Most productivity advice treats your future self as a reliable executor — someone who will, given enough clarity today, simply do what needs doing. But the 13th-century philosopher Nagarjuna had a destabilizing insight: there is no fixed 'self' that persists through time in the way we assume. What we call 'the self' is more like a river — continuous in appearance, but made of different water at every moment. This matters practically, because when you design a system, a routine, or a stripped-down workspace 'for yourself,' you're actually designing it for a stranger who shares your memories. The person who sits down Monday morning is not the person who built the system Friday afternoon. Nagarjuna's concept of anātman — the absence of a permanent, unchanging self — isn't a counsel of despair; it's a design principle. Stop optimizing for the self you think you are, and start building environments that work for the self you'll actually be: tired, distracted, in a different mood, operating with different priorities. The most durable simplicity isn't the kind that requires you to be consistent. It's the kind that doesn't.

Name one system, routine, or workspace you set up that assumes a version of yourself you rarely actually are. What is it assuming?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy / Cognitive Psychology of Self-Continuity — Nagarjuna