Kavser

memories (archive)

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000

I dont remember what it was like. I can't put myself fully in the state. not logically. not emotionally.

but for older timeframes. Not one bit. Is there any way I can get in contact with that guy? He is dead.

-but why do I need to get in contact with that guy?
-maybe he knew something, something important.
-He definitely had a lot of thoughts
how to better do parenting
how to better do schooling.

but unfortunately, those feelings, thoughts, emotions seemed to have vanished with time, eaten up by entropy.

little did he know

by the exercises I've done in writing these posts. This website is probably a way of archiving these "states". to inform myself in the future

Its all for the future eh?

Hey there, I want to hear your thoughts! These posts started as "me talking to a wall" but its much more fun if the wall is a human;;

The next posts will be of a different flavour. For one I dont use spotify anymore hehe. the pictures will stay though - i loove taking pretty pictures

Don vs Kore

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

A clearing in the forest, a chance to see the city from above

So the other day I learnt the hard way that I misjudged women.

I was at the grocery store, buying pears. I love pears so I'm packing mad loud. As I walk out however, I realise that the lady at the cashier billed me for PEAS instead of pears.

Pears are around 1.50/kg, peas are 10 dollars per kg. So I'm literally paying 10x! There's no way I'm paying 10x for my pears. I took it back, and I showed a man in another register.

"I think you billed me for peas"

"...Ah we did bill you for peas. Gimme a sec I'l fix it"

Whew, close one. I almost hadn't caught that - but thankfully this very nice man will fix it for me and let me go happily on my way.

He took the bill to his friend, and they went back to the machine. No way! Both these nice men are working hard to make my day!

Now outside, I get the urge to just recheck the bill.

Huh, I only saved like 2 dollars. That really wasn't worth the time. Now I feel bad about going back and wasting 3 people's time.

Still walking, I take a closer look at the bill.

Wait a second, they charged me for the most expensive pears in the store! Instead of paying 10x for peas I ended up paying 9x for fancy pears. The second time on purpose! Baffled, I sprinted back to the store. I see the same guy through the front door, locking up for the night.

Waving, "Hey man are you sure these are the Bartlet pears we talked about? The bill doesn't look right"

"Yeah man pears, they're pears! Look, can you come back tomorrow? Were closing right now."

I want to upload a YouTube video, circa 2010. I find my camera, and press the record button. I think of a video idea. I do the video, and stop the record button. I think of a great joke to add to the video. I press the record button again.

But now I'm older and I need to find a motivation and I need to build a story. But most of all, I need to wait. A lot of the job is just waiting. Wait 14 months, till the iron is hot.

You might not have heard about Don and Kore, but you most probably have seen them. They're me. If I was in Tom and Jerry they would be sitting on opposite shoulders.

Don wears Rick Owens shoes. He doesn't care about anybody else. Not in the sense that he spits his gum on the pavement but in the sense that he doesn't feel much attachment to the people close to him. Around strangers, he likes to find ways to feel like the biggest in the room. When he looks around, he likes to set his gaze below eye level.

What do you want? To be better then everybody else. When you lose a game of DOTA, you immediately check an enemy profile for their in game hours. They cant possibly be better than you and be lesser experienced. Seeing a bus go by - customarily full of people sitting on their phone, It feels good to be the one on his feet, out in the cold.

I love how crazy it is that we sit in this box. It moves even before we command it to. We have no idea what the box is, or how it is connected to the body.

How do you rank cultures? Could "older is better" be the answer to cultural relativism? If people followed an ethical concept for longer, the ethical concept must at least be more compatible with humans. On a world scale, the Olympics might be one of the oldest concepts. Sports.

Contrary to my hopes, I am not the only person outside. In fact, people are playing basketball in the rain.

When you have your head down, grinding, hustling, you don't lift your head to look up.
When you don't look up, you forget how beautiful trees really are.
But what about when you die? What was it all for? What's it all worth? What did you do with it?
You weren't doing anything with your life before you existed, so why the thoughts now?
Why not just be like you always were, like you always will be - nothingness?
But think about the times we live in. We have all these things - phones, cars, football stadiums. We wouldn't have these.
Sometimes, when you look at people, you can see it. You can why they work and you can see how tired they are from just sacrificing so many things for it. It really is beautiful.
It's why I'm here.
But only I have the luxury of saying this. My fellow third worlders can't relate.
They would say it's ridiculous. I like to believe that they would.
I love to say, "You know I would rather be you. My life is bad." But its not. I have the best life and I love it unapologetically.
Do I want to help them? Sure if they're my friends but no I don't want to do anything
I look at those people in the buses, and contemplate how close I was to being in the same seat - cluelessly contemplating. But they really aren't right.
I one of them last year in my room but now I'm free to walk the world
I am weird, I'm a psychopath. I'm crazy. I'm not just a dude, I'm not average.

