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

Mental peace and mobile phones

Posted on 2016-02-19 15:24 by rv

Back when I was living in Japan I often had introspective moments. Whenever I was out on a walk or in a train I'd look out, sometimes while listening to music. Nowadays whenever I'm on a train I play with my phone. Whenever I'm walking I can't help but take it out every once in a while to see if I've got new messages. Even if the act of checking for new messages takes only a few seconds, it completely destroys something that could otherwise have been an interesting introspective moment.

I might be jumping to conclusions here. I was younger when I was in Japan, so maybe I just was in a more introspective stage of my life. For that matter, I may have had more of a life there to introspect on, whereas now I am more defined as a person and there are very little surprises in my life, so there's more 'dull' time to fill up with phone play. (Unlike ten years ago where every quiet moment I had seemed like a great opportunity to solve yet another existential crisis. I'd like to think my personality has solidified since then..)

A similar thing happens to me at home. Whenever I have access to my primary pc, and all the access to interesting things that it offers, I find it extremely difficult to pull myself away from it. Despite that, whenever I do manage to pull myself away from it, I tend to become happier. Not always, but often. Sometimes I'm just in front of my pc, experiencing for the sake of experiencing, forgetting to enjoy myself even though I'm experiencing the things that are my most favourite. (No, I'm not talking about porn. There's plenty of other hedonistic vices accessible via the internet, such as watching tv shows, playing games, reading comics etc.)

There's a mental oddity in there somewhere. The feeling "I like activity X" does not lead to "I always like to do activity X even for 8 hours or more a day". Experience something for too long and it loses its value. Break moments are needed. Mobile phones are devices that intrude into life's necessary pauses, and destroy them. If you've got your mobile phone primed and ready to use then you're not truly allowing yourself a break from whatever you're doing.

The world has changed a lot since mobile phones. In the past, if I rode a train I would take a paper book with me. Nowadays I've got books on my phone. In the past, if I went cycling, I'd navigate via compass and look at road signs. Nowadays I've got offline maps downloaded into my phone. It's become a device that is impossible to replace, but at the same time I (and we) have lived life just fine without it for millennia. It's powerful. But it's binding. Doing without a mobile phone for a while might set me free, but I'd be giving up an awful lot of convenience. It might be interesting to try and leave my mobile phone at home every other day, or every other week. I wonder if it'll make me happier or less happy.

Posted in Thoughts

Funemployment

Posted on 2016-02-09 17:44 by rv

It's been a week since I started my self-chosen 'funemployment'. As a developer I like to tell myself that the field I work in is so in need of developers that I can expect to find a job any time, but I know that a large part of that is wishful thinking, especially after you've reached a certain number of years of experience (and expect the salary to go with it). It's not easy, and I am in the extremely fortunate position of knowing that there's a place for me to go back to later when I'm done funemploying. That said, I'm not getting paid for anything right now and work is completely out of my mind. It's an amazing feeling that I wish everyone could experience. The mental clarity is overwhelming.

I can't help but contrast this to how I felt when I did my cycling trip last October. I thought it at the time, but in retrospect it's blindingly obvious: I was unable to enjoy that trip properly because my mind was bogged down with stress and worries. When you're already stressed out and you go to a situation that you think should relax you, but it doesn't, it feels a bit like a very slow panic attack. You know you're supposed to breathe slower and relax to stop yourself from stressing out, but your mind just won't let you sometimes. It took until the very last day of that cycling trip for me to really regain that feeling of calmness. After entering funemployment it really hit me after the first full week and weekend of not-doing-work were over. It's the feeling of not being in a hurry, and not worrying that time is slipping away. Elusive.

So what am I doing with my free time? Well, mainly: cycling. Albeit indoors cycling on the exercise bike most of the time, I've set my primary goal for this time period to be to lose weight. I've proven time and again that I suck at accomplishing this as a secondary goal. When I work full-time, even if I try not to think of work as my primary goal, I'm thinking about work at least 8 hours a day. Work becomes my primary goal when I work, it's that simple. It's the only way I can deliver good quality work and be professional. But with that generally comes stress. Not a massive amount of stress, mind you. My work situation is probably one of the best ones in the country. But I am also a peculiar individual with way too many hobbies and a desire to spend a lot of my free time on them. If after work I exercise, I have less time for my hobbies and I feel more stressed out about not having enough time. It's a negative feedback loop; one that I am not happy about but have a very hard time avoiding.

