exogenous shock

This weekend has passed. I went to LA for a video shoot and then Dallas.

It was an eventful weekend. I’m on the plane back now. There’s an hour left in my flight. I spent the first half of the flight watching a movie. Then I read more of the book I brought. Then I started to listen to some music and started to get some feels. Just songs from my past. I made a playlist of some EDM songs I liked during undergrad, and I listen to it on occasion to remind myself how far I’ve come. I remember how it was like back then, and then I observe how things are now.

I don’t really think about the trajectory in which my life has taken on a regular basis. I do think about it but not regularly. I’ve been invited to think about it this weekend, and I am still thinking about it. I feel like I have infinite willpower. My past is where I got my willpower from. My past self experienced some hardship, so my present self could thrive. I am thriving right now. There’s not anything that I would change about my life that I haven’t worked on changing already. There’s nothing I want to do that I cannot, subject to certain constraints and still valuing patience as a virtue. I’ve told everyone how I felt about them. I have kept all the friendships that I want to keep. I’m in a continuous state of peace with the world. If I die, then I die.

Compared to my friends, I’m very okay with dying. It’s a personality trait I’ve picked up after being suicidal for so long. It’s very hard to think about the future 20 or 30 years from now. Why would I put money into my 401(k) when I don’t know if I’ll be alive when I’m 59? Why would anyone?

I think about how unconscious I was for most of my life. I still don’t feel awake, but I know that I was not awake before. It comes through moments. Exogenous shocks leaving me with a different secular growth rate than what I had before. I live my life to maximize the number of exogenous shocks in my life. I don’t perceive change. I only perceive acceleration. I perceive when I am changing quickly at an above-trend rate. I feel alive when I am growing at an above-trend rate. I feel mostly dead otherwise. Without exogenous shock, I am just a more pronounced version of my previous self. I don’t want that.

Growing means shedding personality. Shedding personality means that the personality you had before is unrecognizable to the personality you have now. Character stays, but personality is something that we experience momentarily. This is my personality now. That will be my personality in the future, and so on.

Under the neoclassical growth model, an economy grows at its secular rate until it undergoes an exogenous shock advancing total factor productivity.

Without exogenous shock, our current personality is caused by our previous personality. There is no free will to that. There is no room to change in life unless you pursue things that will change you. That’s where exogenous shocks come in. My exogenous shocks are the people I meet. Mostly the girls I like, with whom I share certain experiences and conversations, but there have been some exceptions. I can’t really think about my personality in absence of the people that have changed me.

I once saw a chart in my positive psychology class in college that showed that people become happier over time. I didn’t get it while I was taking that class sophomore year, but I get it now. Things do get better – or we cope better – whatever the case, I continue to pursue things that change me, recognizing that personality is reactionary and recursive and non-cumulative. The self I had before is not the self that I have now. The self I have now is not the result of the self I had before. The self evolves stochastically and intentionally by experiences and conversations we choose to have.