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.

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.'