Life: Struggle, Absurdity and Happiness

Tags: writing life life-review goals happiness absurdity struggle

[[Life Review]] [[July 29th, 2020]]

I turned 26 today. So, this write-up is an exhaustive review of my life - the past and the present. Perhaps, a peek into the future too.

If you are too busy or bored to read these long, broken thoughts of mine, here’s a TLDR:

Struggles come in many forms. Some struggle with money. Some with relationships and connections. Some with careers. Some with the absurdity of life. In all, it’s the struggle to get into a “happiness state”, a peace of mind (peace from mind?).
We tend to be cognitively biased - - peak-end-rule - - in remembering our past. Instead of seeing life as bits of experiences, we see only the extreme highs and lows.
Satisfaction doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness. You might be perfectly satisfied with something, but still be anxious from other emotions.
The intrinsic value of “money” is relative. For some, it can contribute to 10% of happiness, while for others even 99% of money leads to happiness. Whatever it is, money does provide a way for survival, an identity to one’s life.
Track your expenses!
For me, happiness (perhaps) is a state where I accept and appreciate reality without much expectations.
There should be a balance between work life and your personal life. Don’t try to mix them up.
Try to minimize temporal discounting. We make decisions, usually with unforeseen consequences, that our future self has to deal with. This is quite the opposite to the compounding effect.
Have habits that you provide you a sense of being alive and present.
Life’s absurdity hits us all. Sometimes life seems short. Sometimes it feels long. Whatever it is, life is “just enough” if you use it wisely.

I woke up around 5 am and kept on staring at the ceiling for almost an hour. I’d say that’s my way of doing meditation, to relieve all the anxieties. Then finally, I shaved my beard after 3 months or so. I look so young now. Haha. Joke’s on me. “Young” is probably relative like anything else (at least most of them). Sometimes I feel like an old man who has gone through a lot of shit (and bullshit) in life; at 50 years of age, sitting somewhere in front of the screen and writing about the past he keeps on dwelling into, memories fading away. Sometimes it’s the reverse. A young guy full of energy, pipe dreams, goals, and a lot of anxieties stimulated by turmoils of life.

Whenever I hit July 29 (in Nepal’s Bikram Sambat calendar, it’s Shrawan 14 which is coincident today…), I tend to reflect on that dark-shadowish day of our family [1], when we had to move (suddenly) to Kathmandu due to unforeseen financial crisis. I was probably around 11-12 years old. Memories are hazy, but they still make me sad-anxious-hopeful that we have come a very long way. Plus, those days have acted as checkpoints to my life; how I experienced “life” through struggles, sadness, miseries, and eventually found a way to accept reality without many expectations.

I want to review my life today, to get a macro-micro perspective on things that happened, and what it holds ahead, especially I want to talk about Happiness, Absurdism and Goals which had different meanings for different versions of me. [2]

[[Life Review]]

(All out of 7, 1 being unhealthy: 12.75 out of 35)

What is my relationship with the world?:: 2.85

(The names of people are removed for privacy. I had jotted down people in Roam, that matter to me and tried to form “rating” for my relationship with them)

Family:: 4.67
Relatives:: 2
Friends:: 4.25
Romantic Love:: 1
Strangers:: 1
Office: 3
Self:: 4

How much satisfied am I with my life?:: 3.5

Office Work: 5
Writing:: 3
Guitar Skills:: 3
Self:: 3

How happy am I in my life?:: 2.5 (central affective state)

Endorsement: 2.5

Sadness-Joy: 2
Irritability-Cheerfulness: 3

Engagement: 3

Depression-Exuberance: 2
Dissatisfaction-Flow: 4

Attunement: 2

Anxiety-Tranquility: 1
Insecurity-Confidence: 3
Compression-Uncompression: 2

Have I gotten the important things in my life?:: 1.75

Writing:: 2
Music:: 3
Grad School:: 1
Life Partner:: 1

Time Goals:: 2.17

How good are my accomplishments?:: 2.5

Newsletter:: 2
Grad School:: 1
Guitar Skills:: 3
Reading:: 4
Learning:: 3
[[Coffee With Nish]] Podcast: 2

How complete are my accomplishments?:: 2

Are my goals streamlined?:: 2

The score is weirdly low because I might be cognitively biased to only see a lot of failures and dissatisfaction in life. This has something to do with [[Peak-end Rule]] bias. Instead of seeing life as bits of experiences, I see only the highs and lows part. Lows have outnumbered everything.