One year later, and I still have no cash and no women. I'm slightly higher MMR.
The real world is weird. You gotta know the right people, fill up the right forms, submit applications, reach deadlines, I hate it. In Dota, you just got to be the best. That's the beauty of it.

I really hate making this but future me will hate it more so it's worth
- April 2022

Core believes in good and bad, and is of the opinion that being good is good. He is a traditionalist. Some ideas he finds good: responsibility, self sufficiency and independence. He wants to be in a place where he is able to help the people that he wants to help. However, Core hasn't been a lifestyle for long. He has mostly just been the reference material for "the good life".

Therapy took me to Core in February 2023.
It feels good to walk around. To smile at the people you cross. To listen to music. But its a different kind of good.

3 minutes to the bus, tap your card, stand for 17 minutes. Press the button, thank the driver, walk towards EDC.
Or stop in the middle. Tell them you like their watch.

But something is missing. I'm missing the other kind of good. The order 2 large pizzas at once kind of good.

Core kind of good doesn't lend itself to unhinged rants on google notes.

14 months. It is futile to discuss ideas and to choose between them.

Every idea is born equal. Every idea is born as lights in a brain. At this point, ideas are neither good nor bad. The first human to "discover" murder could think it good or bad. One opinion could be that murder is bad - because a human must have the right to life. Another opinion could be that murder is good, as long as the victim is of different nationality. A third opinion could be that murder is good - because humans are a cancer to the earth.

So we deliberate and debate right? We try to find the "right" idea - through reason, through the scientific method, etc. In vain.

However the idea of murder sounds to me, an analysis of each opinion does not affect the probability of me adopting it. The "pros and cons analysis" of every opinion surrounding an idea will always be judged through my lenses. My lenses which have been biased by DNA, and my 22 years alive. In a macro sense, I didn't have control over either, i was born to the parents I was born to, in the place I was born. In a micro (quantum) sense, If particles are fundamentally determined, your life was set in stone long before you were born. If they are fundamentally random, your brain is simply a rationalization of random noise, as seen in Generative Adversarial Networks. Neither allows for the ideal - objectively analyzing an idea before adopting it.

Generative models are one of the most promising approaches towards endowing computers with an understanding of our world

openai

Ideas are adopted by someone: in childhood because of the people surrounding them; in their adulthood because of the people they admire; and in life through the events the universe randomly (or free will?) chooses for them to experience. Because of our DNA and past, every idea has a certain "compatibility score" with every human. If an idea is compatible with enough humans, they are adopted as "common sense". Some popular ideas are logic, and rationality.

When studying for Indian law school, I was incredibly surprised to see how much of "the law" is codified to depend mostly on judges' common sense.

As much as people like certain ideas (like statistics), they can never be used to make objective comparisons in the universal domain. There is no "good life" to live, or "good world" to live in. While I spend a lot of time deliberating between ideas, spacetime is too vast to properly consider both ideas. The "analysis" I conduct is closer to a compatibility check.

An argument can be made for natural science. That irrespective of compatibility, different humans will come to the same scientific conclusions because of the nature of physical reality. However, strictly natural ideas (like g=9.8m/s^2) do not come under the umbrella of "ideas" because it is born out of nature, not out of a brain. The word "science" as we use it today, pairs observations made using the scientific method with conclusions derived using popular ideas. Gravity, meters, seconds, acceleration, and down are all ideas. You don't need firsthand experience in science to know that observations don't lead directly to conclusions without ideas.

Ideas are used to understand these natural concepts, The Golden Record is a great attempt at conveying ideas using natural concepts.

