This doesn’t mean I’m some kind of prepper, but there’s a similar pitfall at play.

At some point when I was much younger (roughly between 11 and 14, if memory serves), I read David Brin’s The Postman. I’d learned of the book due to the eminently forgettable movie that was loosely based on it. But the movie coming out in the 1990s meant that it made no real effort to actually understand the book, and threw out all the interesting themes and ideas in order to make something about as generic as possible. I will not be referencing the movie further.

The book takes place in the post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest of the United States. The main antagonists are a group calling themselves Holnists (after Nathan Holm, their founder), a fascistic, individualist culture. (That the book was published in 1985 shows how little some things change.) But the idea that has really stuck with me is a point of history in the book’s world. The collapse of society wasn’t brought about by war (mainly EMPs and bioweapons), but rather these isolated survivalists that kept attacking relief convoys and generally preventing society from rebuilding itself. (Looking back, I have to wonder of Hideo Kojima was influenced by this story in making Death Stranding.)

I think about this idea a lot. Prepper culture, to my limited outsiders’ point of view, largely ignores the need to rebuild a society for any individual to survive. Having 10 years’ worth of food in your basement won’t do much good if you’re attacked by a well-organized group, no matter how many guns you’ve stockpiled along with it.

We see echoes of this in the present as well. How often are we told about how “it’s not what you know, but who you know”? Networking is such an all-pervasive practice that it’s almost cliché at this point. As an extremely introverted person, however, that advice always feels like a bit of a slap.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more it’s also very telling. The idea that we should be building relationships solely out of what those people can do for our careers is an extremely cynical take on social structures. I’ve always found myself uncomfortable with such a mercenary approach. I’m not sure how you keep it honest, which is to say how you avoid what amounts to being nice to someone solely out of the hope that they’ll do something good for you in the future. Even if both parties are going into it with their eyes open, there’s still something about it that cheapens the idea of community and our relationships with each other. I don’t think it’s possible to entirely prevent having this kind of relationship in your life from bleeding over into others.

The result for me has been an unwillingness to do traditional networking things. I interact with co-workers whom I like interacting with, and maintain the relationships I want to maintain. I have nothing to do with LinkedIn.

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if I’m not going too far. Not in feeling networking to be distasteful, but in trying to go it alone. I’m not sure yet where the proper line is. On the one hand, I’m all about finding teachers, and tend to learn a lot better in that context anyway. And it’s not like I would never call someone I have a genuine relationship with for help. My default, though, is absolutely to try to do things entirely on my own. With this in mind, it’s a small wonder that I so often feel disconnected, and like so much of what I do is done, well, in isolation.

The other side of my highly independent nature is that I don’t trust myself to be able to build any kind of community. I love the idea, to be clear: I’d really enjoy having a group coalesce around something I do or have done, whether that’s this blog, some creative project, some app I code, whatever. This too is telling, in that it’s an example of how I want connectedness but with a minimum of risk or vulnerability. I have a very difficult time becoming an integrated part of the social groups I’m part of, and often feel forgettable or disposable. After years of this, I don’t really seek out groups, and have very high rejection sensitivity (even where no rejection is intended). It’s this self-fulfilling cycle of not putting in the work to really be a part of the group, then feeling rejected when I’m not part of the group, followed by pulling back.

Even though I intellectually understand it, I have a very hard time with the work aspect of relationship-building. (I’m sure Mrs. Zampanò would agree.) I have to imagine that some of it is “forgetting” to do it (the non-squeaky wheel doesn’t get any grease), while some is my issue with the perceived cynicism. I also don’t want to come across as desperate for inclusion, since that’s understandably a turn-off for most.

So despite my actions to the contrary, this box isn’t entirely isolated, and there are bridges to it if you care to cross them. Maybe the first step is to start working on some signage.

I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea, which would certainly explain why I’ve been tired every morning for the last…long time. For awhile I assumed it was a (then-new) antidepressant, but apparently that’s not it, or at least not the whole it.

I began treatment a couple nights ago, which consists of connecting myself to a fancy air pump to make sure my lungs get a steady stream of air overnight so that my whole system doesn’t go into panic mode. I’m not used to it yet, but I definitely noticed that my feelings of sleepiness since I started were qualitatively different from how I felt before.

It’s been an adjustment in other ways. This feels like the first step over an event horizon into being “old.” Sleep apnea is a condition that I certainly associate with older people, and the little information I’ve seen suggests that the risk increases as you age. It’s also more common in men, so I have that going for me.

Even once I hit 40, I’ve been at most vaguely conscious of my increasing age. I start sweating much faster than I did even a couple of years ago, and while I know my muscles don’t recover as fast from serious exercise as they used to, it doesn’t feel like it’s a significant change (it was doubtless more gradual, too). Beyond that I’ve been very fortunate; my physical health has remained quite good, with nothing more serious than the odd infection that we all get. While sleep apnea isn’t especially serious (even if it can cause plenty of long-term effects that are), there’s definitely a sense of everything being downhill from here.

I’m also fortunate in being able to get it treated. I don’t know what this would cost if I were paying out of pocket, but I imagine it’d be significant. Aside from getting the initial diagnosis, management via CPAP is typically life-long and requires regular replacement bits. I have insurance, but because I live in the United States, that’s not really guaranteed. So it is that I can’t but see this as another example of technology doing more for those of us that are already in a better position. Even if I’m hardly “wealthy” (depending on the standard), my family is quite comfortable, and as a civil servant my employment is about as secure as it gets.

This is why I think that many of the fears being raised about large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are misplaced at best, if not outright self-serving. For the latter, one only need look at that open letter that made the news a few months ago that was signed by all kinds of tech “luminaries,” most of whom have their own “AI” tech (more about the scare quotes in a moment) in the pipe, and so are hoping to use regulations by a woefully ignorant Congress to both slow down OpenAI and wall off the broader technology from any late-comers. They have deep enough pockets to avoid whatever paltry regulations governments can actually put in place, but that is unlikely to be the case for an up-and-comer without a whole lot of outside funding. Moreover, given that the Age of Free Money seems to be more-or-less over, at least for now, it’ll be interesting to see just how many start-ups can lose money for years and keep getting new funding. The Netflix approach (lose money while basically creating a new business type, then jack up prices when you’re entrenched) doesn’t seem consistently effective, as there’s always a bigger fish who can eat the cost much more easily.

That said, I do think there’s a danger in going too fast. But it’s not a case of having insufficient regulations, rather a case of rushing to adopt a technology that isn’t actually fit for purpose. We’ve already begun to see instances of ChatGPT or similar models “hallucinating,” which means “making things up.” The recent high-profile case of a law firm in New York using ChatGPT to create a legal brief (and the sanctions that resulted) are a quasi-example of this. (“Quasi-“ because the lawyers’ pleas of ignorance were not deemed credible by the presiding judge.) The question of funding I mentioned above also crops up here, as trying to get all those VC dollars creates a huge incentive for over-hyping whatever it is you’re doing, as well as using various buzzwords that venture capitalists haven’t seemed to figure out yet, even if the rest of us have. (Looking at you, blockchain.) See also: the wildly over-stated claims of LLMs’ actual capabilities.

