Seismic Shifts

I've arrived at this point by operating for years under an essentially unchanged framework - trying to be a little wiser each day, trying to systematically remove harmful and counterproductive habits, and continuously optimizing how I spend my time and resources. It all sounds great on paper. And yet, now when I turn around, I can no longer see the shoreline. There's nothing recognizable out here, no reference point for me to reverse my course towards. What happened? Was my strategy unsound? Or am I imagining this? Was I wrong then, or am I wrong now?

I've been thinking about Jung seriously for the first time in many years, and trying to understand what is going on inside of me. There are so many things that feel out of balance in my life:

1. Free time just brings me anxiety that I will waste it - a self-fulfilling prophecy, since anxiety annihilates joy.
2. I rarely find any sort of connection - even tenuous - with other people, and so I have almost completely stopped trying. Even my friends seem to be drifting away, one by one, and I find myself with less and less to say to them.
3. I feel like I've forgotten what was special about Merry and I's relationship, and how to re-engage with it.
4. I've long had a vision of fatherhood as becoming someone my child could admire. But now that I'm a father, I don't feel admirable, I most often feel clueless and without inspiration to be anything more than merely present.
5. I live in my head, trying to weave feelings and impressions into stories, but it feels like this well has run dry. Mostly I just find myself re-reading what I've written and longing to feel more of the same things that I've already written, or express them in deeper ways, without quite knowing what that means. What does it mean to have taken so much time unearthing these old impressions? Should this produce some particular effect, like setting off some psychic chemical reaction? I guess I had come to believe that hard-won expression was supposed to produce a virtuous cycle with inspiration.
6. I dream often of staying in or exploring unfamiliar houses, often populated by a mix of people I know or used to know. These dreams seem very exciting to me, but despite their repetition, I don't know what they are trying to tell me.

I have an overriding psychic feeling of "something large passing me silently in the dark," to quote a source I can no longer find. It is as if substantial dislocations are occurring subliminally, whose effects upon my consciousness go by, barely noticed.

I have only my own optimism to tell me that I will overcome this, and a primitive sense that what I am facing is a natural process - one I have gone through myself and merely forgotten, in part. My hope is that, amidst my own incomprehension, I have found a clue in Jungian psychology, described here:

“[...] to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. [...] If he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God.”

- Marie-Louise von Franz 

Or, stated simpler:

"When things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

False Narratives

Before I begin, I should admit that my mental state is poor. I slept little last night, then I went to work for seven hours, my brain wired to a nonstop task list of decision trees ever since. Now I'm in the sort of still-sleepless mid-afternoon sub-deliria that makes it feel like it might be any time of day and I might be any place, as if my grounding to the present is as thin as a thread.

Maybe my mental state matters, or maybe not. For months now I've been dreaming vividly - just about since I cut significantly back on caffeine. (Is it possible that caffeine systemically muffles - or perhaps garbles - the unconscious?) My dreams have taken a decidedly dark turn in the past week, and the world feels like it is closing in around me. The obvious questions to ask myself, then, are: why these feelings, and why now?

I'm reminded of Ballard fearing the future would be a "vast suburb of the soul," everything having already been experienced. I wonder if my subconscious isn't telling me that I'm stuck in place in some way and that I need to shake off a stasis. It's a suspicion that didn't come from my consciousness. If it had, I could be sure that a dream wouldn't also be telling me, because the unconscious doesn't amplify the imbalances of the conscious, it compensates for them. But I came to the theory of personal stasis only recently, when I realized how much time I spend trying to make my days productive, yet finding, over time, that my life lacks a sense of meaning.

Ever since becoming a father, I've been plagued by a narrative that I can't escape: that I'm trapped. This was probably borne of a prior narrative that was also reductionist: that I would find joy in personal freedom, and particularly the freedom to travel. This prior narrative, I am only now fully realizing, was always a sort of "manifest destiny" fallacy - the belief that, given more degrees of freedom, I would seek, pursue, and capture whatever happiness was waiting for me out in the world.

