Henrik Karlsson
@phokarlsson
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I write long-form essays at I use Twitter as a notebook to explore ideas—right now mainly about love, writing, agency, thinking
Joined September 2011
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I don’t know anything about dating, have barely ever done it. But I am married to the coolest person I’ve ever met.
So some friends asked for advice on finding someone like that, and I said, LOL why not.
An essay
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"It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential."
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treat people like they are too complex to fit in your head (link in next tweet)
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People tend to find their calling when they have the time to get really bored (link in next tweet)
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Graph of decision quality among professional Go players. A sudden increase after AlphaGo. It is not only because they are learning from the AI. Players are suddenly inventing new moves at a faster rate too!
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On finding form-context-fit in relationships (from an essay linked in the next tweet)
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some notes about unfolding a life that fits (link in next tweet)
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If I look at things that have turned out well in my life—my relationship, some of my essays, my current career—the "design process" has followed the same pattern. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an "unfolding."
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when I met my wife: we talked in public ~15 times but she didn't really get me because I tried to be polite and not talk for 20 min about my obsessions
then she happened upon one of my really early essays and was like "yeah??? you think like that? I must talk to you for real"
I’m starting to believe that “write on the Internet, even if no one reads it” is underrated life advice. it doesn’t benefit other people necessarily, it benefits *you* bc the people who do find/like your writing and then reach out are so much more likely to be compatible with you
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An interesting observation in Maslow's work on self-actualized people is that they tend to be less "introspective" than others. Meaning they spend less time thinking about themselves and their feelings. But they are more attuned to their inner compass when *acting on the world*.
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the world is fractal and gets richer the deeper you pay attention
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If you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of you field.
What if we take this approach to raising and educating children?
An essay
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I find it so liberating when I remember that every situation is a chance to practice attention, to show up with intention and dedication. The dishes, filing taxes, feeling the pain in my hand—all opportunities to practice aliveness.
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Someone asked me what I mean by "unfolding a relationship"
tl;dr it is about letting go of any preconceptions of what you are looking for and instead paying attention to what you feel when you hang out with various people, and then iterating
If I look at things that have turned out well in my life—my relationship, some of my essays, my current career—the "design process" has followed the same pattern. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an "unfolding."
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a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your dms (link in next tweet)
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If a single status game becomes dominant, it breeds violence. Social fragmentation is a release valve.
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a pattern I see is that people who are bad at finding the right people to date tend to think more categorically (link in next tweet)
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Look at the things that you are excited to do, and figure out ways to do more of that. Learn what you need to solve the problems you are currently facing. Look for people that fascinate you and hang out with them, do project with them.
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You are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.
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I can't strongly enough recommend setting off 20 hours a week to work on a project that forces you to learn and grow. It is not that hard to find 20 hours--you are awake some 110 hours a week!--but it adds up in a surprising way if you keep at it for 3 years.
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It is tempting to think that so many people read books back in the day, but whenever I look up a great book that was "a sensation" when it came out in 1834, or something, it is always like "it sold 2000 copies!!"
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A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them to route interesting stuff to your DMs.
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I'm starting to feel I need some time along again so I can process everything I've learned
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Things will grow out of this, if you keep iterating. You might need to get yourself a degree to get a job to cover the bills as you fiddle with the design of your life, but don't worry too much about that. Anything that pays the bills without breaking you will do.
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A mistake I did when I was young was that I paid too much attention to what I thought was doable and let that decide what I allowed myself get curious about.
I didn't understand enough to judge what was doable. And I severed myself from my curiosity—my fuel and compass.
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The important thing is to keep enough space in your calender so you can keep improving your *current* life.
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What are some examples of generative "conversation moves"?
I'm thinking about things like the "yes, and" pattern in impro theater
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If I look at things that have not turned out as well--my education, the books I've written and hidden on a hard drive in our attic--they have followed the opposite design process. I've tried to construct a new reality from nothing. I was caught up in my head, or on paper.
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The internet makes me blind to the scale of things. If I write a blog post that is read by 2000 people that feels like crickets. But last night we had 200 people come to the opening of a new exhibition at the gallery. It was overwhelming.
