Aspirations, Anxieties, Restlessness and Braincrack

I’ve had multiple thoughts bouncing around in my head for a while and wanted to get them down on a page, so here it is. This post does not have any central theme. I hope that writing this will help me get a better grasp on some of my internal conflicts.

I. Can't keep up with the things around me

I remember about a year ago I was cycling back home from the supermarket. The final third of the journey is uphill and, feeling more tired than usual, I realised the tires on my bike were completely flat. Battling on for a while longer I started to feel frustrated, the bugs (of which there were particularly many in late summer) hitting my face getting increasingly more annoying. The bike would do that thing where it makes sporadic clicking noises and the exasperating desire to get home was grating on my patience. Everything felt not quite right.

The last few hundred metres are along a clifftop with a beautiful view - there had been a storm the previous winter that toppled many trees, revealing a valley behind the now sparse forest. I looked up, then came hurtling down onto the asphalt a brief moment later, having driven into one of the pothole remnants of the storm.

In that moment it felt like I had been running away from something. Or maybe something was running away from me. Everything around me was going too fast, my thoughts were racing and I couldn’t catch up with them, it had all gotten a bit too much. Hobbling back home with a grazed knee I felt the tears start to appear on my face. I wanted the universe to decelerate, to slow down so I could catch my breath and keep the pace, yet it felt as if the universe looked back at me, gave me the middle finger and sped away.

II. The oscillations of motivation

Sometimes I have bursts of motivation and organisational drive, which usually last anywhere between a week and a few months. These are often followed by burnout, which can present in a variety of ways ranging from feelings of tremendous exhaustion and fatigue to a dull anhedonic apathy. I will struggle to force myself back into the rhythm of things, until some freak event suddenly restores my motivation and I suddenly feel better again. This cycle has happened for about three years now with a strangely predictable consistency.

I *do* think I have improved my motivational consistency overall as I’ve gotten older. I’ve tried to establish what actually works for getting back on track but any concrete answer eludes me. Surrounding myself with hard working/driven/organised people, forcing myself into a reasonable sleep schedule, going on long walks, having deadlines to meet - these have helped… sometimes.

III. Information and acceleration

A growing theme of the Anthropocene is the gradual acceleration of so many things on our planet. There is plenty of writing on this topic out there so I will keep it short and to the point.

In prehistoric times you could only travel as far as your feet (or perhaps a horse) could take you. You were geographically bound by the availability of food, local weather and dependence on your tribe to survive. Information was passed by word of mouth and writing, and thus had both a hard limit on bandwidth and distance of travel.

An isochrone map depicts the area accessible from a point within a certain time threshold. In the 1700s, sailing ships needed at least six weeks to cross the Atlantic, and by 1845 this had been reduced to 14 days through the use of steam-powered ships. Long-distance information transfer was still reliant on written letters but now could be sent practically anywhere in the world given enough time. Below is an isochrone map (travelling from London) from John G. Bartholomew’s “An Atlas of Economic Geography”, 1912, and a modern reproduction from 2016.

One could imagine waves of information emanating out of each point on the map and travelling across the globe, limited by the speed of our fastest locomotives and ships and planes (the first scheduled airmail services began across the world in the 1910s).

In 1848 a telegraph line was laid between Berlin and Frankfurt (the longest in its day), a “hot line” between the King of Prussia and the first German Parliament, taking only an hour to dispatch messages. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866 by the SS Great Eastern. A submarine telegraph cable was connected to India in 1870 and Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in 1872.

Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876; by 1900, there were around 600,000 phones in Bell's telephone system. In 1915 the transcontinental telephone line began operating.

Localised computer networks first became a thing in the late 60’s, The first bulletin board system (the CBBS) was created in 1978, Usenet began in 1980, and by 1997 about 10 million users had free webmail accounts.

What results is not a globe with emanating waves of information but rather one in a constant state of epileptic seizure, white noise of insurmountable bandwidth filling every wire and every frequency range in our atmosphere. An unstoppable incomprehensible cybervomit of news, doomposting, entertainment, media, voices and faces and everything else that flows down the sprawling river delta of our digital network. When you look closely, it is not just white noise, it is vast quantities of ordered information that is continually being born and then dying back out into the entropic disorder of the universe.

You can filter this information, e.g. by means of having a computer with its own identifiable address that politely sends data requests in the forms of orderly packets that navigate across the globe to some server, which sends back other orderly packets which your computer uses to construct some webpage addressed “https://mesityl.substack.com/”, which you as a human can interface with and have the information you requested trickle into your brain at a bandwidth manageable by human standards.

This is all fine and good, and if you put in some effort you can ensure that most of the information filtered through to you is helpful and relevant and interesting. What bothers me is that out there in that digital sea there are limitless quantities of helpful, relevant, interesting things that will remain undiscovered by you, and even if they were the sheer quantity would make them impossible to comprehend. Even disregarding the internet, there are (probably) over 1 million books published every year. So many fields of study, so many fascinating theories, fact and fiction. The next time you go to a library, look around and comprehend the fact that a lot of the books around you will never be read by a human being ever again.

