Tagging the Soul
Preamble
The taxonomy is where private residue becomes queryable. The project needs tags that can find recurrence without flattening it into one generic mood.
Tag Groups
Vectors name direction. States name weather. Catalysts name the first push. Calibration names the gap. Decay names what should rot.
| Group | Job |
|---|---|
| Vectors | track direction relative to core values |
| States | name the internal weather of a period |
| Catalysts | mark where movement begins |
| Calibration | measure the gap between stated intent and observed work |
| Decay | hold zombie patterns, stale labels, and dead habits |
The taxonomy is a theory of the self disguised as metadata. Once a tag exists, the system can find it again. That gives memory shape, and it also gives the tag gravity: future entries may bend toward the category the machine has learned to notice.
Public Boundary
The private taxonomy can be richer than the public one. The garden publishes the safe shape of the pattern and keeps raw journal tags out of public view.
The logbook architecture keeps taxonomy human-gated:
core.yamlholds approved themescandidates.yamlholds watched themesarchive.yamlholds retired themes
The machine can propose a pattern during review. It cannot promote one alone.
Why It Matters
Classification needs pruning and provenance because stale labels can outlive the pattern that created them. The system has to know when a label still helps, when it should be watched, and when it should stop shaping the present.
The tags become hooks, the hooks become branches, and the branches become a map of what keeps returning.
A useful tag makes recurrence inspectable. A bad tag turns one period’s language into a permanent lens and makes private life easier to file than to understand.
Requirements Boundary
This taxonomy needs an ontology that keeps intent, state, action, avoidance, performance, and emotional residue separate enough for the therapist to reason over them. A bucket of moods would make the system feel perceptive while giving it almost nothing to compare.
The three-zone lifecycle matters for that reason. core.yaml holds trusted themes, candidates.yaml holds watched possibilities, and archive.yaml keeps retired patterns visible without letting them dominate the next read.