"try yes"

this is the most Oblique Strategy blog post

I was bummed about something and going "ugh, no no no" the other day, details aren't important but ask me if you want, and someone else was walking by, singing a song, and as an aside mid song says to me, like under his breath as if he was a top secret spy, "try yes." and then keeps singing his song as if nothing had happened. It was the most bananas thing. I could not believe it even happened. In two words, totally owned me, but also he was smiling like he wasn't trying to be a jerk, but also didn't seem like a smarmy ass, and I can't probably convey how he managed to do both those things. Hit me at just the right time. Anyway.

I have many more thoughts but it's hard to write them down, so I will just say this is my mood the last few days:


("maybe everything isn't hopeless bullshit" image from here)

I hope it lasts, but at least in the meantime it's a very good feeling.

feel like I should have figured out "managing my feelings around the news" by now

I've developed a mental/emotional sore spot, it seems, around the US government. Or most governments these days, including but not limited to California, Pennsylvania, the UK, Brazil, Hungary, uh I dunno anywhere that fascism or nimbyism is gaining. The way the sore spot works is that, if anyone mentions anything about it, I become a black hole of depression. Everything they say is either stupid or obviously correct and despair-inducing. I feel worse, and I bet they feel worse, and then I feel worse for making them feel worse. It's not great.
Behind this are a few obvious feelings:
- worry/fear that our world is going to become a really awful place to live
- anger at all the people who are so bad
but I think also less obvious feelings:
- responsibility, like "I've got to do something"
- fear that I'll become the target of scorn from Angry Internet People if I'm not angry enough ("if you aren't depressed what the fuck is wrong with you" - someone on twitter)
- worse: fear that I'll lose respect from real-world friends if I'm not angry enough

Meanwhile, another huge terrible problem is world hunger. Hundreds of millions of people are still in extreme poverty or chronically hungry or food-insecure. And yet, it doesn't consume my life, and I don't turn into a monster whenever anyone mentions hunger. Maybe I should do a similar thing for the government.

(possible counterargument: "but you can do something about the government." sort of. I still vote and stuff, but I have so far been pretty bad when I've tried getting involved with anything beyond that. Like, both ineffective and hating it. I remain open to the possibility, but not optimistic, that there's a way I could be useful.)

I guess this is just the ongoing job of continuing to care without being angry. Maybe I'm still, after all these years, erring on the side of "being too angry." And maybe I'd unlock a little more energy in my life, which could be used to do something about something, if I didn't spend a lot of it on being so angry.

Mystery Hunt, take 2

Mystery Hunt just wrapped up again. It was so fun! I think my post from last year still mostly holds true. If you want some examples, they're at http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2020/. Some of my favorites this year:
Player Piano
Goldilocks
Trebuchet
Story (you will need to know that there is a co-op house at MIT called "Pika"; this website will help at some point)
Tunnel of Love
Creatures from Outer Space
If this interests you, I'd be happy to walk you through any of these!

Some thoughts:

1. I went to Cambridge (Boston) this year to do it. That's been pretty cool. We all rented a house together; some ppl stayed in the house, others (including me) stayed in a nearby hotel. But we spent all day in the house, sitting around on our laptops, cooking meals and stuff. It felt extreme in the way that putting on theater shows as an undergrad felt extreme: staying up late, suffering through periods of being stuck together, having to do the necessities to keep your body healthy but just because you have to and not because breakfast is the high point of your day.

2. It's nice to get to know some of these folks more. It's less social than you might think; it's so focused on doing the thing that you sometimes end up not really socializing. Also, it's very sober; not that you need to be in mildly-altered states to build up relationships quickly, but it often helps. But being in a place with people for 36 hours, you're going to get to know them at least a bit.

3. But though puzzling doesn't strike me as super social, it's still really communal. It's weird; I imagined it being like an Ocean's Eleven kind of thing where one person smooth-talks the guards, one person hacks into the mainframe, one person does the laser dance, etc. And maybe it is, accidentally - like, if you don't like doing laser dances and you open a puzzle and the way to solve it is to do a laser dance, then you'll just close it and ignore it. But there's very little explicit division of labor. There's also very little attribution of glory; when you solve a puzzle everyone celebrates for like 10 seconds and then moves on. I tried to dish out props as much as possible but nobody seemed to care. Nobody talks about great insights they had afterward.

This... might be healthy? Like, you could go very ego-tripping on this, and like build up identities about how good you are at this, because it seems pretty connected to some kind of pretty-general intelligence, and we nerds love being good at intelligence. So, if the cultural default is not to ego trip, then great!

OTOH I wanna get better and/or get specialized so that some time they can be like "a laser maze! we need someone to dance through the lasers!" and I show up and do the thing with the music playing and everyone loves it and I feel important. Some basic human desires don't go away overnight.

4. Seriously, though, there seems to be a big difference between "being competitive" and not. We were definitely not, for a few reasons: our team (Threemoji) is only ~40 ppl instead of 100+, we've only been around for 3 years, and ... I mean, we're not that good. Which is not to say we're not good; I witnessed many feats of advanced black-belt level 9000 puzzle-solving this weekend, and it was awesome, but we still got about halfway through the thing by the time the winners had finished it. It's like someone was telling me about chess: "the difference between the #1 and #50 chess masters is bigger than the difference between the #50 chess master and you or me." (I don't know if that's true about chess, but let's believe it for now.)

