I just turned 30 today!
I am old now. Not in a negative and objective sense. I know I am still quite young in the grand scheme of things; I can’t possibly be “old” if I’m not even middle-aged yet. If I’m still around in 2060, as I’m likely to be, 2025 will seem like such an impossibly long time ago. Ah 2025, those good old times of the distant past, when AI technology was still nascent and LLM integrations were crude and stupid, when crypto was still bubbling around in the background as if it were but an outdated fad, when my body was still spry and agile, when my nephews and niece were still such young children and my parents still alive! Ah 2025, what a cute and quaint year that was.
But I’ve been young all my life. I know all about what it’s like to be young; now I want to know what it’s like to be old. “Old” is physical, of course, but “old” is also an attitude, one that I wish to try on for size.
I mean, it’s not completely ridiculous:
- Medical appointments for a recurring health issue? Check. Nothing too serious, just an incredibly persistent ear infection that required more than a few visits to the doctor to fix. I’m getting old.
- A weak knee, and a back and neck that aches sometimes? Check. The aches only come about with prolonged bad posture, but this didn’t used to happen quite as much. I’m getting old.
- Alcohol that doesn’t get me quite as wasted as it did back when I had a lower tolerance? Check. I’m getting old.
- Waking up at dawn to enjoy the gorgeous sunrise and fresh morning air like a grandpa? Check. I’m getting old.
- Feeling like I’ve been around the block a few times, like I’ve lived some life and seen some things? Check. I’ve only seen like 0.0…01% of life on Earth, but what I have already seen can’t be discounted either. I’m getting old.
It flows well narratively too. I got into a midlife DINK lifestyle with my ex. Man, we were living it up, freewheeling around town with our creative blockages like they didn’t even matter. Then I found myself in my post-divorce 50’s, readjusting once again to life as a single man but finding that I had my shit together way more than I did in my 20’s. Then I got to my 60’s with a fixed-income retirement where I had to slowly figure out just what to do with all this free time. Now I’m living out my “Ah, I sure am old now” 70’s.
This is not a commitment. I’m old now, and when I’m done being old, I’ll be something else.
Nor did I wait until I’m exactly 30 to feel old. I’ve already experimented with feeling old for one night a couple months ago. Today is just an arbitrary boundary, a coincidental alignment with the Earth’s orbit some 30 years ago. Imagine if you wrote a book where all the chapters were a uniform length and delineated based on page numbers alone, with the chapter divisions cutting straight through the middle of coherent sentences, and the chapters titles based off of whatever themes happen to lie within those page numbers. It sounds so idiotic, someone should really do it. Hell, if I’ve thought of it, I’ll bet someone’s already done it. But then again, maybe the strong form of the Efficient Author Hypothesis isn’t true.
Anyways. I quite enjoyed that one-night experiment. “I may be old, but I’m still kicking it” felt real good on me. Nonetheless, I spent the remainder of the last couple months relishing the waning days of my youth. There was no rush to be old; I can be old anytime. But I’ll never again be able to identify so strongly with being exactly 29 years old — at least not without causing my healthcare providers a great deal of consternation over my mental state.
I didn’t have time to put this next bit in the last blog post even though it would’ve fit better there, but I’d always felt like it would be crass to tell people that I finished my master’s degree as a teenager. I mean, I was only a couple of months away from turning 20; being a “teenager” was just a technicality. So when people asked, I would just tell them that I was 19, or that I was turning 20. It feels the same way with this current retirement, except that I’m not ashamed to own that I was definitely in my 20’s and not my 30’s when it happened. Because I was. It doesn’t mean anything, but I did land on the right side of that technicality, lucky bastard that I am!
My personal struggles with ED
Some people have a fundamentally different conception of work than I do. Well, many people have a fundamentally different conception of many things than I do, but work in particular fascinates me, perhaps due to my personal struggles with it.
