Notes archive live
Between September and December last year, I wrote thought experiments on LinkedIn. Short philosophical reflections — each beginning with a question rather than an answer, each resisting the impulse to conclude. Then I deleted my account for a while, and those posts disappeared from public view.
They now have a permanent home, outside the algorithmic churn.
https://prayasabhinav.net/notes contains 55 thought experiments. The topics scatter across judgment, education, time, networks, and presence — but reading them together reveals something I did not plan while writing them separately.
The unifying thread is the space between knowing and articulating. We judge design concepts without being able to explain why one coheres and another does not. We learn most effectively through observation, not instruction — knowledge accumulating beneath articulation until it surfaces as transformed capability. We sense another’s presence in darkness before we consciously register why. We rate meals on food delivery apps without seeing kitchens, rating confidence we do not possess.
These are not insights dressed as questions. They are genuine uncertainties I have carried for years, given form through the act of writing. Several explore what happens when systems optimise for smoothness — how frictionless existence might dull our sensitivity to friction in others’ lives. Others examine legacy as gradient rather than category, consistency bleeding across boundaries we draw but cannot maintain. Some ask whether forgetting performs essential architecture — releasing us from the accumulated weight of every moment demanding equal significance.
The posts share a methodological commitment: dwell before resolving. Most writing rushes toward synthesis as if ambiguity were failure. These notes sit with the unresolved because the unresolved often contains more than the answer we impose to escape it.
I notice, reading them together now, that they form a practice I did not name while doing it. Writing as a way of noticing contradictions within assumptions, of placing rough stones in smooth paths, of maintaining what one post calls “productive discomfort.”
The archive is not organised by theme. It remains alphabetical, scattered, resistant to the satisfaction of neat categorisation. Perhaps that is appropriate for material that resists resolution.
What thread do you follow through your own scattered thinking? What pattern reveals itself only when viewed together?