lord-arlen - Tumblr blog

[lord-arlen]

I think the main reason I want friends is that when I make decisions, I don't really have anyone I can consult about those decisions other than my family, who only have a limited perspective. If I had more friends, I would be able to hear a more varied range of perspectives and that might lead to me making better decisions.

But I also feel like this kind of explains why I don't have friends. If I was the sort of person who could have friends, I would want them simply because I like people and want to be around them, I wouldn't have to be thinking of such particular reasons to have friends in order to motivate myself.

[lord-arlen]

lol, as if i was ever going to actually stick to this for any significant length of time. anyway there was a whole pandemic since i wrote this which has made my lifestyle a lot more sedentary, so that sense of gradual impending doom about my health continues to gnaw on me.

i’m 27 now... is that right? 27? I don’t remember my age very well any more. it doesn’t feel good. i don’t like being 27.

I’ve never really had the inclination to delve into how I should do nutrition; I was told in school to avoid sugar and saturated fat but I hear the part about saturated fat, at least, is obsolete these days, and I never followed that advice at all anyway. Anyway, lately I’ve been feeling like I ought to look into it more as I’m approaching the age of 25 and won’t be able to coast on youth for much longer.

What I’m trying to do to start with is count my calories, with a view to eventually trying to lower my calorie intake once I figure out how much calories I normally take in each day (first indications are that it is around 3000 which is definitely on the high side). I’m assuming this is something that’s sensible to do if you can do it, and it’s pretty easy for me to do the counting part at least since I mostly eat packaged foods which have the calorie counts on the package.

[lord-arlen]

I’ve never really had the inclination to delve into how I should do nutrition; I was told in school to avoid sugar and saturated fat but I hear the part about saturated fat, at least, is obsolete these days, and I never followed that advice at all anyway. Anyway, lately I’ve been feeling like I ought to look into it more as I’m approaching the age of 25 and won’t be able to coast on youth for much longer.

What I’m trying to do to start with is count my calories, with a view to eventually trying to lower my calorie intake once I figure out how much calories I normally take in each day (first indications are that it is around 3000 which is definitely on the high side). I’m assuming this is something that’s sensible to do if you can do it, and it’s pretty easy for me to do the counting part at least since I mostly eat packaged foods which have the calorie counts on the package.

[lord-arlen]

Although I complain a lot on here, there are many ways in which my life is very good, and lacks many of the problems that trouble others. This becomes very apparent when I read things written by people in the rationalist community, especially those on the Twitter sphere where people seem to be particulary emotionally open. A lot of the things that trouble these people greatly are just not very relatable to me.

For example, many rationalists seem to go through a lot of personal struggle to find “meaning”. But I’ve never really been very concerned about that; I find it quite difficult to predict what people will regard as “meaningful” vs. “unmeaningful”. As far as I’m concerned the goal of my life is to have fun, and the problems in my life are all cases of being forced to do things that are not fun to maintain my health, wealth, social status, etc. (which is ultimately a trade-off I make in order to maximize opportunities for fun). At the moment I am able to have fun for a large part of the day, most days, and I just want to increase the size of that part; it seems like it would be a lot worse to be going through a crisis of meaning, where I would be feeling constantly that “no, this is not good enough”, rather than only at specific times while engaged in specific activities.

Similarly, a lot of rationalists (though perhaps more the old-style rationalists than the modern Twitter crowd) are really concerned about being special and not just ordinary, doing the best things they can do and not just things that are good enough; optimizing rather than satisficing, to use some of their neologisms. But I’ve never really had any desire to do anything other than satisfice, personally, in any of my pursuits. So I don’t get so worked up about how things might be better as I might do otherwise. It’s OK for things to be good enough.

I guess that goes back in large part to my identity as a disabled person, and my more ancient 2008--2012 affiliation with the disability rights community. The central message of disability rights activism, as I see it, is that it doesn’t take as much as you might think to have a decent life and there are many different ways to have a decent life, not just the one “normal” way. That’s still something I very strongly believe in; but it doesn’t appear to be something the people in the rationalist community are very familiar with, or would be inclined to agree with.

[lord-arlen]

Well, that was interesting---while trying to go to sleep just now I experienced a proper hypagogic hallucination, where I saw a shadowy female figure standing before me who said "Hello, I'm Ann" in a Mancunian accent and reached her hand out towards me. For a moment I honestly thought somebody had got into my bedroom and I said "Who are you?" aloud before realizing it was an illusion. Never had that happen before.

[lord-arlen]

The thing I hate about programming is, I think, the feeling of getting stuck. I've never experienced it so much before with other things people get stuck on, like writing and learning maths (although obviously I've had a lot of opportunity to choose what kind of writing to do and what kind of maths to learn, so I've probably gravitated towards choices that help me avoid getting stuck), so programming professionally is the first time I've had to deal with getting stuck on a regular basis.

