The Underground

The Underground is where you stuff your unacceptable feelings and ideas, everything that makes you feel different. When you go to any actual underground space it reminds you of your inner basement where you hide your true self.

But you have accepted that you are a heretic now (sorry it comes with reading this blog) so you need to go down there and find all that "different" stuff and bring it up to the open. You need to finally own and be your true self.

This makes the Underground less of a scary place and more of an exciting exploration.

You also hide your pain in the underground which makes it especially uncomfortable, but it can be an opportunity. Down in those caverns you will also find your bravery and you can use that to confront your pain.

In this way, the Underground can become a place to heal.

Question Everything

Question Everything

If you are a Heretic, that is what you do right?

Some people are afraid that questioning destroys things. It doesn't destroy... It changes.

Questioning always changes things even if, after questioning you still agree with the original premise, you change it slightly. You cannot help but see the thing in question in a new light a new framework of thinking, because you questioned it.


And frameworks of thinking are contagious.

Your own Private Hackathon

Hacking: Disrupting things made for the masses so they work for the individual.

My company recently had a Hackathon which is a two day marathon of engineers working on their own ideas. I get excited about this because hacking seems to me to be an ideal Heretic's tool. 

Fluxite: Try it yourself: Find every day things made for the masses and in your mind break apart the function of the object and repurpose it for something that serves your heretical plans.

Hack an object

Example: Stapler as catapult

Hack a System

Example: This was created in PowerPoint

Hack a process:

Example: Modified GTD Process: Defer, Delete, Deconstruct, Delegate, Do

Hack an Idea:

Example: Socrates statement "All that I know is that I know nothing" can be reinterpreted to be seen as giving us the freedom to recreate our reality.

Programmers: Creating Something from Nothing

Open a text editor, the programmer's tool, and look at that wide open space. Programmers create something from nothingness. They start by setting up variables which are empty containers made of thin air, that can be filled and emptied again and again with whatever you want. They query the world in the form of "If this is the case, then do this, else do that." With this simple instruction they can branch off the well worn path into the deep dark of the forests of new ideas. they create loops that go around like a carousel, each time grabbing for a new ring. They build beast-like procedures that they feed parameters and milk for results. All this in the service of solving problems, and the singular goal of making things just a little bit better.

Learn to program: Codeacademy

Programming for kids: Scratch