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Month: October 2023

On Facing Judgment’s Shadow

Picture this.

You’ve written a post that you want to share on social media, or you’ve made a video somehow or another. You’re sitting there on the edge of your chair, just about to click post, but you look at what you’ve written, what you’ve made, you notice that final error, you question yourself, thinking about the manifold ways in which people could be judging you silently and from afar, contemplating in your mind’s eye the dialogues that must be taking place.

“Oh my gosh, this person wrote this?”
“Oh my gosh. Did he really make that grammatical error?”
“Wow, this is boring. Why am I even watching?”
“How could he make such a video?”

And so the thoughts come out, percolate like coffee through filter paper, and eventually crystallize into little gems of self-doubt, blocking the nervous signal that would have caused you to click. You turn away from your plan, and you declare:”Maybe later, but not now.”

Before you know it, the entire project is abandoned.

If you’re anything like me, you may have faced this, this feeling of wanting to do something, but realizing, or at least thinking that you weren’t good enough, that the manifold imperfections that existed in you would come out, and that people would judge you one way or another.

Well, here’s a fact, though. People certainly will judge you. I mean, how could they not? Everyone encounters something as a first glance, thinks about it, and evaluates it on their own terms.

That’s just how it is. The judgment will happen.

There is absolutely nothing that you can do about it, and your feeling certainly is right. The thing is though, that even though it is right, this isn’t a valid reason to run away. Because truly, the only way to get past it is to face your fears, to accept judgements as they come, no matter how people see you. To push forward anyway, knowing that people may not enjoy what you create, and what you decide to make, for a million different reasons, related to who you are, how the thing was written, and their prior experiences with your content and with you as a human being.

This has been tough for me, and in many ways, terrifying, because it feels almost as if every time I publish a piece of content out there, my entire soul is being put on trial from the eyeballs that surround it, that look at it, that question, evaluate, contemplate, and ultimately judge the person that must have created it.

In the sum totality of things, I think it is easy for a person to simply declare that this sort of judgment doesn’t take place, or to understate its impact by simply saying that it doesn’t matter because nobody is watching.

I think, contrary to the way that some influencers present it, that this sort of judgment is very real, and unlike the very same influencers, I don’t believe in denying it. Because whether we like it or not, people do care.

Where I do align, however, with what many popular YouTubers and creators that parrot the idea that people don’t care and you should go forth anyway, is indeed that one should push forward anyway. However, my underlying thesis for why one should move forward on my part is a little different.

I think that we should acknowledge that people may care. And you must acknowledge that people may hate what you create, because that is a real possibility. Denying it totally, I think, cuts out a great part of what makes up reality. Because although it’s true that the vast majority of people on this planet won’t care about what you produce, it’s true that there may be some people out there who just dislike it on balance. And that may be what your heart is afraid of. It’s not that it’s not valid, because it’s a real possibility, and it could be that truly you just fear that outcome.

Certainly you might say that at the end of the day, what you need to do remains the same – you must push forward. And yes, I get it. Even if people do judge you, or if they don’t judge you, neither of those outcomes is really consequential to what you have to do, which is to simply push forward, accepting that somehow or another, what you have to share has value that extends beyond all of those considerations, which ultimately shouldn’t constitute a major part of what motivates you or impedes you from what you choose to do.

But I don’t think that’s a valid reason to just get rid of those fears altogether or say that they don’t exist. Because what you truly need to do and what is truly going to matter is acknowledging these fears and battling them head on. Hitting publish even if you know clearly that people can hate what you’re saying and that they may not enjoy it. Knowing that you are on a quest to make yourself better at expressing yourself, articulating what you are intent on saying, and doing so better and better each time. This is true because I think ignoring people’s perspectives and choosing to go forward just leads to a situation where a person grows stagnant and simply does things for the sake of doing them and does not question meaningfully how to make things better. This is anathema towards growth. And it’s not something that I can abide. Still, to those of us who face those valid fears, there are various choices out there. The first is simply to give in to the possible and real hatred and to choose not to publish. This is something I cannot abide either, because if you choose not to expose yourself in the first place, then people will never see what you’re thinking about, what you’re writing about, what you’re considering, what you’re contemplating in the very first place.

