what lives in the unseen
material and immaterial value
sharing some notes I wrote on internal vs external worlds
Dreams are powerful and substantive. As Borges once touted, writing is nothing more than a guided dream. I’ve been having really weird dreams lately. A recurring short story dream I’ve had recently: a couple, broken up amicably for years, stay ‘in contact’ via credit card payments to the same chiropractor. The centrifugal emotional force of the dream is that the actions and desires of Others are always secretive and opaque, but only as secretive and opaque as your own. I should probably write out this short story in full.
Even my dreams are asking me these questions: What is seen? What is unseen? I’m a material creature. I live in the concrete, sunlight-as-disinfectant, world. I wake up at the exact same time almost every morning like clockwork, choose a select outfit for the office, spray something sweet and sharp on the inside of my wrists. It’s easy to adopt San Francisco’s temperate stability as my own. Unperceivable changes ripple below the surface of apparent sameness. Perpetual sunshine and slight chill, the nocturnal beauty of crow migration at dusk. I look almost the same though I’ve grown into my face over the years. Dark, long hair, and soft features. Internally, though, there’s been an oceanic split. The way I used to be. The way I am.
I feel encouraged when I’m presented, eerily, with a similar set of circumstances I’ve faced before — where I failed to live up to my own values or gave into vices or responded poorly. The question then becomes whether or not I can face my ghosts: respond through different methods and mindset with grace, sincerity, and honesty to my own lived reality. A and I joke about this all the time: we wave our hands about, call it tests from the universe, but I think what we really mean is that surpassing unseen internal benchmarks of growth requires an unglamorous, thankless, sort of self-awareness.
The material/immaterial value divide is the central source of tension across several decision making outcomes. Variables are often bundled together and hard to disentangle or isolate. Take an easy example, such as choosing which job to join. Material value are the things you see and can easily quantify: the desk setup, the hours, the salary. Immaterial value is what you swim and breathe in: what is culturally self-evident.
Prioritization of career choices means an internal stratification of what you care about at precise moments in time. How do you trade-off concepts like agency, autonomy, intensity, ownership, a sense of purpose, mission, status, location, team-dynamic? Well, no one can tell you that!
Your valuation of the un-seeable only becomes obvious when you are faced with operationalizing your internal model of the world. It’s all theory until you have to actually act on your principles. You finally arrive at the axes of your claims. You have a decision to make. Which way?
Carving your own vision requires attunement. Extreme presence. A way of being here and now that precedes both self-knowledge and decision-making. It is a particular receptivity to reality that allows for a recognition or identification of what’s important, specifically, to you. When life inevitably gets complex, messy, hard, you can return to that solace — that warm place within yourself to know what to do.
’s elegant piece on On Attunement describes attunement as a “meaning-laden receptivity to the world.” Something self-related goes quieter, Carlsmith writes, and recedes into the background, allowing something beyond-self to come to the fore:For so many of us, it's our deepest experiences that lead us onward. Some vision, some seeing, that says "this, this; don't forget." And said in some distinctive way; not as just-another-emotion, but with, it seems, some different depth—some particular harmony and clarity. For me, at least, this sort of depth is core to the weight and mystery and authority of that strange word, "goodness." It's related, I think, to the way sincerity feels like coming home; like something falling into its proper place.
Attunement. Then, moving in tandem with said attunement. There’s that saying that once you see something you can’t unsee it? Or maybe in my own words: once you’ve reached a heightened sensitivity or perception toward truth, ignoring your judgment feels like a betrayal of self.
You change the way you act when you start to recognize the significance of internal repercussions. If I lose self-respect I only have myself to blame. If I make the same horrendous mistake twenty times, the external world might turn a blind eye, but, importantly: I would know that I fucked up. The only person I have to embody integrity with forever, is me. Although I’ve tried to escape that line of thinking — it does echo within me like a percussion. I want to be a good steward to myself. I want to feel safe in my own mind.
Belief formation is an active internal process. The process of deriving for yourself what you care about, what principles you live by. You can, in fact, choose your values. "Choice is the fundamental activity that defines our character," writes
, echoing Sartre in his review of Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café.“Existence precedes essence,” he (Sartre) put it, meaning that we are defined by the decisions we make more so than who we are, i.e. by any sort of identity. It follows from there that — as if in the polar opposite of determinism — we are making decisions, choosing our being, every moment of our existence. And it follows from there as well that, even if so many of our choices have precious little impact on the world around us, that doesn’t make any of them less real. Our inner lives, and our constant choices, have as much power to them as anything in the ostensibly material reality.
Even if so many of our choices have precious little impact on the world around us, that doesn’t make any of them less real. Is that freeing, or is that scary? Borges again: A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought...life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence — Clarice Lispector
I started reading Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong. Martyr was touching (5 stars!) Work has been hectic, given it’s JPM Health Week in San Francisco and I spent all my free time on catching up with health founders visiting. I feel really lucky that my job is just to meet smart people at the frontier and absorb information like a sponge.
Some songs I’m listening to. I really like the Marias 2024 album, Submarine. Run Your Mouth and No One Noticed are my select favorites.
PS: Happy late birthday to my dad who is reading this newsletter and has always been one of my earliest readers and supporters — I am grateful for his infectious enthusiasm, philosophizing, and our long walks in the forest.
The Role Model cover of the 1975’s song is also very addictive.
Really love the idea of attunement. I’ve felt particularly *not* attuned recently (dreary winter weather, work, too much screen time), and it’s absolutely draining. A bit of Sartre is always a good antidote ✨