zushi's place

Some short notes on the making of a decision.

Recently I've been quite interested in the idea of eventually operating a 3rd space like the SF Commons in NYC, this sounds like a really promising candidate for a project I could be passionate about long-term: for one, it brings together my interest in community-building and aesthetics. For two, it has enough financial potential to support myself and the type of future plans I might make.

However, working on this seems to come to direct odds with my plans to start job-hunting. If something has the potential to succeed and you have to bottom line to work on it right now, why not just work on it right now?

I came up with various reasons that rationally supports working on the 3rd space as a side-hustle, but there weren't anything that felt viscerally compelling enough to counter the above argument.

So I devised an experiment, suppose that I work while side-hustling the 3rd space, and that it takes 2 years to see whether the idea pans out (in that it both succeeds and is something I feel passionate about doing),

p(400k) total income = ~100% p(passionate & succeeds) = ~4%

Suppose I value (passionate & succeed) at $10mm, this comes at the expected value of $0.8mm.

On the other hand, if I jump into creating the third space and it takes a year to see whether it pans out, and take a job for a year after that:

p(passionate & succeeds) = ~5% p(200k) = ~100%

Note that spending full time on it only increases p(passionate & succeed) by 1% since I would have a smaller network, and I expect the diminishing return dropoff to be quite high. The expected value is $0.7mm.

The expected value is therefore similar. However, people are known to be loss-averse, and I think the loss is quite different.

On one hand, the two-job route has a 1% chance of losing $10mm, on the other hand, the one-job route has ~95% chance of losing $200k.

And this is the part of the experiment where abstract numbers become visceral – and the reason that I usually always have a dice or coin in my room.

The 1% chance of losing $10mm when taking the 2-job route can be loosely modelled by tossing a coin 7 times and having it always come up heads, which is an 1/128 probability. The 95% chance of losing $200k when taking the 1-job route can be modelled by 4 coin tosses with any heads, which has a 15/16 probability.

So I tossed a coin to simulate a future.

The pattern was tail-tail-heads. Meaning that I landed in a world where I didn't lose $10mm if I took the 2-job route, and a world where I would lose $200k if I tool the 1-job route. I emulated the feeling of gaining and losing that much value internally and thus viscerally.

And after experiencing the relief and the loss via imagination respectively, it wasn't difficult to pick the 2-job route.

— Categorized under: decision-making, psychology

I've been reading Patricia Mou's writing on third spaces recently, and what struck me about her mentality when writing it is that there's clearly time made for deep contemplation in her life during that period.

This is something I feel is currently missing in my lifestyle. After being in NY for 4 months and sprinting towards some personal goals for the majority of it, I feel like I've let discord grow for too long. The discord takes the following forms:

• Too many books being read at once
• Too many articles saved in my backlog
• Unread emails accumulating
• Useless notifications distracting me throughout the day
• General disorganization of application trays
• Clutter on the daily rituals template
• Lack of clear daily & weekly routines
• Missing a magic circle to enter space of focus

After sprinting for a while, it's time to take a breather and clear up my immediate surroundings. This is something I'd like to address today.

In conversations with friends, I've chatted about the idea that the concept of love could be decoupled from the idea of providing resources. In our culture, we tend to associate love with willingness to provide resources – whether it's time, money, food, shelter, or attention – to the person we love. However, if we decouple them altogether, it's now possible to love anyone unconditionally without feeling like you are stretching yourself thin.

But after thinking more about how kindness works, I'm realizing that looking at it as providing “resources” doesn't really capture the process of giving all that well.

For one, I think that there are plenty of times when what we give are much, much more nebulous than what can be strictly defined as “resources”. For example, instead of giving time or money, we might give kind words or put ourselves in psychological or physical discomfort for others, and it feels strange to me to characterize this as “providing a resource”. When you add the set of nebulously non-resource things we can give to each other – words, safety, thoughtful gestures, potential to actualize – to the idea of resource, I honestly cannot think of a good word for the combination of everything we can give. Perhaps I'll think up a better word for it one day, but as of now, I can only call it “giving” as opposed to “giving resources”.

There's another big reason that I think the framing of “giving resources” is quite flawed. When we thinking of the idea of giving resources, we think of zero-sum transfers of assets where both sides value that resource equally. In some of the most important acts of kindness, this mental image is just not true.

To someone who is homeless in Winter, a blanket means much more than another item in the closet. To someone who's looking to escape an abusive family, small gestures of giving and trust can mean more than the world. Using Heinrich maneuver takes little time but could save a life. Giving a child a dime so that they could buy their favorite candy could mean a long-term faith in the generosity of others.

What I'm recognizing now is that even when you don't feel safe enough to give a lot yet, a significant amount of possible kindness arises when you notice that there are opportunities where your contribution makes a large difference in someone else's lives. These types of situations are not very common, which means that following social norms will generally cause you to ignore these opportunities to give without thinking too much about why. But if you can get past that psychological barrier, then you open up the opportunity to not only make a huge difference in someone else's world, but to create a new norm of kindness and thoughtfulness for those around you. I think this is part of what makes kindness so inspirational.