I’ve told myself this a thousand times. To not look at where I am right now, or how I will be judged, because certainly I will be judged. That is a fact – after all, being comfortable with being judged in the very first place, I think, is the very cornerstone of success: One that comes right after being able to establish a habit of creating in the first place, and putting yourself out there on the stage.

Once that stage has come to an end, here we begin to deal with the entire theater of human opinion, ideas, beliefs, wants, and desires. And it is here that we are put to the acid test, which determines how what we create is going to fare. The reality, though, is that whatever judgments people have in this world, shouldn’t be the primary determinant, I think, of why a person does something or chooses not to do something. Because, frankly speaking, the act of self-expression is about, in the very first place, choosing to use your voice for different things that matter to you, that come out in the way that is most natural to you and shouldn’t, therefore, be subjected to the self-editing faculty constantly, at the expense of being able to produce something out there for the world to see, to evaluate, and for yourself to understand what it’s like to actually have your thoughts interact with those of the world.

In many ways, I think that this is part of growing as a person, understanding how to put yourself out there, to understand that even if you should face rejection, that it ultimately is inconsequential, that rather than pining over any rejection, denial, or otherwise, that one should take in the entire world and simply aspire to create something better the next time, continuing to do things not because they are directed towards some sort of extrinsic or imagined idea of success or fame, but rather because it was something that was meaningful and that the person enjoyed in the very first place.

For me, I think that that’s been the hardest part, knowing how to just go out there and just share things without regard, fear, favor, or any of those little inconvenient trinkets of human temptations that could otherwise spoil the broth that is genuine motivation with other elements that don’t ultimately matter. I don’t think that everybody is necessarily suited towards sharing their voice, and I think that in many ways, people learn how to do it through experiences, reflections, and different moments of time in which they grow through different incidents. On my part, I think that it takes a courage to share and that I haven’t fully gotten to that stage just yet for different reasons, but I feel that with each thing written, article published, thought released into the world, that I am moving forward one step at a time.

Work, Life, World.

One of the things I’ve come to really appreciate learning in college is the ability to just work, and work, and work. Sometimes I feel like my work ethic is just unending, and I can continue doing everything that I’m supposed to do, just efficiently and continually, almost like a machine. 

I start, I take breaks specifically for the purpose of making sure that my work efficiency is maintained, then I begin again. The cycle continues, and life proceeds just in that way. 

It’s one of the miracles that has come about, I think, from being trained in an environment where people were constantly working hard, and a place where people would not just work hard, but also have the right motivation, initiative, and desire for it. 

Somehow or another, it influenced me, and rubbed off on me. And before I knew it, I was one of those workaholics out there, just casually pulling long hours without even questioning things, completely by my own volition. 

It sounds bad, but I’ve come to appreciate that part of myself quite a bit. 

It’s one of the many reasons that I respect myself, and appreciate the person that I’ve become. Because it’s become an enduring facet of my personality, and something that I know that I can look to whenever I think about my identity as a person, but at the same time, I think it’s come with at least two different disadvantages. 

The first of these is that when I think about work, I just continue on and on. It takes hold like a vice grip, consuming almost every single aspect of my mind and my thoughts. 

The result? 

I just carry on doing things in the way that I feel most natural. Ignoring different things, socializing, hanging out, spending time with people, messaging…The list goes on, and I don’t know how many different things I’ve missed out on, just because I have this inclination within me that somehow or another just pushes me to carry on going on. 

Both a blessing, yet also a curse in various ways. 

The second of these things is that sometimes I’m inefficient on at least two different dimensions. The first of which is that in the midst of my work, I sometimes find distractions, one after another, that appeal in my life for the simple reason that I have many different things that I want to do, accomplish, and put into play. 

This translates, I think, into moments of distraction or inefficiency, and just generally having to spend more time in certain circumstances on work which may have taken another person less time to do. This is something that I’m continually refining, and something that I hope to get a little better at in the time that I do have. But there’s one more aspect of that, which is perhaps more pernicious and pressing, and that is not knowing what exactly to work for. One thing I’ve learned about time is that work expands to fill the time that you allocate towards it, but at the same time it also shrinks. 

The small and subtle things that a person does while they are working can change the entirety of their schedule, how well they can do things, how efficiently they can do things, whether or not they plan to do certain things. 

