March 2016

A new cycling trip!

Posted on 2016-03-30 14:09 by rv

Last October I did a two-week cycling trip in Shikoku and the north of Kyushu. I was unfit, unprepared and did not enjoy it nearly as much as I should. It's time to fix that: I'm heading back to north Kyushu in mid April with the intent of cycling back to Tokyo along the north coast. I've got exactly a month to do this before I have to head back and restart my job in the UK. I don't intend to rush, though. I won't plan out any day in advance, and will be bringing my tent, so I can camp in random places and don't have to stick to a schedule. That said, I've mostly made up my mind about taking the north coast towards Lake Biwa, and that part of the plan is unlikely to change. What happens after that.. nothing is set in stone. I've got some plans but haven't decided on which way to go yet. It's also not unlikely that I'll simply run out of time and will have to take a train back. Who knows! Not knowing is part of the fun :)

Although by bike's frame was bent heavily after the last cycling trip and was declared beyond repair by the bike shop, I've decided not to believe them. I bent back the frame as best as I could and it's reasonably straight again. I've done a few day trips since then and haven't noticed any weaknesses or further bending happening. Touring will be a lot more stressful on the frame, but I'm mildly confident that it'll hold just fine, since I'll be on good Japanese-quality asphalt practically all of the time. But should it fail during the trip.. well, that'll be a whole other adventure, and surely an interesting one too. I'm ready.

Posted in Japan , Spirit of Japan 3

Experience

Posted on 2016-03-16 00:44 by rv

I've gotten reasonably 'good' at life. I've somehow managed to keep a job for quite some time, earn some money and even bought an apartment. The rate at which I'm learning and doing new things has declined a lot in the recent years, mainly because I find myself able to have a complete life with just the things I have already. So I focused on optimizing that which I already know, getting better and better at a limited set of things, making my life more and more efficient. Sometimes even without noticing it, I can't help but try to make things more efficient. I've become more rational, more logical, and ultimately incredibly more boring.

Efficiency, no matter how highly I hold it in regard, is without a shadow of a doubt the wrong metric to optimize your life for. You could have the most 'perfect', optimized, efficient lifestyle, but all you would get is a minuscule measure of satisfaction at your own efficiency, and nothing more. Life is made up of experiences. New experiences. Imperfect experiences. Sometimes uncomfortable experiences. But still: experiences.

Efficiency is a trap. It's a micro-optimization that lets you feel happy about your life without seeing the big picture. This doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have a happy life while being efficient, but it's very easy to succumb to efficiency and focus all your attention on it. (At least for me it is.)

New experiences are important, but the more you do something, even if you do it in a different way in a different place, eventually your brain will find a pattern. And once it finds a pattern it will start ranking the activity lower in terms of interest. The eight cycling trip in Japan will not be as exciting as the first one. The thirtieth cycling trip in insert-random-country-here will also not be as exciting as the first-ever cycling trip. This is a fact of life and the way our brains work. Eventually, everything gets boring. (Un)fortunately for us the world is chock full of exciting things to do, and we don't have nearly enough time to do all the things we want in the span of a normal human life.

New experiences aren't free, of course. A lot of us are not yet in a position where we can choose to experience any new thing at any new time. Personally, I need my day job to fund my new experiences, and that is not an ideal situation. But it's a hell of a lot better than it could have been, and I'm really grateful for that. At the same though, I am getting older, and I am starting to feel constrained. I'm training up for a new cycling trip at the moment and I can feel it getting harder to get into shape, comparing myself to the me of only a few years ago.

As I get older it seems that the intensity with which I like things, increases, but the spread of the things that I like, decreases. As I experience more and more things my mental model of how everything connects together becomes more and more populated. I see patterns that I never used to see before. In the same way that I grew out of childhood cartoons I find myself growing out of Hollywood movies. The tropes are all so well-known to me now that I can't help but analyze a movie as I watch it, which to me often diminishes the value of the movie, especially if it's badly done (which most are). There's still some brilliant movies out there that I love watching, and I've watching a few incredible new movies recently as well, but being exposed to so many movies and so many tropes throughout the years has greatly reduced the selection of movies I would enjoy watching.

This reduction of available material for enjoyment feels constricting. It's not just movies either; other hobbies are suffering the same fate: gaming, cycling, driving. Rather than settling for a broad spectrum of average quality experiences I end up focusing on a narrow range of higher-quality experiences. That quality is inevitably harder to find. It's the same kind of thing when I think about programming. I could learn yet another programming language or yet another database system, but what's the point really, if all it's going to do is power something that could easily run on any similar technology that I already know? There's still interesting challenges left, obviously, but rather than being excited about learning 10 random programming languages, I am now excited about learning 1 or 2 functional programming languages. The scope narrows, inevitably.