As opposed to 20+ years ago, there seems to be a big push in the business (and thus government and other fields that shouldn’t be businesses but are) world to be the first to adopt a new technology, if for no other reason than the marketing that can be done with it. This becomes increasingly dangerous as the technology involved becomes less understandable (even to those creating it) while simultaneously being given more responsibility. It’s virtually impossible to debug a statistical model (which is what these learning models or whatever actually are; they don’t think) that is entirely opaque. How do you figure out what factors are being weighed by how much when there are millions of them? My favorite example of this was a story I heard on the radio awhile ago, where some researchers were training one of these programs to diagnose lung cancer. While in many cases it was accurate, they also discovered that the program was including the name of the facility that was printed on the x-rays it was viewing. Its statistical model weighed everything, including the fact that (in this case) someone in a hospital was more likely to have (or get) a lung cancer diagnosis. Thus the very fact of being in the hospital was itself a factor that made the software more likely to “find” cancer in a given image.

In this case, of course, the flaw was able to be found. But as these models become more complex (to say nothing of proprietary), how soon before that complexity exceeds our ability to meaningfully evaluate their effectiveness? While even some error can be acceptable, especially if it’s better than whatever it’s replacing, that assumes that we can actually figure out the error rate. Meanwhile, our legal and regulatory systems, at least in the West, are entirely based on proving that something went wrong that shouldn’t have. How do you do that with a black box? How do you hold a company accountable for an error that was unforeseeable? (At least in the U.S., foreseeability is a major element of negligence.)

There’s also a tendency, at least among some “entrepreneurs” (or however they’re styling themselves these days) to assume that “new” is automatically better. This was my big takeaway from the recent sinking of the private submarine Titan on its way to view the wreck of the Titanic. Since the sub’s disappearance, more and more stories have surfaced of the company (and its CEO) ignoring safety warnings, both internal and external. It seems in many ways to be a case of Dunning-Krueger; the CEO seems not to have known enough to know why, for example, using carbon fiber in the hull of a deep-diving submarine is a bad idea. The simple explanation, as I understand it, is that carbon fiber doesn’t deform like steel does as it starts to be put under too much stress, but it instead simply shatters. This is also why the safety system the company relied so heavily upon, acoustic sensors that were supposed to detect the beginnings of hull damage, were not enough. OceanGate (the company involved) seems to have assumed that the beginnings of any failure would be detected in time to do something about it. This was clearly wrong.

The hull design this company designed was new in a sense (or at least different), but there was a very good reason no one else was doing things that way. Reasons that OceanGate would’ve discovered if they’d tested it properly, rather than simply hand-waive such concerns away. For example, the company CEO said that the reason they never had Titan certified by an outside agency was that their technology was simply so revolutionary that it would take them years just to get that agency up to speed on how it worked. Whether he believed this or not, OceanGate’s CEO (and four other people) would pay for these mistakes with their lives.

We also can’t forget that people have an inherent compulsion to anthropomorphize things. On some level we want the things we use to seem like they’re actually in conversation with us. You can go back thousands of years and see epigrams painted on clay jars that are written in the first person, seemingly by the object itself.

For the most part, I’m all for any new technology that can make people happier. If someone’s super isolated but can get that connection from a chat bot or whatever, so be it (and I’m not qualified to really evaluate any side-effects of this, which I imagine are highly situational anyway). My fear is that this tendency to humanize the tech we use will blind us to its inadequacies. This is of course what the companies hyping this stuff are hoping for. (Ted Chiang’s magnificent novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects gives a brilliant but different example of how this could work and some of the implications that we’re not really ready for.)

—-—

Ultimately it’s difficult to know exactly how ChatGPT and its ilk will do the things new tech always does (entrench most of the existing players, shift around a couple others, screw everyone else). I just know that I’ll be very much in luddite mode when it comes to anything “AI”-related for the foreseeable future.

Thankfully, the tech I use to sleep good isn’t reliant on that. Granted it does rat me out to my insurance company (I have to prove I’m actually using the thing for them to pay for it, which as insurance company bullshit goes isn’t too bad). It does make me think about what more stereotypical “sci-fi” tech would/will actually look like. Sure, you can have a bionic arm, but only the manufacturer will be able to repair it, and it’ll record everything you do and everywhere you go. And there’ll still be plenty of limbless people around.

What the hell can I do with my knee, with this leg so long and so skinny, with my arms, with my tongue, with my weak eyes? What can I do in this tangle of imbeciles with good intentions? What about with corrupt thinkers Or sweet girls who want poetry, not a man? What can I do among the poets made uniform by academia or Communism? What, among sellers or politicians or shepherds of souls? What the hell can I do, Tarumba, if I’m no saint, or hero, or criminal, or admirer of art, or pharmacist, or rebel? What can I do if I can do anything But just want to watch and watch?

But I find that coming up with something worth writing about in this (imagined) context was exceedingly difficult, and I didn't want to just have a blog where I complain about day-to-day life. There's also the fact that many of these issues or questions haven't changed or been resolved especially. Change is typically incremental.

It also means that I only write when I have the time and focus reserves to spend a fair amount of time on a given post, which is also pretty rare. So adding this to the probability of having something to write about that was “good” enough (or “deep” enough or “significant” enough or whatever), and small wonder my posting schedule was as infrequent as it was.

I do still want to maintain a space where I can talk about things that I'm not comfortable sharing with people who know my offline identity. The observations I'm generally making about the world are changing somewhat as well; I'm far less interested in politics and related things (like “policy”) than I was even a couple years ago, and I've struggled to find observations or ideas that don't simply come down to “be less terrible to people.”

I'm also coding a lot more, but don't feel like I have the knowledge or experience to do a worthwhile dev blog (and don't want to limit myself that much anyway). I do hope to write some tutorials at some point, but I'm not sure what I can add to the existing corpus. My main idea is to target an audience that most don't, namely people who aren't necessarily interested in becoming hobbyist programmers, but those who have some other work to do and want to make that easier. That's also how I choose my own projects: how can I streamline processes that aren't traditionally “automate-able.” Sometimes I just want to make existing software less terrible to use, even if it's just sprucing up the visuals.

Strangely, I'm also finding myself wanting to dig in to legal minutiae, despite not wanting to get back into any kind of traditional legal practice. If I had to guess, I think this stems from my wanting to like, do something that isn't just putter away in my isolated corner of the world.

This has proved elusive. I'm not really sure what it would look like, much less how I would get there. Because I feel so trapped and so powerless in my life, it's easy to preclude any thoughts that come to mind by assuming that they're unattainable. It's also coupled with a tendency to imagine how I'd feel in the situation rather than what I'd do, which muddies the waters that much more.

It’s very easy to romanticize going wherever the winds take me, and there can be value in that sometimes. At the same time, the why matters. While I’d hoped to get some clarity about things, and in particular about where I want to be going, what I’ve come to realize is that I was actually avoiding choice.

Choice is difficult. But it wasn’t about realizing that not making a choice is, itself a form of making a choice. I wasn’t not making choices, I was just not thinking about them, not trying to discern why I made them or what I hoped to gain (or avoid). Instead, I’d feel myself resist something and let that be the end of it. I didn’t really know what questions to ask, and just assumed that there couldn’t be anything underlying the feelings I would have.

