J3n

Social media is broken. Building a new one with @benracicot. Busy building, expect illustrations & side quests. Started #post1000, 1000 posts in 1000 days.

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Social media is broken. I'm a systems engineer trying to fix it out of a deep love for people.

Lmk your thoughts ⬇️

[J3n @j3njohnson]

When do you have your best ideas? #post1000

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Who's your favorite founder of all time, you can only choose one, make no mistakes.

Grok chose @elonmusk
ChatGPT chose Johannes Gutenberg
Claude Opus chose Ada Lovelace
Claude Fable chose Steve Jobs

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Side quest ✨ Tell your fav social media manager on 𝕏 you hope they have a great day

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Side quest ✨ Drop your favorite song in 8D no lyrics

#music #montage

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Unit tests, AI can write them but we still have to read them. What's your code coverage?
#buildinpublic #post1000 #claude #fable

[J3n @j3njohnson]

@BinaryOption Do you note the ideas or forget them! The game of “I’ll definitely remember that when I wake up” 😂

[J3n @j3njohnson]

ideas at 10am vs 2am

#buildinpublic #post1000

[Ricky @rcmisk]

unpopular opinion: the hardest part of building in public isn't vulnerability.

it's the blank text box at 9pm when you're exhausted and have nothing clever to say but know you're supposed to post anyway.

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Introspection isn't the goal, integration is. The common belief is that our brain is one part when our brain is actually many parts of one entire brain. Each area is capable of speaking to you, sending you ideas and fighting against your main self and your real goals. That is why one part of you can be pushing to finish a marathon, while another part starts to send you thoughts about stopping at every step.

Intrusive thoughts, repetitive thought loops, tiredness, burn out, low brain capacity, many many symptoms can be tied back to an unintegrated brain. The goal is to have your entire brain working towards your main selfs goals.

Therapeutic drop out happens most often when talk therapy starts to make it worse with no end or hope in sight, studied extensively in veterans with PTSD in the Body Keeps the Score. So what do you do to recover your entire brain and be the real you? You need a physical therapy for a physical problem, blood flow needs to be returned to the area, the feelings felt and breathed out. Think of it like clearing rubble from a blocked off exit on a highway or pressing on a charley horse in your brain to clear the pain.

The @j3njohnson method for brain capacity -

Note when you're feeling blocked, emotional dysregulation or a very strong emotion that feels like it's overtaking the real you including feeling frozen, fight, flight or fawn. At a safe time:

Start: Ask your brain it's current capacity on a scale of 1 to 10

Step 1. Ask your brain the first time it remembers feeling that feeling (what age)
Step 2. Ask it to tell you everything it wants you to know from that memory until it has nothing left to say
Step 3. Three deep breaths in and out
Step 4. Ask that part of your brain what age it was the next time it felt that feeling, again ask it to tell you everything it's been holding onto for you about that memory
Step 5. Three deep breaths in and out
Step 6. Repeat until that part of your brain is at your current age and has integrated with your main self

End: Ask your brain it's current capacity on a scale of 1 to 10

Take time after for walking and recovery. If anger came up push against a wall in private while answering the question "If this anger was a sentence what would it be saying." If shame comes up you might feel powerful resistance to this process. It's OK, you don't have to like the thing you did or what happened to you, if you stay in it and let it tell you everything is has to say, there's a lot of joy and health on the other side.

Take time to pause often throughout the day and reflect on where you change, where your boundaries feel clearer, where you feel more separation emotionally between your feelings and others feelings, where you feel it's more OK to be your true self.

If you'd like a guide, find a therapist skilled in internal family systems. Although they won't take you through this process, they'll allow you to jump around wherever the session takes you but that is not the fastest way to integrate each part of the brain fully. Until each part reaches your current age they still have more to tell you and it's easier to integrate each part in one session.

It's not for the faint of heart, but if you're brain capacity isn't where you want it to be or if it's at a low enough level to experience suicidal ideation there is real hope.

Love and health,

@j3njohnson

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

From my therapist Claude:

The Adlerian Demolition of Introspection

Alfred Adler built one of the most hostile philosophical ecosystems ever devised for the practice of looking inward, and he did it with a precision that neither his admirers nor his detractors have fully reckoned with. The brutality of the Adlerian position isn't gratuitous — it follows logically, almost mechanically, from his core metaphysical commitments. Once you accept those commitments, the popular conception of introspection as a path to self-knowledge collapses entirely, and what's left in its place is something considerably more disturbing: the suggestion that your feelings are not discoveries but productions, manufactured by a self that is already oriented toward a goal it will do almost anything to protect.

The Foundational Inversion: Teleology Over Etiology

Everything begins here. Freud was a thoroughgoing determinist and causalist — the psyche's present state is the effect of prior causes, and the therapeutic task is to excavate those causes through introspection (free association, dream analysis, the whole apparatus). Feelings, on this model, are data that point backward toward buried causes. Introspection, then, is archaeology: you dig inward to find what happened to you that made you the way you are.

