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Ethical Crisis and Flappy Bird

A certain fog of sadness has descended upon me with certain revelations about a certain acquaintance and his actions. When the uglier sides (or are they just repressed?) of humanity are unearthed and displayed, so many latent questions are dredged up along them. How should we judge others, and how are we ourselves to be judged? As an extreme hypothetical, suppose someone found the cure for cancer and saved millions of lives but was also a murderer. Where do the scales fall? Where should they fall?

A friend who majored in video games brought up the news article about the game Flappy Bird, whose creator recently revealed that he pulled the game off the market because it was too addictive (link). Which seemed interesting to me because I’m quite skeptical that the elimination of one game, which has already spawned many clones, would meaningfully curtail game addiction. And to give up what’s been reported as up to $50k per day for such a reason seems almost crazy to me. But said friend, the only one who’s a Kantian (or at least who outwardly would admit so), brought up the fact that ethical reasoning doesn’t work in that manner, and mentioning the categorical imperative in a twitter conversation (which, in my book, deserves an award of some kind).

This would be an inconsequential piece of chatter but for my state of mind as outlined in par. 1 above. Somehow, thoughts fill those little moments of vacuum, and then I am sad. Isn’t who we hang out with, and what things we choose to do, a judgment of our character? I was reminded of an incident from college, where one of my dorm mates, whom we thought was maybe a bit eccentric and maybe a bit angry, but otherwise not of special notice in the loony bin that is Stanford, ran over his dad with his car. (Aside: I wonder what percent of the population is an acquaintance with a murderer anyway?) Had it been invented back then, wouldn’t he have been a facebook friend? Was he a bad person? I don’t know the circumstances of his situation and would find it difficult to think that his would be justifiable patricide, but does one notable bad action result in someone being bad?

Some lines of thoughts cross, and I’m left with questions. Given that ballet supports this ideal of thinness as beautiful, am I complicit in girls’ eating disorders? Since I willingly work in tech, am I guilty of promoting income inequality? Maybe these rules are such that there’s no way to win, but who’s to say that we need must play the game?

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Resolutions 2014

What a deliciously odd year 2013 has been. I think I’ve done so much, but also lived most of the year in a daze which hasn’t subsided. One of the perils of a whirlwind year, I suppose.

Looking back at my resolutions for this year, while I’ve checked so many of them off the list — more than I would have expected — I still feel the year was a bit of a failure in many regards. It was like winning all the battles but losing the war. Re-reading that old post, I wanted to put down some roots; in actuality, I feel even more lost than before. As tweeted, I threw everything to the wind to see what would fly.

Of the five resolutions for 2013, I think four are probably successes to varying degrees:

  • Get promoted. It didn’t happen in the first cycle of the year, which no doubt triggered some (most?) of the craziness that was the latter half of the year. But it did happen in the later cycle. So things are good.
  • Not be afraid to say I love ballet. This was a banner year for me in many ways, from doing some great shows to meeting awesome friends in adult dance camp. And given that this was the year that I’ve felt genuinely pained and anguished by certain aspects of ballet, it must be love, right? Not to mention just how annoyed I am about my ankle preventing my dancing right now.
  • Buy a house/condo. A partial victory here as I enter the slumlord business.
  • Not be too depressed about that birthday on the horizon. Things aren’t quite so bad, and I think I’ve made my peace with much of being on this side of thirty.

And of course, “be in a relationship”, a perennial favorite, remained ever elusive. I’m a slow learner, but I think there was a little progress even here.

My resolutions for 2014:

  • Tell my family I love them. It’s not that I don’t feel it, but I’m not sure I’ve ever said it. They’re not sentimental types, as far as I can tell.
  • Write more. I have no idea if anyone derives any pleasure reading all this junk, but I’ve begun to realize that, for me, this is a necessary catharsis. There’s something strange and wonderful about sending all your thoughts and grievances out into the aether, knowing that anyone can read it but so very few — the ones that matter — will. Yes, this feels more and more amateurish each passing year, but isn’t that life?
  • Shoulder sit or quit. It’s getting to be a little embarrassing this glacial progress in partnering. If my ankle heals up, I think it’ll be time to double down again on dance, and if that fails, find something new to pursue.
  • Keep chasing unicorns. Never give up that sense of wonder. Believe that dreams can and do come true.

