Starting to Run

 Today I started to run again. After a full 6 months of doing pretty much nothing, I finally began to discipline myself. Hence, running. Well, actually I didn't decide to do it myself. As. always external motivations.

For some reason I always react better to things that I consider homework, which mmakes it hard for me to reach above and beyond.  At least, however, I have a PE class which requires me to show up in order to report the exercise that I have done.

So I did it. It wasn't actually very much though. I ran 2 miles on the treadmill over a period of 18 minutes. That is considerably slower than usual, compared to my average last year.

But, as my PE teacher says, the speed wil come with time, pacing is more important. Although my pacing wasn't actually that good either ... oh well.

The horrors of cleaning

 Cleaning is quite annoying. For much of my life, I never needed to clean, because I had a higher tolerance for dirty spaces than the other members of the household. Thus, long before I was motivated enough to get the space clean myself, someone else would do it.

Like everything nice, it didn't last. Eventually, I was pressured into agreeing to do some cleaning. Like all external motivational systems, they did not last. Within a week of when the agreement was first made, my parents got lazy at enforcing the rules, and within another week, they forgot that an arrangement even existed. But still, like my other work, off and on, I would be forced to clean.

And then I realized how annoying cleaning was, and why I was delegated the task in the first place. Repetitive motions and the knowledge that the work was never done. Endless frustration at other people messing up my clean area. It was a nice role reversal, for normally it was me who contaminated the sacred ground.

Along with other reasons, our house is a mess. Seeing other houses is like seeing into a whole different world. Although, I suspect that our household's habit of furious cleaning when guests arrive is shared by other households as well.

When I clean, I feel connected to the past somehow. Forget the ideals of the hunter-gatherers or the proud warriors of the bronze age, the true connection to the tradition that I had was the feeling of cleaning house. 

At least until the ROOMBA stops getting stuck. Then its back to the internet.

Nightly Reminiscences

 I've always had trouble sleeping, but it has been particularly bad lately. Like a lot of my classmates, a full six months without much definite obligations leads to wonky sleep schedule as people sleep later and later into the night. In our household, at least, my parents kept our sleep schedules reasonable, by turning off the internet at around 11:00pm. A couple other people I know had parents who were less strict and also ended up screwing up their sleep schedule. 

There were however a few times they messed up, either by staying up way too late themselves or occasionally forgetting to shut off the internet.

Going to sleep intentionally is quite difficult. One lesson I've learned through years of experience is that the very act of consciously trying to sleep prevents one from falling asleep. Instead, I cycle through thinking about a bunch of unrelated topics and eventually tire enough to finally fall asleep. 

Often this lasts quite long, I don't know exactly how long it takes, but I suspect I spend an average of 90 minutes between turning off the lights and actually falling asleep each night.

Then, when I fall asleep I have dreams. I used to dream about once every month, now I dream every single day, without fail. I don't always remember them, but I know that I had them. It feels like a lot of time passes during that point.

My dad agrees that I am a light sleeper, to the point where I can sleep longer than my siblings and still feel drowsier than them. I have heard conflicting things about dreams, that they are either a product of extremely deep sleep or extremely light sleep. Personally, I believe it is the latter.

Oh and sometimes my brother cries at night. It doesn't wake me, but it extends the time it takes for me to fall asleep.

Work

In the last few days, there has been an external motivation for me to write again. While in the past few posts I have expressed an internal motivation to write, the truth is that most of the real reasons I have written are related to rewards from my parents. This is rather obvious in hindsight, and I have a feeling that I knew about that in my subconscious, but never thought the words "I am playing tricks on myself."

There is social desirability in being self-motivated. Even at the depths of my lack of self-confidence, I still managed to trick myself into thinking I have better character than I actually do. It took my mom and my sister constantly reminding me of the fact that I am being externally rewarded to write, before I realized consciously what the reason was.

It took five seconds to realize, and now I wonder how it took so long. All the pieces were there, I just never put them together. 

Nevertheless, it remains true that I write to remember my ideas, and no matter why I begun, it is still true that I have, and that makes me happy.

The Thousand Year Time Machine

This story is based on the short story: "The Trial of Thomas Jefferson" (https://web.archive.org/web/20161227175444/http://www.davidbarrkirtley.com/thetrialofthomasjeffersonbydavidbarrkirtley.html)

***

One day, you discover a time machine that lets you set the rules for its usage.  It does not allow history to be changed, but is set up to create alternate timelines where the evildoers of history may be punished. According to the time machine, you have the privilege of doing so as a result of being the first to walk upon it in a thousand years.

The time machine must be used to bring evildoers to justice. Your first thought is to define a wrong as something which is considered wrong by society today. Then you realize that there are perhaps a dozen particularly divisive issues which society has not yet come to a consensus on. You linger, perhaps for a bit too long, on the thought of setting the rules to reflect your personal stances on those dozen particular issues, and ultimately decide that that it is quite unlikely that your personal stance on all those issues are all correct. 

