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Usually I say in conversation something along the lines of, <em>"Highschool is bad"</em>, and most people agree and we move on. In reality I don't just think highschool is bad… I think highschools are <strong>one of the worst social institutions to exist in the US</strong>. Most highschools are built in a way where they are <strong>perfected machines to <em>suck the soul out of learning</em></strong> for most if not all students.
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I'll take this blog to both flesh out my point and express just how much I hate the structure of highschool.

First lets imagine a student interested a subject—lets say history. They love reading through history, finding historical trends, reading stories, and finding unique links between certain periods. Maybe they have a couple papers written out describing the unique parallels between the Roman empire & current day US—predicting failure modes in our current system. Altogether the students future seems extremely useful & promising.

Now lets design a system to completely break down this passion.

1. **Let's waste their time.** Let's literally take 8 hours out of their day, every single weekday. Which hours of the day? How about the morning ones, the ones where people commonly do their best work. What if they don't want to go? Let's make it government mandated!

   *What about their time at home?* Surely we can't stop them from working on history at home. **Lets give them "homework" (~3 hours of work a day).** But we can't let this homework be a creative outlet for them, that would be too much. Lets make them simple things, like problem sets, ten pages of notes, or even writing an essay in another language (which you have to take).

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2. **Let's break their sense of community.** By telling them the only way they'll meet other people interested in history is in college. Of course the only way to get into college would be by checking the list—14 AP classes, 4.0 GPA, 1600 SAT, 36 ACT. If not someone else will check those boxes, someone else will get the community you want. Maybe you could lean into your passion—history?

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3. **Lets break their passion.** *This is the most evil, most deplorable part of highschool in my opinion.* Lets make them hate history. How do we go about this? Its pretty complicated and well thought out, so hang with me here.

   **First we need to convince them history is actually just memorizing facts.** How could we get them to think this obvious lie? We'll repeat it to them. Every single day. For 181 days straight. We'll tell them their worth, how much they know "history", is by how many dates they can recite. How many people can they fill in the blank for, how many passages from the textbook can they memorize.

   **Second, we need to prove to them that they hate history.** How do we make them think such a thing? Give them homework. Take their passion that they once loved doing, and condense it down into a grotesque mind numbing activity. Every day have them memorize ten different dates, memorize a new chapter of history. Don't focus on the big ideas, make sure to have the homework focus on the "gotchas"—the exact spelling of the names, the specific type of product, June vs July.

   **Last we need to make it hard to escape.** The problem here is teachers. They might actually have a sense of passion for the subject, they might possibly show these students what real history looks like. How do we pull of the task? Rank teachers by how well their students do at memorizing dates. Perfect. That way teachers are obligated to throw out any passion they have for the subject, obligated to assign as much homework as possible, obligated to grade as harshly as possible—solely as long as more students get a 5 on an AP test.

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Okay lets take a couple steps back. Do I regret my highschool experience? Surprisingly… I don't. **I managed to <a href="https://neelr.dev" style="color: #75a4c3;">do what I loved</a>, <a href="https://hackclub.com" style="color: #d47471;">meet communities outside of school</a>, and <a href="https://notebook.neelr.dev/stories/the-hacker-zephyr." style="color: #9065b0;">explore my passions</a>. In short, I was <span style="color: #cb932f;">lucky</span>.**

Though, if we invest so much time and effort into an educational system, ideally people who follow their passions and do what they love should be the norm—not an anomaly. How do we change such a system is an entirely different blog in and of itself (I have some outlines here <a href="https://notebook.neelr.dev/stories/education" style="color: #75a4c3;">on my blog about education</a>) but you can't deny the system is broken right now.

I'll keep my takes on the "what now" question pretty short for this (look above for more fleshed out takes):
- Charter/project focused schools are great but still fail in the way of mandatory classes + assigning students projects. Teachers are also still paid in metrics of how well their students do on standardized tests => leads to systemic issues.

- "Some highschools aren't as competitive => aren't that bad." My response here is mainly that the competitive highschools are at the current equilibrium given a majority of students want to go to college (limited seats mean inherent competition). Noncompetitive highschools will probably attract people who want to stand out => cause other students to start the rat race. We probably shouldn't be designing systems that work worse when there are more passionate people. 

