I don't know who this is written for or why I’m posting it. I think it’s just written for me, but I want to post it anyways because that seems to be a generally good heuristic plus I want to be able to find it later and I’m not convinced google docs will afford me that possibility. I imagine it’s not the easiest read for anyone who is not me, apologies in advance.
I tried this exercise over the last couple of weeks. Whenever I would watch something or think about something that I wanted, I tried to hold it and really feel into it, rather than immediately flinching from the fear that it would never manifest.
I now have a list of such things, not a singular mission per se, but a life that I want to have. And although it seems implausible that I will do all of the things I have written here, I can genuinely say that they at least all feel like real possibilities to me, now. Tangibles that I could create, should I want to.
So here is my New Years… list. List of hopes or dreams or wants, or something of that sort, in no particular order, with no particular attention to editing or ease of reading.
Make dope music videos and art. I really want to make a music video for the song No Light, No Light, in particular. Florence shares my soul, there is no doubt. In fact, a line from this song is my twitter handle, silenceinbetween. It’s the most enneagram 4 shit imaginable, which is great for me, because I’m the most enneagram 4 person imaginable. She says “the silence in between what I thought and what I said,” otherwise known as the vast and unbreachable distance between the ineffables in the mind and the horribly lossy compression of that great theater of experience into words, never to be fully comprehended by anyone but yourself. It reminds me of one of my other favorite 4 lines, “a word is elegy to what it signifies,” aka, words, as symbols and abstractions, fail to capture any particulars. By saying a word, you’ve already stripped the texture of reality from it. A whole world of experience denied by the symbols meant to signify it. The main thing about being an enneagram 4, from what I hear, is loving the mist and feeling perpetually misunderstood. I have both of these qualities in strides, which is why I love the north and why I love Florence. 4’s are also artists—they cannot help but try to express themselves even while they know all attempts are futile. Well I’d like to make another attempt anyways, with a characteristically 4 music video to a quintessentially 4 song. I’ve already started it and it’s awesome. I want to finish it.
I want to co-create things. Anything really. Maybe music videos. I’d love to get drunk or high and just fuck around making art with people.
Travel. I have all of these grand plans. Hiking through the Dolomites, hiking through Ireland, visiting the Faroe islands, pilgrimaging in Spain, visiting parrots in New Zealand, falling in love with Japanese architecture, and so on.
I really liked watching Taylor Swift direct her music video All Too Well. She’s good at it, and she creates her vision diligently and persistently without being too overbearing. I’d love to do that someday, a whole production, a whole artistic vision.
I also want to figure out what it means to be an artist who is stuck being curious about “scientific” matters. I’ve always been more of an artist, whatever that stereotype means, although I’ve been trapped in a STEM bubble. And I do like STEM, I like understanding the world and figuring out how it works. It’s the most beautiful thing. But I think that’s part of the problem and maybe part of the answer, too. I find it beautiful, this understanding thing, the sort of beautiful people feel when they talk about bringing artistic visions to life. And that’s sort of a strange angle to come at things from. It’s not the sharp, disciplined angle that engineering takes. It’s not the logical angle that science often takes. It’s this weird, vague, wondrous intensity about deeply understanding reality. What the fuck even is it. I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. I just have it, whatever it is. I’d like to figure all of that out more and understand what the hell I’m doing here and why, or maybe not. Maybe I just want to do it, whatever “it” is.
I want friends who will come over after hard days and go down to rocky beaches with me and take swigs out of wine bottles.
I want weeks of immersion. Weeks with intentions to only write, or only read, or make videos, or take vacation, whatever. I want more intentionality about my days. Not the vague limbo I’m currently in where I try to pretend that I can fit everything in and so try to do everything and inevitably fail without ever really admitting it. I want those weeks to be full of whatever thing I fill them with.
I want road trips with my boyfriend and with friends. I want roaring laughter and magical evenings and warmth in hard times.