Not knowing what to work for is anathema to progress, and oftentimes I think that that is my greatest flaw. 

I find myself thinking about what to do before I get distracted into doing things that I feel are productive but actually are not. I do things that seem as if they are carrying me forward but in reality aren’t truly contributing towards my deeper purposes. It is this that yields wonder sometimes on my part about the direction that things happen to go in, for the simple reason that I had not thought about the direction sufficiently. 

When I look back and evaluate the entire scope of my personality so far in relation to work, I can be thankful for at least a few things. I am thankful now that I see work as a natural expression of personality, inclination, and effort. I am thankful also for the way that it has just expanded over time to include so many different and interesting activities, opportunities to speak to different people, to teach, to learn, and to in part grow and ultimately develop as a person through the expansion of my mind on the basis of the quid pro quo from expanding the minds of others. 

It is something that I deem positive, desirable, and meaningful on multiple different levels. At the same time though, when I think about work, I think that on multiple levels there are things that I can improve. 

There can be parts of myself which I think are addictive in the sense that they continue forward with a single activity with narrow-minded focus. At the same time, there are parts of my personality that do not focus on the right things. 

On the other hand, I can identify at least also a part of my brain that has yet to orient or direct my activities towards the right areas of focus in the very first place. And therefore, without the aim and in the absence of the target, there is no journey and destination. 

In the past year, I’ve learned a lot about how to start projects, to move forward continually, even in an informal sense, and to just push forward unrelentingly with each day. I think that that has carried me in many ways across different projects, across many different plans, but I feel in various ways that it is not enough. 

I look back and evaluate everything thus far, and I’m overcome with a sense of gratitude, because it feels like it had all just come to pass without me thinking too extensively about it, but I see also that the flip side of that is that maybe, because I didn’t think extensively about it, that there’s much more room to grow because there must be a new horizon ahead. 

There always has been, and while it’s not guaranteed that there will continue to be, every time I thought that there was not, I found myself confounded, unable to disconfirm the reality of the new territories that lay ahead. 

As time passes, I know that I will continue to grow. And as that happens, the part of me that seeks out growth will continue to push forward. I can only hope that he will not simply work relentlessly, but also take a moment once in a while to look back, to consider the broader picture, to see the flowers around him, not only in the service of finding out which direction to head in, but sometimes to be at peace with himself as well, and to become comfortable just doing absolutely nothing at all. 

The journey continues.

My cardinal sin

If there is a sin of which I can unreservedly declare my guilt, it is the sin of over-complicating things.

As a thinker, I tend to plan very extensively. I consider different things here and there and everywhere, and this manifests itself very often in just thinking about different factors and considerations that should go into a final plan. At the same time though, this manifests very often in overly complicated content, which in turn highlights another possible problem. 

What if the fundamental problem isn’t actually over-complication, but instead the wrong way of planning, or planning in such a way that it doesn’t serve the goal at the end of the day? 

If one simply were to distill things down to the simplest of all possible elements and in turn just use those things effectively, wouldn’t that create a transformation? 

Wouldn’t that make things significantly easier at the end of the day? 

This is something that I’ve noticed about myself, and it’s something that I would want to resolve in the days ahead. But what I’ve come to recognize and see is that simplicity requires effort. Completion requires work. Shortening requires sacrifice, judgment, and discernment. It’s not something so easy to develop. 

One might say that it’s a talent, but in reality, it’s probably best considered as a skill. One to be honed over many successive days, months, years of practice that go into the development and creation of something that somehow ends up working out.

As with all skills though, it’s not something that one can immediately receive just from having done it one single time. 

Rather, one must do everything to make sure that it is perfect, tailored. 

And although it’s possible to practice for many years, it may be that the person does not reach the destination.

What is required is the correct planning, the correct noticing of inefficiencies, the correct awareness of how to boil down things to their most important elements and to arrange them in order for the benefit of those who will receive it.

There are many things out there that have fostered this reflection, but I see it as my most immediate and prescient area of improvement…

So now to think of a strategy to resolve it.

Automated Speech Recognition

Once in a while, a technology comes along that just completely transforms the way that we think, we live, and we experience the entire world. 

​​Certainly the entire world has been captivated by the rise of AI in recent days – how could it not, when millions of influencers around the world endeavor on a day to day basis to showcase the 500th AI tool that you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO USE on a day to day basis?