- IMO College admission rates aren't the whole problem. We probably need a structure that 1) gets people to their passions quicker and 2) allows them to up-skill fast. If this happens then ideally colleges would of course want better people and the system would adapt pretty fast.

- Private schools seem to work better because they have the resources to tailor an education to every single student—think having college professors teaching for highschoolers. This just isn't scalable with almost 50k-70k per year per student. I also don't know how they work for students who already want to specialize (ie. why waste a students time teaching the Bohr model of an atom when they're interested in Roman history—it's extremely hard to align student current interests with what you "want to teach them")

- I'm bearish on the classroom + curriculum method of education. It seems fundamentally problematic to distill peoples interests into curriculum that they must follow (contrary to interests at times), as well as trying to align to 30+ student interests.

- Colleges seem better initially because you get much more freedom with classes (checking for the classroom problem), but I think this mindset still plagues mandatory "intro series" classes.

This blog post is more of a rant/expressing just how much I hate the system as it is right now and I definitely think there should be more discussion into how to reform it! This takes a ton of inspiration from <a href="https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician's_Lament.pdf">"A Mathematicians Lament"</a>—I genuinely love this paper and think that it highlights a lot of the problems I find are crazy with todays educational system.

a quick rant + explanation of why I have this take

When people try to fight against human psychology, they almost always lose. The good news is that human psychology is unsurprisingly really good at keeping you alive (due to evolution and whatnot). One of these deeply rooted psychological biases is that “correlation is causation”.

Although almost everyone knows this is false, everyone has to believe this to a degree. Humans simply can’t understand the complete causal structure of the world and make decisions based off of it. Doing so would require extreme compute and immense knowledge of initial states of many things. Instead evolution chose a much simpler strategy—approximation. By encoding our brain with an immensely rich prior, we are able to generalize quite well from past experiences. We can create correlational links between actions and effects, words and reactions, even movements and physical phenomena we might not understand. Fundamentally we love to create heuristics to lighten the load.

The specific niche of correlation that seems interesting is psychology. It is actually quite easy to create correlations for human action. You can start to draw correlations for specific people, how they might act when you talk to them, which motions to go through etc. The problem here comes with drawing correlations about yourself and external stimuli. It seems quite likely, and even easy, for your brain to just draw correlations between stimuli and actions. You feel happy therefore you need to jump, you feel x therefore you need to do y. The danger about this is that this causally eliminates yourself from the world around you.

If your brain is meta-approximating what it will do and acting on that, this isn’t necessarily bad but it leads to the pitfalls of any strange loop—value collapse. There has to be a strong moral/ideological basis behind what you do, because fundamentally actions will collapse/degenerate onto these couple values. This not only places an immense importance on “conscious actions” which become a correlational baseline for your brain, but also places an importance on the simplicity & generalizability of these principles.

The second implication from the correlation/causality dichotomy is also that people should also generalize this to other areas of life. People should not “judge” until action is needed/maximal information is gathered. To support causal relationships benefit of the doubt is needed—if you want fundamentally more accurate predictions, you need as much data as possible. Tracing causal relationships and casting doubt on gut instinct correlations is not only optimal, but can help you become a better person.

TLDR; I think that the psychological bias to correlation is interesting as 1) an argument for rigid moral systems 2) holding off on gut feelings of judgement until causal structures can be determined or direct action is needed.

my main argument for why intuitions are dangerous to lean too deep into

Something that I think is really important is a coherent moral framework—intuition is not enough. Mainly this is for the reason of not relying too heavily on black box, nonverifiable methods, for actions that definitely do have an impact on the outside world. My main reason for being against this is the compounding factor + nonfalsifiability of intuition. You can verify almost anything via intuition, and thinking your intuition is right promotes more actions. This snowballs to justify almost any action.

Making checks against things such as implicit biases and immoral things that might currently be societally normal (think how norms have evolved over the past ~150 years).

So… consequentialism is deceivingly simple. Surely focusing on the impacts of your actions is a good way to live life—maximize happiness/utility/or some other metric that people can agree upon as “objectively good”. This seems obviously right, and you might even keep going on your day to day life thinking you’ve solved morality.

My key issue here is tractability. Can you functionally determine the impacts of your actions? What do you mean when you say “impacts”? The impacts that immediately follow your action? Maybe the impacts a week out? A year out? There has to be two scenarios. 1) You calculate the total consequences X moments after your action. This X amount is always arbitrary and can change the moral value of your action significantly.

