Cold Wind and the Chastity Blues

Recently for reasons that don’t matter, I came up with a definition of depressed: imagine that someone gave you £10,000, and you couldn’t think of anything you could buy that would improve the quality of your life. Here are some answers a regular person might think of:

A luxury two-week holiday
Replacing your old second-hand car with a later model second-hand car
A few trips to, uh, masseurs whose, um, publicity material you’ve seen online
A blow-out catered supper for all your friends and acquaintances
A bunch of city breaks throughout the year
Re-stocking your wardrobe
Upgrading your hi-fi and media kit
A really good leather sofa and armchair
Replace all the mattresses in your house
Get the bathroom or kitchen refreshed
Pay down your debts

You know. Lots of things. All of which are reasonably attainable and don’t involve fantasies involving Mica Arganarez.

Any excuse for a picture of Mica.

Some of them I’ve done already. The point is, I realised that if I did some of these, it wouldn’t make me feel any better about my life or myself. And I can’t tell you how much I still look at my three-year-old kitchen and pat myself on the back for it. I appreciate material stuff. I am after all a Taurus.

But right now? Nada. And not because I am super-spiritual right now.

Some of it is the Chastity Blues (celibacy is not being married, chastity is not getting laid) . Extended chastity is not like long-term sobriety: it’s easy not to take the first drink. Staying chaste requires the same lack of effort (don’t buy booze, don’t approach women) to maintain, but I’ve found that long-term chastity puts my soul under a constant tension that every now and then breaks one of the its fibres.That’s when I feel the hurt, and think that some intimate contact would be a tremendous relief and wash me through with Good Hormones. But of course, when I’m feeling the hurt, I wouldn’t go near an opportunity, because it would mean too much, and be too painful if it failed.

No-one with plastic and metal wires in their mouths can feel relaxed and at ease. I’ve cut back on the range of food I eat and while I still taste it, the act of eating is not itself a pleasure. That’s a lot to miss. It’s been un-naturally cold in the UK this year and I just haven’t wanted to leave the front door if I can avoid it. And us ascetic types get tired of the friction of just seeing and hearing the rest of the human race.

It’s called “functioning depression”. I get up and go to work. I eat and exercise. I don’t mope. I keep myself, my clothes and my quarters clean. I pay my bills and generally take care of my affairs. But I don’t do anything that results in me feeling relaxed, happy, satisfied, and generally at one and ease with the world. However temporarily. Because I can’t think of anything that might that wouldn’t basically be drugs (sex, booze, holidays, chocolate).

Expert Beginners - Ouch!

I follow Erik Dietrich's Daed Tech blog , as should anyone interested in programming and software. He has a couple of posts about the awful effects of Expert Beginners which made me wince.

I was that man.

Ouch.

Fortunately it was only ever in small companies, and mostly in my head. No careers or customer applications were damaged by my stupidity, neither were budgets blown or deadlines missed.

I’ve since become a modest journeyman with no pretensions of expertise.

But still…. Ouch.

Whisky, Cigarettes and the Meaning of Life

RooshV is a smart guy and playing a long game none of the rest of us get. He’s found his audience, and is cultivating them well. Some of it is good, some is okay, and some is just old-fashioned twaddle. Like this...

Lifestyle design has become so popular among both men and women because meaning and purpose have been removed from their lives, particularly god, family, and tribe. Without those, you have nothing to ground your existence on...

No. No. No.

The meaning and purpose of any person’s life cannot be found outside of them. We can decide to dedicate ourselves to a goal that is external to us, but it isn’t the goal that brings meaning, it’s the dedication. Any athlete, artist, scholar or entrepreneur will tell you that. Children don’t bring meaning, they bring the opportunity for the parents to find meaning in the task of raising those children - an opportunity that a noticeable proportion of parents don’t take. God cannot bring meaning, since there isn’t one (or a hundred): what makes the meaning of the religious life is the devotion and dedication. Meaning isn’t an object, it’s a process: it isn’t a goal or an objective, it’s the manner of one's living.

I read somewhere a story about a man who was having a slow recovery after heart surgery. One day the doctor suggested he put something on his bedside cabinet to remind him of why he was getting well. A couple of days later the doctor returns and is shocked to find a bottle of whisky and a carton of cigarettes on the man’s cabinet. “What’s all this?” the doctor asks, and the man reminds him about his suggestion. “Well, I meant a photograph of your wife and children, or some pastime like walking or sailing,” the doctor stutters. The man looks at him. “I’m not married,” he explains, “and I’ve worked hard all my life. I have no hobbies. This, the whisky and cigarettes, this is what I like to do, and it’s why I want to get better.” And the doctor did indeed notice that the man had improved even over the last two days.

That man understood. It wasn't whisky and cigarettes: it was smoking and drinking and all the things that go with that. The process, not the products.

God, family and tribe were never purposes, but institutions to whom we owed something for providing social order, support, welfare and work (maybe, if you were lucky). Today we discharge that obligation by working and paying taxes.

Roosh is right about one thing: find your purpose and your "lifestyle” will follow. Mine, as an ongoing amend for being a drunk and a psychological mess for so long, is to be a quiet, modest, useful worker and a quiet, considerate neighbour, as well as a reasonable brother, son and friend. From that, the early nights, training, work and quiet living follow.

Piper Harron’s Identity Politics

Piper Harron is a black woman who feels oppressed by mathematics. She has a PhD from Princeton and is married to a mathematics professor at the University of Hawaii. Her PhD is written in an informal style that crosses the border to cute a few times. She's been interviewed by no less that MathBabe Cathy O'Neill and Michael Harris has talked about her at least twice on his blog.

Here’s an extract from a post called Why I Do Not Talk About Math

“My experience discussing math with mathematicians is that I get dragged into a perspective that includes a hierarchy of knowledge that says some information is trivial, some ideas are “stupid”; that declares what is basic knowledge, and presents open incredulity in the face of dissent. ”

Translation: other people have strong ideas about what’s worth spending time on that they don’t hold back and I get upset by that.

To which the reply is; woman up, behave like an adult and join the community, or quit. Because that is going to happen to her wherever she goes. Some places they may be more polite about it, and then she will finish the year with a “struggling” grade in her appraisal, which she will know is their way of telling her to be employed elsewhere.

Attention-seekers feel oppressed by lack of attention. They don't want attention for what they have done, but for who they are, or perhaps for the fact that, being who they are, they have done what they have done. Attention-seekers take to identity politics like cats to catnip: it gives them so many ways to define the "being who they are" that makes their otherwise journeyman work attention-worthy.

And if Ms Harron thinks a bunch of nerds in a math seminar are bad, she’s going to get the shock of her life when she tries to fit in with the other mothers at the school gate. Then she will know scorn and rejection.

Harron’s affiliation with identity politics is a shame. Because she’s on to something with the style of mathematical papers and communications. Fifty years after Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, a lot of mathematicians still write like Bourbaki. That’s something worth writing about.

It's April, Of Course I Have a Cold...

... and in about six weeks' time I'll get hay fever and be almost unable to stay awake in the afternoons. That will last about six weeks. Spring. I love it.

On the other hand, having a muzzy head means I can look at my photographs a little less harshly. So here's a few I prepared earlier...

From the top: cranes on the way into Vauxhall; orange pots at the bottom of my garden; the pub on the road into Poppit Sands, Pembroke; Dutch graffiti in a Banksy Stylee.