We *can* find happiness in the world we don't yet know, and freedom to try new things is a fine way to explore the possibility, but it's far from a miracle cure. When I think about the travel I've taken, I can remember moments of happiness, others of frustration, and many of boredom, a distribution that is only moderately different to that of my everyday life at home. My current narrative is probably equally inadequate - first, am I really trapped, or have I made a conscientious decision to be present? And second, should that mean I'm any worse off?

Now that I've written the questions down, I'm satisfied that I know their answers, which I framed in an essentially rhetorical voice, anyway. So if I'm not trapped in a life I don't want, then what is actually going on with me? I suspect it's more likely that I'm trapped in my own false narratives. But in my defense, false narratives persist exactly because they're not obvious. So what are these narratives? Let me list a few, on the off chance that it will help me begin to separate the underlying problems from what the narratives have unjustly added:

1. I have a persistent feeling that "I'm not doing what I want to be doing with my life," though when I stop to ask myself what I want to be doing, the answers don't hold up to scrutiny. e.g., "Traveling." Well, fine. But it won't magically make me happy, it's just a different sort of okay. Nor will it make my life intrinsically meaningful. And yet, either something is missing in my life, or I need to reset my expectations downward, until it lines up to whatever meaning I can find.
2. The same thing, except in the day or even moment. The desire to make the most of my time expresses itself daily in irritation at the trivial and a despair at being helpless against the basic construction of the world. Like, I'm stuck in traffic for the 700th time, what am I doing with my life? Is there a world where that's a satisfactory local maxima? Could it be in this world? What if the way out of that is to be unemployed? What is the tradeoff between being stuck in traffic occasionally and having no income?
3. At home, I relegate myself to menial tasks like cleaning and organization, then find myself defeated that I can't make any decisions without Merry's review and approval. Usually, these same things aren't priorities for her, and I feel bad continually badgering her, so the impediments persist. Should I just stop asking? A clean and organized space is one of a small number of things that are sufficiently under my control to make me happy. Except, even that's not under my control! Can I just reprogram myself to accept a state of constant disarray in my surroundings?
4. I wonder if Merry and I will ever be attracted to each other again. We scarcely seem to notice each other except when we're taking care of Signe, or talking about Signe. Is it because we've suddenly become the two lowest priorities on each other's long lists? Do other couples find their attraction to each other reduced by 99% after having a child? How does anyone ever have a second one? I know I'm new as a father, but "having a child" and "having a romantic relationship" appear to me as opposite ends of a continuum. The closest we come to connection nowadays is our explicit mutual acknowledgement that we're tired every single night (which requires about 15 seconds of interaction), and our desire to spend 100% of our evenings with our phones, and 0% with each other. Are our romantic lives over? Did we make that decision implicitly when we had a child? It feels that way to me. Or is there some other explanation for this? Is age, or toxins in the water, lowering my testosterone levels?
5. I'm eager to meet new people, but I don't know how to. This occurs all the time and everywhere. Merry and I went to a party with her coworkers the other day and I spent about 90% of the party watching Signe. (Because I have to, right? I can't even articulate how impotent I feel not to know the answer to a question like this, or be able to figure out some puzzle as simple as how to watch a two-year old and talk to anyone else, at all, because she requires constant vigilance that she not put herself in a hazardous situation. Or do I trust she won't hurt herself, or that others will parent for me if she starts to do something dangerous? Why wasn't anyone else at the party having these problems? Was this something I ironically failed to observe because I was busy watching her?)
6. I'm worried that, by not having friends with similarly-aged children, nor much of a family or community life, we're depriving Signe of beneficial social experiences. I worry she will grow up disadvantaged by not knowing how to play with others or tolerate sharing. I worry that she won't have many friends. I have dreams where I go to see her at her school and she is always alone on the playground, occupied by something off in the corner while the rest of the children play together. Pregnant in all such dreams is the feeling that I, myself, cannot replace friends she will gain on her own, if for no other reason than that I will die before her, and she will be left alone. 

