About structure, the little things, and critical thinking

2026-10-01

Think of yourself as a bundle of energy without a body. Your energy is dispersed in all directions, like heat in the environment. It is not directed towards a specific goal. This is mostly how you are as a child. You are curious about everything around you. You touch it and you want to taste it as well. Curiosity may eventually develop into a more sophisticated form of expression. Areas of endeavour will capture your imagination. You will want to explore the world in breadth and, at least for a few things, also in depth.

This energy of yours will always be wasted or remain ineffective if it is not channelled towards something in a laser-like fashion. Every person does this to some extent. We impose our being on our immediate environment. Our room is, at least in some way, an expression of who we are and how we see the world. We change it to be more like us. We impose ourselves on everything we do.

To occupy the safe space of a house, someone has necessarily displaced other life forms from its midst. There is no human settlement that is inclusive to all life, for that then is the wilderness. This I know firsthand: I had to clear the wild vegetation and force rodents, venomous snakes, spiders of all kinds further away from here. Otherwise my room would be infested by forms of life that can kill me either directly (e.g. a viper’s bite) or indirectly (e.g. bats with rabies).

Areas of interest are the same. We direct our energy towards them and thus infuse them with our vitality. This topic I am expounding on, for example, can be covered in many ways by different authors, but the exact line of thinking herein has an unmistakable pattern that you will discern in my other writings; a pattern of a common author; a signature, as it were, that reads “Protesilaos”.

The bundle of energy becomes capable at imposing itself when it is given a structure, else a body. Though the body alone is not enough. It needs to be complemented by patterns of behaviour that themselves reinforce focus. It further has to be buttressed by relationships that demand attention. Such is the extended structure beyond the body.

Absent the extended structure, the person becomes wasteful and self-destructive. They will grow addicted to video games, for example, thus leaving other parts of their life to atrophy. They will hop from one project to the other, never accomplishing anything in the process out of fear that such an eventuality creates commitments, and thus they will refrain from not creating relationships that would demand attention.

This extended structure involves other people. A person who is solitary may seek a substitute for friendship or support in imaginary bonds, such as intimacy with an AI bot, falling in love to a camgirl, gambling, and the like. In so doing, they are a victim of a life without supportive structures.

The extended structure is not limited to other people, however. Someone who is committed to their garden, for instance, is necessarily channelling their vitality accordingly. They have to keep doing it indefinitely, for the garden will not sustain itself qua garden: it will become the wilderness if left alone. Similarly, these can be commitments to hobbies or to goods of some sort such as maintaining a free software project.

Structure, then, consists of all the magnitudes that prevent, dissuade, inhibit, influence, direct, frame, or otherwise condition one’s innate energy.

Every person needs structure in their life. Else they will fall into wasteful and eventually self-destructive patterns of behaviour. For some people this will come from their interpersonal relationships. Their family and friends will be there to hold them accountable and to nudge them towards benign activities. For others, this structure largely comes from within as the austerity of discipline.

A highly sociable person will still benefit from some discipline, just how a highly disciplined person benefits from sociability. No matter where one is on this spectrum, they cannot avoid the mechanics of energy dispersal and of energy direction.

The unsustainable pace of instant gratification

A contemporary euphemism that people often admit to is “I am a dopamine addict”. What they really mean is that they are governed by the desire for instant gratification. This is the common in the multitude among all self-destructive activities. Think of drugs, gambling, gluttony, and pornography, among others. This “pornification”, as I will be describing it henceforth, is edifying in the moment at the cost of longer-term vitality.

Though instant gratification also extends to other media which have effectively been pornified in the process: short videos that elicit an intense emotional response, saturated flavours that bring everything to the maximum (e.g. the common combination of grease, salt, and sugar), constant loud noise which you get by default in cities, perfumes and intense smells, over-the-top colouration, and even exaggerated body parts such as muscles that require doping and boobs that come from plastic surgery.

They all have the effect of dulling a person’s response to stimuli. The conscience of such a person is that of the artificially amplified reality that can only be maintained by increasingly more intense inputs. Everything is intensified and intensifying. It is louder and faster to the point where it cannot be realistic anymore. It effectively is the opposite of what one gets in a natural setting.

Such “dopamine addiction” is uninteresting and not gratifying long-term owning to its shallowness and to the fact that one cannot intensify towards infinity without suffering the consequences of poor health, lack of concentration, and so on.

Interest that is sustained involves depth of understanding, which presupposes focus, else structure. Such is gratifying long-term. It is the gift that keeps giving, because there is always something to it. It is sustainable, for its rhythm is consistent with the natural pace of the human condition; the pace that we experience in the great outdoors.

Building up discipline from the little things

The disciplined person necessarily is the austere and stern person. They have to be able to hold back and to say “no” to temptations. By extension, they are neither a pushover nor a people-pleaser. They cannot yield to the pressure of a group to, for example, do some drugs together. That is not discipline anymore, but the beginning of a descent into the slippery slope of self-harm.

Discipline starts with the admission that “no” is not bad per se even when it runs counter to one’s feelings. “No” often is the imposition of structure, understood as restraint, against the want for energy dispersal; a want that if left unchecked will unravel the structure altogether.

“No” starts out as a private affair. You have to reach a point where you are able to stop doing what you know is bad for you, bad for your loved ones, bad for society at-large; “bad” because it wastes energy and becomes self-destructive by extension (the ongoing decline of Western civilisation is a direct consequences of its pornification, for example—if you are not seeing this, either you are not paying attention or are so deep into pornification that you cannot even imagine a world outside of it).

This, however, cannot be done right away. One must build up the capacity for it through tiny steps, which cumulatively create the critical mass that produces what we describe as discipline: the conscience of strict austerity.

In a world of persistent distractions, one begins to impose themselves on their immediate environment through abstinence. Create short breaks from the constant noise, such that you get used to what will initially seem like silence and boredom but which actually is the baseline of sustainability.

Spend 30 minutes in the morning drinking your coffee/tea/whatever or having breakfast without engaging in any other activity. Do not use the phone, do not play music, do not have the TV on. Make it as simple as it gets: you and your immediate activity. This can be a social event, though it is important to not have other intense stimuli involved.

Extend this practice to your other meals. Spend however much it takes to eat food without any distractions. Do not eat in front of your computer, for example. Switch off the radio. Be in a quiet place. You get the idea.

In the beginning, those dishes will be relatively intense in their flavours. Though you want to eventually move away from that towards simplicity. You do not need everything to be maximally sugary, milky, greasy, salty. If you can have a dish without extra sauce, for example, then skip the sauce and work to uproot it from your psyche.

You can have “cheat days” in the beginning, if you think you cannot live without them, such as a once-a-week indulgence. Though your goal is to taper off, to gradually reduce the cheating until there is none of it. If you can do it “cold turkey”, as they say, then that is even better.

Introduce in your daily routine more such breaks from the noise. One example is a brisk walk through a park or in the great outdoors. Walk, do not run. Take the time to pay attention to the little things, to the slow things, to everything that effectively represents through its very mode of living a rejection of pornification.

Such is your new normal for a lifetime, hence austerity.

Care and critical thinking

Structure consists in judgement. One must have a concept of the end goal in order to pursue intermediate objectives. As such, they have the capacity to determine what is a deviation from the goal. If the goal is the lodestar, then we know when we are moving away from it, given means for orientation.

Critical thinking is judgemental. This is already evident from the word “critical”, which is derived from “crisis”, the Greek word for judgement. We use “crisis” also in the case of an economic downturn or an emergency because those too have a reflection on our moral character. Maybe we were being greedy or careless, for example.

Crisis is a call for orientation. It is the need to find the fixed point in the sky and proceed accordingly. By extension, critical thinking is the skill of identifying patterns in thought that are benign and separating them from those that are degenerative in the consequences of their application.

The judge who upholds correctness, else the rule of law, over cancel culture, for example, is effectively standing against the degeneracy of indictments based on vibes. The judge has a longer-term understanding of their thoughts because they factor in the consequences of their conduct. Whereas the angry mob is governed by their immediate impulses and unchecked passions, not recognising how those engender tyranny.

Critical thinking is an indication of self-care. This is the case since one must be able to evaluate their choices in accordance with longer-term sustainability. The person who succumbs to the pressure of instant gratification does not have the mindset to pause and to consider things carefully, i.e. to judge them.

A child may exhibit some critical thinking, but is not there yet because much of its life is being taken care of by its guardians. Guardians in a society are the parents but also the various tutelary figures. An adolescent who becomes an adult may still be a child well into their 30s, for example, if most of their life is being taken care of by some form of stewardship, such as school and college.

Such a person, now the adultchild, has not developed sufficient capacity for critical thought, since they never had a need for it. They never had to appraise the consequences of the dominant factors in their life and, as such, they did not develop a keen eye for judgement.

The adultchild can only become more critical in their everyday thinking by taking more control over their life. This starts with the sort of small practices of self-imposition, else discipline, that I covered above.

The adultchild is forever hampered in the rigour of their critical thought for as long as they are operating like a child. Perhaps they cannot have strong discipline, in which case they need robust interpersonal relations to hold them in check and to push them towards the essence of adulthood: duty.

The two leashes of humanity

Pornification is an alias for recklessness. All that is pornified is in disrespect of longer-term wellness. Exaggerated food destroys your health. Exaggerated online content destroys your concentration. Exaggerated consumption destroys your environment. And so on.

Historical societies had understood the pitfalls of recklessness. They codified those as instances of hubris or sin and they organised their social experience in a manner that kept people’s self-destructive propensities in check.

We can think of structure as a leash in the interest of simplicity. Your dog is a good canine citizen when it is trained to not pull on the leash. By extension, it knows not to rush towards excitement. From there follow other markers of good training.

A person benefits from a leash in the same way. Historical societies did so through the expectation of gendered duties. Males were on a leash to control their innate aggression in favour of fatherhood; an aggression that quickly degenerates into violent abuse and self-harm if left unchecked. They were pressured to pursue activities with a pro-social function, such as guards, priests, and coaches of various kinds. Similarly, women were expected to concentrate on motherhood and neighbouring activities (e.g. teachers, nurses) and to thus assume the pro-social function of social reproduction, starting from the extended family and extending to the community at-large.

Absent those two leashes, else the structure, society begins to disintegrate. Its energy is dispersed because that is exactly what is happening at the micro level of the individual. The man falls into some sort of pornified addiction, as does the woman, as does the child, as does the politician, as does the church at-large. From there, they can only salvage the situation if they revert to strict discipline. Else they are bound to be replaced by social groups that retain their vitality, that do not disperse their energy, and that are necessarily more austere in their lifestyle.

There are no shortcuts. Do not ignore the little things. Do not underestimate how those activities that harm you one bit at a time are enfeebling you and the world around you. Seek the slow-paced experience. Learn to say “no” and be strict with yourself in order to become a paragon of duty. Lead by example so that you may be strict towards your peers as well. Be the change you want to see, else you are a fraud. There you will find the personal and collective empowerment of austerity.