Anxiety

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YouTube: Give us better options for why we’re “Not interested”

I’m writing this brief rant because of a recurring irritation.

If a video is offered to you by YouTube, and you are quite sure that you’re not interested in watching it–perhaps the subject matter or the title or the thumbnail make it clear that it’s not something you wish to view–you have the option of clicking on the little three-vertical-dot thing and selecting “Not interested”.  Part of why you might want to do this is to train the YouTube algorithm so that it avoids similar videos in the future.

Once you say you’re not interested, YouTube promptly removes the video, leaving the following:

YouTube video removed

It’s nice to have the “Undo” option, since that lets you change your mind or correct your mistake if you didn’t mean to select “Not interested”.

However, if you click on “Tell us why”, perhaps hoping to give the YouTube algorithm more and clearer information, you get:

YouTube tell us why

These have been the sole options for as long as I have been aware of this function on YouTube.  But this combination does not make sense!  The first option is at least okay as a reason.  Perhaps you’ve already watched the video and just aren’t interested–ever–in watching it again.  However, simply telling YouTube you’re “Not interested” should accomplish everything that choice could provide.  And the second box is pretty thoroughly illogical in light of the first box.  If you haven’t already watched the video, how can you know that you don’t like it?

It’s maddening.  It caters to the judgmentalism and purulent self-righteousness that feels as though it is infecting society ever more as each day passes.  Also, these are simply not very useful choices.  It would be nice to able to say that the subject matter is not of interest, or that you don’t like the particular creator, or that the thumbnail looks off-putting, or that you fear the video will make you angry, or whatever.  The ability to give some feedback beyond just not being interested would be useful.  These choices, however, are essentially without value, or very close to being that way.

If anyone out there works at (or with) the people at YouTube responsible for improving such things, could you please bring this matter to their attention?  I’m already depressed and stressed out and near my wit’s end, seeking videos to improve my outlook or least to distract me from despair (if such a thing is possible).  Such idiocy from a company that ought to be on the cutting edge of technology, and perhaps even of logic (which is supposed to be the purview of computer scientists and engineers and programmers and the like) is deeply disappointing and profoundly depressing.  It also pisses me off, which just makes me feel more depressed, since I feel I spend almost all my time stressed and angry, and I hate that about myself.

Here endeth the rant.

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“…out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old…”

It’s Tuesday, the “two day” of January of 2024 AD and the “two day” of the year.  That little, rather forced play on words is about as much good as I can say about the day.

I’m at the train station, soon to be headed in to the office for the day, but I did not go in yesterday, though the office was open.  If I had been feeling healthy, I suppose I might have gone in even though I resented the fact that the office was open.  I’m weird that way.  It’s not as though I had anything better to do with my time, had I been feeling healthy.

But, of course, I felt sick, still, albeit not nearly as bad as I did on Friday or even Saturday, or even Sunday.  By that progression, you may be able to deduce that my physical health was gradually improving, and though I am not fully back to usual (let alone optimal) health, I did at least get some rest.  There were quite a few annoyances related to the other people in the house, who had a huge New Year family get-together of some some kind, and were up waaaay past midnight, including some young children who were‒as sleep deprived children tend to be‒evidently quite grumpy and vociferous.

As for my mental health, well, despite my brief rest, it’s still rotten.  I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to imagine that it would have improved.  I got enough rest that I even had a few dreams this morning, which is unusual‒I almost never have any remembered dreams‒but they were just weird, irritating dreams involving a B-list Hollywood star about whom I know almost nothing.  I have no idea how that person infiltrated my subconscious.

The holidays are over now, of course, and even though I had no cause for celebration in the first place, there is still a bit of melancholy involved in their passing.  There’s nothing even nominally to celebrate for months to come, frankly, and precious little cause for major joy in the world.  But of course, my main problems are internal; my hardware and software are dysfunctional.

I sometimes may give the impression that I’m some form of purely philosophical pro-mortalist or nihilist, that my sense of the pointlessness and worthlessness of my life are simply reasoned conclusions, arrived at logically, quite convincing.  That probably makes some people feel that there really is no point in trying to do or say anything to change my outlook.  I make impressive sounding arguments in favor of nihilism and despair and pointlessness at times.  But that’s really just the left side of my brain acting as an attorney, arguing the case and providing “justifications” for the products of my dysfunctional mood and sensory and motivational systems.

It’s all sophistry.  My depression‒as with any other, preexisting neurodevelopmental and possible neurohormonal issues I have‒is a disease, a malfunction; my dysthymia is in a way a real disability, at least by some definitions.  These diseases are killing me, and it’s not a good death, nor even a mediocre or middling death.  It’s a bad, slow, drawn-out, miserable, torturous death.  Just consider the fact that I often wish I would develop cancer, because that would probably be a better way to die; certainly there would be more support and sympathy involved.  And I’m a medical doctor.  I’ve treated many people who have cancer, and I’ve lost loved ones to cancer; I know what it is and what it entails.

I’m trying to say that I really could use actual help.  I’m not able to do self-care well at all.  I’m very smart and creative and capable in some ways, but I cannot save myself nor even take very good care of myself, not with only myself as my motivation.  I find the upkeep involved in having and using a bicycle daunting and awful, let alone other ordinary tasks of personal and general maintenance.

I am eroding and decaying and rotting, both metaphorically and literally, in various ways.

I do not want to feel depressed.  I do not like being depressed‒that would be frankly contradictory‒and I do not like feeling horrible anxiety and hostility and confusion.  I do not like not having anyone with whom to do anything.  I don’t like hating my own presence and company.  I would like to like myself and to like my life and to feel that I deserved something, anything, good to happen to me.

Robert Sapolsky has pointed out that one cannot simply will oneself to have a stronger will.  Similarly, one cannot simply stop being depressed by choosing to be optimistic and to love oneself.  One cannot simply choose to be able to integrate into the human world effortlessly and seamlessly when one simply does not feel human.

One cannot eliminate anxiety just by saying that there’s nothing to fear.  And, of course, one cannot simply choose not to be in pain, if one is in pain.  Nature does not select for that capability.  If one could simply deactivate one’s pain and one’s fear, then one would probably do so; pain and fear are, by nature, unpleasant.  But then one would not flee danger or avoid injury.

