Reading Magicdead's journal

Well, haven't posted a journal entry in a long time, but just felt like it while strooling around on the site.

Well, as you probably know from the thread in the "What rocks" forum, I moved out a year ago. Actually today a year back was the day I signed the contract for the appartement and well, I'm still happy with it and the thought of moving to another appartement has never crossed my mind, even if those suckers did raise the rent twice times now, but it's always been for rational reasons, so yes, no point complaining about it.
I've also been doing sports regularly for the last year, whereas I've never done sports in the rest of my live. Gained some weight due to it (6 Kilos, so that makes me 59 now ^^) and generally feel good. Now I switched from weight-training to muay thai, even made myself a 1.80m heavy bag to practice at homeand well, I love it, when I finish training I feel rejuvenated and it's so much fun. And I mean, many people do this sort of stuff to get rid of their aggressions, but I usually don't have any aggressions and I'm not stressed easily, but I think that makes it even more fun. Putting on some rage against the machine and just getting rid of your powers untill you can't stand straight anymore.

Switched my whole hair style (used to be almost shoulder with for at least 10 years) and am quite happy with it.

me pretending to be cool ^^ I only lack a gun and a worn-out leather jacket to pretend to be a hitman ;)

At first i was afraid that I might look shitty and hair doesn't grow back all thet fast now, does it? But yes, love it and saves so much trouble. Also the best way to cope with my starting male pattern baldness.

Or well, I used to be rather timid, and when I went to parties, it always had to be with friends and after some time, I'd start asking myself "What the hell am i doing here?" and end up somewhere in the back talking with my friends or going home "early" (early means before 3 o'clock in the morning ;) ).
But lately, even that changed. Like some time ago, there where a lot of parties in Zurich and I was out with some friends, we wanted to go to a DnB party, when they met some friends of theirs who were going to a hip hop party, and well, I like listening to hip hop once in a while, but not going to a party, put aside paying for one. So my friends went to the hiphop one, and I went to the Dnb one alone, and damn I had a good time. Or on new years eve, i was at a party with 2 floors (one DnB, one Electro/Minimal) and my friend was staying at the minimal one all night, while i prefered the dnb one, and well, from 5 till 6 am, i was the only guy dancing, with about 20 people around watching (guess they were tired). Was cool, especially cause that way the dj always played what i asked him to play :)

Also I think I've grown up a lot, taking responsibility for my action and my failures, being honest and fair (with myself as well as others) and so on.

Well, basically, it's all I wanted to acomplish for the near future 1.5 years ago (was a little in a "down phase" back then), except maybe, I'm still single, but hey, that's nothing you can force. And even that may change in the not too distant future, with a girl I like moving to the city (she lives like, 300km away) and so on. We'll see ;)

But the funny thing is. it doesn't feel like an acomplishment. It's just the way i am now. It's funny how you always imagine something as being wonderfull and so on, until you get it.

So my question to you guys really is: Does something you really want and finally get has to make you feel like you've accomplished something or is the "I want more"/"I can do more"/"It can still get better" feeling actually the reward for your efforts, knowing that you haven't lost your spirit and are still moving on? Is it really the journey that is the reward, that makes the reward feel humble compared to the journey? And if so, is it better to keep the journey going instead of reaching the goal?
What do you think is the reason that the future usually looks brighter than the past? Maybe because the past is settled and the future is unknown, which gives the feeling of adventure?

Just some questions I've been asking myself lately and I wanted to share with you.

i'll keep working and am thrilled to what awaits in the future ;)

P.s.
Just so you don't think I'm a macho walking around in sunglasses all day:

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

Does something you really want and finally get has to make you feel like you've accomplished something or is the "I want more"/"I can do more"/"It can still get better" feeling actually the reward for your efforts, knowing that you haven't lost your spirit and are still moving on?

Hmm, I think to me it's both. I need a sense of achievement, and the people who live with me see me patting my own back rather often. As for reaching a big goal, usually it's something along the lines of, "duude, you've done it! Now take your time to celebrate, and then see what you're gonna do next."

Also, hi. :-)

Consider yourself hugged.

Hey there null.

Well, I have another example. I'm quite a good cook, at least I've been told that on various occasions. For instance, I can cook almost perfect soufflées, which many consider a quite difficult recipe. But it's nothing special to me, just like putting spaghetti into boiling water. Because I've done it many times, I always succeeded, so yeah. nothing special there.

On the other hand, chinese pancakes. God i hate and love em. Basically you have 2 balls of dough, you dip one ball into oil, press the 2 ball together and then take a rolling pin to make an as flat as possible pankcake and cook it. After that you should be able to seperate the 2 layers of dough again (due to the oil) to make 2 even thinner pancakes. Never made it once, and it's somewhat my current personal benchmark at how good I am. Like "when i get this right, I move on to the next level".
Because, well, I like to cook and not succeeding at a recipe that's as simple as "flour, water and oil" is just a downer.

