re: love

rick and morty s4e8 features morty hitting on a girl and repeatedly pressing a life reset / checkpoint button device to successfully win her over. when he does win her over, he decides to put it down and live life without the device. through trials and tribulations, he begins on what he thinks is a happy ending. but his father, jerry smith, ends it by resetting his life back to the original checkpoint, and he fails to recoup what he had lost (but hadnt truly gained in the first place). 

in what seems to be a fable, teaching us that life's path dependent nature was designed the way it was and shouldn't be tampered with, a deeper truth is revealed: such a device would be invaluable. 

but, life is already designed to be analogous to the checkpoint device. assuming all else staying equal, we will always be presented with an equivalent if not near equivalent opportunity again. so it doesn't matter how much you fuck up (within reasonable bounds), u will always be given another chance. such is life.

as long as we r learn and evolve, we will always get to where we want to be in an eschatological convergence. for example, if you want to find a gf, u will continuously try and iterate towards a better tuned self, to get to the state where you would get a gf. 

this framing of eschatological convergence requires that the spark doesnt die. the goalpost keeps on moving: the goalpost that you set on day one will probably diverge by the time you reach year one. as inevitably, the spark will die - either because it is fulfilled or replaced by another spark (after realizing that you don't want to pursue the spark and a different one comes along). a potential outcome of a fulfilled spark is that a bigger spark emerges (aka compounding).

as long as the spark/intent doesn't die, u will eventually get it. 

this is a truth that many around me have dismissed as too retrospective. i.e. getting into yc, getting into top research labs. "everything can be explained retrospectively, but not forward projecting." and i tend to agree that this viewpoint can only be pieced together retrospectively, but, forward projecting, u can still engineer reaching your goals through mini such-cycles, continuously compounding little things (which one can engineer through mere exposure/the sf-ism "luck surface area").

but simultaneously i'm a firm believer in definite optimism, that you should have a goal that you are striving for. but, as you progress, you start realizing that the goals become more and more blurry and less define, i.e. you begin to follow a path that fewer and fewer ppl have walked before, and such a path is less defined. 

a contradiction naturally arises - how can this viewpoint simultaneously support forward projection towards goals while requiring a definite goal, which is more retrospectively defined than forward projected. the reality is less clear - u need to know of a blurry shape of a goal, and working towards it necessarily unblurs the goal, and u obtain a more defined shape. 

so, as you progress, the goals become more blurry. but as you progress toward said goals, they become less blurry. such is the eternal imbalance. as long as you keep striving for bigger things, there won't be a tension-less moment between where you are and where you want to be, such is the driving force of life (when we ultimately stop striving, when we give up on our life's meaning and we succumb to fate, e.g. the 27 out of 28 jews who died in nazi concentration camps, as recounted by victor e frankl. we are forever trying to answer the meaning of life, and it is in this strive for an answer that we find our answer).

thus, perhaps the definition of definite optimism and indefinite optimism is less defined (ha), as indefinite necessarily evolves into definite, given the right mindset, which necessitates a different axis to separate the two. one naive proposal is optimism (again) - as one interpretation separates definite and indefinite by merely how optimistic you are: being (conventionally) more optimistic is associated with the traits of definite optimism, and vice versa.

a better candidate for a second axis is how forward looking the thought is - i.e. if you r optimizing for the short term, you are probably just dopaminemaxxing (overused, another overused term is "instantant gratification") without too much a care for long term goals (overused, another overused term is "delayed gratification"); but if u r optimizing for the long term, you will probably weigh things differently. this tends to agree with peter thiel's definition, so i've won! (take that mr p 😈)

thus the debate is settled. indefinite/definite are vain terms. a better descriptor is how long-term/short-term the thought is.

but this is a useless thought, because long-term/short-term and optimistic/pessimistic are both subjective. what's long-term to me could be short-term for you, and what's optimistic for me might just be considered as pessimistic for you. so in the end, these are vain descriptors too. what really matters is that you keep trying and learning. that's it.

a famous zootopia bunny once said, "i wont give up no i wont give in until i reach the end and then i'll start again". such is life.

now that i've addressed the question of will i ever get a gf (answer is who knows, only time will tell), it's time to get to the more dire topic at hand: ABGs, here on out referred to as abgs (lowercase).

abgs r nice to look at (lust), but are nothing more than that. they are all insufferable in person (overgeneralization, there is always exceptions to the rule, but the rule here is overwhelmingly empirically true). all they do is set unrealistic expectations as no one (overgeneralization) irl looks like that.

"dont meet your heros" they say. but the more and more i look at it, i dont see where my heroes (abgs) are. bc u cant find camy yang irl, she doesnt exist. it's a fairytale, fable. (makes you wonder if mythos even exists, a conspiracy for another day)

love is the only thing that can make a man act (insane). from the exterior, they look insane, but from the interior, their mental models and cognition have already been rewired so that this all seems sane to them, even irrevocably/logically so .

love is blind.

this is a long roundabout way to get to the event that triggered it all: we had finished filming our launch video (again), but this time we were at a stanford pizza joint. there was a girl, similar age, wearing knee-long jean skirts, a crop top, hair in a bun, and glasses, disregarding conventional dress. i initially dismissed her as she didn't look like camy yang, but after some thought i wanted to go say hi. i had cooked up a funny joke already (how we were both wearing jeans). and i waited for the right chance to go say it. but i did not observe such an opportunity arise, and she left without me noticing. and i wasn't even facing the right way.

she was fit (not fat) and smart (probably, we were in stanford after all), but too much rationalization and not enough doing. she is the embodiment of everything i stand for (not caring about outward appearances, which is extremely shallow but still, who knows). again, too much rationalization and not enough doing.

btw the whole reason this came to be was bc morty is retarded. i am retarded. morty's girl wore glasses. the girl in the pizza place wore glasses.

also, there exists a phenomenon where we resort to lower levels of pursuit when we r in despair, e.g. watching camy yang bc u dk what tf to do w ur life.

the moral of the story (fable): it's in everyone's best interest to unfollow camy yang (figurative), mute her posts (literal), and stop her from poisoning our futures (fr).