Then you think of more abstract rules. Maybe you let the rules change as society changes, reflecting what the majority of society at the time agrees on. You fiddle with the proportion a bit. 

One of your friends calls you. They believe that a much higher percentage of society must agree before an intervention into the past is to be made. They argue that there are times when the minority is indeed correct. They also emote that the time machine should be used sparingly, because ethics is complicated, and that such a powerful tool should therefore be restricted. They beg you to at least require a supermajority, if not unanimity. 

Another one of your friends calls you. They believe that a much lower percentage of society must agree before an intervention into the past is to be made. They argue that people are very different, and that even getting 50% of the population to agree on anything is difficult, because there are more than two stances on any given position, much more for the combination of all the positions. They point out that the time machine should be used as much as possible, because to not do so is to tacitly endorse the crimes of past humans through inaction. They beg you to lower the proportion required to at least the size of the smallest politically cohesive demographic, if not individual people.

A third friend calls you. They believe that the whole idea of societal consensus is nonsense. They point out that the popularity of an idea is unrelated to its veracity. Some bad ideas are popular, some good ideas are unpopular, and letting the multiversal justice system be based on the fluctuations of popularity is a bad idea. They suggest instead to only punish people for not coming up with ethical conclusions that it would be possible for them to come up with. Thus, if for some reason if people in the future thought it was unethical for people to make origami, then they would be unable to punish people in the past, because people in the past would have no way of coming up with that by themselves. They point out that this hypothetical society which hates origami could punish people in the past if you take the suggestions of the second or even the first friend.

The first friend calls you again. They think the third friend's system is too relaxed actually, because it is possible for individual people to come to any number of wild conclusions. They suggest as a compromise that people in the past must allow themselves to be judged by future people for a specific ethical conclusion before people in the future are allowed to judge them. That way, the origami situation could only happen with the consent of people living in the past. 

The third friend calls again to reply. They think that the first friend's compromise still fundamentally relies on the whims of societal consensus far too much. They demand that only people exposed to the arguments that lead to the societal consensus in the first place may be judged by it. Otherwise, they argue, people might be punished for the crime of ignorance.

The first friend hesitantly agrees, but expresses a worry that people will isolate themselves in order to avoid hearing arguments for conclusions which they do not agree with. They suggest that an effort is to be made to make everyone hear the arguments before a vote is taken. They decide that perhaps a smaller proportion of people will be necessary to begin the process of spreading around the arguments for the actual deciding vote. 

Just as the first friend is about to agree, the second friend calls you again. They realize that they are about to be outvoted, and focus in on their demand to remove the restrictions on the use of time travel. They point out that there exists a fundamental trade off between restricting malicious actors and empowering benevolent actors. They argue that in general, people in the future are more moral than people in the past, and therefore that people in the past should try not to restrict the actions of people in the future. They point out that people abusing the time machine in the future can be punished by people even further in the future. They claim that no matter what system of restrictions the other two friends make, they will never be able to overcome that fundamental trade off. They then repeat their confidence in the fact that people in the future will be more moral. 

The first friend casts doubt on whether or not people in the future are actually more moral or not. They point out that even if we in the present are more moral than people in the past, this does not immediately suggest that people in the future will also be more moral. There are no grounds for extending the trend into the future.

The third friend then argues that, even if the second friend is right that people in the future are more moral, it is still a good idea to hedge the bets. There is no way that going all the way to one extreme of the trade off does not have diminishing returns. It is not impossible to tell apart good people from bad people, therefore having no restrictions is a definitely a bad idea. It is still a good idea to have basic restrictions at the very least. 

The first friend suggests a compromise. Revolving around a system with many restrictions initially that can be lifted through sufficient consensus.

The second friend rejects the compromise, on the grounds that the compromise is still a restrictive system.

The third friend also rejects the compromise, on the grounds that the compromise will quickly turn into the second friend's system, because good people and bad people both believe that they are good.

A fourth friend calls you. They disagree, on principle, with the idea of retributive justice. They say that the creators of this time machine were pretty cruel in only allowing it to be used for punishment, and thus for suffering. They are concerned that the other three friends are focused in far too much on punishing the right people, and not realizing the other ways they could be using the time machine for good. They suggest instead to use the time machine to create alternate timelines of bountiful happiness, and thereby slightly increase the amount of pleasure in the multiverse. You politely point out that the time machine was not designed for creating happiness to your fourth friend, and throw them out of your thought experiment.

You hear the other three friends murmur in the background. 

You propose to your friends that whether or not people in the future are actually better can be empirically tested. You point out that because time travel exists, it does not matter how long it takes to make the rules of the time machine, as long as they are made eventually. The people to be punished will still be there. You make it so that the specifics of the rules of time travel can be decided in a thousand years. You also attach a general summary of what the moral positions of current society are. Before you submit your rules, you consult your friends one more time. 

