11^st December, 2025 • Søren Aas

The Free Hotdog Paradox or How Writing Exposed My Problems

There’s a moment that reveals everything about how I’ve learned to protect myself: someone offers me something free, something good, and I reflexively say no.

Not because I don’t want it. Not because I’m full. But because accepting feels like transgression somehow.

I’ve spent years refusing free hotdogs—literally and metaphorically. I told myself it was minimalism, efficiency, being low-maintenance. The aesthetic of the empty desk, the virtue of less. But recently I’ve had to face an uncomfortable truth: this isn’t a philosophy. It’s a coping mechanism.

Through writing I’ve been uncovering an unconscious algorithm that I am running: minimize yourself because you are too much. The pattern was invisible precisely because it automated my responses to everything, it was the way I saw the world. The water this fish swam in. What finally broke the cycle wasn’t better discipline or deeper insight—it was writing. Writing using a structured process.

How writing breaks the cycle:

• It’s external - once published, you can’t undo it (no ctrl+z for life)
• It’s witnessed - public accountability prevents private reframing
• It’s documented - the pattern becomes visible through accumulated evidence
• It’s a mirror - putting words to paper creates space for new perspectives to emerge

These properties combined with a process I am experimenting with seems to make the invisible visible. The subconscious can emerge. The process looks like this and spoiler alert - it uses AI:

• Signal arrives - a feeling, memory, pattern becomes available to consciousness
• Rough capture - write it down immediately, 80% clarity, don’t polish yet
• Conversational excavation - I give the text to AI. It unpacks and mirrors my words back, explaining what it makes of the input. This generates questions, challenges assumptions and crucially: helps preserve the signal.
• Clarification - the actual truth emerges through dialogue, rewriting, running what-if scenarios on the text
• Structure - once the signal is captured in words, I use AI to help organize, structure, spellcheck and identify rough patches.
• Publication - before publication I ensure the meaning I intended is coming through, and then make it irreversible by putting it in public space
• Integration - I now get to live with what I’ve named, I can’t unsee it now

The piece I’m sharing today came from this process. It started as a late-night refusal of a free hotdog and ended up mapping a three-way civil war I’ve been fighting since childhood—between Mind, Body, and Soul.

The example piece from the process: https://tidesofsea.com/the-free-hotdog-paradox

The hotdog is still on the counter. But now at least I can see why I keep refusing it.

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