It’s almost sunrise, and I’m staying at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. I texted a girl last night, something of a logistical nature to hide my attachment to her, partially hoping that she didn’t reply, and then I fell asleep at 9 PM. It was my first night here in Singapore, and I was adjusting quite well. It’s always easier to adjust for time differences when it depends on staying up late
The effect people have on me is not a function of decay. There isn’t a sort of absolute effect people have, followed by the next couple of months where the effect becomes less strong. I’ve noticed that people’s effect on me follows a function of committed capital curve, where the peak of someone’s effect on me doesn’t occur until much after our interaction is complete. It takes a couple of months for me to digest the experience and for the event to incubate. The actual effect does of the experience resulting in personality change does not occur until much after the event itself, and the tail of that is very long. It could be for a couple of years, or it could be for the rest of my life. Change from one person overlaps with change from other people, similar to how capital is continuously called and distributed in portfolio with alternative investments.
There is this quote in Before Sunset that I really like: “I guess when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people with whom you’ll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.”
Each time people meeting, if substantial, it initiates change, and that change takes significantly longer to happen than most people think. I don’t know about people at large, but I am very much drawn to the people who have made a change on me, even if we don’t share the same life anymore. This naturally results in some asymmetries in relationships, because we are not all changed equally even sharing the same events. Some people are more changed by certain interactions than others, and some people grow more attached than others.
It often reflects in my inability to go back to “how things used to be.” The nature of change is that it is thermodynamic. Change occurs in a way where it cannot be reversed, like many thermodynamic processes.
shades of gwei 