This “quantification of life” is highly superficial. It can only give a sense of direction of how I am living my life and how I can make it better [3]. Life is all about constantly updating our prior beliefs.

[[Struggles]]

I have struggled in many areas of life. Following are the main ones I have reflected this year:

[[Finance]]

Money and anxieties are highly intertwined. Let’s face it, in modern times if you’re struggling for survival then it can seriously affect your [[Mental Health]]. If not the least, money can buy you things that help you to live fully the next day.

My family struggled financially for more than a decade. Through those struggles, I have learned to value money the hard way. This can be seen in how I don’t normally squander my life materialistically [4]. The intrinsic value of “money” itself might be relative. For some, it can contribute to 10% of happiness. And for some even 99% of money might lead to [[Happiness]]. Whatever it is, money does provide a way for survival, an identity to one’s life.

Nevertheless, for more than a year now, I have incorporated the habit of tracking expenses. At the end of each month, I run my python code to visualize things like:

Aggregation according to categories and sub-categories.
Time-series visualization of daily expenses for a given month.
Average Expense

expense from April-2019

On a quick dry run of my python script, I found that for over a year the expenses have accumulated to be around NRs 4 Lakhs i.e. $3350. On average, I spent around NRs 25000 per month i.e. $210. (I might be priveleged enough to even have such a seemingly-large amount. But I beg to differ!)

total expense from April-2019 to July-2020

Tracking expenses has helped me significantly to optimize the areas I should be spending with care. One key takeaway here is how our financial needs grow at faster rates than we can anticipate. Responsibilities increase. Our personal needs increase. No matter what we say about money being a materialistic view of happiness, it still matters.

Only [[Savings]] won’t work. I have to invest money in something. I have been struggling to discover that “something”. I can only think of doing business [6], or investing in shares and stock markets. Keeping an optimal flow of money is the only way to have some financial stability. That’s how the world economy works.

It’s only in the past 6 months I have truly felt financially independent. For almost 3 years after my graduation, I was hopelessly anxious about personal finance, mainly because the earning wasn’t able to mitigate the family needs in any way. There was a period where my joblessness caused me to go under [[Depression]]. So, I am hopeful that in upcoming times I will try to balance this financial need with inherent struggles. The way I contemplate this is how I see the world. I know there are people who are struggling way more than I have and I intend to take those as inspiration to do better.

[[People and relationship]]

Being an introvert I have probably struggled to connect with newer people. I am “choosy” to whom I share my innermost emotions [5]. So, right now at the age of 26, I am not sure I am confident enough to talk to people in general. Probably, I might get locked up in my smaller sphere. Even if I try conversating with people, things weirdly go meta in my mind. Maybe that’s where I have to improve a lot.

The same goes for my romantic relationship with someone. I’ve fallen in love rarely. Most of the affections were infatuations and fantasized versions of “love”. However, things changed when I met Aurora. I realized what “loving” someone actually meant. Eventually, it didn’t work out. And here I am trying to move on.

One thing is sure: falling in love makes it difficult to move away due to stronger emotional attachment because people rarely stick.

Anyway, I guess I still yearn for that kind of relationship in some ways. But I am pretty skeptical of that. I have started to love myself again and leaning onto someone is probably not that good for my mental health [7].

So definitely there are a lot of rooms for improvement here, especially to find solace in one’s own mind-cave.

[[Career]]

Technically being an “engineer” people tend to have a certain form of bias about intellectual and smartness. I don’t find myself anyway to be fit for that (although that, yet again, depends on the frame of reference). I also don’t have a strong affinity towards “being passionate” because frequently I get hit by [[Shiny Object Syndrome]] [8] where my mind oscillates here and there.

But one thing is sure: I love solving problems, and love to question almost everything. Probably, that’s why I am currently working as a Researcher in Docsumo. It has been a wonderful journey with this amazing startup where I get to learn so many new concepts in AI. So, a big shout out to them (the startup) for making me feel valuable.

However, I don’t find myself doing programming after 30 (at least that’s the plan). I’d say I want to have some secondary field before I hit 30. Experimentation is the only way to test that. I want to explore more. That’s where writing and blogging have come to be.

