First things first, Pi Day was over a month ago and although I am all for team Pi in the long running Pi Vs Tau battle, I have never taken a pledge of loyalty. So, there you go, I am team Pi.
I was, I am and I always will be Team Pi. Tau can go half itself.
—Harivinay, Team Pi
Now that that’s out of the way, greetings to whoever on the interwebs is reading this. Hope you are doing alright. Its been a while since I wrote something here. I see that is the case when ever I decide to write here. But, this time I had a legit reason. I was writing my thesis. The extraordinarily long awaited accomplishment is finally achieved. I graduated from my master’s program. I always knew I would graduate, but I never knew when. Ah… the uncertainty.
** Laughs in Heisenberg**
I am now looking for a job. But not just any job, I have a few very specific things in mind. But, at this moment, with the pandemic, the progress on that front has been slow. Interestingly, one thing I have noticed with being particular about things (which is just a fancy way of saying I know what I like) makes people annoyed and sometimes slightly angry. I am still testing my hypotheses on why that is. But my bet is on that they are unaware of what they like. More data and testing needed on that. Anyway, in the mean time, I am just learning new things frequently with MOOCs, youtube and plain old reading.
Lately, I have had a few things on my mind. One of the major things is how fragile the world’s infrastructure is when it comes to a global catastrophe and how vulnerable our species is as a result of that. When you think about it seriously for an extended period, you realize that the world is a complex, convoluted, beautiful, unique meta-organism. And the future of it depends on the decisions of divided, selfish, greedy, uninformed and misinformed world governments. This may come across as cynical or pessimistic and may be it is, but these decisions have long lasting consequences. I have seen small groups of highly motivated individuals achieving incredible feats in many pursuits of the human species. I am wondering why this can’t be extended to a larger scale. I hope to atleast make peace with these thoughts internally. As far as the real world goes, I don’t know what to do. I hope to inform and educate myself on this front. If I have a potential solution or improvements, I will definitely put it out there.
The other types of ‘decisions’ on my mind are the ones you make for yourself in the short term. I make my short term decision for 3 months at a time. At least for the past 5 years I have and I find it very efficient. It is usually based on what my goals for that year is. I might say I live my life quarter year at a time. For those who get it, sorry! You get a chance to include a corny fast and the furious reference anywhere… you do it. I did the same in 2020 and I am still doing the same for this year and will probably continue for the foreseeable future. The system just might evolve and get more efficient. But, I encountered a bug in the system last year. I made one bad decision and I lost all confidence in my decisions and started to question every decision I had made. I did not see that coming. This happened in october and I had already made the decisions for the rest of the year. For a while there, I felt like I was standing on thin ice every turn.
Costly as it was, it only added a very bad year that was 2020. I had to relearn how to trust myself and this was one of the biggest lessons from 2020. This was probably the first time that I had to deal with a problem as unique as this and I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that this problem would persist if It didn’t go addressed and I had to deal with it. So, I went to work, broke down the problem into small pieces, started with the smallest things and started taking control where ever I could. I was working on my thesis for my academics at this time. So, my decisions would surely reflect in my work. The scrutiny and the quest to find a solution continued for about 45 days for every day. In late november, I finally reached some clarity as the decisions I had made and had been making started to give me the results I was looking for. And I knew that In about a month I would be equipped to set my goals and make my decisions for 2021. I write this here as a note to my future self, that all one needs to do in a situation like this is stay hydrated, keep a calm mind and work the problem and let the rational part of your brain take over.
Talking about the brain, I have been wondering about another thing for a while… my busy thoughts. Its nothing new, I am sure everyone has busy thoughts like fast moving traffic. I am thinking about this because, they can occur in many different states and forms and you never have enough time to process them. Sometimes I write them down on paper and sometimes on the phone. These thoughts have chance to be processed. But not all thoughts get recorded and given a chance to be addressed. And not all thoughts can be remembered long enough to address them later. Some thoughts are recurring, some are new and some are just bizarre, but all thoughts get acknowledged in the moment. I am currently looking for a framework or techniques to efficiently respond to at least a good portion of my thoughts. Although there is no agreed upon number for thoughts per day in an average human, the latest research puts it in the neighborhood of 6000/day. Now, a good portion of 6000 is still undetermined. I will pursue this as a personal project and see if I can learn something from it. What I look forward for from this experiment is to learn how to respond to my thought effectively and positively. I hope setup a system to efficiently streamline and prioritize them. I see a lot of benefits if this works and the most important being that this will help me see more of what my brain is upto and how relevant my thoughts are in that present space and time. I do not know how much mental effort this will take hopefully less than writing down hundreds or thousands of thoughts per day.
That is all for now. I hope write soon about things I am currently learning/working on.
Happy belated Pi day.
Cheers!