I feel like I operate in some sort of happy tension between love of structure and love of freedom from constraints of structure. I did not realise this explicitly until someone pointed out to me how I was critiquing rationalist thinking in a highly rationally structured form. I reflected about this. I mean, my daily life is dominated by routine and structure. I am the opposite of spontaneous or 'going with the flow'. I rarely change my mind on things once I have made it up—but for that reason I won't commit to anything that I am not 100 percent sure I can deliver. Sometimes people could see it as me not wanting to do things... but it's me weighing up if I can go the distance. My idea of commitment is not about what I feel in that moment, it is about whether I can stick with it till the end. You could say no one knows if you could stick with something till the end, you might change your mind, circumstances might change, etc. But I see a commitment as something that goes beyond all this; it's primarily about will, decision, and effort. It is also about desire and that's what I assess at the commitment stage itself. If I do not desire it, I might not have what it takes to stick with it, so I must decide if I want to go the distance. Reason I am going into all these thought processes is to show that I am constrained by both internalized structure and externalised structure. If I have to travel somewhere, I am drawing up a plan to the minutest detail with plan B for everything that could go wrong... you see what I mean?

So what do I mean by love of freedom from constraints? How I see it is that I need even more structure in practical life and relationships because it affords me the solid ground in which to soar freely in the world of ideas. That is the arena where I want to fly unfettered. Does that make sense? If everything around me is predictable and works undisturbed, I then have the freedom to float inside my head. Just because my PowerPoint slides have a rigid structure to them, that does not mean the ideas they contain have to be linear or formulaic, right? I do not see the point of worrying about the format of the slides because what is important is the content we are talking about? Just as I do not see the point of me being inefficient about how I get my groceries when I could use that time to think about what makes a certain type of sentence more beautiful than another? Just because I love structures around practical things does not mean I love structure for its own sake. Nor does it mean I see truth or the good as structured or linear or following a structured logic? Do you see my point?

I asked Claude (yes, my forays to understand AI better has meant I experiment with it—more on this later) about this and it came up with a wonderful explanation based on my MBTI type which as you know is INTJ. You'll probably understand the explanation only if you understand MBTI cognitive functions really well. So introverted intuition and extroverted thinking are the first two functions in my cognitive stack (there are only two MBTI types INTJ and INFJ among 16 who have introverted intuition as the first in the stack). So Claude's point is that introverted intuition is unfettered, unconscious, and free, and extroverted thinking is all about laying down systems, processes, planning etc. That's why it makes perfect sense that I am driven to fly with my intuition into abstract territories completely unfettered by any constraints, but my feet at the same time are also firmly planted on the ground. That also apparently allows me to bring my insights back to the ground in some structured form rather than letting them waft vaguely in the air...