the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything

 ... is 42. or so the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy says.

it's obviously tongue in cheek, but it's also something more.

it means the answer doesn't mean much, if you don't ask the right question. and sometimes asking the appropriate question is more tricky than finding the correct answer to it.

I don't know if it's a mid-life thing (aside: I wonder why the word mid-life is almost always used with crisis!), or if it's just a my-life thing, or it is a combination of both and the series of crises that life seems to be throwing at me with regularity.

but yeah, it's definitely a time to think about questions, as much as I think about answers. in fact, the answers to most questions I ask myself these days are quite obvious - which, to me, is a hint that perhaps I'm not asking myself the right questions.

one thing's for sure though, my 40s (so far) have been an exercise in crisis management. it seems to have started with the motorbike accident just 3 weeks before I turned 40 (or maybe the near-crisis career "bump" that happened a few months before it?), and it's just been one thing after another since. some positive things have happened as well, but it's fair to say that while the successes are welcome and lasting, they also seem to be few and far between, while the struggles, although not disastrous, do seem to knock me down with regularity - to the point where every single day seems to be a struggle I'm ill-equipped to deal with. some of those struggles are self-inflicted/self-exacerbated (mechanical problems with my motorbike and car come to mind) but the vast majority seem to be curveballs life/the universe is throwing at me.

one thing that stands out the most though, is that these crises have reminded me in no uncertain terms, that the most valuable of all things is health. the next is human connections. somewhere in the mix is things like discipline, persistence, consistency, etc.

but those are all "answers". it's been a while since I've even stopped to consider the questions, in anything more than an academic, philosophical, almost idle sense.

mom loved to say that one of my granddad's favourite expressions was "is life worth living? it depends on the liver" (an obvious pun on the organs/health of the person asking the question, as well as the state of the person themselves).

in my case, I can say, beyond doubt, that as a person, my life seems worth living.

my daily struggles have reminded me repeatedly of the privilege and opportunities I have - my support system (both emotionally and economically), my stress-free environment (if say 95% of the people I know were in the same situation I am in, they probably will not have the circumstances to easily deal with them!), and more... 

and yet, the struggle remains. a struggle so bad that I am sometimes jealous of people around me (obviouslt on a superficial level! I know my situation is unique and I cannot pick and choose aspects of others' lives - that's not how the universe works!). a struggle that I hope isn't going to occupy me for the rest of my life, although I am realistic enough to acknowledge that worse struggles do exist, and it's not a guarantee that things will get better quickly or easily.

I don't know why I am so fixated on this struggle. I don't know why I can't see the bright side of things. of getting the clarity to see life as it really is. without all of its assumptions and distractions. 

I've been advised to try meditation. but meditation in and of itself leads to idle meandering. I think I need something mroe directed. I think I need to ask myself more questions.

or maybe I just need to sleep on time (yes, there are actually 3 people who have advised me the same thing, and in fact it's the only thing that the majority of people who are closely aware of what I'm going through agree upon). damn, that would be an anticlimax if it was true!

either way, here I am, rambling along. a metaphor for my life, if there ever was one. 42 years old. happy birthday to me!

black roses

I came upon a rose garden. The rose garden had black roses, which I know fascinated my mom as she has mentioned them multiple times for some reason - I think she saw them once 45+ years ago.

I was going to go bring her to see to see the black roses when a friend arrived at the garden to tend to the roses. She told me they looked black because they were burned roses. She showed me the bit where the ends of the petals were still red, as that was the newly grown bit.

I didn't at the time question how burned petals could continue to grow and how the new growth was red, but I did think to myself that it would be very disappointing to explain to my mom that black roses are simply burnt roses.

And that's when I woke up.

Coincidentally, I completely forgot about this until I saw a video today, a tongue in cheek one about people who can't see colour in their imagination, which prompted me to describe my dream in the comments. I found the coincidence (that I would dream of black roses on the same day I'd come across a video of people with black and white imaginations) uncanny... or was it confirmation bias?

Either way, time to tell mom about my dream about black roses... or not.

the un-optimized life

A comment on a youtube video about watching everything at 3x speed (to keep your mind sharp and optimize the rate of flow of information) reminded me of something I've never blogged - a bit about my past, that very strongly shaped how I lived ever since. 