The Golden Record cover shown with its extraterrestrial instructions. Credit: NASA/JPL https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/golden-record-cover/

I chanced upon this realization early in life, but it was too big an idea to immediately integrate into daily life. Maybe I became more open-minded, but I continued to never fully enjoy the life I was living - still embroiled in a search for the "correct" ideas. Living life like it was still the flop. Calculating the various possible hands I could have.

"yeah im still heading up the mountain.

i just stopped for snacks"

what do you want to do?

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Dopaminergic loss chasing, ADHD.

What do I want to do with life? Turns out I haven't been living my life very differently from a pathological gambler.

At this very moment, if all your responsibilities disappeared, and you were free to do anything you choose, what would you want to do? What would you like to spend every day of your life doing?

I would want to play the video game.

Think back to the last week of May. All your exams were over, you had no commitments. You knew you were going to start working in the summer, you didn't have to worry about your future - in the short term at least. You had the opportunity to play the game all day, but you didn't.

Well, that’s because I was losing all my games. If I was good enough to win more, my ideal life would be just to play all day.

Really think about it. Even when you do win your games, you didn't play all day. In fact, you play even lesser when you win. It's the days that you keep losing (or lose more than win) that you keep playing. Perhaps chasing lost ranking points? Loss-chasing?

Loss-chasing describes the tendency of a gambler to amplify their betting in an effort to recoup prior losses. It is widely regarded as a defining feature of disordered gambling, and a hallmark of the transition from recreational to disordered gambling

“Pathological Gamblers(PG) who lost money had significantly increased dopamine release in the left ventral striatum compared with Healthy Controls(HC). PG and HC who won money did not differ in dopamine release. This suggests a dopaminergic basis of monetary losses in pathological gambling, which might explain loss-chasing behavior”[1]

But that is a phenomenon unique to pathological gamblers right?

In a video game research study:

“When splitting the sample according to weekly hours of video game playing into frequent (n=76: 24 females, 52 males) and infrequent (n=78: 58 females, 20 males) gamers (median 9 h) and contrasting Grey Matter(GM) and White Matter(WM) segmentations between both groups, we found significant higher left ventral striatum GM for frequent vs infrequent video gamers (P<0.001, corrected for multiple comparisons; MNI coordinate: −9, 12, −5;)”

This is in “conceptual accordance with findings of enhanced dopamine release during video game playing and excessive gambling in Parkinson's patients due to dopaminergic medication”[2]

It isn't just the regions of the brain that coincide. In fact, the entire phenomenon is similarly exhibited.

“Frequent video game playing is associated with higher volume in left ventral striatum, which in turn shows higher activity during feedback of loss compared with feedback of the absence of loss in frequent players.”[2]

Turns out I'm not that different from a pathological gambler. And society treats gambling very seriously. “Twitch” is one of the largest live-streaming websites on the internet, owned by Amazon. For video games specifically, Twitch is considered to be the biggest live-streaming platform. Soon, Twitch will no longer allow any gambling-related content on its website.

Gamers banning gamblers from their platform seems almost ironic now

Today's song is something I listened to a lot when I was younger. The intro was always captivating - something about it really spoke to my soul [3]. I guess I now know why.

Through the later years of high school, I started to believe that I might be exhibiting some symptoms of Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Coming to university and living alone, I started to experience worse symptoms. Irrespective of my neurotypicality, I knew my attention needed work. I was, however, surprised to hear how many of my peers believe the same. As a generation, our ability to pay attention is declining.

Percent of children with a parent-reported ADHD diagnosis [4]

This relates to video games. A study on 9th and 10th-grade students found:

"There was a significant increase in inattentive (p ≤ 0.001 for both Internet and console video games) and ADHD (p= 0.018 and 0.020 for console and Internet games, respectively) behavior in those who played video games for more than one hour"[5]

However, "This cross-sectional comparison of video games and ADHD does not allow for cause-effect relationships to be established. Therefore, it is impossible to say whether playing video games leads to an increase in ADHD symptoms, or if adolescents with more ADHD symptoms tend to spend longer times playing video games."[5]

Another study was investigating the effects of a drug treatment (MPH) on internet addiction, video games, and ADHD. It interestingly finds that:

"The changes in the severity of Internet video game addiction is associated with a decrease in ADHD symptoms, especially inattentive clinical symptoms and omission errors."[6]

"the severe Internet video game addiction group showed a greater reduction in omission errors than the non-addiction group after 8 weeks of MPH treatment"[6]

"The comorbidity of Internet addiction and ADHD may indicate a causal relationship or may suggest a common etiology, such as functional deficiency of prefrontal cortex and dopamine neurotransmission"[6]

Thus, they come to the conclusion that

"We suggest that Internet video game play, which releases dopamine and requires visual working memory, might be used for self-medication by children with ADHD."[6]

Maybe my problems with attention led to finding solace in video games, where my mind felt under control for once. However, [6] studied young children, and I don't think playing more video games will help my attention problems.