One of my hopes is that in this new year, I'll be able to recognize and give more in this type of situation.

— Categorized under: #social, #psychology, #kindness, #interactions

I was talking to a friend about the idea of kindness and gracefulness recently. It's been a while since we both agreed on the idea that you really only know how kind someone is when they are under stress, but in that recent conversation I pointed out that sometimes you can observe kindness through small acts that are non-performative.

What is non-performative? To give an example, there's the old saying in dating that you should observe how your date treats the waiter, since it shows how kind your date is when not biased by trying to impress you. However, since this saying has now become universal, the act of how you treat the waiter itself has become performative. That is, your date might treat the waiter nicely to try to impress you.

So now you have to expand what you observe in your date to understand how kind that person actually is. It doesn't necessarily have to be about which person they are kind to though. Kindness can also show through small details, like how patient someone is when an order takes a long time, etc. These acts are usually done without awareness of performance, which makes them better signals of someone's kindness.

Is that all, though?

Thinking back to the people I met in my life, I can point to at least one instance where a friend is quite kind even non-performatively, but her kindness breaks down significantly under stress. When not stressed, she's the type to make all kinds of small gestures one wouldn't think of to make people feel welcome, comfortable, and at home. However, when stressed, she had a tendency to lash out at those immediately surrounding her.

So maybe it is true that kindness is only fully observable under stress after all. It's not a satisfying conclusion, but nevertheless a useful one to keep in mind.

— Categorized under: #kindness, #psychology, #interactions

I was talking with a friend other day, and he brought up a definition of faith which I thought was quite interesting.

Basically, faith is the confidence that you can overcome statistical odds. In life, we often shun away from choices because we hear statistics that sound vaguely like this: – only 1 in 4 first-time college attenders ever finish college – only 1 out of 100 actors ever “make it” to star in blockbuster films – most people who are neurotic feel unhappy in life

Such factoids tend to cause us to abandon our goals or feel like we are consigned to some sort of doom, but a person operating with faith believes that through effort, they can become the exception and overcome the odds. And to be honest, I think many times having this sort of faith does help out tremendously.

I like this definition because it not only captures a common word really well, but is also something that lends a lot of hope and optimism. It also makes me rethink the relationship between statistics and will, and gives me a bit more courage to tackle things that are hard, uncommon, or unusual. I wanted to write it down here because it's not everyday where a simple definition can do so much.

— Categorized under: #philosophy

One trap I often catch myself thinking about in fashion and art is “how could I make something that showcases my entire self?”

Whenever I start contemplating that question, I always spend a ton of time without coming up with anything good; and after some deliberation, I think it's because trying to represent all of myself is the wrong thing to do there.

I think the story of most people are quite complex, and not really possible to capture in something as simple as a single outfit or a single work of art. For one, there isn't really an overarching “designer of our life” that sculpts our life to have certain aesthetic qualities. For two, in different contexts we can be into completely different things.

For example, I enjoy both Japanese and Italian cuisine at times. However, it's impossible to capture a representation of how I enjoy both cuisines in a single dish. Since meals are usually considered one slice of immediate experience, a meal that tries to be both Japanese and Italian can only represent a meal of fusion cuisine, rather than the pleasure of eating each authentic cuisine individually, just like how an Italian sushi of shrimp wrapped in soft bread is likely delicious, but nobody would argue that it's authentic Japanese or authentic Italian food.

In this way, a single song, picture, or outfit fall very much short of having enough scope express our different likings fully. They only express a slice of our immediate experience, not a collection of them. While it is possible to combine two different likings to something entirely new, a part of the authenticity and directness of each component is lost in the process, and that can remove the effectiveness of the art itself as a whole.

It's no longer possible to convey the joy of pure Japanese food or pure Italian food in a fusion context. Conveying the liking of a single style within the scope of an immediate experience (a song, a picture, a meal, etc.) requires commitment to that style.

On a broader level, in order to authentically express a person's different likings (and most people have such different likings) fully, something of higher scope than an immediate experience. An artist needs an album or a menu, or beyond that, a discography or a set of restaurants, in order to fully express the idea that they can like things from different contexts at different times. Pinning it all on a single dish or a single outfit is, as I have found at numerous times, a purely futile endeavor.

What this means, luckily for me, is that I have license to make multiple pieces of art and to shop for a wardrobe instead. :)

— Categorized under: #fashion, #art, #communication, #identity

Went on a quick 17 minute run yesterday, for the first time in a while, and the improvements I felt today were pretty miraculous.

1. Strongly improved mood, I think on the order of +3 or +4 on a 10 point scale.
2. Much improved sleep quality, I think also a ~30% improvement.
3. A lot of mental clarity upon waking, beating an old drum here, but maybe 30% as well?
4. A strong motivation to do productive things. I've been struggling with mild burnout for the past few days, and it was pretty unthinkable to me how I woke up basically eager to tackle these things that I've been dreading to do the previous two days.
5. No longer feel the desire to go back to sleep all the time.

