Agreed. Logs are for when everything and anything is broken. They aren't supposed to be pretty or highly functional, they are just meant as a starting point for gathering data.
It really depends for people. You can keep track of all your thoughts and ideas meticulously, to ensure that none of them are a quantitative exaggeration or minimization of a linguistic translation of your present perceptions of the objective state of 'things'. But if you do that long enough, it is very hard to have an imagination, and you also can easily squash desire and fear this way as well. Dreams may also come out weird, and mathematical, logical, and computational terminology may seem to express multiple meanings about your conscious awareness (implicit metaphor - because logic + truth = ?, which gets very weird when you describe emotions or familial/friendly relations).
You can live assuming everything everyone tells you is correct, and you can assume this collectively forms your information sphere and consequently, your image of the world, and even then project that image onto something you call 'reality'. But it's a bubble. People change those bubbles because even though everything in reality tells them that they can not change the bubble, they know that it's still a bubble that you have to be convinced into in the first place.
I have quit coffee for the last two years, aside from a very rare (once every four months or so) dessert coffee.
I used to depend on coffee intellectually, I always had to have a cup next to whatever work I was working on, and a pot brewing to back up the cup when I was finished.
Quitting was very difficult, but I have learned to appreciate moving through work slowly, carefully, cautiously, and with regular pacing, that I can meta-regulate with multiple levels of thought and planning. When I used to drink coffee, it just felt like all of my attention was superficially and strictly devoted to whatever work I had to pound out.
I still drink tea, from white tea to oolongs, but this has no where near the effect coffee has on me. Caffeine from coffee makes me feel like someone has thread tied into my eyeballs and into the center of the prefrontal cortex of my brain, and is pulling on it with shaking hands. I assume that is hypertension. It's the worst 'focused' feeling I know of, and I absolutely can not get work done in this state any longer.
I really like being able to think slowly, with occasional minor distractions. It's more reliable, has more coherency, and builds on itself naturally.
I am a 20 something in tech, and I just don't understand the mentality that doesn't value the perspective that age affords. It just seems really stupid, like overwhelmingly stupid.
Even if a young person can hold as information as an older person does, I bet it's not as nuanced. There's a huge difference between seeing generations of people age and seeing the way culture moves across the internet. Socio-cultural shifts are not the same as generational, age shifts. And growing up in an economy of technological boom and prosperity is not the norm either.
People would benefit just from having the experience from a different perspective of how to observe the world, interpret information, and relate to it. I view my generation as one that is intrinsically linked with technology, and I think it blinds us to a lot of assumptions as to how we think the world functions, and I think there is a lot of stuff we haven't existed long enough to observe and become aware of. It's like an invisible divide. I don't know how much I take for granted about my perspective, and I don't know how much others take for theirs, but I know that often, I am rarely correct in understanding how other people think, and I know often, that there is so much more variance that exists, that doesn't get translated through numbers and words. It's like it disappears, but it affects the way one navigates and establishes their own existence.
Even thinking in terms of how a computer 'thinks' versus how people 'irrationally' think is a ridiculous and absurd irony. Judgment is overrated.
I don't know if many scientists and researchers understand how much harder it becomes to do science when you are surrounded by information chaos.
If you have someone tossing the right words at you here and there, and I literally mean like 10 words over 5 years - if those are the right 10 words, then that can mean all the difference between making sense and going crazy. Having a smart teacher point you in some direction that they have a developed intuition for is billions of times more valuable than having what essentially seems like static noise.
Which gets to a more important point about slow progress in research. If you go too fast, it's complete chaos. Languages and data doesn't translate well across large populations quickly, information gets entangled with multiple incorrect definitions and multiple ways of interpreting, entire populations can be wiped of their confidence of the integrity of information and data, left with shrugs and feelings of confusion that has zero inertia behind it.
> Epicurus taught that living a simple life with friends, food, exercise and art would make you truly happy
He must have never heard of eating disorders and competition between artists.
Epictetus taught something that is similar to some kinds of buddhism. He was a Greek Stoic philosopher who was born a slave. Suffering is an inevitable part of life, and the best one can do is choose to be free from it in their mind. You either give the suffering power over you, or you separate yourself from it.
People can suffer over anything, but it is callous to assume that they can flip it off easily through the strength of mind, and it is naive to assume everyone has the same root causes of suffering. It is also naive to assume the process of alleviating suffering is the same for everyone in a general sense.
You can't get to your philosophy through the words of others. That is the most I have learned through every philosopher - that they did not choose to think to relieve the pain of others, but to first relieve it for themselves. How can you expect to teach something if you don't know that it works? And that is the problem I have with philosophy. You have to keep believing in it to make it work. This leads to study about the nature and existence of truth.
> Suddenly everyone is a poet, inclined to the morbid.
This is an equally eye-roll inducing over-generalization. Death is a profound topic to many people - the contemporary considerations of immortality may bring what you see as the superficiality of death, to light, for others. That's nothing to snub your nose at. While some may actually take immortality literally, for many people it is better thought of as a metaphor.
> "Fuck you, I didn't choose this, but I love it."
You'll find that most difficult experiences people endure in life don't make sense on a logical level. You'll also probably find it hard to empathize with. If you've heard of love hate relationships, it's sort of like that.
I wasn't homeless, but my father was as a child under 5-10 for some time (I am not exactly sure how long).
All I can really say is sometimes it feels like you've been born into a path that is predetermined by fate, you've tried as hard as you can to jump over that wall to get out of that path, and every time you try, someone kicks you out. So you wind up rationalizing your current circumstances, finding value where you can while you have to live it, and generally developing intolerance for people who do not tolerate you.
But most of the time, quick snaps of the tongue like this are exactly that. They are a flit of emotion, over a thing that is a tangled web of emotion.
These are complicated things. It is sad to me, but most of the time, instead of helping, all I can do is continue trying to survive, so I don't have to live the life my parents did.
Even if a scientist can legitimately prove depression is different from sadness, you will not believe it, because it requires a degree of subjectivity you will not tolerate. You expect a kind of purity, an objective, emotionless vocabulary with it's associated numeric data; data that has been wiped clean of the people and the lives of those people it describes, to describe that which is fundamentally indescribable to someone who has never experienced it.
Sometimes compassion means saying 'okay, I understand, that sucks?'.