the park

I.

the last time i visited central park alone, in the fall of 2019, i mostly just cried a lot while looking at trees and people. it was where i realized i was clinging too strongly to high school and that i was finally ready to stop, and so i did

now it’s march of 2021 and i’m feeling numb so i go to the park again, hoping to unclog my pores even if that means another breakdown. the dreamlike mixture of cement and greenery and glass and water gets me every time, and i’ve found central park is an incredible thinking space, maybe the best place ever for sifting through my brain and honing in on my innermost thoughts

i peel back the layers of my consciousness and ask myself what i’m really feeling, but all i really pick up on is confusion and noise. it’s one of the first warm days of 2021 and so despite the pandemic there are tourists everywhere, and i think they’re preventing me from focusing so i walk deep into the park and cross a fence and sit on a large rock far from all the people. it doesn’t help though, and after a long while i realize i’m not actually confused about how i’m feeling. there is no hidden wave of sadness or nostalgia to fight this time; all the noise is my brain telling me that confusion itself is the feeling i need to settle

II. 

the most immediate question to resolve is this: why aren’t you happy? it turns out this is actually a somewhat meaningless question to ask myself, because most of the decisions i’ve made, from the big ones like where to go to college and whether to live on campus to the small ones like which friends to talk to or what food to cook, weren’t being made with personal joy as a particularly explicit consideration in the first place. the absence of happiness demands to be felt and answered to even when the answer is silly, and in this case i just need to remind myself: short-term happiness isn’t something i was trying to control in the first place, so it really shouldn’t be shocking when i go through occasional stretches without it

a more relevant question which surfaces next is: why aren’t you feeling motivated? this is more uncomfortable to consider because i moved into group houses with the explicit intent of being more motivated, and because my role at asimov is actually fairly close to what i’ve wanted for the past year, so why is all the excitement seeping out after two months? and i don’t really have a good response to this, other than that it’s been two weeks since i went to the park and asimov is having one of our quarterly hackathons and i feel perfectly motivated to do my job again. i don’t know if it’s possible for me to be continuously motivated by work or if i just inevitably require breaks and new contexts every few weeks, but i have learned that most of my lapses in motivation are brief and not worth worrying too much about

there is something to be said about what kinds of activities i’m motivated by though. social media receives a lot of criticism for hooking people onto sub-minute or instant gratification cycles, with significant effects on peoples’ ability to concentrate or read longer texts, but i think a lot of more serious activities aren’t particularly dissimilar. like, i do chess puzzles and spent maybe five years practicing seriously for math contests, and these both share the implication that you should think about a problem for a few minutes or hours and arrive at a few important insights and that properly doing this results in successful outcomes, so what does it say about my capacity to focus on work now if as i grew up my brain was trained on hundreds and thousands of these short-term dopamine cycles? 

not that i regret math contests, because three-hour feedback cycles are much longer than what you’d get from most other high school activities, and a lot of tasks i do nowadays still fit comfortably into intervals of a few hours, like reading a paper or writing small chunks of code. but as with any other activity there are very concrete and surprisingly low bounds to the mental stamina you acquire from olympiads, and i feel myself crashing into my ceilings nowadays as i figure out how to extend the scope of what work i can be motivated by

III. 

it’s only now that i comprehend the question that’s actually been bothering me: what do you actually want? this is probably the most important unanswered question i have right now, and it’s a question i’ll ask my friends over and over when visiting boston, but i’m getting ahead of myself; that will have to wait for a later post

a few months ago i wasn’t concerned at all about my ability to do work. i probably didn’t even think it was possible to concentrate on a single task for more than a few hours a day and sustain that intensity daily over multiple weeks or months. but after living for an extended time with people who run their own startups or who work the equivalent of two full-time jobs every day, i understand firsthand that the limits of feasibility reach far beyond what i assumed, and there’s an implicit pressure, maybe even an expectation, to function at a similarly high level

if i’m being honest then i have never in my life worked as tenaciously as some of the people i am currently with. and along those lines, i’ve noticed i get much more enjoyment from being around my favorite people than from doing my favorite work. this is unsurprising and i think most people feel similarly, but it is a bit disappointing because it means that i am currently unable to pursue anything as single-mindedly as if i were on the other end of the spectrum

of course this isn’t really a problem; not everyone should be running their own startups anyway, and besides, this is a statement about my past and present which may not apply to my future. so i’m not really worried about this at the moment; i think i’m more concerned by what it means to actually care about people

there’s a recent bookbear express post about how people who are focused on entering relationships often do so because there’s nothing in their own life they care strongly enough about to anchor them, and i think i generally agree with this assessment. this is not me trying to impose a value judgement about relationships being worse than self-sufficiency or anything of that nature, but i find it sad that i keep a list of project ideas and actually work on them regularly but none of them thus far have been compelling enough to become my life. not that i necessarily want something to take over my existence right now, but having the option would be nice, like, i want to at least know it’s possible for me to care that deeply about something, even if i end up choosing not to, you know? 

IV. 

a related topic i’m struggling to understand is the relationship between motivation and hedonism. of course hedonism is a loaded term about the worship of personal pleasure, and supposedly not being a hedonist involves doing things that don’t directly concern yourself, or something. but if you do things for other people because you get most of your pleasure from being around people you like, or if you do work because you enjoy it more than anything else in the world, then are you ever really escaping from the endless pursuit of personal satisfaction, or are you just moving the goalpost? if by default we’re chained to whatever our brains associate with short-term and long-term pleasure, then true freedom must be something like the ability to dissociate from your wants or the power to alter what you enjoy at a fundamental level, all of which is a lot less straightforward than it sounds when you just throw it into a sentence

and this is an interesting kind of freedom to think about, but i’m not convinced it’s something i’d even want. these are such systemic psyche changes that i wouldn’t be surprised if dissociating from your desires renders you incapable of caring about anything particularly strongly, or if the ability to redirect desires at will results in eventual self-immolation

so i don’t think complete liberation is the solution here. i also don’t think the solution comes from walking around in parks or writing blog posts; after all, “a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts”. so i guess i will keep exploring and learning and doing work i am only mostly motivated by, and i will keep thinking about what i really want. i believe i’ll figure it out eventually; i just hope it happens sooner rather than later

(i know this post runs into issues with determinism at… pretty much every level. let’s just agree to assume some reasonably weak notion of free will? i don’t think this stuff is worth codifying anyway)