Anyway, that’s my New Year’s message about me, I guess:  I’m depressed and despairing, not by choice, and I cannot simply snap out of it, nor can I save my life on my own.  And I don’t know of anyone else out there who has the wherewithal to help me, so I don’t expect my life to be saved.  I expect it to be lost, and soon; frankly, I expected it to be gone, already.  I’m amazed and rather appalled that I’m still alive to write this.  I don’t consider it an accomplishment.

Oh, yeah, by the way:  Happy New Year.

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“Check it and see…”

Well, I’m writing a post today, again, for some unknown and unholy reason, and I’m doing it on my smartphone, because I did not bring my laptop computer back to the house with me last night.  I was not up to carrying it.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber that’s bringing me to the gas station near the office, because I am feeling quite under the weather and do not want to face any train travel today.  I spiked a fever overnight‒not a huge one, but my pulse really raced for a bit there (about 136 at rest).  I don’t have much in the way of specific symptoms, other than a general achiness and malaise that is different from the general elevated pain I’ve been having lately.  Also, I feel just a slight sense of breathlessness.  It’s not literally difficulty breathing, but just a feeling as if I were exerting myself even while sitting still.  My pulse ox is fine*.

You may wonder why I am going to the office at all, if I am sick, and you are not foolish to wonder this.  Unfortunately, my coworker who shares some of my roles was out yesterday because his wife and baby are both sick, so I had to pick up the slack, such as it is, despite exacerbations of chronic pain and being suicidally depressed.  And I don’t know if he’s going to be out again, today, but by the time I find out, it will be too late for me to get to the office on time from where I “live”.

I feel just a little bit queasy, now, also.  It’s not like I’m in danger of throwing up, as far as I can tell.  It’s just a bit unpleasant.

No matter what, I swear I am not going to switch and fill in tomorrow, even if my coworker cannot make it.  The boss will just have to figure something out.  Or he’ll have to close the office.

Sorry, I know this is all boring.  I don’t know what you’re hoping for from me, but this is probably not it.

Oh, I took delivery yesterday of a four part book collection compiled from the writers of the Less Wrong website.  Collectively, the set is called The Engines of Cognition, and their individual titles are: 

Trust

Modularity

Incentives

Failure

In the inside front of each book, on the first page, there is a little quote from some famous thinker, such as Richard Feynman.  This is particularly fun because, in the first volume, the quote is uncredited, but I knew right away Who had said it.  The quote was, “If I always told you the truth, I wouldn’t need you to trust me.”

That quote is from the 11th Doctor, in series 5, episode 5, “Flesh and Stone”.  I think it’s cool that the luminaries from Less Wrong chose a Doctor Who quote for the inside of this book.  There’s a bit of a spoiler associated with the quote in the show, so I won’t get into it any further.  Maybe some of you will eventually want to watch Doctor Who, and I wouldn’t want to mess you up with spoilers‒though that’s always a potential part of any time travel adventure, I guess.

Here’s a related thought:  I don’t understand why more of the companions in Doctor Who don’t ask to learn about the science of the TARDIS and the Time Lords in general.  The TARDIS is “bigger on the inside”’ thanks to “dimensional engineering” but how is that actually accomplished?  How does time travel work?  If the past can be rewritten, what does that say about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?  If the past can be changed and have within-universe consequences, just rewriting reality, then why (and how) are there parallel, nearly identical universes, such as the one to which Rose was sent?

I know, the writers have no idea of the answers to such questions.  But why aren’t the characters curious about them?

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I’ll just close by mentioning something related to health insurance.  My sister said (in a comment on Facebook instead of here‒I’m not sure why) that she would very kindly help me with filling out forms.  Unfortunately, the forms aren’t my issue, really.  It’s the actual starting of the process, the picking up of the phone and the calling of the insurance broker.  That’s the main barrier, partly due to social anxiety‒though that feels like too mild a term‒and partly just my resistance to taking care of my health.  I mean, think about it:  how hard would you work to help protect the worst person you know, your least favorite person in the world?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course.  But I would like to remind people that I prefer it if they leave comments here rather than on Facebook or other social media.  For one thing, it apparently helps boost my blog via whatever the WordPress algorithm is.  And I don’t really need my personal Facebook page boosted.

I suppose it matters very little.  Maybe this illness I’m fighting now will end up killing me, and everything else will be moot.  🙂

I doubt it.  It just feels like an ordinary virus.  But who knows?  Maybe I’ll get lucky.  And, as part of that, maybe all of you who read my blog out of kindness and/or obligation, will get lucky and not have to do so anymore.  It would be appropriate for it to happen on the weekend of New Year’s.

Fingers crossed!

*Of course I have my own pulse oximeter.

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Yeah, yeah, whatever.

It’s early morning and I’m waiting at the train station again.

It’s also relatively cool out, and it looks like it’s going to be so for most of the rest of the week, if the forecast is correct.  I should probably have walked to the train today, but even though I woke up hours ago, I just didn’t feel up to walking.  Actually, I didn’t feel up to much of anything at all, and I still don’t.

I almost just stayed at the house today, even though it’s payroll day, because I didn’t want to get up and move.  I’m really feeling that each and every thing I do or can do is utterly pointless, even taken from the scale of an evanescent mammalian lifetime.

Our boss apparently intends for the office to be open on New Year’s Day, but I am not going to be there.  I think it’s bullshit to make people try to work after New Year’s Eve and also to expect to sell anything.  In past years on those occasions when we have worked on January 1st, we barely made any business, and a good percentage of it was canceled.

I have no interest, and I have no motivation, to do anything at all, and certainly not to come in to the office on New Year’s Day.  Other people had their three-day weekends last weekend, and their family holidays, and you can bet dollars to donuts that most of them will not be coming to work next Monday, anyway.

Of course, it’s not as though I have anything better to do with my time by staying at the house; that’s one of the reasons I’m going to the office today.  I have nothing better to do.

I have nothing.

I had been looking forward to the 60th Anniversary and the Christmas Doctor Who specials, but now they are done.  They were good, and I’m glad I watched them.  But the regular season isn’t starting until May, apparently, and I’m sorry, I can’t wait around for that.  Five months is way too long.

