Guiding Principles to Moving Forward on Stuff

This post is kind of a guide to my life organization that may be of incidental use to others, so I'm putting it out here as reference.

Over the past 3 years I had been evolving workflows and systems that aid my ability to gather sufficient focus for professional work, and also for personal development. The key goal of establishing these workflows had been and still is, to mitigate the effects of depression and feel more comfortable with my technical skillsets and capabilities. As things stand now I think the effort has been reasonably successful - I'm operating at about 50-60% efficiency doing part-time work for MetaCell, and volunteer work with OpenWorm.

Mentally I break this down into four key stages: Setting goals, creating actionable tasks, scheduling, and prioritization. I don't always succeed, and indeed a fair number of things are resolved on an adhoc basis. These guidelines are however useful for making the process less stressful, and more enjoyable.

High-level Goals

Where high level goals are concerned, I tend to make use of MindMeister to brainstorm and organize my thoughts. The basic paid package is pretty useful. For instance for my current goal of setting myself up to be a reasonable full-stack web developer, I had laid out a map of the tools I might need, highlighting what I am comfortable with, and what I do not yet know but would like to.

Then I pick out a couple of items to set active goals for - typically a personal project that exercises the skills I'd like to maintain. From those project ideas come a set of actionable tasks that will need to be accomplished. 

Creating Actionable Tasks

To organize those tasks, I'd use Trello. So far the free services from Trello have been more than adequate for my needs. In Trello, I'd break my lists and cards down into notes, and stages of activity. Within each task I can maintain notes about progress, and also set up todo items that can be checked-off as I make progress.

Scheduling Tasks

Trello supports deadlines for its cards, but I prefer not to use that. Instead what I do is to make use of Google Drive and documents, to lay out plans and activities for each month, week, and day. I had found it useful in light of my depression symptoms to build a kind of regular time-structure around my life with the understanding that I can sometimes lose focus, and then engineer sufficient wiggling room within that structure to accommodate the loss of focus.

Also helpful to me is my organization of activities/tasks around meetings with others in the communities I collaborate under. I found it helpful to make sure that I accomplish (or fail to) tasks pertinent to meetings, so that my presence at that meeting can be meaningful.

Prioritization

This stage is a little nebulous and adhoc on my part. Generally it works if I simply allow the pieces to fall into place. However it sometimes helps if I break down sub-tasks to accomplish, and prioritize them before starting work on any given allocated time block. The prioritization is generally set up to help me achieve easier low-hanging fruit first. In my current mental and emotional state, I had noted that I make better progress and achieve greater productivity if I get the sense of satisfaction that all the easier tasks are done, before I get bogged down in the more difficult/troublesome ones. I suffer a lot of angst, stress, and loss of productivity when I feel like I'm bogged down while having other accomplish-able things hovering about at the back of my mind. I recognize I'm not a good multi-tasker, and need to avoid scenarios where I'd feel like I'm juggling stuff over an extended period of time.

Summary

So there it is - the current state of a professional/personal workflow that is reasonably useful to me. It is not the same as the original version (one that did not take advantage of mind maps, and included daily check-lists to help me deal with memory-related issues then) from three years ago, and continues to evolve.

I had intended to document this from a long time ago, but never got around to it until now. I hope this will be helpful to others as well as myself as I continue my journey to rehabilitating myself to a 100% productive professional (and general) life.

"Going" to Mars

It has been a while since I've last posted anything here. Things have been ... rough, but they are slowly turning around. I may talk about it when both my feet are on the ground again. Meanwhile a little something random, but close to my heart -

Watching My Heroes Talk About Self-Doubt

Wasn't expecting to make another post quite so soon after the last, but I came across this video of some of my heroes talking about scenarios and situations that had afflicted me all my professional life. I cannot help but share this with very few comments - it is highly inspirational for me, and the sense that they are human like myself helps give me hope that some day I can claw my way out of this rut to do something good and useful with my life.

Procrastination

A very apt and interesting video has coincidentally appeared on Youtube that described many of the scenarios that has affected me as an individual, former graduate student, and academic. Those are the very same scenarios dealing with focus, motivation, stress, and depression that I had been trying to solve with the latest workflow framework that I had put in place (and it has been working pretty well over the last 4 days it has been in play!)




 I have some additional comments about the video though. While I think it is great they hinted that it is unhelpful to view all outward signs of procrastination as "laziness," I also feel that they hadn't covered enough of how unhelpful it is to inflict (self-inflicted or otherwise) the sense of guilt on individuals.

