A roar starts up, fills the air. I look up and see lines, streaks in the air, barely visible on their own but with great motion and energy when saturating the sky. Voluminous, worldly. These panes of glass feel so sturdy usually, a barrier between the ultimate comfort and stronghold, my home, its heating in the winter, its cool in the summer, its brightness when working at night and darkness when sleeping. Windows are a view outside, a painting, a pleasantry, a decoration.

But, having been on the inside of it for a week now, these panes of glass have thinned. The rain outside: not a decoration, but a representation of all the things that exist, thunderous and massive and beyond comprehension. Grand, tumultuous, and thoroughly unconcerned with me, with any of brick structures that tightly pack and wind themselves into this city. The windows are no more than wires of a cage.

I look around; the room has darkened significantly as this feeling takes hold of me. Then, as quickly as it started, the roar dissipates. The downpour has moved on, leaving only its mist in its wake, barely perceptible streaks of rainshower, droplets clinging to the windowscreen. The downpour, huge and touching, yet so transient; something to always calculate for, to fear, to dread when it persists, but never guaranteed, always fleeting.

A small, low, wispy cloud moves quickly across the sky, a canvas of uniform glowing gray-white. My desk area brightens, lit by nature’s great diffused softbox. The sounds of the city resume, the hum of traffic, the sirens, my mother working at the dining table behind me. The windows re-solidify.

![](/blog/2020-04/rain.jpg)

roar

Talking with a friend about how things are falling apart, how we might not be able to return to campus for the rest of the term; me realizing just how many opportunities are vanishing — again, me suffering the absolute least of it, everyone below really having their trajectories blown into turbulent chaos. It just feels bad now. Maybe even worse that I’m not the one taking the hit. I’ve escaped. Some of my friends have escaped. But many of them, most of them, the ones I maybe viscerally wanted to do better than me and do what I couldn’t, who I was invested in as someone attempting to be a mentor and who I looked to with awe and admiration, are the ones suffering most.

This realization came in two parts, both of which happened approximately today. The first part was just that, woah, this is a real, lasting problem. I realized that not having school is the default state of things, that we can’t take structure for granted, that external structure and society is conditional on a remarkable but ultimately frail stability to human life. At first, though, the tone was completely different:

> So I’m at home. I ran a 10K PR earlier, but then my sleep habits slipped and I haven’t run, or left the house, in a bit. I’ve cooked a few meals: learning how to make curry these last few days! Cauliflower has been the best so far. I’ve spent lots of the day staring at my laptop, or my desktop. Lots of texting people on Messenger; pretty much a constant handoff between that, and writing something, this reflection or my TEDx talk, or plucking at the keyboard next to me, or some snack that I shouldn’t be eating. My sense of lunch has died; I woke up at 11, had a trickle of food — strawberries, half a banana, a quarter of a bag of roasted cashews — until now, and I guess that’s my lunch. It’s a vibe shared by some others I talk to; “embrace your inner lazy,” says Irura.
> 
> ...
> 
> It’s a somewhat familiar vibe — lots of breaks go like this. But this is almost not a break; this is the uncertain, somewhat indefinite future. When class resume, I won’t get to escape this house; rather, the classes are just infused with my computer, the feverish, passive but incessant claustraphobia I am experiencing now.

Only later did I have the second part of the realization. A friend texted me as a conversation opener:

> What to do when you don't know what to do
> 
> Life feels kinda trapping rn

It seems like things have changed so much today. Earlier today I was excited to write, to reflect, to take my time and find myself and sail forwards into uncertainty, sure, but uncertainty that felt like it would ultimately be fine. But today has been that turning point, when I realize, maybe, that things won’t be fine, that I, and others far more than me, are going to suffer and lose things because of this.

I wrote at one point in my doc of musings:

> The city doesn’t start for you, and it doesn’t stop for you; it goes on, as urgent as ever, as cynical and dismissive of any threats as ever. This is the spirit I want in my own life. The world moves continually forward. You can hide from it, try to ignore it, but you will be falling behind. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Take it slow, spread out your interactions across a longer time period, take in less and live for yourself more. But for now, the city is nice. Churning forwards. Dangerous, sprinting down a tightrope above a pit of chaos, but resilient, never stopping, never doubting.

