2/17/26

When I see a really well-written piece of work, I sometimes get a feeling of envy: "Could I have written that? How...?" Today, I came across a really well-written reply to this video. To summarize, it's about "how to be Zen at work" -- the central premise being that by acknowledging our limitations and letting go of things outside of our control, we would actually find greater success. Here's the full text of the comment (credit: Mark Cheetham) pushing back on this messaging:

It’s compelling but this tendency to develop post hoc ‘crack the code’ discoveries after the power laws, sacrifices and imbalances have paid out ignores so much of that which is inevitable And unavoidable about life and trying to reframe it as potential choice . It maybe nice to hear how a mountaineer reaches a summit of a brutal climb then ascribes it to ‘trusting their journey’ and giving up on fear if failure - but when overlooking the missing toe, the dangerous oxygen debt and hospitalisation after the last climb and the local guide who carried all his stuff it risks becoming disingenuous . This starts to feel very close to something akin to spiritualisation of privilege and it starts to undermine the struggle of people still trying to just get to the point of less struggle. To talk about ‘not worrying about that which you can’t control’ is great advice when someone has security, stability and their safety net is also well established - but overlooks the fact they’re likely doing it because it became a habit when they didn’t or has yet to create security.

Should you not have such scaffolding worrying isn’t neurosis it’s your nervous system doing it’s job…ultimately this all has a tendency to make calmness look and sound like a moral superiority when it’s typically just a material advantage.

What seems incredible to me is that this seems written mostly off-the-cuff -- there are grammatical errors throughout -- but the structure and flow are precise, with one idea transitioning smoothly into the next. In particular I like the usage of "power laws" here -- alluding to both the statistical and sociological effects that work against you when you're on the "long tail". 

Power law - Wikipedia

And the sharp metaphor about climbing the mountain -- neither vague nor overexplained. He adds realistic detail as he slips into and out of the metaphor smoothly. And "spiritualization of privilege" sums up so much! As for the opinion itself, it seems well balanced and I agree with it. On one hand he agrees that the Zen advice is well and good for people in any situation: the mountaineer learns to "trust the journey" out of necessity during struggle. On the other hand, it's risky to imply that insecurity and struggle is the result of not being Zen enough -- anxiety is, like he says, "your nervous system doing its job" -- it's a lot easier to be Zen when you're secure. 

If I were to try this myself (rough, not edited): 

You want to swim upstream but you're thrashing against turbulence and struggling to breathe. Yes, you could just learn to swim better, but then not only are you not guaranteed to succeed even if you had the skill and mindset of Michael Phelps, it's actually a lot harder to learn to swim if you're constantly being pulled under. It's normal for your body to panic and thrash. 

It's really wordy and I'm not sure I even have the tools to shorten it, but there it is.  

Some takeaways: If I find myself resorting to vague analogies, question: "Do I really understand this?" If I find myself breaking down the problem using the same neural pathways, challenge myself to consider alternatives. For example, while writing this I was tempted to use the pattern "attributing the cause to X" since it aligns with the way that I normally think about causality, but it was unnecessarily formal. Exploration yields conciseness: by considering a broader scope of alternatives, we allow the idea to breathe and to be expressed in the way it needs to be. Avoid being so afraid to lose detail that you express everything in bit strings -- it's inefficient. 

One further note: If I find myself using the same words over again (like the cliché "good"), ask if I could increase clarity by being more specific, or be more concise by considering alternative ways of thinking. 

https://www.facebook.com/share/14WnxpD5MKM/

We are the same up to diffeomorphism on the shape of life

Do you ever realize something that's so obvious that it doesn't have to be realized, but you realize it anyway? Yesterday I was sitting in traffic getting blinded by the chrome grille of an obscenely large pickup truck. I put on my sunglasses and suddenly I saw: the chrome contained the full reflection of the sun itself! As curved as it is, it's still just a mirror -- you can even see a portion of the sky and clouds around the sun. 

In fact, every glare and glint you see in the daytime off of any continuous surface holds the full image of the sun, however distorted and small. 

I guess I thought there might be some deeper meaning to this. The Platonic Form of the Individual, or something like that...

You often see others in only small portions: you understand abstractly that the glare is "from the sun's light", in the same way that you might empathize with someone because some part of them is like you. But that glare contains the entire form of the sun itself. Every individual is entirely what you are -- all images of the same individual and consciousness -- just warped onto the different circumstances and terroir of life.

Heuristic medicine

I remember a hilarious comment on a TedTalk about breathing saying "I'm even breathing wrong??" I found it to be deep somehow but didn't realize why at the time. 

I was watching this IG reel about reducing the gap between decision and action and immediately felt this instinct to disqualify the advice, thinking about cases where it wouldn't apply. People have any number of reasons they don't act after all... fear, trauma, habits... everyone has their own situation. But was I making excuses? Why?

That's the risk you run consuming this sort of content, I think (particularly as a perfectionist). You miss the whole point: people give you medicine and you refuse because it means admitting that you are sick. But it isn't your fault that you are sick. I don't think the language people use to talk about the "sick" helps either. We blame them for causing their own problems because it helps us believe in a fair world. 

We don't need to self-flagellate. The whole point of self-help isn't to feel anguish for not feeling ready or able to follow this advice nor to feel grief about not having done any of it sooner. 

It's funny because in this case the very sickness often causes us to refuse the medicine. The content could even be about perfectionism and how it has us keeping up illusions and keeps us from living life etc. but this is a painful pill to swallow for a perfectionist given that this is how they might have lived most of their lives.

If I were to suggest anything, content creators should use more compassionate language in serving content. We should think of it in the same way that we think of medicine. Granted it's more holistic (heuristic?) medicine, but we can easily imagine that when the science catches up the whole "doing life" thing won't seem so much like magic and morality and wisdom, but a matter of fact. Morality creeps in when we don't understand something fully. 

This is a lot like the issue of crime. We see criminality as this moral thing and demonize criminals, but as we understand it more scientifically, that it's more like an epidemic, we are somewhat unintentionally realizing that a kind of rational empathy makes far more sense. Even on the individual level we are moved to think of criminals as simply those who are sick and need our care.

I think there will always be that instinct to distance ourselves from the "sick", as we have with lepers and the disabled. Whether it reminds us of our own frailty or it's about guilt, it's uncomfortable. 

But I think as we understand more, we will raise up our level of consciousness. So there is reason to hope. Life, as we know it now, will not seem as complicated. Maybe we will look back on these attempts to explore and share our inner lives the same way we see leeches and acupuncture and herbs -- some things worked, some didn't, but we did our best with what we knew. 

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.