Personally the single most helpful thing for me was to recognize the symptoms, and to find a way to gently nudge myself and also to create a working environment that facilitates my ability and willingness to focus on a task. As I had indicated in the earlier post, I plan on elucidating some of my anecdotal observations of my experiences in a more technical post on another blog.

One of these recent experiences had to do with my preparations for potential job interviews. As part of these preparations, I had to revisit and review my past work. While these all involved work I had enjoyed doing, the circumstances around them and the fact that they reminded me of the paths that led me to my current state also involved painful or traumatic memories. I recognize these sources of pain, and in my workflow I had built ways of planning these painful tasks such that I am able to adjust their scheduling accordingly - making progress until it hurts too much, swapping out alternative tasks, or scheduling painful tasks in flexible non-critical time blocks.

To me understanding that these emotions are real, and cannot be swept under the rug is key. They have to be negotiated, along with the understanding that (as the video indicated) the stress of dealing with them does not go away with the procrastination. They have to be managed with a balance of tangible progress, and emotional self-care in mind. A good workflow goes a long way toward facilitating this - it allows for emotionally difficult tasks to be broken up into bite-sized chunks that aid morale and relieves stress each time a bite-sized chunk gets completed.

In addition to individuals suffering through these scenarios, I wished more bosses understood the nature of what their employees may be going through. The professional world would be a better place for it.

The Breath of Life

I mean to write a more technical perspective on this on my technical blog, but for now I'd like to note a more personal perspective on what I'm about to describe.

I have recently started a fresh attempt at a much-needed structured life/professional workflow framework. I had tried (and failed at) this several times from years before, but this time around I have taken a step back and worked in a number of mitigation and resiliency mechanisms to help me cope with my weaknesses - a poorer memory, and any depression-related spells. My past attempts had been ambitious, and done without any self-appreciation in mind. In particular, I'd blame myself if I failed. This time I am more prepared to fail, note details on how and why I failed, and try again. This time there will be no conscious self-blame on my part.

Things have started out well. The workflow is structured around regular daily activities supported by checklists, and an alarm system built around the modern and free online tools of our day - Trello (www.trello.com) for Kanban board styled task tracking and management; Google Calendar to schedule events and the workflow structure itself with automated alarms to help drive the workflow; and Google Drive to host documentation files that help me take notes and create slides - pretty much a free online Office for personal use. Under this workflow, blocks of time are allocated, tasks are assigned with time estimates, and I am able to get a good sense and confidence that I am doing the appropriate things at the appropriate blocks of time without constantly feeling like I am missing something at the back of my mind. The latter was unsurprisingly a source of great stress for me and seriously needed to be mitigated, particularly since I have poor memory and high anxiety issues.

The classic analogy to Life is our breathing. This attempt at a regular and well-paced workflow can be seen as bringing rhythm to my breathing and analogously my life. Prior to this I could be metaphorically thought to be hyperventilating. My challenge moving forward is fault or error recovery - it remains to be seen if my workflow as envisioned can help me recover from disruptions, whether it be from the down time of my depression spells, or from the actions of other people. I would say I am prepared to deal with those challenges.

Meanwhile I hope this entry is interesting or has been useful to some of the readers. I do intend to write something more technical on another blog - covering the details of how the workflow is designed, how I expect it to work, what features of tools are used, and how it can be of help to others. Given my own history, that more technical blog post will be targeted at graduate students who struggle as I had managing my time in what is a highly stressful environment with many ad-hoc (and sometimes even arbitrary) events and tasks.

Early Thoughts on Mindfulness Meditation, Anxiety, and Self-Care

This is an attempt to structure my thoughts about my recent attempts to organize a strategy for mitigating the sources and symptoms of my state of depression. It is not scientific, but I'm not using this as an excuse - it is simply because there isn't much I understand of neuroscience and psychology, and I am relying on simple intuition and rationality to try to help myself recover. Perhaps when I am better, I could begin to read literature on the science behind this.

Sources and Symptoms

This is probably the most disorganized of the sections. I am in the thick of things that negatively affect my psychological state, and hence I have found it hard to rationally and consistently observe myself. The key source of what I believe to be my state of depression is probably the stress resulting from the loss of financial and personal independence, following marital failure and my professional burnout. That is however in the past. What appears to be more important are the current drivers for the stress - the guilt, the high anxiety, and the rumination over the past. These issues are apparently known to psychology and to neuroscience, but I have no scientific literature to link here for now.