Just cycling doesn't take up nearly as much of my time as work did when work was my primary goal, so I've got a lot of time for secondary goals, without any of the stress of not having enough time, so I get to be creative and experimentful. One of the major side goals I wanted to accomplish this period was to get all my old photos on shutterstock in the hopes of making some passive income. I have over 10 years worth of travel photos. Sadly, the first 2-3 years of my collection are useless because they were shot on a crappy camera and the next 2 years after that are crappy because I had no experience taking photos and all the shots are very poorly composed or lit. Yesterday I submitted a batch of about 20 photos taken more recently, all fairly well-composed (imho of course), well lit and quite tasteful (again imho). They were all disapproved. Compositions that I chose specifically because I liked them were disapproved because of composition, photos that I liked because of the lighting were disapproved because of the lighting. Others were disapproved because of potential trademark issues, not having a release for a person in the photo who can only vaguely be spotted in a corner and is clearly not the main subject, or simply for being unsharp. Clearly, in the venn diagram of photos I've taken that I deem good quality, versus the photos that stockphoto can accept and thinks are good quality, there is extremely little overlap. Now that I know I'm unlikely to earn any useful income from shutterstock, I've scratched it off my list.

Speaking of passive income, another thing I was thinking of doing is to write some technical articles/tutorials. I'm not sure if people would be willing to pay for content like that, though, and it'd be a lot of time spent on something I wouldn't do for fun. Maybe later.

There is one topic I always find myself coming back to for some reason: the stock market. Attempting to do some data analysis on historial stock prices and attempting to make some algorithms to predict stock values is something I'd do for fun, and something I'd go into without high expectations of great success. Yet if I did succeed somehow, it's something that would be very easily scaled up. If you've got the right algorithm, all you need to do to make more money is to insert more money. Of course the quest for the right algorithm is a never-ending practically-impossible one, but that's what makes it actually fun to play around with. I'm sure I'm likely to get discouraged as I learn more and things start getting more complicated, but for now I'm still in the absorbing-all-kinds-of-information phase, which is quite enjoyable. Plus, it's likely to be information that will be useful to me in the future, so it's a win-win.

I wasn't planning on doing another cycling trip any time soon, but I have to admit that the bike is calling out to me.. maybe it will happen.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Cycling trips

Posted on 2016-02-08 13:05 by rv

Why am I still doing cycling trips? I can't deny that, over time, my reasons for cycling have changed. I've done cycling trips for sightseeing, for staying fit, for doing something amazing together with friends, for nostalgia, and for the sense of accomplishment. But I'd say that none of those are currently the true reason that would motivate me to do another cycling trip.

Coziness is a word I would definitely associate with a cycling trip in Japan. You're never far away from society, and you can be pretty much sure that you will not encounter a single person that will try to do something bad to you if you're on a cycling trip in Japan. You don't have to worry (well, worry less) about safety, theft or crime there; the only challenge is the primary challenge: that of cycling and fitness. For every single cycling trip I've done I've been overweight, yet I've managed to cycle up mountains 1000+ meters high while carrying four heavy panniers and a backpack full of crap with me. Your body adjusts. You can go anywhere. And Japan brings with it the coziness that you need to not have to worry about all the 'side quests': no matter where you go, there will be a vending machine with an energy drink or a person who will offer to let you set up a tent in his garden (or temple).

Another part of cycling trips that I cannot do without is the freedom it gives you, but you need to plan it properly. By 'plan it properly' I mean: don't plan it at all, and give yourself plenty of time to get to your destination so you can make detours and change the plan as you go along. It's such an amazing feeling to learn about something exciting during the trip and to take a multi-day detour just to check it out, or even to just find a random road and decide to see where it goes, without having to worry about whether you'll make your flight or not.

This freedom is a thing that cannot easily be shared. As soon as you start traveling with another person you'll end up in a situation where you're trying to maintain a schedule, and/or one person feeling like they're following the other. That is actually a great thing, and some of my most memorable cycling trips have been with others, but as I do more and more cycling trips I'm starting to lean towards being a solo cyclist. I definitely would still go on trips with friends though.

This post hasn't remotely done justice to the feeling I'm trying to describe. I can list the aspects, I can try to tell you why I enjoy them, but in the end, you just won't understand unless you do a cycling trip yourself. So, get going!

Posted in Cycling , Japan , Thoughts

Collected thoughts for a new year

Posted on 2016-01-07 19:31 by rv

It's been a while. 2015 has been a very quiet year for blogging, although I did end up taking more photos than some of the previous years. I've been writing down short notes in Google Keep for the purpose of eventually turning them into blog posts, but find myself just ending up with more and more notes and never in the right mood to blog. But rather than throw them away, I'll write them down here. They'll prove useful to future me.

