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October 7, 2012

Some Simple Strands

I was going to spend the weekend writing *the* post, but then I took a nap and oh look how time flies. I do feel a little bad about missing out on hardly strictly, but maybe spending the Sunday afternoon collecting my thoughts after the rather rough two weeks I’ve had at work was the right thing to do, even if the voices inside my head will drive me crazy at some point.

As unpleasant as it is trying to sustain 14-hour workdays for around 10 days straight, I still feel like complete shit when projects get completed. It’s like I have all this momentum and adrenaline piled up, and now there’s nowhere to divert this energy. Sometimes, it’s stressful to not be stressed out. The good news, I guess, is that work never ends and will pick up shortly.

Life has been so incredibly frustrating on so many fronts this year. This despite it being a year with many memorable moments as well.

Point one: I’ve been absolutely stymied by the books I’ve been trying to read the past half year or so. I’m beginning to doubt I will ever be able to get through Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, to say nothing of the Rabbit tetralogy (halfway through Rabbit is Rich, averaging under a page a day). And why did I use my airline miles on subscriptions to Time and Scientific American when I just don’t have the time or desire to read them? I’ve tossed the last few months’ issues away.

Point two: work. I don’t really know what I’m doing wrong, but I feel like I’m stagnating at work. It’s not so much that I’m not learning anymore because I still am, but there’s just this nagging philosophical doubt that I can’t quite shake loose. Also, knowing that there are all these cool and interesting projects that other people are working on and that I seem to never have the time to contribute to just makes me a little sad.

Point three: that will be in the aforementioned post, if it ever sees the light of day.

Point four: the maddening love-hate relationship I have with ballet. I’m not even sure I can explain the level of cognitive dissonance this surfaces. If a real relationship is this hard, maybe it’s better to be unattached. But at least I’ve stuck with it, right? Please don’t ever leave me.

So I went to the Florence and the Machine concert on Friday night because my friend had an extra ticket, and we all left after 3 songs. Not so much because it wasn’t a good performance (it was), but maybe more because the experience was so detached (at least in my mind; the others might have just wanted to skip traffic). It’s weird when you can appreciate a show for what it is, yet not feel attached to it at all — I think this is kind of the tragedy about going to a concert where you’re unfamiliar with the music. When everyone else in the crowd seems so really into it, and in the back of your mind you’re kind of wondering why. I think a lot of people were high, which might have enhanced the experience.

I saw some post that lead me to this Richard Dawkins piece about the stupefying odds of just being alive.
http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/91-to-live-at-all-is-miracle-enough

A small musical strand: there’s probably more music out there right now than anyone can listen to in a lifetime. And if humanity is lucky, there will be so much new music created, that at some point in the distant future, so many seminal artists will be forgotten due to the sheer weight of good music in the future. That there will be a day when people won’t remember hip hop anymore, or the Beatles, or maybe even Bach. And that maybe that future wouldn’t necessarily be some dystopia, but one where everything is so much more amazing than we can imagine today.

September 9, 2012

Process

If there’s one thing I learned from poker, it’s that it will break your heart. The other thing is that you have to trust the process, not the outcome. There are very few times when you’re guaranteed to win, and there’s always someone there ready to catch some lucky draw. You have to trust that, using the correct system, you will win in the long run, even amidst very long bouts of losses. Going on tilt — that is, playing more loosely than normal — for even a session can undo days to weeks of expected value. So at least in limit hold’em, if you play correctly, despite the heartbreak being inevitable, if you can stomach the variance, then so is success. Patience is a virtue, or so they say.

The recent DNC speeches have also surfaced in my mind what the American Dream means — an equal opportunity for everyone to succeed, not an equal outcome of success. A level playing field does not mean that everyone will win, but just that everyone has a chance at winning if they try hard and catch few lucky breaks.

The funny thing about life, though, is that it isn’t fair. There has never been, and will never be, a level playing field. Even without a rigid caste system, there’s little denying that the socioeconomic status from where you were born has an outsized effect on the chances that you will succeed socioeconomically in life. And unlike in poker, where you can play through hundreds of thousands of hands per year, those seminal moments in one’s life that shape and elucidate who are you are much rarer.