I am tempted not to go to the office the rest of this week, or next Monday…or ever again, really.  I’m tempted not to go anywhere ever again.  What’s the point?  There’s nothing to which I look forward.  Life is just a series of discomforts‒many of them not at all minor.

My whole body has been hurting more than usual lately, despite aspirin and Tylenol and naproxen and icy hot and a massager and ankle and knee braces.  My back, especially, has felt as if the spine is becoming completely disconnected at its base and I am about to split in half.  And I’m getting some new form of sacro-iliac/coccygeal inflammation/arthropathy, too, the source of which I do not know.

I wish I could go into a coma.  I wish I could simply sleep.  No more.  ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I’m tired, and I feel horrible (and horrifying, come to think of it).  I hate my life.  There’s no point to it, and it gives me very little in the way of positive things.  Even thinking of my kids‒the best part of my life, ever‒just makes me miss them.  Since yesterday morning, I feel that I’ve just been fighting back tears most of the time.  It’s pathetic and disgusting.

I really do often wish I had some kind of drug problem (other than OTC analgesics, ha ha), but even alcohol gets unpleasant really quickly.  I bought a few bottles of wine for the holiday weekend and ended up pouring out as much as I drank, or more.  It doesn’t even do a good job of blunting my anxiety and tension, let alone making me feel good.

I don’t really want to see 2024.  I have no optimism about the year, and if anything, I feel that more and more of the little, stupid aspects of my life are falling apart all the time.  I’m just a net detriment to the world‒not that it deserves anything better, but still, I don’t enjoy that fact and process, and I don’t want to keep feeling the guilt and shame of my life.

I don’t know what to do.  I’m useless, even to myself.  I hate this world, I hate the social and political state of things (see yesterday’s post), I hate my body for its chronic pain, and I hate myself above all else.

I think I’m pretty close to being done, here.  I hope you all are having a more pleasant holiday season/experience than I am.  Tomorrow is Thursday, so if I do a post, it will probably be in my old “traditional” format.  If I don’t, you’ll know that I decided not to go in to work.  If I don’t ever do any more posts, I guess that will become evident after a while.  Though, of course, as with the halting problem in computation, you could never truly know that I was never ever going to release another blog post until you had waited until the end of time.

You could pretty sure, though‒sure enough to bet your life on, after not very long.  You could even bet my life, but that’s not worth much, so it’s not much of a bet.  It’s also a bit too self-referential and potentially paradoxical, given the subject matter.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  I know this isn’t pleasant, and you all deserve better.  But, it’s in my nature to disappoint and to bring people down, so that’s what I’m doing.  Have a good day if you can, nevertheless.

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“Merry Christmas, you filthy animals!”

It is Saturday, the 23rd of December in 2023 (AD), and I am writing this while already at the office; I did not go back to the house last night.  It occurred to me yesterday that, even if the workday were to be called off, I needed to be here, since I had several deliveries—unimaginative Christmas gifts for coworkers—arriving today.  With that thought came the realization that I did not want to commute to the house and then back overnight, and that I would be just as comfortable, or nearly so, sleeping at the office.  It’s not as though there was anyone waiting for me at “home”.

To be fair, I probably did not quite sleep as well as I would have at the house.  Then again, sleep is a fickle friend for me at any time, in any place.  And Saturdays are rather slow workdays at the best of times, so I’ll be able to meditate and/or nod off during the day as needs may have it.  I really ought to do that more, anyway—meditating, I mean.  I used to either meditate or self-hypnotize every day, and over quite a long stretch of time during my teenage years.  I would say that I was more together and mentally stable at that time, but I cannot give all—or possibly any—of the credit for that to my introspective states.  It may be enough that I was also in my hometown, and had a core group of long-term friends, and of course, I was living at home with my family.

In any case, I think it would be good for me to engage in some form of mental practice or meditation practice regularly, just to try to calm my mind a bit.  I’m extremely tense very much of the time, and I think it contributes to my sleep troubles and to overeating.  I rarely eat from hunger—when I’m doing something in which I’m interested, I rarely even feel hunger.  Instead, I eat as a sort of self-soothing behavior, something that becomes less of a problem when I’m less depressed and unhappy.  So, as you can imagine, it’s been pretty bad for quite a while.

Of course, it’s hard to avoid indulging at this time of year, since there are holiday treats and goodies everywhere.  I think since around Halloween I’ve been going back and forth trying to do better with diet and exercise, with highly inconsistent results.  I think that, after Monday at the latest, I should be able at least to avoid most temptations, since even at the office people won’t be bringing or receiving sweets or special foods and people won’t be talking about them as much anymore.  Not that I can use such things as an excuse; the weakness is all mine, of course.  But I must strive to become stronger if I can, and this will at least be somewhat easier with the holidays over.

Speaking of holidays, though, let me use this as my opportunity to wish all of you who celebrate it a Merry Christmas!  It’s a good holiday, a family-oriented and uplifting holiday, whether you focus on religious observation or purely secular observation, and even if you go so far as to use it as a day to celebrate the birth of Newton (whose birthday was December 25th, albeit on the Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in the modern world).

As far as religious observation goes, it should be noted that—as I understand it—Christmas wasn’t even a holiday in Christendom until the late Middle Ages or some such time, when it was more or less engineered to take over from other popular solstice-related celebrations such as Yule and Saturnalia and all that stuff.

It’s fair enough that they didn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus in December, because apparently most biblical scholars agree that he was born sometime in the summer (and that wasn’t in the southern hemisphere—see my post recently that discusses seasons and the solstice and such).  Still, I doubt he’d be too worried about the date of the celebration of his birth being moved.  After all, there’d been a hiatus of about one and a half millennia during which it wasn’t really celebrated at all, though the story—two different versions of it—is there in two of the Gospels (Matthew and Luke*).  He was probably only too willing to take what he could get, as long as it wasn’t frankincense or myrrh.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful.  When I was giving the year above, I deliberately only put in the Anno Domini contraction as a show of respect and courtesy, and I did not do so ironically.  Though I don’t think Jesus was perfect as a moral teacher—C.S. Lewis himself admitted that much in an oblique way—even if you’re thoroughly areligious, there are a fair few good things in his sermons.  He certainly was no advocate of war or avarice or nepotism or xenophobia, and hypocrisy really ticked him off.