With more time and some outside help, I’ve begun to pick apart why I function the way I do; why I bounce, why I have a hard time starting things I’m not actively excited about, why I almost never finish anything. I still have a long way to go, but ironically it’s focusing on smaller-scale that has allowed me to better understand the larger.

[ – – – ]

I’ve been thinking about tools lately. It occurred to me when I first joined the tildeverse that here I was, signing up for another website. It could just as easily have bene downloading some other app, bookmarking some other software library or documentation. I’ve long believed that tools are value-neutral, and I still think that’s true. But the other thing about tools is that they have a way of demanding use.

Tools also carry a prestige with them. “This isn’t for beginners” and all that. Even with things that are relatively accessible, there’s a certain posturing that comes with talking about how we use a thing to do something. There’s something undeniably alluring about the stereotype of the loner-savant, sitting in the darkened workshop or in front of a computer screen. I’m not really talking about the inevitable fears of how some new thing will be abused (whether unfounded or not, which varies), and am instead thinking about the more prosaic way this can get us into trouble.

Strangely, mine has been introspection. Not because I shouldn’t be doing it, rather because I haven’t been paying attention to the how. Thanks to ADHD, I hit plenty of walls in my daily life, whether that be resisting getting stared, resisting stopping, resisting changing what I’m doing, or resisting not changing what I’m doing. Any of these can happen at any given time, and the result is a serious feeling of being out of control (hence the “drifting” I referenced earlier). Of course, this is only compounded by the more existential question of how much we really have control over our lives when we’re so often subject to the whims of the powerful and the innate laws of the universe.

The best I’ve been able to do so far is slow down a little, and try to see that inertia with a given thing isn’t the atmos; I have to figure out what causes it instead, what pieces make it up. Sometimes it’s fear of missing out (or a case of comparing myself too much with others), others it’s just plain ol’ executive functioning (or a lack thereof). It’s useful, though, to continue on one train of thought rather than letting myself branch too much, which is far more natural for me (as if this weren’t already obvious from my writing style). Rather than going around in circles, I end up fractaling off into the void.

I also have some accepting to do. One is to accept that some things are just plain going to be harder than I want them to, and that my walls of difficulty may not be where I expect. It’s unfortunately easy to see these walls in “simpler” tasks, which in turn makes me feel a lot less capable. I also have to give up on this idea of seeking out some silver lining to my neurodivergency. This question, i.e. what I “gain” from my particular brand of miswiring, is ultimately unanswerable: even if I weren’t terrible at recognizing my own strengths (or at least describing them in a way that’s meaningful to me), there’s no way to say that some arbitrary attribute would or wouldn’t be present if I didn’t meet some diagnosis or another. It is frustrating, though, both because I would like to have there be some positive that I could associate with the parts of me that I don’t like, and because I tend to focus on those negatives regardless. So it’d be nice if I had some way to balance them out, rather than feel like I’ve been working with a handicap my whole life.

Returning to the issue of tools, the ironic thing is that I tend to seek out things to help make me more organized, but I end up with so many that I’m just shifting where the organization happens. I have two text editors open right now: iA Writer, in which I’m writing this post, and Textmate, which I use for coding. I also have Obsidian running, and just downloaded Logseq to see if I like that better. This isn’t counting the two other fancy word processors I have (Pages and Scrivener). I collect development frameworks and programming languages just as quickly, and only get part way into a project before I start thinking about refactoring. It’s amazing how much effort I can throw out there only to not actually go anywhere.

A lyric from an old KMFDM song has haunted me for years:

But you’re terrified you have nothing to offer this world Nothing to say and no way to say it But you can say it in three languages

Difficulty getting started, whether it’s a symptom of some issue with neurodivergence or more normal forms of procrastination, is a funny thing. It’s always obvious what we’re avoiding, as long as we don’t look past the task itself. One of the things I’m having to start asking myself, though, is what it is I’m really afraid of.

I once heard someone refer to seminary as the place faith goes to die, or something to that effect. That hasn’t been my experience, although it does help that I’m not actually Christian; I’m monotheistic, for sure, but more Christian-adjacent. I don’t subscribe to some of the core tenants that you have to subscribe to in order to actually be Christian. But I’m still interested in theology, history, textual criticism, all of that stuff, and I’ve wanted to improve my religious education for awhile.

But I do understand how learning some of this stuff could affect someone’s faith. The early history of Christianity is full of examples of things being done differently, at the least, and it’s easy to question whether things have improved (I personally think that in many ways it has not). Meanwhile, being exposed to how different the early Christians were on various doctrinal issues could also be difficult, as it shows there has never really been a consensus beyond some broad strokes, and even that took a few hundred years to develop (depending on the issue). The same is true for theology more generally: having to think about how you got to where you did could doubtless be disconcerting.

For myself, I’ve noticed that I have to be careful trying to over-analyze certain aspects of my own faith. There’s a point after which reason just doesn’t work anymore, and trying to force it is not going to lead anywhere good. Trying to cram a logical framework on religious belief is simply using the wrong tools for the job.

While I’ve enjoyed what I’m learning, as I said, I did find myself facing some disappointment at one point. Exploring this further, and I realized that on some level I was looking for some new truth about my own faith and its basis. As I’ve said, of course, this can’t be based on logical extrapolation (or at least not predicated on it), so this was doomed to fail.

Take the Bible, for example. I’ve studied it some, but still don’t quite know how to take it in my own personal theology. There is no original text, really, as it was copied hundreds of times and things changed as a result. (My copy of the Greek New Testament is the best we’ve been able to reconstruct so far.) Meanwhile, it didn’t even start being written down until after Jesus’ death. There are also plenty of things that, to me, seem clearly to have been done to make Jesus sound more legitimate (the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew, for example). Did Jesus really take on the godhead? Examples abound. But this doesn’t mean everything it has to say, particularly in terms of Jesus’ specific teachings, aren’t really worth listening to.

Anyway, I think I was hoping for some kind of guidepost about how to approach Scripture, and so far no luck. Even the discussions about Biblical theology that we’ve had so far have assumed a Christian take on the Bible, i.e. as a legitimate source of Christ’s life and teachings. The debate is more about literalism vs. types vs. allegory, how to apply historical criticism, that kind of thing. Not useless, but not really what I was hoping for, either. I’m not incredibly surprised, looking back, as this kind of substantive change just doesn’t seem likely based on learning more history or whatever.

As I think about it more, I think it’s really that I’m feeling stuck. Or better said, I’m afraid that I am. I’m worried that my religious life isn’t really growing anymore, and that I’m somehow tailoring my religious beliefs to justify what I already think. At the same time, I don’t feel like blindly following some other teacher (living or dead) is the right answer, either. But it seems unlikely that I’ve “solved” my own faith, either. Meanwhile, it seems like so much of theology is concerned with things that are either unanswerable or irrelevant. It’s the reason I’m non-trinitarian, for example: it’s a fight about an arbitrary way to conceptualize the Divine, which is not something we can fully conceptualize anyway. Analogies are the only way we can remotely understand, so I don’t understand most of the fuss over how those analogies are formulated. Rarely is it going to make a practical difference.

