Consciousness
🧠 Five layers—from feeling, to prediction, to the living system that makes a point of view possible.
At the Plateau of Meaning
This essay explores the exhaustion that arises when intellectual clarity exceeds material capacity. Moving from PhD brain fog to a broader critique of overstimulation and performative culture, it argues that autonomy requires material support. Meaning alone is not enough without the resources to live it fully.
What 50 Books Taught Me About Doing a PhD
During the first year of my PhD program, I read fifty books about how to navigate doctoral research. This essay distills the most valuable lessons they offered—about writing, ambiguity, rejection, mentorship, and the psychological realities of research. It’s less a guide to “doing a PhD” and more a reflection on what the process actually teaches you once you’re inside it.
Why I’m Not Building a Personal Brand
This post explores why Katâlepsāra is not a personal brand, framing it instead as a living intellectual system and epistemic engine. It emphasizes the value of documenting thought, building clarity, and cultivating insight over pursuing followers, virality, or monetization. It also outlines the audiences served—lifelong learners, systems thinkers, digital minimalists, and experimentalists—and clarifies what the project is and isn’t.
Exercise
This text explores the fundamental principles of strength training, emphasizing the importance of focusing on compound lifts, progressively increasing weights, and maintaining simplicity in your approach. It draws inspiration from Milo of Croton's method, illustrating how progressive overload drives muscle growth and strength development. Key metrics, such as aiming for a total lift of 500kg across Squats, Bench Press, and Deadlifts, are discussed, along with optimal rep and set ranges for muscle development. The text also highlights the significance of proper technique, balanced muscle training, and the role of nutrition and recovery in achieving fitness goals. By understanding that muscle engagement is more critical than just lifting heavier weights, you can enhance your training effectiveness and overall strength.
Science of Successful Learning
This text discusses the importance of spaced repetition as a long-term growth tactic for learning, emphasizing that it is the way our brains are hardwired to learn efficiently. It highlights how learning is critical for our survival and explores the relationship between studying, memory, and living better. The text also delves into the challenges posed by the forgetting curve and suggests effective strategies for combatting it, such as spaced repetition, active recall, associations, and desirable difficulty.
MediTEAte
This article highlights the underappreciated capabilities of the iPhone Shortcuts app, showcasing its potential for personalized automation. The author shares examples of creatively designed shortcuts, such as using NFC tags for household tasks or automating the retrieval of price history for Amazon items. A specific shortcut called "MediTEAte" is detailed, demonstrating how it integrates with the Forest pomodoro timer app and iPhone's background sounds to facilitate a focused meditation session with a single tap on the home screen.
My RSS Feed Subscription Lists
The author is making a conscious decision to shift from passive consumption of various content to actively directing their own knowledge consumption. They express a desire to move away from the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake and instead focus on deploying their existing knowledge. The decision is influenced by five years of experience and a realization that living in the moment and being prepared for any circumstance based on past learning is a priority, leading to a shift towards knowledge creation in 2024 and beyond.
A Grave Threat To Mental Health
The text discusses the negative impact of task switching on mental health and productivity. It explains how constantly shifting between tasks disrupts immersion and flow, leading to a state of languishing. The author emphasizes the importance of learning "how to think" rather than just "what to think" and advocates for a balance between commitment to goals and detachment from outcomes. Additionally, the text briefly mentions the influence of the woke movement on cultural values.