Day 2: Dystopia/Realism?

What do you do when you wanna do so much, but feel like you’re absolutely unable to do anything?

The past couple of years have been difficult if I’m being honest. Not because of external factors, which of course influenced and impacted me in ways that led me toward feeling the way I did, but because of that final result of being unable to function. (Read ‘Yudkowsky: the person’ if interested, would give some insight.)

I love Physics. I love Math. I loved school. I hated college. Academia is a lie, an illusion. This is me so far.

It’s true, that if you wanna make any real progress, you need to find other ways. Different paths. For example, let’s continue with the app thing from yesterday, when you want to build an app, from scratch with no real external help, you’re doing it from start to finish: what happens? Answer: You learn so much more. You learn the back end, the front end. You learn to weigh the pros and cons and decide, which particulars to use. You make executive decisions, you make mistakes, and you learn from them. You learn quickly and surely, at least if you don’t want your project to be unfinished. You have no idea how to build an API, 10 minutes later you figure it out. You have no idea how to use various software, 30 minutes later, you feel like you can rule the world. And end result? You get more done.

But when these seemingly difficult tasks, turn out to be not that bad, you, of course, start doubting yourself. You start spiralling, thinking this is going NOWHERE! That you’ll probably end up scrubbing the whole thing and starting from scratch AGAIN.

You feel like you wasted years, well at least I do, trying to figure everything out, making everything perfect and then moving forward. And now, you feel like you’re behind on EVERYTHING, which, well let’s be honest is true.

There’s so much to learn, so much to discover and invent. And now in this age of information, you can never truly be done. Everything’s at the tip of your fingers, and soon it’ll be worse than that, everything’ll be at the tip of our neurons. We’ll be plagued with indecision or burnout! There’s no in-between!

You find a corner of the rug the size of the universe, you start to pull on the thread, and slowly, so very slowly it unravels. You get yourself to realize, there’s only so much you can do because you can’t change the world in a day. Nothing can, except maybe an asteroid. And that’s not good!

Everything seems fun and exciting, but while time is seemingly endless, our particular lives aren’t exactly so.

I was out with a friend the other day, we were sitting in a crowded… let’s call it restaurant, and there wasn’t enough space between our table and the adjoining one, for the busboy to move around with ease. He had to do a roundabout turn every time he got to this point, and come through the other side.

So my very nice friend wanted us to get up and move the table and chairs around so as to make space for the busboy. But that meant: we couldn’t really sit properly at the table. And the busboy would miss only our table as it was at the end of the row and we were still eating, it didn’t seem like a pressing issue to me. So I said (paraphrasing here), “There are acts of kindness, then there’s inconveniencing yourself to help someone else by a slim margin. We all have our jobs to do and the busboy is doing his, which literally is to go around the restaurant, cleaning up the tables”

What I’m trying to derive from here is that, at a certain age, you get to choose your responsibilities. Not just your responsibilities to your friends, family, coworkers or companies, but your responsibilities to yourself and to the world.

And in this world during this information era, where neither evolution nor technology has yet caught up with the societal culture, and we are yet to adapt to having all this information around with either higher processing power on our computers or having biotechnologically enhanced our own capabilities, we need to pick and choose what we need to do. And we need to start at a tiny corner of the rug, and just keep pulling.

And this, is Day 2.