#narrative thinking

I’ve never really been interested in grad school, and I think that going to grad school was a mistake, and I’ve always figured that this was a failing on my part, that I was a failure.  Like, this was my dream in undergrad -- I wanted to go to grad school in NLP or computational cog sci, and I wanted to publish a bunch of papers and become a professor and spend my life in academia.  And then... at the end of undergrad I burnt out, and then I spent two months traveling, and... when I got back, I just didn’t want to go to grad school.

And despite immense depression and repeated attempts to drop out, I’ve stuck around, largely because I felt like I “should” be interested in grad school, and that my lack of interest was a fall from a better state, and that maybe I could “recover” and learn to love grad school again someday.

But this weekend, somebody made a comment that was like, “after you’ve traveled and seen more of the world, the things that once seemed important to you often stop seeming so important”.  And... something about that comment made me realize that my lack of interest in grad school was not necessarily a fall or a failure; it could be a change or a growth.  A natural part of a reasonable life-narrative.

And I’ve already been pretty ok for a while with the fact that I might get fired at the end of the semester.  Thanks to @somedaysiamspike, I know I have a job lined up in that event, and a cheap room to rent, and that takes an enormous weight off my mind.  But the comment I heard this weekend made me feel even more ok with potentially dropping out of grad school.

(I’d actually prefer to stay in grad school, for at least one more semester, since there’s a class on algorithmic game theory that I’d really like to take.  But if I get kicked out, then things are going to be ok.  And maybe I’ll drop out on purpose sometime later.)

I’m more and more ok with just exploring, with not having a life narrative or keeping my eyes fixed on any specific goals.  I’m not trying to do anything important; I’m not trying to save the world; I’m not trying to get married and have kids by this-and-this age.  I’m just trying to enjoy my life and get by.  Would working in a grocery store help me along a career path?  Would it earn me a lot of money?  No, but I would enjoy it, and that’s what matters to me right now.

You can tell me I’m giving up on my traditionalist values.  You can tell me I’m giving up on the things that are important to me.  You can tell me I’m succumbing to the same liberal “enjoy my life” nonsense that is (supposedly) going to be the death of our society.  But here’s the thing -- I am not going to get a husband or kids by worrying a lot about how I don’t have those things.  That’s the paradox of lust for results: it’s only when you stop seeking that you’re able to find.  And I’m not going to get anywhere by sticking to a highly demanding career that I don’t like, one that requires an immense amount of emotional investment to succeed in.  But I have enough skills to support myself, and I will get by floating from job to job for a while.

That said, the sense of responsibility I described in my last post does carry through to my plans for my future.  Right now, I’m currently weighed down by debt, and that affects my life significantly.  It’s why I haven’t dropped out of grad school so far (since at least that’s a reliable salary), and it prevents me from doing things like hiking the Appalachian trail or doing the wwoof thing for a while.  (I know, I know, look at me whining that I have bills to pay, and so I need to *have a job* rather than spend my whole live going on adventures and vacations.)

But anyway, I could pay back all my debt, and save up a bunch more money, if I just worked as a software engineer for 2 or 3 years.  I’m sure I could get the job -- I’m an algorithms badass -- but up until now, I hadn’t really considered it as an option, because the prospect just seemed really daunting and unpleasant.  I know I could wake up every morning and go to work in Joseph’s organic grocery store and be really happy about it.  But when imagining a software engineering job, always I worried that I would have trouble dragging myself out of bed.

15. Five most influential books over your lifetime.

Oh man, that’s hard.  How do I pick just five?

My life revolves around books, in a sense.  I make a lot of my decisions based on “what would do in a situation like this?”  So basically any book where I admire the characters is likely to have a big influence on me.

To hell with the number 5; I am just going to list books that influenced my life.

(1) When I was in first grade, I read a picture book about Van Gogh.  It told the story of his life: how he was hated, how he had no friends, how his paintings weren’t even appreciated until after he died.  But after his death, his artistic brilliance came to be recognized, and now he lives on in the canon of Western art.

Well, at that point in time, I wanted to grow up to be a famous novelist.  And at the time, I also had a lucky star on my wall that granted wishes.  But it wouldn’t just give you whatever you wanted; you had to offer up a sacrifice in return.  And so, after reading this book, I wished on my lucky star: that someday, I would be a famous novelist.  And I decided it would be worth living in misery, like Van Gogh did, if I could achieve that someday.  So I offered that up as my sacrifice: that I would go my entire life without friends, if only I could become a famous writer.

