Life

Life is both hard and weird.

Life, in a reductionist sense, is the accumulation of billions of years of chemical processes that manage to interact with each other in a way that allows a package to be created that contains them. Life can be as small as a single cell, to as large as a multi-cellular organism, or it can be extrapolated into the larger view of the ecosystem as a whole.

Life is not guaranteed. If we let life be defined as the set of sets of chemical processes that create a package that is in some ways self-propagating and capable of having a well-defined border of what is itself and the outside, then we find that there are many viable such sets of chemical processes, which explains the diversity of life as a whole. But as I said, life is not guaranteed---some form of life can arise eventually, but a specific instance of a specific life has an infinitesimal chance of appearing.

Why all the verbiage? It is the end of the year, and like always, I get a little more introspective and in some senses, retrospective as well. The contemplation of what I had done over the past ten years to get to where I am now has made me mull over what it means to be ``alive''. I used to believe that I would die at the end of twenty-one years old, and in many ways, I did die then. The cells that make up by current body are not likely to be the same cells some fourteen or so years ago, and the experiences that I had undergone since then have also changed the harder-to-pinpoint parts of me as well.

But to make it more to the point, the verbiage on life is the start of my beginning understanding of the world, in that each of the specific people that we meet in our lives are themselves specific forms of life that, short of a better word, underwent a miracle or two (or more) just to be where they are. And it is because of that type of infinitesimal existential probability of that specific person existing at this specific time and interacting rather specifically with me makes me start to appreciate people (as a whole) much more than I ever did.

I am not turning into a saint or a buddha by any degree, but at some fundamental level, I am starting to ``feel in my bones'' some of the truths that some of the sages have been trying to tell us over the ages, no matter their creed or belief. Existentially, there is no reason for any one of us to be here, not because of fatalism or nihilism, but because if we were to attempt to ascribe a reason for existence, we start running into the attribution problem of to whom this reason is meant for. That is an unanswerable question. It is more of the case that we are here, therefore we exist, and from there, we try to discover our own reason and meaning of existence for ourselves.

I used to have dreams. I liked codes, inventing, and thinking, and was drawn rather deeply into the whole sneaky aspect of espionage. I used to have a solid core of morals (I still do, but things were more black and white to me then, as compared to now), and I used to be someone who was willing to sacrifice myself for the sake of the society.

Then somewhere in between, reality hit me hard and I started to lose those vagueish qualitative dreams. I went with the flow, riding out the probability waves as best as I could, each time trying to position myself in ways that would minimise the type of damage that could be inflicted upon myself. I was never truly ambitious, but I was definitely competitive. If I could see a reason as to why I needed to be competitive, I would go in whole heartedly.

Today, I look back at myself and am a little concerned. I don't have much dreams any more.

It is not that I do not have any dreams---that would be a patent lie---but I do not have those ``big'' dreams any more. Come to think of it, I never really had ``big'' dreams ever, just really small qualitative ones involving a state of being than being in a state. Wordplay aside, I mean that my dreams involved me positioning myself in life such that I would not suffer at the very least, and have a type of contentedness at the very most, where ``not suffer'' and ``have contentedness'' were the extent of my dreams, as opposed to the quantitative ones some folks might have (e.g. ``be married with children by thirty two'', ``reach my first million by thirty'', ``own my company by twenty-five'').

Each day was a blessing if I could wake up, move about, do paid honest work, hang out with people I like, partake in my hobbies, before finally going back to sleep. That's about it for me. It feels as though I have reached the peak of the modern day peasant.

I am bringing this up because I realised that over the past year, I had more overtly started to care more about the people around me. These people aren't necessarily friends nor family, they are just people I meet often when I walk about. I don't know who they are other than how they look and what they are doing when I see them, I don't know anything else about them. But I take the effort to at least acknowledge their existence, to assure them that yes, they had won the infinitesimal probability of existing as a life form, and that they are.

I think it is because of two things. The first is the positive influence of Chara, who does these things by a second-nature that is likely forever alien to me. The second is that I know how it feels to be treated like one does not exist. It is a nasty feeling; while it is often important that one knows how to self-substantiate one's existence before seeking external validation (i.e. ``love thyself before asking others to love thee''), sometimes one is just so angry at oneself that one does not readily see that one's existence is miraculous and should be cherished instead of wallowing down the path of eventual self-destruction. It is in those circumstances that having an external validation can make the difference between gritting one's teeth to soldier on out of the pit, or to go down the path of no return.

It isn't much, but we are all we have for each other. If we don't look out for the people around us, who will?

Life is already hard and weird enough, why do we want to make it even harder for ourselves then?

Existential

Existential.

That's the general type of feeling I get at the end of the year.

