Ikaruga is one of my favorite video games to watch. In particular, chapter four of the game is incredibly beautiful. It combines an aesthetically unparalleled stage theme with an utterly gruesome level design. In the game, you have to get the same-colored enemies three times in a row to earn a “combo”, and the particular type of movements that the stage encourages you to do in order to combo this stage is truly beautiful to behold.

Beyond all that though, what I really love about the stage is that it can be seen as a metaphor to life. Each chapter in the game captures an essential human concept like “Ideal” or “Faith”, and chapter four holds the ambitious title of “Reality”. The game delivers. Throughout the stage, you tackle the absolutely gargantuan spaceship Misago (Osprey) by systematically destroying its constituent parts, until at the end you destroy a sort of “core” so that you can advance to the next chapter.

The scale of the spaceship really brings the theme of “Reality” to focus. The player's plane feels like a tiny ant compared to the elephant that is the stage, and I'm enamored with that metaphor – that reality is an overwhelmingly large object, but something where with determination you could break it down to constituent parts so that you can eventually gain victory over it.
Recently though, I've been rethinking what that reality really means.

For a long time, I conceptualized reality as the physical reality. Things like physics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology, social dynamics. Once your figure out how to navigate these parts, you will feel that reality is your playing field.

What I've been feeling more recently is that those might not be the right metaphors for the stage. What to me has been feeling bigger over the course of the past few days is the concept of “Ego”, and the understanding of how “I” handle my philosophy and my emotions. There is something about that system that feels as intricate as the economy of a whole country, and if anything much more instrumental to my attitude on navigating the world. It is also something much, much harder to understand. Reality is like a photograph that you can always trace given enough time. Ego feels like a fleeting scene that we barely catch during a car-ride, and we spend the rest of our time figuring out how to reconstruct that scene.

If there is a crux of what I'm getting at, it is this – it's not difficult to survive as an American in today's world. It really isn't. Even with a minimal understanding of the physical reality (which is easy to understand, but just takes a lot of work) physical sustenance is possible for most people. However, the real challenge is the pursuit to satisfy the self in an emotional way, and I feel that very few people I know have that figured out. So there I was thinking of understanding physical reality as the biggest challenge I should overcome, when all the while the actual tough part is to figure out my emotions.
A while ago, I thought that I had my emotional system figured out, in the sense that I no longer feel a sense of baggage coming from my childhood. While the latter part is true, the prior part is not. Even without past traumas, emotional baggage can still come up. The pride of wanting to be better than others, the jealousy of wanting something that others have, the disappointment that you didn't live up to your image, the loneliness of finding yourself in a temporary social lull. These still exist, and they are a vaster and tougher barrier to personal happiness than many physical objects are for me today.
And so I think that I should conceptualize the challenge of Reality differently. When I see the Osprey ship in Ikaruga now, I no longer see the different components of physical and psychological sciences. Rather, I see the nooks and crannies of my own psychology, the way that certain parts are scraped, dented, stripped, and sometimes bent out of shape. I see parts of my emotions and actions that don't flow naturally, places where speech might not align with intent, intent don't align with action, and I want to understand that Reality instead.

I supposed I should provide more loose thoughts here, but it is getting late tonight. I will come back soon, but in the mean time, I'd like to think about what the following means to me: pride, status, double-binds, ironic detachment from desires, the conflict between what I want to do when hanging out with others, and what society tell me is rational to do. I suppose that will be for another day, but I eagerly look forward to digging into it.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy.

Just got back from Vibecamp. On the very last day when I was relaxing on a the grassy hill outside of dining cabin, somebody handed me a bubble wand, and I played with it while watching the people around me.

Right before Vibecamp, I spoke with a pretty devout Buddhist, and have been thinking about that conversation a lot.

While blowing bubbles by myself at Vibecamp, I experienced a lot of equanimous joy, and there was something I really valued in it. It seemed to me that a moment of equanimous joy is equal to hours of excited joy. Equanimous joy feels sustainable, while excited joy (think about the likes of going to a rave) stems from a large amount of expectation, which I think is the same thing that leads to much of our suffering.

Buddhism attests that all emotions are suffering, and I think equanimous joy to be a sort of sweet point in terms of positive emotions to strive for. Maybe it's the case that I prefer it now over hours of ecstatic joy, and that it's what I might look for in events and chats going forward.

— Categorized under: #philosophy, #buddhism, #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 of the things I always liked about myself is that I have an interest in people. Looking at the things that occupy my mind the most – psychology, sociology, music, art, writing, reading, culture – there's no doubt that there's always been a humanist bent to it.

The other day, during a meetup, I was chatting with an artist who specialize in doing portraits. She really liked drawing portraits, and her portraits looked really good, but she mentioned that she was always a bit scared of doing full character drawings. The body was really hard to draw for her, she was less interested in the subject, and she had no confidence that she could get the body proportions right. So we chatted a bit about strategies for tackling that.

This episode stuck in my mind for a while afterwards. When I think about it, it's natural to like drawing specific parts of people (like faces). However, the idea of liking specific aspects of people has never occurred to me before. Looking at my own interest in people, it becomes extremely obvious that I'm interested in specific aspects of people, rather than people in general.

For example, most of my interest in people lies in self-help, aesthetics, culture, and social psychology. On the other hand my interest in learning about the life of a stranger, the idea of how to navigate conversations in a selfless way, and my attentiveness in putting people at ease are pretty deficient. There are weaknesses in many other parts too. In other worlds, despite knowing a decent amount about people, my social intelligence is still pretty low.

