My desk has a notebook that I’ve used every day for the past two years. It doesn’t sync anywhere. I’ve tried the digital equivalents. They’re fine. But there’s something about the friction of writing by hand that slows my thinking down just enough to notice what I actually think, versus what I assume I think. It’s not a productivity hack. If anything it’s the opposite. I just find I make fewer bad decisions when I’ve written them down first.
I’ve lived in four cities across three countries since I left home for university. Each move felt like starting over, and also like carrying everything forward. Academia and industry are the same. I’ve never fully belonged to either. I think too practically for some rooms and too theoretically for others. For a while that felt like a problem. Now it mostly feels like the right shape for the kind of work I want to do.
The short answer is: I wanted to understand why people suffer in the ways they do. The longer answer involves an undergrad psychology class, a summer working in a memory clinic, and a slow realisation that the questions I kept coming back to were empirical, not philosophical. Not what is consciousness but what goes wrong in depression, and why does it go wrong differently for different people. Neuroscience doesn’t have clean answers to that yet. That’s why I’m still here.