It's Thinking Time

by *eddieI spend a lot of my thinking-time these days on evaluating the relative merit of different activities I could be performing. I worry about wasting time or energy on things that aren't sufficiently novel, adventurous, or intellectual, and as a consequence I often end up doing nothing at all. Oh the irony.

There is a combination of things that cause me to worry about something this stupid, but the highest of these would be the recent realization that I don't really have any defined goals for myself. I'm not talking about getting married by XX, having kids by XX, or buying a house by XX. I don't have those either, but those are not things to which you uniquely aspire as an individual. Those things do not make you special and are not measures of you. Those are incidents which happen TO you while you're trying to do other things. Those are milestones common to every other of the 6.7 billion upright primates on this rock. That doesn't mean they aren't significant to some, but just that they don't represent an earnest personal intellectual effort.

What I'm talking about is creating goals for myself somewhere in the range between 'learn Cantonese' and 'develop an HIV vaccine'. Something which, at minimum, is a specialized use of my intelligence, and preferably, has some kind of net-positive effect on the world around me. It doesn't even need to earn me any significant notoriety, I'm fine with remaining publically insignificant, I'm not looking for fame unless it's a means to an end (advocacy on some issue for example). I'm just looking for something that I can spend time on and build some intellectual equity. This blog and my photography are important creative outlets, but they really only represent relatively ineffectual creative content. They may influence my friends in a small way, but I'm looking to create/discover/learn something more widely consequential than that.

Of course just saying that is easy, action requires more effort. And most people who know me know that I've been bitching about this sort of thing for over a year now. In the past I've made the mistake of allowing my ambition to exceed my ability and motivation. Both literally and figuratively deciding that I'm going to be a marathon runner before I'm able to keep a consistent pace for 5K. The daily photography is a break from that. It's a sort of small, sustainable, stable effort that steadily builds ability and expertise. So I need an intellectual equivalent of the 365 photo project. I need something I can reliably put effort into that will allow me to look back in a few years and see that I'm a more knowledgeable person and that I've contributed something useful to the world.

by Digital SextantAt the moment I’m thinking that a monthly essay on a subject chosen at random may be a possibility. Write 4000-8000 words worth of amateur research paper on a subject I’m relatively unfamiliar with at the outset.  I have access to UofT’s library to use for research, and essay writing was always something I loved about university. As a starting point I could use assignment descriptions posted online for various university courses. Or I could set StumbleUpon to NERD and hit the button, researching and writing on the first viable subject that came up. To be fair this isn’t the first time I’ve come up with this idea, but it’s the first time I’ve thought about how to make it doable and sustainable.

I’ll concede that this may not work out, I may lose motivation, I may find I don’t have the time. But it’s a more achievable objective than deciding to be a marathon runner, and with a lower barrier to entry and lower cost than reentering university, as well as being more self-directed. And who knows, maybe the first step in the long process of acquiring the knowledge necessary to develop a viable single-stage to orbit spacecraft was made when I started this post. Or maybe I’ll just begin posting ever longer pieces on ever more esoteric subjects. Or maybe I’ll just stop entirely and work on my drinking hobby. 

Comments

[Anshuman]

Ooh, do that drinky one.
Looking forward to what happens. Be it an essay, liver damage, etc.,

[Joey]

What about offering your photography skills to various different NGOs? The summer is when NGOs have a BUNCH of events taking place, and they are always looking for someone to take good pics of the events. Normally someone just brings out their 50$ special camera, but part of activism is having that salient and memorable shot that captures the essence of the movement. Could maybe even get you interested in an NGO, once you've photographically flirted with a dozen of them.