Take the trolly problem. What if I say 5 minutes later by flipping the switch you kill 100+ people? What if 10 minutes later it saves 300? In our day to day life, its extremely easy for us to use our intuition to make a moral guess, choose a time period that justifies this intuition, and move on feeling unburdened by the need to think about our actions (leading us back to functional intuitionism).

Especially astute consequentialists might make the claim that 2) You calculate total consequences as an integral to the heat death of the universe. This…. seems intractable. With so many variables and so many confounding factors, actually calculating this value is not only extremely hard, but straight up almost impossible in practice. There’s also no possible way that people are able to do this unconsciously everyday with every action they take ⇒ leading us back to intuitionism!

Another qualm I have with consequentialism is the lack of free will in the framework. Since gradients are used (ie. all actions are better/worse than another), there is only one action that maximizes utility in any given scenario. Any other action would be immoral. This seems initially weird, because not only am I unlikely to pick that action (ie. I’m always immoral) but I want to have free will with what I choose.

Okay now that consequentialism seemingly defaults onto intuitionism, can we come up with a moral framework that 1) doesn’t use consequences and 2) is simple enough to calculate easily unconsciously?

Consent! I think some version of the non-agression principle seems like a good moral framework! Specifically one should not violate the bodily autonomy of others, which can be extended via contracts to ownership etc. There are only morally impermissible and permissible actions here.

Lets run through a couple scenarios just to get set up:

Trolley problem: Don’t pull the lever—the act of any death is wrong and therefore a violation of consent.

A murderer asks you where your family is—you are free to either lie or not lie in this scenario, there is no pre-existing contract of “telling the truth” to everyone.

Super trolley problem, kill one person to save the world—heres the most interesting thought experiment imo. Since there are no gradients, you would choose to not kill that one person no matter what. This is explicitly different from “consent maximization” which would lead yourself to choose the world over the person everytime.

Animals! Not included in the consent framework, more of an aesthetic problem.

So… whats so great about this framework? In my opinion it matches my intuitions a lot more, is much faster to compute (permissible/impermissible), and gives room for free will! I can choose to have my own subsystem, maybe intuition or something that guides me towards my own goals, while having good guarantees that I’m not actively disregarding everything else.

The wiggle room for free will + tractability is extremely important for me because I do have goals in life and don’t want to purely rely on intuition. I am firmly against intuition as a moral framework for all the basic reasons stated above, and find anything too complex just devolves to people using intuition in their day-to-day lives.

I’ve fleshed out a lot of this framework in my conversations with other people, and I’ll try to update this post as my views change on it!

how to think about day to day life + how I make decisions

my new thoughts on how to find friend groups + live my college life and some life updates!

a quest to be more intentional (sparkle edition)

This is an addition on my past post on Simulations. I would suggest reading it (it's quick):

TLDR; I think that when acting people live in layered abstractions on reality that make actions easier. Think "Doing homework is good." where as a value system it is generally good, but of course can have faults (ie. if a piano is about to fall on your head in 5 seconds but you haven't finished your pset). A lot of general ennui comes from too many abstractions to which people forget what they actually want—people should probably introspect and minimize/be intentional with their abstractions.

In addition to simulations, I think a very important thing to note with decision making is scope. If you imagine simulations as extending your "decision realm" vertically, I would say scope is horizontal to that—what exactly should be included into your decision calculus?

For example take the same homework example I used in the TLDR: "Doing homework is good." What exactly what considered while making that abstraction? What was the reasoning behind that?

Maybe if your scope was only your high-school and limited by time till graduation, you might think doing homework is beneficial to beating out the rest of your classmates and think nothing of it. Your reasoning could even be for a literal prize like getting valedictorian or some similar achievement. This is contrasted by another scope like your position in the entire world. By doing your homework you might be able to have good sustainable relationships with your teachers, so later on you could ask them for help to find jobs. Maybe doing your homework would help build ethos around you as a person being able to be on top of things, leading to more opportunities down the line.

Though the processing/how hard you need to think changes with scope, some people get locked into an extremely small scope of what they can change in the world. If you only think locally, then of course the only change you can have is local. A global scope encompassing over as much as possible, is necessary to have higher levels of influence.

