(being weekly post 1 of 52 in the year 2026)
Welcome new readers! I appreciate your kind responses to my end of 2025 update, and am excited to begin this year of writing!
Honestly, I was hoping to start off with a big splash, and I drafted a lengthy post about a recent Methodable session I undertook1, however, that post is going so well that I actually want to “cook it a bit more”… (I’m hoping this doesn’t become a pattern…)
But fear not, I maintain my explicit commitment to filling your inbox, along with my implicit commitment to not wasting your time, so I have selected for you a short story from my past writings titled “The Origins of LIFE.”
I believe this is a fitting first post as it acts as a backstory to many of my current projects, including not only Methodable, but also my personal routines and writing systems.
Be warned: the story is brief, and quite incomplete, but that’s actually the point - it is a story about how a small and incomplete thing can blossom into something larger, through the power of reflective self-improvement - a theme which is core to many of my interests.
Enjoy, and see you next week,
Daniel
Towards the end of high school I became concerned that I wasn’t living my life well and didn’t even have a methodology for living a good life. I figured that I could solve this quandary by producing a system that, when followed exactly, would cause me to eventually lead the best life I could. So I got to it.
For some reason I called the system “LIFE”. The acronym didn’t stand for anything. Here’s the first version:
Complete the following activities without fail.
Daily: Write in your journal about how your day went and any thoughts you have about how to live your life better.
Weekly: Review last week’s journal entries, then update this reflection program in order to improve this program’s ability to achieve its goal: to help you lead a good life.
That was the whole program. A minimal strange loop that seeks to improve itself with time. It wasn’t much, but I figured it was enough to pull itself up by its bootstraps. If I could follow this system, in time it would grow to become an ideal guide for me.
So I got started, and 8 years later the LIFE system is still going. It and I have evolved a ton, and I hope to write about that coevolution soon.
Daniel Sosebee, March 2024