There’s a related feeling here. I was recently talking to someone I know online about his finding a community and source of identity in the nation his ancestors came from. He talked about feeling like having a home for the first time. Since then, I’ve been realizing how much I myself feel homeless in this way. I don’t identify with my country, I’m not a member of a specific religious group, I don’t even have a sports team that I care about. I really don’t understand how these kinds of identities develop, and how I would go about finding one. I think having something by which to define my faith is part of this, and that on some level I was hoping my studies might lead to some kind of group identity. A sense of belonging, perhaps.

I’m mostly thinking about guilt, and whether I should feel any. I understand the importance of recognizing complicity, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of collective guilt, especially when it comes to an entire country. I’ve never supported a politician responsible for invading Afghanistan, for example, and I have significant doubts about the extent to which U.S. politicians actually represent any part of the popular will. Why we keep believing political campaigns is equally mysterious to me.

I think we’re frightened to call ourselves powerless, since it does sound like an attempt to evade responsibility. But we may have overcorrected on this point. It’s a part of the broader conversation about things like privilege that isn’t really happening. Nonetheless, there’s a frequent battle in my mind about how what specifically I can do to make the world a better place, to what extent I’m selfish by doing things that I enjoy but that don’t necessarily contribute to others, and how much money one can have before it becomes “too much.” Other than this blog I’m usually pretty disconnected from the world. I try to remind myself that not everyone is called to be some great spiritual or political leader, but this isn’t an all-or-nothing question.

Rather than rending my garments in some paroxysm of white guilt, I’m just feeling vaguely sad for other people and…that’s about it. I realize my feelings aren’t especially helpful, yet they’re all I have. I’ve donated to charities for Haiti and Afghan refugees, which is not nothing. But I always wonder: should I give more? Is there some amount after which I can feel like I’ve done “enough”? To what extent is even this debate self-indulgent?

There is an undertone to all this, which is an assumption that I’m actually capable of doing enough. As someone with a decent amount of control over his own life, relatively speaking, it’s easy to over-state that. The idea that I, or even thousands of us, could magic away some major catastrophe is steeped in arrogance. And it’s a type of arrogance that can itself be dangerous; I’ve seen it argued that it was America’s belief that we can do anything that we put our minds to that helped propel the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to begin with. I’m inclined to agree.

I think, then, that the real lesson we need to take from all this is humility. We in the developed world can’t totally recreate the planet as a whole. We can do more than we do (which includes stopping doing the harmful things that we do), but I think that having a better sense of our own limitations will actually improve our ability to change the world. By the same token, I need to do a better job of recognizing my own limitations; it’s not defeatism to say that I can’t single-handedly stop the fighting currently going on in Ethiopia, for example.

I wonder too if there’s isn’t something to this as a distraction. It’s like how the fossil fuel industry are the ones who came up with the idea of a “carbon footprint” as a way to put the burden on individuals (broader discussion here). To what extent do we expect less of our leaders if we assume that we can just make up for it on our own? Yet few of us have enough, even if you get a lot of us together, to donate enough to make any kind of systemic change. It’s certainly unrealistic to think that even a couple million dollars to a charity can have the same effects as a decent foreign policy from large, influential nations (such as the U.S.). Charities can often help, meanwhile, but they represent a place where the system has failed, and too much focus on the charities themselves is a distraction from asking why they’re necessary to begin with.

Another potential pitfall, in my view, is how easy it is to blame the people who need our help. We’ve seen this plenty in the case of Afghanistan, where some have tried to characterize the Afghan military’s rapid disintegration as them just not wanting it enough. Which is of course ridiculous, but it’s an easy narrative to buy into. Especially since it takes longer to explain why it’s wrong than it does to say it. Similarly, we shouldn’t think of Haiti as simply unlucky (something I’ve been guilty of myself these past weeks), because this ignores the reasons why that country has had such a hard time coping with the various natural disasters that it’s faced. Attributing those problems to simple bad luck means the mistake that led to them are that much more likely to be repeated.

I don’t want to suggest that people in the Periphery (I think that’s the term we’re now supposed to use) don’t have any agency, but there’s a difference between that and responsibility. I’ve often thought it’d be interesting to write a sci-fi book about America being colonized by a more-powerful alien race, but I don’t think I could do so without being super preachy, and I’m not sure how many people it’d actually convince anyway. But recognizing that agency doesn’t absolve e.g. colonial powers from their own role in creating various circumstances that those people now have to deal with. Plus, at a more practical level, I’m hardly going to blame someone for not being willing to risk their life and that of their family for some vague hope of political change. It makes those who are that much more laudable, but is hardly something I’m in a position to criticize.

———

Thinking about all this in the context of my own life, it’s a good way to get rid of the “if onlys.” I find myself often thinking that “if only I could do x,” things would be different. But for a variety of reasons, x may be completely unworkable. Returning to a comment I made above, we’re not all led to be some great leader, and it’s easy too to stop listening for what I am supposed to be doing because I’m too busy fantasizing about things that I simply can’t. I’d love to find my dream career, but as I’ve said before, I don’t even know what that looks like much less how I’d get there. Trying to figure out the first part can be useful in figuring out what I want more generally, but it doesn’t magically make something possible or even worth it. For example, to what extent can I ask my Spawn to give up the opportunities my current salary affords so that I can have a job I like marginally more?

It’s easy to be frustrated at just how much is outside my control, while just reminding myself that it’s so isn’t enough. It’s easy to rage against the unfairness of it all, and here too perspective doesn’t always help. Recognizing that it’s equally unfair that I have what I do while others don’t can be helpful, but only gets so far. As I’ve said before, the human animal is often a selfish creature. What I’ve found most helpful is asking myself whether I really want what I think I do, or if it’s just a signal of some unmet wish that could just as easily be met in some other way.

This is also what helps me avoid any(?) delusions of grandeur; I don’t harbor any illusions that giving me dictatorial power or massive influence would be a good idea. I recognize what I’m good at, and political leadership ain’t it. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like more decision-making as a part of my job, but that can take many forms, and the answer is certainly not to get into politics. I think it’s better to embrace the degree to which our universe is beyond us.

Returning to my original topic, it’s just the same even when it comes to helping people. I can only do what I can do. And part of recognizing that is also trusting that I’m honest enough with myself about what that actually means. I may wish I could do more, but that’s not the same thing as being selfish for not doing so. It doesn’t erase the sadness I feel for what’s happening to others, and I’m not sure anything should get rid of that. At the same time, I shouldn’t let those feelings spur me to either act beyond my means or to self-flagellation. Recognizing privilege is one thing, but feeling shame about it is something else, and it’s something I see far too much of (especially among the Terminally Online).

I’ve often wondered to what extent knowledge of things I can do nothing about is useful. I spent some time avoiding the news as much as possible (which admittedly wasn’t actually that much), thinking that my feelings on something didn’t magically make a difference. I’m beginning to rethink my stance on whether what I know in terms of current events matters. I doubt it’d be determinative in terms of voting, for example. At the same time, there’s something to be said for understanding just how the world and people work generally, and certainly for trying to understand other cultures and viewpoints. I don’t pretend that my being aware of, say, Turkish airstrikes in northern Iraq or Algeria’s current spat with Morocco will have a meaningful impact on either event, or any other on the world stage. Yet one never knows where knowledge of events or a better understanding of the world in general may lead, provided it doesn’t damage my own mental health, which I think I have an okay handle on for the time being. Maybe just witnessing is enough.