Although you probably see where I'm going here by saying higher level scopes are probably better long term to achieve things in the greater scheme of things, but I'll go one step further and say that a lot of competition based conflict is over scopes.

An easy way to think about this is through a game theoretic perspective. Take a math class with a terrible curve. Only one student gets an A and the rest fail the class. Its pretty obvious that if you scope your life to just the realm of the test, you should be the most competitive person you could possibly be. Never share your homework, sabotage people whenever possible, twist the rules however you can to get the best score in the class. This is a regular prisoners dilemma.

Now tweak the parameters a little. Change the scopes to the end of time and to the entire world + more. The test is less of a life altering moment, but just a tool to utilize in achieving your goals. Help as many people as possible, build connections, be as outwardly non-competitive as possible. This of course is != not trying at all. An optimal person would study 24/7 and beat others, but in a way that would never let on that they are competitive. The balance of maintaining relationships and succeeding on the test would be the optimal outcome. This would be a repeating prisoners dilemma.

Most games in life are repeating (ie. your life won't end if you fail) yet people are still competitive. Why? I think the answer is scope. Most people forget the global scope that is key to gaining perspective and achieving what you want. We see so many cases of this happening in the real world too—take workplace skirmishes, or arguments between people. Arguments, grudges, and more are just not optimal with conflict itself being self defeating when raised to the global scope.

quick sidenote about how scope is different from abstractions

I think its really easy to conflate the two, so I'll just make a quick note here. Scope is the realm of goals in which you build your abstractions on. For example in the pass fail example, an abstraction would be "You should tear up everyone else's notes". Breaking down abstractions to the lowest level usually reveals the scope in which a person is acting in, which can reveal dubious scopes

I'd never try and say something as totalizing as all conflicts are derived from difference (though I think this honestly could be a defendable stance), but I think a large portion of them are. Sometimes the scope is global for someone with life or death scenarios, but a lot of the time we aren't facing extreme situations like this.

In those cases I think we actually see a lot of media call for a return to base reality, reflecting what a lot of people think. For me, I think of shows like Three Idiots or manga like Vinland Saga. Some crazy quotes from Vinland Saga I love are "You have no enemies. Not a single one." or "A true warrior doesn’t need a sword."

I feel like these media really resonate with me for a very specific reason—I genuinely think these are true. Not in a crazy, psuedo-communist everyone should be kind way, but in a practical day-to-day action decision way. People who act like they don't have enemies or view conflicts in a global scope always have an edge and often get what they want.

Either way, this was an extension I've wanted to make for a long time on my simulation essay which I reference oh so much. Hopefully something came from this and feel free to start a conversation with me about this anytime. I'm guaranteed to almost always be thinking about it and I'd love to hear any takes

How our interactions are affected by the scope we interpret the world in

During all my years of school my motto was, "Just one more day". You have a test tomorrow and fifteen assignments due the day after? Take it one day at a time. Theres just one more day, then you can relax. 

Now its here! With tomorrow being my last day at school, I'm not exactly sure how to feel. Should I be happy that its all finally over, or be sad that it's ending? Surely I couldn't have enjoyed all the stress of completing mostly meaningless assignments, or cramming before a test just to forget the topics a couple days later. Maybe it was the people, but I've also met my fair share of people outside of school that I would bet are either on par or better than those at school.

So I guess this boils down to the question of, "what would you miss about school?", yet I'm grasping at threads to exactly what I would miss. Almost any aspect of school I could isolate, there is a better counterfactual that would be a better way to achieve that goal. Going to parties or libraries to make friends, self learning concepts instead of long lectures, and even joining sporting events for the community. So why would I miss school if every part of it could be replaced? The people themselves I could meet outside of the context of school if I really wanted. So why?

In reality I'd like to think its some version of Stolkhome Syndrome. The fact that my internal habits will be changing so drastically, not having a 9am-3pm schedule of pure lectures, changing to completely new method of socialization and learning—it'll be better, but scarily different. With days passing by fast, I'll make sure to keep in contact with as many people as possible, making sure the past 12 years will at least  remembered.

With so many of my projects & ideas put off till "after school ends", it begs the question of if they'll ever happen. Motivation doesn't seem to be magically entering my fingers as the end approaches, and I think I'm fine with that. At least now I won't have the constant excuse of school lurking around the corner, but I honestly don't know if thats enough to spur me into action. Hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow, school will be over, and I'll magically have everything in my life fixed—but I know that won't happen.