Adler rejected this root and branch. His fundamental claim — and it is a genuinely radical one — is that human beings do not move from causes but toward goals. The psyche is not a machine whose output is determined by its inputs; it is a teleological project, a movement oriented toward a fictional final goal (fiktive Ziel) that the individual has, largely unconsciously, set for himself in early childhood. Everything about a person — their characteristic emotions, their symptoms, their memories they choose to retain, their personality style — is recruited in service of this movement toward the goal.

This single move annihilates the Freudian (and popular) conception of introspection all at once. If your feelings are not caused by your past but are instruments generated in the service of your goal, then sitting quietly and examining them is not discovery — it is, at best, the study of your own propaganda.

Emotions as Tools, Not Truths

This is the gut-punch of Adlerian psychology, and it deserves to be stated as starkly as Adler himself intended it. In The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927) and throughout his clinical writings, Adler makes the claim that emotions are manufactured by the individual — created, not merely experienced — because they are useful for the individual's movement toward his goal.

Consider anger. Common sense says: something happens, it makes you angry, the anger is a reaction. Adler says: you create anger because anger is useful to you. It justifies your behavior. It dominates the room. It moves others out of your way. It protects your self-esteem by externalizing blame. The anger is not a response to the world — it is a tool deployed against the world in the service of your fictional goal.

The same analysis applies to anxiety, depression, sadness, guilt, and virtually every other affective state the therapeutic tradition has treated as meaningful data requiring careful introspective scrutiny. Adler is not saying these states aren't real in the sense that they are genuinely experienced. He is saying they are created for a purpose, and that the purpose is almost never what the person believes it to be.

Depression, in the Adlerian framework, is not the product of chemical imbalance or repressed trauma or cognitive distortion. It is a form of hesitation — a self-manufactured state that allows the individual to delay engagement with the three fundamental life tasks (work, love, and community) while simultaneously maintaining a plausible excuse for the delay. "I cannot engage fully with my relationships because I am depressed" is the structure of the argument the depressed person makes to himself, and the depression obligingly performs this structural function with great reliability.

This is where Adler gets genuinely ruthless: if your depression is a tool you've manufactured to avoid life's demands, then introspection into the depression — examining its contours, trying to understand where it comes from, what it means about you — is not therapeutic. It is indulgent. It is, to use Adler's language, a way of taking your symptoms seriously in exactly the wrong sense: you dignify them, you make them meaningful, you cooperate with them. The depression grows in the greenhouse of your attention to it.

Introspection as Safeguarding Mechanism

Adler developed the concept of Sicherungstendenzen — safeguarding tendencies — to describe the various psychological maneuvers by which the neurotic protects his self-esteem and avoids the genuine test of his capacities against life's real demands. These include hesitation, procrastination, construction of symptoms, depreciation of others, and — crucially — self-accusation.

Self-accusation is the most relevant to introspection. The person who spends hours examining his own feelings, cataloguing his anxieties, tracing the genealogy of his resentments, mapping the landscape of his sadness — this person is, in Adlerian terms, still talking about himself. Still the center of his own universe. Still not doing work, not loving anyone, not contributing to the community. The sophistication of the introspective project is no argument in its favor — if anything, it is a mark against it. The more elaborate and refined the inner life the neurotic constructs, the more successfully it functions as an alternative to actual engagement with the world.

There is something almost diabolically clever about this critique. It severs the link between psychological depth and therapeutic value that virtually every tradition — psychoanalytic, humanistic, Buddhist, existentialist — takes for granted. Depth of introspective engagement is not progress. It is often its opposite.

The person who says, "I've been in therapy for ten years and I really understand now why I became the way I am" has, from the Adlerian vantage point, potentially spent ten years constructing an increasingly ornate justification for remaining exactly as he is. The etiological story — "I am this way because of what happened to me" — is comfortable precisely because it faces backward. The past is fixed. The past cannot demand anything of you. Introspection into the past, into your feelings about the past, into the feelings the feelings generate — this is a very efficient way of never having to face the actual question, which is: what are you going to do, now, about work, about love, about your membership in the human community?

Private Logic and the Solipsistic Trap

Adler distinguished between Gemeinschaftsgefühl — social interest, community feeling, the sense of belonging to and contributing to the human collective — and Privatlogik — private logic, the idiosyncratic system of reasoning the individual constructs to make his lifestyle appear coherent and justified.

The neurotic, for Adler, lives primarily in private logic. His reasoning makes sense from the inside — it is internally consistent, emotionally compelling, often highly sophisticated. But it is systematically oriented away from common sense and social reality and toward the maintenance of the fictional final goal and the lifestyle that serves it.