But maybe it can choke. Maybe we can fall off the tightrope, and have to climb back up. Stop for a second. Doubt a little. Maybe that’s where we’re at, or headed, now.

Brief Reflection on Coronavirus, or: Realizing The World Is (Slightly) Falling Apart

Talking about Coronavirus, confrontation with the possibility of death or the death of a loved one, and the emotional pain caused by having higher desires and ambitions ripped away by this newfound sense of perspective, a friend complains:

> Why we gotta do this self idealization thing
> 
> Emotions are messy, failure is messy, why can't we just try and like survive and be happy abt not dying out as a species

Alright, full disclosure, from this point on it's just a ramble. Maybe I'll revisit and make it into something more organized later, but for now I just want to get it down.

Emotions, stress, pain from failure; self-idealization, striving to be better, even when you know it’ll hurt if you fail. These are all survival instincts; different forces, pieces of machinery designed to make your monkey brain better at driving your monkey body through a monkey world, and eventually have monkey babies and keep the species going.

For the most part, we live in a profoundly un-monkey world. To find a sense of purpose, to find happiness and satisfaction in life as self-improvement books try to get us to do, then, is to calibrate the machinery of our brains to an equilibrium state, to guide ourselves on a path through life that creates least resistance in our brains. And not least resistance as in minimizing pain or maximizing material indulgence and pleasure; rather, minimizing the deepest level of resilience, the part of your brain that tells you you’re doing life wrong, that you’re unhappy, that things need to change but you don’t know how.

To minimize this is maybe to live in a state of constant stress and effort, constant striving and fighting, but knowing the purpose for which you suffer, feeling content that this is the way you wish to live your life. Minimize, perhaps, is not even the right word. It’s like finding an equilibrium state, a way of living life so that the monkey forces balance out, that makes things okay, that moves you forwards rather than being destructive or getting in your way.

Where this equilibrium point lies changes with time and circumstance. If your life is threatened, there’s no point in seeking balance; your primal instincts take hold to deliver you from danger. Even after things are settled, say you’ve found a steady job, a steady life; at any point in time, a new stressor, a new competitor, a new ambition, may come into your life and mess everything up.

Viewing purpose this way makes it obvious why it must be defined in terms of process, not outcome.[^process] If “success” — say, material or social — is a function in space, these underlying monkey mechanisms — stress, anxiety, hope, ambition — are the derivatives of that function,[^clarif] the coefficients of various variables beyond our control. If we choose a point in space — a specific outcome, say a certain salary, or to befriend a certain person — as something to center our sense of purpose around, there are a million combinations of derivatives that will get you to this point. But chances are, most of them create unstable equilibriums, if equilibriums at all, and if these derivatives shift, as they inevitably will if you go through life without thinking about them, your point will certainly become something unsustainable or meaningless. It’s better, then, to define your sense of purpose in terms of derivatives, or at least in terms of other functions that get closer to the root variables: for example, striving to be more communicative or more vulnerable. This way, you get closer to deliberately modifying the function itself, creating something that can be stable. Eventually, if you’ve created a stable equilibrium point that you’re happy with, you can aim towards a different equilibrium point by modifying the derivatives at a different point, aware not only of your surface level achievements, but the amalgamated, adaptable, sustainable machinery of self that you’re creating beneath them.

In an unmonkey world, our monkey mechanisms are often miscalibrated. We must rely on our unmonkey tools — language, science, art — to calibrate them for our lives. This is what we call happiness, the purpose and meaning of life.

[^process]: i.e. instead of setting a goal of losing ten pounds, setting a goal of running three times a week and eating only until 80% full.

[^clarif]: i.e. your experiences are a function of all these basic biological mechanisms. Experiences = f(stress, anxiety, hope, love, etc.). Success markers are points in this space of experience.

Tag: #coronavirus

roar

Brief Reflection on Coronavirus, or: Realizing The World Is (Slightly) Falling Apart

Meaning and Purpose in Life as an Equilibrium of Monkey Mechanisms in an Unmonkey World (briefly ft. Coronavirus)

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