So if I had to summarize it all, this would be my open note to school:

I was so invested into the small moments, I never even realized you had passed since it was too late. Though not great in teaching or even socialization, I've been with you for these past 12 years. I'll miss how you put me in situations good and bad, forcing me to make friends in the hallways. Even when it was 3am and I was praying for you to just end, your uncaring bells still rung the next day.

Most of all though, I want to at least remember you—the amalgamation of all the people I've met in the past years. With every person I forget and every person I don't meet, a small part of that memory will fade into oblivion. I don't want to act like nothing happened for 12 years of my life.

I'm glad that you're over. I want to remember you. I hope I change.

what do you do when it really is the last day?

I find myself asking that question constantly, from my 3rd grade self finding meaning in eating food to philosophical tirades in high school debate. Honestly I thought philosophers had it mostly down—existentialism, virtue ethics, hedonism, error theory (my favorite), to even intuitionism. Finally I just settled on a vague idea of "happiness", a (simple but) complete solution.

Though, while reading "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanith one word stood out to me: human relationality. Initially thinking through the idea as "K-literature jargon", the text around it ended up changing my mind:

> A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning.  

Looking at meaning through the lens of "human relationality" made my life in retrospect make sense. Thinking back to all the times where I've been the happiest, one thing stands out—they've been with people. If pure happiness was the factor, I'm sure food would be at the top, but that's almost never what comes to mind. Even when enjoying media or art, similar to Camus, those are just abstractions of connections with other humans. Humans tend to be at the center of meaning.

The book also takes a unique approach to storytelling, not necessarily having a plot, a happy ending, or even a solid moral conclusion. Seeing the journey of someone start looking for meaning, end up blinding themselves (metaphorically) in their journey, and finally finding meaning in the people around him, makes you think—is looking for meaning in life worthwhile? Or to better phrase it, should one even look for meaning in life?

This idea struck a chord with me, especially after that simple question being such a core facet of my internal monologue; searching for meaning can elucidate you to the "true meaning". Whenever I've felt the happiest, its not because I've necessarily been optimizing towards that feeling my entire life. I've felt that way when I've been with people, enjoying life. Similar to how working with cadavers creates numbness to human connection, I think searching meaning can numb you to "real" meaning around you in life. Similar to optimization problems, staying stable in one spot just thinking won't help—exploration and living life will (especially if your "meaning" is human relationality).

With that idea combined with human relationality, it provides a decent basis for life—finding meaning in the relationships around you, while not overthinking it too much.

This all begs the question of why. Especially as a relativist, why contemplate meaning in life? Similar to my post on simulations, I believe we constantly live in abstractions—do well in school, make money, get into college, make a promotion—which is great short term. Long term these bring us away from our core values, even making us forget them (hence feelings of regret/emptiness). Searching for meaning (not excessively like I said before, but at least thinking about it) in my opinion, just grounds all of these simulations to a singular goal, making sure you're not on autopilot 24/7.

TLDR; Human relationality is a cool concept, and you shouldn't think too much about the meaning to life but instead just enjoy the people around you.

Hope this helps broaden someones understanding in some way and I definitely recommend giving When Breath Becomes Air a read!

a new perspective on how to view life (taken from paul kalanith's when breath becomes air)

For reference, I'll be talking about simulations here in a less technical sense, so sadly no, I am not going to be talking about how we all live in the Matrix and need to take red pills. Though I think talking about simulations in an abstract construct sense, we can look into our lives in an interesting way.

Have you ever done something, and ever wondered why you're actually doing something, even though you might not like it? Like studying or working, we do things that may not directly make us happy, but we justify it through the idea that it might make life more pleasurable in the "long run", or after a period of time. Usually this end goal is happiness or something of the sort, where we make small sacrifices to guarantee that goal.

Now going back to simulations and how they play a part in this scheme. All of these constructs, whether it be school, work, interpersonal relations, they all have something in common, where they try and abstract the idea of gaining happiness to a level. For example let's take capitalism and work. People work, and create multiple simulations like the economy, the idea of capital, work, and say that all of these will bring you happiness to a level due to increase in global capital and distributing materials. It also abstracts the idea that capital is happiness, and that more capital is equal to more opportunities  which is what we should all strive for. In that way we abstract our happiness to be equivalent with work and capital. 