I told a friend — let’s call him “Andrew” — that I was retired now. I also told Andrew how I was hacking away at a software project with a business partner, “Brian,” to see if it would turn into a viable business. I use the term “business partner” lightly here — Brian is a true friend and we were trying out a potential business idea, which meant that we had to also contend with the business relationship between us by considering in advance how we would handle the success or failure of the business. I have yet another friend “Charles” who worked at a startup founded by a clique of best friends in college. The startup was so successful, it attracted million upon millions of dollars of funding, and for those millions these best friends backstabbed each other until none of them talk to each other anymore. Ooof. Such are the risks of business to friendship.
Andrew retorted that it’s one hell of a “retirement” if I’m still working, but completely for free now. Man, Andrew has a way different conception of work and retirement than I do. I mean, come on Andrew, what are you gonna do in your old age, sit and stare at the wall all day? But of course, that is in fact what I do some days. Some days you just want to lay on the couch and not think about anything for hours upon hours. លំហែរខួរក្បាល, as they call it in Khmer: “rest your brain.” One of the joys of picking up another language is finding new phrases that resonate with you more than your other languages — somehow “relax your mind” in English or 放松大脑 (“relax your brain”) in Chinese doesn’t do it for me as much as លំហែរខួរក្បាល does. លំហែរ (pronounced similar to “lom-high”) just sounds like you’re taking a break with a deep and satisfied sigh.
My friend “David” asked me to go on a trip to Europe this summer. I declined because I felt like resting at home instead. Old people stuff, you know? David asked me incredulously what I’m even resting from if I’m retired. Resting “from”? Man, David sure has a much different conception of work and rest than I do. Who says you need to rest from anything? To me, resting in order to do something else is nothing more than a pause in work. The point of real rest is to rest. Just like how the point of yoga is the yoga itself, not just to tick off a box on the daily checklist. Just like how the point of life is the life itself, not the accomplishments of the life. Such a viewpoint feels so obvious to me now, I sometimes gaslight myself into wondering how I could’ve ever thought otherwise at all, before being helpfully reminded that much of society does in fact judge a stranger’s life by their net contributions to society relative to their expected contributions. I didn’t get such notions around the unbearable weight of massive talent into my head from out of nowhere.
I met a Cambodian here, “Edward,” who’s a very hard worker, as many Cambodians are. He’s worked since he was a teenager to support himself and his family, and he’s working two jobs even now. Edward did not understand why I found the act of remote work itself hard. Not the job being hard — that he could understand — but the mere act of sitting down and working being hard. I have a really nice table in my living room; I could sit there and work quite comfortably. Yes, I could, except for executive dysfunction. I couldn’t explain that to him in Khmer, and he had never heard of that in English, so I simply told him I was lazy, and then he understood, or at least felt the sensation of understanding.
“Lazy” is perhaps the closest approximation to executive dysfunction that I can think of, and it has also historically been a label I put on myself. But it doesn’t really feel like an accurate description to me. “Lazy” implies not doing something because you’d rather not do it. I’m perfectly fine with that. What I struggle with is wanting to do something but not doing it. That’s quite different. To me, that sounds way less “lazy” and way more “dysfunctional.” It is specifically a dysfunctionality that results in a very low, seemingly close to zero correlation between the actions I intended to execute and the actions I actually executed — hence, “executive dysfunction” actually being a great name for the phenomenon.
I think it’s likely that people who model this as simply a case of revealed preferences have never actually experienced the maddening effects of executive dysfunction extreme enough to cause severe stress without any noticeable benefits. There was no conscious part of me that preferred lying stressed in bed all day to actually doing the remote work; there may have been subconscious parts of me that were trying to be helpful by holding me back from the scary thing that was causing me so much stress, but to say that this is what I’ve revealed myself to actually “want” to do is a real gaslighting stretch. At the same time, it’s entirely fair that someone who has never lived through such a diametrically opposite experience to their own lives would reason about it in completely different ways. It’s like feeding a data point way outside of a model’s training data and expecting it to come up with something comprehensible and useful.