It is perhaps most difficult to wrap my head around the current driving sources of my stress. There is a complex interplay between guilt, anxiety, and rumination that makes it really hard for me to explain without contradiction what's really making things tick. Rumination is the most natural and easy-to-understand phenomenon I guess ... there is an under-current of driving anger and hurt from the memories, and when I encounter current events that mirror or remind myself of those memories, they flood right back and are really hard to shake off. These unpleasant memories and feelings are also brought to the forefront for when I think about my paths forward, for these paths inevitably cross the paths I had taken before. Anxiety I believe I had always possessed, but it was kept in check by a sunny disposition and optimism that I had built around me since childhood. Like it or not now that the old optimism has been (mostly) swept away by the recent events of my life, high anxiety is something I have to try to consciously work against. This leads to the issue of guilt which isn't an easy thing to talk about. There is an aspect to my upbringing in terms of family life and societal pressures that appear to make self-guilt loom large in personalities like my own. Ideas like "you did not try hard enough," or "you are a failure," are drilled deep into me, making self-doubt a very strong force in my psychological makeup. For myself I now know this to be false, but those negative feelings still dominate more often than not. I am fortunate enough to have undergone been-there-done-that experiences that inform me that I am capable of good work, and great passion. As I will try to elaborate on later, when I began to understand the symptoms of depression I had also begun to realize I am not "lazy" when I do not perform.

By far the most powerful symptom of my current condition is my inability to focus for extended periods of time. The urge for distractions is strong, and somewhat bizarrely the urge for distractions to distract myself from distractions. Until recently (see my previous blog entry) I hadn't even realized this was a classic symptom of a good number of depressives. This makes a number of modern social media tools a particularly deadly combination, with my own being Facebook and Youtube. At their most bothersome, I have observed myself desperately and instinctively seeking new content - first from email, then from the news (e.g. BBC,) and then new videos from Youtube, and then with hundreds of friends the almost-infinite stream of items on each of their news feeds. At the same time I would set for myself the same trap by sharing interesting stuff that I liked, and constantly checking to see what my friends think about it. Needless to say this sucked up hours each day. This is where in the past I'd have said "hours of my productive time," but that would be my guilt-drivers kicking in. Now I know these hours would only be productive had I possessed the necessary focus to set and follow goals in the first place. In truth I would have had replaced one distraction with another, and felt guilt over it.

There are a number of side-effects to the key symptom I had just described. The first is physical. Whenever I get hit with a feeling of high anxiety, I start entering a form of panic attack and breathing becomes difficult. These are most often driven by feelings of guilt, and also by instances of rumination. In fact I am going through a minor panic attack right now, as I try to express all of these thoughts in writing. These physical attacks can also be triggered by physical discomfort. In my case these could vary from itch on a patch of skin, to an insect attack, to tighter-than-comfortable elastic bands around my waist from my shorts. Very often the very distractions I seek end up triggering these attacks, the classic being the negativity one often encounters in the news and from social media. Some are self-engineered through unfulfilled expectations of reactions from friends. As it turned out, the technique to mitigating these effects are easy but can take a while to achieve. I will explain this a little later.

Another side-effect is my tendency to waver in my focus at the slightest obstacle in whatever I do, or whenever I am forced to wait on something for any length of time. Again this source of frustration tends to feed back into the guilt that further drives the stress, almost into a feedback loop.

Mindfulness Meditation

I will admit that as a scientist, a skeptic, and an atheist, I generally avoided new-age mumbo-jumbo (or as the Amazing James Randi called it - "woo") stuff. I still avoid them, but from the perspective of unfounded superstitious beliefs. I did however encounter anecdotal evidence from respected neuroscientists that these practices can aid the brain and the mind, particularly where focus was concerned. Plus it appeared to be a harmless activity. That was what made me consider mindfulness meditation as a possible strategy to combat the lack of focus due to my state of depression.

There is an ancient East Asian fear (or paranoia) that one could "enter the fires and demonic realms" when practicing meditation "incorrectly," or without supervision. While I had still been "spiritual" that paranoia was quite a dominant one, which was why I had avoided thinking about meditation as a way to bring calm and structure to the mind. I am now fairly certain this is bollocks, and unfounded superstition, and probably in the face of the entrenched "spiritual" interests of some. As an important corollary effect the realization that there isn't (really) any "correct" way to do this was helpful to my taking this up. All I needed was to understand my goals, the concepts behind the practice, and how I was going to go about doing it.