He did tend to teach in parables a great deal, and he got rather exasperated when people didn’t quite get the points he was making.  I don’t see how any Christian could read the gospels and then take the whole Bible as literal truth.  Jesus was practically screaming in everyone’s face that a lot this was metaphor, and if you take him as an incarnation of God, then surely this can apply to the whole shebang.

Anyway, I won’t get into all that anymore for now.  Belief is tricky.  I’m not good at it in general—I have to check and make sure I have my keys with me about 200 times a day—and I don’t really advocate it; I prefer to be provisionally convinced by evidence and argument and to remain open to have my conclusions updated by new evidence and argument to whatever degree is appropriate.  But I do believe there’s nothing wrong with wishing all of you a Very Merry Christmas (and with words borrowed from my favorite Doctor, at that).

santa-whoand merry

The Happy New Year stuff will come next week.

*Am I the only one who wants to say the gospels as “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Leia”, or perhaps, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Han”, which would at least sound nearly the same?  Best not to read from the book of Boba Fett, though, or so I’ve heard.

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Causality, relativity, uncertainty, and attractive versus repulsive gravity–these are worth celebrating

Okay, well, I’m writing this blog post from the office, because this is where I slept last night after the holiday party.  We did not have the party at the office, just to be clear.  We had it at a very decent restaurant called Maggiano’s, which may be part of a chain to some extent, I think.  It was a nice enough restaurant, food-wise, and the building and the outside lights were quite beautiful (see below).  However, inside, it was way too crowded and noisy, and we were seated at a very long, narrow table against a wall.

I felt incredibly stressed when we first arrived; I can hardly hear out of my right ear for one, and I have had tinnitus in it since about 2007 or so, and everything else was a tumult and commotion.  There was too much visual sensory overload also, and way too many people in too close quarters.  I miss the social mores of the pandemic, honestly.  I was barely able to endure long enough for our server to get me a drink so I could calm down a little.  I almost left and just walked back to the office.

My difficulties with such things have gotten worse over time, probably at least partly because I only ever used to go to restaurants and whatnot with people with whom I felt quite comfortable—my family, near and extended, then my wife, her family, our family, and so on—so there was always someone on whom I could focus, and with whom I could speak.

The drinks were rather weak, which may be good, since it was a work night, but I had to drink several to keep from tensing up.  Even so, at the end of the night, when they wanted to take a big group photo, I just walked away.  I had been dodging pictures all night already; there was a terribly annoying number of them, because everyone has their own little cameras in their smartphones, so instead of conversation—which was very difficult with anyone more than one seat away, and pretty hard even with those neighbors—people just took their little, instant, digital snaps, which I suspect will never really be used for recalling memories.

I’ve said it before, it’s not the case that things on the internet (or smartphones or whatever) are forever, as is sometimes claimed.  There is such a cacophony of data and images and whatnot, a good portion of it now not even being “real”, that most things will be swiftly lost like a drop of ink in a roiling, stormy ocean, or the quantum information of something that’s fallen in a black hole.  In principle it’s all there, but in practice it’s as lost as the echoes of Julius Caesar’s death rattle.

I guess it was a pretty nice evening, and the food was pretty good.  The salad was above average, and the broccoli I had on the side with my ziti dish was good.  It was all certainly well above the level of, for instance, the Olive Garden, but it was terribly noisy, literally and figuratively.  By the end, when we were the last party in the restaurant, it was still noisy, because our group was terribly noisy, and it was embarrassing and unpleasant.

I think I mostly at least prevented anyone from capturing my disgusting current face and form on camera in anything other than, perhaps, an oblique angle.  I really don’t like how I look, or how I feel, and certainly don’t want it memorialized, even if it’s evanescent and ephemeral*.

After the party, I was brought back to the office, which is only about four miles from the restaurant.  I could have walked, since the night was reasonably cool, but since I knew I wouldn’t be taking a shower, I decided not to do that.  I have washed up this morning and applied antiperspirant and aftershave (or whatever you call it when you haven’t actually shaved) and I brushed my teeth and everything.  I slept on the floor, with my backpack as my pillow, and it was about as comfortable as sleeping at the house, and I got about 3 hours of sleep.

This is the state in which my life is and has been for years now:  sleeping at the office and spending time here (by myself) is just as pleasant as being at the place where I nominally live.  That’s because I have no life, and I don’t expect one to occur again for me.  I’m really absolutely dismal and morose and unpleasant, even to myself.

I’ve hardly even read anything in over three weeks now, which is very weird and rare for me.  The single thing to which I’m now looking forward is the Doctor Who Christmas special, and that’s not a huge draw, just a pleasant one.  It’s not as though I’m actually watching it with anyone or can talk about it with a friend or anything.

I got out the hardcover books Spacetime and Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible at the office.  I have them resting on the desk, hoping to entice myself during any downtime I might have at work.  So far it hasn’t paid off, but I would like to master the mathematics of GR well enough that I can understand intuitively why a uniform energy field permeating space generates “repulsive gravity”.  I understand that it does, but I don’t have a good picture of it in my head, whereas I do have a much clearer intuitive sense of why the curvature of spacetime (especially the time part) leads to the apparent force of attractive gravity.

In a way, that’s my only remaining unaccomplished (and reasonably achievable) goal.  Quantum field theory is interesting and all, but the basic concepts of it seem fairly straightforward to me**.  Contrary to what people often say, quantum mechanics (et al) are only really counter-intuitive if you insist upon trying to apply macroscopic and mesoscopic intuitions to phenomena that happen at much smaller scales.  It’s a bit like expecting one of your bathroom tiles to behave just like the Burj Khalifa, only the scale is much more disparate between the quantum and the macroscopic.

People seem somehow puzzled by the notion of how complementary pairs of one’s measurements of quantum “particles” can never be more accurate than a certain level, as if this is truly different from measurements of macroscopic phenomena.  I’m quite sure that the errors when measuring, say, the mass or velocity of something as large as an elephant, or a car, or what have you, are waaaaaay huger than the absolute uncertainty in measurement of the position and/or momentum of a particle.  They’re just not as noticeable because the thing itself is big, and so the percentage of the error might be smaller and less consequential.

