I’m not really sure where I want to go with this essay, and that’s sort of the point. Let’s start at the center: in Japanese martial arts, particularly karate, there’s a concept called zanshin (残心). Zanshin, roughly translated as “remaining mind” (or “lingering mind”), is a state of awareness. It lacks a specific focus; it is not intent but it informs intent. In zanshin, which is a state that you most often adopt when in kamae (構え), a ready stance, you are aware of everything while being focused on nothing. You are open for the purpose of eventually closing (closing here meaning reacting to your opponent’s approach, whereupon you “collapse” from a state of potential into a corresponding movement). Said otherwise, your state of openness already contains the potential of closing within it. Your mind exists in suspense, floating without direction but with the *ability *to choose a direction when it becomes necessary. There is a tension which doesn’t fatigue you, a choice to not choose but to be ready for choice when it becomes necessary. A tracking of targets and their vectors without locking on to them.
If this is all hard to understand, and it’s very hard to explain to be honest, that’s probably built into writing about martial arts, which is an intensely physical practice. In the introduction to his translation of Mayamoto Musashi’s The Book of the Five Rings(五輪書), Kenji Tokitsu (a lifelong practitioner, philosopher, and teacher of karate) described trying to write about martial arts thus: “as though having immersed myself in water, I were immediately to try to turn the pages of a book without getting them wet”[1]. I love the physicality of this description: the awkward twist of the arm you might imagine someone doing to accomplish the impossible feat of flipping through a book in such circumstances conveys the awkwardness of trying to describe a physical art with words. It’s like sticking your tongue in the absence of a tooth; it’s like trying to see from the corner of your eye; it’s like trying to describe pain or a scent. There is something inherently elusive there, frustratingly at the edge of your understanding and your ability to convey it. Of course, as Tokitsu himself writes, once you marry the words with physical application in the dojo(道場), great leaps of understanding can be reached. This is what any great teacher of a martial art tries to accomplish: the joining of thought and act which allows a student deeper access to the art itself.
I have been practicing karate, on and off (mostly off, for now) ever since I was eleven (that’s twenty seven years, out of which I have been practicing karate actively for about fifteen). Over the years of practicing it (and having risen to 4th kyu, or rank, from white belt twice), I have become fascinated with attaining zanshin. My third sensei, Aviram Ring, first introduced me to the concept as part of his teachings. One of my most vivid memories is from my 4th kyu test; I was so tired and after executing one of the moves from Heian Godan (the last of the basic katas in karate) my mind completely blanked. I couldn’t “find” the next move, could not retrieve it. The more I grasped at it, the more it avoided me, like a stubborn cat. And then Aviram’s voice rang through the dojo: “Zanshin Eden! Zanshin!” My mind opened. I no longer sought for the next move. I “reclined”, sitting back inside of my mind, ready for and accepting of whatever came next. Not targeted, not focused, but choosing not to choose, ready to remain or go as needed. My mind, lingering. And, like that stubborn cat, the next move ran to me, appearing inside of my mind, coaxing. My body “collapsed” into it and I finished the kata (and, by the by, passed the test).
By definition, maintaining zanshin is difficult. As the state of mind cannot be forced because it has at its root an aversion to conscious intent, it must be cultivated. Inch by inch, over time and practice, you must allow your mind to find this state. Even worse, communicating this state, what it feels like, what might bring it about, and how not to achieve it, is even harder than explaining how your shoulder should be angled when blocking or how a kick should strike an opponent. You cannot observe a teacher performing an instant of zanshin because there is no instant of zanshin. No one can demonstrate zanshin. It’s an internal state. Instead, you must watch a skilled professional practice karate for years, and notice the tiny ways in which they are “prepared without preparing”, see their quickness and agility that have nothing to do with their physical body and their strength. Bit by bit, by association almost, you find that moments of the lingering mind, of a strange sort of floating peace, descend upon you. Notions of “blocking” or “attacking” disappear and you find yourself moving with your opponent, into your opponent, through your opponent. A few seconds of liquidity for every ten hours spent in forced focus. A glimpse of a plateau for every mile of chaffed knuckles and, finally, the ability to sometimes reside on that plateau, until the wind of reality knocks you off of it again.