To be competitive, we'd have to practice and we'd have to grow. (We'd also have to be willing to write an entire puzzle hunt if we did win; the winning team writes all the puzzles the next year, and that takes a long time.) So we're explicitly not being competitive, now.

And that's great - I don't really even want to be competitive. It feels like it'd make it stressful instead of fun. But I want to get better, mostly because getting better is fun. It's like being very fluent at a programming language - you can just think, less-hampered by needing to google function names. And just-thinking is so joyful; the higher-level (because you're fluent at so many lower levels), the better. So basically, I'd love for Puzzle Dojo to exist.

5. I've got an ongoing hypothesis that one reason I'm depressed, in general, is that I spend too much time thinking/in my head/in my ego, and not enough time feeling/in my body/just being. In that case, just thinking real hard for a whole weekend is going to set me way back! Should I not focus so hard on thinking-type events like this because they're going to reinforce this big thinking-focused way of life that only feels good after coffee?

For the meantime my response is: nah, let's not overthink it here, puzzling is great. Mind/body might be like biceps/triceps or quads/hamstrings. If you exercise only one, you'll be sad... but like, you can't make your biceps stronger by skipping your tricep exercises! To improve the body, just improve the body, don't give up on the mind.

But it's also possible that mind/body is like weights on a scale: if you're too developed in the mind, quit putting weights on that side of the scale. I'm keeping my mind (hah) open to this hypothesis.

6. A trip to Boston was a great excuse to see 4 really good friends outside the puzzling world, and I should continue to find excuses to do this. There's very little that's as good as old friends.

I swear, only a little bit of decade-recapping

Happy new decade. I'm on kinda an emo tear right now, and I was going to post something more mopey and grim about how I'm not gonna post a best-of list because the earth is a cold dead place or something, but I tend to regret doing that. It's been a hell of a decade. Here's some highlights in media that are somehow roughly connected to when they came out or when I first experienced them. These are the moments that stick with me.

2010
Life in Cartoon Motion by Mika
For the best parts of Burning man. I tried this! I tried a bunch of things in Seattle. None of them stuck. I always felt like I was intruding on someone else's party. (Especially at Burning man.) But when you're at someone else's party and they're having a great time, sometimes you can get a little infected by their joy. It's not enough to live on, but it's fun in the meantime.

2011
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West
Gosh I mean, this is a masterpiece and can be all things to all people. To me it's originally two memories: "Lost in the World" walking over the bridge on Pine St feeling a sense of well-being, and singing along to "Monster" riding my bike as I "visiting scholar"ed (read: sat in a lab and did my own thing) at UW. Monster in particular is still a favorite.

Eye Contact by Gang Gang Dance
I started my gap-year-travel by flying to Delhi, busing to Manali and then on to Leh, just jumping as far into the deep end as possible, and spending 3 days in bed with altitude sickness. This album is about as out-there as you feel at 15,000 feet, trying to stay warm in a parachute dhaba in the More Plains.

Sir Lucious Left Foot the Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi
This one, on the other hand, is a welcome taste of home when you're just leaving the dark Nepalese border town of Mahendranagar where you spent a mildly worrying night, strapping into a 12 hour bus ride, and wishing that something could be easier.

2012
Odd Blood by Yeasayer
I'm in Pecs, Hungary, just killing time looking at whatever local medieval castle. It's sunny and pleasant. Somewhere around "ONE" or "Love Me Girl" I wonder about the travelers I've met who are basically wandering indefinitely, and I get a sense that I'm wasting time. I'm glad I'm headed back to the US and getting back to nerdy computery things, and building a life. But dang this is nice in the meantime.

Juicy Lucy by Jupiter
Turn back on the adrenaline; I'm back in Pittsburgh, starting grad school, meeting new friends and an exciting new relationship, and everything's working. Wow. This music is what I would make if life was always working so well. Bouncy, infectious, smooth, perfectly produced. Makes even me want to dance.

2013
Shrines by Purity Ring
6 months later: OH WAIT grad school is awful and I am bad. And we call my house the Pretzel House because it feels like it's made of pretzels. This album, though, opens with a creepy synthy bit about "they'll sew their own hands into their sleeves, to keep the crawlers out" and just gets better from there. I played it in the Pretzel House kitchen in Pittsburgh fall/winter and immediately put it on repeat. In contrast to the previous album, Shrines is dark and weird and beautiful. I don't care if I can only use that word once in this whole post. This is probably my favorite album of the decade.

DUKE 2 by Mrs. Paintbrush
Part of what helped me deal with grad school was the Pittsburgh connection. I have friends, and I know some local culture and stuff, and Mrs. Paintbrush (half of Grand Buffet) is all the things I love about Pittsburgh. A rapper who's funny as hell, but doesn't act like he thinks he's funny as hell.

2014
Inspector Norse by Todd Terje
This summer was electric as it seemed like a way out of the grad school doldrums. Tati interned at Facebook, I interned at HP Labs, I lived in a shared house in San Francisco, I did a lot of Caltrain and burritos, but it was ok because this seemed like an exciting new world that's worth going for more. Inspector Norse is a song that seems right at home exploring this goofy new city, or a song that you can listen to on headphones while you work.

Edit: Space Is Only Noise by Nicolas Jaar
This is the dark shadow side to the excitement. The title track especially, but really the whole album, is the moodiest dark-sidewalk-at-night kind of music that's a great accompaniment to being a bit of a stranger in a bit of a strange land.

