unfinished thoughts
assorted musings from a weary traveler too tired to put together a complete idea
I am so tired.
That’s largely a byproduct of a ridiculously fun but exhausting east coast trip where I subjected my body to an inhumane amount of abuse, but in general these last few weeks have been really draining. I think it’s because I feel like I’ve increasingly been at the mercy of the environment around me; I feel like I’ve barely had any space or time to myself. All I want is one hour, let alone one day where I can have some time that I can purely dedicate to continue building my relationship with myself and have some room to breathe, but for whatever reason that’s been ridiculously hard to come by. I feel like I’ve been spinning in circles, going nowhere.
Despite the incessant background noise that’s been constantly buzzing in my head, there have been some pretty cool ideas I’ve come across that I’ve found myself interested in exploring further. I didn’t have the patience and mental clarity to pick one idea and go deep in it, but I figured it’d still be fun to share some of these unfinished ideas. Maybe I’ll revisit some of these in full posts at some point in the future. Who knows.
Regardless, here’s a glimpse of the random assortment of things that I’ve been thinking about as of late.
reactive vs. proactive action and imagination
I recently came across a really interesting quote:
Politics essentially “became a wing of management, saying that it could stop bad things from happening instead of imagining how things could be better.”
I thought a lot about how this related to proactive versus reactive action, and it increasingly seems to me that our society and politics are driven by reactive action, always focused on responding to the constant stream of outrage provoking events. There’s a heavy cost to this; it takes away from the space required to imagine and dream about a better future, let alone conceptualize the steps we’ll need to take to get there.
Which makes me think, are we setting up our leaders for failure? How can they dream and build towards a better future when they’re constantly being forced to react to and respond to every little event that occurs? And if we’re in agreement that this is a bad thing, how do we snap out of it given the constant pressures of polling and the election cycle?
Then I realized the same thing applies to us in life too. Whenever I feel like I’m being reactive and controlled by the inputs fed into my life (news, emails, social media, slack messages, TV, peer pressure, etc.), I feel like I’m not able to build towards anything; I feel stuck. This year has been a pointed effort to minimize the stimuli that hijack my brain in a desperate attempt to regain some agency over my life; to give myself the sense that I’m being proactive instead of reactive. I feel like I’m finally getting some space to think, to wonder, to dream, and to imagine, but it’s a constant battle trying to prevent myself from slipping into bad habits.
When I first cut out all news-related inputs from my life, I had a feeling that I was fiddling while Rome was burning; that my attempt to cut stimuli was a naive attempt at escaping from the harms of the world. I’m getting more and more okay with this feeling. I still feel selfish sometimes for prioritizing my mental peace over ‘staying informed’, but I have faith that the proactive action that will flow as a result will have far more potential to bring good into this world than any attempt at reactive action.
TLDR: create space for imagination? proactive action > reactive action
health engineering and the placebo effect
I’m starting to entertain the idea that science has it all wrong when it comes to the general decline in population health (chronic conditions, cancer, mental illness, etc.) It starts from this central question: why does it feel like there’s a societal attempt at engineering the perfect diet and lifestyle for health when throughout history, humans have long flourished under vastly different diets and lifestyles? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
It gets even more weird when you bring the placebo effect into play, which at a high level states that the outcome of a treatment or action is directly affected by the patient’s belief in the efficacy of that treatment or action. My worry is that the nonstop publication of studies regarding the right exercise regimen to have, the right foods to eat, etc. and the nonstop creation of new health products that will in theory make you healthier than you’ve ever been before directly affects people’s confidence and level of belief in their own lifestyles and routines. How much is the insane incidence of chronic conditions in the US a function of everyone’s worry that they’re not doing the right things? How much is the low efficacy of behavioral interventions tied to people’s belief that there are better products, pills, treatments, etc. out there that they can’t afford or have access to?
If it is true that a good portion of the results we experience in our body from any action we undertake is directly tied to the level of faith, belief, and confidence we have in what we’re doing, the constant flood of new, conflicting information is the worst thing for our health because it replaces our foundational belief systems with confusion and uncertainty. And when we lack faith in what we’re doing, it seems inevitable that our health will suffer.
