The Path to Devotion
Someone asked me recently what my experience at university has taught me. My first answer was "patience", but the word immediately felt wrong and hollow. Correcting myself, I said that what it had actually taught me was just how much strain I could handle -- like many other experiences, it has taught me how to be miserable. Other lessons it's helped me to learn are that nothing is really about what it's supposed to be about, and that I ultimately stand or fall on my own.
Around the middle of summer, two things dawned on me.
The first was that there was no sense in which I was getting value for money from my experience here; clearly I was paying for something other than the education process, considering that all the most useful and interesting things I learned came from other channels. Through some very helpful conversations with friends, I realized that what I was paying for was a prefabricated structure, and what amounts to a passport: as long as I was "doing something" with myself which was widely held to be a Good Thing, I could avoid the existential terror of having to make my own life up as I went along; as long as I was getting my papers in order, I'd never have to worry about doors being shut to me for arbitrary reasons. Right?
This is, of course, rampantly delusional. My own experiences over the past year or two, and those which others have recounted to me, have convinced me that all social barriers are in some sense illusory, and 80% of getting through a door is just acting as if you obviously belong on the other side of it. (The other 20% is avoiding tripwires.) There are many things we pay for because they streamline the process of getting there -- because they save us the risks and challenges of infiltration. For someone like me, a university education felt like one of those things.
Except that it's a trick: the arbitrariness doesn't stop once you have your papers in order. In Soviet Russia, paper orders you. Having stepped back and looked quasi-objectively at my value system, my best model of how things work, and my ambitions, it's hard to answer this very simple question: where might this process get me that wouldn't involve more of the things I hate about the process itself? Who, in the final analysis, do I need to impress?
All the people whose respect or assistance I might crave value demonstration above all else: you either show that you know what you're talking about or you don't; your prototype either works or it doesn't; your predictions come true or they don't; you do what you say you will or you don't. My People love nothing more than sharing their joy in creative activities that get them jacked, and most of them are so deprived of that experience on a day to day basis that they'll overlook a lot to get it. This too, I have tested and demonstrated to my satisfaction.
The second light that dawned on me was that reality itself had become a problem for me. I'm cursed with three traits: sensitivity to disconnects and conflicts, a proclivity to look at where a process is going and jump ahead, and the obsessive-compulsive need to reckon things thoroughly. When I try to force any of these primal processes into the background for any great length of time, my world starts to come unglued: even mundane things stop working, vibrations of doubt begin to propagate through my web of knowledge, and my behavior becomes erratic. Sorting out the resultant tangle to re-establish stability is something I've learned to be good at, but that takes considerable time and energy, and unfortunately "making sure I stay sane" is not an acceptable reason for handing in an assignment late.
Very little of what goes on in a university is real in any meaningful sense of that term -- yea, even in a physics program. You get to do a cool little experiment now and then, but only for pedagogical purposes; mostly you get trained to think about physical problems the way your professor thinks that he thinks about them, though often he really does no such thing, and never mind how the best physicists think about them. Reality isn't introduced until fourth year, and then touched on only lightly.
As games go this is one I can play, but the question is whether it's worth the candle. I've also demonstrated to myself that I learn little from lectures and much from hours alone with books & pen & paper, and that if anything I find the methods I'm expected to use confusing at least as often as clarifying. The disconnect that drove me screaming out of the computer science department and into the neuroscience one, and then out of there and into mathematical physics, is everywhere: I see how beautiful it can be, and then how awkward it actually is, and feel driven to fix that. Unfortunately, this is not part of the script I'm supposed to be following. Undergrad studies is not a place for improv.
Being both extremely strong willed and extremely sensitive is a strange combination, possessed by only a handful of people I've ever met, all of whom have struggled -- and still do struggle -- in their own idiom, with the same problems I do. None of them have really figured it out in a way they've been able to explain, so even amid the sense of camaraderie we're still in some sense all toiling away on our own. I can't shake the sense that there's some common assumption which, when dumped, would at least open up the problem to novel approaches. With all of the above in mind, I'd like to give my best shot at moving the pile: I'm willing to turn my life into an experiment, documented publicly. I need to see for myself how far I'm capable of getting by making my own rules.
I'm not an idealist about this: I expect it will be like moving from hell to purgatory. Often you don't know how much damage you're doing to yourself until you stop, and then holy fuck does it ever hurt. Pain doesn't stop me; never has. What scares the shit out of me is numbness -- of becoming so disconnected from my body as to lose cohesion with it. It has recently been brought to my attention just how far out in that direction I'd managed to get. I know deep in my bones that nothing is worth this -- no curiosity, no promise, no ideal.
All this verbiage is just an attempt to articulate something words inevitably fail to convey. There's something more important being triggered here than any ideas I might have about what I'm supposed to be doing: this is pure survival instinct, a felt sense which has literally saved my life in the past, and which has more than once been the last remaining thing I could trust when all else failed. We've got a history that I'm not about to betray.
Q related an allegory to me whose gist was that disobeying standard protocols that are there to reduce risk means that they can't protect you anymore. Once you're in uncharted waters you live or die by your wits. Having mulled this over thoroughly, the counterpoint has made itself known: when the protocols were designed for someone whose ends and constitution are not quite totally unlike yours, it actually can be more dangerous to stick to them. One needs principles by which to reckon, but the ones I need were not made by the people who think they're helping me. They were made by people who needed to survive under uncertainty, whose external feedback came in a much more immediate form -- from entities more akin to forces of nature than personal presences -- and who were playing with everything on the table.
Ultimately this is not about surviving; that one I've had covered for years. What it's about is much more important: living. Being not just a person, or even a human, but a man, in the oldest sense of that word -- living by the cooperation of mind and hand. It can be done because it has been done, and I can do it because I've *been* doing it. This feels, weirdly, more like the consummation of an intention never explicitly stated before which has been guiding my actions up to now, than like a major change of direction. Like signing a contract I've spent the past three years drawing up, witnessed by a perfectly uncaring God.
It will require a level of honesty never before forced on me. It will require decisions harder than any I've had to make. In this way of life, every delusion is a liability. Urgency is the first delusion to go: I have time, and a good thing too because I'm going to need a lot of it. The second is rugged individualism: I will need to help and be helped. The third is intellectualism: nobody can think their way out of a wet paper bag -- knowing is about doing, and your body knows more than your rational faculties can fathom. Doubtless, there will be more to come.
Around the middle of summer, two things dawned on me.
The first was that there was no sense in which I was getting value for money from my experience here; clearly I was paying for something other than the education process, considering that all the most useful and interesting things I learned came from other channels. Through some very helpful conversations with friends, I realized that what I was paying for was a prefabricated structure, and what amounts to a passport: as long as I was "doing something" with myself which was widely held to be a Good Thing, I could avoid the existential terror of having to make my own life up as I went along; as long as I was getting my papers in order, I'd never have to worry about doors being shut to me for arbitrary reasons. Right?
This is, of course, rampantly delusional. My own experiences over the past year or two, and those which others have recounted to me, have convinced me that all social barriers are in some sense illusory, and 80% of getting through a door is just acting as if you obviously belong on the other side of it. (The other 20% is avoiding tripwires.) There are many things we pay for because they streamline the process of getting there -- because they save us the risks and challenges of infiltration. For someone like me, a university education felt like one of those things.
Except that it's a trick: the arbitrariness doesn't stop once you have your papers in order. In Soviet Russia, paper orders you. Having stepped back and looked quasi-objectively at my value system, my best model of how things work, and my ambitions, it's hard to answer this very simple question: where might this process get me that wouldn't involve more of the things I hate about the process itself? Who, in the final analysis, do I need to impress?
All the people whose respect or assistance I might crave value demonstration above all else: you either show that you know what you're talking about or you don't; your prototype either works or it doesn't; your predictions come true or they don't; you do what you say you will or you don't. My People love nothing more than sharing their joy in creative activities that get them jacked, and most of them are so deprived of that experience on a day to day basis that they'll overlook a lot to get it. This too, I have tested and demonstrated to my satisfaction.
The second light that dawned on me was that reality itself had become a problem for me. I'm cursed with three traits: sensitivity to disconnects and conflicts, a proclivity to look at where a process is going and jump ahead, and the obsessive-compulsive need to reckon things thoroughly. When I try to force any of these primal processes into the background for any great length of time, my world starts to come unglued: even mundane things stop working, vibrations of doubt begin to propagate through my web of knowledge, and my behavior becomes erratic. Sorting out the resultant tangle to re-establish stability is something I've learned to be good at, but that takes considerable time and energy, and unfortunately "making sure I stay sane" is not an acceptable reason for handing in an assignment late.
Very little of what goes on in a university is real in any meaningful sense of that term -- yea, even in a physics program. You get to do a cool little experiment now and then, but only for pedagogical purposes; mostly you get trained to think about physical problems the way your professor thinks that he thinks about them, though often he really does no such thing, and never mind how the best physicists think about them. Reality isn't introduced until fourth year, and then touched on only lightly.
As games go this is one I can play, but the question is whether it's worth the candle. I've also demonstrated to myself that I learn little from lectures and much from hours alone with books & pen & paper, and that if anything I find the methods I'm expected to use confusing at least as often as clarifying. The disconnect that drove me screaming out of the computer science department and into the neuroscience one, and then out of there and into mathematical physics, is everywhere: I see how beautiful it can be, and then how awkward it actually is, and feel driven to fix that. Unfortunately, this is not part of the script I'm supposed to be following. Undergrad studies is not a place for improv.
Being both extremely strong willed and extremely sensitive is a strange combination, possessed by only a handful of people I've ever met, all of whom have struggled -- and still do struggle -- in their own idiom, with the same problems I do. None of them have really figured it out in a way they've been able to explain, so even amid the sense of camaraderie we're still in some sense all toiling away on our own. I can't shake the sense that there's some common assumption which, when dumped, would at least open up the problem to novel approaches. With all of the above in mind, I'd like to give my best shot at moving the pile: I'm willing to turn my life into an experiment, documented publicly. I need to see for myself how far I'm capable of getting by making my own rules.
I'm not an idealist about this: I expect it will be like moving from hell to purgatory. Often you don't know how much damage you're doing to yourself until you stop, and then holy fuck does it ever hurt. Pain doesn't stop me; never has. What scares the shit out of me is numbness -- of becoming so disconnected from my body as to lose cohesion with it. It has recently been brought to my attention just how far out in that direction I'd managed to get. I know deep in my bones that nothing is worth this -- no curiosity, no promise, no ideal.
All this verbiage is just an attempt to articulate something words inevitably fail to convey. There's something more important being triggered here than any ideas I might have about what I'm supposed to be doing: this is pure survival instinct, a felt sense which has literally saved my life in the past, and which has more than once been the last remaining thing I could trust when all else failed. We've got a history that I'm not about to betray.
Q related an allegory to me whose gist was that disobeying standard protocols that are there to reduce risk means that they can't protect you anymore. Once you're in uncharted waters you live or die by your wits. Having mulled this over thoroughly, the counterpoint has made itself known: when the protocols were designed for someone whose ends and constitution are not quite totally unlike yours, it actually can be more dangerous to stick to them. One needs principles by which to reckon, but the ones I need were not made by the people who think they're helping me. They were made by people who needed to survive under uncertainty, whose external feedback came in a much more immediate form -- from entities more akin to forces of nature than personal presences -- and who were playing with everything on the table.
Ultimately this is not about surviving; that one I've had covered for years. What it's about is much more important: living. Being not just a person, or even a human, but a man, in the oldest sense of that word -- living by the cooperation of mind and hand. It can be done because it has been done, and I can do it because I've *been* doing it. This feels, weirdly, more like the consummation of an intention never explicitly stated before which has been guiding my actions up to now, than like a major change of direction. Like signing a contract I've spent the past three years drawing up, witnessed by a perfectly uncaring God.
It will require a level of honesty never before forced on me. It will require decisions harder than any I've had to make. In this way of life, every delusion is a liability. Urgency is the first delusion to go: I have time, and a good thing too because I'm going to need a lot of it. The second is rugged individualism: I will need to help and be helped. The third is intellectualism: nobody can think their way out of a wet paper bag -- knowing is about doing, and your body knows more than your rational faculties can fathom. Doubtless, there will be more to come.