But we know things change with scale, like surface to volume ratios and whatnot.  An uncertainty of a millimeter when measuring a blue whale is hardly relevant, but if you’re measuring an ant, it could easily be crucial, and if you’re measuring a dust mite that error would be larger than the organism.

I also don’t get the objection to the possible “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics that derives from the fact that we only ever see and experience one world.  I don’t know why that puzzles people.  It’s not as if you can see both the outside and the inside of all the solid objects around you.  If you touch the near surface of a basketball with one finger, you can’t feel the opposite side of the ball with the same finger at the same time.

Yet, there’s no real doubt that the inside and the other side of physical objects really exist.  We just can’t sense the whole of any given thing at once.  Any part of space that will never enter our future light cones is something we will never, ever see at all***, but we don’t have any good reason to doubt that far distant regions of spacetime exist.  Internal consistency of reality and logical coherence of the world seem to demand many things existing with which we will not, and sometimes cannot, ever interact.

Okay, that was a weird tangent.  My apologies.  Anyway, I doubt that I’m going to achieve my “dream” of getting an intuitive, mathematical understanding, something I can feel, about why spacetime expands in the presence of a uniform energy.  After all, it’s something about which I honestly care, and my track record with such things is abysmal.  I don’t expect to achieve anything else of value, even to me, in my life.

I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m depressed, I’m alone; the only person in whose presence I always find myself is a person I despise (me).  My catharsis via this blog isn’t working.  I’m getting no help, though I wish for it, but I’m not sure how well I would respond if some were to come.  Maybe, like the wonderful simile Sting used in Be Still My Beating Heart, I would wriggle like a fish caught on dry land, unable to tell the difference between help and danger, between an offer of comfort and a warning of pain.

Whatever.  Sorry, that’s all pathetic, isn’t it?

In closing, I wonder if anyone listened to my little audio snippet yesterday, and if anyone thought it was worth it for me to try to do such a thing more often.  Let me know in the comments (on WordPress) if you have any feedback to offer.  Thanks.

maggianos

*Performing together live, for the first time.

**Straightforward for quantum field theory type things, anyway, to be fair.  I don’t mean that it’s not complex (ha ha! it uses complex numbers all the time, get it?) but I have a sort of picture of how the processes work, and it makes sense.  The rest would just be building details and specifics on top of the basic framework, which is a lot, of course, but there’s no real intellectual hurdle to be cleared.

***Assuming we do not discover any exceptions or workarounds to special relativity and the speed-of-causality limit.  There could in principle be workarounds, but it seems unlikely that there are local exceptions to the cosmic speed limit.  In any case, even such exceptions shouldn’t violate chains of causality.

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moans and whines and cries for help, doodah, doodah

It’s Monday morning again; it keeps doing that, even though I’ve made it clear that I think it’s a bad idea.

My back has really been acting up this weekend; it’s particularly uncomfortable right now, as I wait at the train station.  I would have just stayed “home” today, except that there is an office holiday party this evening, to which I said I would go.  Then again, I said I would get health insurance by last Friday, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do that, even though I know it’s not really all that hard.  Yet, when I try to bring myself to do it, it’s a bit like trying to force myself to lay my hand flat on a red hot stove top*.

Partly my resistance is because I feel like I’m being set up for something, though I know that’s paranoid and silly.  I’ve just had so many things blow up in my face when I thought I was doing perfectly reasonable, harmless, and even beneficial (and certainly well-intended) things.  It’s pretty ironic, when one has always felt affinity with the bad guys in many stories, but one recognizes that it’s not ethically justifiable to be a bad guy, so one tries very hard to be a good guy and to do good things in the world…and one ends up being punished as if one were a bad guy, and has one’s life shredded and pulped and jack-hammered into so much twisted rubble, maimed and deformed into a shambling, undead mockery of itself.

Maybe I should have just tried to be a bad guy.  I probably would have won the Nobel Peace Prize or something.

Anyway, I’m feeling very stressed and unsafe about all of it, more than I was already.  And it’s not as though my chronic depression is any better than usual, not at this time of the year, when it’s dark more than not.  I generally like darkness, of course, but a dearth of sunshine does seem to impact my mood.

Also, there’s that big holiday coming up in a week, which is sure to be just wonderful for my general outlook.  It comes right after the solstice, so by then the days will be creeping towards longer again, but it will be a very long time before the change is noticeable.

I say “very long time” but of course that’s scale-dependent.  On the scale of the age of the universe or even of Earth, it’s very tiny, and even on the scale of an ordinary human life, it’s pretty negligible.  But on the Planck time scale it’s an absurdly long period, way longer than any of the epochs of the immediately-post-inflationary universe (assuming inflation happened).  And on the scale of a person with chronic and exacerbating depression, with chronic tension and anxiety and anger and pain, and with very few social supports and no future to which to look forward, it is a very long time indeed.

I’ll be working this coming Saturday, though I rather expect that business will be quite slow.  I guess that’s a good day to work, but it’s also a bit dreary.  But lying around at the house or lolling about at work are equally bland and gray and stale.  At least this last weekend I got some rest.  I took a fair amount of Benadryl, since there was nothing that I needed to do.

This blog is getting really boring, too.  It’s better than many other things, of course—it’s the only thing arising from my internal motivation, though it’s never achieved any of its intentions, which included originally trying to promote my writing/books/stories, and then providing me some kind of therapeutic outlet, as well as a cry for help, as the expression goes.

None of these goals has been accomplished.  Well, I suppose I’ve succeeded in making a cry for help, but it’s turned out to be just that old biblical “voice crying out in the wilderness” thing.  So it’s basically been a really shitty and ineffectual cry for help.

That’s about par for my course, though.  I only seem to succeed really well at things that don’t matter much to me.  I don’t know why that is, whether it’s related to the whole hypothetical ASD thing, or to my depression, or some kind of pathological demand avoidance (or whatever that term is), or anxiety, or just my general self-loathing.  I seem to have a very strong tendency to fuck up the things that matter to me the most, and to alienate the people I love the most (this last isn’t a universal thing, though…I still get along fine with my sister and brother, but they are special cases, and they are also very far away).

