happy holidays
Here's where I'm at at this point in my life:
- I feel like I'm progressing intellectually very rapidly. Since I'm doing this largely alone, this is both isolating and exhilerating. I bore easily.
- I'm feeling fairly secure in myself as a person. I've put a lot of effort into the integration of the parts of myself into a coherent whole lately. I can remember some times where this has been a theme in my life, but also times where I've felt disintegrated and unsure of myself. It's nice to be in the latter state.
- I am feeling somewhat insecure in my future. People are always asking me "what do you want to do?" and I don't know. What I want to do is for people to stop giving me stuff to do so that I can consolidate the threads I've been gathering my whole life into a dissertation. I just want to sit around and work on my dissertation. Is that crazy? Apparently nobody is supposed to be into that.
- Then again, since I keep learning new stuff that seems relevant to what I want to write about, maybe I'm unprepared to do the dissertation work?
- I suppose my biggest concerns are about long term financial or career goals. In the back of my mind I'm hedging on going back into industry. But I'm also feeling myself get less and less cut out for industry. This is supposed to be common for PhD's.
- It's getting harder and harder to be ideological, so it's getting harder and harder to be ideologically motivated. I can't tell if this is due to an appreciation of the complexity of things or just a function of getting older. I wonder what my other sources of motivation are.
- I've been trying a new motivation lately, for fun. I've decided to experiment with lusting for power. This seems like a natural enough motivation for a man in his late twenties. I've generally resisted that motive because I thought it would make me a bad person. But at this point I think I'm a good enough person and I probably wouldn't misuse power as much as a lot of other bastards would. Also, how much harm can I do, really? How much power can you get in a PhD program? It's a mystery.