Healthy Wealthy Journey

So my plan here, is to soon maybe archive all posts and make this site a little less personal and a little more objective and of general use, or at least provide more value to others from it than keeping it a personal journal.  One of the reasons for this is because I’ve been busy, and the second reason is because I’m going to the hospital soon to have a few things checked out that have been giving me anxiety and holding me back from fully committing to a healthier and more productive lifestyle.

Wasn’t planned, but I ended up spending hours and hours cleaning out my digital life this weekend, which is more or less and never ending task unless you just delete everything.  I’ve done this a few times over the years and even over the past few weeks and I think the most important thing is getting a system that maintains itself over time and just letting go of files you haven’t used and don’t plan to use (e.g. that 10GB digital discography of xxx that seemed like a good idea to download at the time).  Turns out, if I haven’t read the 10GB history of the planet by now, I likely won’t any time soon. delete.

The hardest part is cleaning up my research files and philosophy/art work that *might* be important at some point in time but are completely disorganized and duplicated over many poor attempts of making backups of backups just to be extra safe.

I now us backblaze to backup everything, but in order to only take a few months instead of half a year to do so.  Using a combination of windirstat and ccleaner has allowed me to remove big files and duplicate files that are the biggest offenders, such as 20GB of linux isos and virtual machines hiding in my second semester of CMU research.

It’s nice finding pictures and memories I’d forgotten in the past and watching long forgotten movies with my wife now.  My biggest things moving forward now are to (1) not make back ups of back ups, (2) not add random crap to my backups, and (3) delete not so useful things much more often.

Keeping a clean digital life and maintaining it essential, and keeps a nice peace of mind in moving forward.

So, there are a lot of topics I could have touch upon for this post.  But, in the end, emo circumstances won because sometimes they just do, as all Humanists should know.

I tried to find the links to the TED talks I watched with my wife tonight, but apparently the fist one was so bad I couldn’t find it no matter what searches I pursued.  It was concerned on reductionist neurosciences and extrapolating conclusions concerning emergent phenomenon, such as emotion, with out sufficient evidence from lower level causes.   Not impressed, and will provide link once I can find it.  The second talk had absolutely no neuroscience, but provided a much clearer picture of emotional intelligence and human biases.  It concerned a closed “Christian” community in New Zealand and a woman’s escape from authoritarian conditions.  This revealed much more of human psychology than  the reductionist scientist perspective.  Both are important, but I completely understand why people have completely lost faith in science when claims from reductionist perspectives are applied to every day life, and myself as a scientist doesn’t even believe it.

Will update soon with links and further explanations, I think I’m hitting on a core problem between connection between elites/educated and normal people here but haven’t quite put my finger on it…

So, I’ve been stuck for years in a postdoctoral position and struggling to move towards the next level in my career: A tenure-track assistant professorship at a highly ranked engineering institution.  After years giving it my all and then some, followed by rejection and poor work/life circumstances, I was ready to give up for good.  For some reason, I gave it another shot this year while investigating other options.

Am I masochistic and not letting go, or not giving up for a dream I believe in?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit as I’ve searched for alternate career routes, but I think the idealism and my intrinsic motivation for philosophical/research endeavors and progress keeps me turning back to Research as my real passion.  I’ve got nothing to lose in going all in and giving it one last shot, I’m finished up with my current postdoc and floating along in a pretty decent unemployment system through Switzerland until I end up somewhere.  Due to finances and the wife, artistic and start-up endeavors are out at the moment.  I don’t want a soul-killing corporate job either and not knowing German has definitely limited my options.  So here we go, one more time at this.  Let’s do it right this time.

So, what was wrong the previous times.  Simple, I never believed I would have any position.  There was always something that would have made me gaining any position unbelievable so far, in a way that it just wasn’t fitting.  But this time I see at least one of my positions as a perfect fit where I would feel the world righted itself and all my hard work paid off if I wind up there.  So, I’m going to be positive about it every day and attract the opportunity.  I’m going to take care of my self and over prepare.  Updates to come.

So there’s a reason I update this blog every Sunday, it’s because it’s a perfect day for taking a reboot for the week.  And a reboot is necessary.  Or at the very least, a reflection.

Humans, and all animals, operate on cycles.  That means we tend to do the same thing over and over and become creatures of habit.  But, humans are also conscious, and we can make decisions to override our habits, which is often much easier said than done.  Providing a day each week to assess our habits and decisions related to them provides a means for our subconscious connections fighting those habits to become stronger.  I typically find myself very good at overriding a bad habit early in the week, followed by slowly slipping back into it later in the week.  And that’s why the reboot is important, I get slightly stronger fighting it each week.

