29 maio Confessions of a parascientist

“I am nothing. I will never be anything. I cannot wish to be anything. Apart from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world.”
— Álvaro de Campos, better known as Fernando Pessoa.

If there’s one question that has haunted me for years, it’s this: How, exactly, do I define myself? Not in the existential sense—that, frankly, isn’t worth the effort. I mean the professional label. The one that should be on my ID badge, my work card, or my LinkedIn bio.

I’ve rewritten my own job description so many times that anyone watching from afar probably thinks I’m having an identity meltdown. And honestly? They wouldn’t be wrong. It’s a chronic restlessness. A utopia without a period.

For years, I’ve chased the surgical word, the perfect definition, the ideal nomenclature—one that’s not only accurate but also lets me feel comfortable filling out a form at a department store, explaining to my mom what I do, or answering, with a confident smile, that classic question at a kid’s birthday party: “So, what do you do for a living?”

At 62, I have one absolute certainty in life: what I’m not.

I am not a scientist.
I am not an academic.
I am not a guru.

I have the tics of a specialist, the look of a scholar, and the speech patterns of a researcher, but none of those quite fit the chaotic, mildly Renaissance space I inhabit. What comforts me (a little) is knowing that — epistemologically speaking — I don’t belong to the army of performative know-it-alls flooding the market with shallow ideas disguised as genius. But now, as in every other time, I feel I’ve found the word that defines me: parascientist.

Off the tracks, but not off the rigor

No, this is not a title. Nor a flag. It’s just a supposedly honest attempt to give visible shape to a trajectory that has gone — and still goes — off the traditional rails of knowledge production. Not because I despise those rails. On the contrary. Formal education is, to me, one of humanity’s greatest achievements. It is essential, vital, and in most cases, irreplaceable.

But due to various circumstances, unconscious choices, or perhaps accidents along the way, I ended up on the other edge of the blade. And on this path, one alternative imposed itself with brutal clarity: either I created my own systems of learning, investigation, and knowledge construction, or I’d spend the rest of my life applauding other people’s intelligence. And let’s be honest, that second option was never my style. I confess: I’m intellectually vain. Vain, but not showy.

I study what cuts through me

I constantly coexist with a question that is never asked outright, but hovers in the subtext of every interaction, every lecture, class, or published article. You can almost hear the unspoken whisper: “But who are you to say that?”

The answer is disarmingly simple: I’m someone who chose not to outsource his own thinking. If academia is one possible and legitimate path for constructing knowledge, there is another one — more winding, more solitary, more unpredictable — but no less legitimate. Feyerabend already warned: “The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.” (1975). And in my case, what worked was ignoring the boundaries of the official cartography.

I am, forgive the swearword, an autodidact. I know from experience that this word, for some cultural reason that deserves its own article, can quickly turn admiration into suspicion, respect into mockery, and sometimes even into repulsion. It’s sad. It’s unpleasant. But I get it. I get it because, ironically, one of the subjects of my study is precisely this behavioral phenomenon: people’s difficulty in detaching themselves from majority thinking, in letting go of institutional validation, and allowing themselves—consciously or not—to reflect honestly and independently. I get it, but it still hurts.

Bourdieu said it best. In his concept of the “scientific field,” what credentials you isn’t exactly what you know, but who authorizes you to know. (The Scientific Field, 1983).

In theory and in practice

What few people know — and many don’t even care to know — is that my work is to observe, study, investigate, and build models about human creative behavior. Models that didn’t arise from empty speculation, or hunches disguised as insights, much less from shallow readings of a few PDFs. If there’s anything that guides me, it’s what Thomas Kuhn described: “Normal science is, for the most part, a deeply conservative activity.” (1962). And it’s precisely in the cracks of that conservatism that I operate.

Everything I’ve produced — and continue producing — comes from decades of observation, obsessive study, practical experimentation, and meticulous reflection. My field of work is that space where cognition, behavior, creativity, and adaptation intersect — not as academic abstractions, but as living, applicable, operational tools.

Finding my coordinates

I’m not interested in competing for authority. I’m not. I’m also not interested in demonizing academia — it is not my enemy. I’m simply raising my hand and asking to speak because naming is occupying. Naming is existing. Pretending that a trajectory like mine doesn’t demand a public clarification of what it is — and especially of what it is not — would be cowardice disguised as humility.

A parascientist is not someone who rejects science. Nor someone who lives on the fringe of the exotic, much less someone flirting with mysticism dressed as cognition. A parascientist is someone who chooses to develop knowledge outside the bureaucratic protocols of academia, but within the non-negotiable boundaries of rigor, logic, observation, and consistent construction of models about reality. Or, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it: “We need an ecology of knowledges.” (Beyond Abyssal Thinking, 2010). And it is precisely in this terrain — outside the monocultures of knowledge — that I’ve built my home.

Freedom (with asterisks)

I’m not a stage specialist. I don’t teach “everything.” I don’t perform erudition on social media. I don’t give opinions on things I haven’t studied. And I don’t participate in the digital vanity contest that today disguises itself as knowledge production.

My work is specific, defined — and perhaps for exactly that reason, incredibly free. I investigate how the mind operates to create, resist, protect itself, and adapt. And from that, I design systems, frameworks, and models that help individuals and organizations understand, map, and transform those behaviors. And from this work, this subversive — but epistemologically legitimate — path, emerged what I now call the Szkło Ecosystem™: a living system of tools, practices, and organic models for those who, like me, prefer to think outside conventional scripts, but within structured reasoning. It includes, among other elements, the Neurocreative Architecture™, the Neurocreative Engineering™, the Creative Ideation Pipeline, the Szkło Creative Potential Test, and the Creative Awakening Journey.

Parascientist of creativity

I didn’t write these confessions to convince anyone. Maybe to convince myself. I didn’t write to be accepted. Or maybe that too. Being a parascientist doesn’t save me from insecurity, doesn’t solidify my self-esteem, and doesn’t guarantee results. I wrote because, between the arrogance of certainty and the delirium of belief, there’s a territory where few dare to live. That’s where the parascientist lives.

Off the maps.
Within rigor.
At the margins of seals.
At the center of thought.