This is the part of the essay where, like a karate-ka performing a kata, I whirl around to face my second opponent, my second subject. While I was studying karate, I was also living my life. Among other things, I was building a career, both a professional one which paid me and an amateur one which also paid me, albeit not in money. As part of that “second career”, I’m now running a music blog, reviewing books and albums, and, in general, experiencing and analyzing culture in a unique way. That way (the do in dojo) differs from most people’s in approach but also in volume. I am not writing this to brag. I am writing this to give you context into the challenge I was and am faced with. On average, I listen to over 1,000 albums a year, for my work on Heavy Blog is Heavy. I don’t keep track of my reading quite as closely but I read a few dozen books a year, and essays and short fiction, across multiple genres. And I also love films and want to find good TV shows amidst the slop, and I lead reading groups, and so on, and so forth. Finally, I also have the aforementioned “proper” career and have had one for thirteen years now. I started in sales but then became a web developer, a product manager, and more recently, I have been managing sales, operations, and sales engineering teams. This of course comes with a slew of tasks, goals, and plans, all of which need to be executed to a high level and on a repeatable basis. What tech calls scale (a truly despicable term, at least when tech deploys it).
All of which is to say, there is a lot of *potential *in my life. There is a great big ocean out there of things I could do and a somewhat smaller, but far more urgent, reservoir of things I have to do. Alongside being introduced to this endless field of possibilities, thirteen years ago or so when I started doing all of this, I was also introduced to the very common feeling which comes with it: anxiety. In the past fifteen years or so, it has become fashionable to avoid calling the emotion that comes with a vast potential of options and a limited timespan in which to accomplish them “anxiety”. Instead, it’s called FOMO, fear of missing out. But I really don’t like this whitewashing. FOMO is playful, a problem we all face together and which we agree is sort of silly and overblown. However, the very real anxiety that is an inherent part of our modern, over-saturated lives, is an undesirable mental condition. It’s a direct result of the underlying mindsets of growth and self betterment that our societies instill in us and not some funny quirk of our personality or a “first world problem”. So let’s call it what it is: anxiety. A worry, a concern, a neurosis, that there’s something amazing out there, something better, that we might miss out on or that we already are missing out on by doing other, less worthy things.
This concern is part and parcel of the liberal project of the articulation of the self[2]. This project, which was kickstarted by The Enlightenment but which, of course, has roots that go way before that, is an essentialist project. It conceptualizes the self as a kernel of rationality, the part in us which deliberates, chooses, and intends. More importantly, it sees this self as buried, muddied, obscured. Corrupted. By our bodies, by society and its shortcomings, by the conditions of our lives, and, in many cases, by supernatural or religious forces. The goal of the liberal project then becomes to excavate, clean, bring to fruition, polish, or discover this self. Under the liberal internal geography, the self is pre-existing; we do not create it. We simply work towards our potential. Through education, through practice, reading, exercise, therapy, prayer, and myriad other methods, we bring to light that which has always-already existed: our best self. That is what the term “living your best life” means - the best version of your life, always existing in potential but brought to actuality through “self care”, through the polishing of who you are into something better.
The connection of this to the pursuit of the “best books” or the “best films” should be obvious. The objects, be they paintings or novels or shows, are not consumed primarily for themselves, for the aesthetic experience (although this can be a secondary and major side effect). Instead, they are consumed to display their consumer as a good one. If the books you read are the best ones, then you are a good reader and, by extension, you are good. You have acquired good taste; you have constructed a good self, a self which is able to parse the deficient world we live in and extract from it the best things. If this seems circular, it is, by intent - since we are dealing with a neurosis here, it must be constantly nourished. I cannot merely consume a set amount of “best art”, establish myself as the “best self”, and then rest on my laurels for the rest of my life. The world is in constant motion, diametrically opposed to the true self which, by definition, is eternally still, waiting to be discovered. Thus, the good consumer must continue to consume and must continue to consume well - falling behind or, even worse, consuming the wrong thing, will lead to an immediate decrease in status and massive insecurity about the quality of the self. The dreaded beast named “Irrelevance” is always stalking, hiding an even larger threat: the passage of time and, ultimately, death. This vicious flywheel creates what I like to call “anxiety of the self”, a fear not just of missing out on the good things in life, but a fear of missing out on finding, and communicating, a good, a best, version of your “self” and, perhaps worse, the fear of gaining that best self only to lose it to inattention and the ravages of time. To ultimately die, even if the best self has been constructed. To watch all your works fade to dust, including your meticulously constructed self.