In the past, I would often end up wallowing a little in the kind of self-pity thanks to the triple whammy of aging thrice---once through the end of the Gregorian year, once more through my birthday, and yet a third time through that of the Chinese lunar new year.

I don't self-pity any more. There is nothing to pity myself about---my bad skin has significantly become less bad over the years, my old issues of wanting to love and being loved are no longer an issue now, and my usual refrain about how friends often ended up being further apart is no longer that big a deal.

But ever so often, I still get bouts of what I might politely call an existential dread.

This year, it is heightened by a few things that can at best be called coincidental.

Work has gotten to the point where I vacillate between feeling in control of the situation and being completely overwhelmed. It's simultaneously bad and not that bad, and I really cannot decide which of the two states it is in. Regardless of how I feel, the proverbial show must still go on, and things need to be done and delivered, and so that is that; everything else is mostly an academic exercise of wielding and parrying off of power/authority with different types of power/authority.

My hobby time has gone a little weird---I feel a little weary from having been played for a chum every now and then, and the gradual realisation that if I want to go even farther, I may need to take a different tack on things.

My reading time has gotten even weirder still; having finally finished reading 《厚黑学》 recently, I had started on Little Women, which I am now regretting a little, because it has such strong emotive content that it is doing nothing towards resolving my innate existential confuddlement. It also did not help that I had finished the manga Battle Angel Alita, which itself is a type of existential exploration of what it means to seek meaning of oneself.

Vg vf ng gvzrf yvxr gurfr gung V rail gubfr jub unir n fgebat snvgu va gur oryvrs gung fbzrbar be fbzrguvat bs gerzraqbhf cbjre bhg bs gurve xra vf ybbxvat bhg sbe gurz. Juvyr gur rkcynangvba bs cbffvoyr pnhfr naq rssrpg pna or dhvgr uneq gb whfgvsl jvgubhg oryvrivat va gur fnzr nkvbzf, gung gurfr crbcyr pna frrx fgeratgu sebz n fbhepr gung vf fvzhygnarbhfyl sebz jvgubhg naq sebz jvguva vf n fvtug gb orubyq, rfcrpvnyyl jura gur bhgpbzrf ner, sbe ynpx bs n orggre grez, zvenphybhf. Va znal jnlf, jurgure be abg fbzrguvat unf qverpg pnhfr naq rssrpg vf vzzngrevny gb gurz; gurve fgebat oryvrs unf perngrq gur ernyvgl gung gurl jrer ybbxvat sbe. Nz V raivbhf bs gurz? N yvggyr, ohg vg vf gur xvaq bs ``yrnc bs snvgu'' gung bar zhfg xabj ``va bar'f obarf'' orsber vg znxrf nal frafr.

Existential.

It all goes back to that word. This year had been quite awkward, and I am not quite sure what to expect for the year to come. But one can always hope, and perhaps as the days of 2020 make their way known, the existential dread that I feel will ebb away temporarily, only to make itself known once more nearer the end of the next year.

Marching Onwards...

Heh. I didn't write for most of the year, and suddenly as the year draws to a close, you see me have entries in here.

Naturally, life is getting more exciting. Not necessarily good of course---I'm pretty sure that I had mentioned more than once in this blog that when things go smooth, there is almost no reason to be writing blog entries.

So clearly, things aren't going smooth. But how badly are they going then?

------

It's funny how often the phrase ``be careful what you wish for'' gets thrown about. To those who never really understood what this truly meant, better to learn it soon. To those who know what this truly meant, you will know what I mean. In my previous organisation, the management issues were to the point where us engineers were basically sitting around waiting for things to be assigned so that we can do them---the projects were drying up because of management issues, and that our time was fast being co-opted towards fulfilling more and more useless management ``memos'' and ``reports'' for unknown reasons. I was essentially paid to sit around and do things that had little to do with what my skills were, and I was getting antsy.

Obviously the thing I wanted the most was to get my hands dirty to actually like make something.

And I got my wish. More than my wish, actually. So I'm now working around 72 hours a week on a 45-hour week pay, losing sleep, hair, and my sanity. I don't think my brain is getting enough down time to regenerate, and it is not a fun thought, because it means that over time, I would get sloppier, and productivity would take a hit. To be fair, it is exercising the ``making'' part of me, but more of the ``run till you fall, then continue to crawl'' sort than the ``think about things and come up with something innovative and impactful'' sort.

But as they say, it is in times of trials and tribulations that one builds character and learns of who one's friends are. So I'm taking it all in stride. It's not a complaint, just an observation and a note here that when I look back from the future, I would be able to decide if I should be laughing at my naivity, or to nod at the sagacity of past me.

My friends around me aren't having that great a time too---they have their own trials to grit through. 2019 hasn't exactly been a great year for many of us, but that's just how things go I suppose.

Whelp. Enough of belly-aching. Time to grit on.

Till the next update.