“You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” —Steve Jobs
Epistemic status: still cleaning up my thinking, but reflecting some of the messiness here
last updated: May 1st, 2024
We like to tout that “writing is thinking,” but ask anyone who’s spent days spring cleaning and decluttering — it’s no less than an intense process of bespoke, applied reasoning.
Whenever I listen to anyone regaling me with main character tales about their adventures, the endless hackathons and events, the bicoastal life, their important work projects, the yoga retreats, the travels across the globe, the questions I ponder map to ordinary curiosities: how do you operationally run your life?
Tell me about the mundane, janitorial reality.
Speak to me about your systems of maintenance and cycles of renewal.
How do you think and reason about all the areas you have autonomy, and agency over? How do you allocate attention between different surfaces? What is the harmonizing logic that thoughtfully connects and disconnects the disparate flows of your life, so you can fully show up for the people and commitments you care about with main character energy?
What is your understanding of the systems that create cohesion, a beautiful sense of grounding stability, weaving your life’s tapestry together?
How do you Dobby your world? (Love you Dobby. 🥰)
These are much larger questions than what I can cover in this post, but let’s take a look at the everyday feeling of “overwhelm.”
If someone describes their life as “overwhelming,” instead of immediately addressing the cascade of to-do items in their life, or applying a local bandaid — I like to take a step back, and recruit higher order thinking.
I now affectionately describe that as the process of decluttering your life.
When a person is looking at the mountain that is their life, or wishes to distinctly reshape their life, there is a quality to it: they often feel like life is happening *to them, and they want to become a better agent in it. Perhaps they’ve become an object, and the climb uphill is equal parts exciting and daunting. Forces are being acted upon them, before another set of forces either actively or passively awaits their attention, decision, or action.
There is a vast potential to be agentic and address each open tab in their mind, while actually being agentic seems less accessible, less appetizing intrinsically.
Thus begins the musical score of the deepest forms of “spring” decluttering: the great audit of reasoning towards emotional alignment.
There’s talk-therapy, and then there’s something old fashioned that your grandmother could amusingly relate to: decluttering.