అనుకుంటంగానీ..

Over the last few days, some of David Foster Wallace's insights from This is Water have been popping up in my head with increasing regularity; Especially the one about banal platitudes. When put together with the concept of Münchhausen trilemma and Ramarao Kanneganti gari quote, "We are not rational people, Dheeraj. We are rationalising people.", I seem to have gathered the rudimentary components for constructing a metaphysical lattice for the next phase of my life which I have been feeling I've entered in last few months. That somehow there's been a phase transition, that the liminal space of my life from ages 29-33 has finally led to the light at the end of the tunnel.  

Foremost is ofcourse a growing apprehension to accept that there is or will be a silver bullet, a final answer, that one little piece of the puzzle that'll reorient and clear everything up. Most credit for this should go to Nathan. In November, after a few weeks of dipping motivation during which I hardly trained, I created a SWOT chart and called Nathan to discuss how I could plug in the flaws and do better going forward. "I'm not looking for a silver bullet mate, I know that doesn't exist. I'm willing to put in the hard yards but help me with that please", I told him. He responded in no uncertain terms that that plea was the silver bullet I was claiming I didn't want. "There is no answer, Sirish, except getting up in the morning and doing what's on the sheet. I know that doesn't make sense when you're not able to do exactly that, but that is what is to be done. You can't think your way out of this. You just do what's in there. Everything else is just an excuse mate." The harshness hurt but also helped. Its been 6 months since that chat, and while I've had crests and troughs in training and performance, that question of "I'm not motivated, can you do something about it?" has ceased to exist. Like I eat, like I go to office, I train. There are good days, there are bad ones but the activity has got nothing to do with what my mind tells me that morning. I don't want to jinx it but there is hardly any mental wrangling around the question of Why- Why should I train and what are the reasons I can find today not to?  I still ask myself if I want to train, if I'm in the mood, if my body is in the state but there is no attempt at rationalising my way into or out of it. Obviously, I've heard versions of these over the years, Meheranna's "You just write Sirish. It is what you do" being the most exasperatedly endearing, so perhaps the thing about that particular conversation with Nathan had less to do with the matter of the statement than in my exhaustion and reluctance to keep searching for ways around it. I wasn't able to defeat the relentless excuses my mind kept throwing to take me away from the here and the now, so I suppose I found a way to transcend it. Or more uncharitably, ignore it until they just withered away.

Which brings me to the second aspect- a growing understanding that most actions are underwritten by thoughts not too shallow but also not too deep. I once defined emotion as proto-thought and philosophising as extreme-thought with thought itself defined as the most widely used and manipulated mental artefact. Stretching this unscientific, albeit temporarily useful, analogy further, if emotion causes one to commit intense, surprising actions that one might regret or cherish later, and philosophising condemns one to paralysis-by-analysis, the former focused excusively on the present moment and the latter on the widest expanse of space & time one can conceive at that point, then good action is what happens somewhere between those two extremes. In one of their clear, concise essays on Indian Philosophy, Prof. Peter Adamson and Prof. Jonardon Ganeri place the Caravakas and the Advaitis on two ends of a spectrum- one claiming that the world was pure matter and the other that it was pure mind; One advocating pure hedonism and the other pure abstinence. Then they go on to say that the more important, more useful question isn't who's right but that where does one want to stand between those two extremes to lead what to that person is the good life. I spent a large chunk of my youth flitting between the two, craving the purity of picking an extreme. Now, though, I've compromised/ realised/ embraced. Its not that I haven't had this thought before. I had trouble placing myself "somewhere" in the middle. Extremes are more tempting positions to take not just for their purity-signalling capacity but also because they make it easier to orient and move oneself using external markers. Staying in the middle depends on parsing more ambiguous and noisy signals and, in lieu of clear external signboards, a more evolved and stronger internal apparatus.

And that is the third component- a better functioning intuition. In one of his recent posts, Venkatesh Rao talks about moniliths. Put together with his other contention that people are like APIs, it seems to me now that we are, under everyday circumstances, black box monoliths even to ourselves. We might be able to find a rationalisation for every one of our actions, however far-fetched and feeble they might seem even to ourselves, but not only is the opportunity cost high, it is also for the most part pointless. Because once you have a fairly well-functioning advanced software within, the value of constantly refactoring or peering under the hood falls of steeply compared to testing it on the real-world and making changes to parameters if and when required. [Holy fuck, how much of my thinking is so deeply influenced by Studio|Ribbonfarm?]. It still means you need to have spent a lot of time, data and compute in creating the original product (I use it in the sense of a mathematical multiplication of myriad components) but after that until there is an outlier event, it is more optimal to keep it running and tweaking, than spend time questioning the first principles over and over again. 

All of which is a convoluted and pretentious way of saying that I'm turning into the adult I once despised, mocked, and was wary of. One who says that they've decided on a few non-negotiables and will now go through life not having to answer everyone about their choices and decisions with anything more than, "Because that's what I've decided to do". There is something freeing about this mode of living despite the fact that my Black Swan Detector is shrieking. The hope, though, is that I'm able to make the best of both methods- to still be able to confidently act without veering off into obstinancy, egoism, or unquestioning, unimaginative imitation. 

It is also humbling to think that for all my exaltation of language and writing, I have essentially grokked myself into this place. That all the words here, and elsewhere, are for the most part shallower (in both senses of the word) derivatives than the basic datatypes that I insisted they be. I suspect though that this is just another phase and I will change again and then find ways to undermine all that I believe is true now.  Until then though, which for currently unknown reasons will come sooner or later, I will try to be me- whoever that is.