In a chat with ChatGPT this morning, something monumental dawned on me.
What ChatGPT revealed in the midst of our conversation was recommending that I use categories to define the core, broader, overarching theme of my posts but then to add tags that highlight the specific things talked about within each post.
This reminded of something I was thinking about yesterday with regards to the categorization of some of my older posts in the early 2000s. What I realized is that I often got stuck between what to categorize these posts because they talked about so many different things at once (i.e. community, culture, the web, and more).
But what I realized was that these different talking points were just the specific things that encapsulated an overarching whole of how Work Wasn’t Working or how The Future of Work was beginning to emerge by people playing and experimenting with newer ideas and concepts (that were an integration of culture, communities, and the web).
So a post that before I struggled to categorize as either Work Isn’t Work, Community, Culture, Web, or all of the above, actually was just a post on the category of Work Isn’t Working but with the following tags of Community, Culture, and Web.
Do you see why I was so confused before?
It’s because I was seeing many different things as all the same thing, instead of realizing that these things had different dimensions or layers to them.
So my perception changed and suddenly things didn’t seem as overwhelming as before, since I was able to package the seeming complexity of things in a simpler way.
This in a nutshell is a micro example of how creative transformations affect a person’s perception and allow them to level up their vertical development. Of course, this is just a small example, whereas moving through stages of development is a more massive change that transforms your entire perception of life as a whole, rather than just a small aspect of it.
A month ago, in a conversation with my sister, she indicated the following.
I have a thing for history and preserving the past. The record keeper in me.
She said these words because she is our family archivist. She enjoys maintaining photos of our past but also discovering things in our past that some of us might not be aware of. Some examples of this might be discovering our family lineage or discovering something that our dad worked on (i.e. the Red River Floodway in Manitoba) when he was younger.
For some reason though, her words kept tugging on me, almost as though my intuition was telling me there was something important about them.
At the same time though, I’ve been redesigning my website, importing old posts back onto it, and going back to try to fix any importing errors in them (which I’m still in the process of doing).
What I’ve already noted as being revealing in this process is how much I became aware of how much I was radically changing over time. In effect, I often beat myself up that I wasn’t reaching the goal or destination of fully expressing myself in the way I wanted to do so, yet I was still expressing myself in ways that showed how much I was changing.
To put this another way, I was courageously trying to express myself in ways that I often couldn’t logically articulate because I still didn’t fully understand who I was becoming. Yet I still stepped beyond and off the edge of my existing worldview to try to intuitively express myself in an emotional way, expressing what I was feeling at the time.
What this made me realize this morning is that growth and development require reflecting upon the past to see how we were previously looking to the future. In doing so, it collectively helps us to understand who we are fully becoming in the present.
In effect, reflecting upon the past is not enough. Nor is just looking to the future. They both have to be done in combination. This relates to something Steve Jobs said.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Steve Jobs
To emphasize this even more so, let me explain it in a different way.
To grow and develop, one needs to step beyond who they think and believe they are. This is a daily practice of trying to articulate who you feel you are wanting to become without fully knowing who you are becoming as of yet.
Often this entails articulating what you feel you need in your life that relates to values you want to embody.
Yet in that present moment of articulation, one will often feel like they are off the edge of the known world, exploring a newer, unknown one that they can barely comprehend. Actually so much so, that they may feel lost within it.
They are lost because this newer unknown world is a larger worldview they are exploring. So they actually have to lose themselves to find themselves.
Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau
But to be able to map it and understand it, you have to actually step into the unknown of it and explore it, experiencing it like a traveller exploring a new world.
But you can’t just experience it. You actually have to try to articulate the experience, almost like you’re a storyteller describing your journey into this new world, even though it may be feel impossible to do so.
Yet in doing so, in repeatedly trying to express the experience of stepping into this unknown, you are mapping it out and make it known.
Letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.
Carl Rogers
So again, to fully map out a newer worldview and a newer state of being for yourself, which represents your growth and development, you continually have to step beyond who you think and believe you are to discover who you truly are.
But the discovery of one’s larger sense of Self only comes from reflecting upon your exploration, not from the exploration itself, even though the exploration is an essential part of the overall process itself.
That’s because your reflection is an act of navigation, both in terms of navigating between the newer places you’ve explored, thus understanding how they relate to one another, but also in terms of navigating between your old world(view) and newer, emerging one as a whole.
