Daily Log Digest – Week 48, 2024
2024-12-01
Intellectual Obesity Crisis
a tweet from a mutual brought this article back into my current working memory: The Intellectual Obesity Crisis - by Gurwinder - The Prism
Common types of junk info include gossip, trivia, clickbait, hackery, marketing, churnalism, and babble. But in fact, any information that you can't use is junk info. A typical example on social media would be a photo of a freshly cooked burger, captioned with “Look what I just made!” but posted without a recipe so you can't even recreate it. Such an image might make you briefly salivate, and possibly spur you to make a burger of your own, but it provides no discernible value to your life.
The vast majority of the online content you consume today won't improve your understanding of the world. In fact, it may just do the opposite; recent research suggests that people browsing social media tend to experience “normative dissociation” in which they become less aware and less able to process information, to such an extent that they often can’t recall what they just read.
It's interesting to contrast this with a slightly counterintuitive insight from Oliver Burkeman's Meditations for Mortals, which I am reading at the rate of chapter a day. A excerpt from Chapter 5, in which he offers three pieces of advice about reading
“Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.”
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“The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all. (This attitude prompts some people to develop complicated systems for taking notes on everything they read, which turns reading into a chore, which then perversely leads to their not reading books they’d otherwise enjoy or benefit from, because they can’t face taking the notes.) Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.”
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“The closely related final rule is to remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else. It’s not merely that a fixation on retaining facts is a poor way to reap the benefits of reading. It’s also that any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now. So you needn’t always choose to read what’s most edifying, or professionally useful, or most enthusiastically endorsed by the arbiters of culture. Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.”
Meditations for Mortals - “DAY SIX: You can’t care about everything”
Read Chapter Six of the book today.
It was in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum result, that I first began to notice a bizarre effect of all this in myself, and more acutely in certain friends and acquaintances. It wasn’t simply that people were addicted to doomscrolling (although they certainly were). It was that they’d started ‘living inside the news.’ The news had become the psychological center of gravity in their lives – more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event…Living inside the news feels like doing your duty and being a good citizen. But you can stay informed on ten minutes a day; scrolling any more than that risks becoming disempowering and paralyzing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference
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In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.
2024-12-02
Another day of doing a lot of Math Academy and watching several shows while taking breaks.
Meditations for Mortals Chapter 5
Read Chapter 5 today titled Let the future be the future On crossing bridges when you come to them, and it feels like I needed it because I found myself worrying about 2025 and what it will bring for me.
There’s a tendency, in self-help circles, to portray worry as an act of irrational foolishness; but in the prehistoric environment in which humans evolved, it made perfect sense. Things happened fast there. If you heard a rustling in the bushes, it was vital to fixate on wondering what might be causing it, a reaction that was accompanied by a spike of anxiety: that response would have kept you alert until a few seconds later, when you could confirm it was only a harmless bird. The trouble is that today we live in what’s been called a ‘delayed-return environment,’ in which it can take weeks or months to discover if a potential problem is real or not. If your worry concerns something less immediate than a rustling in the bushes – if it’s about, say, whether your application for funding will be approved when the grants committee meets the month after next – then there’s no useful behavior for your anxiety to motivate, and nowhere for it to go. So it lingers and loops, distracting you from the tasks that might actually have helped you construct a more secure future.
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The fact that you can’t cross bridges before you come to them is liable to seem dispiriting, as if it leaves us with no option but to keep trudging vulnerably into the fog, trying not to think about sinkholes. But it contains a hidden gift. After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment – that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can. Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future. But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later. You get to stop fretting about literally everything other than how to spend the next instant in a wise, enjoyable or otherwise meaningful fashion. Finite human beings need never worry about anything else.
2024-12-03
Meditations for Mortals Chapter 8
Read Chapter Eight titled Decision-hunting: On choosing a path through the woods
The topic of deciding and choosing naturally calls to mind one of the most famous poems ever written, Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’ You know the one: about the two paths diverging in a ‘yellow wood,’ and how the speaker chooses ‘the one less traveled by,’ a choice that he says ‘made all the difference.’ On the standard interpretation, Frost’s poem is little more than a clichéd celebration of the American dream. Spurn convention! Do your own thing, believe in yourself, and success is guaranteed! But as the poet David Orr explains, in his book also entitled The Road Not Taken, it’s really something much stranger. Frost’s poem undermines the conventional reading on almost every line. No sooner has the speaker told us about the road less traveled than he admits that, in fact, previous travelers had left the two paths worn ‘really about the same.’ And on closer examination, he never asserts that his choice of path ‘made all the difference’ in his life, either. How could he know, since he never got to compare it to the other one? What the speaker of the poem may be saying is that ‘ages and ages hence,’ when he’s an old man, he expects that’s what he’ll claim. Because he’ll want to rationalize the choices he made – like everyone always does.