In designing my future, I think it is safe for me to assume that I shouldn't consider any dopamine-intensive activities that I “want” to do. What else could I spend my day doing?

I can't really think of anything. I never could.

However, I notice that when I do difficult things, I feel good at the end of the day. Maybe that's a good starting point.

Let's try doing hard things.

[1] Linnet, J., Peterson, E., Doudet, D. J., Gjedde, A., & Møller, A. (2010). Dopamine release in ventral striatum of pathological gamblers losing money. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 122(4), 326–333. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0447.2010.01591.x

[2] Kühn, S., Romanowski, A., Schilling, C., Lorenz, R., Mörsen, C., Seiferth, N., Banaschewski, T., Barbot, A., Barker, G. J., Büchel, C., Conrod, P. J., Dalley, J. W., Flor, H., Garavan, H., Ittermann, B., Mann, K., Martinot, J. L., Paus, T., Rietschel, M., . . . Gallinat, J. (2011, November). The neural basis of video gaming. Translational Psychiatry, 1(11), e53–e53. https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2011.53

[3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UOWd8NKtzKqlZe-tK1iCbNJFpvkKdXVW/view

[4] CDC. (2018, September 28). ADHD Throughout the Years. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/timeline.html

‌[5] Chan, P. A., & Rabinowitz, T. (2006). A cross-sectional analysis of video games and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms in adolescents. Annals of General Psychiatry, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859x-5-16

‌[6] Han, D. H., Lee, Y. S., Na, C., Ahn, J. Y., Chung, U. S., Daniels, M. A., Haws, C. A., & Renshaw, P. F. (2009). The effect of methylphenidate on Internet video game play in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 50(3), 251–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2008.08.011

two people living the same life

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 12:00:00 +0000

How can the same person go living two completely different lives within the span of a few months?

I woke up this morning like it was any other, to my phone alarm. But today, I had nowhere to be. My last day at the kitchen was Tuesday, and now I'm back at University. I check Google calendar. MANU 480 - 10 AM. I can probably skip it, it’ll only be an intro class anyways right?

It was a familiar thought. Too familiar. Dozens of times, I would argue in my head for a little bit and rationalize a reason to go back to sleep. I can’t live like this again. I had to catch myself. I had to get to class. I opened my curtains and stood up.

Before I knew it, I was already on my way to class! I was very surprised - when I woke up I was almost convinced that I would go back to my habits of old. It was really hard to wake up, but the rest was surprisingly easy. Something else is inside me now. Something that gets me effortlessly from bed to bus.

The sun is setting. You wake up. You launch the game. Find match. You play 1 game, and immediately queue for another. In the few minutes it takes to find a game, you check your classes and assignments. You see a deadline tonight, but it's at 12am - plenty of time left. The next game. Immediately queue. The deadline is now approaching, so you close the game. Just before starting the assignment, you open Youtube to check whats new. Suddenly the deadline is a few hours away. One last video, its an easy assignment anyways - you rationalize. The deadline is one hour away. Finally, you open the assignment page only to realise you don't have one of the prerequisites. Frantically, you message all your friends, while setting up as much front-end work as you can. You get a reply, finish the assignment. Pat yourself on the back. As a reward, you take a trip to the garden - the skies. Finish yesterday's pizza. Lets get ahead on tomorrow's assignment, you don't want a repeat of the disaster that today was. But you check YouTube one more time. The sun is setting.

You wake up. Shower. Bus. You're at work 5 minutes early, so you get in some push-ups. Done with the days work, you head back home. You walk as much as you can - no earphones, no screen. You finish your 150 pushups per day. The only things you have eaten today are chicken, greens, fruits and nuts. You get on the meeting, and follow it up with 3 hours of focussed work. You read a little before heading to bed. 20 minutes spent on Instagram. 30 minutes spent on Youtube. You meet your friends on the weekend. You keep your room clean. You shower everyday.

