Sabitlenmiş Tweet
Today I'm excited to announce that I will begin "building in public" something that I think is quite unique. Not an app, but a "practical theory of everything" called "Swarm Theory." But before I get into that, I'd like to tell you about how I got here.
A little over a year ago I left the company I started to focus on my family which was welcoming our third child in under 4 years.
Eventually, I started to ask myself what was next for me and as part of that exploration I started a newsletter that was aimed at answering the question of whether it was possible to consciously increase the amount of meaning people had in their lives.
But a funny thing happened along the way. I realized that in order to answer this question I needed to lean on another idea that I had been mulling over which I now call “Swarm Theory.”
Swarm Theory started off as a kind of “personal philosophy” but as time has passed (just yesterday I was quite shocked to discover that it has been 9 years!) I have come to believe it is something more than just a personal philosophy.
That conviction got kicked into high gear when I started looking at the issues of “meaning,” “meaning in life,” and “the meaning crisis.” I believe I was right when I originally claimed that it is possible to increase one’s meaning in life, but to actually understand how to do that would require a powerful tool.
You can find a million different people claiming to know the answer to what “meaning” is and how to give life meaning, but they’re all just opinions. Intuitions at best. I didn’t want to add yet another opinion to that noise. That’s when I decided to dust off Swarm Theory and see if it could provide the help I needed.
The thought had occurred to me that Swarm Theory could be a kind of “theory of everything” mostly because I had frequently been using it that way, but I think I pushed this idea away because of its grandiosity. Still, I often found that if I had an especially challenging question that I wanted answered, viewing it through the lens of Swarm Theory generally provided the answer. Since I was trying to answer an especially difficult question (How can we increase our meaning in life?) it only made sense to revisit my old friend, Swarm Theory.
The answer I ultimately arrived at was that meaning emerges from connecting with your self, others, and something greater. So why didn’t I just write that? Well, I guess it’s because I had the answer I was looking for and something in me recognized that this meant I had been asking the wrong question.
I now believe that the right question for me to be answering is “What is Swarm Theory?” I do think that understanding meaning and solving the meaning crisis will “fall out” of Swarm Theory, but exploring this theory with you all—building in public, so to speak—is what will deliver the most value to myself and others, precisely because it is a lens through which anything can be explored.
I think a part of me was also afraid to talk about this publicly. A “theory of everything” sounds simultaneously cringe, narcissistic, and deluded. But I don’t think it is any of those things and I hope you will give me the rope to either climb this mountain, or hang myself with.
The other reason why I think a pivot towards Swarm Theory is a good idea is that it will give me the freedom to explore a wider range of ideas. Part of the reason I am interested in this kind of theory of everything is because I have such varied interests. I want to talk about economics, technology, physics, and social issues. Swarm Theory will give me that freedom while also, I hope, provided the guardrails necessary to keep me on track and working to some kind of goal; the full articulation of the theory.
If this sounds interesting to you, follow me on X and subscribe to my substack (now called Swarm Theory) link in the comments!
English