I don't really know how to characterize getting stuck as a quality of the activity rather than as a feeling---like, I know what it feels like to be stuck, but I don't know how to predict what sort of activities will make me feel stuck. The parts of programming that make me feel stuck are debugging, and deciding how something that's working might be improved; implementing feature requests is much easier (though still quite hard compared to something like maths!) Perhaps there's something about not having anything to work off initially, having to creatively think of solutions with few as opposed to many constraints. Not sure if that is a real distinction, though---like, why does "implement this feature" feel so much more guided and constrained than "fix this bug"? Both involve having a goal about what you want the software to look like, and having to creatively think about how to get to that goal.

Another weird thing is that although goals which feel highly constraining are often easy and enjoyable to satisfy, and goals which are less constraining are difficult to satisfy and result in great frustration, it seems like goals which are hardly constraining at all wrap around to being easy and enjoyable to satisfy. Like, "have fun" is an extremely open-ended goal, and yet, in my free time, I have no difficulty satisfying this goal by finding fun activities to occupy myself with. But just adding a little bit of constraint, like " contribute to your company's success" or even just something like "do something that will be good to talk about to other people" or "do something that will give compounding benefits in the long run", has the capability to ruin this enjoyability and lead to feelings of boredom, in my experience. (This is one reason I have an antipathy to the rationalists concepts of productivity and optimizing stuff---having to think about how to optimize and be productive seems to me like it will ruin the enjoyability which makes anything worth doing in the first place.)

[lord-arlen]

I was off work most of the week with a cold, just came back in today and I can feel, physically, that I'm just replacing one illness with another. I guess that's one reason to hate this job that I can articulate, that it's just plain physically unpleasant.

[lord-arlen]

One piece of evidence I have for wanting to socialize more is that reading Tweets like this makes me feel intensely envious.

I mean, 43.5% of days socializing? That’s ridiculous!

I wonder how normal that is.

[lord-arlen]

I’ve read a lot of advice on the Internet about how to be more socially successful. It’s always seemed basically reasonable to me. The advice always gets responses saying that it’s unhelpful but it’s always seemed clear to me that the responders are just rationalizing fear of change and trying to find an excuse to not follow the advice.

But I'm not really much different from those responders, in the end. I’m self-aware enough to not rationalize my fear of change, but I still haven’t yet managed to actually change in the way that is required---the fear of change is ultimately overpowering, even if I’m strong enough to not let my verbalized thoughts express it.

That’s arguably the central problem in my life: how to translate my conclusions about what I ought to do into action.

But to even frame this as a problem is to invite defeat. I may come up with a strategy for translating what I ought to do into action, but in order for that to work I need to implement that strategy, and that’s the problem I’m trying to solve in the first place.

Really what I guess I need is some sort of external force that will make me have to act. The solution can’t come from myself alone.

But that goes back to the initial problem---the external force that could make me act would probably be a social connection.

[lord-arlen]

Just slept 10 hours and had sweet dreams.

Maybe I should just optimize my life in favour of sleeping a lot and live for the dreams.

[lord-arlen]

The most consistently salient experience of my life these days is the anticipation of the need to go to the toilet. As soon as I feel the slightest urge, I go, in order to have as often as possible a brief respite from the monotonous grinding slog that I otherwise spend all the hours of the working day trudging through. Work, piss, work, piss, work, shit, repeat. Dripping water, the whirring of the fan, and the exertion of the body are the the felt sensations of freedom.

[lord-arlen]

It would be great to have a job which involved writing. I miss writing a lot. I did a lot of it during my education, and I always thought I was reasonably good at it. Education gave me things to write about. Nowadays I can still write here or elsewhere on the Internet, of course, or I can write to myself, but I don’t really have anything to write about other than my own personal life, which is extremely dull. I try to keep learning new things but much of the energy to do that seems to be gone, and the energy to write about them certainly is.

[lord-arlen]

I continue to be pleased by my flat, which is a big improvement over my previous living situation. However, there are still a few ways in which it could be improved:

There are other people living in the same building, and some of them like to throw parties and have people going in and out of the front door all the time and have loud, animated conversations and play loud, thumping music and also, for some reason, they smell really bad, or at least make use of some substance that smells really bad.

Related to the first point, I can’t practice singing without feeling too self-conscious.

I’m too far inland. You don’t routinely see seagulls flying around in the street. It doesn’t sit right with me; I’m a port city kid.

[lord-arlen]

I dreamt that I was reading a book by a journalist called Annie Bryant, which was about her experience working in war-ridden areas like Iraq and Afghanistan, but for some reason was full of mathematical equations.