And if I finally exit this zombie-like trance, that would be fine by me.

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Never Good Enough//The Dreamer

It’s been an Alice in Wonderland past couple months. I don’t think I’ve ever been so spaced out for such a long time. I feel like I’ve been walking through a dream world, and even more tired all the time than usual. Everything has seemed so bizarre and detached, like the things that I found meaningful before have stopped and become inverted. My motivation has plummeted and I don’t know how to regain that spark. Maybe the pendulum is swinging back from idealism to realism, or maybe I’m just completely losing it.

By all rights, it’s been a rather productive latter half of 2013, and I probably should be pretty happy:

  • I survived the John Muir Trail, which was absolutely stunning and an amazing hike. I really need to write things up, but knowing me, it might never happen at this point. Highly recommended.
  • I’ve somewhat acclimated to living in San Francisco. Despite the fact that it’s almost always foggy and cold and parking sucks and the 2-hour round-trip weekday commute makes me want to stab myself in the face, I’m slowly warming up to the city and discovering some of its charms and (shall we say) character.
  • I bought a house down in San Diego. It’ll be a rental property, and my dream of being a slumlord is becoming a reality.
  • I got promoted.

And yet, I feel this nagging dissatisfaction, which unlike most times, I think goes way beyond the lack of a girlfriend thing. Hard as I try, everything I do never seems to be good enough for myself. Which, fine: I know I’ll always be my harshest critic, and fundamentally, I think that being complacent is the kiss of death. I can’t help but wonder, though, if life really should be this endless struggle for betterment. Shouldn’t there be a point where we can call it quits and be satisfied with the results of who we are and what we’ve accomplished? Even knowing that there’s the next mountain to climb, can’t we appreciate the view from this one?

At some point in the past, I had a meditative refuge to where I could retreat. I don’t think I have that anymore. I feel perpetually restless. Sleep doesn’t reinvigorate me.

Maybe it’s this ankle that’s been sapping my motivation in ballet. It’s not that I can’t dance, but the soreness and weakness just makes moving so frustrating. It’s only tendonitis, so it could have been a lot worse. But I also feel like I’ve not improved much, if at all, over the past year or so. I told myself that I’d stick with ballet for five years, or would quit when I stopped getting better at it. It seems like the two are coinciding quite neatly right now, and so I wonder — after an especially frustrating rehearsal — whether it’s about time to move on. What do you do when it stops being fun, and yet you can’t quite seem to let it go?

There was this article about how Taylor Swift’s view on love has migrated away from the “daydreamy prince-and-princess place” (link). I think a little part of me died when I read it. A lot of my friends wonder why I like listening to Taylor Swift and other teen-oriented pop, especially given my otherwise rather pessimistic worldview. Notwithstanding that there’s no accounting for taste, I think that I’d much rather live in a world where there exist such dreamers, where people still believe in things like true love, and where there is such a thing as innocence. Even if I can’t be fully convinced of such things, at least others still believe. Isn’t that what life is about, pursuing the stuff of dreams?

Maybe the JMT has affected me more than I thought. After all, the first and lasting impression upon coming back to civilization was that so much of this is so unnecessary. We can live with so much less than what we have; and I’ve never been convinced that, despite all the good that technology supplies, whether any of it makes us any happier. And yet how quickly I returned to business as usual, my quotidian routine.

It’s always been a promise to myself that I wouldn’t get so caught up in the rat race that I would lose sight of my dreams and what really matters. Have I strayed again? Have I gone so far from my true self that I don’t even realize it? Or do I not even know what my true self is to begin with?