[This gets kinda rant-y. Don’t worry though, it’s not about the Watch.]
I found it irritating that I had to adjust the time on my wristwatch twice
every year because of DST, so I bought a radio controlled watch that would do
this automatically, and it’s working fantastically: Now I don’t even notice
when DST starts or ends. Except when I stop and ask myself why I’m feeling so
tired all of a sudden – but that’s beside the point. Here’s the thing:
Every 24 hours, the watch stops for around 20 seconds to look for a signal and
reset itself to the correct time. This is good, of course. Otherwise the watch
wouldn’t know when DST starts or ends, and it would all be for naught. And
besides, you don’t need the second-hand most of the time anyway.
The watch.
Still, it would be good to put the reset time at some point when most people
don’t look at their watches. “How about at night?” one engineer probably said.
“What a fantastic idea!” another exclaimed, “People sleep at night!” And they
went forth and set the reset time to midnight. Of course things aren’t always
accurate, so my watch stops every night at around 2–3 seconds before midnight.
There are not many times at which I need a sort of accurate second-hand, but
the last few seconds before midnight are practically the worst time I can
imagine for an interruption to happen. First of all, I would assume that
a lot more people are asleep at, like, 3 AM than at midnight, and
second of all, midnight is like the number one Schelling Point for things to
count down to. Think birthdays or New Year’s. Nino is like, “You guys, I got
this. I have an accurate watch.” And then everyone is like, “yeah, ok,” and
then they say “10 … 9 … 8 …” and when they’re at “3” the watch stops and Nino
is confused and the others keep counting, and this is not okay.
Why couldn’t they make the watch reset at 10 seconds after midnight?
Or at 2 or 3 AM?
I have a feeling that this wasn’t super well thought through.
[This was difficult to write in a way that makes sense to someone who
doesn’t live inside my brain and I don’t know if I succeeded. I’d be
curious to know if this makes any sense at all to anyone who is not
me.]
When I have a big problem that I want solved, I have found that there is one
simple process which tends to work. It goes like this:
Move towards the goal.
What I’m about to write is kind of part of what his post is about,
but it adds a layer of framing that has allowed me to feel virtually no
anxiety about the future for almost a week now, which is extremely unusual for
me. I wanted to share my thoughts in case anyone finds them useful.
So I know what the goal is and I’ve figured out the next action that will move
me closer to success. At this point everything is fine, but as soon as I look
into the future and try to visualize the transition from the current state to
the state of having reached the goal my mind tells me there’s some mysterious
huge task that still needs to be completed – one that feels unlike any “next
action” I can take along the way. Like all the next actions are just
preparation, and the actual accomplishing of the goal is different –
something I have no idea how to do because I’ve never done anything like it
before.
This probably sounds vague, so here’s an example.
Say I want to make friends. I’ve made friends before, I have some memory of
what I did prior to calling the relationship a friendship – talk to the
person, maybe make a joke or two, don’t be a huge dick, don’t complain about
their improper use of hyphens as dashes, that sort of thing. And then at some
point: bam!, friendship. So I say to my brain, “brain,” I say, “let’s
go talk to people.” And my brain says, “okay, but then what?” – “Then we can
become friends.” – “But how does the actual becoming-friends work? You only
know how to talk to them. You don’t know how to create a friendship. If you
can’t figure that out we might as well not try at all.” And so I stay silent.
There are many other situations where I feel like this. When I’m trying to
study, for example, a good next action might be to do one of the homework
problems. And my brain tells me, “yeah, you can do this now, but have you
looked at what’s still in front of you? You still have to work through this
whole textbook and do all those exercises and pass those two exams and do you
really think you can do all this? Those are really big tasks and
you’re just a small, not particularly impressive person.” So I start worrying,
which makes me unable to focus on the work I have to do now, which
makes me fail later.
But fortunately, for once, the truth is more pleasant than what my intuition
tells me: There are no big mysterious tasks you need to complete in order to
reach your goals. Once you completed all the challenges that stand in the way
of success, you have reached the goal. Everything you will ever need
to do is find the next thing to do and do that in this moment. When you have
done that, reaching the goal is not another task but a consequence that
happens on its own.
And in the meantime, there are never any tasks too big for you to handle. You
won’t need to study for three years, you won’t need to prepare that exam, you
won’t need to write a whole novel, you won’t need to create a friendship out
of thin air. All you need to do is look at one homework problem, read one more
sentence in the textbook, type another key on your keyboard, say another word
to someone you like.
Sure, from your current perspective you can see big tasks ahead, but you won’t
exist anymore by the time those become the next action. Those tasks will be
handled by the millions of consecutive future-you’s, all working on their own
next action for the infinitesimal amount of time they exist and letting the
next one continue.
Thinking about my goals this way helped me worry less about not knowing how to
solve big problems and not being sure whether I will succeed in the end.
Instead I can now focus on right now, and let “someone else” take
care of the rest.
People always tell me not to worry so much about seeming awkward in social
situations. Like, “oh, nobody is ever going to remember you being weird or
stuttery or that time where you didn’t know what to say, or said something
wrong, or mispronounced something. They’re all just as caught up with thinking
about their own awkwardness that they don’t even notice you’re being
weird as well.”
