Life is infinitely many regrets and a finite amount of time. We didn’t overestimate the resolve of reason, but we badly underestimated the lingering wound of feeling hidden deep in the heart until the very end. Feeling lost now and then is perhaps proof that we have lived.
Moments
Some of the posts I wrote during my inner-drain days are so damn childish 😂
Walk alone, young one.
Stay away from all kinds of “groups” and think for yourself. By groups I mean communities, clusters, crowds. Someone who hasn’t cultivated their mind loses part of their reason and morals on entering a group, becoming lax, arrogant, utilitarian, greedy and resentful, bound by invisible rules.
So-called streaming media, so-called captions, so-called life philosophy: they first sort opinions into opposing camps, then label groups, which makes targeted big-data brainwashing and thought control easier. You get swept along. First you’re given a dimension-reducing framework that takes you from plural views to binary views to a single conclusion, then you’re “reinforcement-trained” into an obsessive understanding of some subjective view, then labelled again, over and over, forming an “n-ary tree of groups”.
When you’re caught up in the disputes and conflicts of the big-data world (some new meme, some big scandal, some polarising debate) and find yourself doubting or giving in to some view, that is essentially cheap inner drain and a waste of time. I now know very clearly how important time is. Inner drain over good and bad feelings is human nature: it makes you work out what you should do and understand people, and when you’re done thinking you have a choice, to get better or keep sinking. Most people do whatever feels good, and I was once stuck at that level too. But inner drain over conflict and criticism, all the moral victories and defeats, and giving in to some subjective view, is animal nature. Stay well away from it.
For objective questions, search actively with keywords for the answer you want. For subjective questions, I love something a friend once told me: “Think it through yourself, solve it yourself, ask your own heart. I can only comfort your feelings; I can’t give you views or advice, because I’m not in your situation.”
So go ahead and bang your head bloody, go wild, make a scene, act with a clear conscience, but think for yourself. Don’t seek any moral victory or help beyond comfort.
Take what I say critically too.
The plum blossoms alone, proud through the winter cold; when spring winds come next year, I too will have made it.
The answer is willpower.
Work on my emotions.
Never worry about others overtaking you, because most people can’t keep going for long.
Keeping at it in a field you have a feel for is what makes you strongest.
https://open.spotify.com/track/1X1DWw2pcNZ8zSub3uhlNz?si=xYUTSE-cTv2f26LRn0SVuQ
“When you’re feeling down, think about how he beat it. It’s not about how much money he has; look at the methods he used to turn hard work into a habit, into something he enjoys.”
We’re not alive to deal with trivial little things. Once you have an idea, stick with it, day after day.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6GUq9y0Iy5QrAuPYxTrFp2?si=PvhZKNbpTc6oinuTJE1A_g
First principles
The most basic propositions or assumptions, which cannot be omitted or removed, nor violated.
When you run into a problem, think about how to solve it instead of fretting over what has already happened. You just need to be a little ruthless.
Excessively strict perfectionism is a disease.
Grace under Pressure.
The essence of journalism is spreading true information, not spreading rumours and quoting out of context. “Brain-dead journalism scum” refers only to the latter.
This is so anti-intellectual. The rise of brain-dead journalism scum will only sharpen ethnic tensions and slow the growth of science and technology. Historically this kind of scum never ended well; when the crisis comes, they’re the first to be strung up on lampposts.
If you want to be the one everyone looks up to, you have to persist longer, endure more and work harder than everyone else. You can slack off, but your competitors won’t. The gap between people grows faster than you can imagine. Lack of ambition and laziness are the original sins.
Rather than thinking “how good it would be now if only I had done things differently”, spend that energy doing better now.
“People are highly adaptable creatures: lie down and you rot quickly; stand up and you heal just as quickly.”
Nothing but a little wind and frost.
“God” will sometimes give you a warning, or an opportunity. These things are telling you that if you change yourself, realistic dreams can come true. Consciousness is bound to the body, so the control that neurotransmitters and hormones have over it is frightening. Recognise how frightening it is and deal with it rationally. Ultimately, that means changing the laziness rooted deep in your nature, taking almost complete control of your body, and breaking through every obstacle in pursuit of yourself. The “God” I mean is not the god of any theology or religion, but cause and effect, tied to time in the physical sense.
While running last night I noticed the sky lit up by moonlight: spotless white near the countryside, a riot of colour near the city.
The white moon lights a flawless sky; city glow stains the clouds into a muddled hue.
For a long time I was stuck in a kind of inner drain, always feeling I’d wasted a long stretch of my life.
But now I’ve figured it out: “time is there to be wasted.”
What’s frightening isn’t wasting time; it’s standing still.
I suddenly remembered the time I lost my way, when my depression was at its worst, and on an impulse deleted my website’s database, backups and all. From 2019 to 2021 I’d written a lot of musings I thought were pretty good, plus articles by my friends. Most importantly, there were so many study notes and solutions. Such a shame!
Musings: Every Person Is Unique. “People cannot be defined by pseudo-‘rules’”
A while ago, under my partner’s influence, I started using Douyin. I found it’s a genuinely good platform for entertainment videos, but the more I scrolled, the more of those “caption”-style videos it recommended to me.
Some people who think they’re clever have summed up the surface of the world into what they call “laws”. They believe they’ve seen through the rules of the world, but they ignore the basic science underlying the human organism, and they have even less reverence and respect for each unique person.
For two people in the world to be exactly the same, you’d need necessary and sufficient conditions on two fronts, the physiological and the psychological.
Physiologically, the two people’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) would have to be completely identical, setting aside genetic-engineering cloning (artificial replication of human genes is ethically prohibited).
The Human Genome Project (HGP) puts the number of known human base pairs at 3 billion. Under absolutely ideal conditions, with genes combined completely at random, the number of combinations is 4^(3×10^9); that is, under absolutely ideal conditions each of us is one in 4^(3×10^9).
But nothing is ideal. For one, genes don’t combine randomly; for another, genes mutate all the time, already while you develop from a fertilised egg into a person.
So it can’t be calculated simply; you can think of it as 1/∞.
For the complex calculation, see:
There’s plenty of time for evolution.
^Herbert S. Wilf, Warren J. Ewens. 2010. There’s plenty of time for evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2010, 107 (52) 22454-22456; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016207107
Psychologically, even two people with completely identical genes would think absolutely differently. Only at the same time t, in the same space s, in the same environment e, ignoring the randomness of mutation and ignoring that intangible thing called consciousness and thought, could they theoretically be the same, and that’s only theory.
Having felt how unique each person is, why do so many people in real society feel like they’re looking in a mirror?
In today’s society most people just go with the flow; they’ve never calmed down to think about what being human means. What the rulers at the top of society most want to see is stability, regularity, uniformity. As the capitalist and ruling classes, they build for those below what they consider stable living facilities and living areas. By changing how social facilities run and by steering opinion, they move one so-called “trend” onto another. That doesn’t stop people enjoying it, but their thinking has already been carried by the current, drifting toward the regular and the commonplace. How could people long used to taking the easy, steady path ever think of acting against their environment? Those “unified” by the rules and those who proposed the rules are all just bound by man-made laws.
We can’t overthrow the ruling class or fight the capitalist class, but we should treat them as meal tickets and make use of them without sinking into it, using them only as stepping stones on our own path.
May everything be well.