I have to periodically remind myself that my own informational path in life is no more or less significant than any other, but nonetheless it *is* special to me because it is uniquely my own. We are nothing but a bundle of our own experiences.

IV. Turning bad habits into productivity fuel

Robin Hanson recently wrote a post about a paper that essentially says “bad information is processed more thoroughly than good”, and then discusses how we can use this to our advantage. At school I noticed that if, lets say, I came third in a test sat by twenty students, my attention would be selectively diverted at the fact that two others beat me. I would understand on a rational level that I had beaten 17 others, but that knowledge didn’t make me feel any better.

I do not think this is because I am particularly competitive - I never got that much enjoyment out of competitions like academic olympiads or competitive sport - but I do like knowing things and get anxious when others know more, better. I do not feel jealous or callous towards them, but I do feel upset at myself for not having fulfilled my potential, knowing that I could do better.

It is worth pointing out that I do very much procrastinate, waste time, feel lethargic et cetera. I know plenty of people who work harder than me, spend their time more productively, get more done per unit time. These thoughts can build up and nag at me until they cross some threshold and mobilise me into a spurt of high-functioning productivity.

V. Braincrack

The worst part of writing an essay is bringing yourself to start it. In fact, once you get going, it can actually be quite easy-going and fun. Fostering a habit of starting tasks promptly without the need of a deadline to kick you into them is a vital productivity skill. More generally, I find that I sometimes get anxious at the prospect of whole fields of study or skills I could learn because I don’t know much about them and don’t know where to start - the meta-hobby of ‘getting into things’ is something I’d like to work on.

Zefrank made an excellent video about braincrack - I seriously recommend you go watch it right now! Braincrack is also discussed at 41:33 on this episode of Hello Internet. Lets say you have an idea of a thing you want to work on (e.g. you want to write a book, make a video, learn a new language). Over time, if you don’t actually work on that thing, you can start to think about how good that thing will be. Your fantasy can get so carried away that achieving it becomes unrealistic, beginning progress on the thing becomes increasingly more daunting, and whatever you end up achieving will probably end up underwhelming.

Don’t get addicted to braincrack.

I have found that braincrack can become particularly enticing when you are short on time. Let’s say I am studying or have a full-time job for the next three months - that gives me three whole months to become a victim to the braincrack of whatever ideas and projects I hope to work on after I finish my studies or job! Better to get started on those ideas now, even if I can only spend 20 minutes a day on them. 20 minutes a day for 3 months sums up to 30 hours, which is plenty of time for progress to be made. And even if I don’t have any time to spend on some particular project, I try to concentrate my efforts on whatever I am or could be doing right now instead of thinking about what I will or could be doing in the far future.

VI. The academic staircase

Recently I have found myself with the mental image of a staircase, the top of which might represent mathematics, the next step down being computer science and physics, then chemistry and materials sciences, then biological sciences and so on. It is much easier to transition academically down the staircase than back up - for example, if you do an undergraduate in mathematics, you could do graduate work in the field of chemistry or biology quite easily, but not the other way around.

This is partially a result of fields like biology being very compartmentalised (you don’t need to know ecology, or even the general biology of the cell, if you are researching the structure and function of some particular protein) whereas maths has a lot more foundational knowledge and much more interdependence between its subfields.

Somehow the fields at the top of the staircase feel ‘purer’, ‘righter’, ‘harder’, ‘more grandiose’… My passion for a long time has been chemistry, and I know how silly these feelings are, but nonetheless they are there and sometimes they plague me.

VII. Some final thoughts

On occasion I find myself sitting down with a book and unable to concentrate. I have to read the same paragraph three times over because my mind starts to wander halfway into it. I feel an internal white noise, as if my brain is being defrosted in a microwave. What is the best course of action in these situations - are there other tasks that are more conducive to this state of mind that I should be doing instead? Probably. Can I ignore it by virtue of sheer willpower and perseverance? Probably not. Is this some sort of ADHD and/or would medication help? I honestly don’t know.

A lot of the worries and anxieties I get are silly. Puerile fabrications of my mind that, on a rational level, I know are totally baseless and, in theory, easy to fix. Nonetheless there is a rational-emotional disconnect, I know what I feel is nonsensical and I know what I should do about it but my feelings will not yield. As far as I understand this is the sort of thing that cognitive behavioural therapy tries to deal with. I should look into it.

Why is my mind so obsessed with knowing things anyways? I would call myself an existentialist - fundamentally I want to live for the sake of experiencing things and enjoying myself and sharing joy with others and my “purpose” is whatever I make it out to be. None of that is conditional on me optimising my academic performance or feeling guilty or anxious about it. In retrospect, this whole thing can sometimes turn into a bit of a wild goose chase.

Yup. I said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.