The principles and logic behind my attempt are fairly straightforward. As I understand the basics, the practice involves focusing the mind on the act of breathing comfortably - all the while being aware of one's surroundings and where one's mind is. For me the key to the whole enterprise is the act of gently shifting focus back to the breathing whenever I find the mind to have wandered off - whether to a random place, or to some form of rumination. There is no guilt, and no self-reproaching because there is no "correct" way. Self-care and self-love is paramount.

My principal goal is to help my mind get used to focus, and to gently get it to stick. The meditation serves as a gentle exercise of that. As such my practice involves 20-minute sessions prior to sleeping, just after waking up, and before a designated period of time over which I'd like to get some professional work done for the OpenWorm project. The forms are currently being experimented with. I am usually lying in a comfortable position, rather than be engaged in what I consider to be the East Asian cult-of-suffering approach where nothing appears to be useful or worthwhile unless one suffers for it. I tend to set specific meditation goals over the 20 minutes which is signaled by a gentle audio-visual alarm on my iPod. Examples would include "Nothing but breathing and my surroundings," which I tended to take prior to sleeping. The logic behind that is that when I do wish to lull myself to bed, I'd then allow my mind to wander. "Focus on thinking about what I would like to get done," is something I would try for the mornings and prior to a period of work. In all cases keeping my mind on top of each breath I take is retained. One thing I had found helpful were yoga-ish physical movements or positions taken to a nice slow rhythm as I focused on my breathing. They really do help bring an almost-mindless mechanical structure (I count my breaths) my mind feels comfortable with, all the while never forgetting my intended points of focus.

Early Thoughts and Conclusions

It is still fairly early to talk about real conclusions, but anecdotal observations of myself appear to support this activity as helpful. In some ways, I feel calmer and less prone to beating myself up over problems or frustrations. The key metric for me is my ability to focus on professional goals and tasks. In this regard, there are some notable improvements. I have derived sufficient focus to set a simple goal for the next day each night. I have been better able to set aside a small window of time to go about achieving those goals, and (mostly) stick to it. On encountering an obstacle or some source of frustration, I am now able to seek shelter in a short meditation session (2-5 minutes) instead of seeking some form of distraction as I used to be wont to do. Usually this allows me to continue, or at least reason that the obstacle was a greater challenge than expected which then necessitates setting new goals and reorganizing my plans. More importantly I no longer feel a strong urge to blame myself for when I am unable to stick to the goals I set. Instead I do the mental equivalent of financial restructuring, set about new goals, and meditate. Just as importantly pleasure and relaxation activities have become valid goals, and valid intended foci for meditation. In real terms, I have gotten my levels of focus (tentatively at least - I now guard against euphoria, which is part of the mood swing due to the cyclical nature of depression) to a somewhat consistent 1-2 hours of professional focus each planned day of activities. This is a far cry from the 8 hours of work in a paid professional setting, but I'll take that over 0 hours of focus for extended periods of time (weeks on end!) without my even noticing it. The goal is now to function with a consistent rhythm that I can build on.

And before I forget about an earlier promise to elaborate, all of these have come in conjunction with other mitigation plans for dealing with my state of depression where distractions were concerned. I made peace with Facebook by a variety of tiered steps. Primarily I had cut out the news feeds of most friends whose content tended to annoy me or to trigger negative reactions. I had also ensured that new sessions of my browser necessitated the keying of the Facebook password prior to login - this puts a "what do you think you are doing step?" to discourage unintended logins due to instinctive urges for distractions. And then I had removed a button link on my browser to Facebook - it is easier to catch myself typing "face" on my browser's URL input than it is for me to click a button. Finally I made it a point to deactivate my Facebook account over the week days, and only log in over the weekends. Note that deactivation is merely an exercise of pure discipline. Facebook has no real deterrence mechanisms against logging into a deactivated account - all you need to do is key in your password, which is what I'd do normally anyways. These mitigation steps against distractions have proven quite helpful and quite instructive. I have so far been able to stick to this plan over the past 3 weeks. Youtube and regular news turned out not to truly distract me the way Facebook had. And I found out that when I do log on to Facebook over the weekends, I will still get sucked into the endless streams of wall updates for at least an hour before I even notice it.