I had a conversation on Discord awhile ago, and somehow the issue of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came up. I repeated what I had always heard to be true, namely that the use of the bomb was done to prevent an invasion of the Japanese mainland that would’ve cost even more lives, both American and Japanese. This is certainly how Truman et al. portrayed the decision after the fact. But one of my compatriots explained that the historical consensus now is that basically none of this is true. He went on to recommend Prompt and Utter Destruction by J. Samuel Walker, which I have now read.

This is my kind of history. Even though it’s about political leaders, it doesn’t really get into the form of history that is all about how one or two people changed the world. In this case, the focus is on President Truman and his advisors, and their thinking leading up to the atomic bombings. Because one of the first things that Walker points out is that, if you’re going to answer the question of why Truman made the decision that he did, you have to look at what he and his advisors knew at the time the decision was made.

This gets into the first popular myth: that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost 500,000 to a million U.S. casualties. This range is cited often, including by Truman and people close to him. But significantly, they only cite this number after the war, and there’s no record of it during the actual discussions of the atomic bomb. Truman had already authorized the invasion of Kyushu, one of the Home Islands, by the time the a-bomb was ready to go. But the casualty estimates for this were much lower, something like 30,000 (and were largely based on U.S. losses in the recent battle for Okinawa).

More importantly is the fact that there was never any real discussion of whether to drop the atomic bomb at all. It was taken as a given by Truman that, if it worked, it would be used. The only real debate was in terms of ancillary matters, such as whether to give Japan the opportunity to surrender before the bomb was dropped, whether to warn Japan that the bomb was coming, and what to tell the Soviets about the whole thing.

Much of Truman’s thinking is informed by the overall goal he inherited from FDR: that the war be won as soon as possible with a minimum of American casualties. Bombing civilians had become de rigeur by this point of the war, and Walker doesn’t find anything to suggest that the civilian death toll was ever a concern in the decision to use atomic weapons. On the contrary, a committee set up by Truman for deciding how the bomb should be used specifically recommended that the U.S. target an industrial area where the workers lived nearby. Meanwhile, there were still American casualties due to naval engagements, even if there were no land battles going on as of the summer of 1945. Truman’s primary concern was minimizing (or stopping) these, and does not seem to have cared at the time that tens of thousands of Japanese civilians would die.

But this wasn’t Truman’s only concern. He was also worried about the Soviet Union, since it was becoming increasingly clear that there would be some form of conflict between the U.S. and Europeans and the Soviets. One of Truman’s considerations, then, was that making it clear that the U.S. was a functioning nuclear power would help keep the Soviets off-balance in later negotiations. Truman may have also had a bit of an inferiority complex as well; he had not been privy to much of FDR’s diplomatic and national security thinking, and letters and diary entries make it clear that he was nervous going up against Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam. But having a functioning nuclear arsenal helped his confidence considerably.

The long and short of the book is that everything in popular mythology about America’s use of the atomic bomb in WWII is wrong. One, it wasn’t done out of a belief that the only options were dropping it and an invasion. Two, the likely casualties of an invasion were lower than are portrayed now. Three, the Japanese government was close to surrender anyway, with their only real concern that they get to maintain the imperial throne. It is possible that the bombings accelerated their decision to surrender, and may have overcome the resistance of some of the holdouts within Japanese leadership. But again, the important thing is that Truman and the American hierarchy were not thinking in terms of “a-bomb or invasion,” as there were other options (such as a blockade to starve the Japanese into surrender) that were also considered.

One of the most interesting arguments for use of the bomb was actually that it would help to limit the use of atomic weapons in the future. James Conant, a chemist who had taken a leadership role in the scientific mobilization for building the atomic bomb, argued just this. He and other Manhattan Project scientists believed that demonstrating the true destructive power of the atomic bomb and showing that at least one nation in the world was willing to use it were the only way to prevent their use in the future. This was of particular concern regarding the Soviet Union. Walker writes:

Conant believed that only if the American people clearly demonstrated their willingness to use their atomic arsenal would the Soviet Union be amenable to nuclear arms control agreements.

Even though this idea does not appear to have entered into Truman’s calculus, it is to me one of the most interesting thoughts raised in the book. It’s an attempt to see future consequences beyond the immediate, something that humans seem preternaturally disposed to do despite being so bad at it.

I see this as stemming, at least in part, from our need to control our world as much as possible. If we predict the future, we can engage in the fiction that we’re capable of doing so with meaningful accuracy. To be clear, sometimes we are (and some are better at this than others). Prediction markets are pretty accurate by and large, at least from what I understand. But it’s also very hard to measure, since we have no comparison; in other words, we don’t know what the consequences would’ve been if we’d made a different choice.

I think about this a lot in my own case. It’s easy to say that my life would be better if I’d gone left instead of right in a given situation, but how can I truly know? One different decision a few years ago would cause so many ripples in my life that it’s impossible to account for them all. Really the only answer, as I see it, is to give up on the idea of certainty, and accept that we can generally make at best vague judgments about past decisions. It’s easy where there’s a clear case of cause-and-effect (even if we’re too eager to make a causal link between events sometimes), but that’s rare with anything as complex as a human life.

It’s a scary proposition to think that in truth we have no idea what we’re doing, even when it comes to our own lives. This is also a consequence of the Fallacy of Induction: we don’t necessarily know that because a decision has always gone a certain way that it will always go that way, and this becomes more and more true as the complexity increases. But of course, all we can do is what we can do.

It’s the same reason I see so much undirected anguish about current events in Afghanistan. For all the left’s (usually valid) criticism of U.S. foreign policy, I don’t think we’re any more comfortable with helplessness than anyone else. Blaming someone is one way to ameliorate this, whether your target is Biden, Trump, or Bush. Instead, I think we have to learn how to accept no-win scenarios; doing otherwise just leaves us flailing. Meanwhile, we have no clue what the future truly holds, and shouldn’t let our imagination run away with us. I’m not defending the Taliban by any means, and their taking charge would not have been my choice of outcomes. But the whole point is that it wasn’t truly up to us, and this is something we have to learn to deal with. It’s a difficult proposition for Americans.

Meanwhile, it’s frustrating to see the number of people willing to take to the airwaves and/or blogosphere to pontificate about what all this means. It’s all guesswork, no matter how educated. But saying “I don’t know” doesn’t drive viewership or clicks, and we’d rather someone pull something out of thin air than think about how much bigger the world is than human reasoning can encompass. I don’t see how anyone is served by wild speculation, except as a bromide for the readership and income for the speculator.

You may notice too that the ambiguity and difficulty has been twisted to actually serve certain members of the elite. Those who were wildly wrong about what would happen on those issues with the most difficulty, especially foreign policy and the economy, routinely maintain their credibility despite their only consistency being in their mistakes. Somehow an ability to be wrong is fine as long as you were in a position where those errors could affect large numbers of people. Small-scale mistakes, though, are far less pardonable. So I guess the message is to go big, since you’re less likely to be blamed that way. (Actually, it’s another reminder that there’s a club and most of us are not in it.)

