Jan 2026

Somehow I'm always surprised that travel so consistently forces you to re-think and experience in first principles. Being snowed in, having plans and flights cancelled repeatedly, trying to manage classwork and (mostly self-imposed) social expectations with compounding sleep debt... fighting bitterness and depression resurfacing over petty comparisons, past mistakes, lost time... but having the space and time to work through it all and come out happier. It reminds me a lot of the winter youth retreats from years ago: the cold and the discomfort that seemed to contribute to the emotional purge I'd experience at the revival sermons, the afterglow that lasted all of two days when I got back. It turns out those two days were the actual vacation. 

Shoveled friend's driveway for fun. Vacation never feels like vacation unless I do some work... 

There's always this turbulence between a nihilistic "life is meaningless and painful, so why do anything" and existentialist "life is meaningless but joyful, make meaning of it". I think it's that both are valid at different times. You can reframe pain all you want but there is no escaping it in that moment. Avoiding it dulls your capability to live, drags things out. Being stuck in your head prevents you from engaging with, experiencing, remembering the external world, but that struggle is necessary sometimes. You have to fully hold both sides as valid.

I was listening to this podcast today and the author (George Saunders) and Dua Lipa reflected on the absurd nature of death, and how he himself, despite struggling and failing to find peace with death in any consistent way, finds that it lends force to art -- the impermanence of those "sacramental" moments where through art, we become something more than our mundane selves, something more pure. Actually, I'd like to pass this idea to the limit and say that we die every second we are alive, each such "mundane" moment holding the same beauty. It's just that sometimes we are allowed (allow ourselves?) to bask in it when awareness aligns with the moment in a kind of flow state. 

Deleting

I hoard notes. I can't seem to let them go the same way I can't seem to let the past go. I don't want to forget since I don't trust my memory. But it seems the more I try to hold the more things slip through, the more I forget. Sometimes I wonder if my past prevents me from living in the present. 

Many times I've thought that the only reason I didn't end myself is because I'd leave all these notes behind, baring all my embarrassing and personal thoughts. It's a stupid reason, so tonight I decided to eliminate that. I gave a cursory look through some of my notes -- mostly rubbish, but some approached honesty, feeling. There were a couple interesting ideas I thought to save, write-ups I wouldn't be too ashamed of leaving behind. 

So much of my notes were about how to do things better, how to improve, lessons I'd learn, things I had to do and learn. A few reflected pain and anguish. Some were impressive, the way I could contrive thought without knowing a whole lot. It felt pretty human and insignificant, to be honest. If I were capable of regretting right now, I'd say I'd regret not feeling, experiencing, instead of thinking more. I wish I had been at a point I could be more honest with myself. But I guess I've never been a good writer. 

More surprisingly I found that I didn't find a lot of things embarrassing. A few things still were, but I felt more than just cringe. It really felt kind of familiar and distant at the same time. I didn't really care for his past struggles... but I suppose he was not speaking to me. Humans are humans, I feel that now. I can't really judge. Even the most embarrassing parts of myself, stupid things that I wouldn't tell anyone, things that still make me cringe at first glance, I think twice. I now know better than to judge myself, judge others. So maybe it was that, or maybe it was just not caring. 

One particular entry from NYE 2020 was rough. It was titled "I am shit", and it was this text exchange, or more of a tirade on my end, about me realizing how worthless I was. About me having convoluted everything, and it's clear to me now, because I was so incapable of dealing with emotion in myself and others. It's embarrassing but I accept it. I just feel bad that my partner then had to deal with that.

I think the entries that were hardest to delete were my rants on whatever relationship issue I was dealing with at the time. Things with feeling. I don't know if it was the right move... but it feels like a form of death. I remember reading this thing, that even if you remember it's not the real thing, a facsimile, a projection of your current self. But I feel like I remember that past self quite well. It wasn't that long ago.