Anyway, I’m tired of the blog.  I did a little recording on Friday of a few minutes of a rant about the useless updates that the various software sites keep undergoing.  I’ll embed the audio of that here for those to listen who wish to do so.  See if you agree with me, or if you think I’m being too much of a curmudgeon.

That’s enough for today.  I may come back to the office and sleep there after the work event tonight, since it’s a very long way back to the house just to lie down and get back up in a few hours to come back to the office.  I mean, I feel that way most days, but it’s going to be worse tonight.

I hope you’re all having a better holiday season than I’m having.  For anyone who’s having a worse one—and I’m sure there are far too many just people for anyone’s comfort—I can only offer my sympathy and good wishes.  Coming from me, that’s sure to be worthless or worse, but it’s all I have to offer.

*Knowing me, the stove thing might even be the easier of the two things.  Goodness knows I’ve deliberately burned myself quite a few times before.  Never on my palms, though.  Back of the hand, yes, but not the palms.  I don’t know why that feels psychologically different.

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On the eighth day of Hanukkah…nothing much happened

It’s Friday morning, December 15th, and I’m waiting at the train station for the second train of the day, again.  It’s really quite windy this morning, even more so than it has been the past few days, but it’s not as rainy.  There’s just a slight bit of drizzle around, and some of even that is probably just the wind blowing former rain off the trees.

I’m not sure what I should write about today that won’t just be rehashing all the other crap I’ve been writing nearly every day.  It doesn’t seem to do me any good as therapy, and it certainly doesn’t seem to do you people any good as readers.

It also hasn’t really seemed to garner me any real help, other than perhaps being at some level the trigger for my ex-wife to ask me to sign up for health insurance.  That was, of course, a nice impulse on her part, although it’s very stressful for me, and I haven’t yet done it, though I’m supposed to try to get it done by today.  I keep hoping there will be a car accident or some health catastrophe that will take it all out of my hands before I have to go through with it, because I find the prospect ridiculously stressful.

I don’t trust “the government” if they’re involved in the process, but I also don’t trust private industry.  You may say that I have only myself to blame for my issues, then, to which I would reply…well, blame isn’t a very useful concept most of the time, but it’s definitely because of my own psychopathology that I am in my situation.  The only person who’s ever been able really to beat me is me, but that guy really is quite dedicated to the task.  I’m probably not too unusual in this.  I suspect it’s the case for a great many people.

My sister has also offered to help with getting the insurance together.  I’m not sure what she might be able to do from where she is.  She may know, but I’m not sure.  I’m hoping to go through a person who got a good deal on insurance for a work friend, and presumably that can be done over the phone.  I hate talking on the phone most of the time, partly because I have difficulty hearing, but also just because I am quite awkward, socially.  Still, I hope I can do it.

I really need some help, and with a lot of things.  It’s sad and painful to say it, but there are many aspects of life in human civilization that I find very uncomfortable and alien and anathema to me.  And though I have work friends, I have no real other friends of any kind, and as I’ve said, my family is scattered hundreds to thousands of miles away.  I don’t do online relationships very well, other than my ongoing relationship with the likes of Amazon.  Ha ha.

Incidentally, I have the weekend “off”, so I won’t be writing my blog either tomorrow or the next day.  The Sunday thing is nothing new; I almost never write a blog on Sunday, and when I was writing fiction, I never wrote fiction on Sunday.  I had to give myself some mental break, and it made sense to do it on the day when I never did have to work.

Today is the last day of Hanukkah, of course.  I’ve been neglecting lighting the candles at work, though I have a nice little menorah there.  After the first two days, it just felt sad.  Actually, it felt sad the first few days, too, since it’s the sort of thing one does with one’s family, especially with one’s kids.

It’s a weird thing to think of wanting to have medical care for myself.  Having been on the delivering end of much life-prolonging care, I know only too well how much we tend to strain to stretch out the latter portion of our days, even when all it really does is compound misery, or at least make it last longer.

Pediatric medicine makes more sense—we should prevent kids from suffering and/or dying young and from falling victim to illnesses that might harm their later life and joy.  But why do wasted, washed-up, older people like me*, who are alone and sad and depressed even want to stay alive, other than due to persistent but pointless biological drives?

I’m not saying that I’m drain on the world or anything; I earn a living and pay my rent and electricity and water and cable and food and everything.  But I have a chronic illness from which I’ve been suffering most of my life**, and though there are treatments for it, there is no known cure.  It has a fatality rate—just counting suicides, not addressing the manifold ways in which it wears away at general health—that is worse than many cancers.  And I possess several of the attributes that are associated with increased risk of suicide, including age, solitude, probable “neurodivergence”, chronic pain, all that good stuff.

Why is there no physician-assisted suicide available anywhere for chronic depression?  It’s certainly as miserable as just about any disease can be—it turns one into the spiteful Satan of one’s own personal Hell.  Of course, the real trouble with a physician-assisted suicide for depression is that, by definition (if you will) the person involved is suffering from mental illness that affects that person’s judgment about the process, so legitimate consent is troublesome.  I guess I can’t blame “the powers that be” for wanting to keep their fingers out of that particular pie.

Perhaps that’s evidence that they’re not entirely unethical.  Mostly, they’re just largely nonethical.

My train is going to be arriving in a few moments, so I’ll wrap up for the day, feeling no closer to any improvement in my situation than I was at the beginning of the week.  I am giving up on the dietary changes I recently began; my GI tract has gotten no better with it over several days, and it’s just not worth the suffering to try to sustain it.  I’ll try to go back to a more workable healthy solution.

What I really want is to be able to rest and to feel rested.  Obviously I didn’t do that last night, or the night before, or pretty much all the way back to the mid-nineties.  And then, there was only one night I can remember on which I slept and awoke refreshed.

It stands out because it was such a departure from the norm.

Oh, well.  Life is hard.  It’s also a cereal and a game and a magazine.  Time is just a magazine, as far as I know.  And Scientific American has become an ironic, contradictory insult to its former self.