I want more of an intellectual community. I’m sort of part of one. But somehow it’s not quite what I need. So close! So close that I keep coming back even though it never quite fits. I think I need the sort of intellectual community that has figured out whatever this “artistic drive towards scientific understanding” thing is. I want people around me who are in awe of the world, who boggle, who are curious about its secrets, who are genuinely driven to find the truth. The real truth. Who are not curiosity stopped by passwords. Who push on and on and on until they actually get there. Who can take on new frames, who stare at trees and hands and waves because they’re fascinating and beautiful.
But I also want these people to be epistemically rigorous. Man is it really too much to ask for? I feel like most LessWrongers have the rigor thing down and I really admire that, but then they tend to lack the “wondrous intensity about deeply understanding reality” thing. The Santa Fe Institute people tend to have the wondrous intensity but barely any of the rigor. (Like, jesus, don’t even get me started on Sara Walker). Where are the people with both?!? I want to find those people and I want to work with them!!
Because I want to understand what the hell life is, what it means to be a thing that thinks and feels, how all of that came to be, how it could have come to be, how the universe ended up being hospitable to that sort of matter configuration. Such an interesting configuration of matter! To be composed of I don’t even know how many atoms, trillions of cells, and for that whole churning system to just work… what the fuck man. Just what the fuck. It’s so wild. I’d like to figure out why. I’d like to feel that depth of understanding around words like “computation,” “intelligence,” “complexity,” “agency,” “goals,” and “abstractions.” They’re all related. All maybe just the same thing, somehow. But I don’t know how yet and it’s driving me crazy. The good sort of crazy, the kind that brings me back to my books and my writing over and over as I bang my head against what all of this could mean. I’d like to know.
I want to write!! I have so much to write! So much written, in fact. So many drafts at the “almost ready to publish” purgatory stage. I want to get it out. I’m tired of perfection, I’m tried of giving a flying fuck what other people think of me. I just want to shape it up, get it out, and start sharing these ideas. I want to publish all this work that I’m really proud of and excited about!
I do want them to be good, though. And that’s a whole other thing. I’d like to better learn what the right tradeoff is between making things masterpieces and “shipping them.” I know that I am far too much on the masterpiece side of things. But I also can’t just let shit drafts get published under my name! Come on. So what’s the good middle ground here? I don’t know, but I expect that I will keep learning it. For now, I just wanna rip off the publishing bandaid and start feeling what it’s like to have shipped a thing.
I want to spend some real, actual time trying to fix my sleep problems. No, okay, I just want to fix my sleep problems. It’s been my Hamming problem for years now, and it feels like a real possibility that I could just do it, but I keep sort of flinching from it or only half trying because I am scared of it and I’ve tried futilely before and I am just sort of averse to the whole enterprise. But it would be just so great if I could, and I want to spend one of my intentional weeks, maybe two, just going ham on trying to fix this thing. Okay maybe I just want to go ham until it’s fixed. The only problem being that it might not be fixable. Hm. I at least want to spend enough time that I become like 95% certain that it’s not fixable rather than where I’m at which is only like 30%.
I want to go on real adventures, to enjoy the reverence and beauty of being alive with my boyfriend. I want to see plains and oceans and mist with him. I want to think with him more. It’s so incredibly fun to think with him! A person who mysteriously shares my mind in a way that is hard to articulate. He just always gets it, my weird fascinations and my ineffable hunches. It’s the greatest thing, when someone gets you. He is the first member of the intellectual community I’d like to form, and I hope we do some of the forming together. Here is what he had to say about this paragraph, when I read it to him on New Year’s Eve: DRINK DRINK DRINK DRINK DRANK DRUNK DRINK DRINK. Yep, I love him :)
I want to see my family, about as much as I have been, which is about four weeks a year. I want to make sure I am calling them regularly. I am ever so cognizant of the passing of time, so fearful that it’ll eventually take them away. I love them so much, and I want to make sure I cherish it. I think I’ve been doing a good job of that, but I hope to continue.