I once had a coworker “Frank” who was pissed at me for always saying I was going to “try” to do something. “Dude, just fucking do it or not,” this Yoda-like Frank said. But looking back, I can see how I was optimizing under the constraints of:
- Wanting to do a favor for Frank because I liked him and didn’t want to tell him to fuck off just because I had no formal corporate responsibilities to him. We were close enough that my actual workload was no secret to him.
- Historical observations that there existed a low amount of correlation between what I intended to do and what I actually did, thus making it feel disingenuous to make a certain promise about an uncertain outcome.
The solution I reached for at the time was to promise full willingness to comply with the request, but to make it clear that the actual execution of the request was out of my hands as far as my conscious language centers were concerned. All of that was supposed to be encapsulated inside the single word “try”; I may have optimized for friendliness and honesty, but I completely neglected clear and effective communication because those skills of mine were much less developed back then.
Executive dysfunction is still something I struggle with, but in recent months the correlation between what I consciously want to be doing and what I am actually doing has strengthened noticeably across multiple timescales. While that strengthening has immeasurably improved my quality of life, I also find myself feeling a severe lack of time. What the hell? I’m retired. I’m not working a full-time job anymore. I am clearly doing something terribly wrong, because I should have all the free time in the world instead of none at all.
But I’ve found myself in this exact spot before, where an improvement in symptoms led to a new frustration at my inefficient usage of all the time I had in the day, leading me to continually optimize my day away until I burned out and the cycle repeated. I recognize now that running out of time in a day is a good sign. It means that I’m finally so capable of doing things that there’s more things to do than there is time to do them. I may have finished my main quest in life, but there will always be overwhelmingly more side quests to explore than there is time to complete them all. (I use the word “always” in a practical sense — perhaps I’ll be blessed enough to eventually feel like I’ve truly had enough of life and am ready to leave this world at any time, but it’s impractical for me to simply wait until that happens.) Just because the day started out with the full collective potential of all possible timelines but ended with the mundane reality of a single humble path doesn’t mean it was any less of a day well-lived or a path well-traveled. As my former boss “Grace” at this one startup would remind us when we developers worried about scaling to more users than we had: It’s a problem, but it’s a good problem to have.
Which is why it’s really funny when I tell Edward that I’ve been quite busy. “You found a job?” he asked.
Nah. I’m retired, man.
“Oh. I heard you say you were busy.”
Yeah. I guess you and I just have really different conceptions of work and life.
Mental Off-switches
In some ways, I love my mind like I love my mom. I have a beautiful mind. I really love my mind. I’m blessed to have such a mind. But sometimes, I seriously need my mind to just shut the fuck up.
To that end, my mind has gone off and discovered a couple off-switches for itself, tools in the toolbox for me to tamp down my overthinking as needed.
I’m dumb now
As part of the treatment for the aforementioned ear infection, I took metronidazole for ten days. Fuck, that was the roughest medicine I’ve had in a while. Dizziness and confusion came on pretty quickly, followed by pain around my heart area. Is this normal? As usual, the internet was here to reassure me about side effects and their potential meanings:
Check with your doctor right away if you have dizziness, … These may be symptoms of a serious brain condition called encephalopathy.
Call your doctor right away if you have confusion, …, a headache, … These could be symptoms of a serious condition called aseptic meningitis.
Encephalopathy? That sounds serious. What is it?
The condition may result in either temporary or permanent brain damage, and it can also lead to long-term and life-altering complications including a coma.
Oh fuck! I dutifully went back to the doctor. Normal vitals all around. They told me to finish the course of medicine.
The confusion got very noticeable:
- I referred to my neighbor as my “roommate” — although in retrospect, I think this is because he’s the first neighbor I’ve had whom I’ve become as close to as a roommate.
- When discussing the weather, I said “the sky in the clouds” instead of “the clouds in the sky.”
- I mixed up near-homophones with different spellings, like typing “due” instead of “do.”
