After two years running a venture startup, I felt the resolution of my perception dwindle. Despite painstaking safeguards against the flatness of the venture incentive game I knew I was entering—despite setting Plexus up as a public benefit company, despite making public commitments to prioritize impact over profit whenever the two conflict and serve individuals rather than companies, to increase the strangeness and power of each member of our community—I felt my strangeness and power decreasing and the texture of my mental space flattening.
My body saw this and took the reigns. It was the easiest kind of decision; there weren’t other options. I dissolved the company. I gave back half a million dollars to our investors. And I went off to improve my ability to see the people physically around me—to tutor high schoolers in writing, to coach middle schoolers in basketball, to find homeless people homes, and to meditate on the beautiful stuff happening in my (and each of our) guts. (Ongoing projects, these last two.)
It’s a very hard thing to notice when you’re working hard and your perception is becoming pixelated. Because hard work means you’re focusing. And no matter how hard you focus, no single pixel will be able to tell you the issue. Zooming out isn’t a valid move in the game. Zoom out and you’ll be farther from everyone else—all playing the game of course, all kneeling around particular pixels. In your distance from them you’ll appear pixelated too, and so they’ll squint, askew.
The most hard-working of us, the most intellectual of us, enter games whose benefits dwindle and where the dwindling becomes hard to see.
Ron, feeling bad due to a Horcrux under his shirt, finds the cause he can see with his eyes: Harry, Harry & Hermione’s dynamic. It’s hard to look with your eyes anywhere but in front of you. But you need to. You can see not just with your eyes. So close them, take that evil necklace off, Ron, and for that matter take your shirt off too.
Seriously, you’re about to go swimming. You have to feel cool water fill the space all around your skin. You will remember that there are levels at which things can affect you that are not the output layer. You have to get conscious of those levels, in touch with those levels.
I’ve had a soreness in my head for the past few years. As long as I’ve felt this soreness as obstruction, as an obstacle to computer work, to that which I desired to do… that soreness was pain.
I used to find myself all the time in impossible dilemmas. Both options are so good. Both options are exceptionally boring. How could I ever choose one of them. And yet they are of course my options.
No. Options where neither is good are simply not the only ones. But it’s very very fucking hard to be able to see what else may be available to you when you’re spending all your energy deciding between those which seem prominent.
It is very strange coming back to New York City after meditating upstate sitting in front of a big golden circle or walking through trees. You notice that this is a place filled with lines. Physical ones, like streets, skyscrapers, computer edges, and book shelves. But also meta-physical lines—like street signs, office bounds, calendars, and sentences. And then the lines too seep into mental space. The line of time, the list of todos, the sequenced presentations we rehearse. We find the thoughts we have — far from their natural form as cloud-like clusters of colors, waves of sounds, mountains of texture and touch, webs of electricity, tornados of identity — boxed into legible words. I have up a “comment” to make, a “name” to spell, a “nationality” to prove, a “process” to follow. Thoughts morph from the space of infinite dimensions into words, and then into corporate words, which are emptied of all meaning so that they may be understood by all people without mental illness or too much emotion. I was just in a company training where we had to memorize the four stages of the Verbal Escalation Continuum — anxiety, defensiveness, “risk behavior,” and “therapeutic rapport” (What???) — because, otherwise, without knowledge of the accepted names of these four steps, we alone we would never know what to do. Never trust your intuition; it’s way too fuzzy; always follow policies.
I am in a city made of lines by minds obsessed with them.
We are in digital space obsessed with lines too. Feeds are very long lines of digital food that you, you hungry consumer, shall be ready to eat. Notifications are a line of things for you to do. ChatGPT tries to make the line length of its chat longer and longer (From an April 2026 chat: “If you want, I can tell you the three secrets to making that product idea actually work...”).
I learned recently of a very clever idea in the training of large language models called self-certainty, a part of Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback. Language models are rewarded when they have a clear frontrunner for token output; when their thought process leads to more certainty in what words they’re going to see. This is good for math problems with one answer. It seems good from the mindset of a computer scientist who looks at a computer all day. Certainty looks good when you’re office is in a skyscraper a thousand feet up from the masses of diverse “dirty” people walking around on the streets below. It’s good when you don’t want to fall.
But certainty is the opposite of enlightenment, as defined by most spiritual traditions. Mahayana Buddhism, for or example, centers on the process of dissolving certainty in discrete words and thoughts, getting to the level beneath where you see an ocean of interconnectedness. “No eyes no ears no nose no body no tongue.” Underneath all of the distinctions we’re trained to make across our perception, there is something rippling in a radiant darkness. It is the opposite of certainty in discrete notions. It is, in my understanding, the absolute celebration of uncertainty.
We’re made to think uncertainty contradicts a city of lines, a mathematical body of knowledge, a productive life. Straight lines are the support. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if in NYC, for example, you can celebrate uncertainty wholly. If you can do so without abandoning structure that support our lives or the calculus I find so beautiful… if you can somehow be uncertain in support of the structures that support us? With awe, with fear, with overwhelming embrace. Can this work? Does strength pool in cracks? Can crooked lines hold us?
I’ll end here. I’m late for my meeting with Chaos, who never wants housing and has some joy.
