I’ve had a Unix system in hand since 1974. Built my whole life philosophy around simple truth and plain speaking. Been running Emacs since the eighties. And this morning I voluntarily picked up a big honking Moleskine and a pocket notebook and made them part of my toolkit.
That’s not a regression. It’s the Unix philosophy in action.
Use what you have. Hack. Distrust all claims for the one true way – including the ones about which tools real engineers use. The right tool is the one that fits the job, not the one that fits the implied ideology.
It started with my budget.
I have a fixed number of months to get a business going before I need to go back to work. I’m not buying lottery tickets or letting AI invest my twenty dollars or surfing one-weird-trick scammers. Just good old-fashioned here’s-something-useful-for-not-much-money. The rare and valuable and not too expensive route.
The paper money tracker helped immediately. My spending profile, projections, and run rate are now private – not sitting in some app waiting to be breached or sold. But more than that, it’s a physical object. Bitwise spreadsheets feel ephemeral. I keep recomputing them in my head, second-guessing the numbers, running scenarios at two in the morning. Put the same numbers on paper and something shifts. More solid. A page-flip away. Easier to push back on panic.
Same with vital signs. I’ve gotten off more medications in the last two years than most people take in a lifetime, mostly by finding the kingpin number and watching it. High blood sugar? Brisk walk, tall glass of water, down a hundred points in thirty minutes. That’s plain-text finesse. But it only works when the numbers are real to me – tabulated in my own hand in a Moleskine, not filtered through someone else’s opinion of how I’m doing.
Paper is harder to fantasize about. That’s the point.
The notebook is a Unix pipe.
No dependencies. No sync issues. No lock files. No feed algorithm when you open the cover. Your pocket notebook doesn’t need xterm-mouse-mode. Your arguments appear in your own voice, written by your own hand.
When I scan a page I wrote, my subconscious adds weight because I wrote it. It’s not cleaned up or filtered to look like everything else in the interface. No fancy font, no emoji, no embellishments creating inappropriate spin. Just my mind to my paper – to badly misquote the Vulcan mind meld.
Scrappy and sloppy as that may be, it’s mine. And I find it gives me more solid resolve to be who I am, rather than the revenue-generating product someone else would prefer me to be.
Even Emacs has its limits. Yes, it’s an operating system desperately searching for a decent text editor – we all know this. But even that venerable bastion has its quirky ways that are not my ways, and when I immerse myself too deeply I start to carelessly make Emacs my one true way. Not great.
The principle I keep coming back to is sixteen: distrust all claims for the one true way – except pizza. Pizza is always the answer.
I want to be precise about that. I’m talking about religion, not faith. Faith is worth having. You have to choose some objects of it, and those choices are yours – not mine, not anyone else’s. That’s the Prime Directive. But religion – the institutional insistence that your way is the only way – that I distrust on principle.
Don’t crowdsource what you believe. Pick things that make you feel solid. For me, pizza happens to be one of those things. Where else I place my faith, you’ll have to get to know me first and then ask.
And yes, I’m currently eating Caulipower pizza because bread is the supervillain in my health comic. Distrust all claims for the one true way. Even this one.
My credo isn’t gospel. It’s a diagnostic tool. And lately it’s been diagnosing that I need a pocket notebook and a paper journal to keep some things personal, simple, and private.
Find your own angle on authentic living. It might be a number two pencil and a piece of typing paper. It might be an SSH session to the MIT supercomputer. The choice is yours. Just make it consciously.