But it's likely that I won't remember anything now. The idiosyncrasies that stay with me from those times, I won't be able to trace. If I meet them, what reference will I have with them? I'm no longer that person, even moreso now. But maybe that's exactly the thing I have to do. 

Future

It's a well known question: if all we know and are is *now*, what sense is there in preparing for the future?

In the late 1960s, a study was conducted in Stanford where a child was seated at a table with a marshmallow placed in front of them. The child could eat it now or wait until the researcher returned, at which point they would get a second marshmallow. These children were tracked throughout their adult lives, and those who were able to delay gratification tended to have "better" life outcomes -- better paying jobs, better health, etc. 

Some people moralize delay of gratification, talk highly of discipline and grit. Not everyone feels so strongly about it but I'm sure most agree future-thinking is better than living hedonistically or impulsively -- that it's far better to wait for the second marshmallow.

I question that, though. Only the present moment is certain -- and even if we model the future, the further out it gets the more uncertain it is. And a marshmallow in hand is worth two in the bush, no?

There is no real benefit to assigning a hierarchy to different parts of the brain -- the so-called "monkey brain" and the frontal lobe are all part of a singular reinforcement learning agent that seeks reward. For some, two marshmallows doesn't mean double the happiness and they'd rather have a certain marshmallow now. For others, maybe the waiting itself is the reward, as the promise of two is worth it. Or perhaps the reward is the the feeling that you're following the rules, that you're taking the "smarter" path, being a good boy like your parents taught you, or even avoiding punishment by doing the "right" thing. Maybe you even get to feel better than those undisciplined, uneducated folk who just can't wait. 

As it turns out, the latter is closer to the truth. Later replications of the marshmallow study found that family environment and socioeconomic status explained much of the difference in life outcomes. In other words, people who wait for two marshmallows do so mostly because their parents told them to. Then they grow up and tell their kids the same thing, that two is better than one, which conditions their kids to reward themselves while waiting for that marshmallow ("I'm a good kid"/"I'll get hit if I..."/"I'm better than them"), and hence the two-marshmallow faith self-perpetuates. 

Loneliness

There's a kind of loneliness that goes deeper than physical loneliness, emotional loneliness. It's the realization that no matter how close you are with someone, at the end of the day it is only your conscious experience that you have. It is the solipsistic reality that you only presume what others think and feel, *that* others think and feel. It's what I describe as the realization that you are an island in a dense, eternal fog, and there's no real evidence that there are other islands in the sea, only currents to suggest so. 

Even if they do, you communicate through such channels already so narrow and further hampered by societal, cultural, or emotional barriers. 

It's a feeling I want to investigate further. I don't think it's necessarily a bad feeling, this loneliness. I think that maybe it's not necessarily the stripping away of the physical, mental, emotional frameworks of our everyday life that gives it this "lonely" flavor -- in fact I think this ought to be liberating. Maybe it's the holding onto that last frame of "concept of self" -- the ego. If we rid ourselves of this, then what is left but simply a collection of experiences and memories? What is there to *be* lonely?

Moderation

Centenarians often say their secret to longevity is "everything in moderation". But moderation means different things to different people. What is moderation, in a lifestyle where excess is normalized? Too much sugar, meat, caffeine, too much sitting, too much stress, loneliness, and too little sleep... Not to mention our baseline exposure to substances we are slowly learning are poisons: PFAs, xenoestrogens, and more recently microplastics. Our bodies no longer understand "moderation" as it once was known -- it is now considered normal to live out the end of our lives in poor health and isolation.

It is amazing to me that in 16th century Europe, sugar cost more than gold per ounce. It was sold by apothecaries and praised for its medicinal properties: energizing the body, curing melancholy, warding off disease... makes it sound like a drug.

What is the "optimal" use of rote learning in studying (pure) math?

I feel like I wrote a decent answer to the above-titled MSE question so I'm pasting it here. 

