There seems to be a threshold above which people are able to examine themselves or a situation, and gain more and more clarity, more and more understanding about what is going on and what they need to do. But below that threshold, people can end up more confused if they spend more time trying to understand a problem, or at least, they can get caught in the same assumptions and beliefs, making the same mistakes over and over again.
It's similar to how multiplying a number by itself leads to an exponential growth if that number is larger than 1, or exponential decay if it's smaller than 1, such that a small additive increase, let's say going from 0.99 to 1.01, can lead to tremendous differences in the long term.
This idea of the spiral of vagueness (or clarity) is an oversimplification, like all analogies. First of all, it is domain specific. Some people are very good at introspection in the domain of programming, but they might not be so good with their personal relationships, where their shadow is more exposed to their partner or friends.
Second of all and more importantly, what is the domain of the threshold I am trying to point to? It's unclear. It's not just intelligence, which itself is highly dimensional and very complex. It's also about emotional processing, your environment, how you use and relate to language, what you want in life, and so much more.
Someone might not get any better at let's say doing pushups, which is incidentally something that I'm experiencing right now, but is it really all that important if such a person doesn't consider it central in their life? I don't think so. People care about different things, which is why a "problem" for one person might simply be irrelevant for another. 1
The whole thing I care about here is clarity of introspection, which itself needs to be clarified. But first, let's ground it the context which made me want to write this. Most of the people I have been interacting with at work, those who are outside of my team at least, are very bad at communicating. In what ways exactly? (notice how I am engaging in the process of clarification here)
First of all, they are very bad at giving the context of whatever they are looking at. They work on different things than me, and use different terms, but they basically assume that I think and speak like them, which means that I constantly have to ask them to define things, or just tell me what exactly they are working on and what they are trying to do.
This is another thing which people are typically very unclear about: their intents. If I ask them to talk about what they are working on, they might give me some more details, but even after that, it's quite rare that their intent has been clarified: what they want me to do, what they want to do afterwards with whatever I could help them with, on and on.
All of this is made particularly difficult by the transparent fact that most people don't care about doing a good job. I would know, because I am a tactically mediocre person. I know how much more a person who cares could do, and it's obvious to me that the vast majority of people don't care and aren't productive. It's even worse, they don't even know what being productive looks like, which means that their idea of the possibility space they are within in is incredibly bad, but they don't even think about it.
Thus, talking to someone who is very vague is not just problematic because they don't know, it's that they don't know that they don't know. They lack the self-awareness to even recognize that they might lack some things or not, which means that they automatically assume that you are the stupid one in the interaction.
Vagueness at work is frustrating because it feels like spending more time with such people doesn't help solve anything, which means it becomes tempting to stop trying to understand them, and interact with them as little as possible, which makes the lack of clarity even worse. It's a negative spiral and has a strong effect on how teams interact with one another.
Typically it feels like the vague people have to choose one mediator, who can communicate between different groups, but of course the whole operation would be much more efficient if the people in each team could reasonably communicate with one another without needing the mediator.
What exactly is clarity then? For a lack of a proper definition, one central aspect of clarity is that it's about having a good enough picture of the situation that you can meaningfully act from it. If you've identified 38 different factors that you could change in your life but the only thing it leads to is decision paralysis, then you don't have clarity, you have inactionable complexity.
Ultimately, our pictures of the world are only good to the extent that they help us live consciously, because conscious experience is the ground of our life, not words or concepts. It's good to have a clear picture of what Love, or courage, or freedom, or technical mastery looks like, but what good are those if I can't actually live and embody them?
Clarity is also the ability to identify certain leverage points in a given situation, so that we can again act meaningfully on it. This is why getting more and more specific typically helps, because if you know that for instance you struggle running because of your form, more so than your cardiovascular capacity or your muscles, then naturally you will focus on that aspect, because it will unlock the limiting factor in that situation.
But clarity is not always about identifying specific details, or about clearly measurable goals such as in the case of running. Clarity can be the realization that you have perpetrated the same dysfunctional pattern in all of your romantic relationships, because of your insecurities. Or it can be the realization that your pursuit of material gain has been a way to achieve more peace in your life, but has actually made you less at peace, more anxious about the future and more insecure about yourself.
Ultimately, clarity is about seeing the whole of my life and the situation I find myself with, which is fundamentally not reducible to literal language. Just like reducing a joke to a crude explanation kills the joke, or trying to summarize a great novel only keeps the dry facts of the plot and none of its qualities, so is attempting to boil down clarity to this or that aspect impossible in practice, because we are talking here about conscious discernment. We cannot encode 'vagueness' or 'clarity' in mechanical (non-conscious) terms, because clarity is about engaging with the whole of Life, not just the parts that I enjoy or understand, which is why clarity often has this sense that "I already knew this, but wasn't willing to admit it". Yes, I knew that I was making myself miserable and blaming everyone else but myself, but my self clings onto its misery, because it doesn't want to know the Truth.
That being said, we can still identify some aspects of clarity which are good to distinguish from one another. Just like trying to classify vertebrate animals in terms of mammals, reptiles, birds, fish and amphibians is useful, in that there are many similarities within each group, but also limited because there are inevitably going to be examples which don't seem to fit anywhere—what Darren Allen calls a "platypus"—we can identify some different aspects of clarity, to notice for instance that we might be good at one but poor at another.
Here are the different types of clarity I have identified, based on the example at work I outlined:
No one is perfect at any of those. The point of clarity is not to be perfect, but to engage in a self-clarifying process. No one is and can be perfect, but you can certainly be living in a way which brings more clarity and consciousness to your life, or likewise living in a negative spiral where things are getting worse and worse for you.
The opposite of vagueness is clarity and decision-making. Because we always live in complex and uncertain environments, we always have to make decisions with somewhat incomplete information, and lossy models of Reality. That's just how it is. Sometimes the best thing to do is slow down and collect more information, and sometimes it's better to just do things and see what happens, especially if the failure in that case isn't a big deal.
Perhaps a way to simplify this discussion on the types of clarity is to simply view it in 3 categories: 1) The present, what is going on right now? 2) The future, where do I want to go? and 3) The decisions, how do I bridge the present to the future?
Again, it's impossible to completely figure out each one. We live in such complex environments that they are impossible to fully grasp, the future is very uncertain, and we can never know how well a certain plan of actions will work out. But what is certain in my experience is that vague intentions are worse than none. People who don't have any specific intention can let life surprise them, and since many of the things in our life come from pure serendipity, such as our relationships, interests and many of the ideas we come across, having no intentions is quite powerful.
Conversely, having very sharp intentions and being willing to follow up on them as quickly and best as you can inevitably leads to some type of change, even if it's not what we expect—and in many ways thank God that we don't get what we want. People who are decisive are much better at finding out what they enjoy, what they are good, what type of people they want in their life, and so much more, because they recognize, implicitly or explicitly, that such clarity starts from very explicit intents, and seeing how they land in the world.
At least that "active" side is one half of the process of clarification. If having clear intentions and plans on what we want and trying our hardest to get them in our lives is the "yang" energy, then the "yin" energy consists in a more contemplative approach, allowing the answer to emerge from silence, rather than action. Both are very valuable, and again which one is better depends on the person, the context, and what they want.
The worst thing to do is to sit in the gray zone in between each polarity, when someone for instance is passively scrolling on their phone, neither sitting in silence and resting, nor actively doing things they want to do, because that type of activity is how your focus, energy, and clarity of mind become hazy, and how people end up slowly simmering in a pool of their own anxiety, so to speak.
In summary, we could say is that there are two modes of clarity, yin and yang, and three subjects of clarity, the present, the future and the decisions that bridge between the two.
Clarity is important because it allows us to focus our finite energy and time on the things we truly care about, because by default we are surrounded by a sea of noise which pulls our attention in all kinds of ways. Not that the self-help junkie who neurotically tries to spend every minute of his life being "productive" is a good person to emulate. Clarity should not be viewed in a narrow manner, as a way for "me" to get what "I" want, but as a process of unfolding to Life, living more and more consciously.
Even if we don't engage in that process, sooner or later, pain enters in our life, and in a sense we are forced to clarify what we truly care about. It could be the pain of disappointment, or the pain of grief, or simply the pain of an illness, but whatever it is, it will happen, because we are bound to die, and because Life is much more than whatever we would like for ourselves.
In such moments of genuine pain and loss, people often find that, almost miraculously, there is an incredible moment of lucidity, a moment which can hardly be communicated to others, but which undeniably changes something in them. They realize that to be human means to have your heart broken, not because there is anything "good" in that, only a monster would wish pain onto others just for its own sake, but because having our heart broken is often the only way for us to surrender to something greater than us.
It's amazing how quickly we realize how few things genuinely matter when death invites itself in our lives. All of the petty arguments, and trivial complaints, and the emotional roller coasters, all of them are seen for what they are. And this death clarity then nudges us to feel what truly matters, which is of course Love, the state of connection to something beyond the self-informed self, when my lover's eyes seem to shine with the first rays of Spring, or when the sound of doing the dishes fills the room with a peaceful atmosphere, or when the embrace of my bed is warm and soft, after a long day of meaningful work, this connection to the world around us makes us feel the Love which was always there, a Love which gives me clarity about what matters, the kind of clarity that makes me accept my own mortality, and accept whatever is in my life, right here and right now.
1 That being said, in the pushups example, even if I don't consider it a core part of my life, it is still concerning that I don't seem to be getting stronger at that one exercise, despite doing them for a few months now. What it signals is that there might be something about my body which I haven't been aware of, which is worth looking into. All of this requires clarity, which is of course the whole point of this piece, which is why inspecting the results might not be so important if you don't care about the narrow task, but the surrounding context might still be worth inspecting because it reveals something more general about your life. Which is to say, lifting weights isn't an existential matter, but it does indirectly reveal your character.
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2025-12-16