2022-06-11
- Ideas of the week
- You see what you want to see
- Thinking about how to structure living situation
- App release
- Finished David Foster Wallace interview book
- Misc other reading notes
- You see what you want to see
- This week, I got frustrated. This happens, at some point, just about every week. Pretty normal. This time (there were several times tbh, but I will focus on one), it had to do with the amenities/living situation in my gf’s apartment. I was cooking dinner for the two of us, pasta with carrots, brocolli, chicken. Very healthy. Unfortunately, I got in a situation where I felt I needed some prep bowls that did not exist. This, combined with being hungry, triggered a pretty intense bout of frustration. I started looking around at the apartment and seeing all kinds of things that weren’t up to my liking. I won’t list them here, for the sake of conflict avoidance with people I care about. The interesting thing happened only when I paused this tour of apartment inadequacies. I noticed that it’s not at all a surprise that I can find so many inadequate things when I go around looking for things that aren’t exactly the way I want them to be. So, I decided to see what would happen if,
instead of looking for bad things, I started looking for things I thought were good, or at least good enough. Doing this did not cause my frustration didn’t dissolve immediately, but it did slowly bring my back to a more balanced emotional place. Of course, this whole “you see what you want to see” thing is going on all the time. Thought about that quite a bit. Big areas where it comes up seem to be, and are worth trying to actively monitor would be: interpersonal relationships, politics, religion, sex, music, art.
- Thinking about how to structure living situaiton
- I’m coming up on a decision point about whether to keep living in my current apartment or move to another situation. I had kind of assumed that I would just keep my current situation. It seems like an insanely good arbitrage, one that almost anyone would ride out as long as it’s reasonable. But then I had some convos that reminded me that my circumstances (e.g. being in a serious relationship) have meaningfully changed. The fact that I didn’t actively see this and revisit the apartment decision was a reminder that I am probably living according to some life script and not embracing reality in a way that reflects who I am/what I individually want/need/etc. So, it’s time to revisit this situation. It’s a daunting thing to explore tbh, but that’s mostly just a statement that actually living according to your own script is a daunting thing. It’s also interesting that reflecting critically on the living situation comes into potentially dangerous territory around “seeing what you look
for.” Like when I ask myself “what are things that could be better about my current living situation,” I’m starting from a point of reference that kind of assumes something is wrong. Now, I do think that it’s important to sometimes take that point of reference with things, helps avoid stagnation. And, I do think there’s a good amount that is stagnating around my current place. One of my primary goals with getting this huge, expensive Manhattan apartment was to have it be a very social space. I’m not really pushing in a social direction anymore though, or at least not pushing in that direction in a way that revolves around having a big apartment. Various reasons. But this realization is enough to question the validity of the current situation for me. Like, if I’m not using this space to host parties and gatherings, why am I spending significant resources on it? It’s a great place to live, and there’s value in that, but I don’t intuitively expect that the value is high enough
relative to the best alternative options to justify continuing on that path. There’s a lot here still to unpack, and I’ll be ruminating on it for the next few weeks I think. The current best alternative would revolve around either 1) living alone in a substantially different part of the city that exposes me to different way of life (e.g. closer to parks so that running is easier, closer to museums to encourage more engagement with art, closer to more friends to try and cultivate a more regular social vibe) or 2) living with Elena and making progress on long-term compatibility questions. It’s likely that both of those options would involve me moving into a “less nice” apartment, but the question is whether having a nicer apartment is the optimization I’m looking for. Of course, there’s other stuff in my current apartment that is part of the optimization scheme too, I just don’t know how to cleanly talk about it in this medium.
