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“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.”

– Louise Miller, Twitter.

As my internal model of the world evolves, I find this to be increasingly true.

Introspection and time form links between loves near and far. The more these nodes, the richer my model gets, the clearer the patterns that form, the more obvious the truths that emerge, the more visceral their understanding becomes, and the fewer the conflicts I experience.

This writer called off her wedding, but finds it hard to escape being constantly reminded of the relationship. On This Day photo reminders, anniversary emails, recommended topics to follow – all features that were previously welcome have now made her online world an emotional minefield.

When engineers build ad retargeting platforms, they build something that will continually funnel more content for the things you’ve indicated you’re interested in. On average, that’s the correct thing to do… [b]ut these systems don’t factor in when life has been interrupted. Pinterest doesn’t know when the wedding never happens, or when the baby isn’t born. It doesn’t know you no longer need the nursery. Pinterest doesn’t even know if the vacation you created a collage for has ended. It’s not interested in your temporal experience.

So much of our software has become more than a tool. Because the majority of popular software is either ad-driven directly or indirectly, many features now serve both the software provider and you. Re-surfacing old photos as ‘memories’ is meant to have you, the user, use the app by responding to the notificaton, a notification whose timing has been chosen to maximise the probability of you tapping it.

This is no longer a simple photo organiser that you use. Both you and the software’s maker are using each other.

This is deeply uncomfortable for me, not just on principle but also because in mere weeks or months I will face an event that’s will turn many past events into painful memories, and I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it.

Olga Khazan says you can be a different person after the pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/opinion/covid-personality-change.html

After all, the person who emerges from quarantine doesn’t have to be the same old you. Scientists say that people can change their personalities well into adulthood. And what better time for transformation than now, when no one has seen you for a year, and might have forgotten what you were like in the first place?

… now, it appears the idea that our personalities are immutable is also not quite true. Researchers have found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality — extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness — within just a few months.

Like almost everyone around you, you have lost, gained, stressed, adapted. Some change in personality is going to be inevitable, I think. You may not even have the power or drive to be deliberate about it or influence it. The only question then is how conscious you will be of this change. So that over time, in less trying circumstances, you can mould it forward or backward.

(Via Jason Kottke https://kottke.org/21/04/you-can-be-a-different-person-after-the-pandemic)

(Part 1)

None of this is to defend or criticize meditation. Nor do I have easy solutions – or any solutions – to mitigate the risks that the articles vividly describe. These are my observations of the difficulties I’ve faced in my own years of practice. More of us need to understand that not only meditation a hard journey but also that breakthroughs are vastly more powerful than we expect.

The academic I K Taimni, in the preface to his masterful exposition of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, had this to say about people embarking on the practice of Yoga:

[the pursuit of the Yogic ideal] can be undertaken only on understanding fully the nature of human life and the misery and suffering which are inherent in it and the further realization that the only way to end this misery and suffering permanently is to find the Truth which is enshrined within ourselves, by the only method which is available, namely, Yogic discipline.

It is also true that the attainment of this objective is a long-term affair and the aspirant should be prepared to spend a number of lives—as many lives as may be required—in its wholehearted and single-minded pursuit. No one can know in the beginning his potentialities and how much time will be needed. He can hope for the best but must be prepared for the worst.

It cannot be, as he says, “undertaken as a mere hobby or to find an escape from the stress and strain of ordinary life.”

(ends)

I came across two recent articles (one, on BBC’s website and two, Harper’s Magazine) that described the ill-effects of meditation, including profiles of people who’ve had terrible experiences after meditation – both mindfulness and transcendental. I suggest you at least flip though both of them.

I credit meditation – along with a couple of other things – with helping me get through years of depression. Having had a regular meditation practice in the past, here are some observations:

• For months into my mindfulness practice, I attempted to pay attention to everything around me. The act of trying to notice everything at once caused immediate anxiety, and the rush of sensory input was overwhelming, and made for dozens of hours of unhappy sessions that left me more frazzled than when I began. It was months later that I learnt to notice only what my brain was already filtering in, without trying to manipulate those filters. That was a step-change in the quality of my practice, and therefore the effect it had on my well-being.

• I also attempted to breathe evenly and deeply. Oxygen over-saturation is a real thing, and it causes me to become light-headed, with a tingling sensation on my nose, fingers and toes. I worsened the feedback loop by attempting to notice the tingling even as my brain dealt with the light-headedness, and that led to some light hallucinations and a spike in stress levels.

