There’s this very strong desire and need to organize myself on the internet, there’s just so much (blogs, articles, lectures, videos, tweets, books, people …..) you’ve bookmarked, so much you’ve read, topics you’ve explored and forgotten, topics you’ve decided you’ll get to but never had a chance to remember, random spontaneous ideas, thoughts, and perspectives about random things.

All this information about yourself is now scattered lost and unrecalled. What’s it that’s not getting a chance to take shape? What’s really trying to take shape? Is it a part of the self that you are unable to build and let grow?

How am I being influenced (emotionally, intellectually, psychologically, etc) by the information I’m exposed to on the internet? What’re some obvious patterns I exhibit in the way interact with all this information? How’s this information-based representation of the identity taking shape? Not being able to answer these questions can sometimes be anxiety-inducing.

Well at this point, we’re actuating big parts of ourselves through the internet and software, like — buying food, listening to music, and meeting new people (people you’ll potentially fall in love with, live and build meaningful things with through the internet), learning about new ideas, I stay connected to my family and a large percentage of my friends through the internet, but most importantly I record my thoughts, feelings, and aspirations on software that’s fundamentally built on the internet. We are in a cultural moment where the rate of immersion of ourselves and the society in this medium of information like never before, the patterns that we call identity were mere reflections earlier but now they are firmer and deeper, these palpable groves being created through deeper contact with the medium. We need new tools to be able to preserve and build on our informational extensions.

How can we become more acutely aware of these information-based extensions of ourselves? How important could it be to bring all of this together in a meaningful way? What could it enable? what are some obvious gaps that we live with that could significantly enhance our lives?

All of this points to the need for an interactive and evolving quantified self (the bitself). This bitself gives us the opportunity to form a larger picture of what's happening to us, it enables us to create tools to build that larger self, for example, by measuring the number of hours you spent a week in various states of mind and correlating that with the no of calories you eat and the type of food you eat could give us insights into how certain foods affect the states of mind, which in turn can affect our productivity, relationships and overall contentedness. Just this ability to see more correlations and potentially arrive at working explanations of our reality could help us organize better. In the specific example that I talked about, this could be about the impact of the consumption of certain foods on the mind or vice versa.

Scale this ability across all facets of being, both, the part of ourselves on the internet and the one in the physical reality. It gives us the ability to build and mold ourselves to do more with ourselves. For example, maybe you could live longer like Bryan Johnson, maybe you could improve your performance at some sport like the British cycling group did with cycling, or master your physiology like Joshua Waitzkin did with HRV training.