Making my work more pleasant and cosy is not an inherently bad thing, to the contrary. If I feel vulnerable and need to get some stressful work done at home, lighting some fairy lights, putting on noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds, snuggling into a warm blanket, with a hot cup of cocoa and a bowl of berries, will make the whole experience far, far more cosy. That makes me want to happily do it longer, and feel less tense, less stressed, less overwhelmed. This makes me more effective. I could take these dirt cheap comforts away, and that would make fighting my way through a confusingly worded and yet very important funding form far more stressful—but it won’t get me to finish the form with more speed or accuracy, just leave me more miserable, which is neither productive nor sensible. If I want to do more and better work while staying calmer, I should make everything about it that I can awesome. As a consequence, I restructured my work space—my desk looks inviting, and I have a cosy reading nook; people step into my office and say it makes them want to work there. It makes me want to work there, too, that is the whole point.
The physical exercise that actually makes me feel best on an everyday and long-term level is not training though pain until failure. There is some “good pain” involved in training, of course—but you shouldn’t have bad pain. I used to do that, and as a result, I had muscle ache essentially every day until the morning on which I would train again, meaning while I looked very muscled, I tended to be too hurt to actually be able to use them effectively for real life—you know, lifting things for a friend, fucking my girlfriend hard, the reasons I had actually wanted muscles in the first place. I also kept injuring myself, badly, over and over, with some of those injuries permanent, and most of them disruptive. How silly is that, when I am primarily working out for health? Nowadays, I train more often, but with good form, while listening to my body. I’ve incorporated swimming, sauna, yoga, low impact cardio on a crosstrainer. I still get intense training impulses for my muscle and get my heart rate up, but my workouts are enjoyable, and when I leave them, I feel pleasantly spent, not destroyed. And nowadays, my workouts are helping protect my body for life, not break it down. My former self would have said I am not hardcore enough. My former self was less strong than I am now, though.
That said—I took far (!) more classes than advised at school and uni (had to go to the counsellor and all), just because I was so excited about everything, and I genuinely loved and didn’t regret it. I didn’t do it because it was supposed to be hard/painful, but because I thought school with competent teachers was fucking awesome (I went to a school for highly gifted people, and that place was heaven on earth). The idea that a moderately intelligent, moderately rational, highly educated person who had put active thought and training into teaching and had comprehensive knowledge on the topic at hand would be able and willing to tell me, at length, about mysteries that scientists hundreds of years ago would have given their right arm for, with me allowed to ask any questions, and see the equations and examples and data, handle the tech, build my own robot, paint my own painting, apply these ideas in writing, and immediately get feedback… it is like reading a paper, and when you run into something that doesn’t make sense, you can immediately prod the author, and they will immediately sketch another graph, mix you a demo, recommend a book that goes deeper on this. As long as the classes were something worthwhile—and for me, that was basically anything that wasn’t lessons in religion or knitting—and as long as the teachers were competent, it felt like an incredibly precious opportunity; a person whose sole qualification was teaching this very thing, and I had them nailed down in a room. I didn’t want to miss biology or math or art or Japanese or theatre or history or physics. And later, I didn’t want to miss philosophy of mind or phenomenology or logic...
And one of my happiest memories of studying philosophy is me reading in a library that was open 24⁄7, at around 2 am, in halls nearly empty, quiet, with starlight shining through the windows above, the scent of books, the rare rustle of a page or scratch of a pen. Knowing I get to study philosophy, that its wonders fill the night, that I have just now finally unpuzzled something in the book, and quietly hold a piece of truth in me, and noone else yet knows that I found it. And around me are books and journals as far as I can see, and my laptop is next to me, all filled with questions to answer, secrets to uncover, wisdom to learn, mistakes to point out and fix, thousands of years of human knowledge here at my finger tips, so exciting I cannot sleep, and yet, with a quiet and clarity that is truly beautiful. I know sleeping rhythm wise, this sort of thing does not make sense, but it felt… magical. There is a special atmosphere in a library at night, and it is a special, wondrous thing. I wanted to be there, and was glad of it. I think back on it often, and always smiling, and I never stopped hating it when I switched to a different university for my Master and that one closed at 23:00.
Love much of this post.