All three friends want the time to be extended past a thousand years. Each of them point out in their own way, that taking your logic to its conclusion, requires delaying as long as possible.

You, however, keep the time at a thousand years. It seems ... right, for some reason you can't quite articulate. Before you submit the rules, you decide add a transcript of the conversation you had with your friends.

The time machine disappears. 

Problems go together

Whatever issues one has are always related. Well, everything is related, but especially problems. I suspect part of the reason I notice this, is that when my mind wanders to thinking about the issues in my life, I am in a headspace where everything else that I dislike about myself comes to my wandering mind. Then the connections begin to form. Perhaps the connection is very tenuous, but nevertheless it is made. In that haze, I think clearly, from a different perspective than the one I use in my everyday life, and sigh, knowing that this will never last, that after I have fallen asleep, I will have forgotten everything, and continue doing exactly what I was doing before, with a vague sense of shame in the background.

I will wonder when I will next think the same thoughts. For the actions which I must reflect on are do not vary much between hazes. I hope that I will not think these thoughts again, that this will be the one conversation with myself I need to finally motivate myself to do something. But I expect the worst.

I know that I have thought the same thoughts before, and wonder what exactly I felt back then. Am I, at this very moment merely following the cycles, the only difference being the time that I have wasted in the mean time. 

All my self-reflection eventually reached this point. At the time when I begun writing this, I had not expected to come back to thinking about my motivation, but it appears that that idea is forever entrenched, for all my problems are related.

It is said that everybody has the same twenty-four hours in a day. How fortunate then, that I have invented time travel, in the depths of my own mind, the clock strikes twelve, and it echoes with the sound of each clock in the past, and each clock in the future.

That which is not written down is easily forgotten. I have not been very active in writing recently, the reasons for this are varied, but are generally due to a combination of the sloth that preys on boredom and force of habit. In that time I had thought of many things, trivial things, true, but interesting to me nonetheless. One thing that repeatedly came up though, was a need to write down interesting ideas. It was still quite difficult to actually work out the effort to begin, but at least I've started now ... by not actually remembering any of the things that I wanted to write down.

My ideas are not original, perhaps no one truly can come up with an original idea. Even this paragraph right here has probably been expressed innumerable times today already. Ideas build on previous ideas, and the amount of ideas that a person from a single background is likely to encounter are very limited. The most unique ideas that a single person may come up with are ideas which synthesize prerequisite ideas from two sources that seldom come together due to quirks in that person's background. 

However, backgrounds have much variation, and thus I have felt much more comfortable in expressing ideas that apply narrowly, to myself and people extremely similar to myself. And yet, even narrow ideas can be expressed broadly, through the power of analogy.

I like the idea that someone I may never meet may come across "my" ideas and pick up a variation upon them that makes sense within their own worldview. I am a mishmash of ideas from many sources, like everyone else, and I no longer feel bad.

The ones who block themselves

Imperfect Circle had always struggled to roll. That was bad. It was the purpose of being a circle to roll. Those who did not roll were unable to move forward, forever Shapelings. Today was yet another practice for the future. The practices always happened, their repetitiveness a particularly cruel metaphor for the journey of which the practices were meant to imitate. There were many times in which Imperfect Circle had wondered what the point of rolling was. Once or twice, Imperfect Circle had even considered being an eternal Shapeling, to throw off all expectations, and consequently, all status. Imperfect Circle had never managed to communicate that. It had always fallen flat. 

And so, to practice Imperfect Circle went. Up and down. Forward and backward. Close to the front, perhaps, but never ever as close as Imperfect Circle desired. To the front was perfection, a select few who transcended all flaw. Fast yet steady, Large but nimble, simultaneously ungrindable and always grinding. Imperfect Circle was aware that those who were further back thought the same of them, but that was obviously untrue. Imperfect Circle once had dreams of rolling ever further into the future, of going farther than ever circle before them. It was a bitter memory, and the reason that Imperfect Circle had lost all of the big dreams that they once had. 

Then, one of the circles in the front fell. There was a sudden tension in the area, as if the spikes of emotion within each circle had leaked out. It wasn't supposed to be like this, the Perfect circles would never fall. But nevertheless, there the circle in the front was, flat on the ground, the only distinguishing feature from a common Shapeling was the grinding of the edge. The other circles in the front passed it by, and Imperfect Circle got a closer look at the edge of the fallen circle. Imperfect Circle saw the hint of an ungrinded edge, and suddenly felt at peace. 

Perhaps, despite all that was different, between the front, the middle, and even the back, none of them were perfect, and perhaps they were all alike. And so the circles rolled, and as they rolled, they grinded, as was the role of a circle.