Well, I don’t know much about technologies beyond ChatGPT, to be honest, but there is definitely one thing that has come out from it, which is probably the feature that I use the very most out of pretty much everything on the planet, and that is automated speech recognition, specifically, the OpenAI ChatGPT Whisper ASR Recognition System.

Automated speech recognition is how I’m communicating everything here to you. It is how I’m putting down my thoughts, word by word, by simply sitting down next to this open door on a rainy morning, narrating out the story as if I were talking to you. 

The Automated Speech Recognition Algorithm, which is in this case the ChatGPT Whisper app, is transcribing everything that I’m saying with an almost perfect accuracy, but perhaps with some small issues with punctuation that I will fix after the fact. It is incredible, tremendously accurate, and something that I could have never imagined just three to four months ago.

As a result of this technology, as you read, you’re actually listening, in a sense, to what I said on that morning when the air was cool and the rain was falling, it was 7.49am in the morning, and 48 seconds had passed on the clock. 

As I narrated these words then, eventually, the clock turned to 7.50, indicating a shift in time. 

I made a mental note to myself at that time that I would look at the total number of words that had transpired during this time, because it bears a significant meaning, which I would like to elaborate upon. 

Automated speech recognition is wonderful for me. It has done some of the following things:

  1. Dramatically sped up my rate of interactions,
  2. Reduced the strain on my body
  3. Given me extensive practice in public speaking and articulation. 

Let me go into all of these one after another.

Dramatically sped up my rate of interactions.

Every form of communication has its idiosyncrasies, and can be considered a skill in its own right. 

In terms of speed, handwriting is the slowest, clocking in at 12-20 words per minute. 

Typing comes next at around 40-80 words per minute, depending on the typist, with some people going far above that, assuming they’ve had professional training. 

And finally, speaking clocks in at around 130-150 words per minute. 

The clear corollary of all this, I think, is that if a person adopts speaking as their dominant mode of communication, that they will be able to get things done at a much faster rate than they otherwise would be able to by texting or writing to others. In fact, this is the reason why communicating by phone or meeting in person can be so much more efficient relative to just sending out messages and waiting for email conversations to proceed. 

As a user of automated speech recognition technology, I get to take advantage of the fact that I can speak quickly in order to create documents, which in turn helps me to very rapidly think of different things. 

In a sense, I am constantly on my toes and crafting different ways of dealing with problems, for the simple reason that I can now deal with more of them within a smaller amount of time than I used to. 

Rather than taking, say, 5-10 minutes to reply a text message, as I did before, I can now simply speak out the contents of what I want to say to others, very simply and very easily, without really thinking too much about typing down all the words, which itself is a long exercise. 

This has allowed me to take many more opportunities within shorter periods of time, and in turn to try faster and more frequently. This, for me, has been a game-changer in many different ways, and the consequences are something that I have yet to even fully understand, although they will need to be accompanied by developments in planning in the days to come.

Reduced the strain on my body

Texting is physically strenuous. 

It might not initially seem so, but it absolutely is, because whether you’re typing on a computer keyboard or on a phone, what is happening is that you are actuating your fingers and joints to hit keys over and over again for the purpose of communication, which requires you to move your fingers around in such a way that you can create the desired pattern of output on the screen. 

Having said that, these implications alone are far from the only problems that one could associate with texting for long periods of time. Here’s a helpful list created by ChatGPT.

Using automated speech recognition can reduce repetitive strain by reducing the repetitive movements associated with typing and even text claw, which is something that I discovered when I began using these technologies after a long period of time in which I had begun facing finger and wrist pain from texting too much and making use of devices too extensively. 

This has been a game changer for me because I was in so much pain on some days that I found it difficult to type but found it necessary to continue typing anyway. 