But I already know, once I get the hang of it, it won't be anything special anymore, yet another recipe in my arsenal. I'll be glad for a few minutes but then move on to something else, a new challenge. But actually, every time I try it, I try little variations, look what works better and what doesn't, you could say I almost make a sort of Zen thing out of it. It occupies me and it's interesting how you can put so many subtleties into such a "simple" thing. so basically you get far more from the process (experience, also ways to deal with other problems) then from the result (the result being a simple meal for breakfast). But the driving force behind it is reaching the goal, thinking you'll be happy and confident when you reach it, which rarely happens for a long time.

So long story put short (and yes, my intention was to make you hungry ^^)
you usually don't have time to lean back and enjoy the fruits of your labor, because the next challenge is always behind the next corner, even though the leaning back part is what you've worked for all along. And that's sorta unfair and a cool thing at the same time ;)

It's similar to the concept of entelechy by aristotle, "having the end/goal within one-/itself". Basically doing something to do it, actively working on being oneself, even tough one always is oneself... ah this is getting confuseing ^^

Or another way to put it, it's not like working to buy a new car, and when you got it, you drive around with it until it doesn't serve it's purpose anymore (whatever that purpose may have been).
It's rather like already having a car and pimping it to make it better. there's always something more you could do.

Or like the dwarf on the shoulder of a giant analogy. A dwarf standing on the should of a giant can always look farther (and dwarfs are stackable :P ).

So yeah, what kept me thinking is, working on oneself, changing ones life for the better is an infinte process with no ultimate goal, there's small mile-stones, but none of those are all that comforting, and what use is there working for something you can never achieve.
While on the other hand, if you don't do it, nothing good will come out of it either.

So is it just a personal choice? And how do you justify the effort to yourself?

This is especially troublesome as my current philosophy/religion is stoicism, which basically mean, true happiness is happiness that noone can take from you, and therefore this happiness cannot be dependant on external things, as you cannot control those. But knowing that it is impossible to perfect oneself, to achieve eudaimonia ("the luck of the wise" look it up ;) ), so to speak, within one lifespan, contradicts the "sorrow comes from unfulfilled desires" I so learned to love (stoicism and buddhism have a few things in common ).
Some people turn to god, some just don't care, I turn towards philosophy, and whilst philosophy can give you a glimpse at the answer, I have yet to stumble upon an answer.
Buddha once said something along the lines "The leaves of a tree that you can hold within your two hands are the questions you can answer, while the leaves on a tree are the questions you can pose". And I guess I want a whole forest ;)

"every art and every scientific inquiry, and similary every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good. Hence 'the good' has been well defined as that at which all things aim." - Aristotle

"He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has." - Epictetus

"If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this." - Marcus Aurelius

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

(and yes, my intention was to make you hungry ^^)

Mmmh, pancakes...! <Insert Homer-style drooling here>

So yeah, what kept me thinking is, working on oneself, changing ones life for the better is an infinte process with no ultimate goal, there's small mile-stones, but none of those are all that comforting, and what use is there working for something you can never achieve.While on the other hand, if you don't do it, nothing good will come out of it either.

Mmh, I think I see your point. And I have to agree. I'm tempted to respond with the badly overused "the journey is the reward", but I think that'd be oversimplifying the problem a bit.

To me, there is no 'ultimate' goal for several reasons.
First, it could never be reached. Try to imagine a situation where you're 100.00000000% happy and never wish for the smallest thing ever again. That's just not possible. If you express happiness or perfection in numbers, perfection would be infinity. When you assume that you start with less than infinity (as your life is currently not 'perfect') and can only add finite numbers (as your actions are limited), it just won't happen.
Second, goals tend to change, and the idea of the 'ultimate' goal is no exception. What's important to you today may be unimportant or forgotten ten years from now. Even if things were 'perfect' today, they wouldn't be tomorrow as your idea of what is 'perfect' is bound to change.

The approach that works best for me is balance: when you work towards a particular goal, you invest resources that you then can't use to work towards other goals.
Take the workload/money conflict, f'r instance. You want as much money as possible, but you also don't want to work 18 hours a day. You can roughly express this in pseudo-mathematical terms -

happiness = money * free time

and

free time = 24h - workload

.
and

workload ~ money

.

Now turn this into an equation

happiness ~ workload * (24h-workload)

, determine your personal non-linear workload and monetary needs curves and then find the workload that promises the greatest happiness.

Of course, if you win the lottery or your last name is Hilton, your equation will be a different one. (On the other hand, if your last name were Hilton you wouldn't be able to read this, nor would you care about it. Come to think of it, being cute, filthy rich and incredibly stupid probably is the key to happiness.)

This will answer questions such as, "is it worth it to work an hour longer each day for an additional 500 bucks a month?".

If you apply this principle to all important decisions, you will get at close to happiness as you can. Or that's what I believe anyway. The trick is the same as elsewhere in life - don't waste your time looking for the perfect solution, but find the best solution you can get at reasonable costs.