• Finally, while mindfulness eventually does help you form a more sustainable relationship with yourself and the world around you, the path doesn’t appear to be simple. Some of the realisations I had felt like gigantic crises, the storm before the calm of acceptance and understanding. I can see why people who are hit with the sudden clarity of just how insignificant they, their lives, their stories are feel broken. To me it’s quite possible that their brains create automatic defence mechanisms that could manifest as paranoia or mania. I’m not sure how to tackle this: whether meditation is to be performed in the same sorts of careful setting that psilocybin is administered in some parts of the world today, or whether there are forms of Meditation Lite that ease practitioners into understanding.

(Part 2)

In a study that found a correction between Western countries and parental burnout even before the pandemic made life at home challenging:

parenting norms in Euro-American countries … have become increasingly demanding over the last 50 years, resulting in intensification of parental investment, and growing psychological pressure on parents,”

“What parents feed their children, how they discipline them, where they put them to bed, how they play with them: all of these have become politically and morally charged questions… The distinction between what children need and what might enhance their development has disappeared, and anything less than optimal parenting is framed as perilous.”

As the article says, there’ll need to be other studies to determine causation. It’s unquestionably true that the politicisation of bringing up children, including education which wasn’t mentioned here, requires parents to constantly tread a line that seems to get finer every year.

These problems might be a microcosm of the schisms we’re seeing in increasing aspects of our everyday lives. For instance, whether it is ‘right’ to buy from Amazon given how it treats its warehouse workers.

As things become ever more interconnected, ordinary people feel they are responsible for taking stances and making choices about innumerable such issues.

I think this is responsible in large measure for what I see as a pervasively stressed society.

Earlier this year, The Atlantic wrote about what we’ve all felt but haven’t articulated. That all but our closest friendships have suffered greatly during the pandemic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-goodbye-casual-friends/617839/

… much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends. These other relationships have withered largely unremarked on after the places that hosted them closed. The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life—and buoy human health.

More on the withering:

There are people on the outer periphery of my life for whom the concept of “keeping up” makes little sense, but there are also lots of friends and acquaintances—people I could theoretically hang out with outdoors or see on videochat, but with whom those tools just don’t feel right. In my life, this perception seems to be largely mutual—I am not turning down invites from these folks for Zoom catch-ups and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside indoor dining and international travel.

Personally a significant percentage of friends are those with whom for years I’ve been in daily touch with chat apps and the occasional phone call. Those haven’t suffered because they weren’t in person to begin with. But all of them are with people who I had spent some time regularly in person at some time in the past.

I do think new friendships are rather hard to form in these circumstances – although not impossible.

Detailed article on the complexity of the chip deign process and the semiconductor supply chain. Specifically, how the company TSMC in Taiwan is probably the world’s most important chip company.

The world next innovations depend on a single country, Taiwan

The world’s current and next innovations depend on a single country: Taiwan. It’s probably one country you might never hear about, or perhaps confuse with its neighbor, Thailand, or even think it’s a part of China.
I’ve been living in Taiwan for 3+ years, and am baffled that I never pay attention to…

The last paragraph is a pretty good summary, but it doesn’t do justice for the detail in the rest of the article.

The cutting edge semiconductor chip manufacturing is (and was) done in Taiwan by TSMC. The island has acquired strategic significance, with partners all over the world depending on them. The chips they make are essentials to any of today’s and future hardware: (flying) electrical cars, space ships, servers, 5G, machine to discover new drugs or vaccines, and any military equipments.

Update 13 May 2021: Bloomberg has an in-depth article on the complexity of the chip manufacturing process. It also covers the dynamics of the industry.

… it takes years to build semiconductor fabrication facilities and billions of dollars—and even then the economics are so brutal that you can lose out if your manufacturing expertise is a fraction behind the competition…

Manufacturing a chip typically takes more than three months and involves giant factories, dust-free rooms, multi-million-dollar machines, molten tin and lasers. The end goal is to transform wafers of silicon—an element extracted from plain sand—into a network of billions of tiny switches called transistors that form the basis of the circuitry that will eventually give a phone, computer, car, washing machine or satellite crucial capabilities

This is why countries face such difficulty in achieving semiconductor self sufficiency. China has called chip independence a top national priority in its latest five-year plan, while U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed to build a secure American supply chain by reviving domestic manufacturing.

– The Chip Shortage Keeps Getting Worse. Why Can’t We Just Make More?