Another Refinement

This entry is about feelings and stuff :)

In particular, I don’t intend to give advice, or make moral claims, or any of that. I just wanted to share some thoughts. Given the number of people that read things on my site, I’m practically talking to myself here.

So, everything good in my life, in terms of me increasing my capacity to think, to understand, to do “career stuff,” has been a direct consequence of a significant improvement in my health and functioning. Both mental and physical.

Indeed, I grew up practically sick all the time, either physically or mentally, often both, and it seems that all of my permanent lasting changes in capacity, intellectual or otherwise, have come from a big leap in health.

I failed math in 9th grade and the 10th grade midterm, and, due to either emotional or physical sickness, barely went to school. There was this running gag from some of my teachers at school that I, in fact, went to two schools, as I showed up every other day, or even less often.

One of the changes in my family came about because of my brother, who helped us figure out how exactly to eat healthy.

The increase in physical health was immediate and already a good kickstart, and another improvement this gave to the whole family was, in some sense, a first encounter with a concept called health.

The period between 10th grade and right up to when I was about 20 was the most mentally rough period of my life, and the first improvement in capacity I got was me slowly working out (over a week or so) the first page of Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics.

During the “JEE” period that a lot of Indian kids have, and with my JEE period being especially horrible, I had lost all sense of what understanding even is, and no amount of quantity of thought could do anything about its sheer lack of quality.

Slowly, as time went on, the quality of my thoughts kept increasing, but still, I had to deal with a large amount of fatigue due to my unreasonably chaotic life thus far.

Somehow, modafinil and nicotine and caffeine in varying quantities (sometimes small, sometimes extremely liberal) entered my life.

And to this very day they have still not left my life and still leave a negative impact on my life. I wasn’t consistent at work (for the brief time I did work); my head just didn’t feel right, and so on.

All that being said, I am at the happiest point of my life right now. I met amazing people, worked on machine learning systems for about 4 months, enjoyed the work (well, most of it :)), and made lots of new friends.

After leaving, I have also done math that I am satisfied with (though, of course, one truly never is satisfied) for the time being.

Most of the biggest improvements in my life have come from taking suffering, whether due to external circumstances or due to my own stupidity or ignorance, and stepping away from it and trying to sort of churn out the good stuff, and leave my inner world a little cleaner than when I found it.

Refinements are exponential. All of this is a snowball of betterment. But the momentum of the snowball over a long run is only affected by the permanent amount of mass you add onto it.

That is, capacity via substance use, for me (not a moral judgement, Erdos seemed to enjoy it quite a bit), has almost certainly dried up in every way. At any point, using stimulants for me is like guaranteeing that the future snowball will have less mass, and hopefully the snowball at present will have more. This is already bad; however, these days, it’s not even putting more mass on the present snowball.

I don’t find it emotionally pleasing either. It’s not a reliance that makes me feel good about my own inner capacity, which I surely have.

Thus, we make another refinement. I’ll be back, more sober than I am, whatever it takes. Shit’s gonna be wild! :)