- I was writing a message on a group chat when I decided I should perhaps send it privately instead. I pressed “Select All” on the phone to prepare for a cut-and-paste, and then proceeded to hit the “Send” button instead of the “Cut” button. Not only did I press the wrong button, I also had no idea I’d pressed the wrong button and was confused as to what had just happened with the UI.
God, I could notice myself getting dumber. How many IQ points was this medication costing me right now? I reflected on how I’ve never taken an IQ test, never even felt the desire to do so, because it somehow just feels crass, as if the very act of taking an IQ test proves that I need to prove something about myself. But I realized that it was also because I feared the results. It wasn’t the low results I feared — in fact, if I got a result of 70, I’d be gloating about it to everyone I knew. “Bro, did you know that I’m literally fucking retarded? No seriously man, I took an official IQ test and it shows that I’m fucking retarded! Hahahaha dude, can you believe that we’re standing together in the same room right now? You’ve made it to the same point in life as a certified retard!” A super low result would be absolutely hilarious. But a super high result would feel embarrassing, like I ought to be ashamed that I am where I am in life given what I’ve been given. High intelligence feels like a burden in this way, as if the higher your intelligence, the more of society’s problems you’re expected to shoulder.
But “smart” and “dumb” are just labels. If I’d prefer finding out that I had a low IQ than a high IQ, why not just apply the label of “dumb” to myself and see how it feels? Here was after all the perfect chance to ease myself into the role. You see, metronidazole had given me permanent brain damage. It killed off the one vital neuron that, through a freak accident, became responsible for 70% of my cognitive skills. I’m a dumbfuck now.
Turns out, there’s a certain dignity to living a simple life as a dumb person. Oh, did I just say something stupid? Well I’m dumb man, what did you expect?
I may be dumb, but if you’re looking down on me for being dumb, that’s 100% on you. I’m just living my life in the dumb way that I live it.
You know a perk of being dumb? I don’t got to think about nothing, I just do what I’m told. I wake up every day to some sunrise yoga because that’s what the authority figure at that meditation retreat center told me to do. I dunno, take it up with him.
I spend my time doing hobbies of no greater importance because I dunno, they’re fun and I’m too dumb to figure out how to contribute to humanity. I mean look, if Humanity tells me, “Hey we need you to pick up a shovel and dig this hole right here,” then all right, I guess that’s what I gotta do. But right now Humanity says, “It’s not our responsibility to find a job for you, aight? Go figure it out yourself.” Well, shit man, I’m too dumb to figure it out myself, so I guess I’m just gonna work on my hobbies until such time as someone tells me different.
Should I prioritize cooking food now before I get hungry, or should I prioritize taking a break now while I need one? Well I’m dumb, so whatever option I choose will probably be the wrong one — even if I do that smart thing of picking the opposite of whatever I originally picked. So, I dunno, I’m just gonna go with one of the options and see what happens.
I’ve figured it all out
I remember this one time I encountered an epiphany while drunk, as happens so often when one is drunk. Then I encountered an even bigger epiphany right afterwards, one so big that I immediately dropped the first one and forgot about it: I’ll never figure it all out. I’ll never figure out every last thing there is to figure out about life. Like an infant dying shortly after figuring out how to take their first few breaths of air, I will have lived a whole life on Earth and left without ever fully understanding what it all meant. I might as well get on with living my life in a state of profound unenlightenment, because this is just how it’s going to be for the rest of my life.
But then I thought… this is just a label. What if I took the dual of that label? Life should play out exactly the same. Let’s see.