Enter tech. Not an industry to ever miss an opportunity to prey on a form of human anxiety, tech has been using our “anxiety of the self” as fuel for decades now. I’d like to keep this timeline purposefully obscure because when exactly what we call “tech” today really started to appear in these spaces is debatable. Another way to put this is that the obsession that Silicon Valley has with extreme productivity (which is to say, building the best “worker self”) starts much earlier than Apple or Microsoft and goes back all the way to the nineteenth century and the advent of Taylorism, or “scientific management”. But regardless of long tails and chronologies, the obsession that tech has with turning this “anxiety of the self” into users and, more importantly, user hours, has never been clearer. Here is just a partial list of tools and services that burn this anxiety as an endless source of fuel: Notion, Goodreads, Obsidian, Storygraph, Untappd, Foursquare (ominously marketed as Swarm today), and, of course, the entirety of social media.
These tools (some of which I like, to be clear) can be divided into two broad categories (although some of them operate in both): the first is the category of collection and, more importantly, prioritization. Notion, Obsidian, and the myriad tools of their ilk, are designed to help you centralize the field of potential items to consume and to decide where to start. Oftentimes, this ranking is designed to be simple: assign a priority to items, start at the top, and work your way down. Other times, most famously with Obsidian, the effort is far more subtle and complex. The brain you see, say these tools, doesn’t work that way! It’s messier and fuzzier and more decentralized. So, what we must do is build chains of items, give users the ability to create ontologies, complex hierarchies of what is out there, how what is out there associates with the rest of it, and what paths might be pursued through these associations which will bring us closer to understanding.
The second category is for tools that then communicate these rankings or paths or, rather, communicate the work of the self as it traverses these paths. Goodreads is the most famous example; it doesn’t just allow you to collect books into lists, it also encourages you to share your progress as you work your way through these lists. Reading challenges, hashtags, page counts, numbers of books per year, number of reviews, following specific reviewers, and more are all meant to help you not just read more but to read publicly, to display what you love and, maybe more importantly, what you hate. The anxiety is centered not just around building a better safe but, because we are humans and, therefore, social, to showcase that better self to others.
As you might have guessed by now, I am going to focus on the first category (often known as “productivity software”) and what it does here, even though I cannot stress enough that these two categories are bound together. “Productivity software” is sold to us, marketed to us, as a cure for our “anxiety of the self”. In their post, “I Deleted My Second Brain”, Joan Westenberg, a long time user of “productivity software” and a recently disillusioned one, describes the promise thus:
For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
[…]
The modern PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) movement traces its roots through para-academic obsessions with systems theory, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, and the Silicon Valley mythology of productivity as life. Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. A library Borges might envy.
In the phrase “capture everything, forget nothing”, we can find the kernel of our “anxiety of the self”. The world is so much and, worse than that, it keeps changing. To keep up, we must build up our defenses, walls of sand that try to keep the ocean out. But even more interesting is the use of the words “everything” and “nothing”. Why is the level of this anxiety so high? Asked another way, why are these tools so damn successful and popular? In case you think I am exaggerating, Notion had over 100 million (!!!) users in 2024 and some reports (unverifiable but probably pretty close) putt the database/productivity software provider at 4 million paying customers. Obsidian, which is targeted towards a much more niche crowd of developers, writers, and other “lifehackers” as Westenberg calls them, has estimated its user base at over one million. These are not niche tools, at least not in the slices of society they are aimed at. If we expanded our focus to include companies like Monday, Goodreads, or Storygraph, we would find hundreds of millions of users more.
