How not to forget what matters

1.

Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. Often, these epiphanies are accompanied by a sense that I actually know this already, it had just somehow slipped my mind.

And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.

The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultia. “Stultia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”

is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.

You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.

In the same way that it is not enough to make a resolution that you will learn the piano, it is not enough to realize that when the kids act out, you shouldn’t lose your temper but slow down, listen, and regulate their nervous systems with the help of yours. Imagine how good a person I would be if having insights were enough! But reacting to the frustrations of your children with calm and curiosity is a skill as much as playing the piano is—and as with the piano, the act of learning it requires rewiring your nervous system through sustained attention and practice. Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.

And this is much harder than making a habit out of playing the piano. When you’re trying to make something like piano practice a habit, the standard advice is to chain it onto some already existing habit—to practice immediately after you brush your teeth in the morning, for example, or after you change out of your work clothes in the afternoon. Chaining the new habit to an already existing one provides a predictable trigger that helps remind you to practice. But the habits that make up our characters often do not follow a predictable schedule like this. I never know, for instance, when our children will act out (except that it will usually be when I’m least capable of handling it with grace—whenever both they and I are unusually hungry and tired). The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. If Johanna and I talked about how we want to deal with the kids’ conflicts the night before, I will nearly always handle the situation well. The problem is to keep it top of mind.

2.

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation,¹ in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

This was, as I understand it, an exercise designed to combat the problem I outlined above. Meditating on what matters is a simple habit, which you can chain onto your morning routine, but it reinforces the habits you can’t plan, the habits that make up your character. It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises.

The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on²—and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.³

What could be an example? Today, June 14, I woke up with a headache after having slept with my neck at an odd angle and so didn’t feel like working. Having procrastinated for an hour or so, while Johanna tried to get me to start the day, I recalled principle 23 from a list Nabeel S. Qureshi has compiled for himself:

Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’.

Walking around the farm with a cup of coffee,⁴ reminding myself of the truth of this observation, I gained a sliver of motivation, enough to throw myself into rewriting this essay—and now my headache has lifted, and I feel excited. For more examples of things one might meditate on, I suggest looking at Nabeel’s list. I also like to meditate on stories that make real to me some ethos I aspire to, such as the story of how Werner Herzog, dead broke while scouting for locations for Nosferatu in Brittany, happened upon a field of menhirs and decided to abandon his work to stay at the field for as long as necessary to solve the mystery of how the giant stones had been erected—a story that makes it visceral to me what it means to “take your curiosity seriously.”

The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.

3.

I first came across the idea of using hypomnēmata in this way eight years ago when a friend sent me a copy of Foucault’s “Self-writing.” In the essay, Foucault talks about hypomnēmata and other modes of reading and writing used to fashion a self during the Hellenistic and Imperial eras. I didn’t pick up the practice in its full form. But rereading the essay now, I realize how much it has influenced how I write: my essays are (often) meditations I do in order to deepen core ideas I want to live by, and to strengthen parts of myself I want strengthened.⁵ (Writing treatises and letters was a common way of internalizing the content of the hypomnēmata.) And this practice has been transformative for me. I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.

But it strikes me now that the practice Foucault wrote about was probably more transformative than what I’ve ended up doing. Essay writing is incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time is spent on things that aren’t self-transforming: I spend less time reshaping my mind than I spend solving literary-technical problems that help me write more functional and beautiful essays, for the joy of the craft and for the benefit of readers. Another limitation of my practice is that when an essay is done, I move on. The ideas—though they have been much deepened and more firmly lodged in my mind—fall out of attention and start to fade.

There is an element of self-deception involved here. I like to write essays, so it is comforting to think of it as a powerful practice, something that helps me live more fully and grow as a person. But if I look at it soberly, it is clear to me that essay writing is not a practice that is ideal for the purpose of ethopoiesis.⁶ It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.

The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion.

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Credits

This essay is based on a fragment from a longer essay on spiritual exercises that I wrote. That essay didn’t work, and Johanna suggested using a few of the paragraphs for a new essay. She also suggested the main argument and general outline of the body of this essay, reorganized the second draft to shift the emphasis to what we came to see as the main idea, and corrected several faulty lines of argument I made.

The ideas were influenced by reading Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life and Michel Foucault’s The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Care of the Self, and “Self-Writing.” I was influenced by several conversations with Michael Nielsen and his notes on Tanya Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real, as well as a conversation with Alexander Obenauer about his practice. Claude Fable 5 (RIP) corrected four factual errors.

1. The practice of keeping hypomnēmata had already existed for more than 400 years at this point, but the practices around it shifted significantly around this era, as I understand it, from a more conventional type of notetaking into the more specialized type of meditation described in this essay.

2. How do you actually keep these notes? A lot of people have insights and write them into Apple Notes, but then they never look at them again, and it becomes a mess after a while, so when they need the idea, it is nowhere to be found. I’m not sure exactly how the Romans managed to find their way back to the right wax tablet or papyrus. I guess the easiest thing is to just keep a single document for the most important ideas and stories, with short memorable concept handles (länk) that help you remember each. If you can’t be bothered making your notes structured, though, LLMs are powerful enough now that they can trawl through your messy notes and find the relevant quotes. Just give Claude Code or Codex access to your notes and ask it to find segments relevant to whatever you are thinking about. This will not be as powerful as doing the work yourself, but it is better than just forgetting.

3. I read somewhere that when meditating on their hypomnēmata, the Romans and Hellenistic Greek would also set intentions for themselves, principles they want to live by that day. I can’t find the source for this claim now, but it resonated with something Johanna often tells me: it is much easier to hold the line if you’ve articulated your position to yourself beforehand. If, for example, I’m on a call with someone who wants to propose a project, I will often get caught up in their excitement, or feel uncomfortable setting the right boundaries—I often don’t even know what the right boundaries are, because there is too much to consider for me to figure out my position in real time—and so I will say yes to things I shouldn’t. But if I have thought things through beforehand, and have articulated to myself what I’m trying to achieve, and what my principles are, I can more easily see if this is in line with what I want, and I can clearly articulate my position. I wish I did this more often. Or at least remembered the principle to always ask for time to think things through on my own before committing.

4. Seneca and Epictetus would have insisted on making meditating in writing. The argument is that writing engages you more deeply, transforming what you have read “into tissue and blood” (in vivres et in sanguinem). Using a an oft-repeated metaphor, Seneca writes, “We should imitate bees, who wander and pluck from flowers suited for making honey, then arrange and distribute through the combs what they have brought in... We must digest what we have read; otherwise it passes into the memory, not into the mind.” Food, he says, is a burden so long as it stays what it was; only when it changes into blood and tissue does it become strength. It might feel like I understand a topic without writing about it, but if I earnestly try to unpack my thinking in writing, my ignorance is revealed, and my thinking transformed.

5. I’m not sure how much of the shift in my writing came directly from reading Foucault: it has been something that I’ve iterated myself toward. I’ve gradually written more with the intention of shaping my character and my attention, and this has been driven by the experience of deepened presence this has afforded me. But I’m pretty sure the ideas from that essay provided a template that helped me make sense and direct the evolution of my writing. I know I have often returned to the essay, and have used Plutarch’s term ethopoetical writing to make sense to what I’m trying to do.

6. What it can do well, though, is to push deep into an idea and to restructure your thoughts about something. It is like an intervention where you want to shake things up properly, a three week session where you think and think and think about the same thing all the time. It is, I think, a useful complement to a daily practice.