Useful Things That I Have Written Down in My Past
6/xx/21
What follows is a collection of my thoughts and writings from the past two months. The order may not make sense and each paragraph may be treated as separate, though many of the themes/ideas are related. The main idea I started out with was balance of preparation and execution with respect to personal projects, but that concept expanded into more areas that are far more important to me in the long run. The rest of the snippets just delve into other dilemmas I am facing currently.
It has been a while since I have consolidated my thoughts, so I thought I would write this snapshot. Currently, I am in Utah visiting Zion National Park, and nothing spurs deep, organic thought like the silence that comes with hours of strenuous hiking. Some of that thought was occupied by the coursework that I am currently studying, but a lot of it was directed towards self-reflection:
I feel I often struggle with striking the right balance of self-analysis to action. In order to make certain that your actions are correct or good, you must evaluate them before you perform them. For small and veritably inconsequential actions, autopilot will suffice, but actions that substantially affect your life and the lives of others require more attention. On the other end of the spectrum, if thinking is all you do, then you will do nothing. Thus, the more you evaluate and analyze, the less you will do. This is the generalized dilemma, but I mostly encounter this problem with situations that almost wholly involve and concern myself. “Does this thing that I am currently doing align itself with my long-term plans and goals?” and “What are my long-term plans and goals?” seem to be the main questions that disrupt my current actions and force me into a state of analysis until I can decide on my next sure action. These are, of course, a couple of questions that everyone grapples with throughout their lives, but I still wonder what this disruptive cycle looks like for someone much more productive than myself.
The main driving force of this current train of thought is my recent realization that, in the preceding months, I have been bouncing around many subjects, engaging in each of them but not making any real progress before moving on to the next. Each of these bounces was triggered by a bout of analysis/introspection/reflection and each resulted in a different conclusion, sending me in completely different directions. Maybe this process is necessary for my development and eventual happiness, but the only thing I know for sure right now is that it is damn annoying. I’m left with no feeling of accomplishment or sign that I have made any strides towards what I really want in life… because I don’t know what that is.
What I want more than anything is to know myself completely. This includes the entire suite of my ideals and beliefs as well as my place and purpose in the world. I want to have confidence in my exitance. I want to get to a point where I no longer need to think before I act because I know intuitively what the right answer is. I envy the person that can act in the interest of others on instinct. Earlier this year, I divulged to a friend that I have never once purely helped another person. Before I help anyone, there is always a layer of analysis in which I take myself into account (intense self-awareness seems to be hard-programmed into my brain). This is selfish because that analysis does not exist solely for the benefit of the other person, but for myself as well. This reaction can be helpful, but I believe that it also means that I can never be sincere in my actions.
One thing that always comes to mind when I think about my motivation, or the lack thereof, is my upbringing. My fearless, painless, white, American, Texan, private school, upper-middle class upbringing. It seems like the people that I consider the greatest forces for good in the world have what could be called (highly understatedly) rich backstories. In one way or another, they were exposed to something that forever changed their outlook and continuously motivates them. I have always been taught that I should be grateful for my sheltered and strifeless upbringing, but now it feels like my empathy and moral compass are fucked up. I am aware of the fact that I am “set up” for the rest of my life, and that has me sitting squarely on my laurels. I am aware of the suffering of others, but I am content with my own existence and so I do nothing because that alone is enough. I am a blob. I absorb all perturbation and stimulation and output nothing. If I feel something, it doesn’t mean anything because I haven’t experienced anything and my perception of the world is woefully skewed and incomplete. This is why reading long-form nonfiction is so impactful to me at the moment. Emotions can be faithfully portrayed through this medium. Empathy can be gained through interaction with the right literature. This is also why I am leaning more and more towards thrusting myself into a new, foreign environment after school. Before I try to make my mark on the world, it is essential that I fix my view.
Part of why my throughput is so low is due to my inability to create a sustainable schedule for myself. I may identify something that I want to get done and create a detailed schedule, mixing task allocated time with the rest of my commitments, but I will always underestimate my fatigue. When I make these schedules, I am full of passion and determination, but at the time of asking, when I look at 3 hours of a self-imposed task when all I want to do is indulge in some brainless activity and I feel a severe lack of motivation. Fatigue is hard to plan around currently.
College (specifically undergrad) is viewed by society as the place where one “finds themselves” and solidifies their ideologies. I desperately want this to be the case for myself, to find out exactly who I want to be for the rest of my life and stick with it, never making another poor decision and to live without regrets. I know this is not possible; I am human and prone to error. Even though I can seemingly acknowledge this reality as I write it out here, I cannot stop myself from wanting it and slaving after it. I also like to subscribe to the school of thought that one must constantly challenged and change themselves throughout life in an evolution towards a better state of being. These ideologies of wanting to solidify myself and constantly changing in an effort to be better are clearly contradictory and the existence of this paradox explains my restlessness pretty well.
I have been doing robotics research for nearly the past year. A lot of this has been learning as I did not know much about formal robotics before joining LIDAR. I really love robotics and as I am beginning my control curriculum, I am getting more and more excited. However, the research I’m engaging in now is purely academic. It is a part of a new, promising, and rapidly developing field, but there are still very few useful implementations at the moment. Thus, it effectively has no immediate impact on the real world. If my team succeeds in building a great robot platform (which is the goal), your average person will hear nothing of it. It might enable cheaper research which then accelerates the betterment of the human condition, but when I’m doing tasks for the project, it almost feels gratuitous. I love robotics and control and would love to keep working closely with the field, but the research that I engage with long-term needs to be a project whose success/implementation means that humans or the environment are being directly impacted positively. I would like to make a clarification: what I’m framing here as the more disconnected type of research (like the stuff that I am currently doing) is obviously essential for the overall progression and evolution of the field. I just think that the world might end up being a better place if I’m working on implementation and integration rather than on a higher level. It’s just a hunch.
I read something recently where someone made the observation that it must be nice to be able to fully concentrate on your education. I am allowed to fully concentrate on my education and I don’t know how I would fare if I did not have this privilege. Surely my progression would be severely negatively impacted. I have given money to education-related groups while I had an income in an effort to ‘make education better’ or something, but this other side of things makes the situation much more complicated. People must have some kind of security and some amount of unspent time before they can study and learn anything other than things related to their survival. Welfare is as important to higher education as good learning opportunities are. I will carry this realization with me and try to put it to use.
For anything that I have worked on, I never feel as though the preparation for execution is complete. There is always more I can study and learn, more features and functionality that can be added on, and more I can go over my current work to make sure everything is correct. This sounds like good practice, but it can be incredibly limiting to one’s throughput. Ideally, I would learn everything there is to know about a field I’m working in or an object that I’m working with, however this is clearly infeasible in practice. There is also the dynamic of learning vs doing. If I start a project now, with my current knowledge, it would be inferior (in theory) to the work I could do after learning more.
It’s not enough that I know I have proven something to myself before, I always feel the need to rederive and have an active understanding of subject matter that I am working with currently. This can be a good thing, as it puts pressure on me to learn things correctly, but it also soaks up a lot of time and concentration.