Have a good day and a nice weekend, please.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*Yes, I’m “only” 54, but I have felt much older for quite a long time.  My subjective age has been increasing on an exponential growth curve for years.  Sadly, my wisdom does not appear to have been growing similarly, and it may actually be diminishing.

**Dysthymia/depression, in case that isn’t clear.

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They will eat like wolves and blog like devils

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 14th of December in 2023 (AD or CE), and it’s the second to last day of Hanukkah.  Not that such a thing matters to me, really.  I don’t have anyone with whom I’m celebrating this or any other holiday.

I’m not really celebrating anything at all, come to think of it.  That seems appropriate.  What, really, is there in this world for me to celebrate that isn’t drowned out by all the noise and idiocy and spitefulness and pettiness?

I’m waiting for the second train today, not the first.  I was awake well in time for the first train, but there was not really any point in trying to get to that one.  It was at least as crowded as the second train has been, and getting to the office an hour earlier just left me puttering around there.  Also, it may have contributed to me writing quite a long blog post, yesterday.

I’m not sure if anyone actually read yesterday’s post all the way through.  Certainly, no one appears to have left any comments, even on “social” media—although I guess someone might have commented since yesterday afternoon, which was the last time I checked.

I’ve decided to go back to wearing my slightly larger Timberland boots, which—obviously enough—I have neither given away nor discarded.  They are simply more comfortable and feel more protective than most of my other shoes or boots.

I haven’t been doing any long-distance walking for a while, but I’ve walked in total 2 to 3 miles a day each day this week, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular problem with the boots.  Of course, my back and my legs hurt—a lot—but they almost always hurt, so it’s difficult to attribute that to the boots.  I’ve also not been wearing knee or ankle braces at all this week, because they’re irritating me.  They probably give me some benefits, of course, but sometimes I just don’t care.

I’ve been trying to eat a somewhat healthier diet this week—heavy on legumes and beans and nuts and stuff and light on breads and cheeses and all that.  I haven’t even had any meat at all.  So far, it’s given me terrible gastrointestinal discomfort and has made me feel unwell, but I’m hopeful that this is just because of the shift in diet, and that my system will adjust itself.  If it doesn’t do so soon, I may give up on the notion.

Basically, I’m trying to do something, almost anything, to improve my overall daily mood and energy and motivation.  Because I really don’t feel any interest in or joy regarding much of anything anymore.  I haven’t read more than three or four pages of any book this week (in aggregate), fiction or nonfiction.  That’s weird for me, and it’s not a good sign.  But I cannot seem to conjure any interest.

If you’ve been reading my blog so far this week, you know I said that I would try to find health insurance for which I could sign up and which I could afford, and I have today and tomorrow left to try to meet my deadline.

That’s a good word, “deadline”.  But I guess it may be somewhat ironic when discussing health insurance.

Having that task before me really stresses me out; I don’t like it hanging over me, but I also don’t want to do it, particularly when I don’t even want to take care of myself.  The only possible silver lining might be that, just maybe, I might be able to check myself into some mental health facility that’s slightly better than some Florida county or state level shit-holes.  I doubt it.

I probably ought to be in some mental health place.  I’m almost certainly a “danger to myself”, at least for some portion of most days.  Not that I have imminent plans, mind you; don’t get all excited and call the local police.  I’m cleverer than that.

It’s quite windy and a bit rainy around these parts today, as it was yesterday afternoon.  That probably contributes to my back and legs flaring up above their usual baseline.  I’m still keeping up with my pull-ups and dips, though I need to get back into doing more crunches.  Maybe that would help my GI and back trouble.  It might make it worse.  It might have no effect whatsoever.

That’s the conundrum, and I cannot really do a case/control, double-blind sort of test to find out clearly what the reality is.  It may be that the boots I’m wearing now have never actually caused me any trouble, and that it was merely coincidence that I had flares-up before when wearing them.  Or my assessment may have been accurate.

None of it really matters, anyway.  I should just walk and walk, as much as I can, and to hell with the pain.  It’s not as though resting makes it go away, though pain does make one not want to do much.  That’s a biological, organismal thing, though, and it doesn’t necessarily make for the local best decision.

The train will be here in a few minutes, so I’ll wrap up this waste of your time for today.  If you’re celebrating Hanukkah, please have a good last few days thereof.  Please have a good day and good days in general if you can.  If you feel like commenting, please do so.  If you are able to “like” a post and wish to do so, please do.  If not, it won’t hurt my feelings.  I won’t even know it didn’t happen, not in any specific sense.  Eight billion people fail to “like” my posts every day, and I hardly even notice most of them.

TTFN

red eyed wolf smaller

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“From ev’ry depth of good and ill…”

Does anyone else ever feel guilty about never letting their first alarm of the day sound, about always shutting it off before its allotted time because you’re awake anyway?  It feels almost like an unkindness—as though the alarm wanted to do its job, but was always thwarted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m the only one who so anthropomorphizes such a function, but what can I say?  I’m a weirdo.

I’m currently waiting for the very first train of the day, since I was awake anyway, and I decided to see how the new, even earlier, 4:20 first train is.  I’m hoping it will at least be less crowded than the 5:20 train.

They haven’t even opened the gates that lead to the stairs or the elevators or the ticket machines at the train station yet, which seems a bit unreasonable, considering they are the ones who set up the new schedule.  Still, according to the tracker site, the train is on its way, and it’s only two minutes (!) behind schedule.

I don’t know why it’s two minutes behind schedule at this hour.  I don’t see how it can be dealing with any kind of traffic or anything.  Oh, well.  This constant inability for people to keep to schedules is only one of the reasons I despise living in this world.

Speaking of things that make me not want to continue living, if anyone out there reads this on WordPress Reader, or by any other, similar means:  are you able to comment and “like” the blog posts I write just as used to be the case?  I know I’m having trouble doing so with, for instance, my favorite website that I follow, and that fact is starting to make me fade away from reading it as consistently as I used to do, because I cannot “like” a post and see the comments (or leave a comment) all in the same place.  I’m wondering if that’s also happened with my blog, because I’m getting many fewer views and stuff than I used to receive.