The explanation of both this wild success and the usage of the extreme words “everything” and “nothing” in Westenberg’s quote is the connection I hinted to above between the “anxiety of the self” and one of the strongest anxieties we have (sorry, just a bit of Freud, I don’t like it any more than you do): our anxiety and fear of death. As I alluded to before, when our efforts to discover our true self are eroded, by the passage of time and the rate at which culture and the material world moves, we are reminded of a simple fact: there is no true self. Or, if I’m being fairer, even if that true self exists, there is nothing eternal or permanent about it. Even if the world was slower (as fascists everywhere dream) or even if we accelerated ourselves into the perfect consumption and cataloging machine, we are still going to die. Our self, our work, our libraries, our labor, everything we have cataloged, prioritized, and executed, will one day be gone. And that, to put it bluntly, is fucking terrifying. So terrifying that we need to capture EVERYTHING because even one missing thing is a synecdoche for THE GREAT MISSING that is our ultimate demise. And we must forget NOTHING because even one forgotten thing reminds us of THE GREAT FORGETTING, which is death.
Of course, there is no collecting everything or forgetting nothing. No matter how well you build your little walls of sand, the ocean is going to come rushing in. Even worse, it doesn’t even need to come rushing in; your walls don’t require a tsunami. All that is required is a little rivulet, a small forgetting, a small mistake, and the walls turn to mud and wash away. The more we insist on building perfect walls, the more we invest into making our productivity software perfect, the more we reveal the timeless truth of the Heel of Achilles, the second law of thermodynamics, the awful germ of death in greatest life. The more we push, the more our goal, a perfect shimmering life, recedes into a blank, dull simulacrum of a life, a neat representation which has nothing to do with either the original nor the way we wanted to think about the original. Life lies in the mutability of the world, in the dynamics of presence and absence. To live is to one day to die. In avoiding death, we calcify life. When we try to keep everything and lose nothing, we lose the very basic structure of what it means to live. As Westenberg puts it:
PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.
The problem of death sneaking into everything we do is a classic problem of martial arts and has been one for centuries. The Hagakure Kikigaki (葉隠聞書) is a classic text of Early Modern Japan. Compiled in the early 18th century from commentaries by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, this collection of sayings is considered a primary and fascinating portal into the attitudes and philosophy of “late” bushidō (武士道), the so-called Way of the Warrior (though bushi has far better translations). During this period, the samurai class was no longer actively engaging in warfare and required a cultural philosophy that would keep its traditions, and the access to political power these traditions provided them, alive.[3] The Hagakure is a fascinating, deep, complex, and contradictory historical text and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. However, the passage most relevant for us (unfortunately, only because I don’t want to be associated with the many practitioners of “bullshido” that often quote it and only it) is from the famous opening paragraph:
The Way of the warrior is to be found in dying. If one is faced with two options of life or death, simply settle for death. It is not an especially difficult choice: just go forth and meet it confidently.
This same attitude is useful also for modern day karate-ka. Why? Essentially, this is because getting hit is a very, very, very unpleasant experience, especially when the one doing the hitting knows what they are doing. Every fiber of not only our bodies, but also our minds and our social mores, is programmed to do whatever is necessary to avoid getting hit. Unfortunately, studying martial arts only solves this problem partially. In fact, to begin with, it makes it worse. In essence, when we start training in martial arts, we find a panicking monkey flailing in all directions to defend itself and put a knife in its hands. The monkey, which is of course us when we are about to be hit, now has a knife but does not have the discipline to wield it effectively. Now imagine if we give the monkey not only a knife but also a staff, a bow, a sword, and a shield. Flailing, it picks up one weapon, throwing the other immediately to the floor and then, when blows keep coming, it repeats this again and again, panicking even more.
If you think I am exaggerating, then you have never experienced the awful feeling of trying to defend yourself against a series of attacks and doing everything at once. You punch and kick and block all at once which, of course, means you do nothing but instead just jumble your limbs against each other, get hammered by the attack, and exacerbate that hammering by retreating awkwardly or even just flat out falling down. The other sad fact is, perhaps even sadder, is that this happens even when you are the one attacking. In fact, it happens even more often; the onus of action is now on you. You initiate, the other reacts, and, in order to land your attack, you must now keep initiating, keep choosing from this new arsenal of moves. But watch out! A defender can become an attacker at any point. And also it’s hot in the dojo and taxes are due and the gi is chafing and so on. And this is all in the controlled environment of practice; what happens if you have to use these tools in the reality of a fight? The monkey screeches even louder. Here’s the thing about the monkey: the reason it is flailing is because it senses harm and, here we go, it senses death and it would very, very, very much like not to die. Like a person drowning in a riptide will do everything they can to get free, and in the process fatigue themself, the monkey flails. Enough monkey; you flail.
