Life, as the John Lennon song goes, is what happens when you're busy making other plans. Should you pay more attention to life or to your plans? This is probably the fundamental question that any life philosophy should ask. "Personal growth" philosophies nearly always answer "plans." This is why they mostly suck. And no, it makes no difference if you substitute "agile" plans. This is not agile-versus-waterfall, episode two billion.

I realize that many of you approach this newsletter like it's about personal growth, but I'm slowly coming to the realization that I've never actually believed in, or liked the idea. Anything I say that seems valuable for "personal growth" is unintended, and purely coincidental.

I have an alternative frame that I call life intensification; an idea of progressive fermentation and distillation of your life spirit (heh!) from an unfermented mash to a 140-proof alcohol (no actual drinking necessary). A path of increasing "life drunkenness" as you go from ethereal youth to fully alive adult maturity, aging like a fine scotch along the way. Think of the guy in the "most interesting man in the world" Dos Equis commercials for a caricature of what I mean, or perhaps John McAfee. Love him or hate him, he's certainly a very potently distilled version of himself.

1/ Long-time readers have probably detected hints of my skepticism of personal growth in several past issues. My arguments against waldenponding and against deep work in particular, are arguments against the personal growth frame in disguise.

2/ I pull my punches a bit in this newsletter, but my skepticism is probably even more evident on my blog, ribbonfarm, where I've lately taken to openly, unironically, championing mediocrity.

3/ The alternative to "growth" is not stasis or passivity, but a growing aliveness to the actual change that you're undergoing in the process of generating responses to specific life challenges. If these challenges are real, then the way you change through responding to them is not entirely within your control.

4/ The question then becomes, what do you do with the unexpected person you find you've turned into? If you generated an imaginative response, you'll generally like that person and become more alive. If you haven't, you'll reject that person and become less alive, loss turning you into a loser.

5/ Here's the problem with personal growth frames: they encourage you to look at the evolution of your life in terms of its deviation from an aspirational idea of it. Ironically, "growth" is framed in terms of a deficiency. A gap between actual and aspirational selves.

6/ Think of it like this: at 14, you're something like a ghost: a cloud of potential, along with a bunch of ideas about how that potential should be actualized. You're not quite real. You are ethereal. Some people stay ethereal. As ghostly at 70 as 14. Others intensify with every experience, whether they win or lose.

7/ Life intensification is the process of consciously becoming increasingly real (and no, I'm not talking about being more "present" so don't jump to that conclusion) by letting go more and more of your idea of what your life should be like, and embracing the possibilities of what it is actually turning out to be like.

8/ You may not be able to spin this actuality as "growth" no matter how you hard you try. To others it may look like a descent into hell or a deal with the devil accompanied by moral decay rather than growth. Life intensification is a pre-moral framing of life.

9/ The premise here is that coming alive is the first order of business. Moral questions are moot until you do. Ghosts have no moral life because they have no life. A path to a more intense life, an couple of degrees closer to fully alive, may not conform to whiggish ideas of personal growth.

10/ "Growth" fixation makes you less alive to the realities and possibilities of what's actually happening, and inclined to go into denial or futile activity in response to changes that you cannot undo, like aging, losing a leg, or being caught up in wartime and strife.

11/ Unwelcome self-knowledge is the biggest source of such rejected change in the name of presumptive "growth" discipline. If you are attached to the idea of being a classical musician, but accidentally discover along the way that you have more of a talent for simplistic ad jingles, you cannot unknow that.

12/ Your choice at that moment of self-knowledge is to either use it to intensify your life and become more alive (going into advertising) or rejecting it in favor of continued ghostliness (reject the call of the advertising career and continuing an anemic pursuit of classical music).

13/ Viewed through the lens of life intensification, every challenge navigated ("success" or "failure" is irrelevant so long as you come out alive) brings you face-to-face with a newer, more intensely alive version of yourself that you can either accept or reject. A pull request from a possible future-you that you can either merge with or reject.