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When ppl say, “You are the average of the five people you spend most time with,” the subtext here is that you should look for more interesting people and cut others out. Yes. But you can also change your social context by changing how you *relate* to ppl.
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it is from
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Ok, so this is interesting: it seems maybe the quality improved not after AlphaGo, but after the release of open source versions. Because they allowed players to look under the hood and understand the strategy. Just seeing the AI moves was not enough.
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Schopenauer on the value of reaching a conclusion on your own rather than reading it in a book
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I used to think that there was a tension between "moving fast" and being "patient and deliberate." But that is a false distinction. Good work comes from fast and detail oriented execution done again and again for a long time.
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Interestingly, my life feels richer when I do less. When I cut down my priorities, when I travel less, when I read more slowly.
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some thoughts on creating a satisfying career (from my email)
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6 techniques people use to access and remain in the zone where new ideas are born —
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The special thing about a small personal blog is that you can think aloud at length in a way that is not ok to do around strangers irl and that can really accelerate how fast you get to know someone
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This was all very frustrating and scary--I thought I would never figure out what I wanted to be, and that I would end up wasting my potential. If I could go back, I'd tell myself: trust yourself.
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This week I've asked myself in basically every situation "so what are we trying to do?" followed by "what are the alternatives?" and it is funny how much better things goes
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An essay is not a vehicle of knowledge transmission. It is a landscape to think in, and a path to get there.
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This quote from Erich Fromm makes me think that it would be a good idea if we could figure out how to write novels that portray the inner life of people who are unusually high functioning psychologically speaking.
What are some examples of such novels?
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there's this feeling which is the opposite of audience capture - this feeling when you find a group of people who give you permission to be more and more illegible and spontaneous
i love that feeling
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In my early twenties, I thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to be a diplomat?" I spent a lot of time getting into the university program where future diplomats in Sweden go--only to discover that it is a world filled with politicking, and I am allergic to that. So I had to drop out.
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~150 years ago Swedish workers and farmers got really into teaching themselves new stuff.
They ended up building the world's most comprehensive system of non-compulsory education, an important factor behind the success of Scandinavia.
New essay
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When I was younger, I would only write when I had an idea. But these days I just sit down anyway. Never ceases to amaze me that if I just sit at my desk for 10 days a piece of writing that moves me will arrive.
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A great thing about blogging is that is has taught me that there really are so many people out there that I resonate with. I just didn't know how to find them. I assume everyone has people like this, and it is worth working very hard to find them.
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Why is it so much easier for some people to see reality clearly and accept it, while many struggle against it?
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Also, I managed to sneak in that you start a blog. You should always start a blog.
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Something which disturbed me once I realized it is how much of what is in newspapers is not written by journalists but by PR firms.
I write the press releases at the gallery where I work, and newspapers almost always printed it as if they wrote it, with zero fact checking.
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What is a good book about agency? Or that makes you feel agentic
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This is a good prompt to find people to learn from in your craft: "Create a recursive list of influences starting from [insert person]."
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And then I spun up a new design for my life: I should be a translator! Which ended the same way: I realized, after much work, that the reality of that occupation is not as glamorous as my idea of it.
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It is hard to describe how moving it is that there are people who want to support my writing financially. 355 subscribers to be precise. If ~100 more were to pay, I could quit my job and write full-time. That is crazy. I will at some point support my family by writing!
Escaping Flatland is such a joy to read. It's the first newsletter I've been a premium subscriber to.
"You just have to grab hold of what awakens a sense of loving curiosity within you" - on having ideas
Thank you!
@phokarlsson
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I used to feel that everything had been said already. But the more I write, the more I feel that there is so much left to be said.
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Today I'm celebrating 3 years of writing online. Wrote some notes about that—
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“Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.”—Erich Fromm
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I have more exciting ideas when I don’t feel shame about what excites me, when I allow myself to be stupid and naive and boring. I try not to judge myself in the act of giving birth to ideas.
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In 2023, I published 37 essays. These were the 5 most popular.
