Random Musings

In stream-of-consciousness order:

I recently read an article about, "Manage Your Energy Levels, Not Your Time, which I had read somewhere else six months ago or so. Back then, I enthusiastically agreed by reading nothing more than the title, and now I find that I already do (or think I do) most of the strategies suggested in the article. This is disappointing given my belief that I have an energy deficit, most apparent in my inability to use the hours after 8:30pm (coincidentally some of my only regular free time) for anything besides vegetating and feeling vaguely forlorn. What's causing this? Some possibilities, in order of my suspicion, greatest to least:

1. Maybe drinking coffee in the morning is amplifying my daily energy cycle, exhausting me prematurely
2. Maybe my intermittent fasting routine (only eat between ~12-8pm during the week) is putting an inordinate digestive and metabolic load on my system in the evenings
3. Maybe I'm 38 and can't use genetics or fitness to outrun my decreasing energy levels any longer

In addition to being disappointing, the article was irritating mainly because it gave me hope that was quickly dashed. Merry and I filled out the associated questionnaire, which told me I have "severe energy level problems," but maybe I was just a tough judge of myself answering the highly-subjective questions?

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I've been tracking more and more daily nutritional and fitness metrics - coffee & alcohol consumption, exercise type and frequency, intermittent fasting. I've had success with this approach through the "what gets measured gets managed" behavioral pathway, but there's some problems:

1. This isn't the best pathway for managing behaviors. Far better would be to engineer more-desired behaviors that supersede and thus extinguish the less-desired behaviors. For instance, learn to enjoy the feeling of fasting, instead of watching the clock while shaking, knowing that I will get to write down a "16" instead of a "15" for fasting hours that day.
2. So, what's been happening is I'm losing interest in the tracking, which is problematic since having the results written down both generates the interest, and is itself the enforcement mechanism. This is either exacerbated by, or subliminally justified by (I'm not sure which), a general skepticism of how beneficial each of these things is, anyway. I mean, I drink 50% less coffee and beer than a year ago, but I don't know if I feel any different. I can either throw away the changes I've made (if they're having no effect), or keep them (if they are), but being unable to distinguish the two, how do I justify the latter?

I guess it's in how I weigh the evidence, but age seems to be making me increasingly empirical, meaning the hurdle for any amount of evidence to convince me of anything conclusive is much higher than it used to be (especially in the behavioral realm).

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Signe will soon be two, and I've started to anticipate that sooner or later, the subject of having another child will come up with Merry. I've pictured the moment, and it always happens exactly the same: she will broach the subject, and I will hear myself speaking some response back to her, while my inner monologue simultaneously says, "Where are these words I'm speaking out loud coming from? I don't have the slightest idea how I feel about this subject!" But for that matter, what subjects *have I*, in my whole life, felt I had thought about *enough* to make a decision on? Probably nothing important.

The thought of having another kid sounds more insane than the first one ever sounded to me. The first one was a rock-hard "no" by my inner monologue's rationalizing, based on the profoundly un-estimable variables involved. The second one is a diamond-hard "no" to my inner monologue's rationalizing based on exactly what I know - that having a child involves sacrifices I don't want to make - tremendous amounts of time, money, and energy (all inter-related, of course) for some number of isolated moments of irreplaceable joy. And I don't mean "irreplaceable" as synonymous with "priceless"; I mean it synonymous with "novel."

And yet, my inner monologue has never had much to say about anything, even before you factor in the influence of the environment, and other people. The most obvious reason is because even at its best, our conscious "override" systems are a very modern aberration that are hopelessly outmatched in their competition against the mind-bogglingly complex bundle of ancient heuristic mind/body pathways which, taken as a whole, define us as a species.

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In my 20s I got the idea in my head that I somehow needed to balance my analytic compulsions (to better understand the world) with an experiential naiveté (to aesthetically enjoy the world). Of likely particular relevance is Richard Feynman's assertion that, despite what others seem to believe, his scientific curiosity actually enhanced his ability to experience beauty in the world. So which way is accurate?

First, Feynman was no doubt in the minority opinion on the subject. But today it occurred to me that maybe what everyone else is doing is conflating nostalgia with beauty. Think of it this way: when most people think of the idea of there being beauty in the world, they are thinking of all the beauty they've *already* witnessed. But what Feynman was talking about was the experience of *new* beauty - the joy of finding things out. I have to admit that when I consider the world as a place to have aesthetic experiences, most of what comes to mind are the collective experiences I've *already* had. Is that just lack of imagination or ambition? Or perhaps there's still two things in this puzzle that I'm still conflating. But maybe one of the things Feynman was really good at was living in the moment.