I’m not sure what we can do on a societal level to fix this, but on an individual level I’ve been experimenting with abandoning any kind of data-driven approach to what I’m eating / how I’m exercising and just following the rhythms of my body and seeing what feels good for me. This is way more fun, and I feel healthier and fitter than I ever have in my life. Am I lying to you? Is this wishful thinking? Am I just trying to delude myself into feeling better about my body? Perhaps. I guess it’s up to you to believe what you wish. I will keep doing me.
TLDR: Health engineering is wack
physics, life, and vibrations
In New York, I spent a lot of time just generally catching up with people I hadn’t seen in a while, and I noticed that people generally used physics-related language when describing where they felt they were at in life. Here are a few examples: feeling ‘stuck’, wanting ‘movement’, feeling like they’re ‘floating’ or ‘untethered’, trying to build ‘momentum’, etc. I thought this was particularly interesting since these are usually the exact kinds of phrases that I use when reflecting on my life.
For me, that begs the question: is there something material or meaningful behind our tendency to apply terms generally used in relation to physical objects to our journey through life? Is it just a convenient way to express complex ideas or does it betray a deeper truth surrounding how our perception of our life is intimately tied to the movement of energy within us?
Science is increasingly starting to get behind a resonance theory of consciousness, which posits that vibrational patterns within fundamental particles are the driving forces of consciousness and life. Yogis have also long said that different emotional states emit different vibrational frequencies, with emotions like love, peace, and contentment emitting faster and higher vibrational frequencies while emotions like hatred, shame, and guilt emit slower and lower vibrational frequencies.
This begs the further question: is there a relationship between our perception of movement in life with the emotional frequency we’re at? Do we feel a greater sense of stagnation in our life when we’re flooded with feelings of hatred and shame? Do we feel a greater sense of movement in our life when we’re flooded with feelings of joy and contentment? Can we feel motion and movement in our lives by elevating our frequencies and cultivating peace and higher vibrating emotional frequencies?
I dunno. Wacky stuff, but interesting to think about.
TLDR: Raise your vibe to move in life? 🤷♂️
home
What is home?
That’s a question I’ve been pondering a lot lately. A lot of this has to do with general uncertainty about my future; my parents really want to move out of MN, and given that I don’t really have any strong ties to any other city, I have no idea where I’m going to go. Also, the ridiculousness of my travel schedule has left me feeling more like a nomad than ever, completely disconnected from any specific place. Even at home, I haven’t necessarily felt at home or felt like I have my own space; I’ve spent the past couple of months sleeping out of my living room as a result of the general chaos that’s been going on at home with guests coming in and out and our basement getting finished.
So what is home? Is it a place where I have my own space? Is it a place I feel particularly connected to? Is it a place where I feel the greatest sense of kinship with the people there? Or does it have nothing to do with all those things, having more so to do with a general feeling of purpose and fulfillment? In other words, do you ‘feel at home’ as a result of being in alignment with your life no matter where you reside physically?
I have no idea, but I’d like to explore these questions a little bit more deeply as I figure out how to cultivate a feeling of ‘being at home’ in my life this upcoming year.
TLDR: I’m not sure what home means
value systems and decision-making
I have so many questions when it comes to the way we come up with our own value systems and the relationship that our value systems have with the actions that we take.
First, how do we define the values that we adopt? Are they determined on an inductive basis (i.e. I generally feel good after doing these kinds of things which means I must value this principle), or are they determined on a deductive basis (i.e. I really value this principle, which means that these are the kinds of things I should do)? How much of our values are based off of personal experience vs. stories we hear or read (i.e. how much is my use of ‘honor’ as my north star value driven by the fairy tales and stories I read as a child as opposed to my own experiences?) How honest are we about the values that we adopt, and is it possible for us to be self-aware enough to know what our values really are and what we stand for? Is it even possible to reduce ourselves to standing for certain values, or are we all just complex creatures that have a tendency to adopt certain values when they’re convenient? Do we even live life according to values, or is that a convenient story that we tell ourselves and others to validate ourselves and our actions?
Second, how do we evaluate the actions and decisions we make relative to the values we stand for? Is it possible for us to ever have enough information to assess the entire situation and be sure that the action we take represents the value that we want to express? How do you evaluate the outcome of an action or a decision relative to the value it expresses? Does any situation ever have an objective interpretation of it in terms of the values that are expressed, or does it differ from person to person? Is it fair to judge others based on differing value-based evaluations of situations?
