The Curious Engineer

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Escaping Flatland

henrikkarlsson.xyz

I write essays about relationships, thinking, and agency, sometimes with my wife. We live on a windswept island in the Baltic Sea with our two daughters. Click to read Escaping Flatland, by Henrik Karlsson, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalGeneral

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
120 from 9 Oct 2021 to 22 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (27 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/feed

2026 23

  1. A project of one’s own
  2. How is music possible
  3. The hyperlocal
  4. Some remarks on being stuck, with digressions on David Hockney, developing style, and gardens
  5. First we shape our feedback loops; then they shape us
  6. On having more interesting ideas, pt. 2
  7. On child birth
  8. How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?
  9. Escaping Flatland meetups summer 2026: times and places
  10. How not to forget what matters
  11. Notes on Bakhtin
  12. Love is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion
  13. The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot
  14. Thoughts about making a career as a writer
  15. How to walk through walls
  16. Days are enormous
  17. Some relationships deepen when you tell the truth and some end
  18. Getting a better sense for when you’re thinking well and when you’re faking it
  19. The need to make art
  20. Things that connect us to ourselves, and things that don't
  21. On political power
  22. On the preparations before writing an essay
  23. Being creative requires taking risks

2025 28

  1. Reflections on my first year writing full time
  2. Just and loving seeing
  3. When I accept myself just as I am, I change
  4. A list of books and essays that I love
  5. When is it better to think without words?
  6. Agentic fragments
  7. How I read
  8. The moments
  9. Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
  10. When facing a complicated problem, don't try to solve it, try to understand it
  11. A constellation of lookers
  12. I went looking for friends, see what I found
  13. On agency
  14. On the pleasure of reading private notebooks
  15. Caring for others
  16. When writing, look at what you are trying to describe more than at your words
  17. What problem should you be working on now?
  18. Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet
  19. The newness of depth
  20. Repeat great words, repeat them stubbornly
  21. Take a part of the world that you love and give it your care
  22. Why we ended up homeschooling
  23. King of the sea snakes
  24. An essay in which my friend feels stuck and I suggest relaxing some constraints
  25. Modular life, meaningful work
  26. Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  27. A funny thing about curiosity
  28. Bring everything into the conversation layer

2024 30

  1. Things I learned working with artists
  2. A summary of what I wrote in 2024
  3. How I write essays
  4. Rationality is an underrated way to be authentic
  5. Living 80 years, you can have 8 lives
  6. 6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery
  7. Ethos and imagination
  8. Without looking it up, what do you think?
  9. On feeling connected
  10. A measuring device that tells me what is interesting
  11. Can we scale cultures that support learning?
  12. Having a shit blog has made me feel abundant
  13. Becoming perceptive
  14. Pseudonyms lets you practice agency
  15. Thinking about perceptiveness
  16. Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  17. Swimming in July
  18. Garlic and gravel
  19. Thoughts on agency
  20. Don’t sacrifice the wrong thing
  21. On having more interesting ideas
  22. Shortcuts and longcuts
  23. How to think in writing
  24. Reading challenging books with kids is fun and probably useful
  25. Self-help for cocoons
  26. The third chair
  27. Integrity
  28. Morning ritual
  29. Life update
  30. Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on

2023 30

  1. A summary of what I wrote in 2023
  2. Seeing people clearly
  3. Socratic dialogue with kids
  4. Look for people who likes the illegible you of today, not your past achievements
  5. Talking to part of a friend
  6. Notes on energy and intelligence becoming cheaper
  7. On mentors
  8. Relationships are coevolutionary loops
  9. Writing in a way that gets your thoughts to flow
  10. Being patient with problems
  11. A tongue of bright green grass reaches out into the sea
  12. The Dresden Quartet
  13. Into the Abyss
  14. When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster
  15. Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
  16. Squinting at the labyrinth from afar
  17. Two kinds of introspection
  18. The shapes of our stories limit what can be said
  19. Language models as community moderators
  20. How I wrote "Looking for Alice"
  21. Writing up
  22. Internet: a user manual
  23. Dostoevsky as lover
  24. Essays the size of cathedrals
  25. AI tutors will be held back by culture
  26. Why Sweden punches above its weight in music
  27. Where to go to sleep after all of this?
  28. Childhoods of exceptional people
  29. Looking for Alice
  30. Conversational Canyons

2022 6

  1. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
  2. Scraping training data for your mind
  3. First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us
  4. Using GPT-3 to augment human intelligence
  5. Popular education in Sweden: much more than you wanted to know
  6. Christopher Alexander's architecture for learning

2021 3

  1. Reader-Generated Essays
  2. The Learning System
  3. Apprenticeship online