Related realisations for me:
Making my work more pleasant and cosy is not an inherently bad thing, to the contrary. If I feel vulnerable and need to get some stressful work done at home, lighting some fairy lights, putting on noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds, snuggling into a warm blanket, with a hot cup of cocoa and a bowl of berries, will make the whole experience far, far more cosy. That makes me want to happily do it longer, and feel less tense, less stressed, less overwhelmed. This makes me more effective. I could take these dirt cheap comforts away, and that would make fighting my way through a confusingly worded and yet very important funding form far more stressful—but it won’t get me to finish the form with more speed or accuracy, just leave me more miserable, which is neither productive nor sensible. If I want to do more and better work while staying calmer, I should make everything about it that I can awesome. As a consequence, I restructured my work space—my desk looks inviting, and I have a cosy reading nook; people step into my office and say it makes them want to work there. It makes me want to work there, too, that is the whole point.
The physical exercise that actually makes me feel best on an everyday and long-term level is not training though pain until failure. There is some “good pain” involved in training, of course—but you shouldn’t have bad pain. I used to do that, and as a result, I had muscle ache essentially every day until the morning on which I would train again, meaning while I looked very muscled, I tended to be too hurt to actually be able to use them effectively for real life—you know, lifting things for a friend, fucking my girlfriend hard, the reasons I had actually wanted muscles in the first place. I also kept injuring myself, badly, over and over, with some of those injuries permanent, and most of them disruptive. How silly is that, when I am primarily working out for health? Nowadays, I train more often, but with good form, while listening to my body. I’ve incorporated swimming, sauna, yoga, low impact cardio on a crosstrainer. I still get intense training impulses for my muscle and get my heart rate up, but my workouts are enjoyable, and when I leave them, I feel pleasantly spent, not destroyed. And nowadays, my workouts are helping protect my body for life, not break it down. My former self would have said I am not hardcore enough. My former self was less strong than I am now, though.
That said—I took far (!) more classes than advised at school and uni (had to go to the counsellor and all), just because I was so excited about everything, and I genuinely loved and didn’t regret it. I didn’t do it because it was supposed to be hard/painful, but because I thought school with competent teachers was fucking awesome (I went to a school for highly gifted people, and that place was heaven on earth). The idea that a moderately intelligent, moderately rational, highly educated person who had put active thought and training into teaching and had comprehensive knowledge on the topic at hand would be able and willing to tell me, at length, about mysteries that scientists hundreds of years ago would have given their right arm for, with me allowed to ask any questions, and see the equations and examples and data, handle the tech, build my own robot, paint my own painting, apply these ideas in writing, and immediately get feedback… it is like reading a paper, and when you run into something that doesn’t make sense, you can immediately prod the author, and they will immediately sketch another graph, mix you a demo, recommend a book that goes deeper on this. As long as the classes were something worthwhile—and for me, that was basically anything that wasn’t lessons in religion or knitting—and as long as the teachers were competent, it felt like an incredibly precious opportunity; a person whose sole qualification was teaching this very thing, and I had them nailed down in a room. I didn’t want to miss biology or math or art or Japanese or theatre or history or physics. And later, I didn’t want to miss philosophy of mind or phenomenology or logic...
And one of my happiest memories of studying philosophy is me reading in a library that was open 24⁄7, at around 2 am, in halls nearly empty, quiet, with starlight shining through the windows above, the scent of books, the rare rustle of a page or scratch of a pen. Knowing I get to study philosophy, that its wonders fill the night, that I have just now finally unpuzzled something in the book, and quietly hold a piece of truth in me, and noone else yet knows that I found it. And around me are books and journals as far as I can see, and my laptop is next to me, all filled with questions to answer, secrets to uncover, wisdom to learn, mistakes to point out and fix, thousands of years of human knowledge here at my finger tips, so exciting I cannot sleep, and yet, with a quiet and clarity that is truly beautiful. I know sleeping rhythm wise, this sort of thing does not make sense, but it felt… magical. There is a special atmosphere in a library at night, and it is a special, wondrous thing. I wanted to be there, and was glad of it. I think back on it often, and always smiling, and I never stopped hating it when I switched to a different university for my Master and that one closed at 23:00.