——————

This pathological need for prediction is no different in our personal lives. For example, I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my mid-30s. I can still remember how when I first tried stimulant medication, it suddenly felt like my brain was clear for the first time in my life. But this inevitable brought thoughts about what might have been, which continue to haunt me. I started wondering how school might have gone if I’d been diagnosed as a kid, and what it might’ve meant for my career. The problem of course is that my brain assumes things would’ve been better, despite not having any real way of knowing this. I could just as easily have ended up in a job I hate, I could have grown up into a worse person, who knows?

Yet these thoughts persist. As best I can tell, my mind is inferring back the relief I get from meds, and just assuming that nothing could’ve possibly gone wrong. We assume things will continue as they have, but because our faculties of prediction are so limited, there’s so much that gets elided.

What’s curious, though, is why my brain is so hell-bent on assuming that a single positive change 25 years ago would’ve automatically meant so many other positive changes. I’d still be me, after all, and I question how different of a person I really would’ve been. I think, instead, this falls under the realm of fantasy or daydream. As such, what this is really showing me is things that I’m unhappy about in my own life as it stands.

Much of this is stuff I’ve written about before. I wish I’d gone further in my career, even if where I am isn’t per se bad. I wish I could use more of my brain more often, rather than being limited by the time periods that my stimulants are in effect. I wish I were the type of person who could build and maintain professional connections, rather than wanting to go it alone (or at least not being cool with the mercenary use of social relationships).

What I have to do, as a first step, is figure out how to recognize these feelings of loss (and I’m not sure how else to describe them) for what they are. Dissatisfaction is okay, provided it doesn’t completely take over. It’s important not to feel hopeless, since that doesn’t lead anywhere good (and certainly nowhere productive). The hardest pill to swallow is how many decisions I made simply by default, or how many times I chose not to make a decision, which is still a choice of sorts. I’d almost rather I’d been wrong more often rather than simply avoiding mistakes, which is not the same thing as being right. But here too, how could I possibly know that this would be better? It’s darkness all the way down.

I do know that I tend to use uncertainty as an excuse for not making a difficult decision, and also that my brain wiring does not handle the truly open-ended well. It’s why I get stuck so easily, and even now have difficulty imagining how to change the things I’m dissatisfied with. This drives me to fantasy about things being magically different, which then leads to disappointment when they don’t come true.

I wish I could say I understood what Truman was thinking in the summer of 1945, but I really can’t. I’ve never been faced with an open-ended decision like that one, even if I can say that I wouldn’t take it for granted that the atomic bomb should be used. But that’s about all I can say for sure. For all the historical second-guessing, especially in popular culture, far too little attention has been paid to the decision-making process, to the psychology of this sort of thing. Instead, it’s just the canard that 500,000+ U.S. soldiers would die in an invasion, when that wasn’t the number Truman had at the time and he wasn’t facing an either-or between dropping the bomb and invading.

I’d like more discussion of the decision-making process in part because it seems so alien to me. I can’t imagine deciding that killing tens of thousands of people to save a couple thousand Americans is the correct one, but I also can’t pretend that I know what it’s like to be faced with that kind of decision. For all my hand-wringing about not having any real responsibility in my job, there is another side to that particular coin. It’s also easy to blur the line between learning from a decision like this and playing armchair general. That’s why Prompt and Utter Destruction was so engaging for me, because it focuses on just that: what Truman and his advisors knew, what their priorities were, and (as best can be gleaned second-hand) how their thinking went. It all comes back to priorities, at least some of which went beyond the ending of the war itself. It would’ve been nice to have more discussion of Truman’s thought process, but (1) there is already quite a bit, and (2) Walker wisely limited himself to what he could actually document. This is not a book full of speculation.

As much as this kind of decision scares me, isn’t that on some level what I’m looking for? Don’t I want to feel responsible for something? Usually that has negative connotations, so clearly not that, but how do you only take the good? The potential for greater or wider-ranging successes is also the potential for equally broad failures. I don’t want to be solely motivated by fear of screwing up something important, of course, but I do wonder if my desires are only looking at part of the equation.

Despite this being a non-review, I would definitely recommend Prompt and Utter Destruction if you’re at all interested in the subject. It’s a quick read, too!

I’m sitting in Starbucks as I write this, waiting for my Spawn to finish an activity and hoping the caffeine I’m drinking will wake my brain up a little. There are a bunch of colored ribbons hanging from the counter, each apparently representing an affliction or another. The only two that I can make out are green for bipolar disorder and red for addiction. I assume the others are for other forms of mental illness. But I couldn’t help but wonder: is there one for me?

Of course there isn’t. How could there be? My weaknesses, strengths, maladies, and talents are only found in me. The same is true for anyone else. This isn’t the beginning of some treatise on the arbitrariness of psychiatric diagnoses; they couldn’t be otherwise given our understanding of how our brains work, and God help us when and if we have the knowledge to be more precise.

I know representation matters, so this isn’t really about that, either. Or at least not directly. But I have to admit that my initial emotional reaction was something akin to frustration, a “why do I not fall into some cognizable category?” In other words, what about me? To be clear, I recognize this feeling for what it is, but the human animal is a self-centered creature.

But I do have to wonder if (or to what extent) recognizing some means excluding others. This is a common canard used by so-called men’s rights activists (a term that has unfortunately been co-opted by less than savory people for the most part); anytime a women’s issue is brought up, they ask “what about men?” and then explain how men face the same/similar/worse problem. I’m not defending this practice, but it’s worth thinking about what it means.

Some of this, of course, can be chocked up to the strange race to the bottom we find ourselves in. We can only legitimize our own struggles if they’re bad “enough,” which usually means showing that they’re the literal worst or close to it. It seems to me to be a kind of self-perpetuating cycle; saying “yeah but I have it worse” is a way to delegitimize someone else’s complaints, no matter how valid they may be. So there does seem to be a perceived (rightly) need to get out in front of that. But the problem is that the focus has become proving severity over anything else. More importantly, it shows just how little empathy is a thing, at least (or especially) online.

Anyway, thinking about whether there’s a ribbon for me at my local Starbucks has brought to mind the question of where we draw the line(s) period. I don’t necessarily mean psychiatric diagnoses, since those are well-known to be arbitrary (and the psychological/psychiatric community would be the first to acknowledge this). They’re generally a case of certain traits gone to an extreme, with where the cutoff for “extreme” ends up being wherever your doctor decides it is. This is really the only way to do it at this stage.

But that doesn’t mean these don’t still have power. I know I felt strangely better once I was diagnosed with some things, because it legitimized what I’d been struggling with for most of my life. Having, for example, ADHD means that it’s not just that I don’t focus well, there’s a host of other issues that comes with it. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a way for me to acknowledge to myself that the difficulties I have aren’t just a lack of willpower or whatever. It’s the same thing with dysthymia, which I also have—my brain just doesn’t handle the mood part of living the same way as a neurotypical person.

Here too there’s a question of where to draw the line. I can’t control the underlying symptoms or illness, but I do have control over what I do about it. We’re still trying to find the right medication regimen for me, but at least I’m trying to deal with it and get to a better place. I also don’t want to get to a point where everything bad that I do or feel is the result of my illness; in my case, at least, these conditions aren’t a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card. So it’s about knowing what I can control and what I can’t, which is not something we as a species have figured out very well even in the most normal of us (whatever that means).

