Tabs on air guitar, miss lyrics, timing: watched or the watcher, for the watcher or ourselves. Strum while walking, air high hat, drop. Involuntary motion distinguishable, ticks. Controllable, plot under plot intentional authored, implied read. Present or ignorable happening.
EXCAVATION
Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
On Avery Island in the airport, Neutral Milk Hotel
Surveillance threatens asymmetric optionality. Privacy is a tool of defense. Inferring relationships reduces surprise: competitive range of motion constrained. There is value in silence. It feels like Keggerman has known this for decades. Kellerman hums it in a mythical tone, storytelling and dreaming. Beatrice processes it all, the offline present top of mind.
SURFACES
Quantum computing’s impact. When optionality ends. Daily action. Behavior, moving what was unconscious conscious and having the unconscious process different areas.
She had a dream about him, Should she tell him? There were procedures for protecting oneself against dreams. Against dreams others have had about them. Describe the dream to a panel of five conscious people. There’s nothing special about them. But five together creates a court that can issue protection.
Against dreams one’s had of oneself, there is confession. Under the sheets or in front of a talisman. Alone.
She could tell him, as a favor. Murakami’s librarian would give him a unicorn skull. She wasn’t sure she wanted to give him a chance to defend himself. Against his appearance in her dream. There’s a liturgy for unknown narrative. She could ask if he’s recently recited a general protection in court. What for? It’s the same as telling him.
Scratching an itch relieves the sensation. Exercising a tick relieves nothing. Self awareness channeled to understanding the outcome shows the futility of ticking. The external aside muscles exhaust, irritation spreads: contagious. Doubt becomes.
Feeling unsatisfied with the anonymity of Lao Tzu’s leadership prescription he doused his confidence in envy. She watched him miserable, strengthening his belief that he could stop the cycle. He stood on that belief, her gaze his pillar unassuming protector, provider stance. Her love uncontained. Took him years to accept in simplicity, humility unhumiliated.
Today, when they walk, he folds his hand onto hers. Sits assuming reflection of what the moment requires. When unrequired, he holds back projection of will. Words still wielded when necessary. Recognition allows peace. When need still postures. Gives in to ticking when unaware or unconcerned with the external. Poor reflection.
What do they get from his ticks? His words? His posture? In all forms. Coherent picture unavailable to himself. Complete package observed over years by others, apprehended. Appreciated: despite himself. Coded every moment, binding to belief. Adhering to principles guiding action or inaction. Strategic planning. To adhere to formed perception he molds. While holding to adherence to the unknown and divine.
APPLICATION
Coherence is constructed many times. A person adheres to a code: principles guiding action or inaction, invisible to others because visibility can convert character into performance. Observers encode the same behavior into a narrative of who that person is, assembled over years from accumulated moments. These processes, adherence and encoding, operate on identical material from opposite directions, neither aware of the other. But a code does not sustain itself through will alone. The piece locates what makes adherence possible in love that is uncontained, unannounced, and patient across years. That relational ground allows someone to stop projecting and start simply being present. The “complete package” others apprehend is a reference class built from data generated according to principles the observers cannot see and the person cannot narrate. Self-awareness reveals the futility of projection (though the act of coding belies complete belief in this). The coherent picture belongs to none of them alone.
For Beatrice, the cost of optionality was zero. Certainty felt like death. Nervewracking. There are so many things still to do. AI accelerates it. Even making peace with the not the latest model. Incorporating deeply into workflow, breathing. The tool accelerates the unease of waiting. The price of less activity rises.
Kellerman. Dear Kellerman. Buys jewelry and spends. Materiality can eat uncertainty, unease. This bauble. That watch. This trinket. Adorns. Embodied activity: yes. There’s actuality in that. Not for measurement or revolution. For consumption: of concern. Anxiety of what’s left, to do. Anxiety of what’s more, to do. The wall attains greater heights to less concern and more stability. She runs.