It may simply be that people have gotten tired of reading my posts or even of dealing with me at all.  I know I’ve gotten tired of myself, more and more all the time.  I can certainly understand if people have just gradually drawn away from what is, after all, a depressing blog.

Even posts like yesterday’s, in which I went into all sorts of minutiae and trivia about temperatures and percentages and the like, are probably just mind-numbingly dull for most people.  Many of the things I enjoy are difficult for other people to appreciate, it seems.  As Edgar Allan Poe wrote in one of my favorite poems, “…all I loved, I loved alone.”

Anyway, I would appreciate some feedback about the visibility and/or accessibility of this blog for others, because I cannot readily tell from my perspective how others are seeing it.  And please—as always—comment here, not on Facebook or TWFKAT*.

I fear that the “Happiness Engineers” at WordPress, as they nauseatingly refer to themselves, have altered things to try to make the platform more exciting and up-to-date and have instead caused it to cease to work properly for oddballs like me who really would prefer things to be consistent, for them not to be constantly fiddled with, especially since that so often makes so many things so much worse.

If I were more paranoid, I might imagine that the world is trying to push me finally to commit suicide, since so many of the things from which I have taken at least some small modicum of distraction, if not necessarily comfort**, are shriveling up and blowing away.  I’m getting increasingly bored of the science and mathematics offerings on YouTube, and the reaction channels I watch have already reacted to stuff I like, and no matter how briefly enjoyable it can be to pretend I’m watching something with a friend, that’s clearly really not what’s happening.

Most of these people would never be my friends even if we lived nearby and had anything else in common but shows to watch.

And the newer science and math and nature videos I’m encountering are sometimes astonishingly idiotic, credulously addressing things like UFOs and whatnot.  Ex-Twitter is even less interesting than it was before, and I was never a huge fan of it.

I try to get involved in Facebook, but it’s also rather sparse and spare, and there’s not as much interaction as might be beneficial, and even the briefly interesting little, short video things very rapidly become astonishingly repetitive and boring.  I think those are all attempts to compete with TikTok or whatever, and if that platform is at all like those things, then I can see that I am not missing much.

Even the podcasts by Sean Carroll any by Sam Harris are too brief and intermittent to provide enough benefit to make a serious difference, though they at least are truly engaging while they last.

[FYI, the train arrived finally, just about here.  I meant to note this when it happened, but I got distracted.  It’s more crowded than I would have predicted, which is quite disappointing and borderline distressing.]

And now I have this external pressure to get health insurance, even though I don’t want to care for my health, because there’s not any compelling urge to keep myself alive and “healthy”***.  However, I did promise****.

I don’t want to take care of myself.  For what purpose, to what end, would I do so?  I mean, I do keep trying little things, attempting to tweak matters, trying to adjust and improve my physical and mental health, but even when I start a day in a relatively playful mood, I still wind up at some point slamming my forehead repeatedly against the metal posts that support cubicle walls in the office, until a coworker has to come and make me stop.

This was because some people who arrive late end up staying and working into lunchtime, bringing me alone for the ride, even if it’s supposed to be my break time.

I think, today, if at the beginning of lunch anyone is still on the phone who arrived at the office later than the official starting time, I’m going to unplug the modem and just forcibly interrupt these worms who have no consideration for other people’s time.  Of course, if there are people who were on time who are still on the phone, I’ll not do that.  People who began work when work is supposed to begin and who just overflow a bit into break time deserve some courtesy.  The others deserve only shadow and flame, but I’ll be merciful; they’ren’t really worth the trouble.

I’m really uncomfortable in my own head and my own skin.  I feel quite desperate, and I am losing most of what few psychological supports I had.  I will do my best to force myself through the process of setting up insurance before the end of the week if I can, but I can’t help but hope that some catastrophe will take the whole thing out of my hands and make it moot before then.

I’m running out of time, though.  I’m so tired and stressed out and frustrated and in pain, and it’s only the stupid, pre-programmed, hard-wired, firmware-like, non-intellectual fear drive that keeps me from doing the sensible thing and just dying.

I’m not afraid of anything specific, really; it’s just that innate, existential, unkind drive to avoid dying, which is about as pleasant to me as the need to urinate and defecate.  I hate being alive.  I hate my life.  And while I definitely don’t want to hurt people who still think I’m the person they used to know, and whom they wouldn’t want to have die “before his time”, it’s simply the case that that person is already dead, anyway.  He has been dead for years.

I’m so tired.  I feel like the last passenger pigeon or the final surviving quagga, whiling its time away in a bleak cage somewhere with no company of its own kind, waiting to die and put the final full stop on the extinction of its species.

I suppose it would still be acceptable if some miracle were to happen and change my life and bring me back to the way I used to be, or better, but I don’t see how it’s going to happen.  Certainly, no “supernatural” figure seems poised to intervene, and I don’t think any natural ones have the wherewithal or the inclination.  There’s certainly little to no benefit in the admittedly well-meaning cajolery to “just hold on” and all that jazz.  I try, obviously.  I’m still here and writing.  But it feels more like I’m fulfilling a prison sentence than it does like surviving…and I’m familiar with both.

As another poet I admire—and who escaped the prison by his owns hands—wrote:  “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”

*The Website Formerly Known as Twitter.

**WEIT is a comfort and often a joy, and I am very distressed about not being able to see and comment and “like” it, and other comments, as I usually do.

***Physically, of course.  My mental health is a lost cause, anyway.  I received a “how are you doing?” automated email from betterhelp.com last week.  I had briefly used their service, but I quit when my therapist had to go on leave (for legitimate personal reasons).  I didn’t want to have to try to find a new therapist.  I know the checking-in email was automated, and the corporate decision to send it was probably related to the time of year, since many people have troubles in this season.  It felt touching, in a way, even though I know that there were no real people involved in sending anything to me specifically.

****To be fair to me, this was a promise made on the spot, and to someone who had long since broken her own much less spontaneous promise to be with me for the rest of our lives, through better and worse, sickness and health, and all that bullshit, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too pressured.  Promises like the aforementioned, traditional ones, however, are no longer taken very seriously, even in the moment they are pronounced…or so it seems.  That’s yet another charming human innovation:  purely performative vows.