About

I am Yash. I write about the ways people make each other smaller, and about what physics and philosophy have to say about possibility, time and attention. Two manuscripts so far, neither published.

I also work in marketing, which pays for the writing and gets one page of its own. That page is here →, and it is deliberately the least interesting thing on the site.

This page used to be a summary of what I sell. It seemed more useful to describe how I think, since that is the thing everything else follows from.

01 · Method

Four habits of mind

These are not beliefs. They are procedures I run on my own thinking, mostly because I have been wrong in the same four ways often enough to recognise the shape.

01
Name the register before making the claim
A sentence about entanglement is either a statement about particles or a metaphor about people, and it cannot quietly be both. Almost all of the nonsense written about quantum mechanics and human life comes from letting one register borrow the authority of the other.
02
Prefer the version that is harder on me
Where two readings of an event both fit, the one that implicates me is usually the more accurate and always the more useful. This is the least pleasant of the four and the one that has changed the most.
03
Treat certainty as a symptom
Not as a sign of error, but as a thing to look at rather than through. Confidence tends to arrive earliest on the questions where I have the least evidence and the most to gain from an answer.
04
Write it down before deciding whether it is true
Most of what I think turns out to be unfinished, and the unfinished state is only visible in sentences. This is why both books exist and why the writing here tends to arrive before the conclusion does.
02 · The question

What I keep returning to

One problem sits underneath everything else I write, and it is not really a physics problem. It is that a fear about a person can produce the behaviour that brings about the thing feared.

Insecurity becomes a need for reassurance. Reassurance becomes an expectation. Expectation becomes pressure. Pressure changes how the other person behaves. And then the person who was afraid points at the result and says they knew all along. Nothing supernatural happened. A prediction was made, and then acted on, until it came true.

The interesting part is not that we are wrong about each other. It is that being wrong about each other is a mechanism, and mechanisms can be interrupted.

Quantum mechanics comes into this as a vocabulary, not an explanation. It gives precise words for possibility before it resolves, for the way observation participates in what is observed, and for the difference between not knowing something and it not yet being settled. Those words are useful for describing people. They are not evidence about people. Keeping that distinction visible is most of the work.

03 · The rule

Where the physics stops

You will find a short note on the books → pages, and again on the work → page, setting out plainly what is being claimed and what is not. It is there because this subject attracts a particular kind of writing that I want no part of.

So, once, in general terms. I do not think consciousness creates physical reality. I do not think two people are literally entangled in the sense a physicist means. I do not think quantum mechanics demonstrates that wanting something makes it happen. Where I use the language of physics about human life, I am borrowing a structure of thought, and I will say so at the point of borrowing rather than in a disclaimer at the bottom.

This costs something. It rules out the more thrilling version of every argument here. I think that is a good trade, and if it turns out to be the only thing this site is remembered for, that is fine.

04 · Scope

What this site is not

Worth stating early, because the subject matter sits next to several things it is not.

Not therapy
I have no clinical training. Where something here describes a pattern you recognise, that is a starting point for a conversation with someone qualified, not a substitute for one.
Not manifestation
The opposite, if anything. The argument is that expectations shape behaviour, which is a claim about psychology, and a much smaller claim than the one usually made in this vocabulary.
Not physics education
I am a reader of this material, not a physicist. Where I describe the science I try to describe it accurately, and the references exist so you can check me.
Not a funnel
Nothing here is selling anything. There is no course, no coaching, and no newsletter waiting behind the third paragraph. The commercial work lives on a different domain on purpose.
05 · Two places

Why there are two sites

For a long time this domain tried to hold both halves, and the result served neither. Someone arriving to read about attachment and fear had to scroll past search engine strategy, and someone arriving to hire a marketer had to work out why the same person was writing about the block universe.

So they were separated. Same person, two rooms, and neither audience has to pretend to be interested in the other.

THIS SITE
yashtulsyani.com
The books, the essays, the reading, and the thinking. Marketing appears once, as a profession, and is not the subject.
THE WORKING SITE
fullstackdigitalmarketer.com
Services, free tools, and the long-form writing about the craft. Everything commercial happens there.
Go there →

Where to start

The books are the fullest version of the argument. The reading list is the honest account of where it came from. If you disagree with something, that is more interesting to me than agreement, and the contact page still works.

The books The writing What I’m reading Get in touch