The answer is to accept harm. To accept death. Or, rather, that is the beginning of the answer. Accepting death clears the slate - it is the precondition to thinking. In karate, accepting that the punch might land, that you might get hurt, is the first step to answering the question “how do I stop myself from getting hurt?”. It is not the answer itself; accepting the punch is not the answer to blocking the punch. But the state of mind is required to begin formulating the answer because, without it, all you have is a bunch of tools which you will deploy with excessive haste. But here’s the problem: just like with our anxiety of the self, just like with the flimsy walls of sand constructed out of productivity software against the ocean of the world, the fear of getting harmed in a fight and, of course, the fear of death, is an ongoing problem. As the Hagakure puts it elsewhere:
There is a saying of the elders’ that goes, “Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.”[4]
The enemy is always waiting. We face death whenever we “step from under the eaves”. It is not a one-off experience. For the warrior, or for us, facing death is a recurring, every day experience. So, what must we do? How can we counter this continuing and repeating fear of getting hit, of forgetting, of dying? How, to borrow quickly from Frank Herbert, can we re-assert our humanity in the face of fear? Zanshin. Like the Hagakure says, we must “go forth and meet it confidently”. In combat, and in life, flailing means death. The best way to get to flailing, to lose control, is by focusing on your opponent and trying to predict everything they might throw at you. The possibilities are endless and you find yourself drowning in them, reacting to things that are not there, tense before the first blow even falls. Lost in thought and reaction to what your opponent might do instead of what they are doing.
Instead, you must “recline”. You must allow your mind to become untethered from the next action and yet, always ready for it. All of the tools that you need, whatever your opponent might throw at you, are already at your disposable - you’ve spent hours drilling them, feeling them, tweaking them. Thinking of them and of when to use them, focusing on which one is going to be the most effective in the next split second, circumvents all of that training. It shorts your muscles, your nervous systems, and your limbic system, sub-conscious processors that react orders of magnitude faster than your conscious mind. And then what happens? You get hit. You get hurt. You die. All the things you were so afraid of, brought about by your very attempt to control and prevent them.
In zanshin, by contrast, you leave the tools on the table, ready to hand, trusting your quickness to pick up the correct one as needed and applying it. Because you are not focused on any one tool, you can keep your attention on the other many, and more important, things that go into a fight: your opponent, your surroundings, your breath, opportunity. The final step then, and the hardest one, is not to focus on any one of those things either, because they are simply more abstract tools. A classic mistake is focusing on your opponent, believing you can read their imminent action in their body or their face or their eyes. One of the hardest things is to let go of this and let your opponent come, not anticipating and then acting before their action is complete but reacting once their action is inevitable and you have come to understand it. This is also true when attacking; the distinction between attacking and blocking is generally erroneous, but especially so when it comes to zanshin. The current posture you are in is irrelevant in this state because it is yet another category, another tool of specificity which has no relation to how your body and mind work at this level. The body does not know “defense” or “attack”. It only knows movement and in zanshin, all movement appears equally, as a means to an end, a path.
Dancing with the flow of our combat, we now return this energy back to productivity software. Its promise to create a “second brain” for us, one organized with more consciously parsable and arrangeable categories and rules, ignores one very important fact: we already have a second brain or, rather, a second mind. Whether you want to call this second mind “the unconscious” or das Ich (if you’re among the handful of Fichteians still out there) or “desire”, the fact remains that all of the decisions we make are influenced by things like our preferences, our memories, what we’ve read, the weather, and an infinity of other parameters. I’m not saying that something in us is capable of totalitizing that infinity and generating a causally determined answer from that totality. In fact, I am saying quite the opposite: in order to choose, we must by definition have some sort of “fuzzy engine” inside of us that is able to work from incomplete assumptions, half remembered facts, and abstract concepts like “taste” and narrow these factors down to “I would like to read this book” or “I love this album”.