How do you solve a jigsaw puzzle? Do you take each piece and try to figure out exactly where it must go first, piece by piece? Or do you start sorting a bunch of pieces by color, texture, until the images start clicking into place? How much of both?

Like puzzle pieces, mathematical concepts gain clarity in context -- e.g. an isolated dark spot on a puzzle piece may be identified as a roof tile only when gathered with other "roof pieces". Or maybe you could have added it with the "skyline pieces" instead. In the same way, there is often more than one way to "understand" a mathematical concept, and each way admits a different set of relations to other concepts. Look up any "intuition" question on MSE and you'll see this at play in the various answers given. It follows that if you are struggling with a particular proof or concept, it's sometimes better to cast your net wide and focus on expanding your context -- that is to say, memorize and move on.

You will find people giving similar advice when reading papers -- skim first, several times if you need to, then drill down as needed. Unfortunately, I don't have anything more specific that can apply to a general case as it even depends on how something is meant to be read, and how well it is written. The best expositors (Halmos comes to mind) mitigate the need for jumping around to some extent and try to keep things linear, but there are still lots of variables like writing style, learning style, and compatibility of background knowledge which make it difficult to give a general solution. The best thing to do, like others have mentioned, is to do the exercises to constantly evaluate your understanding and see where you might need to drill down a bit.

9/19/2025

But all at once I felt like a stone realizing its stone-nature. There is no transcendence to the stone, there is no mind or soul or higher calling. But we humans, unlike stones, possess an incredible ability to acknowledge our own limitations in our own limited minds. A cruel joke, that this doesn't afford us access to any higher plane of experience than a stone's. On the other hand the stone's experience is unadulterated by self-reference, pure and essential. It is better to be the stone. 

There's a sense of disillusionment watching people who are supposedly in love with each other casually hurt each other with their words, and in return, watching those who receive that hurt shrug it off just as casually as if it were nothing. It's the emotional analogue of that sense of disgust and violation you feel watching people do bodily violence to each other callously -- the realization that your body is not sacred or protected, that you're really just flesh. 

It felt like some bubble bursting around me. I, like everyone else, have always felt the need for something sacred in this world. I, like everyone else, possess a void, a void I wanted to fill by striving for something higher, transcendent, without really knowing what that meant. 

It wasn't always Love I sought to fill that void, though. At first it was God. It occurs to me that I have been fundamentally unhappy since I lost my faith in high school. I had felt an acute sense of loss when that happened. I felt aimless... my grades started slipping dramatically and I no longer felt in control of my life. 

Then I found other things, distractions of the mind: I angrily turned on God, arguing with Christians to satisfy my cognitive dissonance. I chased whatever the philosophical curiosity of the week was with my underdeveloped, under-read mind, believing that I was doing something productive with my time. I continued this in college and took on mathematics, that childhood pressure-cooker-turned-refuge when the fruits of my mother's beatings (I was always quite slow at arithmetic) eventually translated into my teacher's praise for being the "smart kid". 

Now I wonder if it's time to outgrow love. Is seeking to fill a void itself a hopeless endeavor? After all, all we have is that irresistible drive to exist and to reproduce, and its countless derivatives that masquerade as "higher purpose" but smell of human and non-generality -- something Mind resists. 

But someone in me protests, says I'm thinking about love wrong. That seeking for others to fill my void is selfish. Like everyone else, I wanted to be understood deeply. But have I really, really tried understanding another soul? To fill their void? I always felt lonely and strived so hard to become more lovable, the most lovable: the most impressive, the most capable and smartest... yet how often do I see others as lovable, without intellectualizing their flaws? They say that love comes when you stop seeking it and start giving it out.

All that to say: I'm not sure it's worth giving up quite yet. Maybe disillusionment is necessary for coming to terms with reality; this reality that is at once so mundane, so cruel, so flesh-bound... If "transcendence" even exists, whatever form it takes, maybe it is within that reality, made of it.