Hammock Philosophy

I was doing some thinking. Thought I’d jot down some thoughts here in an unstructured and largely unedited way, mostly just so that I wouldn’t forget them. Perhaps best to not put too much stock into anything.

Philosophy is best done from a hammock in the shade of an apple tree. Ideally with a cool beverage.

This one strikes me as a no-brainer. No explanation needed, no explanation offered.

Do it well, not fast.

The inspiration for this one, I think, comes from Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Since I read it about two years ago, I’ve been thinking often about the concept of Quality, and what that means for me. I think it’s always been something I’ve held in high regard, but I never really had a name or a concrete conception of it until reading ZAMM. It’s a notion of taking the time to work with something until it’s right; understanding and accepting when it’s not, and continuing to work with it.

I also read through a good chunk of Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities, edited by Jim Williams (a surprisingly entertaining read). A number of the engineers that wrote articles for that compilation referred to an ancient electrical engineering analysis technique known as the “what if?” method. Essentially, to analyze a circuit, the engineer would consider “what would happen at point a if I applied voltage x at point b” for all possible combinations of a, b, and x. They would answer the question for themselves theoretically before running the test, and any discrepancy, even due to measurement error, had to be thoroughly understood and explained before the circuit was considered completely analyzed. The description of such a process made EE sound like a beautiful and pure form of the scientific method. There were many tales of engineers that would skip the process would have their ICs out the door quicker, but inevitably end up with unexplainable failures. Understanding every little detail of the system, and having the patience to turn over every stone before moving on to the next field seems to me to represent scientific inquiry in its highest and purest form.

Before closing this section, I’d like to breathe a word of caution against perfectionism. Here, when I speak of Quality, and doing things well, I speak of taking the time to truly understand the thing you’re building or doing. Iteration on an idea or prototype is not just a necessary evil–it’s a good thing. It helps build the understanding. And the understanding is, I think, what we’re really here for. Cogito ergo sum, and all that jazz.

Time is relative anyway; don’t let it push you around.

I’ve been reading Your Brain is a Time Machine by Dean Buonomano. A great read so far, and has really got me thinking a lot about time. Coincidentally, I’ve also been reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which also offers a number of mind-bending considerations.  One note that struck me from Buonomano’s book, was a quote from the Roman poet Plautus, from the 2nd century BCE:

The gods confound man who first found out / How to distinguish hours! Confound him too / Who in this place set up a sun-dial, / To cut and hack my days so wretchedly / Into small pieces! When I was a boy, / My belly was my sun-dial–one more sure, / Truer, and more exact than any of them. / This dial told me when twas proper time / To go do dinner, when I ought to eat; / But, now-a-days, why even when I have, / I can’t fall to, unless the sun gives leave. / The town’s so full of these confounded dials…

If poets were lamenting the oppressive control of the clock and meeting schedules back in the 2nd century BCE, what hope do we have now that we can measure and break down our days with an accuracy of 10e-18 seconds? Well, as it turns out, when you can measure time that accurately you realize it’s actually relative. Even objective, scientific time depends on you–where you are relative to other massive objects and how fast you’re going. So don’t let it push you around.

You only control You. Only you control you.

The first half of this one I heard iterated many times from my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Manson. I recently read it echoed through Stoic philosophy, which I can only assume is where Mr. Manson got it from. I came across the Stoics in a particularly good read: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine. Don’t let the title throw you off; it’s not actually cheesy. Essentially the crux of this one (for me at least) is that if you’re setting goals for yourself that are based on other people, you’re in for disappointment. While in the hammock this afternoon I realized that an implicit goal I had been working toward, and that had been giving me a lot of stress, was that I wanted to do meaningful work, and be respected for the contributions I make. Trouble is, how do you measure “meaningfulness” in your work, especially before it’s had a chance to do anything in the world? And how do you control whether other people respect your work? Bad goals. Much better would be just to focus on doing work of high Quality. Do that right, and meaningfulness and respect are sure to follow.

The second half of this one came to me as I was writing down the first half. I haven’t thought it all the way through just yet, but it seems like there might be something to it.

Let it come with time.

You don’t have to have all the answers right away. Jot it down, come back to it later. Or let someone else come back to it. The answers won’t all come even within your lifetime, so don’t worry about having them all right now.

One thing that struck me while reading A Brief History of Time was that it appeared that Einstein didn’t really grasp the full implications of his general theory of relativity when he published it. Only when other people read it did they make connections with other areas of physics, and realize the full implications. If Einstein doesn’t know it all, who does?

A thing born quickly dies quickly.

I was thinking about what the meaning of life might be.

My thoughts wandered back to the Musee Mechanique that I visited in San Francisco almost exactly a year ago. There you’ll find loads of wonderful antique arcade machines, music boxes, player pianos, etc. In a few places around the museum, tacked up with scotch tape, were inkjet signs on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, reading:

PLEASE BE CAREFUL. SOME OF THESE MACHINES ARE OLDER THAN YOU WILL EVER BE.

Something about the message hit me in just the right place. That means the machines are also older than their creators ever got to be. At the same time that I was in San Francisco, Alex was touring Japan. She had told me about some sacred floorboards that had been stained with the blood of samurai who had committed seppuku around 700 years ago.

This all lead me to thinking about how the actions you take in your life have effects and leave artifacts that last far longer than you do. So a thought that I’ve been rolling around but haven’t fully committed to is the idea that the meaning of life is to do meaningful work. A bit of a tautology here, and the idea hinges on a precarious definition of “meaningful”. But throughout our lives we spend our energy doing things. Bringing order out of the entropy. Entropy works to undo whatever we’ve done, and largely succeeds–except at unravelling the things that other people have found meaningful. Do a thing really well, and people will work to maintain it despite the natural destructive forces of the world. Have an idea that’s really good, and other people will work with it and riff off it.

In order to do a thing well, you have to take your time. In order for the thing to live longer than a short while, it has to be made well. So, in summary, a thing born quickly will die quickly also.

Pleasure has merit also. Its danger, like anything else, comes in arriving at it too quickly.

Having not found a satisfying answer for the meaning of life, I decided to consider the flipside of the coin to see if there might be anything useful over there. Maybe there’s no point in doing meaningful work. Any advances you make that aren’t disintegrated into entropy will be buried under still more thirst for development. If your life’s meaning is tied up in helping other people, you have to at some point wonder what’s the point of their lives? To help everyone else, or you? So the point of humanity is to help humanity? Maybe. But perhaps dissatisfying. What if the point of life is just to enjoy it?

If we take that to an extreme, and imagine a person living solely for their own hedonistic pleasures, we quickly conjure up a caricature of someone lying to, stealing from, and abusing other people, while maximizing the frequency with which they participate in drug abuse and sex. Quickly we can imagine this person living a short an unsatisfying life full of hatred and fear.

But what if we didn’t take it quite so extreme? What if a person maximized their long-term satisfaction and happiness, rather than a short-term hedonistic pleasure? How would a person do that? Cultivate meaningful relationships, work hard at things they’re passionate about, plan for the future, and take time in each moment to soak up all of the pleasure that it might contain. This seems not only not dangerous, but beneficial.

My takeaway here is to plan and be responsible for long-term pleasures and satisfaction. In the meantime, take some time to enjoy whatever comes your way. Spend some time in your hammock. It’s nice.

Turtles live an awfully long time.

That they do. Jonathan was born in 1832.