Towards an unknown consternation. Desired apprehension, grabbing smaller activities. Smaller and smaller activities. Making them big, inflating importance when uncertainty is non-existent by all other measures. Looming certainty. Boredom. Conflagration, or this is the way the world ends, present as options. While others bear the cost of her choices. The world could cease. Activity weaves ripples she hopes resolve past her death. For others to work on. Keggerman could call it a mile away. Even from the afterlife she was chewing, he’d say. Mawing away at whatever was consumable. She’d eat herself (and often would, did: on purpose). But she herself, Beatrice, never asked what she’d feel. Keggerman would’ve told her. He had opinions on the beyond. Kellerman painted nicer pictures. She never asked him either.
Now she didn’t have to wait for someone to wake up. She didn’t wake anyone up. Unless to share her latest brainstorm, latest conversation with AI. Latest output resolution from anxiety to ripple engagement. Until the immateriality got boring. Or helpless. Had she been a digital native: content creator, software byte experiencer, anything on screen floating her boat, exciting. She may have been content consuming tokens, bragging on spend and plans. There’s something there had she been able to dream of connecting her body to a computer, Keggerman. Someone’ll sell her on it, especially in her circles, in California. She understands being sold. She doesn’t mind it. She speaks that language. She speaks bamboozled too. That’s where digital does enter, to scare her with information. Where can that live when there’s certainty ahead or only options of events she won’t enjoy. Foreclosing delightful choices. Experience can frighten forward viewing. What tastes good now? Will I enjoy a peach? Will I stoop on the beach?
Rolled up, Kellerman recites poetry. Keggerman watches, unsure here. Lines blur.
Levels below levels when it is family. The industry gave you opportunities. We get to work with them. My people.
A layer of wall. Internals setting a bar for passion. Loyalty serves. To get inside impossible. Favored: how we feel they’ve been treated. What is owed. Perhaps. Our reckoning.
Upgrading to the latest AI model, like upgrading OS, only when forced. We’re starting to get to that point in the curve: Signals adoption. Signals decreasing return on investments. Signals carry more weight, outside.
Keggerman a lifeboat depends on was Kellerman in or out. Beatrice straddles. Beatrice’s position privileged, we can say, if she’s defending. We can also say, if she’s with the disruption outside or the wagon inside, circled: attached. The western won.
Harmonious, like loyalty, serves: inside. Friends are the family you choose: exceptionalism. Hesitant: testing. That’s Kellerman.
Vision diminishes texture. Privileging sight over the tactile. Becomes wavy, fluttering.
He was lucky enough to speak with her.
The prince hand wrote a letter by the stove, commending him into service. The princess in the kitchen. The kids were all playing along the corridor leading to and from. It was holiday time. He sealed it with heated breath from the burner. Somehow it congealed into an elegant mark. Dimensionality, depth, swirls. Unmistakable. Mulled wine maroon with fleck of metal. Or feather.
Of course it wasn’t a feather. Privileging words over retelling. Dream forms to idea.
They were a happy couple. Rising up in the world.
EXCAVATION
Staring at screens all day
Dreams
Still feeling
Shannon information reduces to zero. It’s learned it all.
Instrumentalized prediction variance.
What inputs are left? Unconscious processes evaporate. Or expand beyond before.
In the option space: approaches zero. Or rightly expands, Keggerman.
Kellerman proclaims new visions.
Typical, says Beatrice.
APPLICATION
Shannon’s information theory measures surprise. When a system has learned everything, there is no surprise left, and the entropy measure returns zero. For a decision maker, that condition has a direct parallel: the fully optimized process, the fully mapped competitive landscape, the organization that has eliminated all variance. The option space that remains is the one Kellerman sees and Beatrice dismisses. Keggerman ever the realist. What the post surfaces is that the collapse of measurable information is not the end of the decision problem. It is where the decision problem begins. Unconscious processing, affective signal, imagination operating below the threshold of analytical input: these are not noise to be filtered. They are the inputs that survive when instrumental prediction has exhausted itself. Affective reasoning and narrative are not supplements to analytical decision making but the register in which genuine uncertainty lives. When entropy fails to excite, the question is not what the data says. It is what the decision maker, as creator, can still imagine.
Walter Kaufmann, in his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science quotes a passage.
There’s a passage from Heinrich Heine which Walter Kaufmann cites in his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. He says it comes from a diary entry of Nietzsche’s and explains context around eternal recurrence. There’s a woman explaining to a man how they will forever find themselves again in this configuration, in this circumstance, explaining the circumstance they find themselves in, again and again. Of all the ways atoms and molecules could reconstitute over an infinite span of time we will find ourselves here, again.