The true insight of Frost’s poem, on this interpretation, isn’t that you should opt for an unconventional life. It’s that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you’ll never know in hindsight, either – because no matter how great or appalling the consequences of heading down any given path, you’ll never learn whether heading down a different one might have brought something better or worse. Even so, to move forward, you still have to choose, and keep on choosing. If the speaker in ‘The Road Not Taken’ hadn’t consciously made some choice, he’d have made a different, unconscious one instead – to remain standing at that fork in the path, frozen in ambivalence, waiting for something to happen.
The Dune Prophecy Podcast
The Official Dune: Prophecy Podcast | HBO - YouTube #tv #dune
I had somehow missed checking for the official podcast before starting the show. But I am glad I remembered yesterday. Spent the morning binge-listening to three episodes and realised there is a lot of detail that I did not fully notice while watching the show. There is also some interesting trivia from the Dune lore that really clarifies the plotlines in the show. Loved it!
The Agency
Watched the first two episodes of The Agency (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb #tv
A lot of discourse online is focusing on how Le Bureau (the French show this is based on) was so much better. That is likely true, but I feel like to get most out of it, it's best to watch the show without the filter of the original. I enjoyed the first two episodes.
2024-12-04
Meditations with Mortals Chapter 9
Read Chapter 9 of the book titled “Finish things On the magic of completion”
Social psychologists describe what’s going on here using the language of ‘construal level theory,’ which refers to the way we conceive of objects and events as if from different mental altitudes. The classic example concerns summer vacations. Consider how you’d like to spend yours next year, and you’re likely to picture it, figuratively speaking, from 30,000 feet: you might see yourself ‘going to the beach,’ or ‘hiking in the mountains,’ or ‘relaxing as a family.’ But when the vacation draws closer, you’ll descend a few thousand feet and start focusing in on details: which beach, which mountain trails, which restaurants to eat at, and so forth. Similarly, at the start of any major undertaking, we see it in outline, smooth if a little blurry; it’s only as we dig in that we begin to encounter the flaws, the compromises, and the grunt-work involved. At which point we make the error of assuming that a new endeavor might be free of such imperfections. Really, of course, what makes the new endeavor more appealing is just that we’re seeing it at a mental distance; we fail to realize, in the words of the psychology writer Jude King, that ‘every worthwhile goal is supposed to feel hard, unglamorous, unsexy,’ at least for some of the time you’re actually putting in the work.
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Each ending provides an energy-boost for the next. It works so well, I suspect, because it means acting in harmony with reality: for finite humans, every moment is an endpoint of sorts, experienced once then done with forever. Treating what you do with your time as a sequence of tiny completions means falling into line with how things really are. ‘Work is done, then forgotten,’ says the Tao Te Ching. ‘Therefore it lasts forever.’ You’re no longer fighting the current, but letting it carry you forward. Life is less effort that way.
Litany Against Fear
It was while listening to the Dune Prophecy podcasts, I realised that the commonly encountered quote below is known as the Litany Against Fear. Even found a wiki entry about it: Litany Against Fear | Dune Wiki | Fandom
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
2024-12-05
Meditations with Mortals Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten is titled Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear
This is one of my favorite chapters so far, and also the most confronting. Why does it feel like with every chapter I read, that the advice in the chapter came at just the right time (see note after the quote). It elaborates on the Jungian concept of a "life task" (sidenote: Jung seems to be coming up everywhere for me after my friend Jasmine mentioned it a few days ago.)