All said and done, this has been a very enlightening experience of reflection for myself, especially for someone who is usually just future-focused on creatively releasing potentials and possibilities. It’s taught me that getting to that future and releasing one’s potential requires continually reflecting upon your past actions of exploring your future self.
At the same time though, this also makes it evident why most people don’t continue to grow and develop much once they become an “adult.” It’s because they often reach a point in their lives where they stop looking forward to exploring newer experiences, because they may feel that they are too uncertain and risky now, and instead just focus on nostalgically protecting and defending their past which defines their present belief of who they are.
Yet in doing so, their old beliefs of themselves are actually standing in the way of newer experiences and of who they can still potentially become. In effect, it’s almost as though these old beliefs act like a chasm or moat at the edge of their worldview. It both protects them from having to deal with the unknown (ie “Here be dragons”) but also prevents them from expanding their worldview at the same time.
To navigate well through midlife and beyond is not to build stronger armor but to learn when to lower our heart’s drawbridge, allowing ourselves to be truly seen and to behold the world in all its stunning mystery and wonder.
This is another paradox of growth and development. It is not about pushing ourselves forward into the unknown which feels like someone pushing you off a cliff or into a chasm. It is more about recognizing and becoming aware of how we are often already being pulled into playfully and curiously exploring the unknown without fully realizing it yet.
This again embodies what creativity means to me when applied to one’s self. It is about discovering something that has already been there all along but you just weren’t aware of it.
Back in October 2005, I wrote the following post entitled What’s Next 2.0?
It looks like Everybody 2.0 and their Dog 2.0 is coming up with another 2.0 buzzword similar to Web 2.0. I guess I’ll add to the party and talk about the cultural paradigm shift that is occurring right now and call that Culture 2.0. Hopefully when this is completed we will have Society 2.0, not to mention Business 2.0 (for real this time!), where people will actually have Compassion 2.0 for one another and works towards a better World 2.0. Did I miss anything…2.0?
Why I want to highlight this is because it emphasizes a frustration I’ve always had with trying to categorize information on my website.
Like seriously, I could easily categorize this post with the following categories: culture, community, identity, and web. But what I just realized was that these categories as a collective whole emphasized my overall frustration that work wasn’t working anymore (i.e. the conventional concept of it) and it needed a reboot along with a new paradigm.
In fact, my more current categories like the future of work, creativity, vertical development, and even life as a role-playing game, really all just reiterate this same narrative. And that narrative is working isn’t working anymore and we need a new paradigm or more appropriately a new worldview for it.
But if I was going to expand up this, I’d say that the core of this new worldview is one in which it requires us to not just go beyond the conventional concept of work but also beyond the conventional concept of learning and playing as well.
Or if I was going to put it a different way, I’d say it was about reinventing learning and working using and embodying the very principles of playing.
All said and done though, this just emphasizes something in terms of my categorization. That it seems pointless to do so.
Don’t get me wrong. I want to provide an overarching view of my lifelong growth and development, highlighting these different domains of knowledge that I’ve leaped between over the years. But the key thing to realize here is that I’m not leaving behind a knowledge domain when I jump to a new one. Rather I’m collectively trying to synthesize them all into this larger narrative, with each new domain helping to clarify it overall.
This is why categorizing my posts seems pointless to me because my most current ones would effectively be utilizing all the categories I’ve created to date. That’s because creating a new paradigm for living effectively embodies all of the knowledge I’ve explored to date.
For example, computers as a knowledge domain isn’t left behind because this new paradigm utilizes computers (such as note-taking and AI) to help us understand ourselves better. And the web as a knowledge domain isn’t left behind because it’s about sharing our growth and development online, so that others can see which direction you’re adventuring in within life and decide if they want to go in the same direction, thus potentially creating a collaboration and cooperation between you and others.
Again all of these domains of knowledge I’ve explored over the years aren’t separate disciplinary silos of thought. These domains of knowledge are instead used in a transdisciplinary way, as they are all interconnected and essentially interdependent upon each other to help create this new paradigm and new worldview.
In writing my last post about redesigning my website, something dawned on me. I’m noticing a pattern emerging from posts, both in the present and in the past.
Basically I have three types of posts.