In addition to the small thoughts, when I think back on 2015 I can clearly notice one massive.. let's call it 'deficiency' in my life: I have too many hobbies. I've reached the point where I've upped my quality of life so much that I need more real-life burdens to sustain myself. Or, to put it in real-life terms: bought a car, started living together with girlfriend, need to pay the mortgage. Thanks to the amazing apartment we bought I never have to complain about housemates or noisy neighbours again, but in return I need to keep it and all items in it clean and operational. 2015 is also the first full year that I owned a car - another maintenance burden. Adding all that newness to my old hobbies and combining it with a now more urgent need to earn income so I can pay the bills means that I have less time ever for just my old hobbies. Oh boohoo, #fwp..

It's the main thing I want to improve upon in 2016: I want to spread myself less thinly. Less hobbies, more in-depth enthusiasm. Some things will have to go, such as the car. Other hobbies may need to be put into perspective given how little time I've spent on them in the past year. But all in all, a reorganization of priorities is necessary. It's time to catch up to where I am in life.

That was the big thought. Here's some small ones. Think of it as me-to-me pep talk.

Being good at something might make it boring, but only if you're not careful.
A strong appreciation for things can only happen when you are not tired and if you are not worried about other things you could be doing with your time.
Pace yourself. Always go slower than you think you should.
You can't stuff new experiences into your brain bucket if your bucket is already overflowing. Vacate your brain first.
As the body weakens the comfort zone decreases. Keep your body in shape. At least a little.
You can't just receive absolute freedom and immediately know how to handle it.
Question: if you were in the position of someone who feels guilty about their lifestyle, wouldn't you want to be able to enjoy life without guilt if you were them?
Question: how, as a 30+ years old with a steady relationship, busy work and long commute, can one keep in touch with old friends and have a steady circle of people one loves to hang out with every week? I'll be thinking about this one for the rest of the year..
Home is the worst place to change yourself.
Don't go with the flow. Think for yourself.
Keep asking yourself: what is my goal right now?

Time for 2016!

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Goals are personal

Posted on 2015-12-29 12:41 by rv

For some reason I always used to think that if I got a girlfriend my whole life would suddenly make sense. I would change my life to do everything for her and that would be more than enough satisfaction for me to live my life, no matter what I would have to do. We would have goals together and those goals would be the only ones that matter. The 'I' would dissolve into 'we' and the old me would disappear and something grander and better and different would be born.

This did not happen.

I mean, sure, there's stuff we do together, and a very large part of our lives overlap, so there's a lot of things that now naturally only occur in the 'we'-context. But I'm finding that all those things still only make up a small part of me and that the things that really, truly, motivate me are part of my core being and have not changed at all.

And I feel totally guilty about that. After all, I am finally in this fantastic relationship with a girl who shares so many interests and ways of life with me, yet somehow I feel the need to have goals of my own in addition to that? Shame! But that's the way I feel, and one of the things I am still learning in this relationship is how to not make myself feel guilty about that. The 'I' did not dissolve into the 'we', but everything 'we' do makes my 'I' experience better. And her 'I' exprience too (I hope!). That surely must be the sign of a good relationship between introverts.

2016 is approaching. I have many things I want to do. I have the means to do them, although it may involve taking a bit more risk than I usually do. But I'm looking forward to new things because the excitement of new things is what makes me happy. New things are always worth pursuing.

Posted in Thoughts

Values, applied.

Posted on 2015-12-21 04:53 by rv

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of my all-time favorite books. I've recently revisited it and decided to start reading its sequel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. It's been an interesting journey.

I found myself almost completely agreeing with the ideas expressed in Zen, so I expected Lila to be a confirmation of those ideas and something that would be an easy read for me. That turned out to be completely not true. I had trouble reading past the first half of the first part of the book because I simply didn't like what the author was writing. The book seemed to casually put science and scientific development in a subservient position to the book's 'grand theory of everything', and that kind of offended me. The previous book was very clear about the things it presented, and it presented no conflicts with the existing ideas I had. But Lila needed a bit of mental adjustment on my part before I was able to read on. Later on in the book I realized the issue is not as extreme as I described it here in this blogpost, but the way it's written does pose a bit of a hurdle to overcome.

The metaphysics of quality is hard to accept. The subdivision into four kinds of static quality and one dynamic quality seems arbitrary to me still, even after having read one and a half books. I find the subdivision very useful, and can find real-life examples in my life that make (more?) sense when put into these categories. But even Pirsig himself mentions that his theory is another way of looking at the world, not necessarily the way. As with all theories, if it's a proper theory it should be able to make predictions about future situations accurately if it's to hold up. I don't quite yet see how it'll be able to do that for me personally, or how it will benefit me.

The theory does provide some lovely explanations about my own life. I can think about people and experiences in terms of quality and it makes sense. I know someone who always watches incredibly bad movies that I can't watch without cringing, yet this person does not notice at all. Yet despite that lack of static quality this person does have an immense amount of dynamic quality, which is I think what draws other people to them. It's nice to be able to give this trait a name, and I think this name satisfies the properties better than any other word I could've come up with.

