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∞If happiness is the goal in life, then enlightenment is the path, which is to say that if you understand everything in the universe perfectly, you can always be happy. Predictions and the decisions we make based off predictions define the trajectory of our lives. Complete knowledge lets us make better predictions and hence, enlightenment leads to happiness.
Experience is happiness. For many people, enlightenment isn’t a good experience. So, they’d rather seek other experiences, but without the enlightenment, they will inevitably make some wrong predictions and that will make them sad.
In some ways, if you think about it, then, enlightenment is a goal too because paths and goals are not fundamentally different. Happiness and enlightenment are merely two sides of the coin, different but essential to each other and hence, the same. While not truly accurate, then, you could say that enlightenment is happiness.
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∞A lot of smart people I know like to talk about evolution and to use evolutionary biology as a way to explain human behavior as if it were the only the legitimate authority in such questions. Sure, evolution as a theory is fantastic and well-reasoned. But culture, which we don’t understand as well, plays a far more prominent role in modern life and affects us, as humans living in 2010, far more than evolutionary pressure does. It’s easy to see why these people would prefer evolutionary biology as the framework for answering everyday questions, because it is more concrete, more scientific than our present understanding of the role of culture. But that doesn’t mean anything. We know that we are not simply sex-driven, baby-producing, sperm-spraying machines. We are humans. Richard Dawkins, himself an evolutionary biologist, puts it well.
“The joy of being a conscious human being is that we can rise above our origins. We don’t have to ape the nastiness of nature—we can extract ourselves from it and live by our values.”
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∞Peter Thiel, who I’ve come to admire a lot recently, argues that technological innovation has not come fast enough. Very inspiring stuff.
Peter Thiel: All We Need is a Singularity from TEDx Silicon Valley on Vimeo.
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∞2:06PM is a little Mac app that runs in your status bar and tracks all the music that you’ve been listening to. Once, you have it running, you can open the text file with a neat simple list of music.
2:06PM is an open source project. You can find the code on Gihub. Most of the code is derived directly from the open source GrowlTunes.
How can you help?
Personal Tracking
Not much of personal tracking is done. The only application that I can think of that does this is RescueTime and it only tracks application usage. But there is a lot of data that could be used for very good reasons (privacy is not an issue here because I assume it’s only a single person tracking her/his own behavior). So many things in life can only be changed if you can measure it. And so much of life is spent on a computer. So, we should be doing more personal tracking on the computer. The data ranges from bluetooth devices nearby at any point in time (could be used to figure out who was in your room that day), location (see a map of your path on a particular day), keystrokes (to find out which words you type or which ones you always misspell), cursor data. The examples and uses are endless.
You.app
I put up a page here that gives a sneak peek of what such an app might look like. If you have any ideas for projects related to this, you should contact me. To keep up with this project, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog.
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∞Have seasoned entrepreneurs ever changed the world? Venture capitalists are stupid.
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∞About three-quarters into How We Are Hungry, an anthology of short stories (with a perfect title) by Dave Eggers, I finally figured out why I like Dave Eggers. It took me two months to begin to appreciate You Shall Know Our Velocity. At first, I didn’t like the book, it felt empty and at times, I contemplated dropping it but gradually, I began to love it. I miss it now. I want to read it again.
At the core of most of Eggers’ stories is the search for transcendence, the chasing after a hope that there’s something more to life than there is. As The Post’s review put it (emphasis mine), “true to his book’s title, Eggers has made his task here an exploration of the different ways our behavior is determined by hunger — for intimacy and connection, to be sure, but more generally for any kind of transcendence, however momentary.” As someone who searches for this very same thing, I can relate on a very deep level. But often, his stories seem depressing because they are always about the futility of our efforts in transcending. In all his stories, the characters find it but it’s ephemeral and in a moment, it’s gone. And when it’s over, there’s nothing but meaninglessness. They don’t crash or become clinically depressed, they just return to everyday life with its alarm clocks, bad dinners and awkward social situations. And that’s the way life really is.
My other favorite writers, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer, are different. They write about the same things but they offer a hopeful, almost impossible and probably impossible, alternative. These are visions of long lasting transcendence, something to aspire to and to hope for in all life. Their real lives prove that point, their marriage is the conceptual embodiment of this perfection, all they write about.
Eggers and Krauss+Foer are equally fascinating. Their books make me happy even though the conclusions they reach are so different. I’d rather my life be perfect, like a character in Everything is Illuminated. But the struggle for that perfection (and possible impossibility of it) is something Eggers writes about really well. At least, the people in his books are searching for enlightenment and transcendence even if they only find it for a split second. At least, they are like me!
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∞Watching yourself really helps in understanding how you speak. Reasons I’m a terrible speaker:
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∞The opening chapter of the fictional book The History of Love from the real book The History of Love:
The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.
During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go round with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.
Aside from one exception, almost no record exists of this first language. The exception, on which all knowledge of the subject is based, is a collection of seventy-nine fossil gestures, prints of human hands frozen in midsentence and housed in a small museum in Buenos Aires. One holds the gesture for Sometimes when the rain, another for After all these years, another for Was I wrong to love you? They were found in Morocco in 1903 by an Argentine doctor named Antonio Alberto de Biedma. He was hiking in the High Atlas Mountains when he discovered the cave where the seventy-nine gestures were pressed into the shale. He studied them for years without getting any closer to understanding, until one day, already suffering the fever of the dysentery that would kill him, he suddenly found himself able to decipher the meanings of the delicate motions of fists and fingers trapped in stone. Soon afterwards he was taken to a hospital in Fez, and as he lay dying his hands moved like birds forming a thousand gestures, dormant all those years.
If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.