Bit and Paradoxes - 14
The Long, Lonely Game
Hi Everyone,
How are you spending your days in these weird COVID-19 times? Any new habit you've formed? Or perhaps, topics you've been studying?
This post very is long. If you find it truncated by your email client, you can directly visit the published version here.
As you grow older, loneliness keeps on leaking into your life, like an odorless, colorless gas filling an empty vessel.
Just last Sunday, I spent almost 2 hours trying to record a guitar melody. When I had finished with this piece, I had a weird impulsive urge to share it. After thinking for a while, I sent it to exactly 4 people, expecting to get in that "appreciation loop". By the time I got 2 beautiful replies, it was already 3+ hours late. My excitement had died. I was in another mental state.
I understand this. Sometimes even I take time to reply to people who send me messages (which is almost non-existent). It’s just that I am a slow thinker.
The situation is the same ("having-accomplished-something-I-need-appreciation-end-up-lonely") with whatever other (artistic?) way I tried expressing myself, be it my love for silhouette pictures or poetry or music.
I think that's the facade of our growing-up lives. We try to do something, yet we don't feel valued enough fully. A task X we just did feels good. We expect to be cared for. We expect to be loved in those moments, with immediate rewards. An instant gratification.
At the other end of the spectrum, we tend to attribute our impulsiveness from the past as being "very naive", something immature we did. We might even be temporally biased to give our current urges extra weights (more importance) irrespective of the consequences it might have.
The way I look at this is: I want to be more than A guy that's working in company X doing "this-awesome" research and the likes. People attribute my relative "excellence" only from the technical domain (it’s an overstatement, often imposter syndrome embodies me), not from "a person with values" POV, someone who "aspires" to do something. Surely, there are things I enjoy at technical levels (studying mathematics, doing machine learning research, and such). But, those are simply other [[Levels of Actions]], something that could move the world forward from their own vantage points, but does not necessarily drive my love for "art" in general.
The catch is that this cycle of "doing-something-share-it-do-again" is very lonely. I feel this has something to do with how lonely I have felt for the entirety of my adult life. Occasional appreciations fill in the emptiness.
Just on some of the previous posts, I received wonderful comments (not many, but some) that kinda inspired me in many ways, to keep on doing whatever I am doing today.
In retrospect, my solitude has provided me to be more introspective (overthinking is a side-kick). It’s a way to peek into the world, to have rooms for more creativity, do things that can impact someone else's core values too (of course positively). Again, if I am to be a total absurdist, the things I've been doing might not even matter at all.
Sometimes the solitude mutates into lonelines. It keeps on growing…a seed planted in the past.
Anyway, sorry that this sounds depressing. But it's a type of "negative motivation" for me. Thank you very much for sticking around. It means a lot to have you around, who gets these weekly doses of tangled emotions, a means to keep on learning, to keep on filling in that "cup of solitude". Also, caffeine. **coughs**.
[[The Long Game]]
Adam Westbrook’s video essays: part-1(5 min) | part-2 (6 min) | part-3 (10 min)
To play the long game is to have a long-term action plan in effect, starting from today (right now).
Just think about what you've been doing for more than half of your existence. How much focus do you have towards your long-term goal?
The majority of world history have been created through people who invested in their lives, in their works consistently for a longer period of time.
For instance, it took more than 15 years for Leonardo DaVinci to finally have something that people today call "masterpiece" - Last Supper (42 min documentary alert!). So, what happened within all those years? He was torn. His paintings got rejected. But no matter what had happened, he continued to put on the work. Every painting was a way to learn something.
Vincent van Gogh was also in a similar boat. It was only after the age of 27 he picked up the pencil seriously. He started from zero but kept on drawing. Despite his poor economic conditions, he was ambitious to match with his ideals, but without much success. To have a perspective on his dedication: he had only one appreciator - his brother. Just imagine how lonely it might have been. Add poverty to the scene and it feels depressing.
In his short lifetime, Vincent van Gogh produced over a 1000 oil paintings and yet success hit him rarely. It was until after his death, that his art found a place in the history.
Warren Buffett had the majority of his wealth only after 52. He invested in money at an early age, realizing the power of [[Compounding Effect]].
Investing your money now instead of spending it is a form of delayed gratification. You are giving up something now to get more later. That’s playing the long game.