Traveling can be phrased in words of the theory as well. Particularly my cycling trips: when I first started doing cycling trips, everything was new. Every day was a new experience, with nothing planned and I never knew what would happen that day. It was absolutely at the cutting edge of experience. Pure, dynamic, quality. As time went by though, that dynamic quality turned into a pattern. I learned what I liked about the trip and optimized for that. I circumvented the stumbling blocks and became better at doing cycling trips, but at the same time the novelty was gone. I knew the country, I knew the routine, I had a pretty good of all the possible events that could occur to me on any given day. Dynamic quality had turned into static quality. It is by no means a bad thing, but it's also something that's no longer evolving. It's a comfortable, fixed pattern. But it's not the same as dynamic quality. To get that feeling back I will need to find my beginner's mind again. I think I will have to visit a new country, or countries, to rediscover dynamic quality on cycling trips.

Girlfriend trips can be phrased in this terminology as well. Whenever I'm traveling together with my girlfriend it feels like she acts as a tether, or an anchor, to the static quality that binds us together. The things we both like, the things we both want to experience are the common factor between us, and it tends not to vary even when we are traveling. It's the thing that binds us together, which, although it evolves, it evolves slowly, so I would call those values static. For me this means that when she and I are traveling together, I feel very much at rest and at peace, comfortable in my static quality. I think it's more difficult to discover dynamic quality that can be enjoyed as a pair, but when you do, that experience is all the more intense.

For example, yesterday we arrived at a new place and had to go out for food in the evening. It was getting dark and it was Sunday, so not many places were open and we were in an unfamiliar environment. The situation was something that I found quite enjoyable, since everything felt new and dynamic. I'm not sure my girlfriend was in the same mindset as me though, because it's very easy to get hung up on the static quality patterns that we're used to.

But sometimes, when the moment is right, we find ourselves in a situation that maximizes dynamic quality in a way that pleases both of us, like when we saw the eagle rays when diving. Swimming under water against the current was something neither of us were used to, and the environment there was sufficiently different from a regular dive that it forced us to recognize the dynamic quality of the situation. Because we share the same static values that brought us into that situation I think we were both able to enjoy the dynamic quality of it in the same way. That's what made it powerful.

I'm not quite finished with the second book. Perhaps it'll turn everything on its head in the end and what I just wrote might make no sense. But it feels like a good addition to my mental world image. Let's see if it'll hold up over time and experience.

Posted in Thoughts | Tagged pirsig , zen

The rational sacrifice

Posted on 2015-11-12 17:17 by rv

Check out this post on Elon Musk on Wait But Why. The post goes into great detail about how Musk reasons from first principle. By starting at the beginning and thinking about what's best for humanity as a whole, Musk ends up being motivated to make reality renewable energy and travel to Mars. He didn't just start there from scratch of course, and the article shows how he worked his way up from internet startups towards more lofty goals. It's a good read, highly recommended.

Somehow, when I think about my own life in this way, and trying to be as rational as possible, I do not find myself reaching the same conclusions as Musk has. I think what Musk has done is, is you consider the human factor, not the most rational solution to the problem 'what should I do with my life'. And that makes what he does all the more admirable. I'll try to explain my reasoning with some personal life examples.

In my day job as software developer it pays off to be completely and coldly rational about your product. For example, even if you intend to be on a project for 6 months, it still pays off to focus on the extreme-long-term of the project if it was made to last long, even if you don't intend to be on the project for that long. Rationally, what is best for the project is also best for you as a developer, because you are accountable for the state of the project. If the project goes well and continues to go well in the future, that means people think highly of you and will consider you again for future projects. Personal motivation and that of the whole are aligned.

Now compare that to Musk. He made his personal motivation to be the motivation of the whole. There is just no way that this can be an intrinsic, gut-feeling type of motivation, and he says so himself. He reasoned from first principles and arrived rationally at a conclusion about what he should do with his life. I know how this type of reasoning works; I use it all the time at work. In my case it means that I choose to increase test coverage, review code that someone else has already reviewed but I really want to be sure of, or spend a day debugging some hard-to-catch bug on production -- all tedious tasks that don't improve my knowledge as a developer. As a developer I can improve myself faster by learning new frameworks, trying new languages and venturing out into different areas of software. But I am employed for one particular project, and that project benefits the most from me doing what needs to be done, because no one else will do it.

