2025-03-02 11:06
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Reference
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding#footnote-anchor-3-147336576
Notes:
“Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.”
The difference of Vision and Unfolding as life-style design.
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When you design something, a useful definition of success is precisely that—the form fits the context—as Christopher Alexander argued in Notes on a Synthesis of Form (1964). This is true of relationships, and essays, and careers: you want to find something that fits.
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A glove is well-designed if it fits the hand nicely.
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A relationship is healthy if it fits the personalities and needs of the people involved (and the resonance between them).
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An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader’s mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.
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The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context.
- To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
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The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
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If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
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It is a feedback loop between you and the context. By gradually adjusting the thing you are designing and observing how well it fits the context, you create a feedback loop that embeds the context’s knowledge into your design. Your design ends up smarter than you.
Looking For Alice:
The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.
This happens all the time (I mean: the abandonment of Alice in favor of a lover chosen by the group), but few people are perceptive and crass enough to notice where their emotions originate. That’s why we need novelists.
What I’m saying is this:
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You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see.
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You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it.
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You will not be able to explain how this fusion works. So don’t do it.
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But when the interiorities do fuse: notice how things are set in motion.