All this is really confusing to me. As you can probably tell from these questions, I’m getting more and more inclined to believe that value-based lives don’t exist. I think it’s super idealistic to think that we come across a situation, pick a value that we’d like to demonstrate, and act in strict accordance to it. I don’t even think that’s possible anyways. I think we always follow our intuition and our heart no matter how we justify it later, and based on unpacking the feelings we experience later, we have a better sense for how we should act to feel the way we want to feel later on.
I think where values/principles come in is that they can describe the general decisions you tend to make (i.e. if I repeatedly show a tendency to not plan anything and go with the flow, maybe I can say I generally value spontaneity over preparedness). I still think that there’s a big difference between ‘having’ or ‘adopting’ a value on paper and having an instinct that compulsively guides you in ways that align with values you’d like to hold. I’m much more interested in building my instinct and intuition than having the ‘perfect’ set of values on paper.
So what does this mean for the way we should act? I think instead of focusing on evaluating actions as good or bad, right or wrong, etc., we should focus more on intent and the kind of energy we’re trying to spread. Instead of trying to do the ‘honorable’ thing or the ‘just’ thing or the ‘courageous’ thing (which implies a need to judge or evaluate the situation), I’m now just focused on trying to spread as much love, compassion, and positive energy as I can and trusting that the intent to cultivate that energy will lead me in the right place more often than not.
I think I’m ready to accept that no matter how much I try to adhere to values that will insulate myself and others from pain, it’s inevitable that I will both experience and inflict it. And I think a better strategy for learning and growing is to cut the discussion of values out of the equation (which is always too abstract to be insightful anyways), and instead listening to other people’s feelings, listening to my own feelings, and reflecting on the experience as a whole, trusting that the next time I’ll be in a similar situation, my instinct and gut will have a better emotional context to work with. Obviously it’s really fucking stupid if you use the ‘purity of your intent’ to sanitize your actions and get defensive when someone tells you you might’ve made a mistake (oh I couldn’t have hurt you, I was just trying to spread love! 🤮), but I think I trust myself to shut the fuck up, be honest, take responsibility, and learn.
TLDR: Values might be useless?
consumption vs marination
The backlog of things that I want to read, listen to, and watch is absolutely overwhelming. Every day, I add more and more to that backlog, rarely making a dent in anything. I already have enough stuff to read that’ll carry me through the end of next year, but each day I keep adding more and more to the list. It’s definitely exciting coming across so much good shit, but it’s also exhausting and stressful because I know I’ll never get through it all.
But that begs the question, what’s the point of it all? Obviously there are diminishing marginal returns to every additional thing you read or consume, and I’m really struggling with balancing the desire to read more, learn more, and experience more with the knowledge that the impulse to do everything is pulling me away from achieving true depth in the few things that I do choose to do and consume. And depth is what I crave more than all else.
This is a lot of words to say that I want to learn how to find peace and contentment with less, to truly prioritize depth over breadth. To find peace in slowly reading one page and letting the words on that page marinate in my mind for hours instead of feeling the need to fly through everything as fast as I can, to find joy in staring at the beautiful sunset for an hour and being present instead of stressing about all the things I want to build, to find contentment in picking one project I want to drive to completion instead of making incremental progress on 20 different things.
It’s a process, but I’m trying my best.
TLDR: I’m overwhelmed 😰
money and status
I’m slowly starting to realize that I don’t give a fuck about money or status. Ironic considering I’ve gotten several lectures this past week from my mom and grandma about how I need to build my stature and position in society before I can dick around and work on passion projects, but it’s the truth. This isn’t in the very basic sense that ‘money doesn’t equal happiness!!’ or ‘there’s diminishing marginal returns to money and status!!’, but more so that I want to abandon the pursuit of those things. I think it’s depressing and reduces everything to a means to an end. I don’t want any of these things to be a factor when it comes to making any kind of decision in my life. I want them completely out of my mind, period.
I started to feel these things when I was talking about job to people I met in New York. I don’t know if it’s a product of the New York environment, peer pressure, or what, but I felt the need to basically make a pitch for why I was at my job and why it made sense. And I felt like I had to frame it in some kind of utilitarian or rational way. I was telling people I love my job because it is preparing me to be a leading product figure at B2C tech companies moving forward, that I’m in it for the equity payout at the end, that I’m in it for the lifestyle it lets me live right now, etc. That’s such an easy and rational story to tell, but truthfully, it’s not the real reason I’m sticking with the job that I have.