And then I think, that makes sense, because I do spend a lot of time
worrying about how I myself come across. And it’s good to keep in mind that
other people probably do the same, because I tend to forget that other people
are human as well and have emotions and issues themselves. (I think this is
like a reverse typical mind fallacy. Does that already exist? If it doesn’t,
we could call it the atypical mind fallacy.)
But when I think about it more, I realize that I am exceedingly good at
detecting when other people might feel awkward – or, rather, when other people
are in situations where I would feel awkward. And I always remember that. You
know, that time when you were asked something by the teacher and you didn’t
know the answer and looked really shameful and started blushing furiously and
tried to force some words out, but you just didn’t know which ones and you
were probably thinking, “Fuck, I should know this!” Or that time you were
talking to a person at a party and you heard something wrong and replied
something weird; chances are, I’ll obsess about your situations just as much
as I would if it’d been me in the situation. And I’ll spend hours thinking
what could you have done differently to avoid this?
So now I’m wondering: Is this whole “nobody notices/remembers how awkward you
are”-thing all a big lie that therapists tell to calm me down, or do I just
have an especially good awkwardness memory?
Quotation marks were first cut in the middle of the sixteenth century, and
by the seventeenth, some printers liked to use them profusely. In books from
the Baroque and Romantic periods, quotation marks are sometimes repeated at
the beginning of every line of a long quotation. When these distractions
were finally omitted, the space they had occupied was frequently retained.
This is the origin of the indented block quotation.
Last Friday I received my first batch of Joylent, which is like Soylent, only the J stands for “Europe.” I’d ordered the “variety pack” with 15 meals, which means 5 bags with differently flavored powder: vanilla, banana, chocolate, and strawberry.
I was one of the people who fell in love with Soylent when it was still a Kickstarter and you couldn’t order it yet, not even in America. I can enjoy food in a social setting, and there are some things that taste pleasant, but generally, I’m not a big fan of food. Some people find cooking relaxing — I find it emotionally draining. There are too many things going on, you have to be careful not to touch anything or you’ll burn your fingers, and the food will get horribly burned, too, if you stop stirring for half a second. Hence I just end up eating toast with cheese or Nutella or something, 99% of the time, and then I keep biting the inside of my mouth instead of the food, so everything tastes like blood anyway.
If drinking three glasses of gray liquid every day could make all that go away and the only price was that it didn’t taste as exciting? That would be fantastic.
So I opened the first package, vanilla, and took in the kind of un-vanilla-y smell of the enormously large quantity of powder. If you’re used to two spoons of protein powder in ≈450ml of milk or water, this will be a bit of a shock. And it doesn’t just look like a lot of powder, you can tell while you’re drinking it, too, because there’s not enough water to dissolve it all. I’m not going to lie: the first mouthful of that stuff was really disgusting. But I didn’t let that stop me.
While I continued to drink and did my best not to throw up all over the kitchen table, my hunger did start to fade, though I did eat other stuff as well because let’s be serious, 2100 calories for a full day? I haven’t tracked this with great accuracy, but I’m pretty sure I can eat at least 2500 calories and still lose weight.
Trying the next flavor, banana, on the second day, I realized my initial disgust may have been due, in part, to the fact that vanilla flavored Joylent tastes infinitely worse than any of the other kinds. Banana is better, chocolate is better still, and strawberry is about the same as chocolate. Of course it still feels like mud, but I got used to that surprisingly quickly.
My digestion wasn’t super excited about this whole experiment, but as long as I ate some solid food at some point during the day (which I was doing anyway, lest I starve) it seemed to work out fine. Also, it’s not like my digestion is super excited about anything. Maybe I should see a doctor about that. Okay, before everyone starts shouting “TMI, TMI!”, let’s move on to something more fun.
Things you can do to put more joy in Joylent
Mix it with orange juice. Seriously, this is amazing. (I tried this with vanilla or banana, if I remember correctly.)
Put the protein powder you still have lying around in so you get more protein, better taste, and more calories at the same time. This way, after the gym, instead of drinking a protein shake and eating dinner, you can combine both into one!
Put the Joylent in the fridge for an hour before you drink it. I feel like this helps dissolve the powder better, or masks the powdery texture more, but this may be a placebo. In any case, it’s much more pleasant to drink it cold than lukewarm.
Mix in some flavored soy milk. I like to put chocolate soy milk into chocolate Joylent.
These were just the things I tried in the short time where this experiment went on. I’m sure there are a million other things you can do.
So, am I going to buy more?
At first it looked very much like I wasn’t even going to finish the 5 bags I had bought, but as soon as I went back to normal food, I started craving Joylent because the whole process just sucks so much less. First of all it’s faster to make and consume, and second of all, you know how after lunch you just want to sleep for an hour? That doesn’t seem to happen with Joylent.1 The hunger just goes away quietly after some time, while I’m still able to stay awake and think.
In conclusion, nutrition is not a solved problem, but at least I don’t have to use the toaster so often anymore.
Footnotes
Update: After further experimentation, I have to report that, actually, it does. ↩