To this last point, is it common for parents to extrapolate every success and failure out over the rest of their children's lives? What kind of neurosis do I have, and how will it project itself onto Signe? I already fear I am a control freak - but what good does worrying do for someone who is so poorly equipped to deal with problems? When I consider my own life, I have to admit that I have failed at almost everything I've ever done, and that the islands of "success" that I see in my life are profoundly modest accomplishments compared to what others around me achieve. It isn't unusual that I spend many years learning to accomplish something that others can do in almost no time at all. Sometimes it seems to me that one of my defining personality characteristics is my ability to delude myself into thinking that common measures (e.g., competency at some skill) are the "wrong ones" because they don't correlate with a good life, or whatever. Like, that's what I convince myself of. "I don't have to be good at my job to have a good life." "I don't need friends I can talk to if I have a rich internal dialogue." "I don't need to know how to effectively parent my daughter, she'll probably be fine anyway."

I recently listened to Farnam Street's interview with Naval Ravikant, where he talks about teaching himself to live "in the moment." It's obviously an old platitude. But what does it mean to "live in the moment," while simultaneously striving to better yourself? How does a person improve without re-living and contemplating their own past actions? Or is it just something you turn off, like your work brain on the weekends? Like, "today's a 'living in the moment' day, cool, let's go to the beach!"

States of Mind

I came home from a week-long solo trip to Utah a few years ago anxious and a little bit irritated. And though it had primarily been the prospect of the trip being over that had caused this, what I was really irritated about was my own inability to enter the "vacation mindset" more than I had on the trip. You know the one - the state where your everyday worries like work disappear from the back of your mind. In this state, you can have experiences like laying down to sleep in a tent at night and experiencing the ambient sounds around you, or thinking of the day's experiences, without additional narrative. To me, this means that the world comes to act merely as a canvas against which I can enjoy the nature of existence.

After the trip, I lamented how hard that state of mind had gotten to enter. Now, in 2019, I could assume I won't enter it again for many years, if ever. A strange thing has happened in the last 20 years, since I graduated high school. Even as I have gotten much richer, and my skill set has grown - both ostensibly making it possible to work less and worry less about whether I could work later - I've observed my degrees of freedom seeming to shrink, not expand.

I'm not claiming that the world has clamped down on me somehow - rather, that by misunderstanding what that state of mind requires, I have built my life in a way that makes achieving those circumstances nearly impossible. But it's not like there was some "golden age" of the freedom to inhabit the states of mind I wanted - at least, I don't think so. In my early 20's, I had the time, but not the mindset - I spent all my time depressed, feeling as if the world owed me more than it had given me. The only states of mind that linger with me from those times are the ones I used recreational drugs to enter, and those were exceedingly small proportions of my time (it's to their credit, I suppose, that I still remember them so vividly).

In my later 20's, and specifically from the last couple years that I lived in the Dewey house, until I started working again after going to Europe, I was probably in as close to a happy equilibrium as I have known. I was often busy, but I didn't care enough about work to worry about it when I was gone, and nothing else in my world registered. I had already taught myself how meaningless things were, and thus I never worried about what I didn't have or what I could lose. It was nice to travel, in part, because it didn't feel like anything was being left behind. Though it's probably an exaggeration, my mindset was essentially: "worst case, if I couldn't return, so what?" That was essentially phase one.

At some point after I met Merry and had gone back to work full time, I found myself fearing a particular change in myself. I told Merry about it at the time - I remember saying to her, that what I needed to succeed at all the new goals in my life was to apply my work mindset to my personal life. I predicted (fearfully) that this would not come without side-effects - and now I can see that I was more right than I could have then guessed. When I started applying analytic and project management principles to problems in my personal life, I opened floodgates that I couldn't re-close. Soon, those approaches overtook whole domains of my personality, where a sense of gestalt had alone thrived. My fixation on aesthetic experience was replaced with "measurable outcomes" and "continuous improvement."

