ideas are hard

2023-11-08

i am really really bad at coming up with ideas by myself. perhaps this is a byproduct of the us education system or maybe it was my upbringing or maybe it is the political and economic state of the world or maybe

i wrote in the last blog about 'can i do anything' (please read it i needa run up my views) and i think this gets to the central idea of this after some thinking. the synthesis of original ideas is hard.

i dont mean to be one of those people that reaches for meaning in seemingly shallow things. however, today me and my coworkers were talking about jujutsu kaisen, which has been my addiction for the past like 2 months or so. we were talking about the magic system, revolving around cursed energy, which is a power source originating from negative energy. with an idea so simple, the mangaka creates fascinating concepts, like reversed curse technique. it's actually awesome how deep the system gets and its cool to see the exploration of this idea.

i know that one thing that my childhood was devoid from was writing. i almost never wrote anything outside of school. therefore, i am bad at writing, at least outside the context of a homework assignment or school project, where there are constraints. i just wasn't interested in my own thoughts and would much rather experience the thoughts of others. as i grow older, however, i am trying to become more conscious of my own thoughts and more specifically why i am having these thoughts. i think writing without restriction could be a great way for me to work on this, which is why my blogs seem to move around from place to place so much; what i type is directly mapped from my thoughts, which i think is pretty cool. i think that being more cognizant of my own thoughts will help me think more deeply about the ideas that i have.

i recently (like 2 months ago) stumbled upon a video explaining zettelkasten, which is a personal management system used by the German people. essentially, by making your notes atomic (only one subject), you can create a graph of concepts by linking together notes. i organized my system using two 'folders' (or just semantically different spaces for notes): one for references, and one for my own ideas. after using this system for notes / school / projects, i realized that the folder for references was so much larger than the folder for my own ideas. this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but as i said above, i want to be better at thinking for myself. however, it's hard, especially with technical subjects.

i don't really know how to resolve this. i think writing consistently will work for less technical things, but how can i come up with my own ideas for a subject that has rights and wrongs. i can think all i want, but at the end of the day, there are always best practices and better ways to do things. maybe a greater understanding is needed.