How can you identify your current life task? That must always be a matter of intuition. But there are two signposts that may help. The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’ as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security. In the words of another Jungian, James Hollis, it may be the kind of endeavor that ‘enlarges’ you, rather than making you feel immediately happy. This is where you’ll need to be honest with yourself. For some people, honoring a life task might mean mustering the boldness to leave a relationship, or a job. But perhaps you’re someone for whom running away from difficult situations is your default behavior; in that case, your task might entail mustering the boldness to stay. Likewise, it might mean walking away from your life to become a humanitarian aid worker; but the equally uncomfortable possibility is that the voice telling you to become an aid worker is the internalized voice of societal morality, the one that thinks it knows better than you the sort of contribution you should make. Perhaps your real contribution will be designing jewelry, or writing songs.
The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have a hundred dollars in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of dollars’ worth of moviemaking equipment (although it might involve doing something to raise the cash). If you’re the single parent of three small children, it won’t involve working eighteen-hour days for a tech start-up; and by the same token, if you’re unable to have children, it won’t involve becoming a biological parent. “This helps distinguish the idea of a life task from certain popular notions of ‘destiny’ or ‘calling,’ which can leave people feeling as though there’s something they’re meant to be doing with their lives, but that their life circumstances make it impossible. That can’t be the case with a life task, which emerges, by definition, from whatever your life circumstances are. It’s what’s being asked of you, with your particular skills, resources and personality traits, in the place where you actually find yourself.
quoting a tweet which I replied to flippantly the other day.
i have everything else but not courage so ngmi 😭
— Deepak Jois 👨💻☕️🎙️📖📺 (@debugjois) December 4, 2024
It's interesting to relate the courage to act on something with the "life task", which nicely brings me to the last paragraph in the chapter.
The most remarkable part is that while you might have assumed that complying with a life task would feel oppressive – you’re ‘complying’ with a ‘task,’ after all – it never does. It gives you the feeling of getting a handle on life, because the life to which you’re addressing the question is the one you actually have. It is never the case that there’s no next step to take. On some level, I think we always already know when we’re hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from a challenge reality has placed before us. The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can finally do something about it.
2024-12-06
Meditations with Mortals Chapter Day Eleven
Read the chapter titled Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear, in which the author unpacks the concept of the gnawing rats we have in our lives.
I learned this way of thinking about avoidance from Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a lovely book entitled Time Surfing. Loomans refers metaphorically to the tasks or areas of life you’re avoiding as ‘gnawing rats.’ But he rejects the conventional advice about dealing with them, which is to man/woman up and confront your rats – to get over yourself, in other words, and to attack the problem with brute force. The trouble is that this simply replaces one kind of adversarial relationship with your gnawing rats (‘Stay away from me!’) with another (‘I’m going to destroy you!’). And that’s a recipe for more avoidance over the long term, because who wants to spend their life fighting rats? Loomans’s surprising advice is to befriend them instead. Turn towards your gnawing rats. Forge a relationship with them.
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It’s worth noting, I think, that ‘befriending your rats’ isn’t just another way of expressing the timeworn advice to break an intimidating task down into smaller, more manageable chunks. When you do that, you’re reducing the anxiety you feel by reducing the scale of the threat; it’s like separating one rat off from the rest of the pack, in order to more effectively stab it to death. By contrast, to befriend a rat is to defuse the anxiety you feel by transforming the kind of relationship you have with it. You turn it into an unobjectionable part of your reality. Whereupon a gnawing rat, in Loomans’s terminology, becomes a ‘white sheep’ – a harmless, docile, fluffy creature that follows you around until you decide to do something about it. Everyone has an assortment of not-yet-begun or not-yet-completed projects that would benefit from their attention, because that’s the nature of being a finite human. But there’s no need for them to torment you. Once you’ve established a relationship with them, they become white sheep, and can just patiently wait their turn.
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Asking yourself what it would actually entail to befriend the gnawing rats in your life is an act requiring real courage – more courage, perhaps, than the standard confrontational approach, which feels less like reconciling yourself to reality and more like getting into a bar fight with it. Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximize your room for maneuver, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.
Definitive List of 50 Books
Thanks to Rutvi for sending this along.
2024-12-07
Spent a lot of the day at the ETHIndia hackathon. Didn't really have anything to build in crypto, but I ended up hacking on some features for my website.
Email newsletter link
Shipped a feature to display a form for folks to subscribe to my weekly email digest: Add form for newsletter subscription · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@c19c0d3 · GitHub