It is a capital R Romantic read of probability. Of statistics. Of how we come to be in the world and where we’ll find ourselves. It is, in many ways, also gothic. With a capital H for Horror.
It ignores entropy. It is silent, of course, on the findings that would lay the foundation of quantum mechanics. Because that happens in the future. Where there are more possible states of existence. More possibilities. The future has more possibilities than the past.
Looking backward forecloses possibilities, calls to woe and anger and regret.. Casts us into liits of what greatness can be. Joy is forward. And newness. And options. And creativity.
And excitement.
EXCAVATION
Artemis II, the Integrity Crew in an Orion space craft powered by the Space Launch System going deeper into space than any humans have, ever.
Explorers reaching the furthest, fulfilling another step in a bold vision. On reaching the milestone of human exploration wishing for it to be quickly broken. For us to keep going. Keep going.
APPLICATION
The leaders or founders of many of the top wealth-generating public companies have all been inspired by space.
The argument here has a direct bearing on how leaders and decision makers orient themselves in time. The backward-looking posture that the Heine quote Kaufmann uses to frame eternal recurrence encode the sense that all configurations have been and will be again, is not merely a philosophical position. It is an emotional one, and it produces specific cognitive consequences. Leaders who orient primarily toward precedent, toward what has worked before, toward the patterns of the past, are operating from the same assumption Heine’s character makes: that the future is a reconfiguration of what already exists. That assumption systematically undervalues the genuinely new.
Quantum mechanics states this in fact, in physics and as a framework for thinking about possibility. The future contains more possible states than the past. This is not optimism. It is a structural feature of how time and probability work. Every decision made forward-facing has access to a wider option set than any decision made by looking backward. The Last Responsible Moment, the real options framework, the practice of emotional imagining, all of these tools are built on the same underlying insight: the future is genuinely open in a way the past is not. The capacity to remain oriented toward that openness is a competitive advantage.
Artemis II makes this concrete. The Integrity crew going deeper into space than any humans have gone is not a recurrence. It is a threshold. And the response to a threshold, the response the post identifies, is not to pause and reflect on how far we have come but to wish the milestone broken as quickly as possible. That is the disposition of the strategically patient leader who has genuinely internalized a stance where joy, optionality, and creative possibility all point in the same direction. Forward.
Of course, it is scarier and harder to lead there or even to sit comfortably with the unknown. That is the role of vision and being a great communicator.
Nietzsche’s greatest weight borrows Descartes’ demon and asks if we’d be pleased to know everything repeats. The Drunken Song affirms joy opposing optionality in a movement self surpassing.
EXCAVATION
Nietzsche: The Gay Science (aphorism 341), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (79)
Walter Kaufmann: Introduction to The Gay Science, on Eternal Recurrence
APPLICATION
Nietzsche’s greatest weight borrows Descartes’ demon not to induce doubt but to demand affirmation. The question is not whether you can be certain but whether you can bear repetition, whether your relationship to your own choices is one of genuine commitment or concealed endurance. That distinction is actionable for decision making in a way that most frameworks miss.
The standard case for optionality is that keeping choices open preserves flexibility and reduces regret. That case is sound for tame uncertainty, where the variables are knowable and the future is a matter of calculation. But Nietzsche’s Drunken Song points to something the optionality framework does not account for: the form of joy that only becomes available through full commitment, through the willingness to foreclose alternatives and inhabit a path so completely that self-surpassing becomes possible. You cannot surpass what you have not fully entered.
Not all foreclosure of options is the same move. There is foreclosure out of fear, where uncertainty is intolerable and the defined outcome feels safer than the open field. There is foreclosure out of calculation, where the expected value of commitment outweighs the value of remaining flexible. Or, where foreclosure is a failure in framing, of widening the aperture of vision, of denying the flexibility of reality. And there is a third kind, closer to what Nietzsche is describing: foreclosure out of conviction, where other variables compel a path that a pure optionality analysis would reject.
What is clear is Nietzsche’s connecting emotion to decision making, particularly around optionality. To paraphrase: Joy wants eternal recurrence. Woe wants options.