Anyway I hope this has been interesting or useful to any readers of my blog. It is primarily just a way for me to express my thoughts online, but it does help if the experiences are of use to someone else. I would end with a little epiphany I had recently while thinking about my circumstance:

When one has ended up in a ditch or a hole, dreams of looking off into the horizon aren't very helpful. It is one's obligation to focus on looking up. Keep looking up.

Addendum: These were the videos that started me down this path. They sounded strangely new age, but yet not at the same time.

Yet Another Update

This really shouldn't be described as an "update" since nothing has really changed a lot since the last time I wrote something here. However my last entry was from July last year, and I thought I should at least let it be known that I've not dropped off the face of the earth, at least not yet.

I would say I'm now a little more open about talking about my personal situation than I had been a year ago. Certain topics are still unwise to discuss openly, but I feel like it is ok to "come out" about my attempts to fight some level of depression over the recent years. In my case this manifests itself in the form of extended periods for which I would fail to acquire any sufficient focus that is necessary to sustain professional tasks. I believe I had first started to get an idea of my condition after watching the PBS documentary on the Lewis and Clarke expedition where it caught my attention that Meriwether Lewis's (implied - these were never formally documented, even though it appeared Jefferson had known about them) mood swings were a highly extreme version of my own. This blog (http://americancreation.blogspot.sg/2008/11/melancholy-of-meriwether-lewis.html) describes some of what he went through, and in particular I noted that his failure to log journal entries mirrored my own early frustrations with trying to keep my own personal and professional logs. It made me realize that until I developed ways to mitigate these problems (tentatively without having to go the biochemical route) I wasn't going to be able to dig myself out of the hole I had found myself in over the recent years. This was a slow and sometimes painful process of self-discovery, but I think I'm finally in a state where the general progress points in an overall positive direction after a few false starts (some early euphoria over "recovery" was exactly that ... euphoria - see article on Lewis.)

In any event without going into too many details, I believe I have a reasonable set of mitigation plans that are helping. Things are in fact looking up. My skin condition continues to clear, and if no fresh long-lived patches flare over the next week or so I might finally be fully in the clear. I've also started to become more active with my volunteer work with the OpenWorm project again, moving at (what I believe to be) a reasonable pace without slowing the rest down. This will be an essential step toward building up enough personal confidence to start looking at full-time technical work again - I am already fairly confident I am capable of working magic with code when I'm fully focused. My realization that depression was probably preventing me from being able to fully focus, allowed me to realize it was just not right for me to go seeking a job while in that state. More importantly it allowed me to not feel guilty about not trying until I was ready. Once I cross the necessary comfort threshold, I can begin again. Doing good software development work and perhaps scientific work with the OpenWorm group will be that key I seek. It really does tie in with how Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt dealt with the intuitive understanding of what they needed to do to fight off the depression that appeared to run deep within their family - Theodore needed constant action whilst Eleanor needed to feel needed and useful. I share some parts of both those needs, with action being activities and tasks in a structured environment where I can do the most good for the world before my time is up.

Inspiration: I Can Picture Myself As Andy Weir

A year or two ago while I was still deep in the throes of depression, I had in fact heard of the acclaim that The Martian had been getting from a couple of friends, and some public personalities I had been following. Back then I was simply not in the mood to read any new literature. It is hard to say if it would have inspired me had I read it back then, but probably not. I recognize that my issues then were profoundly unexpected, and in my opinion underestimated. Possibly even now.

In any event, as I slowly emerge from my personal horrors, I've had the opportunity to follow a video link from a professional gamer (TheMightyJingles) Facebook page, where Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame got to interview Andy Weir, the author of whose novel is now set to be a major Hollywood movie. What an interview it was!

Andy's personality and demeanor reminded me of all the parts of me currently suppressed by my (still) deep sense of low self-esteem (and my anger ... justified or otherwise). I can in fact picture myself as the same geek as Andy, with the same passions, the same guiding principles in life, even a similar life history. The only thing different is his sense of happy-go-lucky altruistic self-confidence he carries - some of it had been with me since birth, some of it had been brutally beaten out (by the system) of me as I grew up, things that I have since had to (and am still trying to) unlearn. So yes, I see quite a bit of the old "ideal me" reflected in him.