2015
Art Angels by Grimes
Man, this year's kind of a blur. I was traveling back and forth between SF and Pittsburgh, trying to finish up grad school, and geez I don't know what was happening but this album is start-to-finish brilliant multifaceted pop. "Over the first 6 tracks you go from epic symphonic overture to top-40 to aggressive Taiwanese hip-hop back to top-40 to... whatever Kill v. Maim is." - me, at the time.

Edit: Strange Desire by Bleachers
If all emo music sounded like this, I'd listen to more of it. Tracks 1-4 remind me of Silent Alarm in that they'd all be great on their own, but make a solid album kickoff all together. I can't really access this year's emotions very much, but neither can I very well tell what this album feels like, but hey that is fine.

2016
Edit: Without My Enemy What Would I Do by MADE IN HEIGHTS
This and Strange Desire make me want to be a producer. (Or a singer, but I don't think I could ever sing as well as Bulkin. Not that I could produce as well as Sabzi, but eh, one can dream.) I don't know what any of these songs mean, but there are really great sounds on it. It's so crisp and polished and just like... a peppermint? It's not just straight sugar; it makes me feel good afterward.

Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads
Ok this isn't new, but: the key event of this year was Tati and me getting married. Our first dance was This Must Be The Place. I still cry when I watch David Byrne sing this song to a lamp. There's something about that: weird smart nerd who sings about buildings and food realizes he can sing love songs too.

2017
Life Will See You Now by Jens Lekman
The lyric "it's been a long, hard year" in "Evening Prayer" is my version of "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me": a kernel of real, hard truth wrapped in a juicy pop song. This year was kind of a long, hard year: finish a thesis, graduate, move, find a job, get frightening imposter syndrome. Jens writes the kind of songs that make me feel like someone gets me: "To know your mission" and "Wedding at Finistere" especially. Plus, I challenge you to find a better riff than "How we met, the long version."

Solitary Flight by Theo Parrish
I started spending a lot of time in an open-office workplace. I got into deep house for a while - it's pretty great work music and I wish I knew more of it. This is among the best tracks I can remember. At one point I put this on while at a ski trip with some new friends, one of them made fun of me about it, and still I felt like, nah, it's ok, I still belong.

2018
Over the Garden Wall
This animated series is so perfectly in the Venn diagram overlap between me and Tati. It's charming, cute, weird, spooky, very funny, perfectly acted and brilliantly animated. I know it's not everyone's definition of cozy, but it makes me think of a time in our SF apartment that's more cozy than full of our neuroses.

Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae
Like Art Angels, this is a multifaceted pop masterpiece. It's very California, in the good ways; it's like the kinds of warm weather I like, and the kinds of people who still want, humbly, to change the world. (Unfortunately, these things seem rarer and rarer; California seems to me more NIMBYs, cars, and WeWork startup nonsense.)

2019
Clemency for the Wizard King by Mountain Goats
I finally got into the Mountain Goats. Of course they have a ton of great stuff. This is probably my favorite. I don't know if it's because a recurring D&D campaign has been a really nice thing in my life the past couple years; I don't think it's just that. The tone almost feels religious; they're pleading with the captor of their king, but it feels like pleading with God or the universe or something. Did I mention my recent emo streak? I cry more now than I used to. This song makes me also.

Annihilation
It's a sci-fi thriller about journeying into the unknown. It's a psychological thriller about self-destruction. It's cosmic horror about the universe being weirder than we can even perceive. Obviously I love all these things. (yeah the books are better; they're kind of dense though.) I love art that gives you a sense of the sublime and of life outside our little comfortable cocoon, and this does more than most. The sublime and real happens to be terrifying. This fits with how I see the world now. 2020s, prove me wrong.

Cutting off bad experiences, or somehow integrating them into your life

Sometimes people get in a bad state. They become homeless or go to prison or something. There are two ways that a non-homeless non-incarcerated doing-pretty-ok person can respond to this.

1. The "separation" approach. Just say "well, that's not me", and do all you can to avoid that becoming you. Cut those parts off from your world.
2. The "integration" approach. Try to include those parts in your world. Which means, you try to make those situations not so bad, and you try to behave with as much compassion as possible towards those people.

I think integration is better.

(I'm trying not to make this so obvious, though in 2019 America this is obvious, because an individual has so little control over whether they end up in these situations. Especially if you're black or brown or poor or whatever. But let's imagine a more ideal world, a just world where only people who do a crime get thrown in jail, and you've got some control over whether you become poor, etc. I want to argue that the "integrative" vision is better for everyone in it, even in this more ideal world.)

I've got more feelings than logic about why integration is better, and those feelings are based on comparing the world to your body.

Sometimes your body gets in a bad state: you get sick. There will be times you're in the hospital - or at least, sick in bed. And at some point you'll die! You can take the days that that's happening and cordon them off, and say, "well, I'm healthy, not gonna think about that now." Then when you get there, you grit your teeth and you get through it. (Or you don't, and you die - that'll happen once! Either way, it eventually ends.) This "solution"... feels bad? Sure, being sick always feels bad, but being sick and unprepared, knowing that you're in the place you've tried to pretend doesn't exist, makes the sickness feel worse.