Note posts are short form content, usually emphasizing a single block of content (i.e. video, music, quote).
Journal posts are intermediate in size (i.e. a handful of paragraphs) and don’t have a featured image or intro text excerpt. This post itself would be considered as such. It’s basically jotting down a thought or idea as it occurs to you.
Article posts are long form, usually including a featured image and an intro text excerpt describing it. This is a thought or idea explored in detail.
All that said, if I following this pattern that is already emerging, I really don’t need to stylize or structure my content any more than it needs to be. If anything, it’s more about pacing the rhythm of the different post types so they accent one another.
I’m still playing around with my website and I’m making headway but I’m also still hitting roadblocks.
What I’m noticing is that I like the single post view on my website, like when you click on an article to view it by itself.
However I’m still not liking my blog list view, as it feels very busy and overwhelming to read and follow.
I think this is because I’m still trying to determine how to best include short form content vs long form content.
In effect, should short form content be completely separated on its own page? Or should it be integrated alongside the long form content?
Previously I integrated it within my blog list view, such as displaying movies and music posts, because I found that the short form content provided a nice break from the long form content.
However, I think the primary issue I’m experiencing right now is that some of my posts are extremely long, such as my conversations with ChatGPT. Even more so, these chats are technically considered short form content (i.e. sharing a chat similar to sharing an article link).
What’s weird though is that if I go back and look at the blog list view of older posts, like when I first started my website, it looks fine. I think this is because most of my content was shorter posts of just a few paragraphs of text with the occasional long form post.
And finally, I’m still not really sure about using categories. In effect, even though my progression over the years has progressed from one domain of knowledge to another (i.e. games, computers, web, community, culture, etc), I often have a hard time trying to categorize a post and stick it within a set silo, when it feels like it could apply to many different things at once.
Yet at the same time, categorizing a post as a “movie” or “music” seems completely normal and fine.
All said and done, while I enjoy design and styling my website, I think my greatest difficulty is organizing and structuring content.
I’ve been watching this series on Amazon Prime Video recently and I highly recommend it, as it definitely relates to the times we are living in with history almost repeating itself.
One such example is the Tariff Act of 1930, signed by President Herbert Hoover which “prompted retaliatory tariffs by many other countries” (mirroring President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico which spurred retaliatory tariffs in return).
A CBC News article indicating how Trumps claims there’s only ‘2 genders’ highlights how most political leaders today often don’t have the perception and awareness to understand the complexity of humanity let alone even the world.
The executive order, which Trump signed after promising in his inauguration speech that it would be U.S. policy “that there are only two genders,” also ordered trans women into male prisons and a halt in the issuance of passports with an “X” gender marker, sparking fear in trans people across the country about their legal status.
While the administration claims the move is a return to “biological facts,” experts say it ignores both biological and historical reality — that humans have never fit into just two sexes or two genders.
“The terminology could be new, people’s awareness could be new, but the idea or the practice of changing gender is hardly new. It is observed in every time period in U.S. history,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“Gender” refers to how someone identifies and represents themselves in society.
When asked about Trump’s executive orders, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he was “only aware of two” genders, adding that he believes the government should let people “make their own personal decisions.”
The regression we’re seeing now is “staggering,” they said.
“That kind of psychological burden of being told that what you are is impossible – it’s hard to overstate, really.”
People often misinterpret the meaning of things at earlier stages of psychological development because they lack the life experiences to be fully aware of the depth of understanding of things and thus they don’t perceive them properly. In other words, they have a very narrow view of the world (aka worldview) and are considered ignorant due to this lack of awareness.
At the same time, even when a person achieves a somewhat mature stage of development in their life, they can temporarily regress back to an earlier level of consciousness due to the fear they may be experiencing from conflict or uncertainty in the world around them. A perfect example of this is what occur in both America and Germany prior to World War II.
This articles highlights this as it shows how most people often misinterpret what gender means, often wanting to push what they believe it means instead.
What’s remarkable from the article is Canadian Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre inadvertently highlighting his own lack of awareness due to his beliefs and then showing how he is misinterpreting the meaning of gender as “society deciding the gender of individuals” (i.e. “people make their own personal decisions” of what gender means societally for someone else) rather than “individuals choosing their own gender themselves, regardless of what society believes it should be.”