I have no Musk-comparison for the opposite case: the case where you do something out of your gut feeling because you know it feels right, uncaring about the consequences, aiming towards nothing rational in particular but just wanting inner peace. But I do have an example of my own: that of cycling. Being on the road all day, seeing many things as I cycle along, with only room for one goal in my mind, sometimes pondering the book I've read the previous night. Cycling trips to me are a form of meditation, a way of clearing out my mind of unwanted thoughts and focusing on the here and now. It is a mental reset that, as far as I'm aware, I can only experience in that particular way, and it is a very powerful experience, especially when put into contrast against my daily life.

As someone who considers himself to be highly rational, I find it unreal that I am at my [best, happiest, most peaceful] when I am doing something irrational.

But then, rationally speaking, if I know that my mind and body can provide me with this peace of mind if I seek the irrational path, isn't that the path I should rationally be pursuing? And isn't everything else in my life second to that goal? It's a deeply personal (even spiritual?) goal, one that is of no use to the people around me, society or humanity as a whole. I am no Elon Musk, and I can not rationally justify me sacrificing myself to save humanity. Or perhaps I just rate my chances of success pretty low. Either way, I know I will never be spiritually motivated that way, and I think neither can he be, which is why I think of what he's doing as a sacrifice. I respect him for that, but I do not want it for myself.

Reading back what I just wrote I realized there's a contradiction between how I describe my goals versus the whole in the third and fourth paragraph. Although I wrote that I don't want to sacrifice myself in the way Musk does, it appears that I'm doing exactly that in the smaller-scale context of my project. That's probably not good. I think I can attain higher goals before resorting to a self-sacrificing position.

Posted in Tech , Thoughts

Suffering is living

Posted on 2015-11-06 10:51 by rv

Based on my experiences during a cycling trip versus my experiences of working / living the daily life, I infinitely prefer the life of the cycling trip. Cycling triggers strong emotions in me, both positive and negative, and a week of cycling inevitably ends up being more memorable than a week of grinding the day job. It's not just that: cycling holidays give me a feeling of serenity that I just cannot get anywhere else. It's the combination of physical exhaustion, seeing new sights, the possibility of unexpected things happening, being in full and sole control of everything I do all day, and not having to worry about possessions, obligations or anything else.

The best way I can describe this feeling is with an anecdote. When I'm at home I always need to be doing something: I need to play Minecraft, I need to do house chores, I need to learn some new programming technique, I need to pay some bills, I need to do some work thing. Even if I force myself to 'do nothing' for an hour and just sit on the couch trying to clear my mind, it has little effect. It's real life in progress. There's many things to be thought about. My mind cannot rest.

Here's the contrast: yesterday I went cycling to a mountain lake I know very well, and a mountain pass that leads up to the ocean at the end that I've cycled once or twice and have really good memories about. The sun was high in the sky, not a cloud to be seen, and I had the mountain path all to myself with hardly a car passing me by all day. Just me, nature, a tough-but-not-too-tough uphill and a superfast downhill with a gorgeous view. That's all I needed to think about all day. Not a single 'real life' thought entered my mind that day. At the end of the pass I was pleasantly exhausted and had a rest at my favorite beach spot. And then I just sat there, for an hour, thinking of nothing much in particular. My mind was at rest. I did not feel the need to think about something, to solve something. I was just content with being there in that particular moment. Real life provides me with so much things to think about but the beach is just.. the beach.

During the past few years of my life I have made some important life choices; choices that at first glance might seem to take me away from that serene moment at the beach. I cannot pretend to know what I'm doing with my life, nor that I am doing the right thing at this very moment, but every once in a while, thanks to cycling trips like these I get to insert a little moment of serenity in my life that allows me to evaluate my life choices in a more detached manner. Having done that, I can say that I am not disappointed at all at the choices I made so far. I think for me the key lesson of this trip was:

You will never truly appreciate something unless you have suffered for it.

This is a mental thing, and nothing anyone can tell me can convince me that it's wrong. It's just hardwired into my brain. I have experienced both sides of it: sometimes I get something without making an effort, or the slight effort I make has a huge payoff and I pat myself on the back for being clever. But emotionally speaking, it's a billion times more satisfying to work really hard for something and then finally get it in the end.

And that's the irrational part. Human beings are irrational. Logically speaking there should be absolutely no need for us to prefer the working-hard version over the get-things-for-free version if the end result is the same. But human beings are not wired that way. Our emotional payoff is triggered by irrational things, so we must adjust our logic to sometimes prefer the irrational instead. I could optimize my whole life so that I never have to work hard for anything ever again, but I would hardly feel a thing about it. Why would I want to lead a lifetime of meh versus a grand drama of emotional ups and downs? Sensations, that's what life is all about. Experiences. You need to feel in order to be alive. That is the one truth that needs to take precedence over rational thought. Otherwise you're just a machine.

