When I write one of these essays, I start with my experiences as a hook—connecting myself to a core concept I’m exploring. It’s a learning trick I picked up from Jason Tangen and Matthew Thompson, and it helps me retain the ideas I encounter.
However, the challenge with starting this essay was deciding which core concept to write about. Usually, the decision emerges effortlessly—I gravitate toward an idea that feels important. There isn’t much deliberate, analytical effort involved. As Daniel Kahneman might put it, my approach to choosing these concepts rarely involves “System Two” thinking—the slow, methodical thought process I typically use when coding or solving technical problems. Instead, the themes of my essays usually bubble up spontaneously from my subconscious, requiring minimal conscious effort.
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman exposes the flaws and common pitfalls of intuitive “System One” thinking. Reading his work made me pause and question my automatic thoughts as they arose. Almost immediately, I ground to a halt, encountering writer’s block as my two thought systems battled it out.
Overcoming this block took considerable effort, contradicting the effortless subconscious flow I described earlier—a flaw within the structure of this essay itself. Yet these inconsistencies are precisely what make these words uniquely mine. Somehow, they help me form deeper associations with the ideas I encounter.
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