I'm not feeling like rewording my comment, so here it is, copied from the video:

Interesting thing about speed listening. I'm guessing there haven't been long term studies about this though. I have anecdotal evidence about speed reading as an analogy. I started speeding up my reading from when I was about 6, hitting my maximum at about 9 and sustaining that for many years - I never counted words per minute but it was 4.5 pages per minute of paperback novels. At that speed, I was reading between 2 and 3 books a day, literally running out of stuff to read. I kept that speed going till I was about 19. At that point, I think I got saturated with information (I had literally ready my entire school library, although my uni library was much larger and I didn't bother even trying to cover it). I can speed-read even now (I'm 42) but I find it very exhausting and not worth the effort. I have stopped optimizing the flow of information into my head and now focus on enjoying the journey, even if it's information for information's sake. It seems like youtube/podcasts in general are inefficient sources of information, so a person may not hit saturation point as quickly (or at all?) but given speed-listening to youtube has been with some people since childhood, I wonder if they may eventually reach the same predicament as I have with reading.

Just to add: while the first aspect of my life to be consciously de-optimized was my information diet, it's now spread to pretty much everything else. As recently as 10 years ago, I used to believe in packing every moment of free time I had with "things worth doing".

That's completely changed now. Well before Chronic Fatigue Syndrome took over my life, I had very much stopped optimizing my time. Everything has become about being "in the moment" even if the moment was something mundane. Kinda like climbing the same hill twice a week for 3 years - something I could never even imagine 10 years ago!

I still seek new experiences, and still enjoy change, but I have stopped feeling that pressure now. 

To put it differently, life doesn't feel "too short", life now feels "long enough" - a crazy thing to say when I can literally see weeks and months go by in a blink, just staying afloat - eat, work (not always - CFS has really impacted my ability to get things done!), sleep repeat. And no, I've not run out of things to do. I've simply stopped maintaining a ToDo list. I now do things as I feel like, when I feel like. I don't sweat the missed opportunities, the things I could do. Or even the things I could do better.

I don't know if this will ever change, but I can see this is simply what I learned in my late teens with regards to information and learning, spreading over to the rest of my life.

Anyway, it's 10:45pm. I'm off to bed!

Time

Waiting... first at the reception, then in a quiet tiny room. The "procedure" was booked for 4pm but it's now 5pm and no procedure has been started. I've been fasting since 10am, and not allowed to drink any water since 2pm. I started off feeling hungry but I'm not hungry any more - only thirsty. Desperately thirsty. But there's something I'm more desperate to do. To lie down and close my eyes. Ironically, the only thing in the room with me is a bed. But I have not been asked to occupy it yet. The bed looks more and more inviting as the seconds tick away. The seconds tick away loudly - the clock on the wall is really making its presence felt. I'm waiting for something to replace the ticks of that clock. Even silence would be fine. Silence would be great, actually.

The "procedure" took 7 minutes. The doctor said that's about as quick as it can be done.

And then, another wait. This time, in a different room, with a few patients in beds. Thankfully, I'm in a recliner chair. There is a clock, but I can't hear it ticking. There are louder sounds: something I can't see that sounds like a fan, and the beep of someone's vitals being monitored. At one point, the beep turned into a high pitched whine and the nurse asked the patient to take deep breaths. Back to beeping.

There is a TV on the wall. It's tuned to a news channel. The news is all about war.

It's interesting that even war is more bearable than that clock ticking. 

[kris.blog();] New comment on Adriana Jenkins left a message on your guestbook.

what are the odds that a really old blog post (14 years old, to be precise) poking fun of a spam message gets a comment 3 days ago... AND THAT COMMENT IS SPAM! like spamception!

ps: I am now waiting for this blog post to attract more spam 11 years later!

the office party

it was late one afternoon. i was in office. suddenly, the fire alarm went off. everyone made their way to the nearest fire exit. down the two flights of stairs, we were all in the lobby, about to head out the emergency exit. the lobby wasn't like my office building's lobby though: it was much later - maybe 8-10 times the size overall, and with a really high ceiling that was maybe thrice as high as my office's. it also had a completely different style - indicative of a glass fronted modern building, not the 100+ year old stone walled office building i work in.

anyway - the fire alarm turned out to be a false alarm and we were told over the PA that we could return to our respective floors. that's when I checked my pocket (front right - that's where it always is!) and realized I didn't have my access card on me, so I couldn't get back in myself. I spotted my manager Tim getting into the elevator (or actually - an elevator, because there were 3, unlike my actual office) and got into that one. it was a massive elevator - practically room sized!

I stood next to Tim, waiting for the elevator to take us to the first floor.

and that's when I realized I wasn't wearing a shirt.

a lady standing across me, wearing a business suit, seemed to notice the same thing at the very same moment.

she said "you might want to wear a shirt to work", to which I mumbled something and hurried out of the elevator, extremely embarassed. I had no idea what to do, but thankfully the lobby had emptied (presumably everyone had taken the stairs or one of the 3 massive elevators), and I had a moment to scan the seemingly bare lobby for something to save my dignity. I saw a crumpled piece of fabric in the corner. I walked over to it and picked it up. It was a discarded, dirty (but not overly dirty) grey hoodie. in fact, it looked exactly like a hoodie that's lying in my shed at home - it's what a handyman left behind after he built an awning for my motorbike in March 2022, and it's been lying in the shed ever since!