To moderate and contrast that last statement a little: my little cycling trip of beautiful physical and mental ups and downs was paid for entirely by mind-numbing machine-like labour, done in a rationally optimized way to be perfectly efficient with the time I had available to me. I'd like to think that I do my job well: I don't waste time, I use all of my brain to keep track of everything that's going on and I always try to deliver quality work. It's kept me employed so far in a deadliney environment so I must be doing something right. It's not bad at all; I'm quite passionate about how to do my job right. But somehow all of that pales in comparison to the intensity of a cycling trip. If people would pay me to cycle without telling me what to do I would absolutely choose that over my current job.

But nobody does, of course. Also, nobody would pay me to be an astronaut or a formula one driver. Which is exactly why my current life style is as rational as it gets. I get paid for something I am really good at and also quite enjoy, and I use that money to finance the things that I couldn't possibly do without. And then some things on the side too, because why the hell not.

I blogged previously about the mental fog that I was in before and when I started this trip. This kind of statement, this kind of clarity about my life and what I will go back to, is easy to see when you're on a bike on a clear-blue day, cycling some lovely country lane towards a mountain, but it will be tough to keep a hold of when the daily drudge comes back and I'm commuting to work on a cloudy, rainy day. That is also why I write: to be able to read this back again later so I can draw inspiration from it. They're a way of realigning my future self to the path that I know is right, my way of saying "Trust me, dude. We know what we're doing".

And on that note, I'm flying back home tomorrow. I won't be using the word 'drudge' or 'grind' to describe my life any time soon; we've got a lot of fun things planned in the months ahead. And thanks to this trip I'm completely mentally ready for anything. Bring it on!

Posted in Cycling , Thoughts | Tagged woohoo

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

Posted on 2015-11-04 06:01 by rv

Hi blog, it's been a while. This is going to be a long one.

Let's start at the end. Two days ago I stood with my bicycle on the bridge connecting Kitakyushu airport with the mainland, on my way to catch a flight back to Tokyo, and later back to the UK. Despite all the troubles I've experienced on this trip, which I'll talk about more later, I realized that I did not want it to end. Every single cycling trip I do starts with deadening preparation and a start so tough that it makes me think "Yup, this will definitely be the last one". Then the end nears and I just don't want to stop, and I know there's going to be another one after this. It's become what I do and who I am.

Cycling trips are my way of staying sane. I recently read The Martian by Andy Weir. A brilliant book. Spoilers following: the book has a great contrast between the main character being stranded on his own and taking care of everything himself, versus him being in contact with NASA and them doing all the complicated stuff for him. I love cycling trips because they force me into a situation where I cannot rely on anyone else to do things for me. I'm the one who needs to plan, who needs to fix the bike when it's broken, who needs to deal with route changes, bad weather and everything else that could possibly happen. It's a good feeling, that of doing everything yourself. And unlike in The Martian there's less risk of death. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

There's so many things I want to write about now that I'm in the mood for writing. I really want to write about the trip but I need to get something out of the way first: why did I not blog for the past few months? I could come up with many reasons here, but the main reason is that I have been a braindead coward. I'll elaborate.

First, the braindead bit: I have been utterly fulfilled in my daily life for the past few months. Our apartment purchase finalized without issue and I have been living happily together with my girlfriend. We've done all the critical housy things needed to make the place our own and are now no longer in such a hurry for further improvements. Things are good. Not much happens in my life. And when stuff does happen I have the opportunity to fire off a real-life status update to my girlfriend immediately, so it goes out of my system before I have a chance to even consider blogging about it. Which is probably a good thing, because most of the stuff that's happening to me is just boring, personal, house life stuff, like comparing various types of blinds, discussing best methods of hanging up shelves or figuring out where to put the exercise bike. It's all stuff that has been occupying my mind, but I never once thought it would be worth sharing with the outside world.

That sounds happy, right? It absolutely is, but a lack of variation in experience does dull the brain. I have only myself to blame for this: in addition to the 'normal' housy things, I have also been pretty enveloped by Minecraft. Whenever I feel sleepy or absent or otherwise reluctant to focus my full attention on something, I play Minecraft. I create massive worlds with elaborate backstories, and there's always something more to do. It's the most gratifying 'game' I have ever played, especially in the long term.

But I digress. The point was to illustrate how a lack of variety in experience dulls the brain. I pretend it doesn't. I tell myself "Sure, I play Minecraft, I don't have a social life any more, I don't have much other hobbies, but that's ok because I can change my life any time and mold my brain into something else whenever I want to". I tend to use planned holidays as an excuse because I know that exactly what is happening now, will happen: here I am sitting in a cafe in Japan typing this up, a clear achievement of a brain that is once again creative and out of the Minecraft trap. I know trips have this effect on me so I let myself indulge in mind-numbing activities before the trip. Then after the trip finishes I tell myself it won't happen again and I'll stay in that creative first-person real-world mode this time for sure. I don't think that's ever worked, but there's always a next trip to reset me.