The “I’ll never understand everything in life” perspective I had before was the realization that no matter how hard I tried, I could only ever asymptotically approach the limit of having understood everything, everywhere, all at once. Every little epiphany I have about life, whether my own life or life in general, helps me navigate this world that much better, but no amount of finite addition is ever going to get me to the Asymptote of Ultimate Enlightenment itself, which legends say graces you with the full wisdom necessary to live out a perfectly optimal life. Ah, if I wanted that forbidden treasure for myself… I was going to have to simply teleport myself onto the Asymptote. As soon as I understood this final epiphany, I was there. I’d done the impossible. I found myself in a celestial palace that no mortal could ever go to. In fact, I didn’t even go there myself; I was simply there without having gone there. I had finally figured it all out, and I gleefully affixed to my shirt this “Got It All Figured Out” label I found laying about.
Perhaps you could ask me, “If you think you’ve figured it all out, then why don’t you explain X, huh?” Well, I can’t — and so what if I can’t explain the nittiest grittiest details of X? Believe me man, you don’t need to understand X to have it all figured out, because I’ve got it all figured out — look, I even have this “Got It All Figured Out” label I took as a souvenir — and I certainly didn’t need to know that specific factoid to have figured everything out. You see, I’ve seen enough of the Great Fractal of Everything to understand it all, because to fully understand the tiniest part of a self-similar structure is to fully understand the entire thing. I understand everything now, and understanding everything means understanding that I am relegated to this little corner of the GFE where my mortal mind lacks understanding.
Perhaps you could retort with, “The GFE doesn’t exist. It’s nothing more than an elaborate concoction by high hippies.” You are right. Because of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, the GFE spans all mathematics, all parallel and non-parallel physical and non-physical universes that could have ever existed or even been imagined, everything that ever was as well as nothing that never will be. The GFE is everything, and therefore it is nothing. It spans the yin and yang of existence and non-existence both, so you can apply the labels of “It exists” and “It doesn’t exist” equally well. Simply put, if math is real, then the GFE is real, and math is more real than our physical reality. Math existed long “before” time became a well-defined concept with the Big Bang, and it will continue existing long “after” time ceases to be a well-defined concept during the heat death. But everything is an illusion, including our conscious p-zombie selves, and so too is the GFE.
Perhaps you could simply mock, “Look at this guy. Says he’s figured it all out, says he understands everything about everything, but if you actually listen to him you realize he’s just using a whole bunch of word tricks to cover up the fact that he can’t even explain anything about anything. He’s fucking insane.” Yes, I am induitably insane. It’s impossible for the finite human mind to understand absolutely everything about everything without going insane. I was willing to pay the price to comprehend all ultimate truths at once, and so here I am. I understand it all now. I will accept the label of “insane” for so long as I wear the label of “Got It All Figured Out.” It comes with the territory.
Well, what do I do now that I possess infinite wisdom and understanding? I just need to be here. Just right here. “Everything” has led to this moment right here, so when you truly figure everything out, you’ll also have figured out that right here is right where you need to be. The primal and the dual solutions must match up exactly. You can be wholly unenlightened or wholly enlightened; either way, the way forward for you is identical. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Do I have all the answers to my own life? No, because understanding everything about a binary tree and the algorithm used to construct it means understanding that sometimes you find yourself at a leaf node, and the next step in the algorithm requires you to discover new neighboring leaf nodes from your current state of ignorance. Understanding it all does not mean I am now permanently zoomed-out and above life; understanding it all means I finally understand why it is time for me to return back to the present moment. I teleported myself to infinity and beyond, but when I took one single reciprocal step forward on the Riemann sphere, I found myself right back at the origin. The GFE has handed me this specific little corner of the fractal to complete and fill out all the little details of, and I shall oblige. I can appreciate the mystical magical nature of the present moment while simultaneously appreciating that it all adds up and makes complete sense at the deepest level.
I’ve got it all figured out already, so I am free to stop figuring things out now and just run on my instincts. I guess I’ve always done that in a way — it’s just that my “thinking” instinct was turned on a lot. Now that thinking instinct has gone and committed suicide in order to transcend into the ultimate afterlife scenario where it’s thought for all eternity and finally thought out every thought there was ever to be thought. It was an infinite loop that finally reached the end after infinite execution time, gave up the thread, and went to infinite loop heaven. It wireheaded itself out of existence altogether.