At the end of that year (first grade), my best friend moved away.  In second grade, I had no friends in school, and my teacher actively tormented me.  I had one friend in third grade and another in fourth grade, but in fifth grade, they abandoned me to become best friends with each other, and I had no friends in school again.  And my fifth grade teacher, who in retrospect was one of the biggest losers I’ve ever encountered, made fun of me and a couple other kids so that the popular fifth graders would think he was cool.

In general, I was picked on relentlessly.  At one point, in fifth grade, I made the following observation: if you are a fifth grade girl, and the other fifth grade girls pick on you, then you’re still a part of the “girl ladder”, and there’s a chance you can climb back up.  But if you’re a fifth grade girl, and the girls and boys make fun of you, then you’ve fallen off the girl ladder altogether and there’s no hope for you.  And if you’re a fifth grader, and all the second graders know what mean names to call you by the third week of school (my elementary school went 2nd through 5th grades), then you are the single most reviled kid in the entire school.

And I got through all this because of the conviction that my wish had been granted, and my sacrifice had been accepted.  I was suffering now, and it was terrible, but someday, someday when I was older, I was going to become a famous novelist.

(2) The Chronicles of Narnia and The Secret Garden.  I’m listing these together because they had a similar influence on me.  Both are profoundly uplifting; both tend to give me this calm sense that everything is going to be alright.  I don’t really know how to explain it.  They both give me this sense of order, one that I associate with childhood, and a complete trust that your parents know what they’re doing, and they’re going to make everything turn out alright.  But I’m not sure I ever got that sense from my parents when I was growing up.  I mean, my parents are wonderful people, but neither of them gave off that pillar-of-strength ancient-oak-tree kind of feeling.  For the most part, I’ve only encountered people like that since becoming an adult.  (I’m willing to concede that I might have “daddy issues”, because I tend to like calm, authoritative older men, and this seems like a good candidate for why.  I never had that “pillar of strength” growing up, so I’m looking for someone to fill that hole now.)  Anyway, when I was a kid, and I needed something to provide that “pillar-of-strength”-ness for me, I turned to these books.

In particular, I reread the Chronicles of Narnia a million times as a kid.  In middle school I had terrible nightmares, and was often afraid to sleep in my bedroom at night, and reading these books was the main thing I used to calm myself down.  I loved them all through college, but when I went to reread them during a mental breakdown in my first year of grad school, I found the moral absolutism and division-into-good-and-evil too simplistic, and I couldn’t get the same comfort out of them that I used to.  On the other hand, I didn’t read The Secret Garden nearly as much as a kid, but I sometimes return to it now, and it continues to have the same affect.

I’m not sure what it is about these books that gives off the sense I’m describing.  I guess they’re both narrated by benevolent adults, who are coming at it from a perspective of “I’ve been a kid, and I know what it’s like”?  The narrators have no problem pointing out the children’s faults (Edmund and Eustace being obnoxious in The Chronicles of Narnia, and both Mary and Colin being spoiled brats in The Secret Garden).  But it’s not judgmental, it’s… empathetic? understanding?  Like, the narrators simultaneously convey that the children are behaving badly, but they also clearly understand where the children are coming from, and they convey a sense that we all make mistakes, and it’s ok to make mistakes, and that’s part of growing up and self-improvement.  I dunno, I’m having a lot of trouble putting this into words.  But it has to do with that conversation from the other day, the one about spiders and encouragement-without-judgment.  IMO, these books get it exactly right.

(3) Radix by A. A. Attanasio, Demian by Hermann Hesse, and the A Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy by David Zindell.  I’m grouping these together, because I read all of them in college and they all contributed to the same life-philosophy I was developing at the time: one of living with uncertainty, accepting that some things are beyond our control, and saying “yes” to the universe and to our individual destinies.  I feel like I would do these books a disservice by trying to describe them further, but if people are enjoying my blog and want to read the fiction that inspired my thinking, these are the three books I would most recommend.

(4) The Power of Myth and some other stuff by Joseph Campbell.  This belongs to the same cluster as the books in (3), but I’m giving it a separate listing, because unlike the others, it is not a novel.

(5) Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.  This book changed the way I think about language, and the workings of the mind in general.  I study cognitive science, so this was super important to me.

(6) Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson.  This book didn’t influence me as strongly as it might have, since I read it after a friend (who was a huge RAW fan) taught me all about “the map is not the territory” and related concepts.  But it was still influential, and I highly recommend it.