notes from winter ’21

At my Muay Thai class today, I made a realization of why I don’t have any friends.

I don’t have many guy friends because many core parts of my personality are antithetical to traditional expressions of masculinity.

I don’t have that many girl friends because I end up developing crushes on them, and that usually ends up very bad very quickly or very good for a bit and then very bad very slowly.

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In multivariate calculus, we learned about Legrange multipliers, which is a tool that allows us to maximize a function given a constraint, defined as ∇f(x, y, z) = λ∇g(x, y, z).

I keep on thinking — I want to be a billionaire, but I’m doing all of these things in my life that doesn’t make it easier to become a billionaire. For example, I want to work abroad for a little bit. That probably doesn’t help my career since it basically resets my professional network very early in my career. Yet, I still want to work abroad. Why? I’m not sure; it just seems like something that would make life interesting.

Realistically, I don’t think my attitude is to just make as much possible in life. There are constraints here and there, like the need to live a meaningful life, whatever that means.

More likely, I’m trying to make as much money as possible given the constraint of wanting to not regret the way I lived my life until I reach age 30, when my life effectively ends.

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Memento mori is the concept of living a fulfilling life with the pressing thought that we are going to die. Personally, I don’t care too much about dying; I feel like life is too long anyways.

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People often describe New York as losing its grandeur after a couple months in the city. I find that characterization to be, above all, a personal characterization. Someone is always going to find New York illustrious and romantic and whatever. It is only after we condition ourselves do the things around us that used to bring us pleasure, no longer bring us pleasure.

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I think part of the reason I want to be attractive is just due to the fact that I want to be noticed. I tend to notice attractive people more than I notice unattractive people. Since I tend to generalize my own experiences to that of the rest of the world, I also think other people tend to notice attractive people more than they notice unattractive people.

For most of my life, I had the impression that I was the ugliest person on Earth. Somewhere down the line, I became exposed to a lot more ugly people, and I realized that I wasn’t so ugly after all.

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The other day, my friend mentioned to me that I tend to generalize how I feel at a particular moment of time into how I feel at large. I am happy right now. I feel happy because my intimacy threshold has been met for the night, and I feel connected to the people in the world around me. When I am happy, I will continue to feel that I am happy by nature of knowing myself and knowing what makes me happy.

It is hard to grasp how I will feel outside of this particular phenomenon I am experiencing. I don’t know if I will continue to be happy in a couple hours’ time.

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Spotify needs to find out a way to stop suggesting certain songs to me.

Certain songs trigger me, honey.