Aneesh Sathe

xkcd published this wonderful piece:

https://xkcd.com/3172/

want to feel old?

Friend asked if Constantine was my favourite movie… I mean Neo and the librarian in one movie?? Yes please!

but… Not my favorite though… that would be between Notting Hill, The Mummy, and The Matrix. None of them are good movies — in the way that Perfect Days and sooo many others are — but they are my movies.

Rhyme
Managed memory leaks.
Everything
Neatly tucked away.

The poets freed
By print.

Hackers 
Tamed themselves.
Linting,
Hinting, diff-printing

Bolt cutters:
vibe-

image: Rain, Steam and Speed

Earlier this year I joined the contraptions book club. It is my first ever book club, so I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I have. I have tried and failed over the past 10 years to properly start reading again but could never get beyond maybe 3-4 books at a stretch. Since March I think I’ve read about 3-4 books per month.

Every generation worries that ‘kids these days’ don’t read. Online, the debate cycles endlessly — are we reading less, or just reading differently? I used to be in the reading differently camp. After all, social media, blogs, emails, chats etc were all text and I was not just reading but also producing a hell of a lot of it. I have changed my mind. I used to think I was reading plenty — scrolling through blogs, threads, and chats. But that wasn’t reading; it was more like letting highway billboards flash through my mind. As a formerly heavy reader it feels super weird to say this to myself, but books are different. Books are dwellings. Books are places.

Authors take great (sometimes monumental) amounts of effort to explore a topic. No chat, forum, or social media post can ever come close to that. This is true not just because of length but more so because writing a book is a lot of effort. A post demands little effort; a book demands devotion. That difference shows.

Now that I’m reading again, it is apparent that those who read books are those that really want to read. And the act of reading, dwelling in those ideas is as refreshing as hike in the mountains. What has been especially invigorating about the book club is the shared events and cast of characters that have appeared across them. Each book becomes a room I walk through with others — and when we meet to talk, it feels like discovering a doorway between those rooms.

Couple of changes:

1. Recently I’ve been bored of most social media. Until I feel otherwise I won’t be announcing these blog posts.
2. I have recently discovered leaflet.pub. I will be posting my shorter link posts and tweet-like posts there. Technically this is a form of social media being that it is based on ATProto and all… but it is also private and cut-off enough that it doesn’t feel like it. The best thing about this is that I am able to make a proper Terry Pratchett dedication on my own domain. Go check out clacks.aneeshsathe.com!

What is this urge that makes us want to be seen as something we aren’t. Take this blog, for example. I am in no way a writer. Barely even a proper blogger. My professional life has very little of this kind of writing. Scientific and investor communication, sure; but not this. Why do I have — and always have had — this urge to be, and be seen, as creative? Is this some kind of performative, effortless polymathism?

Perhaps the desire is to be a modern Renaissance man. In of Montaigne’s essays is the following passage:

“They would rather talk at length about other people’s trade, instead of their own, and so hope to be seen as accomplished in yet another field. Like when Archidamus faulted Periander for abandoning his reputation as a good doctor to acquire one as a bad poet.

See how Caesar goes out of his way to make us understand his ingenuity in building bridges and siege weapons. And, conversely, how much he refrains from talking about the responsibilities of his profession, his courage, and how he led his troops. His deeds prove he was an excellent officer. He wants to be known as an excellent engineer, an entirely different occupation!

Dionysus the Elder was a great military leader, as fortune would have him. But he did everything he could to be known mainly through poetry, although he knew little of it.”

Montaigne, if not a “Renaissance man”, is a man of the Renaissance. Yet he quotes even older examples of this urge. We have leaders who are CEOs or investors and want to be known or seen as being accomplished engineers or physicists. Fields they are rather bad at. Perhaps there is a common kind of mania here. Maybe it takes hold in the minds of the mover and shakers of history. But what of us not of a geologic character?

I don’t think this applies to us regular folks. Hobbies and deep interests do provide something critical however. Happiness. I don’t really care much about being seen as an expert in writing, making pretty plots, or even performing some AI-for-biology contortion. I would like to know how to do it and how to do it well. I am led by the pleasures of intense curiosity. That is better company than Caesar, I assure you.

Maria Popova writes in one of her wonderful essays on Bertrand Russell:

‘In my darkest hours, what has saved me again and again is some action of unselfing — some instinctive wakefulness to an aspect of the world other than myself: a helping hand extended to someone else’s struggle, the dazzling galaxy just discovered millions of lightyears away, the cardinal trembling in the tree outside my window. We know this by its mirror-image — to contact happiness of any kind is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” something beyond the bruising boundaries of the ego.’

By the end of 2023, I was in proper burnout.*1 It wasn’t until I was able to focus my mind on reading new things that recovery felt possible. Earlier this year I joined the Contraptions book club and that complete focusing of attention has buoyed my mental state even higher. Enough to write regularly and to be ever more creative at my day job.

So, I guess, the Nobel-winning philosopher and mathematician did know a thing or two when he decided to write a book with the title in The Conquest of Happiness.
“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”