Wrestling With Eels
Can You Observe Yourself When the Ground Is Moving?
1
“Thick fog drifts eternally over the water’s surface. Through the steaming cloud from the foam the tops of the tall palms emerge. When a ray of the glowing evening sun penetrates the damp vapors, there begins an optical magic. Colorful rainbows disappear and then return.”
Alexander v. Humboldt, Views of Nature
About a year ago, I walked in the shade of Aleppo pines, along the Adriatic coastline of a dreamy vacation park beyond its prime years. Listening to podcasts of people smarter than me, I followed some concrete slabs on to a small headland of reddish rocks cast into a sea like epoxy resin. From my vantage point the park with its tennis courts, rusty playground constructions and deserted beach bars resembled the dioramas I had built as a kid. I felt sun-dizzy with a sense of total control, as if the world was my laboratory.
This was the moment I got seized by the spirit of scientific self improvement. Things suddenly amalgamated and I took down a note on my sandy phone: “But how to figure out what’s next? The obvious way is experimentation: a structured way to learn from your environment with limited investment and managed risk. It’s a practical application of scientific methodology, that makes sense in many areas of life.”
A frenzy followed: I was sure I had found an opening in the constraints of my life, and I wanted to crawl into it.
When I finished my walk I was fully set up to run on experimentation, making life my lab, documented by numerous datapoints. I had rewired my note-taking system, my to-do list and probably my prefrontal cortex as well.
My scientific episode lasted about three weeks. I did not finish a single experiment. I think the reason I failed my experimental ambitions was not a lack of commitment or discipline. If you take “experimentation” seriously (and I did) then you have to establish a stable baseline first and then modify single parameters to trace change. And this is where we find the issues. None of the things I cared about (Sleep, Fitness, Mood, “Productivity”, ...) could be considered an isolated parameter. Everything influenced everything else. My baseline was moving too fast. A week after I obsessed over “running my life on experiments”, something else happened that occupied my focus and affected my behaviour. The trigger might have been a lesson I learned navigating my days with kid, dog and spouse. Or another smart essay I read online. There is always something to jeopardize the stable conditions a science-ish experiment would demand. The more I move into the sphere of self improvement, the more I pay attention to how I do things. And the faster I seem to change.
While these obstacles to scientific self-improvement are timeless, there is another challenge that seems rather contemporary. Open YouTube on a weekday afternoon. Within three ads you will meet them: jaw-clenched men standing in front of leased Lambos, promising you the protocol that changed their lives. Investment schemes, that one exercise to pump your trapezius muscles, STOP doing this one habit at work and instead buy a truckload of dubious food supplements.
Quantified Self and Sigma Grindset might have been avantgarde attitudes some years ago. But something changed. The hustlers keep hustling, but their takes feel familiar. Their hair starts to grey and their self actualization seems a bit desperate. Whenever I get harassed by Self-Improvement-Dim-Wits in Youtube Advertisements I not only feel seen by the algorithm. I feel a sense of second-hand embarrassment and to be honest, some pity. I think we (as in “me”) have moved on by now, to a terrain that is far less clear in its coordinates. And this makes scientific self improvement even harder. An experiment has to start with a thesis, driven by a motivation. And if I am really honest to myself, which I should be as I am tweaking my lifeOS, figuring out my intentions is the hardest thing.
I realise that self-experimentation inspired by scientific methodology has become a dated method. Yet rejecting it entirely is hard. The impulse still pulls. It seems I, and maybe others too, am in a transitory state, caught between old ideas clinging, while silhouettes of what might replace them shine through the fog sometimes.
2
“What is the nature of life? What is its deep structure; what governing forces shape the appearances we see? We simply do not know. Science is arrested here, for the springs of vitality are not yet accessible to its methods. [My poem] serves as a placeholder, a visible marker that makes evident not what is known but what is not (…) thereby opening a visible gap in the fabric of knowledge.”