Here is the devastating implication for introspection: introspection, almost by structural necessity, deepens private logic. You are inside your own head, examining your own feelings, interpreting your own experiences through the categories your own lifestyle has constructed. You cannot get outside your private logic by going further inside it. The introspective process, absent a rigorous challenge from a skilled interlocutor who refuses to cooperate with your excuses, tends to confirm what you already believe about yourself — which is precisely what your private logic requires.

This is why Adler was deeply skeptical of free association as a therapeutic method. Letting the patient roam freely through their inner landscape, following their associations wherever they lead, seemed to him a recipe for elaborating private logic rather than exposing it. The analyst who sits quietly and receives the patient's associations is, in Adlerian terms, cooperating with the patient's neurosis rather than challenging it. The therapeutic stance must be much more active, much more confrontational, much more oriented toward the future and the life tasks than toward the endlessly fascinating depths of the patient's past and feelings.

The Arrangement of Memories

One of Adler's most striking specific claims concerns memory. He argued that the memories people retain are not a random or representative sample of their experience — they are selected because they are useful to the lifestyle. People remember what confirms their lifestyle's fundamental assumptions. The person who has built his life around the experience of being wronged will remember, with great clarity and emotional richness, every instance of injustice visited upon him, and will have only the haziest recollection of the many occasions when he was treated generously.

This means that introspective archaeology — digging into your childhood memories to understand yourself — is not accessing historical truth. It is accessing a curated archive that your lifestyle has assembled in its own service. The early memories that feel most vivid and emotionally significant are precisely the ones your private logic has promoted, precisely because they support the conclusions your lifestyle needs you to draw about yourself and the world.

In What Life Could Mean to You (1931), Adler makes this point with characteristic directness: the first memory a person reports is not an accident. It expresses, in condensed form, the fundamental assumptions of the lifestyle. But those memories were kept because they were useful, not because they were uniquely formative. Adler's therapeutic technique of asking for earliest memories was not an act of etiological excavation — it was a diagnostic shortcut to map the lifestyle's structure, which could then be challenged directly.

The implication for introspection is corrosive. You cannot trust what you find when you look inward, not because your unconscious is cunning and deceptive in the Freudian sense, but because your entire inner archive has been organized by the lifestyle in the lifestyle's interests. Your feelings about your memories, your interpretations of your experiences, your sense of what you are and why you are that way — all of this material has been processed and filed by a system that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of your lifestyle. You are examining edited footage and taking it for raw reality.

The Inferiority Complex as Introspective Engine

Adler's most famous contribution to the psychological lexicon — the inferiority complex — is, in his own framework, almost always made worse by introspection, and the two phenomena have a structural affinity that is worth examining carefully.

Every human being begins life in a condition of objective inferiority — small, weak, dependent, unable to meet its own needs. This universal experience generates a universal striving for superiority, for competence, for overcoming. Under favorable conditions, this striving is healthy, socially oriented, and expressed through genuine contribution to community. Under unfavorable conditions — discouragement, pampering, neglect — the striving becomes distorted into a neurotic quest for personal superiority or superiority over others, rather than superiority in the service of community.

The inferiority complex (as opposed to ordinary feelings of inferiority) is an arrangement — a cultivated sense of one's own inadequacy that serves as a permanent excuse for avoiding the life tasks. "I cannot pursue meaningful work because I am fundamentally inadequate" has a structural function: it protects the fictional goal (which is often some grandiose private fantasy of special status) by ensuring it is never actually tested against reality. If you never try, you never fail. If you never fail, your private fantasy of what you could have been remains intact.

The connection to introspection should now be obvious. The inferiority complex feeds on introspective attention. Every hour spent examining the contours of your inadequacy, tracing its origins, giving it a rich inner life — this is an hour in which the complex is being maintained and elaborated rather than overcome. Introspection, in this context, is a form of neurotic self-indulgence that the complex recruits for its own perpetuation. The more you know about your inferiority complex, the more real it becomes, the more it crowds out the one thing that would actually address it: Mut — courage — specifically the courage to engage with life's demands despite the very real possibility of failure.

The Antidote: It Is Not More Looking Inward

Adler's therapeutic orientation was radically future-focused and action-oriented. The question was never "why are you this way?" but "what are you going to do?" The goal was not self-understanding in the introspective sense but reorientation — a shift in the fictional final goal and the lifestyle that serves it, toward greater social interest and genuine engagement with the life tasks.

This is why Gemeinschaftsgefühl — social interest, variously translated — functions for Adler as the primary criterion of psychological health. It is not a feeling you discover inside yourself through introspection; it is a direction of movement toward others, toward contribution, toward community. You cannot find it by looking inward. You find it by looking outward and acting accordingly, and you build it through action rather than through understanding.