I have friends who are quite skilled in these areas, and when I talk to them, it becomes apparent that one of the critical skills here is to deeply understand the headspace of the other people, and understand how various ways of interaction affects the headspace. This is pretty often done using yourself as a kind of simulation. Though this is something I do occasionally, I don't really go as far as I would like with it (I feel that it doesn't naturally go that direction), and to me it feels a bit selfish to be so occupied with other things that I don't think about this, especially now that I've become more aware of this flaw.

In my mind, interactions with people can really be a lot more. Instead of two, three, or many people anxious to fill the silence with small talk, it could be a musical duet, or trio, or symphony where everyone gets to pick what music to play, contribute their own interpretation to the mix, and come out happy after partaking in something that was fun, beautiful, and validating.

Right now I'm still pretty far from contributing to it, but at least I'm becoming more motivated in getting there.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy

I've been thinking a lot more recently about how different my headspaces are when I slept well versus not. Though now I'm much less irritable on low sleep, there are still pretty significant differences. The biggest one is that I feel like I have cyclothymic disorder when I don't get sleep – sometimes I'm very happy, sometimes I'm very sad. Things will suddenly become either extremely interesting to me or completely uninteresting, depending on the headspace I wake up in.

This is a pretty big problem when trying to choose a consistent life direction. If you sometimes find the same thing at times irresistibly compelling and at times utterly boring, you will likely have trouble getting anything that requires consistent effort. In addition, it makes it extremely difficult to visualize what a sort of “ideal life” would look like – it requires stable observations of my happiness under various scenarios in order to extrapolate.

Now, there are roughly 1,000,000,000,001 reasons in the universe to try to sleep well, but I feel like this is will probably be the overwhelming reason that pushes me above and beyond to try to sleep well consistently.

On a related note, I noticed that a lot of my recent writings have a sort of sad tone to them. That's actually not the case – I'm probably as happy as I've ever been right now, it's just that I'm currently in problem-solving mode, and problems have a tendency to be negative-sounding things.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy, #emotions, #irl

I was recently chatting with a friend who follows the philosophy of radical kindness, the idea of which is to be “unconditionally kind to everyone, regardless of whether you know them, how they treat you, and how they react to you being kind”. She mentioned the idea only in passing, but the phrase made a pretty strong impression on me.

Having been a recipient of that sort of kindness when I was in a vulnerable place, and seeing the person enact this sort of kindness towards people who she know can be about-faced, there's something about it that felt really powerful. The vast majority of kindness I see (and enact) are of the type towards people I know, towards people I like, and towards people who reciprocate. Seeing something cut so squarely against this assumption of people feels like I'm witnessing some alien phenomena. Though the way it makes you feel, as a recipient, is as human as one could possibly imagine.

Is it possible for me to be unconditionally kind all the time? I think it's possible that I lack the energy for it, or maybe I don't have the temperament for it. But I would at least like to give it a shot, and if it can't be all the time, then at least it's made the world a better place.

—

Categorized under: #philosophy

Old and busted:

• What's the meaning of life?

The New Hotness:

Near the end of their lives, a group of old friends walk into a bar. Many decades ago, all of them have resolved to a competition to live their best lives. As they recounted their life stories, to their astonishment, each of them seem to have acquired a different distinction among the group:

• One person was the most content
• One person contributed the most to societal welfare
• One person who understood the most about the world
• One person had the most meaningful personal connections
• One person was the most valued by the world
• One person had the most fun
• One person had the most experiences

At the next table, you find yourself overhearing the conversation between them. The group of friends know better than to ask someone else to referee for them, but you can't help but think about this to yourself. Who won? How should these friends be ranked?

---

Technically a trick question, since everyone who lived to their meaning has “won” in some sense.

And there are a lot of flaws with this formulation too. Different wordings could make the same person choose differently; I probably missed some common answers too, since I came up with the question on the moment; and “winning at life” feels a bit contrived as a competition.

Regardless of these flaws, if one is willing to suspend their disbelief for a moment, I think this is an interesting question.

As for me, my personal ranking (best to worst):

• One person was the most content
• One person had the most meaningful personal connections
• One person had the most fun
• One person contributed the most to societal welfare
• One person who understood the most about the world
• One person had the most experiences
• One person was the most valued by the world

This is the kind of question I'd like to ask a lot of people about :)

— Categorized under: #philosophy

Recently had two coworkers leave my org at work, it was really interesting to see the differences between the responses of departure.

One had joined the org one or two years ago, and in terms of heartfelt email messages from others, had a hero's send-off despite the short time here.

Another had worked in the org for more than a decade, so he had objectively much more impact on the world – and though there are a good amount of emails of appreciation, it was a much more muted type of farewell.

This made me think about something – in books and talks, we sometimes encounter abstract philosophical questions that are kind of hard to relate to. For example:

“Do you want a more happy or a more meaningful life?”

Or:

“Would you prefer happiness over knowledge, or vise versa?”

It's really hard to think about these types of questions in the abstract, to the point that they aren't really compelling as thought experiments. But if we frame it as:

“Would you rather be fondly remembered by your coworkers, or have a higher impact on the world?”

Then, at least for me, the question becomes much more interesting.

To be fair, I recognize that the question is a bit of a false-dichotomy. Often times, the two doesn't really conflict all that much. But I also think it's not unusual for this choice to actually come into play every now and then, and in those situations, the choice that someone makes can say a lot about who that person is.

— Categorized under: #philosophy