I glossed over "unprepared", because I'm not sure what it means. Obviously taking care of your body helps - if you're usually pretty healthy, your illness might not be as bad. And sure, if you're a meditation master, for example, you'll be able to see each moment coming and going, and knowing the impermanence of it all makes it sting less, and hell maybe you can jhana out sometimes and get some relief. But I'm wondering, positing, guessing that maybe there's an emotional component to this "preparedness" too; that you might be better able to deal with the "sick" parts if you're more emotionally open to them. (I don't know what this means, or how you become emotionally open to them, but it feels true.)

I'm guessing, if you've done this preparation more, then even the times when you're feeling well will be better, because you'll have less fear of the sick states.

So, likewise, imagining "well, I'm never going to be in prison, so who cares" - it's unstable because what if you mess up, but it also just allows your mind to have unspeakable horrors in it, which invariably leads to worries even during the good times. Alternately: it's better, say, to have one yacht but no possibility of going to hell-prison, than 10 yachts *with* that possibility.

(I wonder if this is universally held! I'm sure there are some people who would say "nah, f 'em, I got mine!" I guess I'd just assume that those people are a little bit emotionally underdeveloped, or they've got other issues?)

How do you make spending decisions?

or, "in which I let my privilege hang out" - so, if that kinda thing bugs you, you've been forewarned

How the hell do y'all make money decisions? (Where here "y'all" means "most of my friends and family who do have some disposable income") Like, "friend invited me to dinner at expensive place; should I go?"

Ok, so you make the easy decisions. You switch from AT&T to Fi so your phone bill is $45, not $95. You cancel the gym you never go to, and you share your Netflix account with family or friends. Cool. And then, if you're on a tight budget you might say "my budget for restaurants is $x this month and I literally never go over it." Fine. Or, if you're super rich, you might say "sure, I don't even think about it." What if you're in between? If you've got money to spend, but you're trying to save, and you don't know whether this restaurant is worth it?

In practice, I usually act on the "super rich" side, but that feels unsatisfying. It works - my friends and salary are such that it's never been a problem, and our expenses are below our income - but am I hedonic-treadmilling? How would I know?

I've been trying to do something about this, to at least semi regularly do a little bit of a review, so last year I downloaded all Tati and my transactions from Mint, and tried to categorize them as well as possible, and... well... had no idea what to do. I noticed we spent more than I expected on airfare, but, I mean, what are we going to do there? Not gonna stop flying home for the holidays. We spent more than I expected on uber/lyft, so we both said "huh, I guess let's try to stop taking uber/lyft so much." We spent $x on food, which... I dunno, I guess it's fine? I already cook a decent amount, and certainly I would probably feel like I'm missing out on relationships or experiences or something if I canceled more things because of money (penny-wise, pound-foolish; or scroogey).

But man, we're hedonic treadmilling so hard! My expenses (even just mine, not counting Tati's) are such that if I were an artist or a not-particularly-affluent-nonprofit worker, or something, I don't know how I'd make ends meet! (Yes ok, it's SF, but even our obnoxious rent is still only like 40% of our expenses.)

One thing I've found we can do is to look at particular things, quantify the money spent on those, and think if there's a way to reduce them. But that feels like stabbing fish instead of using a big net - we might make a few targeted changes but it's pretty unsystematic.

So, I don't know, if you have a principled way of thinking about spending, I'm curious to know.

project one-and-a-halfclops

ok, time passes: how's the "shutting off the noise" working?

well, it's pretty ok. it was easier than I expected. I mostly just don't go into a big loop of searching for information to soothe myself now, beyond just my emails and slack. arguably, I'm just satisfying the same urge with slightly different and less satisfying means, but it doesn't last as long though, so that's ok.
some days I don't yell at cars. I do still play video games, because I hadn't beat a20 with Defect yet. (now I have. it's way easier than the Silent, I gotta say. but now I gotta get on the Watcher train!)
I log into twitter maybe once a day, usually when I have something to toot. I like it as a mostly-write-only medium.

I kinda want to know about good jokes from the McElroys, webcomics, and any good memes. (apparently now we've got problems clown? it's pretty good.) But I feel like maybe I'm making a little progress towards something - or rather, I'm taking it on faith that maybe I'm making a little progress towards something. Ideally I'd be more attuned to feelings, and maybe kinder and more patient, because those seem like skills that could make life more pleasant. I realized recently that one of the most important skills in life seems to be the ability to understand and predict your feelings - then you just do the things that will make you feel good! (for some value of "good", of course.)

(anyway, is all this working? who knows? this is frustrating - it's hard for me to take things on faith! but otoh I'm not losing much. reading a bunch of webcomics and listening to a bunch of podcasts: I guess these were not providing as much value to my life as I thought.)

Tasse's Corollary to Pearson's Law

Realize I never set this down in actual written words! So:

Pearson's* Law, paraphrased: when you measure something, you will naturally start to maximize it.

Tasse's corollary: ... even when you're trying to minimize it.

*(or maybe Monson's or Drucker's or Kelvin's or Caulkin's or Ridgeway's or Rheticus's - none of these seem very popular or credible, but I get marginally more hits searching for "Pearson's law")

A friend just pointed out I should have another law: "The broken thing will start working again exactly when you ask someone for help with it."

(Man, am I gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman someday publishing a book of sayings? I hope so, 'cause there's no way I'm gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman otherwise.)

project cyclops

Someone once told me I sounded like Youtuber CGP Grey, so when I stumbled on the podcast he co-hosts (Hello Internet) I gave it a try, and yep I feel this guy very much.

For a while he was doing this thing he called "Project Cyclops" - turning off a lot of his social media and other internet noise. Obviously, he's not the first to do this, but I like the name, so I'll borrow it.

