Pre-Exam Rant

here's a post that has been languishing in my drafts since last semester.

Hello everyone, welcome to another rant. This time you get to see me at my most anxious, as I have an exam in approximately 5 hours and I should be getting to sleep but I got the motivation to write and I have learned better than to fight against the inner voice that rises inside and tells me to regurgitate something onto this editing page. 

Of course, another semester of college has started and quiz week already crept up on me as I was involved in a plethora of other things. 

Many different things seem beautiful to me and worth pursuing, such as music, fitness (not in a naive superficial aesthetic level which I believe a lot of gym culture (though a net positive in promoting health) has reduced it to), and also most esoteric (read schizophrenic) types of mathematics, physics and computation concepts (Category theory, Trinitarianism and Topology are somethings which I have recently become very interested in and want to explore). 

I'm often stuck wondering whether I will be any good at any of these if I don't dedicate all my life to any of them, as there are many people who spend their entire lifetimes in these fields and still their work never sees any widespread acclaim. How can I be any good if I don't focus on any single one of these? I'm often stuck wondering about these things until the whirlwind of life and the fires I need to put out to continue with my daily life become unignorable and I go into a self-defensive ego-protecting state where my actions conform to protect whatever image I have of myself. 

Relating this to exams, this semester I dedicated most of my time until now to things that are not related to my coursework, e.g. music performances, philosophical discussions, and a lot of random math. When the anxiety hits, I'm stuck wondering whether I would have been better off just studying my coursework instead and chilling out a bit right now. There's always been an easy option in life in comparison to what I end up choosing (or maybe this is just my ego romanticizing itself). It is what society is telling me to do, what I see my friends doing. My life could be so easy if I could just be like them (I think things like this sometimes without being aware of the particular problems of their situations which is of course very dumb). But I don't ever seem to be able to go on cruising on the other path. It's always the struggle. 

 In the culture I am in, it is highly normal for someone to even self-flagellate about the time they spent pursuing their genuine interests (or letting their obsessive passion for something drive them wherever it took) when we create this ideal for comparison and see the trajectories of our lives in relation to it. It is something that I have also done (and might do in the future, who knows). For now, I have given myself a free ride to obsessively explore any of my passions as long as I maintain some baseline of identity in the world. 

Whenever I wonder whether my pursuits of studying seemingly unconnected things from seemingly unconnected disciplines would ever be worth it, given that people dedicate their whole lives to those disciplines and are still not able to find what they're seeking, I sometimes get anxious. But in recent times, the (possibly cope) rationalization that whatever potpourri of concepts I study might be used to express something beautiful and unique if I just keep at it is what I use as permission to explore whatever I want to. I want to study math and physics sometimes, not to solve any specific engineering or technological application problems, but rather as languages in which we can write the most beautiful poetry. I want to train and learn different movements the human body is capable of, just to defy gravity and truly find my limits. Sometimes English just doesn't feel enough. 

I do not know whether my giving myself permission to be different (even though I'm probably not that much different from other people) is just romanticization, narcissism, and coping, but there is a possibility that it is. The sad realization I came to right now, is that even if I say I just want to learn something to express creatively, the want to express creatively the most beautiful ideas is itself just an urge of my ego. I force myself to try harder in learning math concepts that seem even more difficult (or things the profs say are too difficult and not worth learning at this point) because I know that often, the more abstracted out the concept, the more the probability to express something even more general and beautiful. It is like a metaphor I remember using in one of my poems of us trying to reach back and express something that is truly inexpressible in representational symbols, but we keep going back further and further in the hope that we might be able to. It kind of reminds me of a lecture or talk I heard (probably by Donald Hoffman) about how these models that are closer and closer to the truth are evolutionarily rewarded, however, if you have a model that would actually mirror the noumenal, it fitness would go to zero. We don't want to see the truth, we just want to see closer and closer approximations to it and to structure those observations into a worldview. This of course interplays beautifully with Kashmiri Shaivite perspectives etc. If everything is Shiva (in a sense similar to Advaita Vedantic conceptions of Brahman, but dynamic instead of ever-present and unchanging, not a personified god), manifesting himself by structuring the divine feminine which is chaos, then at the moment that you truly know yourself, the climax, the game is up and there is no more fun to be had, so the fun is just in making closer and closer approximations, seeing more and more forms of manifestations and structure which can be created on pure creativity and potentiality.

So yeah, I kind of forgot how I was going to connect this to what I was about to say. The point is that even my urges to find a strong enough language to express what I want to say, as creatively as possible, are ultimately an urge of the self. If I were to give this up, that is while saying 'I' here, I am the urge for this expression. If this were to go, then I don't know what would be left. That is of course the fear which is part of the construct of the self itself, intervening as a biological preservation mechanism. So all of us are selfish, not in the sense of moralizing that adjective, but the fact that all our actions are driven by (possibly maladaptive) self-preservation mechanisms. 

Do we even want the constructs of our selves questioned? I realize that I fear this question because (the correct connective here is not because, because the causality is itself attributed by the fear, but rather and/but)the fear in question is itself an urge indistinguishable from the I which fears. All right, now I need to study for my Quantum mechanics exam.

This blog entry should probably have gone into my journal as  I wrote it in half an hour and this was for myself more than the reader, but to demonstrate the mechanism of the self (to myself and to you, the reader) is one of the points of the entry, so I hope you thought along with me here and found something valuable.