There was also a point where I was in the garden of my parent's home with two cats (they don't have cats of their own, but cats from the neighbourhood very commonly wander into the garden loiter there) and as I was walking towards the door to get inside, the cats rose up from their sitting positions into they hind legs and revealed that they were actually enormous, taller than me, and started slowly approaching. By the time I was at the door one of them was close enough to make a lunge, but I dodged it and managed to get inside.

[lord-arlen]

I almost went to the gym for the first time in about 3 years today. I mean, I went there, but I didn’t do any exercise there.

In other swimming pools I’ve been to, you bring a spare pound coin with you, and when you put your clothes in the locker, you drop the coin into a slot and then close the locker, and having the coin in there allows you to take the key off the locker door, which locks the locker in the process. Then when you come back from your swim, you use the key to open the door and the coin falls out for you to use it again. So that’s what I was expecting from this one.

But it turns out that in this swimming pool, you get given a token to use to lock the locker, and that token just stays in there after you drop it in; you don’t get it back when you unlock the locker. So you can’t lock the locker again after you unlock it. Now, normally that wouldn’t be a problem, because you wouldn’t need to lock the locker twice. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, lately I’ve been having issues with unlocking the door to my house. (According to a guy who came round yesterday, it was an effect of the extreme heat of last week deforming the insides of the lock; it hasn’t been an issue for the last few days because it’s not been so warm.) So this has made me a bit paranoid about locks, and so naturally, when I put my clothes in the locker today and locked it, I thought I’d check that I would be able to unlock the locker again. It turned out that I could do that, but I couldn’t lock the door again. And I didn’t want to go swimming with all my stuff just lying there for anybody to take it (I did have my wallet in there).

Now I think a normal person at this point would go and ask somebody if they could get a new token or something like that. But for me I felt like the least stressful option was to just go home, so that’s what I did. I do tend to feel somewhat disappointed in myself on occasions like this (which happen quite often whenever I try to do anything out of routine), because I feel like I ought to be less bothered by this sort of minor disruption embarassment. But the fact is I am sufficiently bothered that I’d rather just give up instead of having to ask somebody for help. Given that as a state of affairs that, while I may want to change it, exists *currently*, I guess going home was the sensible thing to do. Anyway, I can go again on Sunday, if I manage to get up before noon or so, and I’ll know what (not) to do that time.

[lord-arlen]

One thing that has changed over the past year or so is I’ve become a lot more opinionated. In particular, I disagree with people more often. (I don’t think I agree with people any more often.) I don’t think it’s the result of any genuine intellectual development, it’s probably just a change in emotional state. I don’t actually have good arguments to back up my disagreements.

This is probably one reason why I haven’t been very active online for a while. The intellectual discussions that I used to enjoy reading now just frustrate me.

[lord-arlen]

There was a builder in Hong Kong being interviewed on a BBC documentary I was watching who remarked that the good thing about his job is how he gets to see these really nice views of the city all the time, which got me feeling pretty envious. As far as I can see, my own job doesn’t have any such little pleasant things which could help me get through the day. It’s just a nonstop mind-numbing grind, day in, day out. The sole thing one can look forward to is the end of the day.

Maybe this is the problem with my job. Having a job that I whole-heartedly enjoy is probably an unrealistic thing to aspire too. But if there was just a little aspect of the job that I could take some pleasure in occasionally, maybe it would be more bearable. If I had a job working outside in a big city like the Hong Kong builder, I’d probably take pleasure in seeing the activity of the city. Probably more suitably for me, if I had a job which involved being present in a natural environment, I’d take pleasure in observing the natural environment. If I had a job which involved moving between different places, I’d take pleasure in exploring and seeing the variation between those different places. If I had a job which involved interacting with people such as customers or clients, I’d take pleasure in seeing the variation between different types of people and maybe occasionally being able to please or be praised by somebody else.

I mean, there are things one could theoretically take pleasure in my current job. Like, somebody might take pleasure in taking in all the details of a complex system, exploring how it works, and finally figuring out what’s causing an issue and how to fix it after many hours of careful thought. All I can say is that I do not seem to be able to take any pleasure in this. I guess this is a very abstract, sophisticated thing to take pleasure in, whereas the pleasures of the jobs I imagined in the previous paragraph are of a more simple kind, to do with everyday human desires like appreciating natural beauty or making connections with other people. Probably those simpler pleasures are the ones that will more reliably feel like a relief from the inherent unpleasurableness of having to do work.

I think the thing I can take away from this train of thought is that when thinking about what sort of work to do, I probably should think less about on a “macro” level about what the work’s fundamental nature and goals, and more on a “micro” level about contingent aspects of what it is like to actually be working that job on an everyday basis.