And like him, I had thought about writing a hard science fiction story ever since I fell apart professionally. Of course unlike him, I had never made a deeper effort than merely writing down my ideas in a scrapbook - though to be fair, nothing stops me from taking out those notes again. My financial situation is pretty different though. Andy got lucky in that AOL laid him off at a time where he was forced to exercise his stock options at an all-time high. I assume that had bought him a nice big financial buffer from which he did not have to worry about survival. I have a decent chunk of savings from the 4 years of work I've put into Computer Science academia, and so I have a more modest buffer to sit on and some of which I have already consumed in the last 2 years unemployed. Plus my depression, and my lack of self-confidence over my situation did not help.

Anyway his life story, and the story surrounding his writing of The Martian is an inspiration to me to reach out for the sun again. This is especially true since the fog around me has finally slowly started to clear, and I can finally see some light. I love his altruism in the way he shared initially (and still does, I believe.) And I liked how it affirms my own approach to any product create from my pursuit of my own intellectual passions. I had often asked myself what I would do if I wrote a useful piece of software people might like - "give it away" had always been the answer I was most comfortable with; "have advertisers get me a bit of cash" was my other answer, if I imagined myself in a scenario where I was in need of financial support. Right now I am directing my own professional skills to volunteering with the OpenWorm project - an open science collaboration amongst volunteers and academics to simulate in software a simple nematode worm species in all its biological details. It is not pure altruism on my part of course, I very much need to feel like someone finds my skills useful and feel needed, and I very much need some direction I can comfortably put my energy toward. I had already decided some time back that while employment is nice, I am in no shape to pursue it and I still have some time before I must seek employment simply to put food on my table.

In Andy Weir, I find faith that I am not alone and that my position is not hopeless. One day I'll reach out and thank him for this.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Doing Necessary Things That Terrify You

When I had first returned to Singapore almost 2 years ago, the temperature and humidity of the place appeared to start taking a toll on my somewhat old laptop and on my pretty-dang-old one. Very quickly I started observing that the ancient one was no longer able to keep cool even when it was in sleep mode, something that had not happened even when it was subjected to the higher temperatures in Texas (which was a lot dryer.)

For two years, I had struggled to make use of my newer laptop for professional purposes. At first the heat and uncomfortable surface made it hard to work while resting on my bed (necessary at night because I had to be protected by the mosquito net,) and so I bought myself a laptop fan. The fan turned out to not be particularly effective, and while the extra padding meant the heat wouldn't get to my legs, abdomen or chest quite as fast as the bottom of the laptop the extra weight made it highly uncomfortable. And so I got myself a laptop tray for the bed so I could actually avoid direct contact. This worked for a while until my practice of leaving my laptop on sleep when I do not use it, also started to take a toll on the device ... to the point where like the ancient laptop, it too started to overheat when merely asleep. Turning the thing off each time I stopped using it became a hassle - it is relatively slow now and with an older spinning harddrive, starting up and shutting down felt painfully slow. And now not only did I need the laptop tray on my bed, I also needed the fan to go between the laptop and the tray. The contraption was getting ridiculous, and independent of the trauma of my skin issues I got increasingly unproductive.

It has finally come down to a necessary, but terrifying decision if I wished to have any chance of continuing my plan to work my way out of this place - make a huge purchase that takes a big chunk out of my local savings, while unemployed.

So ... yah ... ouch. I hope this pays off.

Updated 6/20/2015 - the new machine runs a little hotter than I would have liked, but for the moment it seems to have paid off. I feel more productive professionally, there is no need for a bulky and ineffective laptop fan, and it is no longer a mind-numbing 1-2 minute wait for the machine to start up or shutdown each time I feel like I have to leave the machine alone to think/rest merely because I'm uncomfortable leaving it alone in an overheated state.

Sometimes You Just Need ...

... to know you are not utterly alone in your path, chosen or otherwise. Sometimes you just need to know about someone who walked as you now walk, and did not fall off into the abyss.

The Pursuit of Beauty

Yitang Zhang solves a pure-math mystery.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty

“You must have been unhappy.”
He shrugged. “My life is not always easy,” he said.

I am no genius like he is, but I have some faith I'm not completely incompetent even during times when my sense of self-worth is shot.

Scalable Visions

By itself, this is a large-scale statement of vision from Neil DeGrasse Tyson which is part of the inspiration for Bill Gates' foundation to make a push to try to end world hunger.


Personally, it can also scale down to myself as an individual. My takeaway is this: "You have to be invested in the outcome, that's where change comes from." From that perspective I'll have to remember that a job is good, but I'll need to balance the need to pay the bills against what I'd like to do with my life. Right now, I'm committing to the latter. I'm making that bet that I will achieve what I want. And when I do, the need to pay the bills will not be an issue.

