A gentle stirring of the ether

hooray this is not a life update. (edit: well not an overly whingy one.)

real life has nothing to report except to say that despite a few bumps and humps (read into that what you will) things are going great.

what’s more exciting to me at the moment, and the reason CLS is starting fresh is that after a whole year and six months of internal searching and external floundering, I’m narrowing in on at least the VIBE of what I want to be doing. It’s ambitious and stupidly unrealistic but those are my middle names so it should be fine. What is really important is the focus: i need to keep narrowing into something so that I can see a path and then go for it.

my brain is pretty mushy so ill be warming it up. but let me summarise what led me to this point for posterity, starting with me in a full time retail job (still have this job) a year and a half ago, suddenly realising that my light was dimming and I wasn’t using any of my real potential, a result of using all my energy scrambling to keep up with all these job things I am naturally terrible at.

I took some leave and spent a good few weeks trying to analyse myself and make some videos, thinking I was going to be a YouTuber. the videos didn’t take off but i did discover some things about my personality and what setbacks i faced internally. how could i overcome the shit things about me while capitalising on the good things about me? what should I do next? where will I thrive? none of it was obvious. i explored the potential of generative ai to help with understanding myself, which turned out to be limited but a good start. i discovered this potential of ai by trying to automate the “discovery” step of a design process with a chatbot, and realised the similarities between what holds brands back to what holds people back: internal narratives and self-perception. I explored cognitive behavioural therapy (anecdotally) and psych concepts like growth mindset, and began to identify my own stories and created strategies for rewriting them.

I didnt get too far… or actually thinking about this now… did what was to follow help me reset my narratives? yeah I think so, along with everything else it reset.

some big changes in my life got set in motion and all that introspection got put on pause. i took some good understanding away and clarified the issue: picking a direction to put my best efforts towards. at 45 i didn’t want to start the wrong thing, and the major life changes happening around me prevented me from thinking about it with any certainty. but for almost a year I was unable to progress towards any clear direction or recovery of my creative, curious spark.

but now that my fate is more or less sealed and the door the past officially closed, with real options heading my way that will enable more choice than I’ve had, ever, i feel energised to begin planning my future. at the moment i’m committed to finding the direction: the field; the problem. the thing my brain, mind and experience, as well as desires for myself and this world - sets me up to thrive at.

Other people may not believe in my potential and that’s fine, because despite evidence to the contrary, i am still fully convinced i have something amazing to offer this world and can contribute to the important problems in a way that is fulfilling and also celebrated. it’s not because i’m the smartest or the most anything, i don’t even know why I’m so convinced. I’m only mentioning it because part of what I want to see in the world is more support for people, young and old, to escape cycles of doubt and to find and develop their thing. i want it to be possible and normal for people to wake up and say ‘fuck this, i am more and i want more.’

CLS stood for creative lost souls. I’m keeping the substack at the same address (old posts are gone - fresh start) but repurposing the initials. “C.L.S” is now a creative constraint (it’s actually a very tight one despite ‘creative’ being obvious) and I’ll play with the title until it fits. It’s fine for now because I don’t know what this is yet. But Lynx are sharp and agile and chill seems like a nice word to balance that. And studio means I’m cooking.

i will be primarily using this space- and i intend to fill it up with not only updates but also context about what i’m learning about as i start to get the gears moving again upstairs. Less ramble I promise.

And as a hint as to what I want to be doing, i want to move to the forefront of the intersection of creativity and technology in some domain or other. Well, a humanist domain.

As one example under consideration, i feel like ai is important and there is a severe lack of accessible, usable ways for people to use it as more than a glrorified search bar. The capabilities are bottlenecked by the interfaces - still feeling to be designed by engineers (unusable or not useful).

I’m still reseaching the future landscape and opportunities for someone like me.

And just to add some value to this first post, I’d like to talk briefy about this amzing peice i read on substack last night. It was insightful and comprehensive, even though it was clearly crafted from an ideological and one-sided. It was hugely useful in that it did identify several hard-to pinoint dangers with AI, positioning it as a new tool of value extraction for what it termed “empire.” Yes it was steeped in victim culture bullshit, and was also slighly appropriative, but you know what, everything is relevant and deserves consideration. At the very least this peice opened my eyes to the potential for AI to subvert our usual subconscious processes (if you’ve ever bought a coke don’t tell me youre not vulnerable), in order to not just convince us of certain preferences but to shift paradigms of understanding and co-opt our imaginative powers to capitalise on our subconscious power to create the world in a certain way (the collective subconscious being the engine powering the manifest). Anyway I feel like that’s a good enough intro give it a go if you’re brave and feeling openen minded (yes you will need both).

So that was rambly but kind of necessary - i dunno as usual im just oragnising and recording my thoughts in realtime to delineate a change and propel myself to movement.