07: Athletic recovery
Hello!
Over the holidays, I thought a lot about this idea, from Jean Yang, about “what recovery looks like for people whose work involves giving their minds, rather than their bodies, a beating.”
Jean compares intensive mental work to being a sports athlete. Athletes aggressively prioritize recovery time just as much as their physical time. If you’re reading, writing, and deep thinking all day, what does recovery look like?
Seeing this question gave me license to be honest with myself about how I like to spend my “recovery time”. I love reading, but it doesn’t help me relax in the evening, because I’ve been processing words all day long. Watching or listening to things doesn’t really help, either. It helps pass the time in a mindless way, but afterwards I feel just as tired as I did before.
What I do find restorative is anything that’s mindless and detail-oriented (ex. making spreadsheets and lists, washing dishes), or highly focused (working out, one-on-one time with friends). And when I thought about this, I realized that games actually fit my criteria quite nicely.
I played a lot of games growing up, but after college, I tried to avoid them, believing games to be unnecessary time sinks. I’ve started playing a lot more as a way to “recover”, and I’ve been feeling pretty good about it. Completing quests gives me that feeling of simple task completion, while immersive worlds and combat help me focus.
That, or I’m deluding myself into playing more video games. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyways, just something to think about! December was a light month, but I came back in 2019 with a much clearer head, and I’m excited to share some of my new writing stuff with you in the coming weeks.
Writing
Posts I’ve written this month.
Seed stage philanthropy: Some reflections on my experiments with personal giving, and the need for “early stage” philanthropy overall
Notes
Notes from this past month have been updated. A few highlights:
Online communities aren't just where a group of people gather online. I think we tend to overlook communities that form around a single person. "Cults of personality" (link)
Language as string theory? Instead of words as “fixed points”, each word hides a much longer tail of hidden associations and synonyms (strings instead of points). Have been trying to visualize this for years… (link)
The credit attribution problem doesn’t yet matter bc there isn’t much financial incentive to claim to be a maintainer. If it ever becomes super lucrative to be a maintainer, in an automated way, everyone is gonna game the hell out of that system. Open question is still whether we’d ever have to seriously worry about a world like that existing: alternative is to avoid automated credit attribution systems altogether and rely on good old-fashioned common sense as to who the core devs are (but then, without automation, will that ever be lucrative?). Basically, credit attribution matters if we’re moving towards systematization, but does/will the desire to systematize ever exist (link)
Writing as a propioceptive fugue state: when you’re really in the zone, you can just look at / physically “feel” the thing that’s in front of you and describe what you see/touch (link)
A positive narrative around the female experience is essentially that everyone is competing for your time/attention: can be viewed as a position of power. I keep coming back to this being a parallel framing for data sovereignty. Consumers are commonly seen as victims, but alternative way of looking at it is that everyone’s vying for your information. This is an excellent position to be in. Companies should be bidding for your attention (link)
Links
Useful articles I’ve read this past month.
Organizational Debt (withoutboats): Fantastic piece about governance and organizational challenges of Rust as it scales. So many good quotes in here. Maybe the best post I’ve read on the challenges of open source maintainership since Nolan Lawson’s piece in 2017.
Representative and Representational Democracy (Wang Shaoguang): A bold essay that challenges how we define “authoritarian” and “democracy” to make the case for China as a representational democracy. Every time I read something like this, I find myself wishing that I could’ve shorted Fukuyama in the 1990s. [For the extra observant reader: it pairs nicely with the “Organizational Debt” post, above.]
Bullshit hunting: Economies of scale in building software (Sebastian Gebski): Short, curmudgeonly take on how economies of scale don’t apply to building software. I wanted this analysis to be like 10x longer, but as a fellow curmudgeon, I'm still happy to see these conversations in the open.
Abundance Begets Abundance—Giving $3000 (16% of My Net Worth) to 6 Causes! (Rhys Lindmark): A remarkably transparent post on how Rhys thinks about personal giving, and making the case for the abundance mindset: give more, because more will happen.
10 years of Being Boring (Marcin Wichary): A 150-page website devoted to one song, “Being Boring”, by the Pet Shop Boys. I have a real weakness for labors of obsession, so this project made me smile. P.S. I recently discovered Marcin’s work, he researches keyboard design! And is writing a book about it. How cool is that.
Books
Relevant books that I’ve read this month.
The Little Prince and Letter to a Hostage (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry): I first read this when I was 8 or so, but back then, I missed out on the political undertones that make this book popular among adults. Re-reading it as an adult, I honestly thought the political aspect was overrated, but I still enjoyed it from a philosophical perspective, especially as a card-carrying absurdist. Unrelated to anything serious (except perhaps love): my favorite part was the relationship between the prince and his flower, described through the eyes of a fox, which was incredibly romantic <3
California’s Utopian Colonies (Robert Hine): A collection of case studies about utopian colonies, mostly from the late 1800s, which is extra fun to read while playing certain Western-themed RPGs. A few takeaways: 1) Colonies were ostensibly organized around ideas, but really they were organized around cult figures; 2) Colonies produced goods, like mini economies, and managed import/export labor; and 3) External hostilities, e.g. the media, could destroy the reputation of a colony, even if unwarranted.