Notes - March 25
After 5 years I’m archiving my /notes - public archive for now, removed from the main nav. They felt useful, pretentious, and at times, silly. My cadence has dramatically decreased now that I post monthly note dumps on my blog. I’m also renaming these to «notes - feb 2025» instead of «note dump». It’s still a dumpy dump but it’s the nature of notes.
Who are the wise elders of today, standing back from the game we fools play?
It’s uncanny how all traditions are calling for regular contemplative practice, almost in the same way: intentionally sit in a quiet (nice) place for a while, close your eyes and don’t do anything. Meanwhile, the modern man works on 3 projects at the same time while managing the logistics of life, hoping to be able to still play tennis at age 95.
As a side note, to the folks who see in AI the solution to our ever more complicated life logistics: good luck my friends. I’ll keep going the other way, not out of hatred for AI but out of concern for personal autonomy.
«3-5 days in office work with empathetic flexibility» is quite hilariously phrased.
There are many pros and cons to working for a large company. One of the major cons, when one is at the bottom of the corporate food chain, is being paralyzed by executive indecisions trickling down. Similar to how the further drool gets from the baby’s mouth, the more upsetting it is (at least to me).
Good design at scale is an osmotic process. Leaders talking is distillation, hoping ambitions trickle down to relevant actions is delusion via nuggets of wisdom.
Is it better to know that you don’t know or not know that you don’t know — Ignorance or partial knowledge? Pure ignorance is basically what Buddhism advocates, to stop wanting to know everything and anything because there is nothing to know. A state modern Buddhists consider lofty. We are all stuck in a state of partial awareness.
That’s the kind of stuff I think about at age 32 after an empty workday while hanging out with my toddler son.
My wife claimed to have gotten motion sickness from reading PDFs on her Kindle - Apparently due to the page-turning animation and pixelation.
«Tough guy with a big heart» is such an endearing image of ideal masculinity, typical of boomers and genX. My generation is struggling to lean into it. We’re trying to develop toughness in gyms and triathlons, and finding our heart on YouTube and edibles.
I spotted a tern cargo bike similar to mine, with a large rifle case strapped to the rack. I’m surprised it took me a year to see this. REI and the gun store are not far apart, and the combo seems quintessentially Central Coast: wealth, outdoors, and pew-pew.
Beach bums and van life have been a thing for a while. Bike bums are a thing. It’s sometimes hard to tell if they are homeless or took bikepacking too seriously.
I got served the most uncannily well-timed and targeted Zillow ad in my Tumblr feed as I was doomscrolling to find «inspiration»: a container house, in the middle of nowhere on Ohahu, HI for $135k.
Craig Mod retired from tech at 35. I’m 2 years always from 35. It feels like a milestone. Not 40, but deep into active life. I’ll have 13 years of proper ‘career’ by then. I met enough people, who, like Craig, have moved on from work for income as their primary motive. This seems very far from me today, and perhaps it is a sign of how irrelevant this is.
I heard a tech person refer to AI as «potentially very wasteful». At first, I appreciated the candid and relatable remark. Then right after the conversation, I felt like a fool, to have let that one pass. AI, however helpful it is, will have a massive environmental cost. The energy and resources needed for that infrastructure are plain bogus. It’s perhaps how unfathomably massive the cost that makes AI tech appear so great. Something that expensive must be great right?
The way my toddler reflects my neurosis and all sorts of internal affairs gives me a taste of what the gurus talk about when they say: that everything close to the heart can be used as a vehicle for enlightenment. It needs to be close for the absurdity to be so sharp it produces the wildest emotions and renders the mind's projections. At least that’s what I tell myself.
According to my 2-year-old, there are not enough tractors, and everyone looks bummed in GQ magazine.
Why does Ram Dass hit so hard? Why now?
Because I’ve focused solely on pre-packaged knowledge ready for implementation. It’s not only the self-help and podcasts of the last decade but non-fiction and all books I consumed (which explained my /notes page and also why I’m done with it). However chunky and profound these were, all could be summed up in a paragraph and had an agenda: betterment of some sort. Ram Dass is the opposite: abstract and weird. I needed a mix of openness and reaching a certain degree of letting go for him to resonate. I guess I’m there, on the way with all the hippies, deluded religious GenXers, beach bums, eccentric moms, Anne Lamott…
My oldest kale plant is heroically going to flower after having been heavily infested by aphids. It has fought the hot winter, the relentless pesticide spraying, and my negligence and still manages to reproduce, here in its modest clay pot on the sad concrete patio. My resilience poster boy of the moment.
I’m retiring 2 pairs of shoes that are, according to my doctor, my wife, and modern common sense, done. The soles and sandpapered and the lining worn so on can see the shell. Both are sneakers with high-end materials that can still perform basic functions, fitting the lower standard of footwear such as dad-slippers or ship-to-charity. Do you see the moral dilemma?
