mode collapse

on turning 25 (soon)

A CLOSED SYSTEM CANNOT PRODUCE NEW INFORMATION

THEREFORE EVERY CLOSED SYSTEM MUST CONVERGE TOWARDS DEATH

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i. death

there is a kind of lifestyle where you spend your days shuttling between home, the office, and restaurants: your job contains some interesting and unpredictable challenges but largely consists of executing a well-understood playbook (like scaling up infrastructure, or engineering a system whose design was settled months ago, or go-to-market customer-feedback-iteration cycles); your friendships consist primarily of going out to eat and catching up; you recharge at home by doing nothing in particular aside from sleeping and doomscrolling and some hobbies that you find comforting; to get between your home and your office and your hangouts you take public transit, or uber, and you avoid talking to the other transit passengers and to your uber driver, or better yet you live in a city with Waymo and can avoid interacting with anyone at all

to me this lifestyle feels a little bit like death. a kind of death that is not immediately obvious, because it is possible to sustain the illusion of forward progress for months or years; you can be doing a great job at work and spending time with amazing friends whom you feel deeply understood by and so on. there is no fundamental contradiction between the following two statements:

1. the vibes in your life are great

2. you are slowly becoming incapable of receiving genuinely new information

of course you are still always encountering new content, but very little of the kind that is capable of changing your mind on anything substantial: you scroll through feeds that have already learned your preferences; you do not push hard enough on your hobbies for anything new to emerge; the ways in which you interact with your friends have crystallized and you almost never talk to outsiders. perhaps you are continuing to grow at work, but unless you’ve found good alignment most of the lessons you learn from work probably have little bearing on the rest of your life. you are secretly transforming into a closed system

this is the same death that dfw addressed in his commencement speech this is water (which you should read if you haven’t! it’s one of my favorites): “how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out”. dfw made the observation that “You graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration” and indeed, this is my first time reading the speech where i’ve been old enough to really comprehend that

where i disagree with dfw is that he frames the problem as being about empathy and awareness - one can avoid this kind of death if they have more humility and are more willing to consider the possibility that their perspective is incorrect. i believe this solution is insufficient and that the problem is fundamentally also about lifestyle construction

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ii. ideas

i spent much of early january thinking about how to adjust my life to increase my exposure to new ideas. this was not supposed to be one of my new years resolutions; however, i did set a goal of writing more fiction, and when i actually tried to start i realized i did not have many compelling leads. similarly, i wanted to build writing tools and interp assistants, but when i actually confronted the problem of what should the goals of ai tools and assistants be? i ran into a blank wall

it quickly became apparent that i was not encountering new ideas at a rate fast enough to sustain the kind of work i wanted to do; i needed to consume more and consume better. younger versions of me (as recently as 2y ago?) believed that engaging with the world too much would bias you towards thinking like everyone else and creativity was about thinking harder until you came up with something brilliant, but i no longer believe in this perspective. there is a very special kind of person who can pull that off successfully (eg. ramanujan comes to mind), but most people thinking in isolation become trapped and ideate in circles. looking back it’s clear i was just coping with being afraid of new things

some of the changes i’ve made in the last few weeks include: reading a new sci-fi short story every day (i’m not attached to sci-fi as a genre but it’s good that the variance is high), browsing the hci section of arxiv instead of the machine learning section (which unfortunately is not really innovating anymore), meeting lots of grad students, diversifying my instagram and pinterest feeds. tickling my brain in new ways has been very refreshing! i’ve also had a longstanding goal of being less judgemental towards my own ideas and it’s hard to measure but i think i’m filtering less now?

i don’t know how this actually translates into output or results. what i do know is that there was a time where i despised my brain and was terribly sick of the thoughts i was having, and i no longer feel that way

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iii. life

one difficulty with trying to rearchitect your life is that ideas come from unpredictable sources. for instance, a few weeks ago i was leaving the office to go to a dance class and had to decide whether to uber or take the bus. i thought uber would be more efficient and give me more time to read sci-fi or think about new things or whatever. i ended up taking the bus anyway, and it was extremely packed so i was standing inches apart from a bunch of strangers, and then i started daydreaming about hugging strangers and various other topics. it was fun, and i’m very confident that my brain entered a more vibrant state than it would have if i’d chosen the uber option which was supposedly more aligned with my goals

that is to say, i don’t really believe in a central planning / optimization approach to being more generative. i hope that’s not the message people took away from the previous section. maybe a more nuanced framing is that if you notice a part of your life which is consistently dead then you should think about how to revive it. sometimes that entails tearing everything down and sometimes that entails making small adjustments

two related thoughts:

• one reason i find love difficult is that almost everyone i meet (with the exception of 1-2 new people a year) reminds me of death, and as a result i can’t be attracted to them. this is definitely a skill issue that i need to resolve by finding better ways to relate to people

• i keep thinking i should move to new york or something. i don’t actually think i’d enjoy it more than my current life, but i do think spending your entire 20s immersed in one culture is probably not healthy