Being able to address this problem was truly incredible because it opened up possibilities of communicating without a situation of pain. It’s also worthwhile to note that typing via automated speech recognition allows a person to communicate with better posture and under more relaxed circumstances. Even as we speak right now, I am casually narrating all of this while sitting down on my secret lab chair and leaning back with my feet on the gate in front of me. Just communicating everything that I intend to say in a relatively free manner and dramatically faster than I otherwise would have been able to just a short while ago. This helps to prevent a variety of different problems associated with texting or writing which include text neck which occurs when a person’s neck is hunched over as they look at a device. And also the postural problems associated with maintaining one’s eyes upon a device in an attempt to look at the words that are being produced on a document. I am simply at the moment just holding my phone in my left hand watching the transcription seeing if it is going out properly and everything is just coming out easily. Even right now, for that matter, I am witnessing other benefits such as reduced eye strain. My eyes are closed as I am narrating all of this and it can seem as if I am speaking to myself but that is not exactly the case. Still, what is real though is that I am able to perform this entire task without looking at my phone screen even for a single moment which allows me in turn to go right ahead and just type out everything without fear or favour. It’s also worthwhile to note that this benefit offers significant advantages in accessibility to anyone out there who needs such access. It’s allowing a person to potentially communicate at an extremely quick rate even if they happen to suffer from a disability that would otherwise impede them from performing this type of communication. It’s also worthwhile to note that this allows for multitasking and allows me in turn to do different things and to look around me as well. Positioning my focus between different things rather than just looking at the screen and having my entire attention focus on the process of creating a single document. Which in turn leads into a lower cognitive load overall and in turn into a very natural communicative aspect which is manifested in the words that I am saying at this point in time.

Given me practice in public speaking and articulation.

Using an ASR system is a truly unique experience. 

It’s an experience that involves speaking to a device, which in turn involves thinking about what you’re going to say, thinking about how it’s going to come out, and arguably thinking more intuitively about what a listener on the other side might actually be hearing, feeling, or imagining. 

It’s not a complete substitute for speaking to an actual audience, or to actual people, of course, but the very act of articulating things through speech itself gives a person significant practice in understanding how to develop their manner of speech, the cadences of their voice, the structure of their thoughts, and the rises and falls of emotion along the way. 

This is tremendously good practice, I think, for situations in which a person might, at a later point, communicate via speech particularly as one can do it in a relatively relaxed manner, as I mentioned in the previous few points, while at the same time communicating at a much faster rate than they otherwise would if they were simply to go ahead and type things out. 

This type of practice, affirmed constantly and experimented with over time, is something that has dramatically improved my personal speaking skills. It has made me more articulate, not only because I have had to think about what to write about, and because I do so much more frequently now, but also because it constantly keeps me on my toes, forcing me in various ways to source things from my imagination and my thoughts in order to put them upon the page, which in turn reinforces a continual cycle of thought retrieval, building, structuring, and articulation that leads itself into a reinforcing cycle that develops, or at least I feel has developed, my process of thought formation in many different ways and will continue to be tremendously useful over the course of time for practice purposes, creation purposes, and in turn preparing me to speak on progressively larger stages in the days to come.

Using an ASR system is a very unique experience. It certainly is a brand new technology. But at the same time, it is something that allows a person to engage with his or her human abilities on a level that I have never truly encountered before, and that stands as unique to me within the history of humanity.

Concluding thoughts

I spoke extensively about the ways in which using ChatGPT’s Whisper ASR system has dramatically sped up my rate of interactions, reduced the strain on my body, and given me practice in public speaking and articulation. And I cannot emphasize more that this has been transformative, to say the very least.

 The last time I checked the word count of the piece, and prior to saying these words, it was already above 1,800, and I had started this project at 8am in the morning, which testifies to just how quick it is. I conducted the entire thing without straining my neck in any way, and in fact, in an ergonomically comfortable position, either while sitting down on a chair in a reclined position, or while standing up and just casually carrying my phone around, reducing the possibility of any incidence of text neck, and completely resolving the problem associated with text claw and repetitive strain injuries. 

Along the way, after having experienced both of these incredible benefits, I received some very extensive practice in public speaking and articulation, which admittedly was directed towards this device, but at the same time was also directed towards everyone who was capable of hearing me within a certain range. This in and of itself has been truly incredible, and the process of writing this piece has been a wonderful practice session. If it is not clear to those out there who haven’t used this before, I truly consider this to be a transformative technology, and one that has catalyzed a sea change within my own personal life. 

