Uphill

In the history of mankind, we never had this many options to choose from as we do today.

What to eat, where to go, what to do, what to watch and what not. The options are stacking up infinitely. However, instead of liberating us through choice, we have been bounded by the shackles of indecision. How many times has it happened to you, that you open netflix or youtube or any other streaming platform and gets overwhelmed with just the options available for you to watch?

Barry Schwartz calls this Paradox of Choice - every choice carries the wight of every other choice you didn't make.

Here is what i think is happening, when I opened youtube and saw that there are two options, a new minecraft video by parrot and a new podcast by the why files. Instead of looking at the entertainment value that i will get from watching any of the video, I start looking into the value that I would loose if I don't optimize for the best value. But when I look at it closely, it wasn't about the value at all, it was about indecision. If for some reason one of the videos would have gone away on its own, I would have been fine. Not because the video is gone, but a decision was made for me but not by me.

In life, sometimes we are not afraid of making choices, but we are afraid of making wrong choices and spend endless time in optimizing for the best result on account of being thorough.

Due to this very specific reason, in Uphill a feature was added called Dice of Fate - two options, one choice and no re-rolls. You type your options, you roll and you accept the result. That's the whole thing.

It sounds trivial. But if anyone hesitates before hitting roll - that pause is very telling.

Because the dice doesn't make the decision hard. You already did that. The dice just makes you stop pretending you haven't already decided.

The internet gave everyone a microphone. And we have been talking ever since.

Every passing thought gets a tweet. Every frustration finds a comment section. Every opinion, no matter how half-formed, gets published before it has had a chance to breathe. We have confused the act of speaking with the act of thinking — and they are not the same thing.

The thoughts you have are not gold. Most of them are noise. And the only way to find out which is which is to sit with them long enough to hear yourself properly.

The Stoics called it self-examination - the daily practice of questioning your own reasoning before the world gets a chance to. Not to silence yourself, but to understand why you say what you say. Because a person who can refine their own thinking before they speak it is not just more articulate. They are more honest.

But that kind of conversation cannot happen on X. It cannot happen on a Reddit board. Those places reward the loudest version of your thought, not the truest one.

Uphill has a feature called The Void — you type, and the words dissolve. Nothing saved, nothing shared. It is less of a journaling tool and more of a mirror. A place to hear yourself without an audience.

Most people don't know they needed it until they use it.

A specific kind of anxiety knocks on the door on sunday afternoon, when you have nothing urgent to do and are trying to relax. It is not induced by boredom or sadness, but resemble much closer to guilt - it feels like you are wasting something, your potential, time, something.

Somehow we have convinced ourselves that if we are not doing multiple things at once, we are not fully utilizing our resources. At work we have either music, podcasts or some obscure video playing in the background. When we are with friends and family, we keep switching between the conversation and some other topic of work or school. Even inside the house, one eye is glued to TV, one to our phone, one ear listening to the conversation in the house and another waiting for the food to be delivered.

Why do we do this? Just because we have confused our mind in thinking that motion = momentum. Does this helps? absolutely not,

Seneca wrote it a long time ago: "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it." The distractions that we have riddled our lives with are one of the reasons why everything feels draining. And yet we keep adding more.

While building Uphill, I made the deliberate call to not include any graphs, number of tasks completed in last day, week, month. Just because the moment appearance of productivity becomes trackable, we start following the numbers instead of actual work.

May be the honest thing anyone can do today is to find time to STOP.
If you do this today, I promise the Boulder will be here tomorrow for you to push.

The same species that deigned the spacecraft for the moon landing stays up thinking about something that was said 9 years ago.

The same mind that creates these amazing melodies falls victim to watching 20 reels of cats getting scared by cucumber.

I dont think this is a glitch, I think this is how we were designed.

The moment the stakes are not real we are likely to lose the focus we previously had. We consider things like jobs, relationships, and building a legacy to be meaningful, but for most things we just don't think about it.

The ancient Greeks captured the feeling of doing a task that has no end or positive outcome but is repetitively done as Sisyphus. Camus didn't think of it as punishment but rather as the human experience. Every end of day has no real ending. Just another day.

Building Uphill has made me think about a lot of different things - a to-do app where you literally push tasks to the top of the screen to complete them and feel resistance on how “heavily” you’ve weighted them. No badges, No #count of tasks completed today, No graphs. May be sometimes a notification that says “The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Your deadline is Tuesday.”

We are not supposed to compete with yesterday all the time. Sometimes its better to just do the work.