So that's the braindead part of the 'braindead coward', what's the coward bit? A braver me of the past explains it better than I could.

The internet has changed. In 2005 you could write whatever the fuck you want, in my post of 2011 I mention the possibility of potential employers stumbling upon something they might not like. In 2015 writing on the internet is downright toxic for your career no matter what you write. It's a given that people will find out everything about you before they consider you for an interview, and it's foolish and naive to assume that they'll take the time to consider your full background and context of whichever remark you wrote that caused them to scratch you off the list. I've made the mistake in the past of writing stuff in the heat of the moment that could really only have negative consequences for me. When I was confronted with that I deleted my blog for a while, thinking it's better to have nothing at all than something that could be used against me. But, against my better judgment and what I think is rational, it just doesn't feel right to censor myself on the internet. I'm having trouble constructing a useful train of thought for my wanting to keep my blog online, which is probably proof that it's not rational. But my gut feeling tells me I should keep it, so I'll listen to my gut. It hasn't betrayed me yet. I can't promise that there will be frequent future updates, but I will try.

Right, back to the cycling trip.

London had been grey and terrible for weeks when I left for Japan, bike in bag, driven to the airport by my lovely girlfriend. Well before the trip started I had cycled a few times a week on our exercise bike, but lost motivation about 2-3 weeks before the trip. I was incredibly overweight, and unfit. This, like letting the mental fog take me over, is another thing I thought I could get away with because I had a trip coming up that would 'fix' it. Because I only had a little under two weeks available for this trip, and very fixed inbound and outbound flights, I decided the only useful way to plan the trip would be to pre-book flights and hotels, which meant fixing my route and the minimum amount I would have to cycle each day. But, given the location of start and end airport, that there might be rainy days and that I would have to allocate myself some extra daylight time to fix potential mechanical mishaps, the distance cycled each day was not actually that much: anywhere between 40 and 80 kilometers per day. Quite manageable. In fact, for the first few days, I arrived at each hotel very early in the afternoon, giving me plenty of time to think, which is usually a bad sign. And because I already had accommodation and didn't to cycle more, I didn't bother to take a longer scenic route or cycle to somewhere else after checking in.

I need to elaborate on that, because it wasn't just a lack of motivation, it actually involved a fair amount of physical pain. Partly because I am overweight, but mainly because of a bad saddle angle, being on the bike for longer than 30kms caused me to have incredible saddle pain, which also carried over to the next day. It made cycling utterly unenjoyable because all I could focus on was the saddle pain. The worst thing was that I didn't realize at the time that it was because of the saddle. I just assumed that I was hopelessly unfit and just really fat; I couldn't get any power down on the pedals because every time I did I would feel the pain in my behind. Because of this I would take it easy, go slower and coast a little more, but even when coasting I'm sitting on the saddle, and it's actually only making it worse because I'm not spreading the load between my legs, arms and butt: it's just my butt that's supporting my weight.

The worst day happened early on in the trip: it was a beautiful blue sky day. I was cycling along some perfectly flat coastal roads; not much traffic, with some nice scenery on the side. I didn't have to go too far that day so I took it easy. It should have been the perfect cycling moment, and I recognized that as well, but somehow I could not make myself enjoy it. My mind was in a fog from spending too much time in hotel rooms and not on a bicycle, and my body was just hurting from the saddle pain which at the time I had not identified as being worse than it should have been. I just could not get my brain to reset and appreciate the moment, which led to frustration, which led to more frustration at being frustrated even though it was a prefectly beautiful day. I felt clueless and helpless.

It took me a long time to realize that my saddle angle was wrong because a) I had a plausible explanation in the fact that I was overweight and unfit, b) I had taken the time at the start of the trip to finetune every bit of my bike (gears, saddle height, brakes, fenders, chain), so my mental image of the bike was that it was perfect. And finally, c) the saddle angle actually slipped back more as I cycled along because the bolt was not tight enough. Later, much later, during the second-to-last day of the trip, I finally learned of all these things. The day before, after reaching my destination, it occurred to me that maybe my saddle could be angled a bit more forward. I thought it would make a minor difference, but when I made the adjustment it immediately solved all my saddle pain issues! It was an incredibly liberating moment because I could suddenly put all my power on the pedals again and go much faster than before. I was not as unfit as I previously thought after all. It was the best feeling of the entire trip, and I'm sure that one single moment of adjusting the saddle triggered the mental reset that I so desperately needed.

