... Uygun oldukca bakabilirsin, kendini baski altinda hissetme lutfen.

2023-08-29 14:12

No one knows that underneath this high-achieving machine…

At first, they question how it is possible. They get lost at the sight of the complexity of the tasks and the musts. It is so straightforward nonetheless. Things have deadlines, and the closest deadline has the highest completion priority. The number of deadlines does not make it any more complicated. We perceive time linearly, and on the timeline two points are either at the same location or one is before another. I do not make this argument frequently though. It makes people feel stupid.

Then, they interrogate me so as to understand my motivation to combine such irrelevant actions in small time frames. They don’t get how one’s interest spectrum can cover such a wide range. It all so simple despite the looks: Plain boredom. I get bored. People tend to underestimate the strength of boredom in many occasions. It induces curiousity, activity, mobility. People will do anything to get rid of boredom if it bores bad enough, and boredom finds a way to bore bad enough. It is like a never-ending game of tag1 in which you are always being chased in varying paces. Ultimately, it is boredom that lies beneath my unlimited intellectual thirst or vast collection of endeavours. I do not bring it up that often though. It makes people feel redundant.

They continue the inquiry with my ability to carry out all these tasks. They do not see how everything can be done without failure. It has a brief explanation with two arguments however. (i) One cannot fail at a task that they have never started. In what I’m doing, only a two-week foresight is necessary to successfully judge if a quest can be added to the pile without failing any. For every task, each step is already well-defined. No thought has to go into the planning process. Remember, the plan is made automatically with tasks’ due dates. So, the foresight only has to measure the amount of work everything requires to decide whether success is guaranteed or not. (ii) I fail. But when I do, I fail small. In cases where the foresight unites with current state estimation to raise the alarm, I understand that some error or incompleteness need to be introduced to the product. I, then, reorganise my actions to cover the deliverables with big gains, and leave those with little losses untouched. It’s a simple behavioural pattern I like to call minimum effort. I rarely explain all this though. It makes people feel inadequate.

There is a more realistic reason why I do not talk about these: They are simply too good to be true. I am strongly guided by a drive to keep my appearance to the outside world attractive2. Do note that attraction occurs through a concept of aesthetics not limited to sensory input. Ideas, definitions, characteristics, norms, and labels are only some of the non-sensory elements that form one’s aesthetical representation. I have always been one to impress people with my wit, curiousity, and performance. I grew up with those who complimented my smarts, and I have learnt to maximise the reward and minimise the shunning or negligence penalty for futile3 actions by adjusting my behaviour accordingly. Welcome to deep reinforcement learning, if you are one to appreciate such human ingenuity, it is basically a mathematical model that attempts to imitate a child’s development.

My main motivation is —as difficult as it is for me to admit— social admiration. Test scores, competitions, projects, new concepts, achievements and alike do not give me the fulfilment that they ideally would. A tree in the woods learns to fly but no one sees it, a cat in the city meows and people pet it. In the end, the tree has accomplished nothing, whereas the cat has accomplished dopamine, through recognition and interaction. I see the duality of desires of my own self and my shown self. It sounds noble to do things for their own sake, or follow my desires, and this is precisely why people recommend each other to do these. But, viewed from one level above, it is not difficult to see the influence of social acceptance behind this conversation4. Also, what will happen when the person becomes the tree in the woods5? No one can endure the knowledge that what they value the most, their personal values, their most ambitious endeavours, whole lives, will never be recognised by others, by the vast universe. No, it only happens in films where the character lives in solitude, except for the filming set, of course.

Alright then, one might utter, let me embrace the society. I’ll put the self on the shelf and wear my make-up. I will meow, and people will pet me. This decision is not sustainable. It bases itself on a huge cognitive dissonance. The foundation will shatter into pieces, and the make-up will wear off. Aiming for others’ admiration, turning it into the sole source of your own self-esteem, deciding your actions based only on an environmental reading, neglecting the child buried within… This is acting. This is acting shamelessly. All this acting, then, tires me. One might claim that acting will one day become second nature, it will almost be the default state of being. Yet, almost is not close enough. Living will always be conscious and attentive as acting requires deviation from the automatic self. That, on top of the constant variation of roles, always keeping track of the environment, people, my actions, and the social interaction rules every time to decide on the most optimal action to carry out, gets too exhausting and complicated too soon. I need a natural state of being where I can rest my weary mind only to continue the play once again, a state where noises cannot reach my consciousness, the factory of endless trains of thoughts can take a day off, and my appearance is trapped within the mirror, only visible to my eyes.

…slumbers a lazy ogre addicted to resting so strong that he sees himself asleep within his dreams. He appears to be a genius, a mastermind capable of conceiving of every concept however complex, completing tasks however difficult, and sharing his wisdom with peers and younglings whatever the time. Appearances, though, may be deceptive. The deception in this case, is deep, and no one can figure it out, for it is a deception everyone lives in and with.

Hidden beneath many layers, there were itchy areas that made him grumpy all the time. He tried to dig deep into his own self and carve out the problem at the core hoping to replace it with a homemade solution.

“What makes you get out of bed in the mornings?” he asked many times expecting to find an answer that could shed light into his own confusion. The question was always directed towards people who left —everyone leaves, so this description is completely ambiguous. People would come back though, and they would try to come up with an answer of their own. Some drifted off to their own unknowns. Some found the question redundant. Some tried to explain their routines to encourage him to find motivation, they tried.

  1. Except for the end. The pursuit ends when one inevitably dies, and I suspect that boredom might be the top root cause why people intentionally bring the end to themselves. It is so exhausting and disheartening to endure boredom that it causes pain, and as animals with a functioning nervous system, we have to respond to pain in some way. Its degree generally does not cause problems that lead to suicide, but there are exceptions. Some do it out of curiousity, some to escape the pain, some see it as the only option, some are too intelligent, some are too idiotic. The situation gets more and more dire as time passes, and people’s —especially the youth’s— attention span decreases. ↩

  2. No claim of achievement in that sense is made. Furthermore, judging by my social circle, I do not think I am doing a good job in my particular field of interest, but flaws always draw attention. ↩

  3. The definition of futile is directly related to the context in which results are evaluated as it alone decides what use an object or an action has. Although it seems too varied to incorporite into a generalised text, I believe it is safe to say that some behaviours are considered to be more community-friendly than others in most contexts. Basically, if the group’s culture does not deem it worthy, then it is futile, whatever that “it” may be. ↩

  4. This discussion by no means revolves around being a people-pleaser, that is another level of degeneracy I would not want to dive into. ↩

  5. I am referring to the common saying that encourages thinking about how observations affect our perceptions of reality. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Please, take the liberty to head to Wikipedia for this one to find out more if you didn’t know about it. ↩