reveries from minutes to midnight

by Waldemar Fink

Dear reader,

It’s currently 22:41 on the last day of the month, which means I have a little over an hour to compile something meaningful and publish. Yes, the truth of the matter is that I haven’t been very regular with my writing practice. My first instinct is to be harsh towards myself, since I haven’t put more time into it this month again, but then I remind myself that I never want to put writing above being a good husband and parent, above things that truly matter.

See, finding the time to write is not that much of a problem, since there is some time every day after my daughter falls asleep, the bigger problem is finding the energy after being pretty worn out by all the obligations. And if energy is not there the writing is dead. As I’m writing this literally minutes to midnight, it now appears that a looming deadline is a good source of energy.

This month I’ve been thinking how stopping exercise practice is worse than never exercising at all, how stopping to write regularly is worse than never having it in the first place, how increasing the theoretical knowledge without the practice is worse than not having any theoretical knowledge at all. There’s a price of cognitive dissonance to pay for knowing one thing in theory and doing another or nothing in practice. I think the philosophers are right when they said that a thought which was developed individually, from the ground up, is more valuable than any advice absorbed from the wisest and the most genius of the individuals. There is immense strength in trusting one’s own instincts, one’s own thoughts, one’s own judgment.

There is something silly in waiting for science to confirm one’s own instincts in order to consider them valid. There is something silly in trusting the watches or rings to score one’s sleep. Delegating how one feels after a night’s sleep to an imperfect sensor and a data point. I think that’s a path to dissociation, to a loss of gut feeling, to a loss of listening to one’s emotions.

As a software engineer, I am biased towards logic and considering emotions a wishy-washy subject. I am biased towards not caring about that part of human experience. But I think there is a reason they exist and I think one shouldn’t ignore them altogether.

For example, I don’t need science to confirm to me that strolling and listening to music is a very healthy thing to do. I can just trust my judgment and experience of it. I can trust my realizations that after five minutes of walking leisurely all the problems seem to go away, how after a day spent inside the four walls in a slightly anxious state, walking opens my eyes to how small I am in the vastness of space. I can just trust that yes, working from home has a lot of benefits, like getting to spend much more time with my family and not having to lose my mind twice a day in the Zagreb traffic, but also how there are a lot of drawbacks, like reality narrowing to a pixelated rectangle that emits light. What are the effects of that on a large enough time scale? I wonder.

I also wonder what happens to the human species in the TikTok attention spans, chatting with LLMs more than with friends, in the age where legacy media is dead but it’s replaced with a thousand times worse distributed media that capitalizes on the same emotions of fear and despair enhanced with the infinite scroll. What happens when we’re all warped in our own versions of reality, when there is no overarching narrative that would synchronize us?

I hope I’m making some sense, dear reader, and I hope these are worthwhile questions to ask. I hope your February was better than mine and as always, I thank you for reading what I have written.