Recently I went to a week-long festival and felt quite happy there even though I didn't get a lot of sleep. Thinking about it, a part of that might also have come from biking a lot during the day and getting my cardio in too.

Cardio is often one of the first things I let go of since the immediate impact is not that visible, and QoL decreases very slowly, but this experience is making me realize that running should probably be close to #1 priority to me, especially when I find burnout hindering my productivity (but ideally before this situation even comes to pass).

Small mental note: the run yesterday was also a lot more intense than my usual jog from last year. I feel like that might have contributed to the huge effect as well. To investigate.

— Categorized under: #productivity

Thinking about the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, it occurred to me that there's something about current Western society (at least in the U.S.) that can kind of inoculate you to the realities of the world.

I see this difference whenever I visit a 3rd world country and come back to the U.S.. Everything will feel less real for a month or so and then settle back on their old patterns.

This pattern came up again yesterday, when a lot of people in general seem to take Ukraine with less gravity than the situation really calls for. There's a part of me that feels the same way – it's fun to meme something as serious as war. On the other hand, the part of me that has read so many books and seen so many realistic portrayals of war is yelling at me for how serious this actually is.

I sometimes perform thought experiments on this kind of thing – suppose that a foreign country invades the U.S. and hostile troops are literally in my city, would I be able to quickly take reality into account and act quickly? Odds are it would probably take me a while. The length of time it would take me to adjust to that reality is, in a way, how much fog I am in when it comes to thinking about war (and certain realities of the world).

Catch-22, one of those anti-war novels, is pretty much precisely about that realization when the book's protagonist actually come into contact with the realities of war. This quote at the climax of the book feels relevant here:

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

— Categorized under: #psychology

1.

In a humanities course I took, I remember that one of the tests you use to figure out whether something is a religion or philosophy is whether it tries to explain what happens after death. Under that definition, Buddhism falls under religion due to its concept of Reincarnation, but Confucianism doesn't because it's only concerned with social relationships, and has nothing to say about dying.

Under that framework, I feel like an atheist through and through. A death means an erasure of possibility to interact, through and through. There isn't someone looking down from above.

2.

The fact that consciousness can suddenly disappear can be pretty jarring, though. Nothing in life quite does that. The belief that things don't “simply disappear” holds sway over us probably because we see examples of it everywhere. From how water turns to ice and back, to how leaves become soil that fertilizes new growth. Animals encode this belief in some way, which is why when you play a magic trick in front of a cat or dog, they will visibly become surprised or puzzled.

In this way death is very jarring. Going from one to none still feels kind of impossible. This is probably one of the reasons we tend to come up with beliefs regarding ghosts and souls.

3.

Two years ago, I remember comforting a friend over his mother's unexpected death. He grieved intensely, and had hallucinations of seeing her and hearing her at times. I have seen this in another case too, where the despair of the grieving caused someone to enter a trance where for a few minutes she was interacting and speaking to the person while looking into thin air. Ghosts are not such a conscious creation. Sometimes, you really want to see the person again, and whether out of pity or mercy or helplessness or compliance, the brain grants you that one wish.

4.

Some call death “the great equalizer”. I could see why. No amount of ability, wealth, status, or any other type of resource could halt an imminent death due to old age. I felt that powerlessness acutely over the past four days.

But as someone who was lucky enough to only have experienced a death of a close one recently, I can't help but think that it's not something to be taken for granted. When I look around, sometimes I seem to visualize aging not as a natural process, but as a stalking predator that will drag away everyone I care about eventually. Thinking about it that way conjures takes away the beautify and tragedy of aging and death but instead casts it almost as a movie villain. Can humans one day overcome aging? I feel like it's possible, and look forward to that day, even if I might not be around to see it.

Grandma passed away tonight.

A few days ago she went into the emergency room for a surgery, and had been kept under observations since then. Over the past few days we've been on the edge on whether she would make it, and now we know the answer.

She's basically the person who raised me, and had always been frail. After moving abroad, I remember that in the past ten years every now and then I would have dreams that she died, and wake up in tears. It's biologically hard for me to cry, but the dreams do do it.

I think it's fair to say that out of everyone I know, she's probably the person who loves me the most, was the most proud of me, and the person I love the most too. I also believe that she sacrificed a part of her health for me, along with all nine of children and grandchildren she had directly raised.

For some reason, right now I don't feel like crying though. Being in a different country and not being able to see her at all, things just do not feel quite real.

Thinking about never hearing her voice again, or having her cooking, see her sitting at home, or hugging her again, though, does make me feel something. I don't think I should think about it much for now.

In shows and animations when a closed one dies, people will often turn to busy work. Check their phones, open their emails, clean up their desk. I could kind of see why now. Somewhere across the world, some of my cousins and relatives are probably doing it right now. My heart goes out to them.

It's been snowing here the last few days, and it's snowing again tonight. I usually don't like it when snow stays around for so long, but I do like having the snow again tonight.
Z