I couldn’t fall asleep so I went back to my screen at 10PM to file my foreign assets declaration for taxes. I was happy to do it and also very weirded out by how I felt about it. It reminded me of a comment from a German coworker when I turned 30: “Welcome in your thirties, it’s fun and gets seriously weird”
Here is a stubborn thought I have: I’m very privileged to work a well-paid and safe job job. I could find a similar one, better paid or play the personal growth game. They are the default career trajectories. Many alternatives are possible but a lot less popular. They are societal expectations, one has to reach prime income potential, typically after 20+ years of career. In isolation, there’s nothing wrong with that model. Income growth matching increased value add thanks to experience, and expenses like college. This traditional sequence doesn’t make sense to everyone anymore (did it ever?).
For big and small decisions, I found myself tortured by this: «It’s cool but we don’t need it»
I often vehemently advocate leaving statistics and economics out of discussion to focus on ethics and morals. My philosophical anti-pragmatism doesn’t please my wife who consistently brings us back to basic definitions, often grounded in historical fact and/or economics. I want to have opinions and flex my values, loosely observe the world, and navigate it without too much effort and friction. I hold my stance while empathizing (mostly with my wife).
That said, all the AI chatter has me in a bit of a squeeze. If one keeps pragmatic ecological and economic considerations out of the discussion it makes for extreme opinions: Techno optimism or dystopian anarchy. That seems to be the state of things at the moment.
I don’t have much to offer aside from a few comments here and there as the subject surfaces in my own life.
I don’t know if having kids and/or a decade of tech is responsible for this, but my conversational EQ is getting close to world of Warcraft NPG.
Trying to keep my Bay Area tech energy in SLO has been feeling like running in Birkenstock. After 1.5 years it’s starting to clarify.
I’ve lived in California long enough to not be surprised seeing a homeless wearing a piece tech swag. Today I saw one wearing an Ironman event shirt, that’s next level, at least for me.
My memory is not great. I don’t hold grudges. I don’t keep scores. I don’t have many regrets. My wife has a great memory.
From shady parenting advice, popular psychology, spirituality and everything in between, I see is a common thread when it comes to surrendering. It doesn’t happen because one decides it or uses some kind of artificial process. It’s the breaking down of what holds reason together that makes it happen. Nothing artificial can do that. At best it can be sped up a bit.
It’s the other side of Pema Chodron's saying: nothing ever goes away without teaching you what you need to know. The teaching of something has nothing to do with the understanding of anything.
All the children's development psychology books my wife read seem more telling of civilization than kids. The hope to transcend our humanity is equally deep as futile.
Yet my second kid is getting an unfair advantage. The one of having slightly more experienced parents. I’m still winging it, but I know how it feels, and how to deal with myself which makes for an easier life for number 2. Unfortunately, awareness of that fact won’t make the coming years easier for me and number one.
To put it mildly, the wonders of life are hard to appreciate when I face a screen for more than 4 hours a day.
One of my high school friend went on to engineering school. We had about the same grades. I pursued a lower level, technical path. He (18 year old him) believed that machines would soon do the technical stuff I wanted to do. We lost touch. He ended up dropping off from engineering school to get into cooking. He is now a chef. He was way ahead of the curve(s?).
Seeing my mother-in-law transitioning from sending Huberman podcasts and Mayo Clinic’s links to referencing ChatGPT has been upsetting and illustrative of my doubts about AI tools. The new AI tools are offering, to those asking with precision and persistence, answers that look good enough to be taken at face value. At least compared to previous Google searches, whose limited value or need for contextualization was fairly evident. The preAI internet required one to confront (or not) the process of knowledge acquisition by searching sources manually, gauging quality, evaluating insights potential, to eventually take a wise decision that then may turn into some kind of wisdom through and time and experience of the topic.
The growing gap between understanding and powerlessness was maddening in my twenties. Today I’m looking forward to the ease that comes when that gap is so wide, I may even stop considering it.
This was my first full month after parental leave. I’ve been distressed by how I intuitively switched to an aggressively utilitarian approach to how I use time and space. I caught myself feeling odd navigating my own house that, a few weeks prior, I was leisurely perusing. The same garage workouts don’t feel the same.
I like bedtime tea but it makes me wake up to pee. Do you see why AI, or any other technology is useless to the conundrum of my silly life.
My kids and job at a large, mostly "legacy" tech company shields me from the political and technological madness of the moment. Exporting PNG and staying afloat with family logistics might sound like being "behind the curve". By now I’d bet a lot of those riding this curve more aggressively will come out of it with the same feeling I got from the last decade: wow, so much work, so little progress but I can use the money now…
← Index Published on 2025-04-01