(A bit sleepy, hence slightly sloppy writing, sorry)

One of the weirder meals I ate in Korea was at this eerily quiet rice soup store.

It was a tiny rice soup store in the Michelin guide, and inside it only had enough room for a stainless steel bar that sat 7 people. We got there 30 minutes early and waited in line for the tiny number of seats.

The entire place had a brutalist concrete building vibe, and the menu selection was limited, and the waiters and chefs barely spoke, we just pointed to their main offering (pork soup with rice), they nodded and proceeded to make the dish in what seemed like absolute silence. Like the staff and the other guests, I also didn't speak at all.

— That dish stood out to me because up till now i've never seen pork broth this clear. It didn't feel like it had oil in it, and it feels like you can really see deep into the soup.

I felt pretty disappointed when I started on the dish, it didn't have any flavoring – felt like it was just thin-sliced pork. Over the course of the meal though, for some reason I felt myself focusing on the flavor of this dish more intensely than most of the meals I've had before. The lack of distractions – both in the external environment and the broth itself, made me want to seek more experiences, the and only stimuli with enough depth to dive into was the pork itself. And so because the pork was made so simply, it made me appreciate the natural flavor of pork much more.

To be honest, I didn't think the meal was in my top 3 in the trip when I left that store. However, in the months after the trip, I find myself thinking to that meal, and the headspace that it invoked in me, often.

It's actually the case that everything we encounter in life produces a lingering sensation. It's subtle but rich in variety, much like the sensation that food gives us. This is why we call the ability to appreciate it “taste”. And in the past few days, I found myself noticing the relationship between the calmness I feel at the moment and how deeply I can dive into the flavor of the moment.

— The place I notice this the most, I think, are in social interactions.

My mom is an extremely social person while my dad is a super antisocial one. I think in some ways, my tendency gravitates towards that of my dad's. Things that other people pick up socially seem to take just a smidgen longer for me to pick up, and I sometimes wished that I was someone who naturally had a lot of charisma.

Something I noticed though, is that just by being practicing being grounded in the moment, I'm able to detect more nuances in social interactions now. A focused but relaxed mind naturally hones itself for depth. And just like how the blank environment at the rice place made me observe the taste of everyday pork at a deeper level, I find myself more aware of how distracted I am at the moment, and how I'm able to understand things much deeper when I approach it with a calm mind.

And all that was because of a bowl of some pork broth rice.

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

I'm writing this one from a small hotel that's across the street from a Church called “Saint Paul's Within the Walls”

Rome is quite a beautiful city! I've fallen in love with the architecture here. I feel like the spirit behind the architecture and statues have meshed with my thoughts in subtle ways when writing this.

1. Moments of anger, annoyance, jealousy

People who are loosely acquainted with me generally remark that I'm a very calming presence – soft spoken, relaxed, positive, regulated. Although people who know me really well actually know that I'm a really, really moody person.

A lot of quietude comes from regulating expression (mostly speech) – when I feel an emotion, there's a filter that examines whether that emotion is appropriate to express, and that emotion is expressed only when it feels appropriate.

The regulation is rather interesting – it can make you calming to other people, but at the same time it can suppress spontaneity – by the time positive emotions passes through that filter, they tend to be a lot more muted.

On the other hand, I'm also noticing acutely when that regulation fails, when moments of sharp negativity make me say things that I don't really intend, and a lot of me wonder whether its possible to be spontaneous while also not being spiky.

I think that it's probably possible, and that the way to do it is to basically recognize emotions faster through practice. I suspect that meditation is basically this, and will probably tune some of my practices towards that direction.

2. Moments of projection

I was visiting a restaurant with my mom and stepdad the other day, and my mom struck up a conversation with one of the staff.

It had been a long day and by that time both my stepdad and I (who are both more introverted) didn't really feel like conversing. I distinctly remember observing the staff's vibe and body language and noting that he didn't seem interested in talking.

To my surprise, the staff was actually really happy to engage, and brought up conversation topics and kept the exchange going for a while.

To a certain extent, people mirror what vibes others put out, so my mom's openness to conversation probably contributed to that outcome.

Despite that, I usually consider myself pretty good at reading people, but clearly there was a moment of projection here as well. The moment that that evaluation was made, you are already biasing that conversation towards a certain direction too. I think my learning here is to not take my evaluation of people's vibes too seriously, and understand that they could change as well.

3. Initial Impressions

One benefit of living in a 3rd space is that you get a vast trove of data on how people interreact with you and each other. And one of the fascinating observations so far has been how people form different mental models of how the 3rd space operates based on their initial interactions.

For example, they tend to assume that the people they interact with the most is the most in charge of the space. They also assume that the events they went to first were the primary types of event for that space.

Seeing this has actually kinda drilled home to me how important first impressions is when interacting with people. I kinda always knew that it was important, but had nothing analogous to compare it to. When you see how differently people form first impressions of a space, you see how differently they could form an impression of a person as well.

There has been times in my life when I consistently gave people better or worse first impressions, depending on where I am in life at the time; but I don't think there really is a time when I paid much attention to first impressions, and now I distinctly notice when I unnecessarily come across to people as being unlikable, and how that could be improved with slightly better habits.

(I notice how I could fine-grain track the impression I'm making on people too, but am hesitant to pursue this because it could be construed as manipulative. I probably should feel less anxiety around this.)

4. Who's Going to Listen to Me?

Over the past few years, I feel like the notion of listening has become a relatively rare resource.

At least from my personal experience in both 1-on-1 and group conversations, conversations tend to stay at the surface level more often compared to a few years ago.

I'd like to dig deeper into what's changed, but at least for myself personally, I think a contributing factor is how often I hoist my immediate thoughts onto others.

My mind doesn't do much internal calculus on talking to specific people about specific subjects. Instead, it identifies people who seem to have a lot of similar interests, and sends all subjects to those people.

Thinking back, I don't think that's a great method. It contributes to a less exciting conversation usually, since the topic lands less. The topics would have been better matched to people with those specific interests.

Furthermore, the info-dumpy aspect of it makes it harder for me to provide others the space to tell me more about what they're interested in.

In an ideal world, I'd like conversations about the topics I'm specifically interested about to be directed to people who share those exact interests, and this opens up space in conversations outside of my immediate interest range to become opportunities to learn more about the worth.

That might be a good step towards a society that listens more.

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

Had a hectic week last week, just returned from a one-day camping trip with some friends, and was genuinely surprised by how calm I felt afterward. The subjective difference felt somewhat like going from 120 heart beats per second to 20 beats per second, and it feels like a complete reset from the exhaustion of the week (and this was despite doing some running to let off some steam).

I think being away from everything that reminds you that you need to hurry/hustle, including your phone, was amazingly healing even if it was for just a day. Its like how 20-40 naps gaming sessions tend to rejuvenate me, but for a whole day instead.

Anyways, just wanted to record a nice moment :) peace out.

— Categorized under: #chill, #psychology, #nature

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.

One of my goals taking the gap year has been to understand what it feels like to be on the edges of society, what I didn't expect is that this took longer than a year to fully emerge.

On a gap year, people give you unquestioned judgement to pursue anything you want for a year, but beyond a year, sometimes doubts on whether you are “productive” creeps in.

One thing I've been thinking about after the first year is how that perception affects certain interactions with people, and how the perception seems all about social status, which is something that works differently from zero-sum resources (food, water, shelter, money) in that it can be conjured out of thin air.

One example of this is Y Combinator, from Paul Graham (one of the co-founders):

A nontrivial part of the value of YC is that we give people a high-status brand under which to do low-status things. Being able to tell your parents “I got funded by YC” gives you cover to do things that don't scale.

And so “working out of the garage for years on your company idea” becomes a high status thing, rather than a low-status one.

When you see this, you start seeing signs elsewhere too. For example, Tyler Cowen's emergent ventures can be seen as another instance of this. After financial independence, many tech people adopt the label of being a Venture Capitalist. This bypasses the filter of productivity with generally small time and financial commitments each year. Business and profits can be examples of this, though I'm not sure how often this is the case.

In his article about status, Rob Henderson argued that Status works very much like food and water in that it is a primary motivator. We get sad (to the extent that even our immune system can get compromised) when we run low on it, and many of our behaviors are hardwired to seek them.

However, status is different from food and water in that you can create it out of nowhere.

In this way, status work less like a tangible resource, but more like a transmutable object. Understanding the pulse of this status drive can be valuable, such as demonstrated by the Y Combinator post. It gives people fuel to work on things that are more important than status.

One thing I think often about today's society is how the metric for status is not always aligned with what's creative, significant, and meaningful. There are status traps everywhere anchoring people in place. I think Y Combinator did more good than not in terms of meaning, and it did so in part with the ability to transmute status. From it, we can learn a bit about how to find our place in the world.

— Categorized under: #community, #psychology, #sociology

Came across the following segment on Twitter, and felt myself identify with it a lot

75% of the time that i felt “jaded” or “existential” was actually due to me not taking care of my body / health

drinking water, meditating daily, exercising, talking to loved ones, and ✨touching grass✨ were really beneficial to keeping myself sane

I don't think others commonly experience this, but when I don't exercise/meditate/see friends/go outside/sleep well for a while, my mind goes into a sort of OCD analysis mode that wants everything to make perfect sense. This often takes the form of existential analysis, which will seem very important and significant at the time, but feel much more trivial when I do proper self-care.

Perhaps this relates to the thought process that “we must find life meaning to be happy”, or perhaps something about my brain automatically turns into hyper-problem-solving mode (with the most comment version of this turning onto itself) when I live a life that doesn't feel correct?

As I was saying to a friend the other day, my life would be quite a bit less complicated if instead of thinking, I just ran for ~15 minutes every time I feel bad about something. I think doing a proper checkup of whether I did self-care every morning could probably help with this a lot too. I think I'll do both.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #selfcare

Today I was thinking about the various people who published their CVs of rejections out there, and it makes me wonder about something.

I know a lot of people who have anxiety around failure and rejection, and it's common advise to say that we shouldn't let them affect us because it isn't a reflection of who we are, but I don't think that advise is a strong enough treatment of rejection sensitivity.

The way I think about it, being sensitive to rejection is a natural condition of our ancestral environment. When we historically only lived around Dunbar's-Number amount of people, a single rejection would and should hit hard because there were likely only 3-4 opportunities out there for most people, and repeated rejections by many people are costly because it deals a reputation blow that paradoxically makes future opportunities harder.

One theory of depression and frustration advanced by Dr Randolph M. Nesse in the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings is that it causes us to re-evaluate our situation and to give up on the current approach, not through explicit re-evaluation of situations, but through making it really, really emotionally tough to want to try again. This is more reliable than simply making us reframe the challenge because it is more guaranteed to produce a behavior shift.

However, the problem is that this tendency is often too drastic of a solution. The correct response to an academic rejection in modern society is usually not “don't apply to schools altogether” but “apply to other schools”. But many modern institutions are disincentivized by legal reasons to avoid giving reasons an applicant wasn't selected. This lack of feedback turns the emotional reaction that would have been “thinking about how to improve things next time” to “frustration and thinking about giving up”. We see this type of negative emotional process again and again when failures don't come with negative feedback (and this is part of why failing in videogames usually feel much better than failing IRL). Our intuition detects an environment where “you will fail for reasons unclear to you”, and defaulting to frustration and depression is the natural way to pivot us away from the problem domain altogether. In this academic case and many other modern cases, this instinct is subconscious, automatic, and completely maladaptive.

How does one deal with the legal/emotional structures of a modern world that is misaligned with our natural instincts?

I think unusual structures do requite some sort of unusual solutions. And I think often these types of solutions are what we now commonly witness as modern stress-coping responses: – Compulsive shopping – Video games – Pornography – Substance addiction – Aggression

Sites on Rejection Sensitivity Dysmorphia often suggest medication as a way to combat rejection sensitivity, but I think barring actually pathological cases, I'm hesitant about this. Ideally, we want to search for something sublimating if possible – one that takes mal-adaptive instincts and utilize them for adaptive purposes. I think that in order to counteract how unusual our modern world is, this practice would necessarily look a bit intense or extreme or unusual, and I honestly think that the best ones I've found so far are meditation, art, and exercise.

That is, I think to deal with the unusual amount of modern rejection we face, we should try to project our depression and frustration to as much meditation, art, and exercise as possible. This (other than having an unusually good time with friends, which is one thing I'm still trying to figure out how to do) is the one way I can find to sustainable escape the modern conundrum of unaligned incentives and stress.

One line from Attack on Titan I always found interesting was the idea that “everyone is slave to something”. Characters that appear larger than life in that show often had some internal obsession that's pushing them to have inhuman willpower, even when those obsessions are not necessarily perfectly altruistic. I think that beyond all, cultivating this sense of unnatural obsession may paradoxically be one way to live naturally in this unnatural world, full of bizarre, unusual, and crushing rejections.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #sociology

by Freepik

One tiny thought for the day.

When hanging out with friends one on one, I tend to be somewhat attentive to how the other person feels and do things to actively counteract low mood if they have it.

But I wonder if it's better to just do what gives me good mood and have that influence my friend in a contagious way?

This begs another question – how can you cultivate the ability to feel positive moods (the type that's contageous) more of the time?

Imo most people are pretty bad at this, and I feel like there's some genetic component to it as well, but I do think it's possible to practice this, I'm just not super sure how, and not sure that I've seen people write about how to do it either.

It's strange to think that I do a lot of emotional self-introspection, but haven't really found how to do this, but I want to learn!

— Categorized under: #interactions, #psychology

Over the past half a year or so, I've been experimenting with CBD for improving sleep.

The way CBD works on me is a bit different than melatonin, the effect seems to be more in sleep maintenance, rather than just falling asleep. I have trouble with sleep maintenance if I:

1) Did not expose myself to narrative content (animation, TV shows, manga, personal adventures) during the day, and: 2) Did not do at least one short intense burst of cardio the day before

CBD straight up removes the need for both of these for me, and I usually have no trouble sleeping through the entire night. This saves about 45 minutes a day, which is really huge.

As another benefit, I feel like I passive enjoy music more in the past few months, and I think CBD might have had an ambient effect on this. I listen to music a lot, and the passive affect bonus this gives is pretty significant.

However, I think there are issues with continuous usage. Recently I've been decreasing my doses of CBD, and despite this I'm feeling several side-effects (with very, very slow onset over the course of a month or two): – Increase in brain fog – Worse sense of time – More easily distracted – Less inclination to follow routines

One of the things I enjoy the most is quiet thinking time when I can organize the events of the past few days & weeks; the brain fog makes it harder to do this. The distraction & routine hit is also something I believe will culminate to longer than 45 mins per day of penalty. This would be the case even if those 45 minutes were completely wasted, which I believe cardio and watching shows are actually very-much non-wasted time.

The above makes a pretty convincing statement that I should stop CBD, though one of the effects that I might be the saddest to let go is exactly how much I've enjoyed music on it.

I think CBD basically amplifies music for me, and I had a recent peak experience with music where I was moved to tears and felt personally transformed by a track, I think CBD probably did help facilitate it. Nowadays most of the music I listen to are quite positive and prosocial, so I think the amplified affects are very positive and prosocial.

It's ironic, but I do find my appreciation of music sometimes to counter my productivity. Like I'd work and get distracted by a song that hits particularly hard, or I'll have days where I feel compelled to just listen to music and bask in the vibes instead of doing whatever intellectual work. Those are some of the most fun moments for me, there does need to be a balance though.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche outlined Apollonian aesthetics and Dionysian aesthetics, where the prior focused on rational, sharp-edged, elegant beauty whereas the latter focused on passionate, impressionistic, and melding beauty. I think about the difference between these two a lot, and believe that there should be a balance between the two types to continue to motivate both progress & enjoyment in life. What CBD offered me in the realm of music feels like watching a particularly striking sunset. It's great to be there in the moment and immerse yourself in its alluring beauty. But part of the value is that the sun will eventually set and we will find ourselves moving about, making progress on our dreams to build a more beautiful tomorrow.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity

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