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Rick Rubin has this great advice about how to edit:
If you are making a 10 song album, write 30 songs.
Cut it down to the 5 best.
Then try adding songs one after the other and pay attention to if the collection is better with the addition or not.
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Is listening to smart people have long-form conversations on podcasts changing how people speak and/or think?
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There is a parallel here to cognitive apprenticeship theory, ie the idea that the reason cognitive skills are hard to learn is that we can't see them so you should externalize them for students. For humans to learn from AIs, perhaps making reasoning explicit is needed.
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This distinction between different kinds of introspection is central. I often talk about the value of introspection and I worry that people misread that as the "journal about your feelings" kind which has some (but limited) use. I'm more interested in introspection through doing.
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Reading Tarkovsky's diaries and it fascinates me that he is focused on making more money - it is not something that bleeds through in his films. While working on Solaris: "Now I must earn as much as possible so that we can finish the house by the autumn."
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I decided to be way more ambitious as a writer and dad a while back and it is remarkable how much clear things get.
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especially useful if you are trying to impress super cool introverts like my wife, who wants to spend 10 minutes thinking about every interesting she hears, which also is something that is strange to do irl with ppl you don't but is possible with blogs
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Writing the blog has made me much more agentic and changed my life in many ways. I felt afraid this would put me out of sync with my old friends (and it did to some extent) so I invested myself in making them more agentic, too, and it worked!
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Oh, I realized ChatGPT can transcribe my handwriting perfectly. Which means . . . from now on I'll write my essays in a notebook while walking the nature reserve by the sea.
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I saw the graph here, which links to original study:
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Unfolding is about being humble and perceptive.
"I prbly don't know what the ideal relationship looks like for me. I'm just going to pay close attention to everyone I interact with, give them space to be interesting, and then I'm going to lean into whatever feels most alive"
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Since I started to share quotes from old essays, the whole incentive structure around writing has improved. I need to drive new readers to the blog to keep aloat financially. This used to mean: publish often. Now I can be patient and make long-lived pieces instead.
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The significant improvements seems to have come not after May 2016 when AlphaGo was released but after October 2017 when Leela Zero was open sourced.
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some advice about pulling out the deeper ideas from an essay draft
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Been thinking about how I get good blog ideas. Short answer: a lot of input, tons of notes, then I look at the mess and ask what is most surprising and useful to me? then I unpack that. then I ask the question again. and prune. and then again. an example —
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I feel like that when I read ppl's too. I don't care if you misspell and make some mistake when you think. it's the feel of the thought, the earnestness and the tone of the thought--that's what tells me that I'll like talking to someone
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The 2-year-old gets really upset if don't read to her for hours each night but she doesn't really understand the stories so when my wife and I want to talk we hold books in front of our faces and speak. in. that. weird. book. voice.
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When I write, I often worry that I'm not getting my points across, or that things will be misread—but the most pleasant outcomes are when readers find things in the essays that I didn't put there. Essays as a space to think in, rather than a knowledge transfer. Giving up control.
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I should add that my blog at the time was very crappy compared to today, so it wasn't because she thought I was talented and good at what I did. it was the she liked the *texture of my thought*
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figuring out what you are wrong about makes life richer and more interesting
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I'm looking for examples of: small communities that were formative for multiple people who went on to do extraordinary work *and* was designed with this in mind.
The Apostles at Cambridge fits the bills. What else?
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Schopenhauer on what makes for good writing resonates with my experience
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You don’t have to do things others do, or have things they have, at the expense of the deeper things you want. You really don’t. Almost everything is an option.
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Editorial meeting with my wife. Discussing a 6000-word essay draft.
She: "I don't care for this. Why should I?"
I give pompous reasons.
"No. Tell me why you care."
Less pompous.
"Try again."
Has cathartic personal insight.
"Good. Throw this out and write that instead."
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So who is this Alice, in the title, who are we looking for?
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I'm in the mood to wrestle with a great book - spend 2-3 months, reading slowly, going over the secondary literature etc - what should I read?
If you are familiar with my work, which great book would most challenge and expand my thinking?
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