Its almost impossible to not feel like the second lifestyle is superior. Better health- physical, financial, social and mental. Higher productivity. But I have lived the second life for way longer than I have lived the first, and there must be a reason for it. To my brain, the second life has characteristics that far outweigh the benefits of the first.

It's easy to say that I like the activities of the first more. That the things I did were more fun. But I don't think that's true. There's many things I liked - FSAE, boxing, and yet I stop doing them in favour of playing the game. We must also acknowledge how video games are known to exploit the “weaknesses” of the human brain to make us enjoy them more than we healthily should. I don't think it's an enjoyment problem.

We can evaluate the goals that each life aims to achieve. The firsts goal is competition. To be better than everyone else, in the purest way possible. To look beyond all human characteristics except intellect and prove your worth. To lift the trophy amidst confetti and fireworks, and the roaring crowd. The seconds goal would be to create a well-rounded life. A life capable of dealing with hardship, and a life that creates enjoyment. It becomes clearer why I chose the first life. I prefer the first goal because of its merit-based unbiasedness, and because competition resonates with my soul. There is a certain romance to the pursuit of competition at any expense.

A few months ago, however, I realised the third and biggest reason I chose the first life. Comfort. I did the same thing all day, and "sacrificed" anything that seemed uncomfortable.

Comfort is a warm feeling. When you have a final exam coming up, theres a resurfacing thought in your head. Imagine you didn't have to write this final, life would feel so good, so comfortable. It has a very strong draw, you could never choose against comfort. When you have to do difficult things, the things you absolutely must do, comfort wraps its vines around your heart. Vines that can control your entire life.

It's only when you consciously make the uncomfortable choice for weeks, that it becomes somewhat conquerable. The first step itself is almost impossibly difficult for someone like me - born with a silver spoon in the mouth. But thankfully, I was forced to do it. The feeling of comfort never goes away or reduces in intensity, but it becomes more and more tolerable to the point that one day you will be surprised at the things you are capable of doing. Socially, Physically, and Financially.

The Kitchen showed me that life, and I am convinced that I can do anything. Comfort is my enemy.

I’m at a crossroads. I need to choose which life I want to live. It must be competitive. It must be merit-pure. The bus guy inside of me must live on.

Its like Fight Club. Strapped to a chair, peering over the night sky, skyscraper roofs. Three minutes. This is it. The Beginning. Ground Zero.

the average person cant do it

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 12:00:00 +0000

But I'm me.

It's not hard to understand. You've seen the trials and tribulations, the losses, the sacrifice. I can't convince myself that the people around me are living lives as intense as mine, but of course, they are.

Winning is a habit. The school I attended until Grade 10 had a department for debating called “Encounter”. I don't really remember what got me interested in it, but I do remember that my father used to write speeches for me, and I would recite them to some success. There was something about success. I started modifying these speeches, creating structure, adding rhythm. I started practicing in front of the mirror, watching my body language closely. My father's Blackberry at the time was capable of voice recordings, so I would record and listen to myself talk. I would rewatch the (very low-quality) videos he took of my events. Before I knew it, I was winning competitions.

Winning is a habit. Be it an English Declamation event where I buzzed my hair to look like Obama, a Hindi recitation event where I imitated a sage - shirtless in front of the school, or a reenactment of Captain Jack Sparrow, complete with a bottle of orange juice labeled “rum”. My comfort with the stage led me to win almost every public speaking event the school held. I vividly remember my Obama speech. I was only awarded second place, but my friends were so enthralled by my performance that they huddled together and lifted me, throwing me into the sky, cheering my name. I could almost grasp at the heavens.

Winning is a habit. My school was going to participate in Verbattle, a state-wide debate competition. I was teamed up with a junior - a “winner” too. It could be problematic, sometimes winners are incapable of conceding enough ground to allow team play to flourish. However, this team was good. I knew we could win. We spent time together at school, debating various topics in the Verbattle style. We practiced with each other, and against other teams. We visited each other's houses, debating against each other's parents, as a team. Finally, we arrived at the venue, eager to go into the first debate. Three topics would come out in the morning, and we would spend all afternoon gathering points. My father on the Ipad, me on the laptop, my mother on the phone. Parents discussing ideas, teachers giving pointers, and the two of us hyping each other up. Our topic would be announced right before we went on stage, and we would try our best to outshine the two other teams standing alongside us.

