It's about a year ago I joined the forums so I figured I'd do a run-down of what 2016 has been like (if you want all the details you can go through the last 6 months worth of posts, they're pretty salty, this post will be too as a consequence thereof) I'll post something much more enlightening ASAP, I just need to finish building some stuff around the house you'll have some DIY carpentry to look at then.
MONEY:
Savings rate (first time talking about actual expenses in this journal) is 65.1% for the preceding year. My current pay is slightly below national median wage.
Investments are up more than 10% since middle of May. National index down by a few percent.
Looking to expand the global indexing strategy with hand-picked dividend stocks.
Looking to expand into real estate flipping at some point in the not-too-distant future.
SHIT REEL HIGHLIGHTS:
GF had heart-issues and got hospitalized. She's still being treated for severe stress AND a depression.
We moved house. House is great, construction and circumstances around construction were horrible.
PhD project has been sabotaged/crashed repeatedly. I've mentioned this to my supervisor and he acknowledges the shit I've been through and that the 'help' I've been given in making this project right has been completely insufficient. We're on track to something improved (maybe) so we'll see how it pans out.
Grandmother died.
My daughter hasn't been taking well to mommy being 'indecisive' and daddy being brusque... understandably so.
It's not all shit, but some major things have happened which have stirred me quite a bit. The rest of this rather long post is about dealing with this, and how I need to deal with how I deal with this in the future.
ON COPING STRATEGIES:
There is a joke about a European student and an American student both at a lecture, and neither of them understand the lecture they're attending.
The European thinks to himself: I don't understand a word of this, I wonder what I'm doing wrong?
The American thinks to himself: I don't understand a word of this, I wonder what the professor is doing wrong?
I've taken the European approach too far by now. My basic assumption when something doesn't make sense to me is that I need to learn something new to understand why this thing in front of me seems b0rken. It's not being timid, I don't assume I am wrong per se, it's rather being intensely inquisitive towards myself as well as others and being extremely willing to work with a malleable thought universe.
As a rule, questioning yourself first might not be a good approach but...
I decided to try and make a budget for my brain power; to get an idea about what I'm doing with my brain. You know, just to get an idea of why I'm so low on surplus currently and it seems to relate back to my coping strategy when I'm feeling overwhelmed. In the last year I've read the following books:
>> Investment Literature
The Intelligent Investor
The intelligent asset allocator
All About Asset Allocation
How to Own the World
>> Other Finance
The Four Pillars of Investing
Your Money or Your Life
The Economy Explained - Heilbroner & Thurow
Fail Safe Investing
The Dhando Investor
Real estate investing gone bad
15 pct
>> Work related; Machine Learning, Stats and Math
Multivariate statistics (entire book)
Elements of Statistical Learning (Almost entire book)
Introduction to General and Generalized Linear Models (Madsen & Thyregod, entire book)
countless articles on time resolved XFEL x-ray science, photochemistry, stats, cross correlation analysis, photospectroscopy.
>> Self-help, didactics, and Psychology
Early retirement extreme (several times)
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (several times)
Mindfulness (again)
A Life worth living - essays on Positive Psychology
Nudge
Mindset; the new psychology of success.
Clutterfree with Kids
Simplify your life
transform you life with one powerful question
A Mind For Numbers
Thinking, Fast and Slow
What everyone should know about supper efficient learning
how to study as a mathematics major
>> Fiction
Count of Monte Cristo
Gods of Risk
The Martian
Gone Girl
>> Other
Enter The Kettlebell
Never work again; work less, earn more.
The Idle parent
How to talk so children will listen, and listen to children will talk.
How children learn (John Holt; you self-important know-nothing...)
Work Less, Achieve More.
Job Free
Simplify
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree world
Center of Gravity
>> Other
Almost all of Victor Lavrenkos YouTube channel on Machine Learning and stats
Daily visits and contributions to stats.stackexchange.com
And these are just the books I actually read-read. I have several others where I simply skimmed some chapters...
Add to that any and every topic covered on the ERE forums from: polyamory, to van-dwelling, stock picking, ecology, cooking, bicycle repairs, diets, fasting, social capital, climate change, craftsmanship (I've been watching a lot of youtube videos on carpentry lately. ALMOST makes me miss my old job until I remembered what actual industrial carpentry looks like), gardening, you name it.
Then I came across Dave Brubeck's Time Series albums and I have been binge-listening his music. To those unfamiliar with the Time albums: all songs are played in unfamiliar time signatures. I believe Dave (and Desmond too, if you ask me) pioneered what a lot of people take for granted today, ie jazz is played in time signatures like 7/8, 7/4 and 11/4. So not only am I poring over books, I'm overloading my entire sensory apparatus with music is cooky time signatures[1].
But my continuous search for interesting things to poke a stick at is taking me places where I'm not currently really fit to go.
Jennypenny made an astute observation some time ago: Some people sort information in the order they receive it. If new information doesn't conform to what is already in their heads, they reject this new information immediately. Other people try to find out where new information best fits with their current knowledge and then tries to jiggle their ideas around to adjust to the new piece of information. Naturally the latter approach needs a defragmentation from time to time. The former approach is called being a god damn fucktard; don't be like that.
The little elf that lives inside my head is so vastly overburdened with things he needs to label under 'new' and things that needs to go in the right spot that there is most likely stack overflow. But the JIT compiler(AKA the elf) hasn't noticed that we've run out of working memory and so it all looks like jumbled shit to him. There is no cache coherency any more, every piece of information has to be meticulously retrieved from the hard drive and tagged all over again every time I sit my ignorant ass down and try to learn something new. Mentally I'm trashing(computer science).
