Why I write this blog
Self
I grew up the kind of kid who is drawn to abstract ideas. A decade ago I dreamed of becoming a writer, maintained a blog in my native language, and saw the literary life as the highest pursuit worthy of the human intellect.
That came to a stop when I dropped out of academia and found myself having to contend for the first time with earning a real living. But I was not forced out of the world of thinking by the weight of dull existence. I was lured out of it because that’s when I discovered the world of actions - I realized I could spend my days actually doing things, instead of just thinking about things - how interesting! Doing things reveals new information in a way that reading about things doesn’t. Doing things influences how other people do things with a potency that simply trying to persuade cannot compete with. Instinctively I immediately grasped that the articulated world is but a small fraction of the lived world. Plato has got his cave flipped - actions are what is real and primordial, ideas are the shadowy representations.
I was also feeling embarrassed. I was a young man struck by the richness and adventure that adult life started revealing to me. I loved the complexity that progressively unfolds, thrived in it, but was also humbled by it, and didn’t feel I was particularly qualified to comment on it. I found consolation in Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.521: “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.” The unexamined life may or may not be worth living, but the overly examined life is certainly not worth living. Go live life!
The times
When I moved to the US in 2016, I was in pretty much the same frame of mind. I was curious about many small problems and occupied my mind with those, but I did not feel that the big questions of life needed answering. I glided through life one distraction at a time.
Occasionally things would happen that bewildered me. I was a Google employee when James Damore wrote his famous memo and was subsequently fired. I thought that was strange - the memo struck me as sound in logic and earnest in tone - whatever differences in opinion one might have, surely the man didn’t deserve to be deprived of his livelihood because of it? And surely not by the most benevolent and open minded employer in the world? It felt wrong, but complaining to some friends over some drunken nights was the extent of my protest. Life was too interesting to bother with such things, so they just got brushed off.
That approach by and large worked. Until life itself came to a grinding halt in 2020. I’m sure only half of it was the world itself unraveling, the other half being I have never had so much time to look. But when I did look, as one does in 2020, all of sudden there is so much around me that I could no longer make sense of.
I saw an enormous amount of moral righteousness that I previously didn’t think otherwise level-headed people were capable of. I saw the utter rejection of complexity, manifested in the foolhardy insistence of certainty on things we do not know, and willful blindness on things that we in fact do know. I saw an amazing level of performative virtual signaling which repulsed me. I saw the traditional sense-making apparatus of our societies abandoning their responsibilities, and burning through their own credibility with wild abandon. What is going on?
Disoriented as I was, I tried to figure it out. After all, what else could one do in those endless days? I don’t dare to claim that I have an answer. The closest I’ve got to a metaphor of an answer is something like this:
Meaning is like air; it's not important unless you aren't getting any. In which case man will do anything to make his life seem meaningful.
The old narratives of meaning have all but faded. The contemporary narratives that used to pass for meaning are rapidly losing their charm. Alternative narratives from the rest of the world don’t look particularly compelling. The rejection of the very possibility of meaning has been tempted in bouts of nihilism of varying proportions. Meaning is the most scarce resource in the world that we live in.
This blog
This blog is going to be my sandbox for studying air.
Besides quenching my own thirst, there are a few assumptions I’m making that makes me think this is worth doing:
Today there is an enormous hunger among the general thinking public for honest and nuanced discussions of serious ideas - each on their own quests to make sense of this changing world. One might think that such discussions tend to be dull and unsalable. But I think the wild popularity of figures such as Jordan Peterson (230M Youtube views), Joe Rogan (1.3B Youtube views) and Lex Fridman (80M Youtube views) proves this is manifestly untrue.
The prevailing cultural sentiment of our times is trending increasingly absolutist and intolerant, and many discussions that people would have liked to have on such topics are stifled. Tech is at the forefront of this regretable trend. I know friends who do not feel comfortable openly stating their opinions for fear of clashing with the cultural orthodoxy.
The traditional sense-making institutions of our societies are not making a comeback, because of technology. The Internet is the printing press all over again. Whatever it is that will save us from our collective existential fog, I don’t think we have it yet. It needs to be invented.
Strong pent-up demand, shortage of supply. Might as well put in my humble contributions.
What am I hoping to bring to the table? I like to think that my job has got me reasonably good at two things: articulating big, fuzzy problems, and crystalizing the collective intelligence of groups of individuals on such problems. Start with the former, if over time I ever get to applying 2 I’ll count myself very fortunate.
What does success look like? Reducing the dimensionality of this perplexing world to something intelligible.