Why: I don't know specifics, but some combination of calming down, slowing down, getting more out of my head and into my body, just feeling better. Something I'm doing now isn't working; I feel like I'm just zipping from thing to thing the whole time. I also feel stressed a lot, even though my life may be among the less-stressful lives; I feel angry a lot, despite having little to be angry about; and I feel like I'm wasting my life on trivial shiny things instead of focusing on what matters. Turning off your social medias won't solve these, but I hope it helps a little.

Some specifics:

- signing out of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, hopefully just not accessing them. Same with Feedly - I feel less sure about that, but I'm gonna try it.

- not listening to podcasts - still doing language tapes, and music if I feel like it, but gonna take a break from podcasts.

- not yelling at cars. To be clear: ban cars, and direct action in the form of yelling at them when their drivers are entitled assholes is probably a small impact in that direction. But for my mental health's sake, I'm gonna give it a rest for a little while.
- probably not videogaming. I like these too, and I think they can be deep and good, but they get me in a tightly wound mind-state, which I wanna practice not being in. (Plus, I just finished all the achievements in Slay the Spire*, so why even bother gaming anymore?)
* yes I am very proud, why do you ask?

I drafted this post on Sunday, and now posting it on Friday, I've done it for about a week. (I'm not totally all talk.)

Too soon to talk about effects, but I have noticed that my checking pattern when I'm bored at work is now email -> other email -> slack -> try to open twitter, realized that I'm signed out, think "hmm maybe there's nothing for me here", stop checking things. So, that's cool.

really bad and really good mental states, I guess?

I don't know how I got linked to this "qualia computing" site but it's occasionally-really-interesting and occasionally-crazy-seeming.

This post on "psychotic depression" just quotes Infinite Jest, and it's a good-though-terrifying read. Similarly, this post on logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain. Gets me thinking a few things:

1. holy god, how do people survive. how is there so much pain in this world. how can we even deal with living in a world where there are people suffering so much. (my answer so far: mostly, ignore the problem and hope it doesn't happen to me. obviously, this is unsatisfying.)
2. I oughta get back to meditating. (if I had a dollar for every time I said this...) I've experienced some pretty-faint jhana-type states, not regularly or dependably or strongly ("0.1th jhana"?), but it'd be really nice if I had a thing I could do to feel good more regularly.
(not that meditation's goal is producing jhana states. as far as I understand it, they're a nice byproduct, and/or a cool thing you can practice for fun.)

50 interviews with people experiencing PNSE (Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience) and a summary. This gets me thinking a few other things:

1. Enlightenment is a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe a good analogy is, being a good chess player. There are some real discrete steps along the way ("oh, now I really get why you should control the center of the board" or "I finally found a good counter to the Sicilian Defense") but it's not a state you'll get to and be done.
2. It's also not blissful... except, I mean, I think I'd like it. It sounds like it's a quieting of a lot of self-related mental chatter, an expansion of the "self", less common occurrence of negative emotions. I guess that doesn't sound like a general solution to all of life's problems, but it kinda sounds like most of a solution to most of mine.
"When asked, none said they wanted their self-referential thoughts to return to previous levels or
to have the emotional charge returned to them."
3. why the hell does everyone in the enlightenment/etc world write books that look like this

being a body. having a body.

It's been an interesting few days.

For a while I've been trying to "be in touch with my body" more. I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if it's well defined. I think I have for a long time been kinda-in-touch with my body; like, I sometimes know "I feel bad but will feel better when I go outside even if I don't feel like going outside" or "I will not eat that thing because I will feel worse, even though it seems good right now." Also, I can meditate decently enough to where I can feel body sensations at a pretty fine granularity in space and time. (If I try, which I don't very often.)

I've recently been able to feel my body more than that, which is cool. It feels good, mostly! I feel more energetic and positive; like, a little lighter. But it's also a little incomprehensible; sometimes I don't know what my body feels like, or why. I think I'm starting to become okay with the fact that this is just how the body operates. If I could translate all my feelings directly into words, they wouldn't be feelings. Or like, if I want to "be able to listen to my body more", but I'm only listening to things that are easily translated into words, I'm going to miss most of it.

I think about this three level model sometimes:
top level: thoughts
middle level: emotions
bottom level: body
A shallow experience is just at the level of thoughts. If it gets deeper, it feels emotional. Even deeper, and it's something you just feel. Some things about this model:
- You can maybe translate +/- one level - like you can talk about emotions in the language of thoughts. But you can't really talk about body feelings in the language of thoughts (or at least, I can't).
- Trying to interact with something on the wrong level is just not going to work. Ever been feeling a way, and tried to think it out? Didn't work, right? Sometimes just makes it worse.
- The deeper something is, the harder it is to work itself out. Thoughts can change quickly, emotions maybe after minutes or hours, but something that's settled in your body takes a while to change. (I know, I'm just asserting that "things can be in your body" in a way that is uncomfortably squishy and inexact. I'm going to assume that this is a true thing that happens, at least for now, even though I can't really describe how.)

Some other things that I'm feeling more recently, some of which are just platitudes:
- maybe discomfort is ok
- nothing lasts forever; if you don't like now, just wait a few minutes
- I sometimes have to take up more space in the world than I currently let myself take
- the body doesn't think, it just does. it's almost like "my mind" and "my body" are two separate people both living in this same space, and we've got to learn to live well together.

first, links

I have so many things to say! I'll start with "here are a lot of links" because that's easier.

