market correction

this is one of those “there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path” posts where everything i say will sound completely obvious, but i’m not sure if any amount of direct exposition will help with communicating anything that you don’t already believe in? this is also the accumulation of a lot of ideas i’ve mentioned previously so i link to a lot of references; if you haven’t seen them before please don’t feel like you need to read through all of them lol 

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over the past year a lot of people i respect have been giving me similar advice: 

• last august i had a call with my favorite sparc instructor about stoicism. i had a lot of fears about college and my life at the time so we mostly talked about stoicism in the context of worrying less and focusing on things within your control eg. they weren’t at all worried about their newborn child growing up into a mean or unethical person because there was no point; you just make reasonable plans and guide your kid as best as you can and see how they turn out
• a bit later someone sent me the replacing guilt series for the first time. it was pretty nice, though i didn’t think much of it at the time because it all felt… sort of obvious? and i didn’t think i was particularly guilt-driven anyway
• at around the same time i watched bojack. there were some ideas i immediately picked up on like the incremental nature of progress and assuming deeper responsibility for your life, and there are others i am still getting a handle on like what actually goes into managing your own well-being and not fetishizing your own sadness. it’s interesting how the elements of the show i had the most difficulty interpreting are exactly the ones i have the most difficulty with in my own life
• i met a stoic in truchas and they’re actually the person i’ve spent the most time with over the past ~8 months (as in, we lived together in truchas and then new york and also sf right now). we’ve talked a lot about ideas like gratitude through negative visualization and building willpower through fasting and managing work and life in general, and i think it’s safe to say that being around them has been a catalyst for many of the shifts i’ve undergone. meditations is definitely going to be my next book after finishing a pattern language
• different people sent me the replacing guilt series for the second and third times. and again, i genuinely don’t think i’m driven by guilt, but apparently they thought it was advice i needed to hear anyway so i reread it and took away some points related to caring more about the world
• i called a friend from high school and they mentioned how they were simultaneously depressed and in a loving and healthy relationship. we talked for a while about how assumptions like if i had <type x> friends who fulfilled <type y> holes in my life i’d finally feel good about my life are commonly held but fundamentally flawed, and then this was demonstrated to me the next day when i hung out with a close friend for a long time and just felt empty afterwards
• i applied to edyfi and was accepted and ultimately decided i didn’t want to live in any of their summer houses, but went to their sf beach meetup anyway. there were some cool people there and we talked about freeing yourself from external standards like needing to work at a prestigious company or needing to be popular or physically attractive. we got into an argument about whether people choose the games they play or whether they’re forced into them, which became an argument about how to tell if someone has agency or not, like, does a particular person want to work at a well-paying job because that’s what everyone expects of them, or have they considered their options and chosen to value a stable and wealthy life? is there even a meaningful distinction between these two kinds of people? i was of the opinion that a lot of people deliberately choose conventional goals and they were arguing that almost nobody has enough exposure to alternative value systems to ever have a true choice, and the elephant in the room here was whether i had any sort of real agency in choosing my values or if i’d merely rationalized my current beliefs
• there have actually been a lot of similar incidents and it doesn’t make sense to list all of them, but thank you @ everyone ❤ i know i’m very fortunate to be surrounded by people i can have thoughtful interactions with

the phenomenon where people who i think are insightful all give me similar advice has happened a few times before, like when everyone told me to take classes and mit degrees less seriously, and in this instance as with previous ones i think they are probably correct

there isn’t a single coherent direction all of this points to, other than the general notion that my motivations and values (some mix of producing creative and intellectual output, having friends, societal impact, and conventional success, in roughly equal amounts) are probably unsustainable and contributing to a lot of personal dissatisfaction. as you may have noticed i’ve been going through an unproductive slump lately eg. a month ago i wrote about struggling to find motivation to care deeply about anything and in general there are days where strong emotions like loneliness make me feel pretty awful and prevent me from concentrating on work or learning. i spent some time wondering if i was borderline depressed, but didn’t feel comfortable mentioning it to anyone because a) i have many friends with much worse mental health than me, b) it was difficult to tell if i was actually in a significantly different state than i used to be in or if i was just reimagining the past, c) i mask it well eg. even on my worst days i can still convince myself to read textbooks or explore sf, which allows me to project being fine and which provides some minimal amount of daily goodness even if i do literally nothing else

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a friend read my previous post about choosing to value happiness and rightfully called me out for completely missing the point. the main critique was that i’d been associating the pursuit of happiness with leisure time and spending time with people and all that, which at some level comes at the cost of doing work, when persistent happiness is about emotional resilience and mentality changes, and people with sustainable sources of happiness should actually be more able to focus on work. this was very helpful to hear because if you’d asked if i agreed with these statements i would’ve said yes, and i’ve known about the hedonic treadmill for years now, but i was clearly not living according to the beliefs i claimed to have and this is something i occasionally need to be told upfront

anyway, realizing the hypocrisy has been helpful for better self-understanding and i’ve become more aware of a lot of related behaviors recently:

• i am frequently controlled by expectations that aren’t mine, and inevitable failure to meet those expectations often results in unnecessary disappointment. obvious examples are the expectation that hanging out with people or being in a relationship or having a cool job will make me fulfilled; yes, these create lots of pleasant moments, but when i pull back the facades manufactured by pop culture and peer pressure and pay attention to how i actually feel i understand that my life with these things is still empty fairly consistently and honestly not that different. i’m not suggesting that eg. having friends isn’t beneficial, just that i no longer believe the expectations i have associated with them are realistic or healthy, and i am beginning to unlearn them. i think you can look forward to hangouts without expecting them to unlock higher levels of fulfillment in the same way i think you can love someone deeply and viscerally without expecting them to complete your existence. so far the unlearning has been going alright- the mere recognition of what i am feeling has helped to a surprising extent with feeling less of it
• i notice impulses like i feel bad and can’t focus so let me go text a friend or eat doritos, which are often rooted in some notion of expecting these actions to fill holes in my current life, which, again, i now consciously reject the premise of. i acknowledge the impulse, dismiss it, and sometimes i’ll decide it’s a good idea to talk to people or eat snacks anyway but other times i just carry on with my day. if you’ve noticed i talk to you less nowadays this is probably why; it’s not that i suddenly started liking you less or anything 😛 
• as mentioned a few posts ago i am starting to notice and sense breathing. when i breathe deeply i tune in with my body and mind and appreciate life in a way that i haven’t really done before; in the past i mostly just appreciated living when i was feeling great, which is easy and also not the point

it’s funny because vincent from five years ago was more or less free of expectation. not because they agreed with anything i am writing about here, but just because they hadn’t yet experienced how amazing it felt to eg. have real friends. at some point i fell into our societal messaging of how you need to be popular and follow pop culture and sports and whatever to be a more well-rounded person, and in some ways that has been genuinely helpful, like, now i have more friends and a large collection of pop songs i like and can appreciate nba ball movement offenses, but completing checklists hasn’t made my life more meaningful and i could’ve arrived at these same benefits from general openmindedness and keeping an eye out for beauty in the world

of course i don’t regret my history; i’m not trying to equate innocence with wisdom here. i read about hindu accelerationism recently and they mentioned how children raised in deprivation in monasteries choose to leave as adults while many spirituality-leaning people were indulgent at earlier points in their lives and i think that is a reasonably relevant analogy. but it is interesting that many people understand the hedonic treadmill at a cognitive level and very few of them are willing to adjust their lives in response – you could claim that they truly understand the implications of the treadmill and choose not to change accordingly, but as with the earlier section i think it is worth asking whether people actually have the agency to decide in the first place

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in a similar vein, i write code every day, and on days where i spend a long time debugging and don’t make progress i feel generally frustrated. which is fine in the sense that frustration with having bugs is completely normal, but it’s problematic when that translates into frustration with myself. one of the pitfalls of associating output with self-worth is that in any field there is a lot of unavoidable day-to-day variation in how buggy your work is, and tying self-worth to this results in large fluctuations in my mood and ability to focus on anything. not to mention the other obvious dangers, like, if you base your worth on the code you write and then lose your arms in an accident you’re kind of screwed. it’s fine to care deeply about output and i think i still do, but it takes great awareness for me to not conflate that with the value of my existence, and i am still figuring out how to manage this

for now i am turning towards gratitude as an alternative source of self-love. not gratitude as in thank you for delivering my food, but gratitude that lightens your bones and makes you shiver every time you experience it, the kind of genuine gratefulness for being alive that gives birth to posts like this one. i first wrote about this idea in it’s such a beautiful day, after which some people responded that i was asking for a level of appreciation for beauty that is impossible to sustain, but i no longer think gratitude needs to center around beauty and i no longer believe this stuff is impossible or even impractical. i’m not sure how you develop gratitude — i have been doing it through lots of introspection and thinking about aesthetics and am probably also heavily influenced by learning biology and watching vlogbrothers, and i think a lot of other people do it through meditation, but i understand this is not something everyone is in a position to pursue eg. it probably requires some amount of mental stability and not hating your life first

anyway, i talked to a friend about how deep gratitude simultaneously brings them so much joy while also giving them motivation to work and not waste their time, and i think these are the kinds of mentalities that help bypass the tradeoff between being happy and being productive. and i guess i finally understand that this, more than any discussion about guilt in particular, gets at the true message of the replacing guilt series

i’m once again reminded of the quote from this is water, which somehow still accrues new meaning every time i revisit it: “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough… Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”

of course i don’t expect gratitude and letting go of foreign expectations and better self-awareness to solve all my issues; i’m sure that as i embrace them i’ll encounter more problems that need more solutions. i don’t think this process ever really stops, and even if it did it’d be foolish to expect it to stop when i’m twenty. but i believe what i’ve written here is meaningful progress, and i believe it is at least a partial solution to problems i’ve been grappling with for as long as i can remember, and that is all i can really ask for

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usually when i read posts like these written by other people i get annoyed because they’re a lot of vague abstract paragraphs with few actionable points. i’d prefer to avoid wasting readers’ time and also would hate sounding like one of those self-help authors who are actually complete frauds so uhh if any of that is happening please let me know 😐 

i’m also fairly certain none of this is original and that there are probably schools of thought that advocate for literally exactly what i’ve written here. the problem is i… don’t know what they are because i have not read a single page of any of their texts and have never done any sort of guided meditation or introspection or whatever and have been raised almost exclusively on traditional rationality and cognitive science, so feel free to point me to the relevant references 😛