It's not a magic solution of course: I'm still overweight, so adjusting the saddle angle just put a lot more stress on my arms, but they had nothing to do for the entire trip and could use the extra work. I can tell that I'm not nearly as fit as I was for last year's trip, but I'm definitely not as unfit as I thought during the beginning of the trip either. After making the adjustment I was finally able to cardio-exhaust myself, no longer being limited by the saddle pain. It felt great.

There were many other mechanical mishaps during the trip. Fresh off the plane, when I first set up the bike, I noticed I couldn't get the rear wheel into position at all: the two rear bits of the frame were bent inwards even further than they ever were in the past. I had to use brute force to bend the frame open again, which was probably a very bad thing to do, but I didn't really have a choice at the time, since I didn't want to abandon the trip. When I finally bent the frame back enough for the rear wheel to fit in, I noticed that one of the rear brakes was pressed against the wheel, preventing it from turning. Looks like my bending wasn't exactly even and now the rear wheel was not quite in the center any more. I didn't want to take it out again after all the effort and brute force I'd gone through just to get it in, so I took out all the spacers from the side that was hitting against the wheel, and put them on the other side. It actually resulted in a very usable rear brake.

Then I found out that the rear luggage rack didn't quite fit any more, probably because of the bending. Lacking the tools to adjust it, I asked the taxi driver to help me out as I used yet more brute force to push the rack into a position where the screws would fit onto the holes in the frame.

There were some more minor mishaps as well during the trip: two of the bolts connecting the fender spokes to the actual fender fell off because I didn't tighten them enough when building the fenders back home. With the bolts gone I just duct-taped them into place and it's worked fine since. The gears have been surprisingly fine considering the amount of stress that the rear derailleur has surely been through during transport. The front derailleur needed a minor adjustment to prevent the chain from running into it at high gears, but it worked fine without the adjustment as well. Lastly, for some reason my handlebar-mounted gear lever came loose near the end of the trip. I haven't quite figured out why this has happened, but rotating it 90 degrees tightens it again, so I've settled on that for now. I can fix it properly when I get home.

I could talk about many travel-y things here: how the skies were so blue and nice, how the roads were beautiful and quiet and devoid of traffic, how chilly it is in the morning. Or about the random guy who gave me a drink while I was having my morning conbini break. But the main focus for me during this trip was the mental fog and my struggles with the saddle and my unfitness. It may sound petty, but that stuff affects me a lot. In the beginning of the trip I was mentally sheltered and avoided social interaction. As the trip progressed I gained confidence again and began to sort-of return to my old self. Everything just came naturally again. An odd example of this: when the trip started and I first unpacked my bike at the airport, I took a long time to set everything up and eventually had to enlist the help of a nearby taxi driver. I hesitated for a long time before initiating the interaction. At the end of the trip when I had to unpack my bicycle, once again at an airport with nearby taxi drivers, I was swift, efficient and was not phased at all by a nearby taxi driver who seemed to scrutinize my every move. As soon as I first assembled the bike and returned from a test lap I crossed eyes with the driver, smiled and lifted my thumb up. I would never have been able to do that at the beginning of the trip. I can do many things when I am confident.

So here I am. Once again in Atsugi, the inevitable final destination of every Japan cycling trip I do. Yesterday I cycled from Haneda airport to Atsugi, via Enoshima. It was tougher than I thought; the damage done to my butt from the bad saddle angle isn't quite healed yet, and the adjusted saddle angle did get painful near the end, but the feeling of returning 'home' quite compensated for that. I say 'home', but I've been back so many times and have settled into the UK life so thoroughly that Atsugi really does not feel like home any more. Nor any of Japan, for that matter. Japan is no longer mine, but I am content with occasionally returning to check up on it. It's looking good so far. I've changed far, far more than it has.

I think it was on that worst day of the trip, the day that I just couldn't get myself to enjoy, that I started a re-read of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Barely a chapter in the mental fog lifted from me and a lot of things made sense. I have been paying way too much attention to the classical aspects of everything and not at all on the romantic. I'm getting all the technical details right, planning everything in advance with just the right safety margins, etc., but I never once thought about the romantic aspect of the trip - how to enjoy it - until I was on the bus to Haneda. The moment was brief, but amazing. I remembered what I was here for and it filled me with giddy excitement. It's only now, near the end, that I feel like I've connected with the romantic aspect of the trip. I can see the bigger picture again.

Today I've booked a bus and a taxi so I can get home again on Saturday. I've still got two days left. I'm planning to cycle to my favorite lake, over a mountain pass and then back down again to the sea. On the second day I might climb the big mountain, but perhaps not. It's not important what I do, as long as I enjoy it.

Every time I go on a cycling trip I find out what I truly need.

Posted in Cycling , Thoughts

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