I want real friendships! People who think like me or who feel like me or maybe even both! I want the sort of friends who I can show up at their doorstep unannounced and they’re down for whatever adventure. I want depth and fun, I want genuineness and realness. I want to be around people who have an appreciation for beauty in whatever form, I want to be around people who make my ribs fall out from laughing. This year was better than the last, on this front, although it’s still kind of hard and I don’t know how to do it exactly. But I’m hopeful! And excited. I aim to be much more social this year, and I’m getting a better sense of what sorts of social are good for me and more likely to lead to these things I want. So I’ll continue doing those, and I’ll continue wanting these things, and I’m hopeful that at some point these will intersect :)
I’d also like to be more ambulatory.
It seems as though I should also probably do some reflections, as that is sort of on theme with the whole “New Year” thing.
These are pretty off the cuff, just like my hopes, and I did them sort of quickly because I’m tired of making everything perfect, and it is also surely incomplete. In any case, here goes, in no particular order, some Old Year Reflections:
Probably the biggest thing that happened in 2022 was that I was jailbroken. I got demoted (or something? still hard to tell what happened) from a job that I had been trialing for and that I really wanted and something just totally snapped in me. All at once I realized I just did not give a flying fuck what anyone thought of me anymore. And of course that’s not literally true, and caveats abound and what not, but it’s basically true. Way more true than it ever has been in my long, anxious life. I’m proud of that. Not the demotion, lmao, but the response to it. It had been a long time coming, that realization, that there was some deeply unique good in me that could be my ground on which to stand, ground that other people’s opinions do not, in fact cannot, shake. That I am okay. And that I am free!!! Actually, free. I can just leave. I can do whatever I want. There are no invisible strings. I no longer feel that my only path in life is to listen to whatever other people tell me to do, dutifully, in the hope that somehow that gives me a purpose. I have purpose right here. Not quite sure how to point at it yet, but it’s there. And I want to take that and do something with it. My own thing! How incredible! So I’m really happy about all of that. I feel so much energy and passion going into this new year.
I should also probably quit my job… it’s coming, I swear it’s coming, I just… I don’t know, I have to figure out how to do it right.
I spent a lot of time writing this year. And I have gotten better at it, I can tell that I have, but progress always feels so goddamn slow. I’m not even sure what I think I should have done differently, probably the biggest thing is just to do it all the time. Even without other people’s help, you will improve if you just iterate and iterate and iterate again. It’s a lot of fucking work. Writing is hard, it’s a serious craft to get good (or maybe it’s just me for which it is hard and it comes naturally to everyone else, I don’t know). But it’s pretty important for me and what I want to do with my life and so I do want to put in the effort. I’m proud of all the writing I did, I wish I had done slightly more, wish I had published anything this year in any real way. Still, I think it’s going well, in large part thanks to my boyfriend who has just been such an immense support pillar for all of this, and who is already very skilled at writing. I have so many reflections on writing, in fact, that’s a whole other post in the interminable “almost publishable” purgatory stage, so I don’t want to get into it all here.
I think my thinking has improved, too. This is always the hardest to articulate, I’m not sure what exactly to point at. I just feel like I’m slowly but surely getting better at the “bashing my head into an interesting question and getting a quality answer out of it” thing. Partially, this has to do with writing. This year I learned that writing as a thinking tool and writing as a communication tool are two separate things that should be kept separate. There is the writing where you brain dump, then compress, then think about it more, dump, compress, and so on. That sort of writing is for collecting thoughts. Then there is the writing where you know what you want to say and you try to say it with every section, paragraph, sentence, and word. That is communication. They’re both super fun but it’s important to keep them separate, at least, this is true for me. It’s helped with thinking, using writing to collect my thoughts. That’s one thing. Another is… god I don’t know, it’s a million things. It’s getting better at cutting to the goal and shutting out any information that doesn’t answer the question, it’s about prioritizing well, it’s about noticing confusion and zeroing in on it, it’s about being okay with totally pivoting hypotheses halfway through, it’s about not giving up until you’re satisfied, it’s about always holding a question or a guess and then checking that against whatever new thing you find, it’s about not losing hope when there are too many unexplained, anomalous details relative to what the current guess can explain and just shoving them all in a document and then letting your brain run over them until some cohesion pops out, it’s about writing out your thoughts and seeing how on paper they fall short of explaining x or y, it’s about taste and instinct, it’s a million things.
