Items In My Head (Newsletter)

I’m less interested in building things that resolve emotion, and more interested in what we could build to hold it.

Everything works. Nothing lands.

As kids, we pressed against things to understand them. Clay. Walls. Rules. We learned form through pressure. Touch made things real.

When nothing hurts, there’s nothing to push against. And without pushback, we can’t locate ourselves. We’re just floating - stimulated, maybe. But untethered.

But pain and pleasure aren’t reactions to the system - they are the system. Without resistance, reward goes flat. Without contrast, pleasure becomes ambient. The result isn’t meaning - it’s dopamine. And dopamine, divorced from depth, doesn’t satisfy. It loops.

When you're young, pain and pleasure aren't theoretical . They're directional .

They’re your first tools. The original interface.

What’s often framed as “disruption” is, at its core, a byproduct of vacuum. A sealed system can’t see itself. But someone outside it can.

In this light, naivety isn’t ignorance. It’s unconditioned perception.

How can someone with no experience outperform an entire industry of experts?

When a field becomes self-referential - when its best minds are trained by its most established models, it starts to seal itself off. Ideas are recycled. Benchmarks are internal. Innovation turns iterative, not foundational.

This is optimization - but it’s also insularity. ... See more