As for bettering yourself, I wouldn't want to achieve a state where I can honestly say I don't want to change a single thing about me. Because what would I do with no more personal goals to achieve for the rest of my life?

Consider yourself hugged.

I wouldn't want to achieve a state where I can honestly say I don't want to change a single thing about me

Well, I think that's impossible due to the nature of the universe ;) I mean, the universe changes all the time, so one can only have perfect happiness at one moment in time, due to the fact that everything around us will move on, and as it usually takes oneself with it, one would have to know the future to "keep" that state of happiness. And well, that's just impossible, and by the way, predicting the future is useless anyway (basically by predicting the future one changes the future so one would have to predict the prediction...ad infinitum, unless you are completely seperated from the future one predicts, in which case it would still be useless ^^). Hmm, come to think of it, perfect happyness WOULD be a state of change and not one of stagnation.

I guess I get you point. Though I've never liked economics ;)

happiness ~ workload * (24h-workload)

so we introduce the proportional constant c, with c >0.
then we get

h=c*w*(24-w)

we get c and w into the brackets:

h(w)=24*c*w-c*w²

then we take the derivation

h'(w) = 24c-2*c*w

we set h'(w)=0 to find the maximum

0=24c-2*c*w

take 2*c*w to the other side

2*c*w=24*c

cut out c

2*w=24

divide by two

w=12

so 12 hours of work every day equals ultimate happiness ;) And ultimate happiness is 144h² * c (with c having the Unit Happiness/hours²)

now happiness is either measure in the unit Happy, with 1 Happy equaling how much happier you feel when someone gives you a Pound Coin. But as we can't work with that, there's another unit for happiness: the Puppy.
Now one Puppy equals the happiness you get from a 1kg heavy beagle puppy with a body temperature of 310 Kelvins when held in ones arms for one second.
Now, 1 kg of Puppy equals, using the mass-energy equivalence from the theory of relativity, 89'875'517'873'681'764 kg* m²/s², which is roughly 90 peta-joules of energy

Ok, now a typical mammal consists of 65% oxygen, 18% carbon, 10% hydrogen and 3% nitrogen (we won't take the other 4% into concern).
so it's 650g oxygen, 180g carbon and so on for our puppy.
We can now calculate, how many atoms this makes, using the mol-mass of each element and the avogadro number.
So it's 43.33 mol oxygen+15 mol carbon + 100 mol hydrogen + 2.14 mol nitrogen, which makes it roughly 160 mol.
We use avogadros number, we get 96.6 * 10^24 atoms, which is N
Now atoms in our model have 3 degrees of freedom (momentum of each particle), which is f,
k is the boltzman constant.
and T is those 310 degrees kelvin.
the formula for thermal energy is: U_thermal = N*f*k*T/2
k = 1.380 6504(24)×10−23 J·K^-1
so we calculate this again and get 620'107 Joule, which is nothing compared to the energy we got before, so it doesn't really matter how hot the puppy is (unless it's a japanese robot puppy with a fusion reactor inside).
so we get 1 unit of puppy equals roughly 90 peta-joules/1 second
and with our constant c (waaaay up there ;) ) being puppy/hours² and 3600 seconds/hour , c=1 equals 324 exajoules/hour³.

so yeah, basically happiness = 144*x*324 exajoules/hour

now we can go on. an average human can survive a temperature of 42.5 degrees C, average temperatur is 36.7 degrees C, so that makes 5.8 degrees C difference.
We're mainly made out of water, which in liquid form has about 4.18 J/(g*K) heat capacity. so in order to heat a human weighting 60kg for 5.8 degrees, we need 1.454 megajoules.
so lets just say that's the maximum energy you could survive for one hour (the actual one surely is below that, as we didn't take the "heat over time" aspect into account. but we just want an upper border for happiness)
so we get 1.454 megajoules/(144*324 exajoules) ~ x = 3.11*10^-17 is the maximum x we can survive, therefore at this x we would have maximum happiness achievable. Any more happyness and you die...
There you have it.

this also answers the happiness=money*free time question for me, basically free time is waaaaayyyyyyyy up, otherwhise I wouldn't have time for such nonsense.

Ah and null, thanks for your reply, I could say it helped me.

P.s. Of course you could get even happier when utilising an appropriate cooling system. Many people use Beer at 5-8 degrees C, which seems pretty effective.
Don't try liquid nitrogen unless you already happy enough to survive it.

And I don't take responsibility for anyone wanting to jump into the sun now

[edit]I forgot to mention, that without anything supplying additional happiness energy, beer is likely to lower your happiness. That's why it doesn't work to drink ones sorrow away.

And as I've done all the calculations myself, it's likely there's several errors, but what the heck, who cares ^^
At least know we know the answer to everything is 42 and happiness is 3.11*10^-17

[edit2] small error correction ;)

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

This post was edited by Magicdead on Jan 18, 2008.