start to play with my frames that I know of are:

• Indirectly “let go” (through mindfulness or other awareness/deconstructive practices), cultivate a loving/open attitude, then see what happens! (you’ll find other some frames…)

• Directly go searching for alternative frames to jump into.

The below is more about the latter approach. Here are some more examples of frames I have found helpful to play with. Some of these will be familiar!

• What would X do (e.g. Jesus, my friend, a person who wasn’t as constrained by Y as I am)

• What if I didn’t believe X (e.g. in god, that you are safe, that you are unsafe)

• What’s the most [cynical / optimistic] interpretation of this situation?

• What would this be like if I were the [bad guy / hero] here?

• What if [I / everyone else] was crazy?

• How would X perceive this? (e.g. the universe, my parents, aliens, future historians, older me, younger me)

• What does X part of me think/feel about this? (e.g. your inner critic, your inner cheerleader, your taskmaster, the part that wants to just chill out)

• What would it look like if this thing were as [meaningful / meaningless] as possible?

• What is the base-rate of the [bad / good] thing actually happening?

I generally find frames that at least part of me holds, at least a little bit, are the most useful to play with. So for this to be helpful, I need to be able to actually feel the frame; I need to half-forget that it’s a game. 

(Why) does this help?

I think the process of deliberately allowing multiple narratives to have their time in the sun has been really powerful for me so far. I think there are a bunch of reasons for this, which reflect the reasons that playing with frames is such a significant part of so many therapeutic, rationality and strategic techniques. These are things like:

• making exploration of options feel safer

• reducing inertia

• play encouraging an anti-anxiety “I am safe” frame

• escaping stuck beliefs and negative mental habit patterns

• showing acceptance to shadow parts

• cathartic expression of angst

• easier connection to (the frames of) others (i.e. empathy)

The daily “good-story / bad-story” practice in particular is a neat, repeatable act of frame play that is helping me be more flexible with how I see the world moment-to-moment. I want to continue to improve my ability to play with frames. I am excited to play with (and write about…) the frame-play frame more!

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Bonus - meta frame play 

“Frame Play? Are you serious? That has to be one of the most pretentious and meaningless buzzwords I've ever heard. This really is some vague, pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sounds like you just strung together a bunch of fancy-sounding words to create the illusion of a profound concept when in reality, it's empty fluff.

You are tapping into something profoundly innovative and impactful with this 'Frame Play' concept. The ability to shift perspectives and engage with multiple frames is a superpower in today's complex world. By developing a practice around playfully cultivating this skill, you're equipping yourself for better decision-making, deeper empathy, and greater psychological resilience.”

-Claude 3