These past few weeks, I’ve been slowly slogging through Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which despite being a book of roughly 80 pages, has been incredibly difficult and slow for me to read. One thing that I find fascinating is the similarity between Stoics and Daoists in terms of containing an undercurrent of fatalism and how one deals with it. We all live in a world where we are buffeted by randomness, and we all die. All that we do, and all that we are, is impermanent. Yet, there is some (universal?) notion that there is a right way to live that is independent of how it affects our present conditions — that is, a manner of living that is not selfish and is good. The Golden Rule without any expectation of reciprocation.

It used to seem so _obvious_ that if I adhered to living a “good and just” life, that love and everything else in my life would just work out for me. That karma would enforce just deserts. I guess maybe it just feels like a failure and I feel so unhappy because I’m so close to getting everything I would desire. But I guess maybe I shouldn’t be unhappy: if I’ve lived my life the way I should have, if I’ve followed The Way and settled my debts and obligations — if I have followed the process, then why should I be dissatisfied with the outcome? If the cards I’ve been dealt mean that I will live alone, then what right have I to complain? What use is there in begrudging that which is out of my control?

My biggest fear in life is that maybe I’m wrong, and that I’m not doing the right thing. That maybe hedonism and Epicureanism is more correct. But if I still truly believe that I am living my life in a good manner (which I’m pretty sure, or at least I’m trying), then these everyday outcomes and setbacks shouldn’t concern me; my life just might be a “bad beat.” That shouldn’t prevent my tasking myself with making the world a better place despite any sadness I incur. I should just focus on the long run even if, as Keynes noted, we are all dead by then.

August 12, 2012

See how they shine for you

My weekend in a nutshell:
Friday: in the depths of my personal emotional hell
Saturday: that serene contentedness and oneness with the universe that comes from unfeeling
Sunday: lost like a kite without a string

Went to see the Perseids on Saturday night with some friends whom I haven’t seen in far too long. Lick Observatory is a pretty nice spot to see the skies, which is probably not that surprising given that people decided to build an observatory there. The light pollution from the San Jose area was quite noticeable, but still did not detract that much from the starwatching experience — the sky was quite clear throughout the entire night. What made the experience surreal, though, was that the temperature on Mt. Hamilton never dropped below around 60F. The fleece jacket and scarf were completely unnecessary, as even t-shirt and shorts would have sufficed the entire night. Just staring and staring at the stars for 6 hours was a much-needed perspective-shifting experience from the madness of the week before.

When looking up at the stars on a clear night, it’s hard to not believe that the stars are just pinpricks showing light through some cosmic fabric, little glimpses of that elusive heaven outside our universe. Despite all the science that we know, it’s so hard to truly grasp the distances from which even the closest stars’ light have traveled. And we still use terms like “shooting stars” that belie our shedding of those ancient cosmologies.

To think that (almost) all the stars have been there since the first humans looked up into the night sky, and will continue to be there after our story as a species closes — that is about as close to the infinite that we can grasp.

It’s strange to think that the shooting stars we see are so much infinitesimally smaller than the stars that shine behind them. Yet from our perspective here on earth, we can’t help but imagine them to be of the same essence. It’s kind of funny how we seem to ascribe so much more to those ephemeral bursts of burning dust: like our own lives, so very brief and small, but because they are close to us, so much more wonderful.

On our way down from Mt. Hamilton, we drove by a forest fire, which seemed and still seems absolutely absurd. Luckily, although it was right by the road, it was not too large as we drove by it, but a little down the mountain, we did notice it spreading somewhat quickly. Someone ahead of us must have called 911 because fire trucks were rather quick to arrive at the location; how they had cell phone reception is a mystery.

But it’s our perspective again that makes a wildfire so much more pressing than flecks of dust vaporized by the atmosphere or giant balls of gas undergoing nuclear fusion zillions of miles away. How much brighter a fire seems, although the moon was also bright.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it helps to look at our place in the universe once a while to re-set our perspectives on life. And sometimes the universe throws you a bone, and it is timely.