The first few rounds were easy. The other teams made refutable points, and we were gaining confidence with every round. Then we started coming up against people from our school. These were the hardest debates. They knew our tricks, they knew our style. It would truly come down to how we maneuvered through the ~6 minutes we were allowed to speak for. We successfully came out on top of the quarter-finals. Our confidence was now probably the highest in the auditorium, and in debating, momentum is unstoppable. We won the entire thing. Lifting the trophy, and seeing my parents jump out of their seats in cheer, was surreal. The congratulatory speeches, the TV interviews, ecstasy. If life had a pinnacle, this was it.

Winning is a habit, my father told me.

That's where it stopped. A few more events without medals, and I quit altogether.

"Complacency", she said.

I want to be better than other people.

There has only been one thing that has been a part of my teenage and adult life consistently, for up to a hundred hours in a week. This thing is beautiful. It is pure. It is fair. But I don't think those are the reasons I played the game. Every time I pressed play, it was to win. It was to go up against 5 people around the world, in a contest of wit and might. It was to push harder, think deeper, and react faster. It was to be better. Yet when I do win, I lose the desire to play. It is when I inevitably lose, that an inferno rages in my soul. Spotify playlists are made, volume is increased to max, username changed, and the next dozen hours blur together in a passion-fuelled frenzy. 4537 hours.

I must be better than other people, right?

I effortlessly dismiss people’s worth. Seeing people out at midnight? They must know nothing of hard work, partying all night. They drink coffee regularly? Their willpower must be so weak as to depend on a drug. They drink alcohol? Their life must be so bad as to vehemently escape from it. They’ve been in such a low-paying industry for a decade? How cowardly to surrender their ambitions to comfort. Anywhere I look, I justify to myself why I am better than the people I see.

I would spend up to 10 hours a day in my room, clicking at my laptop. But unlike the others, I was sacrificing everything to be the best!

Once I am the best in the world and win millions, everyone will be sorry for what they thought of me.

“How much he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”

I am better than other people.

Why would I go to in-person classes or meetings? I am the Emperor of time himself - consuming Youtube at 2x speed, and university lectures at 4x - all while on a Zoom meeting.

Why would I adhere to the timeline an average person created? When I can do things faster than the average person, I might as well leave all the work to the last minute.

Why would I aim for the goals that my peers do? What good is having a stable job, a loving family, and a reliable group of friends? I should aim much higher. I should aim to be the best in the world at a video game.

I am better,

Why would I listen to what you say?

++credit: older sister R I

life is suffering

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Happiness seemed to be a universal goal, something everyone agreed to be unequivocally good for life, and good for the world. However, as I grow older, the thought grows stranger. The realizations came slowly, but I no longer make decisions in life based on what would make me happy. It isn't that happiness doesn't feel absolutely amazing, but that it seems like a worthless goal. My relationship with happiness changed as I grew up.

At first, it was admiration, imagination, dreaming. My friends and I would gather around the lunch table and proclaim great riches. One wanted a Veyron, another an Aventador, and me an R8. Rohan actually owned an Audi, and accompanied his father to the service center on occasion. I could never forget the day - he opened his bag to reveal a large book. On the front, in beautiful colour, the Audi R8. English, Math, EVS - I was studying the same book in every class. The Audi R8 catalouge. Every day I would ask for him to bring it to school again, and every time I would spend most of the day on a different section. 520 Nm at 6000rpm, or 600 Nm at 8000rpm with Quattro? Blue with grey sideblades, or white with black rims? Finally, he decided to let me keep the book, and to this day - I have an Audi R8 buyers guide sitting on my bookshelf. Life was simple, I had to get a job, and get enough money to buy an R8 (and a second car for my family), and life would be made.

