Mirror, Meaning
and Magic

I grew up in Beijing, China just after the Cultural Revolution, then immigrated to South Africa at the tail end of Apartheid. I was shaped by a Dutch Afrikaans society, fed on American media, bound to British customs, and attended a Black-majority school made up of seven different African ethnicities. Things weren’t nearly as confusing as what went on at home. You can say that self-reflection is basically my destiny.

This crossing of worlds happened concurrently with the development of the internet. It led me into a career where, like many remote workers, I became a portal for hire: UX for Google, Paris Hilton pool floats, workshops for financial institutions, a campaign for a rap battle in Lagos, a Bulgarian cookbook, mobile gaming, product design for male fertility… the list goes on. Alongside this were three decades of uninterrupted internet consumption and travels across eighteen countries. I didn’t lack a sense of identity; I was managing one that could run the many. Reflecting, processing and keeping information organized wasn’t just something I did for my job; it was necessary so that I wasn’t cooked from switching contexts between vastly different worlds.

But as I got more self-aware and did the work of reflecting regularly, by my early 30s I noticed a dip in my agency. The more ‘intelligent’ I became, the less able I was to act on what truly mattered to me. I felt trapped inside a metacognitive fever dream. I could feel my deeper purpose pulling me, but after having done so much, what exactly is it? When I wasn’t working, I read and researched desperately, experimenting with different modalities, interests and methods. Yet no matter what I thought, tried or did, I couldn’t maintain momentum in my own projects. I was locked into the life I had built, but locked out of my own dream. I could translate between worlds, yet I myself never crossed any realm whole.

My mind became an ouroboros of its own design, using yesterday’s unresolved narrative to eat today’s potential, mistaking the act of describing myself for the act of living my truth.

For a long time I misdiagnosed this as a ME problem. Procrastination. Lack of focus. Lack of purpose. Unresolved trauma. I even hired a brand strategist to help me make sense of my stuff.

Therapy, coaching and wellness practices are vital for our emotional and somatic processing, and they are partly designed to repair the architectural errors in how our internal information is handled via schemas, behaviour patterns and narrative models. But sometimes, this can generate even more density and produce the opposite effect, where clarity does not lead to agency. This is when I began to get the sense that maybe, the tree of knowledge is no longer adequate to hold our multitudes, and we may need to rebuild the architecture of knowing, starting with ourselves.

We have access to unprecedented information abundance. Coupled with easier migration and shifting geopolitics, the ability for an individual to synthesize, access, parse, verify, analyze, compute, hold and integrate personal truths has become a sophisticated survival function, a daily activity of the knowledge worker and no longer a personality trait.

And that capacity requires the right inner infrastructure.

The same way you cannot have a thriving city without well-connected neighborhoods, or pipes that guide water, how can we expect the informational properties of the self to stay fluid and coherent without structural support.

Claude Shannon, the father of the digital age, who showed how to encode information into bits, which makes computers, the internet and digital communication possible, coined the idea that information reduces uncertainty. But Shannon was careful to distinguish the mathematical measurement of information from its meaning. Our cloud storage may have birthed from this, but the system we use to organize meaning has largely remained the same.

The majority of the Western world have used The tree of knowledge as a house for minds for centuries: the classification model behind Descartes’ tree of philosophy, Diderot’s Encyclopédie and every university department, with one trunk, branches splitting into separate fields, and each thing filed in exactly one place.

Most of us organize self-knowledge the same way.

But digital information behaves differently.

It is hyperlinked, embedded, instantly referenced and connected in a web that we know is just one prompt away. For example, do we internally file an hour browsing YouTube as exploring our hobbies, a learning method or a ritual time filler? If I read the comments section for hours at a time, is that still considered reading?

The boundaries of our inner reality are shifting as the structures that used to contain them are dissolving.

I've come to believe that we need new ways to approach self-reflection beyond journaling, planning, contemplation or artistic creation: a way to interact with the architecture that houses our knowing, so that not only do we feel a sense of inner truth, we can also understand our relationship to what we know.