- App release
- I pushed a new version to the app store today. Feels good to ship. Important health metric, probably the most important really. Somewhat less exciting is that the updates in the app don’t really feel super significant given a 2-week dev cycle. Updates include new search functionality (added ability to search by brand name and username, but brand name search has some rough UX edges). Also showing brands associated with a post, where the info comes from my assistant doing the labeling work. Eventually clicking on one of those brands will take you to a specific page for the brand where you can see popular posts featuring that brand, posts you’ve liked that have that brand in them, what kind of clothes people commonly wear from that brand (e.g. shoes vs jackets, based on what people post from that brand). And a new page that shows the posts you’ve saved along with stats about what brands are in those liked posts. I guess that maybe seems like a lot of stuff, but it doesn’t feel like it
given a 2-week dev cycle. O h well, it was fun to work on and that’s a more important metric for project health than visible progress. It is worth noting that I had a number of infra challenges with one of my cron jobs, which took up a lot of my time on the project. Kind of an interesting issue, but ultimately not the problem I want to be spending time on. The cron job kept running out of memory during execution. Originally, I thought it had something to do with loading a 200MB ML model into a VM with 512MB of memory and then trying to feed large images into the model, which is roughly what I think the problem was originally. But then I realized there were issues where the file system in the cron job wasn’t stable (it kept deleting the ML model, forcing the job to download it every time), so I had to put the script into a docker image to stabilize the files that are included in the environment. But even that didn’t solve the memory problems. I still haven’t fully solved it, but
eventually was like “just run it on the biggest machine they offer, it’s not gonna be that expensive,” which is the right optimization at this point, and works well enough.
- David Foster Wallace interviews
- I finished the book of interviews with David Foster Wallace. This is the first physical book I’ve finished in years. And it was great. I gorged myself on it. The main themes were on the insidious effect of TV/advertising, which makes sense given the that the interviews were from late 90s-early 2000s. And I think the points Wallace made apply even more so these days. Funnily enough, even though I just finished the book yesterday, it’s a little hard for me to summarize it effectively. Obviously, Wallace was preoccupied with addiction. And he talks a lot about how addiction (conventionally to something like drugs) and things like religious devotion are actually very similar structurally. I guess the big idea is that people are going to worship something, we all do, whether it’s drugs, or God, or money, or material things, or TV, or Google, etc. I think this resonated strongly with me. I think this little app I’m making can be understood as a manifestation of a sort of worship
of/addiction to computers. There’s more nuance there than that, but I think it is a framing that leads to some interesting ideas, good meat on that bone. And I’d personally recommend that others take time to see if they can frame their actions in a “worship”-y way. And then go from there.
- Misc other reading ideas.
- I’ve been continuing to read and enjoy the work of Venkatesh Rao (both book form and on Twitter). The stuff I read from him recently (a book/essay collection called “Crash Early, Crash Often”) made an interesting point about Maslow’s hierarchy. Basically he notes that you need different skills to navigate different points of the hierarchy (seems good). And importantly, at the top of the pyramid, the self-actualization step, what you really need is imagination. I thought this was interesting. I had not previously connected imagination and self-actualization. In questions about things like “finding the real you,” the idea of honesty with yourself and courage and all that are pretty obvious. But it was less obvious that imagination comes to play an important role. When I reflected on what Rao had written, though, I found that it resonated pretty strongly. I think you can see it most clearly when adding the framing of life scripts that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Many
people are doing things because they think it will fit some implicit narrative of their life. For example, there are a whole slew of things that middle-class Americans will and won’t do that mostly serve to signal their inclusion in and reinforce their identity as members of that class of people (e.g. buying Toyota but not Mercedes cars, even if they can afford the latter). This “life scripts” idea applies to all of us, of course. I have my own scripts. But the thing is, you can’t really self-actualize if you spend too much time following established life scripts for a generalized, “average X” person (where “X” could be “middle-class” or “hipster” or “American” etc). You need imagination to come up with new life scripts to follow that more accurately capture your “real self” (put in quotes here because it’s a bit of a stereotype, but really it’s a serious endeavor at the top of Maslow’s pyramid). Also, imagination isn’t just for coming up with entirely new scripts, it is necessary for
reframing existing scripts. You can still choose to shop at Uniqlo instead of Gucci, which might look like a standard middle-class thing to do, but if you internally apply some imagination the meaning of that action can materially change. This is the same muscle as what I was working on above in the “you see what you want to see” section. There, the availability bias threatened to hijack the meaning I was making of a given situation . I had to work pretty hard to come up with (“imagine”) alternative views that were more aligned with who I am trying to become as a person. Without a little imagination, you won’t be able to come up with those alternative views, and you will not thrive at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. According to Rao, you’ll either be forced to go back down to a lower Maslow level or you’ll end up like the tortured artist and kill yourself. Pretty dramatic there, and who knows about that, but interesting idea.
Date
June 11, 2022