Recognition before reorganization
2024-04-19
- Fundamental relationship between organization and information: if it’s not organized, it’s not meaningful
- Key assumption: that things are definitely already organized (and meaningful to me) in some manner, and that there will be friction when I try to reorganize them (assign a different meaning) in any different way
- And that I need to know how things are organized now before I try and reroute them
I don’t think I have nearly enough discipline to organize my thoughts. But I think that it is something that I need to do in order to make the life that I want to live more sustainable, to be different than the life that I was living before and not just different, but better. The organization of thoughts is what makes them legible from a bigger standpoint, not just their fleeting, linear (in time) presence. That’s the starting point from which to understand what is missing, what is disjointed, what contradicts, what burrows into another, what are parasites. Organization is knowing, I guess, and the construction of reality. This is my reality. These are my mistakes. These are my fears & the homes that they live in.
Parallels between material and cognitive organization
2024-01-18 I lost my passport the other week. It felt like a critical mistake when I made it, but in a growing, infectious disease kind of manner: more a sinking feeling and spreading numbness than the fierce panic and beating heart that I think that this used to feel like. My mom said that I just needed to remember to put it in the same place every time I used it.
Even though this makes a lot of sense for organizing material things, this makes me wonder about how this goes for my own thoughts, the parts of my memory that I love, the well-worn train-tracks through my own head. What about times where I don’t want to keep thinking the same thing over and over again? Is it possible to put different thoughts in different cupboards and what would that mean, to have recognized then reorganized them in a way that I prefer?
The beginning of this vault is the product of years of thinking about organizing my thoughts, knowing that my inability to organize feels like a nonstarter / fatal flaw of mine.
2024-01-19_cultural-differences. Culture as organization