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.

38

Today I turn 38, and like many of my recent birthdays, this is one marked by an increasing self-consciousness of getting older. I suppose the other side of this proverbial coin is that I reflect more intensely on what I've accomplished and what I need to accomplish. On balance, my 38th year was what I would consider to be very productive to my goals. Namely:

1. I'm confident I've become a much better father than I was a year ago, though I find it exceedingly difficult to know whether I'm doing well or not in any objective sense.
2. I'm more patient as a father and husband, though the other side of this is that what I want has become increasingly clear, and the gap between the two has therefore come further into focus.
3. I've started tracking particular daily nutritional and fitness metrics, which has resulted in a lot of self-improvement in those metrics. I'm happy with my own design of the metrics and the system to maintain participation and maximize effectiveness, while minimizing any unintended second-order behaviors.
4. I've stuck with a consistent-enough and effective workout routine, all while not restricting myself from doing more recreational activities when the opportunity arises.
5. I list and track my to-do's in one place and have begun reviewing them daily, which seems to have helped me make more consistent progress on them.

Aside from the usual continuous optimization, the main things I want to work on over the next year are:

1. Making sure Merry feels special and appreciated, rather than just trying to make her life easier.
2. Finding time to do things I want to do while maintaining or increasing what I contribute to my family.
3. Learn how to better help Signe to become not just happy, but independent and self-confident.
4. Learn to relax & eliminate "background anxiety" without substantially reducing my productivity.

Signe is 21 months old today, which is not old, but is nevertheless old enough for me to get a sense that she has changed my life in a way that I couldn't have conceived of before. I think some people would articulate what I'm feeling by saying that she has "given life more meaning." Maybe she has, but that's not exactly how I'd choose to articulate it. I recently described the effect of having a child on my experience of life as "adding an additional dimension", but I think it's more accurate yet to say she's increased the opportunity space I have available to explore. Maybe that's essentially what people mean when they say "given my life more meaning" - I dunno, but the latter sits better with me because it feels a bit more precise.

Why My Stories Read Flat

The primary challenge of writing for me is traversing the space between the first draft - which might establish some, if not all, of the primary ingredients which will shape the story - and the final product, in which they have been refined and optimized to (hopefully) maximum effect.

The method for crossing this gulf is a mystery to me, in so much as refinement must occur on multiple scales - some of which possess a compositional or logistical complexity larger than my working memory. Surely some form of summarizing, or some other reductive process, can increase the scale across which a person can effectively optimize writing, but I don't know what those methods consist of. In my writing, I can collect themes and ideas into a text, and I can optimize well enough on the sentence and perhaps paragraph level, but I do not know how to trace a series of paragraphs or whole sections of a text gracefully along forms that will produce some profound cumulative effect.

Anyway, I think this is why my stories so often read 'flat.'

More Musings on Parenthood

Having a child (less than a year and a half old, as I write) has given me a perspective on my own life that nothing else ever had, by exposing me to entire categories of knowledge and skills that I had avoided, or perhaps of which I was never even aware. It's also brought me back to a lot of things that I had left behind a long time ago. How did it happen that way?

In short, I think I had gotten very good at avoiding certain of life's normal vicissitudes, which having a child forced me to face again. Indeed, when I reflect upon the things that I have found myself feeling lately, they strike me - a 37-year old man - as rather appalling:

1. A frequent inability to empathize with my daughter's sadness and frustration - it has often been very hard for me to remind myself that she doesn't have the means to control her emotions, and I am often apathetic or unsympathetic to her feelings.
2. Impatience at her failure to understand what I am asking (or telling) her to do.
3. Anger when she is angry - especially if she hits me or pushes me away. My most common reactions are either to feel sorry for myself, for her 'not liking me', pout that she has done something unfair or unwarranted, or wish to punish her punitively, without knowing if she would understand what was happening. Again, this on the part of a 37-year old, about a 15-month old.
4. Anger when she intentionally defies what I ask (or tell) her to do. If that seems - for perhaps a fraction of a second and without further analysis - like something that is reasonable, please ask yourself - is there any real possibility that a one and a half year old could be exercising some innate free will when she decides to defy me? Or is it more likely that I have inadvertently taught her to defy me by my own actions and unnoticed patterns of reward and punishment? I'm not sure at what age you can stop blaming yourself for your child's undesirable behaviors, but I'm pretty sure it's not at one and a half years old.

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Becoming a parent has made me feel a lot of things, and I'm grateful - as a human being with one life to live - to have felt all of them. But many of them felt bad (and some awful), and can only be seen as beneficial when viewed through a practical lens by their capacity to prompt reflection and change in myself.

One of the predominant things I felt - especially in the first six months - was a sense of being imprisoned by having had a child. I no longer had much free time - and almost never when I wanted it - nor did I have the freedom to come and go as I wished, nor to travel places often, except by Merry's kindness (which I can't help but continue to see as a debt that I accrue). That feeling of imprisonment has dissipated - not for the circumstances changing, at least not very much - so much as having simply gotten used to it, the way people are apt to do with virtually any circumstances they end up in.

