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a profound need to escape

2024-09-04

3 minute read

I've been thinking about what conditions let me thrive. I guess this kicked off with my time off in 2022, and my struggles with finishing things. I've made huge progress with external structures; Lessons have returned massive value, gym classes have seen me grow much stronger, and the "A Voz Limpia" events have helped to actually write and perform poetry.

Things that involve other people seem to help too. Obviously the Teacher/Student dynamic is necessary for a class, but I think the other members of the poetry night and the gym classmates are also encouraging. I'm not going to guess why that is.

why that is

I was thinking earlier about personal writing. Stuff like this journal, or blogs, or articles. It's not something I'm interested in doing for the public eye. I know this journal is public, but I'm not doing it for the public eye. I'm writing this journal to get more comfortable writing, and to practice expressing myself and my ideas. I'm writing it to get better at writing, although honestly I don't know that it's helped. It's helped me express my ideas, even though that's been a little embarrassing. My thoughts all feel so intelligent when I think them, and putting them here displays them in an honest and unflattering light. That's okay.

that's okay

I made a silly mistake at work. It highlighted for me how far I have to go to being a good at programing. I used an Array.reduce function and forgot to provide an empty object for the second argument, and then I never tested my solution before I rolled it out. I struggle to make myself do Test Driven Development; The slow down in starting and the infrastructure required for some of these tests is overwhelming (I have a low tolerance for arbitrary complexity.)

In that last paragraph I went to write "I ought to do Test Driven..." and then I deleted it. In the weekend I talked to someone (can't remember who?) and remembered a quote that I think about often:

I think we’re way too quick to identify ourselves with long-term goals, especially when we’re not in the moment of being tempted. We can say “look, I know how I should really live. I know that I should read those books, and I should not eat the cookies, and I should be less stressed about these things, and I should spend more time with my family—these are things that I know”. And I think the truth is that I do not know any of them. I believe them, and I also believe the opposite. Some of my beliefs are more presentable to other people; so I am more to you if I say, “yeah I know I should spend more time with my kids” than if I say “I have a profound need to escape my kids”. But both of those things are true of me, and I think the violence to the self occurs as long as both are true of you. I think — but this is sort of just me agreeing with Socrates about something — that if you had knowledge, you would not have that conflict. A lot of people have the goal of mastering themselves, which is to say exerting enough violence over themselves to quiet that other voice, because they “know” the other thing. But the truth is the fact that the other voice is there means you don’t know it. The violence over yourself is trying to quiet it when it’s really there. Knowledge would mean that you unanimously and obviously in a very simple way did the thing you thought you should. - Agnes Callard’s Socratic framing of knowledge

that's all for now

I added this in after

I was thinking also this week "what if I was dying? What would I change?" and I thought I would probably read less UX research papers and more poetry. I already read very little UX research, but it's nice to be reminded of what I really care about.

listening to

Lesbians by Alice Longyu Gao

questions