In a few years, I understood the reality that material possessions alone would not make my life. It wasn’t as simple as having an R8, I also needed to have a “cool” day-to-day life. Of course, a 9-5 job was out of the question. A cool life should be filled with worldwide travel, freedom, and fame. Engineer did not fit within any twisting of this definition. I could be a DJ. I would create cool music and play concerts across the world. After all, it seemed easy - I just had to let my creativity flow. A quick search through the app store leaderboards led me to a music creation app. I had to simply add to the samples with appropriate repetition and timing. I will never forget the post-exam bus rides, when I was allowed to have my phone at school. Reclining in the back seats, mixing and mashing beats, I could already taste the ingredients for worldwide success. I took it straight to SoundCloud, however, to tepid success. Youtuber could be cool too! If I got popular enough, I would just have to hold a camera to myself doing anything I desire, and it would pay for all my desires. I followed myself around with my mother’s camera, using free editing software, and an old tripod I found in the attic. This was so easy! I needed people to watch my videos, and life would be made.

AVICII committed suicide. The face of EDM across the world. He had everything I could dream of and more. The world was in his palm, but he couldn't scrape together a reason to keep living. Soon enough, like many of my peers, all my favourite music was filled with rap about drugs, numbing the pain, and suicide. Lil peep, 6dogs, I looked up to these people as idols, all I wanted was to be them. To do something I love, and have the freedom and resources to live in any way I please. Neither is with us any longer. The people who lived my dream life couldn't bear to exist in it, so why was I dreaming of it? What was I missing?

Life will never be “made’. The nature of our existence is a balance between happiness and suffering. Evolutionarily, it would be disastrous for our species to be capable of satisfaction, peace, or tranquility. The unhappy one, always chasing the next goal, always unsatisfied with their present self, and always pushing the limits would be the high fitness gene pool to be passed on. By definition, considering the “hedonic treadmill” nature of the human brain, happiness cannot exist without suffering. If your life is full of happiness, your brain adjusts its baseline to be higher, resulting in an equal amount of suffering throughout life. Societally, our brains process negative emotion in a much higher capacity than positive emotion. Why is it that YouTubers will always complain about hate, even though much greater than the majority of their comments are positive and encouraging? Humans simply aren't built to remain happy. We can be happy momentarily, but it will always be fleeting.

Humans are creatures of storytelling, and the most popular stories of our time are those of superheroes. While many complain about the formulaic scripts of these stories, this formula is the reason for their success. Superhero stories resonate with people irrespective of language, culture, or age. Even historically, the hero archetype is one of the most common. How do all these stories begin? Heroes are born from suffering. Be it Batman witnessing the murder of his parents, Spiderman allowing the murder of his dear Uncle Ben, or Superman being the last remnant of a planet-wide extinction, heroes are born from suffering. What differentiates a superhero from a villain, is the reaction to this suffering. While a villain becomes bitter and resentful, a hero rises meteorically through the suffering to become larger than life. [The prison escape - “The Dark Knight Rises”]. However hard fate might hit you, bravery will take you far.

In clinical psychology, it is accepted today that, a person can indeed rise to conquer a challenge they currently find unbearable. By breaking a challenge into its smallest parts, and approaching each part individually, slowly increasing the difficulty, we observe that people can overcome phobias. People don't ever become less scared of these challenges, they actually seem to grow braver, ready to face greater and greater challenges. They become mini-heroes.

The universe is cruel. Humans are diabolical creatures. Destiny seems sadistic. “Life is suffering” is a phrase I have heard more than I liked to.

But we must face this suffering with bravery.

Here you find one of the reasons I write these posts. It takes a lot out of me to write them. It scares me to expose my naive thoughts. But I do it all in the hopes that by facing this suffering voluntarily, and head-on, I will find the courage to shine a light on the beauty of life that I truly believe exists.

For I have seen glimpses of it, and you will too.

I chase not happiness, but suffering.

i must outpace death

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Why can't we indulge in pleasure every day? Why can’t I come home from work, grab a drink, and entertain myself till the rising sun? I did my job after all, I spent an entire shift contributing to society. So why can I not enjoy myself after?

I am very new to the workforce, and it seems like most of my colleagues spend a good portion of their time at work looking forward to getting home, unwinding, and relaxing. The stress and pressure of work is mitigated by the tranquility of going home at night. But for some reason, when I get home and put on my favorite TV show, I feel a gnawing inside my body.

An aching in my soul when I “waste away” the hours I spend at home, I have come to call this all too familiar sensation my productivity tick. It ticks to my watches tock, every hour that passes measures a deeper sense of failure. Throughout my childhood, I had understood it to be a fact of life. I assumed it was the manifestation of a basic human need to live a purposeful life. Yet, I never gave thought to what a purposeful life meant, or what steps I had to take to induce it. I assumed that if I simply spent the entirety of my day working (in any sense), the feeling would go away. Thus was set an easy scapegoat, for an unrelated goal. And I chased it, unsuccessfully, for too many years.