Update: A Caption Change

I think it is a good time for a small caption change. Nothing has changed where my circumstance is concerned, I am still unemployed and still hoping to find a life/career path that means something dear to me. However I think I am finally ready to begin to leave the trauma behind, and reach out into the future with a little more optimism in my outlook.

So, a good bye to:

"Mostly infrequent random stuff. I've been quite tired the past few years. Am hoping to relax, regroup, and reach out for something better in the near future."

 While I will not look back to this period of my life with any joy, it has been an important chapter nonetheless. It is one during which I was forced to spend a serious amount of time contemplating who I am, and what I'd like to do with my life. That contemplation has yielded some results, and some focus. Life will still be emotionally tough going forward over the next year or so, but I have a path forward that looks promising and is one I feel comfortable with.

What a Wonderful Company Ethic

Any regular follower of my blog should know by now how I feel about the asshat mightier-than-thou "successful" people yearning for their "hungry" slaves in the corporate world, especially the high-tech ones. The constant drum-beat of articles posted on Facebook about them from friends have depressed me so much that I had stopped some of their news feeds just to keep my temper on an even keel, and my stress down.

So it came as a rather pleasant surprise to see on my feed a blogpost from a company that appears to defy conventional "wisdom." It looks like a venture-capitalist company, so they are a group I'm never likely to work for, but man would I love to work for a company (or found a company) with an ethos like that!

http://www.adventur.es/adventures-blog/2014/12/22/no-asshole-rule

I'm also entertained by their URL. They went out of their way to make a cool name stick - they are a mid-west firm, and have a domain name in Spain, just because :).

Anyway, they made my day today. It was that little bit of sunshine I needed in an otherwise gloomy outlook. I even sent them an email thanking them for it. My hope is that they do well, and serve as a shining example of how employers should organize a team around the idea of treating others, and each other well. I think it is what defines us as humans.

EDIT 1/10/2015 - These guys officially ROCK in my books now! I sent them a little email thanking them for helping make my day with that blog post, and they replied the very next day with kind words of encouragement to help me along my current circumstance! It was very sweet of them!

More Work, Less Facebook

Just a short note-to-self. I needed to remind myself that my mornings are more productively spent on email and a review of my daily working log book, than on catching up with friends on Facebook. Yes, I disagree with a recent op-ed that checking email is mostly a brainless activity which tends to sap one's energy if done early in the day. In a way it is brainless, but it is also the case that I need to be able to catch important notices at the start of the day, that I may act on them in the course of the day.

I have a tendency to keep checking Facebook, obsessively even. I am guessing that stems from my eagerness to see people "like" my posts. I also enjoy interacting with the friends whose company I enjoy but who are physically too far away. However, Facebook also has the nasty tendency to feature annoyingly negative comments from friends (or worse, friends-of-friends) ... even after I had trimmed down the amount of news feeds I get. Now these really sap my energy for the rest of the day, Facebook "surfing" being a brainless activity notwithstanding.

So I am going to try to put in some workflow discipline from now to the mantra of "More Work, Less Facebook"

Youtube on the other hand ... is going to be another different story, hehehe.

So How Did My Year Go?

Well, on the whole pretty crappy. And so for a while I was quite annoyed by the wave of Facebook's "I've had a great year! Thanks for being a part of it!" series of posts from friends. This is no fault of my friends, nor Facebook for that matter. I cannot expect my own misery to have to translate into the lack of joy for others. But Facebook did make one mistake which annoyed me a tad more than usual - they asked me if I would share my year with others, pre-filling the entry with what they thought were pictures representative of my 2014.

That was nearly enough to push me to put up a snarky status post - "My year was shit. I'm now on Walkabout." But I held back ... as I had indicated above, I had no desire to inflict my misery on the joy of others.

It was however a lot more hurtful for others. This blog post captured the issues very well, and captured a lot of my own feelings about the matter.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/

The one thing he said which resonated most with me was:

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault.  This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

The thing I had to re-learn after so many years of being indoctrinated by my grandparents and parents about being wary of others to the point of paranoia, is that most (the vast majority of, really) people are decent people by nature. It tends to be better if we try to view things (at first) from that perspective whenever we feel hurt by others, before we find evidence that leads us to conclude they are in fact douchebags out to get us.