Trying to at least kinda hold car companies accountable for their totally nonsense predictions about how fast they'd have autonomous cars.

Newsletters are the new thing it seems, maybe because of the dark forest the internet has become, and some of them are really good.
Normcore Tech comes to mind. This post about Reddit is pretty right on - Reddit has become a great place for a lot of weird niche things, but there's no sign it's not gonna go the way of Facebook or Twitter. This post and this post about Facebook.
The Margins seems good too, though I haven't read it as long.

"It's so much more than cooking." Yes! "my husband... had focused on the one thing he'd promised to do: grab a pot and a pan, put something in it, and make edible food. But what I'd wanted him to do was much more complex, so ingrained in my experience of cooking that I didn't even think to articulate it. I wanted him to pick up the baton. To check what ingredients we already had, and what might need using up. To plan out a meal that would meet everyone's dietary needs and preferences (including a balanced amount of protein and starch, and at least one vegetable). I wanted him to look up recipes, and make a grocery list if needed, and stop by the store on the way home."
(I mean, I'm usually pretty good at this kind of logistics stuff - but it is certainly a lot of mental overhead!)
(and, in before your "smart refrigerator" - this is the kind of thing that is too multifaceted and messy to be Solved By Technology for a long time, I think.)

Technological development in every direction is not inevitable. "Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. ... Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered."

"Venn Diagram Problems"

Imagine two friends A and B.

A: Hey, want to go to this Indian place?

B: Nah, I don't really like Indian, how about this Mexican place?

A: You don't like Indian food? How is that possible?

B: I don't know, I'm just not a big fan. And you always want to go to an Indian place, why do you like it so much?

etc

At about line 3, it changed from a conversation about "where to go for dinner tonight" into one about "whether Indian food is good". That's probably not the one you need to solve.

Put another way, imagine the restaurants A likes as one circle, and the restaurants B likes as another one. A and B are trying to force those circles to overlap completely. But that's not the right question - the question is "can we find one place that's in the Venn diagram overlap between A and B?"

These also come up when you're thinking about the future ("what will we do if ____"). You've both got a decision tree in your mind, and you want those trees to overlap perfectly, but you don't really that at all. You just need them to overlap for the part of the future that ends up coming true. So maybe it's not worth arguing about the low-probability branches of the decision tree, and instead focus on stuff that's either true right now or is more likely to be true in the future.

Anyway, just keep your eye out to notice when you're dealing with a Venn diagram problem.

"Pleasure as an organizing principle"

This post/talk (video if you prefer) is a really good description of where I'm often getting to these days.

(I immediately feel a need to defend and hedge by saying "when I (or Tiago Forte) say pleasure, I'm not talking about stupid-hedonism, like just sex drugs rock and roll"; if we've ever talked about this, I've probably said this exact phrase to you; perhaps a way to put it from adrienne maree brown quoted here: "the idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is.")

I've been wondering about this when traveling recently; traveling was hard, and I wanted more comfort. But when I'm home for too long and have too much comfort, that's not great either. I mean, obviously this is true with food and sex and stuff too. Walking that line of "enough" feels better in the long run.

"If you can never tell what makes you come alive, you can never take responsibility for yourself; you're always at the mercy of what you want to do, what you must do, what you should do - there's always some externally defined obligation."

Some of this feels like just the concept of creativity. Like, it's way harder to draw a dog than it is to just color in the lines of someone else's dog drawing. Or, it's way harder to draw something you like than it is to erase things you don't like, or to look at 10 pictures and throw out the 9 you don't like. But curating all the time is draining; creating often feels better afterward.

"The opposite of pleasure is not pain, it's dissociation. Just unhinging from any kind of sense."

I'm trying to just get to a place that is sustainable, that doesn't hurt. What would that be like? How would I know? I can keep increasing my bank account, but that doesn't even necessarily make me feel any better. I thought for a while I could keep increasing my meditative zen and that would just be Better, but that might not be true either. Living a happy life seems more like gardening than spreadsheeting or optimizing. (If this metaphor makes no sense, I will expand it in a future post.) Maybe the real thing is to keep learning what feels right (both to my body and my mind) and trying to get closer to that.

(On the other hand, this is appealing; not suffering sounds better than gritting your teeth and fighting through it. So maybe this is all confirming-what-I-want-to-be-true; maybe I'll wake up someday and realize I've been ineffective my whole life because I've been chasing this dream. But I think it's worth taking that chance.)


ok, enough pleasure, here's some pain, from around the internet:

A good recap of why Uber/Lyft are Bad. (and this doesn't even get into how crummy they treat their *ahem* employees!)

Scientists have been underestimating the pace of climate change. So like, A of all, Mitch McConnell Roger Ailes and Newt Gingrich have done all they can to destroy our future but will die pleasantly of old age before they have to face the consequences of their actions, yes we know, and sorry to pour more salt on that wound; but B of all, this is an interesting look into science communication. The emphasis on univocality and "conservativeness" is a thing I feel too: I really undersell stuff, because I don't want to be wrong. It's hard to build a career on "knowing stuff and being right all the time."

