The Project

how insight becomes just one more thing to get right

A reader corresponded with me over several months. He is a searcher of a particular kind—the kind who turns the search for insight and self-understanding into one more thing to get right, and then worries whether he has gotten it right. He calls this “The Project.” What follows is the essence, the highlights of our long exchange. I have changed his name.

FILIPE: I’ve read your books and followed your Substack. You write about themes usually tied to the spiritual, but I want to ask about the secular version—the self-optimization culture. The message is always that you’re responsible, morally obligated to strive, to be the best, until you’re hyper-productive. And I sense it leaves one numbed to life, now.

I’ve used that fuel to get off the couch, but it crashes into a compulsion to become better out of self-inadequacy, as if we’re broken and ought to fix it. I’m 23. What I’m afraid of is wasting my life on false hope, believing we’re almost there, right up to the finish line. When one of my grandparents died, I felt, not as an idea but for real, that this now is short. Do you have any comment on it?

ROBERT: The religious language is just one version of the structure you are describing: As you are is not enough, and something must be done to correct it.

There is always a next version to reach. Improvement happens, but it doesn’t settle anything—the baseline shifts, and what satisfied briefly becomes insufficient again. The system doesn’t resolve dissatisfaction. It depends on it.

You’ve already seen the loop. Effort appears to produce a result, the result relieves tension for a moment, then a new demand appears. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it doesn’t terminate. Your fear of “almost there” belongs to that same structure. It assumes a finish line. Without one, the fear has no object.

FILIPE: Within your view, can we still talk about improving—health, habits, skills? Striving produces real changes. We still choose, and our choices matter.

ROBERT: That word “we” needs examination. You imply someone standing apart, outside the loop, surveying the options and deciding.

But what looks like choosing and deciding is the system moving toward whatever attractor is deepest in it at that moment. The experience of choosing is the system registering its own movement, not a separate agent initiating movement. This doesn’t make effort pointless. The effort is real, the changes are real. But they are operations of the system, not achievements of a self that stood outside it and decided.

FILIPE: So you’re not critiquing the contents of the system. You’re critiquing the implied ownership of them. Effort is worthwhile—it just isn’t outside the system.

ROBERT: Yes. One organism is drawn to good food and exercise; another, quite similar, drinks to excess. All of that occurs and influences those organisms. But this does not require a “myself,” separate from the organism, standing outside it, choosing how to live. That myself is a claim, not a fact.

Then there’s no fuzz in anything. I’ll both strive at times, and feel at peace at times. No right or wrong. Both discontentment and contentment are ‘awakening’ because = flow. So no need to intellectually interfere with what already is.

Hmm, this makes me lose interest in trying to grasp, in a good way.

Here Filipe brought in Alan Watts, Sam Harris, and Zen. I kept returning the focus to the same place.

ROBERT: Watts was influenced deeply by Zen, which says this in many ways: Trying won’t get it done, but if you don’t try, there is no difference between you and a rock.

FILIPE: Then do you imply that trying is worthwhile? What gives me confusion is when you go to the ‘not quite.’

ROBERT: No, trying happens and so does not trying, but no one is doing either. Watts presented this as a paradox, but it sounds paradoxical only from the perspective of an imagined “myself” that stands apart and chooses, decides, and acts. Heard from there, “trying won’t get it done, but if you don’t try, there’s no difference between you and a rock” looks like a contradiction you have to solve.

But it isn’t a puzzle demanding a solution. As I hear it, it’s a warning against falling into nihilistic passivity on the one hand--the shrug that says nothing matters, so do nothing--and essentialism--the belief that there’s a final state to reach and a right method to reach it--on the other. The saying closes both exits. Not the rock, not the seeker. Just this, happening, with trying and the not-trying arising as they do.

FILIPE: I feel close to your point but never spot on, so I think I have to go further, which confuses me more. It feeds my ruminating monkey mind. For you it might be like talking to a stone.

ROBERT: No, this does not feel like talking to a stone. It feels like conversing with someone who wants to understand and is doing the work honestly.

But notice what just happened. You caught that preferring alert inquiry over indifferent shrugging seems to reinstall a goal, which reinstalls the trying. That’s a genuine observation. But the alert attention I’m pointing to isn’t something you produce by trying to be alert. It’s what remains when the seeking for a final answer stops. You cannot make muddy water clear by stirring it toward clarity.

FILIPE: So how do I relate to all of this? I think the answer is just to see that experience unfolds moment by moment. When the muddy water clears by itself, then that’s it? Then ordinary life? Because if it’s that simple, I can go on without feeling I need to understand it more to ‘get it.’ But then grasping comes in, and it clouds again.

ROBERT: Yes. Ordinary life. It’s all ordinary life.

And the grasping that clouds it is also ordinary. It’s part of the flow, not evidence that you lost something that needs recovering. When the water clears, it clears. When it muddies, it muddies. Neither is a verdict.

Then Filipe said something that changed how I understood all of it.

FILIPE: I must apologise. With OCD, trying to solve these thoughts is a compulsion, driven by unease. These aren’t always genuine philosophical questions—I’m doing a compulsion, which is to get your explanation. But it’s never good enough for OCD. I’ll try not to do it so much.

ROBERT: You’re welcome, Filipe. OCD may be involved, but many people go at it this way, OCD or not.

FILIPE: I was going to stop, but can I ask one last question?

ROBERT: You can ask, and if I answer it, my reply will be one more thing in your mind you have to deal with.

FILIPE: It will stir the muddy water. Better to leave it alone. Clearing is not my goal—I see that’s the loop again. But the stirring can stop.

ROBERT: Yes. You answered your own question again. There is no next place to get to. This right now is it, and always is.

Weeks later, after reading an essay of mine called “No View from the Outside:”

FILIPE: These are genuine questions now, not anxious ones. If sitting lowers my stress, isn’t that verifiable inside the loop, the way exercise is? And responsibility isn’t lost—the drives already ran on their own. So all that is lost is the author, not the writing. And sitting for its own sake is coherent with your view?

ROBERT: You’ve got all three. If sitting lowers your stress, that’s as checkable as exercise is. It stays clean as long as what you’re checking is the effect, not whether you’re getting closer to something. Stress went down: verifiable. Getting nearer to no-self: that’s the project again.

“All that is lost is the author, not the writing.” That’s it exactly. What drops is only the claim that someone was authoring the words. The writing continues. Only the byline goes.

And yes—sit because you like sitting. But notice: you’re asking me to confirm it, and the asking is the last of the project.

FILIPE: The confirming is a project. So why do I make projects? I guess it’s the loop, part of experience, not something wrong. And now I won’t try to NOT make it a project—haha, that’s a project again.

What I’m left with is simple. I won’t try, or try not to try. I stay with my experience and be my own authority. It’s funny—asking you to confirm what I got is already my authority, because I judged you to be someone to trust, which rests on my own judgment.

ROBERT: You’ve got it, and you got it yourself. And you’re right—asking me to confirm was already your own authority at work. It always was.

One thing to leave you with: there’s no winning here. This isn’t a game with a finish line where you finally get it right. It’s an ongoing experience. It just continues. Stay well.