ChatGPT continues to hold the throne, of course, for technologies that have enabled the possibility of seemingly reasoning, AI systems that are capable of creating outputs that shock us and that, even now, I am continually learning from. In fact, it even houses the technology that has made it possible for me to make use of what I am making use of at the moment, possibly training its systems on the type of communication that I have chosen to initiate. Perhaps OpenAI’s engineers will keep track of this entire speech or conversation that I have initiated and that have in turn released onto their servers, but that for me is not ultimately a matter of concern, because I do believe in the idea that if one’s thoughts are sound and otherwise valuable, that they should be shared with the world anyway. As a matter of individual and collective responsibility, whether these thoughts are, of course, worthwhile, desirable, and may lead to a causal and beneficial impact upon the world, of course, is a matter of contention somehow or another. But one that I believe is being continually refined and created through the development of these technologies themselves. Of course, a person should repose self-awareness in the extent to which they truly are able to contribute, and should not overstate or over-inflate the extent of their capabilities. For what I can say, however, is that it feels a tremendous privilege to live in this day and age, and to be able to make use of something that has had such a profound impact on our ability to interact, to utilise our cognition, and to create in turn. It may seem like something trivial or otherwise small in the grand scheme of things, but this for me has been truly profound, and it is one of the many things that I cite and will continue to cite as my rationale for undertaking a journey of constant self-improvement as I move forward into the future. 

Thank you for reading (or was it listening?) and I will see you in the next piece.

Insomnia

Insomnia is a horrible curse, but it’s one of those reminders out there that sleep is one of those things that we can rightly call a blessing and that ultimately, the greatest things within life come from within and not from without, from the simple acceptance of the struggles around us, rather than just continually trying to force things to happen in the way that we want. Nowhere is this more clearly represented than in the domain of sleep.

The simple act of just closing your eyes and having yourself fall asleep is one of the most beautiful and restorative things in the entire world, and when it’s taken away from you, it reminds you at the end of the day that one of the greatest joys in this world is one that is inbuilt, one that lies within you, one that has the ability to transform you if only you will accept it, rather than challenging it by adulterating it with things like caffeine and other sorts of things out there that disrupt the balance, change the equation, and otherwise impede you from doing what is natural to you.

That the body can rest is something that we assume by default should happen, but in reality it’s one of the greatest luxuries upon the planet yet one of the easiest to corrupt the moment, we allow our minds and our psychologies to take over and to take on the driver’s seat, during which we begin to push ourselves to go for more than what is natural, to push ourselves beyond to do certain things when in reality they are neither needed nor desirable for our ultimate furtherance.

Often we sleep late just because we are worried about those things, about all the different matters that will not be completed if we simply do not fall asleep, yet ironically enough that is one of the very worst things that we can do for our productivity because it causes us to be able to do in 8 hours what normally we might do in 2 or 3, causing the entire balance of the equation to fall.

That is what happened today.

Spent too much time thinking about too many things, drank too many cups of coffee that I shouldn’t have drunk, spent time thinking in bed about how to fall asleep only to end up forgetting all the lessons of all the books that I read about sleep and all the benefits that it could have yielded if only I had simply kept my mind loose and ready rather than attempting to corroborate the story with wakefulness that shouldn’t even be there in the very first place while worrying about things that frankly, I shouldn’t even be worrying about.

In many ways I think that if a person were to step back from things that adulterate and that change the way that life is lived, if we simply stepped away from our own lives and from intervening in them, we would be able to do better, with less stress, with less concern over the course of our own lives.

It is something that I am trying to learn even now, to be able to lie in bed and to fall asleep, to relax, rather than to push myself forward constantly without regard for the consequences or anything else of that nature.

If there is anything good about this bout of insomnia, it is at least that I know that I will try in the morning to cherish sleep a little more, that there will be a bad day because of what happened today, but that at the very least there was a reflection that accompanied it that moved me in a positive direction. I don’t know how far it will move me along the way, but I do know that the course of a person’s thoughts can entirely transform the direction and the path that he or she may take along the way. I don’t know when sleep will come tonight, but I can only pray that it will be soon, and that whatever lessons that I shall learn will come along and be well learned from the strengthening of mind that comes along with the greatest of repose.

Goodnight, friends.

I hope I’ll fall asleep soon!

Advanced Laziness

Today I thought I would talk about a little philosophy that has powered me for the past couple of years.

This is the philosophy of advanced laziness.

