What Is Your Purpose? — Issue #5: Ash Stuart
A look inside the mind of a modern-day polymath.
👋 Hi everyone,
Welcome to Issue #5 of What Is Your Purpose? — our biweekly series where I invite writers from around the web to share the deeper why behind what they do. The goal? To explore what keeps them grounded, focused, and moving forward, especially when things get hard.
Quick reminder: If you’d like to be featured in a future edition, a few slots are still open. Just DM me here on Substack 💬 or reach out at 📧 camilo@self-disciplined.com.
Today’s guest is a fascinating one. Ash Stuart describes himself as a engineer, technologist, polyglot, linguist, and geek — but that’s just the beginning. He’s also a researcher, consultant, and writer whose interests span AI and tech, history and futurism, economics and finance, business and geopolitics.
A true jack of all trades.
Ash is the writer behind several thought-provoking publications, including Vīta Brevis, Wit Artefāctōrum Ætērna, and Polymathon. In each, he explores complex topics through a multidisciplinary lens, navigating, in real time, the rich and sometimes stormy seas of intersecting fields.
So, what drives Ash to write about all this? What keeps him going?
Let’s hear it from him directly.
The Flickering Spark of Curiosity
We are born curious. Immensely curious. We are filled with wonderment about the world around us, we want to try, we want to discover, we want to know. We ask, we inquire, we demand; about this, that and yonder: what is this, why is that, yes but why?
And then comes school, ostensibly the avenue for us to be imparted with knowledge, surely that should whet our curious appetite, enhance it, augment it even more? But it turns out, school kills curiosity. Our education system prioritizes conformity over curiosity. Material regurgitation over knowledge exploration. Examination over experimentation.
But I was having none of it. Without going so far as to claim some kind of exceptionalism, I’d still like to think that I fought exceptionally hard to preserve my curiosity, at the cost of conformity, all the comfort conformity brings, and perhaps much else. A trait which by adulthood seems severely attenuated I retained, even fostered, further amplified.
From Spark to All-Consuming Flame
A large part of my journey through life has been dedicated to satisfying this insatiable curiosity. It has often been at the cost of other pursuits and pleasures. It has been across several fields. It has been in the sciences and in the arts. In technology and the humanities. In engineering and in history. In fields perhaps useful perhaps useless and perhaps somewhere in between: etymology, epistemology, economics, business, finance, geopolitics, rhetoric, futurism; the sciences such as mathematics and physics alongside social sciences such as anthropology and psychology; philology and philosophy.
Each new stone I turned, each new door I opened, each new gem I uncovered, I only realized that there was so much more, beyond each horizon there was a world far vaster, with each new milestone reached there was another one beckoning: run rabbit run, dig that hole, forget the sun, and when at last the work is done.. it’s time to dig another one.
It’s been exhilarating going down these rabbit holes, finding tasty nuggets of knowledge; it’s like a squirrel collecting nuts even though winter is not nigh; a python devouring everything on its path even when not hungry. Hungry but not hungry.
(There’s a lot more I can say in the evolution of my own thought process and experience, and in fact, I have spoken about this at length in my personal introduction, so I won’t repeat that bit here). Let me instead get to how this more concretely leads to my purpose here:
First Principles First
I started with a point about curiosity.
Why are we born curious? The answer I think is quite simple: our existence, our very survival depends on it!
The key evolutionary purpose, in my mind, of curiosity, is to propel every member of a species to seek to understand reality - its environment, its needs, its very existence. Thus I posit that curiosity is one of the very cornerstones of the existence and survival of an organism, and its species: if a creature was not curious, it wouldn’t seek to understand the reality around it, and would soon be taken over by another creature, perhaps of another species, which was and did.
So what are the tools we have at our behest to understand reality?
Fundamentally, it’s intelligence. In the context of my argument here, intelligence is what we - humans, but to different degrees, all species - have, in our quest to satisfy our innate curiosity and make sense of the world around us.
Intelligence is a very powerful tool. It allows us to recognize patterns in our perceived reality and process them to our needs. It allows us to visualize and predict potential actions by other actors in the environment and modify our own behavior accordingly. Intelligence is the very basis of life, and by extension many of the systems we build in life.
And, given intelligence, what are the means we have at our disposal to understand reality?
I would mention observation, reasoning and learning. We observe the world as it were. Why? Because we are curious. We reason about it. Why? Because we are curious why. And we learn from our observations and our reasoning.
And in all these, it’s our intelligence that enables us at each step along the way: it’s with observation that our intelligence can do its pattern-matching, which combined with reasoning enriches our ability to process reality, enhancing our mental model of reality - the learning.
And, using these tools and means, what are the props we have within our grasp to understand reality?
(This is what I have been exploring in my work, continuing the above reflection in Wherefore Curiosity, and so won’t repeat that here either).
From Purpose to Practical: The Path to Polymathy
My purpose has been to synthesize all that I have gathered in the course of this personal multi-disciplinary pursuit and share it with the world. Starting with a first-principles approach - get down right to the very fundamentals and build up from there, as I’ve laid out in the set of my introductory articles (in my 2 publication streams here and here).
For this purpose to be meaningful, I take a two-pronged approach: one on principle, and one practical.
Here’s a practical scenario: with the advent of advanced machine intelligence, I posit that specialist expertise will become a thing of the past. Those of us who choose to develop cross-disciplinary focus, augmenting our own brains with AI, will get ahead of the specialists.
The future belongs to generalist experts, and empowering us to get there is my concrete goal here.
But there will be rewards beyond the purely pragmatic: if you value knowledge for knowledge’s sake; if you think, like Socrates declared, a life without inquiry is not worth living. So in that spirit, let me end with this:
Stephen Covey said, live, love, learn and leave a legacy: lest that be too lofty for me to labor, here’s my little shot at sharing what little I’ve learned in my life.
- Ash
Thanks, Ash, for offering this fantastic peek into your mind.
I’m an avid reader and lifelong learner; learning is what led me to create this newsletter in the first place. So I deeply resonate with the drive that fuels Ash’s work.
We met by serendipity, but since then we’ve stayed in touch, and I’ve had the honor of reading several of his pieces, this one included. His writing is rich with insight, grounded in knowledge, and guided by a clear sense of purpose.
Ash doesn’t just write to be heard; he writes to share, to teach, and to spread ideas far and wide. And he works tirelessly to make that happen.
At the time of publishing this, he already has enough writing work lined up for the next 6 to 9 months.
He’s not just thinking about the road ahead… He’s already walking it.
When you have purpose, nothing can stop you.
It certainly isn’t stopping Ash.
Have a wonderful week!
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