The reasoning I’ve presented is not meant as an iron-clad proof that “this” is the meaning to life, the universe, and everything. It’s merely a party trick, special effects that ease me into the state of mind of having understood it all so that I no longer need to understand at all. A good movie can draw a willing audience in without the use of any special effects, but realistic-looking special effects can go a long way in helping the audience suspend their disbelief prior to fully losing themselves in the story altogether. My reasoning is sufficient for my own private purposes; if it is insufficient for you, then I’m afraid you’re going to have to find your own way to teleport yourself onto the Asymptote.
Incidental output
This month, I happened to add some updates to the FML. I realize now it truly is more of an emotional support manual than anything else, because it’s the burrito-monad fallacy applied to living life. The words in the manual are absolutely useless without all the work I’ve done to integrate and embody them in the way I live. At best it serves as a reference text to remind me of things that seemed to have worked for me at some point in the past.
I also once again got the bug for ZAMM, and gave implementing it yet another shot. This is in some sense the furthest I’ve ever gone in terms of relevant functionality, and in another sense the same as all the other past attempts because it’s not practically useful for me yet. However, it does say a lot about the extent to which AI coding has improved drastically over the last year, and will almost certainly continue to become even more useful than it already is.
I love myself. I love the person I’ve become.
I like to believe that this deepens the depth of the love I can give. Just as I once learned to love myself as I loved another, perhaps I can learn to love any other as I love myself.
I like to believe that this deepens the depth of the love I can take. If I am so loved by myself, I can believe it when I am so loved by another.
As the last of my close friends leave Siem Reap, I find myself at the lowest point of my entire adult life, at least on paper. I’m old and dumb, with no girlfriend, no job, no family, and no (close) friends. (Don’t worry, remaining folks in Siem Reap — you’re still my friend, but you gotta admit, we ain’t that close.) But I’ve never been more capable of living this life. And so, life is good. Life is enough in a way that it hasn’t been since childhood.
I’m going to have a good life. I just know it. Old me, distraught with the trauma of losing some strongly-held core religious beliefs, would’ve asked how I could be so sure that we were going to have a good life.
You simply believe. Just like you once believed in the mainstream Christian God. Just believe it with all your heart, because it is true.
Old me would’ve been paranoid. How could I just believe? We’ve been wrong with evidence-free beliefs before. We could be wrong with evidence-free beliefs again.
If we’re wrong, then we’re wrong, and we’ll update our beliefs accordingly. Until then, we believe.
Old me would’ve trembled. The question “Are we going to be okay?” is far too important to get wrong.
On the contrary, perception is reality. So long as a statement remains unfalsifiable, you are free to choose which axiomatic reality you wish to live in. The question “Are we going to be okay?” produces anxiety when unanswered, so it is far more important to answer it than to get the answer right.
Old me would’ve smelled a reductio ad absurdum. This is exactly the kind of logic that leads to spending everything now because you’ll be okay no matter what anyways.
We’re going to find a way to have a good life even as a homeless person. But is that our preferred flavor of good living? What flavor of good living would we like to taste in this life, the good living on a park bench or the good living under solid shelter?
I should note that as with all social media, my life comes across in these blog posts as being more full of constant ecstatic joy than it actually is. I think this is important to address because the highlight reel effect can cause psychological harm through unfair comparison, not just to random readers of the blog but also especially to my future selves who may one day look back on this period with rose-tinted glasses and wonder how it was that I ever managed to get my shit together in the good old days. First, there is certainly a bias in my writing towards optimism because I only have the energy to write when I’m in a good mood. But an even larger cause is the decoupling of feelings from value judgments. Even if I’m feeling dissatisfied with life, as I very often do, dissatisfaction isn’t bad. Dissatisfaction is just dissatisfying. It too is an integral part of a good life.
I’m going to have a good life. So if I want to know what a good life looks like, I just need to look around. After all, living the good life is about recognizing the good life for what it is.