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I ruined a dinner party recently by asking a simple question: how much of what you believe did you actually work out yourself, and how much did you just inherit?
Nobody had a good answer. Neither did I. That question is the whole reason this series exists.
Here’s the setup. Over the past while I’ve been falling down a rabbit hole that connects a Roman emperor’s private journal, a 2,500-year-old Chinese poem about water, the second law of thermodynamics, and a bongo-playing physicist named Richard Feynman who refused to believe anything until he’d rebuilt it himself from scratch. Four wildly different sources — different centuries, different continents, different vocabularies entirely — and somehow they keep circling the same trick: catching yourself believing a comfortable story instead of checking the actual thing.
Myth versus first principles. That’s the thread I’m pulling on.
A few of the questions I’ll be chasing:
- Why does the universe seem to prefer mess over order — and what does that actually mean for how hard you should be on yourself when things fall apart? (Thermodynamics has an answer, and it’s oddly comforting.)
- The Stoics had a two-item list — “up to me” and “not up to me” — that’s almost insultingly simple. Why is it still so hard to actually live by?
- The Tao Te Ching opens by warning that naming a thing means you’ve already started lying to yourself about it. What does water have to do with that?
- Feynman’s real first principle wasn’t a physics equation. It was “you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” What does that look like applied to, say, your actual daily habits?
I don’t have this fully worked out. That’s on purpose. I’m not writing this as someone who’s arrived somewhere and is now reporting back with a tidy conclusion — I’m writing it while I’m still in it, still checking my own assumptions as I go. So instead of one long essay dropped all at once, I’m going to build this out piece by piece, a few days or a week apart, letting each idea breathe before stacking the next one on top.
Think of it less like a finished lecture and more like watching someone take a machine apart on a workbench, one bolt at a time, occasionally holding up a part and going “wait, why is this here?”
My hope is that it stays fun rather than academic — short enough to read with your coffee, but with enough of a hook that you’re still turning it over in your head an hour later. If a section makes you go “huh, I’ve never actually questioned that,” it did its job.
Next up: why order might be the strangest, most temporary thing in the entire universe — and what a melting ice cube has to do with your to-do list.
See you in the next one. Still checking my own math as I write it.