But that narrowing of the scope is in itself a consequence of trying to be more efficient. I'm trying to optimize my life into focusing on the things that I already know I like, skipping entirely the act of finding new things that I already know are not worth my time (with an increasing accuracy as I get older). Although it seems that to me this is the most rational thing to do, in this case I don't think it's the right thing to do. There is something to be said for coming out of your comfort zone every once in a while, trying something new, even if you've already decided beforehand that you probably won't like it. If you just keep doing the things that you know you like you'll end up in a self-confirmation loop, only becoming more and more who you already are, but you'll never be anything new. Sometimes the overall quality of your life will only increase if your local and immediate quality of life decreases. It's important to recognize that. Otherwise you'll get stuck.

I haven't blogged much lately, partly because I've 'optimized it away' out of my life. I intend to expose myself to a greater variety of experiences in the future. I think it's the best way for me to grow. It's something I should blog about - blogging has always been a great way for me to organize my thoughts and have an inner dialogue with myself. The fact that I've blogged less and less over the years is a testament to how optimized and efficient my life has become - there just wasn't anything new and exciting to blog about because I've been focusing only on existing things in my life. It's not something that'll change overnight, but the observation about my own life as I have written it in this post is something that has crystallized very clearly in my mind and will stay with me in the future.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Wanting things we don't want

Posted on 2016-03-08 13:22 by rv

Let's start off hedonistic and materialistic - there's two things I've always wanted in life: a sports car and my own living room with a massive TV. They were both things I always put off until later, either reasoning that I couldn't justify the expense or because my living situation wouldn't allow for it. Having a car in Japan was absolutely unnecessary, and I never really felt the need to pay more rent for a place with a nice living room while I was living by myself. Two years ago, when I decided I'd be in the UK for quite some time, I bought a car. Last year my girlfriend and I moved in together and I finally got my own living room with big-ass TV. Now it's time to reflect and realize that neither of those things were what I really wanted, and I did not get what I expected.

Often what's the ideal image of something in your mind turns out to be very far from the truth when you actually experience it in real life. For myself, I think that, as I strived for the ideals, I optimized my life in such a way that I ended up better off without them. Let's tackle the sports car first. I wanted one because as a kid I loved go-karting, racing games and watching F1. Getting a sports car and taking out onto a track would be the logical next step in that hobby. Plus, I loved to just drive around in the countryside, seeing new sights and exploring new roads. What better vehicle to do that in than a nice, grand touring sports car?

During the years that I didn't own a car I satisfied my driving needs in other ways: I kept playing racing simulations, getting ever more serious. And for the 'wanting-to-see-the-countryside-and-drive-around-bit', I settled on cycling. It might not have given me the range of driving, but any casual drive that'll take you out for a few hours at most can also be done on a bicycle if you take a day out for it. I found alternatives to owning a sports car and optimized my life to them. I got fitter, went on cycling trips, and spent hours on end trying to beat my best lap times in netKar. Then, years and years later, I finally bought a car.

After the initial excitement wore off I realized that what I wanted no longer corresponded to what I obtained. Or perhaps they were never the same and my mental image was always too idealized. Every time I would go out for a casual drive I would be stuck in traffic for the first 20-30 minutes trying to get out of Greater London, something I never had to worry about when on a bike. Any epic hill that would give me a great sense of accomplishment on a bicycle was just a quick drive up in the car, and nothing special. On my bicycle I can stop anywhere to take a picture, by car I need to find parking first. Mostly though, the car brought worry with it. Worry about damaging it, worry about not hitting things on the countryside roads that were the absolute best on a bicycle, but kind of narrow for a car. Also, worry about warping the brake discs on a track day and having to actually pay for parts that you damage, unlike in a racing sim. The ultimate hassle of owning a sports car was just nowhere near worth the satisfaction of having one. I didn't realize that as I was striving to finally own a car, I had already found better alternatives.

The same goes for the TV in the living room. I've hardly used it since I got it, because I'm always at my PC. I've got a dual monitor setup, with the second screen basically a reasonably-sized TV, so I get to watch movies as I do other things on my primary screen. The setup started out as a necessity because neither the room I had at my parent's place not the one-room apartment I lived in in Japan did not have space for both a TV corner and a desk space, so I optimized what was most important to me: the desk space. Now that I've got both of them separate I find that I miss the convenience of being able to do other things while watching TV shows or movies. There's still exceptions, of course; some movies or shows you just have to see on the big screen, giving them your full attention. But I found that for the majority of the things I watch, they're just as well enjoyed while also doing something else.

There's definitely a pattern here: it seems that any hedonistic expense I make ends up backfiring on me, or at the very least was not quite worth it. 'Spend your money on experiences, not objects', is the old saying, which everyone easily accepts as true, but sometimes it takes a personal experience to truly realize what it means. So I guess I'll add that to my list of 'feelings I've experienced personally and now internalized into my mental view of the world'. Lesson learned. The things that I used to think of as substitutes for the real thing ended up being better than the real thing, and I now have a new appreciation for them.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts