Intentions · The Expanse

Intentions

I had a big long post I did yesterday morning and not sure what happened to it...anyway. Here's the idea distilled down to some conclusions I've made:

I used to think intention meant hopes and goals (nice house, happy family). I’m realizing intention is actually deciding what my internal “code” should do instead of what it currently does. It takes awareness first because Awareness = finding the faulty line of code that produces the undesired behavior.

Code is code. It will run every time the input is provided, in the same way and produce the same results. You can try to throw in new code to take those results and alter them, but ideally you figure out the bad code and rewrite it.

I’m getting better at awareness (looking for the bad code and not just identifying the undesirable behaviors) The problem is my pattern:

Become aware > Jump straight into trying to redirect or alter the outcomes. I skip the intention and strategy steps.

Result: behavior changes (or seems to), but the code doesn’t.

Real change (manOS) works like software development:

Identify the faulty code

Define intention (what should it do instead?)

Design a strategy

Take action

Use accountability as QA

Iterate until it works

It dawned on me why a lot of therapy feels broken. Some therapies increase awareness but stop there. Labels and diagnoses become explanations or excuses. Avoidance gets framed as self-care. Awareness without intention leads to stagnation. “This is why I do this” replaces “this is what I want instead.”

Growth isn’t thru more insight. Growth is rewriting the code and testing it in real life. The goal isn’t to understand myself better. The goal is to become someone different on purpose. Spaces like this allow us to declare our intentions and have other like minded people be part of that iterative QA. So when I'm tired or defeated and say, that's good enough, someone who knows my intention calls BS and say "you're not done!...but WE'VE got this!"

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