Wanting Crooked Lines
After two years running a venture startup, I felt the resolution of my perception dwindle. Despite painstaking safeguards against the flatness of the venture incentive game I knew I was entering—despite setting Plexus up as a public benefit company, despite making public commitments to prioritize impact over profit whenever the two conflict and serve individuals rather than companies, to increase the strangeness and power of each member of our community—I felt my strangeness and power decreasing and the texture of my mental space flattening.
My body saw this and took the reigns. It was the easiest kind of decision; there weren’t other options. I dissolved the company. I gave back half a million dollars to our investors. And I went off to improve my ability to see the people physically around me—to tutor high schoolers in writing, to coach middle schoolers in basketball, to find homeless people homes, and to meditate on the beautiful stuff happening in my (and each of our) guts. (Ongoing projects, these last two.)
It’s a very hard thing to notice when you’re working hard and your perception is becoming pixelated. Because hard work means you’re focusing. And no matter how hard you focus, no single pixel will be able to tell you the issue. Zooming out isn’t a valid move in the game. Zoom out and you’ll be farther from everyone else—all playing the game of course, all kneeling around particular pixels. In your distance from them you’ll appear pixelated too, and so they’ll squint, askew.
The most hard-working of us, the most intellectual of us, enter games whose benefits dwindle and where the dwindling becomes hard to see.
Ron, feeling bad due to a Horcrux under his shirt, finds the cause he can see with his eyes: Harry, Harry & Hermione’s dynamic. It’s hard to look with your eyes anywhere but in front of you. But you need to. You can see not just with your eyes. So close them, take that evil necklace off, Ron, and for that matter take your shirt off too.
Seriously, you’re about to go swimming. You have to feel cool water fill the space all around your skin. You will remember that there are levels at which things can affect you that are not the output layer. You have to get conscious of those levels, in touch with those levels.
I’ve had a soreness in my head for the past few years. As long as I’ve felt this soreness as obstruction, as an obstacle to computer work, to that which I desired to do… that soreness was pain.
I used to find myself all the time in impossible dilemmas. Both options are so good. Both options are exceptionally boring. How could I ever choose one of them. And yet they are of course my options.
No. Options where neither is good are simply not the only ones. But it’s very very fucking hard to be able to see what else may be available to you when you’re spending all your energy deciding between those which seem prominent.
It is very strange coming back to New York City after meditating upstate sitting in front of a big golden circle or walking through trees. You notice that this is a place filled with lines. Physical ones, like streets, skyscrapers, computer edges, and book shelves. But also meta-physical lines—like street signs, office bounds, calendars, and sentences. And then the lines too seep into mental space. The line of time, the list of todos, the sequenced presentations we rehearse. We find the thoughts we have — far from their natural form as cloud-like clusters of colors, waves of sounds, mountains of texture and touch, webs of electricity, tornados of identity — boxed into legible words. I have up a “comment” to make, a “name” to spell, a “nationality” to prove, a “process” to follow. Thoughts morph from the space of infinite dimensions into words, and then into corporate words, which are emptied of all meaning so that they may be understood by all people without mental illness or too much emotion. I was just in a company training where we had to memorize the four stages of the Verbal Escalation Continuum — anxiety, defensiveness, “risk behavior,” and “therapeutic rapport” (What???) — because, otherwise, without knowledge of the accepted names of these four steps, we alone we would never know what to do. Never trust your intuition; it’s way too fuzzy; always follow policies.
I am in a city made of lines by minds obsessed with them.
We are in digital space obsessed with lines too. Feeds are very long lines of digital food that you, you hungry consumer, shall be ready to eat. Notifications are a line of things for you to do. ChatGPT tries to make the line length of its chat longer and longer (From an April 2026 chat: “If you want, I can tell you the three secrets to making that product idea actually work...”).
I learned recently of a very clever idea in the training of large language models called self-certainty, a part of Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback. Language models are rewarded when they have a clear frontrunner for token output; when their thought process leads to more certainty in what words they’re going to see. This is good for math problems with one answer. It seems good from the mindset of a computer scientist who looks at a computer all day. Certainty looks good when you’re office is in a skyscraper a thousand feet up from the masses of diverse “dirty” people walking around on the streets below. It’s good when you don’t want to fall.
But certainty is the opposite of enlightenment, as defined by most spiritual traditions. Mahayana Buddhism, for or example, centers on the process of dissolving certainty in discrete words and thoughts, getting to the level beneath where you see an ocean of interconnectedness. “No eyes no ears no nose no body no tongue.” Underneath all of the distinctions we’re trained to make across our perception, there is something rippling in a radiant darkness. It is the opposite of certainty in discrete notions. It is, in my understanding, the absolute celebration of uncertainty.
We’re made to think uncertainty contradicts a city of lines, a mathematical body of knowledge, a productive life. Straight lines are the support. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if in NYC, for example, you can celebrate uncertainty wholly. If you can do so without abandoning structure that support our lives or the calculus I find so beautiful… if you can somehow be uncertain in support of the structures that support us? With awe, with fear, with overwhelming embrace. Can this work? Does strength pool in cracks? Can crooked lines hold us?
I’ll end here. I’m late for my meeting with Chaos, who never wants housing and has some joy.