Once you start looking, there are tons of abstractions that are in our everyday life, from the abstraction that we need to create relationships with other people to sustain ourselves and be stable, to everyday digital ones. Even with this considered, I don't think these simulations are necessarily bad, most are even great for people, like family and education. All of these simulations are necessary to deal with the complexities of day to day life, since we can't really just spend years pondering what would make us happy (or is the thought that work/innovation is necessary a construct *confused meta noises ensue*). 

The part I want to focus, is with the fact that there are thousands of these simulations on top of each other, that make up our day to day world. Just like any construct or simulation, you lose a part of the goal, albeit a small percentage, every single time. Even though from step to step, it might seem like a good simulation, the inefficiencies in every step build a completely distorted worldview that we see today. Today people have created entire businesses that manipulate the economy, or judge people by tests that have no real basis in any science.

This is what I would say is the cause of confusion when you find yourself doing things that don't really "matter" but you're stuck doing it anyway since its meant to help a construct of a construct of a construct so much so that its distanced from what actually makes you happy. Some people act only in this realm of simulations, and end up confused at the end that the happiness that they've been optimizing for, or any goal for that matter, hasn't been achieved. 

So, what to do? I'm not exactly sure myself, but I don't think simulations in of themselves are bad, since you need them at some level to act, but having too many might blind you to what your real goal is. Its good to self check often and assess if what you're doing is to please others, help gain wealth, and many other things, is ultimately making YOU happy in the long and short run. I honestly don't have a perfect solution to this, but breaking through these simulations once in a while, and not getting too tangled up in them (stress for deadlines, tests, needs for improvement), can be helpful. 

This has been something I've thought about for a hot while, and its nice to get it on paper. Hope you understood it, or it helped you think a little more about the world!

What is a simulation, and how do they serve us in our day to day lives?

> FYI - This is a new type of article/blogpost I'm trying out based off Emil Cioran, though this is just a test. It's supposed to be harder to read with sentence fragments throughout, and ask more questions than giving answers. It might not be your cup of tea, but feel free to read it (at your own risk haha)! Cioran mostly wrote for himself in a therapeutic way, so I wanted to see if something informal like this is something that might be fun.  

## Whats the Point?

We live we die, but we keep memories. Do we even live if we don't remember something? Without memory, everything is just the present. Memory is intrinsically our meaning in life, for it is what we remember when we die. Even if it isn't, the fact that it will be the only thing that determines happiness upon death, should be an indication. That could mean that the past never existed, but the present is everything. That would also mean that every moment has to be memorable. Is there any value in an unmemorable moment? One spent dawdling the day away, looking at grass, when you could have been skiing down the Eiffel Tower. What makes a memory intrinsically memorable? Probably fun, however subjective that might be.

Most of my memories are short, or for 10 days. It's crazy to think that 10 days is also the amount of time I spend in school, or studying for a test. Are those preparations for the future, really giving me more memories? How can you min max the ideal of work and living in the moment? The ultimate good would be to enjoy the momentary work, which builds enjoyment for the future. Preparing for the future is an endlessly regressive task, that doesn't have much enjoyment. Does someone who prepares to live, up to the point they die, have a more fulfilling life than a person that lives with no regard for the future? This brings back to themes of capitalism, which I wont touch on, but its important to think about where we want to go in life

## The Passing Days

If we have the ability to make memories constantly, by embarking on fun tasks, why do we work? Small moments can be memorable in mass, but then you need to weigh it against larger more maintainable memories. There will always be something lost at the end though, because you can't remember every single day that happens. Living life to its fullest is important, and to not get ensnared into the capitalist ethic of working until death, just for a remorseful grasp at a vacation at cripplingly old age. To do this, we need to reorient our goals from being physically rich, to being experientially rich. This links with what millionares say, where money can't buy happiness. It also has themes of absurdity, where we should accept experience as experience, as long as we live in the moment, and don't let it pass by instantaneously.

What makes a memory fun? If we take an absurdist view, where everything is memorable, but that isn't true. The only way that could work, is noticing the details in life, and capturing it with some significance. Since you ascribe significance subjectively, this would mean that you actively need to search out for significance to create memories. This search for significance could be thought as a search for meaning, but I take it to a much lesser degree. The smallest memory, is one that is a step for finding meaning, but not completely grasping it. Through the cumulation of significant moments in life, we can find arbitrary meaning in life. 

