Searching for Ideas

Once in a while, when I’m frustrated or uninspired, I go to Steve Pavlina’s blog and read articles there until I feel pumped up again. Or I listen to cool songs like Elvis Costello’s Watching the Detectives .

Personal development blogs are largely a case of ``easier said than done.‘’ The advice is usually excellent – tips like progressively developing one’s abilities, even in more esoteric areas like courage or creativity, or being centered in one’s goals and self-belief rather than being avoidance or approval-motivated.

Great. But what if you actually, genuinely don’t have any goals that you really believe in? The advice says “well, just search for it. Do other things till you find it.” I’ve been doing other things my whole life. “Many people don’t find it until they’re old.” So what do I do until then? Just stare at the wall?

Paul Graham offers advice for this situation – stay upwind. Upwind here refers to a hang-gliding metaphore: put plainly, the idea is to do things that are as hard as possible, so that once you find what you want to do, it will seem easy to you compared to what you are doing. The hang-gliding equivalent is to stay upwind of where you might want to go, so that you will experience a nice glide when you decide to go there.

For me and my interests, this probably means something like getting a PhD in pure mathematics, so that when I figure out what problem I want to solve, I’m such a freaking genius that the problem quivers and explodes before my cerebral might. Yeah, bollocks.

Staying upwind really means that you never go where you want to go, remaining always afraid that you’re not upwind enough to be able to get there. And what if you never decide on a final destination? You simply keep striving away at the most difficult things you can find, consistently depriving yourself of the pleasure of success? Um, great.

This is descending into an increasingly fear-ridden, whiny spiral, and it’s my frustration with this spiral that I wish to express here.

I don’t know what to do.

It’s that simple. I just don’t know what to do. Nobody can tell me, and I don’t know myself. And while mildly attractive, doing nothing is not a path with “a heart”. So, these are questions to which I do not know the answers:

• Do I actually want to get a PhD?

• Do I even like CS or Machine Learning or science or academics at all?

• Do I want an international life or not?

• Who do I actually want to be?

These are probably questions (especially the last one) that a lot of people have struggled with. The solution is perhaps to have Bruce Lee’s “mind like water” and simply sidestep the issue, doing what feels natural in this moment and allowing the rest to unfold as it will. While this approach is quite revered in Asian philosophies, in the Western world it’s often pejoratively referred to as “muddling through” (although just as widely practiced).

This blog is so young and new and yet it already sounds tired and repetitive, at least to my eyes. The most profound truth of all this is that one mind alone cannot sustain itself – at least mine can’t.