Month: July 2022

A Quick Note About Coffee

On July 15, 2022

Because changes in the dosages of my medications can only happen once every month or so at most, a strategy for managing my mood and energy levels has been to supplement with the caffeine in coffee. My wife got us an espresso machine a while back, so I’m able to pull shots when needed.

Initially, my dosing schedule for espresso shots mostly assumed front loading with 2 to 3 in the morning followed by single shot top ups at noon and in the late afternoon. This was based on the assumption that I wanted to have a consistent level of caffeine in the bloodstream, and avoid peaks or high variance, since the half-life of caffeine is about 5 hours. This sort of worked for a while, but I noticed that I crashed pretty hard in the evenings despite it.

Recently, after reading more, I noted that the Adenosine levels actually increase over time throughout the day, and so fixing the caffeine level at a particular amount will probably be too much early in the day, and too little later in the day, assuming that we need to offset the rising sleepiness. Thus, a more practical dosing schedule is probably an even distribution, something like a double shot in the morning, followed by a double shot at noon. Initial experiments suggest that this works better, and keeps me from crashing as much in the evening, although this is still early in my testing.

On Struggling With Mental Illness

by Josephius

On July 11, 2022

In Life

One of the more challenging things I’ve experienced in my life has been dealing with the complexities of mental illness and the struggle to live a normal life despite it. Despite my best efforts, I find myself infuriatingly inconsistent due to a mood disorder that means I’m occasionally overly energetic, and other times fatigued. In either state, I find it difficult to focus on being productive, either because I’m distracted by a rush of thoughts, or alternatively, too tired to do anything. The midway state between these two extremes is a thin region where I can be productive and effective.

A lot of people don’t really get the extent to which our moods and behaviours can be shaped by something as simple as a little blue pill. For me, the cocktail of medications allows me to function, is an added cost of living, but also comes with the danger that an adjustment can overcompensate and cause me to become the opposite state than what I was in before. It becomes rather infuriating, how easily the balance can be broken, and how obviously I am not in control of my own mental condition.

It’s bothersome. I want to be effective, to be able to productively do the things that I want to do. But often, during periods of adjustment, I find myself struggling to do basic things. When things are working right, I can be quite productive, like my first two and a half years at Huawei were. But then things can go wrong, and I can find myself stuck in the mud, worried that I may never be able to function well again.

I can blame the illness for a lot of things. Lost friends, lost time, lost hope, a sidelined career, and so on. But at the same time I hesitate to. I hesitate to admit to the public that I have this illness, because of the severe stigma that is attached to it. And I don’t want it to be an excuse for my mistakes. But at the same time, it is the reason why I sometimes wasn’t myself, why I can be maddeningly inconsistent.

It becomes a struggle because, in part, I want to hide these facts from people, so they don’t look down on me, so they don’t decide I’m too much of a risk to employ, things like that. My parents always tell me to keep the fact a secret. It’s not something that other people understand, and it hurts my chances to get or keep a job. But at the same time, if I don’t explain why things are happening, do they expect me to be able to keep the job anyway?

We’re expected to be our best, day in, and day out, but for me, that’s impossible. It’s impossible for me to be 100% all the time, and moreover, there are days when I’ll just be useless. How am I supposed to work with this? What do people think I should do?

It’s just bothersome. The world expects us to be striving and achieving all the time. But I literally cannot be that way. Do I belong in this world? Or am I just too messed up to survive?

These are some thoughts I sometimes have. The kind of thoughts that on better days the medications take away. But sometimes they come back. And sometimes I’m trapped by my own mind in a seemingly hopeless situation. At least, hopeless for someone who wants to be effective and productive and to contribute meaningfully to the world.

So, that’s a small glimpse of the struggle. There’s a lot more that I still don’t think is wise to explain. Because most people don’t particularly understand. But hopefully, if you care to, this post helps you to understand a bit of my experience, and why I am the way that I am. Thank you for your time.

On Altruism

by Josephius

On July 2, 2022

In Life, Motivational, Philosophy

One thing I’ve learned from observing people and society is the awareness that the vast majority of folks are egoistic, or selfish. They tend to care about their own happiness and are at best indifferent to the happiness of others unless they have some kind of relationship with that person, in which case they care about that person’s happiness in so far as it has an effect on their own happiness to keep that person happy. This is the natural, neutral state of affairs. It is unnatural to care about other people’s happiness for the sake of themselves as ends. We call such unnatural behaviour “altruism”, and tend to glorify it in narratives but avoid actually being that way in reality.

In an ideal world, all people would be altruistic. They would equally value their own happiness and the happiness of each other person because we are all persons deserving happiness. Instead, reality is mostly a world of selfishness. To me, the root of all evil is this egoism, this lack of concern for the well-being of others that is the norm in our society.

I say this knowing that I am a hypocrite. I say this as someone who tries to be altruistic at times, but is very inconsistent with the application of the principles that it logically entails. If I were a saint, I would have sold everything I didn’t need and donated at least half my gross income to charities that help the global poor. I would be vegan. I would probably not live in a nice house and own a car (a hybrid at least) and be busy living a pleasant life with my family.

Instead, I donate a small fraction of my gross income to charity and call it a day. I occasionally make the effort to help my friends and family when they are in obvious need. I still eat meat and play computer games and own a grand piano that I don’t need.

The reality is that altruism is hard. Doing the right thing for the right reasons requires sacrificing our selfish desires. Most people don’t even begin to bother. In their world view, acts of kindness and altruism are seen with suspicion, as having ulterior motives of virtue signalling or guilt tripping or something else. In such a world, we are not rewarded for doing good, but punished. The incentives favour egoism. That’s why the world runs on capitalism after all.

And so, the world is the way it is. People largely don’t do the right thing, and don’t even realize there is a right thing to do. Most of them don’t care. There are seven billion people in this world right now, and most likely, only a tiny handful of people care that you or I even exist, much less act consistently towards our well-being and happiness.

So, why am I bothering to explain this to you? Because I think we can do better. Not be perfect, but better. We can do more to try to care about others and make the effort to make the world a better place. I believe I do this with my modest donations to charity, and my acts of kindness towards friends and strangers alike. These are small victories for goodness and justice and should be celebrated, even if in the end we fall short of being saints.

In the end, the direction you go in is more important than the magnitude of the step you take. Many small steps in the right direction will get you to where you want to be eventually. Conversely, if your direction is wrong, then bigger steps aren’t always better.