When you react to your anxiety, whether anxiety of the self or anxiety of death, you flail in the face of this fuzziness. You might read bad books. You might listen to bad music. You might have a bad time. And that idea, together with the fact that our life is limited, scares you. So you flail. You construct endless lists in database software. But that’s just the first tool. You then prioritize those lists because the lists themselves are long and your time is short. You then assign arbitrary timestamps (what tech calls SLAs, Service Level Agreements but with yourself as both provider and customer) under which the items on each priority must be consumed (“I’ll read my priority one books within a month of adding them and at least one priority two book every year!”).
Books are an easy example because there’s (relatively) less of them and you consume less of them. Albums are everywhere, by comparison. But albums are also “easy” in that regard. What about quotes? Ideas? Perspectives? References? Memories? You keep flailing as the sea of content rises above you. Most people stop here but many of them don’t. Now tools like Obsidian come into play. You map associations. You sort. You catalog. You chase the second brain that your first brain (or even your zero brain, your ur-brain, your monkey brain) tells you you need to have, the perfect arbiter of choices, the informed surveyor of existence. Perfect. Immutable. Dead. Just like a karate-ka focusing on their opponent’s hands, you have brought about that which you feared the most by trying so hard to control it. You have died.
Instead, we should strive to attain zanshin. In what I am calling here “everyday zanshin”, we accept death. In this “everyday zanshin”, productivity software still has its place. We accept that we will never be able to experience even a tiny shred of “good” books or music or games or experiences at all. Furthermore, the existence of these “correct” experiences disappears. Their existence or non-existence is irrelevant to us; they serve no purpose. Instead, we “recline”. We let our minds, that have already read plenty of books or heard many albums, and certainly experienced many things, both good and bad, take over. Like the karate-ka who focuses nowhere and reacts instead of anticipating, we let the next things we want to experience come to us.
Just like that karate-ka, we don’t sit at home and just wait for them to appear of course; none of this is literal. Even the literal practitioner of martial arts does not do that - they go to the dojo. They engage with the art. They put on the gi and tie their belt and make conscious decisions which (eventually, after a lot of practice) lead them to combat. So too I, in my day to day. I use productivity software to collect a general idea of what I’d like to do today or tomorrow or next month. I keep lists of books but I let those lists go out of date. Items appear and disappear in the databases at will, as needed. If I forget to update a list for a few months, nothing happens. I was living my life, I was doing what I wanted. The tool should be able to accept that and to work around it and, if it doesn’t, I kill it. Literally, I delete whole lists, I abandon tools, I move on from projects and prep all the time. Westenberg says this:
My new system is, simply, no system at all. I write what I think. I delete what I don’t need. I don’t capture everything. I don’t try to. I read what I feel like. I think in conversation, in movement, in context. I don’t build a second brain. I inhabit the first. [...] I’ve started keeping a single note called WHAT where I write down a handful of things I have to remember. The important bits will find their way back.
I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.
I am not preaching hermitude. I go online, I go to bookstores and music shops. I make plans with friends. I travel. I seek out these experiences, I have goals, I am still part of that high stress, high functioning career. I still use Todoist (and I very highly recommend that you do as well) and even things like ClickUp (better Notion, basically). I have a database of books and a kanban of music to listen to and one for shows and films. There is a system there - the martial art, with its kata and movesets and principles, is practiced. But when I am forced to confront the great ocean that is existence, and often when encountering the experiences themselves, when combat is joined, I try to adopt the stance of zanshin. I try to think without thinking. I try to be ready without focus. I try to not flail and control and anticipate. I try to live, allowing life to come to me, reaching out when needed, but always trying to stay reclined, aware, to accept my own limitations and my own death. To live in zanshin.
[1]: Tokitsu, Kenji (2004). The Complete Book of Five Rings.
[2]: I am essentially summarizing a lot of Michel Foucault’s work in the following few paragraphs. For the most accessible further reading on these ideas, I recommend The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.
[3]: For a deeper exploration of this historical analysis and the world bushi and how to translate it, I highly recommend reading the introduction to Alexander Bennett’s translation of Hagakure Kikigaki, from which I quote here.
[4]: Here I preferred this translation.
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