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This is a hard one to cope with. On the one hand, when I’m struggling, I try to make changes that decrease my level of struggling. Then, when my struggles have decreased, I become so bored, that I want to undo all the changes I made so that I begin to struggle again. This is seriously messed up. But it makes sense. The struggle is an indication of work and progress. It is a very explicit feeling. Not struggling doesn’t feel like anything at all. I enjoy struggling, and it would be damned near perfect if it were not for one thing: the struggle takes me out of the real world. It makes me…

Some weeks ago, I found myself tinfoiled by the question of the objective vs. subjective nature of reality. I was so endlessly obsessed with trying to understand, what is the true nature of the world, as opposed to the nature of the world from my perspective? It sounds like a meaningless question, and probably is, but is extremely fascinating. At first, it was just an amusing thought. Later it would grow into a behemoth that occupied a great percentage of my working CPU. A friend was also fascinated by this question, and we talked about it at some length. The question itself is increasingly…

There’s a strange part of the modern, scientific human being that likes to observe the world and its functioning. If something good happens, we say, how do we make more good things happen? We try to deduce it to an exact science. You might also find me contemplating, as in previous posts, things like “nature rewards this or that” or “life tends to act this way or that”. The reality of course is these are dumb, blind guesses, and are at best bizarre personifications of a world whose “true nature” we know little about. I’ve noticed the more I try to observe the world and try to extract…

I’ve been stuck in a loop of non-progress for some time. Things are going well, but not as well as I’d like (I’m pretty sure that remains the case at every level of progress). In any case, the hardest part of building something new, especially a company, is that the road is unpaved. There are no signs, other than a few warning and “Dead End” signs here and there. I’ve found myself extremely stuck as of late. Not knowing what to do next. I’ve scoured through books, through the web, through my mind, and have found some direction, but not enough. My questions are so particular, that I feel…

A hopeless in love friend was oozing his worries yesterday, and said in the most beautifully tragic way: I have this vision for how my life should be. And my real life doesn’t match it. If there’s anything I uselessly specialize in, it’s letting worriers know that they are symptoms. You are never ever alone in how you feel. You are a statistic, and odds are, most other people feel this way too. Even more hopelessly, I replied is this not the human condition? I reflect on this now because of how beautifully sad that original statement was. And how relatable it is. That vision, those images…

What comes from the ground is grounding. This much I’ve learned. It’s tethering. The ground produces some of the most addicting products we consume (well, it produces all the products we consume, but). Food, fruits, vegetables, alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms, coffee, tea, tobacco—they all come from the same place, and all seem to share a common property: they are grounding. They bring you into the earth. But I don’t want to be pulled in. What is the 21st century human being if not a beacon of outward exploration? Of space, of solar, of science. We are departing the ground. We are developing…

I've been telling myself that I am not afraid. And therefore any mismatch between the progress I'm making and the progress I want to be making is due to a datetime imbalance, and not some sort of inhibition. I may have been partly right. But also very partly wrong. Perhaps I am not afraid of many of the things I choose not to go after. I am not afraid of meeting people, yet I always tend to stay inside my head. I am not afraid of talking to people, yet I always prefer to avoid small talk. I am not afraid of trying new things with an open mind, yet my experiences for the past year have been…

A friend was telling me yesterday that he’s been struggling to get daily tasks done. He’d rather just put them off. But this friend might as well be me, or probably you. Sometimes we go through periods of absolute demolition of our daily tasks, but other times, we go through seemingly longer periods filled with reluctance to work. In observing this behavior in myself in the past, I’ve noticed that it usually comes down to three reasons why I don’t feel like doing the work I should clearly be doing. The way I’ve been able to observe it and get at its root is because it felt physical. There…

The question of the random vs. non-random nature of our existence in essence asks: what part of our lives has meaning, and what part is chaos theory? I tend to think that science ascribes too much randomness to our world, while religion and spirituality ascribe too much meaning. But, as a friend of mine says, it is the job of each of those fields to specialize. Science specializes in eliminating meaning, and allows it to focus on what removing that lens makes the world look like. Religion specializes in ascribing meaning to almost everything, and yields interesting, different results. I was…

Have you ever heard of a company or startup having more labor resources than they know what to do with? I’ve never heard such a thing. Instead, every employee, every company owner, and every story I hear is riddled with The Great Squeeze: human resources are squeezed far beyond their breaking point, and hiring more is detrimental to the bottom line. The result of the squeeze is unhappy laborers in every corporation around the world. You must complete eighty hours worth of work in forty (the result is of course eighty hours of work). The emotional cost is unbearably high. A friend of mine…

I’ve been under the weather for the past few days. The world must have read what I said about being twistedly envious of Charles Darwin’s extended sicknesses and took it literally. As shitty as it feels, it has allowed me to finally take a small, much needed break. Yesterday was the first day in probably a year that I did no work at all. I’ve gotten into a rhythm of listening to podcasts when I can instead of music. Typically I go through a podcast phase once every year or so, before deciding I’ve been intaking too much information and need a break. Joe Rogan’s podcast has been hitting the…

This one is fascinating to me. Someone I follow on Twitter liked a tweet someone else posted, and that tweet was a picture of Ray Dalio’s book called “Principles”. I had never heard of Ray Dalio before, but apparently he made Forbes’s 100 richest people (17 billion USD net worth) through an investment firm called Bridgewater Associates. Ray himself is an intellectual, and so far his book is extremely fascinating. He takes a very iterative and evolutionary approach to self-improvement. The screenshot that got me interested in the book captured a passage that said: Reality is optimizing for…

The memory of winter is always the same for me. It’s always difficult in an emotional sort of way. The memories themselves are clear, but the times while they pass are hazy. I’m always half sleepy during winter, and thus only half myself. Maybe it takes adjusting to. But memories of winter are always dark. There are memories of working on other projects years and years ago from my bedroom in my parent’s house. That was, during the moment the most profound era of my life, but retrospectively a dark and challenging time. There was the memory of starting several different employment jobs, which…

I had a fascinating conversation with a friend regarding the objective vs. subjective nature of reality. Does the universe objectively exist whether or not someone is there to observe it, or is its existence subjective and in the mind of the observer? This question dates back centuries, but comes back highly recommended from quantum physics, which makes this question no longer a metaphysical one, but a fundamental scientific one. Neither of us made any particular progress on this question. I believe that our senses plays a large part in how we perceive the existence of the universe, and…

My wife always forces me to make unnatural poses for a Snapchat or Instagram photo. She tells me “smile!” but if I wasn’t already smiling, then the photo is a lie. I’m being pedantic just to say, I hate hate posing for photos. It’s more of my introverted nature than anything to do with worrying about faking an emotion. I’m really not sure when this started. About a decade ago I remember being extremely extroverted. I was an arrogant teenager, and I probably loved taking photos of myself. Something unhinged in my twenties, where I’m now extremely reserved and internal. You’d have a hard time…