Arnold Schwarzenegger played [[The Long Game]] by betting on the movie Twins directed by Ivan Reitman. In it, together with his colleague actor DeVito and the director, he did back-end profit-sharing deal where they would get a percentage of the movie’s profits. That is, if the movie flopped, they wouldn't get paid. Luckily, the movie hit success and benefited them.
Naval Ravikant played the long game on long-term relationships with people. If you've been working together with someone for a very long time, trust becomes frictionless. Oppositely, if you're constantly changing your paths, re-adjusting with new people, it taxes your own growth. No tangible long-term connections form.
In all these, I find three things very inspiring:
Perseverance in the long game matters more than that in the short game.
Enjoy whatever you are doing. Have faith in yourself.
The years are long and difficult, yet meaningful.
A largely self-directed apprenticeship that lasts some five to ten years, and receives a little attention because it does not contain stories of great achievement or discover.y
Somewhere along that line:
Today, it's easier than ever to get success, to pour out ideas into the world. It's because of this reason, we want instant gratification.
So, what do these add up to?
To be honest, I feel turmoils in some aspect (mostly inspiring though).
A question I have: How long is "long"? How late is “too late”? What good is your life if the entirety is in the shade, struggles, and dissatisfaction?
No matter how much hard work you have put, how much good things you have created, it simply doesn't get noticed or acknowledged.
I think a very "balanced" answer comes from Warren Buffet himself:
"I think there’s a lot to be said for doing things that bring you and your family enjoyment…I always believe in spending two or three cents out of every dollar I earn [on fun]…I probably know as many rich people as just about anybody. If you aren’t happy having $50,000 or $100,000 dollars, you’re not going to be happier if you have $50 million… Don’t go overboard on delayed gratification."
Play the long game, but also enjoy your life. Don't go overboard in delaying the gratification.
Now, looking at this from another lens, I feel that it's a silent lonely game. That takes us to another section of this write-up.
[[Loneliness]]
Loneliness is a bit fuzzy topic just like happiness, satisfaction, and the likes. But, there's a common ground to it. We agree that at some point in our lives, we have felt lonely; the kind where you are awake around 2 am, listening to your favorite psychedelic songs, writing things...
There are many fluctuating causes of this out of which following might be the major ones:
Moving to a new environment.
Circumstances like breakups, death of closest one, rejection.
The thoughts and attitude you have towards life. (Possibly, Internal Locus of Control defines this.)
Whatever the causes are, one thing is sure: lack of some form of social connections begets loneliness.
Just as hunger makes us pay attention to our physical needs, loneliness makes us pay attention to our social needs. We yearn for meaningful connections the lack of which kinda makes us feel dreaded.
Let's try to explore a few things regarding this.
Video: Loneliness
Kurzgesagt | 13 min
The way we treat our lonely feeling synonymously with physical pain stems from the Hunter-Gatherer era. In those times, if you were slow, you would be left out. You wouldn't have much share in resources. Probably, you would behave weirdly to cope with that social pain. The behaviour might have catalyzed rejections and more physical pain. Thus death. In regards to this, possibly now, it's our primal instinct to relate to "pain" when being lonely.
That's not the end of the story. Modern loneliness stems from when society (and people) moved towards a more individualistic mode of living. Long-standing communities began dissolving. Cities emerged. Social connection started becoming less frequent. This is ever so prevalent in today’s digital era.
Despite such circumstances, we're still biologically fine-tuned to be with each other. We yearn for meaningful connections.
Additionally, it seems that the design of cities also affects loneliness. (Follow Up: “we and our tools”)
How loneliness begets loneliness
Olga Khazan | 9 min
There’s a difference between being alone and feeling lonely. Being with others doesn’t mean we’re going to feel connected, and being alone doesn’t mean we're going to feel lonely.
However, things become painful when loneliness leaks into our everyday lives.
So what can be done? I liked the concept of EASE presented here:
Extend yourself, but safely. A little bit at a time.
Have an action plan. Recognize that it’s hard for you. Most people don’t need to like you, and most people won't.
Seek Collectives. People who have similar interests, activities, values. That makes it easier to find a synergy.
Expect the best. This is to counteract our hyper-vigilance behaviour (defensive, skepticism) when feeling lonely.
Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work
8 min
"Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He* moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening." - Rachel Carson
"You are wise enough to understand that being “a little lonely” is not a bad thing. A writer’s occupation is one of the loneliest in the world, even if the loneliness is only an inner solitude and isolation, for that he must have at times if he is to be truly creative. And so I believe only the person who knows and is not afraid of loneliness should aspire to be a writer. But there are also rewards that are rich and peculiarly satisfying."
I think, while loneliness relates to that "painful" sensation, it equally allows more space for creativity, in-depth thinking, a profound sense of [[self]] - an art of being alone.
Being Alone
Ankit Shah | 24 min
The first time I read this essay, it struck me hard in a way I had to be still for ~20 minutes, contemplating…
Ankit Shah, the one who started Tea With Strangers, has put everything artistically here everyone can relate to. This is an essay about why you might want to give “being alone” a try.
(Note: I urge you to read this essay thoroughly. Seriously!)
Loneliness is usually framed around your relationships with others—community, friendship, family.
But that’s not the whole picture.
To feel less lonely, you have to also build your relationship with yourself, which requires time alone, free from distractions, and that can feel scary.
One of the reasons why we feel lonely is the sense of purposelessness in life. Context gives us a sense of purpose and reason. It helps us to live with vigor, without lamenting our self.
You’re still in the same seat you’ve been in for weeks, breathing the same air, staring at the same wall. As much as you know that there’s a world out there—a world you were just seeing through the wizardry of high speed connection and built-in front facing cameras—the afterglow of that video context just doesn’t last.
We fill the moments between Zoom calls with puzzles, reading lists, new baking habits, virtual workout classes, and endless social media scrolling.
We are all scared of being lonely and possibly fear talking about it with other people. The reason for this "being lonely sucks" narrative might be because we think it as a flaw in us, a hole that needs to be filled in.
Sometimes, there is no reason at all to feel lonely. Yet we feel its grasp. We’re fated to be lost.
It’s when you wish you could talk to someone, but as you scroll through your phone looking for the right person to call, no one feels particularly right for whatever reason; wishing to feel connected but just not wanting to do the whole connecting thing.
In all these, (just) maybe we don’t know about our “self” much than we ought to. We are strangers to ourselves. We have to figure out why we are feeling the way we are….
In that sense, we can spend our solitude to minimize stress. We can give ourselves more space, introspections in hindsight. It can be "try whatever works" narrative. I do following activities frequently:
Taking showers to get relief from stress, suppressing the feeling that you even had the day.
Waking up early, feeling that first drop of coffee down your throat, observing the morning sky, listening to the birds chirping
Going on a long walk, to forget what you were even thinking in the first place
Writing things down. It helps a lot to get everything off the chest.
Sitting on the roof in the afternoon, wandering among the clouds.
#Reading
Selfless Life
6 min
This was an inspiring short biography of Angur Baba Joshi who is known to be one of the renowned progressive personalities in Nepal's education system. Although she passed away recently, it's inspiring how she overcame the strong societal barriers in her young age.
This short read also gives a glimpse of Nepal's history, especially how it was difficult for women to get education.
Despite being married at a very young age, it seems she got a very supportive family to pursue her higher education. (Recommendation: this video).
DeepDream: How Alexander Mordvintsev Excavated the Computer’s Hidden Layers
11 min
This read adds coherently to the feeling of doing something impactful; an inspiring read on how Alexander Mordvintsev created [[DeepDream]] (Computerphile video alert!). His curiosity made it possible to open black-box Neural Networks.
It's also interesting how visualizations have come to be from his algorithms. The very first image, Nightmare Beast, was a mix of cat and dog features and other weird patterns.
Mordvintsev fed in just the cat portion of the image and stopped partway through the hidden layers, bursting with neurons containing a mash-up of dog and cat features, as well as whatever else is in ImageNet.
Christopher Olah's comment on the hacker news thread puts a nice perspective:
I've been incredibly lucky to work with Alex on several projects, including DeepDream. He's amazing. If you think you have a new idea about how to understand neural networks, there's a decent chance Alex did a prototype of it five years ago.
Regarding DeepDream, it often feels to me -- I don't wish to speak on behalf of Alex or Mike -- that we didn't really understand what our results meant when we published DeepDream. It was kind of like discovering that warped glass can distort and magnify images: a really interesting discovery, but a lot more work was needed to turn it into a scientific instrument like glass can be used to form a microscope. As the community got single neuron or direction feature visualizations that worked well, lots of research possibilities began to open up. And in retrospect, one of the most important tricks was jitter, which Alex introduced. This style of feature visualization is probably the single tool I rely on most in my research to this day. (If you're curious what this has led to as we've continued to pursue it, check out Circuits, Building Blocks and Activation Atlases.)