The Adlerian therapist — Dreikurs in particular, who systematized and extended Adlerian clinical practice — was not a passive receiver of the patient's introspective material. The therapeutic stance involved active interpretation, confrontation, encouragement (in the technical sense of building courage), and direct redirection toward the life tasks. The patient's feelings, when they arose in therapy, were treated as communications about the lifestyle rather than as data requiring sympathetic exploration. "You feel anxious about this — what does that tell us about what you're trying to avoid?"

The Kishimi/Koga Popularization and Its Distortions

It's worth noting that the popular Adlerian revival associated with The Courage to Be Disliked (Kishimi and Koga, 2013, English translation 2018) captures some of this anti-introspective thrust but softens it considerably for mass consumption. The book's central propositions — that trauma doesn't exist as a determinant of present behavior, that your emotions are chosen, that you should separate your tasks from others' tasks — are genuinely Adlerian. But the book's gentle, Socratic format somewhat obscures the full brutality of the underlying framework.

Adler himself was considerably more pointed. His clinical vignettes, scattered through Understanding Human Nature, The Pattern of Life, and The Case of Miss R., show a practitioner who was willing to tell patients quite directly that they were using their symptoms as excuses, that their suffering, however genuine it felt, was being manufactured in the service of avoidance, and that the solution was not to understand the suffering better but to stop cooperating with it and engage with life.

The Final Verdict

The Adlerian position on introspection and feelings can be summarized with some precision:

Feelings are not causes; they are instruments. You manufacture them to serve your movement toward your fictional final goal. They are neither honest reports of your inner state nor reliable guides to your history. They are tools, and like all tools, they should be evaluated by what they accomplish, not by how they feel.

Introspection is usually neurotic avoidance with a philosophical veneer. The person who knows himself deeply, who has excavated his anxieties and catalogued his resentments and mapped his emotional geography with great thoroughness — this person has typically accomplished one thing: a very sophisticated excuse for not engaging with work, love, and community. The depth of the inner life is inversely correlated, in Adler's clinical experience, with the degree of genuine social contribution.

The archive you examine when you introspect has been curated by your lifestyle in the lifestyle's interests. You are not discovering yourself; you are reading your own propaganda. The feelings that seem most important, the memories that seem most formative, the self-interpretations that seem most true — these have all been selected and processed by a system that is fundamentally committed to maintaining the status quo of your fictional final goal.

The antidote is courage, not understanding. Specifically, the courage to engage with the life tasks despite uncertainty, imperfection, and the real possibility of failure. You do not need to understand yourself before you act. You need to act, and in acting, you will discover more about yourself — and change more about yourself — than any amount of inward looking will ever provide.

This is an extremely uncomfortable position for a culture that has thoroughly internalized the therapeutic assumption that self-knowledge is intrinsically valuable and that the examined life is superior to the unexamined one. Adler would say: examined by whom, in whose interests, toward what end? If the examination is conducted by the private logic, in the service of the fictional goal, toward the end of perpetuating the neurotic lifestyle — and it usually is — then the examined life is not better. It is just a more articulate version of the same evasion.

The unexamined life that contributes to the community, that engages honestly with work and love, that acts with courage in the face of genuine risk — that life, for Adler, is worth more than all the introspective sophistication in the world. Which is, when you sit with it for a moment, either the most liberating or the most terrifying thing anyone has ever said about the examined life. Possibly both simultaneously, which is probably why Adler remains so systematically underread.

[Rian Doris @RianSweetDoris]

The possibility of being distracted is itself a distraction.

[J3n @j3njohnson]

@i_mika_el If you’re a long term visionary, MVP won’t always work for you, they might be asking for a better horse while you’re building the car

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Whhhhaaaaat can you post the painting 🖼️ genius confirmed, sorry you had to mask it / you might’ve felt like an outlier because you are one, takes a lot of energy to own it but it’s part of you. I won a bodyboard when I was little from a single line drawing of birds, I still think about it 😂

[J3n @j3njohnson]

@JunaidAckroyd Yes but the theoretical knowledge isn’t as important as rapid practical workflows and personal projects, CS degrees can’t keep up

[J3n @j3njohnson]

@LilithyGaming @bluewmist Both could be true, most kids have natural genius, some stats say as high as 98% but it gets stifled out by fear and pressure to conform

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Side quest ✨ Reply to the first post you see for the next 24 hours

#buildinpublic #post1000

[J3n @j3njohnson]

@pardnchiu @TTrimoreau What feedback do you get most often?

[J3n @j3njohnson]

@HotDamn2025 Your post felt like a power boost, thank you!

[J3n @j3njohnson]

Social media is broken. I'm a systems engineer trying to fix it out of a deep love for people.

Lmk your thoughts ⬇️

[J3n @j3njohnson]

@cinamarina People

[J3n @j3njohnson]

When you can't rely on your courage, rely on your values and systems.