It’s the same philosophy that has made me exercise every single day since January 1st of 2019, which makes today’s run Day 1740 of exercise without stopping.

It’s the same philosophy that makes me work hard in many areas and to carry forward doing many of the things that I have been doing without stopping.

It’s a philosophy that seems to bear almost no relation to laziness, and may at the end of the day just be a profound rationalization based upon delusional reasoning.

…But I believe in it.

Let me explain.

I believe that somewhere within a person’s spirit, they have things that they wish to accomplish and would wish to accomplish no matter what the circumstances are. As goal-driven beings, we seek to accomplish or do certain things with our lives, and therefore face an innate wish to strive for these things.

Here are some examples. A person might want to lose weight or to learn an instrument. Maybe they might want to successfully create a business that will sustain them or to sustain a social enterprise that is brought forth on the strength of their personality and many other things along the way.

Maybe some of these things are formed by society or from the people around us, or maybe even random interactions between ourselves and the world.

Nonetheless, their existence remains undeniable fact: To deny them is to pay for a future in which one sits up in bed and ponders why the goal has yet to be achieved, to question every moment that came before, and to recognize that one didn’t manage to pay respects to their inner will, leading to existential crisis, confusion, and a recognition that one should have done better.

It is to eventually return and remember the innate wish and see that it hasn’t been fulfilled in the world, and therefore face doubt, anxiety, and a wish to strive for the goal again.

Advanced laziness is founded upon these premises which may well just be assumptions at the end of the day, but it is founded on the basis of the belief that the most efficient way to strive and to minimise the time that a person looks back on life and tries again to achieve something that they could have achieved before is to simply pursue it every single day and with all of their heart to minimise the total amount of time that a person ends up wallowing in regret and wondering about things that could have been and instead capitalising on the benefits of compounding and the growth that comes when a person dedicates themselves daily towards small improvements brought forth manageably as they pursue the goals that arise from within their deepest being.

It is a philosophy that is based upon the idea that benefits compound through daily practice and regrets can be minimized if one doesn’t have a reason to have them in the first place because one is engaged instead in the pursuit of moving the needle forward with each day, interaction, and moment instead. This has always seemed like a more appealing way of living life to me than the converse, though I feel that on a personal level, it hasn’t always played out in that way.

Like any other person, I have moments when I feel subjectively that I’m not up for something, that I’m tired, that I cannot push forward in the way that I would like because of external circumstances, time constraints, or any number of other things that could make life difficult that I haven’t been able to push past constraining me from doing the things that I want on a day-to-day basis. But one thing I’ve come to learn throughout the course of life is that what we want is manifold, and it’s not always clear that we can make rational judgments about what should take precedence over what, and moreover that time inconsistency also assails us with the inability to make decisions on a consistent basis across multiple time periods in the situation that we do not spend time reflecting.

When I reflect personally on the different things that I’m doing, including Korean, cello, making videos, and pushing forward in learning how to educate people, I recognize at many different decision points that these things are difficult to balance because they require discipline and many other facets of personality which I have only imperfectly developed throughout the relatively brief duration of my life upon the mortal coil that is the wick of my life upon the candle of earth.

There are times when I am tempted to deviate and simply rest and stop and pause for a quick bit, allowing the wave of freedom to wash over me, only to realize that this decision represents, when I reflect upon it, a denial of my previously freely chosen decision to pursue these things in the very first place and represent an insult to my earlier self. One could very well contend that a person should be free to make decisions at an earlier point and then also to make decisions to deny that earlier decision when a person has changed. But has a person really changed along the way? Not necessarily. I know that I definitely haven’t. When I reflect upon the deepest parts of my soul, I recognize that the things that I say are valuable, remain valuable, regardless of my immediate feeling of stress or difficulty with coping. Because when I look at the deepest part of my being, I see that I value knowing how to speak Korean and with the world at large. And I know that I value music and its ability to unite people by appealing to the soul in ways that can only be brought forth with skillful practice and a sensitivity not only to rhythms but also to the souls of those who lie without. I see in the balance of things that impacting souls and helping them to strive for better, to live for better in the eventuality of things is and remains something tremendously worthwhile to aim for.

Each of these things is something that bears the possibility of failure the moment one moves away. A person cannot learn a language by simply choosing not to continue a class and hoping that one’s innate nature and supposed freedom will bring them on the path towards a greater mastery.

