Written in April 2014.
Haven’t been writing. Why? Any good reason? Feels like a natural ebb and flow. Got kind of tired. Felt like I was saying the same thing over and over again. Maybe I’m not managing my energy properly, maybe I’m not starting enough. It’s not a chore, anyway. It’s a pleasure, a privilege, and I should remember to think of it as such.
I have too many things I vaguely want to do and so I do none of them. Overly ambitious projects. I also feel like I should just focus on getting better at my work. I’m making progress, but I can’t shake the feeling that it could be faster. In which case I wonder if I should be trying something more fundamental, like practicing meditation or something. Or if I should jusy compress my life into individual days, and take each day by itself.
Meeting and connecting people
The latest idea on my mind, I guess, is that I ought to be meeting people in real life. I want to meet people 1-1, and I want to organize drinks for small groups of smart people. I feel like that’s something that’s missing from my life. I always feel energized after goof conversations, and the nature of conversations in person is just different from chatting online- though even that is superior to ‘regular broadcasting’. I’ve found that the best way to use Facebook, for me, is to go back to basics and connect with individuals via PM.
If I can’t have a conversation with you that we both enjoy, why are we even ‘friends’? It’s just dead weight, people as redundancies, a safety buffer, a bucket list of sorts that we never get around to doing. A bookshelf of unread books. Some day, we say. I’m tired of waiting. I feel like I’m always waiting- waiting for a better day, a better mood, a flash of inspiration. But we all know that almost never happens. Inspiration is something you only get en route to something.
Challenging each other
Here’s a thought. We live a certain number of days. Suppose I discount life before secondary school. Say I’ve lived 10 years- 14 to 24. 3650 days. How many of those days can I remember as days well spent? The two times I did standup. The 100 or so live shows I’ve played. The times I spent meeting people I cared about. I wouldn’t actually count all the days I spent with my closest friends, because we were very comfortable together and probably took each other for granted to a large degree. We didn’t really challenge each other much, we just validated each other’s life scripts. The challenge is to see with new eyes. To meet old friends I haven’t met in years. To meet new friends. To help people out. To try new things. To push myself harder. To move hard and fast, rather than to be flimsy- allowing the wind to take me, to fall into the same patterns/routines that haven’t served me very well, haven’t exactly helped me go anywhere.
There’s a world of possibility open to me and a squander it. I imagine I will always be saying it, but at the very least I should get something done each day that allows me to go to bed with a smile on my face, thinking yes, that was a good day. Only then is it likely that I’ll die thinking yes, that was a good life. That’s the most we can do, right? Help and serve others. It’s a big video game about managing the chemicals in your head. There are challenges to overcome. The easy path yields no fulfillment, driving in the grass gets boring after a few years.
I’m tired of being tired. I have great opportunities. I have a great home and a great job. I just waste my time because of shitty routines and an ill-disciplined mind that never had to work hard at anything. This is like the hundredth time I’m repeating myself about this. But I can’t worry about sounding like an idiot. I made a commitment to write and I’m sticking to it. The voice will change with time, practice, experience. And it won’t be perceptible in the short run so I got to just keep swimming, just keep swimming.
Arbitrary configuration of reality
Tired of waiting. Every moment is an arbitrary configuration that can be changed. So change it. The right amount of energy at the right points is all it takes. Vaguely flailing around doesn’t help. Focused effort in the right direction. I’m going to reach work in a few minutes and I’m going to start with an intense burst of useful work. I can free up more time for myself if I sprint rather than dally.
Something that’s been on my mind for a long time but I haven’t properly put into words- everything about the world today is the way it is because of largely arbitrary reasons. To look at it through the lens of an individual’s life- your life could be vastly different from what it is. We don’t intuitively grasp this (or at least I don’t) probably because for the most part, we don’t usually question what we’ve inherited.
But there’s no single overarching reason why things are the way they are. Things change all the time. We’re just really good at explaining things on hindsight, at fitting everything into our existing (and often largely inherited) world views. We learn the ways of our families, our culture, our history, etc.
There’s a quote by Steve Jobs about how the world is designed by people no smarter than you are- and very often when you’re upset at something or frustrated by something, you can actually do something about it- you just probably don’t realize it because it doesn’t normally occur to you how things might be different, or how a path to that different state might look.
We err on the side of not rocking the boat
I had a elucidatory thought about this when having a conversation with the wife and a friend- let me try and jog my memory. We’re generally biased to stick to the status quo. It’s familiar, and we’re quite wired to live and work with the familiar. When we have conversations with ourselves or others, we tend not to rock the boat or ask difficult questions. Most conversation serves the purpose of making us feel better about ourselves and validating our life scripts (see: Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle on ribbonfarm.com, see Losers). This is okay if you’re satisfied with it, but hollow and draining if you’re not.
Elon Musk talks regularly about soliciting negative feedback, especially from friends. That’s a very different way of living. It’s a more “scientific” form of living, in the make-hypotheses-and-seek-to-falsify-them sense. You learn nothing from confirming your hypotheses. It’s like playing a video game and staying in the early levels over and over again- yeah you get better at doing low level stuff and you can even get some flow from that, but it’s far more interesting to go to the next level.
Learning by falsifying
So I guess it’s helpful to have a list of hypotheses that you’re seeking to disprove. That’s kinda what pro musicians and athletes do to improve their craft. They don’t just noodle around with what they’re familiar or comfortable with, they pick specific frontiers and push them to the breaking point- and it’s at those breaking points that you witness really interesting/special things. That’s when other people get interested in the stuff you’re doing. I suppose that adequately describes scientific advancement too. Work at the frontiers of human knowledge.
I got too big too fast. I have nothing meaningful to say about the frontiers of human knowledge. My purpose here with my writing is to figure out how to improve my own quality of life, and perhaps help others in the process.