Alexander v. Humboldt, Views of Nature
While Alexander von Humboldt was considered the most-important living European next to Napoleon1 his relevance had waned towards the end of his life. Charles Darwin always admired Humboldt, yet when they finally met, Darwin was unimpressed by the chatty old man.2 Emil du Bois-Reymond, another disciple of Humboldt, described his late mentor “a living ruin” in a speech after Humboldt’s death.3 In private, du Bois-Reymond shared the same sentiment, calling Humboldt “antediluvian”, which is “something from before the biblical floods”.4
On his explorations, Humboldt came up with several concepts modern scientists take for granted today: he invented isothermal maps, discovered the magnetic equator, founded the discipline of Plant Geography and was one of the first to identify human intervention as a main cause for climate change. But despite his long lasting contributions, Humboldt’s practice jarred with the streamlined apparatus of professional science emerging as Humboldt was getting old.
While Humboldt was obsessive on collecting data in the field, he resisted the early impulse of crunching numbers on his observations. After discovering how Earth’s magnetism varies with latitude, he handed the work of integrating the data into mathematical formulas to his friend Carl Gauss. Moving from raw data to modeling was not the thing Humboldt cared about. He consistently refused to polish his publications into coherent thesis-driven devices and instead insisted on showing the overwhelming richness of his work, with all its gaps and inconsistencies. This became most apparent in his Magnum Opus Cosmos, which contained an enormous amount of footnotes and struggled to form a coherent synthesis.
Humboldt just did not care about being a scientist in the modern sense, not the least because the very term “scientist” was only coined when Humboldt already had done his major expeditions. His way of working did not match the efficiency and precision demanded by the crystalizing branches of modern science.
It is tempting to frame Humboldt as catalyst for a paradigmatic change that rendered himself obsolete. But I think the more interesting read is that Humboldt was in a transitory state. He was a forethinker of scientific modernity (and that’s what his official legacy is about) but he also represented a different mode of inquiry. Others have framed everything of Humboldt’s method that did not fit into modernity’s toolbox as an “anachronism”, but I prefer to consider him a hybrid of alternative modes for seeing the world.
Du Bois Reymond I mentioned earlier lived scientific modernity with his clean lab experiments on quantifying nerve impulses. Every petri dish a miniature glimpse of life, the scientist in total control of the arrangement. Charles Darwin on the other hand can be considered another hybrid: heavily inspired by Humboldt, Darwin shared a similar practice of note-taking, yet he opted for a much cleaner, thesis-driven way of publication, hiding a lot of the intuitive messiness from the public.
Humboldt’s science was non reproducible, embodied and embedded into the territory he was exploring. Humboldt was not building dioramas.
3
“When, after many undulations of the ground on the craggy mountainside, we finally reached the highest point of the Alto de Huangamarca, the long-veiled vault of the sky suddenly cleared. A sharp southwest wind chased away the mist
(…) For the first time, we were seeing the Pacific Ocean; we saw it clearly: next to the littoral, a great body of light, reflecting, ascending to a horizon now more than merely sensed.”
Alexander v. Humboldt, Views of Nature
My failing self experimentation might be attributed just to myself. My unstable character, my jumpiness. But there is this contemporary element I can not deny. Call it Disruption, Zeitenwende, Gramsci-Gap.5 Every generation assumes they live through unprecedented change, and they’re usually wrong. But the thesis I subscribe to6 suggests something more useful than either “everything is unprecedented” or “nothing really changes”. History happens as long, overlapping arcs of how things feel, work, and make sense. Some rising, some operational, some fading. This implies that the “in-between” of a transitory state is the honest default at any point in history. And it reveals alternative paths for our wandering.
Reading my notes back with that frame in mind, the failures I described seem less personal. Several conditions were missing which lab experiments structurally require: a baseline that holds still long enough to measure against, variables that can be isolated from each other, and an observer who is not also the system under observation.
In nineteenth-century laboratories (like du Bois-Reymond exploring nerve impulses) those three could be approximated well enough to let entire fields take off. Applied to my self in a moment like this one, none of these hold. The baseline drifts faster than the experiment runs. The variables can not be decoupled: sleep affects mood affects “productivity” affects the kid affects sleep, in a loop with no clean ingress. The observer (me) rewires themselves while running the experiments.