In that direction, Project Wren: make it easy to buy carbon offsets. I'm going so back and forth on A. whether this is good and/or B. whether I should do it. Speaking of "not being wrong", I am loathe to sign up and Be Wrong again, because:
- they're y combinator, and like, that means they *might* run a successful business, but they *might* just totally hose the whole thing and cause more harm than good, not that that ever happens with white people dumping money into Africa
- carbon offsets has been a scammy market in the past (sometimes maliciously scammy, sometimes ignorantly)
- shouldn't I be donating to bed nets instead?
BUT, all that said, it might be worth it for the purely selfish reason of making myself feel less guilty.
Eh. Anyone got some better climate-guilt-soothing donations?

On being "tough"

I kind of value being "tough", where that means some combination of "physically fit" and "able to tolerate discomfort."

Some people who are insanely "tough" would be, like, Shackleton or the guys in Meru. Some people who are more reasonable but still very "tough": probably Appalachian trail through-hikers, or your average mountaineer. Some people who are less tough than that but still tougher than me: more regular backcountry hikers, many-day cyclists, dirtbag backpackers.

Why do I value being "tough"? I think it is some combination of these:
1. I want to be able to do anything. Like, we just hiked the Inca trail; that was amazing but required a certain amount of "tough"ness. Similarly, I have had camping trips with friends I am now glad to know better; I am glad I didn't have to say "sorry, I'm out because I'm not "tough" enough."
2. I tend to admire people who are "tough"? Maybe this is just coincidence? Like, there are very many people who I like a lot who are not "tough." Besides, it's correlation at best.
3. I'm afraid of the life experience of being very non-"tough", or of being the average American. Like, the average American has diabetes and a job they hate. That doesn't sound fun. Maybe if I'm tough I can avoid that.
4. I'm afraid of being contemptible by being very non-"tough". Something like "you coddled rich American, you can't even do a hard day's work (or hike a thing or whatever) if you had to!"
5. I'm afraid of being "the wrong kind of nerd." Like, socially clueless, unkempt, unhealthy, without good skills, generally pitiable. (Being a math nerd, Magic player, computer gamer, etc, I have met many people like this.) "Tough"ness doesn't exempt you from being this but it does correlate negatively.
6. Maybe "tough" people are on to something! Like, runner's high, or some kind of peaceful sense from being in the woods. Usually when I'm in the woods I feel 10% beautiful-peaceful, 40% bored, and 50% tired/dirty. Maybe I can grow that 10%.

I think, of these reasons, I should do the following:
- try to jettison reasons #4 and #5; they are just insecurity and judgment, which are not cool for me or other people.
- worry less about #2. You meet who you meet, and I meet plenty of both "tough" people and "not-super-tough" people.
- worry less about #3; I think I will be fit and healthy enough regardless of whether I go camping often.
- be open to #1 and #6, and continue to do some "tough" things when the opportunity arises, but not go out of my way to prove a point.

I don't know what the sum of these changes looks like, but it's probably some kind of "trying to be kinder to myself for being exactly as "tough" as I am." Well, we are all growing, bit by bit.

Observations about Bolivia mostly

Ok now we have been through:
La Paz
A Salar de Uyuni (and beyond) tour
Copacabana and Isla del Sol and Luna
Puno, Peru

Some things I have noticed:
- a lot of dogs have jackets.
- menus have either two choices (local spots) or 500 (tourist spots). Both can be good or bad.
- ATMs in Bolivia are great; they give you lots of small change. In Peru so far they are terrible because they all seem to charge a 5% fee.
- prices for big things (cars, etc) are listed in USD. This doesn't make sense to me; is it just to avoid the sticker shock of "7000 bolivianos" and "1000 USD" sounds better?
- altitude sickness can happen even after a week or more. It can make migraines even worse! It can also manifest in weird ways, like making small problems seem like big problems.
- Bolivia seems entirely cool and very low tourist hassle. I remember seeing some map saying that Bolivia was one of the most foreigner-unfriendly countries, and in our experience that couldn't be further from the truth. Peru (well, Puno so far at least) seems like there are annoyingly more hawkers and touts.
- I find it hard to enjoy things when there's even a moderate amount of discomfort. Like, kinda-wet socks level of discomfort. I think this is a major weakness in my character.
- bathrooms have been great. They usually cost 1 or 2 (or 5) bolivianos ($1=7 Bs) but they are pretty clean.
- Llamas have long banana-shaped ears. Alpacas have short stubby ears and are softer and really just overall cuter. Vicuñas look like deer.

Altitude and cold are bad, teleféricos and airbnb experiences are great?

We are in La Paz, Bolivia!

1. Altitude and cold are bad.
We're at 10,000 ft, and nights get down to maybe the 30s, and central heating kinda isn't a thing? We've got a space heater. Anyway, I haven't really felt 100% the whole time I've been here, and it's gotta be that, right? Like, my stomach is just kinda not hungry for anything and when I do eat, it feels bad. Luckily, we're otherwise doing well.

When my stomach feels "ehh", it also makes me feel mentally "ehh", and I've had a couple of really sad moments so far. That's weird. Gives more evidence to the "depression is caused by feeling bad" hypothesis (as opposed to the "depression is caused by meaninglessness" hypothesis).

2. I think teleféricos are great?
There's gondolas! That go over the whole city! There are 10 lines and like 30 stops! That's how you can get around! It's so cool. And really genius for a city that's like a bunch of little islands between the mountains. They're pleasantly full but never seem to have lines. They cost Bs.3 = $0.50. Waiting for someone to tell me why "actually, they're bad", because they seem pretty great.

