Our lives are measured in memorable moments

The reason our childhood years seemed to pass so much more slowly than our adulthood is that they were filled with novelty and excitement, memorable first experiences: learning to ride a bike, entering a new school, making new friends.

Events, experiences, things are memorable not by some inherent quality, but rather become memorable by virtue of being different from our everyday life. What matters is the magnitude, not the sign: both the best and the worst times in your life will stick out in your memory.

Memorable experiences come in all sizes: cooking a new dish, meeting up with old …

Distractions

Reddit, Hacker News, Tumblr, Twitter, Imgur, Netflix, YouTube. The onslaught of pseudo information and conversation is relentless, it's easy to get lost in the comments. Feeling as if you are learning a something new all the time, a little gem in every post.

Somewhere along the way our natural curiosity and joy of learning has been hijacked and we waste away our lives reading and responding to useless chatter that seems useful and educating.

Every spare moment is filled by a quick glance to our smartphones, no time for thought and introspection left at all. Yes, that one post was …

Scarcely Credible Stupidity

I just finished another book in the excellent Culture series. It contains this little gem of a speech given by a member of the Culture (a utopian society with very advanced technology, best described by the phrase money is a sign of poverty) on the topic of planet Earth:

'Now, on Earth things are not quite the same. On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited …

Reflections

Walking just forces me to think, requires me to take from all the reading and practicing I normally keep myself busy with. When I'm walking down the street there's no paper on Deep Learning I can read, no Feyman Lectures I can study, no Kanji I can practice, just me and my thoughts.

The same is not true for running, there the exercise and exertions distracts me, my competitive drive propels me to run as fast as I can, leaving no energy for idle thoughts. It's only in these slow walks - which ironically I used to regard as wasted time …

Fleeting Thoughts

Often I wish for a way to instantly capture my thoughts at any given moment so I can pursue them later on, when I have more time on my hands. Just now, I realized that wouldn't actually work as intended: My whole state of mind would be different then, so the thoughts would play out differently, I'd come to different come conclusions.

This presents me with a conundrum: Sometimes, there are too many interesting thoughts to pursue all of them. How do I pick? Do I try to recapture those that I didn't pick at a later time?