Pragmatism vs Fun

When I was applying to college, I picked out three places. Two of them were “Bottom of the hill” and “Snowy Hill”. I met up with a guy who also considered going to both these places, and he ended up in “Bottom of the hill”, and he said he wanted to go to Snowy Hill, but Snowy Hill was more expensive. But he liked the entrepreneurial spirit at “Bottom of the Hill” better. I went to Snowy Hill, which was quite similar to “Bottom of the Hill”, because both places were founded within 5 years of each other. They were both large universities which tried to excel in a wide variety of things, but Snowy Hill was more austere, more monastic, more removed from outside life, not within an hour's drive from any major city. It was some kind of wonderland, detached from reality, where we looked at the world through a telescope and sat around and pontificated all day.

Whereas the other guy, he got caught in the spirit of the place, founded a company more than 15 years ago, and it's still alive and kicking today, he's a jet setting millionaire.

So sometimes I wonder, do I miss being him? Did I miss the boat? I'm not very sure. Maybe I took too much comfort from all this mental pontification. Maybe I not only think too much, but I like it too much. It used to be my job as a student to be thinking all the time, and I kinda liked that. And later on I'd have liked a job that required me to be more of a thinker than a doer. Unfortunately I never really got those jobs. They required me to have more executive functions, and I disliked that.

I used to spend quite a bit of time in the university cinema, I may have caught 30-40 films there in all of my time there. Maybe even more. I don't know why I saw it as a learning experience. I must have been daydreaming a lot in my time there. I always thought that I loved a life of scholarly pursuits, new experiences, new food, new places to visit, new music, new art. Maybe a life of ease. I roughed it out when it was required of me to master intellectually difficult material, but only because I enjoyed it. Maybe I didn't really give that much thought about building something that was actually useful for somebody else. I was probably better at figuring out how to spend a million dollars than to make it.

Having responsibilities, and having to think about the exact details about how to do things – maybe I just didn't like that sort of stuff. That happened a lot when I became a programmer. It was fun at first, to be churning out a lot of code and trying to see how things worked got a bit tiring. I kept on thinking about escape. I read a book about drug addicts – they kept on wanting to chase that next high, always wanting their buttons pushed and thinking about what next was going to push those buttons. Life is one high after another, and all the time in between. Maybe I haven't wanted to think about anything else – building a house for the future, earning shit loads of money. I do want to have a good musical legacy, but other than that, not much. Somehow I have the mentality of a wanderer, not thinking too much about the future, but instead just living right there in the present, watching, viewing. Rather than imposing myself upon the world.

And I've often felt that my pursuit of knowledge was a bit like consumption of entertainment. That's nice, that's something to play around with in my head.

But that was different from a real work ethic, the work ethic that produces something that's useful in this world. Whether somebody is dedicating it to a greater meaning, or he's doing it for pure money, he looks to be working steadily towards some end point. Maybe I haven't got that mentality of working towards a goal. Or maybe I get tired of it – I can do things that take 1 year to do, but maybe I have to change directions after that. I can't recall the last time I accomplished something that took more than 1 year, other than earning degrees.

When I got to the University of Mexico, it started to dawn on me that it was more important to pick up practical skills. I had come armed with practical knowledge. Based on the first few modules in Snowy Hill, I had picked up some programming. But there were other opportunities for me to have learnt more practical skills at Snowy Hill that I might have missed out on. For starters, I at first applied as an engineer student, because I thought it would maximise my chances of getting funded. And once I got funded, I decided to switch majors to mathematics, because I thought that it was the best compromise between studying something that was bookish, which appealed to me, and something that would somehow be more useful in the world out there.

As it turned out, I didn't exactly like the mathematics major either. Everything was incredibly arcane. It sounded nice and fashionable to talk about abstract entities all day long, but it started to grate on me. It was an uphill task. There's nothing like putting the university on top of a hill and making you climb the snowy hill in order to impress upon you that knowledge acquisition is an uphill task, but it was a pretty austere existence.

There were a few things I wished I had learnt. I only got the engineering mentality while working, when the mentality shifted from “this is intellectually interesting” or “this is a nice caveat to this other theorem that everybody else knows and look how smart I am” to “we're actually going to do something that people can use and run with”. God knows that even one or two of my bosses never made the transition from being book smart to doing something that had a real impact on the real world.

I finally saw “Bonjour Tristesse”. I had been meaning to see it since I was in Snowy Hill. I thought about the first few years since I left Snowy Hill, how directionless they had been. Snowy Hill shaped me into something, but what, exactly?

It was one of those major art films that I wanted to see. People debate over its merits, but it has some famous fans, including Jean Luc Godard.

It was one of those films that I liked to watch when I was in Snowy Hill: the post-war European existential angst movies, and it was some kind of golden age, because Truffaut, Hitchcock, Godard, Fellini and Antonioni were at the height of their powers. In a way, life was simpler and urban decay had yet to set in. Everybody just looked impossibly glamorous and at the same time fretting that their material prosperity was somehow spiritually void. In hindsight, I was in America during some golden dusk of America being the sole superpower.

What entranced me about those movies? Was it just the chilling out and doing nothing? Did I just enjoy lounging around too much for my own good? Because I remember that was when I developed a taste for lounging around. That was probably the height of me believing that my liberal arts education was going to serve me well in life. Of course, my education had some pragmatic bent to it.

I did some pure mathematics. I remember trying to study a lot of mathematics, in part to atone for what I took to be wasted opportunities – I never became a maths genius, in spite of showing some aptitude for it at a young age. Then I found that people in the reading classes were reading such interesting books – I just took a course in a new academic discipline every semester. I don't know why or how it was all related or put together. I basically behaved as though those 4 years were going to last forever. Of course they weren't. I did try to cover a lot of ground intellectually, but how about the meta-knowledge?

Perhaps I should have thought about how to arrange my knowledge acquisition around some more practical task. Perhaps I should have oriented myself around the principle that I was there to learn about my place in the grand scheme of things. What happened instead was that I saw myself a little as a passive learner who was just there to sit back and learn whatever stuff that came my way.

I think what made me think I didn't have to change my approach was seeing that I was taught very academic and arcane equations for some engineering discipline. That was the culture of Snowy Hill. Because it was far away from civilization, there was a lot of emphasis on basic research. I don't deny that basic research makes for a very good education, or that it makes you think deeply and try to understand profound truths. But there's also a lot that more application oriented stuff teaches you about how the world really works, that you miss out on. I got the fairly inaccurate impression that the arcane and complex equations I learnt in advanced mathematics were widely applicable in the world, and I oriented myself towards learning those things well. In a way, I still don't regret the time and effort I spent towards those ends, but that's only because it was satisfying in its own right. It wasn't useful.

So here's the rub – I wasn't finding the stuff that I learnt for fun useful, and I wasn't finding the stuff I learnt in order to advance my career fun.