The mind is the ceiling, the tools are the limit

Let your mind wander, slowly, into the pool of infinity
2025/08/02
The Cursory Journal

People fall victim to thinking that their tools will save or supplement them. Professionals make this mistake repeatedly as they find newer, better and faster ways to work. The idea that you must use tools that either match or succeed the capabilities of your own mind is deeply misguided. It is a failure to understand how your mind works and what it needs.

Your mind desires peace, silence and focus. It needs an unbounded freedom to speak to your senses, travel to different corners of your universe and work through an entire life's worth of experience to solve even the most basic tasks. This is how it works, and this is how it should be allowed to work. You are the sum of your parts, and your mind, while being very important is still, very much so, just a part. Trying to section it off into, walking, running, cutting, typing, writing, working ... is fruitless. It does not exist in these states at discrete points in time, and neither do you or your problems. Doing so prevents you from finding the truths common, shared and hidden in all aspects that exist within you, truths you can only uncover if your mind is allowed to travel to them. These truths at their best, are novel ideas that can change the trajectory of your life and at worst are problems that may be addressed.

You should start seeing tools for what they are. Items created to help you do tasks conveniently. In this definition, anything required to do a task physically or mentally impossible, is not a tool, it's a necessity. Identifying necessities is often quite simple. Can you lift a car nonchalantly? Whisper to someone at the opposite end of the Earth with just your voice? Simulate an entire operating system, running discrete processes, that themselves run thousands of programs that communicate across them in just your mind or matter in under a millisecond or loosely, a second? An item that mixes ingredients, turns them into paste, helps you open machines screwed shut, allows you to make and verify computations, write programs easily that can then be run and solve your problems, these are tools, actual helpful tools with merit. A distinct quality that tools posses is that they do not get in your way, They provide your mind a freedom, often a convenience to work, think and just be. These tools are slow, that is either by consequence or by design, and that slowness is often considered a limitation. To counter that, we go through a cyclical process of acquiring tools that work faster, are "better" and "efficient". This repeats as we eventually get tools that can match the speed of thought. This continues further, until finally you get tools that flash through your work before even single thought enters your mind; the mind is now the limit.

These tools are a burden and your mind is a servant to them. It struggles endlessly, following you follow your tools as you speed through your work under the guise of productivity. Slowly, it learns to work with them as it picks up on underlying patterns that designed these tools. It learns to ignore what they replace, to find even a sliver of space to think and over time, forgets what is no longer required of it. You settle into patterns to help you work with them until you feel hopeless without them; They are no longer tools, you have created necessities. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is how you now work in distinct parts, each separate from the other, following the model of your tools. Each excelling in it's designated use, but cut off from the rest of reality. So now, your reality is that of your tools, running through things as fast as your mind allows, trapped in a room, repeatedly interrupted and often exhausted.

Do you question why you feel exhausted? Is it because you have worked hard to solve a problem? Or did your mind run endlessly in order to catch up to your folly? Now, nothing but a simple and slow databus.