About

(Singularity in the) REARVIEW MIRROR is a 100% HUMAN, HAND-CURATED Eternal Lifelong Learning Creative Befuddlement Production. An exploratory hybrid remix of a 21st Century Third Millennium version of Bujo, Bullet Journaling by Ryder Carroll, on the reMarkable Paper Pro (RMPP) e-ink writing tablet, reinterpreted and integrated with Julia Cameronʻs Morning Pages (The Artistʻs Way) process, originally implemented through the Astro Modular theme, which turns Obsidian into a CMS for publishing.

I didn’t feel comfortable with the code base of that theme which seemed to reach way too deeply into Obsidian, which might include both my publishing content and personal notes. Not that there are any state secrets or shameful stuff there; it is the principle of neuro-integrity that is more important today, in the age of the Attachment Economy, an important and accurate term that I first learned from reading Sasha Fegan at the Center for Humane Technology. So, I’m in the process of refactoring to plain vanilla Astro.

A Draft Framework

If

Then

Shards of rulial refractions glimpsed in a REARVIEW MIRROR reflect a fractured world that observers like us somehow make whole.

Skewed angles, shallow and narrow focus, fleeting motion, objects may appear nearer or farther than physical reality. Faces and signs compress to shards of light and color. Details blur. The mind stitches fragments into familiar patterns, guessing continuity from motion cues and memory before the scene slips back into peripheral sub-context, as attention remains primarily focused on the road directly and immediately ahead.¹ Somehow, nevertheless, this extremely thin slice of situational awareness provides vastly outsized tactical advantage for navigating everyday life. Isn’t it?

But When Are You Publishing Your Next BOOK?

The incessant question asked of every author and writer and equal in qualia and consciousness as asking a new mother, “When are you going to have ANOTHER baby?”

REARVIEW MIRROR is the “next book.” It is also an open source, often only partially filtered and edited Substack stream of consciousness that I may or may not agree with, much less advocate for as policy; always subject to new, vetted and verified data or information. Always subject to further reflection, review, and scrutiny.

Creation Process

Most of REARVIEW MIRROR is composed, handwritten, and converted to text on the truly remarkable remarkable Paper Pro (RMPP) e-ink e-paper tablet. Exported by email to Trello, copied to Obsidian, rendered by Astro with pnpm, hosted by GitLab. Primary *dashboard” is a Bujo “method” on the RMPP. All non-referral links.

In the late 2020’s publishing universe, as correctly described by Julia Mossbridge, it is no mystery that books, at the micro scale, and academia on the macro scale, are both far too slow to advance active, timely, information transmission, and new knowledge creation, exchange, and actionable innovation to keep up with the pace of reality in the Third Millennium, Post-Automation Era.

As I have both ranted and done my inadequate best to live by, the only way to figure out what comes next – in this case, beyond books and stifling credentialism – is to experiment, demonstrate, fail, pivot, remake, and repeat. Try stuff. Creative FAFO. Fail fast, upskill often.

If you think that sounds ridiculous, there’s this other random guy that says the same thing.

Constituent Interim Perspectives

Following are a few of the lenses and perspectives reflected throughout the content of this project, in no particular order, and as always, subject to Continuous Integration and Development.

Think of these subheadings as a stack of rough stones from which we stack a natural, free-standing wall without use of mortar, by matching stones like a jigsaw puzzle, exactly as they are.

Created and Evolved

Most of the content in the REARVIEW MIRROR reflects some aspect of the following always-subject-to-revision-and-refinement perspectives.

For example, the observation that human beings appear to be both created and evolved beings.

Both material and immaterial. Symbolic and non-symbolic. Walkers between worlds, between rulial realms, inhabiting instantaneous present moment eternity, and mundane linear time in a kind of existential superposition.

Unique and original creations, ongoing creations, and resilient recreations, actively and adaptively evolving, day by day. This interim interpretation seems both scripturally faithful and scientifically accurate. After all, the scientific method was created by monks observing the universe in breathtaken reverential awe. We know from both scripture and science that people can and do both change and do evolve, from King David to Saul’s transformation into Paul on the road to Damascus. Repentance, a reversal of thought, behavior, and character; an admission that we have been misled, mistaken, or just plain willful and wrong; is the definition of personal evolution and transformation. The holistic entirety of body of both philosophy and psychological science are equally adamant on this point.

Closer to Zero

Creative Befuddlment is not negative self-talk, it’s The Truth about learning and the reason so many in the 20th century preferred denial of that fact, opting for the duck-n-shuffle avoidance of genuine accountability and responsibility with a kind of punch-the-clock, nine-to-five, just doing my Just Over Broke Justification Of Being JOB-JOB, man, typical 20th century semi-existence. A David Graeber worthy Zombie Apocolypse in the rear-veiw mirror. If it sounds depressing, it was the most powerful paradigm in history for driving depression drug sales to the moon. So may groypers far and wide be instantly aware that this is neither descriptive nor prescriptive of the earthly context of the first half of the twenty-first century. To wit, wailing and gnashing of teeth over, “what will people do for meaning, dignity, and purpose” in this 2025-2035 Third Millennium Post-Automation Era if Just Over Broke Justifications Of Being have become irrelevant!?

Maybe the most polite Derp-Duh-Der response is probably something akin to, “that was never true, dumb-dumb.” Dignity, Meaning, Purpose, and Value are intrinsic, Endowed By Our Creator, which even you yourself parrot, when it serves your purpose to perpetuate the Job Trance, “because that’s how grandpa and grandma always did things” when they lived in the jungle and cooked their neighbors in holes in the ground, as pastoral, peaceful, gentle, nature-loving indigenous people do. Enough of that clap-back. My bad.

Certainly seems like the case that, if we are not to some degree in (way) over our heads, confused, and therefore productively overthinking in order to figure things out, then we simply are not learning to the deepest degree we are capable.

This may further explain why the term overthinking became a favorite, cheap and easy poo-flinging monkey pejorative attempt to disable thoughtful deliberation and acute direct observation. “You overthink everything,” became a classic gaslight of the early 21st century.

Are we not living in the midst of the precise outcome of those entirely underthought, reactive, and impulse-driven experiments in the year 2025? Maybe not. Sure seems like it, though, when you hold it all up to the light.

Anyone can complain, but generating concrete, well-considered, rigorously stress-tested solutions – what to do about it – seems not so common.

By definition, to learn is to acknowledge and face our ignorance with some modicum of enthusiasm and faith in our ability to, at least, eventually, increment our ignorance closer to zero in one aspect or another, to some value greater than zero. It’s actually quite a low bar; which makes the general prevalence of an apparent lack of curiosity and learning for its own in the human population, all the more puzzling. So let’s favor the developer’s philosophy for this project, instead.

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The Honor System

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Footnotes

1. 45% unaplogetic assistance of duck.ai ↩