Also big news is that I may have finally (finally!) made some real progress on trauma processing. It has been a very long time (like maybe six months?) since I have felt any sudden pangs of inexplicable misery and pain only to eventually realize it’s the same sort of inexplicable pain I had back then. I don’t flinch and cringe and wince whenever I think about them. It feels more like a long ago, fading memory than it does like an active wound. I can tell that whatever strings kept me connected to those people have weakened or perhaps been cut entirely. My life does not feel like it somehow secretly routes through them or depends on them, anymore. They are just people, separate from me, part of my past, but not my present. Who knows why. I couldn’t tell you that either. I wish I could, but it’s probably a million things like everything else. But I’ll try to list some things which feel like they probably contributed, anyways:
being able to cry about it to my boyfriend who was just super there for me in a very real way as I processed something I realized I had never been able to process with another human before
becoming jailbroken and not giving a fuck about what other people think of me (maybe related or the same thing? not sure which came first)
being loved? (I do feel like being in a stable, loving relationship with someone who cherishes me made me eventually question some of my previously held assumptions about my total and utter worthlessness)
understanding the situation clearly and my response to it (oh, okay, so because people I loved did this terrible thing to me, I updated that… I was fundamentally bad because… otherwise it meant that they were bad… but I still needed those relationships in my life so I couldn’t accept that… therefore, yep, I’m bad, terrible actually, totally worthless… thus there is still some hope that… we’ll be friends again)? like actually wtf mind—still, super helpful to see that all laid out, it made updating easier. These models came together in large part due to my amazing therapist.
back to the being loved… constantly having these assumptions questioned. Like my boyfriend, when I would talk about how sad I was about what happened and then how sad that I wasn’t friends with these people would be like “I don’t think you should want to be friends with these people. Yeah, it’s a hellishly painful update, that they were your best friends and then terrible to you, but that should be the update! Not that you are somehow inferior.” And I was like.. oh, actually yeah that seems right… (obviously the “oh that seems right” played out over many months).
“finding my ground” which is maybe just the same thing as being jailbroken. I somehow don’t feel like I need anyone’s validation anymore, let alone theirs.
maybe aging? I feel like it probably wasn’t just that because progress happened all of a sudden after dealing with this for almost a decade, but idk, maybe?
I guess one other maybe relevant thing is that I stopped taking hormonal birth control… I didn’t really think about that until now. The timing is a bit off and I don’t feel all that different off of it (at least not super noticeably), but I suppose that could be part of it too, since I have also been on hormonal birth control for a decade or so
I doubt this trauma is “solved,” like all psych stuff there are ebbs and flows. But I feel pretty encouraged, as it is. It seems like there’s been quite a big shift here, whatever the cause, and I am super psyched about that. Life is improving!
Some other random rants like why I am so annoyed about the mathematical universe:
I do think there is one thing that my brain does particularly much of which is often helpful although occasionally annoying to everyone around me. I call it the “what’s actually happening” or “what are you actually saying” mental move. It sounds very… obvious. And maybe it is, I don’t know. But I keep noticing the ways it doesn’t show up in other people’s thoughts and it drives me crazy. It’s one of the things that drives me most crazy with how people talk about minds and all the associated words: intelligence, agency, abstractions. There’s this weird way where people just say things without being tethered to reality. Like, one of my friends, love them to death, but they go on and on about how capitalism destroyed their 20s. What the hell do they mean by capitalism, here? I’m not even sure if they have the association in their head of capitalism and market economies. I think they might just imagine capitalism as this vague miasma that hangs in the air and turns green land into factories and is burning the world with its greed. But what could any of that mean? How does this word, “capitalism” connect up to “burning the world”? What’s actually happening? I’m sure they have some story for this, but my guess is that it’s just as detached from reality as their previous claim was about capitalism destroying their 20s. And I’m also sure that they’re picking up on something real, but it’s not the right thing, the referents are all fucked up, and they end up saying some vague association cloud based mostly on their social reality.