Ideas That Changed My Life
Morgan Housel | 5 min
I’ve been reading a lot about people sharing their life lessons (and possible advice) to feel inspired, to mitigate my loneliness. This has stuck around.
Everyone belongs to a group -- [[Memetic Bucket]] -- that defines their identities. A group's impact is greater than an individual's.
Strive for collective wisdom. Everything has been done before. There were people who had tried doing X, failed, and succeeded.
Allow yourself to be engaged in multi-disciplinary learning.
Be open to new ideas. Don't be ignorant.
Allow for rooms for errors. No one is perfect.
Have healthy competitions. Don't treat each other condescendingly.
Know that we are simply a dot in a dot. We are cognitively biased to believe what we only see, not how others have seen.
Be empathetic.
Try to see why certain "crazy" idea sounds "crazy" in the first place.
Along with these points, I found this tweet inspiring too:
#Watching
Turning a passion into career
Ali Abdaal | Sara Dietschy | 12 min
Ali Abdaal’s channel is a recent addition to my YouTube-watching life. I found this interaction between him and Sara inspiring.
The main takeaways for me are:
Nothing is original in modern times. [[Everything is a remix]]. "There are no unique messages, only unique messengers."
Be satisfied with whatever you're doing. Don't try to be someone else!
Personal branding matters a lot.
One Breath Around The World
Guillaume Néry | 13 min
This is hauntingly beautiful.
The Brine Pool footage around the timestamp 5.55 gave me chills. Brine Pool is like a swimming pool on the ocean floor, a hot tub of despair.
The ending scene with the whales is epic. The deep ocean is as mysterious as deep space.
#Fragments
The Play That Goes Wrong
Royal Variety Performance | 10 min | Watching
This is hilarious. Haha.
On a serious note: a brilliant performance. It might be harder to play something "wrong" intentionally.
you're bundled up now? wait till you get older.
vlogbrothers | John Green | 4 min | Watching
Heartfelt.
What Loneliness Taught Me About Writing and Love
Becky Mandelbaum | 6 min | Reading
Rather than view our loneliness as a wound that requires the Band-Aid of somebody else’s affection, what if instead we filled it with art?
#Interesting/Fascinating
Halifax Explosion
(I am not sure if putting this under the “Interesting/Fascinating” section is justifiable or not…)
The Halifax Explosion was a disaster that occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on the morning of 6 December 1917. SS Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship laden with high explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the Narrows, a strait connecting the upper Halifax Harbour to Bedford Basin. A fire on board the French ship ignited her cargo, causing a massive explosion that devastated the Richmond district of Halifax. Approximately 2,000 people were killed by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest man-made explosion at the time, releasing the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT (12,000 GJ).
In light of the recent Beirut explosion (link is a comparison of before/after satellite image), these events make me realize how fragile and error-prone humanity is. Imagine, if next world war broke out, nuclear warheads here and there….
This reminded me of the Trinity explosion. Also, there’s the Tsar bomb (Wikipedia link, because I’m lazy) which was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created.
#Ending-Thoughts
I guess that’s all for this short game of words.
How do you feel about loneliness? Do you love being alone? How do you cope with the profound sense of being just a dot in a dot?
Going on a tangent here:
Just a few days back first positive COVID-19 case was found in our locality. So, it’s more restrictive around. This made me realize how ignorant we become when it comes to these situations. We tend to act only when we see the consequences, especially nasty ones without any regard to a higher level of thinking.
Probably, going “meta” is taxing for a large group such as a society? But then, long-term sustainability depends on those long-term thinking… Is “we haven’t seen anyone with the virus, so why do we wear masks?” narrative prevalent in many regions?
I’ve seen crowds without masks roaming around nearby. It’s scary that there might (possibly) be another wave of the virus here in Kathmandu and probably in other parts of the country…
Thanks for sticking around till the end. I appreciate it. If you feel like sharing the posts, please do so. It might pump up my serotonin levels.
But then, frequent appreciations are like “needles to a firefly pinned on the hair.”
See you next time!
Love,
Nish
PS: Music recommendation: Night In Lenasia. Beautiful flute raag.