Consciousness is a mystery. Self-reflection is recursive. How do we express the invisible physics of our inner dimensions? Since the early days of tech I have wondered: what if we could see inside our minds? A way to be closer to the magic that powered my being? As AI became more advanced, my first instinct was to dive in and make something tangible. I created many AI-powered self analysis tools using my existing data and inputs, but the more I made, the more plainly I saw... No.

This is not it.

Data extraction of ourselves generates more data synthesis.

More information.

This is not it.

I couldn't Marie Kondo my mental clutter, the tools that helped me to process just became more outputs I didn't need. Hundreds of application prototypes gathered in my folder like mounds of disfigured pottery.

But then I noticed something interesting.

I started to anticipate how each application would feel before I even typed it to AI.

Just like how we'd anticipate the feeling of clay if we've potted for a while.

By interacting with my own software, I have gained an intuitive familiarity with my mind's operating environment. And that’s when I realized, interface design, is a medium for self-reflection. Because interface, is the art of translation between worlds. Specifically, the invisible structures that guide the exchange of information and intent. By repeatedly using the software I made to express the invisible, I got to feel out the invisible structure of my mind at work, through interaction instead of introspection! No data input or output, design itself became a container of intuitive structure, and through repeated use, I became more intimate with the shape of my mind. Errors in the architecture of how I processed the past, came up without deliberate effort. Childhood wounds that I never fully understood, became structurally visible because the interfaces were built with the same mind. Disparate interests found expression through UI choices that I never realized had so much potential. The digital surface became a living rorschach for my inner world.

As a UX professional who has created countless user flows, I never thought that one day my own interface would guide me towards freedom, towards my inner truth.

You might ask, but isn’t everyone’s mind different? What if it only worked for me?

Well, I don't doubt that everyone's interface expression may be different, but I am certain that the medium of design is able to reveal the invisible structures that make up our identity architecture. Because if design isn't a universal language, we would not all be able to use the same apps daily.

If UX principles can successfully create one-size-fits-all, then it is possible to achieve the reverse: designer software built to accentuate the beauty of your unique mind, to reflect the depth of our lived history and reinforce behaviours that not only benefit us, but suit us. Design at large have served a commercial function for so long that we have neglected to see it for what it is: a practice in deciding how things relate, what comes first, what sits next to what, and what we return to, while keeping in touch with how it all feels. It is the art of guiding intention and attention, giving information structure and room allowing for understanding to emerge.

UX, user experience, designs for the many: one product shaped so that millions of people can use it the same way. IX, individual experience, turns that around. The individual is the source of the technology. Your history, the way you think and the way you relate to what you know decide the shape of the interface, so using it shows you your own inner world more clearly. This is what I mean by technology for inner life.

To test whether what I discovered had value for others, I spent the next two and a half years on a self-funded quest to unlearn and relearn the UX principles that had shaped my career, and then tested it on a handful of existing clients who were open to working with my new experimental methods. From this period, I learnt that if the individual is treated as the source of technology, then UX becomes an expression of identity rather than a function of usability. Paradox, bias and disconnection as may be terrible for building rocket ships, but they are essential to the continuous, luminous and emotional reality of our inner lives. Rather than trying to break our habit of reaching for our phones, we could utilize this very ritual and design personal instruments for the human spirit instead of responding to cognition as a constant problem to solve.

This inquiry into how we can express the identity architecture that govern systems, self and spirit, as well as my devotion to the inner life, is what gave rise to The Metaphysics Agency. As a practice, it utilizes a combination of systems thinking, interface design and symbolic inquiry. To anchor these in tangible projects, I have chosen to focus on three types:

This work is the beginning of The Metaphysics Agency. My story may be different to yours, but I know that we all carry immense histories within us, connected far beyond the physical. I hope to serve others who wish to cross different realms whole, to gain clarity of their dreams, and to build better relationships to the knowledge that they hold. As I continue sharing methodologies, discoveries and experiments along the way, I welcome you to join my mission in reimagining technology for inner life. You can find me on Substack or drop me a message at hello@metaphysics.agency. If this work speaks to you, you can also become an agent.