The configuration of my self does not sit still, and I am the moving terrain on which I have to place my self improvement toolkit. Lab science of the self belongs to a configuration that is passing. It was harder to see when the ground felt more stable, but it becomes obvious to me now. My recent experimental phase was not calculated but driven by my need to find a new lever I can grab. I had assembled a miniature replica of my life, complex but irrelevant beyond the mere purpose of self reassurance. I was building a shitty castle.7
Counter-evidence exists. Seth Roberts ate butter every morning for years and tracked his arithmetic speed; he lost weight by drinking flavorless sugar water; he stood up more and slept better. He ran disciplined N=1 for over a decade and learned things that could be replicated. The case against lab-science-of-the-self isn’t that no one had ever done it well. But doing it well requires a composure stable enough to be the baseline. Roberts maintained this stance in the 90s and 2000s. It was a coherent configuration that some people still inhabit, but others (me, perhaps you) no longer do.
Humboldt’s idiosyncratic fieldstudies provide other impulses than lab experiments. These may be considered elements for a timely way of learning things about ourselves and the world, an epistemology of divergence:
Humboldt did not speculate from his armchair but embedded himself into the matter of his interests, rediscovering South America’s territory beyond the maps of Spanish colonialism.
Humboldt wrestled with eels to learn about their electricity. On the slope of Chimborazo, mouth bleeding from height sickness, he used a cyanometer to measure the color of the sky against his own eyes. Sleeping in the mud of the Amazon river beds fueled long speculations on the impact of mosquitoes on civilizations.
When Humboldt struggled to nail down his theory of “Lebenskraft” in Views of Nature, he did not pretend. Instead he inserted a poem written years earlier, marked it as “something other than science” and let it stand for the gap. A change of registers avoided forcing his essay into artificial closure and pointed at something that might come later.
I notice a temptation to create a new personal doctrine, to announce field studies as the new method to replace scientific self experimentation. That might just start the construction of another shitty castle. I commit to this anyway. Every method is partly wrong, but the direction of failure is more interesting. Failing backwards means casting a good idea into a dead diorama. Failing forwards means keeping eyes and mind open, searching for signal and marking the gaps.
Months later, walking below beech and oak steaming from recent rain. The dog trails on. I take some notes on my phone, plain text only. A lighter harness allows me to see more. We move on together, right into the fog ahead.
It has been said that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Humboldt’s fame throughout Europe was second only to that of Napoleon himself. During those years, in the judgment of paleontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould, “Humboldt may well have been the world’s most famous and influential intellectual.” See Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey that Changed the Way We See the World (Gerard Helferich, 2004)
“When Darwin arrived at the house in Belgrave Square to meet Humboldt he was prepared with a litany of questions on plant distribution and species migration. He left three hours later dumbfounded and dismayed — the elder scientist’s flow of words barely stopped to allow Darwin to speak, let alone develop lines of inquiry into matters of interest. For three long hours Humboldt chattered away, cheerfully but endlessly, ‘beyond all reason’, as Darwin later put it.” The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Andrea Wulf, 2015)
"Wilhelm's posthumous reputation benefited from the fact that, having been carried off at the height of his powers, he was already being heroized at a time when Alexander [v. Humboldt] still lingered among the living as a sublime ruin, and was damaging his reputation in close quarters through many a senile weakness." Reden. Band 2 (Emil du Bois-Reymond, 1912)
“In private du Bois-Reymond agreed with Bence Jones (1852) that the Romanticism of Humboldt’s outlook was “antediluvian both in mind and matter”; still, his patron’s success in presenting a unified vision of nature nagged at his ambition to do the same.” Darwin and Neuroscience: The German Connection (Gabriel Finkelstein, 2019)
“The aim is not to declare the “end of modernity,” but to close out a rough analysis of the machine that took 400 years to build and turn on, making modernity possible, and sustained it for another 400 years, being patched in increasingly fragilizing ways along the way. And also to explore why its very success post-1600 began forcing a slow phase transition to a different kind of civilizational machinery which began to get constructed around 1600, right when the Modernity Machine got turned on. This machine, which I refer to as the Divergence Machine, is being completed and turned on as we speak, even as the Modernity Machine is starting to get decommissioned in bits and pieces worldwide.”The Modernity Machine III (Venkatesh Rao, 2025)
