It takes time to get more-or-less familiar with the major branches of human knowledge, which is traditionally called a classic education.

This gives one, among other things, the ability to see what other people call “connections” between seemingly unrelated “things”.

This ability, in turn, helps to see things as they really are, which is the most important part of life, and goes back to the Upanishads and the Buddha.

The most difficult and subtle “thing” to see (as it really is), is, of course, your own self, and the habit of doing so, which is called introspection, which ultimately leads to self-knowledge and self-control, is the most sought after ability since beginning of time (at least in the Orient).

One could observe, for instance, that contrary to all that western “humanitarian” bullshit, we are techincally driven by dopamine and a few other neuromodulators, and all that seemingly complex “unique” behavior, based on a “human spirit” and “free will” is basically dopamine-induced random-walk (constrained heavily by the current social environment and its current contexts).

Have you ever heard about that “drunken sailor on a lamp post” story, which is used to illustrate the “random walk” scientific concept?

Anyway, there are a few facts which could be easily observed, if one wishes to do so:

  • most of our actions are habitual ways to get a tiny dopamine release
  • performing regular, familiar, even ritualistic tasks is just these dopamine releases (this explains all the repetitive religious practices)
  • all the repetitive compurer tasks, like rising, configuring, updating, tweaking, customizing your environment is of exactly the same nature.
  • simple coding (unlike serious principle-guided programming) is also driven by these dopamine-based yays (this is why a crappy code is

so abundant).

In addition to that we could also observe that:

  • we have very limited cognitive capacity
  • we are very easy to distract (with almost every unwanted sensory stimuli)
  • restoring the previous mental state is literally impossible (we will always get something different and slightly worse).
  • maintaining a focused attention is very hard and takes lots of deliberate practice (the ancients of the East knew this)
  • relaxed mental concentration, which is called awareness, requires absence of distractions and interruptions (which ancients referred to as solitude)
  • these mental states are absolutely required to do any highly competitive intellectual work involving computers

The modern memes for all this are “an adult ADHD” and “Deep Work” (the meme book).

There are, however, “connections” and underlying principles behind all these observations and memes. We are evolved biological systems, made our of meat, conditioned by the environment and driven by neuromodulators.

What is absolutely crucial to realize, is that we were not evolved to live in modern social environments with are:

  • overcrowded and competitive
  • full of sensory noise
  • full of social distractions
  • full of lies and bullshit (verbalized nonsense)
  • full of low quality unnecessary, meaningless information

The last one is especially important. Our brains has been evolved within stable and “fair” physical environment. The explosion of language and “information” is the most recent phenomena.

Ok, what all this have to do with Emacs?

Well, Emacs, being a “software LISP Machine” and an “operating system written in LISP, which happen to include a text editor”, is the partial solution to most of these problems, assuming we use it “just right”.

For us, Emacs is an information processing and environment, which includes most of the required tools and building blocks. It could even be used as a rudimentary “knowledge base”.

At least, Emacs has been evolved for reading and writing.

We can read web pages with eww, PDFs with the pdf-tools, EPUBs with the nov-mode, and so on.

It has the org-mode for writing math and prose, and various specialized modes for writing programs.

Fortunately, we also have a world-class LaTex support.

And the org-roam2 for creating and maintaining a simple Wiki-like knowledge base, which is absolutely essential for overcoming all the cognitive limitation and challenges.

All these tools (and much more) are being integrated withing a single extensible and programmable environment. (“Lisp is a programmable programming language”, your know).

Technically, the Emacs environment is a collection of layered DSLs (embedded in Emacs Lisp), packaged into a collection of built-in and third-party “packages”.

It is sort of an operating system, for us.

Now lets get serious here.

Unnecessary, redundant, unwanted context switches (within the brain) is the root of all evil.

This is not just another meme from the “Deep Work”. An electrochemical states within the specialized brain areas (within sinapses, basically) are very real, difficult to maintain and very easy to mess up.

Emacs helps to avoid (well, to minimize) distractions and interruptions.

Within Emacs it is possible to limit (minimize) redundant context switches.

One basically learns a new set of habits to stay in Emacs and do not even thing about it, just like drivers do not even think about driving a car.

It takes time and understanding to separate what is essential and even fundamental from memes, bells and whistles.

Essential (required) things are:

  • having minimum visible UI elements
  • having the same font set everywhere
  • have the same colors everywhere (rising has it merits)
  • having the fonts and colors being consistent everywhere
  • the similar thing have to look sthe same, different - differntly
  • (this is the subtle point that theme designers miss)
  • a key-bindings-driven navigation and buffer management
  • to have a true discroverability (which-key and describe-*)
  • “fuzzy” search on M-x, C-h-* and describe-*
  • having a context-aware completions (at point) everywhere

The most important part is that everything is a Emacs Lisp code which could be read, understood and modified if necessary. Everything.

Another emergent (evolved) key aspect is to use org-mode (the particular generalized file format of a structured text) and the related tooling (libraries) everywhere.

The org-roam2 package has been, in some sense, built upon all of these evolved characteristics which makes Emacs unique.

Again, it is not particulars, but the underlying principles, which require understanding (everyhing has a structure, nesting, composeability (via interfaces), proper ADTs, declarative embedded DSLs, etc.)

This is just a few-page overview, which barely shows the way.

The point, however, is that it helps to overcome our cognitive limitations and to deal with all the challenges, partially, because it is an evolved system, evolved by the smartest people on Earth.