Now I feel something else - something that I wouldn't have predicted (though maybe I just lack the imagination). Having come to realize just how much influence I will have on her life, I feel a prisoner to Signe's own future. I've come to believe that any shirking of my responsibilities as a parent, or any failure to be a good role model, will reduce Signe's long term happiness and well-being - an equation that only Merry and I can affect so substantially. There is "nowhere to run" - anything less than the best is less than she could've been given.

I have, on multiple isolated occasions, gotten very mad at Signe, and failed to treat her with the compassion and patience that she deserves. The most recent time, having already reproached myself and reflecting on the incident, I had a vision of her choosing a partner later in life that, likewise, would treat her poorly. I don't know if there is truth to the adage that children grow up to choose romantic partners based in part on what their parent of the opposite sex is or was like - but I'm inclined to believe there is something to this. (For my thought exercise, I'll assume there is.) What if this person abuses her, by words or even physically? (To be clear, I have never done this to Signe, but I fear that it is only different by degree if she comes to believe that unjustified anger is an acceptable form of expression.) The thing is, I can see a path from here to there - I can imagine by my own poor actions that she learns - without her ever realizing she has learnt it, much less from me - that she should accept, and perhaps even love, someone who would express such unjustified anger towards her. There are few things I've felt in the last year and a half that are so disheartening, that motivate me to fix myself quite so urgently.

What I'm now imprisoned by, is the thought that my own actions have the power to profoundly affect not only myself, but someone else, in a way that will determine the quality of their entire future. How would I feel at the end of my life if I knew I did any less than all I could to give Signe a good life? I can't think of many greater regrets.

Regret Minimization

"After your death, you will be what you were before your birth."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

I had a girlfriend for a few years in my mid-20s who believed in heaven, who used the word for comfort upon occasions of loss, or uncertainty, such as when my grandmother died, or when we talked about what happened to the baby - if fertilization had, indeed, taken place - the time she took the 'morning after' pill and sat, forlorn, for days in her room afterwards, thinking about our future children, who she couldn't have then known we would never have.

We had talked about having children - about what they'd look like, and how we'd raise them. And, she said she would teach them about heaven, too. I didn't believe in heaven - I even wanted to, for the certainty and the comfort of my soul. The problem was, I had been infected by a self-sustaining process of reason and pattern-matching, which had discredited the idea. There was no way to fit the idea of heaven into our universe - it would have been an insult to the rest of it.¹ I had even hung onto the idea long after this realization had first occurred, but time did me in. It's amazing how slowly the gap between rote knowledge and true internalization (or, 'feeling it in our bones') can be in closing.

The metaphor for our lives that has long resonated best with me is that we have been propelled (I picture a cannon, but that's just me) into a foggy sky. At any given time, we can see only the most proximate of our vast surroundings. By our expectations, and our intuition, we know that we will rise, slowly level out, and then begin descending. We don't know where the ground is, but we know once the descent starts what is coming. We cannot change the nature of our end, though while we are airborne, we can manipulate our trajectory some small amount. Maybe we even have a guess as to whether one trajectory is better than another - although that sounds like a more difficult matter, epistemologically, to me.

Years of the traditional business problem-solving mindset have taken their toll on me - when I face any life problem now, big or small, the first thing I ask is, 'what am I solving for?' And, I seek an answer in the specific form of one or two goals (any more than that and it starts to muddy what the real priority is). Then I look for one or two things that can be measured for each - things for which optimization would tractably help achieve that goal. It's a simple process that can be used for virtually anything, so long as you define each goal and its representative measures properly. Along came my daughter, who I want to have a good life. Well, how do you define that as a goal? And what do you measure to know you're on the right track?

My mind went to some ideas I've since rejected - "total happiness" being the first, but also the most nebulous and useless of all, I suspect. Happiness may be the most obvious facet of a good life, but it's far from the only one.

I had a dream that my daughter was old - and I knew at once that I must be old, too. I knew that my wife - her mother - was already passed away. My daughter had no friends, and I was afraid that I would die before her, and that she would be left to die alone. But, dying alone was, for a long time, something I was afraid of - was I just projecting my own past fears?²

I used to be afraid of it. I got over it when I realized that my fear of dying alone was really my fear of dying too soon - which is to say, dying with regrets. Nobody has to die with regrets - they can forgive themselves for anything that has happened in their past (which is not to say it's easy), and they can be mindful of the present. I only have a problem with those two things because I'm not good at either of them.

But I want to be. I want to spend time with my parents while I can. I want to spend time with Signe while she's this age that she will, of course, never be again. And I have the means to do so, if I can only get A connected to B, whether by a straight line or not.

I don't know what I need to do for my daughter to have the best life she can. But the best hunch I have right now is for both of us to learn regret minimization - to identify regrets as early as possible, and minimize or eliminate them whenever possible. I'll learn to do this, and as she grows, I'll teach her to do this, by words and my own examples.

Then again, maybe I think all of this because I'm just over-compensating for myself. That's what parents do, right?

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1) For what it's worth, the closest I can come today to a notion of heaven is by Simulation Theory, which begs the question, what are the characteristics of the world in which the simulation is running? That is, to me, one of the most interesting philosophical questions.
2) There was a period of a few years when I was quite literally afraid of Antony and the Johnson's song, "Hope There's Someone," because of the nerve it touched.