One of the areas in which I’m easily overwhelmed is, as the title suggests, salience. To take a prosaic example, I am terrible at finding something if I don’t already know where it is. My eyes will just slip right off it even if it’s so close that, as my Dad says, “if it were a snake it would’a bit ya.” For whatever reason, the part of my brain responsible for making things stand out just doesn’t work. This is also why I hated open-ended assignments in school. Give me a topic and I can figure out something to say about it no problem, but say “write about whatever you want” and I’m completely stuck. How do I decide what stands out enough to write about when everything sticks out to the same degree? If everything seems equally important, can any of it really matter?

I have this same struggle anytime I have to make a decision (or see the product of one) that involves assigning importance to some members of a group, whether they be people, objects, or concepts, but not others. I shouldn’t say all the time, I suppose, as some people are unquestionably more important to me than others, but that’s the exception. And even then, it starts to get difficult to pick from among those I love in terms of value, as I suspect it is for most people.

This is why seeing the ribbons on the Starbucks counter throws me into kind of a mental loop. I have no real criteria for saying that some mental illnesses warrant recognition and some don’t, even if it’s something as simple as “our counter is only but so long” or “we only have so many ribbons.” I recognize that we have to draw the line somewhere, and that we shouldn’t let an inability to recognize all who deserve it mean we don’t recognize anyone. This is probably one of those things I just have to accept that I’m not good at, and maybe have to go so far as abstaining from judgment altogether when other people make these kinds of choices.

I feel the same way about trigger warnings, for example. By recognizing some kinds of trauma but not others, do we risk making some people feel excluded? If so, is that a price we’re okay with paying? I don’t know how you weigh something like that, but God knows our society likes to try. We all have things that can provoke unpleasant feelings or memories, and so I do wonder at the wisdom of singling some out as somehow more deserving of recognition. Is it fair to say that some traumas are worse than others? I’m sure there’s plenty of individual variation, but I wonder if it’s actually worth the risk. But this is also exactly the kind of decision that I’m lousy at, which is why I don’t have a “policy” or whatever you want to call it on this subject. I have questions (and hope that I’m not just asking them), but no real framework for answering any of them. Any answer is bound to be arbitrary one way or the other, since it involves quantitatively comparing the immeasurable. This just means there’s not really a wrong answer, in my opinion, rather than supporting one side or the other. But again, take even this with a grain of salt, since I’m pathologically unable to make this kind of judgment.

It’s a strange position to be in, admittedly. But I’m coming more and more to realize how often we feel compelled to answer a question that is unanswerable. It’s the politician’s fallacy, as explained by the sitcom Yes, Minister: “Something must be done. This is something, therefore we must do it.” I think online discourse is especially guilty of this, and that it in turn bleeds back into the “real world” kind.

There’s just something about that text input box that demands we put some words in there, and something about the “reply” button that demands we click it. Where having a take costs nothing, why shouldn’t we inject what we think? Overall this is all well and good, but as I said, I think it can often lead to a compulsion to just throw something out there. This is especially true when saying something more measured doesn’t get the engagement that a firm opinion does. I saw this, for example, when the protests in Cuba broke out last month; speculation was rampant on social media (from what I could see, at least), despite no one actually having any idea what was going on. But again, saying “let’s wait and see” doesn’t bring those clicks or retweets, so anyone who does say that can’t stand out from the crowd of people who don’t.

This is one of the things that keeps me on the periphery of the rationalism community. One of its greatest strengths is that rationalists actually value saying “I don’t know,” even if they fall into the trap of trying to measure the immeasurable too often for my tastes. They also value admitting to mistakes, something that is all too rare in our broader culture.

Anyway, I wish I could figure out what the answer is, how we can discourage wild speculation and rumor taking flight. It simply takes waiting, but both the economics of online publishing and of social media (measured in ad dollars and dopamine, respectively) are pushing very hard in the opposite direction. It’s simply a case of what we demand: we want to feel like the world is a legible, intelligible place, and acknowledging that we don’t know isn’t just unsatisfying, but it can sometimes be scary too. There’s nothing stopping us from throwing out the first thing that comes into our heads, and with so little feedback and self-reflection, it’s easy to feel like we’re on top of things even when we’re anything but. Add in a little Dunning-Krueger for spice, and you have quite a dish. Ultimately we get the kind of culture we ask for, and it’s a lot harder to go back to a more thoughtful model than it is to throw ourselves headlong over the side.

Even experts can be guilty of this, or at least of not making it clear (how can you in 240 characters?) that they’re speculating rather than basing their opinion on any specific information. Unless you show your work, so to speak, there’s no way to know how definite a prediction is unless you’re reading one of those exceedingly rare writers who attach actual certainty levels to their predictions (something else the rest of us could learn from the rationalists). Even this assumes, of course, that experts predict the future more reliably than anyone else, which certainly remains to be seen in a lot of cases. This leads to another problem with the ease of speculation, in that there’s no real disincentive to do it, since no one will remember if you were wrong anyway.

——

There’s another way this question of salience can come up, and that’s in my choosing to write in a semi-public way. I say “semi-public” since I write under a pseudonym which isn’t known to anyone in my personal life. But while this may help with some of the vulnerability, it doesn’t eliminate it entirely. So the question then becomes: how much do I want to stand out? Would I actually be happier with a massive readership? I wonder.

It also influences what I write about. Do I want to try to do “takes” as are so common on social media? Do I want to be willfully contrarian? I admit the latter is often compelling; it’s easy to feel like the only way I can show that I’m smart is by “seeing through” some common narrative or another. But being contrarian for its own sake never leads anywhere, and certainly doesn’t result in my having anything interesting to say. So as much as I would love to show off, there’s just nothing there in terms of actually having interesting things to say.

I wonder too if there’s not a self-esteem issue there. In other words, do I perhaps not trust the “real” me to be interesting enough to stand out in the way I want? After all, I don’t find myself to be particularly interesting, but then I’m always in my own head, so I wouldn’t. Validation from others is certainly one way to stand out, or to recognize that I do (which is the more difficult of the two). If I’m honest, using a pseudonym is also partially an attempt to create some kind of mystique for myself, even if I’m unlikely to ever have people trying to dox me. But it’s not all self-aggrandizement, of course, as it does help me be more honest about myself and what’s in my head. Plus, who knows, maybe one day I really will have some kind of controversial take, in which case I’ll be glad for it.

One final question on this issue, and this is my biggest source of struggle. When I have free time, what do I do with it? I find that I often don’t have any particular leading in one direction or another, since this is another way that my brain struggles to make things stand out from the background. If I’m faced with the option of doing x, y, or z, how do I pick when x = y = z? It’s easy enough to prioritize when I have some kind of deadline, but I have no idea what to do when I don’t. It’s the same reason I used to hate open-ended assignments in school: when you can pick anything, how do you make one topic stand out from all the others?

If you asked me what my thought process was for this blog, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you. I have a whole folder on my computer called “ungerminated,” which is full of posts I’ve started but that never went anywhere. I don’t generally know where my brain will take me when I start writing. Instead, I just have to hope that whatever it is that’s popped into my head will lead to something. But this also means sitting down to write almost every day, and being okay with a pretty low ratio of posts that I start to ones that you could call finished. I’m a firm believer that we have to give space for creativity to find us rather than forcing it, so that’s all I can do.