3. I think "Airbnb experiences" are great?
A guy named Javier was offering mountain bike tours, he had 30 references and positive reviews, so I went biking with him. It was also so cool. Like, he's just a guy, with a lot of biking-in-La-Paz experience; I could talk to him as a person, not a tour operator. Waiting for someone to tell me why "actually, this is bad" too; I would be less surprised because I'm sure the San Francisco Venture Capital machine will find a way to suck all the humanity out of it or destroy some other industry or whatever, but in the meantime it seems pretty great.

I'll show you photos later. Blogger's mobile app seems to have been made in 2009 and not updated since then, so I don't even know if I can add photos here. (Of course. The SFVC machine doesn't care about maintenance.)

The Dark Forest of the Internet

I feel this a lot. In short: the author (and many formerly-very-internetty people) are withdrawing from large swaths of the internet because those swaths are like being a gazelle out on the savannah: it's not safe and everyone is gunning for you.

In contrast, "dark forests" are "spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments."

I was going to say more but I realized after walking away from this for a while that all I was going to do is just say what the author was saying, but less polishedly. So, maybe I'll just say read that article instead.

Personally, I'm certainly doing this - much less interested in The Internet At Large, much more interested in small dark forests within the internet.

Continuing the series of "Dan notices more what's going on in his mind"

There's a low level hum in the background, basically always, telling me why I'm a Bad Person. Sometimes it's "remember that time in high school where you said that dumb thing" or "you yelled at a car person unnecessarily yesterday" or "global warming is happening and you're still flying 20,000 miles every year, you selfish ass" or whatever. Sometimes it's just a kinda bad feeling without much content around it.

I always used to think that this was because I was judgmental towards other people. Like, I won't tolerate it if someone parks in the bike lane for 5 seconds; I think their car should be immediately impounded and their license revoked, and when they get to the Pearly Gates, St Peter sends them to Purgatory for an extra 1000 years. Therefore, if I commit a traffic violation that's approximately that bad, that shows that I am an equally awful person, in the grand scheme of things, and a hypocrite to boot. I judge other people, and then because of that I also judge myself.

But I had an interesting conversation today where someone suggested maybe it was the other way around. Like, I judge myself, and then because of that I also judge other people.

This has some interesting implications for how to address it. I kinda always thought "I better be nicer to other people, and eventually if I send enough love out into the universe, it might reach that judgmental voice in myself too." But maybe instead I ought to just start by being nicer to myself.

"Logical Mind"

(Mannn I wish I had a better title for this. The point of it, though, is that I'm trying to define an internal concept, so I guess of course naming is hard.)

There are a lot of voices in anyone's head. (talking non-schizophrenic, not-actual-voices "voices" here.) This is obvious when you do something as simple as decide whether to eat a cake: "I want to eat it, but I also don't want to feel too full later or gain weight." There's a real powerful voice that gets a lot of airtime in my head. Let's call it "logical mind" for now (though I might actually just mean "ego" or Kahneman's "System 2", not sure).

Here are some characteristics of Logical Mind:

- it's always looking for problems to solve, and solving them.

- it loves quick answers; it's not patient. 

- it really dislikes things it can't solve.

- it loves saying no and reducing things to a size it can think about

- it loves not having to think about things.

- it's defensive, and hates possibly being wrong.

- it's judgmental and snobby.

(These might not be totally independent vectors. Probably if you dimensionality-reduced it, you'd end up with 3 main dimensions: 1. knowing what you can do with computers, but 2. not having much RAM or processing power; 3. hating being wrong.)

Logical Mind seems like a fine tool to have, a fine voice. But it's troublesome when it runs the whole show all the time. Here are some times it is troublesome:

1. when I don't have anything to do on a weekend, so I just clean stuff up for a while, and then invent more problems to "solve", and then end up mad that I wasted a whole day doing nothing

2. when I have a big mood, but I can't figure it out, so I just distract myself for a while; meanwhile the emotion sits there unprocessed and still messing with me

3. when I notice someone's (perhaps my own!) complex emotional issue, and decide "I know the answer, it's simple, so I should not bother being compassionate with them."

4. when I don't have a super well-formed opinion on something, so I default to "it's bad" to protect myself from being wrong.

5. when I start trying to learn something, find it difficult, and then quit, because in theory it should be way easier.

6. when I think about doing a potentially-fun thing that requires some work to do, and I decide, well... fun thing requires maybe -10 amount of work, and somewhere between I dunno +0 and +30 amount of fun, that's too hard to evaluate, I will not do it.

7. when I'm on vacation or something and I can't just sit still and stop trying to find or solve problems.

8. when I've got some mild discomfort, but I have to fix it, I can't just let it be.

9. when I am debating something that I've already figured out, and I can't tolerate the complexity of the debate because I am Right, dammit

10. when someone does something wrong, and I think "this absolute horrible human, how could they possibly have gotten it wrong, it is so obvious and unquestionable that I am right here."

It is hard to listen to Logical Mind all the time, mostly because it continually points out what is wrong, and therefore focuses you on it. When Logical Mind is in charge, there isn't even a concept of "enjoyment" or "meaning" or "wonder" or "joy", there's just "things are broken and I feel bad" or "nothing seems to be broken right now so I don't feel so bad." It would be nice, I think, if Logical Mind were a bit player I could pull out when I wanted, instead of the captain who's usually steering the ship. So, that is a thing I'm trying to work on.

edit: this very appropriate comic just happened to come up today