To be an intelligent, imaginative being, a human, is to be condemned to carry the burden of an ever-increasing weight of What-Ifs. Every decision I make forks into atleast two paths and while I, thankfully, don't have the cognitive capacity to keep a tally of all those possible paths, and their subsequent derivatives, nonetheless there remains this strong sense of missing out, of काश, of a shortcut that could've taken me to the destination (enlightenment? wealth? bliss?) faster than if I keep following the path I'm currently on. Venkat Rao once defined aptitude as how long it takes you to learn something. Probably owing to a residual of pop-Advaitam but I am fairly certain that I'll get there (wherever that is) eventually. My contribution is only limited to choosing the paths of most efficiency.
The ostensible reason for getting on this train of thought is the MA course being offered by University of Silicon Andhra (that name is such a Gult fantasy boy!) that is being taught, among others, by Dr. Mrunalini garu for which Bujjimama had signed up, was encouraging Amma to apply as well, and so I was super tempted to do the same. Fortunately good sense prevailed, thanks primarily to Sravani's measured insistence that I sit on it for a few weeks and make sure it isn't another one of my temporary whims, and I decided to pass this cohort by and consider applying in August; Not before I had a conversation with Mrunalini garu during which I gushed breathlessly in an extended fanboy moment. But for the brief while I considered it, my mind went into a realm of fantasy about all the wonderful things I'd learn, the invigorating conversations, the poetry, the knowledge, the inspiration that would lead me to create an important, powerful cultural artefact. While this is a more dramatic example of that onslaught of feelings, I feel a version of the same whenever I open a new book or sit down to watch a film or even consider the best way to read- do I make notes on the margins, stop and write down in an app like Evernote or Roam (if so, what's the best way to leverage the myriad minor design choices), take notes towards the end to make sure my reading thread isn't broken, or abandon all these considerations and read it for the fun and see what sticks because, hey, isn't that the best way to pursue knowledge- with abandonment and a lack of greed. This literally goes through my mind all the time, as I feel a variant of this goes through yours too, and its exhuasting, boring, and positively detrimental to the exercise- but what exactly is the exercise? What am I trying to optimise?
Marxian sociologists write about the nature of false consciousness- a rather bold claim considering my shallow readings on the internet, so please excuse the hubris temporarily- but is there anything but false consciousness; False consciousness-es all the way down. Having said that, there is also this desperate attempt to look into this space with these infinite nodes and find the set of connections that will create the path of most-efficiency/ least resistance. But again to where? Since I've convinced myself that there is no static, external reward, all these attempts at an increased performance are either attempts at social signaling or to test the limits of possibility. Sometimes, admittedly, they're for the inherent pleasure. That holds true for my upcoming attempt at the Spartan Beast, for an increasing inclination to make more money, to write/ film/ pod. That much is clear. Underlining all those desires is the desire for intense, new experience- to use the debauched vocab of Capitalism, to extract most from life. Naturally, it is extraordinarily hard to optimise when the end goal is so vague. Ever since I heard Prof. Alison Gopnik's superb conversation with Michael Garfield on Complexity, I've been trying to apply the Exploration/ Exploitation framework to my actions and that has slightly improved the way I deal with the tension between instant gratification and longer-term reward. The problem is there doesn't seem to be an optimal solution. Since I don't know what information I have encountered now, or would've encountered had I taken the other path, is going to be useful in the future, a part of me insists that I capture, classify and store everything I come across. However, there is this other notion that scoffs at being such a desperate bore (something I felt powerfully, rather unfairly?, when I heard this episode), and points, rather rationally, at the impossibility of capturing anything more than the tiniest of fraction of not just Assembly Possibles but also Assembly Contingents (for more on this nomenclature, please refer to this Lex Fridman conversation with Lee Cronin). In a sense, rationality, atleast the classical, engineering-style, bounded, won't be of much help here. Yet, it would be foolish, scary, and premature to give up hope and just follow my whims. Not least because that isn't giving me any pleasure or certainty (are they the highest aspirations I'm capable of?) anyway. What is to be done?
In this recent (oh! not-so-recent, I read it quite late then) jaw-droppingly brilliant essay, Venkatesh Rao uses Benjamín Labatut's (who's work I too highly recommend) stunning debut, When We Cease to Understand the World, to launch into an exploration of the nature of acquiring and using knowledge to act in the world, and goes onto convincingly show that the transformation from, to put it crudely, data -> information -> knowledge, i.e., something that is observed in the world to something that can be woven into a larger tapestry to understand higher order causes and emergences to finally something that can be conveniently handled and commodified and invisibilised so that it can be used to act and bring about changes in the world (and the self), is neither easy nor a linear progression nor always desirable or even possible. The successful paths create hard boundaries, the failures, and their unborn children, a sense of longing and melancholy.
I think the sufis and the spiritualists completely bypass (or transcend depending) this formulation because the difficulty (futility?) is obvious. They are able to, the real ones not the pretenders, short-circuit their rational faculty and/ or build such deep intuitions while also supressing their what-is-society-thinking parameters that they get there by some black box magic. For those of us obsessed with both wanting to achieve something incredible but also be witness to it but also do it in a way that society lauds us but also build the necessary vocabulary simulatenously to be able to articulate it, it is a much harder path- Refer in this essay to what Herzog has to say about Psychoanalysis.
The fomo though refuses to abate. I suppose the only way to go about it is to be both the bodhisattva and the carvaka. To be both in the knowing and the abandoning. కాఫ్మన్ పెద్నాన్న చెప్పినట్టు, Enjoy it. అంతకు మించి ఏం పీకలేవ్ for the house always wins.
What to do then? Go back to finishing the half-read book because that's the right thing to do, and it builds discipline etc. or skim through the magazine in search of something new, juicy, succinct? In a sense, you can't go wrong. Or rather, can't go right. Either action will add to that already large complex tree of the universe of all past decisions, and there will be regret irrespective of choice. Ofcourse, there seem to be lesser mistakes and greater ones, and I hope to one day build a mechanism to identify those, but for now it is sufficient to know that a large part of the problem isn't with the things I should've done but with the thinking at a point in time that takes me flying on those seas where the wistful waves roll. It is with both alarm and alacrity that I recognise myself growing middle-aged as I mutter under my breath the banal platitude- Embrace the Moment.