For the issue of my free time generally, this is less applicable. I haven’t quite gotten to the point of flipping a coin, as I think it’s more a case of looking for something specific that I’m unaware of rather than all options really being equal. I guess it’s back to the self-reflection swamp.

There’s a scene from The Wire that has stuck with me since I first saw it. Well, more than one actually, but the one I’m thinking about right now is when a character who goes by “Bubbles” is meeting with his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor. The sponsor, played by Steve Earle, tells Bubbles that quitting drugs is the easy part, but that after that “comes life.”

I thought about naming this post something more maudlin like “addicted to suffering,” and while I obviously didn’t, this doesn’t mean that’s untrue. There’s a real appeal to feeling like you’re at the bottom, like you couldn’t possible feel worse than you do. So much of pain is a result of the change from a previous state rather than the sensation itself; in other words, it’s the relativity of it all. So it is that if you feel like things couldn’t possibly get any worse, there’s a certain security there, a freedom. After all, what consequences could any decision actually have at that point? You’re already miserable, and after a certain point you reach your capacity for despair and don’t feel like any additional pain will even register.

The other side to this, and the one that makes recovery that much harder, is that feeling better is scary. Suddenly, you have something to lose, a way to fall again. I know for myself, this made me embrace my own unhappiness and cling to it like a child’s security blanket—it was something I could wrap myself in and feel safe in a strange way. There’s also an intensity of feeling that you get that makes you feel alive in a way that mere contentment can’t really match, especially if you don’t know how to view it.

Another scene from the same sponsor character I mentioned before also comes to mind; a couple of times, actually, he refers to someone needing to become “tired” before they’re willing to confront their addiction. That was how it was for me and depression—I avoided drugs and only kinda-sorta engaged with counseling until one winter I realized things were getting really bad. And it wasn’t that I was somehow less happy than before, but I recognized all of a sudden how much energy it was taking me to keep up basic functioning, and how little I had left. Meanwhile, I was a spouse and parent, and on some level I realized that I couldn’t let myself completely fall apart. This took some doing, as I’ve always been very good at downplaying (even if not especially to myself) the severity of my own conditions.

So I finally decided to get on antidepressants. It took a couple tries to find a regimen that did anything, and this was while trying to manage my ADHD as well. Even now, I’m pretty sure the reason I feel tired in the morning no matter how much I sleep is due to one of the meds I’m on, and while I may see about lowering the dosage a tad, it’s still better than the alternative. Caffeine also helps, as do the stimulants I’m on for ADHD.

The down side to stimulants is they metabolize a lot faster. It’s not like an antidepressant where they work all the time as long as you continue to take them; I burn through stimulants in a few hours.

When they’re working is when I feel most like myself. Suddenly doing things doesn’t feel pointless, and I can really focus and dig into whatever it is that I’ve decided to do. I can pay attention at a basic level to anything I want, and it’s no longer a roll of the dice as to whether something will engage me. I can actually finish what I start, and more significantly, continue something I’d started previously. Suddenly I don’t have to do something in one sitting or bust.

But all this is a double-edged sword, since it makes living without stimulants that much harder. Suddenly I have something to compare that feeling to, and it’s harder to adjust as a result. Plus the improvement in depression makes my ADHD more noticeable, since there’s not this weight on my mind all the time that suppresses anything and everything in its path. The best analogy I can use for the neurotypical reader is how you feel in the morning without caffeine, and now imagine that that feeling comes back when your coffee or whatever wears off. Only worse.

It could always be worse, of course. But I need to give myself some room to be displeased with it; the person with one broken leg is better off than the person with two broken legs, but they’re still not fully healthy. Still, I never know quite where the line is. More importantly, I don’t know at what point feeling sorry for myself stops being cathartic and starts getting in the way of actually living. It also starts to get dangerously close to those feelings of settling that I’ve written about before.

Perhaps more importantly, though, I don’t want to be so focused on what I can’t do. Part of the process of dealing with this is just accepting that, for example, there are certain jobs that I may be objectively smart enough to do (for example) but that my mental conditions would make unrealistic. For example, I would make a lousy psychologist, since I wouldn’t really be able to pay attention to what my patients were telling me half the time. I don’t feel like I’m missing out in any meaningful way, but this is a pretty new thought nonetheless. It never would’ve occurred to me a year ago that there were things that I couldn’t do. It’s interesting, then, that giving up is actually a form of progress in this instance, rather than being something to hide behind. I suppose it all comes down to the why?

Of course, “why?” is a much harder question to answer most of the time. It all gets very existential, the only satisfying answer to which is “because.” This is my interpretation, at least, of what Camus meant in his Myth of Sisyphus. He suggests that even Sisyphus could find meaning in his existence by choosing it himself (Camus rejects any “objective” or external source of meaning for one’s life). Of course, one of the things ADHD does is make me have a very difficult time with open-ended questions. I always hated those assignments in school where we had to write an essay on whatever topic we wanted, because it was extraordinarily difficult for me to narrow “anything” down to something more manageable. So it is that trying to find an arbitrary source for meaning, even if it’s the only way, hasn’t been fruitful.

Of course, a lot of this search for a “why” presumes a lot more data than we can ever hope to have. All of us cause ripples in the world, but we can’t see where they go (or the others they interact with) any more than the rock thrown into the pond. I’m reminded of an old Zen poem:

Scarecrow in the hillock

Paddy field –

How unaware! How useful!

In other words, the scarecrow doesn’t know that it’s serving a purpose, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t serving one. Knowledge isn’t a pre-requisite of purpose, as frustrating as that can be sometimes.

Of course, knowing why I can’t do something requires knowing that I can’t do it, something I was blissfully ignorant of before. Yet somehow this doesn’t bother me. My only guess is that it’s because I recognize that knowing I can’t do something isn’t the reason I can’t do it; that is to say that I couldn’t do these things whether I’m aware of that fact or not.

Still, it’s hard sometimes to let go of this idea of doing something Majorly Important, even if I don’t understand what that actually means. I also haven’t lived all of my life yet (hopefully), so who’s to say what I’ll accomplish in the future? But now we’re back to the problem of open-ended questions: if I could pick anything to accomplish in my short time on this earth, how do I choose out of near infinite possibilities?

One of the thoughts that keeps me up at night is being on my death bed and feeling like I’ve wasted my time on this Earth. I can hope that I’ll be sufficiently satisfied at having been a decent partner and parent, at least, and maybe that’ll be enough. But I do know that I won’t wish I’d given more time to the Bureaucracy, even if that is what keeps a roof over my head. There is definitely an “enough” there, even if it’s higher than I would prefer.

How will I look back on things like this, things that I do just because? In addition to blogging, I’m also a translator, but have rarely been published. I mostly do it because it’s interesting, and maybe that’s enough. I have no idea how I’ll feel about it in however many years; maybe it’ll be satisfying to know I finished some things or maybe I’ll feel like it was a waste of time. How could I know? And maybe that’s the real answer: there’s no way to know how the me of the future will view certain things. I certainly don’t regret the time I’ve spent on writing and translating so far, and if anything wish I’d done more of it. There’s also an inherent optimism to this question, of course; it presumes that I’ll be happy enough in my future life to notice a few regrets here and there. Maybe that’s a good problem to have.