2022-06-05
- This is a brief life update for the homies
- Things are pretty good, overall. A friend recently told me about a saying her family uses when they are just hanging around, chilling, doing nothing: “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” And I feel like my life could be described like that. Alternatively, in what I consider the least-good-but-still-reasonable framing of how I’m doing, it’s kind of like the title of a poem I read recently called “I’m pretty comfortable, but I could be more comfortable.” The poem is just a sequence of statments like “the edge of my sleeve is damp.” It was quite nice, and resonated with me a lot about how I conceptualize things most of the time (even when I recognize that “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is” is actually a more reasonable framing). So, yeah, in the least-good-but-still-reasonable case (considered from the perspective of normal, American person), I’m pretty comfortable, but I could be more comfortable. Things are pretty good.
- So, what’s going well? I’m doing a bit better with exercise. I’m getting more into yoga, which I think is the right call for hleping recover from/prevent future issues like my shoulder problem/hamstring tightness/achilles strain. I went for a run yesterday, the first one since getting covid a couple weeks ago, and it was brutal. But at least I got out there. I’ve been eating pretty healthy and sleeping well. I’m happy in my relationships with friends, families, and my partner.
- One big thing that’s going well is this new app. Here’s what I mean by that. First, it feels like I’m actually making progress towards having a useful tool for making fashion purchases. This is a long-standing problem in my life (though I am now old enough and have seen enough solutions to “long-standing problems” to know that even if I had a perfect solution to this one, I’d still find a way to be dissatisfied with some other part of life). And it’s cool that I have the feeling of making progress towards a real solution. Second, building the app just feels great. When I am working on the app, time disappears, I’m in what in pop-culture is referred to as a “flow state”. I was recently reading an interview with David Foster Wallace where he said the same thing happens to him when he’s writing fiction (more on DFW later). And that is sick, even if the output (an app to help me find/buy better clothes) doesn’t resolve the most pressing concerns in my life. THIRD (but wait,
there’s more), it is looking like I’ll be able to use the app to spend more time with my brother. This one feels the most exciting of the three, as it addresses a much bigger, long-standing problem: I wish I was closer with my brother. It looks like I’ll be able to hire my brother over the summer (at an extremely reasonable wage) to work with me on this thing. I also love the way it resonates with the idea of challenging normal life scripts. Most people wouldn’t even think to hire their brother as a means of killing many birds with one stone (1. spending time together, 2. helping him learn job skills that open up more options for him outside the brutal job market of academia, 3. accelerating development of interesting features in the app at pretty minimal cost since I’m competing against grad student wages). It feels like a huge win.
- Speaking of the most pressing concerns, let’s shift gears to that. Things aren’t all great. Seeing as I am still alive, there are still challenges and frustrations and whatnot. As usual, I continue to have the persistent, cosmic background radiation of existential dread about life. You can think of this as whispers of questions in the back of my head like “Am I spending my time in a way that’s consistent with an understanding that someday I will die?” These thoughts are pretty normal for me on the day-to-day level, and are mostly manageable. But sometimes the volume is turned up on these questions and it can feel very tough. The recent thing that cranked the volume was reading the interviews with David Foster Wallace. I don’t have enough time here/sufficient writing skill/sufficient mental clarity in this area to really explain why this happened/tends to happen when I encounter the output of exceptional artists. The short version (lacking in many important details/caveats/nuance)
is: great art shows me a way to live that more fully embraces the idea that someday I will die. The dissonance between seeing that way of life from the artist, contrasted with the way I structure my own life, is challenging to reconcile. A concrete effect is that it leads me to ask questions like “damn, should I quit my job?” or “is making a fashion app really the artistic expression that I feel needs to exist in the world?” These can get heavy. But the intensity does wane over time (for better or worse), which I bring up so as to mitigate any concerns whoever is reading this might have about me. I am fine. And it’s not as if the answers to the “heavy” questions are cut-and-dry. But wrestling with those questions is challenging. And this section is about challenges.
- Ideas that piqued my interest:
- the medium is the message. I mentioned above some of the challenges around the meaning I’m currently making of life (e.g. “is what I’m doing really meaningful? how do I know/how could I find meaning if it’s not there right now”). There’s another, challenge about these challenges (a meta-challenge, if you will), which is that it can be hard to talk about these meaning-type challenges with people. It’s hard to tell your boss, for example, “hey, is the work we do here important?” And in large part, i think that meta-challenge comes back to the idea that “the medium is the message.” Most mediums I typically use to communicate aren’t appropriate for the kinds of messages that I would want to send about meaning and whatnot. Hard to broach the subject over text, for example. Fortunately, there are other mediums (like this blog, or, more conventionally therapy. One way of conceptualizing the value of therapy is that it is a medium that supports the exchange of messages that cannot be
exchanged in other mediums, and the exchange of messages is valuable in that it helps resolve challenges, mostly by revealing 1) you aren’t actually alone and can send these messages to someone and 2) the messages you want to send aren’t actually as damning as you think)
- There’s more here, but I have to go dancing with friends. If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
journal
- Things to pack
- electronics
- computers
- chargers
- kindle
- hygiene kit
- ergonomics
- bookes
- clothes
- shirts
- shoes
- socks
- pants
- sweater
- shirts
- jackets
- hat
- sunglasses
- sunscreen
- food
Date
June 5, 2022