So that’s one thing. But I think a pretty similar thing happens when people talk about shit like the mathematical universe. My god does this drive me up the wall. Of course the parties I go to are full of people steadfastly defending the mathematical universe. I say “I don’t know man, I just don’t really see why that would be true. I don’t see why it should be the case that every single platonic mathematical object exists in physical reality.” “Oh, it’s because of isomorphisms.” “Okay so… because you can draw an isomorphism between some mathematical object and some of the objects in the real world that means… that all objects exist because of those mathematical objects? Like what are you even saying, physically, about the world” “Oh, well it’s not a physical argument, it’s prior to that. It just is the case that what exists are mathematical objects. It’s Occam penalized to think anything else.” God damn it. I just don’t even know how to engage with a claim like that. It’s not contending with physical reality, not something that is even in principle possible to get evidence about. The referents are all fucked here, too, although it’s a different sort of fucked than the destructive forces of capitalism kind of fucked. Usually, people take physical objects, like a ball, and they point that towards a mathematical description, like Newtonian laws of motion. In the mathematical universe, this is flipped, for no apparent reason other than math is simple or something. In the mathematical universe, math comes prior to objects, it is the math that points to the balls! And it seems… like quite a stretch to say that where math is a good description of something, it is actually the cause of that something's existence. I think it’s weird, anyways. Partially it’s weird because even though I inserted cause into that previous sentence, I’m pretty sure there is no causation in the real story. I think mathematical universe people believe that it just is the case that all mathematical objects exist in reality, manifested as physical isomorphisms. And that’s part of the problem, too, how could I possibly tell that this was true? How do I even evaluate such a claim? That it just “is true” that all possible math objects exist as physical objects. Like what the fuck are you even saying. The logical empiricists would have a hell of time at these parties. And I don’t go as far as the logical empiricists to think that claims you can’t get evidence about can’t be candidates for truth... and honestly I don’t know if I would even disagree about some steelmanned, more philosophically sane version of the mathematical universe, I just feel like the steadfastness and lack of curiosity or philosophical grappling is weird. Like you’re invoking some platonic mathematical God to replace the old God that used to give you meaning.
And it’s the same shit with all of these cognitively loaded words too, like people cannot get their shit together about abstractions. Half of people think they don’t physically exist (even pretty sane people! like Hofstadter). Half of them think they are simply useful constructs for prediction, nothing more. All of these stances feel so totally confused and detached from reality. Have any of them ever even thought about what it means when an organism “uses an abstraction”? Like actually, what’s chemically happening? What changes in the physical world? Abstractions are real, they have to be, in some sense anyways, because nothing is immaterial. But they are also clearly more than just “predictively useful.” That idea gets it entirely backwards. Abstractions are predictively useful, yes, but that’s because the existence of abstractions is the only reason that things can be predicted. It’s the other way round, and I do think that this is an extremely important point that is at the crux of why I am interested in biology and computers and minds in the first place. Anyways. It’s been helpful to me to have this mental move. It just makes me go deeper into everything, makes me press on until I have real referents and a gears level understanding. So that’s been good. It is probably the predominant mode of my thinking, and weirdly sort of unique, or like rare in the flavor I have it or something. I’m proud of whatever this thinking style is! Even if it means that publishing things is insanely hard because I am barely ever satisfied with any answers and I need to dig knee deep into every topic before I can say anything about it. Even if it means that I am basically always confused about something, because I will not settle for just so stories. Even if it means that I annoy the people I talk to, getting bogged down in details, not accepting the high level claims until I feel sure that they mean something real. Even so! I think it’s a useful mental trait. I’m sure I could do with some other thinking constructs too, ones that I don’t even know about, yet. Still, I am pretty sure that what I have now is somewhere on the Pareto frontier, and I’m excited to keep running with it and see where it goes.
this was such a joy to read from start to finish. it's uncanny how much of it resonated. excited for more!