2024-06-04 Walden, Waldout

What I Did

I went on vacation, so not much done relative to other updates. However, there’s still value in basic maintenance throughout each day. More on that in the next section.

More technical debt payments. I did use the time to divide-and-conquer the worst part of the pile.

What I Learned

Vacations are overrated, and I can’t say I like the concept anymore. Even though I wrote a guide on how to enjoy vacations and trips, I’m not sure if it’s healthy to take protracted vacations that surpass a week.

Since this status update blog post here is not catering to the largest possible demographic for a particular guide (and therefore omitting the daily dose of tinfoil that consumes my mind at least twice each day), I’ll give a dose of tinfoil that has consumed my mind a few times.

This is probably the most anti-American thing I’ll ever say, but I’m convinced that we are designed from a core phenomenology to rest every week. We don’t really know what made a “week” become a 7-day affair (and refuse to achieve scientific consensus that it had anything to do with ancient Jews), but we have always taken to the idea of 5–6 days of toil mixed with 1–2 days of recreation.

This is not a coincidence. Scientific studies have shown that one day off work every week makes us 150% more productive, which would make the guy who takes a solid weekend 7.1% more productive than the 7-day guy and the 6-day guy 28.5% more efficient than the 7-day guy. This also isn’t counting the quality-of-life improvements of not working (such as having actual fun).

Beyond thinking of The Twilight Zone’s A Game of Pool, this mechanism means that we ought to structure our lives around a type of rhythm: work lots and rest a bit to celebrate that work.

There are certainly times and places to work on weekends (e.g., moving), but the over-implementation of nonstop effort gets in the way of being able to sufficiently recover. It also stifles the creativity that could magnify our efforts even further (or, in some cases, clarify if our actions still reflect our purposes). From a mechanical perspective, its opportunity cost comes through pushing the system so far that it impedes the ability to assume more domains of influence. You can’t work more on Saturdays if you already work all day on Saturdays, after all.

This principle can be easily violated by pushing just a bit too far. For example, you may feel compelled to work because it can pay more money, or have a side hustle, or feel like you must take care of your kids.

Since we are creatures of habit, this week-by-week situation will follow us once we’ve curated it, irrespective of it being intentional or non-.

In light of that, the vacation is a violation of that weekly schedule. Instead of developing a routine in a new place to experience it as the motivation (and weekend) leads, the idea is that you go visit a place and drop shedloads of money on the local economy to be entertained.

The economic reality of the tourist town speaks for itself:

• That locale gets a rhythmic rush of people flocking there to see things, then they’ll head home after a set number of weeks with far less money than they had before. If you ask them, they’ll say it was “worth the experience”, but they’ll often return home with very little to show for that experience in relation to many other forms of self-improvement (e.g., fitness bootcamp, educational curriculum).
• In their wake, the town slowly conforms itself to rendering few services that don’t accommodate a seasonal rush of trivial purchases. The vendors sell overpriced products, to oblivious customers, who ransack the local region for baubles, and leave the vendors who win in the free market of chintzy knick-knacks with more money to scale the cycle.

Now, this isn’t to condemn visiting new places or exploring new regions: my complaint comes through the mechanism of blind abdication of all responsibility for the purpose of self-gratification. The I’ll-work-to-make-my-retirement-huge mindset has other issues, which I may touch on when the tinfoil strikes.

Instead, I propose a different mindset: the sabbatical.

We all travel through seasons, and taking a hiatus to travel or seclude yourself is a wonderful way to live for a time. Thoreau’s “Walden” arose from two years in that domain, and a shift in cadence is utterly critical for finding your own happy medium to live the good life that works for you.

The primary difference between a vacation and sabbatical is far less about what you do than how you do it and why:

• A vacation is driven by the desire to “escape”, while a sabbatical is driven by a broader range of desires: to “grow” or “learn”, or maybe to “relax” or “redefine oneself”.
• While a vacation is a fixed interval of spending and consumption, sabbaticals can often require working to earn a living, and may simply be an internship in something you’ve wanted to do.

The beauty of the sabbatical is that it’s also more cost-effective. Instead of toiling to save, with the hope of visiting a far-off land to escape the toil, you take a mini-version of the toil with you, and get some freedom to wander for a time.

This obviously isn’t for everyone, and I don’t even think I’m certain enough for this to be advice, but I know I’ve found something antithetical to mainstream Americana, so it’s still something I’ve learned.

The funny thing is that when you have children, the extra maintenance requirements almost make every vacation a type of sabbatical.

What I’m Doing Now

Marching through my Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

• It consists of 10,917 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
• As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will likely make more files.
• The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

The project will eventually send everything to 3 possible places:

1. My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
2. My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
3. The primitives and templates for future projects.

Throughout the entire system, I maintain a schema that reflects the content I’m building:

The flow of work represents itself through a unique semi-ordered flow of “phases”:

1. Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (0->a-d): 2,674 left.
2. Send grouped inbox items into their appropriate categories (020-060->100-86170): 492 left.
3. Update the old content I’ve already written (100-750).
4. Finish out a few easy pages (800).
5. Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
6. Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (8580).
7. Finish the Management pages (8590).
8. Finish the Math pages (180).
   • I’m aiming for breadth, not depth. I don’t need to perform combinatorics in my head, but I do need to explain in plain English what the heck each math “thing” is, traced along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education:
     • Basic arithmetic
     • Algebra
     • Geometry/trigonometry
     • Statistics
     • Calculus
     • Number theory, with a likely divergence into applied maths and game theory. Along the way, I’ll keep a jargon-resistant dictionary of the big math words.
9. Bounce around Trendless Tech for a while (86013-86170).