I am not that good at writing, but looking at my long past of writing habits, I tend to write about the abstractions of life - nuanced experiences to absurdities. I have rarely written technical essays. I am not even sure I am good enough to write about technical experiences.

Still, I am struggling in other forms. Writing has been one of the two mediums to express myself (the other is music). But then, whatever I am doing has been for myself, to express my emotions. On one side writing has enabled a way to think deeply. On the other side, it’s a portal to learn more about the world.

On that note: I have started my weekly newsletter [[Bits and Paradoxes]]. Trust me, it took a really long time to start this [9]. So, yeah. That might be an achievement. I guess.

[[Happiness]]

This has been my “THE” longest struggle in life, more than a decade. I’d say almost 15 years of “Nish”’s existence. Now as I reflect back upon the past, it seems there weren’t much rooms for finding that peace-of-mind.

Happiness means different things to different people. Some get a form of that while reading books, some while walking and writing, some having that perfect taste of caffeinated reality. Whatever it is, I feel the ultimate goal of life is to be in that state where “being satisfied” and “being happy” are almost identical [10].

There are many thoughts I had regarding what happiness was.

First, resolving financial situations might lead to happiness. However, as time progressed I realized that it’s only a scant hope. In some ways money contributes to a part of happiness, but not to the fullest.

Secondly, being in a “good” romantic relationship might resolve anxieties which further catalyzes happiness. This, in many regards, is a tautology for me. But, it’s equally destructive if you are the person (like me) who takes almost everything seriously. Some parts of the relationships that contributed to my happiness were going on a long walk with someone, getting an email from a soul from another country, someone thinking of me… You know how it goes…

Lastly, working for financial independence. This directly relates to the first. But, given the nature of anxieties I have been getting, I’d say work life can only create satisfaction, not what “being happy” is. Surely, there are more than enough times that I got happy to solve that problem X that had been bugging me for a while. But, it can only do so much.

So, [[What is Happiness]] for me?

I have come to the terms for this meaning:

Happiness = Reality - Expectation

Happiness is a state when I accept and appreciate reality without much expectations.

“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today… The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”- Seneca

Perhaps, that’s again me trying to comfort myself with “Don’t worry Nish! Everything works out eventually” narrative. For the upcoming times, reaching this state is my goal. Finding a good balance between my “self” and the outside world.

[[Absurdism]] and Will to live

There’s a good reason why this section is right here, in the final.

Unlike happiness, the absurdities of life knock at my mind-cave the most. Because no matter what I do, life weirdly seems absurd. This perhaps is the accumulation of every nuanced experience in my life. No matter how lonely I get, how much tears roll, how much anxieties hit me, how much suicidal I get sometimes, I intend to let go of all the hassle and live up to the next day.

Sometimes life seems short. I think of everything - past, present, and future [11]. There are too many things to do. Single life isn’t enough. Ever-increasing reading list. Accumulation of write-ups to publish. Stories to narrate. Topics to learn. Mysteries to understand. Tools to try. Places to visit. Places to experience. Very short conversations. The list goes on indefinitely like the sky that you barely get to view in a single fish-eye perspective.

Sometimes it’s equally long. You stare at the single page for too long. Empty “today” to fill in the journal. Scrolling. Tapping. Unlocking. Walking. Dark ceilings. Too many people on the street. Too many buzzing vehicles. Long meetings. A very long movie. A long wait for a cup of coffee.

It seems our interpretation of time-span varies greatly with what kind of situations we are in. Looking at the long history of the Earth, we are merely a tiny aberration. Just zoom out enough and we will realize we are a speck of dust. A dot in a dot, hurling through emptiness somewhere and nowhere. [12]

So, then does nothing matter?

I hope it doesn’t. But if you get another side of the reality –a very humane value of life – it matters.

People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron… If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for. — George Mallory

I guess things feel amazing when I discover something new.

A guitar piece that connects directly to my soul. Ancient philosophy which I’ve been contemplating for a very long time.

Just think about it again.