Second reason the reboot each week is important is to stay on task.  It’s easy to get distracted during the week and lose sight of our goals, but a rewrite of goals, even if it’s just a copy/past from the year before is essential in being strong for the week to come.

No more alcohol!

No more chips!

No more animal products!

No more late nights!

No more wasting time!

Easier said than done right?  Each of these I have been improving on, but why is it so hard to break a bad habit or make a positive change?  Lately for me, it’s been due to many external circumstances that have made it too easy to use crutches rather than stick to my guns and stay healthy.  In addition, my personal health has been a bit poorer than usual so I haven’t been taking care of myself in certain ways on top of that.  Even those outside circumstances have made me less healthy, due to stress and time management, adding on extra problems certainly doesn’t help.

So why do we do it?

In a way it’s a form of control, at least I get to decide how to hurt myself rather than the outside world.  Or to backup everything else as an huge conspiracy in that it’s not my fault, because ‘x’ happened.

So right now, I’ve been doing my typical gradualist changes, but this week is starting with vegan M-F with my workouts each day as well.  No alocohol, except socially, same with bad foods.  This will also make me more social, which is something that I need to add to my Yes more lists, once I get control of these no mores.

So it’s always nice to sit down with my wife and reflect on our last year, and we do a setup of (1) What we accomplished in the last year, (2) What we wanted to accomplished, but didn’t in the last year, and (3) What we wish to accomplish in the New Year.  I was slightly dreading the exercise this year since I generally feel it hasn’t been a good year, but in hindsight I am actually much happier about the year.  It’s a nice feeling.  We tend to be a bit biased in only thinking about what has happened in the last weeks or months, but in reality a year is a long time and there are many accomplishments forgotten.  Both big and small.  For instance, I finally published a high-impact paper that I had been working on for years, and I’d forgotten all about it on a daily basis.  One of the smaller things is just taking the time to begin small projects such as blogging or I’ve dabbled in a bit of RPG Maker as a fun little outlet.  These haven’t taken much time, but demonstrate big steps towards personal growth and moving forward.  I love my wife and I’m glad we’ve been there for each other through the year, even if it is hard at times.  So, here’s to 2018, a year of financial stability and new career paths for me!  Stay tuned for positive updates =)

The meaning of the Holidays has changed over the years.  As a kid it was about presents and moving forward.  In my grad student years, it was about catching up on work and having time to travel.  Now, it’s an opportunity to take a break, look back, and reflect.

It’s quite odd how a year both goes very fast and slow, how it seems not much has happened but it always amazes me what activities I’ve forgotten over the year and how much growth has occurred.  Making my New Years list with my wife is something I look forward to, it’s a chance to reassess the goals that were important and not so important from the last year, which ones to be proud of and which ones deserve a second shot.

A healthy wealthy journey is much easier in a facilitating environment, than a disabling environment.  Most people don’t give enough credit to how environmental factors influence their work and life, but it will make or break you.  Environmental influences include anything external to your own decision making that influences your decisions, such as top-down government regulations, family rules, poor work place/societal culture, and any other number of external circumstances that makes it more difficult to accomplish your goals.  A lot of of these circumstances are associated with privilege and it is one of the hardest things to admit you have, and an easy thing to realize you don’t have.  Part of a healthy wealthy journey is realizing that these environmental factors and privileges effect everyone in a different way and part of overcoming them is accepting them while slowly making changes and decisions that help change the circumstances to your favor.

So, with sad news at the end of the week right before my usual time to update, I had a notification to call my wife’s parents as soon as possible and found that her sister’s journey had come to an end by her own hand.  I processed for a moment, than delivered the news to my wife.  We had two to three days of upset chaos in getting ourselves and dog on a plane to the States as soon as possible while not completely blowing off everyone in Zurich, but finding many plans and obligations suddenly cancelled.  To my understanding, the journey’s end was a result of a gun, drinking, and impulsiveness, and there’s only speculation as far as the real reasons or rationale behind it which is not a discussion for here.  My thoughts on it here are that everyone was too focused on their own lives (me included), and this was the resulting casualty.  It is very important to recognize that a healthy journey is not completed alone, and does not result in the end of another’s.  I can only hope my journey in the future leads to impacting more people positively and to someday fully visit the idea of empathy engineering and spread it to others.  It’s hard though, because these idealistic and hopeful endeavors are not the ones that are not support from the top and from the bottom people do not like change.  It’s with a heavy heart I continue my journey along the path of Western civilization while at the same time trying to improve the system from the inside.