Last week, I sat down and really gave it a think. I now spend the majority of my day working a job, yet the tick remains deafening. Shouldn't it have shrunk a little? I know the human brain is flawed. Was the productivity tick really an appropriate compass for my life? Or is it dead weight that I am ready to shed?

In the past three months, I have turned around every single facet of my life. I am working a full-time job. I am eating clean - high protein, minimal sugars. I am exercising, 115 pushups a day. I get at least 6 hours of sleep a day. I spend the majority of my weekend outdoors, meeting my friends, and trying out as many new things as I can. It seems like I am doing all the things on the list. Nevertheless, every day is still filled with gloom - but I have exhausted my list of problems. The final boss - my productivity tick.

To begin, let's tackle my initial assumption. Humans must live a purposeful life. I strongly believe so. I have only one Youtube video on my bookmarks bar, a clip from Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He is talking about his multiple-decade-spanning breakdown of the idea of “rescuing your father from the belly of the whale”. He is an inspirational figure to me, and his talks share a theme. He believes that positive emotion is birthed from setting a path towards a goal, the highest goal one can manage. “Meaning”, is derived from following this path. Living a purposeful life. [1] The suffering of life, and the malevolence of the world, seem to be bearable through having a purpose.

So is the productivity tick a symptom of the lack of meaning in my life? It seems like I am doing all the things on the list. The list of “good things for life” that I have built through interacting with various types of people throughout my life. So why the gloom? What more do I need? There are two things I know I will soon need. I need to improve my job prospects. I need to build a romantic relationship. But I seem to be on the right path for both. I have a job right now, and I am in university for engineering. I am spending time with friends, meeting new people, and I don't plan to start a family in the next decade anyways. So why the gloom? Looking around, I’m doing enough as compared to my 21-year-old peers. However, while my peers seem to enjoy spending time watching TV, playing games, and going out drinking, I cannot. I try these activities only to succumb to the agony of my productivity tick, to a seemingly worse degree than my peers. I end up paralyzed. Unable to be productive because I am weak, and unable to have fun because of the tick.

This all made me incredibly frustrated. If the gloom doesn't cease, what's the purpose of the list anyways? I felt cheated. Why do we need to do any of these things? It's useless. I should just go back to how I used to live life. I liked it more back then. Meeting people is hard. Exercise is hard. Working is hard. I should just quit it all. What's the point anyways, life is suffering. Why do anything?

Death. Death is the only phenomenon that every human must experience. The thought of death is unbearable, I ignore it for most of my life. Death is a burden too heavy for my young heart to lift. Death laughs in the face of all ambition, all purpose. Everything you did, or will do, will finally be reduced back to the ash from whence it came. In the face of death’s nothingness then, why do we humans strive?

Because that's what makes it worthwhile.

I can’t eat good pizza when I’m dead

I can’t laugh tears of joy when I’m dead

I can't be tucked into bed by my mother when I'm dead.

Surprisingly, death is the force that gives everything in our life purpose. You have to do it all now because it's the one shot you get. I must have a family, I must buy my parents a good life, I must sit atop Singapore’s tallest building amidst the stars, simply because I cannot do any of these when I'm dead! Most importantly, I have to do it NOW.

Death exists not only at the end of our life, but all through it. 2019-me is unrecognizable, I would call him dead. He set up well for my current self. 2022-me will soon be dead too. If I stop working now, my next self will suffer unfairly. Soon, our bodies will be aging, and our minds maturing. Every stage in life has its enjoyments, and I can't fall behind now, life only compounds.

A flame grows within my soul.

I know now why I must work, why I must endure, why I must persevere. It isn't for anyone. It isn't for myself.

I simply must not allow death to catch up to me.

I must outpace death.

And you must too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU1Po6qH7O8&ab_channel=ThoughtFeeder

The city in the distance

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0000

All day, the mind occupies itself with extravagant justifications of the past, present, and future. The soul is rather odd. It winces at times. Like a helpless puppy, it leaves our Sapien brains to puzzle out compromises. A project car, driving through the minefield of life, guided by an indecisive navigator.

A journey begins.