Zoom into your mind-cave. Lust, love, hatred, dislike, pessimism, optimism, skills, philosophical dilemmas, empty room, growing hair, beating heart, sinus, hernia, shaking hands, closeness to people, encounters with strangers, strangers with deep respect, Deep Meaningful Conversations, hope that it’s going to be alright, fragmented reality, dispersed attention, attenuating memories, vanishing ideas, energy to be born. Just think about everything. Feel it and you will realize that the whole existence merges into a distinct superposition of Struggle, Happiness, Absurdity, and Peace of mind.

Life is long enough if you use it wisely.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca

Footnotes

[1] - Those were the times, where I witnessed heavy fights between my parents because of circumstances. We were being chased and tortured by loansharks. I had been living with my aunt (mom’s bigger sister, Thulo Mom) for a week I guess. And on the day of my birthday, uncle picked me up from the bed (still asleep) to put me in the van to Kathmandu with my parents and my sister. We had so little money to support us. We ran away towards the capital city. This might sound like a movie, but it’s probably like a nightmare for a child like me at that time. I still get goosebumps while trying to recall that day. And rest has never been the same for me.

[2] - Different version might not be the “best” way to represent the [self], but seems legit in terms of how I view the world and how my prior beliefs got reinforced here and there… Anyway, despite unavoidable circumstances, there’s a core that forms a very essence of my “self”, something that hasn’t changed for the longest of time.

[3] - Improvements are more like very minute things that tend to add values to my life. In the long run, these improvements are only “bets” for minimizing [[Temporal Discounting]].

[4] - Except when buying some necessary things to work or improve myself. For instance, buying a guitar cable even if I already have one that’s not broken.

[5] - Emotions range from being profoundly self-reflecting to talking about private matters to talking shit. Something I don’t normally talk about publicly. I can’t head into someone and be “Hey! I have been refraining from masturbating for a few weeks. But today, I simply masturbated to sedate my anxieties.”. Those aren’t the type of conversations you’d want to be in, right? Imagine someone headbutt towards you out of nowhere and spew those seemingly bullshit conversations. Not all can be “there and just listen”. [[Listening Is an Act of Love]]. So, people who value me listen to me, and I do the same. :)

[6] - My very first business was as an ML-based startup. We were a team of 5 co-founders. For the first 8 months, we struggled really hard. For many months I couldn’t even withdraw my salary. Months were pretty empty. In the end, I had to quit because of my family’s financial crisis. From a year of running a startup, I realized that with unclear goals/visions, I get exhausted…

[7] - Leaning on someone ranges from a romantic kind to friends. It can also be towards “something”. For some, this might be healthy, but for me, it isn’t just that comforting. I end up having too many expectations from them.

[8] - I tend to get fascinated by almost everything - [[Quantum Mechanics]] to Evolutionary Biology to Astronomy to Rockets to [[Poetry]] to Animation to Videography to [[Music]]…you-name-it… This is probably unhealthy for anyone when they struggle in almost every field.

[9] - Imposter Syndrome kicks in whenever I think about writing. Talking about the newsletter, I wasn’t sure if I’d be good enough to do it. Plus, I kept on procrastinating the idea. However, given the amount of reading/journaling/note-taking I do, I had been meaning to start it. I used to exchange this conversation with Bijay. I still think I suck at writing. But, then it was the only way to experiment. :)

[10] - For me, satisfaction doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness. I might be perfectly satisfied with whatever things I do, but still, be anxious from other emotions. Nevertheless, the hedonic interpretation of “happiness” isn’t able to fully enclose what happiness feels like. Surely, there are “pleasures” and “pains” in everyone’s life, and balancing that to a positive side might be a “goal” for having a “satisfied” life. I seem to be in this loop where I want to “do something”, yet I don’t quite feel “good” about anything.

[12] - https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html

Just look at the history of humans. We have been in existence just recently. Life will continue for another million years without you. Just look at the timescale. It’s bizarre. And probably, most of us might not do anything remarkable.

Appreciations

I appreciate Prakash for always being there whenever I needed help. He’s probably the only person to have read most of my drafts first, before everyone else. Haha. Of course, Bijay for being there, among all the absurdities, and tolerating all of my sadness and rants. Finally, Ayushma (recently) for being there among all those emails and Deep Meaningful Conversations.

(I think that’s about it to whom I shared this draft. Haha. Yeah. I know. Not many can find their time to read all these turbulent thoughts of mine. Shoutout to other few closest people in my life.).