## In The End.

I'll try to have more experiences like the Zephyr before school ends, but is it even possible with school? What is the meaning of school if at the end, you don't even remember it? People have nostalgia for highschool, but comparatively I can't name 10 days in middle school as memory packed as the Zephyr. Does this mean that the most efficient way to find meaning, is through small compact significant experiences, over time? This way you maximize memories, preferably 10 days at a time, then by the end of the year, you have 36 memories to share. Through that, you may be able to slowly march yourself into finding meaning in life, and building towards a more fulfilling death.

Sentence fragments on the nature of memories. Trying out a new writing style, read at your own risk...

TLDR; Motivation is a push against inertia, so it's counterintuitive to wait for it. You have to be a little spontaneous, and actually make it a habit to gain motivation, or find external motivation through parents/friends/commitments.

## What is Motivation?

Okay, so now starting with the base question: What is motivation? I think a good place to start here is with most peoples dilemma, not being able to find motivation, and therefore never starting something. The way I see it, in most cases this would mean motivation is a push against ones social inertia, in one way or another. Let's look at picking up your trash for example. There is a great reason to pick it up, but some people just don't because they aren't "motivated to". This applies to almost any case, all the way to not wanting to learn something, which is the fundamental idea that there is no intrinsic reason to do it.

Now after defining it, let's take a look at most peoples reason to not do something, which happens to be "not motivated". Since we've defined motivation as basic social inertia, it becomes apparent that motivation can come from 2 ways, spontaneity, or through external means (a push from someone else, or to meet a goal). Spontaneity is a great way to try many things, and to be motivated to do "stuff". It could be almost anything they want. The second means can be seen in practice often when parents try to push small kids to do activities, which they may not be motivated to do at first, but after time they start to like it, and are motivated. 

This leads to the greatest sin, waiting for motivation. Since motivation is a push against inertia, by waiting around and building habits, you actively make it harder for yourself to get motivated, by gaining inertia. This often leads to a cycle of regret, where you wait for the perfect motivation to do something, but end up never doing it, or just forgetting about it all-together. A great way to imagine this, is to think of humans as advanced dogs. We love to follow patterns and ruts, but if we ever want to break the rut, no gut feeling will tell us, because internally we love these ruts. It really is a funny cruel way for life to act, but in the end, that would mean the spontaneous win out, while the people who wait for the perfect second end up failing. 

## So what?

So! How do we end up gaining motivation, and doing things that we want to do? One way is to become spontaneous. Act on every desire you have, and when you feel like something, just do it! It's a funny thing to say, but most often, the cure to motivation, is to just do it. You'll find motivation as the "inertia" to do the task lowers, basically meaning as you find it becoming a rut/habit (In a funny sense, that makes motivation counterintuitive, but meh). The only way to build spontaneity, is to be a little spontaneous in a sense (It sometimes doesn't even have to come from spontaneity, some people find it in motivational music or speeches).

The second way, is to find it externally. This could be a whole range of things, but the one I find interesting is to have a friend motivate you. This can be seen in many areas to work, like studying, where most people like an "Hours" type group, where they check in every hour or so, give progress checks, and share screens the entire time. I think this could be applied to a whole range of areas, with people reminding you to try something new and stick with it. Personally, this works with me by making commitments to show people things, which motivate me by not wanting to flake on them. Really, any means of motivation aside from yourself should work.

Now with your newfound knowledge what shall you do? Climb Mt. Everest maybe? Take on a pack of ravenous wolves? Take out the trash? Whatever you do now, just make sure to never wait for motivation to do anything, but try to apply some of the methods I said above.  You might even learn to incorporate tons of cool new habits, and isn't that really what motivation is for?

What is motivation, and how can people get more of it? Learn a bit about my perspective!

#my take

highschool is terrible

causality, psychology, and intuition

moral frameworks & consent!

a quest to be more intentional (sparkle edition)

Scopes Interacting with Life

one more day

human relationality

Simulations

Memories

Motivation

.css-4cffwv{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}#my take

highschool is terrible

causality, psychology, and intuition

moral frameworks & consent!

a quest to be more intentional (sparkle edition)

Scopes Interacting with Life

one more day

human relationality

Simulations

Memories

Motivation

#my take