The effect this had on my ability to access different states of mind was to make the hurdle to access them progressively higher. Eventually it became something of an oddity, even on a week-long trip, that I would enter a state of real relaxation. More likely was that I would spend the trip acting as I did in my everyday life - my thoughts jumping rapidly between half a dozen concerns, both immediate and far off, planning and optimizing and re-planning and re-optimizing the trip as I went, trying to "maximize enjoyment", as if such an equation not only existed, but required continuous monitoring.

If this wasn't the death knell of such states of mind (and maybe, in time, it still would have been), then having Signe was. Having a young child to care for essentially ensured that I will *never* part from my anxieties, just as it has ensured that I will never have any sufficiently long stretch of time to try, anyway. The thought of being away for a week feels like a pipe dream - but let me be specific. It's a pipe dream for two reasons - not just because her presence practically prevents it, but because I wouldn't want to be away from her for that long, either. Emotionally, having a child is like buying a house that you will never sell and never pay off the mortgage on - it consists of both an asset, bringing immense joy, and a liability, demanding your time and energy - forever.

Today, I seems to possess only one state of mind - the multitasking, hyperactive engine that wants to suck in problems and spit out answers aligned against a broader world view, rinse and repeat. This is true even when I'm doing something I consider recreational, like writing. Perhaps the best I can hope for in those circumstances is a temporary focus, where five of the six concerns-of-the-day drift off for a little while. There seems to be little such thing as an aesthetic mindset left in my life. And though I might have once thought that this "grand unified" mindset could be the best of all worlds, today it feels more like a prison that I am trapped within.

Baby Daddy

We call pictures of Signe when she was younger 'baby Signe', so it only stands to reason that an old picture of myself from when I was a baby is 'baby daddy.' The picture is novel, but it's also candid in a way that I don't think of many old pictures of myself being - maybe that's just because I don't remember ever seeing it before. After all, familiarity with a thing (like seeing an old picture often) overwrites our feelings about it more rapidly.

I'm such a sentimentalist - at least, I can be. I am continuously on watch for the 'me' that is always in the process of un-becoming - the person I was, that drifts away into the past. It's undetectable in the day-to-day, but in a stray memory that gets unearthed, I occasionally catch a glimpse of who I was five or ten or twenty years ago, but no longer am. Much of this is the person I left behind through experience and hopefully becoming wiser. Yet thoughts of my own past naiveté rarely embarrass me - more often, they make me wistful.

But that picture of myself as a baby seems to have triggered something else entirely. It hurts to look at that picture - into my own eyes, almost forty years ago - and have no connection, no matter how tenuous, to my personality or mental state then. It is 100% disconnected from my life today. And though not unique, necessarily, this picture is the first one that has caused me to dwell on this reality.

Nobody has any but a buried, arcane link to their own early childhood, yet I find it sad to be separated from it so completely, and permanently. It is a reminder that this shadow will only creep further over my life - through my childhood, and adulthood - as I grow older. My memory's fidelity for any age in my life will only decrease with time.

While I was feeling bad about this today, I started to think of Signe, and what I can do to make her life great. How can I ensure that the love I feel for her results in happiness, even meaning, that she will find in her own life? That's when it occurred to me that the experience of giving love as an adult is not the same as the experience of receiving it as a child. As an adult or a child, our feelings are products of our life experiences, but a child has a fraction of the experiences from which to form conceptions. When I became a father, I didn't understand that Signe had to be *taught* love. But even now, when we hug, she doesn't feel the love I'm feeling. My love is the memory of my own life experiences. She's feeling a love that she is only now learning. But in a way, the gesture is how we cross that gulf, which makes it more special.