By now it's rather obvious that on top of everything else I've done in the preceding year which includes: moving, having a small child in the terrible two/threes, a GF who got put on sick leave and anti-depressant meds, and a PhD that is a total train wreck that only people much smarter than me are able to make something out of, I've decided to go completely crazy on reading as a coping mechanism. It makes sense in some pathological way really. If I truly consider myself the agent of my existence I should be able to manufacture and control my existence and my own happiness; I just left out the part where I use my agency to not give a fuck and let go.
Either way, I think maybe 40 books in a year as stressful as this one is a tad too much.
In any case I'm not really certain all that reading made me smarter measured by the capacity to DO something that I wasn't able to do before, as much as it has made me able to question things and put new perspectives on things I haven't been able to before. The effect of this learning has naturally been an insane amount of introspection based on all these new ideas. But since the elf is still frantically busy trying to tie all this together, none of it makes sense in a manner where it comes naturally, the new knowledge has not been assimilated and made a natural part of my existence yet. It still bounces around inside my skull. That is naturally a recipe for disaster when my coping strategy is to read even more. Thus, life lesson learned: Learn by DOING and evaluating performance, not by assimilating disjoint theoretical knowledge.
My current behaviour is actually scoring very high on a test for adult ADD... I'm that fucked up. That, or I truly have ADD and the PhD just brought out the worst of my character.
One hour's work is enough to fuck me up for the rest of the day, to the point where I'm incapable of following a spoken conversation and reading anything -even simple recipes- takes tremendous effort. The last couple of entries in this journal could then very well serve as an interesting point of study concerning mental instability. What does the world look like to someone who is slowly becoming unable to handle any more requests; Stack Overflow in humans if you will.
One of the few things where I have never cared one iota is about what other people think of me, and neither have I cared about other people's success. So when I suddenly found myself envious, I had to consider it a big red flag. The two things that has NEVER happened in my life unless I was truly, utterly, fucked are: Being inefficient at work, and being envious.
And now I found myself annoyed at people on the ERE forums for their apparent success/capabilities or knowledge. Seriously? Envy? Off to the doctor you go, you silly little man, something's really really wrong with you!
ILLNESS
So I went to see the doctor.
And now: Holy shitting dick-nipples (that's a googable phrase by the way, I don't recommend it though) boy, I've been diagnosed with a rather severe depression!
But... It didn't -and still doesn't- feel like depression to me. Not quite. Actually, it feels absolutely nothing like I've come to expect depression would feel like. As I wrote elsewhere in this journal, the Sharpe ratio of my happiness is off, but I don't feel like I'm incapacitated, there is simply a tremendous variation in my mood and thought-patterns. The whole bed-ridden-drapes-drawn-incapabable-of-getting-dressed kind of depression is no where near how I'm feeling. None the less, it's supposedly quite severe.
Turns out that often depression does not manifest itself as some degree of sadness/inability to function but rather as a rather specific incongruence of thoughts as a consquence of faulty brain chemistry. The chemistry was known to me, but not the actual symptoms. The feeling of going nowhere while I have in fact managed to get an insane amount of shit done in the preceding year is testament to this faulty functioning. I'm thus not crippled but able to function and get some things done, although working on the PhD is not one of them.
I can function in social settings where all I have to do is run my yap and crack jokes. If something requires thinking, even basic thinking, it's taxing. Letters become blurred when reading from a piece of paper unless I actively tell my brain that it needs to read now. It feels almost like pulling on an old farmhouse pump; keep working at it and the text will flow, but I need to actively balance the act.
Luckily depression meds are surprisingly inexpensive (the shrink not so much), but taking the first pill was a major hurdle.
I literally sat on my kitchen table for 15 minutes and stared down into that little innocently looking box of tiny pills. The box itself is only about 10 cms deep but it felt as if I was about to dive into the Mariana trench wearing only a snorkel and I was sitting on the boat railing staring into the abyss. I have always been supremely confident in my own agency (rather than my abilities) and admitting that I probably need chemical help to move on is rather humiliating actually. I can see though that a lot of my usual coping mechanisms are exactly what they should be ie exercise, Information diet, eating healthy, journaling to get shit out of my head, no self-medication with alcohol, taking walks, and meditation. I do know exactly what I want to talk with the psychologist about, so as usual, I have a plan...
None the less, I can't stop thinking although I really should.
SO NATURALLY:
I've been thinking even MORE!
I'm getting a sick leave from the job and the knowledge alone has already freed up working memory.
Now I need to learn to direct and conserve my energy.
The last three/four days introspection have been rather interesting and I have a gut feeling that being treated for depression could be an insanely rewarding experience in the long run.
I've been given a leave from work and now I think I should find out who I am, find back to who I were, and who I am going to be in the future. I'm actually rather excited about the prospect, although the depression stigma still feels incredibly weird to me.
This is not at all what I imagined depression feels like. I guess I still have much to learn...
Quote of the Day:
We do not rise to the level of our hopes but fall to the level of our training.
[1] In case you'd like to skip directly to the good stuff:
Eleven Four (11/4):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60WB6Aepxmc
(in case you need help counting try counting 123 12 123 123) You'll only ever hear Desmond improvising over this, because he's the only one who could figure out who to do it in 11/4.
Waltz Limp (3/4):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3jWS_3RNFs
Blue Rondo a la Turk (7/8):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlVasHbipo
Far More Blue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snFKf08ziNE
Shim Wha:
https://youtu.be/wlRsvurx3UI?t=8m43s