I dusted it before putting it on, and it fit, thankfully. I took the fire escape, as that was the only way back up that could be accessed without an access card. there was one access controlled door that I had to get through to enter the office though. thankfully, someone saw me through it when I knocked and let me in. my colleague Patrick. he asked me where I was and to hurry up and get into the frame.

everyone was posing for a photograph. everyone had a can of beer in their hand. I didn't want to hold everyone up so I simply posed without a drink, completely unaware of my grubby sweatshirt - I was on the sidelines as everyone was already in place for the photo, which was just as well. the angle from which the photo was being clicked was very weird - it required a lot of people in a verysmall space, so some were sitting on the desk, some squatting in front of it, and a few of us standing on either side.

the occasion was a visiting manager from one of our overseas offices, and after the photo was clicked, everyone took their seats. a lady (katie?) asked if anyone didn't have a drink and would like something. someone asked for a guinness. she said there weren't any more cans of guinness. someone said they hadn't opened their can of guinness and wouldn't mind swapping it for a can of heineken zero. I asked for a can of guinness zero, but there weren't any. I said any alcohol free beer would do - perhaps heineken zero then?

I took my can, popped it open, and took the last seat available - the one right next to the visiting manager. as we settled in, I looked around and was surprised to see, near the far end of the table - mom!

she was making some sort of hand gestures - she seemed to be suggesting she should move over and sit next to me. I realized that her moving over would be quite disruptive as she would have to squeeze past everyone on her side of the table, and then past the manager as well, and find a place to sit next to me, which was already occupied by plenty of people. and she'd have to find a seat as well, or pull one from somewhere else.

i tried to signal back with to her with my eyes and hands that she shouldn't move and simply sit there.

the manager had started speaking, and he was quite brief. somewhere in the middle I sneaked in a comment or question, and he replied with something humorous. towards the end he left it open for questions which a few of my colleagues asked, and he duly answered. once he wrapped up, he stood up and walked over to the breakout room where he made himself a coffee. everyone else got to their feet as well, and started mixing about.

mom walked over to me and asked me what i thought about the talk. i said it was nothing exceptional but definitely useful.

she asked me what prompted me to make that comment in the middle of his talk.

I told her it was simply something that came to my mind at the spur of the moment.

she asked me why I interrupted him when nobody else did.

I told her it's a fine balance of judgement about when saying something is welcome or considered an interruption. if he hadn't paused the right amount of time and I didn't have whatever came to my mind ready to say, I woudn't have said it. I told her it's something that takes years of practice and skill, and it's something that a lot of people don't seem to grasp how subtle but effective the skill is at building relationships - and also breaking relationships if done wrong.

she told me she was glad I was able to do it with such ease.

and that's when I woke up.

ungraceful degradation

"the ability of the human body to gracefully degrade under adverse conditions fascinates me :)"

- Kris, September 7th 2013

12 years ago. How much has changed since then.

I have just spent a whole week, barely functioning. Literally just crawling out of bed to eat and rest and eventually sleep. Cooking is about the most I've been able to muster the energy for.

The funny thing is, metabolically, my body is supposedly fine. Not entirely fine - but probably in similar shape based on medical parameters etc. But it isn't behaving the same. Has medicine not reached the level where what's going on can be pinpointed? Or is this the result of the passing of some tipping point in a slow process which was in motion years ago, maybe even before 2013? Some doctors have said it could also be the result of a brief viral infection that left me but that my body has not recovered from.

Chances are it's a combination of at least two of those things.

One thing is for sure - biohacking does NOT work long term. All those things I did to push myself, thinking I had discovered something really smart about myself? They probably had long term effects.

Irregular sleep, low quality sleep, multiple short sleep intervals instead of one full night's sleep - the impact of those is clear to me now.

Screen time is now having an impact obvious enough to be measurable on a day to day basis.

The constant input of compressed information into my head may or may not be affecting how I process information now - but I know that my ability to process information has definitely been affected.

Embracing the internet and social media (back when it seemed fledgling and world-changing) seems to have had an oversized impact on me as I have been using it for far longer than most people. It's reached the point where the measures I had put in place to streamline my usage have been blocked by social media platforms, forcing me to use them as they see fit.

And then there's random age related (yep some things are clearly age related!) things that are simply making it harder to deal with everything else.

And so, we're at this point - where I'm struggling to cope. Where the degradation is no longer graceful or even sustainable.

But I'm still alive and functioning. I can still do most of the things that I used to, but just more carefully. I'm worried about how long that will last though. That is not a day of realization I'm looking forward to.