I wonder what my parents think of when they see the picture of baby daddy. They've always been sentimental (it's likely where I got it from), and they've had more - and different - life experiences than I have. I think of my mom emotionally gushing over any of a large number of pictures like that one, and how my reactions to her sentimentality have evolved over time, from puzzlement, to embarrassment, to a quiet understanding that her feelings are hers and worthwhile. When she gets old enough to think of such things, I hope Signe understands my feelings, but I shouldn't expect that to happen quickly, and maybe not ever. I hope she doesn't think less of me for having grown sentimental over that picture of myself, so many years ago, nor our pictures of baby Signe, which by then will be growing decades old and beginning to feel lost to a past that neither of us can exactly still conceive of.

Ten Years

It's been more than ten years since I started this blog - not that that's a notable event, especially given that I've been journaling in one of various forms for well over twenty years. But what it does mean, given my motivation for starting this blog, is that it's also been ten years since I was living in Europe. It seems like yesterday - no, really, sometimes it really feels so remarkably close I can hardly fathom it - which is a sentiment that is sure to make the truth more depressing. But should it be?

I've accomplished plenty in ten years, but what I haven't done is maintained the velocity or dynamism  that I possessed then. Perhaps I grew comfortable with things - maybe one day they became "good enough." Whatever drove me with such urgency in those days is long past. I struggle even to imagine what it'd be like if I could suddenly return to that mindset, what I'd do differently, and to whose benefit and detraction it would be.

Even if I could "return" to that mindset, I don't know what the nature of such a change would be. I certainly wouldn't just start acting like I did then - that'd be a disaster. But what if I could plant some similar motivation within myself today and then meet it as the person I am? Although that seems like a more elegant solution - largely because motivation is seen as some deep, innate thing - I'm not sure that artificially transplanting motivation is much different than artificially transplanting surface-level behavior. But if there's something better yet - "more natural" even than modifying my motivation, perhaps - I haven't figured out what it would be.

But wait, why am I having to formulate this in the first place? Surely it is the lack of any such motivation in my life, right? So, is the idea of finding such a motivation just a canard, and therefore bound to fail? I mean, it's not like they just fall out of the sky, right? Is the idea that I can magically instill myself with motivation just a sleight-of-hand owing to my mental model not resembling the real world? Maybe. But, oh well, for the time being, I'm going to explore the idea of finding motivation, anyway.

In 2008 and 2009 I feared I was running out of time to take control of who I was and who I would become. And though I navigated that personal crisis (I hate the term, but I don't know what else to call it), the urgency of time has not really abated - I am every bit as mortal today as I was then, and almost surely closer to the end of my life, lifestyle changes notwithstanding. So maybe all that I lack is the necessary visceral grounding to the knowledge that my life is finite and that I will soon look back upon every day that I wasted as a precious opportunity missed. I need to find the sense of urgency to experience life in the time I still have, because it is draining out of the hourglass, faster every year.

How's that for motivation?

Internal Productivity

My friend and I were discussing productivity as a means to happiness and I told him something that I hadn't thought about in a long time - it used to be the only way I thought about such things, but times change and my thoughts about the world mostly evolved beyond simply distinguishing the mental realm from the physical.

But anyway, he said that being productive, and getting things accomplished - especially getting things built - makes him happy, and that he had a fear of dying without a sense of accomplishment. He and I have known each other long enough for him to understand how few projects in the physical world I feel compelled to do (think: things like home or vehicle improvement / maintenance), so he knew that wasn't true of me.

But what is true, I told him, is that I have a corollary desire to set right my mental and spiritual state, so that when I die I am in a place of peace. And, being productive in that sense - identifying and removing mental complexes, coming to understand myself better and find my place in the world, etc...- gives me, as far as I can tell, the exact same thing he is describing - satisfaction, and though it, happiness.

I'm not sure how profound the parallel is, but it felt worth writing down.

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.