Well, at this stage let us hope that blogpost gets some attention from Facebook engineers and designers, and let us hope they do a more thorough think-through of some of their features. I had previously been upset by their previous antics of delving into the experiments involving negativity. Yes, it was a scientific experiment but one which in my opinion was unethical. They had no right to mess around with real human emotions without the consent of participants in the experiments. Facebook should never had facilitated such things.

Another Reminder We Are Living In The 21st Century

This is an example of inspired Science and Technology, where progress is made as a result of a deep passion for human living. And where the making of money (I have no doubt they will probably make a lot of money from this) is a secondary concern.


This is technology that my own professional interests could play a role in. I enjoy measuring stuff, and want to create tools that can be useful to others. I have a dream that humanity can one-day lift itself beyond biological limits - and allow us to visit/inhabit worlds with wildly different environments. In particular, I think about high gravity worlds - on super-Earths that have been spotted by the Kepler space telescope where we would need to find ways to overcome the fact that every organ in the human body as it is currently built will weigh 4-5 times more, making it unlikely our internal biological infrastructure can withstand such environments, exo-skeletons not-withstanding.

At this stage of my life however, I am still feeling directionless and rudderless. I still combat a strong sense of personal depression regarding my circumstance.  My own insecurities for now, hold me back. It is the existence of news like this that may one day help pull me out of my hole. For now, I can keep dreaming and keep fighting.

Resonance

http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_have_a_great_career

A strangely depressing, yet simultaneously inspirational, funny, and thought-provoking talk. Comes on the heels of a phone interview I'm to partake in slightly over 12 hours.

Obviously his goal is not to crush young peoples' dreams underfoot, but he raised a number of issues that resonated with myself personally. Issues I had been wrestling with since I went into crisis. Issues that I had started trying to reveal/review in an attempt to understand and better myself.

I am afraid, but I should not be. Been insecure since being battered about into a state of professional incoherency.

I think I have a passion, or am starting to identify one. For now, I only vaguely see the future it may take me. I want to make software tools, tools that directly or indirectly aid the progress of science. All I lack now is that clarity of vision and focus to proceed. I want more than anything to make something I would use, and want to use.

I still hang on to Larry's "if only I had" mental object floating in my head. And he's right. It hurts. I wrestle with ejecting this object from my mind, and it is harder than I had imagined.

Well come tomorrow, may my light shine and my doubts and insecurities fade. I am confident and I have high hopes, but I know they often fade (inexplicably) all too easily.

Slowly, I Recover

It has been a long long long 4 months. The skin eczema that I had first documented in the entry "Severe Recurring Eczema: Six Steps Forward, Five Steps Back" has finally subsided to the point where I am no longer psychologically tormented by it. Annoyed yes, tormented no. Instead of having to apply messy creams all over my hands and feet, the only remaining significant affected area is under my right sole. That had helped significantly reduce the torment of my feeling helpless and useless once the creams had been applied each night. Now, I have significantly more freedom of movement even as I continue to apply medication.

The following image documents how things had evolved over the past four months:

How the disease progressed over the last 4 months around my right foot

I am now finally free to focus on my very badly derailed process of getting back on my feet professionally. Let us hope no other disruptions come my way.

Some of the Things I would Tell the Sixteen Year Old Me

Hehehe, found a nice video by Anna Akana with advice that turned out to be pretty apt when the girl stuff is replaced by boy stuff (around the same contextual axis). Definitely made my day. Oh ... and yes, I'll send back a couple of tight slaps too if I could to my ridiculously naive 16 year-old self :)

Academics and Alternatives

Discovered an interesting individual via a friend's Facebook link today. Ian Glomsky was a microbiology professor before he got disillusioned by the funding process, quit and is starting his own distillery:

http://www.vitaespirits.com/

My story is not at all similar to his - for one, I never got off the ground having remained in the highly vulnerable position of being a post-doc or contractual Phd positions. However, I felt a kinship to his story and how he felt toward the grant award process. I very much wanted to create scalable tools that were going to be useful to others in the HPC community. Instead, I was pushed into grunt work. The funding process for high performance computing where I used to work is adequate (I think) but no less brutal. This is the NPR story on which he was one of those featured:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/09/09/345289127/when-scientists-give-up

To be fair, I still feel that the scientific environment in the USA far exceeds that in Singapore. Here, an individual's interests and passions matter far less than what the government thinks you should do and what you can produce.