It comes down to loyalty, commitment, and trust. I somehow found someone who was willing to take a chance on me and commit to me, and for me that’s sacred. When someone invests in me, everything in me wants to pay off that investment and show them how right they were to believe in me. I don’t know how long I’ll stay in tech, I don’t know how long I’ll stay in B2C, and I don’t know how long I’ll stay in sports, but I do know that for as long as I can, I’ll continue staying loyal and committed to the people who believed in me. The trust and fulfillment that comes from this mutual commitment and this relationship means more to me than anything money or status could ever give me. I know eventually I have to build up my own confidence an independent locus of belief from within and not be so reliant on having other people believe in me, but at a time when I’m just starting to learn how to find belief and fulfillment from within, the belief and commitment that my company has shown towards me has meant more than I ever thought it could.
I have absolutely no doubt that I’m happier and more fulfilled after releasing the material desires for wealth and prestige, but I’m pretty confident that I’m anyways going to end up with more than enough material possessions to live the life that I want. This is just a more fun way to go about doing it.
TLDR: Money and status are dumb pursuits
quotes
Gotta toss in some incredible quotes I came across recently:
What emerges is the feeling — something beyond the reasoned understanding — that sadness is not the tip of the Atlantis-sized iceberg of our hard-wired grief for life, but the blazing fire of life itself, of the love of life, burning with the elemental fact that there is no disappointment without hope, no heartbreak without love; in the shadows that sadness casts on the cave walls of our being is the delicious delirium of the life-dream itself.
— Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Is anyone else getting goosebumps reading this?? I mean, COME ON 🥺. This passage so beautifully and elegantly articulates why it’s often at the times that I’ve felt the most visceral and piercing heartache that I’ve felt the most alive and why the sadness and pain we tend to run away from often actually illuminates the most beautiful parts of life. It’s like the Winnie the Pooh quote: ‘How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard’.
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
— Lao Tzu
Absolute gem. It’s like the quote ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results’.
[Fickle-minded men] were of no use to him; those so easily won would be lost just as quickly.
…
At the heart of every nobleman was an incurable insecurity. [He hadn’t] met an aristocrat yet who wasn’t at least in part convinced that the peasants laughed at him behind his back.
— Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
I pulled these gems from a fantasy book written by my favorite author Brandon Sanderson. Hopefully this gives you an idea as to why I’m convinced I’ve learned more about human nature and psychology from fairy tales and fantasy books than any nonfiction book ever. These brief lines touch at foundational principles that are so hard to grasp on a day to day basis:
1) the quicker people join your cause, the quicker they’ll jump ship (a potential reason why so many ‘revolutionary’ movements fall apart at the first sign of resistance)
2) the more you have, the more you have to lose (and that the pursuit of status + prestige breeds fear and insecurity)
So much to unpack from such brief lines! Incredible. Sanderson is an artist.
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But … the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes a man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Okay truth be told, I haven’t actually read this book, but I’ve heard so many good things about it.
This is such a beautiful quote — maybe the point of life isn’t to escape pain, suffering, and responsibility, but rather to accept it and find meaning in it. Maybe that’s the only way to truly magnify the experience of being alive.
That was…a lot. Yeah I know, I’m extremely scatterbrained. I definitely do think I’ll flush some of these ideas out some more later on once I have a little more time to reflect on them, but that time is definitely not now. I’m currently in the midst of packing for an India trip just around the corner where I’ll be putting my body through another bout of physical abuse. 🤠
At times like this, when I’m feeling especially tired, lost, confused, and defeated, I always find myself revisiting these lines and ideas that never fail to bring me a tremendous amount of mental peace:
I am exactly where I need to be.
The most important step a person can take is the next one.
Journey before destination.
It’s a reminder that, at least for me, it’s not about having all the answers, it’s not about figuring everything out, it’s not about getting everything right, it’s not about never making mistakes, it’s not about never feeling lost, it’s not about feeling good all the time.
It’s not about being the perfect person or having everything.
It’s about the process of becoming. Of transcending.
And as beat down as I am right now, I have a delusional level of faith that everything I’m putting myself through is exactly what I need to fully experience all the love and ecstasy that life has to offer. And that faith is all I need to gain the courage to continue taking the next step, to continue pushing forward, and to continue building the life that I want to live, fully trusting that the future is going to unfold better than I could ever imagine.
🤙