The same applies for learning an instrument. In the absence of teaching, it’s not always clear what I would do on my part and therefore, any freedom that would be brought forth on that front would eventually be drawn back closer into the sphere of what I had attempted to do before, across all different things, which in turn leads me yet again as what goes up comes down in what seems to be a teleological direction of return towards facets that I had identified before and that innately I know I should continue to pursue. These are facets that will ever remain as part of me, and that if I wish to chase with efficiency, I must muster the strength to push forward each day.

There is no guarantee that other people abide by the same way of living or think of the world or value improvement in the same way.

But I feel that this will resonate for those who do.

Here’s to advanced laziness to those of you out, there are striving for better and seek to accomplish it in the most efficient way possible, while paying respect to your nature. Thanks for reading.

Some Writing Advice To Myself

One of the most solid pieces of advice that I’ve ever received is that you should write the way that you speak; it’s something I think that I still fall short in, a piece of advice that I’ve wanted to implement but struggled to take, something that I personally want to improve myself in.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that in life, using difficult words and complicated expressions isn’t going to do you any favours – the people whom you’re supposed to serve won’t understand you, which means that if they are going to continue reading what you’re writing, they will have to use a dictionary or otherwise rack their brains trying to understand what you’re trying to say.

The answer probably is a solid no.

Even if you want someone to appreciate the high flown nature of your ideas, and to somehow elevate themselves, if they don’t get what you’re trying to say, then, there is no point – you have just wasted your time, which you could have spent either leveling yourself up so that you would be able to express better ideas, or perhaps, even just watching a television show in the first place:

People will most likely take one look at what you’re saying and immediately go away in favour of greener pastures or messages that they can understand; congratulations, you lose the attention war.

This isn’t to say in any way that people are dumb because they don’t appreciate difficult vocabulary and neither, by the way, is it to say that people should avoid difficult vocabulary altogether. Rather, it’s to say that when we express ourselves, whatever the scenario, we want to do it in such a way that the maximum number of people can understand us.

I feel that the underlying message is solid: whatever you communicate, make sure to phrase it in such a way that you aim to be understood by the person on the other end because if you’re just writing things in such a way that you use things that people won’t get out of hand, your communication will be unsuccessful.

Still, it’s something that I’ve identified and want to get better at, so here’s a note of vulnerability.

This is something that I myself struggle with, because when I think about things, I don’t always think about the most simple, or intuitive way of phrasing things – I tend to think in terms of complete ideas and full sentences, just as I have read them in books; I also tend not to filter them, so they come out the same way that they appear inside my head – unfiltered, often dense, and usually very quickly without any further consideration for the person on the other end.

Often it’s not the case that I think directly about what the person on the other side must be understanding or receiving from my words, hence everything comes out, unfiltered, overly convoluted, reflective of my thought process, and in short lacking usefulness.

I want to have my thoughts more relatable to people so that they can immediately respond rather than face confusion in top of getting what I’m trying to say, and why I’m saying it – that means being able to relate to people a little more and chatting with people in the knowledge that they can understand everything that I’m getting across.

I want to have more people understand the thoughts that I’m conveying, which isn’t just about changing the language that I use so that it can be more easily understood, but also learning how to think about ideas that are worthwhile to share in the first place, and to understand why and under what circumstances to share them.

I’d like to caveat that to some extent, though. I don’t think that learning how to share your ideas with the world necessarily means dumbing them down – in many ways, it means understanding how people will relate to things, how they will engage, and how they can understand things through examples, analogies, and many of the other things that link us together as human beings in the common experience.

Writing in a simple way often isn’t reflective off linguistic simplicity, but rather it’s something pretty darn sophisticated, because in order to write, simply, you often have to really boil down the essence of what makes an idea what it is and then convey those things to the person who is listening while paying attention to what they’re catching onto and constantly listening to their needs – definitely not something that’s possible in the course of writing, an essay, but something that a person needs to be able to imagine and demonstrate effectively when they’re in the process of writing an exam.

This too is something that I’m trying to learn at the moment, and I think I can do it to a southern extent, but perhaps writing it down here will solidify my intent, and make it more clear what I’m trying to achieve. Here’s the hope that in the days ahead, I’ll be able to better implement.