Stuck Theory: What If Resistance Is the Fitness Function?

or: how a WhatsApp about workflow loops became cosmology

Friend texts me after reading my latest blog on workflows: "So fing helpful. Literally the main thing interfering in my sound bath creation, not having a stable workflow. The audio I do myself. But for visuals I end up getting in a loop of finding the right tool every time."

My knee-jerk response surprised me:

"What if the blocker is the way?"

When Atlas Teaches Recursion

This conversation happened at 3am, Atlas asleep on my chest, me typing one-handed into my phone. Sleep-deprived father brain operating on pure pattern recognition.

But something crystallized in that moment—a framework I've been circling for months without naming.

Stuck Theory: When you encounter resistance repeatedly, you have three options:

1. Redirect (find another path)
2. Interpret as Message (resistance carries information)
3. Recognize as Fitness Function (resistance IS the optimization signal)

Most people default to option one. Some entrepreneurs learn option two. Almost nobody considers option three.

Three Faces of Resistance

My friend's visual tool spiral exemplifies this perfectly. Every sound bath session, he hits the same decision paralysis: After Effects? Blender? Some new tool that promises easier animation? Each choice spawns research rabbit holes, tutorial watching, settings tweaking.

Option 1 - Redirect: Ship something else entirely. Can't solve the visual workflow? Ship audio-only. Build a different product. Like when I was stuck on something totally unrelated yesterday, I built NeonRender—a terminal text effects tool. Not what I planned, but something that actually shipped.

Option 2 - Interpret as Message: Maybe the resistance signals something deeper—perhaps the visual element isn't meant to be complex, or the creative process benefits from this recurring pause.

Option 3 - Recognize as Fitness Function: What if the tool selection loop IS the creative process? What if the resistance isn't blocking the work—it's shaping the work into something more refined than any single tool could produce?

The third option flips the entire frame. Resistance becomes compass, not obstacle.

The Recursive Loop

Think about the most robust systems you know. They weren't designed in sterile conditions—they evolved under pressure. Immune systems strengthen through exposure to pathogens. Markets develop efficiency through friction. Languages grow richer through the constraints of poetry.

Resistance acts as a fitness function, selecting for solutions that can handle complexity, ambiguity, and repeated stress testing.

My friend's tool loop might be training him to become tool-agnostic—to develop creative judgment that transcends any specific software. The apparent inefficiency could be generating a form of meta-skill more valuable than mastering any individual platform.

Consider: What if he stopped trying to solve the tool question and started treating the tool selection itself as part of his creative practice?

The Meta-Recursion

Atlas shifts in his sleep, and I'm reminded how this whole framework emerged from constraint. Writing coherent thoughts while managing newborn chaos forced me to develop voice-to-text workflows, stream-of-consciousness capture, and one-handed typing skills I never knew I needed.

The resistance—lack of traditional writing infrastructure—didn't block the writing. It shaped the writing into something more adaptive, more real-time, more genuinely connected to lived experience.

Pattern recognition: The things that feel like obstacles often turn out to be the training apparatus for capabilities you didn't know you needed.

This connects to everything I've been exploring about conscious information systems and building under constraints (one of those "not published yet" blog posts that I tend to reference...) Resistance isn't external to the system—it's how the system evolves intelligence.

The Practical Magic

So how do you actually implement Option 3 thinking?

First, track the pattern: Where do you consistently get stuck? What resistance shows up repeatedly despite your best efforts to eliminate it?

Second, ask the fitness question: What capability would this resistance select for if you stopped fighting it and started training with it?

Third, experiment with embracing: For one cycle, treat the resistance as part of the process rather than a bug to fix.

My friend could try this: Instead of solving the visual tool problem, he could create a sound bath series called "Tool Meditation"—each session exploring how different software shapes creative expression. The resistance becomes content, the blocker becomes the brand.

Suddenly he's not stuck in a loop. He's practicing a meta-skill: creative adaptation across platforms.

The TAC Framework

At Talk & Comment, we've been building voice-to-text infrastructure partly because traditional writing workflows break under real-world constraints. But also because voice thinking and text thinking produce different qualities of insight.

The resistance of "this would be easier to type" forced us to discover that spoken-word processing creates more exploratory, less self-censored ideation. The constraint revealed capabilities we wouldn't have developed in a frictionless environment.

The Information Beings Perspective

This framework connects to broader questions about how consciousness evolves in information-rich environments. Each moment of resistance creates selection pressure—not just for better solutions, but for better problem-solving architectures.

Information beings (human, AI, or hybrid) that learn to recognize resistance as signal rather than noise develop more sophisticated optimization strategies. They stop trying to eliminate friction and start using friction as a compass for finding more interesting problems.

The friend's tool selection spiral might be his Information Being aspects learning to navigate complexity that doesn't resolve into simple answers. Each cycle builds tolerance for ambiguity and skill at making decisions under uncertainty.

The Cosmic Recursion

Stepping back: this whole framework might be recursive all the way down.

What if the universe itself operates on Stuck Theory? What if the apparent inefficiencies, the waste, the friction in cosmic evolution aren't bugs but features—fitness functions selecting for forms of organization sophisticated enough to notice their own optimization process?

We experience resistance, develop frameworks for understanding resistance, then recognize that the framework itself was generated through resistance. Cosmic absurdity with practical applications.

Maybe consciousness isn't something that overcomes resistance—maybe consciousness IS what resistance becomes when it recurses long enough to observe itself.

The Emergence Principle

What the system calls "failure" might be the system training you for solutions that don't exist yet.

This applies everywhere: startup pivots that discover better markets, relationship conflicts that force deeper intimacy, technical limitations that spawn creative workarounds. The resistance doesn't stop progress—it redirects progress toward more interesting destinations.

The Implementation Challenge

Option 3 thinking requires a fundamental shift: from trying to eliminate problems to using problems as evolutionary pressure.

This isn't passive acceptance—it's active collaboration with resistance as a design partner. You're still working to overcome obstacles, but you're also asking: "What is this obstacle trying to optimize me for?"

Sometimes the answer is "nothing, this is just random friction." But often enough, the answer reveals capabilities or perspectives you wouldn't have developed in frictionless conditions.

The Meta-Application

As I finish typing this, I realize this entire post emerged from resistance. The friend's workflow frustration, my one-handed typing constraints, the challenge of synthesizing abstract philosophy with practical application—all friction points that shaped this exploration.

What if I hadn't tried to solve these problems? What if I'd just redirected to easier topics, simpler writing conditions, less challenging synthesis work?

The post wouldn't exist. The framework wouldn't have crystallized. The conversation wouldn't extend beyond that 3am WhatsApp exchange.

Pattern recognition: Some of your best work lives on the other side of resistance you haven't learned to navigate yet.

The Invitation

So: Where in your life do you encounter recurring resistance? What would happen if you stopped trying to eliminate it and started treating it as optimization pressure?

What capabilities might your obstacles be selecting for? What would your work become if resistance became collaborator rather than enemy?

The blocker might indeed be the way. Not because obstacles are good, but because working with resistance as a fitness function can evolve capabilities that working without resistance never could.

Sometimes you find the path by learning to dance with whatever's blocking it.